skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Amazon has definitely pioneered online commerce and has excelled at providing a very engaging customer experience and executing the complex supply-chain steps of delivery purchases to consumers. But its success is not the result of that alone. Amazon has also greatly benefited from many years of resolute avoidance of sales tax collection on purchases, giving it an inequitable and potent strategic pricing advantage over bricks-and-mortar retailers that have complied with sales tax requirements. A recent study found that households in states where Amazon collects sales tax reduced their Amazon purchases by eight percent after sales taxes collection was implemented. The effect is more pronounced for large purchases, where the decline was 11 percent. This advantage is slowly coming to an end, but, over the years, it has cost states and cities billions of dollars in lost revenue, while forcing local retailers to compete with one hand tied behind their backs." - https://www.indiebound.org/spotlightamazon

While I believe that Amazon probably would have won regardless of sales taxes, emphasizing "fairly" seems a bit strong.
The real secret is to pick the right flight! There are certain flights that are always jam-packed in business, this gives you two opportunities. The first step is to check-in last minute at the desk. The next step depends on your situation:

1) You don't have any holidays coming up: Go to the dedicated desk for first/platinum, about 2h before departure. Just check in and if business is full your status will get you pushed up

2) You do plan on taking holidays: Same, but the first question you ask is "do you need volunteers for downgrade?". Trust me, on Emirates they make it worth your while :)

Edit: the protip is the weekday Emirates India-Dubai flights that leave in the small hours of the morning (e.g. 2am). I guarantee the business section will always be overbooked
I don't hate the keyboard. I tried it in a store and after getting over the surprise of the extremely short key travel distance, it is quite usable - but the failure rate, the annoyances, the potential out-of-warranty cost turn it into a complete dealbreaker. It is simply not reliable enough, despite the redesign. Maybe now at the second redesign it's finally OK but no way I'm paying for one until we're certain, and that certainty will take a couple years of real world usage to materialize.

Regarding the touch bar: Indeed the Escape key is what breaks the deal. Honestly if it began after ESC I'd tolerate it - expensive, close to useless, but tolerable.
Austin heat is dry (usually).
I tried it once. You had to wait like 3 weeks for Overdrive to let you download one of the few books in their collection (mostly kids books and just pop garbage).

Going to libgen is a much better experience.
You are fortunate to be in one of the few areas where there is true ISP competition. For most of the country there is none. Yes, it may be hard to move off of gmail but it isn’t impossible unlike changing high speed internet providers for most of the country. You can leave Facebook and communicate in other ways. I’m sure your aunts and uncles have phones so you could text or call them.

I don’t see how splitting up Apple or Google would increase the number of mobile OSs. There have been companies in the past that have tried building a mobile OS either for a specific phone or as an open source OS and none of them have really gained traction. There have been rumors for a couple years now of some of the phone manufacturers talking about building their own OS to use in place of android, yet those still haven’t appeared. Microsoft failed at mobile because they were too late to the party, people already knew which mobile experience they preferred.
It should but cognitive dissonance is strong.
It's because there's no such thing as a public grand jury. that's not how the system works.

This is all very cut and dried. whoever her lawyer is is doing her a huge disservice. She has immunity and a subpoena. That means she's going to testify whether she likes it or not.
In rural areas, there are very few concrete or asphalt surfaces. The dirt roads don't absorb heat so it rarely affects anything. You also don't find glass or nails scattered around in random places in villages. And you get used to those bumpy surfaces so they don't bother you much
Except it doesn't address the problem at all. What happens when another negligent credit bureau pops up to replace it?
She claims protection from the "First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendment, and other statutory rights", not the fifth amendment.

I assume first because she would be under some sort of gag order about the proceedings.

Fourth I'm not getting; unreasonable search and seizure?

Sixth is probably the public part of "public and speedy" trial, but seems slightly dubious, since she is not on trial, and apparently has an immunity deal in place, and my understanding is that transactional immunity breaks the shield of the fifth amendment, so it seems that it would apply here as well.
The LeBron Factor: Who Drives Wine Trends Today
They link directly to the new paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04450

Snippet from abstract:

> Our steady-state model can constrain the probabilities for an Earth visit by a settling civilization before a given time horizon. These results break the link between Hart's famous "Fact A" (no interstellar visitors on Earth now) and the conclusion that humans must, therefore, be the only technological civilization in the galaxy.
Why would they have "unambiguously" fallen into those categories? There's just this assumption that people who "look like that" don't listen to punk or metal, and it's just not true. People who listen to punk or metal can be young, white (I hate to harp on the white thing, it's just the way Wikipedia describes it), live in gentrified urban areas, buy clothes from the thrift store, buy vintage jackets. Lots of punks are vegan and live alternative lifestyles. All of those things are characteristics that supposedly identify someone as a hipster. If it seems like I'm cherry-picking, I'd ask how many of the characteristics need to be met for the categorization to be true. So I don't agree that they unambiguously fall into their own "punk" or "metalhead" categories. Maybe they self-identify as punk or metalhead, but that doesn't change the fact that the definition of hipster is so broad that their subcultures are a subset of it.
...so maybe it is time to finally admit that ISPs are natural monopolies, just like the water company or power company, and regulate them as a utility and ensure that local municipalities who want to provide these services for their residents have a legal path to do so?

The situation right now is so ridiculous that some states have laws outright barring municipal ISPs. If a breakup into regional private monopolies is the stepping stone to reducing ISP influence on government enough to get a more sane legal framework, I'll take it.
I'm not a troll, I'm seriously objecting to the idea that we should reject the concerns of a dying person as "technophobic", as if that's some kind of silver bullet in an argument in favor of technology. I've never heard anybody seriously say "technophobic" before and I found it rather shocking and naive.
Power9 and ARM both have register renaming and micro-ops. In fact, the SVE extension to ARM provides variable-length vectors, so that the "inner loop" of SIMD compute is stored entirely in micro-code space and independent of the ISA.

ARM-SVE seems very non-RISC to me.

----------

The only thing that seems common to all RISC designs is the load/store architecture, which x86 implements under-the-hood with microops now.
No one thinks this is actually secure, it's security theater.

The thing is, the cost of identity theft of consumers to credit reporting companies is less than the cost to actually adopt secure methods to judge one's credit.
“Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” Warren said in a statement. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.”

True. On the other hand, big tech companies are the only agencies that are taking on big problems, social and technical. Break up big tech and many things won't get done. No ubiquitous high speed networks, no practical general purpose artificial intelligence, no indexed access to the world's knowledge, no voice interface minions, and so forth. Government seems unable and unwilling to do the sort of things Big Tech does.

Breaking up big tech seems to be the wrong approach and is likely to be more difficult and more destructive than it would appear at first glance. Better to enlist big tech to cooperate and make the world a better place.
Things won't add up for ICE automanufacturers long before Tesla gets in trouble.

ICE sales are crashing in China already, while EV sales keep soaring.

Remember that the two US giants (GM and Ford) went close to bankruptcy in 2008 because car sales went down a little (less than 8% IIRC).

Tesla is getting leaner by the day: they have everything already aligned for:

* battery r&d and production (leader)

* electric drivetrain (leader)

* autonomous driving (already the leader among manufacturers)

* OTA updates (leader)

* online sales (leader)

* charging network (leader, by far)

* ecosystem around energy production, storage and distribution (still leader)

What am I missing? A few factories and better comm', I guess.

Edit: investor since early 2012
Maybe so, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments here? It just makes this place a bit worse each time.
What practical problems can 4000 CPUs solve that 16 CPUs can't?

You get less and less been benefit for each additional CPU you add to the problem, unless the CPU is the main bottleneck.

Also if something requires 4000 CPUs, it is going to start getting expensive if you need to double the output. These types of problems don't scale well.
I don't see the baloney. Believing a law is unjust is not the same thing as believing it doesn't exist.

She never said she expects there to be no repercussions for refusing to testify. She said previously that she was aware that she is likely to go to jail over this, and accepted the consequences.

As far as I'm aware, she never claimed she's exercising her 5th amendment rights. The ones she listed in her refusal to answer the questions were the 1st, 4th and 6th. I don't care to guess at the connection she sees there on any of those fronts, but I also haven't seen it explained, so maybe I'm missing something.
How programming slowly took over my life (in a good way).
> The 5th Amendment is against SELF-incrimination.

She hasn't claimed the fifth, she claimed that she is protected by the first, fourth, and sixth amendments, and other statutory rights. (On the surface, these claims are as implausible as a fifth amendment claim would be, but they are different and, in any case, if her attorneys have filed a brief making a legal case for it I haven't seen it and can't evaluate it.)
How is a cashless store more convenient and help you better track your purchase, compared with a store that accepts both cash and cards? You're setting up a false cashless vs cardless dichotomy.

> Additionally, I like eat in a clean environment if I can. I don't want to eat where it stinks to the high heavens or is dirty. It is a preference. There is nothing stopping homeless people from going cashless by simply buying a AMX card at walgreens with cash already on it.

These two arguments are at odds. Cash is not what makes stores stink or get dirty; what you're saying is that you prefer stores without people you associate with stink, ie., homeless. But if the homeless could "simply" get a card, cashless stores wouldn't have that advantage.

And the reality is that they can't; prepaid cards have monthly fees, which are only waived in certain cases (e.g. have a monthly direct deposit of over $500).
Keep in mind that on most big planes, first is either to the left of the entrance, or on a different tunnel/floor
Exactly the line of conversation I'd love to see :)
Show HN: Privacy-focused iOS hiking app
Here's a fun trick I learned from Flajolet and Sedgewick's Analytic Combinatorics (available online, page 52). I imagine it will seem incredible when tried with an actual classroom:

> Révész in [Strong theorems on coin tossing] tells the following amusing story attributed to T. Varga: “A class of high school children is divided into two sections. In one of the sections, each child is given a coin which he throws two hundred times, recording the resulting head-and-tail sequence on a piece of paper. In the other section, the children do not receive coins, but are told instead that they should try to write down a ‘random’ head-and-tail sequence of length two hundred. Collecting these slips of paper, [a statistician] then tries to subdivide them into their original groups. Most of the time, he succeeds quite well.”

> The statistician’s secret is [...] in a randomly produced sequence of length 200, there are usually runs of length 6 or more: the probability of the event turns out to be close to 97%. On the other hand most children (and adults) are usually afraid of writing down runs longer than 4 or 5 as this is felt as strongly “non-random”. The statistician simply selects the slips that contain runs of length 6 or more as the true random ones. Voilà!

----

Obviously, the way to beat this site (or the above classroom trick) would be to use "true" random numbers. But if one doesn't have access to coins or computers, it raises the question: what is a good way to generate a long sequence of reasonably random coin flips in one's head? For example, if you've memorized many digits of pi or e or some such "believed to be normal" constant, you could use whether each digit is odd or even (or maybe even something like throw away 8 and 9, and read each remaining digit in octal to get 3 random bits). But that only gets you so far...
> this wouldn't necessarily guarantee that what you import from sagelib will necessarily be available or configured to work with sagelib, unless that piece you've imported has all python dependencies. Is that right?

No, not really - what you can import will be working, whether via python bindings in sagelib, or external ones.
The corresponding ongoing challenge of sagelib/sagemath development is to un-vendor a lot of components currently bundled in. Debian has managed this in their own not very portable way.
It isn't about market share. It is about consumer choice. Access to google alternatives are available to everyone. Many people don't have a reasonable choice when it comes to broadband.
Simple only for folks whose value of one day will be small fraction of business class ticket cost.
> Neither of these would do much to increase your ISP options.

The first one works if you do it properly. One of the lines of business just operates the physical infrastructure. It not only doesn't provide video service, it doesn't even provide internet service -- the end user is never their customer, their only customers are third party ISPs, who all get the same terms.
We shut them down, too.
To continue the speculation, such "life" may be what can travel between stars but life such as our may still be common. Indeed, life such as our may be common enough that interstellar life merely takes note of it and moves on since novelty wears off quickly.
>As a recent example, Net Neutrality involved massive amounts of lobbing and had very clear "pro-consumer" and "anti-consumer" sides

This isn't as uncontroversial of an opinion as it might appear to be in a place like HN. What you're admitting here basically is that you think Comcast should be broken up because they lobby for things you don't like, but FAANG is fine because they lobby for things you do.
Ideally it would classify it as an ambiguous ink drawing meant to test human psychology
It's just as expensive as Chicago and Seattle but with less amenities. I imagine it's going to become more expensive to live there than other major cities very soon.
Why XSplit Is Sponsoring OBS
Odd reference to Juul: 4 dozen new employees juxtaposed with Apple's possible 15,000.

> "Apple’s presence in Austin is the biggest after its headquarters in Cupertino, California, and the company said it would invest $1 billion in Austin to build an office park capable of holding 15,000 additional employees, roughly double the current workforce there. Juul Labs Inc., the San Francisco-based maker of a popular e-cigarette, said it will open an office in Austin for some four-dozen employees to start."
Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) on lessons learned [Twitter thread]
Can you please link that video? This video made a compelling point on why first class does not pay and I would love to hear the contrarian perspective.
Wikileaks has about as much claim to that title as The National Inquirer does, at this point.
Snitching on any inmate like this is a terrible thing to do.

Nobody deserves the kind of attention this will attract from BOP.
Google Tensorflow Crash Course
> “That's a summary statement. If you're interested in more details, Stephen Pinker elaborates more in his books.“

The details within Pinker’s books are irrelevant to my criticisms of this article and of the quote you pasted. Further, it’s also irrelevant that your pasted quote is a summary or not.

The issue is that it’s juvenile, contrived writing that isn’t rooted in any coherent position on anything. It’s a smattering of ideas that loosely touch on different things, but are presented as if together it constitutes some type of bigger picture about art and empathy, which it doesn’t.
The Super-Rich Are Being Scammed on Their Private Jets
People aren't arguing that women and men should be paid differently on the basis of their sex. The argument is simply that it doesn't make any sense to look at two disparate figures and assume they differ primarily due to discrimination.

The pushback so far has actually proven that this is sensible, as the more confounding variables are accounted for, the more the gap decreases. You'll notice that up until a few years ago, and sometimes to this day, pundits, professors, politicians, presidents and the public at large were completely comfortable stating that "women make 77 cents on a man's dollar." People were prepared to legislate for "equality" on the basis of this fact alone. But some people correctly stop and say, "Wait, but why? You're prepared to legislate, but you're just assuming that they're paid differently because of sexism you're attempting to correct."

Well, it turns out that the 77 cents on a dollar was arrived at by literally just comparing what women at large make vs men at large. But do men and women do the same jobs? Do they even work in the same fields? Depending on profession, the answer is a resounding no. So then the question becomes "do women doctors at this hospital who see the same amount of patients and work the same amount of hours and have the same track record and went to the same school and have the same seniority etc etc make less than the respective men." The more that is controlled for, the more the gap disappears.

What you are saying is that you can't believe sexist Americans stuck in the 1950s aren't prepared to legislate to remedy this issue, and that the pushback offered in this thread is evidence of people uninterested in gender equality. That's just not even close to the conversation that's being had, and I'm personally glad, whatever the topic, to have as much nuance brought forward as possible. Nobody is arguing against equality, it's just that you're mistaken in your assumption that this is what _you_ are arguing for.

Also, regarding the UK, please note Carl Benjamin, Paul Joseph Watson, Nigel Farage, Helen Pluckrose, among others, if you insist on the assertion that pushback is limited to those outside your country.
Show HN: Multilogue: non-simultaneous P2P chat protocol
#FREEChelseaManning
As it is a Doctor's time is scarce, which is why systems like this exist in the first place I imagine. One wonders if expecting them to be comforting when delivering bad news, or taking the time to explain things properly to a patient, is realistic. After all, even though this is one of the most important events in the patient's life, to the doctor it's tuesday.

I sometimes wonder if the patient demand for "bedside manner" has led to having doctors with less actual medical skill. I mean, I wouldn't choose my mechanic based on how comforting they could be. I wouldn't even choose my veterinarian on that criteria. One could argue that doctors are all roughly equal in diagnosis and prescription I suppose, making bedside manner the only real differentiation, but my personal experience is that that isn't true.

Maybe a different person should be handling the role of interacting with the patient in these ways, Someone who can take the time to do it properly? I don't know. I just think it is worth reconsidering how this works in today's world.
It's not mentioned because SEPTA still accepts cash. You aren't required to buy a Septa Key card to ride.
Elon insists being theoretically right is the same as being practically right. So for example he uses the theoretically perfectly functional normal vision that humans use even if the practical implementation of today simply cannot reach the same results.
I agree, Premium Economy on Lufthansa is very nice. There is enough room even for me at 6'5" 195cm.
Any more than this would feel like a waste of money. If I want fancy food, I'll pay $100 in a restaurant, not $4000 extra for a flight.
Kaiser bought my healthcare co-op a couple years ago. They promised that prices wouldn't increase, and that they could provide better service for everyone under a unified system. Each year since then, my personal premiums (on the cheapest plan they offer) have gone up by 20%, with no improvement in service, and with no cheaper options added.

I don't know how low-income people are supposed to be able to afford this. I've never even used my plan, except for flu shots and dental checkups, but I'm involved in dangerous work and play so I can't exactly cancel.

I assume Kaiser today is just a generic big company run by bean-counters. This doesn't surprise me in the least.
Do you have a source that explicitly says this?

That was also my inference from this article but it was never outright said. Likely due to the bias of the nytimes.
> Believing a law is unjust is not the same thing as believing it doesn't exist.

Yeah, and I'm of the opinion that the law is perfectly acceptable in this case. Its 100% acceptable to jail someone who refuses to testify in a criminal case, especially if they have information about that criminal case.

If you know someone is a murderer and you have evidence for it... it is a CRIME to hide that evidence from the police. Period. That's how our society works.

Yeah, people hate snitches. Snitches get stiches, don't be a snitch, etc. etc. But lets be frank, if it weren't for snitches, then the Police wouldn't have any evidence to work off of at all. So the government is 100% in their power to compel people to snitch on others. Both legally AND morally.

--------------

The greater question is what is going on exactly. There is very little discussion around here about what this "Wikileaks" case is. That's probably the root of the story.
Python *Args and **Kwargs Made Easy
Back in the late 80s/early 90s the cost of a new game was only $40, if you were part of the glorious PCMR. Now we're just subsidizing the console plebs.
But if a database is unsecured, how do you know it's not meant to be publicly accessible?
Where I live (Texas) electricity costs about $0.08/kWh, which means $500 per year will buy about 700 watts of continuous power. That's much higher than the TDP of any 8-core processor on the market. Even if you have more expensive power and account for cooling costs, it's hard to see how you could end up spending much more than $500/year to power a single machine.