skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article doesn’t link to the study and I can’t find it. “As many as” could mean anywhere from 1 to 50%. Smells like deception, but I could be wrong.
I’ve been to that store and it’s clearly a test bed, not a real store. There are employees who stand there and answer questions. The ceiling has hundreds of cameras which I assume they plan to use for some sort of AI tracking to determine who took what. For the time being, I’d bet they are mechanical turning it, since there is a 10 minute delay between leaving the store and being charged.
> The key problem is the rich buying property for literal rent-seeking to become even richer.

Well, no. The only reason they can expect the rent is because the tenant is unable to buy. If there were more housing that was within reach to be bought, then rents would go down, and the landlords would find themselves unable to rent profitably, and would thus sell the home at the market rate.

As with all affordable housing 'issues', the answer is to build more housing.
> Europe just said: You cannot have your cake and eat it.

Yeah, sure. But they _could_ have just said: You can have your cake and eat it. Why exactly is it "impossible" -- UK exceptionalism was already the norm.

let the UK have their cake and eat it. How much of their intransigence is a matter of principle vs. a game of chicken (hoping that the UK will give up on Brexit) is something that I don't know if we can really know unless push comes to shove.
Bezos says lots of things. Amazon is better at customer service than their competitors, usually.

They still do stupid shit. See the joke that was AIV on Android for years.
No VC of any meaningful size is interested in a $50m exit.

Let's say as a VC you invested $3m and are holding 20% of the company at exit, that means you'll make $10m. A 3x return is nice but not going to be fund-maker.

If you're a $50m fund then you're expected to return >$150m, 10m will nudge you along to that target, but isn't going to be significant. Because a majority of your investments will go to zero or be small returners (1x-3x), it essentially means the good exits have to be >10x in order to be able to achieve reasonable returns for the fund.
> Why would you? You can get better returns by simply holding it (since it is deflationary) than by lending it out or investing in productive assets.

There's obviously a balance in this scenario, as slower investment pace, makes for slower expectation of BTC value increase.

Only "investments" of very low expected return are being prevented by lack of monetary inflation.

If BTC-based monetary system produces relatively slow .5% global growth, that means only investments with expected return lower than .5% are not going to happen. Which is a feature, not a bug. It makes growth cycle much more stable and self-balancing. Too high growth slows down investing cycle, low growth speeds it up. No need for central bankers.

And it's not that much different than current monetary system anyway, where people just throw they currency into speculative, unproductive assets to escape inflation. Nowadays things like housing serves the role of Bitcoin.
Looks like one location in Irvine is the only place you can pay cash. So I guess technically yes, practically though?

Oh, and it's open : M-F, 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Yes. Accept cash, or do business elsewhere.
Why won't banks provide loans?
Typical Silicon Valley Catholic Church-style moral scorched Earth approach.
They'd only ban cashless stores, if Amazon would offer the option you suggest, they wouldn't be cashless anymore, and therefore allowed.
This seems pretty cool. I might give it a try at some point, once I have a blog again.
Not just hard to parse but actually somewhat misleading, I thought first it was official Github cli tool similar to hub.
Pewdiepie has some over 90 million followers. Judging such a huge number of people by the actions of few representatives as not too far from "all muslims are terrorists" and "all christians are pedophiles"
How internet mercenaries do battle for authoritarian governments
How much of the precipitous drop in SF juvenile crime is simply because there are fewer juveniles in the city? SF used to have a large middle class population that has largely vanished with the rise in the cost of housing combined with a reduction in the number of kids per household. While once pretty common, those big families with 4-5 kids are as rare as 4 leaf clovers these days.
so its really only somewhat anonymizing if many people use it? is there some kind of distributed DNS table through TOR or something?
Canada Post is doing that to their letter service which I think is just a write off at this point. Their package service is amazing and far exceeds the US though. The existence of flex delivery boxes has made it less terrible to receive packages if you live in a Condo/Apartment and is beloved by my fellow non-detached-home-owning co-workers (which, given this is Vancouver, is everyone)
This is exactly one of the problems we as a crypto ATM company solve. Allows a lot of unbanked folks to convert the little cash they earn to digital currency or cards. You wouldn’t believe the reasons why people can’t get bank accounts...
I've noticed that Reason magazine has really swung to the political Right over the past few years.
I don't think the parent post made any kind of assertion that sounds like what you're accusing him of.
Minnesota Teachers Invented a Proto-Internet Focus on Community Not Commerce
> The notion that "it could easily happen" that is being brought up throughout this thread should really only suggests that people aren't doing even rudimentary security assessments

Precisely.
Dealing with cash is expensive. You physically have to move it and protect it from getting stolen by thieves and even employees.
Right, it seems like the problem is more political than economic. Point 2 obviously flows from point 1, so the argument is whether point 1 is valid or not.

In theory there might be viable ways to control inflation via taxes and other ways of soaking up extra money supply that's created by printing/spending. The implementation will be difficult though, especially if it's driven by a political process. Even if you initially start with something that has all the correct automatic adjustments built in (assume this is possible), there's always the risk that a new gov't breaks it.

I think that for a change in paradigm like this to be successful you'd need stronger guarantees that things would stay in place long term (similar to UBI actually).
> Brown decided Amazon should hire a few people to accept cash at its brick-and-mortar stores.

I'm pretty sure we have machines that can take cash and give change /s. Anyway, I'm skeptical of how many people can manage living without a bank account in SF.

Are landlords accepting cash for payment? I checked and at least you can technically pay property taxes and traffic citations with cash (it may be a big hassle but it is possible). I'm still skeptical that besides cashless stores SF is 'friendly' to the bankless. And technically, don't you pay with the Amazon Go app? You could, in theory, buy Amazon Gift cards with cash (ironically at a different store) and then pay with an Amazon account. If anything, I would complain that these stores require a smartphone and the Amazon Go app just to enter the store. I think this is a larger barier than a bank account and has far more privacy implications.
> cash itself says you have to accept it for "all debts public and private" and as an equitable society we have an incentive to make sure that is true

Restaurants have to accept cash. When you order food you incur a debt. That's what "all debts" on cash means. Buying things in a store is different. No debt is incurred.

Such bans are a cosmetic solution to poverty. They give the illusion of dealing with the problem. But they solve nothing. Prices will be a little higher for all San Franciscans (handling cash, even intermittently, is risky and expensive). Meanwhile, the poor will have no more income or opportunities. But hey, they will have the theoretical ability to buy a plush toy from an Amazon store. (Assuming such stores still make economic sense to deploy.)
Except they took the Nissan commission. The aren't anti-commercial, they're just commercial averse. Like Google is evil averse. If you're neutral you get to do bad things without being bad.

A lot of people want to be good as long as they don't have to sacrifice anything for it. Really, as long as they don't see themselves as actively engaging in the other direction, they sleep really well at night. They aren't good, they're just normal, but it's enough to maintain the illusion of their self image as a good person. If I'm not an asshole then I must be a good person.

Which I think is why we have so much trouble changing our peers. The moment we bring something up we've already challenged their identity. We've issued an existential threat. We might as well be brandishing a knife.

From the other side, when I give up things for philosophical reasons, some people characterize this as self-destructive behavior. A sign of naivete. Of immaturity. I only know two things. They probably sleep better than I do, and I'll sleep even worse if I don't do these things.

I begin to wonder if it's the case that the only people who are good people will tell you that they aren't. Kind of depressing if true. Think of your favorite person and imagine that you like them better than they like themselves. Harsh.
I believe NZ (as some US states do) regulates pistols differently than rifles/shotguns. The VT shooter also had at least some fifteen round magazines.

Ultimately, the policy goal is gonna be damage reduction. NZ likely understands that perfect protection isn't possible.
I signed up for motorcycle classes and they said to bring glasses or goggles.

I hopped on Amazon and realized I don't trust any of the things they sell to not be fake/junk/something I don't want near my eyes.

I still ended up buying some because I don't really have time to get to the store, but I spent money to try and get a more repubtable brand. Hopefully they aren't fake.
Well that's rather unconstructive. I have used much worse software, but also better... but arguing that doesn't really help anyone here.
Facebook's newsroom post on the story: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/03/keeping-passwords-secur... .
That is reasonable but it might also be more than Amazon's willing to bear. It costs money to handle cash and it's more work to stock and flush these machines. Amazon may have a business case for these stores that depends on paying the relatively small merchant fee to credit card networks and knowing that they don't have any burden of handling any cash.
Hi Eric,
Thanks for all the hard work you did (and doing) putting high-quality technical content on the web. I always consult your blog (or, in all laziness, your SO repertoire) first when in doubt with C#. You're hands down the best explainer of cs-things ever.
But the middle class of today will be the rich of tomorrow, and not allowing them to rent out their own homes when they move means that basically they are prevented access to the same mechanisms of wealth creation that made today's rich people rich.
So they’re going to shut down Blue Bottle too?
HA HA HA HA
just submitted one audio to text startup, another startup text to audio upvoted. ALL in a few minutes interval. Seems to be popular this kind of startups.
Great product! ️
US Army applying new areas of math
The biggest example to me that Amazon no longer cares about the customer is their experience for non-Prime users. Random, regular items like Blu-ray discs or diapers will randomly get marked as "Prime Exclusive", and cannot be ordered from Amazon without a Prime subscription, even at a higher price. Prime Exclusive items are, mystifyingly, not even a better price, and usually the same or cheaper elsewhere. Amazon is literally giving you the choice to get Prime or shop elsewhere, and... I go shop elsewhere. Completely mystifying decision on Amazon's part.

Amazon just seems to enjoy screwing with anyone who doesn't have Prime, and has done it for years. It's never gotten a lot of coverage because of the pervasiveness of Prime: Anyone reading this comment probably never knew this, because they already had Prime.
Well, you need a cell phone to even get in, so that would likely have to change too. And then they'd need one of those complicated self-checkout kiosks where you tell how you're paying. Someone would have to deal with all the physical cash (and checks?). And at that point, you're just Walgreens.

I 100% get the logic, but for progress to happen we unfortunately need to break some norms. Like, Uber also requires a phone and doesn't accept cash... if they had to do both of those, they'd just be taxis.
Philosopher Mary Warnock dies aged 94
I don't know the scientific reason, but I was able to see the 3D image roughly around 5% of the times I tried. And after having success in seeing one, I was not able to learn how to do it always. The 5% success rate remained
If people are just building investment properties to park money that sit empty of course that's not going to help things, it's not really increasing the supply if no one lives there and no one can rent it. They might as well be building a statue or some non-housing object.

That doesn't mean actually increasing the housing supply is a bad idea. Heck, maybe they could have a tax on vacant units to try to force those investment properties that are already built on to the rental market. Or if that's too hard to enforce, raise the property taxes enough where vacant units look undesirable as an investment.

I don't know about the speculative investment market, but at least for the rental market demand is people. I think there are very few people just renting a place with the intention of leaving it unoccupied forever. If there were affordable rental properties everywhere, I think it would be less of a problem even if real estate investments remained expensive.
What I dislike most about React Router is how it pollutes rendering logic. They say it makes routing declarative. A switch statement is not declarative.
Ah, sorry - I guess I lost track of the context due to the threading, my bad.
Jared Kushner Uses Non-Official Messaging for Official Business, Lawyer Says
Tesla thinks the logistics IP is valuable, does anyone else' opinion matter? Didn't Sergey Aleynikov get nailed to the cross for "stealing" something that didn't matter?
I thought that faces were mostly fine. The spots that didn't look right, to me, were when there was a face out-of-focus in the front of the frame (the bit where Sisko's talking to that dude). I wonder if the network recognized it was "supposed" to be out-of-focus, which it is, but then wasn't able to do any edge cleanup to make it more consistent.
Give it another try! I wasn't able to see these at all, and I haven't attempted in well over a decade. I was able to see this in under a minute. I wonder if something with the constantly changing image helped me jump the final hurdle…
To be fair, Microsoft is doing a great job with their new docs site, and I can't blame them for wanting to centralize and refine the search ranking toward their new pages.

Some still have thin content, but I've been pleasantly surprised to keep finding the new docs as the top search results. Just a year or two ago, it was a crap shoot.

As an example, here is the top result for "C# Synchronization Primitives" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/threading/o...
Calculate the amount you afford to completely lose right now. Exercise that number of options. In your personal mental accounting, set the options value to $0. Check back with the company in a year or two, expecting nothing. You might be surprised
Could you please not post this kind of flamebait and comment substantively instead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> without a bank account these stores are inaccessible

So the solution is to ban cashless stores instead of creating a banking option for the poor?
Instead of worrying about a store that gets very little foot traffic lets worry about the homeless encampments, human poop, needles, piss bottles etc. that flood the city.

I agree, if there is a huge shift in stores to cashless we have a possible issue at hand if the unbanked are truly that high. BUT I don't see this kind of shift in stores anytime soon.

There are a lot bigger problems to tackle in this city that none of city government wants to take on. But sure lets spend time talking about these Amazon stores.
> The logic is sound - unbanked people exist, including in San Francisco, and without a bank account these stores are inaccessible.

Wouldn't it be better to solve the root cause instead of the symptoms?

Give residents a legal right to open a bank account - as it's for example the case in some European countries (e.g., in Austria banks are required by law to provide at least a "basic" bank account to people that don't have any other bank account at another bank).

With this approach the stores would still be inaccessible to unbanked people - but everyone would have the choice to become "banked", even if they have a bad credit history, etc.
From the HN guidelines:

"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. ... If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You can apply the exact same algorithm to any starting pattern (it does not have to be random dots). When a pixel is unconstrained by the algorithm, just pick a pixel from an image (rather than a random value). Of course, to work well the image needs a lot of small details. I actually tried that here. But the result "leaks information" into the 2D image (as you move around, the deformations of the 2D image reflects the 3D geometry). It seemed less interesting.
I don't see how cryptocurrency solves this - if you exchange your cash for a cryptocurrency then there are even fewer ways to spend it than when it was cash.

If you exchange your cash for (say) a Visa gift card or some similar reloadable card then you can use it wherever Visa works, which is many places (a lot of which would also accept cash) including online stores.

And if the laws are changing to prevent cashless stores from existing then you can just keep your cash as cash.
The FDIC puts the overall unbanked percentage at 6.5%, and "this number" (black and Latino households) at 15-20%. The 50% number is outdated but still, it's a sizable percentage.
The state space is constrained because the Rydberg blockade forces it to grow in a certain manner like the Fibonacci sequence. Lukin and Ho come up with a toy model that shows some features but it’s not clear it captures all the physics. The authors make this statement because people want passive (not optimal control) ways of preserving quantum information that aren’t (quantum) integrable. (I can go into detail on the definitions here if you want.)

NB: my department chair was Rick Heller’s grad student and we’ve been discussing these preprints here just like everyone else
This tactic has been used against companies friends of mine have started. I've only seen it used by large 20+ year old 1970s/1980s publicly traded companies, never someone like Tesla. The way it works is basically that you track where your ex-employees go after they leave. If they go to a competitor/disruptor start-up with out deep pockets, sue that competitor over trade secrets. It's nearly impossible to disprove in court. The competitor start-up exhausts its VC/Angel money on legal fees and goes bankrupt. Potential new customers are wary of using their tech because of the lawsuit. It's a lethal combination that ensures that you don't have to out innovate them. Stealing source code is one thing. I certainly understand suing over that. But, suing over stealing ideas about warehousing from a car company? Really? I don't see any justification for that other than a lack of faith in the ability of your own company to compete and innovate.

Full disclosure: I am shorting TSLA stock. I have worked on autonomous vehicles and do not believe Tesla's claims about their technology. I expect Tesla to go bankrupt sometime in the next few years. I'm even more convinced of this now that I see them using company-killer lawsuits against other competing start-ups.
Interview with the Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt
> Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory.

Could you clarify what you (and the comments mentioning NVENC below) are talking about ?

As far as I understand it, NVENC and the ilk are solutions that capture video output and encode it to H264. So they are x264 encoding accelerators, nothing more.

If you were running a datacenter this way, you'd be much better of having a bank of Matrox capture cards (which support multiple simultaneous inputs) in dedicated hardware converting your video game output to x264 streams for broadcast. They even support capturing, x264 encoding and streaming to IP addresses on your network for further distribution.

What would be interesting is if they bypass the video display output phase completely and render the finished framebuffers to memory (or an encoder chip via DMA over PCI) instead. I assume this would cut down manufacturing (+licensing for HDMI ?) costs a bit.

I know AMD has DirectGMA that allows other devices on the PCI bus access to limited chunks of GPU memory. There are signalling mechanisms in DirectGMA so that devices can basically implement producer-consumer pairs.

As far as I know this doesn't exist in consumer chips though. You need "workstation" GPUs. Which might explain Google's particular GPU choice, now that I think about it.
I have never understood a single thing written by Guy L. Steele Jr. I think the the languages he has dealt with have had horrible specifications.
If you don't have a system in place to automatically cleanse user-submitted content, you have a liability. The chilling effect this has will only grow over time.
You could probably get something by crossing your eyes instead... you will get the opposite image of what you would get by doing it properly, meaning that every 3d object will appear as carved out.
> Anyway, I'm skeptical of how many people can manage living without a bank account in SF.

Plenty. Most of us step over their belongings on the way to work and try to avoid eye contact.
A neat tech demo, but as with so many things coming out of The Valley these days, I don't think anybody actually wants this. No actual game is so bland that you'd want the ability to overlay your own "themes" on it after the fact. AI has lots of potential for assisting artists, and maybe part of that will include post-processing effects, but putting such things in the player's hands is pointless.
Whoever voted me down on this should understand the regulation and why my response was stated as it was. ( for reference, a good critique of the law is here [0]. )

My main issue is that the offenders are basically no longer really in trouble, but the networks (google, FB, reddit, et al) now are. (yes, that's a simplification, but bear with me).

This is akin to punishing the telephone company whenever someone makes a call on their network as part of a crime.

So, at first glance, everything is normal, until it isn't. Hence my comment about replacing the text on a page with Klingon instead - it looks fine, right up until it doesn't. This mirrors the effect of the law - something looks fine, right up until it's determined to be illegal, and then you are f'ed.

So if you disagree with me, then fine, but at least understand why my comment is there - it is supposed to be insidious, because the law is insidious.

[0] - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/final-version-eus-copy...
Why narrow-gauge?
suppose a local government blocks a global gambling or betting platform, will ICANN happily serve the IP one seeks to a end-user installed DNS server? What is then the legal perspective? Is ICANN then in contempt of local law?
Code prediction with a neural network (2018)