skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Prison is a huge problem. I'm not a criminologist or a psychologist, but there is a lot of truth to the fact that most people think and behave like the people that surround them. Our solution to crime is to surround you with exclusively convicted criminals for a few years.

Worse, going to prison or even jail just wrecks your life. You lose your job, most likely your house, your family suffers hugely, and you have a black mark if you do try to get any legitimate job in the future. It requires a lot of resilience and ability to delay gratification to bounce back from that. Of course the lack of those characteristics is probably a big part of what landed the person in prison in the first place.

Prison seems pretty bad. On the other hand, there has to be some sort of deterrent to committing crime, and for the worst cases, the public simply needs to be protected from some people. You see the lack of this in SF now. The police don't act in cases of smaller misdemeanors like shoplifting or car breakins, and so they're rampant.

For people that have poor future orientation, prison isn't that great of a deterrent. If you're going to use punishment as a deterrent, it works much better if it's consistent and quickly follows the behavior to be extinguished. Being arrested and sentenced only with some probability, and perhaps days or months later just doesn't work all that well. If we take, for example, shoplifting, if potential shoplifters knew that the second they walked out the door of the store, with 100% probability, that they were going to get punched in the face and the stuff taken away from them, no one would ever do it.

I think we need to come up with punishments that are less severe, more immediate, and more certain.
I bought a car for 6000 9 years ago. I have probably put about 1000ish into it. That is $2.13 per day. Gas and licensing is another $600 per year so another $1.64.

This is $3.77 per day. Many people have fewer cars than they do family members and all family members depend on them. This may be a house of 3 with 1 car or 4 or 5 with 2 cars.

Uber doesn't at present nor will they any time soon offer a $5 anywhere you want to go fare. When I have looked because of some logistical snafu suggested alternative transportation fares seemed to be in the $10-$15 range one way. This is true even as uber operates at a substantial loss.

Basically your scenario in which uber represents a savings involves choosing a high cost of car ownership for a single owner who only uses their car to commute 3 miles away at a price subsidized by ubers investors.

Back in reality land a household may trivially consume 5 rides daily at $15 per at a daily cost of $75 or $27375 per year.

Cost sensitive buyers could almost certainly save money by buying cheaper cars not by switching to uber.

Uber will never be an economical alternative to car ownership while it requires a drivers butt in a seat.
Possible, but I don't think it's likely. The volume on something like BTC is higher than AAPL. It doesn't make sense and never made sense. I don't think there are enough people who wrote and confidently run their own crypto-HFT bots to compete with volume in the stock market.
I don't work in robotics, but from my electrical engineering degree, I could hazard a guess:

- Software becomes much harder if you have to interface with hardware. You mess up software, you edit and then recompile/rerun. You mess up hardware, you need to buy a new copy of the hardware. Imagine if every time you wrote a bug or compiled a dependency with a bug, you need to pay $5 to somebody. If somebody else's software caused an error on a piece of critical hardware, your hardware may break too (e.g. car crash). And good hardware costs a ton of money. A Dynamixel servo costs something like $500, for a motor that's maybe 8 inches cubed or less, but if you use a cheap motor from China your precision over time will suck and software-based closed-feedback loops aren't as good as good hardware. So maybe you decide to do simulations, and you write a hardware emulator to load your software on. That costs a lot of money too, and doesn't and never will mimic hardware in all cases.

- Software for robotics is pretty low-level. You may need to write drivers for special hardware you develop, or you may need to rewrite drivers if proprietary drivers don't do the job for some reason. Drivers are if not hard to write, then a long slog to write (I don't write drivers). You need to make sure your software is highly performant, lightweight, and fault-tolerant. Maybe you need a real-time operating system, or you need to fork the Linux kernel and rip out bits and pieces (I heard somewhere SpaceX does this for their avionics, because they didn't want to deal with an RTOS). There is no let-it-crash philosophy. There may be no concurrency abstractions that are performant enough besides threading/locking primitives. There's the added complexity of failover that you plan into your design. You can't live without any of these most likely, because otherwise your customers may not live at all.

- By the time you master all the tools you need to build a successful robotics company, you haven't changed the system, the system has changed you. You accept the truth that good hardware is hard to make, good low-level software is hard to make, and great insurance plans are expensive. You're a Windows guy now because you use SolidWorks to design parts, and you can't be bothered to make a startup to rewrite SolidWorks for Linux because it's hard to get the physics/math background to reproduce even a part of SolidWork's functionality and user experience (which is a lot, CFD/FEA/etc). You deal with manufacturers who are perfectly happy with older tech because it works and because newer stuff always comes with risk. Your customers are enterprise Karens who shatter your roadmaps and don't care about your dreams.

This is a (possibly inaccurate) tasting of why building a hardware company is hard. I have the highest respect for those who do.
This is a mischaracterization of the size and operational use of the average forklift. Small (like under 5k curb weight) forklifts outnumber the big guys by an order of magnitude. If you count the small ones that the big box stores use I'd say it's two orders of magnitude. Most fork lifts are used to move small (<1000lb) things on pallets in indoor settings.

I personally think human form factor robots are a dead end but if the Incredible Hulkbot was as readily available as a forklift then then you wouldn't see so many things being palletized in the first place because you'd just have Hulkbot move them. The reason we have so many fork lifts is because we've settled on the pallet as a form factor and forklifts are good at moving pallets.
>3. None of this is to say that you personally are not experiencing a challenging time or are not subject to bias in any way. None of this should diminish your personal challenges in the work environment. That should be addressed. This particular individual (@jl) and this particular company (Lambda School) are just not addressing that particular cause at this moment. And that should be ok.

I think you summed up perfectly what causes people to have knee-jerk reactions against correcting biases.

Just because one effort doesn't address all issues at once, doesn't mean its futile.

Progress isn't instantaneous. It takes many attempts over long periods of time to move the needle. I'm not sure why people feel the need to criticize any and all attempts at doing so.
It would be helpful. After losing my hair, the sun became the enemy. Easy to forget to bring a hat.
Laravel also as a lightweight version called Lumen for simpler APIs and things. It includes a lot of the features of core Laravel but has a more stripped-down application structure.
Yes, it's a game of chinese whispers, and the issue is usually people from another paradigm (OO) who aren't immersing themselves in FP enough to understand what it is and isn't. Then you have a few people who take bits and pieces and stick them in another language, and call it multi-paradigm. These communities normally have very few people who actually know enough about FP to teach it to the OOers. It's kind of a bubble problem. You need experienced FPers to teach the paradigm and dispel the rumors. All of this really boils down to what a paradigm is: it's not a set of features, it's a mindset and an approach to programming that a language facilitates.
They need to reveal how many of those accounts were Journalists and their Stringers.

I am always amazed how many people the news orgs can instantly deploy to report mass shootings. How many interviews, vids and pics they can generate, how many experts they can round up and debates they can conduct. Not that I am a Facebook fan, but the media is highly responsible for amount of attention these events get.
Miami shows Kennedy Space Center as an attraction, that is over 3 hours away.
Zoom S-1
It's in a fuzzy gray area; it's more an accounting unit than a separate currency. The main advantage I see is that JPM does not have to spend as much on internal controls if txns are recorded in a multi-party ledger. The benefit to customers is that they could in theory trade JPMCoin with other bank customers and have some of the "programmable money" benefits of ethereum without the risk and regulatory exposure.
Intuitively, I don't understand why computer science engineering would have a lower ratio than engineering in general from a biological perspective. Or physics vs chemistry. Or structural engineering vs electrical. Which of the above fields have to do with playing with dolls vs playing with inanimate objects (are dolls not inanimate objects)? Which of the above fields is more aggressive in the academic pursuit? (I've never considered computer science, with a very low ratio compared to other STEM pursuits, to be more aggressive...)

That confusion is why I'm having a lot of difficulty personally buying that much of the differences can be attributed to biological differences in women and men. I feel like I'm missing some evidence where it is proven computer science is more aggressive than, say, structural engineering- and that's why there is a bigger representation of men in computer science.
> Some of the comments in this thread is a master class of how discrimination and gatekeeping work

All the top comments I see are supportive and encouraging. Maybe there were some negative removed comments, but overall this thread doesn't seem to demonstrate gatekeeping and discrimination.
Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?

You could just say "authorities punish the poor for being poor while pretending to help them up". We have reached the point where courts demands that when police move homeless people on that these police offer them a place in shelters. So, you wind-up with a situation where phantom shelter-beds are created. The (mostly) fiction of attempting to help people has to be maintained while the primary intention to remove them as annoyance, knowing they'll reappear elsewhere.

And yeah, allow tiny house camps on private land and you'll reduce the incredible pressure towards higher rents (or build public high rises like the old days or whatever). But then a whole lot of land value is threatened and so the concerned, naive homeowner becomes the threatened homeowner.
> such as lack of basic infrastructure related to health and education

Fight the welfare state and toss black moms into prison because they lied to send their kid to a better school (IIRC, 5 years. for lying about her address). Meanwhile rich white people are photoshopping their kids faces onto athletes.

Fund schools with property taxes. Oh look, those mcmansion filled suburbs have better schools.

Fight bussing (thanks Biden). Criticize the south for resisting integration while NY has the most segregated schools in the country.

Extol the virtues of the great charter schools and lottery systems, while the rest of the kids are stuck in shit.
Understanding of the hype cycle or not, the trouble is that our government is looking less legitimate by the day because it does not recognize and respond to threats such as climate change and a shift away from democracy that's been funded by our own corporations.

Yes, when you invest in China you are investing in communism. You might think you are getting a fast one because workers have no human rights, but try taking your money out and you will see what they think of property rights.
I wouldn't equivocate or dismiss classes as "hand holding" - social resources are very important for many people looking to learn a skill. The internet is a messy place and it is difficult to find the correct information without experience. A teacher in this sense acts a curator of information, giving students enough knowledge that they know where to go to learn more, as well as structuring the knowledge in a way that allows the students to learn in the best way possible. Even things as simple as "Check Stack Overflow" isn't a piece of knowledge to take for granted. Also, many people learn best when they can be in a group of other people learning the same thing. This has the additional benefit of developing social relationships.

To your second point, not all software jobs are as solitary and asocial as you seem to believe. Pairing, project planning, application product design, are all things that are done with other people. In fact, I am a software engineer and have more than a few days at work where I don't even touch my computer, yet still get a lot of work done.

The archetype of the solitary, 100% self-learned hacker as a representative of all, or even most of tech workers has been outgrown by the industry. Even the use of the term "hand-holding" as I've seen it used is a gatekeeper mentality IMO that needs to stop, or at least be toned back significantly. People that don't pull their weight certainly exist, but everyone learns and contributes in their own way.
I agree. Sadly I have been slandered for having this view. Apparently belief in equality means I hate women ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
How?

What work with China?

Sure the words of a top general are newsworthy but some fact checking would be nice.
What exactly is your point? That I am repeating the point in a paywalled article? I have always thought the market data on cmc makes no sense, and am pointing out a simple experiment you personally can do to check.
It's pretty straightforward – building a robot is like building a complex bit of software, except you have to build the complex software and a whole robot too :)

A robot platform can be a complex bit of hardware depending of the use case – it might be mobile, in an open/uncontrolled environment, using complex or expensive sensors, needs to be physically robust etc.

Now, many of those can be built from generic components – off-the-shelf controller boards, sensors etc. – but there's a lot of complexity in getting everything to reliably connect to and talk to everything else. Since there are far fewer robotics projects out there than software projects, there are also fewer of those "abstract components" in the first place – and physical requirements can mean it's harder to use them for particular designs.

Then there's the software layer. Again, depending on the use-case, this can be challenging - it can involve combining lots of sensor data, making decisions, planning motion, and so on. There are established algorithms and some reusable tools that can make this easier, but a lot of the magic is specific to individual projects. User interfaces can also be complex – building a reliable conversational UI is a project in itself, and if you're building a robot which interacts with humans, it needs to do this as well as all the robot stuff.

(FWIW I am working at a robotics startup right now, and every day is quite a challenge!)
Some, such as Google developers, have said these vulnerabilities can't be fixed in software: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/google-software-is-n...

And it's ridiculous to give credence to the idea that the people pushing software mitigations to Linux, and the maintainers merging them, are doing so in bad faith.
Downtown SF
It’s far from clear in the statistics that self driving cars today (without the use of a safety driver) are safer than driving drunk. IMO Tesla autopilot, fairly clearly is less safe than driving drunk if a human is not carefully monitoring.
This is absolutely true.

But when everyone starts taking this view on it, the result is that changes get made tactically based on what makes your task work. With no understanding of the overall vision. The result undermines the integrity of the system, and makes debuggers ever more necessary going forward.

This is a good point to hold in your mind as you read or re-read Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf.
Who (else) said anything about IQ?

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Also, please stop posting flamebait, especially ideological flamebait, to HN. It fuels flamewars, which destroy what we want to preserve here: thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity. Assuming those are things you also want, you're welcome to post here in that spirit.
> Not to do so is merely to accept its bias as the status quo.

This is a biased interpretation itself that assumes there is preexisting bias. It is true that the premise requires acceptance of the ideas you put forth above, but the issue is that many people don't believe those are enough of a factor anymore to justify discrimination. Imbalance does not always equate to unfairness.
Breaking up "Google (or any other tech company)" is not a reasonable solution to any actual problem, I don't understand how people can casually suggest that.
I talked with a guy living in a motorhome in Mountain View California, he works for Google. He could certainly afford an apartment but said his payments on the motorhome are about $600 a month, and an apartment close to Google would be $2500 a month at least, so he feels like its a free $2000 a month to save or spend. He's fortunate that Google also has nice showers, free food, and laundry. Things he might otherwise have to find other options for.

I can't argue with the logic. It means $24,000 a year to apply toward student loans or what have you isn't a bad deal. And he will eventually pay off the motorhome giving him some security there.

Sadly, most people won't talk about their situation (I tried by walking down a road and knocking on doors) I was hoping to get a sense of how many people were living in motorhomes because they wanted to (like the guy I talked to) and how many were there because they felt they had no choice. I don't have any good ideas on how to get that information.

I did enough research to know that building a small lifestyle business out of offering black/grey water pumping and garbage collection services for the folks who were doing this by choice was probably viable. You would need a couple of custom trucks[1] that were capable of being mobile RV dumping stations and a business with sewer rights to dump (the City of Sunnyvale will license a business to have an RV dumping station on site, so starting there would work.) I think it would be a "pump and dump" scheme that would be both good for the neighborhood and probably make enough money to employ a few folks.

[1] To be full service you'd probably want a fresh water tank, a propane tank, and a sewage collection tank. Then you could dump the grey/black tanks, refill fresh water and refill propane. Personally I think it makes way more sense than these companies that were sending trucks out to refill your gas tank.
They don't need rehabilitation, they need to have not been put in prison for a fucking plant in the first place.

Go to prison for weed. Get out. Realize how fucked things are now that you're a felon on parole.
That's what liberal typically means. The OP said "I'm a liberal BUT" and then went on to state a liberal view.

Liberal != leftist.
Yup. For example, GPT-2, a new machine learning program that can reliably produce realistic middle-school-C-student-level text based on minimal prompts, has faced similar criticism: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...

Quote:

> A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:

>> I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.

> I resisted the urge to answer “Yeah, well, your mom is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you back a slightly unappetizing slurry of it when asked.”

> But I think it would have been true.

The better we get at AI, the more we understand how AI works, and the more we can say, "that's not AI, that's just an algorithm that does <insert explanation of how the algorithm works>". OK, but there has to be some mechanism to how our brains work, right? How do we know we aren't just implementing shitty approximations of that mechanism?
>Why does it seem to be that we, at least in America, punish the poor for being poor, instead of, or even at the same time that we try to help them up?

I think that's the natural consequence of having spent years pushing the idea that being poor is a personal choice or a lack of character. Once you make the connection that it's directly linked to a lack of character, you can be punitive instead of providing a safety net, and punitive is much cheaper for those of us with high moral character.
> Check what US does in Venezuela right now.

As a Venezuelan, I’m curious to know what you mean by this.
Keep in mind we've also blown up 500+ nuclear bombs including almost 10 underwater. Not a great idea in hindsight, but overall we didn't experience any major problems as a result.

Seems like even in the worst and extremely unlikely scenario of full detonation, we'd still be fine.
Functional programming is simply the obsession with functions: the use of the function call, and indirection on functions, as the only control mechanism.

Functional programming emphasizes recursion, deferral of control decisions into functions (e.g. pass functional arguments to some function, and let it decide which are called and which are not), and the re-ification of all control mechanisms as functions (e.g. continuations).

If it has loops, ifs and gotos, it is not functional. If it just has function calls, then it's functional, even if there is mutation going on of variables or array elements and such.

Purity plays well into functional programming, because if we have structured the control flows in the program based on function calls, we can determine which functions are pure and which are not, and get a good grip on reasoning about and managing the side effects to avoid surprises.
There are many walkthroughs on these concepts as well online
Another promotion of a protected class designed to bait and separate humans
I wonder what took so long for DOM-deltas-over-websockets tech to show up. It was only in the last two years or so for stuff like Plotly's Dash and Elixir Phoenix's LiveView to become popular even though we had Websockets and event driven networking for ages.