skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Any abuse of this software and/or algorithm(s) evinced by parties engaged in violation of this Agreement, if discovered will be taken as aknowledgement, consent and agreement by those parties to allow any member of the Grassland community to attempt to seek out and identify such parties in order to target and generate any digital news, social media content or other types of information that the household and/or family of the members of such parties may consume using the 'Deep Schizophrenia' narrative

It reads like, "if you break this license, we'll dox you and your family"
What reason does de Becker have to falsely accuse the Saudi Government of hacking Jeff's phone? I don't see any upside for Bezos and de Becker to make themselves enemies of the Saudi Arabian government.
Oracle has 'DATE', 'TIMESTAMP', 'TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE', and 'TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE'.

Out of these, 'TIMESTAMP' and 'TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE' do exactly what you'd expect without needing a big tutorial.

'DATE' is a 'TIMESTAMP' that can't store fractional seconds.

And 'TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIMEZONE' is an unmitigated footgun that you'll probably misuse.
There are a few credit cards that will cover the cost for you. I believe both the Capital One Venture card and Chase Sapphire Reserved card will do this for you.
My father has stopped flying entirely. He's got a pacemaker and sometimes needs a cane and has a small list of medications that he legitimately needs to have with him at all times. He's diabetic, as well. Though he's not very overweight, he just doesn't move as well as he once did.

TSA has made flying for him and people like him so incredibly difficult. He's just opted out. I don't blame him, either, though it does make visits more challenging now.

I mean honestly.... Why do people like this have to take their shoes off and manage all of their carry-ons and personals into bins and onto belts and ... The entire farce of the TSA is all so callous and genuinely stupid.
It was an enabling factor but not a causative factor.

Another question: what proportion of homes had washing machines by year starting in 1928? Large proportions of American homes weren’t even electrified in 1928.
Scolding is the essential foundational mentality of the job. They get paid to actively look for bad behavior. This makes it very easy to find all things to be suspicious at a minimum.

It actually makes it quite hard to not start seeing everything and everyone through a suspicious lens. The odds are good that there are additional structural reinforcements. They probably don't get rewarded for anything else. They may even get actively penalized for not behaving that way.

At my corporate job, I was instructed to a. Look for a reason to pay a claim rather than looking for a reason to deny it and b. Look out for the customer rather than cover my own ass.

Then I had a claim for a benefit that was only paid once a year. I knew the six week period it occurred in, but not the actual date. I got dinged by Quality for paying it.

My ultimate solution: I no longer work there. But most people just do what they need to do to get their damn paycheck. Fighting the good fight is usually not what they get rewarded for.

Office Space:

"I have 7 bosses. If I do something right, no one cares. If I do something wrong, everyone comes down on me like a ton of bricks. I spend all my time trying to not get yelled at."

(Or words to that effect.)
Naively this does seem like it should be an industry where the take could be small. I don't understand why Uber and Lyft are losing money actually.
A world in which business cares about more than just profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
By some metric, your (and my) genetics are also really bad and your (and my) job is not useful for society ;-).

The "it's genetics" argument is also super flawed, as if you look your family 2-4 generations back they were most likely drunk peasants and yet today you're not.
This is a great list on what it means to correctly leverage engineering resources. (I would recommend doing a blog post).

Point 2 (and 5) is probably one of the biggest things I think about a lot these days. Most of my tech stacks are relatively tried and true, with the exceptions of Netlify and GCP. Where it's possible, I will generally try to put a $10-20 dollar SaaS product instead of code. That comes with counter-party risk, but I trust Pingdom more than I would my own notification servers.

When I wrote this article, I struggled with explaining how my thoughts of what a 10X engineer changed over the years. I recognized people would yell 10X != memorization, but the compound effect of working (and learning) without friction (in this case, human memory. in many other scenarios, technical debt) leads to exponential advantages.
Why is it news when a billionaires privacy is invaded, but not ours?
Do some serious homework on the markets before putting that 500k on the line. Some, but not all, and probably not half of the stocks in the S&P 500 will continue to gain this year. Bonds have run up recently, so they also have more immediate risk of decline / low yield.

Also, consider things not so obvious: option selling strategies. Warren Buffet does it, so smart is as smart does.
Cockpits are locked. Passengers are more vigilant. Bruce Schneier argues that this made all the difference. I don't know if it's right but it seems like not a stretch.
Color me surprised that he only figured it out after a few billion dollars.
The real comparison is with the number of human lifetimes wasted getting to the scareport extra early and waiting in line. It is on the order of one thousand per year.
The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob (2005)
I think they don't mind if you commit suicide, they'd just prefer you did it before you got on the plane. The assumption is that explosives would be disagreeable to drink.

Thinking about it more, it occurs to me that it could also just be security theater.
A suburbia for the homeless exists and they can live there forever
Well...if it is working for you, you can keep using it
How does this work when a friend is calling you?
Imagine traveling with five laptops, overseas, because your corporate InfoSec policy doesn't let you ship laptops to your coworkers. Then imagine being picked at random for additional screening and being asked to let $10,000 in company assets roll on through out of site while you get the pat-down.

The only time I ever made polite insistence to a TSA Agent, that day.
I’m not sure what you mean.

I’m 100% serious; that’s a business model with no value in it, and they few vendors who have tried it in the past are all fading into obvilion.

Getting adoption of a language is hard enough as it is (see the slow uptake of say, kotlin despite large scale corporate backing) making it a pay-to-use is just a dead end.

How are you going to sustain the user growth for a paid product when better or equivalent free alternatives exist? How will you build an ecosystem when the core product is paid-to-use? If I’m paying to make something, I’m not giving it away for free. Not only that, it’s a proven failed business model see Borland for example. The few vendors that remain are for embedded devices.

There are so many thing wrong with the idea it’s hard to know where to even start enumerating them.

/shrug

> They are not, and they're not helpful either.

...but please, don’t try to put words in my mouth, that’s just offensive.

I am completely serious, and was in my previous comment too.
This is a good comment, but I think it's worth emphasizing that this is the difference between "7 orders of magnitude" and "6 orders of magnitude". It doesn't in any way invalidate the point in the comment it is replying to.
> If anything it feels like the companies are trying to milk the drivers so that the company can profit.

That's probably particularly true of those companies, but it's also endemic to capitalism more generally.
> The true problem with surveillance is the asymmetry of it all.

Uh, agree to disagree. If someone invades my privacy, I'm not upset because I didn't get to invade theirs.
Thanks for this. Was very helpful!
This is a hilarious and amazing tip.

Another way I've tried to tackle this is on day 1 of a job - I've blocked out a huge chunk (4 hours) of my daily calendar of "Coding Time - No Meetings, No Slack, No Email" before anyone could tell me no.
I wear these[0] when I travel. I can take them off and put them on with no hands at all. I usually do belt and shoes at the same time, in fact.

[0] https://www.merrell.com/US/en/jungle-moc/17703M.html
Paul Graham – “How to Make Wealth”
Tips on getting rid of coil whine?

Because that's literally the only sound I hear from my computer unless it's heavily loaded. Most annoying is an intermittent whine when it's idle. Loud enough to hear from the other end of my - admittedly small - apartment.
I guess by "theater" you mean that there's no actual purpose to taking your laptop out of the bag other than making people feel better? I have a hard time believing that's true. There's people who spend their whole career understanding airline security and (since I know nothing about it) I'm inclined to trust they aren't wasting my time.
I guess slack capacity is the crux of the contractor vs. employee debate. While you don't get paid hourly, you also don't have to be on the job hourly. That gives you the chance/incentive to switch to other "gigs" and improve overall market efficiency. At least that's the theory.
Build, Test, & Debug CGit – The Hyperfast Web Front End for Git, on Ubuntu Linux
How long after dinner do you go to run? And how long or far do you usually run?
What exactly are they trying to prevent with the liquid prohibition, anyway?
You should absolutely never run a phone with MIUI, or any other similar OS which you have absolutely no idea what it's doing under your nose. First thing you should do is wipe it and install Lineage.
Working like a dog for 12-14 hours a day is lazy?
Like pi-hole.net?
Probably explains why (anecdotally) white vinegar is so effective at repelling mosquitos.
I can't quite understand the economics of this rate drop (which happened only in the LA market, btw). Here's my analysis, please let me know if you see anything wrong with it.

Uber makes 25% commission from the per-mile fee, so the total revenues to Uber and to the drivers is moving in the same direction. I assume Uber wouldn't drop the rate unless their revenue increased. So they must know that (1) the lower fee will be more than offset by the increased demand, and (2) they will have enough drivers to meet that greater demand.

It must be that the total money received by all drivers will go up. So each driver will make more money before expenses (not per hour, but in total).

How will Uber meet the increased demand? Sure, the drivers will be better utilized (less time without passengers), but would that really be enough? Or does Uber expect the drivers will work longer hours? I suppose it's possible that people really desperate for cash will work more even as they are paid (a lot) less. That would be both very sad and very hard to believe (since at this point McDonalds pays better than Uber, after accounting for gas and wear & tear on the car).

Anyway, if somehow the hours per driver stay the same, the gross income per hour will grow. Income after expenses will grow by an even greater percentage.

I really would like to understand whether the increased gross revenue per driver will come from longer hours or not.
Last time I flew (three weeks ago) I accidently left a bottle of water in my backpack and a TSA agent just took it out, swabbed it, and put it back without even saying anything.
I think we are talking about physical addiction ;)
Have you ever received a free uber or lyft ride? I was in college when they were blowing up, and me, and each of my friends, probably used around 500$ of free rides each..
I've never heard my iPhone make an audible noise that I didn't trigger.
This is a few years old. I wonder how those eagles are holding up!
Freudian slip? =P
Wonderful write up. If you end up writing a blog post please let me know.
My wife and I have had a little different experience. About 1.5 years ago we took up deliervinf food with Caviar/Uber eats to get out and pay for our dates. She and I would go for 2 hours maybe 2-3 nights a week. On average she and I both made ~$26 per hour. Since we rode bikes we paid no insurance/parking/etc. I tried once doing it for 8 hours a day and my earnings went down to like $6 per hour.
Trying to prevent people carrying through chemicals that could be combined in the airplane bathroom to make explosives I believe.

There was a terrorist plot to do this, which was caught by the security services, and then despite the terrorists being caught the liquids ban was put into place forever more to stop future attacks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_...
I agree with you, but Falun Gong is more than a mere “simple meditation group.” It’s more like a Chinese Scientology.
Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? (2016)
>>>In Korea, barber shop poles are used to identify locations of brothels

What identifies barbershops then?
> ”The only chance we have for people to run their own services is if we make it dead easy”

In the case of DNS, it’s dead easy if the server is built in to home routers.

Many of them do, in fact, ship with local DNS already - it’s just that many users override it with 8.8.8.8 or whatever.
I’m not the most frequent flier in the world, but I have never flown to a US airport without a precheck line. At worst, they’ve handed me a placard for the people manning the scanners saying I can leave my laptop in my bag and my shoes on through the standard metal detector.
It is not a counterfactual. Once you have rent control, existing renters will no longer be in favor of building new housing. You're confusing having the votes at two different times, among other things.
TSA agents don't want to understand how their screening science is supposed to work (or not work). They just follow scripts.
Wow, wtf.
And yet if someone pockets a grenade in their rectum, the system fails.
It’s quite unfair to characterize the entirety of a huge organization based simply on certain functions at which it’s ineffective. Probably the most important thing it does is to keep the world from descending into a flaming fireball of constant wars between countries.

There are literally thousands of other things at which it exce.
Boyer-Moore + Loop Unrolling... fast.

But, perhaps it could be improved further via SSE instructions, or by sending the data to a GPGPU and parallelizing the algorithm...
I've been thinking about this lately because I also hate the TSA way more than is even remotely rational.

Even for frequent fliers, the TSA is pretty far down on any rational list of complaints about government. I fly almost every week, but in the past 12 months I have probably spent a lot more time at city hall on a stupid residential parking permit than I did in (non-customs) airport security lines.

In addition to personality, a lot of people project much larger political ideologies onto the TSA. You see a lot of that even in this comment section.
The comment I was replying to said they would optimize for paying them “as much as possible”, not minimum wage.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/liquids...

A pretty good summary and a bonus foreshadowing of this article.

I have had a pretty good experience with the new scanners. I have global entry/Precheck and one remaining headache with the old scanners was remembering to take my double walked flask out and show the TSA that it was empty by removing the cap. The new scanners can see that it’s empty from inside my bag, which is very handy.
Inflation is an unvoted and unregulated tax; being a flat tax it is regressive and it vastly disproportionately (negatively) affects the poor.

It is not good, nor a benefit.
Wow. Thanks for the prompt reply. Since it's been a day, I didn't have much hope of this getting one. Thanks for the blog post, too!
That walled garden is missing a few stones. Mr. Cook threw them in his glass spaceship.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2989037/iphone-malware...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvakb3/inside-nso...
If Mark Zuckerberg had the best interest of other people, like, all of humanity and the world writ large, in mind, I think it would probably be apparent.

Rather, it actually appears as though he is being intentionally deceitful.

Perhaps his rationale is based on some measured or calculated outcome, maybe he actually thinks he's doing some good in the world.
Hopefully his intention is positive!

Or, maybe he is beholden to investors.

He seems to be a fool with power, not someone with anything meaningful to say.

Is he a classic case of the old adage: "absolute power corrupts absolutely"?

Platform! Graph! Stream!, and, abuse people for profit!!

Are Facebook/Insta/Wechat/etc. good for the long term prosperity of humanity? I would argue that the answer is a hard "no", and I think there's ample evidence.

If he were a noble person, he'd shut his harmful systems down.

Shame on Mark Zuckerberg. History will not remember him kindly.
This topic is important, but this article is weak. They cite a statement about doctor burnout, and a single study about employer statements about the topic. Most of the content is anecdotal, and in that sense they're just going for an 'I hear you' reaction instead of adding anything to the discussion. Disappointing imo.
Even at 200 MB/s that is at least a dozen disks in zero redundancy RAID to get the needed speed.

This test was hitting the OS disk cache.
So many people denigrade these things as “crutches” for bad programming languages or underdeveloped skills, but I don’t know how you can beat getting live feedback as you type.

As someone who turns off autocomplete and other features when forced to use an IDE, and otherwise works entirely with code in a plain text editor (sometimes Vim, sometimes Notepad --- and sometimes just good old pencil-and-paper), I can tell you that "live feedback" is a distraction. It interrupts the thinking process like a backseat driver.
You can write floating point operators in several different ways. You can write with the normal floating point operators

x *. y +. z

or, since `Float.(+) = (+.)`, `Float.() = (.)`, etc,

let open Float in
x * y + z

or simply

Float.(x * y + z)
Learning Data Science: Our Favorite Resources from Free to Not
I doubt he’s clueless.

He has been victim-blaming since Facebook was founded. (Remember the comments about how FB’s users were stupid to hand all that data over?)

Why expect him to stop at battered women or political refugees?
Right, I'll be the first to admit that it isn't totally rational. I get much more upset about the TSA, since I see their petty authoritarianism face to face, than I do about things that affect me much more but only indirectly.
Unfortunately I’ve found that the new tray systems they’re installing make the backpack versions of this obsolete since they won’t open all the way inside the bin.
I've experimented with ketamine a couple of times and can confirm. Very addictive.
Folks say really really positive things about Ketamine. I wouldn't say I'm an inexperienced psychonaut, yet ketamine scares me. Two close friends told me they have problems "abusing" ketamine. If anyone is able to help shed some light what abusing ket looks like, I'd appreciate it.
The iPhone 6 I have for App testing does when charging. Some devices do it at certain display settings or under certain loads. Modern Smartphones are virtually silent 99% of the time but invariably they'll all whine at some point.

I am the type of person who is unsettled until I pinpoint the origin of a sound and my partner will find me with my ear against the wall tracing a drip or creak in the house.

I guess I must also still have some high frequency hearing left because I can still hear every electronic device hum at least under certain conditions.
The book “The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is almost always Good Politics” explains this fairly well. It’s a great read, maybe a bit depressing.

TLDR: it’s cheaper to pay off a small group (family) rather than a big group (populace).
I just got back from Brazil. There is a startup ride sharing service called 99 that is interesting.

As a comparison, a ride that costs 40 R$ (~$12 USD) on Uber will cost half that on 99. And, I heard while I was there that incredibly 99 pays the drivers more.

I don't know if this is a technical advancement that 99 hasn't needed to make the massive investment that Uber did now that lots more is understood about the ride sharing market, or if Brazilian VCs are pumping money in, or what. But, I experimented with 99 and it was much cheaper.

I stopped using them when a driver let the fare run for an hour after I got out of the vehicle. Unlike Uber there is no cancel button. I'm not sure if this was fraud or he turned off his phone or what, but the experience was terrible trying to get it resolved for an hour.

The most interesting thing is that there are startups attacking the incumbents (Uber and Lyft). The exciting thing is that Uber demonstrated incredible growth patterns like no company we've ever seen. I wonder if it will demonstrate shrinkage like nothing we've ever seen. I have no loyalty to them but Lyft isn't in Brazil and after that experience with 99 I stopped using it.

Fun times.
If one was a founder who wanted to have their startup succeed without crushing your teams mental/physical health, how would you do it? I understand the founder accepting it as a cost themselves, but when the company's existence depends on speed, how do you balance the push with survival?

Are there any good case studies?
The new normal that is TSA.
I find type hinting to be very useful, but it has some gotchas (also present in unhinted Python), where the type you get isn't the type you expect:

- Int and float from numpy arrays are np.int/float32/64. And round(np.floatXX) returns a float, but round(float) returns an int in Python 3.
- ruamel.yaml loads CommentedMap and some custom scalar types. CommentedMap is not a subclass of dict.
5 years ago I built the highest performance gaming rig I could using entirely fanless parts.

It got very hot to the touch and probably was rather bad for the chips long term.

The electrical whining was terrible! You could hear all CPU and GPU activity depending on load.

Now I use a macbook and it's far less irritating...
If I gave up 10% of my salary and someone else making much less got to raise of the equivalent of my 10%, I'd do it in a heart beat.
And the problem of programmers not being good language designers is that the design of APIs consisting of nothing but functions and data types is also language design. Oops!