skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This just seems stupid to me. Walking a few minutes from one side of a train going from one place to another would be a dream. I just want to be able to park at the park and ride before I get on a bus and hope the pnr is not full. This is like a second order problem.

I thought the solution would be vans to take you around the neighbor. That would increase usage.
You Can’t Top Bitcoin
My sense is that your experience is becoming more and more common. As far as I can tell, co-pays, deductibles, etc have been going up dramatically over the last few years (as the original article points out.)
Three reasons -

First to allow them to shard more effectively. With different subdomains, they can route requests to various different servers with DNS.

Second, it allows them to route you directly to the correct region the bucket lives in, rather than having to accept you in any region and re-route.

Third, to ensure proper separation between websites by making sure their origins are separate. This is less AWS's direct concern and more of a best practice, but doesn't hurt.

I'd say #2 is probably the key reason and perhaps #1 to a lesser extent. Actively costs them money to have to proxy the traffic along.
Before I clicked, I expected it to be this one: https://xkcd.com/419/
Witness all sorts of horrible behavior, like employers saying "Sorry, all, no raises this year, because one of your coworkers was using so much of our health insurance pool that they raised our rates!"
Show HN: Free My Desktop
in mice
Years ago, someone said something about what we were building that I've never forgotten:

"Anyone smart enough to use this isn't dumb enough to need it."

Those were the words that come to my mind everytime I see stuff like this. Clickers want solutions, not complicated toolkits in a GUI.
Removing my comments because I can't seem to delete them...
Facebook gives social scientists unprecedented access to its user data
If there are enough candidates, you can encode a unique ID in the pattern of your individual votes to prove who you are to somebody reading anonymous ballot papers. I've heard this is possible in Australia with a huge list of candidates and multiple votes.
I wish it really Just Worked everywhere. Unfortunately, the fixed layout and tendency to target 8.5x11 means they’re basically unreadable on smaller screens.
> there is traffic and parking spaces to deal with

In my observation (living in the SF Bay Area for almost a year now), being stuck in traffic is usually still faster than public transit (unless you're lucky enough for all your destinations to be near a BART stop and lucky enough for your home to also be near a BART stop; as soon as you throw in Muni or SamTrans or CalTrain you're looking at much longer travel times even excluding the time loafing about waiting for the next leg of the trip to arrive).

Parking is indeed a problem, but if you think about it, plenty of people do manage to find parking spaces (obviously, since people are parked in them), so you just gotta be prepared to wait for one to open up (or find one a bit further out; helps when there are plenty of parking garages around).

> you really can't go anywhere cool while driving.

You can't with public transit, either, unless "anywhere cool" happens to be on the transit route and you're going there (and going home afterward) during that route's hours.

> Please don't mention something like taking your car to a national park or something. That's what car rentals are for.

lol. That's also what owning your own vehicle is for, plus being able to use it day-to-day for things.

When I first moved to SF, I did so without a car, forcing myself to get used to BART and Muni (and learned very quickly that Muni's timetables are illusory at best, but that's a story for another day). It's fine until you need to haul something (like me trying to haul a bunch of desktop parts back from Fry's) or need to go somewhere outside of the transit agency's service area or before/after their normal operating hours (like me trying to do a lot of things in the city).

Thankfully, I didn't get rid of my car, and as soon as I moved to a place with better parking I retrieved my car and I've been quite a bit happier ever since (though not happy enough to continue to want to live in/around SF, but that's also a story for another day).
Drone makes history by delivering organ for successful transplant
“No-code” = snake oil
Just fyi, unifying Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram is something they mentioned a while back [0], and is something that they're moving foward with now [1]. Although it's looking like they're just going to get the underlying architecture the same so you can message people across apps and less that there is going to be 1 app for everything.

[0] https://www.slashgear.com/whatsapp-instagram-facebook-messen...

[1] https://www.slashgear.com/facebook-messenger-f8-2019-desktop...
Our system of governance is an expression of our culture. In France, when the government wants to build a railroad, they do the studies, then they pass a law that preempts every other law, and the railroad gets built. In the US, the government does the studies, decides to build the railroad, and spends years tangled up in litigation. We created those legal structures to reflect what we think is important.

Right now, folks in our county are trying to shut down three light rail stops that have already been built and are operating. (Transit is a “conduit for crime.”) If we do that, we have to pay the federal government back a bunch of money we got to build those stops in the first place. Americans hate infrastructure. And they don’t particularly like each other, so they have built a distributed society that doesn’t require as much centralized coordination.

It’s not stupidity or laziness. Americans are too individualistic to build infrastructure. Nobody can put the needs of society over their own needs. That’s why every infrastructure project is a disaster of inefficient self-serving union workers[1] and endless litigation. (I have an acquaintance who is ethnically Japanese, and moved back to Japan after growing up in the US. She remarked to me: “Americans don’t really go around thinking about how what they’re doing affects other people.”)

Once you really internalize all that, it’s pretty fine. I kinda like the suburbs. I like being able to roll right up to a chain restaurant and park, instead of having to shlep a stroller up and down stairs. In my old age, I’ve realized that if you’re living in New York or SF, you’re doing the whole America thing wrong. That just forces you to constantly confront all the things Americans do poorly (transit, zoning, social services). Kansas City! You can drive everywhere, traffic isn’t too bad, cost of living is super low, etc.

[1] In the NYT piece on why the Second Avenue subway costs so much, there were French transit managers pointing out how ridiculously over staffed the project was. The French were pointing out how inefficient we were.
Last time I looked it is limited to the page size (so about 4kb on the boxes I played with). If you try and put more than that into an indexed field it throws an error.
Performance was an imposed callsign of Mongo, the reason everybody started using it was the declarative schema stuff and so the dev didn't have to know how to start a terminal, which was a not-insignificant hurdle. It doesn't have significant performance differences over other simple KVs. "Faster" was primarily a measurement of learning curve.
It's called soft bigotry by low expectations.
No, not nearly all! But we do read a boatload of comments.
Those databases all allow and detect deadlock as an optimistic concurrency strategy out of the box.
> your housing costs would be higher

My housing costs would be roughly twice as high (from $2,500 to more like $5,000 per month). Living closer just isn't an option.
> I don't want the WeChat model, or the current Facebook model, or the new Facebook where their toxic waste is externalized to governments and the public to clean up.

Well, what do you want? For people to not communicate?
Virtual and path style share the same domain suffix. It's also *.amazonaws.com, not amazon.com.
"Private schools are not about choice", according to who? That's a subjective opinion which you are presenting as a fact.

The authors argument revolves around removing choice so everyone gets the same thing so we are forced to make that one option higher quality. I'm not saying that is the only way to do it, but that is what this person is arguing for and that is what I'm arguing is a bad idea.
Africa: Where black is not beautiful
Ask HN: How do you know if you're good enough to work on an ambitious project?
Recently, I've been wanting to write some sort of high level programming language for biology, and this is no easy task. The rules are not clear and I don't have a PhD in synthetic biology.

I know this sort of thing will be hugely impactful, and I want to work on it. But I honestly don't know if my work will even be remotely meaningful.

Do I work on this, or just focus on something more tractable, like SaaS projects
skimfeed.com
Use a tax incentive. It should be set high enough that most people will consider it worth their time, but low enough that anyone who really doesn't want to be in politics won't be financially harmed.
I had this exact same thought when I read the headline. It seems like MS and others are viewing ML as a similar opportunity to Big Data/BI ten years ago. You saw the "democratization of data" as people with little technical skills could suddenly create analytics dashboards within tools like Tableau.

In my opinion, it's far too easy to make a critical mistake during design/implementation of ML to follow this same path. And what's more, if you mess up making an analytics dashboard, it's usually fairly obvious. In ML, there are MANY ways to mess up a model and you have no easy way to tell.

If someone doesn't have the technical experience behind creating these models, I would not trust any output they give me from using one of these tools. And if they do have the experience, they would certainly not be choosing to use one of these tools either.
Also property taxes and costs of living: food, transportation and other necessities.
I think TLA+ is a great fit for what you want to do. What problems are you facing?

BTW, while state machines are certainly the recommended approach for TLA+ specifications (and for very good reasons), there are others, which may be useful in some cases. For example, here I have a rule-based specification of Tic-Tac-Toe: https://pron.github.io/files/TicTacToe.pdf Instead of describing a state machine, the specification is a conjunction of state machines in a style known as "behavioral programming".

Also, you may benefit from looking at the TLA+ subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/tlaplus/) for various posts on TLA+ and formal methods in general, and maybe get some ideas.
How would they get anyone to pay anything if their services are being offered by the government as a basic human right? They lose all bargaining power if they can't refuse their services.
Hah, quite correct. I have a link to that in my 'urbanism' bookmarks:

https://taxfoundation.org/state-road-funding-2017/
No, because path-style bucket names weren't originally required to conform to dns naming limitations. I don't know how they're going to migrate those older non-conforming buckets to the host-style form.
The average American gun owner has between 5 and 6 firearms. I just took the class.
tweetdeck.twitter.com
>I firmly believe that the issue is in monetizing the adult content, which Yahoo, Oath, and Verizon did not seem to want to do

Working in the adult content space will get your business blacklisted from mainstream content. No one is going to have official relationships or work on exclusive deals for your platform if their content is going to be side by side with pornography, or even perceived to be alongside it.
do you (or does anyone here) know why Pornhub isn't also filled with non-pornographic content? Is it hard to publish on it? Do they "censor" non-pornographic content?

I mean that it would be a natural place for people to publish all kinds of videos if they didn't like another video platform and didn't mind having their videos surrounded by pornography, and especially if they didn't care about monetization.

but it doesn't have anything at all. For example try searching for "review" and you will (NSFW obviously) get a page full of actual reviews: of sex toys, only. Nothing else. click around all you want, it will only be sex-related.

Why is this? any other platform you can think of has parts that are just using the platform as a technical solution for distribution and not really on brand for that platform.

maybe I'm wrong but I've looked a few times but can't find anything. how does this happen?
Ala Wendy's social media. It only works with a certain demo that's very loud on the internet, but boy does it work.
Vulture cannibal capitalists don't care who or what they destroy, as long as they make $.
Amazon explicitly recommends naming buckets like "example.com" and "www.example.com" : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website-host...

Now, it seems, this is a big problem. V2 resource requests will look like this: https://example.com.s3.amazonaws.com/... or https://www.example.com.s3.amazonaws.com/...

And, of course, this ruins https. Amazon has you covered for * .s3.amazonaws.com, but not for * .* .s3.amazonaws.com or even * .* .* .s3.amazonaws... and so on.

So... I guess I have to rename/move all my buckets now? Ugh.
Is downloading the trained model for offline use possible?
> not be outright hostile to the truly marginalized

No popular party can do this or they wouldn't be truly marginalized. By definition, it's impossible.
That's the same price as C++ (ISO/IEC 14882:2017) and much cheaper than the entire languages codes standard (ISO 639-1:2002, ISO 639-2:1998, ISO 639-3:2007, ISO 639-4:2010 and ISO 639-5:2008).

I get your point, though.
Excel has proven there's a market for tricking people into designing complex technical systems without realizing that they are programming a computer.
The politics of project cost are immaterial and only assuage egos. The fact appears to be that lowest-cost bidding invites this course of events. Contractors simply lie to get the gig.
>> That “dynamic types” are, at their core, there to make unit testing less tedious, and are a tool for finding bugs.

To the extent this is true, it's true because modern dynamic type systems are fairly strong. They enforce a contract about what operations are valid on a given type, and you can't usually get out of the contract. If you can cast in Python like you can cast in C, I don't know about it.

Part of the problem is that we've lost a whole quadrant of languages in the static-dynamic weak-strong graph: Weak dynamic typing is nonexistent these days.

We used to have it. B and Bliss were both weakly dynamically typed languages. Extremely so, in that they only had one datatype: The machine word. Since literally any operation was valid to perform on a machine word, there was no way for the type system to disallow anything, so it faded into irrelevance. Much like Bliss, in fact.

That's taking it to an extreme, shoving the "weak" part of weakly-typed so far that the language is untyped, like assembly language is usually regarded as being.
While this may make sense from the perspective of why people get insurance (to mitigate a catastrophic loss), it doesn't consider the insurer's incentives. No insurance company will want to underwrite a plan that doesn't bundle routine services, since those clearly reduce risk of complications down the road. A yearly checkup is cheap compared to missing a disease and letting it get worse.
The Problem With Happiness
Really? I found that it's fine when all your data is lists or matrices, but it becomes increasingly terrible if you want to process structured data. Maps (associative) have been added late and in a half-baked way, using them is a pain. The way macros are written is pretty bad syntax-wise. There seems to be little consistency in terms of which arguments come first, so composing functions into pipelines can be awkward. Variables in "With" and "Module" cannot refer to earlier bindings, so I end up with multiple nested With/Module statements. Also, "Module" for lexical scoping, really?

Also, I never managed to achieve any reasonable degree of code reuse in Mathematica. Most of my notebooks are single-purpose.
There was a post yesterday about how it is desirable for Fortran to be preserved as opposed to porting Fortran code to C++, because scientists want to focus on expressing the science and math, not on the low level details of passing arrays around and performing safe array access (which Fortran compilers are more strict about and will emit errors for).

I haven't used this tool, but it seems reasonable that the people who it might be useful for (regardless if Microsoft PR recognizes this or not) are for scientists who have an idea for an algorithm, but don't want to spend too much time thinking about how to write and deploy python/C++ code to their clusters.

Sure, it may not seem like that much effort to many programmers, but as the Fortran discussion stressed, just because you can code and think logically, doesn't mean you're a programmer.
Oh yes. One of my "favorite" stories of this was:

"You didn't know you had X. It had never been diagnosed. But looking at your history, your treatment for 'unknown ailments' and such were actually symptoms of X, in other words you had X, though you didn't know it. And when you signed up for insurance, you 'failed to disclose' this condition [that you didn't know you had], therefore, we are voiding your coverage effective immediately [and should consider yourself lucky if we don't try to 'recover costs'...]".
Follow this chat:
https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/93191/discussion-on-que...

https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/bk1eco/git_ransomware_...
I'd have Hubert over Bobby Tables any day!
As someone working in dynamic languages for years, I've noticed a certain trend in arguing about type systems.

People will ARGUE about the benefits of compile-time checking.

However, when people point to concrete benefits, they tend to point to TOOLING communication. (e.g. IDEs supplying functions/variables that provide the necessary type) during writing.

Rarely do they notice these two are not the same thing.

I'm not in a place to say which is objectively correct (I'm both biased and without the right kind of data), but I've seen this distinction come up time and time again. I think it's the most interesting part (also the only part that is interesting) about typing disputes.
Do you have people you are working on with this?

If you're making, say, a compiler that compiles to DNA, you will need something to write out the DNA and get an organism to run it, for instance.

Getting that team together looks like the first step, or alternately that is the kind of thing you might do en route to a PhD.
Funny, I argued similarly 11 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19665221

We do ourselves harm because we do not understand the power of the interactions we are part of. Children should be protected. Adults should know better.
>In ML, there are MANY ways to mess up a model and you have no easy way to tell.

What about all those businesspeople who only hire analysts to tell them (and their peers) what they want to hear? Now they can tell themselves what they want to hear, having laundered it through a computer.
Public suffix list: https://publicsuffix.org

s3.amazonaws.com subdomains are as distinct from each other as co.uk subdomains.
You Are Old, Father William
Wonderful mnemonic, thank you!
> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.

I'd bet that few people exclusively take public transit in Boston. People still take taxis and car-shares, hitch rides with friends.

The key is that for many important high traffic routes, the highest quality of life option in Boston is transit, far better than sitting in traffic.

Even in parts of the world that have amazing public transit systems, there are use cases where a car (whether owned, rented, or hired), fills in the quality of life gap very nicely.
Of course it does, by rejecting many people from the medical system.
Preventative measures (e.g. annual physical) can be seen as a form of insurable risk management. It's arguably much cheaper to treat something if it is discovered early on.
Insurers deny expensive or cutting-edge treatments in the US all the time! You don't have to look hard to find sob story after sob story.

And it makes sense. If a treatment is super-expensive and unlikely to be effective anyway, and that money could be put to better use to help more other people ... It's like how someone who smokes isn't going to get a lung transplant; there's too many others that need transplants and not enough lungs to go around, so give the lungs to the people who will benefit the most from them (generally, people who are young and otherwise healthy). There aren't infinite resources in this world, so in the cases where scarcity comes into play, they should be doled out in the way that creates the greatest good.
> It's a bit like replacing most of your food with "dietary fiber" that is made to look and taste like food. It will fill you up and taste good, but in the end you'll still starve to death.

So you're saying social media is kind of like Soylent ;) -- I agree!
i love when whitey tells me about my own culture/community and then I (a poc) somehow get excluded from the conversation because the worst thing you can tell a white person is their opinion doesn't matter
UK taxman falls foul of GDPR
We live and work in Cambridge, and live close enough to work that walking and cycling are our normal commutes, so our commute costs effectively nothing. I could get a subsidized T pass through work, but I don't need it. When we were looking for a house, we could have gotten something bigger further out, for less money even, but then everything else would cost more and take longer. We'd have to drive more. Hell, taxes would be higher. Our city tax bill is a lot less than most of the people we know in nearby towns pay.
And transferring data to and from the GPU is also a source of overhead.
Moms Who Were Extremely Online in 1993
The Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns (2016)
I want to build, train and deploy a ML learning model in production.

I do know how to program.

I still want this tool. Badly. So badly. Just because I can program doesn't mean I want to use programming to solve every problem. I want simple tools that do the complex things for me for the 90% of cases where they are good enough.

Let me spend my time on the 10% of problems that simple tools can't solve!
How do you pronounce “NES”? Nintendo throws a wrench in the debate (2018)
> I think TLA+ is a great fit for what you want to do.

I'm very happy to hear that.

> What problems are you facing?

Generally, the problem of formally specifying a program in set theory and first-order logic syntax before choosing implementation details, such as the language to program it in.

I have to give more thought to how I would describing specific problems. I've started with a program I want to write that I've already modelled informally. I'll edit this post later to explain it.