skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a similar experience a few years ago.

I quit at a company I was contracting at because they kept dangling the whole, "We're going to convert you to an FTE next." in the meantime, I was working less than 20 hours a week. If you didn't have a project to bill hours to, you didn't get paid, period. I was floating between teams, fixing bugs and doing minor stuff, not being able to bill much of anything. Once I quit I was offered another contract role. I basically told the recruiter, "Listen, if I'm in the office, I'm getting paid for my time, period." Recruiter got it cleared with HR and the hiring manager.

My first day went like this:

Manager: "Ummm yeah, the two major projects we had you slated on, ummmm those got put on hold for the time being. Get your desk and PC setup and we'll have something for you soon."

I literally went 4 months and barely billed any real project work. My last two weeks I had 36 hours of non-billable time. I had two weeks where I actually billed a full weeks worth when a dev took off for his honeymoon and did exactly zero work he was assigned. The funny part is when I quit, the hiring manager told me he would hire me in a minute and to keep in contact.

In the meantime, I was able to learn AngularJS and some other stuff while I was sitting at my desk all day. In a sense, I was very productive when I was there.
It's used everywhere in analytics applications and particularly noticeable at scale. For specific example- We use roaring bitmaps (also from Lemire) in an inverted index to make count queries instant (depending on the query and encoding, top-n queries do 20B events per second per core in our application).
Being able to enjoy something even though you know something better is out there is something that I've managed to achieve in many areas of my life.

For example, I love a great beer. I'll go out of my way to try something new. But when I'm sitting in the sun watching baseball with my wife, I'll get a Budweiser with my hot dog and it will be glorious.

There was a time in my life where I would complain about the lack of craft beers at the ballpark. I was an idiot and enjoyed life less.
> The different time definitions exist to support different use cases. UTC isn't flawed, in fact the adjustments that keep it aligned to solar time are very helpful for its defined use cases.

The user above listed several explicit cases that seem needlessly complicated. Can you give examples where the adjustments to UTC are so helpful for its defined use case? Or elaborate what that case is?

I'm not trying to be obstinate - it's just that without examples your response boils down to "No it's not" without further support. I'm open to being convinced...convince me.
With a basic background in computer graphics, I found it took me about 4-6 months to understand and implement a paper like APIC from scratch. TaiChi's author, Yuanming Hu, apparently implemented that and 9 other papers in the same time. It probably helped a lot that he worked directly with the paper authors, but he certainly has been very productive.

I really appreciate that somebody is implementing these papers in the open. It's incredibly useful to have a reference implementation available to study alongside the paper. Seeing the same thing in a few different ways is great for learning.

His 88-line implementation of MLS-MPM is probably a little too much like code-golf, but when I expanded it out to 188 lines, I found it really enlightening.
That's not how people choose which health insurance policy is offered by their employer, or which private company won the contract to deliver their electricity.
The Rebirth of Placenta Rituals (RP)
On the subject of counter-intuitive effects in traffic engineering, it also seems that adding more lanes to a highway actually makes traffic flow worse. Whenever a car changes lanes on a highway, a small traffic "shockwave" propagates backwards some distance, and more lanes -> more cars crossing more lanes -> more traffic.

Anecdata: I live in DC with its notoriously bad traffic. The highways 395 and 495 have 4-6 lanes each and tons of traffic. On the other hand, the George Washington Parkway has just 2 lanes and carries a large volume of vehicles between 395 and 495, but has very little in the way of its own traffic (except in the event of an accident, of course). Traffic only really occurs on the GW at the junctions with 395 and 495 since the X95s don't have the capacity to receive all of the GW cars at-speed. Whereas the X95s will get random backups for seemingly no reason, and at all hours of the day, backups on the GW generally only occur at the ends.
How do they prevent paying random people who decide it'd be funny to send them an invoice?
Ten years ago I would find articles and blog posts about how awful the speeders and tailgaters are in portland. The blog would effectively blame the influx of Californians.

Today (and this started about 4 years ago) you do the same search in google and you only find articles about how slow some people drive in Portland and that they are a nuisance to be removed.
The name for the specefic website is sr.ht (Sir hat) [0] but the name of the software is Sourcehut.

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availability.html
>Roundabouts reduced injury crashes by 75 percent at intersections where stop signs or signals were previously used for traffic control, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)

https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Safety/roundabouts/benefits.htm
Part of the issue is that the speed limit often times dictates how the street is designed.

In my city, the default speed limit for city streets was 30mph. Safety advocates lobbied for and achieved lowering that limit to 25mph.

The goal was not that cars would immediately all start driving 5mph slower, but rather to direct the city's traffic engineers to start designing the street layout to lower the 85th percentile speed by about from 30mph to 25mph.
Yes, but those hours aren't actually a line item when salaried employees do it, so the expense isn't as visible as other expenses.

I think the perception of a lack of quality engineers in the market is just a symptom of the problem: the expense in time and annoyance of changing jobs and the risk (or experience) of becoming a false negative reduces job mobility and heavily slants the resume stack towards the true negatives rather than the experienced people who would be more actively looking around in a saner market.

I haven't heard of a better explanation for the notion, seemingly unique to software, that so many people floating around the industry are so abysmally unqualified to work at another company in the same industry. There are historical factors, but they don't seem adequate to explain this perceived fraud problem.
Ohh yeah great discussions there.

I see now, that it's not about which is better, more just different approaches thanks!
Yup, true uncanny valley - it's clear that this is something similar to banana but significantly different, it doesn't behave like a banana at all but like dough or modeling clay in the shape of a banana.

I'd never considered how a banana would look like when cut, and I'm not certain how it should look but I'm certain that it's not like this.
Unless they have a separate program that no one has ever reported on, Palantir is a data analysis platform, not a data collection one like NSO Group is alleged to do.

See, e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

"The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears."
> why not choose the one that we can drive at without risking being pulled over and ticketed?

Usually because the perceived (and even the actual) danger of driving at higher speeds is minimal. A great example that I've seen is an access-controlled highway built to modern safety standards limited to 55mph, when the highway is designed to safely support upwards of 80mph.

More, increased speeds increase the carrying capacity of a highway; that is, more cars can utilize the highway in a given time period - like rush hour.
> 120mph maximum and a 40mph minimum are too disparate.

Agreed. The minimum speed for interstate-class highways should be 60 MPH. If you can't do 60, take the country roads.

> And there are other deleterious effects of 120mph. > 100 and most consumer tires are at their brink. Similarly, there is a lack of the average vehicle to accelerate quickly beyond 80.

This is why highways have multiple lanes. Slower traffic to the outside, faster traffic to the inside. If your vehicle isn't capable of keeping up with the fastest traffic, stay to the outside.

Unfortunately Americans in particular are horrible at lane discipline, something I believe is aggravated by speed limits being too low so there's a subset of idiots who take it upon themselves to be speed enforcement and drive slowly in the passing lane.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust currenly has 4738 open and 25,000 closed.

https://github.com/golang/go currently has 4412 open and 27,000 closed.

https://github.com/npm/npm had 2166 before moving to community,forum.

https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs stopped at 1823 open.

https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch currently has 1734 open and 18,000 closed.
Cars are indeed around - and Copenhagen was as car-choked as anywhere else as recently as the 70's. DK/NL cuture shifted in part because of protests saying "Stop using your car to kill children"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands

I've driven in Amsterdam and paradoxically it's a hell of a lot nicer than driving in, say, LA.

I don't wish to conflate Denmark and the Netherlands but they've both made huge improvements in similar fashion with respect to livable cities. If career allows it I might still move because I want to live somewhere my child can ride a bike to school. Houten comes to mind.
Why? He’s a typographer, of course he’s pedantic. Paired with his eccentricities it’s quite entertaining to listen to him.
since the company has no profits and no prospect of making a profit (save from the wild claim that it is waiting for autonomous cars) what is the difference on sizing it on $1 or $50? both are overpriced in a pure analysis (i.e. ignoring market excitement)
How did these "naked shorts" clear the trading floor if there was no one selling them? What is the real technicality here as "naked shorts" are not illegal per se.
Oh come on. My 90s shitboxes are all perfectly driveable around 100. Sure they won't get there as fast as a modern car but the only time you find yourself trying to gain 50+mph really quickly is when you happen to be caught on an on-ramp behind someone who has no business driving.

I agree that an 80mph delta is a little much though.
The big problem with this is that the short contract does not guarantee continuity of health insurance coverage, and this is a dealbreaker for a lot of folks. The pool of applicants who would accept these offers excludes the top-performing folks who have much better alternatives than contract-to-hire.
A Tool to Generate CSS Selectors
Well, assuming that something must be done, carbon trading does seem like a sensible solution. But I am more interested in the forecast/outlook rather than mitigation options, hence the requirement for whoever is looking at it to be a sceptic apriori.
"UTC isn't flawed, in fact the adjustments that keep it aligned to solar time are very helpful for its defined use cases."

What use case in the year 2019 is made easier by UTC getting leap seconds instead of treating it as a monotonically increasing scale (TAI)? I'm genuinely interested. The only suggestion I have ever heard is use of a sextant -- what an anachronism in the modern world...
Interesting to read about that percentile design. Here in Germany we have (as you probably know) a few hundreds of kms of unlimited Autobahn (advised is 130kph). These roads are way better and safer than the US highways and freeways I experienced, btw.. So it is not a fair comparison.

Nevertheless we have a heated debate were many very loud votes in the media demand a speed limit of 120 or even 100kph. Because that is obviously necessary and everything else is stupid.

Now, while there are certainly many more or less valid arguments for a speed limit, I have never heard anyone arguing about the number. The verocity of the debate is contrasted by a total lack of arguments for or against a specific limit. Why 120 and not 130 or 90. What about 160?

To me it looks like there are many people either offended by or incapable of dealing with other people making different choices. The whole debate seems to be a way to force others into coercion and the actual limit is chosen to coerce as many people as possible.

So in Germany the debate seems to target at the complete opposite to define a speed limit at the 15th percentile. That's an intriguing observation. And rather typical for us, tbh.
The premise of the article is that the speed limit is uncorrelated with the speed of traffic, other than a small (10%) group of drivers. Therefore reducing the speed limit to eg. Reduce flow into a junction, doesn’t work, people will continue to drive the speed they are comfortable with.
Not sure about emacs but vim basically requires a period of fighting through how horribly unproductive you will initially be, give it a week or two and you'll be ok.
Ah, cool, thanks. I didn't know they were running that under the hood. Yeah, I've checked out Cloud Run via a screencast I did on it a few weeks back [1]. I really like the concept and am looking forward to seeing the evolution of it!

[1] https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/69-cloud-run-with-knative
Why am I getting downvoted? Do people disagree that it’s common for bedrooms to have lamps? A little context would be appreciated because my comment is 100% accurate in terms my own experiences yet several people seem to disagree. Genuinely interested to know why.
I sold a pen during an interview
You can set unix time to any value, including the future or past. If timestamps are recorded during those time-traveling epochs you will indeed see time go backward. Anyone writing time-aware processing needs to take this in to account, or they will eventually suffer for it.
No, you are wrong. The OP was talking about his experiences in Silicon Valley. I was also talking about my experiences in Silicon Valley not about yours outside of it. I can guarantee if you are in Silicon Valley, this is par for the course.
If your neighborhood has roads built for a natural speed of 40 MPH, take it up with whoever built the roads. If you want slow traffic, build slow roads. If you build fast roads, you get fast traffic. No silly sign changes that.
> [description how Alexa works]

Citation needed. I don't think the actual process is publicly available (though I may be wrong). Call me too cynical, but given the bugs that happened to both Google and Amazon, and that the law can force compel companies to do things with leased hardware they ordinarily wouldn't, I don't really trust it.

> The "user hostility" and "gimmick"-ness of this design is entirely subjective and quite overblown, in that "nobody will ever use Dropbox when they could just use rsync and a cronjob"-type bias that HN tends to have.

It's not like that. Dropbox is a simple service - syncs files, optionally allows sharing them. Doesn't do any weird stuff around it. Doesn't force an Internet round-trip for things that can be done locally. The user hostility of voice assistants comes from the way it's designed - cloud-based voice recognition instead of local one, forcing a cloud round-trip for doing things entirely over LAN, being tied to an "ecosystem" of third-party integrations you can't easily manage or complement with your own as end-user, etc. The "gimmick-ness" part comes from it doing very little, and doing it worse than alternatives.
It's not bad reporting, it's true. This is how "rules of origin" work in general.

For an example relevant to Canada pead e.g. what the CETA (EU-Canada) deal has to say about "rules of origin"[1]. For the gory details start reading at page 549 of the full text[2].

Here's an article about how Canadian car manufacturing gets a rebate on raw materials used for exported vehicles[3].

None of this is unusual, having this happen within a FTZ is just a way to speed up the paperwork part of it. You can setup a process where you don't first have to pay tariffs and then seek a rebate, instead you don't pay the tariffs in the first place and the government makes sure the goods are for export.

Some of those good then make their way back into the country, at which point you might pay tariffs on them.

1. http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2017/september/tradoc_...

2. http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2014/september/tradoc_...

3. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-canada-autos/re...
More like unintuitive rather than counterintuitive, because the prediction doesn't fail because wider lanes are more dangerous per se, but because of the behavioral response of the drivers. Which can actually be considered "intuitive" to someone who is used to trying to model such things.
Latest Disney Layoffs Cut Execs in Fox’s Film Unit
As always, I'll shamelessly advertise Matt Levine's column:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/wework...

The second story is (again) on Uber and definitely worth the read if you want to understand more
But also, charge accordingly, if you don't have to post your prices (as your parents probably did). A lawyer is likely willing to pay a lot more for the same website than a tailor shop, and I'll gladly take both of their money.
I'm more and more surprised that Laravel is so often mentioned over Symfony in this types of debate.

I've worked with both and done professional projects in both. While both are great, I would have to sing some praise for Symfony's developer experience and tooling. But realistically the're neck and neck.

PS: It's really funny seeing people seriously discuss PHP when they themselves have not tried it since the 5.* days.
Not so much angry as frustrated.

Crypto currencies overlook the benefits of a centralized currency - some entity to correct mistakes. Fiat currency is backed by the trust in a nation state for example. If my money disappears, I have some authority I can appeal to for addressing it. Whether they do address it or not is a different question, but at least there’s a process.

When someone in stellar screws up and locks out wallets, or when Mt. Gox loses mounds of bitcoins, there is no recourse. Just a “oh, the math makes fixing that impossible” response. Or they can take the ethereum approach and just rewrite history to cover up your mistakes, delegitimizing the entire currency in the process.

In a world with pure intentions and no mistakes that may work, but the real world is messy and people are any combination of stupid, forgetful, and malicious.

Crypto currencies and distributed ledgers are interesting in theory, but will fail due to the implications of needing to operate in the real world.
But reCAPTCHA isn't some sort of microtransaction replacement for tracking, its just a thing to check if you're a person. I'm a person. Don't make me do work to prove it.
Firstly, I bet if you asked OP they would say $18k is "astonishing," and yet here we are.

Secondly, you can avoid most issues by charging for a weekly or monthly retainer. It's much easier to estimate number of months than number of hours.
Police force woman to pen written apology to cab man
>since the company has no profits and no prospect of making a profit (save from the wild claim that it is waiting for autonomous cars)

Really tired of reading this - its thoroughly debunked in the S1, which nobody seems to have read.
This company needs to change its name.
"a new study [0] from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst finds that single-payer health care will save the US $5.1 trillion over a decade while drastically cutting working-class Americans’ health spending." [1]

"Blahous’s paper[2], titled “The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System,” estimates total national health expenditures. Even though his cost-saving estimates are more conservative than others, he acknowledges that Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan would yield a $482 billion reduction in health care spending, and over $1.5 trillion in administrative savings, for a total of $2 trillion less in overall health care expenditures between 2022 and 2031, compared to current spending." [3]

[0] https://www.peri.umass.edu/publication/item/1127-economic-an...

[1] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/medicare-for-all-study-pe...

[2] https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare...

[3] https://theintercept.com/2018/07/30/medicare-for-all-cost-he...
Gates Notes – Energy Storage Breakthroughs [video]
If only residents went to planning meetings to complain about a lack of places for people to sleep, instead of for cars to sleep.
Except PHP is not Java, and it never can be.

What is PHP's multithreading model again? Hotspot VM? NIO?

I'm sure someone will chime in and cite something similar in PHP, but the comparison will be laughable in reality.
What Happens When You Always Wear Headphones
Try xfinity mobile. They use Verizon's network and you pay $12/gb. You can byod or buy one through them.
That's a very misleading headline. The 'short' in this case is the fact that Morgan Stanley had additional leverage in addition to the 15% Greenshoe option to stabilize the stock.

Even a basic understanding of incentives (let alone stock shorting) shows the absurdity of the headline. If Morgan Stanley purposely overpriced the IPO and then shorted it - it would tarnish their reputation and future IPO prospects.
> Well, the problem with this is that every simplistic view at time is... well... too simple. It's not that many people haven't tried, I especially like this article: https://qntm.org/abolish

This has nothing to do with leap seconds. Leap seconds are the worst mechanism in keeping time, there's not a single advantage to having leap seconds.

> A day is defined as the rotation of the earth around its axis.

And we can now measure time with precision high enough that tying to Earth's rotation is not acceptable. We can still use timezones to fix the shift.

> Changing any of these will make the summer drift into the winter, or the night into the day, or whatever.

Yeah, and it will take a millennium for Earth rotation to shift enough for people to notice it. On the other hand, you'd have no problem with summer/winter time I presume?
Just mathematical constructs.
There are more reasons to control speed than safety. As the article mentions, Nixon lowered speeds to reduce fuel consumption in the US. Considering the climate crisis, I think that's a motivating reason to have lower speed limits.

But as others have mentioned the means of getting people to drive slower or more safely or more efficiently may not be limited to the numbers on the sign.
One thing that this article evokes is the 'I'm wrong and my belief is deeply held' aspect which technology people occasionally fall in to. Looking at the comments, with incorrect beliefs expressed as dicta ranging from just plain wrong, to incompletely specified, to ordinary confusion is giving my tech-PTSD a workout.

There are topics in which the ordinary or common sense understanding of a thing actually interferes in understanding how that topic actually acts in reality when looked at closely or under complex conditions.

The concept of time is one of those things. The best thing a naive developer can do when reasoning about time is to first know that almost everything they assume is wrong, and they don't even know what their assumptions are.

The concept of 'location' is another of these topics.

I would like to close this comment with a helpful link to a concise introduction for people to start with in clearing out the 'common sense' assumptions but I haven't ever found one, and haven't invested enough time to write one. Sorry. Links to same will be gratefully received.