skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its weird they'd use Pitchbook as their source for funding when Uber disclosed information in their S1 under the table titled "Redeemable Convertible Preferred Stock". See page F-51 here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...

From that table, they didn't raise 15B at 48.77 but closer to 8B. The article is off by 50%. Still a stunning amount of money under water.

What's also not highlighted in the article is that holders of that series G preferred stock are entitled to a $3.90 annual dividend per share (again, see the table in the S1). If you assume a 10% discount rate for 5 years of dividends, that dividend is worth like $14 per share today. So maybe they aren't as under water as the article claims. [EDIT:] if you read further along, it looks like Series G got converted to common stock in 2018, so they no longer get paid this dividend.

That said, people who bought common stock do not get dividends as of today.
> If people demanded a shift to a climate friendly lifestyle tomorrow, Exxon would have no choice but to follow suit.

This is a myth that is perpetuated by free-market libertarians and is completely disconnected from reality.

First of all, a very large number of people are demanding exactly that and large corporations have no interest in it. Consumers also cannot make the transition or demand a transition unless there are viable alternatives -- which requires research and if the private sector won't fund that research then viable alternatives won't show up. It's much easier, less risky, and cheaper for the private sector to try to kill a new industry (where they aren't entrenched) than it is for them to compete in it.

In addition, a lot of emissions are unrelated to the type of product being provided. Consumers might not have a green option (and thus cannot "vote with their wallet"), and even if they have a green option they might not care enough. According to the EPA[1] more than 75% of emissions are caused by transportation, industrial processes, and energy production. Reducing industrial emissions created during the manufacturing process of goods would have a much more significant impact than consumers changing what brand of soap they use.

We have laws to protect people from vendors selling tainted or poisoned food. By the logic of a free-market libertarian we should allow the sale of such food because consumers would choose not to purchase it and "market effects" would kill the business. But we all know that the reason those regulations were introduced is because before they were introduced people were dying because of unsafe food being sold.

> Nobody is willing to make the lifestyle changes it would take to have a real impact on climate change. Blaming corporations instead of the people for all that is asinine.

That's bullshit. See [1], individual consumers are one of the smallest contributors to climate change. The main contributors are industry. If emissions were taxed and there were tax breaks for operating in a green manner (such as the carbon tax which was repealed by our coal-loving Liberal government) then companies would have a financial incentive to do research into less polluting processes.

> And what are our best and brightest from Stanford, etc., doing? Figuring out carbon recapture?

Governments (in Australia at least) are cutting funding for climate change (at the behest of their political donors that, as above, have a vested interest against climate-change research). The intended effect of this is that there ends up being so much brain-drain away from public-sector research into climate change. Which is exactly what's happening. I agree that this is a very bad thing, but it makes no sense to blame PhD students (people with no money and no power) that couldn't get grants because the government is actively working against the public.

[1]: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
How do I capitalize on my idea to automate my work
Hey guys! I currently work for a shipping company to pay for college, one of my duties includes transcribing shipping labels (detachable papers) to our computer, a task which can take some time. I had the idea to use python OCR to transcribe them automatically with a webcam, I'm currently testing it at home and it seems to work, and I know my boss is interested in this sort of thing, so my question is how do I pitch this to gain the most benefit for myself (eg, do I ask for a raise? a bonus? something else?)
I'll take a 9N in any condition.
That's no different than the current situation. I can do anything I want to my car, even if it kills me and the people in the car ahead of me. Like not fixing my brakes correctly, or driving without brakes altogether¹.

¹ Which I have actually done, carefully, on my way to the mechanic 20 miles away to get them fixed.
I'm not in full agreement here. Having spent nearly a decade in customer service, I've found that it requires:

+ Lots of empathy

+ The willingness to learn and be wrong

+ A ton of training

Even then, human-based customer service is still subjected to the whims of:

+ Gut checks

+ Power trips

+ Misinformation/misinterpretation of policy (whether intentional or not)

+ Lots of emotion on both sides of the interaction

Not every single customer service interaction requires a human behind it. At some point, there are simpler and more efficient ways of solving a problem besides throwing another human's time at it. Robots can easily process replacements without requiring a human being hear about why it needs to happen. They can quickly identify when something is late and proactively issue a credit.
This is inevitable. In the end we'll face a choice between basic income, revolution, or totalitarian police state to enforce extreme inequality.
How familiar are you with the content of Vietnam-era protests? It seems hard to read a description of e.g. the Kent State protests, and conclude that the current situation of "people say mean things a lot" is unprecedented insanity.
"Compulsory Speech" means the Government forcing you to say a specific thing.

Forcing testimony, via subpoena or otherwise, is as old as courts are. The Fifth Amendment says: "... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", which implies that they can be compelled to be a witness against others.
It seems less relevant to compare the cost of a case at Verizon/Apple than purchasing through Amazon. Why? It's a completely different experience -- you get to see the selection in person, ask questions, try the case on your phone to confirm it actually fits, you know there is near-0 odds of it being a counterfeit or unscrupulous seller (unlike Amazon).

The mort apt comparison is the cost of the phone case when packed with human labor vs. packed by robots.
What an awesome thing. This is probably a rare example of using technologies like machine learning and face recognition for good.

Also, it means that we cannot trust photos anymore.
Let's see...

Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Getting resources from asteroids makes more sense.

As for Reagan and Thatcher I don't see either one as oriented toward growth, but rather oriented towards a "war against inflation" that involved higher interest rates, austerity, and tolerance for a lower rate of GDP growth so long as the pain was felt by the middle and below. Reagan might have had sharper rhetoric against environmentalism, but the movement did not collapse until the Clinton years.

When I've been envisioning space colonies lately it has been really large structures; I am fascinated by the idea that you can build a "small ringworld" where the rotation holds in the air with a scale size of a megameter or so, particularly if you can keep the upper atmosphere cold.

The rotation speeds of such a thing are close to orbital velocity and the material requirements are similar to that of a space elevator... Unless you can construct an orbital-velocity bearing in which case you can build a belt around it to reinforce it.

Even then it is hard to build room for any vertical relief into the budget, no high mountains, no deep oceans, probably you get a rather uncomfortable hydrological cycle.

It would probably look different from one of those O'Neil colonies since you'd have a very blue sky and most of the things that look different from a planet would be far away and would look small. A lot depends on if the z-axis of the colony is long or short.
This is the most "what about men" comment I've read in a while.

Every man should be prepared for every one of their sexual partners to become pregnant, even if BC or condoms or other contraception are involved. It comes with the territory, and you can be sure that women are aware of the risk (since pregnancy is a first-person risk for them).
>machines bring lower prices

Do you have any source about this? If the costumer is already willing to pay a price there would be no point in lowering the price just because you automated the process. Or better said, theres no point in investing in machines if your profit margin is not going to get wider.
How long before they get acquired by Amazon? Also what are the chances of that deal getting blocked?

Getting all of these uber drivers to deliver packages, groceries and food for amazon customers makes too much sense.

EDIT: Looks like Amazon is already making moves in that direction with their own employees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19901196
Note also that in an effort to create drama, the article obscures the procedural context. The complaint with the word “terrorism” was filed years ago. The Eleventh Circuit disagreed with the State, holding that the entire OGCA was public domain because it was published under the authority of the State. What happened now is that Georgia has filed a petition for certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Eleventh Circuit decision. The odds of the Supreme Court even hearing the case are slim, so the Eleventh Circuit decision likely will stand.
Snap jobs out of existence so the workers don't have to suffer by doing them - Thanos would approve!
Uber launches PIN feature to cut wait times at US airports, starting in Portland
Wikipedia has a good summary of his tribulations. It's sobering reading if you think you are having rough day at your start-up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Goodyear
In my experience, if there's an option to ask same price everywhere, sellers will do that. So on app store it will cost (for example) 4.99$, and on third party app store without 30% cut, the developers will still set the price of 4.99$.

The only kind of place I've seen prices less than MSRP is discount stores like cdkeys. For example, try to find microsoft windows that costs less than MSRP -- on all stores, first party and third party, the price will be the same.

So, lack of 30% markup is very unlikely to reduce the final asking price by 30%.
Billions in dirty cash helped fuel Vancouver, B.C.’s housing boom
These are all benefits for John Deere. I don't think anybody thinks there is no incentive for JD to do this.

Reduced manufacturing expense - Yup, DRM and platform lock-down (machinery is a platform??) increases profits. Tractors sure aren't getting cheaper on account of these "improvements".

"Platform flexibility" is nothing more than the ability for JD to lock out capabilities of the machinery that the farmer supposedly bought, and sell it as an add-on later. Again, no doubt this is advantageous for JD, just as locking out portions of a game until later payment is advantageous for EA. It is still terrible for the farmer.
Its still "a lot cheaper than the projected bus costs, and more equitable" for towns:

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/innisfil-tran...
International Harvester is the biggest selling tractor company ..more so than JD ..in the US. But JD has an international reach. And they are very cosy with Monsanto(now Bayer). They wanted to buy Monsanto’s Climate Corp before Bayer deal but DoJ said No and killed it.
Way OT, but that's one of my pet peeves: stop sticking "-gate" on the end of every scandal. Watergate was called "Watergate" because that's the name of the office complex that was broken into. Sticking "-gate" on the end of unrelated words very literally, and perhaps also because it's become such a tired cliche, makes you sound less credible and intelligent.
Study Finds New Wrinkles on Earth's Moon
Agreed also, these jobs involved putting items in boxes for 8+ hours. These are exactly the kind of mind numbing jobs where robots are great.
https://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns
Jobs are changing, the skills we require of the working force is in constant flux. We pretend like this is a catastrophe, while we should be thanking progression and embracing development that improves production which no longer requires humans to do such mundane jobs.

The friction and disruption the abrupt rollout of such machines might cause is a different matter. We should take a long hard look how we want to re-educate or re-employ the workforce which is currently on jobs such as retail sales, factory workers or even drivers.

New developments also introduce new jobs, last I've heard the western population is also aging. And there are still huge gaps in sectors such as education, nursing. Whatever drives the population will definitely create a new demand in work-intense labour. It's needed to keep the economic wheel turning.
> would have no way to make more money (aside from existing inventory) to buy new equipment.

It seems likely to me a bank would be thrilled to loan money to a consistently profitable farmer whose machines just shut themselves off because Reasons and need replacing ASAP.
Two great resources I've been going through are

- https://dataintensive.net - Really deep dives into different types of data storage solutions, their history, and how they actually work.

- http://www.cattell.net/datastores/Datastores.pdf - Good paper that helps differentiate similar but different datastores. Really helpful when you're trying to pick a modern data solution.
Protecting IMSI and User Privacy in 5G Networks
Does Employment-Based Insurance Make US Medical Care Unfair and Inefficient?
Remember, the hypothetical being discussed is that climate change is a hoax. In that scenario, inaction doesn't lead to any harmful consequences.
A lot of these risks apply to today’s cars already. If you change a tire and aren’t careful the wheel may come off later in traffic. I think there is way too much downside to companies maintaining tight control after selling something. Otherwise we are slowly converting the concept of “owning” to “renting”. This is pretty much the dream of capitalists. They own and rent things out to others.
I personally agree the problem's being overblown here, and I agree with what you say about technology like that, but, just to counter a bit, when it comes to agriculture, time's not always available. Depending on when that theoretical stopping of Deere's servers were to occur. There could be massive crop failures. It's all well and good to get everything back up again, but by this time a loaf of bread costs $50 and everyone's flipping their shit.

Not that I think any of this is ever likely to happen, but even small disruptions to the food supply can have large consequences.
I don't know why this is portrayed as a negative -- this is the whole point of an IPO. If the price goes up significantly, it means that the company lost out on capital that it could have raised. If the price goes down, then it means that it extracted more capital from early participants than the market at large thought was justified. It's far preferable, for the company, to be in the second bin than in the first.

If they need to raise more capital in the future, then the higher the stock price is the less dilution is needed for the same amount of money, so eventually they want the stock price to recover, but for now they're sitting pretty on top of a pile of cash that they got despite what the market seemed to indicate.
For certain tasks, robots are also faster, safer & produce higher quality, as the automotive industry has demonstrated.
One, I rarely find it useful to discuss things with people who are in the habit of picking some nit, focusing on that, and ignoring the meat of my point, but I'll try one more reply. Two, per Upton Sinclair [1], I'm not sure it's worth discussing this with somebody who identifies as a marketer. And three, Hacker News is not advertising in the common sense of that term, which is paid placement of a message. If that is somehow confusing to you, I would like to see a ban for paid placement of messages, and not people doing something good for the public in hopes that people will like and pay attention to them.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
You're picturing plastic waste in the oceans wrong. Most of it comes from fishing gear that's abandoned or lost, not disposal of waste like plastic bags. In total 80-90% come from Asian and African countries with poor environmental policies.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/asia-africa-cause-90-pl...

For the record, I am a scuba diver who has participated in the "Dive Against Debris", we use paper straws at home, I bike to work a couple days a week, and switched to reusable bags years before they were required in my locale, etc. I'm not saying that reducing single-use plastics isn't a worthy goal (and microplastics are just as bad as they seem), but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled. Your plastic straw is not ending up at the bottom of the Marinara trench.
Key Points of 5G Security
Looking at these huge open spaces, I can't help but wonder what would happen after a single crack from oncoming debris. To avoid failing all at once a space habitat should be divided into a bunch of smaller sub-compartments -- like the Titanic!
> If I remember correctly each extra 50hp above the base costs ~10k

Upping the fuel pressure and changing some maps should not cost the consumer $10k. The markup in that is ridiculous.

> Should Deere honor the warranty in this case of those who did the hack?

So long as the hack didn't cause the problem they are legally obligated to honor the warranty.
Yes. All of this favors JD.
I have a Facebook account, this creates limitations when it comes to blocking (e.g. I cannot use a DNS block/piHole).

What I found works for me is to use Multi-Account Containers with Facebook being forced-open in a specific container (that's only for Facebook) and then using Firefox's built in Content Blocking to block trackers in other containers (Content Blocking -> Custom -> In All Windows).

This allows you to use Facebook but makes it significantly harder for them to track you across other sites (via shadow accounts or your actual profile).

For example this works for Stackoverflow where I see:

> The resource at “https://graph.facebook.com/[xxxx]/picture?type=large” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

On mobile I simply don't install Facebook's apps and use the mobile web browser and still receive notifications via that.
If you're worried about porch pirates - use a locker instead. They're already stealing some of your packages anyway.

Shady subcontractors are Amazon's problem.
The drivers are not loyal, they are already on Lyft and whatever app offers them a better deal that day/week/month (depending on incentives they sign on to).
Can you give some specific examples of the searches that did not work on Google but did on DDG?
You're misrepresenting both schools here.

First, the "objective" school consists largely of internet loudmouths who have never done an actual A/B test. They're saying what seems intuitive to them, and imagining it's logical.

Second, most serious subjectivists recognize the value of experiments and testing. Where they disagree with the would-be objectivists is that when their subjective experience disagrees with the test, they suspect the test might be wrong as well as the possibility that their subjective experience might be wrong. The so-called objectivists argue that when the test disagrees with the subjective experience, then the subjective experience must be purely imaginary. This perspective could be easily disproven with a test...
The Eleventh Circuit’s decision turns more on the annotations being published under the authority of the State than the fact that judges and lawyers “reference” them. Courts routinely reference the Restatements, for example, but those are private works.
Exxon and friends have been deliberately misleading people for decades about the problem. You can’t propagandize people for thirty years and then turn around and say, this is really your fault for believing me.

If big oil companies had just pumped oil and responded to the market then I might agree with you. But that’s not at all what happened.
>add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%)

Good luck passing a bill that raises my effective tax rate from 17% to 55%. Obviously if you take a whole lot more money from everyone else there will be more to hand out to others.
On the flipside, I hate nearly every non-human interaction introduced in the last few years that I have to make. With the exception of withdrawing money from an ATM (later edit- and some kinds of online shopping), automated customer service experiences have always been worse, mostly because they always seem to be programmed with a very narrow and optimistic set of goals in mind. Life would be even more of a hell if I couldn't mash 0 to speak to an operator in a lot of cases; as it is that option is already hidden.

There isn't a lot of good reason to be optimistic about the future either; chatbots and fast food kiosks were a flop (and rightfully so) and most of these other styles of interaction feel forced and constricting.

Humans may have their flaws but you can't beat the fact that they're what other humans are comfortable around.
At the time I was going out with the mother of my to be first child, my father (a psychiatrist) gave me a preliminary test just to see where the land was, so to speak.

On my partners request I should add.

For fun my then partner took the test as well.

My score 80% or whatever: “severe autistic traits”. WTF?! Ouch...

Hers? A clean 0. Zero?! You’re kidding. Sure she’s probably the most compassionate human being I’ve ever met, but come on!

Eventually we got a daughter and split up a year later.

Best thing that could have happened for anyone of us, daughter included, and we have a great relationship where we hang out all the time.

I believe in part this is because she doesn’t expect “normal” from me when we’re no longer together.

It also gave me a wake-up call telling me I had shit to properly sort out.
> Would you rather fight spammers and keep free-speech alive or give it up over to Google and other platforms?

Spam is a form of censorship. Too much of it and it becomes a denial of service attack that makes publishing impossible.

Let's say you claim you have free speech, because you can go into any park, stand on a soapbox, and give a speech. Only, I have blanketed every major park with loud speakers that overwhelm what you say with noise, or GPT-2 generated fake speeches run through WaveNet.

I used to believe that 'the solution to bad speech is just more speech', but this was a naive pre-mass internet view of how speech and publishing works. In a word where robots can literally saturate every one of your media channels, spam up your email, your phone with robo calls, your text messages, the idea of these platform providers NOT filtering and censoring is itself a form of assault on free speech and public conversation in the town square.
Industry standard is $1000 per horsepower. Belarus tractors made in Minsk offer at least 30-40% less markdown after 120 HP. Available in Canada.
> it will beat solutions that contain that expensive component

It will beat comparable solutions that contain that expensive component.
"Having the DRM in place allows Deere to reduce manufacturing expense and increase platform flexibility"

Sounds like it's right out of the sales brochure.