skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where I currently work (all of our customers are enterprises), we encounter this all the time. I'd say about 90% of our serious support tickets are problems with the customer's system or code and are completely out of our control.

However, we will spend a great deal of time resolving their issues regardless. Last week, for example, we had a customer encountering failures with their program using our product. I obtained the source for the customer's application and debugged it for them.

I like that we do this -- it's really nice to solve a customer's problem, and even nicer to be able to tell them it wasn't the fault of our software. It's expensive, of course, but our support contracts are priced to take this into account.
In theory, these stores could sell more nutritious food. They just need the incentives. Taxing sugar seems like the correct approach. Banning a type of store is very heavy handed, and likely to have unintended consequences.

Schools should probably also have cooking classes. Eating is something everyone does three or more times a day. Why not learn how to do it right. I’m sure something like that would have a huge ROI for state and local governments.
This kind of thing makes me sad WRT the realities of modern life. Why is it that when we think "Oh we lack local shops for basic food stuffs" that we think, "We need to entice multi-billion dollar operations into this area to service our poor people".

What about, "We need local people to open up local mom & pop stores"? Why can't we think, "We need to provide incentives, education and security for local people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and service themselves" instead of "We need to find a way to funnel money from poor people to rich people"?

I totally understand that I'm misrepresenting the actual thinking going on here :-). People in the west are so far removed from traditional ways of doing things that they think that the only way to buy food is to have a 2 acre parking lot for minivans and a stadium sized store with razor thin margins selling pre-packaged food.

Around the world, poor people start small stores and sell things to other poor people. People walk to the store because they don't own cars. They carry their food for today because they don't own refrigerators. And it's definitely not as efficient, but it keeps the money local.
Tyler Cowen's Conversation with Neal Stephenson
Sharing is an even better term than copying; spreading information like this actively creates value by exposing more people to these ideas and designs.

Not that I don't think the foundries should get paid for their work - I don't have a fully formed opinion on this. But there is a definite upside to sharing information freely, and this is better than mere copying.
The Brutalism Post, Part One: Introduction
We avoided that early catastrophe by using fertilisers sourced from mined phosphates. We have about 300 years reserves at current consumption rates. If we double our consumption, we halve the reserve longevity. No amount of genetic engineering cleverness is going to address the need for onoohsates.

Just because we avoided the early catastrophe doesn’t mean Malthus was wrong.

At some point in the future we need to focus on farming ocean plants that recover the minerals we have been leaching into the oceans for the last few hundred years. Once we can close the loop on phosphates we can start talking about post-industrial-revolution population levels being sustainable.
How do you know where he lives?

Does everything there look like it costs a dollar?

If you need a temporary office, are you really on vacation?
People flock to places that are great to live, and those that have many services readily available in the walking distance are usually greater than those that don't.

But I am European living near the big city's center without car, so I am biased.

"In US 100 years is old - in Europe 100km is far."

> My pet theory is it effectively decreases the available housing supply by reducing the number of locations that people can practically commute from.

Also consider the Downs–Thomson paradox: the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport. It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if it shifts investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
Yes, it's population density. In denser urban areas walking and transit become more practical and driving and dedicating space to parking become less so. Those areas are also more desirable to live in (or they wouldn't have the population to begin with) and that tends to drive up prices.

Source: half-assed guess
This is a complex problem rooted in the inexorable rise in property values that required 2 working to maintain a household by rent or purchase. In addition, automated food gathering and preparation in fast food style meant that there was not much of a saving by making your own meals at home.
People grabbed takeout to save $$ as well as time. We see delivered food, ready to cook at home is dying - defeated by delivered take out food - it has tried and failed to get much traction. Now we have fast food container based takeout becoiming a run away success. 100 containers, parked in industrial areas, all over the place, equipped with food preparation and coooking gear and 50,000 foam plastic takeout clamshels all cooking the same menu, internet connected, orders accrue and are filled by the closest container. A mix of delivered and picked up food. No cash transactions - all debit or card based = nothing to rob and containers have good security.
All driven by economics, customers as well as cookers are happy. The only problem is ease of new entries so there are so many container kitchens that many starve. Locals can limit numbers with the right laws.
“Dollar” store prices are no different from supermarket prices. They often are a little higher. The article is about stores like Dollar General and Family Dollar, not whatever dollar stores used to be. Prices are not a dollar and prices are not in even dollars or anything.

I have asked many, many people the same question and the answer is always the same: convenience. The dollar store is five minutes away or less. DGs are practically weeds, I live in the country and there are more Dollar Generals around me than gas stations or anything else.

They have food, but it’s a very poor selection and mostly processed junk food with a few staples thrown in.

Edit: reading the other comments, it’s a little shocking to see how many people have evidently never set foot in a dollar general or family dollar. Definitely a reminder I live in a different world than most of HN.
I'm a huge fan of it as well, but I use it for a slightly separate purpose: It makes fraud impossible by tying each card to one merchant. If someone steals the card, it's completely useless to them (unless they use it with the stolen merchant, which thieves don't usually do).
I live in Montreal with city run metro, train, and bus networks. It’s currently building out a light rail network that should start to be operational in 2022.

The cost of living seems reasonable to me, especially compared to other North American cities.

I pay ~$1000 for an 800 sq ft apartment that is 30 minutes by public transport from the downtown area. My monthly transport pass costs $80. All prices are CAD.

Doesn’t seem so high to me. Our roads are a mess of construction, but that’s another story.
Calendly Founder Tope Awotona's Success Secret: Growing Up in Nigeria
Looks pretty normal if you do any amount of Go.
Take the number out. What can we do to ensure we can feed all the people. Break it down to the level of consumption per person, and methods we have of sourcing the inputs and disposing of the outputs. What fresh water, energy and land area is required per person?
Does distrusting the processor by disabling CONFIG_RANDOM_TRUST_CPU somehow reduce that risk?
Clearly Trump's party is crucially different than John McCain's. It's unimaginable that McCain would keep kids in cages, call the press "enemy of the people", lead chants to lock up political opponents, undermine NATO, or encourage hostile powers to assist his candidacy. I may not be a conservative, but whatever else may be said of the old McCain-Regan-Rockefeller party, they would certainly never, ever engage in any of these obscene activities.

And I entirely agree, the US does have some considerable advantages:

- the "blood and soil" ideology is very alien (though not unprecedented as seen by the first, more obvious, "America first" movement [1] and later by John Birch)

- it's had 240 years of voting and some notion of civil-personal rights

- there's nice separation of powers. (Although it's becoming apparent that a president with >33% of the Senate can exercise almost unlimited authority.)

But these advantages are not automated, people have to use and defend them. The judiciary is especially delicate, it's been the first thing targeted by the other neo-autocrats.

Also there is a possibility of over confidence in these institutions ("it can't happen here"). And there's an unfortunate dose of denial ("he did not mean that literally"). And inexperience (modern Germans know exactly what the AfD is and how dangerous it is)

But absolutely, the future is not written yet and certainly I too am never going to be shut up.

By the way, the Bannon influence is so obvious (and 1930's obsessed) that you see Trump threatening opponents with half understood ideas of a paramilitary somehow made out of "bikers and police"[2]

[1] https://vimeo.com/237489146
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/434110-trump-sug...
Slightly different, but Adobe got me with an unintended annual renewal. For their annual plan billed monthly, there's no way to turn off autorenewal until the 12th month without losing access immediately and paying a penalty. They do send you reminder emails, which I missed, but it struck me as pretty abusive to require an opt-out exactly 11-12 months after signup to avoid being locked into a new one-year contract, with no way to opt out early. One of many forum threads about the policy:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2536257

Ugh, I remember now how gross that felt at the time, to realize I was locked into the contract, couldn't cancel, and that the same thing was likely to happen again next year, because they built it that way on purpose. Blech.
As someone who's first computer was an 8-bit machine with only 16k of RAM - and a cassette tape drive for storage (all circa 1984)...

...well, this is kinda neat.
Netflix will roll out a lower-priced subscription plan in India
I've literally been wanting something like the walrus operator since I first started using Python in '97. Mostly for the "m = re.match(x, y); if m: do_something()" sort of syntax.
Every piece of art contains some sort of message. What distinguishes this type of message from other messages, what makes this propaganda and why other messages aren't? Is it that any message which shows something which you don't consider "representative" would qualify as propaganda?
Yeah, Montreal is super affordable by pretty much any metric.
Beyond Breakthroughs – After the Internet
The giant heatsink seems like plain overkill, given the author of the article was able to stop it from throttling under stress tests with a much smaller and simpler fan install
Try buying ads on linkedin and setting an amount you want to spend. It auto-renewed that amount, every day for weeks, without an email or even linkedin profile notification. It's an extremely shady dark pattern.

I lost well over $1000 to them before I discovered it and cancelled. Have fun getting a refund as well. In short, avoid.
A graphene superconductor that plays more than one tune
Companies which depend on IP trolling for their primary revenue always end up being extortionists who drain society without producing further value.
Well...

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Sure, there were murderous tyrants, but there were also the ancient Sumerians who executed their kings at the moment of ahem coitus. Something about completing the circle between life and death or some such.

They were a weird wacky bunch, and some of them were terrible, but I think it's a more complicated picture than you paint.
Now NYT disables reading from incognito. Lame.

http://archive.is/cF01U
> Nobody buys a Prius for any reason other than that it's a hybrid with great fuel economy. Nobody. Then there was the Honda Insight which was worse in every way.

I don't understand this comparison. Yes, it's a commuter appliance. Any car you spend 90k on is going to look nicer and go faster than a Prius. So will a 7 series, who cares?

What the Prius did is mainstream the idea of hybrids and "green" vehicles in general, and they've sold a zillion of them. Go ahead and call it boring (it's super boring), but so is essentially every other commuter car it's competing against. The Model S on the other hand has only "popped" among people who can buy luxury sports cars to begin with. It's fast, it's impressive, and it's a niche luxury product whose entire fleet is a rounding error in Prius sales figures.
I tend to think this, that its better to have diverse stores and prices, than one bad store with bad goods. But, its regulation. its the acceptance of a pluralist economy outcome but with forcing functions to prevent a completely economically rational outcome.

Its another way of saying "the cheapest list price isn't always the best price" but it also means accepting price support, income support, or, huge glaring inequality outcomes at point of sale.

The up-side is that economics isn't kitchen-economics its town-scale economics. More shops means more shopworkers means more jobs for money and slightly less welfare. So its a virtuous circle.

Small towns which keep a farmers coop alive survive. They often morph into the town coop petrol/gas, the town coop bank, the town coop pub/hotel, sports complex.. Because thats how resilient towns work. And, if it does work, they bring new small business alongside.

Sometimes they even bring the majors to town, but they have to fight back against the category-killer chain on the edge of town.

British high-streets have been hollowed out by Tesco on the edge of town.

Another part of this story is commercial rents, rates, and tenancy agreements. If the landlords are "my price or its empty" then its empty in the downturn. Renting property for commerce needs something different, but not 1000km away from the tenancy laws people need for homes. The town has an interest. The rent rate needs some limits. Just because amazon opened 3000 new people in a hi-rise next door doesn't mean the shop rent can go up to amazon rent prices. Thats the story of S.F. in some ways (except for the building controls NIMBYism)
I envisioned it like "if/else" or "for/else" or "while/else", where a "do" block must be followed by a "while" block.

x = 0
do:
x += 1
while:
x < 10
COTAP here... Thanks to thisjustinm for getting us into the conversation : )

Not to rain on the parade here, just a cautionary tale that is intended to be helpful...

I would say take a look at Cool Effect which launched in early 2016. Charity at a glance, but it's also a bottomless-pocketed family from Marin. It cuts itself checks from the Overlook Intl Foundation, run by the same people. Both orgs have same CEO. All fine...

But look at the 990s... They have thrown the kitchen sink at this and have probably dumped $10+ million by now. $800K+ in PR and marketing before they even launched.

Yet they've only sold well under 1 million tonnes over 3 years. In other words, back of the envelope they've lost $9 per tonne, even when being a charitable donation.

Also, divide their 838,715 cumulative tonnes noted on their home page by their 533,115 cumulative members. 1.57 tonnes/member over 3 years, or a half tonne per member per year. Not anywhere close to the average US footprint.

Half the country doesn't believe in climate change, or it's not a priority, or is living paycheck to paycheck, or all of the above. Offsetting is not anywhere on the horizon of their hierarchy of needs. Offsetting is complex, misunderstood, and controversial (see our op-ed's n TheHill.com for a taste).

When you finally get beyond those nesting subsets, there's enough market size to go around in theory but it's extremely competitive.
Why is 'consistent pricing' important? They're profitable exactly because you get shafted on stuff that'd be cheaper elsewhere, after being lured in by some loss leader.
"Research shows that dollar stores create fewer jobs than small grocery stores ... "

That's how they keep their prices down

"... sell products that are not actually much more affordable than those at Walmart or Costco"

"Not actually much more affordable" translated to plain English is "more affordable". Pennies, nickels, and dimes count more when you're poor.

"And push out full-service grocery stores"

Because people can't afford them.

Like all good liberals, I also find dollar stores aesthetically distasteful, and I wish they provided more nutritious food. Lawmakers who want to ban these stores, as usual, have their causation backwards - dollar stores and payday lenders don't cause poverty, they are created by poverty, and (sadly) serve to mitigate the crushing awfulness of being poor.
Had a similar issue with CloudTrail logs. These are delivered to your S3 bucket but the objects are owned by AWS's 'CloudTrail account'.
This means you can't drop the logs into your security account and then query them with Athena from another account.
Took ages to figure that out.
If you’re talking in the US: no high-cost city has had long term public policy that favors walking/public transport over driving, to my knowledge. Even in Manhattan, cars are given free parking in numerous places, despite a single parking space being worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you’re thinking of San Francisco: how has public transit grown in the past 20 years? What new lines have been built? Sure, the cost of living has gone up, but has the total area well serviced by public transit increased? That indicates to me SF does not favor public transit as policy.
To save a neighborhood, stop insufferable government meddling.
> This is a complex problem rooted in the inexorable rise in property values that required 2 working to maintain a household by rent or purchase.

Inexorable? Various cities have managed to prevent this phenomenon. Zoning is the root of the issue, but now everyone views their house as their primary investment and they'll fight to protect the eye-popping growth they've seen in their property value.
So I get that the infrastructure isn't as well in place to deal with things like this but where I live 100+ isn't that absurd, and that's nothing to say for places like Arizonia which is two blocks away from the sun and 90 is considered cool, with 100+ being a common occurrence. So what makes this particularly bad?
Also agreed! I now look at the google sparkline function with new regard and wonderment...
I don't know in this case, but I do know that the Python community tends to have strong opinions about things. The := resulted in Guido stepping down, which I think is a good indicator that there wasn't agreement that it was "a great feature to have" and just down to syntax... :-(
Yet more housing is needed to alleviate the crisis
> "You can export from Chrome to a CSV, and you can import that CSV into 1Password, "

It would be nice if there was a way to do this without touching the file system, although I suppose a ram backed filesystem would be a bit better, provided it didn't get swapped. But letting my passwords get stored in plain text on my spinning rust, even for just a minute or two, seems less than ideal.
You are supposed to write

for x in iter(f.readline, ""):

Or if you don't know what readline will return you can wrap it in your own lambda:

for x in iter(lambda:f.readline() or None, None):

There is a lot you can do with iter to write the kind of loops you want but it's not well known for some reason. It's a very basic part of the language people seem to overlook. Walrus does however let you write the slightly more useful

while predicate(x:=whatever()):

Which doesn't decompose easily into iter form.
Assuming the companies involved do not give a damn (I'm not sure exactly about what, so I'll assume LGBT and non-white people and/or rights), they (and their friends and families) still find themselves represented in a work of fiction.

Feeling like you belong in the world is a core need of every human being. This recognition has a worth in itself; even if the company did nothing else (e.g. political lobbying, donations, supportive hiring practices, structural changes to the business), this is still something of value for this audience.

There's a weird paradox here. You object to entertainment getting too ideological, but then you indicate that companies should somehow reflect their ideologies (or lack thereof) in their output.

(I'm loath to use marketing cynicism, but the shorter version is: you're not the target audience.)
> There's no need for a theory of mind - the self driving car can identify the kid as a pedestrian, recognize that it started moving in a possible collision course, then disappeared, thus prompting either slowing down to a non-fatal speed until the truck has been passed.

So ... a theory of mind.
Also, fwiw, the dollar stores near me in LA have started stocking some produce as well. It's obviously not the highest quality, but for a lot of families it's better than what they were able to get before, especially in areas that straight up don't have a cheap grocery store.
They are in the neighborhood, so you can pick up groceries and walk or bus home.

They are usually expensive but better than bodegas.
Show HN: Hero Land – Play as over 100 heroes for free, right in your browser
If you sign up for a recurring payment with a company then the company can pursue you for the payment even if the credit card company declines it. This doesn't usually happen though because it's not worth the expense.

In this scheme it is DoNotPay accepting the liability (and declining the payment). It might then become economic for a big free trial operator to sue DoNotPay for all the declined payments.

But I'm not a lawyer. Good luck to them anyway.
I don't know why the downvotes, but I personally much prefer this to the editorialized and incomplete list in the current list.

Looking at the module changes, I think my top pick is the changes to the `math` module:

> Added new function math.dist() for computing Euclidean distance between two points.

> Added new function, math.prod(), as analogous function to sum() that returns the product of a ‘start’ value (default: 1) times an iterable of numbers.

> Added new function math.isqrt() for computing integer square roots.

All 3 are super useful "batteries" to have included.
"How Fortnite Revolutionised Game Marketing"

Please use original article titles, unless the title was misleading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What about fields other than software?

Besides there are lots of reasons to emigrate to Germany besides the money - minimum 5 weeks' vacation every year, employee-friendly labor laws, cheaper healthcare and childcare, college, more interesting city centers all sound pretty good to me.

Also, "you can make a ton of money here so there's no need to improve our processes" isn't a great argument for the US to make.
Does it make sense to use := everywhere (can it be used everywhere?) instead of just in conditionals? Just like Pascal.