skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do online booking companies have no flexibility in customer service?
I was hoping to get some feedback from founders or regular users of online booking sites. I have been using the same site, Lastminute.com for several years. As a consultant who works mostly overseas I spend several thousand euros a year with them. On my latest booking I mistyped the email address. Got no notification and no record of a booking in my account. So the next day I searched and booked again, thinking the payment had not gone through. With autofill, used the same wrong email address.
So totally my error, and by the terms of their booking, both are non-refundable. It's still two months before the trip, so it's not like the inventory can't be resold. But policy is policy, no exceptions.
So my question is, surely there is some flexibility to help out what I would have thought would be a valuable customer. Those of you who have developed similar sites, is it really too expensive to have room for some human decision making in customer service?
It's a tired argument. Like saying Jill Stein is a Russian asset because literally 1 post in 10,000 (from troll farms) mentioned her as a "redirection" effort. Yes, mentioning Sanders is also a way to redirect from voting for Hillary. Suggesting he's somehow accountable or responsible for this is ridiculous though.

The only person HRC has to blame for losing is herself. The amount of actual-fake-news where there was total bullshit made up about her was nearly non-existent, and especially so when compared to the bullshit made up about Trump (paying hookers to pee in a bed Obama slept in, which got REAL mainstream media coverage thousands of times).
Mozilla Asks Congress to Investigate ISPs Data Collection Practices
> I'm going to say that using phones as a standard appliance interface is potentially a huge UI improvement

I couldn't disagree more. Phones UIs tend to be pretty terrible (the good ones just rise to "not terrible"), and I certainly don't want the various devices I use to have one. That's why I will not buy devices that require it.
NASA Has Found a Weird, Unexplained Boundary in Interstellar Space
Bitfinexed is looking a lot more legitimate since US regulators have started investigating Tether over the same accusations that Bitfinexed levelled against them.
How is USDC operation financed? Is it a marketing expense of Coinbase?
Is "Convert USDC at a ratio of US$1.00 for 1 USDC with no fees" expected to change to a fee in the future?
The fixes do not require payment (which would be hard to do with open source software). What required payment was a type of support contract or membership fee for early access.

Vendors were free not to pay, but they'd only know about the issue when the public announcement went out with no advanced warning.
Right, because they have multiple dedicated lanes that are designed to drive in. Bikes and scooters don’t have the same luxury, so they have to choose between risking getting killed by riding among cars, or riding on the sidewalk. The solution is obviously to build safe infrastructure for scooters.
(Was a standard, now withdrawn)
AM mostly did vertical integration markets. My first encounter with them was actually in the Salvation Army where it did church management, but this E300 was originally a point-of-sale system in a party store, and my E450 was used in a 911 dispatch centre. I've kept the original software on both machines.
https://archive.ph/MIKOH
I find that people like to think of this as a theoretical problem, when it is tractable to solve the bulk of it for a lot of folks. Thinking of the average price of a US vehicle $37k, here is what we did with that same amount:

Installed 9.4 kw of solar panels (32 panels) on our roof which generates the same amount as all of our electricity usage on an annualized basis for $24k. Bought a used Nissan leaf for $10k. Refuel at home, from the sky. No oil changes. Prepaid power for life.

I know a lot of people don't live in such a sunny state as Arizona but given that I live in Oregon they can take heart.

Then I got 11k back from state and federal subsidies.

I wish electricity and gas prices would go up, that's the only way to drive additional investment into a non stupid energy future.
Thanks for your report.
When you get time, please tell me on which Operating System (thanks!)

Try also to go in "settings" menu and select an existing "screenShots" path in "preferred path" section... and after save prog.Settings
(It's a new feature... maybe the bug is there)
We’re already seeing the impacts of these kinds of systems affecting many of the most vulnerable in the Australian community. I’m referring to the Dept. of Human Services’ punitive “robodebt” system.

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-03/centrelink-debt-co...
Because the pickup truck form factor is the most efficient and inexpensive one there is. No really, hear me out! I see this asked all the time, but you're actually asking the wrong question.

I mean, think about it, what's the most minimal, lightest, cheapest form a motor vehicle could possibly take? It would have wheels, of course, some sort of frame to attach everything to, somewhere to put the engine, and somewhere to put the driver. That's it! A cab up front to house the engine and driver on a frame with wheels. Add some simple low sides to the frame to keep stuff in and that basically describes a pickup truck.

The truth is, for any particular load carrying and/or towing capacity, a pickup truck is the most efficient and least expensive common consumer option. Adding a cover over the back, additional seating, and other amenities just adds weight and cost. A tiny subcompact pickup truck version of even the smallest little hatchback can be cheaper and lighter then the hatchback can ever be simply because it's the same thing but made with less stuff.

I suspect the real question you want to ask, is this: why are such high cargo/towing capacity vehicles so popular? In other words, why do we buy such huge vehicles?
No it isn't, not at all. The tow operator is equipped for both, already. And if you're pulling with a 3k winch maybe you need to make stop at harbor freight.

Anyhow, instead of faffing around with silly sandbags, a mid-engine truck is what you're dancing around. Closest thing I've heard of is the Isuzu ELF (NPR in my neck of the woods) which they've been producing since the 60's or so. The motor is kind of underneath the cab. Nobody wants what you're selling.
Corporations don't ride scooters, at least not in Los Angeles.
They didn't see how great that was for their product and brand. They just saw that this guy's profit didn't go to them...
Also, cars (illegally) driving and parking on the sidewalk is a huge problem in NYC: https://mobile.twitter.com/davecoion/status/1118969565449469...
>The US sees anti-trust as necessary when consumers are negatively impacted. The EU sees anti-trust as necessary when producers are negatively impacted.

This statement is interesting, considering what it implies about the purpose of existence of producers for each respective side. With this stance, US is more like "producers exist to satisfy needs of customers", while EU is "producers exist just to compete with each other".
I'm still surprised how many very intelligent adults don't understand the difference between an enthusiast and a professional -- for basically any profession, not just tech.
Paypal could void the transaction and freeze your account or your friend's account.
I would like to know what the future "nominal transaction fee" will be.
That was the missing part!

Launching the app from the applescript still does not work but launching it from the terminal does the trick. The error of the applescript is "sh: ./glChAoSP_OSX: No such file or directory (127)".

I do something like this from the terminal:
cd /Users/..../glChAoS.P-1.4.0

./glChAoSP_OSX

And I see a beautiful fractal!
Spend time with your family and friends.
You have an asset. It's worth $1000. You borrow $1000 against it. The next year, after taxes and interest, you owe $1050. Meanwhile, the asset is now worth $1100. Your net worth has gone up and you have turned that appreciation into extra money to spend. You can do the same thing the next year, and your asset will be taxed as if it's worth $1010, and your net position is still in the black.

What you've perhaps missed, I think, is that property tax rates in CA don't scale with appreciation.
Is this a Microsoft product?
Spore 2?
Signaling means "how a good or service gives, shows, or enhances the value of the person who has it." What an elite college degree does is signal the person is in the elite knowledge class. It's a seal of approval. If you graduate from MIT, it signals you are very smart and adept in business, technology, or science.

I think his argument is that when the university signals, the teaching part is anti-climatic. In Japan, if you make it into Tokyo University, you are considered the right stuff, and what you learn isn't as important compared to making it there. The assumption is you can be taught or you teach yourself anyways.

Human Capital in this case means networking and potential. Being introduced to fellow high achievers, and having the innate ability to achieve high yourself.

I think he is pointing out that these days, Lambda could fit those important aspects better than a four year college. The knowledge part matters much less than being approved by high value and high status institutions, and being able to create a professional network of elite people.

I don't know my thoughts on this idea, but I hope this is accurate to him and helps understanding.
Ask HN: Could we build a long-life probe like Voyager today?
Voyagers 1 & 2 were launched more than 40 years ago and next year will be operating 40 years beyond their mission schedule.

Given the technology of the early 70s (very large feature size, very low level of integration, wide traces, probably not CMOS, etc) it's been possible to understand them well enough to keep them running and repurpose them. The more modern mars rovers also exceeded their mission lifespans by several times, but had ultimate lifetimes of about 15 years. And I note that one of the probes had an early failure of flash memory, something that didn't even exist in 1975. So while they exceeded their mission by more than 30X, in absolute time it was much shorter than Voyager.

But outside that kind of almost unlimited budget environment are we still building things with unanticipated lifespans? Everything from electronics to housing is optimized for cost of manufacture, not long term operating value. And that extends far enough through the stack (from semiconductor to UI) that I wonder if design for the long term is even possible.

Sure, a few hackers can reflash an old phone to be a TV remote, but the bulk of the population can't or can't be bothered. More dangerously, in a few years people will be scattering IoT devices willy-nilly in fields, over provisioning because it's OK if a few fail if you have enough running. When they stop working they'll just drop more, newer ones in; it won't be worth picking up the old ones which will just become e-waste in situ.

Is it even reasonable to want active devices to be designed with long lifetimes? Outside space programs do we even have the skills and technologies?
It was EXTREMELY pro-Sanders for a very long time. The entirety of reddit was extremely pro-Sanders. I have to believe reddit owners/admins were complicit in this shift because it was so overwhelming and even today, dissent is extremely difficult. The most notable pro-Sanders sub outside his boring official campaign one(chapotraphouse) is quarantined.
Numerical Schemes of Fickian Diffusion with Neumann and Dirichlet Boundaries
Thanks for sharing. Good read
>A GitHub profile on that topic, (semi-) deep knowledge or something comparable helps quite a lot.

At all places I worked, the practical knowledge of the person to be hired was always most important. I don't think it that important if the projects were freelance or just hobby projects. Just having a toy project on Github, that is also hosted somewhere and close to what you would do at the future job can already truly impress people. Combining that with confident self-marketing will make many small startups get very interested.

Once you got some practical professional experience you can still switch to a company that is larger or has more benefits.
That's why I bought a Kenmore HE3. I can buy most parts for $<50 on Amazon (or eBay in the worst case).
Uber doesn't really have a leg to stand on. Cities use traffic data to determine things like traffic light synchronisation, where to build or expand roads, speed limits, etc...

In this case, they're allowing electric personal vehicles on city sidewalks, information would be useful to determine if they should create bike lanes, change traffic signal patterns, etc... Not to mention, at the end of the day, cities do have control over what drives where, how fast, etc...
The FDIC limit is $250K: https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/deposits/faq.html
For me, I need to run the application from the terminal and it works. I do something like:

cd /Users/..../glChAoS.P-1.4.0

./glChAoSP_OSX

And I see a beautiful fractal!
My mother and father in law have these, they specifically sought them. They're these old brown Maytag machines. Really nice and easy to use. If I ever replace the ones that came with my house I'll probably look for the same kind.
I believe the FDIC insurance was updated to 250k a decade ago.
A good future is abolishing the time switches.
Sure it's doable, it just makes the task that much more difficult. Plus you need to ensure there are no unintentional voids from the balls blocking the pour. Code requires that they can't be within 1-2 inches of any steel or the surface of the concrete.

Also, most designs assume a uniform cross section, and changing that greatly complicates the design method.

And remember that the laborers doing this don't always understand (or care) about these sort of restrictions.

It's usually cheaper and less risky to just use a lightweight mix, with injected air, if needed.
A pick-up truck, especially one with a four-door cab, is by design the swiss army knife of vehicles. If you are not constrained by something specific, then a pick-up is the rational choice.
Excellent! Down in Irvine? I assume this was largely on the S-100 systems.
compared to applicance controls?

The limited hardware almost guarantees a poor experience, and of course no consistency whatsoever across appliances.

Sure, 3 buttons is ok just to set the time perhaps, but quickly becomes unusable with more complex requirements - and then you get crappy lcd screens, and custom menu systems, etc. even bad apps are usually better.
> The problem is that the rules are not applied evenly and transparently.

Of course not. Never are, again you are not saying much here. Also with the billions of wasted dollars. Of course, but that is a natural consequence of dealing with immense scope - it is going to be very inefficient and stupid. Still a far cry from actual corruption.

I feel that people tossing around the word corruption don't really understand what it means and it is a hyperbole - only undercuts the message.

A bit like the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld - he is not really a nazi in any shape or form - don't even mention real nazis in the same context.
A Crypto Content Manifesto
Likewise. But the demand side isn't us, it's exchanges.
The Unexpected Benefits of Writing Tests
That gets closer to the problem, but the solution is further away. You don't want to return "Functor" (which is like a vtable, the interface itself) but instead the thing itself which is implementing the Functor interface.

So you end up with

interface Functor<A> {
map<B>(f: (a: A) => A): Self<B>
}

where `Self` needs to recognize that the type being defined to implement this interface has a "slot". This tends to make things tough.
I don’t know how the availability of educational content online has anything to do what I said. And nowhere did I say that the only place one can get an education is within an institution. Your comment is a pretty big strawman.

Educational institutions in the United States have become customer-focused corporations in all but name. While it’s nice that information is available for personal use via the Internet (although frankly most of it has already been available in public libraries for the last century), that’s a separate point. The discussion is about educational institutions, not the ability of one to self-educate.

The point is: if you’re doing an economic analysis on the value of an education, you’ve already lost. Institutions which once were dedicated to timeless academic values are now mostly about making a buck. If you went to university a century ago, it was probably to pursue an academic career. If you go now, it’s probably to get a better job.

The fact that you as an individual can watch a YouTube course doesn’t change the fact that influential institutions have a dramatic effect on popular culture, society and politics, and ergo graduates of those institutions will shape society.
> Like saying Jill Stein is a Russian asset because literally 1 post in 10,000 (from troll farms) mentioned her as a "redirection" effort.

Therein lies a good point I routinely use to befuddle, is how do you know these trolls are working on behalf of someone for their benefit, or working on behalf of the opposition as a way to attempt to discredit?

Attribution is hard.
I'm not sure why you think conda doesn't support that. You might want to look at [0] specifically the section titled "Building identical conda environments", and at the documentation for "conda list --export --md5" and "conda list --explicit" (and if you don't use pip also "conda list --canonical") which all do exactly that, and which can all be fed back to start a new environment.

Also "conda env export", which adds some more documentation; In fact, all defaults list explicit versions of packages. The only way you can list installed packages without it is "conda env export --from-history", which will reproduce the non-version-annotated list.

So, yes, you don't have a "requirements.txt" and a specific lockfile maintained on disk; instead, conda manages it, and if you want it in source control (and you likely do), you need to make sure your local pre-commit hook runs the export. But everything is indeed reproducible, without any additional package needed.

> apt install gcc:4:4.9.2-2

Ok, so your ci (and everyone) must be root / fakeroot; and you somehow have to manage that outside your requirements.txt and lockfile (e.g. in a pre-commit or post-checkout hook). And you can't have more than one at the same time on the same system (so your ci must have different containers/vms to build two executables with conflicting requirements, even if they are part of the same project). And you can't do it on Windows or Mac at all (whether root or brew user or whatever).

From every possible aspect, Conda is much, much more suited for reproducible and well defined builds. It does it differently than managers using lockfiles; But it definitely does it, and more completely.

p.s. conda also has "conda list --revision" which shows you the entire history of version updates. Very useful for troubleshooting, even if not strictly required.

[0] https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/latest/user-guide/ta...
Who said anything about hard science? Just because something is well-understood by a group of people doesn't mean it has to have some sort of scientific basis to have any validity.
> In conversation, people don't play recordings of previous conversations.

Although, sometimes we wish we could.
> Runners and scooter riders are not the same thing at all.

Wasn't something that was claimed. It was an analogy to show the absurdity of your argument.

> Second, runners do not run everyday, multiple times for every trip and errand. You can grab a scooter for lunch, for an errand, etc multiple times a day.

Above you argued speed was the core problem, now it is frequency? You said a post ago that anything on the footpath going "5 to 10mph" is dangerous due to "the kinetic energy and momentum at 10mph of an adult is considerable." Why is that suddenly safer when it is less frequent? You said it could "lead to bone fractures." Bone fractures are fine when runners do it but not scooter users..? Seems like you've forgotten the argument you were making above.

> Lastly, it is not the job of pedestrians to accommodate scooters

Wasn't something that was claimed.
If you really want what POWER has to offer, like the ability to explore low level board firmware, the price is extremely competitive.
Certificate error:
https://tailwind.build - NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

https://bootstrapshuffle.com and https://bulma.dev - Work fine
Anarchism's Possibilities by Kim Stanley Robinson
Thank you for providing this additional context. If the pairing is exotic and doesn't have much liquidity, can you still compute the expected value of tether by doing Tether->BTC->USD? Maybe not, because maybe BTC->USD is inefficient or illiquid itself?
GDPR fines were meant to rock the data privacy world
Indeed. The crypto dream often involves being able to move huge sums of money around the world, with no ability to trace it to real people. This is the opposite of what established financial systems want. Of course they don’t want to legitamize crypto currencies, they’d be introducing a massive vector for crime and tax evasion.
Though one thing we learned from the last election is that troll farms can push extreme views on both sides of an issue just to encourage division.

If you believe all pro-nuclear-energy people are extremist environmental nuts, or all anti-nuclear-energy are anti-science luddites, then you've got a lot of people who are going to be easy to manipulate, since they won't ever entertain any argument from the other side.
If you are really worried just drop a few dollars on spares for all the internal parts. Most everything can be found on Amazon. It's hard to imagine drying enough clothes to wear out the heater element more than three times in the average human lifespan.
This is news to me, are you able to cite any specific evidence? (Not vague allegations or assertions of fact, but rather actual, specific, somewhat confirmable evidence.)
You're absolutely right. As someone coming into Python and SQL from a purely Excel background, the first realization I had was that I had been, in essence, programming Excel. Not in a rational VBA kind of way, but in how I was linking all of my cells (and sheets and books) and then using pivot tables, etc., to extend Excel beyond a single column/row perspective. Microsoft PowerPivot (or whatever it used to be called) was my gateway drug into the world of SQL.

I can generate similar utilities to Excel/PivotTables using Plotly Dash or Pandas or even DataTables, but even after a few years of learning and practising it would take me less than 1/10th the time to generate an equivalent excel pivot and chart and have it displayed in front of a group.

I'm not saying it's better, just that those execs are so comfortable with that visual-feedback excel approach that it'll be an uphill battle to convert them to a programmatic one. Pivot tables provide very rapid means of filtering, modifying output, and aggregating information than is otherwise possible inside Excel. To those coming from a two dimensional excel spreadsheet world, discovering pivot tables is like viewing the world in 3D.

I don't see why you would go to Excel pivot tables from SQL; you already have a more powerful tool at your disposal, if you're comfortable with it. Going from Excel to SQL? That hurdle is a bit higher.
You still need to be able to choose what time the alarm should go off, NTP won't help with that.