skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The four-year-old company has largely pivoted to an enterprise model where it works with restaurants that have no storefront and prepare their food in shared centralized kitchens, or “cloud kitchens”; with delivery providers like DoorDash and Postmates; and with existing pizza companies to build a hub-and-spoke model for the entire delivery industry. The company has been trying to morph into a data and logistics provider, part of an effort by founder Alex Garden to become “the Amazon of food.”

So they want to become... a commercial bakery? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UjUWfwWAC4

Once again proving that SV companies do no market research before making their ideas...

I'm not in the food industry. I've talked to a couple of food engineers though, and its apparently a very difficult space to work in, with a variety of safety regulations to prevent disease (and if disease does break out, provide a mechanism to track where it came from).

Ignoring that, the space of commercial kitchens / commercial bakeries already produces tons of bread for a variety of companies. From my understanding, these commercial bakeries are flexible enough to change the recipe and create different breads / doughs for a variety of companies. That is to say: commercial bakeries are already "hub-and-spoke" models that centralize production for McDonalds / Burger King / Grocery Stores / etc. etc.

-------

If you're entirely focused on logistics / sales of products from a kitchen to a variety of restaurants, that job is called a Food Broker (http://www.foodbrokers.org/). Its kind of the opposite of a commercial kitchen: if a small kitchen makes a particular food that probably has mass-appeal, a food-broker will distribute that food in a wide area. Food broker work for many kitchens, delivering food to many commercial locations.

In effect: the food industry is already filled with "hub-and-spoke" style businesses. Food Brokers, Restaurants, commercial kitchens, etc. etc. Ever think why your cheap chinese food all tastes the same despite coming from 10 different restaurants?
We Must Stop the Executive Branch from Suppressing Science
Tesla, who uses just ethically sourced cobalt, is also a target of this lawsuit for some reason. So that won't save you from lawsuits like this.
Batman Airport
"Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does—a majority of Firefox “application” code is written in JavaScript."

While it makes hacking on Firefox easier, isn't this a liability for performance? Is this, perhaps, partly why WASM is such a focus for Mozilla?
The thing with Ivory is that it was the traders, not the producers, making the money. You can ruin trader profitability by not trading with them. You can't convince Congo to stop using a child labor force with no protections by making them more broke - they'll just retask the labor force into different labor. We've seen this with diamonds.
“Marsquakes” Reveal Red Planet’s Hidden Geology
Perhaps 'ordered basis' for 'scale'. Or perhaps 'discrete spectrum', just searching for a term that conveys its meaning intrinsically.

I had in mind a reform akin to how modern lisps have rename CAR and CDR to first and rest respectively. For example the Lydian Mode, could be referred to by a codeword that can be unwrapped to understand what exactly it is.

In general I am always in favour of trying to advance the expressiveness and meaningfulness of notations in all fields, and I think that is something that should be continuously evolved, trying to find better way to say things.
Haha here is the link to the original email thread with pg asking me to do this:

https://www.prettyfwd.com/t/a_SBCPYeTLGxeP37RRTpmw/

The last time this came up I couldn't share the email thread because PrettyFWD didn't yet exist.
When there's a dominant group (A) that makes laws to help itself because it feels under threat against a much weaker group (B), it's pretty easy to see that A did an unfair and unreasonable thing. In the US this is the current party in power making laws against immigration of Muslims and claiming the 'other' is illegitimate, in India, it is?
Ban all trade with countries that use child labor and forced labor, simple as that.
Another take on what the author proposing is to simply not care about the output of the task, but focus on how that person approaches the problem (even if they don't manage to complete the task at all).
Because there's no incentive to change the law precisely because it's never been a problem. Despite the popular narrative, legislators are typically pretty busy (a lot of this is self-inflicted, though). So striking a law that has never been enforced a certain way because it might be enforced that way isn't a very productive use of their limited time, especially when courts have ruled quite the opposite.
Django has announced their security releases to match. [0]

[0] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2019/dec/18/security-re...
G Corp

Glencore 2018 Annual report: 'the recent appearance of excess levels of uranium in the cobalt hydroxide being produced at Katanga'
https://goo.gl/maps/g3VS4pfhS49eduVf8
Exactly as Steve Blank mentioned 10 years ago (and 3 days shy to boot). The Elves are Leaving Middle Earth - The sodas are no longer free :

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
I appreciate your trying to figure out a solution to my problem. A sincere thanks.
> (no file system would need a path longer than 260 characters, right? :o) )

This is poking fun at Windows' PATH_MAX, but it's very easy to hit BINPRM_BUF_SIZE's 128 character path limit for #! lines; maybe not so much for humans, but with CI systems installing things in weird deep directories (e.g. virtualenvs ... see https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/596).

So the old adage about glass houses and stones is still good advice ;)
Perhaps if we don't fly on private jets we are not respectable.
Counterpoint: I open sourced a lot of stuff while I was at Google. There is some friction in the open source releasing and IARC policies (one of my projects got denied), but generally the open source teams at Google want you to do good work. And having clear documentation of ownership is actually helpful; there's a lot of dodgy stuff out there where you're not sure who actually has the rights.

Contrast to Apple, where, aside from a few high profile open source projects that help drive their business (Webkit, Swift, llvm), open source contribution is quite discouraged. How many fun Apple side projects do you see on Github?

I really enjoy the freedom now of just being able to click "create repo" whenever I feel like it, and am sad about the corporatization of the world economy, but I think Google is doing about as well as you can expect here.
I hear a lot (and believe myself I suppose) that I would rather hire someone that knows how to learn than someone who currently knows thing x but can't pick up and learn things on their own. But I feel like it's VERY hard to figure this out about someone. It's pretty easy to test how well someone knows a particular technology or tool (given some variance for operating in a high-pressure scenario etc.) but it seems pretty hard to tell if someone can learn new things quickly, and learn the right things. I feel like this is what algorithm tests are trying to do, but I also feel like a lot of algorithms are based on having a key insight into a problem that is, at least in my experience, pretty hard to have when you're in a room with strangers on a timer and being judged, so if you don't know the particular algorithm to apply, good luck. And also it's pretty easy to go study algorithms and hope you remember how to implement DFS if that's what they ask you in the interview. And there is some non-zero value to just knowing about different data structures and algorithms for certain types of work for sure. I don't think many of us web developer types will be implementing DFS ourselves, but I run into issues pretty often where having knowledge about different data structures and algorithms comes in handy.

So I can see the appeal to doing a test like this that has nothing to do with a particular skill, where you're trying to evaluate someone's judgement and how quickly they can absorb new ideas or figure something out on the fly etc. BUT, I just think there are too many factors that can really muddy this up, and I still don't feel like there's an objective way to measure "smart and learns quickly". Even "learns quickly" is somewhat vague; I personally wouldn't expect someone to pick up, say, functional programming in an hour just by saying "go read about it." Some things take longer to learn than others.

Anyway, there's no silver bullet. I still feel like we end up making pretty subjective decisions about other people when interviewing them. I don't think we're even all that aware of them ourselves. I would say though that if you're interviewing somewhere, you're getting useful information about that place by how they interview you, and so I wouldn't feel too disheartened if you feel like the interview is unfair or doesn't work for you. That's probably a good sign that you wouldn't enjoy working there anyway.
Hard ≠ impossible. If problem can be solved with money, then it's not a problem, it's expense.
Thats why I put in the "know how to ask questions" part. Sure, a lot of the time you don't get an answer. And you end up figuring out stuff the hard way yourself. But then I always force myself to go back and answer my own question. It might help the next guy, but more importantly if I have to answer the question myself I need to put what I learned in writing.. and in an understandable way as well. Often the exercise of explaining it will make me understand even better.
The Global Economy’s Luck May Run Out
I may be biased because I live in the NL and I live slightly below sea level. But I would be more worried to live on the coast somewhere else that has no history of dealing with these kinds of problems.

In some sense The Netherlands is the only country on the planet to have the political structures in place to deal with rising sea waters.

What do people think Florida is going to do? They're already losing their drinking water and they're still in denial.

And it really is about having social and political structures in place to deal with problems of this magnitude. The engineering questions are largely understood. Build pumps, dikes and create flood plains. We shouldn't focus on the engineering problems. The problem is one of coordination and mass mobilization of political will, and that already exists here.
You're right, they should couch the truth in at least a paragraph of explainer text.
Immigrants applying for refuge at the southern border are generally coming through Mexico, not from it. Mexicans are (not quite as) xenophobic towards them, too.
> when in reality we all know it doesn’t in the online space

yeah, Sears, keep telling yourself that online is a different market.
For a z-wave device to pair to my hub, I need to put the hub itself in pairing mode.

Unlike wifi devices, a zwave device can't just join my hub by knowing an SSID and password.

Yes, I could do something similar with a wifi network and whitelisting mac addresses etc, but that's not nearly as simple as the way z-wave works.

[addendum] When I talk about checking my network, I'm also not talking about status. With wifi, I'm checking to look for unexpected clients. I occasionally have a temporary freakout when I see an unknown device on my wifi that ended up being something that I bought, added and forgot about (like a media player), etc. That's not a concern I ever have with a z-wave network.
I made a tool for creating React components with visual TDD
It's not illegal in Europe except maybe Germany and that's more because of not being able to assign moral rights in work for hire than anything to do with at work/not at work.

I work in Europe and every company I've ever worked for has had a substantially similar clause.
20 years after to completely own its institutions.

40 years after to completely own its politics.

60 years after to completely own its crime and corruption.

So yeah, about now is when Belgium is entirely off the hook. If they still feel involved from colonialist guilt-trips, that's their own problem. It's time for homegrown domestic scapegoats.
That's a strange claim since the primary complaint abut Elmo was the elimination of Big Bird's social-emotional learning.

Sesame Street is for pre-schoolers, which was never academic outside of a cadre of upper class dog-eat-dog New Yorkers
The only reason "they know your shoe size" is because you carry around a $1000 phone that tracks your every move and spend all your disposable income through their platforms.

The same cannot be said for the poor Cobalt miners, so no they can't just will that info into existence simply because they "want to know"
I found this is very insightful thread on this lawsuit and context behind it:
https://mobile.twitter.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1206896495993...

0) lawyers suing have questionable history

BUT 1) Child labor in Africa is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, and just about anything sourced from Africa will have this problem.

2) The Kamoto mine in question is a copper mine. Cobalt is a secondary product. (One could just about as legitimately call attention to products using copper.)

3) Tesla is targeted in the lawsuit but does not use Congolese cobalt.

4) Possible exception to this is some possible future Tesla cells could come from LGChem which gets some of its lithium from Umicore. However, LGChem is the primary supplier of cells for GM and several other EV producers... Yet they are not named in this lawsuit.

5) Kamoto is a modern industrial mine. Artisanal mines are where child labor is used. Unskilled child labor is of dubious use in highly mechanized industrial mining sites.

6) However, Kamoto has had problems with pirate artisanal mines on its property and has tried to get the Congolese army to help keep them out. (So I guess the lawsuit would be that Kamoto has not been able to keep out illegal artisanal mines from its property?)

7) Regardless of all these points, we NEED to stop this dangerous child labor in Africa, and it's probably a good thing that this sort of thing is drawing attention to the issue.

(Note, I'm mentioning Tesla here because I'm most familiar with it and it's also mentioned most in the thread, but it's possible similar arguments apply to other companies listed: It seems they're listed because they're well-known, large tech companies, not necessarily due to amount of cobalt use or even use of unethical cobalt at all.)
And I was responding to this comment: "if I buy some shares in Amazon I don't get have all their client data."

The point is that GSK wouldn't have invested $300 million without the exclusive collaboration agreement. That is why it's different than buying a publicly traded stock. GSK is not just a random shareholder, they are a significant owner (may even have board seats) with an exclusive collaboration agreement. You are splitting those things up to make your argument, but they are linked together.
Related story:

When I bought my GM truck last year, it came with OnStar. The saleswoman came to the part of the sale where she had to set up my OnStar account. I told the saleswoman that I would not consent to the OnStar trial service. When she tried to cancel it for me through their online portal, she asked for my email address, which was required to cancel the service. I refused to give it to her. She didn't know what to do because that portal was the only tool that she had to work with, and it required the information (she was professional the entire time, btw, as was I), so I told her that I would take care of it.

I walked out to my new truck (still in the sales lot), pressed the OnStar button, and the operator came on, asking me to set up my service. I told them that I wanted to cancel the service completely. What did they do? They asked for my personal information.

I had a back-and-forth with them for 10 minutes or so, with the operator telling me that they could not turn off OnStar unless I gave them my personally identifying information, and I kept telling them that they did not need that information at all and that I would not give it to them (they already knew my vehicle's ID... it's automatically included with the OnStar call).

When asked why I would cancel a "free" service period, I told them in no uncertain terms that I disliked the OnStar company, that I did not consent to sharing any private information with them, and I wanted the "demo" service (that was active when purchasing a new vehicle) disabled completely because I had purchased the vehicle. They kept telling me that they could not cancel the service unless I provided my personally identifying information.

I offered them an alternative. I told them that I could hang up, and the OnStar would stay in the unlimited "demo" mode where I would continue to get the service for free.

They put me on hold, and when they came back, I was told that their supervisor OK'd the cancellation without me giving them any personal information.

I should have just removed the antenna!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katanga_Mining
Vendors that don't get sued can compete better in the market and survive longer, and their prices won't go up (except maybe a little as rents if they have few competitors and those have been forced to raise their prices because they've lost a lot of lawsuits), right?

[EDIT] I'd don't really give a fuck about DVs but I'd love if some of the people DVing my comments on this thread would explain how I've misunderstood orthodox "right"-wing approaches to market-based regulation and commons management, since I don't think I'm claiming anything particularly radical here—quite small-c conservative, actually—and would like to know whether and how I'm missing the mark on it.
European employment law is pretty unified, so it does at least suggest a significant commonality.
> We should still aim for building and sharing stable, well-understood, high-quality code libraries.

And I agree with that 100% - but that isn't the solution to every single problem. That's all I'm saying.
Just because the 'standard' is open doesn't mean it will be free software. See: HTML5.
It's awful indeed. But it's a translation of what haskell does. The imperative version would be much more readable in any case...
No NYT but a bunch of other high profile ones, use Shortyz
He claimed it is an US only thing and US imperialism. The example of Germany refutes that. So it is nonsense.

But funny how you choose to believe his personal experience, rather than mine. All hail the narrative.
It's not going to do that. Over time it's just going to select front-end developers experienced with JavaScript.
> Trust is a very big deal. The biggest deal.

100% agree. And yet, observe the lack of concern in the "pro" camp (some of it on display here) where there is clear evidence for reasonable lack of trust.

I'm not asking that you adopt my beliefs, but if you stop and think about this discrete (lack of concern over at least partially justified distrust) point, does it not seem to be potentially a big deal as well (in that it might actually be driving human behavior)?

> As long as you are not a specialist on climate science yourself, all you can do is trust.

I disagree. Just two of many alternative actions:

- do your own research, to try to get a feel for how trustworthy the message is (for example, are there any clear mistruths being peddled)

- do not assume the message is necessarily correct, and repeat it as if it is absolute fact. History has taught us this lesson.

> We pick people we trust and more or less believe in their stance on things.

Some people do, others do not.

Considering a political consensus needs to be reached, it seems to me that it might be worthwhile expending some additional mental horsepower on the lower level details of why we seem to be incapable of achieving this, rather than just guessing at why people won't get on board. It's rather disappointing that this notion seems to be considered dumb in a normally rational community such as HN, and that it does seem to be considered dumb among the intelligent is to me an extremely interesting and counter-intuitive phenomenon in itself, that also may warrant some investigation.
The same could be said about the Nike shoes you're wearing. By that logic, the company should be sued for buying the Cobalt to make phones. Shouldn't you, the consumer also be sued for buying the phone, containing the Cobalt?
Not just USA this time.

Readers might be interested in this recent case in the UK Supreme Court regarding employee compensation for "outstanding benefits" from an employee's invention (Unilever made £24M selling it, he got his wage).

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/10/28/uk-supreme-court-rules...

It frames the fact that employers claim ownership, and have for decades, but that UK IP law, at least, does something about that.
Depending on when you tried, the speed might be much better; it's hard to measure exactly, but it's gotten roughly 3x faster since 2015. It's still not where we'd like it to be, and are continuing to invest in improving this, especially in the incremental case.
Price control is an opportunity for a New Drug Deal (free article)
One great book on how the culture of an entire giant company can change is "Who says elephants can't dance" by Lou Gerstner. He was the CEO of IBM who orchestrated IBM's transformation from a mainframe supplier to a service-oriented company. My take on the process is this - the change can be done and has been done when there is an existential crisis. The crisis may not be apparent from the outside, but company internals can notice a terminal decline of their core product/service and has an impetus to change the direction. Even then, it's not easy. I would argue that Microsoft had to make somewhat of an about-turn from Windows because first the Internet and second the Cloud was putting pressure on their core business threatening to make the OS a marginal player. I don't think Google is in that position, at least not yet. Google Ad business is not facing any terminal threat. Thereby it is much harder for Google to make a culture change because simply the pressure to make the change is not there at an organizational level.
[Edit: Prepositional corrections]
It's hard to be worse than Theranos, Holmes put people's health at risk. It's going to be difficult to beat that level of narcissism and recklessness.

Every since I heard of WeWork though, I've been fascinated with this SoftBank drama.
If one company is bad at vetting vendors and loses lots of lawsuits, so has to raise prices, that creates an opening for competitors (existing or new) to do a better job of that, not lose a bunch of lawsuits, and crush them in the market with lower prices. No?

[EDIT] to clarify, you're right if you're talking about flat costs across all players in an industry, but wrong about fines or liability exposure that targets specific behavior, as it's possible to avoid those and retain lower costs (yes, of course, compliance and that avoidance of liability has a cost that does tend to raise prices somewhat, but so does any action aimed at accomplishing some goal, and supposedly companies are more efficient at that sort of thing than government so this should be a relatively cheap way to achieve some end, if you think markets work fairly well in general)
I've been to group interviews where they pretty much do that. Randomly divide all the candidates into groups, give them a task, see how they work together.

I can't say I enjoyed the experience - and I've no idea how good it is as a tool - but it was illuminating to see how people treated each other.