skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just some back-of-the-napkin math if you wanted to do this "right".

Let's say you hire drivers as employees and pay them $15/hr plus tips and reimburse them for mileage. You charge a $4.99 delivery fee. Drivers work set shifts and are paid hourly whether they are making deliveries or not.

That means each driver needs to be making at least 4 deliveries an hour or you're losing money. That's not even really counting for mileage or any other benefits like health insurance or retirement (not that jobs like this usually provide this, but people seem to think that they should).

When I lived in DC, driving anywhere could take at least 15 minutes. Getting 4 different trips from a restaurant to somewhere reliably every hour would be difficult. Obviously, drivers can pick up multiple orders and take them in one round trip, but you're at the mercy of what orders happen to come in and where they happen to be located. It seems like it would be very hard to make that sustainable.

Of course, Domino's and lots of other places do it, but they probably aren't paying $15/hour and they also have one central location and more predictable demand. It's more feasible if drivers always go back to one central hub rather than having to get orders from random different restaurants all over the city.
The notion that we can "observe our own states" does not stand up to genuinely deep insight about our phenomenology. Experienced practitioners in insight meditation have been able to shatter this illusion, and realize that we can only ever observe memories of some apparent "self" - that no real "self" observation of our observability 'in a recursive way' is going on (thus, pithily: "no self"). But of course, they're still conscious!
This is so True, as an immigrant - I have changed jobs and every orientation when talking about benefits does not break down the cost to the employee - resulting in "just sign here" so we can be done with everything mentality
Yeah, it's annoying as hell. I especially despise when sites force me to manually select another country from a list, in order to get an interface in my native language.

The country selection itself is trivial, but often the content will be geo-specific as well, and you might end up with things like the wrong currency and so on.
> I have a choice on what software I install

No you don't. Much of the software preinstalled on an Android device is permanent. And you can try stripping out Google Play Services, but good luck having a "smart" phone.
I think it depends on your priorities. I was heavily career focused, then had kids and focus my time on family now. If i really wanted to i could pick them up from daycare late, i could get baby sitters, i could do what’s required to be more dedicated to work, but i wouldn’t get that time with the kids back ever.
Not the physical collection itself, of course, but it definitely does apply to this part:

>When Gates moved the collection into the mine, he simultaneously erected a digital paywall, thereby securing the collection across both physical and digital space.
>Personally, I think that real estate rentierism is a far bigger problem than platforms. But addressing that offends a far broader audience, and lacks novelty, even if the scale of rentierism is affecting higher income quantiles than in anybody's memory.

That's a pretty good summary, yeah. As vile as Facebook spying and YouTube's hit-rate algorithm can be, most people are more affected by old-fashioned landlording, with the semi-novel twist that the metropole and its inhabitants try to limit the number of people who can move in and "compete for jobs", rather than dragooning people out of the countryside to work in labor-intensive industries.
What kind of reader can I import this into? I'd like to get back into RSS.
I paid some $$$ and kind of coasted doing my Masters in Investment Fund Management. I thought the qualification would look good but the actual course content was a bit too rubbish to get very enthusiastic about it. All academic math silliness from teachers who'd never got anywhere near managing actual investment funds.

My earlier free of charge degree I worked hardish and it was taught at a much higher level.
There are many businesses Amazon doesn’t enter. I personally don’t see how Amazon’s strengths can help them compete against other food delivery services. After all, same day delivery is the norm there.
The "interviews" seem to be scraped from Reddit AMAs, take the veterinarian one: https://www.careerfair.io/reviews/veterinarian. The first question seems to be exactly this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k4jkh/iama_veterinari...

This is a rebranding of content farmed from Reddit, which we've seen all over the clickbait journalism world...
This reminds me of a post I submitted a few weeks ago on HN.

A friend of mine works for a restaurant group in NYC and they like many they have had to respond by offering delivery to folks in order to keep some revenue flowing. He and I were chatting and he mentioned that lately, a large majority of high value ($500+) orders were fraudulent with the fraudster ordering things that can be resold such as high-value wine, liquor, etc that isn't necessarily perishable. He says that the scams work like this:

1. The order comes in via Caviar usually with a ridiculous amount of booze. It is usually a courier delivery but he says looking back, some have been picked up by 'customers'.

2. There are some instances where the order gets canceled either by the scammer within the 2 min grace period post ordering of from the actual customer who had their account phished/received some sort of alert/and stopped the transaction.

I am intrigued by this because there is obviously someone on the receiving end that's ending up with a boatload of high-end booze and then offloading it somehow while Caviar eats the dispute later on and still pays the restaurant out.

Literally, thousands of dollars a week of fraudulent booze orders are being fulfilled to people fraudsters using phished accounts with valid cc's. The consumer eventually realizes the charge, disputes it, and gets their money back leaving Caviar with the bill.
Thank you so much for that, I am/was a HUGE fan of that feature in Firefox, and it was actually one of the main features that got me to switch to Firefox in the first place. I was gutted when they removed it, and while I still swear by Firefox over Chrome, I'm finding they're making more and more questionable decisions lately when it comes to their supposed love for a free/open Internet.
I believe that, whatever process they went through to generate the first set of numbers, they went through that same process to determine it's safe to reopen now. 1/3 doesn't seem like such an obviously wrong number that I have to suspect undue influence.
No, making something available isn't entrapment.
Not quite. Reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a public company. In fact, Couchsurfing is the one here backed by VC, having taken in $22.5m.

Edit: I'm totally wrong about Reddit. They're both currently VC backed companies.
I said this in another post about Grubhub but similarly to this article I really don't get it.
Those apps are all 25%+ expensive than ordering take out directly with the restaurant, they screw the restaurants and all those delivery companies lose millions.

Did everyone really become THAT lazy that driving 10 minutes to get your meal is that much trouble?
Start with the price that you need to drive adoption and early usage. Later raise the price as necessary as you understand the business and the value proposition, but only for new customers. Keep all the original subscribers around on a "founding member" plan at the original price.
Is it really the case that blogs are dead? It seems that a decent chunk of the posts on HN are from blogs.

The reason I don't blog as much as I used to is because nobody reads anything I write. The traffic is a joke. Thus is doesn't seem like a wise investment unless there is some ulterior motive (eg. demonstrate proficiency in some field).

Also anything I feel compelled to write about is generally something controversial, especially relating to politics or work culture, and it would be career suicide to write that under my real name. Therefore if I want to write anything that's actually interesting, I have to write under a pseudonym.

If I could bring anything back to the internet, it would be internet forums. Real communities. Reddit and HN serve their purpose, but there's no sense of any real community.
DoorDash already serves as the back end for a number of other services.

But being a courier company is not near as good of a business model. The aggregation element means that they own the end customer and payment flow, which among other things increases spend since you discover new restaurants via the platform and can transact seamlessly with any restaurant on DoorDash vs giving your card info to each new place

More importantly, as a two-sided marketplace DoorDash enjoys network effects which are the source of its defensibility. If they were just a courier company, restaurants could just switch over when they found the next company that could deliver marginally faster or undercut them with VC funding. As a two-sided marketplace, the restaurants can't turn them off without losing all the demand coming through the platform, demand which is captured by DoorDash is because they have tons of restaurants on the platform, creating a feedback loop.
I wasn't aware RSS went anywhere let alone died, I've been using Feedly for years and I couldn't imagine getting blog and product updates any other way. I highly recommend Reeder 4 on macOS/iOS as a client.
Any of the non-founder employees who work at one of their hundreds of portfolio companies that have refused to go public. Literally only one company backed by YC, Dropbox, has gone public to date.
But I didn't need to carry "identification". I just had to answer some questions.
Yes, it has been exploited exactly like you described. An example that I remember - Foodpanda in India. I guess fraud costs are massive for all the food delivery startups.

source: http://www.livemint.com/Companies/rYKC6HjnShogjE62jO5lpK/The...
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta... "U.S. health care spending grew 4.6 percent in 2018, reaching $3.6 trillion or $11,172 per person. As a share of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 17.7 percent." The report itself finds Medicare spending is 21% of healthcare spending and Medicaid 16%, or about 1.3 trillion (with a "t") between them.
I mean, they canceled their phone program too, you don't see Apple packing it up.
It's very difficult to see the other side of the fence. It's nigh-on impossible to see what parent-life is like for someone without kids given how hard it is for parents to picture life without them even having lived it for a number of years.

That feeling of having a child is impossible to impart to someone without. The vileness of the question is directly resultant from that fundamental intrinsic change that comes from being a parent, and the inability to predict it from the other side.
They aren't really "printing" money, for each dollar created a dollar of liabilities is created. Eventually, the positions will be exited, the liabilities will be closed out and the money 'created' will be destroyed. At least, that's the theory.

The stimulus checks are probably the most effective weapon they have in their war chests, as people at the bottom of the food chain are the most likely to spend that money immediately on essentials. This induces economic activity, it increases the velocity of money, and it helps to counteract the natural deflationary pressures a recession creates.
> Domino's and lots of other places do it, but they probably aren't paying $15/hour and they also have one central location and more predictable demand.

One thing to note about Dominos is that people pay at the door, so they would need to look the delivery guy in the face as they stiff him on the tip. Not required for the delivery apps and fewer people tip there.Because people tip, you can pay lower wages.

I had a relative who worked as a Chinese food delivery guy for a while and he did it exclusively for tips. The restaurant did not pay him at all.
In the end the customer needs some single easy interface where to order food from. It is kind of difficult to see how this could work in a way where restaurants would dictate how customers prefer to order.
I’ll settle for self driving package that doesn’t plow full speed into stationary objects. What regulatory hurdle is that stuck behind?
hey there - thanks for bringing this up. right now the main goal is to get as much content up as possible, and I leveraged reddit for 2-3 of these interviews. Another one is:

https://www.careerfair.io/reviews/firefigher

Going forward, I'm going to aim to have all interviews be sourced by myself. Thanks for checking out the site :)
I have a theory that if there are many ways to do something, but one retrieves more data about the user, that way will win.

For example, cisco webex turns on 24/7 microphone access "to find nearby displays".

this could be a funding model - if your app can plausibly access (contacts, location, microphone, camera, photo library, ...) then it should get more funding (because you can slap on an advertising SDK to "coincidentally" extract more user data)
The restaurants (that aren’t mega chains like McDonalds) are usually utterly incompetent in spheres of logistics and IT. I don’t see how this can end up well.
I did this last in 2016 when I forgot my wallet at home on my way out from SJC flying on Delta.
If you think about the energy required to drive a million miles, all concentrated and stored somehow in a car, it would be extremely dangerous. If that energy is suddenly released in an accident, it would probably destroy a city block.

1e6 miles at 3kwh per mile = 3e5kwh = 1.08e12 joules = 0.25 tons of TNT.
Not sure how many buildings that would destroy, I have no practical experience with explosives. But it's a decent sized truck bomb.
Not everyone has a car.
A hash map is unsorted so it's not a useful way to sort data
Why doesn't Google build this as an extension of Google Maps?

Charge restaurants no fee for the platform, if they provide their own drivers. Charge restaurants money through Google Ads to promote their restaurants for higher results.

In a few years, get Waymo's driverless cars on the game.
Pulsar currently is easy to setup if you're on Kubernetes, especially if you can dedicate an entire cluster to it. You can run a small 3-node cluster on GKE with local SSD instance storage and GCS/S3 tiering that can handle GBit throughput.

Otherwise look at NATS with NATS Streaming (although they're currently redesigning a better version of it). There's also Liftbridge which is an alternative NATS Streaming fork.

https://docs.nats.io/

https://docs.nats.io/nats-streaming-concepts/intro

https://liftbridge.io/
I wasn't stating that he was "wrong", I was suggesting that regardless of whether you can find any merit to any of his opinions, it was kind of an odd, dubious obsession that people don't uniformly respect unlike other accomplishments he had.
The piramides must have been a very strange idea from the start. Transporting larger than life stones to build an abstract geometric monument.

Im glad they did because it speaks to imagination to build the impossible.

Imagine a mountain as high as the Alpes still standing there in 10.000 years.

I also think the first people to build dikes where seen as a bit strange. You are well aware that industry has made the dutch engineering name in the world.
> At least 35 current or former congressional candidates have embraced Q, according to an online tally by the progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America.

Parts of this article enter counter-conspiracy-theory territory. Think about how many fringe candidates "run for president" who don't get anywhere near being listed on the ballot, and then multiply that by the number of congressional seats in the U.S. The above statement isn't nearly as shocking as it sounds.
Yes, my second paragraph is addressing random draws probably not being ideal.

But I'm saying that I think that because humans and groups of humans are complicated, not just because I think it's important to reward parents that value and plan for their children's future.
Your ideas for the Earth would play out in a catastrophic manner in practice. Every bit of it requires violation of a basic economic principle - we build out based on the lowest marginal cost. Before we go to the Rockies, we will saturate more fertile and coastal areas. Easier to use what nature provides than to supply those things artificially. Humans will eventually switch over to artificial options, but only after collapse of the parallel natural system is in terminal collapse. Examples start with fishing, and then never end.

In these macroeconomic terms, there is 1 viable way to save life from destruction - open up new frontiers that have characteristics which are MORE attractive to humans than counterparts on Earth.

In practice, that means the moon. The moon is smaller than Earth, but the accessible area is possibly greater because of lack of oceans and lack of existing use. It doesn't end there. Lower pressure and temperature gradients mean that you can dig MUCH deeper. With similar original compositions, industrial mineral availability (in terms of raw elements) from the moon vastly outstrips the Earth. Some asteroids can be cherry picked, but depth of the resource is more shallow.

Much high-tech lithography requires vacuum, which is produced artificially on Earth. Space gives you that for free. We don't even really know what's possible industrially with diffusion and surface tension effects, because gravity cannot be eliminated on Earth for factory-type work, at all. Combined with the mineral abundance, you have what you need for a self-sustaining super advanced and practically limitless robotic industrial society. That is the draw. Other things that fleshy humans need are a cost, which the other benefits have to offset.

Materials from the moon can be delivered to low-Earth orbit at extremely low physical effort compared to delivery from Earth's surface. Rockets are improving such that human trips to space stations from Earth could be economical, but a cislunar robotic presence must be able to sustain activities beyond there.

This is the only option for saving the planet, and we are lucky that the richest person on the planet shares the view that Earth should be light industrial and residential... but ultimately, narrowly specialized in environmental tourism. All we have to do is move the primary economic engine into orbit.
If it's an existing restaurant that has excess kitchen capacity they probably don't need that many deliveries per hour as he customer isn't paying for a table and that margin can go towards paying the driver.
I enjoy that In-N-Out is still proceeding with the suit even though DoorDash has taken down the advertising in question. Have to send a message.
Fair enough. I had the free plan for ages and really only changed to the paid one so they would get something after I'd used it for years.

Edit : Their free tier has 150 RSS subs allowed. So it's pretty reasonably. I have the middle tier for $US 20 a year that sets that to 500 subs.

Also, I have no interest in the company financially, just very pleased that there is a better than Google Reader replacement.
The main goal of any species is to survive/reproduce.

We don't know if there's any other intelligent life in the universe, or how common it is. The one thing we do know is that we haven't found any.

There could be many reasons for this, and one of those is the Fermi Paradox (great filter).

Whether this is a real thing or not we don't know, but by establishing sustainable settlements in space, we hedge against the idea of us dying out via ourselves, asteroids, etc.
If prices rice on doordash the restaurant can just offer takeout cheaper.
Here are some additional clues on the mission: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/498210-how-the-latest...
Ask HN: How'd you reflect Stories, Blogs you've been reading on Internet?
I think People come to Internet mostly for reading After, a long read of your fav: blog post. I'm curious how would you maintain, reflect what you've read?
I don't understand why doordash, uber eats, deliveroo, and similar business are starting to exist. Restaurants have been running successful delivery operations independently for ages. And there are many software offerings to help businesses get set up with delivering food.

Why do we need a centralized on? Is it just the benefit of being able to browse in one app/website everything available for be delivered to you?
Depends on how much overtime they have to factor into there. In the short term, especially for short term demand, it's going to be a lot of people making time and a half or 2x more likely than not.

A new shift will take a while to train up and temps are... ugh... don't even get me started about the sort of people temp agencies send. We had some that only lasted a day for not listening and doing stupidly unsafe things. One of them nearly hit me upside the head with a piece of glass because he wasn't paying attention to where he was swinging it. That was his last day on the job, for precisely that reason.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

― Robert A. Heinlein
Works just fine on firefox on linux.

I even have the privacy settings set to strict, which usually breaks things.
30-40% from restaurant + up to 35% in promotional fees from restaurant + delivery fees + service fees from the customer.
This seems to e a general cultural thing where rules are seen as malleable. See how well the lockdown is (not) being adhered to.
Hard to get good liquidity from a unicorn. The description sounds like trading to me.
I agree with your general take but I'm surprised by your last line.

> I think Mr. Thiel will regret his place in history. But it's very hard to blame him or Palantir. It's like blaming the sharpness of a knife when someone stabs you.

If Thiel actually wanted to help the problem, there are surely much better ways than making Palantir. I think the "someone else will" logic is a thinly veiled excuse to justify what he wants to do, for other reasons. I think he 100% made the world worse with what was done here, and deserves according blame for that.

To replace your analogy, I would say he saw a stabbing about to happen and instead of attempting to stop it, he decided to stab the person with a slightly blunter knife. The analogy breaks here, but this could have been thought on for years, and he couldn't think up any other solution to it, or spend his time somewhere more worthwhile instead? Even a failed attempt to stop the stabbing would have at least been understandable.
This would be key for restaurants to do, in DoorDash’s largest markets.
I'm not an expert in this, but I think that the evil VC game plan is to try to make their portal the default first stop when ordering food. If they can get to that point, then they can start transferring the profit from the restaurateurs to themselves. This is more likely if people are indifferent to the specific place they order from after they've selected a dish or cuisine; less likely if people want specific restaurants.

Essentially, they've looked at the food delivery market as thousands of individual orders all going through individual phone calls or web orders and said, if I could take a percentage of all that, I'd have a great business.