skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The right question is -- why is this forced onto Uber rather than being a question of national healthcare.

Because one political party has spent the last 4 decades fighting to prevent "national healthcare," forcing states and businesses to deal with it.

Hell, they've spent the last 10 years trying to demolish a law that the overwhelming majority of voters support, including those within their own party.
The Uber situation seems to be echoing the deregulation of the CA energy market [0]. First, hopes of new efficiencies through unleashed market forces, then bad-faith actors (Enron), then clusterfuck, then taxpayers left worse off.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
>Secondly, we need a crowdfunder to support people who've suffered grevious bodily harm at the hands of this regime.

What about this one?
https://www.facebook.com/donate/1123543824684874/
https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8rjj4ZxCNs
The message in Mozilla laying off the Servo team, for me, isn't so much that Rust is dying as it's about a team making their programming language a priority can't at the same time focus on their actual task ie developing a browser. What a missed opportunity to specify web layout in a constraint formalism (and I hate to always be right).
Back in first grade in the early 90s we had a computer lab class where the teacher taped a handkerchief over the keyboard and forced us to learn touch typing. At the time it seemed ridiculous (and sweaty!) But looking back I am glad I learned touch typing early! I currently type around 100 words per minute which is enough for me where it isn't a bottle neck any more.
Does this come pre-configured for high availability (e.g. replication to a standby node)? Given the pricing I would have assumed "yes", but I don't see any mention of it in the blog post?
Whereas I've been seeing less honeybees over the last several years, my garden this year seems to be teeming with native bumblebees, mason bees and a few others I do not know the identity of. Perhaps a decline in honeybees will actually help native bees to recover?
A couple months ago I released automation in our cloud environment to shutdown/startup resources who have been tagged with cron expressionS. It has been an incredibly flexible solution to manage and reduce the cost of resources which charge per time spent operating.

Not only do tags fit well into already existing work flows (CI/CD, policy), cron expressions give freedom to devs/sysadmins to choose whichever schedule they need. Also, this solution allows a central IT team to easily query and calculate duty cycle of any tagged resource, and relate that calculation to money saved.

I suggest using cron expression tagging for any scheduled resource automation, as it will likely be more flexible and more easily monitored than anything natively offered by the cloud vendor.
Thank you for your feedback, it is very appreciated. Some answers:

1) I work with my wife at this, so we are a team, though web development is new to us. I got a PhD (math), used to be a backend, and then a data scientist for awhile, but I do not know how to sell these things at all, so we tried web dev, since it seems some people do apparently live off it. I've tried marketing myself as a freelancer in the past and have made literally zero cash from it, so we gave up on that and rebranded as a web dev shop. The rewards seem the exact same, though I can pretend to be a CEO now:)

2) We will check this channel out, thank you. I don't think either of us is strong on design, so this is a valid criticism. It is a goal of ours to improve in this dimension.

3) Neither of us has any contacts who want to buy any software, so we agree with you on the importance of cold selling. We are starting up this process now, and trying to run some ads, but Ecuador has only a 30% online presence anyway, so yeah...

Please keep us in mind if you need anything though, our entire family lives on 300 dollars a month, so I'm quite sure we can undercut virtually any competitor's deal. Thanks:)
Well, this IS an urban center, so no, it’s not normal.
Or you hire someone who cares about the mission and can settle for a pittance like $1 million per year.
Yeah, and it’s very mild compared to prison, and quite literally isn’t the same thing (which is why they have different names).
Internet Glossary – Free Internet 101 Tutorials
https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/ is much more comprehensive, and sadly very few ever read it.

Lots of functionality in the spec that isn't even possible to find on MDN or W3 Schools.
I lived through this in Austin. It's happening again.
> Nobody will because the business model won't allow you to pay people enough money without charging too much.

Do you mean to say that, after expenses and benefits are taken into account, an Uber driver working 40 hours a week makes less than minimum wage?
A moving target! :)

Not suggesting this is for your lawn, but you might find this [0] to be an interesting read.

It's subject is people whose job descriptions are to answer your question, and how they are currently grappling with the subject of human-stewarded ecology.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma...
Facebook doesn't have a fix set of whiteboard problems for interviewers
> This kind of implementation is actually quite concerning, because it means you're punting through a language which is notorious for its heavy reliance on undefined behavior, and there is no way to opt out of undefined behavior in some cases.

I think it's worth pointing out that you can't always get away from those undefined behavior situations even if you skip C all together. Rust, for instance, has some internal/implementation details I've run across that are just C undefined behavior details leaking out of the LLVM IR instructions they use to implement the language, since those instructions have the same undefined behavior semantics as the corresponding C code they're used for.
Software Development Languages (Part 2): Rust
I don't see many people speaking about code they find good. I'd appreciate this. Pointing out bad code is usual, but good ones?

My comment may seem exagerated but that retranscribes very well how I felt when I discovered this code. Often, I'm overwhelmed by the code tree of medium to big-sized projects, with many abstractions and complicated folder structures. This is a browser and yet it was easy to figure out where to find the parts I was interested in and to understand what the code did.

Now, one can always find problems and discuss about the lack of gotos or arrays, but if as a complete outsider I can navigate and understand the code, and even feel that I could hack it quite easily with no documentation, something must be right with it.

I'm not in any way connected to the project, I don't even use this browser (sadly, it is too impractical).
I think that you’re underestimating just how much infrastructure goes into running something like Uber. A friend of mine does ML work at Grab (South East asia ride hailing company) and the amount of data processing that goes into getting a good fast and cheap ride is incredible.

It might be possible to somehow distribute it and pay people at home for spare compute time, but it would still run into latency and spike problems.
The Servo team and Rust team were two different teams, so this doesn’t follow.
Best way is to build your product. A real world product. There only you will be able to confront upon the wall of Reality .... Even the lightest simplest product is the best tool to really learn, as you confront, think, invent, try and errors everything.

Languages have no meaning if there are not tested in real space. I lost a lot of karma here because of discussion on PHP (I am a ruby guy). But at the end you can keep and relie on PHP, because until you don't see yourselve flaws, then those flaws doesn't really exist. And only then you choose your language that will correct problem the right way ;)

After your product is done, show it to us here, return to HN and expose your vision, and receive rewards and critics at the same time.
Each endeavor you undertake will have different hurdles for how to define worthwhile progress. You need to evaluate what you're doing against a the right framework.

To use your example - if you're writing a book as your full time job and, after 12 months, haven't finished the first page of your manuscript, it would make sense to seriously reconsider whether or not you should be writing that book.
I see you’re familiar with retail jobs.
That depends on the state and the section of highway. There is no Federal prohibition on walking or bicycling along an Interstate highway right-of-way. State laws vary.

In California, for example, bicycling or waling on freeway shoulders is permitted except where specifically prohibited and signed. Bicyclists and pedestrians are prohibted from most California Interstate highways where there are alterantives bicycle and pedestrian routes, but there are mnay California Interstates on which bicyclists and pedesrians are allowed, including sections of I-5, I-10, and I-80.

In California, state law expressly allows walking along a freeway in an emergency:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
I can imagine the impact Clojure had; learning about Lisp had a big impact on my programming journey.

What was it about Go that made your Python code better, though?
The 285th Rule of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition states that "No good deed ever goes unpunished."
Wow, with all that information generated you would think some of it would tell us how to move off the planet and use more of the universe.
I'm sure the finance guy hates it when his coworkers are too stupid to think of revenue and costs.

I'm sure the project management guy hates it when his coworkers are too stupid to think of planning and deadlines.

I'm sure the product manager guy hates it when his coworkers are too stupid to think of users and use cases.
Totally agree on the root cause here. Curious though - can California deal with this by offering some a state-level single-payer benefit and charging employers? That would be a broader solution that would address many things in one swoop.
@ Aaron - Thanks, as always, for the thoughtful note but I disagree with you on this. Yes, there is risk of over-dilution if you raise boatloads too much out of the gate (including the very real and potentially fatal risk of being undisciplined on spending). But at the end of the day, if a founder figures out the business in that first 12 month window and is still sitting on another 12-24 months of cash, she has so much more power than if she is 4 months to cash out. She can take capital now but exactly on her terms. She can decide to keep pushing and raise in 12-18 months when the business will be in even better shape (and valuations higher, etc). Time becomes her friend, not her enemy. In my opinion, one would be crazy not to take more capital when it's this insanely cheap (valuations for 2 people with a powerpoint have never been higher). As we've seen with so many great companies, p/m often takes more than 8 months. Take more than you need and buy time. It will come out in the wash. I know this may sound self serving given my VC Cloak but having raised my first venture round as a founder in 1998, it comes from a place of experience (and pain). Thanks for listening.
>The right question is -- why is this forced onto Uber rather than being a question of national healthcare.

Because that's the way the stupid system currently works?

So it's both- Uber should be forced to work in the current confines of the system, and there should be questions like national healthcare

>If we offered national healthcare, like many other countries, it would solve the problem across the board. It could be funded by Uber and all other companies through some type of tax. That seems a lot more efficient than trying to solve the problem piecemeal.

As others has said, it's not just healthcare.. payroll taxes, other benefits etc.. Uber is basically trying to avoid all of this by pretending that 100% of their workforce are "contractors" even though many work 40+ hours a week like a normal employee.
I not so much, beyond some occasional assertions of Rust being responsible for features that Ada already had them first.

As for compilers being expensive, while true, I learned Ada via books a couple of years before being able to put my hands on a compiler.

Then again, maybe that is no longer fashionable way of learning.
Not everyone has the same potential, but a lot of potential goes to waste because it is not encouraged.
There were talks about creating Rust's own Foundation, to secure financing independent of the mess that Mozilla has become. Not sure if that went anywhere.
In this case the word "good" is used synonymously with "profitable" or "on a trajectory to be profitable". So there is no bias or belief system at work here. It's a direct correlation.

This entire article is geared towards people who actually have a business that _can_ make money, and that they should have more faith in their abilities to make do with less.
Whats with the alternating caps in the title? Is it to be sarcastic?
In May, the company announced it was abandoning the project, citing economic infeasibility. But what wasn’t mentioned was that the project had also become politically infeasible.

Google’s incompetence was multivalent. But that’s the nature of Dunning-Kruger incompetence. Toronto is not a bigger version of the bedroom communities it is familiar with. The site wasn’t lacking pie-in-the-sky planning exercises. Nor interest from deep pockets. The biggest incompetence was pitching the project as “what we want to do will finally put Toronto on the map.”

In real estate development, fanfare is to provide cover for fait accompli. Publicity before the ducks are rowed is amateur. Steamrollering opposition first requires a steamroller.
I meant to ask about backup with point-in-time restore too - is that provided out of the box?
> I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely.

Ahem, "everyone"?

I, and the people I went into 'lockdown' with quite enjoyed ourselves. I'd argue that this period has been the most productive for my mental health in decades.

You aren't everyone.
What is the point you're trying to make?
> We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die

I find this sentiment as funny as I do frustrating. This thing has been around ~8 months. We know some about this virus. We are still completely ignorant about the long-term effects. And we're continuously finding troubling signs about it. It's looking like even mild cases can result in long-term brain, heart, and lung damage [1].

The US has handled this absolutely horribly. Our "lock down" was so mild, even in NYC, so as to be the tiniest of inconveniences, hardly the prison sentence you imply. And yet, our "freedom"-loving compatriots bitch and complain nonstop about it, and ultimately just extend the time we have to live this way. If we'd taken it seriously earlier like virtually every other modern civilization, we'd be living in much more normal circumstances today.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...
Amazon reportedly wants JCPenney and Sears to turn into big fulfillment centers
> I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose

If the purpose of Mozilla is to fight systematic racism, then I'm sorry building a web browser and running a VPN is a terrible way to go about it and the leadership team should be removed.
Seems a bit silly to rewrite working software in a relatively new language. I like Rust, but it has its own trade-offs. The big one for QEMU being that QEMU developers and users tend to know C already and not be familiar with Rust.
> You compare uber to etsy, but uber sets a price and does not even list the name of the driver till you order to pay.

Yes, but the driver is similarly offered the fare, and may choose to accept or not. This is actually one of the critical distinctions between employees and non-employees. If they were an actual employee, Uber would be able to just assign the fare to them.

This is also unlike taxis, where, if your light is on, it is illegal to not accept the fare. (Although violations of these rules are common and blatant, which ironically stopped me from using taxis altogether.)

It’s certainly true that Uber operates in a grey area. When cities have explicitly banned them, they stop operating (e.g. Vancouver). It seems like California has clarified some of the ambiguity around employment, and Uber may similarly stop operating.
What Uber did likely isn't sufficient. Uber restricts the maximum drivers can set, only allows increases in 10% increments, does not allow passengers to see the rates of more than one driver at a time, does not let a passenger set their own rates, does not allow drivers to go below auto-pricing, and still sets surge pricing themselves instead of letting passengers and drivers set pricing when demand is high.

Starting Tuesday morning, drivers at the three test airports can either accept Uber’s original price for outgoing rides, or ask for up to five times more, in increments of 10%. After next week they will have the option to ask for less than Uber’s original price.

Essentially those drivers now are bidding against one another for riders. Uber passengers will see only the lowest proposed fare range. If that driver rejects their ride request, they could see a new, higher fare range, as Uber would then show the request to the next-cheapest driver.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Uber-tests-lett...

Uber likely wouldn't be in this position if they stayed out of pricing/visibility and let passengers/drivers set whatever rates they wanted to. Just provide a platform for people to get rides and stay out of pricing entirely.
We’ve been working on it, and be “we” I mean “not me personally but the core team generally.”

It’s not so much about finance as it is holding the trademark, imho.
> Uninstall the existing driver, pull the official one down from Microsoft.

Are you specifically selecting that search option after it fails to install a driver? If you're just uninstalling the vendor provided drivers, removing the vendor drivers from disk, and redetecting the hardware then Windows might just be pulling a WHQL driver off disk that it already has.

Most Windows installs come with a cache of WHQL drivers for common devices, companies like Synaptics, Realtek, etc will provide a single driver that supports most of their devices. In rare cases where you have a device with limited storage (e.g. a cheap tablet) then it might not have those drivers, but that's not the norm.
Free and open source is not good enough
Well, yes and no. They can avoid healthcare requirements by not allowing people to work 30+ hours per week (as Walmart and MacDonalds often do), but that doesn't get rid of their other obligations to employees (disability, unemployment, social security, payroll tax, etc.). They already provide these services for their non-driver employees, so the issue here is purely cost.
Yep, we like to eat our dog food =)

Timescale Forge, which I mentioned elsewhere, is based all around Kubernetes (including StatefulSets), which enables its decoupled compute/storage and instant pause/resume.

For that we employ helm charts, but also have additionally built k8s operators + more internally to handle the dynamic operation and reconfiguration you want from an "full lifecycle"-managed database service, while the helm charts are slightly more static.
This blog post agrees with you, and says that re-writing the code in Rust is a bad idea.
Why throw money into this fire?
Ehh, I lived in Portland - where do you see anything about a decriminalization of all drugs there? I must have missed it.
Thank you for the tip, I will keep that in mind!
Greed and Avarice mixed with cupidity blended with terminal nimbyism pretty much sums it all up.
Google was seen as a monster cash cow, and blood-suckers lined up to drill for gold.
Property costs (not values) have ramped up in much the same way as if San Francisco, driven by height limits, density limits and the huge ramp up of properties bought and rented for income. (aka rent seeking).
Often highly leveraged with 80%+ mortgages. the owners lice in fear of a market decline. Rogue AirBNB owners infest the market, even when precluded from doing that, they rent and litigate.
So I think the smell of the terminal cupidity they detected drove them away.
When I was in high school, one day I cleaned my disgusting keyboard by taking it apart and cleaning beneath the keys. When I reassembled the keyboard I intentionally mixed up all the letters, numbers, and punctuation. Like a blank keyboard it kept me from “cheating” and taught me touch typing. And it was hilarious whenever someone else tried to use my computer. They’d usually give up after a few seconds of staring at the keys.
Cross that bridge when you get there.
The article itself presents an ideological position. So, this was ideological from the start.

I am presenting an alternative ideological position that better frames the original one. It is a better framing, because the original is backed on racial grounds, whereas I am making a point based on taking personal responsibility or not (being governed).
2-3 minutes was typical before.
A Shopify Haiku
Check out with Tobi
Shopify--how green your bag!
eCommerce is king.

I write at https://whitenoise.substack.com/
California has seriously discussed doing exactly that. But given the situation in DC, it is likely that they would be actively sabotaged by the federal government if they tried. So much for "states rights"....
I don't know what kind of background checks and interviewing (if any) Uber drivers have to currently go through (beyond having a valid driver's license and good driving history?), but if I'm hiring someone as a full time employee, you better believe I'm going to be more rigorous and it will cost me more, and that will limit the number of available Uber drivers IMO, or the number Uber will allow to work for 40+ hours. In turn that lowers supply, driving up Uber prices even further. I don't know how this makes sense overall. If a driver chooses to Uber as their primary (or sole) source of income, that's their choice. Do drivers that hustle more for Uber get a larger cut? (I think that's fair).

This is not about Uber, but about how a government can force something on a business model. Something seems off about forcing a company that created massive opportunity for people in the first place. (I am in no way supporting Uber because I think their leadership and culture have very questionable ethics).

How much more are local, state, and federal governments going to reap from taxes once drivers are classified as full time employees?
It's far from dead, a new version of the compiler is being developed on top of ATS2 (https://github.com/githwxi/ATS-Xanadu). ATS2 is being updated too (https://github.com/githwxi/ATS-Postiats), the latest stable release happened last December:

https://github.com/githwxi/ATS-Postiats/blob/master/CHANGES-...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ats2-lang/files/ats2-lang/
I think your views of local municipalities ability to provide transportation in california are way too optimistic. San Francisco currently operates the most expensive bus stop ever built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center
Considering the attendant economic devastation and ongoing uncertainty about the health situation, would you expect it to?

Nobody’s arguing that there’s no adverse consequences.
> Is this a case of get woke, go broke?

Yes.
Evidently they can. The Servo parts are the only things that are fast in Firefox.
To add onto this —- living with only one kidney rather than two only barely increases your risk of dying, and many people each year die due to lack of kidneys. So, creating a market here (regulated of course) would save a lot of lives.