skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The existence of a well-run government agency goes against free-marketeer beliefs that the government can never do anything right. The USPS flies in the face of that.

Unionized government employees also typically lean Democratic, too.
From what I remember in this video, it's actually been a independent company spinoff since the 1970s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A

And stopped using tax dollars in the mid 80s
Imagine if they had to pre pay pensions and the VA - they'd be insanely underwater.
Compiler Explorer, PVS-Studio, and Terrible Simple Bugs
this is very awesome thanks for sharing! Been having a lot of fun with pokemoncries
Yeah I agree, some more competition for TSMC would be great, it will drive down prices for all of us
Notes on Programming in C
I assume this is based on the CDC recommendation which doesn't seem to be based on any scientific research. On the other hand, this study finds that valved masks are as effective as cloth masks as far as leakage is concerned. (1) Also, I would assume a valved mask covered by a surgical would be ok (doctors and nurses do this sometimes) but that's not clear. Otherwise, they are asking people to wear less protection based on nothing but conjecture.

(1) https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/early/2020/...
"optimize like a Vulcan"... classic!
"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

— Linus Torvalds
> People like that could get by with dial up

Speeds 10x that shouldn't even be an option in 2020 honestly. It's a failure of capitalism that they are.
Yes, I do find that counter-argument unconvincing. Do you? It will always be painful, but right now it is especially painful because of a contentious election in three months that is going to rely on mail-in ballots more than ever before. And given Trump's history, it's very reasonable to be suspicious of his motives for doing this now.
My guess is that it's pretty simple. There are ML models predicting the ad quality score; when the predicted outcomes for a site/account don't match reality it is a strong signal that something is wrong. Other inference models determine what is likely being violated on the site or by the account. A human has no chance of digging through the model to figure out exactly what causes the flagged outcome.
The only solution is trying various changes on the site and seeing what the models and clickers/consumers think of it unless you want to try to pay Google to deepdream your site for you with their inference models; good luck with that.

It's not worth it for Google to fix rare edge cases; fixing them manually may even bias the models to cause problems for a greater number of sites. I am sure the models are trained as well as humanly possible; there are millions of dollars on the table at the fringes. Every employee's time is most valuably spent improving the models as a whole and not chasing down one-off edge-cases unless it's for a very high profile client. I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists).

Accept AdSense for what it is; a highly-profitable-for-Google way to use ML to turn HTTP into $$$. It will not work for every site, only 99.99xx% of them.
TikTok might (as far as we know and at any given moment) collect fewer individual pieces of data than other apps, but they have been caught circumventing protections and covertly collecting data.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/tiktok-tracked-use...

Their actions are not justified by what other apps do. Regardless of whether GP's comment included speculation or was merely using hyperbole, the sentiment is reasonable. At this point, I think it would be irresponsible to defend TikTok.

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23684950

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725139
Yes, here in Canada too. It just wasn't enforceable and taxi drivers regularly refused fares and kicked out passengers if they weren't lucrative enough.

https://globalnews.ca/news/3907475/taxi-driver-refuses-to-dr...

Medallion-taxis are comprehensively awful, and California seems determined to regress to where they're the only choice for riders again.
> Curious, do you have any advice on how to avoid these pitfalls?

I can tell you some things I've found helpful, but I think sytse (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sytse) or antirez (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antirez) could give better advice than I ever could.

Off the cuff, for me it always comes back to having a good filter -- which can take time to develop, and can depend heavily on what your goals are with the open core part of this, along with what the goals are of the company.

For example, if 10000 users want support for feature X, but 10 users are willing to pay/upgrade to support feature Y, and these features don't overlap (or are mutually exclusive), you many need to make a choice as to which way your goals will point you.

Luckily, there will be also a ton of features/improvements that will neatly overlap with everyone, and so you can make everyone happy as well. For prioritization of those, there's a lot of things you can do, but I always like this article's approach: https://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html.

Another useful tool could be analytics -- the people that use your product the most are usually the people that become your biggest supporters, best suggesters, and paid clients. This might be a bit tough since if you add in an analytics tool to the codebase anyone could rip it out when they have access to the code, but you could do things like watch who is constantly submitting tickets / issues, reaching out via email, mentioning on social media, etc.

Just some quick thoughts, but by no means am I an expert here.
Absolutely. This actually a type of relationship that many businesses have. Most hair salons don't actually employ any hairdresser. They employ the people that clean the shop, and run the register. But the hairdresser themselves are independent and lease a stall in the shop. The salon very much depends on the independent hairdressers to function.

Pointing out that Uber would cease to function without independent contractors is entirely correct, but does nothing to demonstrate that that these workers should be categorized as employees rather than contractors.
>not spent on the real bottlenecks

BE LOGICAL! Of course you first fix the big bottlenecks.

>good PC for $100,000. Doesn't mean it's good engineering.

Of course it is...or can you gold platter a pc case?
Yes, you'd want a better general purpose fix.

But solid general purpose laws are the responsibility of the lawmakers. They're the reason there's a crazy exception list, and they deserve the blame for it. The proposition doesn't make it meaningfully worse.
>> videochat

Big red flag. If you are connecting random people via video chat you open yourself to all sorts of abuse. I'm not saying that it is happening on your service, just that advertizers (and therefore google) are wary of videochat.
Letter from a postal worker in 1921 to 2021
Not feasible. You’d have to offer ‘everything’ to every single one of your employees to prevent them being head hunted, but the opposition only has to make a better offer to a few of them to get the inside track info they need. That massive asymmetry makes it almost impossible to stop the brain drain.
The parent comment was edited considerably and is a much better jumping off point for discussion than I felt it was when I wrote what is below. Leaving it for posterity.

> The view that a human can only have autonomy and dignity through either a workshop or outdoor hobbies is absolutely wild. You should try to understand other people perspectives, interests, and value functions before you proclaim stuff like this.
Not exactly.

`cat` stops reading when read(2) returns an empty string (read(2) doing that is what's interpreted as EOF). Ctrl-D doesn't insert anything. Rather it flushes the terminal's output buffer (the one that's filled with user input) into the underlying program's input.

The terminal does line buffering by default to allow the user to modify the line before submitting it (e.g. deleting with backspace or Ctrl-W). That means that it automatically flushes when reaching the end of line (i.e. the newline). If you flush again with Ctrl-D at the start of a line, that means cat's call to read(2) will return an empty string, since you're flushing an empty buffer.

That means that:

> So with tools where you have to insert an EOF manually like that, it's impossible to have a file that ends without a newline.

is false. It's not impossible, just impractical. You can have a file with an incomplete line at the end by starting a line and hitting Ctrl-D twice. Once to submit the incomplete line, and then again to flush the empty buffer, thereby indicating EOF.
"I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation"

That's really easy to understand.

Humans cost money, algorithms are free.

Also, Google is full of the kind of people that 'don't understand humans' and 'understand algorithms very well'.

To Google, the answer to all of life's problems is probably 'an algorithm'.
Practically a paid advertisement by the Postal Employees Union. Okay, not practically, completely.

Having had two relatives both be Post Masters you can damn well bet the slow down of mail is totally because they are purposefully doing it and not for hours cut. You underestimate the levels they go to. Both relatives recounted days where you would have bickering constantly and having to call in RCAs because two or more permanent employees were bitching over a truck or additions to a route and no mail would go out.

This same union had incredible influence over the poor working conditions RCA drivers suffer; these are all those personal vehicles marked up with PO logos and such. All with their guaranteed day but hoping for enough days to pay their bills. All having to suffer the whims of a regular PO employees who treat most of them like dirt. All this just so they can get their permanent position. Which should be done by the RCA with most seniority but this can be sabotaged quite easily by the regulars.

Sorry, this piece is election year drivel and you can expect story after story on every subject sure to come up in ads
My guess is that they ran it on smaller sites only and targeted those. In my case, it was a "entertainment news"-site that pulled in about 3-5k visitors/day back then - enough to get a lot of victims seeing your ad but not enough that they'd have a direct line to Google or have their own IT people.
Why America Feels Like a Post-Soviet State
I have tried it. It works. But there is too much syntax surrounding code blocks that is annoying. And I need to enable inline Math display and inline image display to get a seamless interface.
That actually seems pretty credible - get rid of the big counter-example to your argument.
No. Their assets are increasing by tens of millions every year - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti.... They'll be fine without my $5.
Looks similar to Miro
Dishwashers are usually much more water efficient than hand washing.
Very cool, indeed!
> It can be beneficial to the worker to, say, prevent themselves from ever agreeing to work in unsafe conditions, even if the boss offers extra pay for it (which the worker might want).

Who better to decide if that is beneficial or not than the worker themself?
According to Crunchbase VMmare raised almost $400M

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vmware/company_finan...
You just have to move around every 20 something days, although I don't know if it's enforced.
Xiaomi unveils a ridiculous see-through TV
Perhaps you could expand on that with details of a solution you have in mind, references to a moderation system using that solution would be useful too.
That's true about floating point numbers. I assume that depending upon the context, it may not be a big issue (e.g. GPU compute)?

In any case, the point Stepanov was making is that if you want to be able to use a certain algorithm, then you have to make a choice to represent your data in a way that enables that algorithm, and the way you know whether the structure is appropriate for that algorithm is the algebraic properties of the structure.
> The claim that Uber is illegal in every country is so stupid it doesn't even merit a [longer than one word] response.

No one likes a pedant.
That's assuming the economic cost of not having those things exceeds the economic cost of classifying drivers as employees.

Or that those services couldn't still be offered by independent companies, so the customer still has them but the drivers are still contractors because they're not employees of the lead gen company nor the driver ratings company nor the payment app company. It merely so happens that the lead gen company shows the customer whether the driver accepts that payment app and is listed with that rating service.
Every monoid is a semigroup, but it's only a monoid if there is also a value that serves as an identity.
I've always taken a very practical, results-oriented approach to software development.

That makes sense, to me.

One of the first things that we learned, when optimizing our code, was to use a profiler.

Bottlenecks could be in very strange places, like breaking L2 caches. That would happen when data was just a bit too big, or a method was called; forcing a stack frame update.

We wouldn't see this kind of thing until we looked at a profiler; sometimes, a rather advanced one, provided by Intel.
Keep in mind though, that dishwashers use less water than washing by hand.
It's the other way around. The government is infiltrated by socialists who pass unjust laws that interfere with perfectly reasonable contracts between consenting adults. Nobody in their right mind believes gig workers are employees-- the economics doesn't work, it doesn't fit prima facie, and no one wants it. Uber needs to win this thing to keep the government from writing laws that have no ethical basis whatsoever.
Yeah, now they will shut down.
How is that different from a regular taxi driver?

Where's the "sharing" in the "ride share" if the driver is forced to take any ride?
The only part of the world's mail services that moved to profitable and privatized mail, is mail service for high-margin packages to cities and large towns.

The day that UPS will be obligated to deliver a first-class letter from East Bufu, Oklohoma (population 68 people, and 837 cows), to Seward, Alaska (population 2,736 people and 14 grizzly bears), for 55 cents, is the day that their privatized business model will stop being profitable.
Not to burst your soap-sud bubble, but modern dishwashers use less water than washing by hand[1], and by extension less electricity (purifying water is high-electricity usage, moving it around within your dishwasher is not)

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/24/564055953/to...
> FWIW I find this is especially important for compilers and interpreters.

Totally. I'm building a relational language and start to get very obvious why RDBMS not fit certain purity ideals of the relational model (like all relations are sets, not bags).

I'm stuck in deciding which structures provide by default. Dancing between flat vectors or ndarrays or split between flat vectors (columns), and HashMaps/BTree with n-values (this is my intuition now).

---
> I added some nice properties that algebraic data types in some language don't have, e.g. variants are "first class" unlike in Rust.

This sound cool, where I can learn about this?
Could you maybe link to a different space with your cluster of thoughts/cards there? I'm not sure if there's a limit for spaces.
The law in Germany is a fantasy. Drivers still can and claim a break down, bad cell service, etc.
I've never understood why media companies don't treat ad sales as a core business. They are in the business of delivering ads to eyeballs, so why are they outsourcing their core business.

I can see outsourcing the ad platform. However sales should be in house, and they should exercise editorial control over who is allowed to advertise.
> Your code might have to rely on code down the abstraction layers that uses unsafe, as interacting with the hardware is inhere you unsafe, but that doesn't mean that any code you want to write won't be able to leverage the safe abstractions.

This is the point I was trying to make by linking to the vec code. Any useful Rust program will run unsafe code. That code might just be hidden in a library. Ultimately, you are trusting that the code author did not write any bugs - in this regard you are not much safer than using the C++ stl.

> The argument you're making sounds to me, and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding, that trying to create safe abstractions is sheer folly so we might as well not do so.

On the contrary! I think what Rust is doing is a big step forward. But it is very important to keep in mind the limitations of a system.

The authors attitude of "This is written in Rust, so it must be free of memory bugs!" is dangerous. The key benefit of Rust is to isolate and explicate the dangerous parts of your program (because there are dangerous parts!!). This should make you more vigilant of bugs, but the "Eh, the borrow checker will debug for me" attitude can often lead to programmers being less critical of their own code.

Of course, none of this really applies if you are doing higher level stuff. But QEMU would definitely have to write their own 'unsafe' code.
Getting attention is the number one thing. I think the method he used worked quite well. I am not sure there would always be an opportunity like this.
And if they don't have better alternatives?

Sometimes I actively look forward to the tech job market collapsing.
Indian Growth Stories: Milk
What's interesting about this is that the Mac's option-character mapping has basically remained unchanged since at least the '90s, maybe earlier. They managed to design for a relatively uncommon use case (QWERTY typists who type in Spanish and French), and basically got it right the first time.

When I bought my first Mac in 2012, I was amazed to learn that the tricks I learned in 8th grade French class still worked nearly 20 years later.
Dope website and inspiring personal website: https://gkoberger.com/

Now I gotta work on my personal website.
I was a chemist in my past life, but not a soap chemist, so no doubt someone will be along to correct me.

At a high level, soap is soap. They are basically molecules with a greasy end (long carbon chain) and a polar end (ionic group). The molecules form stable micelles that looks like little cell membranes almost, with the greasy ends pointing inward and the polar ends pointing outward (in contact with water, which is polar).

That allows the soap to combine with greasy molecules you are trying to clean away. You're basically suspending the grease in water using the soap molecules.

Now, there are a ton of different soap though. The polar functional groups can be carboxylic acids (typical homemade soap, hydrolyze fats with lye), or phosphate groups (now banned as the phosphates end up in waterways and cause algae blooms) or sulfates (the most typical last time I looked). There are no doubt others I'm not as familiar with.

Now soaps all do the same thing, but there are important differences. So this "hack" works in terms of providing a soap and killing the foaming with baking soda (we used this trick in the lab all the time to break up foams and emulsions). The baking soda can also act as a water softening agent.

That said, dishwashers are usually made for specific detergents because you don't want build up from leftover soaps and you also don't want to corrode any metal parts.

So this works, but probably not as good as actual dish detergent (but it might not matter if your dishes aren't that dirty), but you are taking a risk that continued use might gunk up your machine. Or maybe it won't.
I'm curious about whether a/b testing would be considered human subjects research and therefore governed by federal regulations. [1]

I suspect that it will be in some cases. Does Uber have IRBs? What about other big tech companies?

If you work in a company and see them doing something immoral and possibly illegal, you should speak up or report the behavior.

1. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/decision-cha...
Adblocking out of the box would be hard given that most of mozillas ad money comes from search partners which are at root ad companies. They still advertise adblockers like ublock origin among their recommended addons and enabling adblocking is 30 seconds work and with sync it will be automatically added to firefox as soon as you sign into sync.

Ultimately this money is what has enabled Mozilla to exist at all. Brave is living on borrowed money from presumed future revenue from its cryptocurrency scheme which may or may not come to fruition.
There is some meditation that goes along the lines of:

How do you know that you actually enjoy your tea if you don't enjoy washing the bowl?

It would be nice if somebody could point out a source for that idea.
we had the opposite - an early and warm spring that didn't end with a sharp surprise in April or May. Loads of butterflys and moths as a result.
Simple and Elegant Gem Released by Couchbase
"True ownership" is not universally worshiped. Take, for example, Vienna, Austria. Fewer than 23% of this city lives in owner-occupied dwellings, yet they have a rewarding artistic, social, industrial, scientific society. Not everything hinges on the ability to park a boat in your yard.
A court ruling isn't a new law, it's an interpretation of an existing one. But okay, I hadn't heard about AB5 which is from last year.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Assembly_Bill_5_(...
> Reductio ad absurdam [sic] is a legitimate way to respond to an argument, if the argument is susceptible to it.

Reductio ad absurdum does not mean "exaggerate to absurdity," which is what the GGP actually did:

>>>> It's not a bad law - if Uber can't operate in compliance with it, it has a bad business model.

>>> Really, is there no such thing as over-regulation, in your mind? No red tape too sticky? No hoop too high to jump through?

If you want to label this kind of argument, the correct term is straw man. It doesn't address what vkou said, but rather sets up an exaggeration that is easier to attack and dismiss. Loughla was entirely correct in his criticism.
That’s how taxis stole from customers for decades, taking the long way there.
If that's the reason, it would be nice for Google to come out and say so.
There are two counter-arguments to that:

1) UPS is not allowed to deliver first class mail to a letterbox, or at the same cost as USPS.

2) Why should short-distance mail subsidize long-distance mail?
Braze.
I find it hard to believe that most of the rest of the world has, but it seems some countries have. Many countries don't really have functioning mail delivery, whether public or private.

The CATO Institute says "The U.S. ranks near the bottom of the Consumer Postal Council’s 26‐ country 'Index of Postal Freedom.'"[1], but they only looked at 26 countries, and even then, I'm not sure what that index looks at. I found a report from 2012 but it's long and I'm not gonna dig into it now.

Do you have examples of which countries have and what led to the change?

[1]: https://www.cato.org/publications/tax-budget-bulletin/privat...
Reminds me of folks "boycotting" certain stores for requiring masks.

Great, thank you for following the policy.