skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want to point out, it is possible for government to over-regulate a business model out of financial viability. Employees can and often will push for unreasonable compensation or protections.

You may argue the model can regress to essentially taxis. But realize that taxis work due to artificial supply side restrictions generally using a medallion system and strict limits on numbers. This is fundamentally different from Uber where there is basically no restriction on supply.
> why and why now

Playing the devils advocate, it could be a bone to throw to the small government crowd and the "why now" is because it's the middle of an election and they want to drum up support for their campaign.

However, I typically receive five or six packages per week. Two weeks ago I suddenly started having delays and some packages are taking a week longer to show up than I am used to. It was like a switch being flipped. Nothing like this happened even at the height of the lockdown. I also sent in a ballot application which is now a week late compared to when I sent it in last year. That's really concerning with how many people will be voting by mail.

I'm really scared for what is going to happen in November. Even if he loses by huge margins, Trump has set himself up to scream "rigged election" and have at least part of his base believe him. I'm not sure I can do anything other than wait around and worry, but if he loses there really will be a chunk of Americans that have convinced themselves that the new president wasn't elected democratically. That's really messed up and I don't think we've had an administration that has so undermined trust in our democratic process like that. Even when they were on the losing side, all significant politicians in my recent memory have at least shown respect for the process.
I took CA public transportation every working day for 5 years. Compared to the rest of the world, it's unreasonable.

Trains and buses are infrequent and have terrible evening/weekend schedules. Sure, during rush hour they can likely be faster than the incredibly overcrowded Californian roads, but otherwise they're crap. They're also not exactly cheap!

It's no surprise why Uber & friends started in the bay area, and why it's so popular there. They had no competition. The transit in these places is like the bare minimum possible. It doesn't even come close to touching world-class transit systems popular all over the world.
This is kind of a nonsensical comparison. Most people spend more on electricity (especially indirectly) than they do on cell phone service, in total.
I’m not sure about windscreens, but research disagrees overall with your point: “The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects.” From https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-spla...
>Surely the 'scale' issue's answer is for a community to moderate itself. That way, the community should be happy.

Self-moderation is basically what Stackoverflow is and a lot of users are not happy with the outcome. Most of the votes that close questions as "duplicates" and "not constructive" are done by fellow users. I tried to explain this previously[0] but unhappy Stackoverflow users still insist there's an "us vs them".

And consider that Stackoverflow's userbase is a much smaller scale than Facebook.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23977165
Why did Keynes believe that, say, a doubling of efficiency (through technology) would half work time for everyone? Sure it’s a solution to the equation, but so is what actually happened[1]: half the workforce gets laid off. This halves the costs, which facilitates price reduction and thus a competitive edge. Did Keynes believe that benevolence would win over profit? Don’t get me wrong, I wish it had, but that seems a little naive.

[1] It occurs to me that another solution is to keep the work force, but double the work. This also happened; it seems like there are plenty of jobs that are just busy work with no real purpose.
Not quite, taxes are actually higher if you are self-employed. You have to pay SECA, which effectively includes the portion that your company would have paid otherwise (on top of the amount that they withhold and pay on your behalf).
Our President Got the Virus. I Barely Noticed
I've recently found a mount for iPhone XS Max - it's the paper ring from duck tape... Works very well for facetiming between bubs and paps.
but he was definitely an elite who felt he knew what was best for the masses

He is also someone who went to prison for his principles. Was hounded out of American Universities for his views. Characterising him as one of the out of touch "elite" doesn't sound right to me.
Drivers are more than twice as likely to cancel rides requested by black passengers than rides requested by white passengers. Any such "obsession" in this discussion is a reflection of observed reality, which is clearly not colorblind. https://news.iu.edu/stories/2020/07/iub/releases/22-racial-l...
Could also be related to audio transmission, like bluetooth versus wired.

Also, fiber can be analog, too.
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/google-fingerprint-chrom...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/24/google-pa...
As someone who owns a townhome, I feel that this is a misinformed, but common, view of the situation.

> You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors.

We hear far more noise from the neighborhood in general than the neighbors we share a wall with. Granted they might just be particularly quiet people, but there is some significant sound-deadening in that wall.

I think this is partly because of fire code that says the wall needs to withstand a 30 minute fire before crossing over into the neighboring unit.

> You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.

This is perhaps unique to our situation, but the area has never been fully built-out, so we have a 5 acre plot of land that the kids can play on as they please.

Since most of our neighbors never come outside, we actually have an enormous yard that we get basically to ourselves.

> You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home

This is true to an extent, but there isn't really all that much worth customizing on the outside of a house.

I guess you could pick different colored siding, but that seems like an expense I wouldn't be motivated enough to take on.

> I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes.

Honestly this stigma is something I am benefiting from a ton.

I have 1200 feet of living space, plus an attached 2 car garage, plus a 5 acre yard. I paid $106k for all that. I pay $100 / month to the HOA and get lawn / snow taken care of. It's honestly great.

To get an equivalent standalone house in the area I'd be looking at 2-3x the cost.
> I'm not familiar with Singapore

Singapore is a very small (~250 sq mile) country, so it would take less than 30 minutes to drive across.

It's very wealthy.

It has, almost dead center in the middle, an electronics mall called Sim Lim Tower that's like 10-20 stories tall.

They most certainly have options.
Amen. My 23 years experience in webdev says React (the paradigm, not the lib per se) is dominating web UI precisely because it is all about unidirectional data flow.
The Eiffel Tower’s Forgotten Competitors
Right. Even activities you can do alone are distorted by isolation. I usually cycle alone 80% of the time. Now I do 100%. I have less motivation for my solo rides, even though I would be alone this year, or last year, no difference. Last Friday I decided a ride with one other person would be safe enough, and I find myself more motivated to ride alone afterwards.
This is a far better idea than "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces" as suggested by the OP.
> But you really don't want to know how this sausage is actually made.

Please tell me about some quick nasty bits!!!!! I need a joke or entertaining story to share during my friday sprint review
Is there any support for XR on the open web in that team?

Genuinely interested if some of the spirit of Mozilla could be preserved in that transition.
I usually go the other route: instead of trying to get Jupyter notebooks to behave like my favorite editor, I try to get my favorite editor to behave like a Jupyter notebook. In vscode, the python extension can convert back and forth between python files and Jupyter notes books, and can run python files like Jupyter notebooks (with cells).
Sure. But if your are actually as flippant as this response indicates then why make it. Certainly why make it on the internet whose only goal is to provide more efficient societal connections.
Management can have high turnover too. Imagine trying to explain away being head of strategy at a company that drove into a ditch.
That’s the same argument used against voting. Your individual contribution may not matter, but the collective’s does matter.
Even if you're also using ML, Fourier transforms can be pretty useful in this sort of analysis.
I’m sure police are trained in many different ways in the many different places that they exist, but my statement doesn’t specify police it specifies the act of kneeling on a neck of an erratic criminal
Recently I searched the Web, trying to find out the origin of monoids as an approach to distributed computing, and couldn’t find it. This quote is a great find for me! Is this the origin?
Ok, that's fair.

pbhjpbhj's comment did predicate the speculation with an "If". And Mozilla has already had two rounds of layoffs this year ostensibly because of declining revenue. I think speculation on what will happen if the search deal is not renewed is reasonable.

I do appreciate pointing out that we do not know this will expire.
Why not do a Wework, raise 'more money' if you can find people fool enough to hand it over. then launder it by having the company buy or lease stuff from you at inflated prices. In the end the companies success is not really the goal now is it?
If you're interested in learning why this is wrong, the book The Color of Law is an excellent history of the segregationist laws that made things as they are.

https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/
I'd had the pleasure of answering kids in the 'why' stage before having kids of my own. And resolved to face my own kids with answers whenever I could.

I'm not sure it has been successful, they never really exhausted my ability to answer but I fear it may have sucked out some of the magic - not having answers might be 'better' to some extent if your aim is to foster curiosity and personal goal fulfillment.

My kids are awesome and definitely have some intrigue; but perhaps endeavour to not provide answers!
My dishwasher can't do that, but my clothes washer can. The limitation is space inside of the device for the reservoir. In a clothes washer there's plenty of space between the cylindrical wash basin and the square housing, but in a dishwasher there is much less available space between the square dish cavity and the housing, and that space is generally filled with sound deadening and thermal insulation.
The title is ‘post-soviet state’. The article doesn’t liken the US to soviet era Russia, but rather to 90s era.

> The intentional institutional ineptitude and callous nihilism of contemporary Russian society is the product of a seventy-year Soviet totalitarian experiment—or so I have long believed. No such experiment took place in the United States. So how is it that the pandemic has made the U.S. resemble the post-Soviet Russian state?
There's a YouTube video of African immigrant taxi drivers in NYC merrily stating that they won't pick up black Americans because of fare jumping and other issues. One claimed that he could tell who was native born and who wasn't.
Don't the utility companies have the same issues with infrastructure placement and land though? Or is there some eminent domain thing for power utilities that doesn't apply to telecom?
The military has a partial solution to the “chinese whisper” type error where the person receiving the command will repeat it back so the other person can make sure it was understood correctly. This has the downside of slightly slowing down communication.
Oh, my intent wasn't to avoid political implications (but maybe that wasn't meant for me, at some point in HN comments I get lost), but rather to try to dig deeper into them.

In looking at the HN guidelines, I think the closest point related to this would be:

>Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.

I hope HN can be a place where we discuss political and ideological perspectives without engaging in battle, and leveraging curiosity to bring us closer together.

I think the challenge is that most of the examples of political conversation we see is more political debate and less political dialogue—competition vs cooperation.

So far, I've been learning in this comments section and am grateful for those who are contributing :-)
It’s not a matter of under paying them. There isn’t a market for thousands of TSMC engineers at 2x or 3x salary in China so that really isn’t the market rate. There’s only a market for 100 of them, but it mostly doesn’t matter so much which 100.

TSMC wouldn’t have to just offer say 4x salary to 100 of their engineers to prevent the brain drain, they have to give it to several thousand engineers, and then a China would just up their offer to 5x because their ability to pick off a subset of people gives them 10x or even 100x leverage over TSMC. There’s just no way for TSMC to compete on salary like that. The most they could do is make it costly enough that the Chinese only hire away fewer engineers, at crippling cost to themselves, but they can never cut it down to zero.
I was responding to a comment that said: "The day that UPS will be obligated to deliver a first-class letter... for 55 cents". UPS is legally required to charge at least six times more, and cannot use letterboxes.[1] The use of letterboxes is a cost-savings; if it were not a competitive advantage, the USPS wouldn't need a law protecting it.

Whether or not UPS wants the business is beside the point, and they currently cannot have it.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/601
Some people worried the AI model GPT-3 will replace programmers due to de (cont)
Electricity has economies of scale at play there. It wouldn’t be economical at the normal prices per kw if people were only charging phones.

Even ignoring that bit, electricity has different scaling considerations. Everyone’s computers don’t need access to special Youtube electricity and Twitter electricity. It all just comes from a localized grid and can come from any standard generation source.

Internet access would certainly be way cheaper if it didn’t provide global connectivity.
> that providing cell service is 100x to 300x harder than providing electricity?

Yes, unfortunately. It's at least that much harder. For a similar comparison think of traditional radio - you buy the radio, and that's it. You might wonder how that's possible when it costs so much to beam data to your phone wirelessly? It's a complex question with a lot of nuance, but there are two important reasons that float to the top:

First, Internet requires reliable two way communication. Neither radio or electricity require that. These means economies of scales work in favor of electricity generation and radio transmission - they can put up a huge plant or radio tower, crank the power up, and serve a lot of customers far away. The customer's device doesn't have to talk back. Imagine if each home had to have a mini generator to send electricity back to the power plant - that would cost a lot!

Second, Internet service requires much, much more precise electronics than power or radio transmission. The Ethernet port on your laptop can understand signalling at (at least) 1gbps (1 billion bits per second, more or less). And that's not even that much - large networks today are doing 100 of times that on single physical connections, with electronics on both sides both modulating and demodulating those signals simultaneously. All that expensive (both to design and to manufacture) electronics adds up, and is accounted for in the cost of getting those bits to you.
> Why privatize or change the USPS now, when it could very well jeopardize, or at the minimum, give people the impression that it will jeopardize the election?

The post office turned into the USPS (and the postmaster general removed from the line of presidential succession) in 1970 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Reorganization_Act ). Ever since that time, people have been arguing whether it should be privatized or return to what it was before 1970.

The postmaster general just took office in June.

> In other words, is the <$10B in annual loss more important than the integrity of the election?

That’s a question for Congress. If the post office’s bank account is empty, I don’t believe it can get a loan, sell bonds, or borrow money in any other way. It’s not truly independent.

Right now, Congress isn’t ready to allow a postage increase, allow offices to close, or to give the $10B or so to the post office to continue operating as usual. I suspect that could change pretty quickly if voters complain loud enough.
An early mentor put it as “learn the data, which won’t change, before learning the fancy stuff on top, which will”

That carried me very well.
It's live in Seattle, Portland and Chicago.
Nearly half UK residents plan to fly less as climate concern grows
The counter argument would be that git is the poster-child of poor UX, which could be blamed on the fact that it exposes too much of its internal data structure and general inner-workings to the user.

I.e. too much focus has been put on data structures and not enough on the rest of the tool.

A less efficient data structure, but more focus on UX could have saved millions of man hours by this point.
Just to point out the context.

https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=2403#:~:....

Looks like the local wage is very low in general, 90% percentile is 37,114.60 or 1.09 million in Taiwan Dolloar.

So it seems 50-60$ USD is quite high-end after 5 years with a PhD.
i agree, it is a tactic from uber's perspective, but it's also a reality regardless of uber's strategy
This article might not be the most fun read for folks, but I think it does paint a good argument of a culture that encourages presenting good news to your boss even when there is none isn't a healthy practice.
The vig is of course a huge part, but far from the whole story.

Central control of a network means deciding what that network is. Where it begins, where it ends, what goes in, what comes out, who can receive, who can send, what interactions are possible, speeds and latencies, what messages are heard, what are not, who pays, who gets paid.

It's not just the vig.

Also: factors wholly ignored by contemporary US (Borkian) antitrust doctrine.
Alternatively, the contract is between the driver and the rideshare platform. The driver is a participant in the platform and is contractually expected to behave within the rules and bounds of the platform. This does not require defining the driver as an employee.

When the driver activates uber driver mode, they are initiating a contract which states they will work within the bounds of the app. The driver is able to terminate that contract at will and at any time, and reactivate it at will and at his leisure. When the contract is active, the driver has committed to operate within the pricing, pickup and dropoff structure of the platform - as in the driver has committed to minimize discrimination of their rides and accept the platform's rider oriented pricing structure.
Are You a Platform or a Personality?
They're drawing a comparison to current-day (post-Soviet) Russia, not Stalin's Russia.

I'll admit it's muddled, though, since they're referring to Chernobyl.
GE makes dishwashers that do exactly this. You look up your water hardness in a table, push some magic buttons as described in the manual to tell the dishwasher how hard your water is, and you pour detergent into the reservoir. Interestingly, you are strongly advised not to mix chlorine-based detergent with enzyme-based detergent at risk of turning the mixture into hard-to-remove goo.
Probably can use as some sort of server too. Quite amazing considering power use and cost.
Long way to verifying the safety, given the particle size, but that's a fairly novel mechanism of action from my limited knowledge.
The so called repo exception [1]:

> A repossession agency licensed pursuant to Section 7500.2 of the Business and Professions Code, for whom the determination of employee or independent contractor status shall be governed by Section 7500.2 of the Business and Professions Code, if the repossession agency is free from the control and direction of the hiring person or entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact. (nonitalic emphasis mine)

IANAL but that's not an exception - that's the bill saying that if the primary part of the ABC test does not apply, then the existing regulations for that licensed business take over from AB5.

From my quick glance, all of the exceptions I could find boiled down to this FAQ from the CA state website or older legislation explicitly mentioned right next to the exceptions in AB5 [2]:

> 4) Do AB 5 and Labor Code section 2750.3 require use of the ABC test in all situations?
> ...
> Additionally, where a court determines the ABC test cannot apply for a reason other than an express exception, the Borello test, described in Question 5 below, will apply. For example, if a court were to determine in a particular case that the ABC test is preempted by an applicable federal law, the Borello test would be used.

Note that the "express exception" in the case of the repo agencies is due to existing CA state law governing that profession which supersedes AB5 as long as the "repossession agency is free from the control and direction of the hiring person or entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact."

In the case of other licensed professions like doctors, veterinarians, and yes, commercial fishermen (who must have a commercial fishing license) they are all covered by existing, more specific, legislation and federal laws that by definition require exceptions in the State law - otherwise it'd be even more bogged down in the courts. That's why there's the Borello test and explicit exception: in order to fit in with other existing laws.

This is all just seems like self serving FUD from our industry but again, IANAL.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...

[2] https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_independentcontractor.htm
Or we could try to make the apps we write more efficient AND make sure people have decent internet.

You know, saving data is saving energy.
Sonic uses AT&T in my area, so I will definitely check them out. Thanks. It's a little annoying I have to get a landline, which basically adds $15-20 to the price. <sigh> I have an asterisk/freepbx system that I will continue to use. I wonder if their TOS require you to hook up a phone. Not looking forward to reading that...
Agreed. Most people I know were at least curious/interested about the project, but also had serious reservations about Google's privacy and data collection and wanted stricter oversight on how their personal data would be used.
That seems to be the case less and less.
I actually like it because it created something to talk about. And if you watch other Rian Johnson movies, he's a rather competent director, so it's also interesting to watch him fail. He created something originally bad which is hard to do in today's focus group, board room designed, big tent movies.