skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Offhand, I suspect it's a labor issue. The real labor issue for transportation is in finding people to do long-distance drives, and the mandatory rest periods you have to have in those positions. In contrast, local transportation allows people to go home to their families every night, and given that the crew also partakes in other tasks (such as handling sign-offs and manifests), it's not immediately clear to me that you could actually eliminate human positions with automation.
This reads like a comment written by someone not aware of the depth of the problem.

The post is Android-centric because in typical Android fashion, a passable concept is implemented is the most disjointed way varying scross devices.

Limiting excessive background communication? Thats a good thing.

Killing useful apps like media players in the background repeatedly until you end up with 1 star reviews because people don't realize their own phone is killing apps?

Intentionally breaking well defined OS scheduling guarantees?

Silently breaking functionality that users rely on?

Making alarms fail to ring?

Not as useful.

It's to the point there's literally a website dedicated to worksrounds:
https://dontkillmyapp.com/

Look at at this entry for OnePlus

> Not only did users need to enable extra settings to make their apps work properly, but those settings even got reset with firmware updates. So apps break again and users are required to re-enable those settings on a regular basis.

What's funny/sad is their edit only applies to vanilla Android. Other manufacturers have manufacturer-specific settings needed to whitelist apps, because they're not respecting the contract Android provides on background processing

-

And maybe the most insulting part is the fact that the apps that consistently show up as higher energy users on people's devices... like Facebook...

Are normally exempt! These "optimizers" usually exclude any app deemed "too big to make fail".

So it actually undoes an enormous amount of good that would otherwise be done, and shows it's hardly being done with actual results in mind

These optimizers have existed since the early days of Android, but advanced users understood that intentionally breaking apps wasn't the right way to go about saving battery.

Manufacturers picked them up, in large part because clueless users who like the sound of the idea (right up until it starts killing their music or making their alarms fail to ring) were installing them

Some of them even feel like anti-competitive implementations.

Huawei has an implementation that can't be controlled by the user on some devices! So only apps on the pre-installed Huawei whitelist can run in the background period, and that list includes their homegrown apps and a few major ones like Facebook. Good luck if you have a small app with useful functionality.
I believe the fundamental error was to try and break backwards compatibility in a dynamic language. I can see how this would be much safer for a strongly typed language to pull off. It would still be a PITA, but at least I'd feel a bit more save about it. I watched the transition of a NVDA from Python2 to Python3. It took a pretty long time, and some of the commit logs read like voodoo. I would really not want to be in charge of having to migrate a semi-largish codebase from Python2 to Python3, especially if there is only limited amount of automated tests.
MethaneKit: Modern 3D graphics cross-platform meta-API
> when I worked at help desk no matter how stupid a users was I always did my best to treat them as kindly as possible.

This resonates with me because it's something I try to do all the time.

The XKCD "Ten Thousand" comic[0] really spoke to me and ever since reading it I've tried to treat people as 'temporarily inconvenienced geniuses' rather than morons when they ask me for help and it seems to work wonders.

If you enter requests for help with the mindset of "let me show you how to solve your problem" and not "let me solve your problem" you end up speaking to people as if they are an equal which always seems to provoke better responses

Of course the reward for being good at digging holes is more holes and to coin a malaphor if you teach a man to fish he'll come annoy you every time his boat won't start, but it's also pretty nice to be the person everyone assumes can fix anything.

(Also it's a great outlet for the typically annoying desire to solve everyone's problems)

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/
The sorts of humans that go on boats are generally not obese office workers.
Yep. Not everyone comes from the same baseline. Different biases, experiences, knowledge, affinity for a topic, capacity to understand something at a certain speed, etc.

Tangentially related, I’ve noticed some online products almost purposefully make their websites less appealing to filter out certain types of users. I think landing page copy call it “speaking to your audience,” but it’s the same thing where you’re selecting for the kind of customer you want.
> Why should I have to do labor to fix things that already work?

You don't right? Python 2 still works.
This map doesn't even do it justice.

As soon as you cross the border into Germany the easy ride stops, and the bar for what qualifies a bike lane drops significantly. The Netherlands is truely a marvel.
> A phone is not a Unix server or a desktop PC.

Why, because Google says so? I am ever so grateful they make those decisions for me.

> And phones know your location virtually 100% of the time because of cell tower triangulation.

Well if the cell service provider knows your location, what's the harm in letting Google in on it as well, right?
I'm working on a web-based terminal and need some feedback
Less likely but would need to closely scrutinize it more than before. I believe in 2nd chances.
Good for the interviewer for making counter arrangements at that time. Some of the things he said are still true: we still have to come up with categories in our heads. This is true regardless of advancements in ML.
I see your point, but I dealt with users far more often than just whenever they needed tech support.

Interactions with users were more common in my position than just when they needed help. I provisioned all the computers for the company I worked for. I also upgraded any software, usually manually for whatever reason, and dealt with a lot of the day to day maintenance.

Like I said, users are not universally stupid, but when they are they can be especially stupid. A lot of it could be mitigated with better design. A lot of it could be mitigated by critical thinking on behalf of the users.
> So it broke the experience for all first time users.

To be fair, Python 3 provides a very clear error message if you try to use print as a statement, although I don't know when exactly that was added:

$ echo 'print "Hello World"' > test.py && python3 test.py
File "test.py", line 1
print "Hello World"
^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("Hello World")?
It frustrates me that even now I regularly find out about some new thing being written at work, only a few months old but already fairly widespread among internal teams, and...oh, they chose Python 2.7. We not only have Python 3 available but several versions of it, too.

Python 2 doesn’t sound like an ancient, totally-different-language so people just adopt it because it was the version on their laptop or something and because it “works”. In reality, it’s inevitable that some major IT upgrade will finally throw out that interpreter (or, the existing one will fail to work for some obscure reason and no one will fix it because it’s “unsupported”). And at that time it will be non-trivial (to say the least) to fix every affected script and the entire downstream dependency chain because — as so many on HN know — Python 3 is a different language.

Any ideas on how to present this to management as the crisis that it should be? It’s really quite a risk but it is hard to demonstrate the risk when everything “works” so “well” right now.
By crushing it you weakened the structure, creating fissures where exactly that happens, and then over time eats into the rest.
What we are experiencing now is reversion to the norm. The post-ww2 period was a special moment when a lot of things lined up to produce a capitalism that was relatively egalitarian, but that was the result of the USA being the only intact industrial economy left, and owning the world reserve currency, and so on. It was never going to last, and it will never happen again. We’re already bringing back sweatshops and extreme inequality.
> GPU databases are brilliant for cases where the working set can live entirely within the GPU's memory. For most applications with much larger (or more dynamic) working sets, the PCIe bus becomes a significant performance bottleneck. This is their traditional niche.

> That said, I've heard anecdotes from people I trust that heavily optimized use of CPU vector instructions is competitive with GPUs for database use cases.

This comment is important imo. Also related to applied ML inference in applications... the memory needs can grow quite a bit and this data transfer cost, including the memory size limitations vs RAM, becomes very real very fast.

Not sure I understand the scale of the use case or where it's mentioned as well as in comparison to the big data tools mentioned.
I can't listen to the podcast at the moment. But, along a similar theme Doughnut Economics tries to imagine adjustments that are required to traditional economic models from the 19th and 20th century that are required to keep the biosphere productive for humans.

https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/

An idea that stuck with me is that markets are powerful tools that need to be embedded into other systems but arent self regulating systems all by themselves. It seems too often in debates on big problems the argument is simply we need a market solution not how is the system designed to best utilize a market.
I'm not far into it yet, but this isn't the first time that I've heard this thought from Zen practitioners - that the practitioner should not blame capitalism for their problems. It makes me want to look further into Zen to see what leads people to this line of thinking.
https://www.joinef.com
Well, the synthesis is that capitalism is not just an economic system, and that in reality economics cannot be divorced from social and political spheres. Government regulations warping capitalism are in large part a consequence of capitalism.

Think about it, is it ever possible to orchestrate a society where money buys you media, re-election campaigns, charity and favours, without those having the most money wielding the above-mentioned elements to ensure they keep having the most money.

In other words, the social organization is a consequence of economic organization, which explains why it is impossible for a truly free market to ever exist.

It's not possible either to completely get rid of government, because the State is necessary to uphold property.
Maybe the user is like a person walking down the street and your app is your kid with girl scout cookies boxes it's trying to sell, and you're helping it out. :) And it's not about the money as much as the app growing up, or something.
Uhm, Linus makes seven figures.
Not really sure why your comment is marked dead when it is correct. Maybe it's a new account thing? As you say, the Gauss-Markov conditions are necessary (and sufficient) to make OLS BLUE, but OLS still works fine under a variety of pathological conditions, and many of those conditions can be tested for and adjusted for using common techniques.
For Capitalism to work properly the government needs to be be empowered, and properly able, to enforce rules that prevent any one organisation from becoming so powerful that it corrupts and undermines the whole system. We don't have that today.
“Likes” are just one technique among many for increasing engagement/addiction. The core problem is the ad-based business model, that incentivizes companies to make addictive products.
What if consciousness requires an active synapse loop to be maintained, kind of like a magnetic field, with little hysteresis eddies etc, but one that if it loses all power, it disappears forever?
Look, Russian gas is just a side effect, it's fine to import Russian gas, everyone does it.

But why shutdown nuclear? Yes the decision might be made in 2002, and exacerbated in 2011. The question is still not answered.
Personally, I don't mind some inconvenience if language designers occasionally need to make breaking changes to allow improvements, and I've had to port enough scientific Fortran code to newer languages to limit my sympathy for porting from Python 2 to 3. Computer languages aren't static, and sometimes I need to do some work to keep up as they evolve.
Yes! Talk about "dark academe". Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab. Sort of real-life inspiration for The Paragon Institute in The Fury (1979) ;)

A Princeton Lab on ESP Plans to Close its Doors (2007)

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/science/10princeton.html

Inside the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab with Brenda Dunne

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMb4j5tHIic
It’s not FUD and it’s not without evidence. What you’re describing was the actual reality in handheld computing before iOS.

Look at early Android or Windows Mobile or Palm or heck even your own modern-day laptop. Battery-draining background applications aren’t FUD and don’t require any additional evidence because that’s the reality on basically every platform except iOS and modern Android.
Interesting, I don't think I'd mind not having the street view feature. The only reason I use it is to see how foreign countries look like. What are people using it for?
For anyone who's worked on an IoT platform built in Android this is a huge pain that's nearly constant.
Or, you know, we could learn to live together and ease up on overfishing so they also get a chance to eat without having to attack boats.
Also in Pandorum movie.
Is such planning possible? Decentralized models work because centralized planning doesn’t.

I concur with the aims. Solving pandemics, climate change and nuclear proliferation require a different toolset than what succeeded for reducing global poverty.
> Security theater really

Use of this phrase in this context indicates either a naive or incomplete understanding of the constitutional order, i.e. how government works in practice as opposed to as an idealism, which is the foundation for understanding constitutional governance and it's practices. Reading Hobbes as well as Montesquieu, particularly the Spirit of Laws should dispel the notion of security theater in a pejorative sense. Also, unless you have some special insight, you cannot for sure say what has been prevented. Therefore any speculation on "true purposes" is just that, speculation.

> Bad actions are bad regardless of the flag they drape themselves in or any fallacious affinity that assumes what is liked by an actor on behalf of us is good for us.

I'm in full agreement there. I'm grateful to live in a society where the government can be held to account, both legally and via elections. Not everyone is so lucky.
As with my previous post I'm torn on topics like this as again I agree with everything stated. And yet, Python was relatively niche in the early aughts so had only really been in the mainstream for a handful of years before 3.0 came out. What %age of live python code in the wild was written after 3.0 was released? I'd wager that's a very large number.

But yet I get why things are the way they are. Heck, it was only last year that I switched to using Python 3. I use it so rarely that it was just easier to stick with the Python 2 which was already installed on my system.
The first usually happens as a direct consequence of the second.
Computers can be really frustrating to use, the biggest offender in my opinion is hidden state. So many programs don't mention something has changed, and so if you fumble a click or a shortcut you can end up in a program state you didn't want to be in and may not even realise it until something goes wrong.

You wouldn't accidentally hit a switch on your car and now you can only go left, with no indication on why that is, and no transitional information given during the switch. Yet programs and websites will happily modify the state without so much as a brief text flash asaying "Oh hey, you're in Paint Only Mode now" for example.

My absolute favorite way to deal with this is small status indicators in some kind of toolbar, that when I hover over it, it gives me a tooltip on what it is and how to toggle it.

Accidentally hit debug mode? No worries, a little debug symbol just flashed briefly, I can go look for it in the toolbar and hover over it to figure it out.
Is there a review/reputation database for APIs & SDKs, where this type of information can be syndicated to developers?

Can also be distributed via doc browsers like Dash, e.g. if censored from the web.
> the majority of the time, I've generally only seen subcontracting used to do something immoral, unethical, or irresponsible

What about lead generation? Hiring a professional at pre-determined prices like plumber (HomeAdvisor), mechanic (OpenBay), dentist (1800-DENTIST), florist (FTD), electrician (Amazon Home Services), various comedian or model or party clown booking agencies help the consumer to procure an infrequently needed service and not get ripped off in the process. It helps the professional to get some extra bookings when they have capacity for it.

It seems that under AB5 any lead generation shop is in the same primary business as the subcontractor and therefore 1800DENTIST has to fully employ all those dentists on its platform.
Ask HN: How to Scale an API Globally?
Our small startup has managed to gain traction in the US, UK, and India. All 3 regions are desirable. Currently we are hosting a GraphQL API on Heroku and our DB and some other services (an Ejabberd server) on GCP. These are all in the US.

Users in the UK and India complain that our app is very slow. I can replicate this by running through a VPN in those regions. In the US the performance is fine.

So, my question is: how do people handle this? I could host API server instances in Europe / India, but shared resources like the database can only live in one place. All of our app features are dynamic and therefore a CDN wouldn't do much.

This feels like it would be a common problem to have these days, especially in the mobile app world. It's such an obvious problem that I feel as if I'm asking a stupid question.

How do you guys approach scaling your backend globally?
Isn't 2.7 part of Catalina 10.15.6?
How would you know though?
Thanks - so seems it's an issue with their library, rather than something to with PIC's per se.
Is the seventh in the series: https://youtu.be/3CMucDjJQ4E published on Sep 2014, six years ago, and a must-watch account for any outsider even in 2020. Enjoy it!
It's not a crisis. If Python 2.7 works, people will keep using it. The real crisis is all the lost time dealing with porting to Python 3.
Rather the closed system includes both the craft and the ejected mass.
What happens if you rent the house? If someone moves in will they not be able to unblur it?
>A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted

but this is functionally the same thing. whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product. "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing meant to demean your users, just a reality that you have to accomodate the people who are going use your product in a way that's indistinguishable from a stupid person.

You can't assume that anybody will remember anything they did in a previous step, or that anybody will correctly interpret the label on a button no matter how clearly you think it is worded, or when presented with multiple options will be able to correctly choose the one they want.
I'm still waiting for an explanation of how the decision to shutdown nuclear power is correct versus however long they took to make that decision.
A user submitting a support ticket is rather like your code throwing an exception. If just one pops up in Sentry you might add a note to look at it later, but if it happens constantly you need to go fix something.
"Capitalism taken to its fullest extreme is greed out-of-control. This is where the US is right now."

I think this view point sprouts from envy.

"Capitalism when balanced is near perfect."

Capitalism is a level of balance. Similar to common law.
Why is there no equation for the perimeter of an ellipse?
Bitmovin (YC S15) Is Hiring a Technical Delivery Manager in Denver
I wonder if this might have an unintended Streisand Effect outcome e.g. people seeking out blurred locations in person to find what "they" don't want you to see (regardless of the fact that the "they" is just someone who cares about their privacy)?
In the past you could run any push service you wanted, and battery life was worse with many apps. There's also another current (/recent) example on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24462028.
Is no one going to talk about the hypocrisy? Eric Schmidt isn't a beacon of sensible innovation pushing America forward. Peter Thiel called him out eight years ago [1] and I strongly encourage you to watch the 4 min clip.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q26XIKtwXQ
I dont understand the mindset of anyone who would install a campaign mobile app on their phone. Maybe I'm missing something but what could possibly be gained?
> real life version of reversal Plague Inc

To be pedantic, Plague Inc is just a reversed clone of the board game Pandemic.

But overall, I think you’re spot on with his motivation.
I don't think anyone denies that omniscient, well intentioned planners would be very efficient, but subjectivism and the calculation problem mean that you will never have the former, and political economy explains why you will not acheve the latter.

Spontaneously ordered systems are also better at dynamic adaptation to exogenous changes (such as technological ones).
Beasts? Perhaps you are demonizing them too much.
I used to have two dogs. They would check if they were given equal amounts of food and would protest otherwise. Seems logical that Orcas, a much more intelligent animal, would understand that the boats are eating their food.
Strange thing you say you are an atheist but here you are optimistic about intelligent design.
Author here to answer all your questions :-)
There's also a nicely written Forbes piece [1] from January, which focuses on the then-current Tesla situation, but which also references the Bill Ackman v Herbalife short battle.

Another, perhaps ultimate, persuader of the value to markets/investors of short-selling would be Michael Lewis's book, The Big Short [2]. An often overlooked point about short-selling is that it is frequently done, and it was certainly so in this case, in demonstration of utter conviction that the masses are being duped; rather than as some calculated bet against a single company.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/amiyatoshpurnanandam/2020/01/13...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short

[slight edit for grammar/readability]
I think for entry level people you might be able to replace the chat with something they're interested in even if it's not related to the job. I've gone by the philosophy that if the person doesn't have anything they're interested in their life, are they really going to be interested in the job? It's possible but highly unlikely.

Of course, it doesn't mean the opposite holds. They could be interested in something but not end up being interested in the job.
The first scenario is described (in part) by the phrase "crony capitalism," and is a very real situation and danger.