skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the book "The Excitement of Science", by Platt.

"But the remarkable thing about it is that among men who really know something, the looks quickly cease to matter. I remember very clearly the dinner party where I first met L. L. Thurstone, the engineer who became a psychologist and developed the powerful statistical method called factor analysis.

[...] within ten seconds after he began to talk, I could no longer see the face at all, for I was looking at a mind. The excitement of hearing his reasoning and his experience led the whole party out into an area of intellect where such trivia as looks and clothes, the room, the dinner, all faded into the background. I think we rose not knowing what we had eaten and had brandy afterwards up in the flow of the conversation. I suppose it was painful to our hostess that we did not notice much her careful preparations; but if I have forgotten her entrée, I have not forgotten her guest of honor."
My family went to Washington DC recently and there were perhaps 4 companies providing scooter rental. I found out that if I rented one, I could not then rent one for my teenager. That was a fail. Then, the scooter I rented happened to be in a "no park zone." I could rent the scooter, but not return it to the exact place I'd rented it from. So I had to go out of my way to park the stupid thing. My wife rented hers from the exact same spot, but then immediately a "no ride zone" was triggered, so she had to push it for 1/2 a mile before she could actually ride it, all the while paying per-minute fees for the rental.

It cost us probably $20 to go 3 blocks. It was not nearly as simple as scan to ride, ride, scan to park.
Bike rentals enable the renter to put the security and maintenance burden on the provider. If bikes were not so easy to steal, rental bikes would not be a business.
It does once you get past using sudo as second attempt at running a command that failed for a reason you don't understand.
That is not an argument at least for rust since its super easy to consume and offer a C interface. I think it's more of a shift in mentality that needs to occur.
IIRC, store demo units were another kind that would show up on eBay but couldn't be used as normal Kindles.
> Honestly of all the indigenous elders I’ve personally spoken to, none of them expressed your opinion of ‘no benefit’.

I’m sorry, is that an argument?

Are you giving them back the land? No?

Then what benefit do they receive, exactly, and why are they owed it?

> Also, why does anyone have to benefit at all?

If you’re going to ask everyone to expend energy genuflecting to your religious dogma, surely there must be some benefit to someone beyond merely benefiting your own social power/standing?
I'm not sure the two companies are all that comparable.

When you peel away the glitz and techie veneer, Uber is a giant cab company. Cab companies can work we know that. They added a single universal dispatcher with a consistent interface for all and added an on demand labor system and found ways to gouge labor, all solid ways to make more money but still a giant cab company.

Scooter companies weren't modifying a known quantity. They were doing something much more out there. Because they're basically mobile vending machine companies who rely on enticing people to modify their locomotive behavior. That being something notoriously hard to do. Just ask urban planners.
The first story in this issue, Crazy Maro, is by the author of Flowers for Algernon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31875692). Both great stories.
> I think this is hard to do while also allowing for people who want to live in a rural area to do so.

There's no reason it has to be some one size fits all solution. Investing in transit options other than cars in cities and towns where it makes sense doesn't mean trying to force light rail to work in rural areas or whatever. The problem is actually the opposite, where we've set things up such that the transit option that makes sense for rural areas is the norm everywhere.
You just haven't lived in a city with good public transport

In e.g. London or Paris public transport is almost always the fastest way to get from A to B
Well, imo, the US Constitution is very suitable for any human society.
I'd argue that a sliderule is at least something you can manipulate with your hands and immediately see the output relationship.

Tangent, I use a tape measure at work and you can fold it back on itself to make a basic slide rule for quick addition and subtraction without bothering with fractions :)
It has, on RDS.
I’m writing from the knowledge of VC money and becoming a publicly traded company.

If you’re actually interested in a generational business, you do not give it away.
In fact Postmark only supported transactional email (and had an approval process) in the past. It looks like they dropped that to pursue a larger market, with predictable consequences.
Because high karma scores are mostly just embarrassing.
It's a bummer to see what I think is a good idea in theory be hated because the people who implemented it did such a bad job in practice.

The idea of having a fast, easy, low emission and cheap way to get around short distances in a city without needing a car or having to bring a bike or similar is awesome.

Unfortunately, instead of solving the things citizens disliked about them (sidewalk parking/riding, inexperienced riders, rapid expansion) the companies decided they should just take the Uber approach and bulldoze any opposition with money. This made them a symbol of tech and gentrification for many, a symbol of growth and change for others, and aligned basically everyone in the city against them.
> the chance of getting help from a stranger goes up

Or maybe a large clump of people makes everyone more likely to experience the bystander effect.
Recently in Berkeley, California we got a bunch of new players: Veo, Superpedestrian, and Spin, which is an older company but just arrived here. So they are still chasing the dream, despite the money pit.

For the customer these scooters and bikes are cheaper than the bus at distances of 1 mile and at longer range if you value your own time.
I had the exact opposite experience. After already owning a DM42, DM41X, and a DM16L, and I bought a DM12L for a client. The screen had several LCD segments that faintly showed as always on. I wrote an email and was contacted by Michael (the founder) almost immediately. He said they'd happily take it back and send me a new one, but it would take a few weeks for shipping from Europe. Instead he suggested that I first try putting it in the oven at 70C (160F for us 'Mericans) for a few hours. So I disassembled it and put just the PCB/display unit in the oven. And sure enough: problem solved!

tl;dr: I thought their service was great.

Although I do love my real HP's, too. I own maybe a dozen. I think the 32sII is my favorite, but I dearly miss my 41CV from back in the day. Maybe I should find a used one of those.

On the programming side: I definitely agree with those saying calculators were/are an entry to programming. My first programs were on an HP-29c. I thought I had invented binary search!
ipcalc is older than 2015, but it lived in a different repository:

https://github.com/fedora-sysv/initscripts/commits/313773794...

ipcalc gets removed here:

https://github.com/fedora-sysv/initscripts/commit/76201baf7a...

All in all it looks like ipcalc predates sipcalc by three years (1998 vs 2001)
The main factor is not to have to worry about charging it while you do what you do, you just drop it off and pick up another one on the way out.
Really good thread. I saw a lot of different discussions about how folks cope. Was surprised not to see Internal Family Systems discussed. Visualizing a younger version of myself being inside of me reacting and controlling has been very helpful in terms of helping me empathize with the poorly adapted (or adapted to my bad early environment not the real world) parts of myself.

Obviously finding a good therapist has been part of that (I had a fine one for 6 years and switched to a different one {body based} a year or so ago and it's been transformative). The other thing that has helped is couples therapy has been very good as individual therapy. Given how many of our issues are relational, couples therapy is a surprisingly good context for forcing individual growth.
A lightweight, tapered Italian jacket that I nabbed at a consignment store at a great price. Wearing it, I feel like a million bucks.
I personally could not be happier with Bird's downfall. I was seriously thinking of running (as a one-issue candidate lol) for some City office in Santa Monica to get them off the streets. It was absolutely bonkers how terrible it was when they're weaving past you while driving, how terrible it was with people leaving them in front of my apartment building, and how terrible it was that the majority of folks taking advantage of them were out-of-towners anyways. This one time when I was walking home from a bar, some poor girl face-planted off a scooter in the middle of the street, she started crying, bleeding/etc. and myself and a few other bystanders had to call 911 to make sure she's okay and taken care of.

So the vibe of cool cities like Santa Monica were totally ruined by these annoying "micromobility" startups, but also from a business standpoint, the idea also made no sense. All their pivots (in particular: what do you do with used scooters?), fell flat. With that said, I do know folks that worked at Bird (mostly ex-Uber or from the LA tech scene), and they were super smart, motivated, and driven people.
> Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities

If you don't worry about what people think, you're never going to understand and address the actual reasons people buy cars.

When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! They are making choices informed based on their own life experiences that it would be smart to understand and emphasize with, if you want to drive meaningful change.
Interoperability would indeed help a long ways in many markets but it's antithetical to the monopolistic business models of the current tech industry.

Card processing is something you can do on a cheap microcontroller - the only blocker here is EMV certification. I'm sure with all those millions (billions) collectively poured into the industry they could've released a cheap EMV-certified module that can accept payments locally, or failing that, bypass the certification problem by building their own, interoperable system end-to-end so that customers at least just had one app to install.

It reminds me of a company here selling(?) powerbank vending machines - seems like they're still around, at least online (I can't imagine this thing ever making money, but I suspect it was more about "growth & engagement" and resume fodder than building a sustainable business): https://chargedup.theup.co - the problem is that for you to take out a powerbank, you need to install an app on your phone. This automatically excludes the customers whose phone has already died even though they're the most likely to pay for it. I used to see their machine at my local bar for a couple years and I don't recall anyone ever using it. At some point it disappeared and replaced by a competitors' that at least has a built-in card terminal. Still don't recall anyone using it ever, but at least I guess you now technically could if you had no other option.
Honest question here - not being snarky...

Does anyone have an example of someone who was unable to get mortgage from a traditional banks but was able to do so via Crypto? Are there any examples of someone with a great business idea who couldn't get a loan from a bank but was able to get funding via Crypto?
I guess this makes sense from a business perspective. Why build something brand new when you can reuse.

I love the technical breakdown.
More pedestrian friendly Main Streets are an opportunity for more local stores to open and thrive. Towns that want to collect sales tax, income tax, and property tax will do road diets, widen sidewalks, enhance trash pickup, and move parking to the periphery of the commercial zone to cultivate growth. While citizens pick their local government leaders, governments also pick their residents by setting zoning laws that effectively determine who can move in or open up shop. Local governments are incentivized to pick what use yields the most votes or tax dollars.

People driving through in their car are only contributing a danger to pedestrians, parking demand, air pollution, and noise. People driving to downtown can be accommodated with parking off to the side (but not taking up prime real estate). Pedestrians are much more likely to stop and participate in the economy.
Small compared to a bicycle.

Of course, bicycles have other benefits so I'm not hating on the bike users. But yes, 12kg / 25lbs or so isn't really that big or bulky IMO.
I have a much more cynical and pessimistic view that's pretty much not on brand for HN.

I spent 3 years working on a videogame as a personal side project. Although I was passionate about it, thing is it was a very niche idea. Sure, maybe I got literally 2 or 3 people that were super into it, but it never got any traction.

So yes, doing something that you enjoy is it's own reward... to a point. I poured hundreds of hours in that videogame and led to me burnout once, jut to have a few hundreds visits. I don't exactly regret the experience, but I could have spent much less time and effort on it.

Now I'm less "follow your passion" and more tactical about my efforts. I spent a weekend prototyping a game where you guess an emoji using a "hot/cold" system by comparing emojis based on their semantic similarity. When I asked for feedback it was universally panned, so I decided to drop it. Sure, maybe there is one person who'd love the game, but we only have so much time on this earth, so I have to consider the opportunity cost of building something that one person could love vs building something more people might enjoy.
Amygdala damage impairs moral judgment
Thank you so much for the kind words! It really means a lot.
I think there is a gap between people riding every day and people riding once a week to go to the bar or something. Of course it is going to be more practical to buy one for the person doing a daily commute to work or something, but my hunch is that user pool is vastly smaller than the pool that is getting around on the weekend.
And public transit also costs money to operate and ride. The point is that your proposal doubles up on capital costs.
> Tokyo was insanely expensive and locals couldn't afford it.

IIRC that was buying housing, not renting. Purchasing housing is subject to speculation in a way that rent is not.

But if you have data that says otherwise, I'd love to see it. The data I can find shows the expected price spike in Japan for buying condos, but no such spike for renting:

Condos - https://japanpropertycentral.com/2013/10/japans-apartment-ma...

Apartments - https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/changes_in_house_rent

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if rents were higher in an economic boom, I just doubt it got as crazy as condo prices did in Tokyo.
Ironic that Linkedin hates people who scrape their site which is nothing but user generated content yet they do the same.
Software Defined Cooking Using a Microwave Oven [pdf]
Three of the greatest programmers I've experienced worked there, Peter, Tor, Raph. Hats off.
Wayland's protocol is basically an isolation prison that requires "big DE's" and destroys choice. The protocol moves everything into one central place called the "compositor.” This machinery must provide:

- the window manager
- the hotkey daemon
- the compositing effects
- the windowing server
- screen reading tools
- screenshots
- screen casting

magnifying glass tools
global dictionary tools
etc etc etc everything.
Wayland's design makes it impossible to write a portable hotkey daemon for instance. Supposedly for "security reasons.” Wayland is a GNOME dev's dream, it kills the ability of people to control their own system. If you're actually excited for Wayland you either thoroughly misunderstand what it brings and just like it because it's new or you're a GNOME-lover who hates customization.

And don’t get me started on the security argument. If someone has arbitrary code execution on your machine, you’re already toast. I’ve yet to see an example of malware that can use xlib to read keyboard inputs on X (the supposed vulnerability Wayland was made to stop) but can’t just write some LD_PRELOAD hook to .profile or bashrc to make the compositor keylog on Wayland too. Is there a real world example where this supposedly great isolation that is easily circumventable actually prevented any security issue?

None of this is to say that X.org isn’t the accumulation of 30 years of cruft and technical debt but I don’t think Wayland is the right alternative.
One factor there is that you can choose between having a limited set of gear that you own vs a pretty much unlimited set of gear that you can rent from which is guaranteed to work when you need it.

So the comparison between something you'd need day-to-day and one where you would need to use something only incidentally is where it breaks down and I think that is exactly how it works for those scooters: people that need them every day for the same kind of trip will buy one and the incidental users will rent. But for the economies to make good sense those companies would need a substantial base of regular users.
the content and schedule have a 90%+ overlap with a standard machine learning course

Note that neural networks are not even mentioned in the content. This is not a good course to learn modern ML.
Self driving cars will remove barriers (ie. licensing, age, ability, cost(if they're taxis)) that prevent people from driving and so it'll result in MORE cars on the road.

If we want to limit cars from our cities self driving cars is one of the worst developments that could occur.
That one was posted later, while this one was (independently) picked by a mod to go in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it got a random placement on HN's front page.

Probably the thread is interesting enough to deserve a merge, so we'll move the comments thence hither.
Most of the schools I work with now have their students use Desmos, a free online graphing calculator. So thankfully, we've been moving away from TI.
The self feeding cycle we have now is: science advances -> more energy production -> higher gdp -> more environment destruction + population growth.

The solutions proposed so far is to produce more, do more science, create more green jobs etc. we all know that this doing “more” won’t work but we are scared to lose our jobs or funding etc. So we have these pseudo intellectual-socio-scientific discourse trying to “solve” the problem but all the while we are just digging our graves deeper. To fix the problem we just need to rip that bandaid quickly and ruthlessly. This will cause economies to fall, governments to fail and wars to be waged. Good luck getting this through - the proponents already know all this, they are just making money while the sun shines organizing conferences and marketing their pet funding projects.
If this is the case then I wonder what happens in the event that LinkedIn's scrapers make a mistake and dont't parse the salary range on a job post, and then publish that post in a jurisdiction that requires one like Colorado. Would LinkedIn be opening themselves up to liability?
> the author attempted to fake crystallography data

That is not what fake data is. It might be a misrepresentation is the author tries to pass it out as experimental results, but it is not fake, i.e. it came from a real study and actually has some meaning (though not much if it is indeed an unstable structure that can just be observed in a computer, and it is ground for rejection depending on the journal).

I mean, I don’t have much patience with people over-hyping their results, but fake data of the common sort is either photoshopped graphs, re-used spectra coming from other studies or compounds, or things like that. And this definitely happens. But the “it came from a simulation, therefore it’s fake” argument is very unhelpful in general.

A spectrum from a simulation is not fake, it’s just a simulation result.
As a method of urban transportation escooters have been relatively successful (at least in Europe). But this hasn’t translated into profitable businesses due to the lack of a strong technical moat: it’s too easy to clone Lime, Byrd, etc, especially with cheap capital availability.
What they mean is: if you have 200 drones, your base production rate is 200 bases per 100 seconds.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32280756, which is currently on the front page (because of the SCP - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)
Show HN: Presbot, generate 30% more leads with a chatbot
I wonder how you were able to manage your time and break down and implement such a significant project.
> That's the real issue at hand here.

I really don't think it is. If you think about it as a rent-or-buy trade off for the "same thing", your reasoning is fine. However I think it's really a transportation trade off, which has a bunch more factors.

NB: I was never optimistic about the scooters per se, I just think this is too limiting a way to view it.
What differentiate you from the number of existing monitoring platforms? Genuinely curious as it is a crowded space with a lot of established players.
That's about the weight of my (non-electrical) folding bike, so not that bad actually. (They have a titanium one too but for that price you can buy a nice second hand car...)
> The math never made sense.

I bet it was a "growth & engagement" situation. The objective was never to build a sustainable business but was instead to build an engineering playground while collecting hefty salaries paid by VCs.
Why not?

If you’re asking everyone to subscribe to your religious dogma, shouldn’t you be able to present even a modicum of an argument as to why?
Due to the situation in Ukraine (big exporter of vegetable oil), the world is currently quite dependent on palm oil. You know the one they cut down rainforests to make. It was interesting to follow the politics around the Indonesia's temporary export ban back in May.
This is just good management. Delegate what you can, do what you must.
> The sad reality is that most people want cars

Why is it sad? I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself, or compared to alternatives like mass transit that don't go to all of these places in comparable amounts of time or even have service to all these areas). The only viable successor that meets our standard of living will be something like autonomous rideshare, and since that's always 5 years away, and we enjoy the standard of living we have, nothing will change. It is that simple. The point of human progress is to raise our standard of living over time, and convincing people to roll back to inferior alternatives is a fool's errand. The successor to cars needs a similar to superior convenience factor.
> Sure _if_ there’s a scooter nearby _and_ it’s charged… Then there’s the issue of needing a half dozen scooter apps

Sure, but these are all relative inconveniences and you have to compare them to the alternative inconvenience/cost of either other forms of transport for your short journey, or lugging a scooter around with you constantly.
I did the same fix for my mother-in-law’s calculator. She teaches high school kids and this is her mainstay. Of course one day it got the dreaded disappearing rows (where two or more rows go dead), and this was the fix someone recommended on the forums.

Now my own 83 is in the same state. Although I have a Ti-89 kicking around, I still miss the ergonomics of the 83.

All in all, wanted to say thanks for the writeup.