skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was obvious for years that:

1.) Self-driving, especially to the degree necessary for a taxi service, was never going to happen in a timeframe that was economically interesting for Uber and

2.) Prices were always going to have to end up in the ballpark of taxis and private car services to be profitable--with everything that implies for the size of market/network

3.) Uber did offer a better experience than many existing taxi companies but that wasn't really a material moat and taxis now widely offer apps
This quote is a bit odd, it could easily be interpreted as a justification for authoritarian rule by entitled criminals:

> "“Fortune and human imperfection assure that at some point in life everyone will experience suffering, disadvantage, or mistreatment,” wrote the authors of the new study. “When this happens, there will be some who face their burdens in silence, treating it as a private matter they must work out for themselves..."

So, if one is a victim of a crime, or repression, or some other injustice, and one makes it a public issue (by, for example, seeking redress in a court of law), one is engaging in 'narcissisim, psychopathy and Machiavellianism'? What does the US Constitution have to say about this?

> "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Yes there are those who abuse the courts (and the court of public opinion) in the manner the authors describe, but I think the vast majority of cases don't fall into that category.
Is it too surprising if I tell you that Candace Owen's husband is the CEO of Parler? Yes, the same Candace Owens that has been advising Kanye West and appeared with him in the matching White Lives Matter t-shirt...
The Hunt for Wikipedia's Disinformation Moles
AirBnB seems to be a counterexample. Ever-rising fees, but it's still pretty much the only show in town if you want a non-hotel experience.
Going from a tech job to minimum likely wouldn't cover one's current expenses. Unless you live with your parents. What's the refrain from the right again? Oh, that minimum wage jobs aren't meant to be a living wage.
AI is able to spot diseases before symptoms appear
Being forced to participate in society doesn’t mean that’s what people prefer.

Your last line is like the mocked meme of “if you hate capitalism so much why did you buy a shirt”. The logic doesn’t work. Of course many anti-capitalists are going to consume capitalism because they live here and not everyone can leave.

The same logic would hold for pilots. Regardless of the numbers.
Great, I will tell that to my customers!
I think this is an overly cynical take. I think the majority of Uber's investors (along with a surprisingly high fraction of the tech community) genuinely believed that self-driving cars were just a few years away, and so Uber's stated business model was viable: in the few years it takes to develop self-driving cars, sell rides at a massive loss to get customers accustomed to cheap taxi transportation and destroy existing taxi markets, and then switch customers who are now addicted to Ubering everywhere over to self-driving cars, thereby yielding absurd profit margins.

And to be fair, had self-driving cars indeed become commonplace by now (as many people ~10 years ago believed would have happened), Uber would rightly be one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Thank you for introducing me to this rabbit hole. Here's a NYTimes article from 1976 -- note, many issues with the OCR, but still interesting and entertainingly written:

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/26/archives/why-nothing-work...
When only the rejects use the sites of course it's going to be full of bad content. That doesn't mean there isn't value in free speech being better valued on mainstream platforms.
If I'm travelling for leisure, I would prefer things like Slack to stay as far away from me as possible. Preferably on my work machine that I left behind on my home continent.

If I travel for work, or if my employer requires me to have Slack (or similar) on my device and with me at all times, then they can provide me with a dedicated device for that purpose and that purpose alone. It's then their problem to worry about operational security associated with having work comms on a device that might have to be compromised by a foreign government.

Even the most basic android phone supports email and text (sms) out of the box. My country enjoys incredibly deep WhatsApp penetration, and subsequently it's become the default mode of communication for almost everyone. WhatsApp runs on almost anything. Back in the day they even had .jar files to download and install on your Symbian dumb phones.

I'm talking here about a "burner" device as it's sometimes called. The minimum viable communicator that you can take with you so that you can keep in touch with friends and family and be reachable in the case of an emergency.

But you make an interesting argument for not needing to go with a new device. A beat-up second-hand mid-ranger from a few years ago will probably work just as well. I have a drawer full of them, and if I don't have any, they can be had for very cheap.
The losses are primarily due to it writing off equity investments in food apps and self driving cars. It made a profit as recently as Q4 2022. Revenue (a much harder number to manipulate than profit) has been growing rapidly.

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a....
Laravel Spotlight
I have nothing to contribute but it's nice to see someone can appreciate the positive changes that have been made while also acknowledging the problems that have arisen as a result. Without addressing these, we risk ceding to the reactionaries with their much simpler "solutions."
You can trace when/how it was printed, but not who owned it.
Punishing end users with security training when they successfully spot and report the company's phishing campaign e-mail.
> Alexander Hamilton was right: to the average person, the difference between one-in-three-million odds and one-in-three-hundred-million odds didn’t matter, but the difference between a three-million-dollar jackpot and a three-hundred-million-dollar jackpot mattered enormously.

This is one of the most infuriating things about lotteries to me. The base Powerball jackpot is $20 million. Even cutting that in half for getting it in a lump sum and the taxes on it, that should be around $10 million.

That's life changing. But I never hear about people buying tens of tickets when the jackpot is that low. It's always when the jackpot breaks $1 billion. Then people start buying tickets as if $900 million wasn't also equally life changing.

And still for the exact same piss-poor chance of winning. But people try to justify it by saying the cost to return is so great. It's always great. It's great at a $20 million jackpot. Some people say it's just "harmless entertainment" because they can then fantasize about winning and what they'd do with the money. I ask why can't they just fantasize about buying the ticket? If you accept the odds are that against you and you're just imagining if you would win, you don't actually need to buy the ticket to do that.
The guidelines also say to not post a comment about how a submission is off-topic or inappropriate, so since they're so important to you maybe you should try reading and following them yourself.
Why does nature create patterns?
What drama with the Factorio devs is he talking about at the end (and namesearchers?.. I don't get Twitter sometimes)

I've never heard anyone say anything about the Factorio devs except praise their productivity and professionalism.
GUPU – Teaching Prolog and Constraints
True. But if I'm reading z80 documentation, I'm going to be able to read it more easily. Plus I don't have to be also willing to learn a second language.

Of course in the end you have computing skills and a second language.

Slightly off topic question though.
Are programming constructs based around or influenced English making it easier to learn as an anglophone?

Would (true)if be more common, or do{}while(true) be more common if English weren't the Lingua Franca?

I know you could find examples of these in many languages, but they aren't 'standard'
> On the Non-Theoretical note, I recently turned Stable diffusion to generating images from Mnemonic stories used for remembering Chinese characters.

What a great idea! I’m learning Chinese characters through mnemonic, and I’m also an SD enthusiast, but I never thought to combine the two
Undercover at the library: spies, reference desks, and the invention of privacy
Which just results in you getting a DUI even though you chose not to drive.
*they, this is why they hate their tweets being posted here
>How spent are the Russian forces? They haven't even applied 15% of their full forces to this operation

This is in stark contrast to what analysts are saying, which is that Russia already _lost_ about half of its military. Visually confirmed losses of Russian tanks alone are over one thousand units. Russians are so desperate they had to introduce mandatory conscription, despite it being a suicide from political point of view.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, and you hadn’t provided a single source that would support your view.

>as democratic as West

Lol, no. Russia isn’t even a dysfunctional democracy; it lacks basic prerequisites to become one. You’re probably imagining Russia is kind of like Eastern Europe, only poorer. It’s not - the "cultural distance” between Russia and, say, Poland is much greater then between Poland and, say, UK.
This is behind a paywall, so I can't tell if the writer deals with the sticky problem of advertising: it tends to corrupt the ad-supported media. We saw this with Google, where search results gradually get replaced by ads, and Amazon, who is getting a lot of money from the ads for their sub-sellers, but ending up recommending less than stellar products.

Legacy media wasn't immune either: it's well known that newspapers chose to not run stories that major advertisers would probably have trouble with. TV news went from an FCC public service requirement to a money maker, but also lost the ability to run high impact, controversial stories.
FB is very different depending on curation. I know everyone on my list, there is no 4chan content (of course, I also stopped using FB because they made the website so bad I couldn’t anymore)
If you took out a loan to pay tuition, the loans don't disappear. Isn't this basically the same thing? The employer is loaning you the money to cover training with loan forgiveness for time worked.
Nowadays all you are gonna get is a fancy CGI reconstruction of the telescope...
Something else. We are actually sandboxing dynamically loaded applications in a hybrid CAmkES environment, while using CAmkES as a way to help statically analyze and componentize the rest of the userland services.
Not that I was expecting any different, but this does not particularly help Parler's (tepid) claims to free speech legitimacy.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

The legal tender law is about what forms of payment can validly settle a debt denominated in US currency.

That is a far cry from "what must businesses accept in daily consumer purchases".

Congress could likely force businesses to accept all forms of legal tender, but hasn't.
It's not worth going point by point when there's so many fundamental misconceptions. Best to reject the entire comment.

What HN needs is less engagement with useless, time consuming misinformation, and more outright rejection of it.
> Use Git. Use it for everything – infrastructure, configuration, code, dashboards, on-call rotations. Your git repository is your point-in-time-recoverable source of truth.

I'd amend that to "Use configuration management."

Git is wonderful, but it isn't a Swiss Army knife. There are some things that are better archived using systems like Perforce (many game developers use it, because Very Big Assets), or even simple incremental file system backups.

Back in the "dark ages," the Japanese release managers at my company used to clone an entire computer disk drive onto an external disk, and store that disk in a special file cabinet, so you not only had the source, you also had the entire system that was used to build it. This has some obvious issues, but it worked for them, for years.

Also -and I cannot stress this enough- TEST YOUR BACKUP RECOVERY. I have been in the position of needing to restore old files (either partially, or whole-hog), and found out, the hard way, that my backups were pooched.
In the 20th century alone, malaria claimed between 150 million and 300 million lives, accounting for 2 to 5 percent of all deaths (Carter and Mendis, 2002). How do you imagine eradicating a mosquito species could be worse? Meanwhile, between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year.
Textbooks on rhetoric. Aristotle’s book is okay. I also had a book from the 1950s.

They didn’t teach me logic, but taught me how other people think. Or, at least how they act after you communicate to them.
> And I had to give 3 months notice before quitting.

That's pretty crazy. So if you apply to a new job you have to tell them: "I can start 3 months from now, no sooner"?

Edit:

This kind of clause seems so counter-productive to the employer. If I was forced to give 3 months notice, I'd be checked out for 2/3+ of that time. What are they going to do? Fire me?
> I'm a member of Parler and expected to see useful interesting content

Well I'm not sure why you expected useful interesting content. The whole point of Parler is to be a home for these far-right extremists.

Good moderation is important on platforms where anyone can post anything otherwise misinformation and conspiracy theories will spread.
One of the best dotcom era sites. I loved the comments.
If you think about what its sales are, it should be trading a lot lower than 1. Most of what it is doing is matching a buyer to a seller, and taking some amount of that transaction in exchange for facilitating the transaction (I think ~30-40%). Today, it counts the entire price of a ride as revenue, and the entire cost of that sale as an expense.

In comparison, if you use Uber's ideas of what is revenue and what is an expense, Ebay (another transaction facilitator) had a P/S ratio of 0.34 in 2019 with a fee of ~10%. Ebay does not count revenue the same way Uber does - they only count their fees as revenue.

Another transaction facilitator, Costco (yes, I am comparing Uber to a retail chain - it makes the same fundamental trade), has a P/S ratio of 0.89. Walmart is 0.61. Nobody who retails something from a wholesaler has a P/S ratio greater than 1. Uber is an online retailer of taxi services.

Most two-sided platforms treat their fee as their earnings, and thus can claim a very healthy margin. Uber doesn't.
Why not use CloudFlare Pages directly? It avoids you having to deal with and maintain a droplet, beings the $5/month to $0/month, reduces attack surface, makes scaling "magic", etc. The only caveat is that your site needs to be fully static, but it probably already is anyways.
Hasn’t Cuba had a lung cancer vaccine for decades?
I bet if we asked them for it they’d give it to us.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/01/09/cuba-ha...
Bitcoin is going away? Good riddance.
I don't understand why the employer merits protection from the employee in this case.

The employers could, offer bonus payments for the employees tenure, top of market salaries, equity in the business, or secure private insurance to cover losses if the employee leaves.

Asking an employee, to pay you money so that you can make money from their labor shouldn't be legal.
I can’t imagine working any way other than this. A system where you are assigned precise little tasks with hard deadlines that sum to precisely your compensation is a low trust environment. I’d much rather hand people projects or work as a team to solve large problems than need to micromanage the hell out of people so that they’ve got enough shit to do to justify their wage without overburdening them. That sounds exhausting.

“Hey, I pay you to work on my team and build something with the team” is a much healthier and happier system. It also gives people agency about how to tackle problems and the ability to propose work or even experiment. The alternative is a joyless factory line.
> career revival

Kayne's career hasn't declined (unlike maybe his mental health)? His music seems he's as popular as ever.
You’re mixing up stocks and flows. Uber had the equivalent of a worker in the following situation:

* their salary goes up. They can now cover all of their living expenses + save
* the value of their stock portfolio goes down

Are they poorer? Yes, on paper. But they aren’t losing money, defined as their living expenses costing more than their salary. In terms of salary vs. expenses they are doin great

Buffett has long decried measuring business performance based on fluctuations in value of holdings
It absolutely is; it's the main schtick and premise of the show; it clearly resonated with wide audience, I'm just an outlier for whom it really didn't work.

(FWIW, I'm also the kind of person that didn't love "Everybody Loves Raymond"; it just seemed that characters never learned or tried to get better or showed real empathy / awareness of each other. The schtick seemed that he would "Cluelessly try to get away with stuff" and she would get upset and he would do something sweet and she'd forgive him. Episode after episode season after season. Something like first few seasons of "Mad About You" always seemed more enjoyable, funnier, and more relatable :)
I think if we compare the history of the relationship between America and Saudi Arabia (also a desert with catastropic demographics, but a rather different economic outcome) vs. that between France and its African colonies (or Britain and its India colony), we can see that European colonialism was actually a bit worse in outcome for its partners than what's known as American imperialism (which still has major problems, but not as bad as what Europe got up to).
I am old & non-american. Felt dumb for not knowing who this 'Ye' person is.

Then I learned about him on wikipedia.

Now I wish I remained dumb.
Candace Owens really played Ye.
> I don't understand why even this is sensible. Why not just use a database?

Who's gonna run it? Any individual company in the chain has a vested interest in fudging the data, and the technical means to do so. A private third-party lacks oversight (and thus could also be given a vested interest in fudging data). A government agency could do it (assuming one's government is trustworthy, which is often a poor assumption), but that would likely preclude international cooperation unless it's something like the UN running it (and even then).

> The only miners/validators on a produce blockchain are likely to be agri-companies anyway.

Preferably you'd use an existing public blockchain rather than spinning up an entirely new one.

Even if there was such a blockchain solely for tracking produce, the fact that no individual agri-company has control over its data makes it more trustworthy/impartial than some centralized database.
It sounds like your last line is saying corporations are too corrupt and broken to be as good as human beings?

It’s not cool to force training on someone and then force them to stay or pay it back either. Why does the corporation get off the hook?
I suggest reading a mini-book called "Breaking the Time Barrier", which is about how to transition from full-time to consulting. Several chapters talk about the mindset shift needed to value your time appropriately, once you move into hourly billing.

https://www.freshbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/breaking-the-t...
But it means the models were trained on images that are under copyright. In fact many of these models were trained exclusively on such images without any permission. For example Midjourney is clearly trained on everything on artstation.com where almost all images have commercial purpose / licenses.
I watched this review of it a while ago, it seemed pretty cool to be honest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M06S2aBUNDk
And being able to use Gmail (search emails etc) while writing an email too
That's still a traceable blockchain though, just privately kept. As soon as you start keeping a ledger, you make transactions traceable. With a single or low number of ledgers, network analysis becomes easier the more heavily each actor uses the currency as well, compromising anonymity.
From TFA:

"it displays information required by crew members to manage their rosters and work lives in a single app.

The app is particularly popular among the large number of ‘reserve’ flight attendants at American Airlines because it gives them more control over their schedules, and the app has other features such as a calculator to make sure crew are working to legal limits."
The old turn it off and on again...
Well, paper cash isn't the only way to pay for goods. The spirit of the "legal tender" statement is that that it applies to U.S. Dollars broadly, not necessarily the paper. After all, a Treasury Bond is exactly as good as paper cash.

If you look at the edge cases, it becomes more clear why the federal government doesn't require businesses to accept paper cash. Imagine someone attempting to purchase a sky scraper in Manhattan with cash. That would be a mountain of bills which would be unwieldy to carry, transport, and count. Or what about if someone insisted on buying your house with all pennies. Would you like being required to accept that payment?

The idea that cash shouldn't create an undue burden to a business is an important one. And that's why the federal government doesn't require the acceptance of cash for transactions. It's best to let the parties involved decide what method of payment is most appropriate.
Except that this article contains neither propaganda nor personal opinions, but only facts that are well known to all the older people who live in countries that are neighbors of Russia.

I have been born and I have grown in Eastern Europe, in one of the countries invaded by the Russians, so nothing from what was said by the Baltic interviewed people was new for me, all their stories sounded very familiar.

For example one of them has mentioned that both his maternal grandfathers have been deported, then murdered by the Russians.

My two maternal grandfathers happened to have exactly the same fate.

The reason why they were among the first chosen for deportation was that one was the teacher of the village, while the other was a farmer, but he also had a part-time job at the mayor's office as supervisor of the maintenance work for the road passing through the village.

The Russian invaders applied a policy like in the Japanese proverb about the nails which stick out, everybody who was somehow distinguishable from the mass of the local inhabitants was a prime target for removal, because they feared that among such people there could be some who might try to organize a resistance.

The Baltic interviewed people expressed frustrations about the naivety that is widespread in Western Europe and Northern America about Russia and its methods, which have never changed since ancient history, through WWII and until present. Such sentiments are also common in Eastern Europe, among the older generations, who still remember the Russian ways of doing things.
How about trends towards unpaid overtime? Are these theft and deception?

In the 80s, I worked in the defence and aerospace sector. There was a term "green time", which was N hours a week of more-or-less mandatory overtime. It's not new.
At first, then it felt like every character - lead or supporting - got Flanderized into pap.
psx-pi-smbshare: A Swiss army knife enhancing classic game consoles with Rasp Pi