skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess the implication of eBay's shift (and the general demise of most C2C formal online "flea markets") is that it's not a great business to be in. There are probably a few factors at work.

- Arguably, there was something of a fad aspect to eBay's initial rise. Yes, there were serious buyers and sellers but I also suspect it was something of a game for a lot of people who subsequently moved on to do other things.

- In general, my sense is that buying/selling used goods is overall something that makes less sense today. That's a very broad brush statement but I've seen this directly in some areas with some local sports stores, for example, getting out of selling used gear.

- The overall broadening on the Internet population tends to mean that anywhere scammers can scam, they will. This is harder to effectively protect against in the type of market eBay originally focused on (one-off sales of pre-owned goods that were often not standard items).
The likely outcome of such a system would be for the for-profit prisons to hire lawyers to get their past "clients" off on technicalities.

How about creating a system where we help people who have been to prison to avoid going there again - say training them for good jobs and treating them like human beings when in jail so they treat others the same way when they get out?
About time!
Great new for the NodeJS community.
Funny to see how the original bug reporter (Skewer) hung around for about 18 months before other people continued the discussion for the past 13 years. I wonder where Skewer is today and what he thinks about the feature.
> I have noted that perhaps a third of the students seem incapable of reasoning with vectors as abstract elements of a linear space. Rather, they insist on conceiving a vector as a list of numbers or coordinates. I have come to regard this concept of vector as a kind of conceptual virus, because it impedes development of a more general and powerful concept of vector. I call it the coordinate virus!

It's hard to tell what the author is proposing, but from the surrounding pages it sure sounds like he's talking about teaching vectors as geometric objects with various manipulation rules and avoiding coordinate descriptions.

This is actually the sort of angle that may be possible for mathematicians (although I doubt it's sensible) but is not for physicists. In math, you're studying the logical implications of various axioms, and the abstract ideas are the goal. It's perfectly possible for a mathematician to learn and master an abstraction that was historically inspired by a physical system without personally ever actually connecting the abstraction to the physical system.

But for physics, it is absolute essential that you are also able to think about vectors in terms of coordinates if you are to connect them to the real physical world, which has rulers and T-squares and so on. Physicists are trying to understand the world, not the abstraction. In my teaching experience as a graduate student, students adopt the geometric picture of a vector as soon as they are able to, because it's vastly easier and more pleasant to work with. (That's why the abstraction was originally developed.) The students who don't fail to do so because they struggle to build the proper abstract machinery in their brains, not because they have been "infected" with the coordinate picture. The pictures aren't exclusionary, they are both necessary.
If you want to have a REPL on something like a microcontroller, there's a tool designed especially for that: Forth. You're going to find an implementation for any chip and platform you can think of (Forth is 40 years old and simple enough to be trivially portable to almost anything). Forth is strange and feels archaic at first, but I'd say it's roughly on par with Lisp in terms of expressivity and much better suited for systems with constrained resources than Python.
Oakes literally wrote the Clojure IDE I use when I'm not on Emacs, so I figure he earned the right to call himself whatever he likes. ;)
Surveillance. Mass surveillance. Really lucrative.
Might work for some people but not for me. I'd start worrying I'm not donating enough. With plasma you can donate every two weeks which is pretty often, I only go once every four weeks. However I liked the chocolates that were handed out at the blood bank around Christmas time last year (Australia). Oh and in case your wondering they used to offer beer in refreshment but that was cut out a couple of years ago. But they do have wifi now :-).
What I don't understand is why the for profit prisons are even in the US at all? Why not put them in Vietnam, Mexico or the Philippines where all costs are cheaper. I'd halve their sentences or give them beach access for doing call center work or sewing laptop bags.

It would be interesting to see the unionization rates in the for profit prisons. I am sure the FPP would love to lower their staffing costs and influence while having a more opaque regime overseas.
> In the State of California, the very highest-paying job that can is within reach of most people who do not have college degrees is to be a State prison guard.

This is very interesting, this means there's a big business behind it. I don't know which are the requirements to be hired as prison guard, for sure is, as you said, an unpleasant and dangerous work, but I don't get why a prison guard should be paid higher than a cop, that is always facing criminals, but in more dangerous situations.

> Several years ago a Federal judge ordered the state to reduce prison overcrowding. It hasn't made much progress.

This would definitely cost a lot, prison overcrowding, in some countries, is a big issue. There's no real solution other than build new prisons, hire new people and transfer prisoners. I read in the past an article stating that the future of prisons will be mostly private, turned into a real business. I honestly laughed in a first instance, then reading a lot about the topic, I figured out that maybe that article wasn't so much wrong after all...
I guess what I'm trying to say is, is the problem that the population is too high, or is the problem that infrastructure and economy has not developed along with the population?
Made a site where programmers can find other interested individuals to work
The choices between putting a roof over a family in The Philippines and saving a child from malaria in Myanmar is an impossible one. Information can't solve it.

I have nothing against Give Well's approach. I think it is important. I'm just making the point that at a personal choice level, the "problem" is a lot more solvable. You only need to know about one charity, really.
Fortunately it has begun to decline.

The end of the war on drugs will see the prison population in the US cut in half in 20 years. Colorado has already seen a radical reduction in arrests for drug offenses.
I'd love to see the geo-spatial distribution of guesses.
backtracking, i.e. utilizes a stack, i.e. more powerful than a regular (language) pattern matcher.

Alternative title: you can use regex derivatives (PCRE, Ruby ::Regexp, Boost.Regex, ...) to match non-regular syntax but you shouldn't.

The advice still holds. In the case of HTML you should reach for an XML parser.
12 uploaded already Godly Dreams
> You just didn't go far enough.

99.9999999% don't go far enough. Evidently everyone using Debian for those couple of years didn't go far enough. Not even two whole bytes of entropy is insane.

> By the way, yes, Microsoft was already caught spying on their users.

Surely allegedly. I've heard a few incidents attributed to them (flame, etc), but I've not seen it confirmed that intentional action was taken. Care to provide the links?
You give an entertaining talk :)

I wanted to avoid going into details as it is unlikely to be of interest to anyone here, but the actual idea eventually ended up as U.S. patent 6,737,253 [1].

1. https://www.google.com/patents/US6737253
How charming. The friendly version would've been "check your spelling".

On topic:
I know it is a thing to link resume pdfs as gdrive view links, but I don't like it. If my browser can handle Googles UI without distracting delay, it could've handled the pure pdf equally well.
Nothing ironic about it. Unions, if not enforced on workers by laws, are perfectly valid market mechanisms.

Like economists such as Zingales say, pro-market is not necessarily pro-business, and unions are a good way to gage what people actually support.
Testing new ways to make it easier to discover products and places
It's a group who is lobbying for inefficiency in the recovery and rehabilitation of our citizens. That is not great. It goes against the long terms interests of society. I'm not against privatization of services, but this sort of service lends itself to lobbying for inefficiency which is what you are trying to squeeze out of the system by engaging the private sector.
Fuck it up. Sigh.
I like that - a "most popular guess" vs "actual position" would be really interesting. As we seem to have at least one of the developers in this thread, maybe we can make that happen (or at least a post-mortem blog post analysing the data?)
In the example you give, uncontrolled population is not the problem. Social policies and cultural values are the problems. And I don't think limiting the number of children people can have is the right solution, not morally, ethically, or practically.

Now, who are you (not literally you) to say how many children I'm allowed to have? Who are you to control the size of my family? What business is it--or should it be--of yours? (Maybe we just have very different ideas about the proper roles of government.)

Anyway, if the problem is too many undeserving people on welfare, change the eligibility requirements for receiving welfare.

> So, please, come off your high horse and be a realist about the situation. I have yet to see evidence of humans, en masse, self-determine on impairment in the name of bigger picture.

You haven't? I think that, say, the Soviet Union would be an example of that, and communism in general. Although one could argue that that wasn't a case of self-determinism. It depends on the scale you're talking about. I think there are many examples of mobs of one scale or another being convinced to follow a certain path which had negative consequences. If the mob agrees with its leader, are its actions "self-determined"? Or if they think they're headed for success, are they "impairing" themselves? What matters, intent or results?
"There's no real solution other than build new prisons, hire new people and transfer prisoners."

Changing idiotic laws that land harmless people in jail would help a lot.
I find it amazing that people are amazed that what is essentially a lease of a venue is priced based on the capacity of the venue.

Suppose you have a private prison that is designed to reasonably hold up to 450 prisoners, and could be pushed up to 500. There is no real difference between the following two contracts:

1. The state pays $10.8m/year, plus $24k/year for each prisoner over 450.

2. The state pays $24k/year per prisoner, with a minimum payment based on 90% occupancy.

In both cases the state pays $10.8m/year if it puts 0-450 prisoners in the prison, and in both cases it pays ($10.8m + $24k (N-450))/year if it puts N prisoners, where N > 450, in the prison.
I'm going to assume that people getting laid off is the fault of software makers and software makers only, for the sake of argument of course.

Even then, it's good to know how your work affects people, whether positive or negative. At least you see the result of your work in the big picture, and have a chance to do something about it.
At some point we must get rid of all the humans on earth to keep up economic growth.

Not entirely joking.

Since companies are legal entities and can be run by algorithms, then it's possible that such non-human companies end up with all the capital and all the power. Of course nations and legal systems will also be automatized, with maximum growth as the objective. Then the algorithms can just starve people to death in a legal way.

Though human controlled companies weren't necessarily that humane so far either. At least they would try to keep the owners alive...
I had not heard of VTB before, but I guess your point is that it's Russian. That's interesting. What do you think they're trying to do? Weaken competing economies by convincing them to artificially hamper themselves?

BTW, have you published your research anywhere? Like, even on some anonymous blog, or a comment on a relevant one? Sounds like something that should be spread around beyond this little HN thread.
Of course we have gambling in the UK. It's just that skill-based games are less tightly regulated than purely chance-based games. Hence those premium rate TV phone-in competitions where the player has a choice between one obvious answer and two stupid ones.
Wedding in France – Wedding in Church in France
I love how piece could also be peace in that line.

I am reading The New Jim Crow and it is fascinating. The author talks about how prisons were utilized as a means to get free labor after slavery ended and how laws in this country were/are designed to keep black people in jail. Good read so far

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595586431/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=...
I'd much rather have my name on a parking lot than on a landmine.
> Threads are heavyweight — switching threads is inefficient, they have considerable memory overhead, and the OS will bog down if you make too many of them.

I didn't realize Posix threads were that inefficient?

First, I can't see why the memory overhead would be anything more than having a separate stack and entry in the TCB?

Second, can you not just save the stack pointer, program counter and registers into the TCB, then do the reverse when restoring a thread?

Finally, I wouldn't have thought you'd have too many TLB misses either, thus leaving the only expense being trapping to the kernel to switch between threads?

Can anyone explain?
You mean, like, precisely not stuff like this: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

On a more constructive note, I have a rather high opinion of Doctors Without Borders.

(I know that negativity in comments is discouraged, but I hope I'll get away with this.)
Beano – golang leveldb wrapper which talks memcached protocol
Say Yes to NoScript.
I think it is a bit of a circle - our economic system requires bigotry and prejudice and these in turn help support our current economic system. Break the need for oppression of the poor and my hope is we stop oppressing.
Personal story that relates to this:

A few years back, my wife was finishing up classes to become a cardiovascular technician. Part of the process to become fully certified is kind of a chicken/egg scenario - to become ARDMS certified, you need to work under a cardiologist for a year - but most cardiologists don't want to hire someone that isn't already ARDMS certified. Anyhow - she was pretty frustrated in how hard it was becoming to get a foot in to the industry when she finally heard back from one practice. The interview is conducted in an apartment on the 50th floor of a luxury building in downtown Manhattan - there were a few other people there just doing work on laptops. She gets the job, but she immediately felt something was off - but she wasn't sure what.

For the most part she would help in the "office" and do billing and coding from some other offices this doctor owned. Sometimes she would be sent out to one of these offices to actually scan people (which is what she actually enjoyed and wanted to be doing). And sometimes the doctor would take the whole team of people working in the "office" out to very fancy dinners where no expense was spared.

A few months (I think it was about 6 months - but could be wrong) in to this job, my wife needed a day off for her own doctors appointment, and it turned out to be a good day to take off - the office was raided by a joint task force of the FBI and Secret Service - they took the main guy in to custody, confiscated all the laptops, etc. My wife got a call later that afternoon from one of the other girls telling her what happened. Eventually my wife was asked to come in to talk with the FBI twice - they had pictures of her outside of the building smoking - knew what she had eaten at one of the dinners, etc. She was cleared from any involvement since she really had no clue what was actually happening.

In the end, the guy was arrested for Medicare and Medicaid fraud - he had purchased a radiological service from a doctor that was retiring, and assumed that doctors identity. He was charged with billing out $32 million in services that were never performed - $20M to Medicaid, $12M to Medicare. It definitely seems they were on to him for a little while at least - though I can't find any more details besides the original press regarding his arrest.

Sadly, my wife lost this time and does not feel right putting it on her resume - so she remained in the chicken and egg scenario and eventually she went back to school to broaden her applicable skills so she can actually work in the field - and hopefully, actually get that certification...
On #OpalGate
among the reasons I use my hosts file to blackhole the web bugs from analytics services, is that one of the more-common applications of web and mobile analytics is to determine what is in the public consciousness.

Most webmasters and mobile developers regard analytics as a way to find out how people are using their sites and apps. While strictly speaking that's true, most analytics SDKs are provided free of charge.

The ones who actually pay for the analytics are commonly politicians and large companies.

During the last presidential campaign I discovered that each major candidate's website contained dozens of web bugs from several distinctly different analytics companies.
Sounds like violations are not being prosecuted!
It's amusing to me that there's so much venom for an IT consulting business model on HN but apparently changing the contrast on iPhone pictures or posting ahort anonymous ramblings of college students is profound.
Exactly. The fact Sweden can do this is a comfort: it speaks to amazing inventory management.
Yes, but anyone who has information about their immediate percentile-neighbors (but nobody else) now 2 data points (their own income-part of society and the supplied data point) and so unless they're around the 50th percentile themselves you have supplied them with a ton of information. I think it would have been far more instructive not to include that data point: people's guesses also would have been more revealing (the last, aggregate-guesses graph on the results page). (Especially since we can have a good idea about who the guessers are - readers of the NY Times who choose to complete this specific graph exercise.)
In fact, here in Turkey, a similar service is in use for several years now.
> I don't get why a prison guard should be paid higher than a cop

A quick web search shows cops making $100k, while guards make $70k.

I'd imagine the police are more selective though. It might not be "within reach" of a lot of people (low turnover, and higher requirements).
He has long tied his work on coevolution, on racial, gender and economic justice, and on nuclear winter with the issue of wildlife populations and species loss.

When I see the word economic justice in a piece about extinction, it is a key to me that the author may be more concerned with agendas over facts.
After re-reading the post it looks more like the helper in the lisp functions declarations.

(defn fact (n)
"factorial calculation"
...)
So do you. :)

I see. Well, that is not my area of expertise, but it sounds interesting, even if I don't understand it. So you turned that idea into a product or service, and made a business of it? Did you sell it for research or forensic or medical or...? Sounds like a good story, though maybe one you'd have to be in the field to understand the details of.
There's also pplx, which is a cross-plattfor implementation of ppl:
http://microsoft.github.io/cpprestsdk/namespacepplx.html
Back when I originally read the rules I didn't see that. Won't do it again.
Some countries in EU have 2% of income tax support, i.e. If you are a tax payer in Lithuania and would like to support the development of non-profit/school/academy or sport club, you can do so by transferring 2% of your income tax to the administrating enterprise. And you can change/donate it every year.
One real good way to reduce prison overcrowding would be to abide by court precedent.

Oregon Advocacy Center v. Mink, 9th Circuit, 1993 (IIRC) ruled that when a judge orders a defendant to a mental hospital, the state has seven days to get the defendant actually admitted to the hospital.

The 9th Circuit governs the Western United States, including California, but even so despite that the ruling was made in 1993, it is quite uncommon for the state to obey the law by getting inmates into psych hospitals despite being specifically ordered to do so by a judge.

I personally fault the defense attorneys for this. Every defense attorney should move for dismissal on day 8, but I myself am the only defendant that I am aware of that has had his case dismissed this way.

My attorney was completely unaware of the 9th circuit's ruling until I brought it to his attention. I learned it from a jailhouse lawyer who found it in the jail's law library.
My two cents... Open your startup in the third world, developing countries. Or, at least lead some people in those regions to grow their own problem solving skills with IT and engineering. Or, travel to those regions with your targeted donation savings and see the suffering of humans.

If charity means donating the money we think we no longer need, then we should go for any of the charity foundations mentioned in other comments. But the real charity would be to take our butts off our comfort zones, travel to the targeted countries, experience the real suffering of humans, and to find out how we can contribute with our top notch expertise in IT and engineering. Even discovering hidden prospects in those regions and nurturing them for local socio-economic development would be cool charitable work. Even, opening our startups and employing local people would contribute more significantly in those regions than millions of dollars in donations to those named charity foundations. It will not only improve our skill in practical problem solving, it will also enhance our spirituality.
Most police officers have college degrees.

I don't know that a degree is specifically regard to get a job as a police officer but I do know that most cops have degrees.
I'd hope that would get you arrested in short order and held until you come up with a very good and verifiable explanation about where the blood came from.

Who donated the blood is important at the point of capture, where you want to analyse the blood and make sure that neither the plasma nor the cells carry anything other than benefits to the eventual recipient.

But who exactly sourced the blood should be of no concern to the agency that ends up using it, and if there is a problem the only thing they should have to go back on should be an un-identifiable serial number that they can use to report back to the collection agency to make sure they destroy the rest of the blood from that lot and mark that particular donor as un-acceptable.

What should happen beyond that is up to the local legislation, presumably the donor should be warned and the screening process should be improved so a similar thing will never happen again, if a problem with blood products is only discovered at the time of use then that's a process failure much more than a problem with that blood.