skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
THIS!

JSON starts to look like funny s-expressions.

JS brings a lot more to the table than just a scripted version of "C++ for retards" (aka Java), as it also lets you make use of many FP concepts like higher order functions and functional (vs object) composition.

For example, using currying (aka "dependency injection for functions") lets you often do with a single function what would take a silly-long class to do in Java. Use currying to inject leading parameters to a function that would normally be in the constructor (or setters, ugh) in a Java class, then the remaining "short arg list" function acts like the oh-too-common one actual "we're ready, now do something" method in a class.
Ugh, what people will do for job security.
> If you are driving for both services but Uber comprises 80% of your volume and Lyft 20%, it's an easy decision to make.

And if you are looking for a ride and Uber has 80% chance of having the closest available car then you are probably willing to pay a premium to use their service.
We don't really do catch-all blocks and our app is monitored on New Relic where we almost always have a 0% error rate (rarely we get <1%, most often related to a new commit that we can fix right away)

The only places where we need good exception handling is when doing I/O (network and filesystem). If you have proper layers to handle those things (with queuing/retrying/logging) you end up with a large codebase with very little places where you have to handle exceptions. Anything that is user-input we use TryParse and we do proper validation on the data before doing anything with it. This method is makes it easier to read because you know what the intent is better than doing parse/catch exception in my opinion.
> propagate further up the stack is exactly what you want to do

This is an important point imo. It is actually one of the ways you can describe to a non-programmer why it can be so hard to write typcial desktop software which never ever crashes (as in 'unhandled exception' dialog): huge amounts of time would be wasted to figure out for each and every single statement what can go wrong and how to handle it. Seriously, I've been at meetings where more time was spent on discussion on how to deal with/present to the user some obscure once-in-a-lifetime error than on actually fullfilling requirements.
Nope. Taxi drivers take home their fares. They aren't paid by the hour.
I lived near one of the asbestos super-sites that the EPA was still involved in monitoring. Back in the day it had been a huge asbestos mine. As far as I know, it was safe when I lived in the area but the health impacts were still being felt.

Graphene will see adoption, but will probably be halted at the first sign of asbestos like diseases. I can only imagine how hard it would be to dispose of products with graphene correctly.
I'm kind of bummed out that they didn't update the Voyage too. The Voyage still seems to be better but I don't want to buy an "old" model. I specifically waited for the next Kindle generation to update mine...
This would be a huge improvement, though it doesn't address a more fundamental issue: why should tech companies should have the power to bestow temporary residency on workers? This is an unusual aspect to a labor market, especially at this kind of scale.

The justification is that that there is a critical shortage of software developers (at any price? at market rate?) that threatens the US economy, so we should allow corporations to bestow "front of line" privileges on tech workers that other classes of immigrants don't get.

I don't buy it. Why wait a year, why not just award the green card the moment the immigrant shows up. And why require that the immigrant have a job offer from a tech company? In short, why not just let people immigrate, and allow them to enter the job market in response to market signals?

A dental hygenist earns about as much at the median in SF as a software developer. A registered nurse earns quite a bit more. Why not allow immigrants to choose those fields just like US citizens get to? Why force them to study tech fields and work even a year for disney in a tech role to get to come here?
....because they could have done this without an H-1B Visa program, and in fact, even in the hospitality service, they probably could move a lot of those jobs flat out overseas. Arguably the H-1B Visa program at least keeps the US labour market somewhat competitive with the overseas markets.

No, there are a bunch of problems here, but access to immigrant labour on domestic soil isn't really even near the top of my list.
Yes. It's possible to draw a straight line with a crooked stick.
Common Pitfalls When Using International Calling Cards
To voice your opinion, email guest.services@disneyworld.com.

This was the reply I received:

Dear Guest,

Thank you for contacting us regarding recent media reports about the information technology restructuring at Disney Parks.

We greatly value the contributions of our Cast Members. We take great pride in the fact that we have regularly been ranked as one of the best places to work in the United States, but we are always looking for ways to improve.

Contrary to the misleading impression conveyed by certain media outlets, our recent IT restructuring actually resulted in the expansion of our Disney Parks IT team and the net addition of 70 new IT jobs in the United States. That's in addition to the nearly 30,000 jobs we've added in the U.S. over the last 10 years. And all of our efforts are geared toward enhancing our ability to deliver the best possible experiences for our Guests.

We appreciate your feedback on this issue.

Sincerely,

Matthew Cooper
Guest Experience Services
Walt Disney World Resort
I have never ridden in a cab that didn't state the driver was an independent contractor.
> Is it? If this were to remain, the large majority of the drivers will not have a position to fill. It will not be viable.

It's simple supply and demand. The demand for easy-to-book, gps-enabled car rides is there. If uber cannot accommodate, someone else will.

>No one has 'pushed' anything. Drivers are consensually agreeing to drive because the pay they receive values their time.

People undervalue their labor in order to get the gigs they need to make money. Laborers consensually agreed to unsafe, 18 hour factory work back in the day, and indentured servants consensually agreed to years-long contracts of, effectively, their life.

If the only reason uber competes is due to price difference gained by eschewing labor laws and benefits, then of course drivers are agreeing to drive with them -- there is no other option for their labor when the competitors that provide benefits have to shrink operations due to demand shifting to illegally-sourced labor. That said, I don't think Uber is used due to their price so much as their technology.

>How are they not equipped?

I doubt many will afford commercial vehicle insurance, health insurance, 401Ks, in addition to substantially increased maintenance costs covered out of their own pocket. It will certainly make driving for uber undesirable. Of course, Uber covering these costs is far cheaper overall, and the price change would likely be negligible.

>What society needs is less people forcing them to do what others think is best.

This is just a stupid talking point.
Under the hood: Building Moments
And if Uber's entire business model is predicated on them avoiding taxes, then killing Uber doesn't matter to the IRS.

If most corporations can avoid taxes other than payroll, why would Uber be any different? They're a tech company! Their only expenses are HQ/on the ground labor, server/storage operating expenses, and whatever real estate they have in the US (with most of it in SF).
Not that it matters, but I'm not a libertarian.

There is no pushing of risks. There are inherent risks to any activity, be it crossing the road or driving for Uber.
Objective Europa
Why do we need to make it easy for people to come take our jobs? Why would we do that?
My name is Kasper Grubbe. But in the UK I go by the unfortunate name of Kasper Grub.
Most 'solutions' to this problem involve an open access revolution where researchers put their publications online on the arXiv or similar.

This is entirely possible but it doesn't address the need for journal subscriptions to access pre-existing articles. As I understand it, unless copyright law changes, if a researcher wants to read online a 1970s paper from Nature, their library has to subscribe to Nature forever (approximately), even if everything they produce from today onwards will be uploaded to github.

It seems the only time I'm ever on Springer or Wiley is to read some conference proceedings from 1992.
If I were you and in California I would ignore anything related to non-compete without feeling any need to modify it, as I heard from multiple sources that they're totally unenforceable: http://ymsllp.com/news-and-publications/with-limited-excepti... and also against the cultural spirit people actually believe in. It's as though that stuff weren't present at all.

If you're outside California, I would in your position look at how people actually behave, as well as the law. Possibly I would choose to read the non-compete literally and just do the right thing afterward. For example, I might choose not to take a competitive position for the period outlined in the contract, and instead do something slightly different. It's largely a moral thing, I think.

If the non-compete were very broad (no job on Earth for a period of 18 months after termination of employment) I would just ignore it; what are they going to sue me? They wouldn't care.

I don't think I would push back to modify non-compete clauses, and I certainly wouldn't do it in the way I mentioned for IP, however. It depends on jurisdiction. It's quite a cultural thing.
I haven't gotten much into Javascript yet, but is there any reason I would not terminate with semicolons? Without understanding which "certain cases" won't have them inserted automatically, relying on that feels like asking for trouble.
Awful blogspam devoid of any original thought. Besides, it is obvious, looking at the provided Mercator map, that Africa is at least twice the size of US and China, so the argument that Mercator somehow makes Africa appear much smaller is clearly bullshit. The only areas that Mercator distorts significantly are polar regions. You would have a point comparing Canada with Africa on Mercator map. However the US and China are close enough to equator that the area distortion is not very significant. The fact that a trash article like this already got 100 points makes me lose faith in this community.
If you are logged into Chrome and use `!g`, yes. You can even check it at https://history.google.com/history/

In the past that page would even discriminate searches made with DuckDuckGo. They recently redesigned the History page to fit their Material Design look.

I would hope that when I'm logged out, Chrome would not track me... And what about Chromium?
Move Over, Minimum Wage; Here’s Basic Income
i haven't seen an EPUB that calibre couldn't convert into a MOBI with less than good results.
Hm...did you pay to promote the page some time before?
I genuinely wonder what the quality of the training was. If I was being fired so the company could give my job to someone cheaper, and I had to provide training under threat of monetary loss, you'd better believe that I might forget a few key lessons.
I don't believe self driving cars will be practical in the next 10 years. Not at the level Uber would benefit.

I don't understand why self driving cars are good for Uber. Uber is successful right now due to he network effect of their drivers. Once self driving cars are a reality you will see numerous offers for this service with all of them racing to the bottom.

Bigger fish like Apple and Google would be able to siege them and starve them out as pricing races to the bottom. Uber is valuable because of their drivers, not despite their drivers. In the age of self driving cars - Uber won't be able to compete.
But if you increase the mass of the probe, you increase the cost of the whole mission. Bear in mind increasing the mass of the power system emans the lander needs more powerful thrusters, more fuel, stronger landing gear, etc. That's the tyranny of the rocket equation.

This could increase the cost of the mission by hundreds of millions of dollars, which means you'd lose the potentially hundreds of million of dollars worth of other science projects that money has been available for.

Whenever somebody suggests a solution to the problem that involved 'just' spending more money that's a red light, right there.
What does it say about what the Uber drivers think about "worker/labor protections" that they are willing to work without those protections of their own free will?

> society is screwed

Please elaborate.
Yawn.

I upgraded from a Paperwhite 1 to a Voyage because I thought the screen and haptic buttons would be improvements. I can barely see a difference in the screen quality when I'm deliberately looking (and don't notice any while reading), and the haptic buttons are poorly placed so I rarely use them. The Voyage is nice but was questionably worth the extra money over the Paperwhite 1. Now with the Paperwhite 3? Fuggetaboutit.

You know what feature would be a great improvement? A backlight without blue light, for reading at night without screwing up sleep cycles.

edit: clarified
Codesearch: indexing and performing regex searches over large bodies of code
You mean, worse answers here, right.
Well, what they say:

> If you distribute a product (whether software or hardware; whether free or for pay) that uses the LIVE555 library code, then you must - when requested by either a customer, or Live Networks, Inc. - upgrade it as soon as possible to use the latest version of the LIVE555 library code (or else provide a way for your customers to perform this upgrade themselves).

That's a very strained reading of the LGPL, but the way the LGPL is written, they must provide a way for customers to updgrade the LIVE555 code used to whatever version they want to, including the latest version. It doesn't have to WORK, necessarily, but the ability to replace LGPL code in a work with one's own code is part of the license.

TL;DR: I think they're wrong but not so far wrong as to be crazy, and what they insist on happening is a consequence of following the terms of the LGPL (customers being able to upgrade to the latest version).
> JS is more like a lisp with C syntax

Indeed, so the tale goes: Brendan Eich was originally going to make Scheme for the browser, but Netscape said their browser language had to look like Java, and that's how we wound up with this odd vaguely-functional browser language called Javascript.

In light of that, definitely seconded. Using Clojure (and watching Rich Hickey's amazing talks) made me a much better developer, and especially a better JS developer.

Somewhat relatedly, one thing I personally like about CoffeeScript is that it really lets the functional, Lisp-y side of Javascript shine through by melting away all the crufty syntax. That really helped me apply some of the style I picked up from Clojure.
Interesting enough, Tcl was one of the past's most versatile tools. We used it in agent-oriented programming in 90's where code could move from place to place to cut data bill. Sandboxes were built for it. Tcl was also used in AOLserver and a related web framework before that became a fad. So, the author's point that Tcl is an option for high-performance event driven apps was proven when the highest traffic site in the world ran on it. I think we have something better today in about every area due to inherent properties of Tcl and labor invested in other solutions. Yet, Tcl delivered plenty in the past, apparently still can, and has potential for people using that sort of thing.

The main potential, though, is portability and future-proofing. Tcl is so ridiculously simple that it's been implemented on about every OS and architecture. That's batteries included due to all the existing code and ActiveState's development tools. People can extend live apps, run shell scripts, configure networks, and so on all using the same (or a similar) language. Any change in underlying platform just requires porting the (simple) lower layers. Makes Tcl a powerful future-proofing option if used judiciously.
The traditional taxi market has been expanded due to Uber's low prices and liquidity. In SF Uber is reportedly doing 3-5x what all taxis were doing before.

Restricting supply and increasing the prices will forego the benefits of Uber.
at least now there's absolutely no need to ever touch amazon on a kindle. never know what the future brings, but i'm cautiously optimistic. the hardware itself is best in class; it's the macbook of e-readers.
> The law should be written that if you caught violating the terms and spirit of the h1-b visa program, you give up right to participate in h1-b sponsorships for x number of years.

Let's go a step further. If you are in gross violation of the H1-B program terms, you lose the right to participate permanently.

Incentives matter.
Can't the same driver provide rides using any other app besides Uber? Lyft, or some other guys that show up? He could have all the apps installed and hop between them, right?
Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for you because you have access to lots of food at prices you can easily afford. For a great many people, more and cheaper food means they can actually afford to get enough to eat.

Foods have been modified to stay fresher and be more nutritious. But you don't see them in stores.
Uber Drivers Are Employees, Not Contractors, California Labor Commission Rules
I am not sure if Cops will help.... any other way?
Completely unrelated;

My brother's father-in-law, while lecturing me how we younglings don't know nothing and have terrible education, insisted that Iran is in Africa and full of arabs.
I wish there were more details about the changes from the last paperwhite. From what I read, primarily it's a higher resolution display; the rest of the stuff on there seems like it could just be OS features that will be applied to old paperwhites as well.

Oddly enough, given that they have a higher resolution display, it does not appear that they've changed the smallest font size, which is something that I would definitely like to see. I can't help but wonder why they made that decision, when the smallest font is still noticeably larger than what you would find in a standard print book.
Agreed.

My best friend works at Cargill, and they're doing the same thing.

They get around the "outsourcing" rule by creating a Cargill office in India and then sending all the "business" to those offices instead of here. It's semantics, but its still outsourcing any way you look at it.

She's heartbroken because she's in the process of finalizing people's year-end reviews who are going to be laid off within the next few months. Cargill also makes it a policy you have to train your replacement or else you lose your severance. So here she is, writing up year end reviews that have no value at all, while training a new team that will replace her entire team here in in the US.

Not cool, not cool at all.
That's very interesting, I would be curious to know on average how much their seeds have returned so far, is the "1 startup out of 10 is a success" valid also for Y-combinator?
Ah, the "minify" bug: forcing people to put statement separators into a line oriented language.

Think of semicolons in JS like colons in BASIC: they let you stack multiple statements on a line. Then, go learn what the language REALLY thinks is the end of a statement, which is not "I put in a semicolon".

Too bad JS doesn't use (an explicit) backslash for line continuation, rather than guessing when a line/statement was done :-(
Of course there are still people who don't understand what repositories are and how they work. That's really a pity with such a big, well known project, because then others have to do that work for them. (And this kind of project usually has many repos because people don't talk to each other)

Example: https://github.com/hackeron/live555
I've owned every single small Kindle, since the Kindle 1, I think so far I've bought 4 Kindles including 2 PWs (1st gen, 2nd gen). They keep upgrading things that don't bother me. What I WANT them to upgrade is the software. Why can't I sort books by Genre? Or Tags? Or Series? Making Collections is a pain so I never use it. I've got hundreds of books and the sorting is rough. I'd like to be able to list #SpaceOpera, or #Mystery, #Vampire, etc. Having to be online to get book info sucks. Most books don't have descriptions so I can't pick a random free book I've downloaded and read the jacket to see if I'd enjoy it. I'd like an offline synopsis.
That is one perfectly fine way to do it. But that is exactly what i want to highlight. The generators. You can combine them with promises, callbacks, even the CSP channels. But you need the generator. That is where magic happens and no amount of library code will do that for you, one needs compiler support (or a macro...)
Oh, I agree that TryParse is much better than Parse for cases where parsing is expected to fail. But that doesn't detract from having better error handling capabilities in places where it is needed (e.g. i/o). A lot of the .NET i/o APIs will throw 4-5 different types of exceptions, and as the article states, you need to cross reference docs to see which exceptions are possible on certain calls. It's easy to forget or miss because compiler will not care.
Optimizing “Send More Money” in Racket
Good example. Minor nitpick, you listed 0.09 twice.
I guess it is similar as U.S pusing into the rest of world.
Not necessarily. As other people have pointed out, Uber's business model, margins, and valuation are based on shifting their costs onto their drivers (especially the capital costs of vehicles).

Switching to driverless raises the question of who owns the vehicles they'll be using, and if they're the ones owning the vehicles in their fleet that represents a major shift in capital expenses and ongoing maintenance costs.
I think that's the stage I'm at right now (or getting there). But what is the divide between "junior" and "senior/advanced" programmers? And what would help somebody (me) push across that boundary?
> If all the food producers decide to use the same cheapest ingredient, what help does labeling provide?

But in what world is that true? In any grocery store you can get food that is organic or non-organic, GMO or non-GMO, with sugar or sugar-free, with fat or fat-free, kosher or not kosher, vegan or non-vegan. We consumers have more food choices today than we've ever had in the past. To claim that "all food producers" will just "use the same cheapest ingredient" is a straw man.
> Your bogus rationalizations sound like you haven't held a software job working with other developers in twenty-five years, if ever.

Video codec people are kind of weird as developers. Consider ffmpeg and libav. They're certainly competent, just weird.
The Death Treatment
I believe you can still deduct work-related expenses. That's what Line 21 "Unreimbursed Employee Expenses" on the 1040A is for, if I'm reading the instructions correctly.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040sca.pdf
I have a friend at NICTA who is building a predictive tools that considers your bank activity as learning sets and classify you as adequate or not to receive a loan. Pretty much anything can be used to train a svm or the like:)
Why are you keeping password files on shared storage? Android's internal storage mechanism allows you to save files that are only readable from your application using Linux's user permissions model.

This looks like a PEBKAC rather than Android problem.
If you want to make that even less verbose, try myArray.map(...).filter(...) (those methods don't have to come from underscore, they exist on the Array prototype as of ES5).
I want more cpu and memory specs, I really like my kindle but it's extremely slow.
Whether the judgement is correct or not, they're appealing because it's in their best interest.