esilver

I agree. The typography and page layout are gorgeous.

Funny you should ask, I’m actually in the process of applying to the online CS degree completion program at CSU Monterrey Bay at this very moment. To my knowledge it’s the only online CS bachelors offered in either the CSU/UC system. [0]

If you’re a resident of California qualifying should not be an issue. See “State-based admission limitations” on the admissions requirements page if you’re a resident of another state as you may not qualify. [1]

I recommend reaching out to Kayla Rolicheck, the program advisor, to see how you qualify or if you have questions about the program. She’s been with the program since its inception and is very knowledgeable. [2]

Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have other questions about the process. I’m by no means an expert but if I can be helpful I’m happy to answer any questions. I’ll leave a link to my email in my profile.

[0] https://csumb.edu/scd/cs-online-degree-completion-bs [1] https://csumb.edu/scd/admissions-requirements [2] tel: +1(831)582-3621; press 3 for the program

That's the difference. In an autonomous urban driving environment a monitor is expected to have full situational awareness at all times because driving in cities is a hugely complex process. A truck driving 1,100 miles on I-80 would not need to be monitored as closely, if at all, because that driving process is far simpler. This kind of highway driving accounts for the majority of over-the-road freight.

"Monitor" might be a misnomer, here, in that the monitor isn't expected to be actively watching what the truck is doing; rather the monitor would be expected to respond to infrequent issues and maybe handle off-highway driving to and from shipping and receiving facilities.

What drivers are paid for a given load reflects market conditions like e.g., weather, truck availability, and load availability, more than anything else.

Automating large parts of the driving process would make the job easier and more desirable. More people would be willing to work as monitors, which would increase truck availability and lower rates.

There’s also the possibility that a monitor could do other work while the truck drove. Team drivers already do this; the passive driver occupies herself when not driving by reading or even dispatching other loads.

Local drivers. They follow a different process than long-haul drivers do and are way more likely to unload their own trucks.

If it were as simple as pushing a button a monkey could fit the bill. Or maybe a pigeon. [0]

The monitor would be in place to manage the last-mile driving and any other technically-challenging aberrations on the route. Human skill and judgement would still be required, just for much shorter periods.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

The arrangement I described above assumes no need for active monitoring for long-distance driving. It is the most monotonous and least technically-complex part of the process and the driver would be free to do other things during it.

It’s not the same process as the autonomous urban driving being attempted by Waymo et al. Driving from Phoenix to Dallas on the highway is far simpler than driving around Phoenix.

Some drivers have to unload their trucks depending on the load and the receiver. For multiple LTL (less-than-truckload) loads the driver might stop at multiple facilities and unload a handful of pallets at each.

This would be more likely for smaller-format discount retail like, e.g., the Dollar Store or a restaurant supply chain.

It would be wholly dependent on the load and the technical implementation.

In my view the monitor would be a driver with standard knowledge and experience who could drive if the autonomous system encountered an edge case or for last-mile, i.e., from the freeway to the shipping or receiving facility.

Under those circumstances a load traveling ten hours with six hours of loading and unloading time would require two hours of active work and fourteen hours of standby.

Any driver would accept a lower rate for this kind of arrangement.

The driver shortage is a legitimate crisis and was the cause of huge rate increases last year. Driving a truck is a difficult job and fewer people are choosing it as a career path. [0]

“Regulatory constraints” refers to FMCSA’s hours-of-service rules, the legal limit to how many hours a driver may operate a truck in a given day. [1]

[0] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/576752327/trucking-industry-s...

[1] https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...

The in-vehicle monitor will likely be a standard part of autonomous and semi-autonomous trucking for the foreseeable future.

A monitor can be paid less than a driver, as they’re doing less work, and can respond to onsite issues more promptly and accurately than could a remote one.

> I'm an olive producer in Portugal.

I love this community.

Interesting. This comment, along with the one above, made me wonder whether a detailed analysis of this behavior has been undertaken. Pew's Payday Lending in America [0] series of reports is helpful and there are many, many analyses of the impacts of credit cards on spending. I could find nothing on instant deposit payment tools, however.

[0] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

You may have a point; workers could start living instant deposit to instant deposit instead of paycheck to paycheck. But I don’t think this is as likely.

I’m inclined to think workers who would have turned to payday lenders in the past to pay for groceries or a cell service bill might instead wait until after their next work day to initiate an instant deposit. It’s easier to do so in an app than it is to visit a payday lender, after all.

Doing away with fixed-duration pay periods may help workers better respond to unplanned expenses and sidestep usurious payday lenders.

I would be especially interested in seeing banks offer or partner with services like these as a way of helping unbanked low-income workers access financial services.

It’s a handy comparison in that most adults used to smoke in bed before going to sleep and first thing when they woke up. Sound familiar?

> These demonstration microgrids are delivering a reported utility bill savings of 20 percent to 60 percent, primarily in avoided demand charges, and some have successfully islanded during power outages.

Super promising. Especially considering how many parts of the state face zero power this summer when PG&E tapers transmission in fire-prone areas [0, 1].

Not that power is normally that reliable in rural parts of the state. I had a friend in rural Sierra county who would regularly experience intermittent black-outs. If the line running down the canyon to Sierra City (pop. 221) was knocked out by a fallen tree it could take a day or two for PG&E to restore power.

[0] https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/emergency-preparedness/natu...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-es-radical-plan-to-prevent-w...

A year ago I stopped going to Whole Foods and started buying packaged foods at Trader Joe’s and produce at Berkeley Bowl. My food spending halved.

Trader Joe’s, Aldi, Lidl, and to a lesser-extent Costco, are revolutionizing the grocery business in much the same that Walmart and the A&P did. Except they sell high-quality store brands and offer fewer, better choices to customers with less in-store cruft.

Americans spend a smaller proportion of their income on food now than they did a generation ago; roughly 10% now compared to 17.5% in 1960 [0]. It’s exciting to imagine that average falling to 5%.

And it’s even more exciting to imagine other consumer spending categories falling relative to income, e.g., transportation and housing.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...

I think they meant in terms of population and, transitively, users of infrastructure.

California (39.5 MM) will likely be “larger” than Texas (28.7 MM) for some time, despite a much lower growth rate.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/estimate...

Merced to Bakersfield will probably be the fastest-growing corridor in the state for the foreseeable future, however, the state received HSR funding contingent on the development of a San Francisco to Los Angeles route.

It’s completely unsurprising that the Department of Transportation wants the funding back after the state downsized the project from nationally-significant to regionally-significant.

There are substantial margins to be had in over-the-road freight. The launch of the Amazon Freight platform last week is a clear indication Amazon knows this.

Managing an enormous seller marketplace is almost as fraught as shopping on one. I can understand why Amazon wants to act as the broker in every aspect of the retail transaction. As a third-party broker you’re shielded from much of the liability while reaping much of the benefit.

Unfortunately, third-party brokers are limited in the kinds of interventions that first-parties can bring to bear during a service failure. Walmart, Target, et al., can fix a wayward transaction much more quickly and cheaply than Amazon can by virtue of maintaining many well-staffed warehouses, i.e., stores.

I love this concept. Many HN clients take for granted that the user wants to do away with the site’s styling. I like the minimal interface.

One request: Make it possible to filter out sources. I never look at stories that have, e.g., Medium, The New York Times, or The Guardian as their source. Let me filter those out.

Important to point out that the linked article, in addition to being highly-informative and well-researched is also an exemplary application of type design worthy of emulation.

If you’re running a SAAS business you can admire it; if you publish a blog or editorial site by all means copy it.

We’re living in a moment in which the Shenzhen industrial complex can give us technical wonders at very low material cost. The total social cost, however, is still being measured.

Bloomberg is paywalled so I wasn’t able to read much of the linked article; Reuters, however, wrote about Don Quixote in August 2018 [0].

Interesting retailing concept. I do wonder if Japanese consumers will ever tire of the novelty. Then again, 29 years of growth might suggest otherwise.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-don-quijote/japans-...

I’m not certain Twitter can be fixed.

I’ve opted-out by deleting my account and choosing not to visit the Twitter site. I’ve done the same with Facebook following the same principle. I won’t suggest that my decision had no costs; I miss out on conversations I could learn from and have to be more intentional about reaching out to people in my network. But the costs are far outweighed by the benefits: less frustration, less anxiety, less FOMO.

I highly recommend opting-out to anyone who’s become fed up with the platforms, their conduct or policies, or the way they are made to feel using their products.

My guess would be that the ravens demonstrate effective scavenging behavior to the wolf pups. Interestingly, both wolves and ravens engage in observational learning of food acquisition behaviors [0].

I think most of us would assume that wolf pups have an innate scavenging ability; this is probably wrong.

[0] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/aff0/dca479ca58868890d903cd...

I think it’s largely dependent on the parameters of the problem. The researchers noted the significance of the distance between the reward, the first tool, and the second tool.

My guess is most humans run two quick analyses: 1) what is the cost of seeing if the short tool can be made to work and 2) what is the cost of retrieving the more distant long tool using the short tool. Human/primate efforts would seem to begin with tool use before escalating to metatool use.

All seven of the New Caledonian crows in the experiment engaged in metatool use on their first attempt; only some of them successfully retrieved the second tool but none of them trialed simple tool use.

Corvids don’t just have the capacity for making and using tools but also metatool use, i.e., using one tool on another [0]. In this respect their cognition apparently exceeds many species of primates.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...

You highlight an important point. China is an aspiring regional and global hegemon and the Europeans are learning what that might mean for them materially and otherwise.

I don’t doubt the United States could hold its own in a rebalanced international order but I’m less optimistic about the Europeans and even less so about our allies in East Asia.