surrealize

The bus doesn't necessarily go where I want to go, when I want to go there. Uber/Lyft do. At scale, they can do both demand-dispatching and ride-aggregation.

> There is no reason a well administered city government couldn't do all of this.

It would be great if they did, but I'm surely not holding my breath for everyone to get a well administered city government. In the hypothetical that we're discussing (uber/lyft usage that's high enough for most rides to be aggregated) the cost of using uber/lyft would be much lower per-rider. In that world, cities would be better off giving residents subsidies for private ride-hailing use.

As long as there's a competitive market with multiple entrants, the cities wouldn't be at the mercy of the private corps. The concrete benefit of the private companies is much more competent technology development, and the option to switch if they're not giving you what you want.

> Not "everyone." Just people with smartphones at the moments when they happen to have smartphones with them.

"Everyone" was the premise of the comment I was replying to. But seriously, smartphone penetration is quite high. And how many smartphone users don't carry their phone with them when they go out?

Buses aren't a good choice for "everyone" either--they only help people whose trips align with bus lines and schedules.

> There is no way a transportation system that revolves around everyone getting into cabs is going to match that sort of efficiency.

If _everyone_ used lyft line/uber pool, the vehicles could be larger and more efficient. Uber/Lyft know where people are going; at scale ("everyone") they can aggregate rides more extensively.

> Apple supporting Vulkan on macOS and iOS wouldn't do anything to expose a new GPU API to the web. They are totally orthogonal.

The web GPU API and the lower-level API aren't "totally orthogonal" if you're using the Metal shader language in your web GPU API! You're trying get web authors to use (a part of) Metal! It's totally not orthogonal.

Thanks for following up. I found the hashmap example; it was from April 2013. I think that might have predated the Entry API. The code had ~ sigils! After failing to insert in the None arm, I tried rewriting it with find_or_insert and insert_or_update_with. Entry seems cleaner though.

Thanks for the clarification about the second case not being solved by NLL. Those examples were the ones I had in my mental "code I would like the borrow checker to accept" bucket.

Would Niko's proposals in that internals thread you linked ("Accepting nested method calls with an `&mut self` receiver") eliminate the need for the temporary in that second example?

The first time I wanted a NLL, I did a hash lookup, matched on the option that came back, and wanted to insert into the hash in the None match arm. Since then I think they've added convenience methods for getting or inserting. I still hope that IndexAddAssign (which would have addressed my use case) becomes an overloadable operator someday.

Recently I was parsing a line-oriented, whitespace delimited file and had to introduce a temporary ("line", below):

    let f = File::open(path)?;
    let reader = BufReader::new(f);
    for line_result in reader.lines() {
        let line = line_result?;
        let mut word_iter = line.split_whitespace();

because I think something didn't live long enough when I did line_result?.split_whitespace(). I forget exactly what the code was like before I got it past the borrow checker, though.

For me, it seems like every time I dip a toe into rust I run into borrow/NLL issues right off the bat.

"A work in progress, consisting of a hypertext book and a metablog that comments on it."

Sounds like HN to me.

Human drivers who generally do a decent job still have bad days. They still get tired and distracted. They still can't see 360 degrees around them all the time.

Each new human driver also has to be trained from scratch; when we're starting out, we're dangerous, all of us. An experienced human can't download their knowledge into a new driver telepathically. But software (including AI models trained with data from millions of road miles) can be copied into new cars, no problem.

> It's actually harder to drive on the typical American roadways than it is to be on a track.

Highway driving is relatively easy to automate, compared to driving on surface streets with pedestrians, bicycles, etc. Even if self-driving only worked on the highway, it'd still free up a huge amount of time for a lot of commuters. That'd be worth it even if self-driving cars didn't improve the accident rate.

Argh, this should work:

https://chm.tbe.taleo.net/chm03/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?...

Thanks for letting me know.

There's a nice Scientific American article that reviews the literature:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-make...

Pacific Biosciences (http://www.pacb.com/) | Front-end engineer | San Francisco or Menlo Park, CA | ONSITE

We make a DNA sequencing instrument (you put in a biological sample and get back strings of ACTGs). We're looking for help with our Angular 2/Typescript web interfaces. One interface is on the instrument itself (it has a touchscreen that runs full-screen chrome), and the other is a web page that customers use to run analyses on the data that comes off of the instrument. Both are single-page apps that talk to our backends over JSON APIs.

We launched a new instrument late last year, and we're growing. Many of our users are labs that do biological research, but there are also some human clinical use cases that our technology is a good fit for. So we're working with a partner to get the instrument ready for clinical use as well.

We're a very interdisciplinary company; there's serious physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science going on. There are so many different kinds of nerd jokes, I can't even tell you.

The interview process is a phone screen, a coding challenge, and an on-site interview. Here's the job listing:

https://chm.tbe.taleo.net/chm03/ats/careers/v2/applyRequisit...

If you have questions you can also email me at mskinner at our domain.

There was some discussion about potentially using a SAT solver for cargo in this issue:

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/2064

and graydon wrote a POC of using the Z3 solver to find a solution where semver constraints were satisfied, optimizing for the latest versions within those constraints:

https://github.com/graydon/z3-rs/blob/master/tests/semver_te...

I was wondering the same thing. Just speculating about possible mechanisms: if the different colors have different particle sizes, then they'll move at different speeds. So if you modulate the strength and duration of the charge that you apply, I think you'd have some control over which colors end up at the front of your pixel.

I don't know how you'd do different shades of 3/4 colors though.

I applaud the effort, but I'm skeptical that building enough additional housing is politically feasible in San Francisco.

San Francisco has its head twisted the wrong way on this issue more than just about any place else. A lot of people here will deny, with a straight face, that supply and demand is real or that it's a relevant lens for understanding the affordability problem. When you're faced with magical thinking like that, what can you do? And it's not just SF either, it's the peninsula too.

Rather than trying to push additional homebuilding at the local level, I think it's more important to work at the state level. When we include the whole state, we include all the people that are being excluded from the core expensive areas. People like the firefighter who commutes from Roseville to Palo Alto[0] have a vote at the state level, but not in bay area local elections. That may make the necessary change more politically feasible at the state level.

And some of the relevant legislation exists at the state-level and needs to be fixed there. For example, we should tweak the CEQA so that a few NIMBYs can't simply veto new development.

[0] http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/04/07/in-search-of-cheaper-hou...

Okay, can we agree that lendup helps people who repay, and doesn't help people who don't? Relative to existing payday loan services.

It looks like it's comparable for a first-time borrower, as you say, and then gets better as you build a history of repayment with them.

I haven't used payday loan services myself, but from what I've read, I have an easy time believing that incumbents in that market don't use their own borrower repayment information very effectively.

Previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845301

I've been really looking forward to this, because tree style tabs are the main thing keeping me on firefox. But now it looks like in-window sidebar extensions aren't going to be possible.

Donald Trump is going to save us from self-interested billionaires?

This isn't a story about how the political power of billionaires is failing, it's a story about one billionaire winning against some other billionaires. The underlying problem of wealth inequality and its effect on the political system remains.

Awww, they took it down. It was a pretty cool video IMO. There was a curse word in it, but I thought it was totally justified.

Also: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Flyweb

In fengwick3's comment, "vicarious" modifies "account". Assuming "account" refers to the linked article, then it's first-hand, and not vicarious. fengwick3's (or your or my) experience of the judicial system through the linked article might be vicarious, but the article itself wasn't.

Sorry for the pedantry!

Pretty sure this is a first-hand account. The author experienced the judicial system directly, as a juror. Then he wrote this first-hand account. If you told someone else about it, that would be second-hand.

I had the same thought. The article does mention pumped hydro storage though. And for that, watts (the capacity of the turbines/generators) is a relevant figure of merit just as watt-hours (the capacity of the reservoir) is. The article does use watts kind of indiscriminately, though.

True. You do have to generate hypotheses before you can use them to drive studies, though. Those statistical associations enable the detailed studies by telling them where to look.

People have taken different approaches to this in bioinformatics for numbering intervals of dna bases in chromosomes. I think this approach is catching on, though. In that realm, it's important to speak unambiguously about insertions and deletions, and the "interbase" mental model makes it a lot clearer.

edit: Probably the most popular genome browser, based at UC Santa Cruz, uses this zero-based, half-open numbering internally. But, at some point in the past, biologists developed an expectation that numbering would be 1-based. So the Santa Cruz genome browser actually adds 1 to the start position of everything for display purposes.

The recent NYT story also reminded me of this older Yegge rant, which touches on amazon:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

> My stress level began approaching what I might call "Amazon levels", and I don't even work there anymore. Thank God.

> [...] my brother Mike, who was in the Navy on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf during the 1990s Gulf War, and later worked at Amazon, and declared after four years that Amazon was _way_ more stressful

> [...] astonishingly, we actually managed to launch at least half those crazy ideas, by burning through people like little tea lights.

> Last year, during all-hands, a very high ranking Executive said

> My mentor, an Executive

> most Amazonians and especially Executives

Who capitalizes "Executive" in the middle of a sentence? A middle manager who idolizes Executives, apparently.

It reads like the author has drunk the company kool-aid.

I don't think I did. Security is obviously not a black-and-white thing, and my words "on par" and "close" are entirely consistent with a shades-of-grey view.

Nonetheless, the posterior distribution shifts based on new evidence.

Are you making a claim about which one is more secure? I'm genuinely curious about how they stack up against one another. pdf.js is obviously managed code, which I'm sure helps. But it also seems like it has less person-power behind it, now and historically. Do you agree with that perception? Why or why not?

PDFium wins on functionality and performance; I thought pdf.js won on security but this vulnerability makes me wonder. If PDFium and pdf.js are on par (or even close) security-wise, in my view that tilts the tradeoff toward PDFium.

pdf.js was a pretty cool hack, but I wonder if it's time to integrate pdfium.

edit: I meant "hack" in the "cool application of technology" sense.

> every time a cyclist stops, they lose kinetic energy and have to work harder upon starting off in order to accelerate and restore that kinetic energy.

Please. When you choose to ride a bicycle, expending energy is part of the bargain. And part of the point! Stopping means that you're getting more of that exercise that you're so smug about.