vmarsy

What position was this for?

Maybe they have a quota of new undergrad from a specific school per year (If they assume that every school they go to has at least X% of candidates) or an overall quota.

"no longer hiring fresh undergraduates for the Software Engineer position" might only be for your school for this year.

Also most companies would consider "fresh undergraduates" people graduating soon or who graduated less than 12 months ago so you still have time.

In general you don't want to spam a company for the same position, it's good to wait for 8-12 months before re-applying, so if your desired position usually accept fresh new-grad, you might want to retry before [your graduation date + 12 months] but after at least ~8 months.

> Given that this self-taught dev was given an interview

He isn't a fresh undegraduate, check out his linkedin, he seem to have around 2 years of Dev experience, and 3 of freelance. So he probably didn't fall in the "new grad" track.

WA state has strong protections and environmental standards, but I wouldn't consider it high tax (no income tax for instance). Is it an outlier?

> I wish dearly that I could just enter my own order on the POS system when I am in such places

Visit France. Not only the burger quality is much better there, but also you can order yourself on self serve POS systems for almost a decade. They're also implementing restaurants where your food gets brought to your table.

> Yet France’s trains cost much less.

Decades of expertise might be a reason here, France has the longest amount of (high speed rail miles / country area), and the non high-speed network is also huge. It's also possible that the monopoly of having only one, state-owned, railroad company (SNCF) let that company negotiate/choose better prices much more aggressively than if there was many companies. I don't think it was stupid at the time to have such a state-owned monopoly for building this key infrastructure.

Also I'd think that with that big of a network, some things start to become less costly because of economies of scale. Last April SNCF bought 30 trains to Alstom for 250m€, with the current US infrastructure I doubt the US needs that many trains. If one day like France they have 450 high speed trains, maybe it'll cost them less to have more built.

Japan and France are dense countries, the area of France is roughly equal to the area of Texas, it's hard to imagine 450 high speed trains there, where they're struggling to even get one high speed rail line between Houston and Dallas.

> Do these coffee machine vendors seek to use patents to protect their sales of coffee?

A couple years ago this was a debate in France, Nespresso lost but it was because of anti-competitive behavior[1]. There's apparently[2] plenty of 3rd party nespresso pods : around 50 brands worldwide.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/nespresso-open-sour...

[2] http://www.beveragedaily.com/Processing-Packaging/Coffee-cap...

I found this Scientific American (from 2011? based on comments) article discussing the paper for those who don't have time to read the pdf : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

> Instead of drinking more, the crew were drinking less in the long run when getting more salt. So where was the excreted water coming from? “There was only one way to explain this phenomenon,” Dr. Titze said. “The body most likely had generated or produced water when salt intake was high.”

That's odd, what if simply a high-level of sodium reduces your perspiration? Wikipedia[1] says "The volume of water lost in sweat daily is highly variable, ranging from 100 to 8,000 mL/day." so between 0.1 and 8 liters per day! [2] even says 10 to 12 liters per day!

If on average over a long period the subjects drank let's say exactly 1 liter per day and peed strictly more than 1 liter of water, then I'd agree with what this Dr. said, but neither this nytimes article, nor the 2 papers mentioned [3][4] mention the word perspiration or sweat in their abstracts/summaries, why not?

Off-topic: Did nytimes.com made it hard on purpose to select text from their article? On Chrome and Firefox I can't select text easily, only Edge lets me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspiration

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267797/

[3] https://www.jci.org/articles/view/88530

[4] https://www.jci.org/articles/view/88532

Very interesting article

> Finally, and most critically, there is complete price transparency because everybody can see the prices everyone else charges just by looking at those big signs. If we take away any one of those facts, the whole thing will generally fall apart on its own. For example, if firms could somehow secretly discount and steal market share from their rivals, they have a significant incentive to do that and so on. ...

This is why many big retailers use consumers as a watchdog, typically with offers like "we guarantee you the lowest price, if you find cheaper elsewhere, we'll give you back the difference times 2!". That way consumers think the retailer is having their back and protecting them when actually they prevent other retailers from lowering prices by keeping the market share. Consumers should not tolerate that bullshit and go with the lowest retailer in the first place and realize that they're being used to rat on the cheaper retailer... but there's a good incentive to get the difference * 2.

I'm not sure I get what these multi-use paths roads look like. If by "finely crushed gravel" you mean loose gravel, I would understand why cyclists don't use it.

Maybe it'd be fine for Mountain bikes (but then definitely not fine for the pedestrians receiving pieces of gravel on them), but for regular city bikes with a small tire, this would not be a suitable road.

The European Union is often made fun of with "the Americans innovate, the EU regulates", but in the meantime GDPR[1] is coming into force in 2018

> The primary objectives of the GDPR are to give citizens and residents back control of their personal data

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regu...

> I choose 64-bit integers, but strings would do fine as well.

No it would not.

Sorting 64 bits integers in a vector is fast obviously since they are stored contiguously in memory, so you get to benefit from all the caching layers (L1, L2, L3, TLB) nicely.

Since string are of unknown size, the actual string content is stored somewhere in the heap and reference it via a pointer [1]. If you have a vector of strings, to compare string i and string j, you will need to make those 2 pointers dereference , which will jump to 2 random memory locations.

With the hash table you already pay for 1 indirection, which is really what is slow here. With a vector<string> you now also need to pay for 1 indirection, so the performance compared to a vector<int> would be very different.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42049778/where-is-a-stds...

Pretty interesting : The highest score I've been able to find right now, apart from the extreme examples, is 49.6% success, 5.3% flag ... with the title "Predicting Hacker News article success with neural networks and TensorFlow".

Did the author chose that title on purpose? :)

It's fun to try a title, and then add "Ask HN:" or "Show HN:" in front of it and see the probability change dramatically, or remove the (YC ...) from the extreme examples and see the prediction change.

That's an interesting report. The table only has 15 districts, but it looks like the best area against NPEs is Northern Illinois, and Northern California, with only a 13% success rate (vs. 48% success rate in EDTX)

Texas Southern only has the lowest success rate for NPE (9%), but the median damages is $58m, compared to only $5m and $6m for the California and Illinois.

It would be interesting to see the data for All district courts in the US. In those 15, California Northern looks the best in term of outcomes if you're likely to be at the mercy of NPEs, but I wonder how it compares to lets say Oregon, Western Texas, or Western Washington.

It seems to be a bad deal specifically for other countries companies which do businesses in the US. If you're incorporated in another country, I feel that patent Trolls can decide the state they want in the US to sue you about US law patent infringement on US territory. To protect itself a foreign company would need a local branch in the right state

Kreuz market (also in Lockhart) also opened another kreuz market in Bryan, TX. That's a shorter distance from Dallas/Houston

Yeah, except for

> and a rich culture open to differences & innovation.

Maybe Canada is the only one checking all of it?

You're right the telecom has this particularity of not being a "open market" with these big government regulations and bids for frequencies etc.

As the sibling comment points out : "Nothing's stopping Newber from showing up with a shiny new app and undercutting both". As long as this statement stays true (i.e Lyft/Uber don't abuse their dominant position to prevent competitors to enter the market), then the market should be healthy. I'm not convinced they would though.

You're describing a "race to the bottom" those 2 competing producers would participate in. But we all know that when there's a quasi-monopoly with only 2/3 big players, they would "cooperate" to maintain the high prices.

Phone providers are a good example of this: In France for many years there was phone providers with extremely high prices: 50, 60, or even 70 euros per month for unlimited plans. They were all telling how their prices were fair, that they need infrastructure investments, etc etc. Then came a disrupting player: 'Free', who started charging 20 euros per month for the unlimited plans. Immediately, the 3 other players started offering 20-25 euros unlimited plans as well. The infrastructure hasn't suffered from this, 4G came as expected, and Free is now one of the major players.

What would happen in your example, is, unless a 'Free' equivalent shows up, is that they would all charge something around $19.

mods, the original title should be preserved, currently it is : "U of Houston discovers catalyst that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen"

But the original title is : "UH Researchers Report New, More Efficient Catalyst for Water Splitting"

catalyst for water splitting aren't new. the article even says it :

>The catalyst, composed of ferrous metaphosphate grown on a conductive nickel foam platform, is far more efficient than previous catalysts, as well as less expensive to produce.

Your link doesn't work, it shows "An error occurred while processing your request.". Could you provide a "BibTeX reference" or equivalent?

[1] and [2], both citing the original paper as a source, show that Carbonated water was part of their experiments.

Not only that, but they also tested against degassed carbonated beverage, which is clearly stated on the "RESULTS" section of the abstract.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14352563

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14352725

Your [2] link point "ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2008/01/ftc-c..." (see link address) which just shows the press releases page.

I don't remember where I read it (probably on a HN post or comment) but there was a great suggestion regarding organization chart. Instead of doing one only when you scale from 10 to 20 people like this article suggests, the idea was to do one on day 1.

On day 1 every position from CEO, CFO, to mail delivery messenger is filed with one or 2 names: the founder(s). As the company grows, you hire people and start delegating the work so that they can fill the positions on the organization chart.

Some states are starting to move in that direction too,like Washington state but this isn't as strong as California :

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/scaled-back-bill-aimed-providi...

Apparently Google and labor unions supported the original bill, but the article says that's not the case for Amazon and Microsoft

The scaled back bill removed those points:

> Make noncompetition agreements void if the employee is a temporary or seasonal employee, or is terminated without just cause or laid off.

> Create a rebuttable presumption that agreements restricting competition for more than one year after termination of employment or for employees who are not executives are unreasonable.

> Make noncompetition agreements with independent contractors void

Thanks for the link. The original post is unreadable on my Android tablet as you can't zoom. Other comments here mention the threat to the first ammendment, I find the one about the 4th as relevant to today:

    The fourth amendment protects the per-
    sons, houses, papers, and effects of in-
    dividuals against unreasonable searches and
    seizures by the Federal Government.
    ● Fourth amendment issues may develop
    from:
    —the use of personal and statistical
    data contained in automated informa-
    tion systems as a justification for
    search and seizure;
    —the search and seizure of information
    per se as personal property, particular-
    ly in electronic form; and
    —the use of automated information sys-
    tems as a tool for search and seizure
    operations.

All the other issues are depressing, the 6th amendment issue is that computer models could be used to predict juror behaviors. What is described as a threat to constitutional rights is depicted as cool in the current TV show "Bull"

That's a very thorough report overall, it evens mentions the issue with software patents:

    The concern that continuing uncertainty about
    copyright and patent protection for
    computer software is significantly im-
    pairing software R&D and innovation.

Yes, but also others have tried and have not gone back (yet?) like GendBuntu[1]. Munich was about 15,000 computers [2], GendBuntu is 70,000.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

[2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/linuxs-munich-crisis-crunch-vot...

Bill gates is a famous example, with many cans per day : https://www.inverse.com/article/22652-bill-gates-diet-coke-s...

I think the parent is referring to this: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36772303

> Artificial sweeteners can boost appetite by activating hunger pathways in the body, scientists have found in animals.

> In fruit flies and mice, the mismatch between sweet taste and fewer calories sends the body into "feed me" mode, the journal Cell Metabolism reports. But UK nutritionists say this does not mean the same is true in humans.

What does that heat map achieve? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to show the raw billions per state. Instead it'd be interesting to see the $/population in those states. Because otherwise you'll obviously see a lot of money going to highly populated states like CA and TX.

For instance it would show that CA and TX receive about the same amount of money, but Alabama receives 85% more money than California per inhabitant

Yeah, it could make sense apply it to only "non resident for tax purposes" (i.e. People filling a 1040NR)

As other comments mentioned, a tax like this should also affect rich citizens who similarly contribute to vacant houses, so to actually solve the problem I guess it should affect all property owners