jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
there is very little safety net in America to ensure anyone is fed at all once they are unemployed.

Everything I have read and experienced suggests this is not true.

You may be unaware of it if you have never been desperately poor. A lot of the food aid available to the poor in the US is handled very quietly because it's done by local organizations trying to take care of the local people who actively want to avoid letting predatory vagabonds know where they can get a free handout.

I have read in the past that America would look a lot better on paper if we counted emergency food stores as part of our assets in the same way European countries typically do.

Decades ago, I read about a study that indicated that only one half one percent of Americans qualified as "poor" by the standards of people in India when based on metrics like food access.

I have read that most housed Americans get three meals a day and most homeless Americans only get two meals a day. There are places in the world where two meals a day would be pretty good food security.

I'm sure we are facing some very real challenges. I'm not convinced that America is as precariously positioned as some people seem to think.

I see comments in this discussion indicating that people who have known serious privation are fairly unperturbed. I think the people freaking out are mostly comfortably well off who think giving up a few comforts is a nightmare scenario.

I'm all for actively promoting information for how to feed yourself cheaply while we actively forbid a lot of people from going to work. Cooking from scratch is a terrific way to both save money and give yourself something constructive to do so you aren't going stir crazy and heading for going postal.

But there are many Preppers in this country who already had a year or more of stored food and the things I'm hearing suggest hoarding is being done in a bizarre pattern that suggests a lot of upper class emotional BS is going on.

According to the research in Diet for a Small Planet, at the time the book was written, every country had the means to feed their people. Famine was due to political and social forces, not due to absolute lack of food supplies.

More recently, I have read of cases where food aid sat on the docks rotting because the whole reason people were starving was due to civil war. The food aid was de facto intended to feed people who were more or less being intentionally starved out and the people in power absolutely weren't going to give them free food from other countries.

Venezuela was in a real world of hurt before covid19. They were hunting wild donkeys and breaking into zoos to steal the animals from zoos. They are going to see terrible problems.

The US doesn't have to. We need to figure out what works so we can avoid unnecessary hardship.

A lot of people are working on it. We aren't just sitting here idly waiting for the four horsemen of the apocalypse to show up.
The article seems to apply to one hospital. Extrapolating that to the entire country seems an exaggeration at best.

Though that being said, it seems that Italy still has a lot of pending cases still (that is, that have not been discharged or ended otherwise).
distractions AND lack of clear path to clear benefit. You can craft arrows forever, because you clearly know that this will benefit you immensely: you'll get food and you like getting food. It will even make you a perfectionist because you don't want your weapon to break, fail, miss on you. You'll make it stiff, sharp, easy to handle.. it's almost not work it's protopleasure.

That's why primitive life is somehow easier[0] than modern life, you own your struggles. Here, it's dilluted in space, time and society. You have to negotiate, compromise, wait, be a cog in an absurd machine, swallow others belief and limits.. it wears you off

[0]hyperbole
Jeebus, I agree. There’s a lot in there that I’d never pass in a code review.

There’s no tests, either. As in, if those were in place it would be an arduous but straightforward task to deobfuscate the mess and make sure the tests pass.
Doctors make calls like that all the time. It may not be worth it to expend resources on a patient with low survival likelihood. It may not even be in the patient’s best interest.
My personal trick fwiw is to treat it just like exercise.

If you're just starting out running, you shouldn't say "ok I'm gonna run a marathon". That might be your end goal, but the actual achievable goal in the meantime is to make incremental progress.

Schedule (yes, actually put on your calendar) time to engage in focused work. Start with 5 minutes a day. You won't get any actual deep work done at first, but that's fine. It's about building the muscle. Add 5 minutes a day, or every other day if you're struggling. It quickly adds up - you'll be at an hour within 2 weeks if you make steady progress.

If you fail to achieve your goal, note it and try again tomorrow. If you repeatedly fail, subtract 5 minutes and keep at that level until you're comfortable with adding more time.

Much like exercising, this small incremental progress is also something you may have to fall back on when you lose track of it for awhile.
I have, I was being flippant.

Headlights in your face are not a very good way to keep track of traffic, neither is a complete absence of light where a car should be though. An optimal solution would probably be something that prevented getting blinded by oncoming headlights while still retaining enough visual cue to be able to perceive that a car is headed towards you and to track its position.
>it would be limited to your individual contractual obligations as the owner of an airline ticke

Interfering with a contractual relationship is a tort. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
Ever since I was a kid, the concept of a seven day week threw me. Way back then I came up with a ten day week, three weeks a month, 13 months a year, and five non-month "holidays" calendar in my head. The five non-month holidays were (if I recall correctly) summer and winter solstice, spring and fall equinox, and New Year's Day.

I never could get around the 1/4 day problem, and still had to account for leap years with a sixth non-month day every four years. It was a fun thought experiment as a teenager interested in math and science though.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.

In practice, there is no legal construct that cannot be employed to the advantage of the party that can hire better lawyers. In the battle of ironclad patent versus fully funded legal war chest, the latter wins.

The implication of my post, in context, was that the patent system does not accomplish that idealistic purpose. And indeed, the article itself says that most actual innovation avoids patents. I interpret this as the network of innovators recognizing the flaws in the system and routing around them.
I'm willing to bet that a majority of demo coders were using Pascal because they started learning with Denthor (which was Pascal) and didn't know any other language! Meta.
There is no doubt that it would be costly to add real-time tracking and telemetry. However planes going missing is also very expensive.

I have to wonder if airlines would be more accepting of the costs of monitoring equipment if they paid for search and rescue themselves instead of relying on governments to cover the costs. A classic case of privatizing profits and nationalizing costs.
I have to restart my Nexus 4 more than once a day. Either I don't hear the other party or they hear pure static. And here I thought I was buying a quality device.
I haven't seen any evidence that people here are "pro-piracy" but concerning your first paragraph I'll argue one reason for why many software developers may not be terribly thrilled with the current notion of "intellectual property".

The majority of software developers are employees of corporations. As such they typically receive only a small fraction of the economic benefit derived from the value they create. The current economic system simply does not allocate benefits proportionally to created value. This fact will worsen as technology continues to increase the efficiency of labor. By the 20's millions of people will be losing their jobs to automation (probably not programmers, that will take a few more decades) and labor, the primary mechanism society has for distributing wealth, will essentially cease to exist.

I don't know what will happen at that point but it is clear to me that the current system is unsustainable.
I enjoyed this story many years ago. Reading it now I'm reminded of why. Thanks @brazzy.
The fact is, the arXiv is seen as a legitimate and respectable place for scientists to post preprints.

V.G. Gurzadyan is well-known in the physics community and wouldn't risk his reputation by posting papers with phony coauthors.

Peer review and reputation are nice, but the acid test of any scientific model is whether it works. For example, is the model consistent with known observations, and does it make good predictions?
For the low, low price of $2000 you can buy one of my new, patent-pending Thunderbolt TPM dongles. Simply plug it in, reboot your machine, and you're protected from future EFI firmware changes! One use and you're protected, so pass it on to family and friends!

Includes other Thunderstrike implementations and official Apple updates.
Of course, pay isn't the only motivation behind a career choice. Many engineers take jobs in less lucrative verticals like game development because the work interests them.

That said, if you're an experienced engineer and you told me you wanted to make $200k next year, if you're in NYC I would say "go into finance" which is far more limited than the advice I would give in SFBA which is "go work for just about any publicly traded tech company, or slightly more risky go work for a tech company that seems to have an imminent IPO, or more risky still go work for a well-funded private marquee tech company (many of these companies would overlap with the 2nd group). In the end, it's a much bigger pond.

Look, I'm not saying NYC is void of these types of opportunities. I've got friends who work in the city for Tumblr and Spotify among others. I'm just saying, it's about density. You could take the skyline of SF and put it in a few blocks of lower manhattan. And you could take the tech population of NYC and put it in a "few blocks" of SF.

All that said, the relation to wages is more complicated than you suggest. Less variety doesn't speak to the balance between labor talent and demand.
I had a professor that used to say, "Make it work and then make it work fast." The point being that you need to both understand and solve the problem before you can figure out how to make the solution faster. It is the reason that the concept of a prototype exists in every engineering discipline.

As an additional perspective, compare the solution of an engineer with 2 years of experience to that of an engineer with 5 years of experience. If the solutions are drastically different then interpretation of a rule such as "avoiding premature optimization" will be drastically different as well.

Like any overly simplified statement, it is actually highly subjective. The author of the article even calls out the specific context in which their interpretation of Donald Knuth's rules are being applied, "I’ve listed lots of relatively low-level things up there, but that’s just because it’s the level I work at." and as such their interpretation doesn't necessarily apply in other contexts.

Premature optimization is a problem if you're approaching it from a place of ignorance. If you're doing it mindfully based on experience and domain knowledge then it starts to make sense. But even under these conditions your best intentions can be wrong. I've been in plenty of situations where I thought I'd identified a code bottleneck only to have a far easier, cheaper, and better solution completely unrelated to code come to light.
I am totally on board with the idea of improving productivity. The issue I see is that this is avoiding a deeper problem - namely that the software stack requires a max-level wizard to set up from scratch each time.

Refactoring your application so that it can be cloned and built and ran within 2-3 keypresses is something that should be strongly considered. For us, these are the steps required to stand up an entirely new stack from source:

0. Create new Windows Server VM, and install git + .NET Core SDK.

1. Clone our repository's main branch.

2. Run dotnet build to produce a Self-Contained Deployment

3. Run the application with --console argument or install as a service.

This is literally all that is required. The application will create & migrate its internal SQLite databases automatically. There is no other software or 3rd party services which must be set up as a prerequisite. Development experience is the same, you just attach debugger via VS rather than start console or service.

We also role play putting certain types of operational intelligence into our software. We ask questions like "Can our application understand its environment regarding XYZ and respond automatically?"
Oh, I thought of another (not exactly transparency):

- If you lend out your shares, you can't "sell" them until you've recalled them and had them delivered to you.

If the float is X, then there shouldn't be more than X shares available to sell at any given time. In the current system shorting increases apparent supply which devalues the stock.
> for some people a great touchpad is a requirement,

The touchpad. Nothing else. Just the touchpad?

I'm not given to hyperbole but methinks there's a lot of info and technical requirements that go into purchasing an expensive item such as a laptop. Screen size and quality, keyboard quality, ports, batter life, weight, performance, looks - oh you know...normal stuff.

At least for us normal people. Maybe my mistake was there.
I came here for this. E.g. https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo19.pdf

"This file, pocorgtfo19.pdf, is valid as a PDF document, a ZIP archive, and a HTML
page. It is also available as a Windows PE executable, a PNG image and an MP4 video, all of which have
the same MD5 as this PDF."
The “bikeshedding over syntax” issue misses an important point from the post:

> [I]n many ways, XML and XSLT are better than an ad-hoc YAML based scripting language. XSLT is a documented and standardized thing, not just some ad-hoc format for specifying execution.

Standardization and reliable documentation really is an important risk mitigation compared to a “widespread” convention in YAML that might disappear (and even become confusing to new developers) if some new YAML-based API becomes more popular. In many cases this stability will not be worth the annoyances of XML, but it’s not a trivial concern.
Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum both exceed bitcoin's transaction throughput now. Ethereum has around 3x the transaction throughput.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bc...
Instagram and WhatsApp are as popular as ever.

Their acquisition of Oculus (and its FB account requirement) isn't hurting either. I also hear their groups/classifieds product is doing very well.

Unfortunately, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Perfect recyclability would mean that all things would have a value as parts, feed stock for something new. That would make consumer goods more prone to age imho. If someone is going to pay me for my old computer I am more likely to replace it all the sooner.
We added the question mark. We sometimes do that when a title makes a highly controversial claim. Otherwise the threads tend to turn into discussions about how the HN title is misleading.

I usually post a comment about this but it was late and I was impatient.
The sad part is MovableType is almost solely responsible for WordPress's dumbfounding success.

If MT had not suddenly decided to go pay-only for version 3, it would not have made tens of thousands of people start looking for an alternative and there was WP 2.0 alpha/beta, a fork of b2/cafelog, one of the few open-source programs ready to take them on. MT went open-source for version 4 but it was too late.

Otherwise WP would have been just one of the many PHP based blog programs out there today with a small following, and many of us might still be struggling to code in Perl for MT instead of PHP.

I for one do not miss Perl at all, but believe it or not there is at least one website out there I made still running MT 2.66 from 2003!
Another key/value store?
I'm sure it has its own specific advantages and disadvantages which make it different from all the others.
Still, there's a lot of those popping up lately...
Pretty well everyone who offers online airline reservations uses ITA. So it's unlikely that Hipmunk is their motivation.
I couldn't agree more. I've been following Cyc off and on for 20 years. It has yet to produce anything that interests me. I have yet to see a good project I can get my hands on that gets anything OUT of Cyc. Last time I checked, after decades of input into Cyc all the papers on the Cyc sites were still about new ways to put into Cyc. They started an annual contest a few years ago for Cyc projects. I actually hacked together a not very good proposal to attempt to get value added information out of Cyc; and the winner? An academic proposal on another method of feeding the Cyc knowledge base.
I'm glad the mentioned the pain in the ass that protobufs are under python right now.
The "Poor Jack" song in Nightmare before Christmas is one of the best songs for this purpose ever written, in my opinion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXXOO3Wd_5Q. The basic message is: I'm klbarry, I can do whatever the fuck I want.
Why does there need to be?
Heavily slanted. Some points from the source article:

"workers earning $150,000 or more make up 3.9% of the workforce" (the original headline was "More federal workers' pay" which paints a different mental picture).

"The biggest pay hikes have gone to employees who have been with the government for 15 to 24 years"

"Physicians rewarded. Medical doctors at veterans hospitals, prisons and elsewhere earn an average of $179,500"

IT in particular is poorly compensated when compared to the private sector. In fact the government would be better off hiring large numbers at private sector-level salaries instead of outsourcing to private contractors at huge markups (Robert Gates made the same point with regard to defense contracting).

But the forces aligned against "stunning" federal pay aren't likely to oppose continued outsourcing.

They're also carefully carving the pie to exclude federal defense workers:

"Freeze federal salaries for three years, with the exception of defense paychecks."
If you do it this way paredit works for html too :)
Next up: Unreasonable effectiveness of words in communication. We keep using the same words in different sentences, & they keep making sense.
It looks like they are. I'm not sure if I want to compete with them, or go after a different market. My classifier is good at author identification, and it seems like there might be a market for catching students paying other people to write their papers.
I've created a basic ruby version for google reader. http://github.com/nudded/GoogleReaderAPI
Here 99% of my messaging with real people is covered by VKontakte and Telegram. I can't even fathom using WhatsApp for any kind of serious communication because of how inconvenient and unreliable it is. "Can't download media, please ask them to send again", my ass. What kind of engineering does even lead to this?! And the fact that I have to use my phone while sitting in front of a computer is a non-starter. The web version still uses the phone and occasionally wipes itself completely so you have to set it up again.
Right, except the protesters were sheep led by Trump and his Republican goons. This was nothing short of a failed coup. That can't be an exaggeration.

Stephen Colbert did a great job of bringing this up in his interview with ex-prosecutor Sen. Klobuchar who went straight back to work with her traitor colleagues. She dodged the question of whether more public officials should be prosecuted with a tactful deflection of laying it all on Trump. That bugged me.

https://youtu.be/5PiA9mJommE?t=414
For anybody else who got a dead page, this finally motivated me to switch from Cloudflare DNS to Quad9 [1]. I also find these days that 1.1.1.1 throttles my requests a lot (causing even more requests).

[1] https://www.quad9.net/service/service-addresses-and-features...
What if I told you that ADHD actually makes it likely for you to concentrate much more on something that engages you than a typical person, to the point that you almost forget about eating, sleeping or going to the toilet? Having a tendency to hyperfocus is a pretty common ADHD trait.

It's really not that simple. Squishing it all down to "ability to concentrate" isn't just an oversimplification; it misses the point entirely. Having difficulties with concentration on non-engaging tasks is just one of the possible symptoms.
Not if price is factored in to the user experience. Plus the small amount of value of discovering something you wouldn't have heard of otherwise.
> it looks like the writing is on the wall for the service

What leads you to say that? The article doesn't mention Flickr at all.
smells like déjà vu (synæsthesia: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=188792)
I've found it to be a really great experience stepping out of a world where I felt like I was constantly re-inventing the wheel into a world where I was constantly seeing the result of a lot of eyeballs and a lot of great decisions.

Once I started relying on my tests/specs to ensure my code was working properly I started to appreciate the beauty of the code I was able to write. I also started noticing the volume of code I _didn't_ have to write.

I think you'll find it a great step forward, good luck with the job hunt!
It's a serious news source.
I used to work with a guy who did this with food sorting machines. You've never heard Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby" until you've heard it played on 192 air valves.
Specifically, people should note that many code generators are not carefully designed for strict reproducibility, and will stick time stamps in generated output.

Even if you undo that, code generation tools are liable to at some point traverse a dictionary without caring about whether the result is deterministic. I spent some time at Google fighting with antlr to try to get it to have deterministic output and I still think that I left some corner case uncovered.
According to https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/unternehmen/rechenzentrum they only have data centers in Nuremberg (Bavaria) and Falkenstein (Saxony).
There is still a difference between storing the emails unencrypted and using them to profile users for ad targeting.

But anyway, what you are talking about could still be optional: if you wanted to search and be somewhat private you'd have to download the emails with a local client via IMAP - and if you really need search via web interface, you would toggle the option to store the emails unencrypted for that purpose.
He's not dictating anything, he's merely explaining how meditation actually works. No one if forcing you to do it properly if you prefer doing it wrong.
This is semantics. The point is, relatively speaking, our jobs offer good conditions to the average circumstances.