skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@tqi So when you get down to the numbers and the prevalent value assumptions we all have, Oprah Winfrey (one person) provides more value to the country than 2/3's of the nations garbage collection workers. Even though that is apparently what the numbers say, I can't help but believe it is divorced from reality in terms of practical day-to-day life.

In other words, if the average person was forced to choose to either "get rid of" Oprah Winfrey or 2/3's of the countries garbage collection workers, which one would the average person pick?

*edited

You could easily replace Oprah with some other person. I am simply using her as an example because she is wealthy, popular and her creative output isn't easily quantifiable the way someone like Bill Gates might be.
The vast majority of people don't care about TCP/IP either, but still use Facebook. (Blockchains are similarly low-level infrastructure, that enable all kinds of higher-level user applications.)
I assume that their assumption is that the facebook application has grown in complexity to keep pace with better servers. There is certainly a lot more going on as they had several years ago.
This thread is breaking out in flames everywhere but here you made it even worse. Please don't post like this to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658514 and marked it off-topic.
Ignoring the question as to whether or not "killing the study" was nefarious or not, this is a great lesson on what you should and shouldn't say in emails.

I remember getting training a long time ago from my employer. If you're discussing anything remotely controversial, pick up the phone or walk to the person's office. Don't put it in an email

Why? Because lawyers will find it and twist it however they want to make you look bad. Had a colleague annoy the hell out of you asking for something that didn't need to be done? Don't put "I deserve a medal for killing this study" in an email.
See my newer study above that refutes your old one.

I'm not refuting the negative side effects of alcohol. I'm disputing your ridiculous claim that alcohol has zero benefits over water.

No you don't give it to a child (illegal, they can't handle the effects, and it's not going to provide health benefits for them). That's silly. I wouldn't let them drive a car either but that doesn't mean a car provides no benefits. Plus, as one of my prior comments you ignored, alcohol can protect against cardiovascular disease for men 60+ and that benefit outweighs any negatives.

Water has no negative side effects? Yes clean water in non-toxic amounts yes that is correct to my knowledge.

However, "The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world." [1]

A prior commenter pointed out how alcohol saved humanity by allowing drinkable water.

Alcohol could actually prevent 3.4 M deaths. It can prevent cardiovascular disease for many people. It provides fun/enjoyment/stress relief in moderation. Those are benefits.

Your claim that it provides zero benefits is ridiculous and incorrect. Alcohol is both a tonic and a poison.

[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-17-voa34-67381152/274...
Roundup works best when you apply it in the early morning on a sunny day.
Here is an article along those lines: http://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2014/06/27/world-w...
Not a fan of FB here. That comment is nonsense. It is completely unthinkable that Facebook would do this.
OP said GDP, so I figured he was talking about the US (or another Western country).
I think what he means is that not all servers are created equal, so counting "servers" is a useless metric. An EC2 32xlarge instance with 128 VCPUs is going to handle far more traffic than a large number of smaller servers.
"Scanning a cond for me is almost instantaneous." This is a very subjective concern though. Consider the subtype example. For me, reading that 3x3 table, especially with the grouping of blocks, was a lot easier than mentally parsing a big pile of 'and/or' expressions, or nested switches, etc. And my impression is that a lot of programmers do initially visualise some parts of their work as tables or diagrams.

Our tools on the other hand are indeed 'so finely attuned and specialised to text' that other methods of representation have and will struggle to get traction...
Yeah this seems like an attempt to demonstrate that Facebook can act as a supranational regulatory institution which seems like a bit of an overreach.
I just finished the first and I made it through in 2 days without really trying. I went through it a second time, trying to use the example code as less of a crutch and do it myself, while following different topics that came up.

It's a great overview of the subject. I /really/ like that each chapter is fairly short, you have a working example at the end of each one, he explains both the concept and why he approaches a certain way in code.

I should also mention, learning raytracing won't directly help if you're trying to learn realtime computer graphics.
Are O'Reilly PDFs available through retailers? Through Safari?
> Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch:

Note that excludes the V8 team, which I believe was a decent number itself.
We haven't even addressed the distortion that negative results, such as the results of failed experiments, are never published, yet are extremely valuable. Perhaps scientists wish to condemn their peers to fighting battles already lost.
Increasing your wages decreases your wages! I think this propaganda can be found on cuneiform tablets. What an old old, completely bogus argument.

These hypothesis always get flipped when talking about the rich. For them, more money creates an incentive for them to work more!

Yes it makes the poor lazy and the rich hard working...right.
So you twist it to high consumption levels. What about moderate recreational usage as the parent suggested?
Psychologists Open a Window on C.I.A. Interrogations
But what would make 2B people use an open blockchain-based technology vs a closed proprietary one?
Not trying to be critical or anything just curious.
Why not get like a Van with a 300 dollar note?
At least you have shelter and can park near city services.
> The blockchain to me is fundamentally flawed way to look at distributed computation. It really isn't distributed computing because there is a shared agreed and singular "truth".

This is an odd definition of distributed computing. Blockchains fall squarely under the realm of "distributed consensus protocols", which are quite fundamental to distributed computing.
Dev rescues '80s text adventure source code by baking tapes in an oven
Lots of outrage but the important thing here is they'll still be available from other retailers. They're not forcing you to buy a subscription to get the books.
can you not get a matte screen? I have the G1 XPS DE with matte.
I personally use firefox as my mobile browser. Native add-on support (adblocker, anti-adblockers, anti-tracking, paywall bypasses) are of a huge value to me.

I like the consistent experience between the desktop and mobile versions - eliminating the need to download dedicated apps for each adblock-like service you want on your phone and the dependencies that come with it (root etc).
If there is anything that scares me it is dementia. My grandmother suffered from a mild case of this and it really affected me. I seriously hope to side-step this later in life, either by luck or by choice.
My guess is that he is pointing out the Streisand effect which is his only avenue for revenge against the opaque USA bureaucracy.
"For the first time ever, fewer people die today from human violence than from traffic accidents, obesity or even suicide."

I don't think many hunter gatherers died of traffic accidents or obesity.
it's still possible, you just have to change the architecture
Hopefully not! Lol!
>this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families.

I think you are arguing that school quality is a function of the kinds of students that attend the school, rather than the value the school itself adds. In that case I agree with you.

>saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.

My hypothesis is that schools could be run much more cheaply and be as effective as they are today. Therefore the money not spent on public schools (or on expensive homes in good school districts) could be gainfully invested elsewhere in the economy which would make everyone more wealthy.
Well as long as they aren't using it now, everything should be ok, right?
One of the things I'll miss is the "upgrade a registered O'Reilly print book to an ebook for $4.99" option. Always nice to have both the print and [affordable] ebook versions. Bummer.
I'm sure you mean well, but one-off comments from internet strangers are not going to solve my problems. I am solving them. It is just much slower than I would like. I did not comment on my situation in order to solicit advice. I did so in order to make it clear what the basis of my opinions are.
> glyphosate seems to be safe when used as a pesticide

Just to be accurate, glyphosate is an herbicide, not a pesticide.
Hi, This is really interesting. I notice cards are for online purchases only at the moment but you state on the website that mobile payment support will be available soon. Do you have a timeline for when this will be released?
I agree with most of your post, but I think that $2-$3 a person is probably optimistic. I regularly manage about $5.50/meal, but less than that involves cutting back in quality or selection.
Liquid soap is not good for drinking, but no one is in a rush to claim it's toxic and unsafe to use.

WD40? Drano? Household bleach? By your logic one should either drink them and thrown them out with prejudice.
But that just shifts the question on to the starting premise. What is the chain of logic that leads you to conclude that it's correct to tax people based on how the taxes impact the quality of their life?
Visualizing 'Silhouettes' of Programming Languages
If you want a clear demonstration of the management clusterfuck that is Mozilla, see http://arewereorganizedyet.com/ The average time between reorgs in Mozilla is something like three to four weeks.
Paxos requires trust between peers. The Blockchain is designed to tolerate byzantine failures. These are very different problem spaces.

(/me worked on Paxos for about a decade.)
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.txt

I like bash for the same reason I like emacs, in that no matter what the environment is like, I can usually count on my bash scripts to work. I keep them in emacs org-mode files where I store them in src code blocks. I can tangle multiple code blocks into single executable scripts to different directories. Check out org-mode babel, tangeling, and noweb. Keeping all my bash code in a single file solves my issue with having to dig for that one script I wrote that one time because I forgot how to do this one thing ...

If you aren't running Linux on your desktop yet, consider it. Full immersion is a fast way to learn.
In case it might help anyone many libraries pay for a subscription to safari books. For example the Seattle library system provides free access to safari books to all card holders.

Seattle library cards are available not only to anyone in who works, lives or owns property in seattle/king county but also those who have a card in one of several surrounding county library systems. Further non-resident cards may be had for $85 a year.

Unlike having a personal account you cannot download items for offline viewing, can't access video training, and can't access books in progress.

Still this provides access to the bulk of the material you may want to read.
Why Is My Video Converter Not Working? Keeps Crashing?
Deeply disappointing. O'Reilly had some really good things going for it, and it just decided to flush it down the drain.

This is on par with Apple moving to butterfly switch keyboards across its entire laptop line, or Netscape deciding to ditch its browser and rewrite it from scratch. Tragic, user-hostile blunders. And it wouldn't completely surprise me if this marked the beginning of the end for O'Reilly.
>The Electoral College was created to protect citizens from being manipulated by a tyrannical dictator.

No it wasn't. The Electoral College was created because the smaller states would never have consented to join a union with an electoral structure that made them a footnote at election time.
The S in "IoT" stands for "security".
Congratulations. You are supporting yourself on a monopoly rent. Don't be a fool and give it away for nothing. You've already said too much.
NASA Completes Milestone Toward Quieter Supersonic X-Plane
How Can Men Help Women in Tech?
I recently popped into a farm stand in NC. This was a stand sitting in front of a farm describing how you could buy their wares. I was suspicious of some of the stuff in the bins as it was out of season, and sure enough I'd see "product of Mexico" stickers on some of the produce.

And that's a stand on a farm much less a farmers market.
In terms of feeling uncomfortable with it ethically, but also being concerned about finding another job, couldn't the OP just dedicate some of the free time to finding another job that allows him to continue to live the remote lifestyle he desired when he took the job, then let his current company know that he's created software to do the job he was hired to do and has been testing it over the past X months to iron out the bugs? Then he could give them the option of just keeping the software and not him (without anyone employed who can fix any bugs that might arise in the future) or allow him to continue on in the current arrangement (perhaps negotiating a lower compensation figure in exchange for him running everything in just an hour or two a week and then supplementing that with the new job)?
Glyphosate is only one ingredient of roundup. There are surfactants used in the formulation which are indeed lethal in large doses. Would you trust that the thing you are drinking is only glyphosate, the chemical in question, from some gotcha journalist? I hope not.
Would you please expand on this in a blog post? Very interesting to hear this out.
To be honest, I don't think San Francisco conferences being impacted would cause any movement in policy.

Assuming that conferences moving would even impact policy in the first place, I'd expect Las Vegas conferences to be the ones that trigger change. Just on the tech side, Black Hat/DefCon and CES immediately come to mind. Las Vegas relies very much on conferences, and at least one casino/resort owner (Sheldon Adelson) is a well-known Republican supporter.

Remember, though: This is still a low number of visitors being denied entry. It would take a sizable number of regular attendees—or a notable number of high-profile attendees—being denied entry to cause rumblings of change.
Kudos to you that is one heck of an argument and laid out in a way that it is impossible to refute. Scary thought: those people that function as enablers of people in power with detestable views are always ready to jump forward, no matter how dirty the deed that needs doing.
Cloud computing is indeed lucrative, look how AWS saves Amazon(AWS generates almost 1B net income a single quarter right now). But the initial commitment is absolutely massive, and before they can really become competitive in cloud computing , they are probably going to lose a substantial chuck of money. Comparing to Google, Facebook is even more of an advertising and media company, wholesales might be what they want to dig in.
Don't be silly. Work both jobs.
I don't understand the down votes and all these answers.

If I'm paying strictly for pieces produced (e.g. apples picked, widgets assembled) why would I balk at paying you for all of them if you're capable of 8X the average. I'm not losing anything.

Hell, I should be studying you to see how you're so efficient and apply that to my production (assuming you're not Superman hiding out).

Of course, that's not the same as cranking up the line speed at a dangerous job to crank out more widgets at the cost of more injuries.
I can't tell for sure but it seems to be on the bandwagon of; pay for what you don't use and what you pay for you don't actually own.
Hmm. Fair enough.
The problem is other retailers don't offer the DRM-free ebooks that O'Reilly was. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. all DRM them to heck.

Going forward, the only time I'm gonna be buying O'Reilly ebooks is when they're on Humble Bundle.
Did you read the article?

> In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers tested subjects on their perceptual performance four times throughout the day. Performance deteriorated with each test, but subjects who took a 30-minute nap between tests stopped the deterioration in performance, and those who took a 60-minute nap even reversed it.
Its not two big lucky breaks it should be actually three big lucky breaks. Being born as a human is the first lucky break every human being on the earth gets. If you think about it 'merit' is man made. Nature most of the time works on pure chance.
How we bought an “M” for $12,500
5 Work from Home Job Sites for Finding Work
This is the file in question: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS
Unfortunately, I think this is a 'tragedy of the commons' kind of situation. Existing landowners (or at least groups of them) are incentivized to hoard the land-wealth by vetoing construction on their valuable land. What those landowners are missing is that everyone would be better off if land could be put to its most profitable use.

The resulting higher density of land-use would likely result in each landowners property becoming even more valuable. Imagine owning a single-family-housing-sized lot in the middle of New York City, for example.
I Build Agro-Environmental Control System with Arduino and GSM Interfacing. AMA
They aren't stopping all retail. Just direct to consumer sales. Amazon and brick and mortar stores will still sell O'Reilly books.

Edit: I am uncertain of the eBook / PDF offering at other retailers.
i smell tautological reasoning. people are paid what they deserve cause thats what the market decides? ok- if that is your premise, then i have a couple follow up q's:

1. do thieves deserve the money they steal?
2. are there people who profit from things that are legal but shouldn't be?

those are abstract q's that i think point out how saying "people are paid what they deserve" is wrong. if you reject that because you draw a distinction between "deserve" and "value they create", then i think "value" is kind of meaningless. in that case, it has the literal meaning you ascribe to it (i.e. it is what you call the amount of money someone pays for something), but nothing beyond.

i run into this view very often on here- that capitalism is fair because it pays you what you are worth. but thats so so lazy. you may not agree with me about how its unfair, or that its even worth worrying about, but id hope you would grant me that that premise is just a way to not think about the issue.
In NYC and I've always just brought along my Linux laptop - no one's ever told me it's not allowed. Disclaimer: I use Linux because of the philosophy, hate mega-corps and will turn down any job offer if the offering company runs an Exchange server.

The MBP I'm usually given is left at the office. I use it strictly for iOS/macOS testing and the occasional Sketch/AI/PSD file.
It seems like you could use a dynamically scaling hash instead of a fixed size one. Or evict old entries to keep the number of elements reasonable.
Someone asked me today when I was going to visit the US again. I told them never. That is, not until this madness stops. The US now treats citizens from allied countries as enemies and that's just plain rude and not called for. There isn't a shred of evidence that any of this has made America safer in any way and it would be pretty easy to argue that it has made America less safe on account of pissing off large numbers of people both inside and outside the USA.
Kinda. Electricity is pretty darn dumb. You can get cheap-ish 2-stroke generators with a typical outlet or two that is enough to drive anything short of a refrigerator or freezer.

Similarly analog phone lines are pretty darn dumb. Vibrations registrered by one membrane is replicated in another by inducing changes in an electric current connecting the two. The complexity is in the switch boards that construct the circuit over distances. A proper POTS setup can actually handle loss of long distance lines without losing local connectivity, as long as the local switchboards are powered. And for that we are back at generators.

Computers on the other hand are complex. Your typical Windows install have a buch of processes going in the background, talking to various pieces or hardware, and that is just a clean install sitting idle.

Frankly the old microcomputers were more reliable. At worst a crypto attack would take out whatever floppy was in the drive at the time, and would be gone the second a power switch was flipped.
Hmm, why is it that Blue Apron, Audible, Casper, Dollar Shave Club etc. are so common on podcasts for ads? Conversion rates are especially good for those kinds of businesses?
> Is it unethical for us to sell iPhones for $800 when they only cost $20 to produce?

If you're going to make an argument, why make a strawman?

My $1000 iPhone 7+ costs roughly $220 in materials. [1]

Apple's stated gross margins are 39%, and last quarter was a net profit of $17.9b on revenue of $78.4b [2], so that's 22% net profit. So overheads are somewhere around 17%.

To sum up where your $1000 on an iPhone goes:

$220 components
$390 other cost of goods: assembly, transport, packaging, blah, blah.
$170 overheads
$220 net profit

I'm more than happy to allow Apple $220 of profit on my iPhone. You may not, but let's debate that rather than a ridiculous claim that they're only $20 to produce.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/20/649-iphone-7-estimated-to-cos...
[2] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/01/31/q1-2017-results/
My process is simpler. I printed out the recovery codes on paper and stored that in my fire safe.
> But I think it's silly to suggest that you can hike it to whatever you want and the theories from economists will align and the consumer won't pay more; that it just comes from profits and that won't affect anything.

Well neither me nor the economists suggest that. For a given money supply, a marginal increase in minimum wage will act as wealth redistribution as long as there are profits to redistribute. On average a single worker can only do a fixed amount of workW, so a business that needs a minimum amount of work Z done to be viable needs to employ at least N = Z / W people. At some point on the increasing wage scale the profits run out and you cannot employ the minimum number of workers and the business is forced to close. At that point the only alternative is to increase the money supply, which is where inflation and general price increases will come from.

Note that the wealth redistribution is aggregate: the minimum wage increases are intended to redistribute wealth to the lower-middle class. There will be less jobs (I am surprised there was not more job loss found in these studies), but the total amount of money going to minimum-wage employees will increase.

Businesses that rely on exploiting workers to be viable should go bankrupt. Suppressing wages to prop up otherwise unviable businesses is a slippery slope that ends up at "well, at least we feed the slaves."