skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So either you have hoarding or you have price gouging. This isn't a natural inevitability, it is specifically tied to markets. In extreme situations like natural disasters, markets behave in this way. So some people blame price gougers, and others consider it the only reasonable thing to do. I think we should consider such extreme situations as evidence of the limits of markets for distribution. There are other ways to distribute goods and they may very well be superior in such situations. However, it is completely untenable because markets are politically inviolable these days.

Even if you want to stop something you consider perverse (price gouging), you have to do it with a market mechanism (price controls), but this is a failure mode of markets, not something you can band-aid while staying within markets.

And to emphasize the point: It isn't worthwhile to consider gouging a moral failure on the part of individual actors. Either they do it, or someone else hoards. You can call both despicable but that doesn't fix the economic pathology. Focusing on individual actions blinds one to the setting in which they take those actions.
> Most estimates peg Apples margin on them in the low single digits...

Any references for this. My gut feeling doesn't match up with this. I can't imagine the bill of materials being more than 1/3rd of the cost?

Unless those estimates are including the R&D cost, I imagine these are low volume, and that Apple spent a lot of money on developing them.
I don't understand this. Why would the controversy be any less when releasing the iPhone 7 without a headphone jack vs the iPhone 8? Aren't they both new flagship models?
> It's a sphere whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is nowhere. Is this a trick question?

For what it's worth, the classical quote to this effect (by 'Trismegistus', Google informs me), discussing God, switches the circumference and the centre from the way that you have them. (Maybe that's the joke.)
Linda Crawford: CEO of Helpshift
There is also the increased cost of getting this merchandise to an area that is in shortage. If the roads are in disrepair, or there is flooding, it's gonna cost more to stock it. I have a feeling that not all increased prices are gouging... a lot of it is just that people don't want to have to pay more when crisis strikes. But preparedness counts in a situation like this. Waiting until the day before landfall to go and stock up is just plain idiotic. People need to think and plan ahead. If things cost more when you do it - you probably just waited too damn long to get your supplies.
The ones that are usable and broken are good, like the elongated teapot.

The things that no human would possibly design are just silly.

Would love it if they had a site with just the purposefully poorly designed, but still workable objects.
Those are only for fun, but real stuff are designed to be deliberately inconvenient (e.g. against homeless people):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture
Nginx Unit? :-)
Get Back-To-School Ready with Made by Humans
> I know you want to pitch SS

Frankly, I don't care either way. I work in downtown Seattle in Amazon's back yard. I just know SS has a healthy tech scene and not a lot of people know about it.

> saying UoU and BYU are great universities is just wrong

What? Am I missing something?
It's the stores inability or unwillingness to charge a higher market price that allows the hoarder to buy all that water.

When you shame pricing based on market realities, known entities like grocery stores don't do it but unknown entities like random guy down the street will take advantage of the opportunity. And chances are he won't be paying taxes on his profit either.

And if somehow you are successful at stopping higher prices from being paid, you take all the profit out of rushing resources to the disaster zone. You can even reduce the flow of resources BEFORE the storm hits.

People also may not realize how scarce a resource is or will be in the price stays as low as it usually is. Prices SHOULD be going up when a storm is imminent.

High prices greatly increase the chances that products will be available even when scarce. And prices that are too low for market realities ensure shortages.

I, for one, would rather pay a higher price than not have access to the resource at all. Prices serve useful functions in the marketplace and we benefit most when everybody understands that.

We'd be far better off if we let the market function and instead give victims extra cash to get what they need.
This entire thing sounds like they are trying to solve a problem that doesn't yet exist.

As you said, how can they effectively legislate something that is not even fully fleshed out yet? Is this really the time to centralize legislation at the federal level and block states?

The primary benefit of allowing states to do it instead is that you can have more liberal experimentation in places where it makes more sense, like less dense, deserty Nevada, with lots of freeways. While more densely populated highly urbanized parts of the country can be avoided until it's ready.

I can't believe they are selling this as 'speeding the deployment' because it would be 10x easier for tech companies to convince a state/local government than the federal one. And it seems they already convinced a few states already...

The only thing I can imagine this is "speeding up" is helping the major auto companies minimize their legal costs and allow them to focus on lobbying one level of government. As well as making it easier for these companies to guide the legislation towards their favour. This is how corporatism works in the US. The legislation is designed with big-co's in mind who have teams of lawyers and lobbyists.
I agree it's immoral to price gouge during a disaster. While rationing solves the allocation issue, it provides zero incentive for people to introduce more supply by opening up warehouses of goods or re-routing airplanes from other regions to fly more people out.

A man during Katrina bought 19 generators, drove 600 miles, and sold them for 2x his cost. I would argue his actions were moral and helpful. He was jailed for price gouging.

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1954352&page=1
So people don't get addicted because they have nothing better to do? I lived in Lakeside California where so many people are addicted to meth, it is crazy. If there was manufacturing people would have something to do, have something to look forward to, an idea of a future and stay off drugs. Not everyone can do white collar work and not everyone wants to work in fast food or 7/11. The outsourcing of work an average everyday person does leads to ideas of no future, which leads to boredom & self-pity, which leads to drug use. For $10 you can get high, be happy and not worry about a thing. That high solves all problems. Then the person just thinks about their next high and how to get it.
The article is saying that those unemployed have a higher rate of prescription though, not just illicit use

>Krueger’s study linked county prescription rates to labor force data from the past 15 years
> So, the question is rather: why not a design that doesn't need "normalization" and runes, code points, and all that...

Because language is messy. At some point you have to start getting into the raw philosophy of language and it's not just a technical problem at that point but a political problem and an emotional problem.

Take accents as one example: in English a diaresis is a rare but sometimes useful accent mark to distinguish digraphs (coöperate should be pronounced as two Os, not one OOOH sound like in chicken coop) the letter stays the same it just has "bonus information"; in German an umlaut version of a letter (ö versus o) is considered an entirely different letter, with a different pronunciation and alphabet order (though further complicated by conversions to digraphs in some situations such as ö to oe).

Which language is "right"? The one that thinks that diaresis is merely a modifier or the one that thinks of an accented letter as a different letter from the unmodified? There isn't a right and wrong here, there's just different perspectives, different philosophies, huge histories of language evolution and divergence, and lots of people reusing similar looking concepts for vastly different needs.

Similarly the Spanish ñ is single letter to Spanish but the ~ accent may be a tone marker in another language that is important to the pronunciation of the word and a modifier to the letter rather a letter on its own.

There's the case of the overlaps where different alphabets diverged from similar origins. Are the letters that still look alike the same letters? [1]

Math is a language with a merged alphabet of latin characters, arabic characters, greek characters, monastery manuscript-derived shorthands, etc. Is the modern Greek Pi the same as the mathematical symbol Pi anymore? Do they need different representations? Do you need to distinguish, say in the context of modern Greek mathematical discussions the usage of Pi in the alphabet versus the usage of mathematical Pi?

These are just the easy examples in the mostly EFIGS space most of HN will be aware of. Multiply those sorts of philosophical complications across the spectrum of languages written across the world, the diversity of Asian scripts, and the wonder of ancient scripts, and yes the modern joy of emoji. Even "normalization" is a hack where you don't care about the philosophical meaning of a symbol, you just need to know if the symbols vaguely look alike, and even then there are so many different kinds of normalization available in Unicode because everyone can't always agree which things look alike either, because that changes with different perspectives from different languages.

[1] An excellent Venn diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing_Gree...
I don't see how it's defensible...

Let's say airline X jacks rates during a crisis. The "free market" reaction would be that people would be outraged by airline X, and would then during the crisis and in the future not use them - thereby hurting their business/brand. A competitor, airline Y who didn't jack rates would then get current & future business based on their noble actions during the crisis. The free market would solve the problem by itself ... right?

Except wait... the people in the current crisis, aren't helped at all. And of course, there's no guarantee that airline Y doesn't jack rates during the next crisis.

Anyone else have a reasonable counter-argument?

Edit: Meant for my reply to be for rhapsodic - sorry.
the hedging might have something to do with the W1 chip[0] improvements in the AirPods that provided for fast and consistent bluetooth pairing that Apple cared about more so than relying upon 3rd party bluetooth experience in a headphone connector-less flagship phone.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/12/apple-w1-chip-how-it-works/
Where do they get the money to afford all those opoids? Most people with jobs can barely afford to make ends meat, so how are the growing ranks of unemployed able to afford that, year after year after year?

Why wouldn't they rather spend the money on things that mattered? like shelter/rent or food.
Putin is angry because Yeltsin died from alcohol? What US has to do with it? Or with the fact that Putin's family died in the siege (which was USSR faut, by the way, since they've friended Hitler in 1939)?
Definitely not formally, pedantically true. But, we aren't defending a mathematical thesis here. We're having a casual discussion. Still... let's see: Given a generic workload with equal effort put into optimizations... Should you expect C++ to be faster?

Compared to PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, Java, JavaScript: true with some pedantic exceptions.

Compared to Haskell, oCaml: Usually true, unless facing both well-suited and well-tuned code.

Compared to small volumes of carefully crafted and profiled Fortran, C or Assembly: usually not true.

Compared to CUDA: Not true for applications well suited to GPUs. Still true for situations that map poorly to GPUs. Except CUDA is almost entirely C++! Recent CUDA compilers on recent GPUs handle C++ code directly very well. Nearly everything but exceptions and thread local storage is supported.
To be fair, this is a pragmatic, not a technical, solution. Similarly, we limit the speeds we allow in residential areas not because it prevents wreckless driving, but because it decreases the actual risk of it.

Similarly, the technical solution involves technology that does not require drivers and has no risk of human error anymore. The pragmatic solution is to just limit the acceptable speeds.
Price gouging is not perverse, price gouging is a control on hoarding.
On the heels of the release of "It" in theaters tomorrow, and "The Dark Tower" last month, this has been a great year for Stephen King!
An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin Payment System (2017)
You can make an interface that hides the complexity and lets people check their votes in a user-friendly way. There's nothing that makes it fatally complicated to use.
Open source projects can request free licenses from Atlassian. Here's the form: https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license...

Presumably, they'll add Stride to that form eventually.
Yellen is reflecting the content of the Kreuger paper linked in the article which also states that it has not established causality...
Really? You accept responsibility? In what way has any developer ever accepted responsibility for bad code? When an engineer is negligent and a bridge collapses, they are responsible - there's a whole system of insurance around it. When a developer is negligent and user data is compromised, do they take responsibility?

No.

Should the developers of C++ take responsibility? Or just the consumers of the language? Why is one different from the other?

This entire argument that the users of C++ are at fault for everything is absurd. Users suffer for it, and no one truly takes responsibility.
How often is that though? Is there research on this? What % of new opioid addicts come from doctor prescribed pain medication? I'm genuinely curious.
Essentially, yes. Shiva Ayyadurai developed some little system that he called "email", which had little resemblance to the email we now use, and then recently claimed that he "invented email". And this in spite of the fact that the real email was developed and thoroughly documented by other people well before this guy's "invention".
npm code is a mess and contributing to it is a very slow process. Competition from yarn led to npm quickly adopting lockfiles and being faster.
There really is a very sharp relief between security and tasteful design
I don't understand your position, do you believe gouging is immoral or moral? You've stated both.
You can, but Florida has a price gouging law and prosecutions of people selling overpriced water are quite popular.

http://myfloridalegal.com/pages.nsf/Main/5D2710E379EAD6BC852...

> Florida Statute 501.160 states that during a state of emergency, it is unlawful to sell, lease, offer to sell, or offer for lease essential commodities, dwelling units, or self-storage facilities for an amount that grossly exceeds the average price for that commodity during the 30 days before the declaration of the state of emergency, unless the seller can justify the price by showing increases in its prices or market trends. Examples of necessary commodities are food, ice, gas, and lumber.
That's only true if you have less than 500 karma.

Edit: although stories can't be downvoted.
Europe handles pain management a lot better than America...
What makes you think that any of those things, including plastics, must by made from fossil oil? So tired of being told that the only way to do things, is the way we are currently doing them. Heck, we don't even have to make so much stuff out of plastic at all, and considering where that plastic is turning up in the food chain, it might be worth the expense to start finding replacements. Aluminum recycles nicely, hemp makes some excellent fabrics, cows will do just fine on a diet of grass.
The point is: some languages have capabilities to take some classes of errors out. A language with GC and heap-allocation only makes it hard to get access-after-free-style errors. Languages with bounds checks on all elements reliably crash (throw an exception) instead of showing "random" behaviour on bad reads. Of course all of that comes with a cost, but for many domains that works out ...
Take care, eaten is the only way I've ever seen anyone have a really bad experience ending in a trip to in an ambulance from the results of anxiety, although no long term physical damage was done, nonetheless this was an unpleasant experience and to be avoided if possible! If you are unfamiliar with the effects of cannabis / marijuana talk with someone who is about what to expect, if you or others you trust would classify you on the anxious end of the spectrum, the advice is doubly applied, paranoia is unpleasant enough, when coupled with the knowledge that the strength of the effect is going to get worse before it gets better can be very stressful.
This is just deification of capitalism and conflating decency in the face of a life threatening situation with "socialism". Others have already answered the question of what to do, but I'll repeat. Don't raise prices and let the goods sell FIFO with reasonable limits on quantities. Raising prices during a disaster does absolutely nothing to increase supply.
Imagine psychology... The end of a science.
Seconding this. It always seemed to me that you lose features by going to the cloud hosted version.
It was luxurious, no doubt.

The 68030 Mac IIx started slightly below $8000 with 4 MB RAM and no disk. I can't remember the prices, but I would expect that another 4MB would have cost up to $2k.
The change to UTF-8 source encoding also changed the legal set of characters for identifiers, and specified how to normalize them. Which in turn is the reason behind this thing I posted on Twitter a while back:

https://gist.github.com/ubernostrum/b7b705bf21b86a1b5c1e2c9f...

And also is a big enough change to not really be something that could happen in Python 2.
"... technical understanding isn't the only facet of being a software developer."

True, but consider that some commenters might be commenting as end users of open source UNIX-like OS, not as salaried software developers.

In that case, there is nothing in this email exchange to suggest he could not be a valuable contributor to a UNIX-like project, paid or unpaid.

As an end user, I could care less whether developers are adept at dealing with recruiters (though I might sympathize them for the BS they must endure).

What I care about as an end user is whether they can write portable code.

Given that these companies are dedicated to selling web ads, it really makes me wonder how "progress" would be defined in your chosen context.

I am not sure that UNIX or Linux would even exist were it not for the type of person you are describing.

There is nothing wrong with having technical understanding or working elsewhere besides companies selling web ads. That is where true "progress" has come from in the past and I think it is likely to come from in future.

Just my opinion.
I've gotten them even when I've claimed not to feel any pain. When I fell off my bicycle I was given a prescription for Vicodin which I proceeded to fill and then never use.
Price gouging incentivizes creative and extreme tactics to increase the supply of a scarce good. And even when supply is inherently fixed, it at the very least gives you a clean way (even if it's not necessarily fair or good) to figure out who gets the last 10 bottles of water.

But, if we're selling bottled water at $99 per crate, I can do all sorts of crazy things to bring in water. I can convince my friends to take a week of their vacation to help me figure out how to get an extra 10,000 crates of water to the disaster area for a cool million bucks. And then we've got a fat budget to rent boats, off-road vehicles, even helicopters to bring in crates of water. At $99 per crate, I can think of a lot of absurd supply chain tactics that are actually economical with that kind of revenue.

If you create a law that bans me from selling water for $99, I'm not going to be able to do any of that. Not only am I no longer incentivized to drop everything and spend a week organizing a water supply chain, even if I was incentivized I don't have the kind of budget I need to get water bottles into a city that's underwater.

If people are willing to pay that much for gas, water, plane tickets, it means they really need it, and that you can do some funky and extreme things to increase the supply while still being fully profitable.
Sure. But it's one we don't understand, so we research it.
It's only called strömming on the east coast. The same fish is called sill on the west and south coast.
Related discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15190574
"zero incentive for people to introduce more supply"

Of course! That's why we have government, and pay taxes, so that things like disaster relief can be executed without working about "economic incentives".

See health care. ducks
> There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere.

Just for fun: Humans have added ~1 trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere over 200 years, taking atmospheric CO2 from 275 to 407 ppm by volume. Ongoing emissions are around 36 billion tonnes (2015).

Climeworks apparently costs $600/tonne of CO2[1], with 10 year goal of $100/tonne (although skeptics estimate it really costs closer to $1,000, but I see no reason to believe them either). So the total cost would be $100 trillion to $1 quadrillion dollars to reverse climate change (this would be about a 50% overestimate since ~30% of emissions are anti-greenhouse aerosols), and the ongoing cost would be $3.6 trillion to $36 trillion. Over 80 years that would come to $4.85-$48.5 trillion annually, while the nominal GDP is currently just under $80 trillion. So 6% to 62% of annual GDP.

The total cost to transition the entire world to solar power including all heat, industrial and burning oil would be <$40 trillion, for reference. NB that's a very high level estimate with error ~= 50%

[1]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/swiss-company-hoping-capture-1-g...
Even though you don't drink, imagine you get into a minor accident on the way home from work today. You seem alright but your knee hurts the next morning, so you go to the doctor just to get it checked out. There's a strong chance that in the event of a minor injury you'd be (over-)prescribed oxycontin, percocet or another opiate. Doctors have been handing them out like candy in the US thanks to heavy promotion by pharma companies & pressure to get patients processed as quickly as possible (easier to give pills than really get to know a patient). The doctor says it's safe and it's a medical prescription so it's fine, right.

Your pain is gone and you're able to function normally. After a few weeks your supply runs out and the doctor refuses to renew your prescription despite your injury still causing you pain. The doctor provides no after-care or advice to avoid addiction, writes on your chart that you've exhibited "drug seeking behavior" and tells you to leave.

Your buddy says he has a friend, who hooks you up with a few Oxies (at least you think they're Oxy, the writing is in Chinese), and you're back to feeling "normal" again. After a while you run out of money, but your friend can supply you heroin at a lower price. Congrats you're a junkie, despite being a tee-totaler just a few months before.

Kinda condensed and I'm sure many people on HN will say "but that wouldn't be me". But it is the slope for many, many people in this country.
Such a suit could have wide-reaching consequences -- he'd effectively be getting sued for failing to anticipate the need for a feature.
Node has more than 2 package managers. There's also jspm and at some point of them people were using bower too.