skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We in the developed world are working hard to make sure we won't have to replicate the levels of consumption over so many people; both by reducing our natality levels way below replacement, and by encouraging wars in other places.
From reviewing the thread's discussion, it looks like businesses turn to cloud-based infrastructure for a number of reasons:

1. To outsource non-core activities to experts and reduce risk, for firms that see IT as a cost center. A cost-cutting measure.

2. To provide dynamic capacity for mature businesses that experience anticipated workloads that are short-lived (seasonal or computational needs). A cost saving measure.

3. To provide dynamic capacity for new ventures growing in popularity i.e. fluctuating capacity requirements. This saves on large upfront infrastructure costs when long-term viability hasn't been established. A risk management measure.

4. To be described as "innovative" because peers are doing it, for firms that see IT as a revenue center (in industries that view such investments as a source of differentiation). A form of virtue signalling.

5. To make the accounts look good to investors by accounting for it as OPEX instead of CAPEX [0]. A seemingly irrational but valid reason. High OPEX numbers are easier to justify and more importantly, can be pared down with less friction than CAPEX, if things go south from intense competition for instance. Another risk management measure.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16458863
Flip side would be: short term limits impose an artificiality low average experience on a given job and make for less effective leaders.

There's obviously some happy middle ground between a year or two and unlimited terms, but there are problems with both extremes.
The flip side to this is having a legislature who will never have career lawmakers, and so will never have the kind of experience or insight one gets from doing something as a long-term career. It also invites people to run for legislative bodies as a kind of super-credential, like getting a master's degree; it becomes a resume-builder.
Growth isn't going to always be strong. Economic cycles are inevitable, even if they manage to kick the can of a correction down the road today, it will just come back worse in the future.

People in China can only express their discontent by rioting (which happens in China, a lot). They have no other real way of communicating with officials, they can't even make sneaky jokes on the internet anymore to express their dissatisfaction. That alone is a very dangerous situation.
The post was referring to Bitcoin-based cryptocurrencies which compute addresses using two hashing fictions, RIPEMD160 and SHA256. It's not just the same hash, twice. The PoW for blocks is SHA256(SHA256()), though
I've worked somewhere that didn't care. Business SaaS platform, that moved to the cloud because maintaining servers was dull and taking up too much developer and devops headspace. The entire yearly spend was about as much as the salary of an ops person.

I'd argue that companies where the hosting costs are the primary, or even a significant cost, are a small minority.
Norwegian capital gains tax (no distinction between short and long term) is 30.5% for 2018, with an additional 0.85% of total net worth (mostly minus value of primary residence). I wish lowering capital gains tax was on the radar; if inflation starts increasing then this will be an excellent system for punishing people who have saved money rather than spending it immediately.
You might be surprised to learn that Tesla has steering-wheel buttons, like other cars.
Because we, as a society, allow people to do things that we don't like. We aren't usually very good at it, but when you consider that it affords people the luxuries of doing things that others might not approve of, like having a relationship or marriage with a member of the same sex, or creating video games with unpopular themes, or creating rap music, or burning the American flag, etc.

If we only allowed people to do the things that everyone approved of, we wouldn't actually allow people to do very much at all. Freedom, art, society, and speech would all suffer.
Not particularly directed at you, but it's certainly a dichotomy in that managers are the only ones responsible for "rethinking another's employment". I'm curious to know how often you would consider reflecting on / rethinking your own employment?

I say this because I was recently hired to work on a project where managers are obviously the only ones responsible for deciding how a developer should function within the organization. It is obvious the state of the project is anything but healthy at the moment. Attrition rates are astronomical and the code is beyond ugly in a lot of cases.
Don't forget all of the cloud providers offer a robust sets of APIs and SDKs to automate provisioning of all these services. That is valuable apart from the actual service.
Why would they give a shit what we think of them? I doubt this even factored into the decision.
It's reverse psychology. Surely, if they are in the field, they want it to be true. I frequently find myself invariably assuming a contrarian position in debate just to provoke more arguments, effectively contradicting myself over the course of different debates. In that sense, I just wanna know if that has a name in psychology as a normal or pathological condition. I mean, it might be purely rhetorical.

Also, if it's not "crypto season", what is it actually, nano, cryo, opto, ..?
HN readers are quick to be enthusiastic in celebrating urgent acknowledgement and critical response in the case of server outages and security breaches. Why limit this regard to that?

Sure, saying there isn’t anything we can do about it is irresponsible, and so is the lack of nuance of “the world is fucked”.

Is this the only alternative you can imagine?

>Empathy is impossible without the belief that something can be done, which is optimism.

That is not what optimism is.

If you can not identify problems, you are multitudes more unlikely to solve them. My critique is as basic as that.
The script also works if the SVG is written inline. Sadly, WordPress makes that tricky on my site.
My point exactly. We are not alone. We are surviving on top of a holocaust the like of which was never seen and never even imagined. And we're also poisoning the well and destroying the future for everyone, our own species included.
Serious question: Why does it matter? The masculine singular has been used through most history and in modern times it is as acceptable to use the feminine singular as a "general case" pronoun. His specific example was obviously about an actual, specific man.
Thanks. I didn't since I was still heavily researching the components I might use to design it. Previously, both temporal and concurrency errors were a problem to point that I might have had to integrate Java tooling, some commercial. That Rust knocked GC out of the equation makes it a lot more practical now for system-level code if whoever builds it can ensure the Rust and C code it generates are equivalent. The results on capability-secure, distributed languages such as Pony made me wonder if I should pause again to figure out a parallel or distributed by default version. However, I think we can tons of value out of something like a safe C with Racket expressiveness with the distributed stuff getting figured out over time.

So, I'd like someone to try to build it with all I asked for being credit for the idea on top of a FOSS or free as in beer implementation for wide availability. We don't need another five-digit tool only enterprises can buy that taxpayer-funded R&D often goes to. (sighs) I might take a stab at it in the future, though. If not Racket, I was also looking at PreScheme, Red, and Nim for base languages. Main syntax, like Nim's, might need to be pleasant, though, so it will get adoption in first place with picky programmers. ;) Also, these days I recommend seemless compatibility with C data types or calling conventions so one can plug it into the C ecosystem without abstraction gaps or performance hits.
Have you tried https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll ?

PS: I don't like polls too much. I've seen to many unuseful polls in the past.
I thought this was going to be about astrophysics.
What’s missed is nuance, which a two-sided narrative or imagination can do nothing for.
You mean, like if I were to go buy a laptop pretty much anywhere, and they just include Windows in the laptop price??? I don't see how that is any different. I can go buy an unlocked Android phone at Costco for $199 that has Android 7.1.1. I know that I am paying for the hardware, and the OS is free.

So, you are basically trying to say that proprietary is better because we don't know what the open source version costs? Well, you have the source code... so I guess you may not be willing to look inside, but the other one you don't have the option to even look.
This is an accurate statement.

The reason why it is still brought up is because Teddy Kennedy and others assured the public that the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act (the real name of the immigration act) would not change the ethnic makeup of the country.

Clearly something in the law did change something...
The sun output and the earth surface are constant, that's the zero sum resources I was talking about.

> Putting solar cells in barren deserts isn't going to disrupt local lifeforms simply because there aren't any.

No, but it will cool down the places, which will affect winds patterns and rainfall, which can in turn affect life forms at a distance. I suppose you could paint the ground around the pannels black, and carefully chose the panel/reflector density to have a neutral thermal effect.
Black don't crack.
> Using AWS meant that Amazon had IP logs for Dropbox's users. It had detailed information about Dropbox's business velocity.

That doesn't seem fair to say, without proof. Why would they risk all the other business they do, plus GovCloud, etc, to spy on a company? Are AWS and Dropbox even competitors? I don't think that assertion holds at all.
Pure CSS animated Notebooks
Resign. Find another company.if your management chain nitpicks on this, it is a sign of greater trouble.
You can have career lawmakers, just not in the same office. Cycling politicians between local, state, national would probably do a lot of good for each level.
This obviously feels like a move in the wrong direction, but at the same time, in a single-party government, how much will it really matter? I'm not trying to be cynical, it's an honest question.

Relatedly, could moves like this actually encourage some sort of reaction by the people against their authoritarian government?
I'm interested in the same use case, it would be great if this is possible!
I’m a bit nervous for the graduate student in this equation. There’s a lot of angry people in the iota subreddit - maybe the iota foundation is trying to direct an angry internet mob at this student.

The lab director should have handled all communications.
> Yes deflation is worst but low inflation can be terrible in some situations.

Agreed. But not because of what you are implying: "...people transfer their savings to cash, the world switches from producing real stuff...". That is rather a risk resulting from deflation.

I agree because higher inflation can help an economy plagued with insolvent debt to "assimilate" it gradually and create new room for healthy debt.

> Not true, inflation means that revenues are constantly rising faster.

That's precisely what I'm denying: there's often a significant delay between the outflows of money and the inflows they generate (typically in high fixed-costs businesses).

If you're expanding production every year and you see the added revenue only the year after it's not difficult to see how inflation would have a negative impact (even if constant!).
In a discussion of NHS vs private practice, the fact that some (certainly not most) NHS-employed doctors also do private work, has no baring on the incentives placed upon them within their NHS employment.

I am certainly not saying the NHS system is perfect, and all private medicine is bad, so if that is the impression you got then perhaps I was unclear.

In almost every single clinical situations within an NHS hospital that I have seen or can think of, the clinicians treating you will not receive any extra money, bonus, promotion, etc. for the treatment they provide you or do not provide you.

I have lived in countries with more private systems, where there is a direct relationship between what treatment/investigations you receive and what money ends up in the doctors pocket. For example, a private doctor in HK referring for not-strictly-necessary-but-ultimatelhy-clinically-justifiable MRI scans at a private MRI clinic which, provides a percentage of the (expensive) scanning fee back to the referring clinician. Contrast that in the NHS, no one gets given money for sending a patient for an MRI scan, and in fact, if it isn't going to change the management of the patient, the request is likely to be refused to constrain resources. In the HK system, neither the doctor nor the MRI provider is incentivised to not do the scan, quite the opposite.

The NHS system is not perfect, but pointing out different the pros and cons of different incentivisation structures that do have an impact on patients is not something that is a "meme that needs to die"…
That's backwards. Inflation swindles the wage earner. Have you ever been a wage earner?
The secret to a standing desk is to put a treadmill underneath it.

I have a fully jarvis and I almost never just stand at it. I do walk 5 miles a day at 2 mph though and I can say without hyperbole it has changed my life.

Note: The immediate reaction I always get from people is "oh my god, how can you work or type or mouse while walking." 2 mph is not fast at all. Sometimes I even walk slower than that. Sometimes I'll walk at 1 mph and just shift my weight around to massage out kinks in my legs. People develop this mentality around treadmills where you're supposed to be constantly trying to walk faster, as if that's the metric for your skill at using a desk treadmill. The activity is quite literally not a race.
Shame these are unmaintained as a historic landmark. I bet it would completely change how kids see the world to understand that people used to rely only on visual clues to navigate not too long ago.

It’s one thing to read about it in a textbook, it’s another to be able to see and touch it.
> The whole point was to make an individual or a small group very productive and let them manage high complexity.

And I think it was very impressive.

In contrast, nowadays we seem to get most interest and discussion here for projects that aim make programming more accessible (beginner-friendly, child-friendly, end-user programmable) and/or more suitable to large-team and crowd programming (type systems, golang, git, ...)

Do we still try—do we even want—to design for individual programmer's productivity and mastery of high complexity?
Can you post some examples where it works well?
Nicely done application
"rethinking employment" was a clever way of "firing someone who cannot take direction".

If you're suggesting a manager sometimes needs to self-reflect, sure, but a good manager does eventually have to make the call that someone isn't up to snuff.

There are several people in my department who probably should be "rethought" or let go, but management is too soft to make the call. It's actually more harmful to several, who could easily move on to other roles.
I attended your ML Summer School, and this looks interesting, will definitely have a have a look!

Props for using Clojure, It's a beautiful and productive language. Just being curious, which ML libraries are you using?
That's goalpost motion, though. By that standard the Chinese policy change in the headline is a total nothingburger because the communist party has been in power since the revolution and will continue to be after Xi is dead.

Obviously, no: the headline is significant; east asian governments are subject to policy change and reform even within a single party rule; and this is a canard. There is a difference between indefinite rule by an abstract "party" and indefinite rule by an actual person. And China is crossing that gap.
No response, just downvotes... I see.
I wrote 1000 words on this subject and prior spectacular failures of the "no management" style in Silicon Valley. I deleted it. No good can come of talking about it here.

Instead of an essay, I'll use a modern writing format: the pithy list.

1. This article gravely underestimates the difficulty of engineering management. One must simultaneously handle HR functions, he roadmap of their team and other teams, and their reportee's opportunities for growth and success. It's a very complex juggling act that most people are thrown into with no training, because training for the technical aspects is so bad.

2. This article's author forgets or is simply too lazy to look up previous examples of failure. Further, they're ignoring other attempts to systematize an "unmanaged" environment and what challenges people face there. It's unfortunate that they chose to pen such a long and effort-laden essay without doing sufficient research first.

3. The author of this article also seems to totally ignore the coordination and management functions required of microservice organizations. Presumably because as an engineer who specializes in delivering one single single-purpose executable on top of everyone else's microservice architectures, they may not have a ton of experience with it. Who is doing this if not engineering managers? Product managers can have some mechanical sympathy, but it's seldom their job to deeply roadmap out features.

4. This article ends suggesting that you don't need engineering managers to deeply understand the larger technical roadmap for your company and translate it to your team, but might find room for process custodians like scrum masters fix this problem? What? What even? This isn't even wrong. This is tantamount to suggesting the engineering itself doesn't even matter! It contradicts at least half of what the prior argument said.
How many people can you pay with Bitcoins?
Edit: *someone. either way- to those downvoting me: Please tell me how it's even remotely novel what they did?
I thought "serious" meant at least one million error-corrected qubits or so, and it seems to me that we're at least two decades away from this. The article is talking about the 50 qubits milestone without proper error correction.
What Is Stefan Molyneux's MBTI Type? – Astroligion.com
The Java enterprise edition dev cycle is slow. If you don't have "expert" developers you will suffer in terms of time-to-market.
> Firstly, by the time we have quantum computing we will probably also have quantum cryptography.

I disagree for two reasons.

First, because there is a huge difference between having a single quantum computer and quantum computers in every household.

Second, because we don't need quantum cryptography, we need post-quantum cryptography. Quantum computers break only asymmetric cryptosystems, but despite common belief, quantum cryptography doesn't solve this! Post-quantum cryptography does, and there is already good promise in this field.
You can still manipulate a gold standard it just takes more effort. EX: This coin represents 2% less gold every year.
Why are you singling out capital gains? Your argument works equally well for labor-based income, but capital gains are already taxed much less than labor.
https://shkspr.mobi/svg/calendar.svg
The size of the graphs is just right to untangle them on a 5" smartphone. More edges an it would be difficult to do it without a zoom
I mean, I honestly have no idea. The concerns about inflation are real; we have high employment, and a relatively strong economy. Stocks (and Real Estate in certain areas) are at high valuations already. The tax bill is stimulus at a time when we don’t really need it - and it doesn’t address inequality, which economists like Robert Gordon consider one of the major headwinds against lifting productivity.

I think it’s the Dutch who have a saying that the point of investing isn’t to make money - it’s to not lose what you already have.

Buffet has said something like, “I’d rather have a lumpy 12% than a smooth 10%”. Higher risk can mean higher reward.

I’m not offering investment advice; but for myself, I still think being invested in stocks for the long haul is smart. As they say, if it isn’t, then there are bigger problems to worry about. Doesn’t hurt to hedge against some “black swan” events too.
Senator Amy Klobuchar supports fines on social media companies for bots
Stealth is easy to detect with ancient long-wave radars from WW2 (not very precise, but visible anyway when arranged into a grid). Foreign spy planes would be immediately visible and military planes could easily make visual contact after being roughly guided by LFR.
Is that worse than filling both houses with legislators-for-hire? (I'm choosing my words carefully.)
The government should just use an exponential decay like on HN or Reddit, where something can theoretically stay on the front page forever but it needs exponentially more votes to do so over time.
Casting a $20M Mirror for the World’s Largest Telescope
If you had cancer and didn't know it, and someone named Melinda came and gave you a nice bed, some pain-pills and told you she cared, you'd feel a bit better.

Except you'd still have cancer.

When someone got you to a doctor, who operated on you quickly and saved your life, you'd not only consider the person who got you to the doctor insightful, but far more helpful than Melinda, and be rightfully outraged at Melinda's well-meaning but clueless efforts to help you.

I am the person getting you to the doctor, Melinda is Melinda Gates, and the insightful bit is figuring out what cancer is, and what a doctor would be, in this metaphor.

Melinda and Gates think it's lack of education in the USA. You tell me.
The top 400 taxpayers pay about $100 billion in income each year. Let's use that as a rough proxy for how much income billionaires make (there's about 550 billionaires in the U.S., but billionaires won't necessarily be the highest-income people in any given year). That $100 billion is taxed at 23% (largely because of lower taxation of capital gains). Even if you taxed their income at 50%, that's just $27 billion more into the Treasury. It's nothing. And the 23% tax rate arises out of a conscious decision to tax capital gains at a lower rate--something that almost every Western country does.

Now look at the top 10% (minus the top 1%). That's the income range of $100-350k. They have 25% of the U.S. income--$4 trillion. In Europe, these folks are taxed like rich people. In Germany, individual income above 52,000 Euro is taxed at 42% (the highest marginal rate is 45%). In the U.S., these people have been redefined as "middle class." The tax rate is just 24% up to $150,000. If you taxed these folks as the Germans do, you could raise maybe half a trillion dollars in extra revenue.

Talking about the tax rate of billionaires is a red herring. It's not tax cuts for billionaires that are keeping us from increasing NIH spending, etc. It's tax cuts for ordinary rich people.
https://www.quora.com/As-an-expatriate-why-did-you-leave-the...
Found one near where I grew up. It was on a airmail route run by Pitcairn Aviation between Atlanta and New York City. Pitcairn was sold to a firm that became Eastern Air Transport, which eventually became Eastern Airlines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Mailwing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines
Arguing is not the same as doing something about it. Gates has shown he can take on problems he cares about by using his money and get results. Why doesn't he put money/resources into making the tax system more fair rather than just saying it should be different.

Until he acts it's just marketing.
And this is why you cannot easily host arbitrary user-uploaded SVGs on your website. One of the reasons why svgs are not as ubiquitous as png or jpg.
Web application from scratch, part I