skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. A review on Goodreads sums up the introspective qualities quite well:

>it is a loping colloquy between Faith and its mate Reason, Free Will and its mate Fate; I read in it that I should make my way West to go with the day, with Time, maturation, aging, having children, the coming of the next generation, the slow fading and dispersal at sunset- and East if I wish to go against the day, into the past, toward morning, the smokeless altars of memory, to youth… where we can’t ever stay for long, because the terrain has started to go missing, there is less firm land under foot to hold and lift us, and our Lines must again resume their inexorable Westerly course...
I'm confused as to why you think that just because two concepts are abstract they can't interact with each other. How do you explain that logic?

Do we claim that capitalism cannot produce hyper-greedy sociopaths? Because I would argue that it distills those people better than most systems. We need some form of modified capitalism which has some checks and balances. We did have that system for a long while, but the controlling agencies got captured by private interests and we can all plainly see the risk involved there.

But it's pure capitalism. People who say pure capitalism would have an even playing field discount the possibility that the winners on that level playing field would change the playing field to benefit them forever. What is keeping the playing field level? Not the market. The market doesn't limit systemic drift.
Switching to Elementary , the Good the Bad the Ugly
Try OpenBazaar!
I just don't understand why people think they can refute an argument that's been fleshed out into a book by writing a couple offhand sentences in response to a long form article on the book. Presumably the author would address popularly held assumptions to the contrary of his provocative argument in the book.
> Telcos can’t cut you off, but ISPs can.

Well, ISPs are replaceable (okay, they will offer different speeds). Get cut off, select another ISP (or mobile data).

A telco is not easily replaceable though, as the phone number is your unique handle that often cannot be changed easily (which is why you have the right to keep your number in Europe across providers)...
Running mainline Linux is way harder as it requires decent support most android devices do not have.

Linux almost implies Android will also work. It'll surely be an option.
I don't know what it means to "have incentives to validate the study". The study is useful but the participants are biased and that will necessarily influence the results.

> Or if the opportunity is presented as a privilege they might be less engaged to begin with?

Very likely, but even ignoring that, the sampling bias means that the study is confirming that people who want to work from home do better with that arrangement, rather than demonstrating that work from home is in general a better arrangement. If you want to study X vs Not-X and draw your sample population entire from the group that prefers X, you will like find that X is better in whatever ways you choose to measure: happiness, productivity, retention, etc.

Imagine you want to study open office floor plans vs private offices. If you include only open office advocates in your study, you'll probably find very different results than an study that includes only private office advocates.
Do you think poor people read the New Yorker?
I have a comment blocker enabled on all sites, with exceptions like HN. Much more pleasant experience.
More accidents happen at home than anywhere else, so perhaps kids are safer outside. As an example, my brother broke his arm in a pillow fight when he got knocked off the bed.
False. A government power derives from its monopoly of violence not from the size of its budget.

There is litte correlation between the size of a govenrment and its ability to regulate.
Should be technically possible to have ”these numbers can originate from this operator”. I’ve learned that if a phone looks to be from my area code, it’s actually from China. No idea what the robocaller is saying.

My operator should be able to have a short list of teleoperators in this zip code, and drop other calls.
>While there are workarounds, I don't want to spend more than 2 seconds opening an article (most the time it isn't worth going to google cache, some archive, or doing the fb redirect).

And yet you wasted more time that that writing this comment, so we could waste more time that that reading it.

If your time is so valuable that you can't be bothered to put in even the few seconds of minimal effort needed to engage with the topic at hand, perhaps your time is better spent elsewhere.
I think one could make an argument that unfettered freedom of speech combined with capitalism is a threat to democracy. Money allows one to purchase speech. Speech allows you to influence people. You can control the people if you can control the money. Money is not distributed equally in a capitalist society which results in the power to influence not being distributed equally. We have all seen this in action.

Therefore if you want a properly functioning democracy you will need campaign finance laws which are inherently restrictions on speech. And even campaign finance reform might not be enough now that we are in an era of constant propaganda that is able to lay the ground work of influencing people outside of election cycles.
Take this study with a grain of salt. Shanghai is an extremely competitive and expensive city. There is a lot of social pressure to work hard, or at least pay for overpriced rent. If the employees were authorized to work from home, they can't afford to watch TV or hang around in coffee shops or coworking spaces.
The big problems in social media are already decentralized. Tribalism (also termed as filter bubbles), the spread of false information, and outrage as a mechanism of virality all originate with people in a distributed fashion.

Facebook selling ads based on demographics is centralized but it seems to me like a small part of what's messed up about social networks.
Can anyone show me a use case for the end user with a clearly defined benefit?
Solo projects are no fun. When I get bogged down with it, I will usually set up a call for info with coworkers and just talk through it with them. That brainstorm time is re-energizing and helps me get over the humps.
Capitalism self-selects for those hypergreedy people. Thankfully, a lot of humans are social animals interested in welfare of other humans, and society at large. A Welfare component is required to offset people harmed by the excess of capitalism.
I live 2000 miles away from my parents. I have 2 kids, my parents LOVE the small insights they get into their grandkids lives that happen on social media.

I could lose the no win political debates, the self-aggrandizing from my friends, the memes, but seeing my friends kids grow, my parents seeing my kids grow. That's cool.
You should also check out Beaker Browser. It is a browser built around the dat protocol. Really great community and even has a few decentralized social networks already.

https://beakerbrowser.com/
HN has moderation, so some stories can be pushed back into the /New stack by staff, they can fall again if aren't liked by the community
The only way to fix democracy is to make voting mandatory, but the elites in power have no motive to change the system. In fact they have all the reason to keep the status-quo. The current version of democracy is a treat to democracy itself.
Maybe we do see the potential and it's not yet cost effective for us to implement wind or solar on a large scale. There are lots of smaller scale solar farms around the country, though, and I'm seeing more and more wind turbines, so it's not like we're ignoring it.
Piedpiper Coin Airdrop
Try Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb. He's the artist behind Mr. Natural, but this is a non-satiric work. Once you get past the first few pages of creation myth, Genesis is a riveting story. The illustrations are beautiful and help make sense of unfamiliar customs.
Well maybe, but there's a question of degree. Free Market / Capitalism proponents, will argue until they are blue in the face about how much more clever and intelligent and better actors in a free and competitive market will behave compared to alternative systems, so why wouldn't these actors also apply that competitive edge to the business of "corrupting the government for personal gain" and end up doing the corruption better than an alternative system would?

Perhaps you could have a liberal democracy that copes fine in one era with various built-in systems to combat corruption, but if you make the market more competitive/free-er/better then it can no longer cope in subsequent eras? Who knows, but it certainly seems to match my perceptions of certain countries following market liberalisation.
Would you say that you haven't seen any proof that there are "inevitable" effects of (attempts at) communism?
On the revenue side, robocalls provide telcos with lots of business opportunities. Start with the "billable minutes".

Consider also that the telcos offer premium services to counter robocalls. Verizon "Caller Name ID" is priced at $2.99/month; for their landlines they sell hardware such as the "Call Blocker Shield". Sprint "Premium Caller ID" (which includes blocking capabilities) costs $2.99/month. T-Mobile "Name ID" is $4/month.

Consider as well that many cell-phone plans are not unlimited and that depending on the plan, incoming calls may count against monthly minute quotas.

On the cost side: the technical solutions to tighten up the network cost money, whether it's implementing heuristic filtering on the existing unreliable network, or working to make the origins of calls reliably identifiable.

Between the revenue and the cost telcos thus have significant incentives to avoid solving the problem of robocalling.

The staggering negative externalities of robocalls, though, are borne by the public. We have a huge collective incentive to see the problem of robocalls solved.

Ajit Pai's FCC won't help the public, though -- it's fine with telcos privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Been working from home for 10+ years.

OFFICE

I have a full dedicated bedroom setup specifically as my office. While there have been a few issues with boundaries, having that physically separate space mostly solves that. It helps that it's on the second floor and away from the 1st floor with the traffic of kids and family in and out constantly.

My desk it setup facing towards the windows (no glare). I have a ceiling fan and a dedicated air conditioner so it's always a comfortable temperature.

DESK SETUP

I use a 55" Curved 4K TV as a monitor along with a standing desk. The center of the TV is ~3ft from my nose.

4k -> It's like a grid of 9 laptop screens. I use Divvy as a window manager and have it split into multiple sub-screens. Typically my setup is to have my code editor in the center and then array around that with terminals, documentation, previews, chat apps, etc.

My goal is try and cut out alt-tabbing and context switching as much as possible: use live reload, auto running tests, dedicated virtual desktop per project.

Curved -> The curve helps quite a bit with the larger size and using it as a monitor. I upgraded from a flat 42" 4k and that was close to the corners being too far away to be usable.

Standing Desk -> I'm a weirdo and just stand all the time, the desk doesn't even move. I use a thick standing mat and sometimes a balance board. Also, the combination of 4k + Standing is great b/c you can lean as needed.

NETWORK CONNECTIVITY

I've got an unremarkable (and relatively) quite slow residential cable internet package. The few times there has been an issue, I've tethered to my phone as backup so I could stay online.

Hope this helps.
Preview Android Studio on Chromebooks
They also state in the same Twitter thread that they were aware of the issue before the blog post was written. IANAL but even if the shutdown was intentional (as opposed to being the example of terrible damage control it looks like), willfully leaving a bug in production that allows a set of whitelisted partners to deanonymize their visitors without their consent seems like something that shouldn't fly in countries with data protection laws?
Capture and corruption doesn't help small startups become big[1]. They help big companies stay big.

I think you're right that Google and Amazon (and others) leveraged something new - the catalog-sales and cat-video dynamo we call the internet - to get where they are.

And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are.

[1] You might say 'Uber' in response; I'd say the company was corrupt and failed to find sufficient exploitable government levers to succeed in those efforts, because someone else got to those levers first.
For every touchy feely anecdote like this there are ten for the subtle stresses imposed by daily commutes.
I finally looked into this yesterday. It promises amazing things and is well on it's way to delivery. I'm excited to see where this is going.
>> I am interested to know, how often when you face a situation, you stop and think, oh I read this and that in a book, I should act this way instead of my natural intuition to do the other way.

This of course won't work.

But reading a book, finding a usefull tool in it, and practicing it until it become a part of your skills is possible.
I once worked in an architecture/engineering firm with an old school architect who worked wonders with pencils and inks. He had a cartoon over his desk: "Computer aided drafting." Showed a crusty, bearded architect sitting on top of his computer as though it were a chair, while drawing with pencils as usual.

Back on topic, the solution as I see it is a data store, and different interfaces customized for each employee. Expensive, but the bartender and the hostess don't need the same information.
It exists now, today. Use it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

It is simply a platform on top of the Web same as Wordpress, that anyone can install. It can even run on local wireless mesh networks.

Oh and it’s totally Free and Open Source and any community or startup can use it to build apps to put in the store.

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Contact me if you’re interested to be involved, or just have a question about how to get started. (Greg+hn, the at sign, then qbix.com)
You get two parties naturally out of the winner-take-all system. Some European governments and other governments that got to learn from our mistakes (by forming constitutional republics later in history) have real multi-party systems, which you get much more easily with actual proportional representation.
Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell.
This is on producthunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/public-market
GDPR is not responsible for all those dumb emails you're getting
Last question:

"Please implement the social network in 5 weeks or less, GitHub link to code too please"
> IMO behaving like a normal human isn't "tricking people".

It is tricking people if it is done to trick people.

It is not tricking people if it is done while the person to whom it is done knows the thing they are talking to is not a human.

The question was not "should machines be allowed to act like humans?"

It was "should they be required to disclose that they are not human?"

You seem to think that I object to machines acting human, I don't.

> Voice assistants need to behave like a human to enable natural interaction

Would you say the computers in the "Star Trek" shows "behave like a human"?

> the fact that the AI caller isn't human is irrelevant information in most contexts.

How will it know if, in a given context, disclosure is relevant? One of my first questions about this Duplex service is, "Can I opt-out of receiving these calls?"

> It'd be like if I called a business and used a voice changer during the call to make me sound like I'm a different gender than I am. Would that be fraud? No, because my gender is irrelevant information in the context of that call.

I don't think it's like that at all. Are you impersonating someone else? Gender-bending for kicks? Trying to get better service because you think the person you're calling is sexist or something? Are you The Jerky Boys?

People do weird shit and that's something we all have to deal with because gravity.

Machines calling people and saying "uh" to pretend to be human without the human people realizing it is trickery.

And it's not even needed to make the Duplex service work because, as I pointed out before, when a robot calls you to give you money you don't hang up on it! Okay?

> Now maybe it might be a good idea to program the AI to be upfront about its nature just as a matter of courtesy, but I see no reason why it _not_ doing would be so harmful that it needs to be made illegal.

And now you have made my point for me: if it's not made illegal, people, like you, won't take these concerns seriously.

It's like the guys who owns my favorite cafe. He had a bit of plastic wrap covering his brown sugar and there were little flies sometimes and it was just a little gross. One day I came in and he had put a tight-fitting plastic lid on the sugar. I mentioned it to him and he started complaining about the health inspector making him do it. All I could think was, buddy you're the reason we have to hire and pay for health inspectors, right there.

AIs that can impersonate humans well enough to trick them into thinking they're also human are pretty much a munition. Thank you Google for opening the gates. Now that people realize it's possible we have another thing to guard against. You know most hacking is done though what's called "social engineering", eh?
A 5000 digit prime that looks like Feynman
Ah, that makes sense, thank you.

One iterator simply returns the value and increments, and the other needs to apply the filter first and potentially advance several times.
TiVo Exiting the Box-Making Business
Can you even have capitalism without greed? Greed is just a pejorative term for self-interest, which is a core assumption in the treatise of capitalism. It can't exist without it.

It just needs to be limited. You can't have lassis-faire capitalism forever because the people who are most successful will change the initial conditions and it will no longer be lassis-faire. So you need some kind of control outside the free market. The free market alone is not corruption-proof in any way.
I think the confusion is conflating size, or maybe more precisely 'scope', with power.
> I'm 100% sure this isn't the only thing he did to be investigated. You don't end up in jail for saying "fuck the cops", otherwise half the US would be in jail for that.

So you assertion is that if this happened once, it must be happening everywhere?

For that to be true, it would mean there is absolutely no change in any of these systems, otherwise there could never be a first time.

It also means that all laws have to be applied correctly and evenly across the united states, and that exceptions can't happen, and law enforcement can't make a mistake

Because if laws are applied unevenly in some locations, or in some circumstances, or are applied incorrectly, or if this is the first (or the first of a few to get widely publicized), then it's very easy for this to be entirely about his publicized views combined with something above (or something else not covered).

I see no reason why this can't be a localized overreach, or the beginning of a new trend. I'm not sure it is, but I'm definitely not 100% sure it's not.
I thought this was weird too, because both YouTube and reddit are quite addictive, just like Facebook. YouTube's recommendations are an endless pit of wasted time unless one takes care to view only a small, curated set of channels with daily time limits. As for reddit, it's quite noisy (like Twitter) and attracts a lot of what I consider low value comments and posts (the kinds that are discouraged on HN and get ruthlessly downvoted to oblivion here).
Facebook alone has over 2 billion users, and keeps growing. I can't see how it is a bubble that has burst.

I've met many people in developing countries that don't have running water, or indoor sanitation, but still access Facebook through a cheap smartphone. It's important to a great many people.

Personally I find Facebook extremely useful; I just hate the implementation, which seems to be a buggy mix of dark patterns which attempt to manipulate my state of mind and do bad things with my personal data.

A realistic open competitor would be extremely welcome, but first you have to somehow get past the network effect.
10 interaction design books to read
Pure democracy can be described as three wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner.
So the server stores a copy of your encrypted keyfile, salt, and the result of `encrypt(streched_password, salt, server_name)`?

That's better, but still allows malicious sites (or anyone who compromises the database of a site you have an account on) to brute force your master password offline. Slightly better than reusing passwords since there's no danger of sites using a weak hash algorithm or storing your password in plaintext, but still not great.

IMO if you _really_ don't want to carry the key material around (which _does_ necessarily reduce security btw, as you're going from "something you have" + "something you know" to just "something you know", which is easier to steal and inherently susceptible to brute force), then it'd be much simpler to just derive a private key from `(user password, site id)` and use that with WebAuthn.
How much will it cost to create Virtual Reality for real-estate tour?
I'm not sure if this your experience, but for me the interruption would be all too welcome. I'd love to play with my son (now 2), which would be a terrible idea in terms of productivity.
The billion plus active users on Facebook would like to disagree with you. It's undeniable that social networks are needed and are as popular as ever. It's not always the same ones (more people moved to Instagram) but the overall number is definitely higher than ever.

There is simply no replacement solution for staying in touch with people outside of phone number based solutions à la WhatsApp (which you could argue is also a social network).
Are there any capitalist systems that don't tend towards hierarchical structures? Corporations are hierarchical to a great degree, but what would a system look like that incorporated the benefits of democracy into a capitalist entity?

In a democracy, people are in theory given a level playing field through voting that means that Bill Gates's vote is just as valuable as anyone else's.

In capitalism, people are given the ability to create value to their fullest extent. A single individual could find him or herself creating value outstripping that of thousands of people. Even on small teams, there are great deviations in contributed value. Capitalism is highly volatile, and I would argue the stronger and more natural system as compared to democracy.

Both democracy and capitalism are capable of generating evil and tyranny. The intent of democracy is to create a foundation for a stable society in situ. I think it's very possible to create a democracy that does not progress. On the other hand, capitalism is innately progressive via market competition and trade.

Technological progress and social progress seem to have an odd dance. The goal of technological progress is to create more fit capitalist entities which compete better in markets, but individual consumers are the end route fitness function. The goal of social progress is to elevate the standard of living for individuals, but it might not be easy to prove that democracy is the best known system for raising that standard of living, because so much of one's standard of living is defined by technological progress.

I would argue that capitalism is a more natural system than democracy, and thus more durable. A healthy democracy is an artificial system of good, and a perfect democracy cannot exist in the real world. Again and again, democracy has shown itself flimsy during difficult times.