skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went a long time before learning to touch type properly. I had a fast-ish quasi touch / hunt and peck style I suspect similar to what you describe.

I ended up learning to touch type by 1) switching my keyboard to dvorak in software 2) printing a paper dvorak map that I taped just below my monitor (aside: a big surplus HP CRT with BNC connectors in those days) 3) Forcing myself to use only the correct finger to hit each key, then returning to rest in the home row.

This was back in college. I was a journalism major at the time, and so my inability to touch type had become a liability. It took me about a week of slow suffering before I was off to the races.

If RSI is a problem for you, you might consider training yourself to type on a dvorak layout. There are lots of claims about dvorak (some true and some hyperbole), but one thing that is absolutely true is that the amount of finger travel is much lower. Back when I learned dvorak, I actually measured finger stretch distances from the home row on my keyboard, and compared a corpus of my emails to figure how much travel would have been required in qwerty vs dvorak. Dvorak was substantially less.

There are theoretically better layouts than dvorak, but I think dvorak strikes a great balance between ergonomics and being available and easy to switch to on every operating system.
The article is bylined "Kerry Jackson is the Pacific Research Institute’s fellow in California studies." Their Mission Statement [1] opens:

"The mission of the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) is to champion freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility for all individuals by advancing free-market policy solutions. Since its founding in 1979, PRI has remained steadfast to the vision of a free and civil society where individuals can achieve their full potential. Put simply, public policy is too important to be left just to the experts. Individuals are the real decision makers when it comes to their schools, health care, and environment."

In other words, those funding Mr. Jackson's work have known the answers to California's problems in 2018 since at least 1979. More here: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pacific_Research_Insti...

[1]https://www.pacificresearch.org/mission-statement/
Not a lot of that is very densely populated though, and doesn't need very many roads. You need to compare areas with roughly the same population density, and when I do that, Danmark and the UK and the US completely fail to measure up to Germany.

The average population density of Germany is ~46 times greater than British Columbia. So yeah, obviously you get some long stretches of badly-maintained roads in BC. That wasn't my point, though.

The roads in comparable situations between Denmark and Germany lean very heavily towards Germany having much higher quality. For goodness' sake, they'll put up "Straßenschäden" signs for even tiny little holes in the asphalt. In Denmark, they won't put up a warning sign until someone falls in, and sometimes not even then.
You changed the proposition from `eating chicken` to `killing chicken`.
Everyone in dense areas is the only sustainable settlement pattern. The energy alone needed to maintain existing levels of sprawl cannot go on much longer.
I wish there were a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that cool projects like this that don’t make it as businesses would be open sourced.

Almost every project is based on open source stuff somewhere in the stack, whether it’s the OS, the main programming languages, frameworks, or whatever. And most people don’t have the time to contribute a ton to the tools we all use.

It would be really neat if companies that don’t make it could give a bequest to the various communities and help build a massive library of stuff that, at least at one point in time, ran successfully in production, delivered a certain level of scale, and was able to make some money. If for anthropological or historical or research purposes if nothing else.
>things like counters were also brought with.

Are you from the midwest? This construction seems to be regional. Say this in much of the country and they'll wait expectantly for you to finish your sentence.
that sure seems like it's workable though. take the money, invest it, pay out later. like a bank, or an insurance company.
Companies want to signal their unwillingness to tolerate bad behavior from even top employees. There is probably not an epidemic of bad behavior in tech. The number of “brilliant jerk” employees is probably the same as it has been for some time, but post #metoo, Susan Fowler and others, this issue is now more public.

The appearance of intolerance for brilliant jerks is an inexpensive way for companies to signal a type of culture that that is currently popular and desirable, which is why you see them doing it.
How did you come to 48 years later? When I calculated it came to about 21 years.

In [2]: def reduce_pop(pop, prob):
...: if pop <= 1:
...: return 1
...: return 1 + reduce_pop(pop * prob, prob)
...:

In [3]: reduce_pop(1000000, 0.5)
Out[3]: 21

Where pop is the initial starting group, and prob is how many die off(with 50:50 I expected half of them die off each year).

Please correct me if my math is wrong or if I'm miss interpreting how to calculate this.
Thanks for the response. This makes more sense now. I’m very excited about your project because the #1 reason I am apprehensive of IoT for my clients is because of its dismal security. It’s also the reason I only use HomeKit for my House.

Keep it up! This level of multi level security is much needed.

I hope a whole ecosystem springs around it given it’ll be built on a solid foundation.

As a software person, this gives me more options even though it’s hardware.
They should at least factor in how thin the MacBook Pro has gotten.
its not even a premature optimization to make completely interchangeable server code these days.

the shareholders should be proud that such naivete towards vendor lock is still rampant
Agreed with this. Based on the history of my family, and my temperament, there was no way I was going to be able to protect my mental health in favour of comfortable distortions. But 3/7 days a week I wish that I could.
Should children be banned from using mobile phones in the classroom?
Clarifying further:

Megawatts are a unit of power. Think of the size of the engine in a car.

Megawatt-hours are a unit of energy. Think of the size of a fuel tank.

Both units are useful: if you run a 1 MW load (a synonym, mostly, for power) for an hour, you'll use one MWh of energy, and have to fuel or pay equivalently.

But increasing the size of your gas tank won't make your car more powerful, and increasing the engine size won't let you drive further between fuel stops.[1]

That serious information outlets still confuse the terms is a bit sad really.

_______________________________

Notes:

1. Pedants, I love you, welcome to Costco. But I'm excluding second-order effects, which tend regardless to be in the opposite directions.
> communism as the best system

Marx said capitalism due to its nature would lead to a cycle of wealth inequality, overproduction, debt bubbles and financial crises, and that these would get worse over time. Capitalism would collapse due to this and be replaced not by communism but socialism.

Communism would be the system that comes after socialism.
This would be a disaster that would fundamentally unbalance the patent system -- in favor of trolls -- which would be a disaster for innovation in the US.

The problem is, large numbers of patent applications come in and the patent office can't possibly review all of them upfront in extreme detail. Of course the great majority of them are not especially high-stakes so don't warrant extremely detailed, considered review.

The administrative review process lets them focus their limited resources on high-stakes, contested patents.

Anyway, it would be bizarre to give the patent office the responsibility to grant patents but not give them the ability to fix mistakes in this extremely complex domain.

Bringing a judge into it makes matters worse since courts are more expensive and much less able to evaluate the validity of patents than the patent office itself.

An obvious land-grab by patent trolls that would strangle tech .
The Real Origins of the Religious Right: Segregation (2014)
> 1. They feel really nice to type on

Ok, I guess this is as subjective as it gets, but don't you think that flat keyboard with small key depression and quick reaction time beats mechanical in terms of typing speed?
Interesting take, but I'm not sure I buy it. I certainly don't feel like I get ~2.5x more utility from my current iPhone than I did from the smartphone I purchased in 2012, which was just as fast (on the software of the time) and had most of the same functionality. I'd also be curious as to how you were able to conclude that the so-called "fashion effect" is not supported by evidence.
I bring up God's existence for this end, without such a being, we are left with a material universe. There is no measure within the universe for right or wrong. People need to accept that since all of your ethics and laws are fundamentally build on it.

For example, why is rape wrong? Easily answered with God: because he said so. With out God, well, you don't have an answer. You can say, "Because it impinges on the rights of the victim." To which one will reply, "Why should I care about the victim?" This will cycle until one person is honest enough to admit, "Because if you rape, the force of the masses will descend on you to the point of pains or death." Might makes right (so too for God).

With man, the uneasiness is that we are fickle. We will only defend those we wish to. We know that fundamentally we can't trust each other. We know that we are each out for our own. We can lie and say, "She loves me. Or they wouldn't do that." These are all lies. The Germans were fairly good people until they weren't. The Russians and Chinese too. The government was a kind father until it exterminated millions with the, at least, tacit consent of millions more.

That, dear friend, is your world. That is why you don't need to read Plato first. Plato is predicated on a world view of constants and moral weight: the Forms. Nietzsche shows those don't exist. The only thing remaining is the stark reality that reality and all its trappings don't matter for all is simply matter. It is neither good nor bad. The only rule is that made of the strongest material to crush the wills of others to submission. Whoever bears that scepter has the right to make moral.
Distributed Transactions are dead, long live distributed transaction
But it would turn into some kind of "eugenics experiment" then, where you have a pool of genes that evolves naturally, except the bad genes are moved to an external population.

On the one hand, I'd like to see humans continue to evolve naturally, far into the future. But this approach seems a little weird.
credit card debt. corporations gave money to banks to loan to the employees instead of giving them raises.
Visual snow[1] and scintillating scotoma[2] are associated with migraines and can be seen with the eyes open in the light. But, again, I am not a neurologist, so I would really recommend you see one to have this properly diagnosed by someone actually qualified to do so.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma
It only really causes a problem if you don't prepare your economy for it. Prices should really only drop for commodity products and basics, so that one can live for $100/month. You should still offer incentives for people to spend more, such as offering higher end real-estate and products, or just bringing in more people into your economy.
I had a Model M back in the days when you could still buy a real Model M, and I was happy to get rid of it. I think everyone should use whatever type of keyboard fits them best and I'd never tell anyone they're using their keyboard wrong if that's the keyboard they like, but my favorite keyboard is the one on my 2015 rMBP. (disclosure, I've never used the keyboard on the brand new Macbook so I have no opinion on that)

I was glad to get rid of my Model M not only because, like you said, it was obnoxiously loud, but also because the keys were so damn heavy. Every mechanical keyboard I've used, I feel the same way on. I end up feeling like I'm forcing my fingers down, which tires out my wrists and forearms. Typing on a previous-generation Macbook keyboard, the keys respond almost the second I touch them, with barely any pressure needed at all. It feels a lot nicer and more responsive. I'm sure eventually I could find a really nice mechanical keyboard I like, but yeah, they're really expensive so I don't want to buy a bunch of them.

I personally don't like the feeling or the sound of typing on a typewriter, which mechanical keyboards feel like to me. I'm very happy with my current laptop's keyboard. Along the same vein, my 2013 MBP with the mechanical trackpad click is awful and hurts my finger over time when I click it. I much prefer the new force touch trackpad that doesn't really click, since it takes a lot less pressure to activate.
> If they want to trade, share ideas and generally meet with the rest of the world

From what I get, they don't want that.

In a sense I am fine with their reclusion, what's bugging me is the enforcement of a status quo in regard to their tradition.

Even without external influence, it should evolve, and rules should naturally adapt to their environment. I mean, even their current tradition didn't fall fully formed from the sky, and some of the reasoning behind it is explained clearly (for instance population control). They must have started from a pragmatic point of view to build these traditions, and it seems the thinking process behind these just vanished or got "vanished" by people with an agenda going beyond preserving culture.

I am thinking about the mormons, who aren't as secluse, but also think by themselves about what they want to ingest and what they won't embrace. Nobody's there saying "you don't have the right to go see mormons and tell them things, it would disturb them".
Large cities have higher productivity than smaller cities. Smaller cities have higher productivity than rural areas. Generally speaking cities' productivity is proportional to their size This happens because cities achieve agglomeration economies through the clustering of activities, labor pooling and knowledge spillovers.

http://www.nber.org/chapters/c7977.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
A Tetris Expert Plays TETRIS EFFECT for the First Time
This isn't stupidity, this is malice.
The challenge is that a high performing, badly behaving person can be both critical to the company and harmful to the others. Some people are so toxic they actually bring the aggregate performance down despite high individual performance. So that is short form for, you can't be toxic regardless of your performance. In practice, the true work psychopaths can work around a policy like that, and people with bad social skills tend to get punished unfairly by comparison.
No it doesn't, it needs lower taxes and less government.
Does the rent go up or is it fixed?
I hear this a lot. But the fact remains that it is significantly more expensive to live in a dense urban area. Until the claimed efficiency improvement can be translated to an actual day-to-day cost improvement, people will continue to live where their dollars go farther.
Can't really compare them. How do you compare which experience is better given they are both personal?
> Was Nixon's complete split from the gold standard a factor at all?

No, it wasn't.
My dad had the entire collection of Straight Dope books, so when he found out that I was frequenting Snopes.com when I was 11, he told me that they would be right up my alley.

He was right. I immediately fell in love with the combination of trivia and dry humor.

I quickly read through the set, and even sent a letter to Cecil (he did not respond and my letter wasn't published, but I did get a letter back from one of his assistants answering my question).

All things must come to an end, but I'm sad to see it go.
Consultants create the veneer of objectivity. Reality is that the executive who hired us decides who we speak with, subtly pre-determining our conclusion.
> So while some may find annotations distracting and annoying, there are some that can find those same annotations to be pointers to a fuller understanding of the material so annotated.

The problem is that there's no guarantee that your marks/annotations will add value for the next reader. It depends on who you are.

Of course, such value is subjective, so it depends on who the second reader is.

Because of this, my preference is to have an unmarked book.

Also, the way in which you mark is the book makes a difference. Using the margins is fine - I can live with that. But when the body text is underlined en masse or seemingly arbitrarily with pen and by freehand, I think it's really hard to argue that value has been added.
I've also felt that Glassdoor, across the board, very much underestimates real salaries, and this further supports that. Anyone can think of a reason why this happens? One would be that they have old, historial salaries in their averages.
See: https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...

TL;DR 3 Things, in increasing order of magnitude:

- The increasing share of GDP going from labor to capital

- The "terms of trade", ie, how labor's share is measured, FTA: "the same growth in nominal, or current dollar, wages and output yields faster growth in real (inflation-adjusted) output (which is adjusted for changes in the prices of investment goods, exports, and consumer purchases) than in real wages (which is adjusted for changes in consumer purchases only)."

- a much bigger slice of the pie: inequality in compensation, ie, average compensation has risen dramatically, but median compensation has stayed flat.
Basically executives have gobbled up a healthy portion of the income.
This reminds me of this 15-minute break period[0] that was recently featured on HN.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16364423
A Discord bot to create favicons
I'd imagine it's a major factor. Inflation makes it very difficult to know when you should demand a higher salary. You might get promotions every now and then and feel like you're moving up when in reality you're at the same relative level.
The investor class saw inflation marginalizing their endeavors, and they got us to target price stability as the goal instead of full employment.

The controls, liquidity of global capital, and action of the central banks that maintain price stability, end up suppressing wage growth.

So we have a world in which rather than the debtor’s paradise we had in the 70s, we have a creditor’s paradise now.

https://youtu.be/X5JI0_i_Xik?t=21m44s
The Impact of Delayed Retirement to Business
Computers.

Productivity in jobs that are amenable to automation exploded, concentrated in fewer jobs than would exist without automation. Productivity in jobs that are't (or are less) amenable to automation didn't explode but there are plenty of people competing for them.
>I don't understand why so many people are in love with the Model M

I think it's similar to people who like the audio quality of vinyl records, but play them on a classic 1960's record player, negating the actual benefits. It's not really about the better quality, it's about the nostalgia and retro feel. I know a guy at work who types his personal notes on a mechanical typewriter. Not because it's easier or better, but because he likes the way it makes him feel to use a mechanical typewriter.
One either masters their inner world or is destined to live a substandard quality of life. Victimization protects people with weak character from having to face their past. That people are encouraging learned helplessness in the face of all evidence that it just makes people feel worse is crazy.
doomrl graphical release is probably the last thing i took a big dip into. thanks for the recs! just got cogmind.
I stated my view rather strongly. Thoughtful annotation is fine; annotation that means little to anyone but you or messily underlining the body text isn't very helpful, IMO.
Linked elsewhere in the comments, but this is an interesting read regarding the increasing gap between productivity and labor: https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d....

The interesting fact is that the loss of labor's share of GDP to capital is less than you'd imagine, and a much bigger reason for stagnant real wage growth has to do with inequality regarding compensation. Automation is real and is taking jobs, but it's executives that have been soaking up the financial gains from productivity.
Energy is poised to get cheaper. Consumption will go up and mostly come from sustainable sources.
La Cimbali Junior, older model. It’s fantastic. New ones are heavier and better but seriously pricey.
> The average population density of Germany is ~46 times greater than British Columbia.

... and accordingly traffic is much denser, and roads will see a lot more wear.
I agree. The best keyboard I've found to stave off finger and wrist pain is the Macbook keyboard. I've never tried the brand new one, but the 2015 and 2013 I have, the low key travel really helps the wrist pain a lot.
But why does everyone want to move to dense urban areas? You assume that there’s some small, easy-to-offset group of factors, like public transit or “jobs programs,” and that if the government just did something with these things, it would equilibrate population dynamics appropriately.

I’m not convinced. I think people are more driven by status symbols and glamor. Living in a city is considered relatively more “high status” and a “glamorous” lifestyle. Even poor people in cities are glamorized as having greater access to sex, subculture groups, participation in civic functions like meaningfully large protests, proximity to celebrities or wealthy people.

I think it’s plausible to argue that as developed societies progress, competition between people becomes increasingly focused on intangible social status, and one side effect is that people become more and more willing to sacrifice material comforts to crowd into cities for the chance to possibly compete for higher social status.

It wouldn’t matter if you incentivized people with cheaper housing, “jobs programs,” or anything else, “Ruralness” itself would be such a direct negative thing, in terms of social convention, that people would pay to avoid it, in the form of impossible rents, overcrowded infrastructure, etc.

I conjecture you’d need a generational propaganda campaign to glamorize rural living, combined with some huge changes in how employment is structured, before anything could even start to incentivize meaningful redistribution of population to rural areas.

The jobs programs thing is especially tricky, because there is a chicken and egg problem with modern employment and rural areas. It’s not just a matter of retraining people, because they’ll still want to move to cities independently of jobs, and then employers will want to be located in cities to have high-status clans of employees and to be colocated with other high-status people.

Jobs training doesn’t really solve anything unless you change the underlying culture such that employers can participate in some virtue signalling by locating there.

It’s why you might see start-ups in Grand Rapids, MI, but you don’t see Google opening a new 500-engineer research lab there. The people who want those engineering jobs want a life with status signalling only found in big urban centers associated with cultural progressiveness.

I’m not saying any of this to argue one way is better or is right. Only that I think any theory about why people accumulate in dense cities has to be primarily based on social status effects that exist by convention and not by any material factor.