skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a political idea, liberalism certainly isn't dead. It's got plenty of supporters, to the point a certain form of it may be the 'default' for certain age groups and demographics.

In politics itself though, it feels like the parties and people who are supposed to represent this ideal just don't. That's the real issue, and where it may appear to be 'dead'. The left wing parties fighting for power nowadays are basically liberal in name only, and seem to think having the same economic policies as their rivals and adding it a few token social attitudes makes them 'liberal'.

Which itself may be part of why liberalism is under attack so much. Because while certain social attitudes and rights have indeed gotten better, for many people it feels like the economic situation and other rights have been ignored/left to deteriate. It's great that rights for LGBT people have gotten better for example, but it would have been even better if at the same time, working conditions had improved, wages had improved, housing was more affordable, health care was more affordable (in the US), governments and companies weren't spying on people's activities, etc. That's why its critics seem to be gaining popularity, because they're promising change and a better quality of life, whereas the left wing parties aren't really doing that.

Liberalism as a philosophy isn't dead, but its supposed supporters in government are liberal in name only and people are rightfully wondering where any change is coming from.
If you have 59K and can't live comfortably, then you are clearly doing something wrong. Or perhaps you have a pretty skewed view on what are “essential necessities”.
The vast majority of the country is not professional or union jobs.
Diffconflicts: A better Vimdiff Git mergetool
"if you don't have much savings at all, you live with your parents"

This assumes your parents are alive, can afford their own place, have space for you, and you have a good enough relationship with them for them to let you stay without paying (much) for rent.

"if you don't have a job, you get it from your parents or spouse"

These assume that your parents or spouse have health insurance and that insurance will cover dependents.

"if those don't work for you, you have to wait a long time until you eventually qualify for medicaid and food stamps (1-2 years if your income was too high this year)"

In California, I was told that I'd qualify for Medi-Cal (California's Medicaid program) as soon as I had no job (ie. no income, or very low income -- you can get information on exact income limits from them).
Author of the visionary and flamboyantly named book "Mirror Worlds or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (1992)", and unfortunate target of the Unibomber.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Worlds
tl;dr: This converts a file containing conflict markers into a two-way diff. Claims that tow-way diffs are the better choice.
In the long term, your body produces less melatonin as part of aging.
Nowhere that I've seen did they say they were replacing welds with adhesives or other construction methods, it was just said that a number of welds were dropped for efficiency reasons.

Usually the engineers that determine how many welds you will need to hold something together know what they are doing and you can't just replace welds with bonding without further cascading impact to the rest of the work.
Bandit Algorithms
Yes but newspapers are basically random hearsay on paper. The web is not necessarily less reliable and can often be more reliable.

Dieticians lost trust because they kept changing their advice about what to eat and clearly aren't reliable either. That's unrelated to newspapers.
> - unemployment

Let's see. In the US, as soon as you can qualify for unemployment, you usually get USD 1,000-2,000/month in post tax income for 6 months.

In Switzerland, you get 70-80% of your last salary.

Are you guys still sure you are not getting ripped off buy your government (respectively the billionaires who own it)?
Magnesium is important, many people are deficient, supplementation is cheap and supplementation is very unlikely to cause harm (as long as you keep it to max 300 mg of elemental Mg (e.g. 2g of magnesium citrate) a day). Like with vitamin D, you should have very good reasons not to chose to take a magnesium supplement.
Push to Weaken U.S. Endangered Species Act Runs into Roadblocks
63 - PowerShell scripting. I think I learn some little thing almost every day.
Women definitely cannot always take leave for maternity. They can if they work for a place that falls under FMLA rules, but not if they don't. Not being paid is generally equal to not being able to take leave if you are low-income.

Healthcare is not always provided by the employer, and the cost may be more than your paycheck if you want a family plan. Literally - I've worked such a job. The weekly cost was more than I brought home working 40 hours a week for a family plan: The individual cost was a very good chunk of the paycheck. This was not a high-paying job. Not only that, but it may be the bare minimum of insurance, rendering it basically major medical only. Lots of places won't do a surgery or screening without your copayment upfront, and this is a real issue.

Jobs don't fire you becasue you are sick: They fire you for not having good enough attendance. This includes nearly everything, including you or your children being sick. These aren't abnormal in any sense.
Absolutely not.

Because (a) most people simply don't have the time or skills to fact check every single piece of information and (b) even if they did it assumes that they have the awareness to do so. Both assumptions have been proven wrong again and again.

What we can do instead as a society is force the the billion-dollar social media companies to take responsibility for the content that they chose to display and the ads they chose to serve. Same as newspapers do, television stations do, and every other media format do every single day.
Pre-modern cars have something to mitigate this, testing your brakes more than a single pedal push before you go out on the road. Kind of sounds like you didn't even bother to bleed the lines which is also asking for a heap of trouble even if you managed to properly repair the entire braking system.

I've worked on the brakes on multiple cars and never once took one out for a test drive without triple-checking that I didn't make some stupid mistake that would put other people in danger.

Don't get me wrong, I had a couple cars with dodgy brakes over the years but always made sure they were good enough at the time I was driving them -- had this '53 Dodge that I had to bleed the brakes every time I wanted to take it out for a spin because the wheel cylinders were pitted and slowly leaked but always made sure to do a proper job because other people's lives were at risk too.
I don't think I agree with this. Some news media rely on social media for certain kind of news and to a certain extent. But I don't see it as enough to argue that news media are "increasingly relying on social media for reporting themselves".

I mean, news media quote tweets just as they could quote someone's public declarations. I think the difference between quoting a tweet from a senator and what these pseudonymous accounts do is very clear.
http://elidefire.com/products.htm?
I think the "can continue to run on High Sierra" is a typo -- the last paragraph somewhat clearly states that it runs on Sierra but doesn't on High Sierra onwards.
Not really. If you take a look at some of the publications that Vote Leave put out during the 2016 referendum, some of them actually had nothing to do with the campaign! They put out advertisements about seemingly unrelated subjects, purely to build, collate and triangulate a distribution list for the main material. There was no sign these were from a political organisation.

In my opinion the regulation and reporting of political campaigning and advertisments is absolutely necessary. The ground has shifted below the regulators so much and it's perfectly reasonable to keep regulation up to date.
Reduce the temperature to 25C? What do you normally keep it at?
This is the strange think about market fundamentalism, market efficiency doesn’t really exist but it seems end stage capitalism isn’t about efficiency so much as people who believe they deserve it.
Well most of us aren't going through a serious illness most years, but I think this article is suggestive of how just having insurance isn't enough.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/upshot/lost-jobs-houses-s...

> In the new poll, conducted by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly 20 percent of people under age 65 with health insurance nonetheless reported having problems paying their medical bills over the last year. By comparison, 53 percent of people without insurance said the same.

> [...]

> One reason, many experts said, is a gradual shift in the norms about the generosity of health insurance. In recent years, health plans have come with growing deductibles and narrowing networks of providers, provisions devised to lower the cost of premiums. Those features have made health insurance accessible to a larger share of the population, but may also be leaving more insured Americans vulnerable.

> Ten years ago, David Dranove, a professor of health management at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, conducted research on people experiencing medical bankruptcies. The study he co-authored found that bankruptcy was largely a problem of the uninsured. “But with more people buying less generous health insurance, I think the old evidence might no longer be relevant,” he said.

> Insured people with financial problems often have plans with higher deductibles. But many said that the smaller co-payments piled up to make their care unaffordable. Many also received big bills that were not covered by their insurance. Among the 32 percent of insured patients stuck with an out-of-network bill, more than than two-thirds of patients said they didn’t know the provider wasn’t covered. More than 25 percent of the insured respondents said a medical claim had been denied.

Pinning down "medical bankruptcies" turns out to be difficult because people can't agree on how to define it.
Or the universe cheats by decohering into branches, one for each possible self-consistent configuration.
Vanadium is the latest beneficiary of the battery craze

A metal used to harden steel could also help prevent global warming

https://www.economist.com/business/2018/07/21/vanadium-is-th...
That's a big one too, but having tremendous political influence, the reserve currency, etc. are major advantages.
Why not just take it with a small amount of water?
Are you sure? It’s sold in every drug store in the Netherlands. I usually buy 500 tablets of 0.1 mg each.
> in general correlation doesn't imply causality.

Yes, we know. But it's often a sign that something interesting is going on.
This is FALSE as well, Apple doesn't publish them for the same reason many other companies doesn't publish them: IP/Lawyer departments. This is also why the other stuff happens.

Basically, whenever a company says: we don't want third party X to do Y because of user experience, it mostly boils down to 10% user experience, 10% PR & Marketing, and 80% legal crap.
Life in 2018, as predicted 100 years ago.  a Future of Clean Energy prediction
Were talking a lot here about median wage. The article specifies 80% or workers. What’s the 80th percentile income?
Building AWS native extensions locally using Docker
Some folks in the anti-aging community are taking it daily, not because they have trouble sleeping, but exactly because there seem to be a number of small health benefits of taking melaton8n that are not mediated by better sleeping.
>Iceland don't have oil

But it does have abundant geothermal and hydropower. Aluminum smelting is a big part of Iceland's economy, and it wouldn't be possible without the cheap electricity those natural resources supply.
"The paycheck to paycheck life just means all of these amazing resources are being allocated in such a way that 20% are gaining a bigger share of the pie than 80%."

And that a tiny minority are basically ruling over the overwhelming majority, making the laws, and telling the rest of us what to do as we fight with each other over the crumbs that the rich let fall from their table.

Many of us will never be able to afford to retire, while the ultra-rich will never have to work a day in their life, and neither will their children, or their children's children. We will be polishing these people's shoes for generations to come.
And if that's not weird and robust enough for you, try "Programming the Movable Feast Machine with λ-Codons":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DauJ51CTIq8

Or "Intercellular Transport in the Movable Feast Machine":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YucCpYCWpY

And especially "Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation":

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

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pdf
Apple's devices became harder to repair because of Secure Elements, Asymmetric encryption and DFM. Not because of malice as so many people keep thinking. Not releasing parts and schematics is probably something the lawyer department wanted and since there is very little business incentive to do it anyway, they simply don't do it.
If you want to know more about the distribution, then perhaps it's time to calculate σ...
You are somehow thinking that a responsible worker has money left over. Savings doesn't matter much if you are already using used cars, living somewhere cheap, eating cheaply, and yet still in the position where a flat tire is an emergency or getting sick and missing a day of work throws your finances in disarray. Saving $30 left over after paying for basic crap doesn't help and completely ignores mental health. Investing doesn't even come into the picture because there is never enough money to gamble (invest) with.

To be able to get to the point you describe, you have to make extra money at some point. those things you describe are responsible for folks with leftover money.

It also greatly assumes folks are lucky enough not to have things like an accident that disables them, a spouse that dies young and leaves you supporting children by yourself, a parent that needs taken care of instead of working, and so on.
US Median household income is about $60k/year.
I would call that “utility”. People engage in transactions because they expect some utility out of it.

I’ve always thought quality of life is more of a macro term, dealing with things like quality of education you can expect your kids to receive, physical safety, access to healthcare, vacations, ability to move “up” in the world, ability to practice your hobbies, etc.

Generally, these are the things you can’t specifically go out and buy, but rather the desired end result of all the work and time that people sell.
Is anyone else disheartened by the fact that the discussion on "snake oil" has focused around e.g. regulating clinical trials and pharmaceutical manufacturing, rather than just teaching people basic critical thinking skills and label-reading skills?

Answer: No. Modern advertising techniques are effective enough that most people simply cannot defend themselves against them. Micro-targeting of extremist viewpoints is so effective that I tend to think of it as a low-grade basilisk attack of sorts, a political equivalent of the langford death parrot: If you don't have your special protective goggles on there is nothing you can do to keep your opinion from being pushed around in depressingly predictable ways.

There are studies that demonstrate that information that you consciously and correctly refute and disregard still affects your beliefs. And that's only useful if you're perfect; there's a rather nasty ratchet effect at work on your confidence bounds, so every single error leads to a nearly permanent skew that can be used to lever you arbitrarily far away from "truth". Even if you could correctly discard information that was outside believable confidence bounds, these systems can just denial-of-service your ability to gather competing information and pull off a good Cartesian evil demon act.
As I’m reading this, this post is #1 on HN with a mere 9 points and zero comments.
This is frustrating me because I cannot conceive how this can possibly rank higher than other articles with such weak data points .

Can anyone here shed some light on this ?
Sounds like history repeating itself

Last time Automakers tried crap like Telsa is trying we got the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act

I would have hope we would get a revision that protects consumers but we are more likely to see a repeal of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act from both Democrats and Republicans than any support for lowering of Intellectual privilege protections. (Democrats are in the pocket of Hollywood who lives and dies on copyright laws)
This is utterly wonderful - brought to mind the film Brazil's fly in a typewriter.

I'm now going to have to go down the rabbit hole of each of these ghost kanji. Good times.
I am, yes! Nice to see a kindred spirit :-)
City report on Confederate monuments raises idea of renaming Austin
I recommend reading Elephant in the Brain which points out human's capacity for self deception. One example is the idea that we see ourselves as caring about our health. The truth is that we like to signal that we care about our health to others for a variety of social reasons, but in practice our actions show that we care a lot less then we actually believe.
This is the key aspect of actual HPC clusters that appears to be missing from the pretenders.

That completely depends on your workload. For example, we did (natural language) parsing on thousands of CPUs on one of the large European computation grids. This work was largely CPU bound, the input and output data is relatively small, so the interconnect speed is not a big factor. The problem is embarrassingly parallel, so the primary consideration is having enough CPUs with a reasonable amount of memory.
The poster has a karma of 35285.
Seems to me that someone who can't survive for six weeks by one mechanism or another--whether by savings, or family and friends, or credit, or charity, or existing government programs, or short term work--is doomed anyway. At some point, people have to be dealt the consequences of their actions. At some point.

You can't just spell out a scenario where someone is completely irresponsible and say, "Well, because of this guy we need even more safety nets--the existing two dozen are insufficient."
Sure I can, but it's ugly and cumbersome and doesn't work when you try to provide a library that could be used with the IDE.
Bikes that deliver themselves?
The fixating effect of digitalization is scary.

New characters were introduced by accident, and although they're useless, they're probably not going anywhere. But what about the inverse? Will character sets still be able to change and grow new characters now that they're standardized like this?
Bitter oranges make the best marmalade
> so they can funnel you towards a new purchase.

That hardly seems like a valid business plan for such a large company. If they were to do it purely to create such a construction, they'd be losing clients and money faster than you can hear a YouTuber rant about it.

It seems that everyone is assuming malice in every case while that is not often the cause. Internal Lawyer/security/IP departments, DFM and business rules are like 99.999999% of the reasons why things are the way they are at any large company that tries to serve markets above the bottom/budget line.
Totally agree, this is just about employing affirmative action, how, and why. And yes, I get the criticism but I haven't heard anything convincing as of yet. The only baffling thing to me is that its critics believe that pure meritocracy is still the flagship solution, when the flaws seem so obvious. I think the author does a great job explaining why for this case.
But I think teaching kids to read the label on their food is a good idea...
Its both:

1. Platforms have a civic responsibility to not promote disinformation.

2. Citizens have a responsibility to escape their bias and bubbles and reject disinformation.

But in the current environment where even basic truth and sources are under attack by yelling 'fake news' where is the foundational truth on which to even arrive at critical thinking?

This is the authoritarian's great trick.

Critical thinking is hard work and discomforting, its much easier to pick a side and allow yourself to be manipulated.

We need critical thinking but more importantly we need to attack the tribalism and polarisation that prevent us even making the journey to critical thinking.
Chaos Erupts in Uber V. Taxi Drivers Turf War in Barcelona
Fast upvotes. Doesn’t seem like a very weak datapoint.
Reich is a Socialist who wants to take everyone's freedom away for collectivist ideals that are proven to not work. It's a shame so many people fall for his crap. Inequality doesn't necessarily mean worse standard of living. I think most Venezuelans can attest to that... That's why everyone should be extremely wary when listening to Marxists.
Thanks! I'm delighted that you liked the article :D
heh, reminds me of Tarsnap's picodollars
I agree, but I'd like to add some questions for the OP:

Why do you want to open source it?

Are the alternatives open-sourced?

Do you want to start a small company that sells the license and support of the software?

Are you still studding or you have a full time job?

There are millions of open source licenses. It's not easy to pick one.

My inaccurate small list: Something like BSD/MIT allows anyone to use/change/sell your software. Apache is quite similar, but it has a patent disclaimer. With GLP if someone redistribute a modified version of your code then it must also be with a GPL license, it is more or less free, depending of your definition of freedom. For a server side program perhaps AGPL is better, because if someone makes a modification of your program in their own server then they must publish/contribute it. Don't take my word. You must do some research and get a serious accurate description of each license and choose the one you prefer.

Just don't make up your own license or use a silly license like WTFPL. If someone wants to use your software, the lawyers in the company will be happier to see a usual license.
I wonder if my Internet-mediated viewpoint actually gives me access to a greater diversity of voices than what an average fairly privileged HN commenter is exposed to in their social bubble. Certainly not an unreasonable hypothesis a priori. Not to mention the fact that the least privileged are as underrepresented on the Internet as everywhere else.
Or perhaps preferred DNS resolution purchased from ISPs?
But I don't think it's that hard or time consuming to fact check the news you read. Some people don't have the skills, yeah, which is why we should focus on teaching them critical thinking. That's not an argument for not trying to teach them.
That is what agency tastes like to just about everyone who is being honest. Power through it. Everything else is McDonalds in comparison.
The next part in the tutorial series is out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637553
Depends on your circumstances. 59k per year on NYC or San Francisco does not give you comfortable life. In some rural area I agree.
How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions
What I see in your comment: people are too stupid to understand what's right for them, so we "as a society" should make commercial entities to censor their platforms to pre-filter information available to general public.

Few questions arise: If you believe that people can't be trusted to decide if not guarded against unwanted information, do you really believe in democracy? Who are "we as a society"? Apparently, you are not talking about all people, or even majority.