skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do not think it is quite as simple as that. Pension funds often invest in bonds because they provide reliable cash flow, but for the past 30 years bond yields have been falling, to the point where 3% on a 10-year treasury is considered big news today (it was much lower just a year ago). For the past 10 years interest rates have been kept artificially low as part of the response to the great recession, but pension funds have still had to make their payments.

Retirees are also living longer thanks to advances in healthcare. It would not have been easy to predict those longer lifespans decades ago when they were first promised their pensions, but the pension still has to keep paying as long as they live.

None of this is to say that governments have no share in the blame for this. Failing to take action to stabilize these funds, or worse, cutting taxes when the money could have been used to help keep the funds solvent, was a bad decision too many states made.
If ($)emit is not something you use for very ephemeral events, that otherwise cannot be expressed as state changes in natural way, or in a custom, reusable component (i.e something you could publish separately from your application), you're using it wrong. I rarely ever use emit and when I do it's either a very active reusable component or a solution for an otherwise very difficult problem. And I don't see what a meaningfully prettier/better API would be.
> I think the Mars hype might be a symptom of some sort of societal anxiety and recognition that we are 50-100 years out or less from an extraordinary and preventable tragedy.

This cannot be understated. For the resources we would throw away trying to build a self-sustaining Mars colony, as a lifeline for a few thousand people, after a one-in-fifty-million-years extinction event, we could probably prevent a climate catastrophe on Earth.

Not a hypothetical one-in-a-million-years climate catastrophe - but rather, one that we are right in the middle of.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Why would you want to? The issue was having a big chunk of native memory that you can pack data into on the java side and read contiguously without barriers on the native side and that's what a native allocated byte buffer would get you. Or am I missing something? Not sure what varhandles adds to the situation? Sorry if I'm being dense :o)
Their API is so fucked that it is literally impossible to get more than a couple hundred posts from a subreddit.

Thankfully, services like pushshift[1] exist, which has a sane API and the option to use plain elasticsearch.

[1] https://github.com/pushshift/api
Instead of having them meet the trucks, how about assisted remote piloting? I know a guy who pilots big ships.
I Have Dropped EVERYTHING
Soon to be followed by: Uber shuts down, full stop. Sure, Softbank shoveled another shipload of money into the gaping maw of this capital furnace, but they're still burning it. Now, in addition to a tragically bad main business, they also don't have the fairy tale about how autonomous vehicles will eventually make them win.
I've been using https://www.fakespot.com to flag bullshit reviews for a few months now. After many happy purchases informed by its review analysis, I believe it works.
> And what would you do with the large number of unemployed people that would result?

US demand for labor is at an all time high.

They can find employment in the private sector and produce goods and services that benefit others.
So what would the above code actually look like, in your world?

>you don't have to write these checks every single time

But in real-world applications, the way you react to errors would differ from function to function. Some functions would print a notification to a logfile and return early. Some would terminate the program and send an email to an admin. Some would activate a red "offline" indicator somewhere in a program.
> our taxes are too low [...] our public sector is particularly inefficient

Right. You cannot begin fixing the first problem in a democracy until you begin fixing the second. The solutions cannot happen in parallel either. So we either need to better prioritize our complaints or accept that attempts to fix the first problem is often just flushing people's money that they may need. Perfection is not a requirement, just some level of mediocrity could be enough to restore some trust.
Yes, if you can treat workers like machines (i.e. no “human rights”) they are actually more efficient per calorie/dollar than a rotary engine for many tasks.

This is why slavery didn’t just die upon invention of the engine.
I don’t know about most of your claims, but I do know about the drone program and you are so completely wrong about that it makes me question the rest of your unsourced statements.

The CIA’s drone program had direct approval including explicit budget line items since the Clinton administration.

the consequent need for repairs prompted a budgetary row between the Air Force and CIA, with, in hindsight, the measly sum of $3 million dollars further delaying the project and prompting direct budget amendments from the Clinton White House in the summer of 2000.

The CIA’s use of drones for assignations started with direct presidential approval: The bureaucratic deadlock was broken on September 17, 2001 when Bush signed a finding that created a secret list of high-value targets that the CTC was authorized to kill

https://www.lawfareblog.com/origins-drone-program
I agree that it's largely a crisis of leadership. Both major parties are to blame. Kicking the can down the road, so to speak, has proved politically rewarding. I think that we, as a people, need to stop thinking that taxation is inherently bad. Taxation with incompetent governance is inherently bad. Taxation with little in return is bad. But taxation itself is not bad. Nor are we overtaxed in absolute terms. We are overtaxed in terms of return from government.

I certainly don't advocate throwing money at the situation. I advocate that as a nation we take a step back on reassess what our views on government are. We've largely bought into the false beliefs that government is always incompetent, government regulation is inherently bad, and taxation is bad. I don't see how to get out of the mess we are in. These are structural problems in the nation and I think secession is going to occur in the next 50 years or so.
> Languages that guarantee that functions terminate aren't as useful as you might guess, because they don't say anything about how long it will take. (It could be millions of years.)

That's a theoretical problem, but is it one that comes up in practice? In my experience those languages eliminate the overwhelming majority of long-running functions, so are about as useful as you might think.
Yeah, I don't understand why they aren't doing something like this. Seems like a no-brainer to have a number of staging facilities along major transport corridors that the self driving trucks deliver to, leaving the last X miles to human drivers. The truck unhitches, fuels up, picks up a new trailer, and is back on the highway in 30 minutes. You could have these operating 24/7, with human drivers picking up loads for delivery during human working hours.
Self service at the gas station?
Why? There's going to be 6.2 million of them. Who's going to want to buy them? And more importantly, who's going to go through the trouble of keeping them and selling them for any kind of minor profit?
Here's a couple of early studies of using it:

https://aardvark179.github.io/blog/fibers.html/

https://medium.com/graalvm/bringing-fibers-to-truffleruby-1b...
What?

You're argument is that a non-zero number of Alex Jones supporters don't support free-speech therefore all private platforms should ban him?

As a moderate liberal, this type of extremism (i.e. seeing Nazis and hate-speech and shootings everywhere, without every checking the numbers) actually pushes me to the right. I know I'm not alone, it's Joe Rogan's whole shtick.
that's ok, vote with your wallet, just as long as you don't pressure spotify to change its policies then all fine i guess \_(ツ)_/¯
> Hmm, I had (apparently wrongly) assumed this had become common knowledge.

me too. maybe NPR is behind the times. also: Amazon is a sponsor of NPR (just sayin')

> amazon claimed it was only roughly 1% of all reviews that were paid for.

yes. that's right. the 1% figure also appears in the NPR article:

"Our approximation is that less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic," says Sharon Chiarella, vice president of community shopping at Amazon.
Revolution on travel industry
One small problem: Moon is the gigantic EM recorder. It recorded every EM wave from Earth. Most of them are just lighting strikes, but some of them are interesting, radio transmissions, for example. They are very weak, but antenna is huge. We may be able to restore these recordings in (far) future, so we should preserve at least 1/4 of visible Moon for future archaeology.
It has worked well for me. There are plenty of A and B products, keep looking.
And America’s democracy is in robust health, is it? “Fake news” sourced to state-sponsored actors not currently a subject of concern there?

Oh, and speaking of viruses, anti-vaxxers aren’t still a thing there, are they? I’m sure the good speech will have cancelled out the bad on that subject already.

As for WWII, do I think the weaponisation of the first broadcast communication medium had a huge hand in the rise of Fascism in Germany? Yes, I do.
I really thought they'd pull out of self-driving tech after that. It's insane that they're right back on the roads a few months later. There's no way that's enough time to be sure your broken software isn't going to kill again.
Seems like a brilliant way to make use of a semi-idling workforce.
I hate to say that I don't buy it here, but popular sovereignty (and its close cousin, social contract) is a core belief of liberal democracy. Literally "the will of the people". The people deserve the state they vote for, nothing more, nothing less. If you try to maintain the institutions over the mechanisms that guarantee those institutions, you'll find that those institutions will slip away from you anyway. You risk turning into the very thing you're fighting. As someone who views themselves as more in the center, this is exactly how I see mainstream left politics going right now.

"The concept of popular sovereignty holds simply that in a society organized for political action, the will of the people as a whole is the only right standard of political action"[1]

[1]:https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Massachusetts_Const...
It's a bit weirder than that. It actually does save all the posts, but the "saved" page (like almost every other page on the site) will only show you 1000 items, so there's just no way to access all the older items once they've been "pushed off the end".

I posted some more information about it a while ago here: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/7en0uu/my_saved_posts...
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov is a quite literal take on this question: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
This description bears no resemblance to the interview process I experienced at Google before going to work there in 2012.
Depends on what you mean by dynamics of money. Social science usually features two approaches, one micro approach based on individual decisionmaking, and one macro approach trying to find general rules to aggregates (so mass behavior).

In terms of micro, yes there are pretty consistent theories as to why and how people use money. Probably the most relevant application thereof are in the microeconomics of banking and in so called microstructure models in finance.

In terms of macro, there is of course also a lot of monetary theory as to why people use money in a certain way.

What does not yet exist is a unified theory linking micro behavior to all aggregates. Such models typically rely on some sort of representative agent, which is known and recognized to be deeply problematic in scientific terms of aggregation.
Other approaches exist, of course, such as agent based models.
But there is no "theory of everything" yet.

Can economics give rationales? Yes. Peek into any course on the theory of money.

But reasoning from micro behavior to aggregates is difficult in social science. We are currently in the process of figuring out better theories of aggregation, but doing so requires using game theory and decision theory in fully interdependent (so for example networked) contexts trough dynamics, so this as of yet also requires a lot of methodological (read: mathematical) machinery that is not yet developed.
If someone else had been given Beeching's job (make British Rail stop losing money, hand-over-fist), what would they have recommended instead of mass closures? While they might have differed in what they suggested closing, I don't think the outcome would've been all that different.
Most clients support it implicitly; you probably have to go out of your way to get an uncompressed stream. Now compressing a verbose text string is not optimal but given the past attempts I'd hesitate against using a pre-packed format. Historically that has not worked out well. Compressing the text format is ultimately the worse-is-better solution.
How long before they move back again?
I built something similar: with http://WebFiddle.net you can see what any site would look like with custom CSS and JS applied, its like an editor for changing the web/plugins/extensions ect. Used by technical types.
Perhaps people feel overtaxed, not in absolute terms, but relative to the services provided? The US Gov collected approximately 3.3T in revenue in FY2016--more than $10,000 for every person in the country. By comparison, the Netherlands collected 255B Euros from a population of 17M, or about $17k USD per person (2016 figure, according to OECD statistics). Clearly, a much higher number at the federal level, but they have a much lower average provincial tax (~$1,500) compared to the average state tax in the US, which varies widely, but averages out to about $4,800, bringing the totals to ~$14,800/person in the US, vs ~$18,500 in the Netherlands. Yes, the Dutch pay a 25% premium, but in my opinion they get a good ROI for their tax dollars. I think the issue of ROI is a major barrier to increasing tax rates in the US.
I think you might be using an overly simplistic meaning for "classical". There is nothing preventing a classical description of ferromagnetism, for instance [1]. Bohmian simulations of atoms has established stability despite the orbits, and would similarly entail the diamagnetism needed for this phenomenon, so classical theories can in fact explain it.

> well it doesn't explain anything new and the only problems it might solve are related to prejudices.

Correct, it actually explains everything old which prior interpretations like Copenhagen could not. I assume by "prejudices", you're referring to classical prejudices, but I think those prejudices are perfectly warranted.

> In this kind of situations just go for the more simple and consistent theory as the only thing that matters is measurements.

I disagree! John Bell formed the first no-go theorem because he was a fan of Bohmian mechanics. Without this focus on interpretations and quantum fundamentals, we may never have seen that landmark result or the series of subsequent no-go theorems which have all proven critical to our scientific understanding.

Science and physics does not consist solely of measurements; considerations of ontology are at least equally important because they inform the thought experiments which really drive scientific revolutions.

> Bell has written about this elsewhere, it's not pretty but I'm sure somebody has arrived to a working model by now

There are a few workable models, but Bell was correct to say that non-locality was the unsolved problem of quantum mechanics. Other interpretations let you "solve" it by sweeping it under the rug, but it always rears its ugly head elsewhere.

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/365970/43861
I find that kind of comment incredibly misleading. The concepts that most people attach to lists and optionals don't touch functor semantics and thus are miles away from monads.

Saying that lists are an instance of Monad in Haskell says much more about novel ways you can use a list in Haskell than about properties of a monad.
Or maybe it's a good thing. A recklessly governed self-driving car will kill far fewer people than a recklessly governed self-driving truck.
The people doing the promising are the same as those receiving the benefits.

That's the key point. Budget broken so we can't pay for something? Let's talk about putting money in. Systemic problem where the people making decisions about spending the money are the same people receiving benefits? You can't write a check to fix that. This isn't a traditional "how much do we tax and what do we spend our money on?" public policy discussion.

Systemic problems are another kind of problem entirely. They deserve and require non-partisan attention and discussion.
The 'narrative' is that the US will co-opt programs as critical and important as vaccination to meet it's temporary geopolitical goals. That is demonstrably and objectively true.

Comparisons with ISIS are unfounded in mind. We're expected to hold ourselves to a higher standard than that. ISIS is such a rock bottom standard it's sitting in a lava pool in hell.
Would both of you please stop this ridiculous spat.
How are there not laws that enforce companies to verify there reviews. I understand it is a complex problem, but first it was our elections were manipulated via spam advertising and now, most of the products that we buy are going to be.
Curious why movie chains themselves don't sell "season passes", like almost every other entertainment venue. Sure, it might be much more expensive than MoviePass in order to stay profitable, but I haven't seen any movie theater near me attempt something like this.
I'm a public employee. I don't cause the government to write its contract with me to be the way it is. It's negotiated between my union and the state Department of Education. It is then voted on by the legislative branch and signed by the governor. It's a long process. At no point am I or my fellow workers the ones making the promises.

It costs money to run government. Employees need to be paid. We have had lay offs when budgets were constrained. The funding per pupil has steadily decreased the last 30 years and hence tuition has similarly increased. Our salaries relative to purchasing power has decreased over this time.
You raise the other really important consideration, which is that if we were to raise taxes to the same levels as Germany or Sweden, taxes wouldn't go up on rich people and corporations: https://taxfoundation.org/how-scandinavian-countries-pay-the.... The top marginal tax rate for someone in California, even with the Trump tax cuts, is similar to someone in Sweden. The difference is that in the U.S., the 50%+ rate kicks in around $500,000-1,000,000 HHI, while in Sweden it kicks in at the equivalent of around $100,000 HHI. Sweden collects as much revenue from its 25% VAT, which is enormously regressive, as from income taxes.
How We Monitor Monzo [with Prometheus]
I didn't downvote the comment, but maybe some people think it lacks perspective and concocts theories for why criticism of their code is actually the fault of reviewers rather than taking it as a learning experience. But I didn't downvote it because who knows, maybe the commenter has actually had a bunch of bad faith reviewers.
But most of the money is spent on research and high tech manufacturing. Those are not easy fields to find private employment for.
I like that the astronaut holds a mild grudge.
You could fix infrastructure by slashing the US military down to a reasonable size (~2.5% of GDP), there are no other large problems you can fix with that money. The scale of the entitlement problem, healthcare cost problem, etc. is far beyond anything that $150b-$200b per year will solve long-term.

I have no interest in seeing Chicago fix its pension problems by using funding taken from the US military. Chicago made its bed by intentionally, dramatically over-promising, it gets to sleep in that bed. National high speed rail? That would get my vote, so to speak.

We could throw some money at the university cost problem. However that's not lacking funding at all. In fact it has far too much funding, we need to deprive it of the federal slush money and legally mandate how funds can be spent (ie restrict admin spending). It's a massive theft cartel run by the admins at the universities, they're the ones that have universally benefitted by perpetually raising the cost. You can see that represented in the charts comparing the extreme expansion of admin cost & employment at universities, vs the employment of eg professors, over 30 years.
> I don't see how to get out of the mess we are in.

Gotta start at the top. Transparency and clarity of spending coupled with simplification of the tax code. In the meantime, deference to smaller regions can help (but not on everything) where accountability is more real.

> These are structural problems in the nation and I think secession is going to occur in the next 50 years or so.

Nah, apathy wins in these situations where boats are not rocked significantly on either side.
Yes, but there is no guarantee that the argument passed to that lambda will ever be evaluated. Consider e.g. the following expression in the identity monad:

do { x <- return [1..]; return 7 }

That evaluates to 7, and the infinite list is never evaluated. So the 'data dependency' that monadic bind gives you doesn't, in general, force evaluation order. It's only because the implementation details of the IO monad ensure that the dummy world parameter is always 'evaluated' that you get guarantees about evaluation order. Note that the dummy world parameter is just that -- a dummy -- and no computation actually depends on its value. It's pure compiler magic.
Raising taxes is not the only way to improve public infrastructure. One can also lower the trade deficits, improve the technology the government uses, and legislate away some of the problems (jails would be less full if drug offenses didn't carry such harsh penalties). Taxation should only be tried when nothing else has worked. With 50% marginal income tax rates in many states, the US leans much more towards the communist than Randian side of the spectrum as it is.
I believe at some point in time California and other wealthy states will want to secede. They are subsidizing the poorer states and at some point they may question the benefits of the union.
Have you looked at the complexity of driving a semi trailer? There is a ton that can go wrong even in the best of conditions.

Also, nothing about driving extra long distances in remote areas where there may not be any type of cell signal, or in places where GPS can be lost (no line of sight to satellites, or places where there are tree/building cover, etc) is predicable.
Sugar + organic are combustible, huge quantity can feed a fire to an higher temp, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_candy
How can we believe you?
From my uninformed point of view, most of those things apply to human drivers as well.

Automated trucks seem appealing because they solve (what appears to me to be) a large problem with human drivers - fatigue and allowable working hours.

Building a fixed-route automated truck seems more doable than a self-driving car that can handle arbitrary roads. I don't know if it's actually any easier, but the problems that need to be solved seem smaller in scope.
Trucks often drive mostly or only on major thoroughfares and often on extremely long and tedious routes. A self driving truck that could drive 50 hour stretches without getting tired or making mistakes would be a huge improvement in efficiency.
AMC and Cinemark, the major chains around me, have those kinds of programs already. I think most chains are starting to implement this.

They're not entirely subscription services, but memberships to offer cheaper tickets to frequent moviegoers etc.