skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Linus hold a monopoly over operating systems since maybe 80% of servers and mobile phones use Linux ?

Maybe he twirls his mustache every night thinking about how much cash he will make once he aggressively starts charging everybody 100 dollars to upgrade their Linux version, and all he has been doing over the past 20 years is under price until he has absolute vertical domination ?

Linux harms legitimate 'small business' owners who cannot sell their operating system for 10,000 dollar / license to recoup their investment.

--- BIG RED /S ---

Lawyers trying to create laws about macro economics is no different than me telling a doctor how to perform eye surgery, it's what got us into this mess.

So if Amazon has a monopoly, and you think that is bad why not put you money where your mouth is and aggressively fund its competitors ?

Where were you when for 20+ years shareholders of amazon were funding it's growth, taking all the risk, most amazon investors have not seen any actual cash from their investment, if tomorrow amazon makes a bad decision or mistake, then all the unrealized capital gains wealth that is it's stock price would plummet.

You could solve this anti-trust issue really easily you know ? China has alternate e-commerce sites, so does India, instead of the populist message of "Eat Bezos" maybe give some of your salary to actually solve the problem ? I know amazon shareholders did, and they didn't have our hindsight.

Of course I am not going to take their talk seriously unless they actually buy shares in Amazon's competitors, ask the EU how the shakedown of tech companies is helping them, they could seize all of Bezo's, Zuck's, Sergey's wealth (which is in stocks anyway, how much would it be worth after nationalization ?) and still not figure out how to solve the problem.
At sea, I have ridden through some storms that made it a little hard to walk around, but sleep was not a problem. Ship motion at sea is a bit different from bus motion on a road, but not as far as whether it is predictable. Sometimes we're rolling along and then there is a sharp jolt, as if an odd wave came by.

* From Emerald Princess at sea
Yea, framing the discussion as “people believe pharmaceuticals acted amorally because the produce opioid medicines” is reframing the debate imo.
> If the students were already so great at this, they could make do with so-so teachers.

It wastes the student's time tho.
The scenario is that I am at a standstill because the car in front of me stopped, and am then rear-ended by someone who didn't notice traffic was stopped. Legally, the car behind me is probably responsible, but the car in front of me contributed.
Yavrularını yağmurdan koruyan fenomen tavuk
What the author talks about is similar to saying that a Linux desktop environment won't make you a productive developer due to the vast customization/ricing you could do - themes, i3wm, etc. Yes the first few months of time-sink with Vim was perhaps a tad bit obsessive but now that I've settled into a config and workflow that works, there isn't any possibility of me going back to something else. Just like I finally have a i3wm config that I've been happy with for the last year or two.
Obama Admin Prosecuted More Leak Cases Than All Previous Presidencies Combined
There's a Reason for everything.

https://www.propellerheads.se/en/reason
> There are variations on this that are more problematic (which I've never seen solutions to).

Then you haven't spent much time looking at actual textbooks on GR, since all of these issues are addressed there. (Not to mention in many peer-reviewed papers in the field.)

> if no matter appears to reach event horizons, how can they (event horizons) form in the first place (i.e. exist in our universe)?

This is the same fallacy as the fallacy that nothing can actually fall into a black hole because it looks like it takes forever from the outside. Oppenheimer and Snyder published a mathematical model way back in 1939 that shows how a black hole can form in a finite time from the gravitational collapse of a massive object, as seen by an observer falling inward on the surface of the object. The collapse appears to take forever as seen by a distant observer, but this is an optical illusion caused by the effect of spacetime curvature on the paths of light rays. This has been studied for decades and is thoroughly understood.

> While it takes forever for matter to fall in (again to outside observers), it takes finite time for black holes to evaporate via Hawking radiation.

Wrong. First, if matter is falling in, the hole is gaining mass, not losing it, so it will never evaporate even though, in principle, it is emitting Hawking radiation (in practice this radiation is many, many orders of magnitude too faint to detect for any black hole we can observe).

Second, if you include quantum effects, and therefore Hawking radiation in your model, you've changed the model, and it is no longer true that a distant observer will never see anyone falling into the hole. Instead, the distant observer will see light signals emitted by objects falling through the hole's horizon at the same time the distant observer sees the hole evaporate. (At least, that is the case in the simplest model, the one Hawking used when he first published his prediction of Hawking radiation. More complicated models have been developed since, and we won't know which, if any, of them is really correct until we have an experimentally confirmed theory of quantum gravity.)

> I'm not a physicist, but my speculation is that Black Holes don't really exist, they're just a limit of a process that approaches but doesn't converge to a singularity, which I think is unphysical.

Your speculation is uninformed and wrong. It is possible that an actual black hole, with an actual event horizon, is impossible when all of the laws of physics, including the laws of quantum gravity, are taken into account. This is an open area of research. But if it turns out that actual black holes cannot exist, it won't be for any of the reasons you give.
Not only the manufactures, but also the pharma sales reps who make commission.

Plenty of blame to go around.
In Sweden you don't really have a plan. Everyone is covered regardless including basic sick pay. You can have zero income, pay zero taxes and file zero forms and still be covered like everyone else. The maximum co-pay per year including everything (treatment, hospital, rehab, equipment, medication etc.) is $300 per year. Some other European systems are more like "US light" where you have to qualify and choose. Some employers in Sweden will cover private treatment, vaccinations and more extensive sick pay (you already get 80% of x1.5 of median income if you are employed). But it isn't really required.
I misspoke. Funding by government is just as dangerous as ownership. Both create a conflict of interest. NPR receives more than 10% of its funding from the feds. As an NPR listener since the 80s, I've observed a long, slow shift towards including whacky rightwing viewpoints as the organization has come under threat of defunding from GOP-dominated Congresses.
I was prescribed Oxycondon (the generic) for kidney stones and it really helped me get through excruciating pain. (My stones are not seriously enough to require surgery but you gotta sit through the pain to wait for them to pass through).

But as soon as the pain become remotely manageable I stopped it and just used NSAIDs.

Because it doesn't take a genius to look up online what you're taking and know the side effects (I'm counting addition as one)

To this day I keep the unused pills close just in case but I honestly never once tempted to use them for recreational purposes.

I guess my point is that it takes two to tango and let's not throw personal responsibility out of the window when talking about opioids.
Yes of course. But when someone says they’re late, I assume it’s after the agreed upon deadline which includes a grace period (since that is the real deadline).
Can confirm. Been doing projects all over Europe for a while, Sweden and Switzerland where the most professional ones. Good culture, smart people.
That class action suit did not happen as far as I know

Yes it did. The complaint can be found below.

https://images.law.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/398...
For the next survey, I'm going to develop a JavaScript framework called "Abort", just to gets votes from people like you.
Not everything can be quantified, and I think it's a dangerous line of thinking to equate impact with measurability. Particularly in education, the focus on standardized testing has had real negative impact in the fuzzier areas like critical thinking and the joy of learning. Of course I can't quantify this, but that doesn't mean it's not true.

I get that standardized tests are necessary to some extent, but I would not equate the things that led me to do well on them as the most impactful events of my education. One-on-one human interaction and empathy has been what elevated me past the hoop-jumping to a higher level of agency and self-motivated productivity.
To evaluate the validity of those facts, whom can I ask for advice? Because, I cannot afford years of study in physics to understand and assess the relevance of those facts to graduate school.

Besides that, when we talk about facts, why is that I cannot find any solid scientific sources to those claims in that article?
There has always been junk info floating around. What truly scares me are people lIke the new York times who want to censor anyone they disagree with: to the point of wanting youtube to only show political and scientific videos that they personally agree with. Sometimes on YouTube I watch junk science because I'm bored. I know it's bullshit. What I like about he platform is it represents a diverse range of ideas and I can watch anything I choose to.
Good. This has gotten ridiculous.
Did she buy something there with a credit card? That data is commonly resold.
You mean data breaches are fine as long as they’re intentional?
Oh... damn. But I won't edit.
Most of the interactions here in this discussion have actually been positive. I try to be selective in replying to negative remarks. I don't always get it right. But outright ignoring all of them doesn't seem like the best policy to me.

For one thing, sometimes they bring up good points that legitimately need to be addressed, even if they aren't brought up in a very nice manner. I do my best to focus on replying constructively, though, granted, it can be hard to figure out where to draw that line and sometimes the framing of a remark makes it hard to reply without sounding defensive or something.

For another, if I take a hard policy of "ignoring the haters," then someone not being "nice enough" has committed an unspeakable crime, so to speak. My experience suggests this creates more problems than it solves. It is a form of shunning and I don't really want to do that. It works better to be willing to talk to people who are engaging me about the issues, even if it isn't always sweetness and light.

I continue to try to figure out how to do that in a way that furthers constructive discussion of the issues and without making it overly much about me, but sometimes that isn't obvious to other people. Sometimes people think I am upset and taking it personally when I'm not. I'm just trying to make a larger point and using this detail as an example to further that goal.

I don't know a solution for that. Maybe, someday, I will have everything figured out. But today is not that day. For now, I will continue to muddle forward as best I can, however imperfectly.

Have a great day.
> I'm pretty sure black holes have been observed indirectly

What we have observed indirectly are compact objects that emit no light, but contain a large enough mass in a small enough volume that they can't be anything else but a black hole, if we only take classical GR into account.

As I responded in another post just now, it is possible that black holes, in the sense of objects with actual event horizons (boundaries of regions from which light will never escape, even in the infinite future), cannot exist when quantum gravity effects are taken into account. If that is the case (and it is not clear whether it is--as I said, this is an open area of research), then the objects we call black holes based on our current observations won't have actual event horizons--eventually, in the very far future, light will escape from those compact regions. But they will still have apparent horizons, i.e., surfaces from which outgoing light is not escaping now (or for a very long time in the future). And that, in itself, is sufficient to show that the issues raised by darkmighty are not valid.
If a drug dealer sells a drug that people enjoy and use to improve their quality of life, but a few people don't follow his advice and become addicted and die as a result, the drug dealer should go to prison for manslaughter?
I'm assuming this is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but if you think about what a non profit setup would look like, it would basically be a subscription model, which people have shown they don't really care to support, or businesses "sponsoring" the newspaper by basically paying for ads that aren't a great investment, which is also already happening. And none of it is enough to keep these papers afloat.
They went away when every device had to be on a network and standardized.
So, is this a bad thing or a good thing?
Until it affects you. Then you're outraged, but too late to do anything.
I'm sure it can, but it takes longer and works differently than we like to believe.

Empathy, sensitivity -- the ability to connect to other people on their level and feel what kind of nudges they need to evolve.

But of course you can't expect that to happen if you treat teachers like garbage and stuff them in sterile rooms with 30 over stimulated kids.
Notes to myself on software engineering
One thing that should be emphasized when comparing salaries between Sweden and other countries is how there is a secret tax baked into the Swedish salary -- arbetsgivaravgiften.

Basically, in all other nationalities (to my knowledge), you are quoted how much the company will pay for your salary. Then tax is applied, and whatever is left is what you take home.

In Sweden, you are quoted an in-between number. If you are offered $100k before tax in Sweden, that means the employer is _actually_ paying something like $143k. You will still not be getting $100k, but rather that is the "taxable income", so you end up with about $70k, but your employer paid $143k, but you agreed on $100k. Makes no sens.e
> I still don't really know what this breakthrough idea is ..

As far as I can tell it is the European monopoly model. (My info all comes from Stratechery's coverage - errors are all mine.)

Monopoly regulators look at consumer harm, with US regulators focusing on price. Increasing prices are seen as monopoly power, and that is what they coordinate around. That for example (as the article notes) is why Facebook, Google etc are not seen as monopolies because they charge consumers zero.

Conversely the EU approach is looking at supply - eg can there be new entrants? The Google shopping stuff was an issue because it is way harder to be a new entrant if Google (where many find the sites) demotes or hides the new comer. Facebook is an issue because it is impractical to start a new social network. A new network has to get users to re-do their social graph - they can't just get a copy from Facebook. GDPR making more sense now?

With the "supply" view on, you can see how network effects keep making Amazon more and more efficient (economies of scale) while also making it increasingly difficult for there to be competitors. Their size also lets them impose their own policies (eg see ebooks over the years).
IQ and Society: The deeply interconnected web of IQ and societal outcomes
OxyContin was largely a gimmick to market a drug that was long out of patent (Oxycodone was first synthesized in 1916):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/
No, I posted about this in another comment thread. Here's it quoted:

> One thing that should be emphasized when comparing salaries between Sweden and other countries is how there is a secret tax baked into the Swedish salary -- arbetsgivaravgiften.

> Basically, in all other nationalities (to my knowledge), you are quoted how much the company will pay for your salary. Then tax is applied, and whatever is left is what you take home.
In Sweden, you are quoted an in-between number. If you are offered $100k before tax in Sweden, that means the employer is _actually_ paying something like $143k. You will still not be getting $100k, but rather that is the "taxable income", so you end up with about $70k, but your employer paid $143k, but you agreed on $100k. Makes no sense.

I used to think like you, with this idea that Swedish salaries are substantially lower -- but if you use the true tax, salaries are actually comparable.
Not only should they be forced to give this drug patent away, they should be forced at gunpoint to manufacture this until bankruptcy.

These people are despicable scum.
> Wormholes are science fiction

It would be more accurate to say the wormholes are hypothetical than to say that they are fictional. They are an idea someone came up with of something that might really exist, we just don't have any evidence of them.
That's the exact opposite of what they meant and is what Hanlon preaches to us about.
I think most of what we've solved in math is not obvious.

Some accessible examples would be Fermat's Last Theorem or the four color problem.
It is arbitrary, why do you think it isn't?
I was hoping this would garner discussion. Seems impressive.
If we are talking about Amazon-the-Marketplace and not Amazon-the-Giant-Company I'm not sure I would call that a tech company. Sure, they sell their products using a website, but their core business is sales, warehousing and order fulfillment. It's a fairly traditional business, brought to bigger scale and executed really well. Sure, Technology plays a large part in achieving scale (printed cataloges couldn't fit what they offer), but we don't call Airbus a Tech company either.
Arbitraging a fickle TSA policy (less intense enforcement on rail vs. air travel) is not a good reason to build permanent infrastructure.

Rail and air operators will be similarly incentivized to carry as many passengers per trip as they can, so I would expect seat sizing/comfort to converge.
Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
> To evaluate the validity of those facts, whom can I ask for advice?

You could ask other physicists. But you would not know whether to believe them any more than you know whether to believe the author of this article.

> when we talk about facts, why is that I cannot find any solid scientific sources to those claims in that article?

Where have you looked?
This is one of those misconceptions that’s constantly stated by Americans which couldn’t be further from the truth. I know, because I am an American and used to think that. Having lived in the UK for the last 7 years, yes for noncritical issues or elective procedures, you may have to wait a couple of weeks for an appointment (acute care is excellent by the way), but you always have a choice. You can pay for your own private insurance which is extremely affordable compared to the USA and go nuts if you want, or you can wait for the free care. It’s a better system, full stop. America is literally nuts with regards to healthcare.
Greater is subjective. Larger and more visible, I'd agree with.
...Delved in with a library book, followed by internet and documentaries.
It wouldn't be the first time.

During the bird flu scare, a bunch of countries said that they were ready to ignore the patents on Tamiflu and produce it on their own if they don't get shipments of it - Taiwan, India, Indonesia...
Although it's not nearly as bad as other people have it, even in a good job with good employer-provided healthcare, there are two things that still really bug me about US healthcare. One is a perennial worry that I'll somehow end up with a 6/7-figure bill anyway, for example because I ended up in an ER where some of the doctors were "out of network" (this kind of billing has now been banned in some states, but only a minority of them). If I had no savings I would just not pay the bill, but since I do have some, I worry this could wipe out years of savings overnight, which makes me anxious. The second issue is that it just takes so much time to manage all the bureaucracy. Usually health insurance will in fact pay (if you have a good one), but you can end up spending literally hundreds of hours on the phone, especially if you had the bad fortune to end up in a hospital. In hospitals it seems that every individual person you encounter sends a completely separate bill, half of which the insurance company will initially refuse to pay for various reasons. This can go on for many months after being discharged.
My favorite about:config setting is browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab=false, it keeps Firefox open when all the tabs are closed.
> Want to earn money with the work from Qt devs? Give them something back to pay their bills.

I found that the model is good but the problem is that the Qt commercial licenses are quite expensive. You would have to reach really far to find an example of a product with a greater per-developer cost.
for people downvoting this: did you have something to add to the discussion?

or do you just have to downvote anyone who shares a first hand experience that happen to not fit into your narrative?
There is an absolutely gigantic rail network in the United States. It's almost entirely privately owned by freight rail companies and they're not interested in passenger traffic. Amtrak is the basically only long haul passenger traffic carrier and for almost all of their routes they do not get priority above freight traffic. This makes it very difficult to stay on schedule, which leads to a bad reputation, which leads to decreases in passenger traffic.

The only real exception to this rule is the Acela express train on the eastern seaboard. There, Amtrak owns most of the rail and thus can run their passenger trains at a faster speed with priority. Acela gets good reviews and has tons of traffic.
Imagine AWS being a seperate business from Amazon. Zero personnel in common, no shared office spaces, selling services to each other on a commercial basis with SLAs and pricing negotiations the same way they do to external customers.

Similarly, imagine APS - amazon parcel service, an abstraction layer on package delivery through Fedex UPS USPS courier etc, spun out as a separate endeavor and selling services to all comers the same way they do to internal amazon.

And Amazon Logistics, warehousing and fulfillment, sold the same way. Amazon-product-sales is just another client who pays the same price as anyone else.

Ditto Amazon product sales vs amazon the website. The website continues much as they are now, organized around selling things to people and doing the recommendations / marketing / discovery bit and taking a cut from everyone. The product sales business becomes a separate stockkeeping and inventory buying company. As you say, Amazon-the-product-sales-business could operate just as easily through catalogs or phone orders or late night infomercials.

I'm sure there's at least another half dozen parts of amazon that would be industry leaders in some sub-industry instead of part of the degenerate conglomerate as they are now. It's interesting to think about the places you could draw those lines.
If you read the patent, this is simply a faster dissolving suboxone, which is already an extremely common form of substitution therapy. This isn't anything radically new. I would say it doesn't deem itself worthy of patent, but I know nothing of patent laws.