skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Like were unable to create a stable democratic state.

I believe equality is an unstable equilibrium.

Throw a bunch of people on an island where everyone starts out equal. Soon, some will have marginally more power than others. Maybe they happen to be stronger, or washed ashore at a point with a few more coconuts and fish, maybe they just get lucky.

What do you use that extra power for? The obvious answer is to use it to force others to give you more power. Let that cycle run for a long time and you get the wildly unequal despotic power structures witnessed through almost all of human history.

The reason democracy "wins" is because bringing the least-powerful people up is a net benefit to everyone, including the most powerful, even if it requires bringing some of the most powerful down. It's a more efficient system -- extracts the most value from the most people -- so the total volume under the equality curve goes up at the expense of the top end going down a little.

For that to work, though, everyone has to buy into the system, even the most powerful. You need a populace that will willingly sacrifice personal power for the betterment of the whole. That requires intense, constant cultural education and community building.

When that breaks down, it's incredibly easy for a society to fall back to the default state of "everyone in it for themselves".

The horrors of WWII were enough to scare people shitless about unchecked power concentrated in the hands of a few. But those horrors are passing out of living memory right now, so it's little surprise that we're going back to authoritarianism and rapacious power hunger.

I'm generally an optimist about the human condition, but the news scares the shit out of me right now. It feels like we're forgetting everything about democracy and won't relearn it until we plunge headlong into WWIII.
This is very interesting train of thought and I've been trying for the past two years to find these type of opportunities within my wider network of acquaintances. Still, not much luck. Would you have some ideas / insights / further concrete examples on what could one do? I am very motivated to help and give back to those around because there is not much else I can do except for this.

Feel free to email me at the address in my desc. Thanks-a-lot!
the treaty fee [...] is not the true cost of
delivery, but mostly works out as long as there's
a fairly even flow of mail between two countries.

Isn't the core problem here that there _isn't_ an even flow of mail between China and the US? Because there's far more ebay/aliexpress traffic coming out of China than going in.
There was absolutely an air force, it simply wasn't a separate branch of the service as it hadn't been broken out of the Army yet. Everybody knew what the air force was, it's probably an accurate quote.
Edit: first comment was applied on the wrong thread, oops!

I agree that engineering lethal tools only by people directly employed by the military is one possible way to make this argument internally consistent.

Another way is to just decide that non-lethal force is a useful and legitimate tool for the military.
The Lake Peigneur accident is an example of this happening very, very quickly. It's quite a thing to see: https://youtu.be/3cXnxGIDhOA

From Wikipedia:

> On Thursday, November 20, 1980, an oil rig contracted by Texaco accidentally drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Company salt mine under the lake. [....] The resultant whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven barges, many trees and 65 acres (26 ha) of the surrounding terrain.

> The backwards flow of the normally outflowing Delcambre Canal temporarily created the biggest waterfall in Louisiana.
I had everything set up correctly, including DMARC. I've been doing this a long, long time.
Au contraire: "pure capitalism" would permit two parties to sign any binding contract they wish, free from government regulations about which clauses are permissible.
I am unable to read the actual study (paywall) and this article doesn't really talk about the methodology, but did they account for socioeconomic factors?

I would assume on average that the more books your family could afford, the more money they have.
Show HN: Meeting Stats – Show your boss how much of your life is in meetings
It's a nice platitude, but what does it mean in practice?
Connection Machine (CM-2) at the “Thinking Machines” NY MoMA with Gordon Bruce
Pronounced System F Omega.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_F#System_F%CF%89
The study this summary refers to studied books as an indicator of a “culture of scholasticism.” It didn’t even really try to disentangle socioeconomic effects, because it was looking to use books as a proxy for them.

It did not say “books in the home make you smarter.” It was arguing “books are a reasonable cross-cultural proxy for orientation towards scholasticism in the home.”

This summary, to my reading of the actual article, completely confuses cause and effect.
I wonder what would happen in a parallel universe where Google says, let's change strategy, and provide all the Google suite apps, gmail, maps, photos, ... only to Android, at the cost of the Apple users/traffic. Maybe this would provide a so big advantage to Android to, in the end, recover the loss and create big issues to Apple. But my feeling is that Google pretends that the iPhone is going to be eaten by Android soon or later anyway.
Indeed.

The goal of the military is to apply force with as much precision as possible, to preserve the perception of legitimacy for audiences at home and abroad as much as possible.

Being lethal isn’t necessary to apply force; effectively applying non-lethal force is just much harder, so current military doctrine emphasizes lethality against combatants.

But against irregular opponents, whose goal is often to sow hatred for the opposing, powerful military because of their heavy handed tactics, being able to consistently and safely apply non-lethal force would arguably improve military effectiveness.
So you want to use Kubernetes?
I just toyed around with them, but I am slowly changing my opinion about native vs mobile Web.

PWAs appear to be a very good solution for typical CRUD style performance apps, specially with Web Components now being available across Chrome and Safari on mobile devices.

On Windows 10, PWAs have replaced UWP JavaScript apps, meaning if a PWA is properly signed and packaged into the store, you get to access the UWP APIs directly.

I haven't used ChromeOS, but I imagine similar functionality is available.

So you get to combine Web and native APIs with the runtime doing the necessary FFI for you.

This seems a good compromise when the native features aren't fully required, e.g. WebGL 2.0 vs ES 3.x / Vulkan...
Sorry, vegans. If you don’t eat honey, avocados might be off-limits, too
I’ve been feeling more and more guilty about my 3D printing hobby lately; possibly this is the last straw, and it’s now time for me to sell off my gear.
You're right, it renders terribly on mobile. I'll see if I can find time to fix that today.
What's it like to work (dev) in the US as a European?
I am considering moving from Europe (England) to the US. I am a Developer with just under 7 years of experience. I am looking for first hand experiences from Europeans who have done the same. Were you happy with your decision to move?

I am worried about potential differences in US work life balance compared to Europe.
Given that Germany had declared war on the US, and the liberation of Auschwitz was a direct consequence of defeating Germany, I'll say "no". But that doesn't mean that there's a general principle that "just because something has a desirable outcome, the action itself was proper or justified". Use of force should be reserved for all but the most dire circumstances in general.
I would want to see a ton of data on revenue and so on for your situation but in terms of what I have done in past...

1. I've increased prices for new customers by 30% to 50%. That can help right away if you are charging too little.

2. I've increased the discount on yearly and higher contracts to give us cash to fund the business upfront. IE, if you know your math you can make it easy.
- You can approach existing clients for a contract increase too.

3. Adding to the checkout flow an upgrade recommendation at the final step, ie, for x dollars more a day you get this and this. We had a 30% uptake to our highest plan doing this.

The other way to go, is you can start thinking outside the box on marketing, but without knowing more that is hard. IE, how do you hit your customer segment for 1/100th the price you are now.
Show HN: Birdie for Twitter – Top tweets first, personalized trends and no bots
I think you're probably right--but it's worth noting that it depends on the "space of tank behaviors". It's an open question whether there exists a tank that "strongly dominates" other tank strategies.

One way to deal with this could be to have a system similar to ELO in chess, so each tank gets a ranking. This is compromise between having to defeat "champion level tanks", and having to defeat champion level tanks more often than not!
>Courts have routinely taken the position that "an employment contract cannot be used to deny a worker from his livelihood in the ordinary course of business".

OTOH, I've worked in and am pretty familiar with a particular branch of market research/consulting firms in the IT industry. I've been told directly by employees and ex-employees of a couple of the largest firms that people who leave to start their own practices or go to competitors are routinely kept from doing so. I personally know people who have basically hung out "on the beach" for a year for this reason.

So, in that case, those people basically couldn't go to another firm and do the same thing as they had been doing.
Yeah, I strongly believe that all books carry significant value. You don’t need high level concepts to gain value. We sometimes over focus on the best case scenrerio ignoring what we can get kids interested in.
Algorithm selection in computer science.
Current champion in sorting seems to be Timsort[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort
Also worth mentioning that there’s a ton of stuff that browsers just hands over to websites without making so much as a peep to the user. It’s great that they pop dialogs for the things they do, but they’re still far too permissive.

By default, sites shouldn’t have access to anything more than a JavaScript engine and HTML rendering facilities. If they need/want more, they should have to make a case and earn my trust.
If you are talking about Linux in terms of distributions, some of that mess carries over to OpenBSD as soon as you start installing packages since a lot software depends upon that messy infrastructure.

Of course, a base OpenBSD installation is wonderful to work with and the damage can be minimized through the careful selection of packages.
Thus absolving the people who are building the surveillance state, some nice self serving logic.
Maybe, maybe not. These social studies are so poorly executed that you're just waiting for them to be debunked.
Maybe.... natural predilection is no replacement for experience, though, and reading is a type of experience. Arguably a high quality one.

Also, there are obviously countless examples of seemingly intelligent people having kids which aren’t.
One thing Linux has going for it is a bunch of popular features for developers' desktops:

* Electron apps - VSCode, Atom, Slack, almost every universal desktop app that gets released today. Individual ports of apps to FreeBSD exist, but there is no way to automatically build Electron apps for any of the BSDs.

* Good desktop virtualization - KVM, VirtualBox (okay FreeBSD has these in theory), VMware

* First-class Docker and desktop container support (FreeBSD jails exist but there is no container ecosystem like there is on Linux)

You can still run Firefox, mail clients, vim/emacs, Unix utilities and LibreOffice on any of the BSDs just fine. They're lacking other niceties however. And that's a bad thing in my opinion - although it's mostly not the fault of any of these projects. Some people think BSD is better for lacking those options, but I can't live without them for one.

It's unfortunate: Linux and the BSDs used to have more or less the same application support. Anything Unix-y ran on anything Unix-y. There was nothing stopping you from having an OpenBSD desktop almost identical in function as, say, a Xubuntu desktop - one that looked much cleaner on the inside. But once broader commercial interest started happening for Linux, the BSDs were mostly left by the wayside in application support.
"power over your employees for the sake of power"

Totally true.

When I read about stuff like this, increasing surveillance of employees or all the stuff the TSA is planning with face recognition it looks like there is trend that the regular citizen will be under tight control while the ruling class will live behind walls in gated communities where they will be exempt from that control.
I did have the same problem, and apart from taking too long for dependency resolution it felt like breaking up at each update, sometimes from pipenv update, sometimes from pip update making pipenv breaking. I migrated to poetry and never been happier.
Because google is essentially a monopoly. Almost nobody uses anything else. Because of this monopoly and all the advertising revenue, Google effectively has "infinite money" and uses it to metastasize into other areas such as maps, self driving cars etc. Nobody else can do this because nobody else has "infinite money", Google is losing money hand over fist in self driving cars, I seriously doubt that maps comes anywhere close to breaking even. It's all funded by the bottomless pool of advertising money.
One reason is the lack of native support for columnar storage (though an open source third-party extension exists: https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw)

The need to manually update clustered indexes, and the fact that an exclusive lock is needed to do so, is also annoying.
Interesting, saving this to research later.
Mildly amusing anecdote:

I was on the panel for interviewing software engineer candidates at a large software company where I worked earlier. I asked one junior candidate (having a few years of experience) to tell me how she would solve the set cover problem [1].

I illustrated the problem with a concrete example: a project needing to fill roles with different tech skills; there is a pool of candidates, each of whom had one or more of those skills; and the goal is to find the minimum set (i.e. number) of candidates, the union of whose skills matches the total set of skills needed for the project. (Contrived problem, of course, since just having multiple skills might not mean a candidate would have the bandwidth to use all of them in the project.)

She started out by making up an example set of skills, an example pool of candidate names and their skills, thought for a bit, and then started describing how she would solve the problem.

I asked her to stop, and then, using an OOP analogy, said something like: You are giving a solution for an instance of the problem. Can you give me a solution for the class of the problem? :) That is, give a solution in generic terms, without using a specific input data set. Don't remember whether she could do that or not. But she was quite good at all the other areas tested on, and got the job.
Sounds like a cool concept.

Personally, it's been my (cynical) conclusion that a lot of times the bad-communication around code (e.g. lack of documentation/comments, resistance to PR feedback, closed architecture discussions), when it happens, can be attributed to motivations rather than lack of means.

But perhaps tooling provides more visibility around that and reduces the barrier for edge-cases.
LSM-tree, fractal tree, B-epsilon tree or similar ideas based stuff for on disk storage is what solves the problem. Pretty much no tradeoffs compared to classic approaches, these things are just better.
Skunk Radio Live Music News:
We had a room in the house that had a whole wall of books. There was a carpet on the floor. As a child I would wander in and become slowly transfixed by covers and just the pattern of the whole thing. I tried and failed many times to read books there, often falling back to simpler children’s encyclopedias. With perseverance I became able to infer word meanings through context (a skill that remains today), and slowly but surely titles were conquered one by one. Im eternally grateful to my grandfather for reading so much to me as an extremely young child and to my father who stocked that study with the equivalent of the best wine available. I don’t think that experience would have been possible with the kindle I now own :)
And there's not nearly enough evidence to establish the causal links that you are so certain of. I get that it "makes sense" to you. It fits in with your worldview. But that's not how science works.

"Studies have shown" is the classic hint that "this person has no clue that they're talking about".

Show me specific reproduced experimental studies with proper controls, talk about effect size, and then there would be no argument. Such proof has failed to arise for countless health trends in the past, no matter how intuitive they may have been.
What I don't understand is: will the age not eventually come out? When meeting face to face or little things someone says it shouldn't be too difficult to estimate the age of someone.
OP here, happy to answer your questions! Most importantly:

We take privacy very seriously, none of your calendar data is stored, just tabulated, and as soon as we finish we remove the token so we can't access anything in the future. The ONLY thing we store is the tabulation and your email address (which is not made public) tied to that tabulation.
Researchers cure drug-resistant infections without antibiotics
A podcaster (and Youtuber) who I really enjoy is CGP Grey. He has been proposing allowing voluntary removal of view numbers from Youtube and similar platforms.

I think Apple should fix or remove their rankings but, please, don't add any more metrics.

The podcast world is currently mostly immune from so much of the clickbaity trash on Youtube (that arguably isn't even YT's fault).

I admit it's very counterintuitive or almost subversive these days to suggest that internet points be kept secret.

Edit: Here's a CGP Grey video where he talks indirectly about how he sees the internet fracturing his (our?) ability to pay attention and focus. https://youtu.be/wf2VxeIm1no
True - but the modern diet probably also contains enough microplastics from other sources that avoiding them in salt isn't likely to matter much. :(
EA is, if you read between the lines, a program to maximize deaths from starvation over other causes. Also a form of money laundering, the number of tiers of EA organizations allocating money is always growing. The money goes to employees of charities increasingly.
Why India wants to turn its beaches into nuclear fuel
YouTube partners with Eventbrite to sell concert tickets on music videos
Can you give a recommendation?
Imagine what the Nazi party would have accomplished with Amazon's, "unwavering support". The facial recognition software is just the first phase, just wait til we're hit with the final solution, the racial recognition software, Rekkkognition.
> Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

Like Facebook engineers?
Talking about bodily autonomy to be the start and end of reproductive rights is a bit unfair to the concept at large. Planned parenthood is not "planned bodily autonomy", except given a different name. Planned parenthood, pro-choice, and similar initiatives talk about the choice to be a parent and the benefit in society where children are born from adults that want to have children. There is no physical reason why a sexually dimorphic society can not provide planned parenthood that gives both adults the same choices, rights and responsibilities regardless of gender or if its woman - man, woman - woman or man - man. In Sweden we even have a new law where the state will sponsoring single women that want to become single mothers through artificial insemination.

After the point of conception what rights do men in general have? Its not their signature on the paper that specify who the parents to the child are. They can't decide if they will become a parent or not. All rights and responsibilities are exclusively decided by the mother, as the law dictate. Bodily autonomy has nothing to do with those laws, and the human right of bodily autonomy doesn't need to end simply because men are given the choice to decide if they want to take the responsibility to be a parent and raise a child.
I think only the stomach is acidic, and that bicarbonate ions produced by the pancreas and liver neutralise that acidity in the small intestine.

Your general point stands though: the particular water based solution in question serves a particularly important purpose!
ElectricFlow 8.5: DevOps Your Way
> Respondents, who ranged in age from 25 to 65, were asked to estimate how many books were in their house when they were 16 years old. The research team was interested in this question because home library size can be a good indicator of what the study authors term “book-oriented socialization.” Participants were able to select from a given range of books that included everything from “10 or less” to “more than 500.”

In order words, they just used the number of books as an indicator that very likely correlates with how much people used to read as kids, how many books their parents could afford and how much their parents cared about education and so on. If you accept this correlation, the results of the study become somewhat trivial.

It's amazing how the people at Smithsonian Magazine maganaged to spin this as a causal relationship, though, in the sense of "Just surround yourself with books and it'll have a powerful, lasting effect on your mind." Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/552/
HackerNews is starting to become less and less useful for reading tech news as of late. I come here to read stuff that's interesting in tech/science/etc, because the signal-to-noise was great.

The vast majority of comments on this article are complaining about a single thing: a bluetooth API behind permissions check, and then spilling over into political arguments about what the Web should be (documents only!) and hyperbole (e.g. "i'll be bombarded by permission requests" -- lots of Web APIs can ask for permissions already like the Mic and Webcam, why isn't there an epidemic of permission spam from those, but you expect BT?)

For example, if I hadn't read the link in detail, I wouldn't have even known about the Web Authentication API extension (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Authent...) to the Credential Management API. Improving authentication on the Web should be an interesting topic for HN, but no one even mentioned it.

The ship has sailed, we're 20+ years into this open ecosystem of ephemeral, mobile code execution, with Web Assembly poised to take it even further. We're not going back to documents-only, so either we improve the Web, it's security, performance, and capability, or we freeze in place, and hand our lives over to the App Stores of the world (the security world of native-platforms with side-load app capability isn't very impressive at this point)
>I think it's disingenuous to call anyone opposed to persistent surveillance and the military "crazy"

I didn't label people who are against 'persistent surveillance' as crazy. I don't know why you attributed that to me. Though I will state that there is nothing wrong with an American company providing services to the American government. If you hate 'persistent surveillance' look to Congress, not contractors.

To extend my point to the military, it is unreasonable to label an American company providing services to the American military as intrinsically unethical.
Say what you will about plastic, but it is definitely composed of organic molecules.
Canada's Oil and Gas Sector: What Do You Know About It?