skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most people come under group insurance for an employer. Insurance companies have never been able to exclude for preexisting conditions if you were part of the eligible group

2 million workers lost their employer provided health insurance following the ACA. Now they're paying for their insurance out of pocket. Granted their employers were paying their premiums, but from the person's perspective they went down from paying little or nothing to paying for all their insurance on their own.

> Subsidizing health care for the poor would theoretically raise taxes not the amount you pay for your insurance.

This is assuming that the subsidy covers the full cost of insurance. If this isn't the case then you're stuck paying an extra tax because your didn't buy the insurance that your can't afford.

> And seeing that retirees in the 90s and today come under Medicare, what does that have to do with private premiums?

Older people cost insurance companies more. 80% of healthcare costs are usually spent in a person's last year of life. Insurance companies can't factor age into cost beyond a government set limit. So the other insurance buyers subsidize the ageing insured population.

Fundamentally you're trying to say that the insurance companies can provide more services, charge high-risk people the same as everyone else, and greatly expand the covered population while reducing cost. That just doesn't happen. If a company provides more services and more expensive services then it's costs are going to rise. And because putting those costs onto the people that incur those costs mean than the majority of the insured population is subsidizing their healthcare and thus their premiums rise.
The only company I worked with that made much use of it was open-source inside and out. They mostly hired developers that had been OSS contributors.

They'd use GH to evaluate coding style and as a proxy for skill level.

It was a terrible proxy IMHO, because a lot of the projects or contributions they were looking at were years old. (People change and grow.)

Anyway, if there's a takeaway here it's this: Delete old repos that you wouldn't feel comfortable putting forward as examples of how you currently work. Or refactor the code to match what you'd currently do. Or don't maintain any public GH profile, frankly -- there are plenty of great engineers out there who have a family and no time to contribute OSS.
Vernier calipers capable of measuring 0.001 inch were available in 1851. Agree on your first point, however.
Yeah, I'm probably splitting hairs somewhat, but that would be fortune and not luck.

Also, while that extreme example is somewhat illustrative, I think for most of us it's that we're one of 20+ engineers, illustrators, business-types, etc in a department, and the "luck" we see around us is explained by what I wrote.

Luck implies unexplainable randomness. Example: The person who got the promotion was "lucky", because they just happened to have knowledge in a field that was needed. There's no luck there, they spent years learning that information.
737 pilots have said that they are already trained in the tendency of a 737 to pitch up when full power is applied at low speeds, which apparently is present in all 737 models. (Stall recovery procedures for a 737 apparently specifically detail that you must lower the nose first, and then apply power (and not too much power) as applying full or higher power near stall speed will overwhelm the pitch authority.

What's not clear to me is how much worse the characteristics of the MAX are compared to the NG or earlier 737s? Would it really be unsafe to fly without the MCAS, or was this just the route Boeing took to avoid having to retrain pilots?
And there would be no way to look it up, no way to prove who was right, except if someone had a little booklet. “Anyone got a little booklet?” you’d ask, looking around. “Is there a booklet on this shit?”

Wow! I actually had 'the booklet' when I was a kid. Carried it around with me. If you want to brighten a youngster's day, get it,

https://www.amazon.com/Rocks-Minerals-Golden-Nature-Guides/d...
Gates absolutely took a risk. He devoted many years of his life to something that may not have panned out. He could have spent those same years working his way up at say, IBM. Opportunity cost is a real risk. It's not the same as being homeless, but that doesn't make it not a risk.
Sure. Except people also confuse "this is where the line is" with "this is the material that will be censored." The line is merely how much material those controlling censorship are able to censor. And nowadays a lot of very vocal right wing politicians are getting elected across the world. Allowing censorship merely moves that line and what ultimately gets censored may be very different from what you wanted or expected to get censored.
I ask both Github and StackOverflow profiles. In Github I look for code style & quality, tests written, open source project participation (often good indicator of quality code when accepted). In SO I look for issues created as an indicator of one's struggles and overall expertise. Both profiles offer me a strong view over one's position and the data really helps me to filter out prospects.

95% of the times when they respond with "I don't have a Github|StackOverflow profile" they prove to be juniors or time wasters applying for a high salary. That's fine if I'm looking for a junior but they often apply for senior positions.

I trust the data on these two as I consider it to be really difficult to get by as a programmer without decent activity on at least one platform. HAving code out there, IMHO, adds better than any CV. It's just data but it helps me get a clearer view.
Sparkfun. I've had bad luck with cloned ESP32s. Arduinos seem to be more forgiving for some reason.
While you don't actively penalize folks, it's worth pointing out that candidates with an active GitHub profile often _do_ have an advantage in the scenario you describe.
The esp* boards are 3v logic level, though.
I usually turn off entertainment that is dis-pleasuring me.

Do you need everything to be labeled and rated by someone else before consumption?
Then don't show it off on HN :/
Your points precisely match the various community members i alluded to, calling for best practices and safety.

_I_ wasn't implying that regulation was was a bad thing, but I do think that the industry, or at the very least, established entities in tech, fear it.
It is, Ansible is pretty slow at scale (100+ servers).
Kilo LISP
I think the author is using a much narrower definition of "meritocracy" than many people might. There's a difference between thinking that people who occupy some position of responsibility are "the best" and thinking that in general that they instead simply meet some basic bar of competence. The problem is that for many roles, you can't simply hire somebody off the street and expect them to perform acceptably. I can write software for you but I am in no way qualified to be your lawyer.

Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we "abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to live in a modern society.
If something doesn't work in an up to date Firefox then it just doesn't work.

Same if it doesn't work in Edge (or Chrome for that matter.)

I refuse to run Chrome when I can avoid it (not even installed on the majority of my machines.)

In Firefox (or standalone) Slack eats CPU when someone uses animated emojis in a thread you have open.

Maybe it works in Chrome but I guess not and I'm not gonna install Chrome for that or even for testing it.

When the standalone app doesn't work properly && the web app doesn't work properly in all major browsers it is broken.
Yes, you are thinking about the same. I would just use YAML for the things that can be configured.
>Is Google a monopoly?

Yes in more than one area. The lowest hanging fruit (which will cause downvotes): Google Play. No one can release anything Google disagrees with on Google Play.... but google could. Google and Apple really should be separated from their stores. They know everything that happens on them and no one can compete against that.

Bundling Chrome with Android (and Apple apps in iOS) is no different than Microsoft bundling IE or Windows media player.
Why do they need to raise money with this much revenue?
There Is No Now
The calls for more and better training make me wonder why we don't just train for the relatively rare over pitch characteristic that the MCAS system is intended to prevent. If we can't actually train for that then why are we suggesting that the solution is just being quick to turn the system off? What level of unreliability is required to make it better to just never turn it on?
I love this! Makes me remember the nights I spent lerking online for og hacking info.
I think it was pretty clear the context I was talking about. I wasn't referring to randomness, like with your terminal illness diagnosis.

This is the idea of "luck" when discussing "meritocracy" and people being promoted, which I think was kind of clear if you read past the first three words.
You're not forced to use it and it's not a blob[1].

[1] https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware
Anti-competitive behaviour doesn't require a monopoly, e.g. dumping or tying.
What law makes possession of the video illegal? The post mentioned "possession of objectionable material" is illegal, but that sounds way to vague.
Yes. You should not go to jail just for having some specific sequences of ones and zeroes on a magnetic device on your home.

You should go to jail if you do actual crimes, you know, with real victims. Not imaginary victims that don't know when you see a video in the first place.
Monopolistic behavior and strong product development practices are not mutually exclusive.

Google can put in the effort to make a great new product, but use its market dominance to make sure that it’s products have a better chance to succeed vs it’s competitors.
Agree on this. If you don't have a useful GitHub portfolio that's fine.

But anything on your resume or linked from your resume is fair game.

If you haven't been able to meaningfully participate in open-source work there's no penalty, but don't link to an empty GitHub page on your resume.
Overall society is becoming safer by the year, right? Something as drastic as censorship doesn't seem to be necessary.
For more context into Facebook's decision-making process when it comes to censorship, you might find this episode of Radiolab insightful (it was for me):

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no-evil

From what I recall: Facebook's dilemmas over how/what to censor have existed since very early in the company's history. Internally, FB developed a policy document - separate from the public one we see - which would be applied by both human and AI enforcers. The employment of those human enforcers could be considered unethical in itself (at least without providing adequate therapy). Over time, the secret policy document has grown substantially to account for a lot of edge cases. While terrorist/graphic violence is normally censored, there are provisions for allowing content that would otherwise not be seen/known if not shared on FB (e.g., content that governments seek to cover up). Still, there is considerable internal disagreement among executives at FB when it comes to handling edge cases.

The fact that this secret document (and the processes that define and apply it) has so much power in shaping public perception, politics, etc. with so little transparency is perhaps the most disturbing part of this.
Pilot training is a major reason air travel is so safe.

> One hopes that the pilot a) knows and b) remembers to turn off the autopilot when the emergency starts.

This is where training kicks in. After hitting the scenario 10 times in the simulator, the pilot doesn't remember; they _do_.
>control characters in filenames

I don't understand how this doesn't affect non-shell languages, it's not the shell that interprets these (unless were talking about different things)

> spaces in filenames can cause problems: irrelevant to non-shell languages

Again, this is a format/protocol problem not a language problem. A lot of formats use spaces as delimiters and if you put delimiters in the filename you're going to have to escape it.
There are two issues I've identified:

1) For inclusion it is important that the people with power understand that people that currently have power are as capable as they are. So you see that with disenfranchised groups that have a history of systemic disenfranchisement based on irrelevant and sometimes non-existent biological differences needing to prove otherwise.

2) For the actual goal of companies and many organizations, meritocracy is counterproductive. So you have companies that require people with specialized skillsets, and those people think meritocracy is important. But the company is trying to cater to a broader and broader addressable market. It is more productive to have inclusion looks more like the market instead of an extreme selection of intellects. The flaw being to put intellect on a pedestal in isolation.

So its just as important that people are respected to have access to the pipeline and pedigree, as it is to understand that its also not that important and that other people with different attributes should be included anyway.
Data.

Data.

Data.

The only reason Google has anything they have is their data and their user lock in.

The software and culture are nice, as are the lunches. But seriously, their data is the only thing that keeps them from becoming one player among many.
> All the "free speech" advocates here, do you still stand by that when it comes to child porn, or specific threats against individuals?

Yes.
If the user is the one entering the program name not calling the shell can cause unexpected behavior.
Opportunities are literally luck.
My work laptop is a mbp 2018 (i9, 32GB). The battery life is abysmal. I typically get a little bit over 2 hours. I'm not going to lie though: I'm always running Atom or VSCode and there's lots of opened tabs in Chrome.
So the poor person in the inner city who works hard is going to have the same statistical chance of getting ahead as the “hard working” person in the suburbs where the household income is ten times more?

I bet you also believe the justice system is fair and that a poor Black teenager caught with weed will be treated the same as a White kid in the burbs...
If you are learning Chinese and want to try, I created a file a while ago. I downloaded a youtube video (sorry, can't give creds, don't have the link anymore), extracted the audio and added a long silence at the beginning, so that I actually can start sleeping. Have not tried it yet but will tonight.

Good luck: https://ufile.io/577bn
What kind of benefit does society get from Airbnb that's so necessary to disrupt the lives of people living in a city and raising rents on folks that can't afford it?
what this author fails to do is propose an alternative that captures what we like about meritocracy, but avoidsvtgese unintended consequences.
Can you elaborate on your apparently implicit assertion that the decision of major social media platforms to ban the content constitutes "sticking our heads in the sand" or an attempt to get it "purged from the internet"? That's such a black-and-white leap to me that I'm baffled.

Edit: Or perhaps the "implicit" part of your post is that you're referring to the ISP incident in NZ, and not Facebook?
That book is great, but not mainly about algebraic geometry: it's more about differential geometry.
And if people want the right censored then they’re accepting that the right or center or whoever will censor new critics the way Martin Luther King Jr, The Black Panthers, Muslim movements, Native American Rights movements, Puerto Rican Indepencence movements, and other groups fighting for the rights of their people against the establishment.

If we empower an elite to censor information or have any other power over us they will use it to further their own agendas even if that means inhibiting the freedom of millions of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
In an ancient Indian legend, robots guarded Buddha’s relics
> he was never going to be homeless if his plans didn’t work out

There are entire countries, at least the Nordic countries, where you are never going to be homeless, no matter the business risks you take.
I'm no expert but I believe to move from "great product builder" to "monopoly" you have to actively block others from competing or doing things that would prevent their success.
This is the cycle of Silicon Valley at play, and an example why despite the Exodus of many entrepreneurs and engineers SV is still the leader in software based start ups.

Take the "PayPal mafia" for instance, out of one successful company spawned others -- SpaceX, LinkedIn, Facebook (via investment cash). These companies will spawn others, so on and so forth.

It's a cycle that feeds upon itself and has been a successful model, but it does have major flaws due to "hardcoded" pattern recognition.
the idea that "leave it to the market" will solve all problems is ridiculous as is shown by the historical example I gave.
Well put. When "meritocracy" is defined and enforced by those who gained that power by something other than merit, the result is likely to be anything but true meritocracy.
If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.
It makes sense to think this when looking at modern consumer tech, but I haven't met people who actually want that sort of thing. It always seems like people are having to settle.
That is such a slippery slope. How do you distinguish between painful societal change that will actually produce long term benefits versus painful societal change that is virtue signaling as good but really is lining the pockets of, ironically, Chinese and Saudi Arabian investors.
Ask HN: Best Fiction Hacker Books?
What are some of the best hacker\tech geek books, people have read?

The Blue Nowhere is one of my all time favorites!
> Not inherently decentralized, no. But it’s “inherently” E2E-encrypted, in the sense that that’s why people (or, a large segment of people) use the app. If it doesn’t do that, people will stop using it.

People used and loved WhatsApp long before it was e2e encrypted. I know, I was one of them.

In fact, IIRC was pretty bad before they implememted the new e2e encryption.

I used to think people chose them because they promised no ads and no tracking.

I now think most people used it because it was a user friendly messaging solution.
> An aside on the topic of leading dashes in filenames: [...] This is an issue with traditional argument parsing, which is a very poor serialization format.

I'd say that the issue is that traditional argument parsing uses in-band signalling: a "filename" starting with a hyphen is treated as a control instruction instead of a filename (in some cases, unless a special "double hyphen" control instruction has been seen).
Epic Games circumvented this pretty easily with Fortnite on Android
Makes sense that it would be hottest directly near the flame source - the low conductivity assures that. I’m sure this would be clear if I tried it.

Some in the glass community cook in 110 mm tubes of Pyrex at parties. This is also a commercial product (baking cylindrical loaves!). The tubes are rotated like a rotisserie, and the glass is very thin. It works quite well, but we don’t tend to do this outside of glassblowing camp.

As far as the thickness, the glass pans are much thicker than typical metal pans, probably for that reason as well as many others. I have some metal pans that are maybe 2mm and they are awful about hot spots. I think the glass pans are about twice as thick as my cast iron Dutch oven, but we’d have to measure.

I think the worst aspect is chipping - one chip and the whole thing should be thrown away (one could flamepolish and anneal it, but that’s unlikely for consumers).
> It's very US-centric

thats a strange critique considering the article. i mean the whole thing just focuses on the american society... why is that a problem?

> [quote] This is absolute nonsense

While this quote is indeed nonesens with no context, thats not exactly what the author meant there

Back then, quick organization and initiatives weren't really possible.

Take each of your example and check just how long it took for them to become widespread. It was years - not hours as it is today.
And in order to actually organize something political, a leader of such a popular organization would've to intervene, making his point spot on.
Thank you so much!!! I wish more sites did that!
This comment and its parent are both excellent. I've often heard security and freedom described as a tradeoff; the idea of a causal relationship is intriguing.
Sure, i'm not saying luck wasn't involved. He was extremely lucky. However, he was also extremely talented at both business and engineering, and he worked very hard and absolutely took personal risks. He didn't risk becoming homeless, but if Microsoft had failed he'd have wasted many important years of his career, and would have been set back a great deal relative to his peers.
Many/most free speech advocates seem pretty happy with the way it's implemented in the US, where both child porn and threats are illegal.

I really don't like it when people take the few, narrow exceptions to free speech in the US, and try to expand them: https://www.popehat.com/2017/04/18/the-seductive-appeal-of-t...
On the morning of September 11, 2001 nobody knew there would be a second attack on the other tower. I distinctly remember everyone including myself thinking about the B52 that accidentally ran into the Empire State building. We were all at work so it wasn't like we were watching TV.

You're assuming at the time that everyone knew it was a terrorist attack, which is false.

Nobody knew that until well after the second plane hit. And even after the third plane crashed into the ground.

The only reason anyone watched TV was because it was a major event with a dramatic incident. Most of the people at the time in my town didn't turn on the TV I had to ask several times at a bar to have the TV turned on. Even then people had no idea what was going on.
I'm anticipating more corporate enterprise-y things (like Windows support) and workflows are in their pipeline.
Yes. Between 2012 and 2016, Apple sold a version of the 2008-2012 unibody MacBook Pro that had an optical drive and upgradeable RAM, while simultaneously offering the Retina MacBook Pro, the first to solder the RAM to the motherboard. Arguably from a specifications standpoint the Retina MacBook Pro was the superior model due to its high-resolution display and its use of a fast proprietary flash drive (replaced with standard NVMe in later versions) instead of slower SATA flash drives. Eventually the unibody MacBook Pro would get long in the tooth due to lack of updates compared to Apple's annually-updated Retina MacBook Pro models, but it was still sold until it was quietly discontinued in 2016 upon the announcement of the controversial touchbar MacBook Pro.
I once saw a talk given by Gates where he attributed much of his wild success to timing (luck).

In the early years of Microsoft there were no real software companies for them to complete with.