skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article paraphrases TripAdvisor's anti-fraud guy:

"Better yet, what if, rather than ignoring robocalls, every American answered every call? If enough people pressed through to the call-center agents and toyed with them for hours, the enterprises would be deprived of sales and the robocallers driven into oblivion!"

This. Is there any science or math around this idea? What percentage of robocalls have to be just listening for the whole thing to collapse? It almost certainly doesn't have to be 100% of the people just listening. There has to be some limit on how many concurrent calls any particular robocalling jackwagon can make. What's that limit? How can we get this into existence?
By that definition, "Black" and "Hispanic" and "Asian" aren't ethnicities or cultures either. Each of those groups have numerous distinct and often warring subgroups.

But if Hispanic can be an ethnicity, so can European, AKA "white".
The American government does theoretically have this power, but it's not like any major player is refusing to do business with Americans yet because the downside to that is massive. It's possible it could come to that eventually.

Australia is a target for retribution here because the policy is newer and they're a smaller player.
Would you react the same way if a potential investor asked you such questions?
Well I assume the first thing you do if you cop a notice is talk to a lawyer, and if the government's request is illegal, the American lawyer will tell you so. Since this legislation, the Australian lawyer is going to have to tell you to just do it.
I recently found that nearly all of my procrastination problems in life could be relatively straightforwardly traced back to internet surfing on sites with infinite sources of novelty. As the meme goes, one nacho cheese Dorito has more extreme nacho cheese flavor than a medieval peasant would get in their entire lifetime. [https://twitter.com/matthewpcrowley/status/62107825382700236...] Our brains just aren't equipped to deal with novelty of this magnitude.

I'm relatively convinced that if I want to achieve my goals, especially as a solo founder working from my apartment, I'm going to _have_ to make an extraordinary effort to curb this, since the default is to just consume all evening (and for a work from home person like me, all day). I also have recently wondered if I've brewed the perfect cocktail of procrastination for myself as I may have some non-hyperactive ADD combined with this low accountability environment.

So, all of the normal procrastination advice applies, but I found it useful to make it harder to access these sources of infinite novelty. Especially while working, but even during the evening. There are a number of blocking apps, but most of them can be trivially defeated by a developer with admin access.

The two that I've found to work the best for me are http://getcoldturkey.com for Windows 10 and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft.... for Android.

I see no real reason to ever need to waste time on my phone. I've blocked apps like Chrome and the Youtube app permanently, and it's impossible to get around without wiping my phone (which I'm probably too lazy to do). I had to go ahead and install the Reddit app and mobile Firefox when I discovered I could install apps remotely through the Play Store on my laptop (ha!). I also block the Play Store app on the phone.

This makes my phone a phone, text messager, podcast player, audiobook player, and maps device rather than a source of infinite novelty.

For my laptop it's a little harder since I can't block the browser and and still do web dev, but the Cold Turkey app is the best app I've found to be as undefeatable as possible while still filtering specific sites. You can set up schedules, so I block sites after a certain time at night. Since, a key part of the procrastination cycle is staying up too late and then getting up later or tired, getting a bad start to the day, etc etc as the article suggests.

Cold Turkey can unfortunately be defeated if you are realllllly clever, but it makes a very strong effort to disallow itself from being uninstalled. It's a desktop application, not a browser plugin, so it can actually prevent the whole "I'll just use IE to browse Reddit" problem that Chrome plugin blockers have. And having admin privileges, it can actually enforce blocks.

This may be a bit extreme, but modern life isn't really "normal" in any possible way for our meat sack bodies and brains.

See also https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/
Man I wish I could work with W7-X data, such an amazing stellarator!
Nobody's stopping these "large numbers of people" from swapping URLs.

In 2019, you might as well restrict those guilty of wrongthink to standing on soapboxes and distributing pamphlets. Everyone you don't like will be restricted to the technology of 20 years ago.

(When the man said "The revolution will not be televised?" This is what he was talking about. ;) )

Basically, in 2019, if you don't have virality+monetization, you don't have the franchise.
Why is that important?

I have two taxpayers, Roy the rich ($1000 / month) and Peter the poor ($100 / month). Today we will have a 10% flat tax. Peter pays $10. Roy pays $100. The total tax take is $110 and Roy is paying 91% of it.

If we imagine a 'comfortable' lifestyle costs $200/month then there is an argument against using this flat tax system, but it is difficult to escape from the fact that Roy is doing almost all the heavy lifting from the who-is-funding-society perspective. Even if Roy has a very good team of accountants and is managing to only pay 5% of his income in tax (grossly unfair!) he would still be paying 83% of the total tax take (50 / 60). If we use percentages, the rich are going to be paying for most of what the government does, whether they pay personally or through corporate tax.

Most people overestimate how profitable companies are, the economics of business tend to squeeze margins. I've seen a lot of arguments in Australia whinging that not enough taxes are paid by companies like Quantas because they don't understand concepts like depreciation and carrying losses forward. Those concepts are quite fair once it is accepted that maybe assets take a few years life in them before they need to be replaced.

EDIT Bit slow this morning, I figured out what you meant by proportional basis.
I am a huge fan of NVC, and I agree most people are not psychopaths. Unfortunately, organizational structures can be such that decent people are forced to behave like psychopaths, and I don't think that NVC, at least not by itself, can fix that.
Happens all the time - really hard to pin down without remembering exact details as Google does a surprisingly good job of filtering them out. Not sure why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fresno_shootings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaika_Griffin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings_Arthur_Wise
I worked in EU (Paris, France) for a year, was paid about 30% less than working in China, not to mention high living cost in Paris. The benefit is people DO have work-life balance.
I'm working in US right now, one of FAANG, I'm paid way more (>4x) than EU and China, sometimes I still need to work till midnight, but not as hard as when I was in China.
A story on the this point - I worked with some colleagues from a giant China company. One of them just had his firstborn and was deployed outside the country for 3 months. The other also had small children and was also deployed outside his country for months.

These guys were also the first in the office, last ones out.

I doubt a Western company would be as eager to split a parent from their babies, but this was a common thing, especially when you're the linchpin.
Because you may have an appointment at the place you are going, not the place where you are now.
The absolute minimum “actions speak louder than words” thing for Apple to do at this point is to ship an external keyboard with every new laptop for free. Every single one.

I have a 2013 model that I increasingly worry about. A speaker is dying, the rest is fine but I still don’t know what to buy next. I refuse to buy anything without a brand new keyboard design though, that has a non-Touch-Bar option.
I remember reading on HN before that this ‘draconian’ schedule included both a 2 hour lunch and a 2 hour nap after said lunch.

While it would still be crazy, it wouldn’t be quite as crazy as it seems any more.
Yea, spam is going to make you boatloads of money here.
Is it ethnic profiling though? A thought experiment is to imagine a country nearly identical to the US in ethnic composition, culture, size, GDP, etc but is rivals with the US on the same level China is. If you were going to apply for a security clearance in the USA and your spouse and their family was from this rival bizarroUSA, I think you'd be subject to similar scrutiny. Just a question of where your (or your spouse's) national loyalties lie.
I feel like one out of my every three posts on HN are about the same thing, but this is dangerous advice for people with bipolar disorder, who could be up to 2% of the population.[0]

Not long ago there was a stigma about this thing that wasn't just about hiding it, it was about "it won't happen to me, I'm not crazy". But you can be in your mid 40s or early 50s before you have a first episode[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder
[1] http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516...
There's a reason why denaturalization usually only happens if you perjured your way into citizenship: it's an extremely severe action that is not meant to be a punishment, but rather to correct a mistake (according citizenship to somebody who in reality failed to meet certain criteria).

Denaturalization as punishment is something you see in totalitarian ethno-states, not democracies.
I can walk away!!

And yet quite a lot of people get beaten up or murdered by racists, why didn't they just walk away? Because, in many cases, they didn't have the option. Some racists just sit there and say hateful things, others are more active. I'm guessing you do not have much experience dealing with the latter variety.
3 newspapers dominate the news industry

In that case, these newspapers have a tremendous capability to manipulate the public. Don't have to take that from me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Interesting interpretation!

In undergrad I had a really nice meta course called GEOG 100: On Becoming a Geographer. Loved it. One slide I remember was that a bachelor's was becoming acquainted with the discipline. A master's is to become an expert in a domain. And a PhD is to drill deep into a domain and uncover something new.

Breadth vs. depth basically.
Maybe put a plastic tax on producers.

I don’t think the problem at a psychological level is getting people to recycle correctly (although we should get as many people to recycle). People/businesses will generally do what’s easiest/cheapest to do. The problem is making biodegradable containers more attractive than the ones that are not. Currently, I believe, this is impossible since we don’t really have the capabilities to manufacture anything like it(formable, heat resistant, durable, flexible, transparent, cheap). There are people experimenting, but we’re pretty far away from a solution.

I really think that the only solution that will work at a psychological level is to get companies to pay fully for their environmental impact. Unfortunately, This can’t happen unless all companies around the world play by these rules, and even then we’re talking about corporations that twist to avoid taxes.

Having said that, why can’t we just ban plastics/non-biodegradable materials like its cancer? We survived millennia without it? I’m sure we can figure something out.
Lobby your local government. Here in DC that age discrimination is outlawed for anyone over 18.
At a time where it took hours to download a picture, pagers were more popular than cell phones, WML/WAP wasn't even a dream yet, and e-Commerce did not exist, these ads were pretty prescient.
If he's a citizen, that probably violates the Equal Protection clause.
Yahoo Notepad Is Down
I'm getting a page saying, "Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue."
I taught myself to code on a C=64. I took a detour in life and was in management of a completely non tech related industry while putting myself through an engineering degree. I've been programming professionally for some time now. Through it all, all I have ever wanted to do was program. Why is it so bad that that is all I still want to do that at 47? Especially when I'm damned good at it!?
How would you for example run payroll then for people who work 4pm-2am? You have to know whether the last two hours of the shift fall into one payroll period or the next, which necessitates that you be able to convert to a datetime.
On my 2018 MBP backspace is what gave first (3 months vs 1month on 2016 one). It occasionally fires more than once, leaving me with tons of weird problems in code...
there is some chance this will completely reverse around February 2021 if a different administration is elected. the current White House has promoted paranoia towards China, and made a general push to curtail even legal immigration.
In the scope of research, that's super recent - it probably took the authors 2 years or more to conduct the research they described.
When I was younger I used to get to play this at Gencon when it was still in Milwaukee. All around a good time and the tech is interesting.
Thanks for great posts guys.
I think the hard truth here is that there will always be clever ways to get around anti-age discrimination laws and companies will always optimize to pay employees less even if they project a culture antithetical to that.

I wonder what the graph would look like at i.e. FANG in terms of average age per employee over time. My understanding is that they've been hiring undergrads very aggressively in the past few years such that the trend would be similar to more brazen companies such as IBM in terms of declining age of employees. It's happening everywhere in very subtle ways. LPT: don't get old? \s.
I’m in my late 20s and I’ve already learned not to trust our society/economy to ensure that I’ll have a stable financial future. You need to have a plan and be doubly hedged against shittiness. Keep costs low. Save and invest. Job hop as much as necessary to boost your income. Try to build a business that can generate wealth (but don’t depend on that outcome).

Above all trust no one to care for you. Not your government. Not a company offering options. Not even FAANG. Be ruthless and look out for yourself and those you love first and foremost. No one else will.
Okay yeah questions 1 and especially 4 seem like really hostile questions.

On the other hand, asking for slides from the last board meeting is a good request from someone deciding whether to accept an offer, and "where do you see yourself in 5 years" and "what keeps you up at night" are both perfectly reasonable questions about how you view the potential development of your venture.
> I guess I don't have "dozens of contacts", but getting a new phone/resetting a phone isn't really that common of a thing in my circle.

What income bracket is your circle? Just going to reminisce a bit here...

I come from a family business that used a lot of manual labor from the local neighborhood here in south Queens, NYC. I spent a lot of time with guys in late teens and 20's, mainly black and hispanic kids looking to make some decent side money. They came from low income backgrounds and were poorly educated. This leads to a very unstable life where money really is scarce.

They frequently changed phone numbers due to: "crazy" ex, owes money to scary people, owes child/alimony support, owes the government, commits crimes and uses frequent burners, did jail time, or the #1 reason; out of minutes and no money to put on the prepaid plan. They used prepaid plans as they could refill accounts using cash at physical phone stores or check cashing stores because they don't have a computer or bank account. No phone service means no internet. Most of those guys were good people who I got along with just fine. Ignorance really is a terrible thing.
> In principle, who could be opposed?

Ends vs. means, buddy. Ends vs means. Every single political topic on HN seems to be arguments between people who can't separate the two, and those who do.
American? No. The visa system is the worst in the world. I got past a few interviews, only to hit a block on the visa thing. I've stopped applying since Trump became president, as things will only get worse.
If you are interested in analyzing h1b data, please check out my project, https://github.com/serv/h1bhub

It's a tool to ingest raw h1b data into postgres, so you can study the data easier with SQL. It contains all rejected and approved cases from 2014 to 2018.

I am also working on an app that allows you to look at h1b data on web.
We had the anti-vax movement before Facebook.

And if it were banned, they'd just spin it as the pharma companies paying to suppress the truth. It would only further confirm their beliefs.
Then facebook should name and fire every single person who fought this long to keep racism prosperous on facebook.

facebook is not a monolith, it is a collection of people making evil decisions every single day. When it takes them 15 years to overturn just one of their evil decisions, there still should be some penalty for it.
The Trump Administration also passed a law that affects companies that store data overseas so that they can get that data, after big companies fought such subpoenas.
I wouldn't say I've exactly "solved" this problem, as I do still think relaxation and getting new information are valuable. But making Reddit more than just a ctrl+t -> r -> enter away is helpful.

A great book about all of this that was also helpful for further motivating me to try to be proactive here was Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism [http://calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/].

It's not really a book about "quit Facebook", but rather "be intentional about the technology in your life instead of having technology happen to you. I've determined that Hacker News is a valuable use of my time within moderation, while Reddit doesn't really ever provide any sort of value, whether productive _or_ relaxing.
I wonder what would happen if they flagged it the same way my thermostat flags my monthly energy usage.

“Most of your peers consider this post racist neonazi propaganda.”
Chris Schaepe Ousted from Lightspeed as College Scandal Spreads
Not sure why your comment is being down voted. Decentralized Governance and formal verification of smart contracts of Tezos are really good!
You're really arguing that 700 representatives from 30 countries speaking in 10 different languages with live translation and voting with automatic tallying is _archaic_?

But I agree, the way the counting works and how they do not seem to care at all about accurate results seems ridiculous: https://youtu.be/lzigiPUXNzI
why do people need "jobs"? Does a person playing xbox and smoking weed all day not have the same value?
If You Won’t Stop Speeding, Your Car Will Do It for You, E.U. Tells Drivers
That does happen for lying on the immigration and naturalization forms. We have have deported and denaturalized Nazi concentration camp guards before.
But Satya Nadella is a big NCV fan he has really turned Microsoft around in recent years. Maybe that style worked for a while, but it became very dysfunctional. I recall a famous cartoon with the organizational structures of Apple, Oracle, and MS, and the MS one had everyone pointing guns at each other.
There must be some joke about what some users are willing to give up for vanity, and that could be an interesting dark pattern to explore.
That explains a lot. I guess I need to start getting better sleep. Maybe I'll start next week. Or maybe the week after that.
The US Military used to have a separate track for technical specialists. The only rank left over from that track is "Specialist - E4". That line went all the way up to SGT Major, IIRC.

So, you aren't bad for wanting that; specialization (to the degree of artisan) seems to have fallen out of vogue (except for rockstar roles, which some exist in programming).
I haven't even clicked the link. And my mind plays back...

"And the company that'll bring it to you is AT&T"

That's still etched into my mind all these years later. I've made jokes about this call-and-response as recently as a few weeks ago.

VERY effective campaign.
There isn't a blacklist this guy[0] does business in China, Turkey and India and kept his clearance.

[0] http://ogc.osd.mil/doha/industrial/2018/16-04107.h1.pdf
Again, you're conflating free speech with indexing.

In 2019, indexing gives you the capability to define reality. People riding on the coattails of giant SV corporations have been using this capability to basically put words into the mouths of people and ascribe positions to them that have no real bearing on the truth.

In 2019, indexing is part and parcel of Free Speech. In 2019, you don't have Freedom of Speech if you aren't indexed, and you can't trend. In 2019, trying to exercise Freedom of Speech like that is like giving a 19th century speech with a tracheotomy. It's not the same by literal orders of magnitude. It's as disingenuous as giving one man a club and your political crony a rifle, then declaring trial by combat and saying it's a fair fight.
I'm pretty sure flavours and even recipes can't be copyrighted. Perhaps patented, but as others said that makes them public and protected for only a relatively limited time. Hence why formulations like KFC and Coca Cola are kept as a trade secret instead.

Branding and awareness is their real power, and a small time competitor has no real leverage there. And perception plays a huge role in flavour, so even if your product tastes the same, it won't.
Makes me wonder: is there any language implemented on the JVM that works around the JVM GC the way asm.js works around the js GC? Would it even be possible, could it be performant?
This self advocacy is encouraging and long overdue IMO.

The Chinese colloquial term for developer is "码农". Its literal English translation is "code peasants" -- not the most flattering or respectful way to call software engineers.

I've recently heard horror stories, where 9-9-6 is no longer enough inside one of the Chinese tech giants, and 10-10-7 is expected (10am-10pm, 7 days/week)

I hope this brings about some positive change and won't just get blocked by the authority.
>Gamergate <went> from something about "gaming journalism" or general angst to an identity movement steeped in fear / hate, harassment, and for some actual violence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6TrKkkVEhs

According to ^this video, gamergate actually started out as the latter and only later claimed to be the former.
I work for a bootstrap startup and my solution for not being able to afford the rent in California has been to just move to Mexico. So far it's been working out great since I have actually been able to save a little bit of money. Only problem is occasionally it smells bad and once every few months the water doesn't work. Which is the problem I am dealing with today.
I expect so. But I also suspect the parent is not allowed to answer per the terms of said agreement.
This is covered in the article: "Procrastinators sometimes fail to get enough sleep due to bedtime procrastination..."

I think the point the article is making is that if you want to reduce your procrastination, you should first try to regulate your sleep. Procrastinators who get a good night's sleep, will have a better chance of not procrastinating.