skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Climate change and mass extinction are the chief reasons I am pessimistic about my life.

Can you name another time in recent history where the end of the world wasn't near? WW1, Great Depression, WW2, Mutually Assured Destruction, Swine flu, AIDS, Cuban missile crisis, etc, etc.

The correct answer is it's always been this way and what we're going through right now isn't really all that new.
> Chernobyl only took out 10,000 square miles because they got lucky.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a tenth of that - 1,000 square miles. 10,000 square miles is the total from one accident per decade and an average exclusion zone duration of 100 years.

> If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.

It would have made a large part of the continent have higher radiation doses, but even with linear-no-threshold I don't think that France/UK/Spain/Italy would have been uninhabitable. Or even close to that. And the point was, even with the most incompetent leadership we've seen at a nuclear power plant, that didn't happen.

> Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.

Well, sure - you can take the solar panels and move them somewhere else if you want. But if you're using solar for power, you can't really get rid of them - just move them around.
Another thing to note: Real GDP per capita has basically doubled since 1980, but that increase in wealth isn't being seen by the average person, as your data shows.
It depends also of your lifestyle : if you can't leave without buying expensive stuff, going in vacation in French Polynesia and skiing in Aspen, the safety net should be $100k or $1m. If you can leave in a cheap neighborhood, cook your own food, reading books and HN, doing cheap sport like running or cycling, $10k can take you a long way. The revenue and/or lifestyle of your significant other is also a huge factor.
Some people are able to look past their own noses and think about other generations and what their descendents' lives might look like. That weighs heavily on some people
Same in India. Wealth is seen as a status symbol. The cultures value it, and whoever has more is considered to be high status.

Its not hard to see why though. In industrializing countries with a lot of income inequality, wealth is rare, and anyone who has that is seen as either getting it through hard work, or getting it via their parents' hard work.

BTW, Americans are hardly better, see all the yatches and private jets that corporate executives own.
This is an economic anti-pattern.

Good for building up social capital and references, but a losing economic move as organizations have neither obligation nor incentive to pay you for what you're actually doing, just for what they've hired you for.

Speaking strictly from experience. Doing five different people's jobs, for the paycheck of one has gotten me a fair number of friends, and the companies I've worked at tons of value, but the contacts and neuroses I've picked up for doing so are the only countable windfalls.

Economically, I'm not much further ahead at all. The whole "raise by being hired somewhere else" meme seems to be most true representation of achievable wage growth in today's information economy.
That's like saying if heroin is causing you pain then just back away from it.

Rising sea levels will kill and or displace millions of people. That's heartbreaking for those who care.
Given that Americans gave YOU the internet, it seems more appropriate to ask Europeans whether they would prefer to not use the Internet, or to stop writing bad laws that cause problems for Internet companies.
If you like them Essential Craftsmen is also a great channel. He is a bit more no-nonsense compared to like This Old Tony (who I LOVE) without being dry.
There are lots of variations on the UNIX philosophy [1], but two core points are to:

1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".

2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.

systemd has binary format data all over the place, and it is quite difficult to separate out an individual component and have it work properly on its own. Not to mention trying to replace a subcomponent with something else.

systemd is, in general, a tightly coupled system with lots of interdependencies. It is, in many respects, the antithesis of the UNIX design philosophy.

Hell, even modern Software Engineering practices still talk about decreasing coupling and increasing cohesion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
> the word "poor" has changed from "has nothing to lose" to "is in a position in which they have already lost quite a bit"

I'm not sure that I understand the distinction you're making here. Yes, one path to being poor is losing what you have. But in the end, such people are just as poor as those who never had anything in the first place. They both have nothing (more) to lose.

> many of the young and poor are starting from a disadvantaged state where in reality, taking a large risk is dissuaded by the risk of defaulting on student loan payments or shredded credit scores.

Most poor people are living in a trap of debt -- that tends to go hand-in-hand with being poor, as is having shredded credit scores.
In the last 6 years, my rent has gone up by about 800/mo. It's the same apartment.
No, GDP per capita has doubled since the 80s. We have more wealth per person then ever in history. The problem is wealth distribution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tXBC-71aZs
Neither of them "founded a start-up" while living below the poverty line. Rowling wrote a book in her spare time that eventually got popular. She wasn't putting any money or asking of anyone else's money to fund her book.

Oprah followed the more usual path of "get a job, get promoted, rinse repeat" until she was a household name before she started her own company. Per the article you yourself linked, she was co-anchoring the local evening news at 19. That isn't the same thing as taking a risk on a start-up.
But benefiting me personally doesn't mean I would agree that it benefits or is a positive influence on the world. Coal power benefits me, but it is still negative on a larger scale.
> They do it by spreading information and reducing barriers, not by giving money to higher risk people though, since that's easier to align with their place in the system.

And it is mostly misguided. The barrier to entry and availability of information is what have already changed. It is everything else that hasn't. Or it has, but in the wrong way. By charging a premium for housing, education and contacts instead of taking it out of the equation. Some day all this friction is going to have consequences.
Except our per capita productivity has gone up, and we are not facing any fundamental shortages.
Ruth Etting died in 1978.
I don’t think this study means much. It’s not “it’s ok to make passionate people endure bad conditions”, but rather “it’s more ok to make passionate people endure bad conditions than non-passionate people”.

I don’t particularly agree with this, but if I was asked if it’s ok to ask for overtime from people who hate their jobs and then people who love their jobs, I wouldn’t be surprised if I answered slightly better for those who love their jobs.

Survey design imo. Or perhaps more retroactive Protestant work ethic bias.
British politics seem to have a few psychoses, like the "special relationship" or the fact that it's now a mostly negligible island, not some world reigning imperialist superpower.
Thanks! I just added a note to the README mentioning it. I'm not sure how I forgot it.
Product discovery – Next big thing for e-commerce?
I admit I knee-jerk upvoted without reading at first because I hate open office floor plans so much.
There is an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/605/

The answer is that just because something is happening, doesn't mean it's going to keep happening forever.
Presumably you mean Justin. His father, Pierre, was supremely confident and for good reason. He was in a class by himself as an intellectual and politician.
It could also be that candidates are getting better and better at playing the system. Why aim for the popular vote when it's the electoral vote that counts?
If the popular vote would count the candidates would change their campaign strategies.
I completely agree with you.

It is unfortunate, however, that states do not often act out of ethical or moral obligations unless it serves some other, broader interest. It's my fervent hope the United States chooses to act on its ethical and moral obligations, but overall a regression to the mean of state behavior can also be expected from time to time.

My more cynical self sees many more pressing and dangerous environment disasters domestically that are readily apparent and not being dealt with properly - in places where people actually vote for US politicians. This indicates to me that a fix in a United States associated state will unfortunately likely not merit the expenditure for awhile unless some legal case could be brought.
On the other hand, Gates could absolutely hire an interpreter. You can't trade money for /personal/ knowledge but you can trade it for the time and effort of someone else who knows things.
Interesting... Some of the "influencer search" platforms eg heepsy allow users to download a limited number of email/phone details for influencers. I always wondered how they managed to get this info in bulk to begin witht
Django vs. Ruby on Rails – Choosing the right web framework for your project
I understand it is not a black-and-white situation, and that data is obviously not perfect. And I certainly am not advocating that doctors should order a gamut of tests unnecessarily. But if there is any doubt, how likely is the added data to harm more than help? And I firmly believe the doctor should not fight the patient on a test unless there is a strong reason not to (apart from an obvious medical disorder such as Munchausen syndrome it is hard for me to think of a reason).

If the added data is noise, it can easily be ignored. If it's not noise, then you're lucky to have it. And figuring out whether or not it is noise is important, but you can't do that without the data.

But again, I am not a doctor, and how much bandwidth they have and where their priorities lie is not something I intimately understand. However something that has become blindingly obvious to me is that most doctors do not have a firm grasp of statistics, and will advocate for new drugs when the actual test results are borderline statistically insignificant and easily explained away by confounding factors (most obviously the placebo effect). Sadly not all trials are double-blind, something else I do not understand.
None of that stuff really requires any great level of centralization at all. Many components, like social security, are effectively mandatory requirement savings and could be replicated at the level of an individual if they didn't exist, simply by using the money not paid in social security tax to buy an annuity.

The primary thing you would require any government for at all would be redistributive programs, but that still doesn't require uniformity of centralization. We don't even have it as it is -- the Saudis are some of the richest people in the world, they make most of their money from the US and Europe, yet they pay no income tax to either region.

Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city. There is nothing stopping New York City from imposing a land value tax and using the money to fund a UBI, if that's what they want to do.

Centralized government actually interferes with this significantly, because San Francisco or the state of California can't implement its own healthcare policies when they have the US government overriding them, and hoovering up the state's money and sending it to other states, using it for military spending or sending it back with strings attached that require it to be spent on less efficient or less appropriate programs than the state would choose to fund for itself.
Curious where the corruption measures are from? In the US, public trust in government is at historic lows. https://www.people-press.org/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-gove...
That's a silly question. Why would you want to buy a house outside the Bay area?

/s
Savage. I support this. I relate with your attitude too. That kind of thinking sure have given me more than a roof and a warm meal.
One thing that I find amazing about Americans is that most of them don't understand inflation at all. It's uncommon to see any mainstream source talk about inflation-adjusted values when referring to past numbers. This becomes clear when for instance box office numbers become a conversation topic -- nobody really stops to consider how comparing films from 20 years ago with films of today is just really a measure of how money loses its value and therefore movies make more money than before
Would you just quit the butt hurt about the popular vote? It doesn't make any sense to keep bitching about this. The popular vote has NEVER been how the US elects a President and with good reason.

The US has been on the downslope since Nixon removed us from the gold standard. They let the central bank rob us blind. Now we are letting foreign nations usurp our internal systems until they fail. The next leg down is going to be really ugly and you're bitching about the very people trying to fix this shit.

Also ETA: I got screwed over by Boomers for well over a decade. Nobody would mentor me our help me in my career in any way because I wasn't part of their generation. Find a way to help yourself--quit bitching and get out there and do something about it. That's what I had to do. A friend gave me the best advice years ago: "You're spending all your time framing the problem, when are you going to address it?"
I don't think it is all due to social media. America is very much seen as the 'Land of Opportunity' where people are lauded for 'pullng themselves up by their bootstraps'. Today's environment though makes that much more difficult for younger generations than it did for older ones.

Prior generations are quick to say I did it, why can't you when in reality millenials are in a completely different economic starting block in large part due to the policies and lifestyles of the boomers.

On top of the negativity being levelled at them, the simple act of trying to financially survive is exhausting.

The differences between the haves and have nots and the difficulty in becoming a 'have' without a firm economic base provided by your family is becoming greater all the time.
> Twice in the last 20 years - more than any other time in US history combined - The Presidential election went to the candidate that LOST the popular vote; These generations just lack a proper understanding of civics!

An untrue claim[0] that's been copy-pasted for a while. It has happened twice recently and three times before that, stop making it sound like it's unprecedented. None happened in the 1900s, so it's very rare (well, an 11% occurrence rate now) but not more than in the rest of history.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
Must be rewriting it to address performance hits from Meltdown and Spectre.
I think it's a tricky one, because there are a couple of factors here.

It's not just one thing, but rather a ton of things - for example, there is social media which is a great way to see which of your 500 friends is currently on vacation right.this.second (and someone always is). While in some senses there's more opportunity than ever before for some groups (e.g. minorities / women) in the workplace, there's also more competition than ever before as more people go for these jobs.

Baby boomers and to a lesser extent, Gen X don't really understand that the economy is different for young people, in that everything that was cheap for them (housing, healthcare and education) is now grossly unaffordable, but the things that were the domain of the rich now cost next to nothing (international travel, cellphones, computers etc).

I make a lot of money (I'm 26) compared to most my age. But like most young people in San Francisco, I have a roommate. I couldn't buy a house on my own. But I could fly anywhere in the world with no worries. The housing situation will be fucked in California for the foreseeable future because politicians don't care about the poor and the vulnerable.

We look at business efficiency as a good thing (and it broadly is), but I think we don't fully account for the costs, in the inherent stress it places on us all. So we now all need a college degree to get an entry level job. That's led to a bifurcation of the economy, between those with a credential and those without.

The climate thing is tricky. I think we'll sort it out, but it is a big problem.
There's a reason we design roads, electric grids, food supply, and so on, to not perfectly match needs. It's impossible and foolish to assume constant rates of needs.

For the same reason, no hospital would assume MRI scanners are 100% in use all the time. You cannot schedule people needs that perfectly without fail, on holidays, summer versus winter, day and night, weekends versus Mondays, and so on.
What teams? The article is about homes.
That was a surprisingly interesting read. I think taking it to the next level would be interesting as well. Things I would like to know specifically toward "life plans" kinds of advice.

How many people are in a "dead end" job to make money while still in college?

What areas and colleges can you pay all of your tuition, books, and fees while working in one of these jobs?

What can you do in high school to minimize the time spent at the 'dead end job' level?

What percentage of 'dead end' job employees are the second breadwinner in a household? What percentage are the primary? And finally what percentage are the only breadwinner in the household?

What characterizes "good mobility" (moving from one job to a better job) versus "bad mobility" (being unable to change jobs) and what public policies would encourage for more mobility?
My mistake... I made the classic mistake of reading the headline, the parent comment, and not the content.

This is usually called a conversation.

Enjoy your free downvotes down the thread.
You're not accounting for the higher interest rates of the 1980s.

Which home would you prefer to buy:

$150,000 at 15% over 30 years.
$350,000 at 4% over 30 years.

Hint: they both have approximately the same total loan cost and payment.

You can do this calculation with your parents. My home cost $350k at 3.8%. My parents bought my childhood home for $88k at 8%. Adjust my parents' home price for inflation and run the result through a mortgage payment calculator. You find that I paid slightly more for my home but my home is much nicer (central heat and air, closer to town, larger, better schools, etc).

My parents' home happens to be for sale currently (not by them). If I paid full asking I would pay MORE in raw dollars but LESS in inflation-adjusted-total-loan-cost (which is what actually matters).
True, almost any interface that overlaps helpful data in layers or stacks is usually terrible. Hell, I don't even like desktop computer GUIs that allow you to have stacks of windows. I'd rather see one thing at a time and cycle between them. Or have a picker view.

That said we do actually get quite a bit out of that ability to see depth. People who lose depth perception have quite a hard time adapting to the world. And our spatial understanding seems to go beyond our vision. That to me is where a 3D interface might be really powerful. Sometimes things which we struggle to decode in 2D are just intuitive in 3D like knots or the run of wires or pipes.

As I said elsewhere in this thread I think the 3D interfaces that are really going to be powerful haven't occurred to us yet. And I believe that what we'll find in time is that there are things which 3D interfaces are tremendously advantagous for and using anything else will feel like a hinderance. But those will be things for which 2D interfaces don't already do an amazing job.
> But still, if you want any sanity in your deployment across different distros

This might be true for your in-house app but if you want sanity in packaging your service for inclusion in various distros you include a .service file.
All things considered, I think most people would sacrifice earning power for stability, with a reasonable tradeoff of course.
There was a similar issue with Wellbutrin extended, where the active ingredient was theoretically the same, but the bit that was supposed to slowly give it to you would dump it on you instead.

"'In the first two hours of a dissolution test, we found Budeprion released 34 percent of the drug, while Wellbutrin released 8 percent. At four hours, the Teva product released nearly half of its ingredients, while original Wellbutrin released 25 percent. The generic did not act like a once-a-day formula but more like an immediate release formula,' Dr. Todd Cooperman, Consumer Lab's president, stated."

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/fda-finds-generic-antidepressa...

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information...

Problem with that is Wellbutrin can cause seizures if you have too much at once, and it synergizes with things like ADHD meds to lower the seizure threshold further. Since Wellbutrin itself is a third-line ADHD medication, that last bit was a real issue--at one point I was prescribed both Wellbutrin XL -and- Concerta, and had to get "only as prescribed" scrips for both to avoid generics. Pulling the Wellbutrin generic with the known-bad delivery mechanism was one of the few cases where the FDA actually stepped in on a previously-approved generic and did something.

In general, I don't worry too much about the active ingredients in generics (though maybe I should) but I worry an awful lot about extended-delivery mechanisms. I don't think testing or standards are sufficient to enforce a bioavailability curve across a dosage lifetime.
I'm not sure that working as a waitress at Denny's would be good example, but most of the jobs in 1980s required much more thinking and decision-making from the employees due to fewer automation and much less centralization. That, in turn, gave more bargaining power that translated into more purchasing power.

A college-educated cubicle drone could be replaced with another one in a matter of days without any negative business impact at all, so why would the business pay them more?
I feel environmental issues are bigger problem than wealth inequality at this point, though both are important and going to have disastrous consequences. I too am not for having kids, we aren't alone in thinking this way. Birth rates are falling in developed nations.

It is hard not to feel angry/pessimistic etc at the state of affairs. In a way, a lot of things have improved - crime rates are down compared to 50 years ago, medicine has made amazing strides, we can travel cheaply across the world, the internet has opened up a ton of opportunities etc. Still, more people are depressed/lonely, salaries are stagnating, there aren't many decent leaders (around the world) that we can look up to... If there is one thing that is guaranteed, it is that humans will mess up any good thing sooner or later :(