skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, but they're a lot better about recycling than America is. America doesn't even recycle much any more; we used to pack stuff up in containers and ship it back to China, but now China won't take it, so it's either being piled up, or landfilled. Japan actually recycles its own trash.
Fully remote requires a huge amount of discipline to not end up working 16 hr days 6-7 days a week.

I do agree open offices kill productivity but a blend of remote and onsite is best IMO.

disclaimer : I currently travel mon - thurs to be onsite everyweek
mozilla foundation (the non-profit) accepts donations, but not (afaik) the part of mozilla that develops firefox.
Being single founder vs. having co-founders in a startup
to avoid duplicate user signup. allowing the + would not allow me to use a unique constraint for email address on the user table and be sure an email is only used once.
That's true. I don't know what it would have taken to prevent the Fukushima disaster.
I know this is alien to you, but many people do not care one wit about being the richest in the neighborhood. It is within the capacity of a human being to break themselves free from the "keeping up with the Joneses" race, but perhaps not within the capacity of every individual. If you're the sort of hyper-competitive person who becomes borderline suicidal because their shy personality limits them to an adequate income, then obviously you're going to be in for a rough life. But that experience is not universal.

(Also, it's absurd to say anybody who is shy is doomed to have no health insurance.)
>it looks like rationality is fast disappearing from this world.

You'd like history, the masses of humans have always been like this.
Ebola should actually be easier to contain in any civilized country such as the US. Quarantine measures and disposing of infected bodies properly would limit the pandemic.

In Congo Kinshasa, it's just the chaos politically, there is no real government in many parts of this country, the real danger is that it is not a small country at all, 80+ millions of inhabitants, many can't be reach by the WHO because of the wars and infighting between the "government" and militias. So the crisis there has great chances of getting worse, not better.

Furthermore, many many many people locals despise foreigners and particularly white people, for historical reasons, or just ignorance, and the culture is extremely unsanitary (touching and living with the dead, consuming bush meat or worse, ritualistic cannibalism, and what not), some straight out think Ebola is a white conspiracy.

This isn't a problem only money can solve this time.
I know people who fall into the 20% tax bracket, living in London, who are still able to do a return flight to somewhere in Europe once a month.

How do you prevent people who otherwise live frugally from flying frequently?
Given that it's about startups, I would argue that we should take into account that there's potentially strong survivor bias at work here.

Counter-examples aren't there because these companies "good practiced" themselves into the grave.
That's not a good way to gain the trust of the local population.

I don't have an answer for what should be done, but I can tell you that your suggestion is not it.
Sounds slightly similar to the boat sweepstakes story.

Some cops somewhere decided to send a letter to everyone who had a warrant stating they won a boat. To make sure they didn’t immediately run they went through a couple fake formalities like pictures and such until they opened the door to the boat garage. Inside were uniformed officer waiting to make the arrest.
Thanks, that's good to know! The topic was discussed here a few months ago [0]. It's probably difficult to get the data required for a systematic discussion...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18605709
I can’t think of a big tech device company that’s any less driven by money than apple. What makes them so unique, in your mind? In my experience I’ve had less unwanted tracking and advertising, and better support compared to other phone and laptop manufacturers I used to buy from.
I am amazed at the bravery of the medical staff, health professionals and volunteers who are trying to contain Ebola in the DRC.

Not only are they potentially exposed to the deadly disease, they have to content with violent attacks from the population they're trying to help.

It sounds incredibly complex - a mix of political mistrust, lack of education and difficult terrain making containment difficult.

While spreading to populous areas would be a major concern, I imagine that nations blessed with more resources may be in a better position to quarantine, contain and prevent the spread of Ebola.
Update to Right link: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-2696-v2-...

I was curious how my home PC stacked against it.
Yeah you are definitely right that kids are very expensive. Also when taking into account future negative externalities, excessive kids are also very expensive to our society. The earth has a carrying capacity for humans, even though the futurists don't believe so.
Personally I think many in the pro-remote crowd have a limited view of what a software engineering job is.

If you have a job where your entire job is to crank out some website in Rails or to be the only person building some billing system then sure, remote can make sense. These jobs tend to be on smaller teams with limited scope.

But projects can easily get to a size where you need to:

- Collaborate with other engineering teams

- Work with people on the business side

- Work with product managers, data scientists, comms people, etc

- Gather requirements because what you have is fairly vague

- Determine if what you're doing is having the intended impact and adjusting as necessary

While remote can still work in these cases it's much, much harder. It's even harder when you have two teams in different sites even if you're in the same time zone.l

Some pro-remote people also say "I don't need the social interaction", which I think misses the point. You might not but what about your teammates? Doing things like having lunch with your team, going on an offsite, etc actually matters. It helps build a better working relationship.

This is I think particularly the case for more junior engineers. If one is two desks over from you and swearing at their computer then you can see that and intervene. If all the senior people are remote, who is going to do that?

So if you really want to live in [small town X] here and work at home to drop your kids off at school or whatever, that's fine but there's no getting passed the fact that you'll always have less opportunities and only a subset (a small one IMHO) of jobs will be suitable for that. And you just have to accept that.
The people fighting Ebola responders are not actively ignorant. They are just militia and chaotic.

This is more to do with being unlucky where the outbreak occurred in a country without order in that part, than fake news affecting anything.
I agree we shouldn't wait, but maybe the people who aren't on board would be more receptive to "the world is ending we're all going to die" doomsday preacher style I see so often.

I really think thought it really comes down to economics. Even if they do believe it's happening and it's urgent, the people's livelihoods who are threatened by elimination of carbon are going to come up with an infinite amount of rationalizations to put it off. It's also easy when it's not your job/money on the line to say "yeah we should fix this".
The position is no longer available. Thank you for the great response!
Does anyone have the insight as to why Bayer purchased Monsanto? This to me is one of the biggest corporate acquisition mistakes in history. To make things worse Bayer even retired the name Monsanto making Bayer the defendant in all these cases.
That's my point. From my perspective, the headline isn't: "There are too many humans"
Instead it's:
"It was better when only us privileged humans got to do this thing"
I would really love to know if this phenomenon is limited to Britain/Canada/USA and the rest of the world wonders if we have collectively gone insane, or if each demographic region is experiencing similar paranoia.
When I visited Himachel Predesh I stayed a few days in a remote Himalayan village named Malana, sometimes referred to as "The Village of Taboos" due to all of the rules they have, largely concerning outsiders. Outsiders are not allowed to touch a Malanan person, touch or enter a building, or even speak the village language even if the outsider know some of it. They also claimed to be the world's oldest continuous democracy, and descendants of Alexander the Great's armies. Definitely a strange and fascinating society.
I don't think your interpretation is wrong, just the context of a HN thread makes it more likely "tech" is software related.
They don't seem to stricly rely on the mainland for connectivity, if you look at https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

Although, after a quick check, my own access route seems to touch on Hong Kong (EU -> US -> Pacific).
Ebolla spreads and is endemic in countries with very poor health systems and emergency response. It's a very virulent disease that can be stopped in it's tracks with standard disinfection and quarantine rules observed in any first world hospital.

There is absolutely no need for fear mongering and international travel restrictions, border checks and short quarantine for people coming from affected countries is suficient.
Feeling better and taking care of yourself is, of course, really important.

However, measles outbreaks and hate-crimes aren't going to stop because one does not pay attention to the news.
I also got started programming writing RS bots, private servers, cheat clients, and eventually reverse engineering the game client (and sometimes other people's scripts) to write bot frameworks. I remember talking smack to the article author in the private RSBots script authors forums as a 13 year old and getting banned a few times. Good memories of a great community, with lots of people who ended up in solid careers doing impressive engineering work. Every so often I get a DM from somebody who wants to meet up IRL to grab a coffee almost 15yrs later. If anyone reading this remembers Bomb/Contra/RFTO/RECoders hit me up!
There is nothing wrong with that inconvenient truth. Finite systems don’t care about political correctness.

Perhaps a better headline would’ve been, “Not everyone can join the middle class”.
'Too Many People are using travel destinations as items on the bucket checklist.' They are missing the point of travelling altogether.
I just got back from the Taj Mahal, and I was stunned, it truly is spectacular. Unfortunately it was with a client, and everything was social media picture - check, bad souvenirs - check. Then look at me! I've been to the Taj.
The place is truly amazing. I would go back before dawn and spend a whole day (when the weather isn't 45 degrees C) and enjoy the space. Every time I end up with so many questions to answer. Who maintains the place, how do they do it? Why this, why that? Local bookstores and shops. It makes the history books I read real, the novels set in a place tangible.
Unfortunately, getting a no action letter can take years and there is no guarantee you wilk ever get it. So far only one has been issued among probably numerous requests within the last year or two.
>I'd rather have proximity to co-workers so we can easily share ideas in informal ways.

In my office talking is EXTREMELY discouraged, only certain people have messenger, email is for specific uses only, dress code, in the winters it easily gets into the low 60Fs in the office and in the spring we start seeing upper 70Fs and even 80Fs in the summer, we get 30 minutes for lunch and the closest fast food is 10-15 minutes in traffic, been here 13 years and we just got the right to wear jeans last fall, no office phones, open office with team leads effectively in the back of every row to watch everything you are doing, shared desks with other shifts, not supposed to even look your personal phone, can't go microwave your food on the clock but only 3 microwaves for 100~ people, 1 drink vending machine that wouldn't take cash or coin for the past 3 weeks and is often empty for most choices, parked off of active runways so our cars get coated in unburnt jet fuel/deicer/bird mess, parking lot is cratered nearly as bad as the moon (not exaggerating), photo ID has to always be visible, cameras on every entrance and exit, have to sign in at your desk but it can often take 2-3 minutes to even get a browser open which means realistically you need to be here 5 minutes early, minimum, every day, have to fully log out AFTER clocking out before you leave --- as you don't have admin privs software hangs and you have to force close it every single time you log out because it wants to update (mostly looking at you adobe), even if there is a county travel ban for snow/ice we're supposed to work our full shift...

Yeah man, I'd love to be able to work from home given there is nothing I have to do here that I can't do from anywhere with a computer, a web browser, an internet connection and a few BlueZone mainframe displays open.
But even for fully on-site teams the preferred format of a "knowledge base" is digital (wiki, Google Docs, etc.), because it's something that lasts, can be improved over time and is always accessible. And having the discussions stored digitally (Github issues, emails) is also usually preferred because it's "asynchronous" and it's something that can be looked up in the future.

So on-site teams also use Wikis/issue trackers/emails a lot. The difference is that instead of a face-to-face chat remote teams have to use Slack. Which is also largely used in on-site teams... So my point is that some of the modern IT offices already resemble a "co-working" space because all the tools are already digital, and all meaningful knowledge sharing already happens in the digital space.
Ah, alright. Too bad, actually; I was hoping there was a silver lining.

Well, maybe—did the API previously give extensions the ability to rewrite the request in-flight? Such as e.g. to rewrite Amazon requests to embed the extension-author’s Amazon affiliate ID? I know extensions can do that, but I’m not sure how they accomplish it; it’d be nice if that could be quashed.

But really, you shouldn’t be equivocating the particular capabilities this API provides with the ability to block ads altogether. There are many ways to implement ad blocking, and not all of them require the capability to have your extension active “on the wire”, intercepting network traffic and doing arbitrary Turing-complete things in response with full extension-level capabilities.

Personally, from my perspective (and Google might share this perspective), this API was never “the ad-blocking API.” A true “ad-blocking API”—a single-purpose one that can’t be used for any other malicious purpose—is the thing Safari has, where your extension can feed a block list into the browser, and the browser will prevent network requests matching the block list itself, without ever informing your extension that it has done so.

Of course, Google would never implement that API in Chrome. And that’s the real problem.

I don’t blame Google for limiting some other API that isn’t really “about” ad-blocking, but which can be used to block ads as a side-effect; just like I don’t blame Intel for making their processors slower in response to Spectre/Meltdown. Sometimes security for users trumps useful features or performance.

But I certainly do blame Google for not implementing an API that has absolutely no security impact—is perfectly safe, perfectly performant—and blocks ads.

If anything has ever been decreed on-high from Alphabet to the Chrome team, it’s likely “don’t implement the Safari content-blocking API, or any standard based on it.” Not anything to do with this API. This API is just problematic, and the Chrome team themselves want its capabilities out of the hands of extension authors.
> While this is a pain and can be costly, isn't it still far cheaper to pay the fees to the states and your accountant than renting an office?

Depends on your location. At one point, we had 9 people scattered across multiple states. On one hand, it would have been cheaper to have a small office in an inexpensive location, and force folks to come into an office say, 2 days per week. We’d have been able to ensure that everyone lived in the same place, and avoid the multi-state tax & health care hassles.

We chose to be fully remote because it enabled us to hire better people. The people you want aren’t necessarily in a specific geographic location (nor do they want to move there), and the people you want may have financial incentives to stay where they’re at. The people you want may also choose to live in more expensive areas for quality of life reasons, too.

I found it amusing that, even though we were fully remote and our employees could live in cheap places to maximize their salaries...they didn’t. In fact, we all chose some of the most expensive places in the US to live: downtown Chicago, Manhattan, Miami, San Diego, etc.
Compensate your employees well, have them be independent contractors. That's what my employer does.
Yes, because they're replaced by superior products. Uneven grip holes are a good example here: your 4 fingers together are not nearly the same size as your thumb, so why wouldn't you want uneven grip holes to match this? Ergonomics are a lot better now than they were a century ago when this guy's favorite scissors were made. And rubberized grips help you hold the scissors more securely, so you don't slip and cut yourself (or make an inaccurate cut).
I am often very shy and I agree that it’s a big handicap. It’s just like any other anxiety that limits your life so there is nothing good about it. Being an introvert is another thing though. If you are alone because if your choice instead is fear there is nothing wrong with that.

In the end it’s about choice. Shyness removes choices. I have missed a lot of things in my life I would have liked to join in but was too shy and afraid.
I disagree. I think the part you quoted provides a vital perspective that is still too often neglected.

Society is still primarily organised around the male perspective and male desires. We're working on correcting that, and have made some good progress, but we're not remotely done. There are still many men who feel entitled to sex and female attention regardless of whether the woman is interested in them or in sex at that moment.

We need to find a better way, a better balance, and we're not there yet.
Building machine learning systems for production
> ...10,000 further cases are pending, worrying Bayer investors as well as farmers who rely on the product as a cheap, effective herbicide.

> Cancer may only be part of the story. Studies over the past decade suggest that glyphosate — the active ingredient in Roundup — pollutes water sources, hangs around in soil far longer than previously suspected, and routinely taints human food supplies.

I mean... yeah. I'm not formally trained in biology, but I think at this point it's a sane default to just suppose that any chemical compound that kills plants so efficiently on contact is likely to also have effects on human tissue, especially when the contact is as frequent and intense as is the case for farm workers.

This style of farming (using genetic modification to increase robustness against a particular chemical, and then dousing the field with that chemical) is best understood as a mistake and completely set aside as immediately as can practically be done.

Until it ceases (and after that), if you can afford organic food, buy it (and I don't just mean USDA Certified Organic, although that's a great start, I mean food you know to be organic from a farmer's market). Even if you don't care to reduce your own exposure, it turns out that life is sucking for thousands of these farm workers who get this shit on their hands and faces and clothes every day.
Bad habits die hard
If you first use tar to preserve xattrs/etc.. then you can use anything to compress. xz, bz2, 7z, even arj if you are feeling nostalgic.

tar cvfJ ./files.tar.xz /some/dir
Can you quote some passages that you felt were preachy? I read your comment and then read the article expecting to find the worst. But it seemed pretty even handed and didn't at all suggest people go back to being working class scum.

But maybe that's just my own biased reading. If you could point out the passages you find problematic it would help me improve my empathy.
Honestly, as I've grown older, the more I've come to realize that "rationality" is such an energy intensive skill to cultivate and its payoff so long-term that humans have always been like this and that what we witness in modern times is just a clearer picture of that fact due to the scale of our populations and speed of information transfer.

Rationality is energy intensive and difficult to cultivate and is usually a socially learned or reinforced skill (similar to the fact that long-term research is usually only funded by public tax dollars and not corporations).

So I don't think now is any different, it's just at a different scale and behooves those of us who have had the privilege to cultivate the skill to not gloom and doom and to instead show the way up the ladder (if possible, not all people want to cultivate rationality).
Handling the notch on your website using CSS