skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> infrastructure is spread, expensive, and the cost gets passed down.

The overwhelming profitability of Canadian télécoms suggests some other factors are at play.

The initial infrastructure build may be expensive, but it is in other countries too. Canada at least allows telcos to throw up a big ugly tower wherever they please. Try finding one in Paris. The marginal costs of bandwidth are practically zero. Yet we still see vast portions of the population on 1 or 2gb plans.

There’s massive amounts of excess OTA capacity, but enabling it may cause grandma to cancel their home internet, and we can’t be having that.

My beef is how app developers just assume I have massive amounts of data to spare.

The NPR app decided to pre-fetch 500mb over data when I turned it on for a 30 minute car ride while trying to preserve data.

The economist apps just plain fail to background download over wifi.
I thought only income could be taxed? If you have valuables just sitting there, how can they be taxed? Obviously if you sell them there might be capital gains, but not before?
An open source object storage server with Amazon S3 compatible API
This isn't even a tax. Here's the dictionary definition: "A compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits, or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions." (google)

Taxing is adding a cost to an existing transaction, not taking a cut of money arbitrarily. The idea of a wealth tax is literally the government just stealing money. The American government, for instance couldn't do this. We had to pass an amendment to allow income tax; there is no such amendment for "wealth tax". This is a result of Pollock v Farmers' Loan and Trust Co., which affirmed the government directly stealing wealth is unconstitutional. If you'd rather call it theft or confiscation, fine, but not a tax.

Most importantly, we've got the Fifth Amendment: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation". This means that you could only impose a "wealth tax" if you convinced a court to rule that ninety-nine cents was just compensation for a dollar.

I guess we're just moving closer to "the mob" seizing the property of others, just because its constituents want it more.
Google patents always shows the current date for that line. It actually expired back in 2014.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US991876A/en
Hi author! I am actually not responding to claims made in your article (imagine that, comments that don't discuss the article!) but the broad brush painted by parent that "The ad industry is evil"

I think this does a disservice to the world evil and trivializes it: Hitler is evil. War is evil. Ad tech.. Inconvenient? Frustrating? Possibly infringing on your civil liberties? All possible, likely depending on which ad company it is, but evil? Let's talk about those things! Let's avoid the extremist language what serves no one and only divides people further into their respective camps, and let's try to have an intellectually honest conversation on HN for once, but given the response to my comment, doesn't seem like today is the day.
Respectfully, I don't mind seeing ads. In fact, I like seeing relavent ads.

What a sibling comment said is much how I feel, I don't want to feel like in visiting a site or using an app that it feels the right suck up as much info about me and then uses my info as currency, then when it leaks out, no one cares. I don't want to have to worry if a site is hosting malware through their ads.

If you want to do it ethically, take a note from https://www.roguefitness.com/privacy-policy

They described exactly what they do, how they use it, and they show you that they can let you opt out if you choose. I actually don't mind letting their ads through because they are so transparent about their policy.
When business states the requirements or tech lead states requirements or some constraints and the programmer does not write them down.

I see this very often and the programmer either makes mistakes or comes back later asking for the same information
Then hire for software engineering. Don't lie to candidates that it's a systems admin or devops role.

It's pathetic employers keep demanding more skill and free work for the same pay.
Wealth tax
UK rights advocate co-owns firm whose spyware is 'used to target dissidents'
I have some personal experiences to share - anecdotal and not that scientific.

I found it slightly helpful in my own treatment of depression. Not a miracle cure - it was suggested essentially because Proton Pump Inhibitors I am already on were known to worsen/cause it. In my case it seems to make medication a bit more effective and helped thinking a little bit. A few times when I ran out for a week or so waiting for the next bulk order to arrive it eventually caused a mild worsening of mood that went away when resumed. I don't know if I ever actually had deficiencies because needle phobia has meant avoidance such that I can only list my blood type as a question mark.
I'm curious to hear about the people who are using the commercial Basic versions (PowerBasic, PureBasic, etc). It is interesting to me that there is still a market for paid compilers for general purpose languages.
The comparison is completely arbitrary. Big AI models require more resources than economy cars because an AI model can serve millions of users whereas the economy car only serves one. What if we stop talking about economy cars? It is only fair to compare a "lamborghini" AI model to a real lamborghini and suddenly the situation is reversed.
Useful book on infrastructure monitoring with Prometheus
Fair enough. I think it is the responsibility of the recruiter or the company to clarify which they expect for a particular position, though.
Processed foods are a much bigger health problem than we thought
I believe you're mistaking opting to not show favoritism to a particular theology for repression.
Even the US had a 94% tax rate on income over $200,000 in 1944 and 1945:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...

Mind you - at the same time it looks like the UK had a comparable taxation rate of over 99%.
I spent 3 hours of our 3 week trip around Canada trying to work out why the data, and even phone, plans where so bloody expensive. I was sure I was missing something until about the 4th phone shop where someone understood the background of why I thought I should be able to pick up a couple of gigs of data and some phone calls for about £20.

Turns out it would have been a waste of money anyway. Turns out 90% we went with the motorhome you couldn't even get an FM radio signal :)
Property taxes, stamp taxes, wealth taxes, import/export taxes, sales taxes--these are just some of the common kinds of taxes that are imposed on things that aren't income.
True but that's probably 2 orders less. Ideally it would be done with electric vehicles at carbon neutral factories
It's a dreamhost cert likely being presented by his host.
To put some perspective on this, comparing Debian to npm:

Number of packages:

Debian has 172,000 packages for the most popular architecture, amd64. i386 has 24,000 packages. The rest have less than 500 each.

npm recently broke a million packages.

Download counts:

I couldn't find numbers for Debian. npm served 11.2 billion downloads last week.

(Debian numbers retrieved by https://popcon.debian.org/, npm numbers from https://medium.com/npm-inc/npm-weekly-200-dont-miss-today-s-... and https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-week
Your parent comment was transparently using hindsight (it turns out).

No crystal ball needed.
> I thought only income could be taxed?

Due to some kind of international law against taxing property? There’s no such thing.

Have you never heard of property tax, land value tax, etc?

Other things that aren’t income that are taxed that you’ve surely heard of include value added tax, sales tax, window tax, television tax, you could go on forever...
Can you go do that for my Facebook, Google, Adobe etc etc ad data? Their resistance to GDPR compliance is well documented.

This is the core point you’re missing. People here are talking about the industry as a whole. Not your ethical internet ad firm or you yourself.

The industry. Not you or your situation.

I’ve worked at a “marketing analytics solutions” company before (shudders at the memory).

I had access (was a data processor) to 60 million UK people’s info on their mortgage, email address, age, marital status, car make/model, likely holiday destinations... etc etc.

What we did with the data doesn’t matter. The fact it does is exist and is hidden from the customers view is the problem.
The article does contain very nice illustrations of the cuneiform text, which, in my opinion, are of greater value.
The Gilead Hepatitis C case study mentioned elsewhere in this thread deserves consideration. They made a ton of money for a few years and that is now drying up, since competition came in and the prevalent patient population has shrunk as the drug is a cure. Down the road there will be large savings to the healthcare system, as the costs of a patient leading up to, through and after a liver transplant is insanely large, and the frequency of those will dramatically be reduced because of the HepC drugs. Sharing the cost savings to the overall healthcare system with the innovator drug company incentivizes drug companies to effectivley address expensive diseases. The timing of the economic benefits (reduced advanced liver disesase) and costs (HepC drug price) uncoupled to the casual viewer so Gilead looks to be just a money-grubbing corporation.

I’m also uneasy about federal officials appointing a panel that has final say on drug prices. It’s a hypothetical, and details would matter. Done wrong it could crash industry investment. To those that claim that there will always be investment- How much of your IRA/401K is in small/mid-cap biotech? -there are huge risks and expenses getting drugs to market, and looking at the profitable companies assumes huge survivorship bias on the companies that "made it".
Look at the state of antibiotics drug development (this terrifies me), or look at the availably of a standard, approved bladder cancer drug (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin or BCG) or a handful of other drugs (please internet search for BCG / chemotherapy shortage). These real-time problems illustrate the fragility of the economics of development and manufacture of drugs. Its not just a turn-the-crank widget. Should drug companies be spending on superbowls ads, no. Should Skrelli reprice proven drugs by 500x, Nope. Anything like Valeant or Purdue pharma, just nope. Should a pharma CEO be making $50MM /year, probably not. There are many problems to fix, but hitting the industry with a wrecking ball in order to set drug prices is short sighted will have consequences. Transparency on pricing is a good step. Get the PBMs, the Payors, and Pharma all to disclose where the money is flowing and what the true costs are. That will allow for some informed discussion. I’m not a pharma shill. They need to be held accountable, but accusations such as ditching cancer or Alzheimer disease cures isn’t valid or constructive. It doesn’t even make sense.
Thank you for the thought provoking comments. Hope my rant is coherent and useful to you.
Your strawman and hyperboles about an entire industry is further proof you are an extremist. You should join PETA, I heard they are looking for more people like you.
Its okay man we all have to pay the rent. Just trying to get by in our lovely/shitty society.
Denoising the VOiCES Dataset
a lot of SW out there are just plumbing code. Rarely you see dynamic programming/recursion algo. Most use standard library as the implementation is solid and kinks have been ironed out.
The point of taxes is to pay for things that benefit society as a whole. Having children, especially in high income countries, is not only important but also extremely necessary. I don't like children either but I also don't want to be the last generation to inhabit the planet. And it's important that children have support early in life to be successful.
The onset of depression has greatly increased in incidence, and it is affecting people much earlier in their lives during the late 20th century and early 21st century than before the 20th century (Meyer and Quenzar, 2005). The reasons for these findings are not quite clear, but inadequate dietary Mg is prevalent in America and is the most likely cause. There is probably a real increase in depression, coupled with a change in diagnostic habits, which has to do with the element of stigma. Lower stigma leads to a higher rate of diagnosis.

Somatopsychic medical effects are very real. I've gotten very good results with addressing nutritional deficiencies as a first line of defense for issues that often present as mood or mental health issues.

But I don't think you can reasonably conclude that magnesium deficiency is The explanation for increased prevalence of depression in a world that has had so many profound changes.

Things are more crowded. Most people now live in cities instead of rural environments. Among other things, this means people are subjected to much noisier conditions.

We have far, far better information about the world than we used to. The 24/7 news cycle is incredibly stressful, if only because most "news" is bad news.

There are just so very many confounding factors, no, you can't reasonably conclude that this one singular factor is the sole explanation or primary explanation. That's ridiculous.
Isn’t the point of DevOps that you’re a software engineer who happens to work on infrastructure automation code? If they wanted someone who only knows how to operate systems they would have called it “sysadmin.”
then they can't pay you little. LOL. I'd end the interview right there especially if the salary is low.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15235/did-swedi...
Cool, it uses a distributed database TiDB as the meta data storage.
Reaching 90% is hard, even if you count additional taxes. Take Sweden, where you first remove 31.42% social tax, then 60% income tax, then 25% VAT. You will still end up with 24% of money left of the initial payroll.
That episode was good, but the book/film The Circle I think covered this type of scenario better (even if the movie adaptation did leave a little to be desired)
Let me put it bluntly, I thought you were reasonable and trying to contribute to the conversation, but you are just a faggot.
For interested folks, there is an experimental route bike from the center of Rome (i.e. the Vatican) to the sea and the ancient port of Fiumicino. Here is the article (in italian) you can translate via google: https://www.viagginbici.com/cicloturismo/cicloturismo-nel-la...
Oh snap, author here. I completely forgot to mention how two factor authentication can be a ploy to get more ids for the cross-device graph, and you just reminded me. Next post maybe!
I expect a person in a devops role to not just write code, but write code with unit tests, integration tests, documentation, deployment automation, to the style guide etc...

I also expect them to work well on a team, especially in design reviews and code reviews.

The main difference between a software engineer and a devops engineer isn’t writing code, it’s the kind of code they write.
To me, there is a pretty large gap between "interview questions to test the basics of coding" and "software engineer interview questions". Searching for the latter to find the former is like search for copywriter interviews to study for questions on basic English proficiency.
Nobody gives a shit about ads as much as they care about data being accumulated and sold to hidden third party for unknown purposes.
not when the interviewer wants you to know every corner case of a string reversal problem.
> Because these days "IT Systems Manager" are expected to know basics of coding.

LeetCode questions test for other things than "basics of coding".
Graphic Designers are getting these. It's a bit crazy.
Apparently even NASA is wrong about which planet is closest to Earth
Complaining about leetcode is unproductive. Leetcode is not even that hard, tons of material and key to the answer is on the internet.

Another benefit is, its streamline job searching. You practice once and you can use the same skill to interview for many companies.
For hurricane forecasts issued by the NHC, you can see the official error statistics here [0]. Note that 96 and 120-hour forecasts were so poor prior to year 2003 that they were not issued.

Note these error statistics do not represent true model error as the official track and intensity forecast -- while informed by model output -- are determined by human forecasters.

[0] https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/verification/verify5.shtml
It's unenforceable (since it's way too easy for companies to just say claim they forgot you didn't want to be tracked), but that doesn't mean it is incompatible. It would work if ad companies were acting in good faith.

The fact that ad companies are evidently not acting in good faith makes this a bit of a moot point, but morally it's important to point out that ad companies don't have to make it impossible to opt-out.
If I had a lot of money (which I don't) I'd have started my very own analog semiconductor design and fab company years ago, with the intent aim to be a direct competitor in the market of high speed and precision analog and signal conversion electronics.
My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
Well there's also Dunning-Krugerrands, but that's already been taken
You may find ShareDB[1] interesting – it's a library that does exactly that.

>ShareDB is a realtime database backend based on Operational Transformation (OT) of JSON documents. It is the realtime backend for the DerbyJS web application framework.

And now a selfplug:

We're using ShareDB to create collaborative DOM in Webstrates[2]. The tl;dr is that every DOM change you make gets synchronized to all other connected clients and the document (including full version history of every single DOM change) gets saved.

Creating a collaborative editor in Webstrates is a simple as creating a new webstrate[3], opening Devtools and adding `contenteditable` to the body element.

[1] https://github.com/share/sharedb, [2] https://github.com/Webstrates/Webstrates, [3] https://demo.webstrates.net/frontpage/
I don't maintain anything close to inbox zero, but on Monday when I come into work I'll close the ~50 tabs I have open and only leave 1-3 of what I'm literally working on that moment, first thing Monday morning.
No there isn't.
> No one here is saying we should forbid/outlaw/block bitcoin because of its CO2 emissions.

I am. I'll make that case. Proof-of-work cryptocurrency should be banned for the same reason truck drivers idling diesel engines in cities should be banned: It harms the environment and produces nothing useful for society.

If these crypocurrency developers are such geniuses, and cryptocurrency is really solving a critical problem, then banning PoW will spur innovation in alternative mechanisms like proof-of-stake or proof-of-luck [0] to meet those use cases with far less ecological devastation.

[0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/249.pdf
Some system has an option like "show personalized ads", it will show ADs based on your data, but for normal user who don't take notice of any AD, is there any advantage to enable it?
Accurate. I used to go to the gym and lift weights 6 days a week regularly, slept fine. I just took two months off and didn’t exercise at all. I hopped back into my gym routine again this week and besides being extremely sore (which can happen ever if you only take a week off), I can barely fall asleep and the quality of sleep is horrible. I’ve read that it’s common among bodybuilders who train too hard. It may be a a shock to the central nervous system (heavy compounds like deadlifts can do that).
No, I mean like "Mark's Bucks". As in Mark Zuckerberg.
With all due respect to nations' currency names... can I but recommend "Douche Mark" in this instance ?
That's how most tax currently work, but some have and do include wealth taxes which which tax a percentage of your total assets. Elizabeth Warren's tax proposal includes adding one which would tax assets above $50m at 2% per year and assets above $1b at 3%.
This! plus treating every commit as major version and be done with it.
This is a tangent, but I just wanted to thank you for making that move away from LaTeX. As I explained elsewhere [1], PDF (the primary output format of LaTeX AFAIK) is not very accessible to blind people via screen readers. The structured formats that can be easily produced with full fidelity from Markdown (HTML, EPUB) are much better. I'm sure this isn't the reason why you made the switch, but it's a nice side benefit.

[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/dhjp6r/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c...
US customers to be blocked from trading on Binance.com
Jay Leno has a YouTube channel with several episodes on his steam-powered vehicles, if anyone is interested. He goes through the enormously complicated startup procedure, which takes about 45 minutes. His comment was that most people who could afford a car could afford "a man" who would take care of all of this every morning.

I imagine the democratization of automobiles in the teens and 20s lead to the cheapest solution winning.
Games, demos, and tech of E3 2019
If you're interested in this subject, definitely make sure you check out the xi-editor retrospective: https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/issues/1187#issuecomm...
> Most of the devops (side question, is SRE technically devops?)

In my experience a “good” SRE, devops engineer, or software engineer is difficult to distinguish in skills. It’s more about responsibilities. This is especially true of the folks I’ve met from FANG.
I also began taking magnesium (a few years ago) for running, not depression.

I probably log 50-80 miles per week and low magnesium levels are notoriously low in endurance athletes. I also follow a ketosis diet for as many as 6 months at a time, low magensium is also common with Keto diet.

I take up to 10 vitamin/mineral supplements, but kind of cycle them at various times. It’s impossible to really pinpoint anything, but I tend to think I personally got great benefits to my running through the addition of fish oil, vitamin B, vitamin D and magnesium. Specifically I feel benefits to both energy and anti-inflammation, at one point I scaled up to a half marathon everyday and was never even sore, whereas previously I’d run maybe 5 times a week and sometimes be stiff the next day following 7 mile runs. It’s definately not magic, these supplements don’t run the miles for me, but I do feel better during the runs, recover better, and it just creates this feedback loop where it feels I am growing/improving.
>I guess we're just moving closer to "the mob" seizing the property of others, just because its constituents want it more.

Well, the law is either what some people want to be or what a majority/plurality of people want to be.

The first is not very democratic and can be self serving for the private interests of a few.

If the latter however want a wealth tax, or even if they propose that "90% of wealth should be made public" then that could be made into law, regardless of what the constitution says.

That wouldn't be "mob" but just law.

In fact, the "Fifth Amendment" is already an amendment, showing that the constitution is already not a un-alterable source of divine guidance.

At some point, perhaps the whole of the constitution could be considered a BS product of its own time, and replaced with a different set of operating rules.
Very cool. Makes me think of Bret Victor's work.

http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction

This is the kind of visual programming I'd be ready to buy into.
Am I correct in saying that another way to view this is a 15% fee to launder all of your dirty money in a risk free, government endorsed way?