skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see the debt forgiveness programs similar to decriminalizing marijuana and releasing inmates.

Yes, it's unfair that it's now decriminalized, you had to either serve partial or full time and suffer, but you probably knew the consequences of your actions. Maybe not fully but you had an idea.

Doing this entire debt forgiveness thing is to level the playing field. It's to unburden the people of the past of their fiscal sentence while unlocking the decriminalizing of college. People in the past would be pissed if they had to keep paying their loans (serving time) if it was all free now. People who already paid (served full) have it rough but it was a different time. You have to make the transition somehow.

Maybe my analogy sucks but I don't see how you can get buy in otherwise.
Hi HN!

Mastery with SQL is a course I've been working on for a long time now and just recently released. I'm a big self-learner and one thing I love in courses and books is exercises (with full solutions). I've always wanted to make a SQL course that's not just theory but has lots of great real-world inspired exercises...and not just only simple exercises, but challenging ones too that put you into problem solving mode and require some creativity. Mastery with SQL is just that. I estimate that at least half of the time spent creating this course was focused on exercises alone.

I also wanted to showcase all of the wonderful functionality that's available in modern PostgreSQL - my favourite go-to relational DB.

I'll be around to answer any questions anyone has about the course - otherwise you can always contact me directly at neil@masterywithdata.com.
Can you really do it in python with an arbitrary function? What if your function takes a dictionary, set, or some other unhashable type as an argument?
that's like saying crimes committed before a law was overturned weren't crimes. should all the people jailed for pot (that have served their sentences) get time put back on the clock?
I bloody wish a VB6/Delphi/WinForms-like IDE was available for Python. Coding anything relevant in VB is pain, as is creating GUIs in Python.
Huh? In what country? In the USA, most schools are public, if we go by students that attend public vs private universities and colleges.
That's a pet peeve of mine; I see it all the time when I work with lesser experienced developers, only I didn't know how to call it.

I call it onion skin development, where the developer keeps hiding stuff in more layers of the onion, making my eyes water as I have to dig deeper and deeper to essentially find `a.foo(b)` under 12 layers of abstraction.

They're so focussed on making everything look so purrty, they forgot that it's about telling the computer to do something, as clearly as possible.
SEO can take months to move the needle, especially on a new domain. If the client needs results faster than this, the standard advice seems to be PPC & SEO for the first 6 months, then reduce / eliminate PPC as the organic traffic & conversions from the SEO campaigns increase to the desired amount.
>Bernie essentially wants to forcibly take money from everyone who was financially responsible

"Financially responsible" has become a euphemism for "rich and assumed to be responsible".

I know a bunch of people who are not particularly responsible with their money (splurging) but they are beneficiaries of a lot of unearned income (interest, dividends, rent) and I have yet to hear a coherent argument for why this unearned income shouldn't be taken away and used to fund the kind of education that improves the overall wellbeing of society.

This is the point where somebody tells me that those people don't have enough money to fund this kind of thing (bullshit), or that Bernie won't target them he'll target you (bullshit) or that if you tax them they'll just run away to Panama (there was a study that demonstrated that when their taxes are jacked up they didn't even run away from New York to New Jersey).
Hmm, that's less than 10% of the debt held. Given they as a whole will pay $2T over two years, wouldn't they be losing money as a whole?
I think Warren knows when her unrealistic ideas are unrealistic. She has a background in econ, after all. She also knows that she has to negotiate, which means she has to open with an offer the other side won't accept. Her track record in Congress shows she's capable of that; she's gotten major bills passed before.

And I have a hard time thinking of someone more qualified to lead the Dems -- you've got the foot-in-the-grave (Biden, Sanders), the foot-in-the-cradle (Harris, Buttigieg, O'Rourke, Castro), the memes (Yang, Gabbard) and the anaesthetic (Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, Delaney etc). That leaves Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.
Darn Toughs are nice enough when I left a pair behind by mistake at my hostel after a Grand Canyon trip I prevailed upon the hostel to mail them back to me for $2 for their time + postage. Thanks for the heads up about Amazon.
I know we in tech see all of our coworkers, friends and acquantences with degrees but only ~35% of US adults have a B.S. or higher. I'm not sure these people, the ones with the BS/MS/PHD degrees and can acquire the higher requirement jobs are the one that need to have their debts cancelled. At least Warren's plan attempted to be more reasonable about the limitations on income, relatively.
>a functioning democracy will implement [policy I like]

This is demonstrably not true.
You don’t have to cancel old debt to protect future students. Just ban student loans.

In fact a one time cancellation could screw future students because they’ll expect the same. And it might not happen.
What happens if that causes glass to become more economical? Glass is worse for climate change, partly because of the higher fuel use in transporting it's heavier weight.

This is the trouble with plastic - it's not simple! You can try to force a solution to one problem but exacerbate another one. And of course there are economic costs which I guess would affect poor people the most and push the wealth inequality problem along a little further. How much cost is worth paying? Not infinite. We have to find a balance somewhere but if you never even considered the trade-offs, you're not going to find that balance at all.
The thing is, given a large enough voting bloc, you can vote out everyone that disagrees with you and pass sweeping legislation without needing to compromise. The goal is to force every legislator in Congress to pick a side for the sake of knowing who to vote out.
I don't think the author made a very good case for this. The case made on readability. But indirection is very common that if you can't read a piece of code without having to drill into the implementation of every function, lifes going to be quite painful. Depending on your language and editor / IDE, seeing implementation is often trivial. The only case, I see, for inlinig is where the pieces of code are very cohesive and tied together and will only be used as a single unit. Maybe that's what the author was trying to get at, don't break atomic units of code up.
Some comments here are along these lines: "emancipation is an insult to those who worked hard to pay off their masters for their liberty" give me a break. I paid student loans and I'll be happy that the next generation won't have to.
Yes, and that's what we're doing [0].

[0] https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/tns-s...
The way of dealing with the cost of education is in the article. College is made "free" for students, meaning the government becomes the single payer.
This is essentially my problem with it. I did very well in high school, and had many many offers to attend very expensive universities, many of which offered no academic scholarships. I made a conscious decision not to take on that much debt, and had a much longer road to where I am now, and probably a lessened overall outcome. But I'm debt free. I'm too old to care now, but it's not fair to kids out there with mindsets like mine, to just start erasing student debt wholesale. In that situation, community colleges cease to exist and universities have incentive to skyrocket prices even higher.
There are several factors.
- They mainly fear prosecution after the protests and the travel card as a evidence of their presence. Cell tower triangulation fair worse in court.
- Many people are also using burner cards which are easy to purchase in Hong Kong.
- The protest was decentralized and was mainly organized with internet forums and instant messaging software. Not using a travel card is only a mild inconvenience.
This is extremely true. Financially responsible is also just "privileged."

They don't understand how different the state of primary education in the US is. Two school districts within 20 miles of each other are wildly different.

1. https://www.philasd.org/
2. https://www.lmsd.org/
The reason I mentioned it is because the OP said:

> These would never pass congress, even if Democrats controlled both chambers with super majorities.
Also bad, but gmail at least tries a bit to anonymize and cache.

But sure, what they should be doing with amp is fixing that, not making it worse.
This is usually called 'survivor bias'
The "privileged" are the ones attending college. Cancelling their debt -- in practice -- would be seen as racist/classist once someone runs the actual numbers. So there would be means testing and possibly race testing, or first generation college student testing.

Now you have a dividing line with some people above it receiving nothing, and a lot pro-rated in the middle. Everyone is jealous of those receiving more than they are. The line that schools are getting more expensive because the free-riders don't pay anything isn't going to sit well with those who failed the means test and feel they are subsidizing.

There is a strong fracture between the two groups and suddenly we're producing a whole new generation of Republicans.

Or nobody takes Warren and Sanders seriously when it comes time to actually elect them outside their echo chamber and this goes nowhere.
Ok that’s very nobl, but someone else is paying that 1.6T that is owed to lenders. Doesn’t make sense any way you cut it unless you either force someone else to pay, force lenders to take a cut and a longer term with lower rates.. or ask the students to pay it back once they get settled. Someone is gonna pay
But in Sanders' case 1) it isn't his money (and no, that money doesn't just appear because he wants to spend it), and 2) it sets the expectation of future cancellations, promoting excessive borrowing (moral hazard).
i said time put back on the clock, not formality that pretends like it didn't completely ruin their lives.
> Bernie essentially wants to forcibly take money from everyone who was financially responsible enough to save and pay off their loans early

Bernie wants to take tax money and work out what the best thing to spend it on is. It's disingenuous to imply it's any more taken by force than taxes already are. Significant portions of your taxes already go towards people who have, by your definitions, behaved irresponsibly.

I don't know whether this is the best use of that money -- whether there's something else that would have much better effects on welfare and economics in general.

I also don't have any student loan debt from my university degree, though it's because I grew up in a country that doesn't charge money for education.

The system of being unable to discharge student loan debt via bankruptcy seems brazenly corrupt, though, such that demolishing the whole thing may be an appropriate response.
> When the spacecraft is about 2,000 ft (610 m) from target, it switches to the landing phase. This is when the computer hands over manual control to the Commander, who guides it in for final touchdown. Slowed to a hover, the module can be steered by tilting it like a helicopter to make any necessary corrections.

A rocket landing on (top of) a column of thrust and a helicopter suspended below a disc of thrust are not even remotely the same thing. Classic failure to reason from first principles.

Here’s a suitable analogy: it’s like the difference between having a center of mass behind the center of pressure, and a center of mass in front of the center of pressure.

For the interested layman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_static_stability
Is a case by case thing, some maybe predatory, some ignorant, but some are not. You can’t just say everyone gets off Some bad apples are there
If this is the “correct” way to shop Amazon, then the ops point is only stronger. It makes perfect sense to take your business elsewhere when these kind of shenanigans are required.
And what evidence do you have that this is true? Someone can win the Presidency but it doesn't always mean that Congress falls in line. Even with a tremendous wave behind him, Obama barely passed ACA, with no bipartisan support. The people in swing states that voted for it were axed in the next election. People claimed this about Trump too, that people would be pressured to support his platform because he win...where is the evidence? The only person I can think of that this happened with in the past 50 years is perhaps George W Bush's tax cuts in early 2001.
A fiscal conservative would do what is necessary to make the economy strong, and keep citizens educated. If you think putting decades of economic onus on the future of the economy is a good idea, you're not fiscally conservative.
ICBM intercept has been a solved problem for (at least) a quarter century in the US, the core capability is quite reliable. The practical gaps show up in two tangential areas: upgrading systems designed for anti-aircraft applications to also intercept ballistic missiles and enabling kinetic intercept on hypersonic rocket platforms.

The first case, which includes examples like the Patriot missile system, are making missile systems do something they were never designed to do. You can only modify them so far but it is cheaper to modify them than to design an entirely new system, if you can make it work. In practice though, many of these are being slated for replacement as it was a stopgap measure.

The second case is more interesting. Conventional missile motors designed for ballistic intercept can consistently hit the target. But they are too slow to close the distance to the target, allowing the inbound missile to get closer than the military would like. Hyperkinetic interceptors can close the target very quickly, but the materials performance envelope required does not play well with precise terminal guidance systems due to ablation of the missile as it transits the atmosphere. Basically, the necessary precision of control could not be delivered over the entire flight time due to materials degradation. (This is related to why incoming hypersonic missiles have limited maneuverability -- maneuvering destroys the structural integrity of the materials it is made from.) The US appears to have solved the problem of hyperkinetic intercept of hypersonic targets in recent years.

I think what confuses people is that the tests of new systems are only designed to test the things that currently don't work well. They know they can reliably discriminate decoys and do kinetic intercept, that is proven capability and doesn't need to be tested. What they need to test is things like precision terminal guidance when attached to one of these newfangled hyperkinetic rocket motors that ablates itself mid-flight, which turned out to be a much more difficult challenge.
I didn’t realize how crazy a number this is until I did some math. Sanders proposed to fund it through taxes on Wall Street. Maybe that’s a good plan, but let’s see what it would mean if we funded it as a tax on each H1B. Currently there are 350,000 H1B. Let’s say that their spouses work as well, so we are up to 700,000 jobs (yes, I know the rules have changed recently) Let’s then say that we want to pay off the $1.6T just by taxing those jobs over the next 10 years. That comes out to $228k per H1B per year for the next 10 years. So, taxing H1B alone isn’t going to do it. What about raising the estate tax for the next 10 years?
It seems just as likely it was competition from the Mac, which also at one point during Steve's reign focused on boot time
It's much easier to rob someone when you convince yourself that they didn't actually earn what they have.

This us vs them reductionism is seen in the early days of any communist system (the mass killings come a bit later)
This is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard suggested yet. It goes against every value of fairness we hold.

Is there any chance this will really happen?

If the answer is no, don't waste your precious keystrokes.

If the answer is yes, ask for more: not only they cancel the existing debt, but they also give you your payments back.

Problem solved!! :)
Correct. Fedora was the distro I switched to. I found the standard WM (technically DE, but I'll allow it) to be slow and clunky, and it's performance improved with Cinnamon. I'm more of an openbox guy though.
Reminds me of my first day of python performance analysis, which led to this fix.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130227000541/http://defect.ope...
https://github.com/oracle/solaris-ips/commit/53bb14f750dd111...
Origin and comments on idea: “Email is where ideas go to die”
I've heard this phrase before and it's stuck with me.

I'm considering developing email related tools (NLP, auto-writing) related.

I'm wondering if there deeper context or wisdom behind this phrase pessimistic phrase. Such advice would inform my development and help me avoid pitfalls.

Does anyone have any comments?
And so your point is eventually they will ban half their customers? So what? They aren't even close to the only game in town.

Now if they were a monopoly or oligopoly, I would see your concern.

Private companies have always had the right to refuse service.
Making student loans dischargable by bankruptcy again would be a much better solution. Not only does Sanders' suggestion not solve the problem, it hurts people who did actually pay off their debt. Whereas the problem fixes itself if bankruptcy can wipe out student loans: loaning institutions would be more careful about loaning money. Right now they are guaranteed to get the money back, so if you want a $100k loan to study Aboriginal Literature, sure no problem. If they had to think about whether you could ever pay off that loan, they might think it's a problem, and then the Department of Aboriginal Literature might have to rethink their tuition and/or cost structure.
Holger Chen soon to disappear. Nobody has heard from him since. Dibs on his heart.
Right, but who cares!

Why do we want to preserve this system that doesn't allow everyone to have a fair chance of progressing? Why does education need to be artificially limited?

It's not difficult to imagine a world where education isn't limited by the amount of money in someone's bank. Think about all the possibilities if everyone can go learn whatever their heart desires without worrying about paying something back?
It would be even more exciting if the device doesn't work for large number of qubits. Several theories (e.g. by 't Hoft, by Smolin) predict that quantum computers should not work when amplitudes become small enough.
"...forcibly take money from everyone who was financially responsible..."

I am no fan of Bernie's but this description is completely wrong. A transaction tax would have little to no impact on ordinary savers/investors. It would have zero to do with credit card debt. It would at most represent a slight redistribution from assets generally controlled by the 0.1% to the top 50%.

The place where that tax would pull from in the financial system is currently mined by HFT bots. To the extent that this impacts you, you are already being skimmed by them, you just don't know it.

The financial system is REALLY REALLY big. Hundreds of $T change hands DAILY.
Right, and how does that address costs? It doesn't. It just shifts it to one entity. Unlike with healthcare the economies of scale don't apply as well to education. It just encourages the "bad actors" (ie Universities) to keep hiking up prices. Per capita spending per pupil in the US for primary schooling is close to the top, if not the top, in the world...but outcomes are poor. Not sure how this would be different in higher education.

This also assumes that college is necessary at all, and delays workforce entry.
What I mean is that the phrase itself is not well defined. Certainly the parable is meant to tell us something about its character, but not necessarily its nature.

Until I was in adulthood I figured it meant “heaven”; that is not at all clear, actually.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingship_and_kingdom_of_God#...
You're right but you're wrong. You're blaming students for an outrageous situation and saying they should have chosen simply to be poor.
This is an enlightening article, but I think it's missing an implicit conclusion to accompany the explicit conclusion that "one is constantly fighting against history".

History is absolutely one part of it, but the other part is that there must be a benevolent dictator (person or small group/council) with the authority and courage to make technology decisions. Without that role, bikeshedding can often drain valuable inertia — sometimes fatally — from the decision-making process.
FWIW, Limited Run games are now on their last 16 Vita games, and AFAIK all of them have been manufactured.
The "bailout" was the mass purchase of troubled assets which had underlying securities. IIRC we were paid back in full by Wall Street. So this proposal to cancel student debt is not a parallel. Completely federalizing existing student debt would be a more accurate parallel but would not cancel any individual's student debt.