skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On a mountainbike, if you had a choice between that road and offroad, you'd prefer offroad if it's clear (e.g. not riding through bushes or over fallen trees). Riding right next to the paved Roman road could be nice, riding on it not so much.
Totally fair analysis and I don't disagree at all. I will add, however, that there are a few points that detract from this take.

First of all, when a company aggressively invests in hard capital, innovation, or advertising, they're building eventual value for the company and stock which improves the wealth of shareholders
in the long run but rarely helps the entry-level employees in either the short run or long run. However, those costs are thrown above the line as costs and not financed by what is determined to be company profits.

When this innovation is necessary to stay competitive in the market then this is the invisible hand working properly to balance capital investment against worker living conditions. Eventually, many workers will benefit from the advancements in the form of cheaper/better goods.

However, when capital investment is used to rapidly grab near-monopolistic control of the market in an attempt to wedge out competitors, the invisible hand forces aren't necessarily at play.

If a company's leaders choose to grow at a modest pace and put more money into the well being of their employees they might not be able to grab such a dominant market share, but they'll have treated their employees better. Further, more competitors means that invisible hand forces will naturally improve services.

I think the general problem is that the FTC has been very lax in recent years. Vertical monopolies aren't treated very seriously as the means to establishing horizontal monopolies or oligopolies. On top of that, the companies are trying to jump off shore as quickly as possible to evade serious control.
The answer to your question is that drugs are one of many possible coping mechanisms. One abuse victim copes with drugs, while another copes with Stockholm syndrome, and yet another with therapy. What separates the ones who fall down the hole from the ones who don't is a combination of opportunity, biology (people have different reactions to the same drugs), and choice. It's understandable that this leads people to questions of disease and moral failing. Questions of behavior and coping mechanisms require much more nuance.
On the first, you're looking at $1500 in rent or $350K to purchase for a one bedroom in Tracy versus $3500 in rent or $1M to purchase for a one bedroom in SF. Fair point on the second one, some sacrifices will need to be made. At some point though - downtown won't be able to support everyone living in a 1800 square foot home and trying to get to work no matter what zoning.

I think the last one is the strongest - they are stuck if there are no alternative employment options.
I can't make you read what I had to say, but I think you are being very inflexible and I hope you'll go back and try.

If one isn't willing to read any argument from start to finish before comparing people to "flat earthers" and thinking that only "old people who are about to die" disagree with him, one will fail to convince anyone, young or old.

Many ordinary people are OK with the war on drugs because they believe that the enforcement is less dangerous than access to drugs. If you tell them it's racist or profit-driven, you get to be all smug to yourself; but they weren't in on it for racism or profit to begin with.

To a new Chinese immigrant who's just used to narcotics being extremely forbidden, because they consider them extremely dangerous (for good historical reason); your "enforcement of drug laws is racist and profit-driven" argument is immaterial, because even if they aren't racist or profiting from private prisons, they still think that narcotics prohibition is reasonable.
Amazon has a profit of over $11 billion last year. They can definitely afford to pay their warehouse workers better.
Googling “bicycles in Africa” gives me plenty of examples of peasants who, I guess, would rather use a mule or wagon, but cannot afford one, and are much helped with a bicycle.

I also would think such people existed elsewhere in the world centuries ago.
Supply side economics has been debunked over and over. To change the labour market you reduce the labour supply or increase demand. Demand is already high, so tighten up labour supply. Or, in other words, limit immigration.
It doesn't feed back into the ML directly, according to Google. Instead they use it to evaluate changes to search algorithms. If they get an increase in thumbs up back from the Quality Raters then their changes were positive. If not, they figure out why.
From what I understand, writing can be very lucrative but it is far from guaranteed income. It's like being an actor: sure you can make it big, but there are thousands of actors that don't make enough money to survive without doing other work.

From my vantage, it seems that the homeless community has gotten so large and so widespread that it could spawn and support its own economy. Is there anything that could be traded for services such as washed clothes, security patrol, food gathering, etc?

I keep imagining that assisting the creation of such self-supported services is something that the non-homeless could achieve. I would hope that this would scale naturally, and then naturally result in lifting these individuals out of homelessness. Meanwhile, it would mike homeless life much more comfortable.

Thoughts?
Based on the experience you shared, I think the may find the podcast linked below interesting.

http://www.econtalk.org/canice-prendergast-on-how-prices-can...

Here is the description:
"If you have 250 million tons of food to give away every year to local food banks how should you do it? Canice Prendergast of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how he and a team of economists created an artificial currency and a daily auction for the national food bank Feeding America so that local food banks could bid on the types of food that were the most valuable to them. Prendergast explains the results of the new system and the cultural and practical challenges of bringing prices, even artificial ones, to a world accustomed to giving things away."
> In both cases we only can show that the correlation is so small that we can't reject the null hypothesis.

And by what means has any correlation been studied? What specific data is used?

Has a machine learning approach that examines all vaccination records and compares it to all subsequent patient medical issues, of all kinds, not just autism? Does the necessary data for this even exist? I wonder if that fact could even be determined from reading any official websites on vaccine safety.

> let's start with an easy example where we all agree that is false in spite there is no hard evidence.

a) I wonder how unanimous the agreement really is. I have a feeling expressing dissent in the slightest would be about as good for a doctor's career as it is for one's karma on social media sites.

b) Have there ever been cases in the medical field where "all people agreeing" turned out to be less impressive than it sounds?

https://www.nature.com/articles/437801a

"Marshall and Warren went on to show that patients with ulcers can be treated with antibiotics. Unlike patients given acid-suppressing drugs, their ulcers do not return."

"But gastroenterologists resisted the idea. Francis Mégraud, a bacteriologist at the Victor Segalen University in Bordeaux, France, remembers attending the 1988 meeting of the American Gastroenterological Association in New Orleans and hearing outraged physicians. “They seemed insulted, saying, ‘we are being asked to treat stomach ulcers with antibiotics, as if it were gonorrhoea!’” he says. “It was hard for them to accept that the disease could be a simple infection.”"

> There are zealots and ridiculous claims in both sides, but at the end of the day smallpox is eradicated, polio is cornered (I hope to see the eradication day), meleases is reduced to very small levels (eradication looks more difficult). All of them used to kill a lot of people.

True, however:

a) were vaccines the only factor involved in this improvement

b) relative (net aggregate) vaccine safety and absolute safety are related, but distinct subjects. If I'm taking my children for vaccinations, I am interested in absolute safety, not net aggregate safety.
Stress concentration, especially at sharp corners, is a well known phenomenon. During the second world war, the US manufactured transport ships in an assembly line fashion. The were launching these ships at rates of more than one per week. A lot of them had the same design flaw: the cargo hatch corners were not properly rounded off. This made them starting points for cracks in the hull. Amd once a crack is started, it continues to extend relentlessly under stress. As the story goes, a few of these ships were lost because the cracks grew so long that the hulls broke and sank.
I think the author is trying too hard to think outside the box here. Sometimes the answer is the obvious answer, inside the box, whether you want it or not.
"To discourage fare evasion, the agency should set up regular inspections (on moving vehicles, with unarmed civilian inspectors),"

This absolutely does not work in a lot of the US urban areas, there is a ton of fare evasion.

BART (SF Bay Area) released their "unpaid citation" numbers, it was in the tens of thousands. San Francisco MUNI is similar. There are existing low-cost/free passes for people available, they're apparently "too hard" for people to get and use.
Worse is better. It's an easy place to do collaborative editing. For google specifically, I think they leverage some google docs automation for capturing artifacts for hiring committee in their interview workflow.
But you have to worry about being reported to CPS or even arrested if you let your kid go outside by himself.
Ha ha, one of the Four Horsemen of the Random Internet Apocalypse. If "But Terrorists!" doesn't work, I predict you'll see "But child porn!" or "But Bombs!" pulled out next. "But Intellectual Propery!" has kind of fallen out of favor these days, after every musician publicly denounces any political opponent who uses his/her music.
> I bet a lot of people were happier with it than without.

And a lot of Turkeys will end up in the dumpster as well.
Neat story but is the software really hidden? I feel like I have heard this story many times. It was one of the many feats of the Apollo program, I don't think I would consider it hidden.
Ooh a titanium fire - that would be really cool to see. I wonder if it's possible to make titanium thermite as easily as aluminum thermite?
Skating was a thing long before cycling was. With enough forward momentum one can go quite far balanced on one ice-skate.
My problem has been DDG consistently produces worse results than google for many/most of my searches. It's often sufficient, but often it is so bad I have to redo the search in google :-/

I really want to use DDG over google, but it's just not there for me yet.
Fighting Big Tech Makes for Some Uncomfortable Bedfellows
I'm always confused by this. I have ddg as the default on my home computer and Google is the default on my work. So I'm constantly using both. There aren't really any apparent differences to me in results. I'm not sure what everyone else is searching, but I search everything from how to spell a word that I should definitely know all the way to niche topics in physics.

Maybe it's because I don't have tracking enabled in Google (I'm not logged into my account when at work) and opt out of tracking where I can. Maybe this is the difference between the lack of difference I see and the huge difference so many others see. But I still don't see it as an issue because I generally find what I'm looking for with one search. Might be the third item, but that's not an issue to me.

I hear this so often that I assume something has to be different. I'm curious if others have ideas as to what it might be, or if I correctly identified them.
That’s an interesting comparison. Following the analogy, we should have the equivalent of « alcool concentration » for addictiveness. Some games are pretty mild relative to in app purchases pushing or addiction mechanics , while others are simply awfull.
I'm not talking about using traffic data. Simply rerouting if you, for example, miss a turn, which instructions on paper can't do.
Office is fine? I mean, yes, it feels "non-native," but there's not much left that feels "native" anymore. The concept is as dead as brutalist architecture. And it's not sluggish at all on my 2015 MB Pro.
Space Beckons Again. But Why Go?
This right here is why I don't understand people who complain about DDG's search results. If you simply make the commitment to not use Google, for whatever reason that may be, then using DDG becomes exactly the same process of rewriting search queries until you get the thing you're looking for.

I've been using DDG exclusively since I was a contractor at Google years ago and have never had a problem finding things with it...
For context: if Amazon were to use all of its profits from FY18 (~$11B) to pay its ~650K workers more, it would come out to just under $17,000 per worker.
Business vs. Customer Needs
>I strongly believe that video games today are comparable to alcohol in the 60's.

Get off it. There's a strong difference between playing a game like ''Super Mario Odyssey'' and the trash Google allows because it makes money on trickery and theft.

>Right now we have people who are facing serious problems with video games, and yet we brush them off casually and callously.

China locks up people who have ''Internet addictions''; they might find ''lies'' about political protests in China, as an example.

>I can't count the number of stories on reddit about playing video games all day and all night, at the expense of one's social life, academic success and even career.

Clearly one's career is said person's most important aspect. They could be working or participating in office politics instead of having fun.

>That's not normal behavior; it's behavior indicative of addiction and dependency. And I'm referring to adults.

Yet, nowhere in your message do you wonder why people would rather play games than do other things. You seem to think games are at fault, rather than the sorry state of society.

>Now, regulating video games like alcohol may not be the best idea.

It's important that every medium be heavily regulated, to prevent the wrong ideas from getting through.
Blender supports FBX exports so you can bring models from there to unreal, but Maya is the much more popular program with artists for modelling and rigging, there's a whole lot going on with these programs so I doubt its any one thing, if it were close i'm sure a lot of people would be happy to not pay for Maya considering how expensive it is.
Its a good idea- citizens on the ground likely know local issues better than most politicians. Especially for local issues this could be powerful. I wonder though, Its going to get very political very fast, with each side brigading the other. I don't know how you deal with a community that will be instantly bifurcated and at war with the opposing side. And for the platform to have value, it would have to generate concepts ultimately turned into law or made official in some way. How is an online platform going to be able to get policies implemented? Any thoughts?
This is a rather selective account. Visual Studio 2003-2008 were quite lightweight (even for their time). Visual Studio 2010 was the last one that didn't need gigabytes of ram to use and Visual Studio after 2012 is a horror show.
Visual Studio 2003 (though good luck getting it working) is actually a smaller footprint in memory than other lightweight editors and can normally do more.

There were editors that were fine before VSCode. There was BluFish, Kate, Jedit and those are the ones just off the top of my head. Also Notepad++ is still better than most editors and doesn't need to spawn a node process that slows a i7 machine to a crawl.

As for getting sublime text working, I never had the problems you describe. So Works for me I guess.
I think some apps have 'parental controls' that allow for this, but this kind of labeling would provide a strong incentive to set an upper limit.

I think this would benefit the game ecosystem greatly, because the effects of a relatively small proportion of the audience dropping 80-90+% of revenue really distorts game design to try to capture this upper end.
This would make the business model for gatcha games (which rely on a small fraction of their player base sendings tens of thousands of dollars each) essentially impossible.

So a net gain for everyone, then.
You can submit any new links on this project at GitHub [1].

[1] https://github.com/good/openweb
A. I'm medically handicapped. A lot of that is simply out of reach for me.

B. My writing is good enough to sometimes make the front page of HN. It still doesn't pay, not because I'm doing anything wrong, but because the world expects content for free.

Most YouTube channels, etc, also don't really support their creators. Plus you are de facto asking me to abandon something I've spent years getting good at in order to start over from scratch with something else. The subtext there is "Of course writing doesn't pay! It never will! Just quit!"

This piece (below) by me made the front page, got substantial upvotes and generated substantial conversation. It made not one thin dime.

https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li...

I've been on HN a decade. I've read and participated in numerous discussions pertinent to this problem space. A tldr is people don't approve of any means whatsoever to pay content creators.

Ads are evil.

Tip jars are "panhandling the internet."

Patreon is seen as "begging for charity" rather than a legitimate means to monetize your work in a world where people aggressively use ad blockers and bitch and moan about the evils of ads.

Selling something else as a product and writing related content -- aka content marketing -- is another form of evil ruining the internet.

Doing low-paid writing, such as product descriptions and content marketing pieces for hire, makes me part of the problem that is ruining the internet.

People on HN actively look for and promote means to get around pay walls.

There is zero means to monetize online content that doesn't get decried as evil, evil and more evil. Reflecting that back as "So, basically, you think writing should be done by slave labor" offends the high paid, high minded types that find it an affront that writers want a middle class life.

Meanwhile, they also bitch and moan about there not being enough good writing and utterly dismiss the idea that making it impossible to get adequately paid for writing has any bearing on how journalism etc is going to hell.

I'm exhausted and tired of saying the same things over and over and hearing the same tired argument that I'm just doing it wrong, I'm just too stupid to figure out the right way and some random internet stranger can fix my life with a paragraph or two of advice if I will just dutifully listen.

I already said I don't really want to rehash this. I still don't really want to rehash this. It's amazingly aggravating and pointless.
The titanium fire could be fun but the problem is you don't want to be anywhere near that hydrazine when it goes. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-spacex-crew-dragon-es...
I'm creating this fb group so it's easier to rent a place as a remote developer
I would think most fights in the animal kingdom are predation, where the prey faces death and the predator, starvation. Perhaps you had just dominance fights within the same species in mind?
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Blithely assuming that it is is dangerous.

The fact that, in the past, the economy created new jobs and new sectors that the majority of people were capable of working in does not guarantee that it always will. Nor when it does is that any consolation to the people un(der)employed for years on end or sometimes for the rest of their life.

In the long run, we are all dead.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences are a hiccup in human history. Human history is a blip in the world's history. There are no laws when it comes to this. Unless you can provide some other very good reason for believing that more jobs, and good jobs, will be created than those are destroyed, I will have to doubt it given the evidence before me.

Indeed, even many 'good' jobs are actually economically unproductive and totally unfulfilling make-work. Today's situation is much worse than it appears at first glance.
The standard doesn’t specify whether or not forEach is a “loop” or not. One could implement it using tail recursion. FWIW I would claim that such recursion should also be called a loop, because the control flow goes in a loop.
I must admit, this is the first time I've seen a libertarian bold enough to dress up something as inane as dismantling OSHA with rhetoric deliberately evocative of modern progressive social movements. As though, by dismantling an agency dedicated to assuring safe working conditions, you're doing something akin to legalizing same-sex marriages. I have mad respect to anybody that bold, but give me a break!
Jimmy's transcripts are great. I have been reading through his blog in preparation for a podcast interview and at first, I was a bit skeptical that a transcript could replace a talk but now I find I am liking the format.
I’ve been using DSG exclusively for about a year now and I've had the opposite experience: I've been amazed at how relevant the results have been. Occasionally, when struggling to find something, I'll use Google (via !g) and the results are, more often than not, mostly the same. It's rare for me to use Google search these days and when I do I'm annoyed by the assumptions it makes about my queries.
Florida city issues $30k in fines for not cutting your grass
Except this is unlikely to be a big business opportunity, plus chances are someone would notice (executions in the US aren't exactly secret), so I would be pretty surprised if big pharma companies would try to circumvent this.
What would be wrong in lowering immigration numbers of low skilled immigrants to help people stuck in unfortunate Amazon employment like situation above?

And yet I never hear any such solution being spoken about in public?
as a remote dev i usually do my bookings on airbnb or booking but sometimes i wish the place i rented were specifically target for tech people. like with good, fast and reliable internet connections. good and easy access to public transportation. and inspiring views. i wonder if there are other remote devs around here who would be interested by that.
Unfortunately, as another Pakistani, I can tell you first-hand this account sounds very credible. I've known startup founders coming back from conferences in South Asia being interviewed by "Intelligence" and their companies audited just because someone was curious.

I've personally been tried to be interviewed for having a meeting at a foreign Consulate. The "Intelligence" may be hostile to journalists but their conduct is toxic to all civilians.

Talking about this encounter is the best thing he could've done. Think of it as protection against enforced disappearance. He's already on a "watch list", why else did they interview him?
Too bad "patriotism" doesn't have a good definition. Does it mean "jingoistic nationalism"? Praising anything military-related? Celebrating the good points of your country? Demanding that the bad points/problematic history of your country be censored? Working towards what you feel is a better version of your country? Having a "support the troops" magnetic yellow ribbon?

If you're honest, you've seen all of these things more-or-less defining "patriotrism". It's just as poorly defined as "terrorism", really.