skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author seems to very much worry that negative press is going to be the cause of him losing his job due to automation:

>Just about every job in my sortation center could probably be done by a robot. In fact, it amazes me that Amazon hasn’t simply automated the entire facility. [...] If I had to guess, I’d say that Amazon continues to employ lots of human beings because, by putting money into the pockets of working-class people, the company creates more customers.

>If Amazon is going to be castigated publicly every time one of its 650,000 employees has a bad day, it may well decide to automate as many positions as possible and do away with most of its human workforce.

>But if John Oliver and his ilk keep harping away at how inhumanely Amazon treats its workers, Bezos might decide to completely automate his operation and people like me will be out of a job.

It's as plain as day that Amazon isn't keeping manual labor around out of the goodness of their hearts. There is no bottom line calculation other than the cost of manual labor vs the cost of automation, and no amount of deflection about the working conditions of warehouse work (whether better than Home Depot or not) is going to keep your job once the scale tips in the other direction.
That's not true, you can install whatever you want on your iOS device, it's just not possible to distribute it through the AppStore.

That's how developers install their own apps in development, prior submitting the app to Apple for a review.
Lessons on a Better Way to Learn
The argument involves the comparison with fission. The low power density means it's going to be more expensive than fission, and fission already fails economically.

The difference between fission and solar is that solar lacks many systems (like, turbines and generators) that fission and fusion would need.

More fundamentally, solar is distributed (even on a large solar farm), so there's a lack of coupling between elements that makes everything easy to assemble and very fault tolerant. In fission and fusion plants, the intricate dependencies mean everything has to be highly reliable. Safety (for fission) and the extreme difficulty of repair of activated structures (for fusion) also drive this very expensive reliability.
Submission statement:

Submission statements aren't required here, but I like the practice, and I feel like most people just skip to checking the comments anyway.

This (long) essay was inspired by a couple of things. First, I recently created an app that I believe works better than Anki for a lot of use cases. That's a bold statement, so I wanted to back it up by explaining why I created it and how it fits into a learning process.

Second, I recently saw a post on Medium from someone who attempted to learn the med school curriculum just through their Anki decks (which, if you don't know, are incredibly extensive). It didn't work out that well, and they seemed surprised. It made me realize that there are a lot of misconceptions about spaced repetition and its limitations. More broadly, there are a lot of misconceptions about learning in general, which, as a test-prep tutor, is something I deal with every day.

There's a lot I cover in the essay, including why the attempt to learn the med school curriculum through their Anki decks didn't work. Basically, med school covers both content (facts) and processes (skills). Only content can go into Anki, so it's already impossible to learn processes just by Anki.

More importantly, spaced repetition works great for sticking facts in your mind, but you place a tremendous cognitive burden on yourself by just learning facts without a framework. It's like reading a word one letter at a time. Similarly, there's no guarantee that those facts will ever cohere into an understanding, especially if you're coming from zero knowledge about the subject.

That's why even though med students love Anki, they also very strongly recommend textbooks and problem sets to do well on Step 1 (the massive exam they all worry about). In fact, they have an acronym, UFAP, which is their recommended materials list (UWorld, First Aid, Pathoma).

Anyhow, apologies for the length of the essay, but there was a lot I wanted to put in there. I hope you all enjoy!
For example the support you contact to get your money back if the app doesn't work. I did that and support did return my money. It was a long time ago, maybe now that's automatic with refunds within 15 mins or what it is.
Wittgenstein argues that there is no such thing as a private language.
If you're in the UK, you can watch this on iPlayer:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006p3j/horizon-2019-...

Overall a decent documentary, but some claims, like those about pesticide use on food, were not verified or investigated thoroughly. And sometimes the tone felt a little alarmist when it wasn't always warranted.
Perhaps, but I would also recommend not living as if you expect that it won't happen.
Yes, humans are really important in these situations, thats why "Operational Excellence" is the first pillar of AWS Well-Architected - you can only get so far in terms of reliability and security if you don't consider people and process.
https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Operat...
(I work on the AWS Well-Architected team)
The nix language is a bit hinky; unfortunately nothing available even approaches it in terms of capabilities.
Oh, but you should know enough Emacs to avoid such embarrassing situations: TRAMP!
I worked as a union picker for a warehouse in 2001 - I was just there until I went to college, but if I had stayed for a year the 12.50 an hour I was making would have been raised to 16.50, and subject to raises as I stayed longer.

Nearly 20 years later, and under a tighter labor market, amazon has raised the minimum for pickers to $15 an hour. It's great that this guy likes his job, but I have no doubt that amazon has been a suppressive force on waged labor.
I have very weird read performance issues on read using the stable ZoL in current Ubuntu LTS, on a box with over 200GB of ram and a few TB of L2ARC fast flash.

The default settings for L2ARC fill rate are also super low.

I haven’t had time to track down exactly why it’s so slow, yet.
Sure. It's the prisoners' dilemma.

But that doesn't exonerate the prisons.
This is correct, however in reality completely independent components are very rare. Even things that seem independent and truly redundant e.g. jet engines of an airliner, are much more likely to fail after one of them fails. Therefore this line of reasoning must be applied with extreme care.
The majority of people don't read the articles posted, only the titles. Most TLAs are American, so if you don't know what the FSB is then "a US IC org" is a pretty safe guess.
Jib-Maven-Plugin v1.4.0
> if abiogenesis of a single replicator is extremely improbable

If [0]

> the first successful replicator will start replicating and eating all it can around itself

Assuming such life looked much like it does now, yes. It may, it may not.

I'm not disagreeing with you, these are valid points but we can't know and I am uneasy about speculating in such a case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase

After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, he [Philip II of Macedon] turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe. The reply was "Neither."

Losing patience, he sent the message:

"You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city"

The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:

"If"
Credit Repair
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Thirded. It could really have an effect to write about it and give this more attention, with perhaps a call to action to do likewise (and why that might be good).
A related recent thread is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485859.
As colemickens mentioned, fetchTarball works pretty well. I have an expression that fetches a specific version of nixpkgs, imports it, and instantiates it with an overlay. That lets me override certain packages to customize them or use a different version than nixpkgs provides, and also to add my own packages.

I periodically update the version of nixpkgs it uses, but since it's pinned, I get exactly the same outputs when building.
I had read a few of these negative articles about Amazon fulfillment centers and then a guy we know working the counter at our local pizza place got a job at one of them. That made me change my mind and doubt the reporting after talking with him. The pay was much better better, the benefits if he transitioned to full time were much better, and he was really excited about a program Amazon has to cover tuition after (I think) a year for some educational programs.
I can think of five (or should I say FVEY) that would have the combined means and interest.
Dead Simple VPN
This is one of the reasons my preferred implementation of Vi is Evil -- the TRAMP network layer in Emacs does exactly what you want: let you treat any remote file system as local. It even does multi-hop access through e.g. bastion machines. It is great.
If the following looked normal, it can be simplified:

Create a new branch from master.
Checkout the newly created branch.
Create and push your fix commit.
If everything is alright, file a pull request.
Get it reviewed and merged.
Switch back to master.

That seems like a lot of unnecessary branch switching. I'm hardly ever on master. Checkout with -b option, fetch --prune, rebase onto origin/master.

Edit: bonus tip `git checkout -` works like `cd -` but for branches.
Probably a way to avoid the massive leak of the names of intel officers when that US gov employment database got leaked. The note about operating outside of the standard state IT network is the obvious indicator.

Part of their job is counter intelligence not just offensive.
I really appreciate the good you do for the HN community.
I'm not from the US, but starting from some income threshold you can use dedicated lanes daily and pay in the end of the month. While for most of the populace occasional ticket for the same thing might be a big financial trouble.

More "fair" scheme would be fines proportional to your income or vehicle cost, but I have heard of such things only in some European countries.
Lots of interesting and worthwhile detail, none of which undermines reporting about what goes on in warehouses in which the author does not work, nor does it undermine the argument that paying $30,000 a year for full time work in California is only possible because America maintains a permanent underclass willing to work for next to nothing.
> At worst, the landlord loses money. At worst, the tenant is on the streets.

At worst, the landlord loses the money they were relying on to pay the mortgage on the property. Not every landlord owns hundreds of properties and can eat the cost of one sitting idle. Or worse, the cost of major damage to one by a bad tenant.

I'm biased. I have rented and owned. In both cases, it was what was right for me at the time. When I rented, I was happy to pay the money to my landlord in exchange for living in their property. Admittedly, I've had nothing but good landlords (with the exception of one), but I'm a very good tenant in exchange.
The link is broken, I’m seeing a 500 error.
I love this article. It’s so hard to find moderate voices, especially when algorithmic curation tends to surface outrage first.

As the author puts it:

“I don’t object to journalists writing about the trials and tribulations of Amazon employees. I only wish they would do so fairly.

Just because a journalist has found an Amazon employee somewhere who got sprayed with bear repellant, that doesn’t mean Amazon employees spend their days in mortal fear of a chemical attack.

...we need fair-minded and accurate reporting about the companies we patronize, not scaremongering polemics preaching a black-and-white gospel of tyranny and exploitation. ”
It said the attacks were detected by a Swedish University.
Rent control does little to discourage building in fact (1). One of the biggest, and imo only agreeable argument, against rent control is that leads to higher rents on uncontrolled units. However, if an entire region is under the same rent control, that just wont happen. A 7% cap I think is still very generous for landlords. It's probably still well above the rate of wage growth, though.

https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/242/docs/Rent_Matters_...
There's a difference between landlords in places with extreme property value inflation... and the rest of the world.
I agree that they deserve privacy.

I just think it unrealistic to expect that they'll get it.

And it's also arguably unrealistic to expect that they'll learn how to take it. So for sure, jawboning is also a viable option.
This entire build is strange to me. It does seem like they just picked all the most expensive parts. With Zen 2 I’d imagine an AMD cpu would be a better pick. I don’t really think there are many use cases that Intel is better, if they are better it’s only by like 2-4%. He doesn’t want to use a SSD either, he says it because he doesn’t want to deal with dual booting with two drives, I’ve never had any issues with it. Then he mentions he only buys Bose speakers and headphones. Why? Bose are not the best you can buy. You can spend way less and get way better, speakers or headphones. All I can say is they spent way to much money on a PC, you could easily spend way less and get performance for your dollar.
But will every other Vim plugin (like fuzzy-finding file browsers or whatnot) work with netrw-accessed files as if they were local? Does it trivially do multi-hop SSH through e.g. bastion machines?

I have yet to see something as powerful as tramp for this.
I live in a 2 bedroom apartment in Oregon. Rent went up by close to 11% when I renewed my lease. Management changed 2 or 3 years ago as well. End result is that the quality of life has been going down. Management complained about the color of my curtains when they inspected last time... (Navy blue, not exactly wild or offensive.) So I've been searching for a place to buy. I've also been looking for alternative rentals.

If want cheaper rent, I'd have to move into a rat nest, if I want a house, I'd pay more renting than I would for a mortgage. A couple blocks down a new apartment building was built and is charging $2000+ for 1 bedroom apartments... Every house that's come up within my range is in bad shape, bad location, or gets sold so fast I don't even have a chance to view it. So, yes, the housing situation is tight.

That all makes me think that the allowing denser zoning is a good thing. I'm not willing to live in that dense of a location, but for those that are, it should help.

The part I'm not sure of is the rent control. Maybe someone here has read up on this enough to know the answers, I'll look for them myself soon.

So, my rent shouldn't go up by more than 7% if I renew my lease, that seems good. But what about fees? One of the annoyances the new management company tacked onto the lease is fees for utilities. I'm fairly neutral on them, but if they can be used to increase rent past the 7% limit, I know they will be.

Also, say I leave my apartment. If my rent was, say, 1000/month, how much will it be for the person moving in after me? Can it go up by more than 7%? If so, doesn't that incentivize landlords to increase rents by much much more than 7% for for new tenants?

Wouldn't that make it a LOT harder for people who need to move?

Also, wouldn't there be another way landlords could bypass this by just making life difficult for tenants so that they move out more often, thus letting the landlord increase rents more frequently?

Personally, from what I've seen under this new management company, they've been trying to push out the old tenants who started renting before they took over. That will make it easier for them to implement policies that are obviously hostile for tenants who don't know that things could be better. (For example, if I remember correctly, they sent a message about no longer offering lock out service. Even though the manager is on site, you have to call a lock smith. The old managers would get back in, you might pay a fee, but you'd get in.) So I could see this particular company trying that method of increasing rents more frequently.
Probably not a popular position here on HN but I'm becoming more and more intrigued by the power of a placebo. Furthermore, it's possible we are often undermining a placebo's power but telling ourselves it's science and only science that can save us - even tho', trust is, the placebo effect is very real.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/melanie...
This is not true. AWS provides multiple constucts to help isolate failures, such as Availability Zones that provide seperate locations, and Regions that are designed to be completely isolated from each other. You can also use different AWS Accounts to provide logical seperation of your different workloads and limit management.
Interchange fees in Europe are capped to 1.15% online and 0.2% on payment terminals, and I'm sure Google, Amazon, and other big companies are able to negociate better fees
I believe the specific incident is xpo logistics

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/21/business/preg...

For example, last October, a 58-year-old woman died of cardiac arrest on the warehouse floor after complaining to colleagues that she felt sick, according to a police report and current and former XPO employees. In Facebook posts at the time and in recent interviews, employees said supervisors told them to keep working as the woman lay dead.
> Even if all the SSD does is run the OS it will make the machine much snappier.

This PC is meant for gaming. Loading games from HDD takes a long time. It's beyond me why they chose HDD over SSD, they're quite cheap now.
Small nitpick, but the actual cap seems higher than 7%:

> The resulting legislation would cap rents statewide at 7% annually plus inflation

Which, if I'm reading that correctly, would put the real cap closer to 9-10%.

I don't have a strong opinion about this, but a 10% cap on rent increases seems reasonable to me, keeping in mind that this only applies to existing tenants—if the tenant leaves, you can increase rent by however much you want. This seems like a fair way to help reduce the number of people that are priced out of their homes, without significantly impacting landlords. That said, I'm personally more excited about the zoning changes; single-family zoning was never a good idea IMO, and it's great to see Oregon slowly moving away from that.
Why would embassies need to be anonymous?

If I needed to design a secure system that didn't need to be anonymous I'd just have it send a HD full of random in a diplomatic pouch & ensure that the packets are sent with encrypted 0s if there isn't anything to say.

And that's only if you think that there isn't a safe pubic key protocol.

Bitcoin's security model relies on public key encryption & there is an extremely large bounty on breaking it. There doesn't seem to be evidence of it being broken yet.
I've often thought that the need (and compensation) for senior engineers is partly based around their historical knowledge of systems and business logic.

If you lose a senior, not only do you lose a highly skilled individual, you also lose institutional memory. Documentation can help some of this, but is often not enough or does not capture reasoning behind technical implementations.

Senior engineers are often living repositories for business logic and company knowledge.
Cobra Framework for EVM
Wouldn't the fact that several huge organizations all try to own as many nodes as possible make Tor safer? If more than one org try to gain the majority, everyones share will be lesser. I highly doubt that FSB and NSA are both agreeing that only one of them should be allowed to host a huge amount of nodes.

>The upside is that no government would admit to having this capability

Probably because it's very improbable that they have the capability to do so.
Very relevant to the original question, GTD also advocates having a "Someday/Maybe" list. This includes all your "long shots", that you are important to you but unlikely to start working on them anytime soon.

This list should be reviewed regularly (but rarely), say monthly or yearly. This way you can let go of the anxiety of forgetting something that is important to you, while at the same time not getting defocused from things that you can do now.
I dunno, robotics requires so much planning, and technology development.

If we have humans at a site, we can be like "Hey, take this pick-axe and go dig over there".

To get a robot to do that requires up-front design, development, funding, and the inevitable turf-wars and politics.

Imagine going out to weed your garden vs. convincing a committee with various unaligned priorities to fund a project to build a system to weed your garden. Four years later, it's cancelled due to new President / shifting priorities.

Humans are just generally capable at a level that robots are not -- it allows for less pre-planning, and all the pre-planning is what kills NASA's ability to do anything in a timely and efficient manner.

EDIT> I am in awe of the work done to e.g. put Curiosity on Mars, but the longer we drag out the planning and dev phase, the greater the chance the political and bureaucratic effects will derail the engineering.
Amazon's Audible does that, I went bonkers trying to buy something and couldn't figure out I have to use browser.
Lay/laid as their ‘descent to barbarism’ makes me scared what they’d say about me..
If 30% is ridiculous, what to say about J2ME, Symbian, Blackberry and PocketPC rates of former operators stores?
> or that workers somewhere in Iceland (360,000) have been required to work around a fallen co-worker. But neither of these things, if they happened, would be proof that working conditions in Luxembourg or Iceland are appalling.

They would however be proof that working conditions in a company in Iceland are appalling.
Connecting to open WiFi for internet access is just as secure as connecting to WiFi with WPA enabled. There are so many insecure hops between you and your destination that the last mile access mode is irrelevant.
You're still at the mercy of Apple giving you a valid (and revokable) app development certificate. Apps installed with a development certificate expire after a certain number of days. There's also a limit to the number of devices you can use with a development certificate.

There are enterprise distribution certificates that don't have these restrictions, but using them to distribute apps outside of the company will end up getting it revoked. (Like what happened with Facebook)
I'd like to improve the financial education of people making decisions in government. Because they've run up a $22 trillion debt.

And our government cannot come up with $400 to cover an unexpected expense either. Not without going further into debt.

Which is why all such decision makers should at least learn how to run a lemonade stand profitably.

Until then, they should not be deciding what financial education people should be getting either.