skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.

This times a 1000. This is a huge factor that I think is missing. The market will just price in the labor required of all the people to make something happen. In other governments/countries, the heavy-handed government tends to basically say "We are paying this much, who wants to do it?". And they really only pay that much. There's no room for cost over runs. On the flip-side, a lot of times the amount is established by some bureaucrats friend before the project is even set to take off and the criteria are design to favor that friend and their companies price and strengths.
Well, it's both cost saving and fairness, I think. It just seems like common sense to me. If one employee by default has to subtract something like $4000 from their monthly income to cover living expenses, and another has to subtract something like $700, then the employee who subtracts less is taking home way more money if they're getting the same salary. The other employee is being punished for where they live.
Also common in Estonia apparently, although they may have stolen that from you Finns!
And once you're on the list it's basically a license to print money so the last thing you want is changes to the system.
This is a feature of all natural languages, not just signed ones. We commonly refer to these words or phrase as idioms, slang, jargon, etc.
Adding backdoors would lead to the Huaweization of American tech companies -- Sales of US tech products outside of the US would drop drastically. And the non-stupid bad actors (however small that subset is) would use something open-source, or perhaps sourced from their non-US allies.
I think rather than generally blaming "corruption", nowadays I prefer to blame "lack of competence", although there is a lot of overlap.

That's because I see a lot of bad decisions -- stupidity over greed. It only takes a few bad decisions made by people with power to completely sink a project. Now imagine building an airport or a subway. How many of these do we build? They are basically one off projects. Following a manual to repave a road doesn't require much competence, as it's a project that's done over and over again -- but doing a one-off project with unique challenges -- that requires serious competence.

And lack of competence is a much harder problem to solve than corruption. The incompetent person doesn't admit or know they are incompetent. The incompetent person can't be scared with lawsuits or investigations to become competent. No amount of sunshine will help. The only solution is to get rid of the incompetent person and put someone competent in charge. But that doesn't work at the national level -- if there is a shortage of incompetent people, or if our hiring systems aren't able to hire the competent person. So the solutions are very long term and painful:

* change how governments hire and promote staff to focus more on competence and less on passive traits like seniority/diversity/etc.

* reduce the need for competence by focusing on standardized projects built in a steady cadence. For subways, make every subway the same, or pick just 2 variants, and develop a team of people with experience working on these all across the country, with standardized best practices and a pool of skilled workers who have experience working on these projects.

All of that requires some pretty radical reforms of how our projects are funded and what role cities have to play in building them, as well as upsetting a lot of government unions.

Then there is the issue of Federalism. The Swiss have a highly efficient infrastructure system and have strong federalism, as does Germany, but you're not in a situation where each state has completely different zoning/eminent domain laws, or separate licensing so an engineer in one state may not be able to even work in another. This makes it harder for us to adopt more standardized practices across states for big infrastructure projects as well as a national pool of experts that can go state to state and build standardized projects.
Howto prove you are a God:

Create a json file

{"msg":"I am a God. My name is Bob.",
"sha256":"78A873E..."}

where the hash is the checksum of the file including the checksum. It would be equal to finding fixed point in cryptographic hash function that happens to be checksum to your message.
Given that I have many, many crypto libraries in many many devices, some of which are heavily modified, chances of me even being able to replace those with broken crypto libraries is like... 0. Many people are in a similar situation, so I don't understand how we could even comply with a law like that if we wanted to (which we don't). So yeah, not only trivial to retain unbroken crypto, but nearly impossible to get rid of it.
I wonder if for most folks that it matters.

I'll give the speaker the benefit of the doubt just for the sake of argument, but I have my doubt most people voting for folks decrying "experts" or "the establishment" have paid the least bit attention to what experts actually say.

The end results seems to be the same sort of "oh man those jokers" argument in favor of ... some folks who seem like bigger jokes / less knowledgeable.
The pain with lotus notes is real. I had to work with it for 3+ years and was blown away that someone was able to make an email client that took literal minutes to perform any given task. I always think of it whenever I see any IBM announcement for new tech.
In Search of the Real Bill Gates
Why not just use client certificates? (Not a rhetorical question. Client certificates seem like the “obvious” solution so I assume there’s a reason you’re not recommending them.)
An important distinction. I studied history and international relations to postgrad level at an "elite" institution. As much as anyone, I see value in this research (having done it myself). But it is also important to understand the propensity for humans to make bombastic claims about their own work (which ends up saying, justifiably, that is all total bullshit).

Btw, I think this is equally true of research outside the social sciences...but there is just far more scope to engage in puffery within the social sciences and, unfortunately, people are often far too lazy to counteract it.

It isn't even about data or the distinction between hard and soft...if you can make a solid argument that is justified and you have no data (which is sometimes the case) then fine. The issue is that, in most areas, the evidence doesn't justify any clear conclusion. Again, you see this in harder sciences where the title is eye-catching, the data less so (often in proportion to the nonsense in the title).

Areas like "peace building" and "conflict resolution", mentioned in the article, are deeply political areas. In my opinion, they rarely do much to advance human knowledge. For example, as the article inadvertently shows, peace building is explicitly based on the idea that democracies are best because they don't attack each other. Sounds great...but there is no data to support this conclusion.
Given that history, are there common opinions and feelings in Poland regarding Russias ongoing war with Ukraine?
Just to clarify that all tipping in the US works like this. The rest of western countries pays a fair wage and then tip is a bonus the waiter gets to keep (or shares with other staff in some contexts), but it's not expected to be part of pay.
Obviously it's absurd to think not everyone is conscious the same way we are, but I don't think you need to assert that for the hard problem of consciousness to exist. It's enough that I (whoever I am) am conscious, and no one can lead me to doubt that, although they can cast confusion on the terms I use to describe it.
ScyllaDB is better than Cassandra, and here’s why
Love that story, thanks! Ok, now a serious response. You come administer a Turing Test (in sign language) to a puppet which I'm controlling with some strings which you can't see. Using puppetry, I help the puppet pass the test. Is the puppet conscious?
They require all homes to have a rear door with a cheap padlock that "only they" will have the key. The funny thing of all this is that it accomplishes exactly nothing.
With 600k in revenue why don't you just get a real accountant firm to take care of that for you?
I agree that tipping is stupid. Tipping incentivizes me to spend less and eat at restaraunts less, because I only want to spend a dollar tipping, at most, and so seek to spend around ten dollars, at most.

The only reason I tip at all is because some restaraunts will remember me and you tip or get to wonder if they spit in your food. What a wonderful system.

I tip nowhere else and, since I'm not remembered, I face no negative consequences of this.
The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.

That's really not true. In Neural Correlates of Consciousness research there are two very important things people can only do for experiences that they're consciously aware of: remember then and communicate about them. Someone with blindsight can pick up and apple in front of them as well as a sighted person. But give them a blindfold and they won't be able to reach for the spot their eyes once knew the apple was located in. And they can't tell anyone what is in front of them either.
It's funny how the tl;dr of these articles usually just amounts to "Oh, so they're just lazy and overbearing thieves."
>Intellectuals should stop sharing their knowledge/skills with obscurantists.

What does this mean?
IMO it is less desirable to be a person who incites rage as compared to a person who becomes occasionally enraged.

Driving is strange in that there are upper bounds, but rarely lower bounds. i.e. a minimum speed is a rarity (and even more rarely enforced).

If I made the rules then we would have speed targets (not limits) and people would be penalized for driving outside of a +/- 10% range. After all, it's not speed itself that kills. It's a large and sudden speed delta.

Ideally, the speed targets would also be variable and data driven.
I wouldn't say I was fooled by it. That account only posted that scam portion of the thread, the actual thread is the real account. I was just confused about what OP meant.
Python “Standard” Library
Oh my...I thought it was dead ages ago. I don't really listen music too often nowadays, apart from an odd evening with YouTube,but I do miss the speeds Winamp used to operate on.Blazing fast,even on some crappy pentium PC with a little bit of RAM...
How do you define meritocracy? Ideas are infectious and they clearly do not need truthful or academic merit to spread like wildfire.
I wonder if someone has found a strong correlation between infrastructure costs and legal or land costs?
I think this is his point. You keep hearing about "There have been punishments against professors who question the progressive/extreme-left movement. (losing tenure, being brought up that they're "violence-inciting", etc)" or "Diversity offices have created trouble" but these "examples" are basically non-existent when you actually look for them.
Our company does it too and I thought it was weird at first but now I love it.
The author briefly touched on how it's also expensive in countries with similar law-systems like Canada and Australia.
It may just be that our laws make it a lot easier for contractors to jack up government contracts.

My personal opinion is that managers and regulators in Europe and South Korea are a lot more efficient because they have a lot more freedom to apply common sense and personal judgement without fear of getting sued over a stupid technicality in a contract dispute.

Whereas in US & Canada it's common for companies to sue the government over a small/irrelevant technicality and win a big settlement.

Thus regulators and contractors interpret rules as literally as possible in order to avoid this legal confrontation and I think it's precisely this that drastically reduces the construction efficiency of public projects.

One thing that surprised me in Germany, both in Munich and Berlin was that while the central train & subway stations were quite grandiose (Hauptbahnhof's interior looks like something out of Halo), the stations in the periphery of the city were surprisingly quite "thin and light", built frugally with thin weather shielding and a minimal amount of materials.

Whereas in Toronto it's the opposite. We built a $6Billion subway extension, with 6 stations at a billion each, all overbuilt in exactly the same standard.
Only half of them actually have any population within walking distance and one is a complete ghost-town. The reason why this happened was because treating all 6 equally was safe and no one complained.

It's not hard to see how you can provide the same service for 1/4 of the price.
It feels bad to say but I expected something that is about an order of magnitude cheaper than the price you offer.

Who is your target customer? (I assume not the average HN reader)

Maybe a smartphone app with the freemium model would be interesting, as one might want to update the map outside and people can try it out first.

How big is the community and what perk does it have over existing ones (that are mostly free)?

Marketing ideas: engage in existing communities, answer questions on quora and the like, find a local community/fair and get them to try it out and see what they like
BMW, for example. They pay boatloads.
Just a summary of Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Ask HN: How many trees do I need to plant to balance my existence?
How many trees do I need to plant to negate my entire carbon footprint?
Wait, the “no shoes” thing is mandatory? I remember reading about it, but thought it was optional. Still creepy.

Either way, like you said, I wouldn’t work for them for the same reason — obsessive company culture, which indicates a poor work/life balance. They clearly want the kool-aid drinkers.
My five cents because the basic design philosophies are quite different. And also industry inherent arrogance, especially within the so called premium manufacturers.

Bit the the opposite is true as well isn't it? You cannot treat automotive manufacturing like software development. I'd say the first company to successfully blend the two has a huge advantage.
Construction generally is not doing a brand new greenfield project. Experienced web developers can put together another website for pretty close to budget. As soon as you deviate from the framework and tools that the experienced web developer knows well though estimates go out the window.

Big construction projects have a lot of well understood parts. Sometimes you get unexpected rocks or something, but for the most some countries have done much better than others at controlling costs in projects of similar complexity which suggests that the difference isn't because it is hard to estimate.
I'll gladly purchase products overseas if the US chooses to break it's technology.
Apparently, "enhances" means "worsens", here.
Intent matters. Equifax's breach was a breach - they were attacked. They didn't intentionally post personal information publicly. It was behind a really shitty lock, but it was behind a lock. Facebook's was not, they knowingly & willingly did the things they are being fined for doing.

It bothers me that Equifax exists and is as shitty as it is. But it doesn't bother me at all that intentional maliciousness is punished harsher than incompetent negligence. The degree of the crime matters, too, of course, but this wouldn't be entirely dissimilar to the idea that homicide is a harsher sentence than involuntary manslaughter.
Signed Languages are different. It's hard for people who don't talk a Signed Language to understand because of the Blub Paradox.

The word "Blub Paradox" in itself is a good example of what Deaf people do if they encounter concepts they need to communicate. They make up words. Signed Languages are very productive in making up words.

So it is not just an idiom, slang or jargon, it is more than that.
> Can you explain how this actually solves the main problems?

a lot of weight rests on those two words: "main problems". The main problems for the government are that criminal investigations are being impeded. By banning certain forms of encryption, they can criminally charge a suspect for merely refusing to decrypt data. And you can bet that the penalties will be stackable, allowing the government to use its discretion and perhaps charging someone with separate counts for each file he refuses (or is unable ...) to decrypt. I'm NAL, but I've also heard of the "forgone conclusion" doctrine, which somehow allows the constitution to fly out the window and allows the gov to imprison someone indefinitely until they decrypt the files. So, sadly, this ban does solve the main problems at considerable expense to citizens' liberties.

Conjecturing further:

- citizens would be allowed to encrypt, but they'd be required to keep a set of the keys used or else they could risk prosecution.

- There could be a government cloud server where you "securely" upload whatever keys you use (or, realistically, probably outsourced to companies like equifax which would then charge you a fee to do so),

- existing cloud providers would be required to detect when clients were using encryption-looking libraries/subroutines and store a copy of the keys into some registry.

- this could ultimately lead to "whitelist-only" software libraries, so that you cannot run anything on the cloud without building it with their dev environment so they can be sure you're not secretly encrypting things.

- going even further, this could lead to deep packet inspection that simply detects encrypted transactions and queries them against the gov key registry to "make sure" they are properly decryptable. Any failures to decrypt could trigger an investigation.
Is there a formal language in philosophy? So that one can define the input formulas (axioms) and with some kind of "philosophy math" calculate things like "what is the meaning of life and everything" and "what is consciousness"?

Otherwise for me it all looks like words juggling continuing for many centuries. They really should implement a programming language for philosophy and outsource the hard parts to Ukraine.
It is not 10 years ago but something around that time I was working on automated tests for car equipment. Quite a lot of it was still semi-manual because you had to change some things with physical buttons that you would have in car, but voltage changes, and quite a lot of sensor inputs we had automated. Was quite easy because you could fake CAN connected devices.
It has to be possible to talk about the effects of this phenomenon on all people, as well as the related changes in behavior people choose. We're all new to that, so I think we're all figuring out what language is appropriate. So we all have to be open to discussing that too. Thanks for that openness!
I'd like some kind of standard metric that adjusts gdp to spending power on food, housing etc, and weights based on standard deviation amongst the populace (lower being better).

Unadjusted gdp seems like an entirely pointless metric when as you point out you can look at places like the USA where despite having high gdp there's still widespread poverty.
> the actual prices of restaurant food items are just undermarked by 15-20% of their actual cost.

Right, and it's undermarked because you are expected to tip.
It's disturbing this produced a sort of flame war.

In the not-so-distant-past, a dictator purging academics would be clearly and universally acknowledged as bad.

Somehow it's now twisted around to claim that critics of _supporters_ of a regime are actually the real "oppressors".

Interesting times.
Same principle applies here as with any software development effort. There are some natural bottlenecks that can't be avoided/parallelized (for e.g. waiting for a layer of asphalt to dry). Further, more people doing a thing doesn't mean it will get done faster. You have to contend with overhead of planning, context-switching and handover overhead between workers leaving/starting shifts etc. etc.
33 Beautiful Open-Source Icon Sets
I don't believe in that tradeoff, at least from my experience with "business reports".

When programs take a long time to run, they take also take a long time to debug. Your edit-run-test cycle is longer.

In my experience, programs that are unnecessarily slow are often also unnecessarily buggy. The main reason is that developers don't want to touch them. They rot in the background while the underlying data changes.

I'm talking about reports that take hours to run and often don't have any tests. It's pretty easy to get 10x improvement on such programs.

This doesn't conflict with the notion that most programs (particularly business reports) don't need to be optimized at all. They just need to be written with some basic understanding of the problem and the underlying platform. Tests go a long way too.
Oh it's nitpicker than that - you don't have to 'disclaim' being the author cause, you're, you know, the author and can just say you are.
I recommend using the IUS repo ("Inline with Upstream Stable") for installing PHP 7 on CentOS 7 https://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/CentOS/7/x86_64/r...

These are drop-in replacements for the stock packages that don't break dependencies.
The tip can be variable to reflect your perception of the service, so leaving no tip just makes you the jerk. Also, you chose the restaurant that microwaves burgers, so you knew what you were getting into.
Also, should we listen to scientists who are speaking outside of their area of expertise? "I'm a medical doctor, so let me tell you about meteorology." People import authority from an area where they have it to use in areas where they don't.

Note well: This does not excuse purging intellectuals, in Turkey or anywhere else. Intellectuals aren't gods, but they aren't vermin, either.
Five ways to enable developer autonomy in AWS
There's definitely better ways and worse ways. All we can do is our best.
Can you prove to me that you're not an elaborate bot programmed to post on Hacker News?
I see way too many market leaders on the list - just because they have a free plan doesn't mean they are good "for companies on a budget". The free tiers are designed to hook you in, but switching once you hit the limits can be very expensive (resource wise) and shouldn't be part of cost-saving strategy.

Take MailChimp for example - it's a very expensive email marketing solution.

BigMailer.io is a great alternative to EmailOctopus because it supports transactional emails (EmailOctopus doesn't) in addition to bulk and auto/drip, and it offers a more generous free tier - up to 5,000 contacts.
You need to earn money, sure. But it's really sad that things like this are not OpenSource for people to play around with. I am sure the possibilities would be endless. This seems to make a great foundation for a new MMORPG in space.
There is a trend against that though in spite of meat issue.
The problem is not with failing to comprehend the complexity of cells though, it's that stuff can't just come to existence given enough time.

First of all, the time is not enough, given the complexity of a single cell, the number of conditions/variables needed for something like that to just blindly happen is absurd, a couple billion years is nothing.

Secondly, even if we assume enough time just for the sake of argument, time is not the only factor, you can't just throw "given enough time" and fix everything, things don't just make itself given enough time, a plane would not just come to existence given a billion years.

It's very easy to just oversimplify and throw "billions of years" "mass scale evolution", but once you check the details, it's just not that simple.
Did something go wrong here?

https://pykancha.github.io/test/2019/selenium_p1.html