skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies would absolutely be able to sell stuff without advertising their products. Self education, word of mouth, and 3rd-party informational sources has been enough for a lot of products. Purely informational advertising - the kind you'll see in an extremely old newspaper - would probably not be considered cancerous by the author of this article.

Tune into the TV during a sporting event tonight and you won't see some new information about a product that solved a problem you didn't know how to solve. You'll see problems that you didn't know you had, solved in ways no rational person would expect: Your problem is not enough attractive women making eyes at you? Solution: Buy new car. Your problem is life doesn't consist of exciting parties with cool youths? Solution: Buy light beer. Your problem is you're not a professional race car driver? Solution: Buy chunky watch. And if you missed the message, the same three commercials will air during the next ad break in 6 minutes, and you'll see them when you look at your phone or computer, in the wad of glossy ads cocooned within the thin pages of your newspaper, and you'll hear about them on the radio until the host decides it's time to play another song.

That kind of advertising may be necessary for Budweiser to keep up with Coors, or for Ford to keep up with GM, but if it disappeared tomorrow, people would still know that beer and cars were a thing. People might make smarter choices on how much alcohol to drink and when to be content with their current transportation instead of buying a new car, and sales might go down a little, but that would not spell the end of society.
The way I see it, we've exited the food chain. We systematically breed and "process" animals for consumption in astounding numbers. Also meat makes up a much larger proportion of the modern American diet than it did for our early ancestors.
On the contrary, I think the author addresses this via the "cancer" metaphor:

> It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.

> Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.

I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.

It's much easier to control advertising if its deployment has more friction, e.g. in a physical newspaper or billboard. On the internet, it's different. We haven't figured out how to control advertising on the internet yet, such that it doesn't have all the harmful side effects cited by the author.

I bet that if we do figure it out, it will be because we've made significant technological advancements in customer<=>product matchmaking* combined with an unrelenting focus on preserving humane values.

* This will also probably entail us, as a society, somehow reframing the way that customer<=>product matchmaking happens, putting more control into the customer's hands.

I think there is room for a bit of optimism here, but it means admitting that there are serious problems with the current system.
> There's a phsyical limit to transistor size!

The size of transistors themselves were not changing much during last few node transition, what shrunk was the space and wiring in between of them.
You could use generics for that kind of code, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need them.

If you’re thinking of functional stream operators, many people think plain imperative iteration is easier to write (and easier to read).
I think you're talking about the Blub Paradox, by the guy who started this site.
Hey, been a while. Glad things look to be going well.

This job looks awesome. Is it full time? I assume it is but worth asking.
Up until age 8 I had imaginary talking cats, imaginary dolphin friends, an imaginary horse, imaginary ghosts (or maybe those were real, who knows)...
It's because of permissions there's different databases, plus most importantly the drop lists are usually keyed up 48 hours in advance (you have to do in advance because of all the checks you have to do, etc.). They can take you out of the main but you're probably in some drop lists that have already been send to the provider -- that's why they say a few days/72 hours.
Ok, but can you please not use allcaps for emphasis on HN? It's basically yelling. This is in the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This is the Blub Paradox. http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox
> Those require processing, and often times the supplement industry isn't exactly that clean. (I'm looking at you cheap fish oil sups)

B12 comes from bacteria, and is very frequently supplemented into cattle as well. Animals do not produce their own B12, it's from bacteria consumed in the soil.

https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/livestock-biosecurity/cobalt-def...

> Also you should consider the efficency of what the equillence of plans would take. (More plants requires more land+water, which requires more infrastructure, more transportation, etc). Also, don't forget about soil quality and erosion. You can't just grow infinitely on the same land. Let's not forget yield loss due to pests and diease.

> Cows are huge and they feed a lot of people with very little waste. (Assuming you don't throw out the organs and bones)

I am not sure what you think feeds animal agriculture. Huge amounts of plants (and therefore fossil fuel energy via fertilizer) are required to produce a much smaller amount of animal protein. With the size of animal agriculture, most are not roaming around grazing grass, they are eating farmed plants [1]. Because it takes many plant calories (I've seen estimates from 10-25 plant calories for one calorie animal) animals are using way more land, fertilizer, transportation, no matter how much of the animal is being used

[1] https://sentientmedia.org/u-s-farmed-animals-live-on-factory....

>According to the latest Sentience Institute analysis, the percent of U.S. farmed animals living on factory farms is…

* Broiler chickens (99.9%) live on factory farms

* Turkeys (99.8%) live on factory farms

* Egg chickens (98.2%) live on factory farms

* Pigs (98.3%) live on factory farms

* Cows (70.4%) live on factory farms

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/is-the-livestock-indus...

> A 212-page online report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says 26 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface is used for livestock grazing. One-third of the planet’s arable land is occupied by livestock feed crop cultivation.
That analogy applies to literally anything that can grow. Great. Startups are a cancer. Technology is a cancer.
Why not? The OP was defending that berating someone for their political beliefs was just fine.

Why are we expected to put the line at religion when "berating" someone's beliefs?

The article in the human rights declaration defending the individual freedom to a particular religion and a political view is exactly the same. Therefore I expect the exact same treatment to be applied in both cases. It's you that should explain how do you see one having special status over the other.
Introducing nuclear power in climate discussions tends to cause flamewars because it's often introduced by someone making extreme blanket statements, like "humans cannot be trusted with nuclear power" or "nuclear is the only available solution to climate change."

Just mention it as one of the low-emissions alternatives to fossil power. Cite climate-focused organizations for support rather than industry-specific organizations. The aim is to reduce emissions, not to promote one specific technology toward that end.

I wish that we just had carbon tax-and-dividend instead of a thousand different regulations and tax code incentives mandating or nudging toward specific kinds of efficiency measures and fossil replacements. At the same time I understand that carbon taxes face enormous popular opposition while tax credits and CAFE standards don't, so I'll accept having 3 different kinds of federal tax incentives to separately promote nuclear power, wind power, and solar power (plus a myriad of differently structured state level incentives) as the best the US can currently do.
They're operating in an adversarial environment where other businesses exist.
btw, what happened to GF ?
I don't have a strong opinion either way on your corporate death penalty proposal, but I do strongly support jailing top-level executives for very long terms. We need to set examples. Everyone on this page[1] should be behind bars for I dunno, five years? Ten? If you don't want to risk that kind of sentence, then don't horde that kind of data.

[1] https://www.equifax.com/about-equifax/corporate-leadership/
150M people have not suffered $125 damages each
I did answer the quoted part in isolation, so I understand the ambiguity and probably could have done more to make myself clear.

For what its worth, I have nothing against Beyond Meat or their mission.
It makes Git easier to use for beginners, by freeing them from the need to choose one of the hundreds of Git commands.
That's essentially the concept of a cruise missile
How many Linux contributors are paid by companies who make money by advertising?
First nationalise the legal entity so that the board cannot block the actions. Maybe pay a fair share of paid-for capital to employees, proportional to their pays they earned for the last full payment period, as a severance (this might result in lower-than-minimum severance, but better than nothing that you would get in a regular bankruptcy). However, shareholders which would get more dividends than this payout should only be allowed to be paid up to a week of minimum wage in this severance payout, to avoid exit bonuses. Assets should be auctioned off in a quick increment auction, to pay for debts to outsiders, and IP rights to be available to public domain immediately before severance payout starts. If any surplus money remains in the final account, it should be transferred to the legislative to be used for anti-corruption investigations. The legal entity can be vanished after all these finishes.
> but most advertising is a classic arms race.

Small brained primate thought du jour; advertising shouldn't be an allowed business expense.
Thank god, an argument against universal healthcare.

I’ll eat the snacks I want.

I’ll pay for the healthcare I want and need.

You do what you need. And neither one of us is responsible for the other.

Now leave me be.
There is research showing that number of bugs is a function of lines of code. As in, you can be overall better or worse with the implementation, but the more code you write, the more mistakes you'll make. Removing almost-duplicated code helps with this metric, especially when you operate on data structures ripe for off-by-one errors.
The flavor is better than most fast food beef patties to me and I have higher standards than the average person. To each his own my friend. Taste is subjective after all. Some people claim that American Cheese tastes good and is the best cheese. It is not really cheese and it doesn't taste good to me.
Show HN: AI to automatically turn notes into review quizzes
"Dogmatic viewpoints" are the real cancer on society. Actually "lupus" might be a more apt comparison.

Take a very broad issue like "advertising", which nearly everyone has had a negative experience with but performs a vital function. Highlight some damaging anecdotes and envision a world free from the issue. Thus, we have laid the groundwork that the issue is actually a problem. The stated or unstated solution is obviously to get rid of the problem, but the specifics of how to accomplish this are hazy at best. The conclusion boils down to anything which helps get rid of the issue must be good, and anything which supports the issue is bad. The resulting actions of true believers attack everything blindly because the moral logic has been simplified.

Lupus causes the immune system to start attacking your own tissue in the same way. Instead of identifying specific problems and working to eliminate them, it starts attacking everything, making the body weaker as it destroys an otherwise healthy organ.
Kids suffer most in one of Earth's most polluted cities
Is this article implying a US-Mexico border wall would be the the beginning of the US's end?

As a counter example, why hasn't China crumbled like Rome?
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20576503
As should the executives' assets.
The environmental externalities of bottling and shipping flavored water are considerable, though Coke is not the only offender.
I also found that a binary notification is all I needed. I just want to know if everything is running OK or if there are delays. So I built this a few years ago: https://unop.uk/train-disruption-indicator-with-a-blinky-tap...
It's not a problem for banks. They don't seem to feel any need to put an expiration date on their depositors' money.

Any sensible company should account for the gift card balances as a liability on their balance sheet exactly the same way a bank does its depositors' money.

The potential problem is that predicting how much liquidity you'll need to fulfill those liabilities in a given year isn't so easy. Banks are regulated to ensure that depositors are never out of their money. Some businesses have gone under as a result of getting this wrong with gift cards.
What are you on about? The current draft doesn't enable any type of meta-programming.
Comes out of the same $31 million. I'm unsure how distribution will work once more than $31 million is requested, but you're likely not going to see the full amount.
What kind of data? I’d understand people being this upset if Equifax actually had private data.

Equifax just has a bunch of essentially public financial data, addresses and such. None of that is actually private.
I think the poster was complaining that only conservative students are the target of this.

There is also a wide gulf between "defending your views" and "being berated". Especially given the power differential between student and professor - is the student supposed to fight back, and risk antagonizing the professor?

I thought one of the defining traits of the US left was sensitivity to such power imbalances.
...and he stood holding his hat and turned his wet face to the wind...
tee rũnũ shũ naapoo lẽ teetũ tee pũkii lẽ shamõ teepã õ undefined
Pronunciation: /teː ˈrũnũ ʃũ naːˈpoː lẽ teːˈtũ teː pũˈkiː lẽ ʃaˈmõ ˈteːpã õ ˌundeˈfined/
Naawo word order: and stood he holding hat his and turned his face wet to the wind

I wonder what's going on with that word for 'wind'!

(Whenever I generate a new language on the site, the word for 'wind' is always "undefined".)
That sounds awful. I'm thankful that all the hospital's I've been to in the US are the complete opposite experience, with the exception of the successful recovery.
You are still living in a world with advertising. If there was no advertising, you wouldn't need advertising to grow.
I think an important difference is that EUV exists now.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.

It's the same as saying that living in China and criticising communism is deeply hypocritical.

I believe it's actually the opposite. It takes courage to criticise something your livelihood depends on.
Why are prescription drugs marketed at all?
Thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13207441

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10785164

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408241

Lots of other mentions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ghuloum&sort=byDate&dateRange=...
It seems like you’re objecting to the messaging (not referencing an existing language, which doesn’t work for people not familiar with the implementation of that language) and also that, at its inception, Go didn’t pick (randomly?) a language off of which to model its generic implementation. Am I misreading?
Right, I see this as the biggest benefit.

Go already has generic built-in maps, channels and slices, so clearly those generic types are useful.

If what I actually want is a multiset, say, it would be great to have a standard library class that looks and behaves similarly to map except it’s a multiset, rather than just having to use map and do all the little 1- and 2-line boilerplate tricks for the multiset operations. I can write shorter code that more clearly expresses my intentions, and reduce the risk of stupid little bugs in the boilerplate.
Building a Coffee Pot Monitor Using Raspberry Pi
It won’t work like that, though. It’ll just mean that the 125 the vast majority of people expected will probably end up at 25 bucks each, depending on how many people requested the cash payout.
> we could create a law that sets the maximum price for medicine in the US at some multiple of what's charged abroad.

Why create more laws and complexity? Why not simply repeal the laws that prohibit importation of drugs and possibly also refuse to enforce private contracts prohibiting reimportation? The reason drugs are cheaper in Canada and Europe than in America is because of American laws that prevent importation.
Study results demonstrated that the grades after 4 years for conservative students were not lower than for liberal students. There is a material difference between proving the former and proving that conservative students aren't discriminated against for espousing conservative ideas.

Their data did not capture whether these conservative students kept their ideas to themselves and adopted the socially acceptable positions and beliefs they would assume their professors were seeking in order to get the grades. Why rock the boat when a college degree is an economic instrument and not some kind of political debate?

"Over the phone, Woessner stresses that, in the end, he and his co-authors had 'to engage in speculation, trying to map our possible explanation ranging from discrimination to skills to interests. [Conservative students] may be not as engaged' when it comes to the humanities, whereas 'liberal students are much less happy with their math classes.'"

Nonetheless interesting study, but headline writers once again drawing conclusions beyond the scope of a study. Yay social science journalism. We'll all continue on agreeing with headlines that conform to our echo chambers and dismissing out of hand those that do not, regardless of what the actual study truly demonstrated. Let's just infer explanations that makes sense to us and interpret our findings the way that suits our agenda.
Definite devaluation to information since the internet came along. I used to read books and magazines cover to cover when I was a kid as there was nothing else to do! Sundays were especially bad. Thank god for books.
Have a look at the financial relationship between the two and tell me if it doesn't look like blackmail. Wexner gave Epstein assets & control over assets beyond reason. General thinking is blackmail or something else very odd.
I don't understand how "exiting the food chain" is possible when we still eat other living things. How do you mean that?

Also- what does amount have to do with ethics? If it is unethical to eat meat then it is unethical to eat any meat at all.

Is your comment only about the ethics of meat eating in America (I think you mean the US)? The rest of the world also eats plenty of meat.
It's the average opinion of people who are uninformed, and who've never had to sell anything for a living. They live in a fantasy world where ad people are wizards who can control people's brains and make them buy things they don't need by making them sad.

Absolute nonsense that wouldn't survive a 5 minute test in reality. Unfortunately it's more convenient to let other people at your company do that "dirty job", while mocking the "stupid sales jocks" and their "suits", while assuming you have a great understanding of what they're doing.

It's really the mirror image of nerd bullying, and it's not any better.
>The Global Times reports that all was as normal and that her fans urged her to show her face and remove her filter but she refused, instead apparently saying: "I can't show my face until I receive gifts worth 100,000 yuan ($11,950). After all, I'm a good-looking host."

She is not "a good looking host", as evidenced by the mass Exodus from her stream after showing her face accidentally. She lied to get donations. This is all very obvious.

>My analogy still stands. She wasn't promising anything in return for their money. There was no trick

No it doesn't and you're inventing your own definition of the word "trick".
Yes, you are wrong. It's clear you haven't even read the article. The article is an overview of (semi-)recent* archeological research into Roman frontier fortifications. The general conclusion that it draws was that the Romans focused too much on fortifying their frontiers, which provided them with a sense of complacency. Once the frontiers were breached, it was already over. Sorta like the Maginot line. It also suggests that fortification-building towards the end of the empire was a symptom of the decline itself, not a cause (or cure).

All the off-topic comments here about politics are by people who didn't read the article.

*It's from 2012.
You get a better return from people who want to work for you than from people who are "not that interested". If I was hiring and a candidate first submits shitty code, and then says he's not that interested, then I'm quite likely to lose interest too. It has to be a match on both sides.

Candidates shouldn't be groveling on their knees, and any hiring manager who expects that should be avoided at all cost, because they're selecting on willingness to be abused. But it shouldn't be the other way around either; hiring an asshole is not good for the company.
That's true, but it's still a successful corporation that is supported by users and donors (to the tune of $100 million each year).
Agreed. There are good objections to generics; this is not one of them.

EDIT: If any Apple employees are reading this, I really wish autocorrect would stop confusing generics and generics. :)
No. That was the secondary reason given in the next sentence, not the main reason.
Universal Laws of the World
> own UI for other people's websites ... // ... single purpose UIs in webtech that can access DB directly

Can you point to some good examples of these use cases?
> "Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five time more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

Graven on stone of the resting place of Brandon Lee.
The readme file isn't beginner friendly. It doesn't explain what it solves, now to install/configure it, how to use it.
China did crumble. It was conquered by the tribes the Great Wall was (possibly) meant to keep out. Then it overthrew them. Multiple times.
Idk where you live, but it ain’t Boston.
The correct answer is to find whoever wrote the problem in that way, and slap them silly.

There are two possible interpretations. Either one could be written unambiguously. Writing it in this way is just bad notation.
Rather than banning, how about having an age minimum, something that’s worked fairly well* for alcohol and cigarettes?

*depending on your definition of working fairly well