skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> at best it's just... faster internet

Counterpoint: streaming audio and video were singularly enabled by faster internet. That is restructuring multibillion-dollar industries. The iPhone, one could argue, and through it real-time social media, are products of mobile internet.

There are legitimate new capabilities that will likely erupt from cheaper, faster mobile internet. If the playground is in Shenzhen versus Silicon Valley, that’s where resources should be allocated to explore that potential.

I’m not arguing for 5G. (I don’t know enough about it.) But “it’s just faster internet” is a facile counterargument.
In America business if you aren’t cheating you aren’t playing.
A San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago

http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp23.htm

> THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power:

> As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more — constantly forcing down wages.

> Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human labor to satisfy human desires. We should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot reap these benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to labor. When it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased productivity of labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of progress go to those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot increase. The more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity to make anything at all.
Forget the Space Force -- what we really need is the Galaxy Police!
The text I quoted is from the ”See this link for the comprehensive rules” link, not (AFAIK) from any card.

The hypothetical aliens wouldn’t have access to it.
Building something that implements the principles you support can be a highly effective way of promoting them. E.g. Mozilla and Firefox.
I worked at Martin Marietta, Space Launch Vehicles division, from 1986 to 1990. A couple of engineers from the MMU program came to work with us on Commercial Titan. They would occasionally take a few folks to the lobby of the main office in Waterton Canyon, where an MMU mural hung. The spelled out name of the vehicle was misspelled - it lacked a crucial 'v', making it a "Manned Manuering Unit".
A lot of us HN readers are geeks and love Monty Python. I still use the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch to explain why Zookeeper needs 3 nodes but not 1, 2, or 4. (Though in contrast to the Pythonic instructions 5 is actually OK.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_of_Caerbannog
The issue is that, loosely stated, most people who don't own are spending 30, 40, 50% of their income on rent essentially anywhere.

It's not sustainable in any sense of the word. Their entire life is literally treading water. I've posted about this before - on an individual level if you can't save money you need to rethink your entire life, yesterday.

Of course, if you've already lost, you already have zero capital, well then you're in a very sticky situation indeed.

Any "solution" that involves a huge percentage of the population being actually skint and forced into making a series of incredibly short-term financial decisions is a band aid.

This is what an economy designed for the wealthy looks like. The bottom end of malleable labour pool participants is a 'feature', not a bug.
More often than not it's because their boss doesn't care about the answer to those questions, even if you their peer do.
To fix that through market mechanisms, you have to create a glut of housing, so huge as to make its prices go down, at least at the low end. This would affect not only new but also of course the existing housing stock.

Since a house is seen (in US) as an investment and is expected to generally appreciate, this would go very much against the "reasonable expectations" of many people.
> , but I do recognize that cash payments are a basic human right

Is it a human right to be able to pay with any kind of cash, or just from some governments?
That's what the state does.

And it's important to realize that the destruction happened the money money was stolen from taxpayers or invested by private enterprises that wanted to participate in that plunder.

This last stage (collapse) is merely a reckoning.
These days - no. I’m nowhere near the business expert in the healthcare industry where I now work as I was in the ins and outs of assembly. That’s not my role. I’m a software developer by title, but I would consider myself an “expert” in both the software architecture and the AWS infrastructure of our (smallish) company.

When I was working for the company where I did have to maintain the compiler/IDE/VM after they forced their founder out. I also had to know the complete business needs of the client that kept us afloat because as they laid off people, I had to interact with the customer and write the SOWs. I saw both sides. The skillset I needed to implement the business side was completely different than the skillset I had to have to maintain the compiler stack.

Luckily I was mature enough (and an MBA dropout) to understand the business end and enough of a geek to understand low level computer concepts and could read assembly.
There is a small gap in this reasoning: that something is written down and sounds like a good idea doesn't make it a good idea.

That's his point, doesn't matter if is a good or bad idea, but that someone took the time to sit down to think through, write and publish some ideas that will give developers a new perspective on how to do things that they would never thought about, whether those ideas are good/bad, apply or not to the software we are currently creating is up to us to analyze and decided.
A complaint was filed. We don't know why the NASA employee still had access to the (formerly joint?) account. [ADDED: One would have thought the person whose account was accessed would have been savvy enough to have changed their password unless there's some important detail that's missing.]

Space law is obviously the somewhat interesting story angle. Other than that it's certainly a complete non-story.
Drowning unable to help themselves is an urban myth. While you are still conscious, you can definitely do whatever it takes.
> it does mean that it's quite hard to fire an underperforming dev, because how the hell do you prove they're underperforming? What metric do you use?

I think your criticism of 'at-will' employment is unfounded in this scenario. Having lower guardrails on employment means it's not as pressing to figure out performance metrics. If the company narrative is that an employee is helpful to the mission, then there isn't much cause to fret for a more perfect metric. And at-will means you can test more employees before committing to a few for longer than a couple years.
What you’re advocating for is exactly the status quo that got SF into this mess. “Build X affordable units per Y luxury units” has been the go to line for every shitty NIMBY supervisor for the past 10+ years and we’ve clearly seen all it does is result in a lot less of both.

We need housing in absolute numbers, real units to fill the very real jobs to housing imbalance of 150,000 more jobs than housing units that were added to the city over the past decade. And we need real units of subsidized housing as well for those at the very bottom of the economy. What we don’t need is feel-good percentage requirements where the denominator just ends up being close to 0.

Also, so-called luxury housing is often like ~15% more expensive than the median housing price in many areas. It’s a name that makes it easy to hate on, but like it or not it is housing for real middle and upper middle class people. The amount of hate it gets, you would think we’re talking about housing for billionaires or something.
Agreed, in Seattle some of the activist groups actually actively make the chronic homeless more visible to increase funding to the other group. It’s a very effective strategy actually.
If you made a similar film about Muhammad today it would be banned everywhere. Things haven't changed that much
Many lisps like Common Lisp are multi-paradigm (imperative, OO, functional). Some like Clojure are built on OO runtime and can call Java OO code, but in general heavily favor immutability and functional programming. So you're focusing on one sentence (that is arguably incorrect or only partly correct) and missing the intent of the article.
Impaired critical thinking ability leads to shitty politics. Impaired critical thinking ability is caused by people's lack of experience which is caused by political arguments being seen as taboo. You become fat if you never exercise and you become dumb if you never think critically.

Work is where we spend a major part of our lives 8-9 hours per day five days per week. The idea that freedom of speech should be suspended for the duration is dumb. People aren't automatons and shouldn't be treated as such. It leads to the bizarre situation that you neither care for nor have anything in common with the people you spend the majority of your time with. The most interesting conversations you have is "I see it is raining outside." "Yes, it is raining." because people are so afraid of breaking the workplace decorum.
I'm with you.

Maybe this trend is inevitable because people spend a lot of time here (as I do). It's a forum after all. Focus on tech and intellectual pursuit gets diluted in general conversation.

And that's really a loss.
> This to me is terrifying and revolting to read. How can anybody believe this sort of nonsense, and worse: harmful nonsense at that. We are all slaves to some mythological original sin, we cannot improve ourselves, we are doomed, we need a magical force from above to descend and save us all... Completely contrary to my personal ethics, completely contrary to the mindset necessary for progress (nobody is going to save us; there is nobody else, only us; we need to roll up our sleeves and improve our shitty world, because if we don't do it then nobody will, etc).

I was a raised a "Bertrand Russel: Why I am not a Christian"-type atheist. Your perspective is similar to the one I had for most of my life.

But more recently, I've come to view the things you quoted as metaphorical. Looking at them that way, I wonder if they don't contain significant wisdom. It comes out something like: "We are all deeply flawed beings capable of good and evil. Salvation does not necessarily flow from intelligence, 'progress,' or earthly accomplishment".

I suppose I think that's basically right. We are fundamentally biological creatures and therefore slaves to our biology (human nature) which encompasses many aspects that we consider unpleasant. Progress ("improving our shitty world") cannot change this fundamental fact. That last part is debatable, but I think it's probably true. Attempts to re-engineer (or re-calibrate) humanity have failed spectacularly. Yes, normative morality changes but people remain basically the same underneath that veneer.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve things. It just means we need to do so cautiously and we ought to remember that, despite everything we have built, we are deeply flawed, biological entities capable of tearing it all down in the blink of an eye.

I still view the cosmological claims of Christianity (and all religions) as silly.
There's a follow-up article.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/valve-patches-recent-steam-zer...
Isn't Popper required reading material at every decent university?
Yeah, I was re-reading it, trying to grasp how exactly it got 'ugly', and how were the negative rates to blame.
I understand. Maybe if the conversation takes that tone we'll just have a nice tea and go back to life.
If Comcast can tell you which customer had a given IP address at a given time, I’m sure NASA can figure out that a given IP address was the one used for ISS traffic.
But k means isn't linear algebra. Might as well put k means into a book on APPLIED car repair.
> I can never understand

They can't understand either
Yes. Have you seen The Expanse documentary?
all of the above, probably.

but there was basically zero chance that self-driving cars of the sophistication and scale needed by uber would be widely deployed within 10 years (i'd wildly guess a 50% chance of its existence in 30 years), as anyone employing a critical mind for more than a few minutes could surmise.
PulseAudio remains practically unusable for an audio workstation; latency in the tens or twenties of miliseconds are unacceptable.
Software development is as much of an art as a science.

Personally I've seen people double down on bad design decisions early in a project that becomes major pain to deal with later on. It is easy to see that if they spent a little extra time on quality in the beginning it would pay off in a few weeks or even sooner.

I also see others spend too much time trying to be perfect in the beginning and nothing ever gets delivered or the over engineered solution creates its own form of tech debt.

Every situation is different so you need to use judgement whether to apply someone's advice.
Very strongly disagree with the idea that consuming art is not in itself a generative process. Reading (or many other forms of consumption), if done attentively require practise. There is a world of difference between anxious, distracted twitter scrolling and a good reader.

All a book gives you is letters on a page, the rest of the exercise is left to the brain of the reader. Reading is a difficult and enormously complex process, and by no means less of an active or creative activity than writing. Becoming a skilled and mindful reader takes a lot of time. Learning how to engage with the creations of others also means widening ones own personality.

I think this post falls into the trap of 'productiveness', which thinks of creative activity only in terms of to what degree something can be exposed to others, ironically for consumption.
Sex, Gender, and Fairness in Sports and the Olympics
Ignoring the problematic new spectrum...

If 5g is reasonable to run on existing spectrum (I think this is generally true, but I don't know if mobile devices are configured for it), and it allows for more concurrent use (this is the promise, yes?), and if there are sufficient deployed devices to make it useful, refarming the spectrum to 5g would be useful for improving user experience in the situation described. Most carriers already went through this with 3g and LTE.

You could invest in more 4g infrastructure in theory, that usually means adding more towers to shrink the cell size in congested areas; it's often the case that tower density is limited by municipal agencies rather than carrier budgets.
OK, but why is it in a book on Linear Algebra today? Look at any introductory Linear Algebra book more than 3 years old and you won't find it in the curriculum
Sounds like this person is your employee or direct report. Are you underpaying them? Do you use toxic “agile” practices at work? It’s very likely you can figure out why they left without asking.
> unlike the power density issue.

I reject that assertion. The argument you tried to give against that power density argument (using magnet advances) just showed you didn't understand the point Lidsky was making.

> And as far as I can tell the reason for that price is that the building is built to very exacting standards.

Fusion reactors will also have to be built to very exacting standards -- not because of safety concerns, but because any malfunction in the radioactive, hands-off part of the plant will be economically disastrous. Lidsky goes into this point as well.
not sure Anders/microsoft wanted to replace javascript with typescript. the problem is this imo.

to use javascript -- or say python -- in an corporate/enterprise environment, you need to analyze your code base. static analysis is what worked well and still does but you need types. ofc having types has other major benefits but this is the big one for me at least.
A Codebase Is an Organism (2014)
So “she got the boot but we passed a law 100 years too late that might stop half of this problem but still won’t let you withhold rent for unsafe housing” is supposed to be OK?
> Life was shit

Because, like, no Facebook and stuff?
I used to smoke a pack a day and quit about 14 years ago using the patch. Quitting is ultimately the only solution. "Keep smoking" just means eventually dying from a smoking related illness.
Yes, it was exactly that. It was the Columbus, Georgia version of "I work at Google (let's not mention I'm actually a janitor)."
> You're assuming that these are unpleasant to everyone?

I guess? The concept of them not being unpleasant is... alien to me.

> And there's not really much room inbetween, it seems.

I consider myself to be in between. I'm a strong advocate of products over services, because services come with undesirable things like relationships with third parties, subscriptions (vs. one-time payments), and terms of service that restrict what you can do with things. I prefer ownership, but I also strive to minimize any and all maintenance burden related to that ownership, because I consider it a negative aspect.
Cellphones in particular have essentially invalidated so many situations based on not being able to get in touch with someone or having to make advanced arrangements and missing the connection, etc.

Heck, most of Connie Willis' earlier books--which I do like but also involve people running around and constantly not being able to locate someone--really don't make sense in a world where people carry phones.
There's no reasonable jurisdictional defense.

If I'm a US citizen, and I visit RandomCountry A (or international waters, or Alpha Centauri) and then access a bank account belonging to a resident in US state X, and return to US state Y... the possible jurisdictions are pretty clear (either state X or Federal jurisdiction.. and maybe state Y depending upon facts).

Statute of limitations probably lapses if it's Alpha Centauri, though.
The furthest a human ever went :/
My problem with this style of interview, is that someone like me, who is a mediocre programmer, but stellar communicator will fare MUCH better than someone who is a brilliant programmer but poor communicator.

I spend lots of time reading about smart people's opinions on programming, and will be able to recite that knowledge and play it off as my own hard-earned experience. I could talk for an hour about tradeoffs between Vagrant and Docker, without ever having spent more than a few hours actually working with Docker.

If the interviewer is really sharp they could maybe dig deep enough until they see that there's nothing beneath the surface, but I suspect most wouldn't do so even if they were capable.
Amen. I'll throw in a pitch for "High Output Management," which does a good job of describing how and why to do 1-on-1s. Everyone hates meetings, but they're the primary way for people to propagate information and vent feelings. If you don't have 1-on-1s, people will bottle up feelings that don't have an outlet in other standard meetings. And if you don't have an environment of trust, no one will talk to begin with. So focus on creating an atmosphere where people can talk and then formalize and consistently create occasions for them to share their feelings-about themselves, about their careers, about their projects. Anything that you want visibility into needs to have a channel. And then just accept that your organization will evolve and you can't keep everyone, or make every project successful, or always beat your competition. Life isn't perfect. Being a leader is about driving a strategy and culture while bound by the constraints of your particular situation and the world in general.
The joke the JPL crew always say is that the last time the planets aligned like that was when Thomas Jefferson was President and he blew it.
The problem isn't so much consumption vs creation in itself. It is the overabundance and the complete lack of quality of both the created and the consumed.

Put a high bar on both what you consume and what you create.
> The guy that destroyed millions of research dollars

:)

How? Want explain how that works?

Elaborate your viewpoint
AI Learns to Animate Your Face in VR [video]
Some tokamaks do. MIT's ARC, for example, uses jointed superconducting tapes that let the reactor be opened up to replace the inner wall. That's done annually, and the wall is 3D-printed. Surrounding the inner wall is molten FLiBe salt, which acts as coolant, neutron absorber, and breeding blanket. Commonwealth Fusion is attempting to commercialize the design.
This is quite a mis-representation. The total number of billionaires in 1995 = 289. Of them, 66 died. 24 of them diluted their holdings to family. This is 31% of them. Of the remaining, 126 are still billionaires. That is 43% of them. I rounded it down, but if you add them together, you see only 25% dropped out. Still a big number, but maybe some of them were spiky nasdaq 5000 of the 90s : very temporary wealth due to some reason. It seems like the odds are 80% or higher of retaining your billion dollar wealth over 2 decades.

But now that the dollar is cheap (by 1995 standards) and the billionaires aplenty, maybe we should look at 5 or 10-billionaires for our next study.

[ Edited to add: Actually you do not even need to downsize 25% to 20%. Take a 1% erosion per year and you get there anyways. So basically the odds of someone losing billionaire status were about 1% per year. Quite a low chance of failure. And quite a high chance of death in comparison.]
She was allegedly checking if payment for the drilling arrived from Roscosmos. It was smart to use spouse bank account.
My dad and I would set the VCR to record the daily press conferences and watch them in the evening. Good times.
Lazy but kinda accurate feedback — Went through a few examples and it's not clear to me how this is different from a powerpoint presentation, except I need to know about your website and that your tool exists, and then learn how to use it, and then make it.

Higher level — You are working on the right problems. I'm working in a different space, but feel like you guys are tackling the same problem: computational mediums try to restrict ideas to the capacity of the medium! Ideas are non-linear and the mediums we use (because we don't have a choice) are linear.

Would love to speak with you guys some time about your thoughts on the space in general.

Website looks slick, btw! Congrats on the launch!

a[at]livedocs.io, if you want to chat more :)
Not a lawyer, but my understanding after lots of reviews with people who are lawyers, is the law pretty clear here.

First, there is no such thing as academic freedom in the US Constitution.

As for the NSF example, lying IS a crime depending on the circumstances. So is fraud. In the case of an NSF Grant, it can be a federal crime.

One of my key frustrations when talking about this is the complete lack of understanding of free speech issues in the US by people who claim to be the defenders of free speech (not you the poster, but certainly folks in the article).

Free speech as a legal concept doesn't apply. Even if you wanted to tie it back to State Constitutions (because some schools are State schools), in this case it is the State institution that is limiting its own speech. The paper belongs to the school, not a private entity. The government is allowed to moderate it's own speech.

That's the point about needing an independent and free press. State run news is the opposite of free speech.
The author's statement that "My view is that applications are a social construction" I think hints at a deeper truth, that while _code_ is run by machines, managing a _codebase_ is more like raising a plant in a garden and not like changing the oil in a machine. Reminds me of "A Codebase is An Organism"[1].

[1] https://meltingasphalt.com/a-codebase-is-an-organism/