skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A clearer way of stating it might be not "the euro students value their education more because it's free," but "the euro students value their education more because college attendance is determined by academic status rather than ability to pay. So, they had to work hard at their studies to get into college, and must continue to perform well academically or risk being kicked out."

Whereas in the US, college attendance generally* is determined by ability to pay, and a student who can pay will almost certainly be able to find some college that will let them attend, whether they take their studies seriously ("value their education") or not.

*Of course achievement still matters if you want to get into the most selective institutions ... but I gather you can do that with (a lot) of money, too.
Context matters. There are some underlying assumptions not discussed here. You can see them in the content like...

> Pain point: too much metadata

and

> I expect any modern Linux distribution to only transfer absolutely required data to complete my task.

Consider the case of searching for a package. That search can be performed locally and you would need the metadata locally or it can be performed remotely and the results sent over the wire. It has to be performed somewhere.

If performed remotely than the remote endpoint knows what you've been searching for. If you are trying to perform a search across multiple package repos how do you to that securely? How do you not leak information? The remote endpoint can capture, log, and use information about who searched for what. Then tie that back to company and other data. There's a lot of sensitive corporate information that can be contained in these searches. So, do you do perform searches remotely or locally? Many systems choose locally but that entails downloads a dataset.

There are a bunch of things like this to take into account.

Other things, like serial downloads, are likely a product of the package managers age. I would hope modern ones work out parallel downloads.
Love this idea:

> This dynamic transfer / deployment of arbitrary computations is possible because definitions in Unison are identified by a cryptographic hash of their content, including the hashes of all dependencies (the hash is also "nameless" as it isn't affected by naming of variables).

> To transfer a computation, we send it to the recipient, and the recipient checks to see if the computation references any unknown hashes. Any unknown hashes are synced to the recipient before the transfer completes and the computation proceeds.

Previous discussion (2015):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512955
there are two types of thoughts: active and passive

passive thought probably makes up 80% of our day
Just in case the Wayback Machine has archived the actual Uber post:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140420053019/http://support.ub...

>What is the Safe Rides Fee?

>From the beginning, we’ve always been committed to connecting you with the safest rides on the road. Our new Safe Rides Fee is a $1 fee added to uberX fares in United States cities with uberX ridesharing. This Safe Rides Fee supports our continued efforts to ensure the safest possible platform for Uber riders and drivers, including an industry-leading background check process, regular motor vehicle checks, driver safety education, development of safety features in the app, and insurance. For complete pricing transparency, you’ll see this as a separate line item on every uberX receipt.

It seems clear enough that it is an added fee (or price increase) by any other name.

Next time - say - a Big Mac will go from 3.99 to 4.99, "for complete pricing transparency" McDonalds may add a "Hygiene and Environmental fee" to support their continued efforts to clean the premises and dispose of the plastics, etc.
> They completely eliminated the practice of heating up frozen meals

This is a thing in US schools?

FFS. This puts conversations I have on here about cooking in context, if children are pretty much forced to eat that stuff.
Related to the website if not the article, but I wish this website did not hijack ctrl-f.
Market forces build things like Uber. Are we actually going to get public transit this way? I really doubt it.
How to Learn a New Programming Language Fast
Brave! Liking it so far.
> hobble the USPS in 2006 by requiring them to suddenly pre-fund their pension obligations

Maybe it's a flawed methodology (arguable), but being fiscally responsible about pensions is something that should be encouraged. In California pension liabilities are out of control and at impractical levels, causing all sorts of havoc and manipulation (corruption). https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/2018/12/07/governor-jerry-...
> Second, USPS is obligated to service every location in the US

I’ve heard this many times. I also know quite a few places that USPS does not service.
The levee that broke and destroyed the city?

Because of the topology of the Bay we would basically have to build a levee all the way around it. IANACivil Engineer, but that seems like a big deal.

All I'm saying is that if you're looking to buy or build in the Bay Area do your homework.

A couple of years ago I was looking at buying a condo on the water in Redwood City and it dawned on me that, by the time I paid off the mortgage, it would be underwater both literally and figuratively. ( https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-is-underwater-m... )

It doesn't make sense to build up new urban sites along CalTrain if we don't also deal with the effects of climate change, eh?
Creators don't have exclusive control over their past works, but they do have control over their future works. That is how those monetization strategies work.

> If Marvel releases a movie, I can steal it and ask people to subscribe to my stolen movie service, donate to it, show it using advertisements, write a live show using the script, etc

Yes, you can do that. But you don't have access to that movie until it's released, so Marvel can sell release access to theaters and streaming services. They can crowd-fund new movies by selling exclusive early access to the final product. They can sell merchandise and other media that integrates with the movie. Perhaps they can sell super-high-quality physical media for collectors.

Obviously people are willing to pay money to see these movies. The questions is how to connect Marvel with that money, which I'm sure they can figure out.

> About the only way I can't steal it is through commission, but then how is the person paying the commission getting their money back?

Artists selling their services for commission is mostly seen for smaller works of art, like paintings / drawings or short animations.
Brazil rejects G7’s $22M offered to fight Amazon fires
Global wealth inequality and social insecurity.

I'm a firm believer in real-time payment systems and its ability to quickly address issues vital issues like the above, and related issues like climate change. Markets operate in real-time, and the current banking infrastructure - which creates an artificial bottleneck via ACH delays - is an old and dying dinosaur. I imagine a world of daily paychecks is just a few years in the future.
A set of mid-sized though significant quibbles.

The United States no longer has the largest total national carbon footprint. That title now goes to China, which has exploded past the US. The total carbon emissions title, since 1970 (roughly half, probably somewhat more, of the total since the Industrial Revolution, given ~30-ish year doubling rates), remains the US, though China are on track to surpass this within a few years.

Per capita, US residents still have a larger carbon footprint than China.

It's not the largest in the world, though, with that title going, depending on how you allocate, to petroleum exporting regions (e.g., Saudi Arabia), fueling and bunkering centres (e.g., Gibralter), ammonia fertiliser production (e.g., Trinidad and Tobago), or, if you're looking at direct local consumption rather than exports, largely Scandinavian countries with very large heating requirements.

Emissions by country, graph, 1970-present: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

2017 national vs. per-capita emissions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

Cumulative emissions, 1970-2017: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say
> If the market had already priced in all future events, the price would never move.

I don't think that holds. Let's say we all knew everything about the future, and we all use it to instantaneously and perfectly compute The Right Price for every security. We all know that this stock will pay out a total of $X in dividends over the next Y years before the company goes out of business, and what all the future prices will be. Time moves forward, we pass a dividend payment. I think the price of the stock has to fall?
That was I was thinking about, but DRM is flawed anyways. I don't think there's anything on Netflix for example that isn't available on torrents or other file sharing methods.
> nothing says it has to be specifically earmarked for anything

Lawsuits in the US about deceptive fees like [1] come to mind.

[1] https://blog.ticketmaster.com/schlesinger-v-ticketmaster/
Question is, in which aspects you have to actually trust - with no verification or no ability to enforce - the intermediary behavior? How costly would be to avoid having trust necessary?
If someone in China sends a packet to the US via China Post, China Post are responsible for getting it to the US, while USPS are responsible for getting it from wherever it lands in the US to the recipient. An agreement made between all national postal services via the Universal Postal Union determines how much China Post have to pay the USPS for this final leg, a fee called the "terminal due".

The UPU agreement on terminal dues sets a sliding scale based on the sending country's level of economic development - less developed economies pay less, while more developed economies pay more. The logic behind this is fairly obvious, in helping less-developed economies to fully participate in the international mail system.

The problem for the USPS is that they are obliged to handle large volumes of mail originating in China, but the terminal dues for lightweight items are substantially below their cost of delivery. The handling of these items is effectively cross-subsidised by USPS customers.

The US is demanding that terminal dues should be set at a flat rate based on domestic postal costs, with the possibility of direct subsidies for less developed postal systems. This would partly (though not completely) reduce the competitive advantage for Chinese e-commerce sellers.
Transportation is not that expensive, and I personally believe it grew out of the Combine culture of the plains farmers since so many bees come out of North Dakota. Bee keeping expertise is not a common skill.
GopherCon 2019: Russ Cox – On the Path to Go 2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture...

This is basically the only problem in the world that matters.
Businesses can now claim their trademark blockchain domains before it’s too late
Years ago in school, I decided to figure out how the Linux kernel works. So I've downloaded the sources and open them with a notepad++. After an hour I've figured out that I have no idea what am I reading in the code, close the notepad++ and never open it back. Buy the sources are still awaiting in some old directory at my home's PC :)
Show HN: Joob – A simple and flexible batch job manager for JavaScript
Without IP how can you enforce copyleft? Someone could just take your code and modify it and distribute modified binaries without you being able to do anything.
> With this in mind, I submit that the actual value of IP in most cases is close to zero.

I heartily endorse this opinion or viewpoint.

After accepting this as true, we must confront why "intellectual property" in the form of taxpayer-funded enforcement of ownership of an idea exists.
This is great. The tariff agreements were never made with such a huge volume of small parcels in mind, many of them awkwardly shaped and causing problems with automatic sorting machines. And there’s the obvious ecological viewpoint as well.
I don't actually hear people talk about cholesterol in food, though. They almost always mean high in animal fat, which my understanding is that this then results in higher LDL in the bloodstream.
If somebody makes a better version then good for them.
While that's true to an extent, you could also say that Blizzard learned its lesson with Starcraft and Diablo 2 piracy and designed future games like World of Warcraft and Diablo III such that you had to connect to Battle.net to authorize your copy, even if you only wanted to play offline (Diablo 3).

A full-featured copy of Starcraft will be playable 50 years from now, regardless of whether Blizzard is still around or not. You can't guarantee that for most games these days.
What is the net total protein yield of sustainable grazing-based non-augmented livestock production in those regions, and the equivalent global daily per-person ration?
Extensible Extension Mechanisms
I and most of the other developers hang out on Freenode#haiku, and of course on our mailing lists. Come say hello and get involved, indeed. More than happy to teach :)
Your Avengers example is terrible. Those movies made all of their money from theater ticket sales, not Blu-Rays after the fact.

Consumers spent money on the theater experience because it was the best way to see the movie when they wanted to see it.

Timed releases for content are fine, but if I buy a disk after the fact, I want to be able to copy it freely without DRM and jumping through stupid hurdles.
> First, it isn't a monopoly

But it is. A simple googling gives many hits confirming this simple fact. This one seemed most informative:

> The USPS actually has two legally enforced monopolies, as per Title 39 of the US Code. One is over the delivery of anything defined as a “letter,” which is within certain size and weight limits. The second is over the use of your mailbox.

From https://www.econlib.org/rick-geddes-explains-the-postal-mono...
How to Setup Free Email Forwarding on Your Domain Names
Taking away roads doesn’t make cars any less convenient. It just means that fewer people will travel to that area.

Mission success I guess?
Oh, I would too assuming it were relatively affordable. I'd be pretty happy with one that even just let me doze off when highway driving in a limited set of weather conditions.

I was just pointing out that, if you can't guarantee you won't need to handoff to a physically present driver, then there are a lot of things you can't do with the car even if needed interventions are just an occasional thing.
Do not mix copyright with IP. Copyright is useful for artists.
That’s not plagiarism. Plagiarism is is passing off someone else’s work as your own.

The bounds or plagiarism have no ties to the legal bounds of what is or isn’t copyright infringement. You can have either one without the other, or both at the same time.
> The company was facing rising costs on insurance and background checks for drivers.

I would count this as as part of safety, so if they realised that's where there costs were and added a fee to offset it, this doesn't seem inherently unethical.

In Cape Town, South Africa I've taken a lot of Ubers + Bolts (previously Taxify), and although Bolt is usually cheaper, the difference in how they do background and quality checks on both drivers and cars is very apparent.
What if Blizzard went under before they could capitalize? Not everyone has the resources to pump out another AAA+ product if their first one isn't profitable.
> Trade secrets are protected only by intellectual property regimes, and we're talking about a world without intellectual property.

Not in Germany. In Germany, there exists a class of criminal acts that are subsumed unter the umbrella term "Geheimnisverrat" (secret betrayal), which also includes revealing trade secrets:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geheimnisverrat&o...
>The shipping industry is responsible for a significant proportion of the global climate change problem. More than three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to ocean-going ships.

According to wikipedia, ships account for 2.2%[1] of co2 emissions. However, the transportation sector as a whole accounts for 29% of co2 emissions. Considering how much ships move, that's pretty good.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...

[2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
If only there was some system to sort of implicitly grant creators the ability to control who gets to redistribute their works. Like if they had some sort of rights on what their intellect has produced.

But what would we call it?
There's a contradiction here. Above you're saying that if it wasn't paid for by mass media, it wouldn't be made.

Then you're saying stuff was paid for by a rich patron.

Are you suggesting that patrons would not have stuff made if weren't exclusive?

It's worth remembering that exactly that is what happened. Rich guy paid for a thing, everyone got use of it. Some of the top works of history were created like this, and it bears consideration whether the corporations who make things for profit are as good at creating such works.
Why would real time payment actually improve either climate change or wealth inequality and social insecurity?
Interesting stance. Do you act in a manner consistent with this stance? (i.e. are all your works CC-Zero or equivalent?)
Like the article notes, the Alpine Linux package manager (apk) is refreshingly fast.

It's odd that Alpine lets you install e.g. "emacs-nox" on an IoT device connected via crappy LTE, on the other side of the world, faster than you can install it on your local Ubuntu dev machine, with like 100-1000x more network bandwidth, 10-100x more CPU and 100-1000x faster local storage.
I'd like to see a pushback on privacy intrusions and the dark user-interface patterns that trick people into allowing them.

I just installed Windows 10 for the first time, and the number of things I had to turn off just to get to a sub-totalitarian level of monitoring my activities was ridiculous. The kicker was that Windows Home edition doesn't have disk encryption, so anyone who steals my laptop can help themselves to my private information too.

This probably isn't solvable by technology in and of itself, but consumer education and consumer action against tech companies might make a dent.
They didn't do that at all. Did they stockpile food, or gasoline? Did they build extra houses, or cars, or infrastructure. They did not. They put money in the bank. Money by itself doesn't do anything. It has to be invested, and right now the risk-free investments have negative interest rates.

It's hard for individuals to save the way squirrels do. Farmers could do it, but that's it. Now it requires governments, and Germans elected a government that refused to do it, and instead imposed balanced budgets instead. Now they are suffering the consequences of that.
Office pools buying lottery tickets can beat the stock market...once in a while.

If you aren't doing anything economically useful...don't expect returns greater than inflation in the really long run.
Yes, that's true, even if the "improvement" is merely to define property lines and locations. If property lines aren't there, it effectively doesn't exist. I mean, yes, some chunk of continental crust exists, but it's not "property" if you can't define it.
Sure, but as I said they already settled a lawsuit over the deceptiveness. So arguably that complaint is already out the window...
PC history The true origins of the personal computer
I would love a CPU that ran at room temperature.

OK, it's a cart and horse affair as it is the resistance that causes the heat, but I'm mindful how lab work pans out into real-work. But even reducing resisting a bit in a practical, consumer useful way has massive benefits.
The uncanny valley of plain-text marketing emails
Diversity of what, though? I've worked at progressive tech companies. They're okay at achieving diversity of skin color, but pretty bad at achieving a diversity of world views. Expulsion explicitly on the basis of the fact that Palantir sells products to ICE is going to reduce diversity by alienating the significant segment of the population that does support border enforcement.
Show HN: Duple – Private cloud at home
Would any other Americans prefer to have just 3x/week delivery and still have cheap shipping internationally?

This seems to be more about propping up the USPS’ inefficiencies at the cost of higher prices for consumers.
It's always amazed me that humans - even those without much 'high tech' - can adapt to environments as diverse as the arctic, Kalahari desert, or jungles of Borneo, but god forbid the government stop mandating the precise number of parking spots places need, because no one would be able to adapt.
The case for strategic and managed climate retreat
I don't think the main mystery and classification is about the craft itself but about the cargoes and missions it takes. It probably could be outfitted to act as a rescue craft for 1-2 astronauts though in a pinch all you really need is a way to strap the astronauts in and the pack from their space suits for some short term life support (or maybe even just a CO2 scrubber pack and an oxygen bottle if the interior is already thermally managed enough for the astronaut to survive) being much smaller than the shuttle it can land at more places so they wouldn't have to be in the craft long.
Perhaps I should've said more. I do often end up googling basic OS stuff, especially related to memory (software interrupts still confuse me though, I understand the concepts, but never the implementation), but even more so have been my ignorance of hardware level concepts. For example trying to patch the code for a network card the other week, I learned what watchdog timer is, I've never heard of that prior.
I suspect there's somewhat of a chicken and egg situation going on.

If your city grew up around the car, there was never a need to centralise, so now you need a grid to service that.

Manhattan may well be a special case where the density and numbers would allow anything to work, if you were designing from scratch for mass transit I don't think grid would be the way to go though.
What came to mind immediately was Don Gorske, whose primary diet is Bic Macs, and he seems to have below-average cholesterol level.

> At his doctor visit on April 26, 2011, his first since 1985, his cholesterol level was 156 mg/dl, which is below the average of 208 mg/dl

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Gorske
Why spend money to watch it in the theater, if you can legally get a copy of it online? Without IP protections, any theater employee could legally create a copy of the film (not to mention the audience) and distribute it.

There's no audience participation in Avengers, and with today's home AV setups, there's little benefit to the theater environment; there's no incentive to pay to watch something that will be freely and legally available in a day or two (at most).
Pacman aint slow. Seems to basically run at the speed required to download and copy files. Then again it has no concept of required versions, since Arch just requires you to stay up to date. So there's no extensive solving of dependencies over version requirements, just the packages themselves.

When I was on Ubuntu though, which does have version requirements taken into account in packages, I didn't find apt to be slow either.

You know what's slow? The conda package manager. Or installing software - practically any software - on Windows. I regularly budget half an hour to an hour just to install something on the Windows computers I'm forced to use.
haha, as a non native english speaker, I assumed it jokingly referred to nobles wigs of 18th century kingdoms courts.