skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Saying that "none of this is anyone’s fault" and blaming this on new technology is entirely disingenuous.

This is 100% GM's fault because they learned nothing after the government bailed them out in 2009. They continued to scrimp on labor and build quality, and that resulted in horrible cars that no one wants. And their response? Scrimp even more on labor.

EVs make up a very small slice of the new car market and virtually none of the truck market. What we're witnessing is a form of kabuki theater, where it looks like GM's hands are tied and the only path forward is to build cars entirely in China. Mind you, this is at the same time that most foreign owned companies build and assemble their cars in domestic US facilities.
Your campaign has the full support of the buggy drivers union, tube TV repairmen, and video store employees union.
Nobody's saying it's literally worthless nor are they saying it's literally the same odds as winning the lottery. They're saying that using those as mental models is good enough. "Treat the options as a lottery ticket" isn't supposed to be a mathematically precise statement. I'm happy for you that you did so well, but most people doing what you did in 2013 didn't get those same outcomes, and that's the point.
A Rant on Terra
The second part is difficult because pretty much all cars last longer than they used to. People will grumble about plastic body panels and cheap interiors but overall the average car simply lasts longer than they would in the heyday of the Big 3. Even with a growing population, better built cars are creating less demand. There are other factors, such as ride sharing, remote work, and online socializing, but none of them point to the solution being to build more cars. Perhaps making less expensive entry level cars would get some non-owners to take the plunge but the durability of existing cars makes buying a new entry level model less desirable.
> Virtually all of them are producing synthetic fuel using other fossil fuels.

Recently a plant was demonstrated by DLR in Spain that produced Fuel from air directly only with solar power:

https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/02/20190613...

Edit: apparently this converts H2O and liquid CO2 to a "synthesis gas" CO + H which then can easily transformed into any fuel you want via Fische-Tropsch. So the only step that is missing is liquefying CO2 which can be done via conventional solar power using electricity.

As far as I see it we have all pieces to the puzzle. Electric cars don't make sense anymore and are actually more harmful to the environment because of all the exotic materials used and the losses from transport of electrical power across the whole country. Also keep in mind that much of the electricity is still produced using coal.
Yeah, uh ctrl-f "buybacks" as in, stock buybacks. This has very little to do with electric cars, but I'm not sure you're going to get that from MarketWatch
I'm skeptical of several of the claims in this. Is 125 less parts "far fewer"? Have they really already automated electric car assembly better than gasoline vehicles, even though we've been doing that all my life? Are they really striking because they fear being replaced by robots, or is it for higher wages?

History is full of labor transitions. Nobody makes wagon wheels anymore. Noboby cuts pins from wire. Certainly the job opportunities in auto manufacturing are waning, but new jobs are popping up in battery tech, solar, etc. Change is never easy.
> The whole “learn 2 code” thing that was directed toward coal workers was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Can somebody go into depth on this? Everyday I interact with people who have jobs that suck way more than coding and pay way less.

Why wouldn't people want to work 40 hours remotely with full benefits making decent wages?
I think you mean there is no situation in a god-mode session where he bluffed into a semi-nutted+ hand.
> if we hang these people out to dry we will pay the price down the line.

If we continue promoting industries that cause the global climate to worsen more rapidly, we're going to pay a MUCH bigger price down the line.

Taking jobs from folks who work in such an industry is a price worth paying, considering the alternative.
It seems that Schmidhuber is claiming credit for deep learning and is implicitly comparing himself to Albert Einstein. How accurate is his assessment?
Lazarus was also amusing for shipping a Carbon backend for macOS until very recently - and then telling people to just use Qt5 while waiting for a proper Cocoa port.
Giving Myself Permission to Fail
Agree, up to: "what used to happens centuries ago: dragging business owners into the street and beating them to death"

This seems like a mischaracterization. The history of worker/owner conflict has a lot more dead workers than owners.
Putting entire communities or indeed entire regions on welfare for the rest of their life smacks of unintended consequences later on.
Fair enough. I should’ve said “violent civil unrest” to encompass the long history of worker/employer conflict. It’s hard to distill complex issues into a sentence or two.
Reminds me of the ASICs in the Amiga.
Key findings are here - https://bit.ly/2OqMoyD

At a 5% significance level, the hazard ratios posted there are clearly not significant. Most of them are reasonably close to 1.0 - so there is basically no difference in mortality between the control & treatment arm. Sample size is very large, n=48000.

The data he used is public & verifiable, so am not sure what digging into this person's private life has to do. Whether he is funded by meat industry or eats beef himself is as relevant as the color of his underwear.

In the study, he says "issues of animal welfare and potential environmental impact... is outside the scope. Related to this, we took an individual rather than a societal perspective."

Taking an individual perspective is imo the right thing to do. He further explicitly says if you are concerned about global warming etc. this study isn't about that. So he's being blunt & honest.

Those who are batting for the other team, like the opposing researchers & NYT etc. are questioning not the stats or the methodology but the fact that if you make public policy based on this, it will undoubtedly be bad for the environment. Which it will. But that's not the point of the study now, is it ? The researcher himself says it is not the point.
They're speaking from their experience of making a toy 'show hn' project they worked on for a weekend, abandoned and haven't updated in 4 years.
I write Windows desktop app in WPF since December 2009 and I'm confident that I won't write them in anything else for at least the next 10 years (desktops are supposed to be dead by then but I hope the 'visionaries' are wrong.
Yes. Employers regularly turn down applicants for lack of minor courses. Knowing how to weld means nothing to HR box tickers. An afternoon at joes upstairs welding school: tick.

I saw a kid not get a job because she hadnt ever used a fax machine.
I'm fairly pro nuclear. There was a time when nuclear was probably the best solution to stop climate change. But that time was 5, maybe 10, years back. Since then, solar and wind have caught up significantly in terms of efficiency.

And given the dearth of new nuclear in the us, safely bringing up a reactor, if we started building tomorrow (ignoring the political challenges of where), would take the better part of a decade to be operational. Solar and wind brings faster returns.

Really we just need to stop subsidizing coal and similar.
The Gita does have some great teachings, as does the Bible, and as do the works of people alive today. I think the most important lesson is not to cling too tightly to any one set of scriptures. It seems a lot like programming languages to me.
Maybe not 20, but I expect that the WeWork hot desk membership does this to an extent. Remote workers don’t usually show up every day.
LED is especially brutal, there are few that produce chips but everybody can do the assembly.

You can buy a 3W bulb plus shipping for 1 RMB at anytime, including big brands, 1 RMB, that's $0.1399.
>He's both an opportunistic speculator buying 15 (!) medallions and a victim who was conned. Depending on when the market took an eventual downturn he could have been a villain. He could have been part of the ominous "they" sprinkled throughout the piece!

I would describe him as a victim of greed, as he already had another medallion as an investment. For him to be regarded as a 'speculator' in this context ─ he could have averted financial ruin by conducting due diligence before acquiring toxic assets and/or hedge his bets. If one were to consider him opportunistic, he should have been savvy enough to know, when to get out and leave others holding the bag. Since, he seems to have exhibited none of the predatory behaviour associated with a conman, it is a bit presumptuous to speculate on his villainous tendencies.
LOL, they’re not Martians. They knew what it meant and just wanted to flex their quality.
You, apparently, because you specifically pointed out nationalism and even gave a justification as to why.
> What the ordinary person might interpret as a con game or sheer lunacy, the heavily credentialed investor, with his TED Talk understanding of things, will reliably regard as brilliant eccentricity.

Most people are more scared of looking silly than they are excited about getting rich. The handful who aren't occasionally make a bad investment (Theranos, WeWork, etc.) but also a lot of them become centimillionaires and billionaires.

I'm definitely in the "more scared of looking silly" category, but I like to think I also have the self-awareness to recognize this as a character flaw, and not broadcast it proudly and obliviously to the whole world in the NYT.
> "Start with FROM."

Interesting because LINQ starts the same way, or at least that's how I remember it.
You want to offer incentives to people to go into fields that aren’t needed?
Their core business was Business customers, the company grew out of that. They then pivoted around the time of the pearl towards a consumer market, which was also a couple of years into launching a consumer service BIS, as opposed to BES which required you to have the backend BES software.
That was when the focus shifted and at a time in which the Apple and Google offerings started to appear and the rest is all she wrote.

They did offer their messaging software for other phones for a while in the early days, Microsofts CE offering with blackberry connect (iirc the name). It worked, yet didn't traction that well as anybody who really needed it, would be better of buying an older RIM phone and using that and many did stick with the older phones come the rise of the colour screen and onwards.

What they did do well was effecient comms over 2G, once 3G became palatable for chipsets and more so, cost of use, that along with the rise in alternatives from the likes of Apple and Google, helped Blackberry push themselves into an also ran for trying to compete instead of focusing upon the real bread and butter - the Business customers.

But life is always full of what-if's. But all companies have their retrospective if we knew then what we know now moments.
Not for clock speed, but yes for parallelism. It might look like the Cerebras [0] wafer-scale monster becoming a commodity you could fire up 1000 of in the cloud.

[0] https://www.cerebras.net/
This version has a more nostalgic video: https://youtu.be/5zA1Zkz5DUE
Could you go one level further and get it working with https://bellard.org/jslinux/?
Socialism has a bad rap because it comes with a monetary cost. The powers that influence and control legislature today are foremost interested in personal profits - policies that improve society but cost money to do are uninteresting to such parties because, by the nature of them controlling most of the money, most of the funding for such programs would have to be taken from them.

Its financially beneficial to use corporate control of the media to influence and propagandize culture to be antagonistic towards policies that would help the majority but would cost the rulers. Having a protracted half century long war against a nation self-proclaimed to be socialistic was the perfect scapegoat to justify their actions to moderates and rally a base against the ideal for purely selfish motives.
18 Months Ago, I Made the Biggest Mistake of My Life
18 Months ago, I made the biggest mistake of my professional career.

I screwed up.

More than that, I am terrified to share this story here openly as I don't know how most of you will react, but regardless I still want to share because it can help save a lot of Founders who fall into the trap of people's sweet words.

Everything went down the drain all because of one person.

I started working on my dream project, FunnelBake, roughly two years ago.

I met someone wrong who pushed me to launch FunnelBake when I was not even ready.

The person pressurized into launching and showing me big dreams, and sadly, I fell for his trap.

The software was unbaked and was not ready, and the person knew, and yet he pushed me to launch the software.

That's when I made the biggest mistake of my life destroying my reputation because of that one person who collected his cheque, moved, and didn't give a crap about me.

That's when I realized, some people are cruel, and I wondered how many other SaaS founders are going through the same.

That lead to the birth of PitchGround

I told myself, I will never let any other SaaS founder suffer ever.

Some people don't give a f*ck about you since all they care about is their commission.

One year ago today, I had launched PitchGround with the motive to help SaaS Founders genuinely.

In the very first year, we have helped them raise over $1.1m in revenue.

My team has also played significant support during this entire journey.

I genuinely hope that my story can help all the SaaS founders, and many people reading this post make a better decision in life. Don't rush, keep patience, and do all your due diligence.
Except decent gaming. One of the largest industries in the world.

But yeah, if I can't work on a Linux machine I'd settle for Mac
> Furthermore, we should probably consider increasing the sales tax as it limits the consumption.

You imply that you think government spending has lower consumption than personal spending.

Alternatively, if tax is spent on nothing, wouldn't everything stay the same (just prices or wages shift, but actual consumption remain static?)
There are some entertaining takedowns of mind readers and faith healers on youtube, glad the government doesn't try to protect tarot reading as some sort of cultural gem.
In another post they mention that four different contractors tried to update their software and gave up, on top of the four years they spent themselves.

I think the problem is that their software is just a complete mess but they won't admit it. This whole thing has "sunk cost fallacy" written all over it.
>I do think that we as a society have a responsibility for baseline care of everyone.

If you give people a floor like that, you have to keep them doped up enough to be content with it. Or engineer a more complacent human.
> immigrants fresh off the boat who don't speak english that own their own companies

Do you have a single example of this ?
I do a lot of reading. I discuss stuff a lot with my adult sons who still live with me. I look for patterns.

A lot of stuff happens about 48 hours after the triggering event. My son did some research and this seems to be a significant blood and lymph timing thing.

Other significant time frames seem to be one week, two weeks, one month and six weeks. These aren't peculiar to "things I ate." These are health events triggering physiological changes that don't show up until later.

It's harder to connect those longer time frames to the triggering event, but I am sometimes reasonably confident of the connection because of the specifics involved and I just read a lot and discuss this stuff a lot and write about it a lot. Patterns eventually become clear if you pay enough attention.

As your diet changes, your body changes and your needs change. It's a moving target.
Show HN: HOCify – turn React hooks into HOCs for compatibility
Not really, overengineering is bad engineering.
A sad state - I struggle to say if this is serious or satire.
I have a feeling that welding in particular is relatively resistant to meaningless certifications.
The number of startups that reach a liquidity event is about 1%. a liquidity event is the company gets sold to a bigger company or an IPO. 99% of companies fail to be sold and fail to IPO. about another 9% of companies become zombies which means they don't die but they don't thrive. Options or RSUs are stranded and not saleable due to SEC rules. The other 90% fail.

the numbers reaching liquidity events are higher in Silicon Valley maybe 5% of companies reach liquidity events but the Outlook is still poor for most start-up companies.
Columbia '15 here, the existence of the marching band was the only thing that made me feel any sense of school spirit in my time there.
> As a casual user I prefer the walled garden that I get with iPhone.

No one wants to force you to use other stores.
Yes, without outside influence. That's called deflation, which many consider bad because it incentivizes saving over using money, slowing the economy. We would have seen that after the crash in 07/08, but the federal government stepped in to inject cash into the economy. Should we have done that? Sure, we saw during the Great Depression what happens when you don't. But the way we did it was obviously regressive: instead of forcing some of the existing money supply, the out-of-play portion we've been talking about, back into the economy via a wealth tax, we did a bunch of things that essentially routed "new" money through the major banks (so they wouldn't fail).
Highly doubt it. They get them from the same manufacturers/suppliers. This idea of "countries X and Y get worse QC products" when the prices are the same needs to die.

Now, buying "Made in Japan" seems plausible. Panasonic has long made laptops in Japan, for the Japanese market only. Check out the Let's Note series, like the CF-SV7, SV8 - you won't find them anywhere else. There seem to be a lot of products that are made in Japan for the internal market only.
A Few Bad Apples
We've got a few more iterations of Moore's law for sure. After that progress will likely happen in jumps and address non-xtor bottlenecks like memory access. E.g. wafer scale integration, 3D systems, photonics, etc.
Well said. Many philosophies are common in between religions. What amazes me how people focus on differences instead commonality. Indeed empathy is most important character.
I don't think WeWork is anything special, but your argument is obvious and has been addressed: WeWork packages each lease in a separate legal entity so they're not that exposed to swings in individual markets. They also argue (maybe correctly) that in a recession they'd actually do better because companies would become wary of taking on long-term liabilities and prefer the flexibility of short-term leases.
> Taking jobs from folks who work in such an industry is a price worth paying, considering the alternative.

The options are not fire them or keep screwing the planet. There's a third option: fire them but don't HANG THEM OUT TO DRY. Provide a social safety net - retraining, early retirement, health care, etc. This is the whole idea behind the "green new deal"... catch the people who would otherwise be ground up by the transition away from fossil fuels.
“Patch Now” Warns Spy Agency
> I can only install console games approved by Sony, Nintendo etc for example.

That's an argument against consoles, not in favor of walled gardens.
You can also use a nonlinear transform e.g. Gaussianization
Right now, electric cars are a stupid choice. Half the range, 50x the refuel time, and triple the cost of any gasoline-powered alternative.

The day you can buy a $15,000 car that gets 1,000 miles of range that takes 5 minutes to charge at every currently existing gas station will be the day the gasoline-powered car goes extinct.
Any career change is non-trivial for a mid-career worker and it's probably unrealistic that a majority of blue-collar workers would be able to transition into software jobs.

"Learn to code" is great advice in general and can change the lives of certain individuals but it's not a winning strategy for shifting a mid-career workforce from one career to another, at scale.
> The primary thing that strikes me about that photo is how far apart the tram rails are.

It's an anomaly on that street. The older building on the left edge of the picture protrudes further in than its neighbors, so at that spot, you could not fit two tram rails, two lanes of traffic, and reasonable sidewalks.

So instead, for a few meters, cars and trams share a lane, the sidewalks get wider, and pedestrians don't have to cross a lane to get into the tram.

You can see side by side pictures here: https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/ted/de/index/taz/bauen/universi... (the new layout is very recent, and not yet visible on any satellite maps).
US, Canada, Australia are/were rather different sorts of colonies from India or Malaysia.
No, that's not the right thing to do. You'd be suppressing a great amount of people, whose opinions have to be reckoned with. Just because you think they hold the "wrong" opinion doesn't mean they actually do. It just differs from yours and you have to accept that (and can obviously try to convince them of your position). They have to live with your opinion as well, so that's just fair.
Would Faber and Faber still exist without T.S. Eliot?
Yeah, they just don't have much of a moat to allow them to command monopoly rents. Whatever innovations they introduce, others can copy, and most companies would just switch over to a cheaper provider once their WeWork lease comes up.
Principles to Higher Math Learning: An Illustrated Guide
Nothing but the resistive screens seemed bad to me at the time. Very useable, useful devices. iWhatever was evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Every big business idea in inevitable in it's time. The trick is being first to grow large and take the market. Often people try out the exact same ideas but they are too soon so they run into problems. Timing matters so much as well as the ability to raise money when it is a big idea

Your argument means no business success deserves any credit, they all just inevitable .
Show HN: Visual travel destination discovery tool, currently by matching weather
The tasks the humans are doing seem somewhat arbitrary. e.g. we see both robots and humans inserting and tightening bolts. I wonder why humans are involved in those steps.
A Sociology of Steve Jobs (2011)
You have to remember that almost half of the US population didn’t mind voting Trump.
The prominent developers of deep learning techniques within google were quite upfront that they were applying old techniques that had not been practical until massive datacenters expanded the parameter space and training power.
Fukushima water headache: 1M tons and counting
Thanks for taking the time to explain. Hearing about regular use of unusual motions (e.g. suspend the rules) tends to pique my skepticism. From the way you described it, having a special method for deciding the order of voting on endorsements does sound reasonable.

Just so many times when I see people complaining about Robert's Rules it's not about the rules themselves but about organization-specific issues or about people being dicks (which can happen regardless of the parliamentary authority used).
Even if we don't, the progress is not going to stop, for example on:

- lowering the price of each chip - you can get that by more automation.

- lowering the cost of energy used by a chip - you can have that by raise of renewable energy generation and its decentralisation (and again, more automation).

The point is that automation caused by AI will start a reinforcing feedback loop where more and more work can be done more cheaply, speeding up automation itself too.