skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would differentiate the idea of meritocracy and an implementation. By definition, the idea [1] seems to be a fair and efficient way to encourage effort and achievements.

It's an implementation that fails, as usually. Our society focuses a lot on traditional signals of merit like advanced degrees, previous work at sound companies. We assume that people with those things on their CV are more able than without. The thing is even if there is some correlation, the the process of filtering is far from being optimised on people who can bring maximum benefit to a company and society in general. We can filter out people with weird backgrounds, poor families, no sound education, without polished manners and language.

They mentioned Germany is the article, I would not say Germany has a right and efficient meritocracy model for 21 century. Germany gives an individual a better chance in life by free education. Anyway, the rich Germans would send their children to elite British and US universities. The university education and the notes you got there mean a lot for German companies. Risky ideas, audacity are not encouraged, even switching to a job that is different from your diploma is perceived as very unusual and amateurish move. So German meritocracy is optimised for traditional careers, not for groundbreaking innovations.

Recently, I was impressed with Israel's innovation and business culture [2]. When sending their people to the military or in business in general your personality, ideas, and chutzpah [3] seems to matter much more than your diploma. The focus is more on practical skills and ideas rather then on good notes and sound names. And this meritocracy implementation seems to work good for the country: Israel does not have impressive scores in maths academic excellence comparing to Singapore, Japan, Germany, but they have very impressive results in the number of startups and innovations.

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

[2] http://startupnationbook.com/

[3] https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062883049/chutzpah/
> Wait until you find out how far the pay of those rich assholes goes when you spread it around!

Like by raising wages? How else would you spread it around?

> That some people make more - sometimes substantially more - isn't always one of them.

Read marx. Or chomsky.
>100% probability that Blizzard is making more keeping Chinese customers than angering a few angry people on the internet.

Even if you're right, so what? Is profit the only thing that should motivate us?
I think a lot about how culture is sometimes forcefully changed from without. For example the western values that we hold dear were not really appreciated by indigenous people of all the places colonized by Europe. Most colonized people didn’t think “oh I’m so glad we have fiat currency now, we’ve been waiting for it to come along!”[1]

Only when your own values are under existential threat do you realize that ways of life are precious to those living them, both the good parts and the bad parts. But once the zeitgeist has arrived, there is no going back.

I really do appreciate the values upon which the US government is supposed to be founded. On the other hand, US citizens being worried that another country will subvert their values and bully them into change is a deafening irony.

[1] not exactly an academic source: https://youtu.be/m56H4E5bZLk
I don't know about employment, but Stack Overflow has become one of the main lead gens for our 2-person software development consultancy. I monitor the tags that are relevant to our niche and try to answer any sensible questions that come along. (And try to help out people with less sensible questions where I can too.)

This presumably only works if you you cover some obscure-ish, deeply technical niches, not for more run-of-the-mill stuff. If your clients are non-technical, they won't find you on Stack Overflow. If your clients are companies that develop software themselves but need specialist skills for a project, it can work.

Note that I don't think my actual SO score[1] is in any way of importance. I suspect it's more important that:

- The answers are actually well written, in-depth and helpful.

- I have a reasonably recogniseable avatar image. I have been told by eventual clients that they kept running into my SO answers while they were trying to solve their problem themselves. Presumably this pattern is much more noticeable if there is a human face staring back at them from the bottom of the answer.

- Friendly comment exchanges probably help. Being an arse in SO comments probably won't help your chances of being hired by the person who asked the question or had the same problem and found your answer via a web search.

[1] At around 14000, my reputation score puts me in the top 3%, but if the stats in the article are correct, that doesn't even put me in the top third of the 8% of many-question-answerers. (I have answered 518 questions.) Mind you, my mean answer score is probably about 2, with the median squarely at 1; niche topics mean few people read my answer, and even fewer upvote them. My only gold badge is for voting on 600 questions, but I have bronze badges coming out of my ears.
Show HN: Burner Callback URLs for API Testing
The common complaint is that since unions (at least in a lot of classic union jobs) force pay based on tenure, its difficult or impossible for bright people to succeed and change things.

And I'd agree that such a style of union would be antithetical to a company like Google, but its also not the only kind of union.
Kenyan here (but currently living stateside), the inverse is seen in cities like Nairobi for one simple reason, high occurrence of petty crimes like phone snatching/muggings will make you think twice about walking around like a zombie staring at your device. Situational awareness is a necessary survival skill.
doesn't matter in this context, I only said the actual acronym of the actual party

people don't want the CCP dictating western values, and thats the joke because western states don't dissolve corporations for bad actions
It's possible he meant the Fourth Estate, but he seems to be blurring the lines between Fourth and Second and trying to make this point about how the Second only exists because of the Fourth, so I'm not sure.

But even if it is just an error, what are the words "monopoly control" doing in there?

And is it even useful to think of "The Media" as a entity with an agenda? When he's talking about the editorial board at the New York Times it's plausible, but then suddenly he's talking about this nebulous "estate" concept and attributing motivations to it like it's acting as an individual.

And then once he's done that, he's taking a criticism of Facebook and attributing the criticism to his nebulous concept and saying "of course they would say that," in order to make me feel like the fact that the criticism is true is less relevant?
> Vue embraces HTML, Elm avoids HTML, and it's really a pain to build HTML view in Elm. <div><a href="hello">world</a></div> becomes div [] [ a [ href "hello" ] [ text 'world" ] ]

IMO, this is one of Elm's biggest strengths. The Elm HTML syntax is a million times easier to reason about and build hierarchies in, than HTML. The syntax is cleaner and easier to read.

(For the uninitiated - each HTML tag in Elm is a function that takes two arguments - a list of attributes, and a list of functions that return HTML.)
> What off-by-one on crashing instructions are you referring to?

Here’s an example for GCC on ARM Linux: https://github.com/dotnet/corert/issues/7826 I think I have observed similar symptoms on Windows, too.

> Sampling, on the other hand, is not even well defined

A crash by e.g. RAM access violation, and interrupt generated by CPU to collect sample for a profiler, are pretty similar, IMO.
50,000 engineers just to run a bank? I don't think so.
> "SoftBank exec Marcelo Claure will be involved in the company's management, while former CEO Adam Neumann's stake will fall to low double digits...Since Neumann's departure last month, WeWork's been laser-focused on raising new capital. The company has been in talks with J.P. Morgan to discuss a debt financing.

> Fallout from the controversies and subsequent plummet in value has led to a tense relationship between former Neumann and SoftBank's [Masayoshi] Son, who has invested billions into the start-up. Neumann stepped down last month. It was also reported that SoftBank has readied a financing package to take control of the company and further sideline Neumann, who is also a co-founder."

Sounds like SoftBank's interested in eradicating references to Neumann.

Should Neumann be the focus of why WeWork faired so poorly? Or is he just the fall guy? I don't know, so if someone could enlighten me that would be great.
I'm only interested in password managers with good desktop, web, and mobile support.
Discord

It's marketed for gamers yes but bots, darkmode, all the features, all the compatibility, destroys slack in everyway imo
Is it authoritarian though, in the paternalistic/patronizing sense? I view it more as abusive. Customers are viewed as children in the sense that it's trivial to just steal a lollipop from a kid, or repeatedly exploit their trust to part them with their lunch money.
I seem to run across the opposite: I'm approaching a green on a night with practically no traffic, and the thing changes, timed to go red before I could get through the yellow. So I sit, waiting while it's green the other way, and no traffic in sight.
This effect is called hormesis - _some_ stress can be beneficial to health.
How to Donate or Recycle Your Lego Bricks
That's sector dependent/doesn't exist in all sectors
I said 'sea level rise', not 'sea level'.

Sweden was just an example of a place where sea level is dropping.
Visualizing Tensor Operations with Factor Graphs
> I think you would find that their security is better than you think.

You can get in to my account by verbally relaying my grandfather's first name over the phone. You can open a bank account with a SSN and no photo id. What security? Their "security" is a fraud department, much like our credit card industry.

> Otherwise they'd be hemorrhaging money left right and center to North Korea and the likes.

This is not how transactions work.

> Edit: It's worth pointing out that banks usually don't gain or lose customers based on their UX, so it's not something that the business optimizes much.

All banks offer the same shitty experience. What does differentiate them if not their software? They offer literally nothing my local credit union doesn't offer.

> I don't think there is anything technically difficult about almost any of the consumer software facebook offers, except scale.

No argument here, but facebook at least manages to hire designers and not impose weird non-sensical patterns of auth, like "Look for this image when you log in".
While the helpdesk software PIA used to use years ago did have that potential vulnerability, fortunately, Private Internet Access never exposed the support desk via plain http, and therefore, PIA itself did not have the vulnerability in its helpdesk.
When heating you usually turn some energy into heat. When air conditioning you use energy to move heat out of the conditioned space, emitting waste heat somewhere else. If you’re doing it outdoors, it seems like the waste heat is going to make the local environment even hotter, and in the worse case would cause some kind of air conditioning arms race. Outdoor heating doesn’t have this problem.

Given what I’ve read elsewhere about the lives of migrant workers in Qatar, I can imagine a dystopian scenario where stadium visitors enjoy a cool breeze while workers beneath are being blasted with heat. Hopefully they have engineered a safe way of dissipating that heat energy.
Yes, people of Chinese origin are the second largest single visible minority group in the country, at about 4.5% of population. South Asian origin is about 5.5%.
An alternative. We can have both 13" and 15" MBPs as well (and I assume the upcoming 16" will be an option, too).
Thanks for your feedback! We're preparing a video. Hopefully, it will be online soon. :)
As others have shown, Elm is actually super good at stuff like this because you can just write resuable pure Elm functions using functional primitives like map and filter.
Cochlear implants do have side effects health-wise and consequences, though. That's precisely what I was thinking of. They are very expensive, destroys any hearing the person may still have, can cause nerve damage, has questionable 'hearing' clarity...

Asking a deaf person "would you cure your deafness if you could with no side effects" ignores the reality that current abilities to 'cure' deafness do come with significant side effects, and people who consider them need to also consider the pros and cons of undergoing the procedure.

In contrary to 'stripping away info to dive into the ethics' you are trying to do, I believe you'll never approach the ethics without the nuances of the actual circumstances people are actually likely to be dealing with.
Luckily there's still postmarketOS what accomplishes the same thing by replacing android on android phones with an Alpine Linux install.
When you drive in a new state, it’s good to look up whether the state is “permissive yellow” (e.g. California and Washington) vs “restrictive yellow” (e.g. Oregon) as well as whether it allows “right turn on red”.
And how much data visualization do they do? Software devs vastly underestimate the gravity of the data visualization situation.
Flights are currently "used" by a tiny % of the global population, whereas clothing is a necessity for 100% of the population.

What does that comparison says, exactly? Changing the habits of a few persons would have much impact on the environment as changing the habits of every person on Earth? Which change should we prioritize? Mmmh...
No need to take my word for it, just search on both and look at the 10 blue links.

Makes you think why they present Google as compromising your privacy, but they're dead-silent when it comes to Microsoft. Or Yandex, their other search partner.
What I've learned about IPOs and direct listings
Is there really that much of a portability difference between an Air and a Pro?
Newer traffic lights where I live will flash the green light for a few seconds before turning amber.
Are there examples in recent history where China has flipped their stance on something like this? I just feel like they aren't in the business of 'getting smart' in the way you suggest.
> Presto Vision takes advantage of preexisting surveillance cameras that many restaurants already have installed.

For staff, this isn't going to go over well.

For customers, this isn't _adding_ more surveillance than they already have in their restaurants. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy when dining out.
Hey everyone,

I've written a new blog post (https://rajatvd.github.io/Factor-Graphs/) on an awesome visualization tool that I recently came across -- factor graphs. Initially, I encountered them in the context of message passing on graphical models, but soon realized that they are useful in more general contexts.

This is the first post in a series that covers the basics and mainly focuses on understanding how factor graphs work as a visualization tool, along with a cool example of a visual proof using them. In future posts, I plan to cover algorithms like message passing and belief propagation using this visualization framework.

I made the animations using manim(https://github.com/3b1b/manim/), a math animation tool created by the amazing 3blue1brown. I built a small library, manimnx(https://github.com/rajatvd/manimnx), on top of manim to help interface it with the graph package networkx. You can find the code for the animations in this github repo: https://github.com/rajatvd/FactorGraphs.

Feedback is welcome!
Ouch. Lets see what they have to say about the cosmetics industry ...
It's never too late, and they're working on it.
No, sorry, I was too succinct. I am saying externalities like unions make it HARDER. Therefore the commenter might never have been laid off in a heavily unionized employment situation. Not arguing explicitly for or against, just mentioning that in situations where it is difficult to layoff/fire employees, it is not always a good thing (peer complacency, bloat, etc). Those that have worked in those situations often wish the protections were fewer, which is why I wondered if the commenter would rethink.
Seconded; it's exactly what I use with Comic Neue.

I wouldn't say it's exactly a monospaced Comic Sans; there are substantial differences. It definitely has a lot of the same advantages, though.
You don't have ad-blockers on all devices or for their app.
I'm on iOS and I like using the app since Premium allows for playing stuff in the background, plus downloading stuff for offline viewing. You can't get that in Firefox with uBlock.

I find some of the anti-Google arguments to be really, really weird and I've been speaking against Google on this website countless of times.

If you don't want to be tracked, you're going to be tracked for as long as you're a free user. uBlock Origin will not save you, since you're on their website and you can't block "youtube.com".

Also Google is a big target and subject to laws such as GDPR. I actually trust Google more than I trust any startup advertised on HN, because Google is a big target with a lot of eyes watching. When you go to your profile and turn off the data collection, you can probably trust Google more than you can trust DuckDuckGo.

This isn't to say that you should trust Google. Not what I'm saying.

But paying a membership is voting with your wallet against ads. By not paying you're simply encouraging them to serve more ads. And the break you're getting via uBlock Origin is only temporary. If the audience using ad-blockers on Android grows, I expect them to simply block browser access, problem solved. And because you used YouTube anyway, it means you haven't payed for their competition either, which means you directly contributed to YouTube's monopoly, without encouraging them to give up on ads in favor of Premium memberships.

It's basically how software piracy used to work. Piracy was never a problem for the big companies like Microsoft, piracy being responsible in part for Microsoft's monopoly. And when piracy became a problem, software companies simply moved to online subscriptions. There's always a solution for milking free loaders later.
And how many PoPs regional interconnects, highly availabile, high throughout connections, cross continent highly available connections do you have? Do you detect failure across these connections? Do you detect grey failures? Do you have a team of infrastructure engineers to look after this network?
Yeah the guy has the mental consistency of pudding:

"The consequence thereof is that a lot of good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days."

This, merely a few paragraphs after claiming all questions are answered so quickly he has no opportunity to participate.
So far seems to be a data mining effort. I create an account and then I'm whisked away to a form that want's my information to build a profile. At this point, I have no idea what the service will specifically do for me, other than compile my information.
I witness drivers in this situation just sitting right where they are, past their stop line, left signal blinking, far too close to the perpendicular travel lanes, refusing the clear the intersection until they get the arrow.

Worse: they're the only ones wanting to turn, they're past the sensor, and the next cycle is solid green only.
Here are few things they could do:

* ensure that where they sell gift cards there are store limits on how many gift cards can be bought.

* track the usage of the card to make it more difficult for criminals to use them.

* put a day delay on the card or make the user register to make it more difficult for the user to immediately sell the card off to criminals

Google is very aware that their gift cards are used in massive fraud schemes of millions of dollars that target the most vulnerable (the elderly). It is similar how there is a huge fraud scheme build on Nest products. That they allow it to happen (as it is of no cost to them) is incredibly irresponsible and in opinion even criminal.

When I called Google, their response was that on the back on the cards there is warning in small print that if you give the scratch off key, the money is unrecoverable. As if someone being told that their entire life will come down crashing around them if they don't send the money is going to read the small print on a gift card!

Google is probably the company in the world that is the best at tracking users and cyber security. There is no reason why they couldn't prevent these use cases if they put effort in.
Videos of Ken Thompson and Rob Pike telling Unix history stories:

Ken Thompson (interviewed by Brian Kernighan, 2019, starts after 7m38s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o#t=7m38s

Rob Pike (Unix History presentation, 2018, starts after 3m40s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2NI6t2r_Hs#t=3m40s
>Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players.

It is possible, but you can simply check that the size of the US and world economy has grown tremendously, so that argument doesn't explain the growth.

>So what? Make co-op financing better,

There are plenty of ESOP companies. If they consistently did well enough, then the excess capital they generate could be used to start more employee owned companies.

That this doesn't happen perhaps points to an inefficiency in this process for company creation. Perhaps simply having workers is not enough to drive the economy. It shouldn't be a surprise that when an investor takes a risk to allocate capital to a fledgling company, that the investor would expect a return for resulting growth.

Creating companies without investment is possible, but likely less capable overall.

>That was the day I realized that wealth isn't a meritocracy.

Nothing is a meritocracy - everyone has luck and genetics. Income correlates both with IQ and hours worked, and I suspect most would consider the latter factor merit, and some consider the former merit too.

But wealth, correlating with many things one can control, is also not simply a random variable completely detached from merit.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/w11895.html
> Typos happen.

Indeed, and an artifact of autocorrect and mobile UIs is that typos that don't look like typos happen.

Apparently, they sometimes mimic usage patterns that are common as non-typos.

> In fact, you made one yourself just a couple hours prior

One? I should be so lucky.

> to ridiculing me about mine

The play on the words of your post was not intended as ridicule, but I guess the maxim that tone doesn't translate well into text is as applicable here as ever.

> Don't worry though... I won't make fun of you for it,

You kind of just did...

> because I'm not so desperate to prove my intelligence to internet strangers.

See, if you just said “typos happen”, and nothing more, that'd be believable unstated subtext. You kinda went overboard for keeping that last bit credible, though.
As far as I know they grab the items and bag them, then deliver the filled bags to the loading area. Not sure where the human interaction happens from there.
Blizzard could have issued the player a warning about its policy and no one would have batted an eye. Instead it stripped him of prize money, barred him from competition, and fired the two people interviewing him.
Bandwidth costs dropped steeply around 10-15 years ago, making video streaming services much more viable. I would be astonished if game bandwidth was more than a drop in the bucket compared to that, or if a F2P gamer cost Activision Blizzard anything significant compared to what they make from the paying gamers who benefit from populated servers.