skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is cheap labor a legitimate source of comparative advantage?

No, it isn't. Living in the Rust Belt, I find it so obvious that globalization is a race to the bottom that I'm amazed any reasonable person could believe otherwise. All the jobs move to countries with the worst wages, environmental protection, safety, workers' rights, etc.

In economists' language, through labor organization and the democratic process, relatively free countries' workforces created a de facto monopoly on labor, which was able to extract some monopolistic rent (i.e. workers' wages > what they "should" be). Standard economic theory says this has a redistributive effect (labor pulls money from everyone else) plus an inefficiency effect (there's some potential value lost by the artificially high wages).

Standard economic theory says markets should always be free, to avoid the inefficiency effect. This is where I disagree with standard economic theory: When it comes to the labor market, I firmly believe the inefficiency effect is a cost worth paying for the redistributive effect.

If you open up your trade to the rest of the world, fungible jobs all go to the poorest, most repressed people, who can be paid the lowest wages and exploited in the worst ways. It's great for lifting people out of extreme poverty, but as a side effect it slides every country toward moderate poverty while moving all the wealth to the 1%. That's a recipe for potentially dangerous levels of social and political instability.

My solution? Every country with high standards in wages, environmental protection, safety, workers' rights, etc. needs to implement tariffs to level the playing field. If your country has high standards, other countries can still choose lower standards and trade with you, but the competitive benefits of those lower standards will be nullified by the tariffs. Which lets you keep your high standards without wrecking your economy (and as a side benefit raises revenue without taxing your people directly, and gives countries with low standards an economic incentive to improve themselves. Which is potentially a great humanitarian breakthrough, improving the lives of lots of ordinary people in countries whose rulers care only for their wallet).

I think the Trump's tariffs are a move in the right direction, although I think he's made a mistake by making the policy more of a negotiation lever than a semi-permanent way to compensate for China's low wages and poor standards.

I believe so strongly in the value of a tariff policy that I used to say that I thought Trump's willingness to implement tariffs more than balances all of his many negatives. Lately I'm not so sure about that, not because I've lost faith in tariffs, but because Trump's done a lot more negative things than I thought he would.
That's what I thought with Soylant but here we are...
What can EU citizens do to indicate this is unwelcome?
While this system is hard to defend, it is still in test and it's possible it will never go into production. Less BS than a polygraph maybe?

> Our reporter — the first journalist to test the system before crossing the Serbian-Hungarian border earlier this year — provided honest responses to all questions but was deemed to be a liar by the machine, with four false answers out of 16 and a score of 48.

He might have answered them truthfully, but if he tried (or even unintentionally acted) to influence the perception of the answers is not known.
Rai: Stone Money
And yet, even after seeing firsthand that computer programming is "extraordinarily similar" to the work of a vehicle mechanic, you still refer to it as "software engineering".

Do we think it has anything in common with engineering? Why not call your work something like "software mechanic" or "software artisan"? What is with the continued need for programmers to try to aspire to engineering, while not actually being licensed engineers or practicing engineering?

I don't think anyone outside the field takes programmers any more seriously when they call themselves "software engineers". Software overall is still late, slow, hard to use, buggy, and insecure. Nobody's fooling anyone.
I'm one of the ones who watched the keynote, knew about the feature - and I still couldn't do it. Specifically the three finger "unpinch." However, this thread prompted me to retry, during which I realized it was a lot easier if I used two hands. We'll see if I can manage to use it regularly.
It's not wrong. It seems right to me. The survey also included those with colorblindness.
I don't how many options I've missed or hours I've wasted trying to figure out for myself or others how to do certain things because there were no visual indicators of those options... and I've even had people become disconcerted with me or devices or tech people in general because of difficult-to-decipher interfaces, sometimes to the point of someone panicking and making things worse or getting angry and argumentative.

The false simplicity and "freshness" factor designers and developers are doing to change or add interfaces that cause confusion just for the sake of trying to get attention or change how something looks is a minor change for a major disfunction.

If the change doesn't improve something's usability, DON'T DO IT. I just noticed today iOS changed how some buttons look and menus operate, completely unnecessarily, throwing off recognizability and flow. Totally disruptive to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Just stop, make interfaces that are easy to understand, figure out, operate, and remember. It's much easier to leave something as is than to change it unnecessarily.
I think he meant Visual Studio Code. It truly is fantastic.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that men and women are wired differently when it comes to sex and relationships.

The instinctual influence over men to have sex with multiple partners, I believe influences their desire to still "feel good" about prior partners.

...whereas a woman's instinctual desire to find a man to protect her offspring influences her desire to "feel bad" about prior partners who didn't stick around.

Of course, we're above these instincts cognitively, but it's folly to think they have no influence on our emotional association to past partners.
Great feedback, thank you.

We're still learning how to use our email tool optimally, and we have some fixes to implement, which will help reduce/elimiate the confusion you're talking about.

Over time we can also integrate more of those emails directly into the app, in your settings, alongside the Cal invites and Performance reports. (Doing that requires more engineering work, so is a bit slower.)

As far as the duplicate stats email: I just removed it. Our bad!

Thank you again so much for the feedback. Keep it coming!

Taylor
> whether it has been properly packaged as a DEB/RPM/Snap/Flatpak/AUR/AppImage, etc.

Not sure if you're referring to a choice between packaging formats, or not packaging at all. If the latter, well, it's pretty tiring looking through a list of filenames which contains the platform and arch, downloading the correct one, then going to the project's wik and copy/pasting commands to create users, create systemd files etc. (Looking at you, Go devs). Oh, you want to upgrade it along with the rest of your software on your system? Fuck you.

I get it, packaging isn't painless. But if you've worked hard writing a piece of software, it seems bizarre not to spend some time on packaging and getting distros to accept it.

We like packaging, because it's awesome. A large collection of extremely trustworthy software, all a single, simple command away.
Isn't Microsoft the poster child for siloed groups?
I would love to use this just for the offline and query change detection capabilities alone - but the latter is currently beta and disabled by default. Is there a reason for that?
Ok, we'll re-not it.
You're right, but can you imagine how many problems could be introduced by changing batteries in an underground mine? A brand new equipment takes a single shift to gain a nice coat of mud from head to toe. I don't think it's impossible but there are a lot of challenges with regards to battery swapping that would need to be addressed before this becomes feasible for this industry.
So women blame others and men take responsibility?
Expired
These are expired product
> The reason the contrast ratios failed with the white text is that it has high brightness and is on a background with high brightness. Bright text on a bright background is rendered low contrast computationally. Your design is supposed to satisfy what people see, not computational algorithms. It’s why the designer’s eye should always play a part in the equation.

This is so stupid it hurts. It doesn't pass contrast guidelines because bright things on bright things are hard to distinguish for low-vision individuals! It doesn't matter what you think looks better.

The correct solution for the designer is to use a darker orange or blue then put white text on it. Get correct contrast AND something that subjectively feels better. The correct answer for a designer is never to go "eh, I like my version better, I'll ignore these rules."
Why would anyone in their right mind contribute to or cooperate with such a project?
Martyn Poliakoff of Periodic Videos fame has done a lot of work with supercritical CO2, particularly in the context of more environmentally friendly organic solvents.

This 5 minute video provides an excellent summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBRdBrnIlTQ
Venus' lower atmosphere is actually composed of supercritical CO2 at 90 atm and ~450°C which makes corrosion interesting[0]. sCO2's property of acting like a solvent works against us in this case. Copper grows a hair copper sulphide from the trace amount of sulfur dioxide and other sulfur compounds present. Hydrofluoric acid, even though it's present at part per billion concentrations, cause corrosion problems too. While we now have interesting silicon carbide integrated circuits like image sensors[1] and 555 timers[2] capable of operating at Venusian temperatures, it's challenging to actually use them on Venus because of corrosion of the bonding pads.

[0]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325521557_Chemical_...

[1]http://kth.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1303493/FULLTEXT0...

[2]http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1317...
Every angle of Volvo’s first electric vehicle, the XC40 Recharge
Ok, but accurate-and-shallow is still shallow. What's needed is a substantive accurate statement. It's particularly the shallow dismissals which harm discussion—hence that guideline.
> a lot of developers, including long time Free Software developers, don't get licensing at all

Completely agree; it's a complex part of producing software that people (myself being guilty of this) incorrectly assume they can ignore.

> There are legitimate technical reasons for not liking Electron, not necessarily due to "disproportionate amount of time bickering" spent by "Linux Desktop users".

There are legitimate technical reasons for not choosing electron, but I can't think of any for not liking it. It's a perfectly fine and useful way to make a cross-platform desktop application. If it doesn't suit your project's purposes because of performance, size, or current acumen, that's fine.

But I think OP is referring to "Electron is awful", "I hate Electron", or "Never use Electron" levels of ire that crop up occasionally, which should be exclusively reserved for something that no one should be working in.
Six Nines in Pi
I agree with you, it’s a fantastic book, and not really about motorcycles at all.

(If memory serves, Pirsig used note cards or slips of paper to assemble this ambitious work. Post-It’s were first sold in 1977; the book was published in 1974.)

Those who have an open mind and want to try the book should find the 10th anniversary edition; the author’s afterword explains some things that some readers found elusive.

Pirsig’s obituary in the N.Y. Times is excellent:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/book...
60k Euros is not that bad. You can live comfortably with that in Europe.
There were at least two programs when I was there. I heard a lot more about them under Ballmer than under Satya.

HiPo -- for junior to mid level -- special training, networking, and seminars. MiniMSFT comments section mentions this from time to time.

Bench -- for mid to later career, usually on the way to "partner" or above level -- same as HiPo, but may be asked to work on a project with others in Bench, may see attention from VPs mentoring the group.

Neither one had any official impact on ratings, rewards, or career velocity. What they did do, however, was establish an elite and help that elite network across the company.
Instant Bitcoin Income Paid Every 60 Minutes
iOS 13 has actually made the scrollbar into a first-class UI widget. You have to long-press on the scroll thumb while it's visible, but doing so gives you direct manipulation over it.
I'm also not a fan of VS. From my perspective it is an overly complicated bloated software. But I think that way about quite a lot of software.

However, the developers I've spoken with who love it tell me that it has some insanely good tooling that is just unmatched by anything else. I'm not even in a position to know what they're talking about or why it's so important to them, but that doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.
Dan Luu has a pretty good writeup on the various ways you can get screwed :)

https://danluu.com/startup-options/
This doesn't sound like shenanigans. Reading between the lines:

> While it hasn’t ended up becoming the unicorn I was hoping for

it sounds like the company wasn't a success. It could be the preference overhang, or it could be a difficult acquisition.

Fundamentally, if the company isn't a success relative to the funding, employees aren't going to get paid. Employees can get paid quite well on a $100m exit if eg the funding structure was correct for the exit size.
Yes. The advantage as I've heard is that the extract is flavourless.
Does cavitation depend on temperature in like submarines too?
Make this good enough and you could very well cut into a huge chunk of Firebase's business model.

I'd seriously love to have query subscriptions, especially if the library is robust enough for use on mobile.

Ine large differentiator of Firebase's DB offerings is the subscription functionality, mobile and web, but using that means buying into NoSQL. A proper subscribable SQL database would be amazing.

Of course the conflict resolution on writes, and the local caching is another key benefit Firebase offers. Not sure how that could be done with a real relational DB!
i am being tricked into pinterest link-pages multiple times a day. That is spam ,and has very little to do with their AI work
Well that doesn't help much when you're down in a hole in the ground risking your life for money that is created out of thin air.
A TV station commissioned a song contest for a jingle for Dagen H. Here's the (very catchy) winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ODZtwkBYPs
I might be mistaken, but I believe that's already what Google is doing for a lot of factual knowledge (as a matter of fact they do call it knowledge graph).

Try for example to type "when was jfk born" in Google, you should see a factual answer fished from a kg.
at least include a disclaimer that he doesn't know much about most of the things he writes about

This is true of most journalists.
The Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius
Until the 1990s (at the latest) the U.S. had a policy of widely distributing government agency offices throughout the country. This 1) kept power (agencies, lobbyists, workers) from centralizing in D.C., and 2) spread government expenditures. There were other reasons for doing this, especially before the telecommunication era. But for the middle part of the 20th century this pattern held strong even as transportation and telecommunication exploded.

But there's always the risk of a pathological co-dependency on government employment. You can see this in many developing countries. So for partly legitimate reasons, the Civil Service has long been the boogeyman of Republican politics. Specifically, that civil servants are reliable "big government", Democratic voters. Better to 1) pack their voting power and 2) prefer private out-sourcing. This is one major reason (if not the major reason) why government agency activity and policy have migrated to D.C., and why the headquarters of so many corporations have moved to the D.C. metro area.
Isn't receiving legitimate email and delivering it to Inboxes part of the service it provides to its users?
I signed up for the xbox game pass for pc (beta) today. After downloading the app I found that signing in to said app was completely broken. After some googling I found a workaround, if I sign in to a completely different app (xbox companion) that would also sign me in to the xbox game pass app.

Then I tried to download a game (The Outer Wilds). The download just sat at 0 bytes. I tried several things so I'm not positive what actually fixed it, but I think what did it is I located the folder it created for game downloads, which I did not even have permission to view, and forced an ownership change of the folder to my user.

Granted this is a beta but... not looking good for usability so far.
In my country we call it an "effective management", a tongue in cheek for a situation where on paper all company KPI are perfect and growing but the company is for a huge nosedive in a long run.
Just to add another experience, our company also started getting a lot of legitimate email marked as spam as of about two weeks ago. This included emails coming from the same domain (with all the proper SPF and DKIM setup in place).
Discussion: The Future of SAP Operations
the yuppies living in western metropolitan areas would say yes to that
Thank you for this thoughtful reply, really appreciate it.
You bring up a good point. Perhaps the solution is just to eliminate or reduce the human factor. I imagine for anything equipment so large it requires such a setup for charging would probably be worth the investment in an automated, or at least machine-aided, charging cable inserter.
I'm about to receive a librem5, and Signal is going to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for me to switch over. The electron desktop app can't serve as a replacement even if it could run properly (it needs to be tethered to a phone that can run the Android or iOS mobile client, with the SIM for your number installed), and open source reimplementations are few and far between (and then there's the issue where they don't want third-party implementations or forks talking to their servers, and they don't federate, so it's not like you can actually run your own server and continue to talk to anyone).

I'm sure the librem5 community will eventually scaffold something to make this work, and it might even be somewhat user-friendly, but I can't imagine a scenario where Signal themselves are positive about it.

So, it's back to SMS for me. And convincing my more technical friends to give Matrix a try again, in the hopes that the UX issues aren't as bad for them in late 2019.

I wish Signal the best of luck, I really do; their goal is laudable, most of their source is open, and they're smart folks. But a very limited developer community (and open hostility to the kind of community that might result in broader platform options) means I've stopped suggesting it to folks, because I won't even be able to use it myself very shortly.
I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless.

I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so.

Insane!
Believe it or not, on gender, it is actually possible for most of us (men) to verify this empirically.

As a cis male, one way to do this is to represent yourself as female, and see how much more you get questioned. You don't have to go so far as to cross-dress -- you could simply sign an email with a majority-female name in the signature.
The dangers of digital distraction–and how to overcome it
Why in better fields? When I was 15 I quit a burger joint to work at a burrito joint for like a $.50/hour raise. I flipped jobs often at that age and my coworkers and friends did the same. More than once -- including my highest paid job as a teen -- I quit because the boss was an asshole. Everything paid over the minimum wage is the result of the negotiating power of employees. In a service business, where tips are found, the quality of those employees is critical to the bottom line. That translates into leverage for friendly, productive employees, who can often walk out and get a new job before you can calculate their final paycheck.
I didn't say the UK was exclusively involved, did I?

> IBorderCtrl’s lie detection system was developed in England by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University

I.e. the system which is the subject of the article?
Not really, as mentioned in a sibling thread. If you’re in a big hurry, simply leave two minutes earlier you’ll be ahead of all the folks you’re worried about.

There is an efficiency gained through having space to change lanes as well, which is ine cause of the slowdown.
Commercial vehicles are in a position of advantage here. Many of the places they visit are industrial in nature and those will already have large power hookups. Using the loading/unloading time to charge would seem to be an obvious thing to do.
It doesn't seem that much different than being denied entry because of the country you were born in. Borders are full of arbitrary decisions.
Meanwhile, we aren't far removed from the year when image recognition confused black people and gorillas. Who would ever roll this out thinking that we've made such progress since then that we can tell such nuances as lies or truth? And they still didn't balance the training set with regard to ethnicity and gender?? What a shit show. You can bet your ass that it has higher false positives for some group or other.
We must inform the Klingons immediately.
Is it possible that it's folly to think we're above these instincts cognitively?
Regardless of how good it is, do you really want to be told where you can or cannot travel by a machine? Call me an egotist but I think of myself as better than cargo.
It's a React SPA with no SSR. Why people do that for content only pages, I have no fucking idea.
Best Productivity Apps
Macroeconomics generally lumps those things under "productivity".

Which is the problem. Those things were bigger than Government economic policy, as we can see them having affected trade across a large number of countries with varied policies.

It's not "productivity", anyway. It's "relative cost advantage" and "reduction of trade friction".

The giant mistake of macroeconomics is claiming that free markets are a self-perpetuating condition. In the absence of trade friction and the presence of network effects, consolidation tends to occur. It continues to the point of monopoly or oligopoly. The end state, for now, seems to be having three or less providers who don't compete very hard on price.

There's an EU study that indicates prices drop from competition only with four or more players. "Free markets" seem to have a minimum size in practice.

The US has three big banks, three big drugstore chains, and will soon have three big cellular providers. Two big agriculture companies. Five big film studios, though.
I've never heard of 80 Days, but man that is a lot of awards. IGF winner, BAFTA nominations, I didn't even know Time had a "game of the year."
It's more simple than functional.
But isn't it the exec's job to make sure there are people aligned to problems worth solving? Yelling about problems does nothing without staffing and accountability.
Research "gaslighting", especially the advice and emotional support articles about the theme from people with experience.

This is the Old Men's Club, currently undergoing demolishment.