skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to know how come cheapest $40k USD ($62.3k NZD) Tesla in US, cost $75.9k or about 18% more in NZ?

And come the only "incentive" is "you don't pay road tax thru fuel" (while you still pay quite a bit thru yearly registration)?

How come there are 0 electric buses or heavy equipment in Auckland or whole NZ?

How come solar panels for your boat or lithium batteries for your bike (or electric bikes themselves) cost something like 4x than outside world?

And also where are the bike paths? Or even pedestrian paths in some places? If you live in North Shore and wanna get into city using your electric motorbike (that costs 2-4x per year to keep registered when compared to a car)? Tough look.

Ah yes scooters, nearly destroyed by likes of NZHerald with fear mongering articles...

Lastly this one is more to criticise business and I actually find them vile and atrocious - but where are all the Impossible Burgers?
The PET scanner next door and the cyclotron that fuels it beg to disagree.
MagSafe trained me not to worry overmuch about snagging the charging cable, over a matter of some years. Then they took it away--replaced by a mechanically quite solid coupler for any off-axis forces. (Welcome to the ground!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-bSSCWVNUg
Your description here is what I would characterize as an accurate description of how most laws "just growed" in most communities.

That is, at least up until the time that the special interests got involved. Then they made a point of ensuring that the laws got written to only be applied to "others".
Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, autoimmunity, and psychosis
Which on the face of it almost seems reasonable; but it seems that this would just introduce another form of sandbagging.

"What are your goals for this quarter?"

"Make the color of the button to be green instead of red and World Peace"
http://www.flybarbara.com
Please take a look at our project and let us know how you like the idea to infoplease take a look at our project and let us know how you like the idea to info@flybarbara.com

Thanks David
I've come up with a modern version of Gate's saying of "640K ought to be enough for everyone". 95% of people are fine with an i7 and 16GB of RAM. If you're not running a bunch of VM's, that's enough computer. That's my 2012 MacBook Pro, and it's still getting the job done.
The original point was around genetic testing services. [0] As an example, take 23andme. I know that they take pains to use language that would disabuse a reader of the notion that they were providing medical advice. [1] It seems that 23andme did not accept insurance of any time until after May 2019. [2] I don't know if they are seeking to become HIPAA-compliant now that they ostensibly interact with insurance looking for HIPAA anywhere on their page or various policies turns up nil. Contrast that with someone like Smile Direct Club (page title is "Privacy Policy - HIPAA". [3]

Regarding the BAA exception, if you ever signed a BAA it becomes clear that your interactions with the other party to the BAA are HIPAA covered, even if your normal course of business is not. If a covered entity sends you PHI and they didn't have a BAA in place prior, that would constitute a breach.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465420
[1]: https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/115013843...
[2]: https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026466...
[3]: https://smiledirectclub.com/privacy/
Elon Musk?
Wow. This is an interesting take.

I didn't know higher risk firms like hedge funds, PE firms, and REITs are borrowing so heavily in the repo market.

So basically, this is the Fed just handing out cheap money to these firms. It's socialism for the super-rich.
The problem with pointing to the influx from rivers is that you also have to look at the outflow of uranium (and there must be such an outflow, probably reduction of uranium to insoluble U(IV) in sediments, since it's in steady state.) Any human extraction is on top of this existing outflow, it doesn't replace it.
If you have to rent a kitchen/building to open a restaurant, chances are you will go out of business or at best break even.

Restaurant/Food business is brutal.

Also, is this really any different than the Food Hall concept?
> We live in a fiat system; money is literally created out of nothing.

not out of nothing, all value is created out of shared assumptions about the future. money merely quantizes these assumptions.
One of the big reasons cities are more expensive is that a lot of Americans use their house as a savings plan, causing society to prioritize things that keep property values stable or increasing.

We can't simultaneously have ever-rising property values and affordable housing. Without affordable housing, many people are choosing to defer having kids (including, as you say, by pursuing more education to get higher-paying jobs), which reduces the worker/retiree ratio. That in turn makes it more expensive to be old, requiring more yet more savings.

To me a lot of this problem like a pathological response to the US's lack of good long-term pension coverage. Our every-man-for-himself, devil-take-the-hindmost approach causes a lot of scarcity thinking, which makes it hard to adopt sensible systemic solutions.
It was in a different wing with other 19th century French art when I visited in 2016, but yes, it was huge, imposing, and very moving
In 2013 FB was far from a monopoly.
NZ regularly tops out as one of the least corrupt nations in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

I don't know what happens in your country, but we don't appoint our friends to public sinecures
Do Historians Have No Such Boxes? (2017)
Assuming "the big one" is constantly just around the corner is a really bad investment strategy. Just look at the pure statistics of it, the US stock market finishes the year positive over 74% of the time. You're playing a losing game trying to time it.

I know many of us are still emotionally scarred from the last credit crisis...but storing cash under your mattress is the wrong way to respond to those feelings. It was dumb when my grandparents did it 80 years ago after the Great Depression, and it is still dumb in 2019.

Of course, the world is uncertain and could end tomorrow. If you're uncomfortable with that idea, perhaps try religion?
I'm surprised to see Google and Facebook so low in that list.
While I don't really think NZ needs nucular, the solar and wind adoption here is appalling. Further, afaik water dams have pretty bad environment impact...
OP here - this is a sidebar but the HN hug was making the page load really slowly (~10s for me) even though the blog part of the site is cached. Anyway, because I'm using kubernetes all it took to fix it was bumping the nodes in my cluster, 4x the replicas, kubectl apply and it's snappy again! All done in about a minute. What an awesome tool kubernetes is.
Nuclear power was never a practical option for NZ; the country is too small, has no fuel handy and has no nuclear expertise, and a huge chunk of power (not all of it tbf) comes from renewables already.

Fully agreed for many other countries (disappointingly Germany, most recently) but I don't think Ardern can be held to blame for them.
Thanks - I wasn't aware of that.
> The especially pre-2000 era Disney content is absolutely damaging and well documented in the academic community for that.

I'd be interested in follow-up reading on the academic research you're gesturing towards here- do you have links or any specific names/citations that would point to the material you have in mind?
I think it's fair to make the case that something should be legally wrong, hence why I mentioned it. Something can be legally wrong but not ethically wrong and vice versa, and the best way to fix the problem is to address both at the same time.

And I think the rationalization would be that investors create more value through ensuring efficient value extraction which then flows back into the economy. But overall I think you're right in that we should discourage value extraction because of how it leads to running businesses to favor yourself or your investors rather than the business itself.

The contrast is that what's good for investors isn't always good for the business and vice versa. Right now I don't think there's strong enough checks on investors, since even in the case of failures they often come out ahead.
That's why, when people ask me to estimate work, I tell them that if they need a hard deadline things will (counterintuitively) take much longer, and try to convince them that hard deadlines are bullshit. If you want a hard deadline, I have no choice but to allocate a huge amount of buffer time, at least twice the "aggressive" estimate so that if shit doesn't go as planned (which is what usually happens) I don't miss the deadline. And I have to plan for the worst possible kind of excrement hitting the fan, which is not realistic. And then, in spite of that, people are still under more stress, because procrastination being in human nature, hard shit gets done last, and there's more in it that can go wrong.

Consider instead shipping stuff incrementally, feature by feature, when features are done, without any hard deadlines. Both the speed of delivery and quality will be improved compared to hard deadline driven development.

Plans are worthless. Planning is indispensable.
I file using Turbotax using a web browser on linux. Why do you mention Windows?
Well I for one did go omgomg when I went back. Stuck keys or not, I never got to more than 80% typing speed on the new keyboard and I never learned how to use the arrow keys. I hope my “brand new” mbp2015 will last at least 5 years and then I can reevaluate the situation which might very well lead to me buying a Surface.
It's interesting to me how much Gitee plays up the nationalism angle. All the quotes by tech figures that Gitee puts on their homepage to advertise itself emphasize how Gitee is a Chinese product that will help China's technology scene and make Chinese developers proud.
> You also seem to have missed the point of the Java example anyway, in a misses-the-forest-for-the-trees way.

Perhaps I did, yes. I do think the kind of thing you’re describing is valuable, to be clear. A lot of my comment was intended more as clarification for other people reading these comments than as an argument against what you were saying. I imagine that if I misunderstood your point, other people are likely to, too, so if anything, your clarification is generally a good outcome, I think!
Have you updated your hard drive for an SSD? I'm considering buying a 4TB Samsung 860 EVO for my 2007 MacBook Pro. Maybe two, one in the optical bay.
You're missing the point, which is that markets don't necessarily determine what we get. It's not whether your preferences hold or mine hold, but that neither of us have any influence, unless we are willing to walk away from an offer. So political activity is needed in many cases you don't think that it is.

I used to work for a company where not only was it futile to ask for perks, but someone started a business selling candy and snacks out of their desk (in competition with the vending machine in the basement) and was shut down by management when they noticed. Same company wouldn't let me volunteer at the Red Cross because their intellectual property agreement conflicted with my employer's claim to own everything.

Nowadays, I'm working in the public sector, and my boss cannot just hand out perks, not even free coffee, because, you know, there are laws that say you don't have the authority to do that with tax money - all events like a holiday party or anything have to be financed by employee fundraisers and/or the union.
>Why is this a bad thing? The investors and CEO profited from Sears failing and (presumably) in this free market economy that money can therefore be better invested in non-failing companies. Otherwise it would've just been lost.

Sears isn't failing because the business wasn't sound. Sears is failing because Lampert decided to neglect the business and use the balance sheet to play financial games that destroyed the business once 2007 hit - and once it was time to actually make money, they had been sorely left behind. The company that invented the catalog and was shipping things from warehouses before it was cool didn't take the time to build a proper web platform. Sears was mismanaged and I'm even skeptical Lamport profited at all from the endeavor.

If some hedgefund took over Samsung and decided to divert all resources to invest in Dogecoin, and subsequently lost all of Samsung's money, I'd struggle real hard to call it anything other than a "bad thing".
It does seem a bit oversaturated.

You could probably sell a Terabyte hard disk with the best shows and movies ever made and probably keep people entertained for quite a while.
According to this article, it's worse than that, we're lending money not to banks, but to hedge funds, PE firms, and REITs: https://wolfstreet.com/2019/11/06/whats-behind-the-feds-bail...

These firms than use the cheap money (interest rate < 3%) to make leveraged bets on risky assets (mortgage backed securities, CMOs, etc).
A lot of the commentary here is attacking the specifics of the bill as unrealistic posturing. This ignores what I think is the main point - that the NZ government has reached consensus acknowledging that climate change is an existential risk and they need to respond at a goverment level. The details of how they act will almost certainly be changed but it's a start. It also assists in putting pressure on Australia. This is important because Australia has a climate-change denial government and powerful coal mining lobbies, and with only 25M people generates more CO2 pollution than the UK, France, or South Korea [1][2].

[1] https://www.tai.org.au/sites/default/files/P667%20High%20Car...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-08-19/australia-co2...
Even just feeding cows grass instead of corn improves the methane emissions.
Thanks, it is a well written article. The only part which tarnishes an otherwise excellent article is the language comparisons portion. Such things are best avoided as they almost always reflect the biases of or where the author has the most experience.

As you acknowledge, you were unfair to Julia. Julia has excellent support for general purpose programming. It has support for multiple dispatch, a quite powerful organizational construct rarely found in other languages, for example. Where it might fall short is in the number of general purpose libraries but that shouldn’t matter as much for ML. It certainly isn’t lacking for numeric libraries.

For Java, it’s unclear what you mean by JVM issues but with GraalVM and Scala or Kotlin, I fail to identify any major issues.

F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime nor does garbage collection limit its expressiveness. It is among the fastest, in the Go/Java/Ocaml/Swift tier, which is next fastest after C/C++/Rust/Fortran. Compare https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... to https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/.... Setting aside the problems of microbenchmarks and unidiomatic code, they’re both within spitting distance of each other, both wining and losing with no significant margin. Their runtime also recently introduced SIMD and fine-grained memory management support.

I'd say practically speaking, Swift's current great weakness is its cross platform support, when compared to Julia, Kotlin/Scala or C#/F#.

Swift is an excellent language and it’s great a numeric programming ecosystem is being built for it. There’s no need to justify its existence by misrepresenting or downplaying the capabilities of competing ecosystems. I also saw this occur for why differentiable programming in Swift and not Julia. The more the merrier, I say. Let the various communities collaborate and share ideas in order to better explore the space of possibilities and ideas.
> How can you convince people that what they did was legally and ethically wrong? They intentionally ran the company into the ground to increase the short term profits so they could parachute away with a nice bonus at the cost of the lower level employees.

I feel like you've answered your own question immediately after asking it. As a sibling commenter said, you can't convince someone this is legally wrong because it isn't, but any ethical system that places personal wealth creation over the well-being other humans isn't one I can respect.
Speaking as an old white cisgendered male, my opinion is that if you're white, cisgendered, and male, then you're playing the game of life on easy mode.

You never get a chance to even see what it's like for everyone else who is forced to play on regular mode, or worse.
There are even Neo-Nazis in the USA

True, they are called Antifa.
No, that's clearly wrong.

Make fission 10x cleaner or 10x safer and people still wouldn't build them.

Make existing reactors 10x cheaper, but no safer or cleaner, and they'd be selling like hotcakes.
> Don’t be outraged that the fed is trying to maintain a stable economy.

The explanation for the FEDs doing the lending is it will spike short term rates or something. Why can't we be mad that the Fed is willing to do this? Like what if I'm one of the institutions waiting on the sidelines to make some money off of short term lending and the Fed keeps tamping down on what could be a source of profit?
> I've come up with a modern version of Gate's saying of "640K ought to be enough for everyone".

he never said that. i personally really don't like the guy, but putting words in his mouth is never fair.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
Based on these comments, it seems like a lot of misunderstanding is being proliferated.

I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’d like to dismiss the criticisms of the fed that many are making.

These cash injections give banks short term liquidity, which means that banks can complete transactions. These moves are not at all synonymous of a government bailout. The repo market is what is at concern here. In short, relatively safe financial institutions will loan money for very short term (a single day, for example) in return for a small percentage of interest. Trillions of dollars are moved in this market on a daily basis. When market trust lowers (or demand increases, but this is less likely. But, one example is quarterly taxes coming due), rates can increase. Repo rates are supposed to be low for the market to function properly.

The broader reason for this occurring is that the Fed post 2008-crisis requires banks to maintain higher relative liquidity. On the Feds view, they would rather continue to inject cash than allow banks to maintain pre-crisis levels of liquidity. At least in my opinion, requiring banks to maintain higher liquidity is a smart move.

As far as what this signals economically, I’ve yet to hear any credible answers. Certainly the banks will say regulation is the problem and the fed will respond that we can’t trust the banks that much.
Shopify can be used for that, just set inventory to "continue" instead of deny when out of stock. You might also want something for scheduling, depending on use case.
There are only about 600 billionaires in the US. The top 1% is over 3 million people. Also they'll still be in the top %0.01 with $999 million.

You're also making some weird assumptions that transferring money away from billionaires would just destroy that money, and that the current billionaires are using their resources in the most productive way possible. The real world isn't Atlas Shrugged.

Look up income velocity of money.
2 is really helpful, 100% agree.

I shared my deadlines and progress on this build via the blog and on twitter under @zero_startup and I would say doing that probably pushed me to ship the MVP at least 50% faster.
I am aware of all these things. It is a law that will likely stay in place forever, as it is such a divisive and controversial issue, yet has barely any impact on anything in NZ, no politician will ever have a motive to take political risks required to change it. The only thing it’s ever achieved is straining the relationships NZ has with some of its closest allies.

Specifically it doesn’t prohibit all power generation, but it does prohibit nuclear propulsion. Which again has no impact outside of irritating allies, as NZ never has had and never will have a use case for commercial nuclear power production. It’s a very small country, and 80% of its electricity is already renewable.
Wealth gets you access to the levers of power. A mere phone call from the likes of Gates, Buffett, or Zuckerberg will open more doors than most of us can dream of, and they don't have to spend a penny to do it.

The rich and powerful also tend to associate mostly with their own kind, which will skew their world view and priorities.[1]

The unspent money can also be used as collateral or leverage to earn more money.

Finally, the unspent money can be passed on to heirs to create an aristocratic class who inherit their status -- something the US founders were explicitly trying to avoid when founding the country. Unfortunately, the wealthy have found ways of subverting their intent.

[1] - For an example, see the excellent Born Rich documentary, made by one of the heirs to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, where he interviews all his friends, who were also born in to extremely wealthy families.
If it's actually European firms participating in the carry trade, then yes it would be EUR. When you decide to sell your S&P 500 index fund for Bitcoin, you don't actually directly exchange your USD-denominated assets for Bitcoin. Last I checked Vanguard was not willing to service redemptions in crypto. Rather, you sell the fund, receive USD for it, and then use the USD to purchase Bitcoin.

Same goes for ordinary foreign currency transactions. If you want to short negative-yielding Eurozone bonds and buy positive-yielding US treasuries, you borrow the bonds and sell them, receiving EUR in the process. Then you transfer the EUR to a US bank and receive dollars. Then you use the dollars to buy US bonds. Your European counterparty is now long European bonds and short euros. Your U.S. banking partner receives the euros you got from them and gives you currency. You give the currency to the U.S. government and buy the bond. To make the currency transactions net out, the U.S. government then needs to give currency to the bank to replace the reserves you took out to buy the bonds.

(In reality, the Fed doesn't have to make the transactions net out, because it can adjust the money supply. But if it wants to maintain the current interest rate in the face of strong demand for dollars to arbitrage away interest rate differences, it needs to hand out a lot of dollars.)
Super HCOL locations aside, it’s a solid start for most of America.
Then your database API should use "safe strings" only, simple as that.
Naive question from a guy who doesn't shop often: what kind of stores are replacing Sears for general "house" stuff for an average price, average quality? More specialized shops in boxstores? (I don't like driving and they tend to be located far from where I live)

I used to shop at Sears in Canada when they existed (until 2018). Now for appliances I go to home depot, and for kitchen stuff I go to Canadian Tire. Sometimes I browse Amazon but it's so full of rubbish/fraud I just end up giving up. I have to admit I once tried shopping appliances at Sears, and the sales people were just hawkish and creepy, like car salesmen.
“Praise, correct, praise” is less fawningly known as “shit sandwich” and appears incredibly patronizing to anyone who is either aware of the method or possesses minimal skills of observation.
No, it's the entirely rational fear of losing billions of dollars on bad investments.
Who would take care of someone else like they would their own parents? And you can do things for multiple purposes. Children and family provide a valuable support network to get you through life, but it can also be because you want to raise kids to be good stewards of society and all that Jazz.