skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rent seeking is natural. That's why we get progress.

Nobody would ever invest time and money to a business idea whose profits would get immediately competed away. Everybody would on the other hand invest into a business with guaranteed profits which cannot be competed away - ie. a monopoly.

That's producer's perspective. Consumer would on the other hand rather see competition among producers, because lack of competition leads to overpriced shitty products. However fierce competition leads to shitty and dangerous products too, because of need to cut corners and lack od funding for long term research (eg. current day airline industry).

So there must be a middle ground. Some degree of rents (profit which cannot be competed away) is necessary for progress and product quality.

There are several kinds of rents that I see.

1. Short term innovation monopoly These rents are usually short termed until they get copied by others. These are perceived to be fair and even if not, they have short life span, so who cares. Wait 5-10 years before the market catches up.

2. Rents from natural monopoly. Generally all network infrastructure falls under this because the first mover has great advantage over potential successors eg. by laying railroads, sewers, power grid or network cables in geographically optimal location. Other natural monopolies are eg. law or stuff which might harm you (drugs, pharma) - people prefer goods that everybody else uses and distrust smaller unknown alternatives.

3. Government blessed monopolies. For many industries it is more profitable to strangle competition than to better their products. Eg. patents, Mergers&Acquisitions, price undercutting and especially lobbying of regulations targetted against potential competitors - often in form of 'safety' regulations supposed to protect customers. Pharma industry would be a prime example.

4. Front running is another form of guaranteed income posing as legitimate business.

In finance: you are a banker and your client asks you to buy a stock for him. You buy the stock for yourself, which hikes the price and then you sell it to your customer at higher price.

In housing: you know that there is a massive trend of jobs concentrating in cities. You cheaply buy all land and houses in a prospering city, because you know that it will be needed by future generations. They will pay you huge rents later on. Nobody can stop you because your 'customers' are often not even born yet.

In both cases you seemingly offered your customer a service which they voluntarily paid you for, but something feels fishy about it.

All in all there are good rents and bad rents. How about distinguishing between the two and reversing the weird current tax system, which collects from the good ones (income, corporate and sales taxes) and giving to the bad bad ones (subsidies, redistribution).

Since often the government guarantees some company a monopoly, why shouldn't it pay for that privilege. Monopoly based taxation seems to me like quite a fair tax system.
Vala. C#-like language using the GObject type system with C ABI compatibility
Disappointed the link now 404s. You could have at least put up a placeholder page saying it's being rewritten. As it stands this only confuses your stance further.
If you are correct, what are the policy implications? In particular, is it your view that we should stay on fossil fuels, rather than trying to move to renewables? And are there any possible future scientific findings that could lead you to change your view?
Sure, why not? There’s a ridiculous amount of money out there, but people are squabbling over pennies.
Personally I think something might have happened over at root server level as I had issues while working with dig and whois tools.
The reality is that employment is a modified form of slavery. The majority of one's time and good ideas are dedicated to the employer without a share of profit. Wage slavery. In some places or subcultures, we have made it into polite and considerate slavery. In other places, there is no such facade.

Although it is unlikely that we will ever truly control our own time or be wealthy like the masters, I think that we should at least fight for our masters to be decent owners and not abuse us.

It it wasn't like I say then he would not have been permitted to act as he does for years and years. We do not permit abuse in other contexts. But it is systemically accepted in cases like this because as I said, owners are allowed to treat their property as they wish.
The 23 year old is hoping to become a partner someday and then really rake in the bucks by leveraging successive new crops of 23 year olds.
How is this different from handlebars, php short tags, jsp expression tags, ... ?
Yep! Nathan did an earlier experiment of this, but it was the smallest gpt model trained on a small dataset of Zork adventures.
The translations were a little tough to get through but here's a transcript of the best one:

"...The best leaders are those the people hardly know exist.

The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.

Next comes the one who is feared.

The worst one is the leader that is despised.

If you don’t trust the people,

they will become untrustworthy.

The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.

When she has accomplished her task,

the people say, “Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!”

- J H McDonald (Trans.)
You realize there is a difference between revenue and profit?

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mcdonalds-reports-f...

Their net income was less than $700 million and it’s not corporate McDonalds that pays the employees in the stores - it’s the franchise owners.

Franchise owners make less than $70K a year per store.

https://work.chron.com/average-income-fast-food-franchise-ow...
> Thinking about it more you don't even need the parameter, just declare a local variable, take its address and go crazy.

If you go one layer below with some assembly, you don't even need variables. Just take the stack pointer register (rsp on amd64) and start writing!

Or maybe no assembly needed, just cast an arbitrary hexadecimal value you think is likely to be in range to be your stack pointer [may vary by platform, ASLR, how many frames are on the stack, etc.] into a pointer and go to town.
That could easily be disabled, though. The whole point of this mode is to allow users to tamper with the device, after all; it would be difficult to stop users from tampering with code which checked whether the device was in that mode.
Iirc AGPL states that basically you must make the source to your entire application available to users, both the client and server side. I believe many misinterpret this to mean your entire application must be open sourced publicly, but this is not entirely true. If a corporation develops something using AGPL code and none of their users are external to the company, then they are under no obligation to distribute their source (or they must distribute it to themselves, which is effectively the same thing).

IANAL, however.
> You can do that but once you say there are facts without causes it's hard to know what you're signing up for.

Once you start inventing unjustified entities to satisfy an aesthetic preference for things (except the invented entities!) to have causes, you know what you are signing up for—a perception of reality driven by your desires rather than justified belief.

That the universe exists is a fact. The question of whether the existence of the universe has a cause may not be answerable, and there's a pretty good argument that it asking what the cause of the universe existing is itself is as incoherent as asking what the color of 1+1 is. To assert anything as a prior cause of the universe is to assert an entity outside of the universe, which is just equivocation because the “universe” in the question is the sum total of all existence.

> Uh okay, but if brute facts are possible, how can we do science at all?

Quite easily.

> For all we know, we're just surrounded by brute facts and attempts to systemize facts into theories is just a waste of time because a new brute fact can just come along and bite you in the ass tomorrow.

Of course, that's the fundamental nature of science. It's always contingent, but we build on what has observed predictive utility, because if there are any systematic rules, that's the only even loosely objective way to discern them. Accepting that scientific knowledge is inherently contingent doesn't prevent doing science.

> It's not a satisfying intellectual stance

Satisfaction is subjective; clearly, it doesn't appeal to your aesthetic preferences.

> and if you really poke at it, it just feels like motivated reasoning in which the conclusion (there is no God)

That's not the conclusion. Rejecting a particular argument for the necessity of a First Cause (which, while it gets abused as one, wouldn't be an argument for the necessity of anything much like the image of God it is used to justify even if it was valid on its own terms) isn't the same as denying the existence of God (I'm, as it turns out, a Catholic who quite firmly believes in God, so the distinction is not merely theoretical.)

> is leading the premises (some facts have no causes),

That's not the premise, either. Rejecting as unwarranted the assertion that all facts must have causes isn't asserting the existence of uncaused facts. (Though the argument from First Cause is asserting the existence of uncaused facts, so it's kind of odd for someone defending that particular God-as-brute-fact argument to mock the—imagined, but not actually real—premise of others that brute facts exist.)

Of course, St. Thomas Aquinas’ argument (and the similar though different previous effort at proving the logical necessity of God by St. Anselm) are the actual motivated reasoning in the debate, not the rejection of those arguments.
Interesting. I was discussing hypothetical possibly better arrangements, however, it's clear from the original article that the GSA doesn't currently operate this way.
The sub-$20k new car segment is tiny and shrinking.
Here's one you can use with (pretty much) any version of C++:

__attribute__ ((format (printf, 1, 2)))
static inline std::string format(const char* fmt, ...) {
va_list args;
va_start(args, fmt);
size_t bytes = vsnprintf(0, 0, fmt, args);
va_end(args);

va_list again;
va_start(again, fmt);
std::string result(bytes, '\0');
vsnprintf(&result[0], bytes + 1, fmt, again);
va_end(again);
return result;
}
One of my mechanical engineering suitemates in college cooped/worked at a Frito Lay chip plant for three semesters and got a job there in manufacturing after graduating, I remember because when he got back he always had boxes of product they gave him after each work period.
Negativland – “More Data”
Why would you not vote for conviction if there is any doubt when the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt?
So if you aren’t a fan of subsidizing low margin businesses - like the mom and pop shops - are you also not willing to allow public pensions to invest in VC funds that subsidize money losing tech companies?

I think it’s kind of rich that the same people who are probably working for money losing companies backed by VCs think that small low margin businesses owners don’t deserve to make a living.
In-browser implementation of CVE-2019-13054/CVE-2019-13054 from Chrome 78
In my opinion the cooling capabilities of all MacBook types are pretty lacking.
Even if the 16” is significantly improved in this regard as Apple claims, they also really like to make the fan response low and importantly silent until it reaches uncomfortably temperatures.

Using a program to configure a custom fan response curve is highly recommended.
Capacitor but no 'nuclear reactor' found so far in Northwest side man’s garage
Cloud Service Providers- a Systemic Risk
Lots of motorcyclists replace their lead-acid batteries with lithium-ion batteries that are much lighter. They’re very unreliable but some people will deal with that to save a few pounds.

I imagine you mean ice cars with much more demanding starters, but worldwide motorcycle market is pretty big.
Commonplace Books
Not only that, but React’s new API direction replacing component classes for functions is very monad-like. It uses a magical hidden context which gets switched out behind the scenes.
Low margin businesses are also franchise owners and mom and pop shops. Who do you think is hurt the most if prices go up on fast food and at Walmart?
As someone who's worked in both, I don't entirely agree. Dishwashing was just tiring in a different way. But you could just entirely shut off your mind and zone out. I remember getting into a sort of meditative state while listening to music, it was kind of cool.

Tech jobs are just mentally stressful sometimes. I can totally see a good amount of people not wanting to switch places honestly.
Thanks! Just added it. For others, the list was last updated a few hours ago and successfully makes the sticky headers on ESPN and the NYT's websites (the examples listed on the README) nonsticky while leaving them usable when I'm scrolled to the top of the page.
I’m gobstruck. Totally blown away.

Congrats Nick, this is a truly beautiful interactive demo of the power of GPT-2, while also managing to be artistic, funny, and delightfully dark and satirical.
Re: Debate 09
Both Alex Schoeder's musings, above, and the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book) offer intriguing ideas.

The fact that there are published commonplace books is something I want to track down.
Re: Debate 11
I mean, in a way it’s really beautiful isn’t it?

But I also think the brutal logic really shines a light on how dangerous AI can really be.
How many YC funded companies have ever been profitable? VC backed tech companies “aren’t profitable enough” to pay a living wage.

Small businesses outside of the tech sector don’t have the access to capital that tech bro’s have.
It seems like C programmers uncomfortable with C++ made a wrapper for C++ programmers uncomfortable with C.

I don't know why you call them assholes, they are just being themselves, limitations and all, and providing a fairly amusing story for you to tell.
omg so edgy!! I quote Unabomber!!! I'm so enlightened
Working remote really is the ideal situation.

Commuting sucks, but so does living in a city. It's noisy and dirty and crowded. You can't own your own property and crime is much much more prevalent.

Owning a nice, quiet house in a nice neighborhood without the commute is just heaven, honestly. At least for me anyway.
This actually feels very similar to the original Slaves to Armok, the precedessor to DF. That was an odd little game where you could teleport bones out of kobolds and observe them screaming.
I can throw my iPhone in a drawer in another room. I can't avoid fifty neighbors' Rings while walking down the street.
What about allow a passenger to request a driver who has undergone a background check, US citizenship check, etc.
Hairy Ball Theorem
That's been true for the last couple revs of the MBP: for some reason (likely aesthetics), Apple likes to keep the fan RPMs really low until absolutely forced to crank them up. I don't mind fan noise generally, so I've resorted to loading something like 'Macs Fan Control' (https://www.crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control) on each new laptop, and then adjusting the curves to start cooling at lower temps and max out earlier. The more aggressive fan cooling also, I find, helps eliminate the tendency to thermal-throttle that will reduce the Mac to a crawl under sustained heavy load.
She can't live that far out of town, because the buses scarcely go five miles from the city center.

https://godurhamtransit.org/sites/default/files/godurham-sys...
(For anyone unaware, in this context "ice" most likely refers to "internal combustion engine" vehicles.)
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Making accounts to abuse HN will eventually get your main account banned, so please don't do that.
I disagree. Wealth is not zero sum.

A vaccine is worth much more than all of the sum of its parts.

The value of a bridge is not just the concrete, steel and manhours it took to build it.

Wealth is created when something is built, arranged, or designed in a way that is better than its inputs, in a way that benefits people.
It is astonishing to me, that one of the best known IT security researchers has to rely on a flashing icon to determine if location services were used or not.

Apple could easily disable said icon in certain cases. This begs the question: Isn‘t there a more reliable way to determine if an iPhone uses location services and maybe even say for sure for what they are used?
Super cool project, and I love how it runs on Google Collab. Nice work!
You can buy a Decawave SDK for about $1000 which supposedly works on the same standard:

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/decawave-limited/T...

I say supposedly since it is quite common for companies to make their "compatible" version have proprietary features so as to lock in developers. There is also a $39 eval kit:

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/decawave-limited/D...

and a $300 12 pack of battery powered devices that will work as-is with Decawave's open source phone app:

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/decawave-limited/M...

Note that high quality (10 cm in this case) indoor location tracking means new privacy problems. Your phone can now know which room it is in (especially if you supply a home/office map), what part of that room it is in, what table it is placed on, what similar devices are close by and how they are arranged, and has more info to figure out who is carrying it, etc. Similarly other devices that participate in this location system can potentially know the precise location of your phone and other devices. Combined with GPS this can give quite a complete picture of your entire life, where you are at all times, who you interact with, what institutions you visit and participate in, what products you use and when you use them, what you pay attention to, and more. It makes some magical things possible too, bring two devices together and they interact, sit in a chair and the computer boots. Four DW1000 chips placed at the four corners of a typical house or apartment are needed for indoor location (with a phone and a tile on your keys you can only get distance) so perhaps Apple will introduce an infrastructure kit to set up mapping your home. Something similar for larger buildings/offices/industrial settings also seems likely (or available from a third party).

I've never investigated the data transfer capability of the Decawave system, anyone understand what it's limitations are? Would a video link built with it drop out if someone walked into the line of sight path? 6.8 Mbps probably isn't enough to send 4K video but it might be OK for one 1080p stream or a few SD resolution streams depending on the codec.
Differences of macOS and Windows Power User Workflow
Because society has evolved to consider the economic aspirations of people who own stuff to be a higher order virtue than liberty or the public welfare.
So now when you apply for a job they should base your pay on your household situation? If one person is single and the other is a single mom with three kids, the company should pay more?

Should they also get paid more if one has a medical condition and the other doesn’t?
Hmm it's supposed to cut at end of text tokens. I'll look into that and see what's causing that.
I strongly disagree. One problem with your sub-20k market argument is that battery prices are going to keep falling, so in a few more years ev sticker prices are going to be equivalent. Another is that most sub-$20k manufacturers make a large part of their income from more expensive cars, and so for that reason will be in grave danger of bankruptcy.

As for chargers, the number is expanding rapidly, for a variety of reasons. That means every year that goes buy there are more people who are in a position to buy an ev.

Yes, ice's will keep selling, but the numbers will be going down which means that the economies of scale that present manufacturers depend for profits will no longer be there. They will also be stuck with fixed expenses. That means to make a profit they will have to raise prices, which will just drive sales down faster.

Also resale prices will plummet, which will give drivers more of a motivation to buy an ev. Also governments concerned with climate change, which is basically every large developed country besides Russia and the present US federal administration, will be pushing ev's and punishing ice's (like is already going on in China).

As for your point the auto industry moves slowly, that is why many companies will go bankrupt.
You suggested that this existing tax credit that we've all been accustomed to since the '70s was a suitable replacement for a decent wage. Completely aside from the SUBSTANTIAL increase in cost it would take to make the numbers fit, what leads you to believe that an annual tax refund is an appropriate substitute for a regular paycheck? Do you expect them all to save it all in a bank account and only spend a set weekly amount? If they were in a financially stable enough position to pull that off, they wouldn't be working at McDonald's.
One of the most annoying parts of AWS Console is that you can 'x' them but there is no 'hide always'.
The shocking and disturbing thing about it is the ignorance the general public showed toward it. "Super baby", "supermen army", people just assume that this much touted CRISPR is precise, that human actually know more than a tiny bit of the human genome. All in this current wave of technological optimism.
The hard work part is studying so you have a skillset.
If you believe that germline gene editing is so risky and potentially costly as to be absolutely unwarranted, then you shouldn't support somatic gene therapy as there remains a very real and non-negligible risk of germline integration. Some vectors might be safer than others, but proving the impossibility of gene integration into the germline seems extremely costly and possibly unprovable. I mean, heck, there's at least one scientifically proven case of a virgin birth.[1] Where does that leave us?

I return to my original point: Demanding perfection [and omniscience] is unreasonable and unnecessary. All of these other concerns are typical of any medical procedure: you attempt as best you can to integrate known risks as well as unknowns (known unknowns and unknown unknowns) into a cost and you compare it to the benefit, and if the benefit outweighs the cost then go for it. For germline editing in particular the costs will likely outweigh the potential benefits in most cases for some time, but we still need to make that determination regularly, honestly, and in context (actual proposed cases), without our fingers on the scale.

Issues like consent are ancillary. And they exist regardless of gene therapy. People don't consent to be born. Or consent to be "identified" through family members choosing to publish their genetic information. Social engineering experiments have lead to holocausts, even when they began innocently; if you go back far enough in the causal chain, they're all innocent and completely unintended. These problems, high-stakes consequences, and paradoxes already exist; we already struggle with them. Gene therapy, not even germline therapy, create fundamentally de novo issues. That's the real hubris, the delusion that we're not already playing with fire.

At the end of the day what the Chinese researcher did was reprehensible, but mostly for very particular reasons. I'd wager big money that a significant plurality of medical scientists, if not a majority, are today already prepared to approve germline editing given a good candidate therapy--patient, vector, payload, etc. As for medical ethicists, as scholars they tend to splinter into radical advocates or skeptics because that's how you get tenure and attention; and unlike doctors they don't get fired (or "disappeared") when they're wrong.

[1] "Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal
gastrointestinal tract in a patient with an aplastic distal
vagina. Case report", http://img2.timg.co.il/CommunaFiles/21227065.pdf