skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article is based on two false premises. First, it appeals to the idea that we should give Puerto Rico a pass because it’s poor. But Puerto Rico is not poor. Its GDP per capita is above Italy, and right below Spain and New Zealand.[1] It’s not a third world country where you can say there is a humanitarian basis why they shouldn’t have to pay back money they borrowed.

The other point in the article is simply that these funds are not the original debt holders. But what difference does that make? If your neighbor owes you $100,000, and refuses to pay, I might buy the debt at $50,000 in return for the hassle of collecting it. Is there something wrong with that? Should the debt be forgiven merely because of that?

The article overlooks that legal rules alter primary behavior. People alter their decisions about lending based on what might happen, legally, if the investment goes sideways. The original lenders, who put up money that allows Puerto Rico to pay for various things, did so within a legal regime where it knew Puerto Rico couldn’t declare bankruptcy. They might not have lent the money at all otherwise. Moreover, in general lenders make lending decisions knowing that they can sell bad debt to collection firms or third parties. Eliminating the legal rights of those third parties alters the lending decisions of the primary actors going forward.

[1] I’d go so far as to say that it’s doubtful the author would appeal to Puerto Rico’s poverty if this was a debt owed by Italy, because the reader wouldn’t be as sympathetic. Which frankly is not a very nice thing, viewing Puerto Rican differently than Europeans who are identically situated economically.
I found this good curated list: https://github.com/zudochkin/awesome-newsletters
This is why I said "cash positive" not "profitable". Not the same thing. e.g. Amazon is cash positive, but not profitable.

My priority is making sure payroll is covered. After that, I'd put OS contributions as an infrastructure cost (like licence fees for paid software), so fairly high up the list of priorities, and an annual budget item.
> I have never heard of extinction as a possible consequence of climate change

If things get nasty, the nuclear-armed folk might just light up the 14,000 nukes lying around.

That could do it.
Why did you have your teeth removed?
I'm the author of that paper. Happy to answer questions about it here.
As I tell people, together with my two neighbors I live in the middle of about 100 acres on a road with no sidewalks. This counts as urban as far as the census is concerned.

The US is big. That the above is urban makes sense in the context that I'm only about a 15 minute drive from a small city and am only about an hour drive from a large city. There are lots of places in the US that are 100+ miles from the nearest Walmart.
Just thought I'd toss it in there as a sort of topping or garnish for the article.

Private cars in urban areas are incredibly inefficient from just about any direction you choose to view it from.
Five facts, and one generally-held assumption:

Fact 1. Companies’ brains (for this level of executive decision-making) are their boards of directors.

Fact 2. Boards of directors are made up of people elected by shareholders.

Fact 3. “Making the shareholders money” (either through dividends or equity) is the most obvious “platform” on which to get elected to this position; and “not making the shareholders money” is usually a quick way to get replaced.

Fact 4. Unlike government elections in America—but like elections in Commonwealth nations—corporate “snap elections” can be triggered at any time from a shareholder vote. This means that a board-member can be removed pretty much instantly if they start to look like they’re not serving the shareholders’ interests.

Fact 5. Members of the board usually want to stay on the board, because it confers advantages. Even if there are no explicit advantages to being on the board, they get the ability to vote in ways that work toward their own personal interests, perhaps even getting themselves sweetheart deals. Even if they don’t go for these, there might be “lobbyists” (internal to the company, from industry-organizational bodies, etc.) that are willing to bribe them to vote certain ways.

And now, the assumption, that tends to hold in cases of publicly-traded companies: shareholders in the company are, by majority, pure investors that want their share value to increase, with some making short-term plays and others going long, but neither all that interested in the company outside of its portfolio value.

Putting the facts and the assumption together, you can derive that the board is structured in such a way, and members of the board are incentivized in such a way, that their behaviour is extremely predictable, operating almost according to an algorithm, rather than acting like a “group of people” with human whims.

This emergent behavior of the group, and the clear algorithmic model that can be used to predict it, are what people mean when they talk about “what corporations want.”

It’s very similar to how a person can want things that are at odds with the “wants” of the cells that compose them (such as doing things like drinking that damage those cells, despite each cell embodying an algorithm that steers toward that cell’s own survival.)
Bullshit. Linkedin today is more useful than ever. It’s a way to bypass hr filter - first you go there to find companies you want to work at, then you find someone who already works there. Contact them. Get hired. This is how I found my current job.
They are taxed. If there’s a capital gain when BigCorp buys my stock back, I pay taxes on it. You can argue whether or not Capital Gains is too high or low but the mechanism is there.

Then there’s the question of what I do with the money. If I invest it in government bonds, they get the remainder. Otherwise the money gets recirculated through consumption or other investment.

If you really think companies are too eager to return money to shareholders, take away deductibility of interest. This would dissuade companies from borrowing money to buy shares. (Effectively creating debt from equity)
Emoji are hard to type on non-mobile platforms, and are difficult to search for in logs or files. Often they don't render properly. They're near impossible to deal with from the command-line.

While I agree that emoji shouldn't be used in git, it's worth noting that the limitations you point out are platform-specific, and not universal.

in macOS, emoji work very well in any app that chooses to allow them, including the terminal. Typing emoji is as simple as double-clicking on the character you want from the pane that pops down from the menu bar.

Linux may not have first-class support for emoji, and Windows may not have first-class support for emoji. But those are limitations of the operating systems, and not of the emoji, themselves.
I find this to be yet another example of why the GPL (in general) was created, and why licenses like or similar to the BSD license are flawed.

The way I see the GPL is that by modifying and publicly releasing the modified version of the binary, the payment for being able to do that is paid, at a minimum, in the code that should be released to accompany those changes.

You want to use my code, and not pay me for it with money? Then pay me (or pay it forward) with the code instead.

The BSD license and other similar licenses, while seemingly more free - really aren't. They allow for someone or some company to just come in, take the code, then profit off of it in a closed-source manner - provided they give some acknowledgement somewhere that it came from the original BSD based project or whatnot.

Now - granted - in neither case would the programmer get paid money - but in the case of the GPL, at the very least the changes, fixes, updates, whatever - get "paid for" in code. It won't put food on the table, but it is the least that someone could do, imho, by benefitting from the rest of the codebase.

I note that the above is a very simplified understanding of the GPL, BSD, etc - and of this issue in general. But I still think the basic idea stands; that at its core, the GPL is about "paying for" code with code, so that code nor changes to it will ever "go missing" or become "locked up" into some proprietary version of the code, and ultimately benefiting users less (whether they know or understand it or not).
That’s the problem though.

Equity is an entirely imaginary value store. What’s the point of the majority holding all the corporate equity when it goes poof constantly?

80% of last generations Fortune 500s are gone. Retirees and the public were left holding the bag.

Meanwhile, the aristocracy retains generational control of all real assets.

This is another emotional boondoggle, wrapped in numbers to provide some sort of concretized framework. It’s the same old scam:

Load the public up on ownership/stewardship of ephemeral nonsense (previously religion) insulate the most pious/rich.

The bottom will fall out on the value of the equity, they can buy up more of the real property cheap. Rinse. Repeat.
> that kind of traffic shaping is not really necessary to offer good QoS

It is nobody on HN's responsibility to educate me on this, but I'd love some good hearty technical reading on this topic, because this is definitely counter-intuitive to me. If anyone has a link to a resource on this topic or feels motivated to type out a technical description of how QoS could work without explicitly identifying and prioritizing certain traffic, I will read it raptly and greatly appreciate the additional education.
In france, companies all pay quite a lot of money to some fund. The fund’s purpose is to finance employee education if they want to switch careers.

For instance, my friend was a mechanical engineer at Total, and after 3 years left to go study ML 1 year. Not only was the school all paid for by this fund, but the now student got a decent share of his salary everymonth. Best of best, he can go work for another company after his degree without any problem.

I thought that was a great idea. Although in practice, not every one is eligible to this particular program. I forgot how its called, CIFRE maybe

this particular degree isnt paid for by the government like the rest french education. Although it is taught at a very famous engineering school in france
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
― George Orwell, 1984
In a Western context with our property situation perhaps but look at Japan. 91% of the population lives in an urban area and even in the most desirable metropolis Tokyo it is relatively affordable: https://www.curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496248/tokyo-real-estate-a...

Not every city in the world has to be like New York or San Francisco. Cars should be banned (more or less) in cities. And it should viable for someone to live in a city if they so choose or in a rural area with a car if they so choose. We're failing on both fronts really in America...
> with some limits (only the first degree can be free)

Some countries do, some don't. I know several people with two free master's degrees, and some people basically collect them and PhDs as a hobby through their lifetimes -- a very small minority obviously, as most are quite done after the first.
Car share works pretty well there. Let insurance on my car lapse months ago and I’m getting buy fine without it
That hashtag definitely does not change my mind.
This seems to be a very unpopular thought within CS culture and I find that really unfortunate. It feels like people are rushing to reduce their education, their lives, to optimized market interactions and that's a terrible lens for a human life. There may be an argument that it's a method of successfully navigating our society, thus enriching one's personal or familial existence, but it seems to me that would just lead to a poor societal structure with few common bonds among the people within it.
Articles should declare up front if they are sales pieces. I got most of the way through this article without realizing Network Next was a product and I was reading a marketing piece. Not cool.
"urban" is a very imprecise word.

You're likely quoting the census, who defines any town with more than 2,500 people as urban.

I promise you, if you went to a town of 2,500 people, you would not have the word "urban" in your head.

EDIT: After a little reflection, this really blows my mind. Over 60 million Americans live in towns of less than 2,500 people. This country is massive.
Companies have non public information and therefore can more accurately price the value of their stocks relative to the market than investors can. This may not apply in the long term, but insider trading is illegal due to this information asymmetry.

In the extreme case of a disclosure that will tank the stock price their current investors would be better if the company sold new shares ahead of that announcement. This would then dilute the loss across more investors. Though the ethical issues should be obvious.

Buybacks are simply the opposite of issuing new stock which happens to have tax advantages.
> Is it even possible to do as a licence?

IANAL, but a license, can't, in itself, restrict anyone's rights because it is a grant of usage, and a more restrictive licenses is really a lesser grant. In the case of software licenses, the rights were already restricted by the claim of copyright.

And that's generally the case: you give someone license to enter your home, which they were implicitly restricted from by your holding the right to passage about your property.

The legal mechanism that lets you negotiate to restrict your or others rights is a contract, and that's completely different from a license.
Interestingly, that last line is almost rhythmically (is that the right word?) to the last line of Larkin's Aubade.

> Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

> Postmen, like doctors, go from house to house.
We were supposed to take "History of Technology" which I guess is supposed to be the corollary to "Business Math" classes or whatever. I really enjoy the humanities so I took all the real electives I could.
But what about dTrace and the 20+ years of work on the Darwin kernel?

You seriously believe they'll chuck that in the bin?
Suburban gated communities != rural areas, no matter how well they cosplay rural culture.

blamestross's assessment of rural culture is the most accurate I've seen in this thread, it's mostly teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, property crime, and suicide. I don't see a good way out with our all-against-all culture where trust and cooperation make you a mark for exploitation.

It's not entirely their fault, I'd hate to see how NYC or San Francisco would fare if 70% of their industry picked up and moved out in 5 years.

(I'm also from small town rural America, if it matters)
> the technological and class divide will only widen.

Car friendly infrastructure widens the technological and class divide. They create a base state where you are required to own and maintain an expensive piece of equipment in order to be an equal member of society. You are required to have parking for those cars, both at home and at your work.

Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in society is highly repressive.
Not really when you have 5-7+ kids.
Here's an application of ultrasound towards essential tremors that is already being used on people! https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2019-11-20/...

Transcranial ultrasound + monitoring via MRI. Requires a rock-solid transmitter clamped on the skull.
Not to undercut your point too much, but no one comes out of university learning about the latest and greatest tech unless they went to a graduate program where they did research in tech. They may have played around with it more on their own time, but most universities aren't teaching cutting edge stuff.
Thanks, I skimmed too quickly :-). Time to do further research, you know, for a friend.
Congrats! Can I ask you - how did you find the potential buyer? does they mailed you or you outreached them?
How about simply altering the way we now farm industrially so that we can trap carbon in the soil? See permaculture and biointensive farming practices.
I think this is more common than the HN crowd assumes.

As someone who develops multi-lingual web sites, I can say that the vast majority of the people who visit the sites and then request a language other than English still have their computer/browser configured for English.
If you are interested doing other things at home, then why transition at all? I mean, how much time you will need to become good at "server side" and the company benefit from this?

Imho it's about 50/50, company should not expect employees getting new skills only on their own time and the employee should not expect learning only from 9 to 5.

Technically searching through the internet for examples, is already learning.
While I’m fortunate to work for an org that pushes training, my generation was not given much feature work at the start. We were expected to take over support and learn the systems and graduate into development/architecture some day. That’s how monoliths swung.

Today, that’s clearly out of fashion. Nobody seems to maintain anything and the next group wants to reimplement much of the same function in the new flavor of the month. Anecdotally, it does not all look more stable, bug free and performant but it does seem more fun.

/okboomer
Yes, exactly that, you bend out one pin per chip and wire that up to some decoding logic. But all of the other pins are parallel.
It happens to me with some regularity while massaging large patch series via rebase.

The common pattern is that as a consequence of squashing, rebasing, and so on, an early patch in the series has a bug / compile error that is trivially fixed in the next patch in the series.

In those situation, you have to fix the first commit in a middle of a rebase, but keep the result _after_ the next patch the same. This can currently be done by making the change, immediately reverting it, and then squashing things together again. That is, before you have:

o -- A -- B

Then:

o -- A -- F -- F^{-1} -- B

Then you squash A and F and F^{-1} and B to get:

o -- A' -- B'

Having a more convenient way of doing such fixups would be nice, and I think being able to edit the index directly would help in some of them.
Not op but would like to comment on this:

SSB is great; I'm not sure if others would agree, but while I think it has a lot of problems, none seem inherent (i.e. while they mightn't necessarily be easy to fix, they wouldn't involve any major architectural overhauls or scratch rethinks; what's there is conceptually sound).

The main issue for me is performance and resource usage, which is tricky since a lot of the traditional solutions to perf/resource challenges are cloud-based, which would erode ssb's value. Thinking about SSB on older recycled or embedded systems, etc. is hard.

The other is NIH; this is definitely something I feel the community is acutely aware of however; I recall seeing discussions of parallel implementations in Kafka, etc. years ago. I haven't kept up with recent development though.
They were total jokes at my (admittedly) second-rate-at-best state school. Most of the gen-ed courses failed to go beyond material we'd covered back in 10th grade or so. The English courses were probably the nearest to being remotely "serious" since they at least expected writing and critical reading on a slightly-above-high-school level, usually pretty early in the course.
Ask HN: What do you do when you find out it's already been done?
So you've got an idea for a side project or something that you'd like to start. When you inevitable find out that it's already been done. Do you quit? Do you continue. How do you feel?

I usually feel discouraged. Should I? Should you stick with it, and try to put your mark on it.
Only of you downsample to text. The inflection, tone and manner of speaking convey huge amounts of data, reguardless of how much is used for framing. This is to ignore facial expression, gesticulation, and posture, which are also part amd parcel of human speech, phones be damned.
The car free concept is strictly about city centers, and has nothing to do with those who live in the suburbs or rural areas. Absolutely no one is advocating removing cars from those areas. This has nothing to do with elitism, and everything to do with optimizing transportation for different environments. Proponents usually advocate for better metro transit networks, which would benefit those who live outside the city centers.
I think this is fairly overblown, there are a fair number of FUSE for macOS forks out there with signing certificates.

I have kext signing certificate for ExpanDrive, Google has one for Google Filestream, I suspect many others have one as well. Rightfully, Apple doesn't hand them out as easily as they do with regular developer certificates, but if you want one and do a reasonable job representing that you're not going to panic end-user systems, you can get one too.

FUSE for macOS remains open source, fork it if you want. Benjamin merely decided not to work on it for free anymore and essentially providing bug fixes etc for those who pay for it.

Lastly - FUSE of macOS is not going to be around in the current form much longer. Apple has made it abundantly clear that Kernel Extensions are on the way out, and that macOS 10.15 will be the last release to fully support kexts without compromises. Check this slide from WWDC

https://imgur.com/a/EAzT6Ch
Supercharging Windows Search
The GP is me. CC is not open source^TM and hence closed source^TM.

> "Open source" is a misnomer,

Sure, but who cares? The fact is that if you tell me "this software is open source" I know that this is a domain specific term and what it means, just like "this is a normal vector". In particular "normal" here means something else than in standard English.

The only thing you are then doing is complaining about how you wanted to use "normal" for your new cool definition.... That ship has sailed.
Claiming that I live in an urban area does not suddenly make my commute walk-able or produce new public transportation options. I live in an urban area and still need transportation. My city does not allow mixed use buildings, which would go a long way toward reducing the need for transportation.
Tips for Software Engineering Careers, After 30 Years of Life
I think you're confusing me with somebody else.
I wouldn't mind if there was a "DONATE" button, I'd certainly donate 5$ or 10$. Under these circumstances even more since this driver is unique and several other drivers I use depend on it. (sshfs, perkeep, ext4fuse, ...) Probably these small but frequently used projects should also be supported by the FSF, at least in the *GPL case.
I can understand this. I know my company has a bug backlog a mile long, and some real issues we should put substantial time into; but it would rather have HR put downwards pressure on compensation while pursuing record buybacks. It gives a sense for what the priorities are.
One popular attack on public transportation is to tie it to class and race issues, in order to prime people to think in zero-sum, tribal terms. Another is to place the burden of solving every transportation problem upon those who would dare propose any modification to the status quo.

Once you see it, it stops working so well. (More depressingly, you see this cynical strategy repeated elsewhere and repeated by people who don't actually realize what's going on.)
if anything, whimsical memery adds authenticity, sincerity, hacky feeling. i'd be suspicious of anything more packaged or polished