skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The largest corporation (not government-owned) in existence today is a microscopically small fragment of the size of the corporate behemoths of 100 years ago, and the corporations of one hundred years ago were microscopically minuscule compared to the largest corporations of 400 years ago.

Not only that, but the ancient proto-corporations were not partners with government, they were governments.

For about 20 years, the Mississippi Company was worth between $5-7 trillion, adjusted for inflation. That's about 6 Microsofts, and at the time of the Mississippi Company there were many chartered trading companies that ruled over their dominions with iron fists. Microsoft doesn't have a private army.

How did puny little Microsoft/Google/Apple/BP/GE/Chase/whoever/whatever "end" the class war when Standard Oil did not?
> My heart goes out to the people I overhear at work, the ones who are struggling the most, lamenting and complaining that tool X (In this case scala) is “so” embarrassingly awful and, with the implication that it’s to blame

Yah, I have noticed lately a division between two types of programmers.

The first is the "infrastructure oriented" programmer. They assume that the rank and file programmers will be expected to write bad code. They look at problems in the codebase as a sign that there is a missing piece of infrastructure. They 1) wait for the pain level to get high enough on the team, 2) identify a class of problems that is not getting solved well, 3) install or implement a new service/middleware/library that solves that class of problem elegantly, and 4) port all of the crappy code over to the new reality.

The second is the "pattern oriented" programmer. They assume that sloppy code will create areas of rot around it that become cost centers, and that "low hanging fruit" cleanup tasks will generally pay for themselves. When there are problems in the codebase, they go back and refactor. They advocate for team discussions of patterns, establish precedent for the team to follow, and expect other members of the team to learn and apply those patterns correctly.

I'm not really sure whether these two types of programmers should work together. Each group's primary assumption:

1) Programmers will inevitably do sloppy things, and'

2) "Low-hanging cleanup" pays for itself

... is correct in practice. The problem is they are somewhat at odds in terms of pointing to a high level strategy.

If you are committed to ripping out and replacing large parts of the codebase when they become unworkable, there's not really any point to trying to keep up with tidying.

And if you tidy, you won't really need to rip out large parts of the codebase.

So maybe we should just each try to find a team that fits with our values, rather than argue about it.
Artificial Intelligence Rewind 2019
I have a Mazda 6. I would say that Mazda is a mature manufacturer. Yet the Mazda, which I purchased brand new from the factory, sight unseen (big mistake), shook at high speeds (I found out later due to a warped brake rotor), sounded like the windows were cracked at all times and you couldn’t ever roll them all the way up (for which Mazda issues a TSB years later), pulled to the right because it came off the truck out of alignment, and made a crunch vibration in the pedal every time I pushed the brakes. The dealer refused to even acknowledge any of these problems. I had no recourse.

On the other hand, Tesla lets you return the car within a week if you don’t like it.
I can't see how libertarians would actually work in a space colony situation.

Leaving aside how self-sustaining a space colony could ever truly be (Charlie Stross has written a lot about that), in a world as fragile as a space colony would be, I see fascism as vastly more likely than libertarian. If literally anyone can push the a button and kill a substantial percentage of the colony, you have substantially more risk from mental health issues, angry people, etc. than you do here on earth. And that leads to repression and using force to assert control.
So they put the type of guys who like to cut costs at the expense of everything else, including safety measures in charge? I feel safer too!
I bet some of them are moving a little faster than we expected them to and are just not where we last saw them. Creepy nonetheless.
I mean, are you advocating for the policy that people shouldn't be allowed to say this?

Would you have also advocated that people shouldn't say "mold cures disease"? How would we have then come to a consensus that in fact this mold does cure bacterial infections if we couldn't discuss it because it was considered "too dangerous to ever discuss"?
That is not at all the definition used in the article which is the point of the OP's comment.

If the membership and topics are exclusive based on comfort then it is, by definition, not a safe space for any kind of difficult conversation. It's just a private club.
> It's not up you how somebody wants to be addressed after requesting it.

Really? If you were to ask me to address you as Your Imperial Majesty, you should not hold your breath waiting for me to comply.

Language evolves; in formal English, singular they has long been unacceptable. (Informal English is another story.)

EDIT:

>You don't have to harbor cruel feelings about it.

You're proving my point in assuming I "harbor cruel feelings" about trans people.
SpaceX still put satellites in orbit. From what I understood, SpaceX tests the entire software where they simulate launches. Something such as different timers should've been caught already.

Anyway, I do not care too much about pointing fingers elsewhere. The parachute thing was quite embarrassing and IMO this problem should have been prevented as well.
So, let's acknowledge that we're just random people on a message board discussing a complicated topic neither of us are authoritative about, and that we're both going to do the standard message board thing of quickly Googling for resources that connect to our arguments.

With that said: the resources I found strongly suggest that puberty blockers are, especially for patients with strong dysphoria (which is dangerous in its own right!) safe and present no meaningful long-term consequences.

The more powerful argument here would be that the people who do have the most authority in this subject --- medical professionals --- appear to have achieved a consensus on this topic, and that most of the push-back on it seems to be from laypeople second-guessing them. If those laypeople themselves can generate powerful arguments, more power to them, but I don't see what they are. So far, I'm inclined to trust the doctors.

Outside of the Jordan Peterverse, I don't see "legal consequences for misgendering people" as a live issue, but I'll say right now that I'm only familiar with and interested in the debate in the US, where the story we're commenting on takes place, and which is the most important venue for the "snowflakes and safe spaces" debate.
- another stat for you: most entrepreneurs fail "about twice" before making it, i.e. you'll probably fail 1-3 times for sure before entering the 5% of those who create a profitable business. Trick #1, thus: you can roll the dice several times (consider 2-5 years per "real try").

I've never heard of this stat. Seems like a case of survivorship bias more than anything else.

For every entrepreneur that "made it" on their third try, there are millions who had to declare bankruptcy and set their career back years because their ventures didn't work out.
The list of Front-end technologies explained
Yes.

I don't see the US winning this one given China's brute force, no rules approach. See their social credit thing.

SV as great as it is will have a hard time competing against that wild west approach given that it is still constrained by rules.
I was expecting to find it there, but older people who I've walked through these interfaces would expect it to be under something like "settings" or "switch account" rather than "this account".

Also, it's really a stretch to say that an action related to account x is "switch to account y."
> Memcached, Redis, and Postgres are all dangerous to use because they are written in C?

Yes, actually. And in fact, both Redis and Memcached have been implicated in both security issues and their policy misconfigurarions have lead to widespread DDoS attacks.

As for Postgres, I think most of the industry has finally stopped directly connecting postgres to the public internet. It took many years to get any of these projects as stable as they are, and all have had major security issues in that path.

You should expect those problems if you start a new project in C, with roughly the same lifecycle. Even if you play it in fast forward (say, 25% faster) you're still in for years of major security and stability issues.

This seems ill considered in 2019.

> Does your blanket statement apply to C++ and other C derivatives as well? If so, we lose MySQL, Oracle SQL, MS SQL. Basically every database written more than a decade ago.

No, although you really need to stick to the libraries to make C++ safe. Bare pointer handling and falling back on C-like semantics is dangerous.

> From what I can tell general consensus seems to be that all of those systems are pretty stable and not dangerous because of their language choice.

I'm not sure how we'd directly measure it. Most folks I know trust Memcached slightly more than Redis because its smaller, but consider both to be risky and best when not directly connected to the public internet, as is common with MySQL and Postgres.
Done now!
Thank you for breaking this down -- since the author compared BigCache to the built in `map`, this collision behavior is precisely what brought on my line of thinking.

Of course BigCache is faster than the builtin map -- they are completely different kinds of hash table.

As malisp explains in a comment above, BigCache is a "direct mapped cache".
It pretty much does solve the versioning issue. “Latest, always”. The downside is the abysmal state of monorepo build tools. With multirepos, who updates the downstream repos’ dependency files (e.g., requirements.txt) when an upstream project releases a change? And is the policy “latest, always” or do you support N versions of every package? I would argue that the latter is insane at any scale, and the former leaves you dealing with dependencies manually (someone is updating the downstream repos’ dependency files when an upstream change is released) or you build automation that does it and you’re well on your way to implementing your own monorepo-like build tool.

Everything is hard, unfortunately.
That's all well and good but it seems to me all of these "new" forms of organization are essentially to benefit the ultra-rich at the expense of everyone else. There is nothing here that will help working-class people, and instead, seems to seek to abandon them.
The article tries to make the sub-point that the swab was somehow an excessive test - I was trying to highlight that this is not the case, which makes the overcharging even more egregious.

Also to clarify, in Australia there is no cost to anyone with permanent residency status, whether they are insured or not.
The suggested failure/problem was in the software side.
Are you talking about Hawkfish, CNBC, Bloomberg or Washington Post?
so by putting everyone at risk with really minimal security looking at conviction rate and who really are sexually abusing the kids (hint, it's not a rando on the internet) is a better alternative to a long term advantage of having better highly educated parents that will stop cycle of mismanagement across generation like how abuse spreads from one generation to another. Principles and behavior do too.

Why not ask politicians to put forward regulations that makes it mandatory for companies to make parental control accessible and usable?
But of course that won't do. Parents should have no responsibility beyond giving the kid an iPad or a smart surveillance device.
You're thinking of Project Narwhal: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/02/project-narwhal-...

I think the distinction here may be "the Obama campaign" vs "the DNC" but yes, the media lauded expansive data collection, microtargeting, and get out to vote (gotv) efforts in the ancient days of 2012-2015.
Facts are objective truths. I don't see how discussing them could ever be a problem, regardless of how you consider the person quoting them.

"Drink bleach to cure diseases" is not a fact. I'm not sure what that example is supposed to mean. Obviously people making stuff up is a problem but isn't that the complete opposite of facts?
The Third Food Revolution
By the title, I though this would be a discussion about the MacOS System 7 Penis Bar: that weird resizable control strip that stuck out from the edge of the the screen with control panel pop-up menus and a grinning spotted dick head at the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7....

You could drag the dick head left and right to make it shorter or longer, or drag it around to different parts of the screen, but it was always horizontal and stuck out from the left or right edge of the screen, never vertical sticking out from the top or bottom.

You could click the head and it would retract so only the head stuck out, and then click again and it would sproing back out to reveal the shaft at its original length that you'd set.

I would have loved to see the focus groups they ran on that. I wonder if there are any video tapes of Steve Jobs demonstrating it at MacWorld?

Eventually somebody at Apple must have realized that it looked like a penis, and then it quietly disappeared from a later version of MacOS. The spots on the head did not look healthy.
This is of course a glib statement, but in general cached have specific (often configurable) eviction policies, so we would expect to see the root of the cache held perpetually anyways.
If you are talking about mapping kernel address space into userland Linux does that too (or at least did until Spectre). It's a performance win because you don't need to flush the TLB on every syscall. You can't normally access the data because only ring0 may actually read from it.

GDI objects make these even more complicated because they were originally designed to be fully userspace, but were moved to kernel for performance reasons back in the NT 4 days. "Security" meant something quite different back in the early 90s when this was done.
Chapter 3 text 8 of the Gita on Karma Yoga

Perform your prescribed duty, for action is better than inaction. A man cannot even maintain his physical body without work.
This is a harder problem than you seem to imply. There are very few physical activities I truly enjoy and these tend to require a significant investment of time and money (like skiing) and are not sustainable on any schedule that makes them useful as regular exercise. There are activities that I enjoy occasionally (hiking, running), but I feel like if I started doing them on schedule (I tried), the way I go to the gym, they would become a lot less enjoyable, because it is now a chore rather than entertainment. So I would rather go to the gym and hate it than grow to hate the things I actually like.
The linked article made this claim, so it's perfectly fine to debunk it here.
It gets worse. They just updated the Terms, however, they copied them directly from this site here:

https://scale.com/legal/terms

They even forgot to change the links, so all sebenz.ai links still go to the scale site...
I always had trouble with videos. Some of the nicer gyms near me do kettlebell classes, so that might be worth it as a more cost effective way to get a professional opinion.

If you learn how to do a good get-up, it's one of the best full body workouts. 10-15 of those, 80-100 swings, and you're basically doing simple and sinister.

My favorite part of it is I don't have to go for a run and I still get a great cardio workout!
There's a somewhat progressive government in Honduras,
Pres gets kidnapped by military and flown out of the country
Thiel + friends get ready to buy out a piece bringing prosperity and justice
I'ma be real with you chief. That's hella shallow and pedantic.

I think it would be hurtful and disrespectful to die on such a mole hill instead of just accommodating people over something so simple.
Is there a scientific way to distinguish evolutionary biology from bourgeois ideology?
We need a variety of cell that is transparent to wavelengths plants use, so they could be used above farmland and pasturage. Many plants could probably be grown under them in places where it would otherwise be too hot, maybe even needing less water.
How do you know what is an isn't an objective truth? People disagree about things. You've just shut down a real (and inexplicably popular) opposing view, that vaccines are poison and bleach is medicine. What gave you the right to do this?
Scrooge Had a Vocation Too
>and there's not a straightforward reason to think that physical exercise is flipping some binary master switch that is "good" (by some arbitrary definition) for all cells.

Its not about a "master switch" turning on/off good/bad. The systems must work together to promote healthy metabolism of the cells/energy production. Catabolism and anabolism have separate metabolic pathways controlled by a distinct set of hormones.

Anabolism and catabolism must be regulated to avoid the two processes occurring simultaneously. Each process has its own set of hormones that switch these processes on and off. Anabolic hormones include growth hormone, testosterone and estrogen. Catabolic hormones include adrenaline, cortisol and glucagon.

More generally going back to the idea of muscle...you can't lift weights and gain muscle (i.e. grow) without also gaining fat. Growth can't be isolated to muscle cells, the entire body must be anabolic to grow, which means growth of fat cells too. Many people do not understand this basic point and will swear they put on muscle and lost body fat, it doesn't work that way growth is an all or nothing metabolic process. What can be done is you can add more muscle than fat, but you will be adding both. Or in the alternative you can't lose fat and not loss muscle, if you lose fat you are catabolic and you will loss muscle. Similarly it may be possible to loss more fat than muscle, but you will be losing both. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, in which case you would be sure to be an overnight billionaire, without any exogenous drugs/hormones, it is impossible to simultaneously grow muscle/lose fat.
The entire series is amazing. In addition, he has a collection of short stories 'The Wandering Earth'. If you want to see a movie loosely based upon the ideas of one of those shorts stories, look up the movie 'The Wandering Earth' on Netflix.

Just to give some background, I watched that movie not realizing what it was based off of, just knowing it was a chinese sci-fi. And I remember being amazed at how big the ideas were and thinking China must have a culture of exceptional sci-fi writers. Afterwards I did some research and realized who it was.

Cixin Liu is the author and he's so good at big ideas. I can't recommend his stuff enough.

edit:

link

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+wandering+earth+cixin+liu
> In practice, you deal with the unproductive employee, lying partner, etc. the same way you always have.

> But it means you don't let it affect you emotionally in the same way.

“When the great doctor D. T. Suzuki was asked what is it like to be enlightened he said, ‘It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.’”

— Alan Watts
This is a plot element in The Dark Forrest [0] book. Otherwise called the Dark Forrest theory [1]

[0]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest

[1] https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/the-dark-forest-theory...
Can anyone recommend a decent CO2 and VOC monitor for a desktop? It'd be great to have something to help tell me when I need to improve the ventilation.
It sounds like you have a similar story—if I understand correctly, you went to Stanford as a veteran? If you'd be willing to share more, I think readers here would be interested.
That's definitely not the norm. A lot of companies offer ESPPs to buy their own stock at a discount, which is fine, but 401k matching in company stock instead of cash is a major red flag.
Do you cool off the flour tortillas to prevent the butter from melting? I'm curious now!
AFAICT, the foreign agent stuff happened in the 2014 mid-terms and was only exposed when they came under fire for the data breach. I think why CA went down is not because the core of what they were doing was illegal, but because after their data scandal no campaign would have wanted to associate with them.

Ironically, there are so many snake oil peddlers in the data brokerage business that my hunch is that they probably didn't actually derive much value from the data they got in trouble for having.
Is there an easy or more automated way to do this in WordPress?
Imagine paying to have extra oxygen inserted into homes, schools, and offices. To offset CO2 levels. Or perhaps we will use CO2 scrubbers. This will further increase the division between the haves and have-nots because it puts a higher price tag on cognitive abilities.
I have a car that "requires 91 or above". It runs fiiiine on the "regular" octane (87). Obviously, you don't want to do it for an extended period, and if you do use it, it's not a great idea to put your foot down.

I have run into very rural stations with only 87 and a bottle of octane booster behind the counter.
Even as a libertarian I would argue that libertarianism will not be the guiding principle of space exploration for a long time to come.
YouTube is a net positive for society, and I will say that to anyone.

It’s also an attractive nuisance, as it is a single point of failure (in the form of censorship) to most common video publishing.
> I think the studies are looking at this backwards. Physical activity should probably be looked at as the natural state of humans and ask why lack of physical activity affects the brain.

I wonder if there's a selfless gene in humans that reduces the reproductive fitness/longevity of humans that aren't pulling their weight for the group. I could imagine that a gene that shortens the life of a member in a group could increase the survivability of the gene in the same way that we've documented selfless genes that spur primates to alert predators to save close relations at their own personal expense.

Lack of activity might just be telling the body that we're useless and we need to exit in order to help others. It's a silly idea, but just a shower thought I've been mulling over.
I don't think that's fair considering how government approach is to blame the privacy for their incompetency and alternative intentions.
Why should politicians who statistically have higher chance of being potential criminals than average population be able to use encryption?