skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed money printing solves the gross income promise. I meant real income as the problem as well.

UBI, guaranteed jobs, seems all these solutions fundamentally require sufficient money flow to work. People spending slowly (rich or poor) means low tax/biz revenue causing program failure. I think the key problem is how we can guarantee the economy to sustain X velocity of money.
Does a lion born in a zoo understand it's being held captive by (in comparison) super intelligent humans? When it's tranquilized, does it know this isn't a normal thing for a lion? When the caretaker throws food out or pets it, does the lion have the capacity to think about it in any other way than what it means right now for the lion - food, feels nice, etc?

If there's a correspondingly more intelligent alien species hanging out on our planet with us, would / could we even hope to know?
Changes in US Soybean Production from 1974-2018
Do you use a web browser?

Then 200+ companies already have shadow profiles on you.
You shouldn't have to find a half dozen toggles somewhere. there should be a master toggle somewhere that turns that crap off. Location, sync, listening, all that stuff. They could provide that if they were serious about privacy, but they don't
If the introduction of UBI is coupled with the dismantling of existing social safety net it is effectively the privatization of public welfare, and will result in all the related pitfalls.
In scenarios where the other water available for purchase has risk of being sewage-contaminated, that negative association might not exist.
All you're really saying with your post is you'd rather live in an oligarchy (free market players) than a democracy (the state). The free market is in no way fairer or less corrupt than elections, but it is more single-mindedly incentivised by the profit motive. I fail to see the inherent moral victory.

Many people add on the mistake of thinking they will belong to the class of enlightened despots. You haven't said enough for me to tell if you're one of those.
everything is okay now?
And yet, over time, humanity has trended to respecting the life of all sentient creatures. It seems like in the limit, especially if scarcity of resources is eliminated, all life will be precious and valued.
https://www.whereisroadster.com/

“A telescope about 51,075 ft (15,568 m) in diameter would be required to resolve the Upper stage from Earth. A smaller one could see him as an unresolved dot, about 98.2 ft (29.9 m) in diameter, in ideal conditions”

So I recon that reinforces the hypothesis.
I think they meant "in the hundreds" not "between $100 and $200". Rent for less than $1000.
Of course some radical indian activist wants to contrive a link between modern mass shootings and the wars against savage indians . . . perhaps even collect some sympathy or restitution money as the result ?
I think your assumptions about what is hard and what is easy to detect need some recalibrating.

Alien life forms wouldn't need to use technology to make themselves harder to detect. It's extremely difficult by default.

They would need to use technology to deliberately spread a message in a way that is at all likely to be detectable, and even then would still have to get quite lucky.
It would still take a long time to actually send all that data to BigQuery
There is also the issue of QA in the supply chain (to be clear, by making this comment I'm not necessarily saying that the GP in particular didn't have pure DMT).

I've seen multiple studies, mostly looking at pills sold as MDMA, which examined the actual content of samples of street drugs, and the findings were not exactly surprising - almost all samples were not pure (I mean, aside from cutting agents!) MDMA, often containing significant amounts of amphetamine.

In a legal, regulated marketplace, there are guarantees of quality, which would represent a huge increase in safety for drug users.

With a legal marketplace, production would also shift from global cartels to local businesses - improving lives, creating local jobs and increasing tax revenues.

The fact is that there will always be a market for drugs - people have afterall used drugs for millennia - so why not accept that and try to make something better of it?

There are of course risks to taking any drugs, just as there are with alcohol - but the potential for good by legalising is staggering.
But your argument requires that all these branches, separated by light years, collapse, and then stay collapsed forever. The counterargument does not require that they progress exponentially forever. They can go through cycles, even extinctions, but the remnants can pick themselves up and go on.

Your scenario requires a uniformity of outcome across all the parts of that civilization, spread across multiple stars, and spread across all future time. They all have to go down and stay down.
Doing nothing may cause an even worse situation.
I would be especially careful of arguments that end up like "it's a great opportunity for humankind as no-one else is there to compete for the next million years"

It might be true. But the most likely thing we will find on the nearest habitable planet is a legal writ and summons.
Sure, there's still plenty of "You" in YouTube, but it is absolutely not what is featured by the site itself as it was in the past. YouTube would probably be much more profitable if we all consumed only those channels and it was just "Netflix with PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles". I think if they dropped all the other content at the current time, there would be a lot of backlash. The danger is after ten years of psychological manipulation of users (e.g., the main feed), many of whom will be young and not know the 'old' YouTube, they might be able to get away with it.

> People need to get over this hipster delusion that quality of production is inversely correlated to quality of content. There's plenty of horrible content on Youtube with low production value from random people (take a look at reaction videos,) and plenty of good content both poorly and well produced.

One of two of my pet peeves with YouTube videos. Good content is 90% of the way there. I don't know why some YouTubers quit there or why people make excuses for them. There are literally YouTube videos about how to make good YouTube videos. Even a little effort in production goes a long way.

(The other peeve is videos that should be 30 seconds long but are 10 minutes long. Although a good portion of that has to do with incentives created by YouTube and/or monetization of the videos.)
> I don’t think fixing broken technology requires the ongoing involvement of the state

If said technology served to meet universal basic needs, the state would have to be involved somehow. Otherwise, how would someone destitute be able to pay a mechanic to fix the machine that makes the food? That money would have to come from somewhere, and if we're guaranteeing that everyone has a right to a working food-making machine, then it's hard to see how private interests keep those machines running.

The idea that we could just give everyone a food-making machine and solve state dependency issues just seems so shortsighted in how technology and government really works. I struggle to think of a single consumer appliance that doesn't require some kind of maintenance, which would have to be paid for somehow.
This is unfortunately very common but doesn't take away the fact that privacy on Android can be significantly improved with very small changes.

For example:

* Reintroduce the network permission

* Add a notification event so your smartwatch etc can subscribe to that instead of requiring full access to your email account

* Clean up the Google privacy settings which is right now the most complex part of Android

* STOP passive data gathering for giving users crappy services they don't use anyway. Let them actively search when needed.
I'm thinking of trying to dump my smartphone for a flip phone. It's much easier to control tracking/privacy from a laptop. Maybe I don't need the Internet everywhere I go?
Ants then. Or even bacteria.
If that happened you would probably see (wealthy) people migrating to underground bunkers to protect themselves and interact using VR. That could be one of the explanations why they don't go out to create colonies and make enough noise for us to detect them.
>Because they bought low-property housing from the entity who previously owned it without a guarantee that the demand was going to be there and then demand grew. Risk meet reward.

Risk? More often than not, they engineer the growing of demand, help throw out old tenants (even with thuggish methods), select new tenants to drive up values (e.g. with redlining), use connections in the city government to develop specifically the areas they bought or intent to buy, and so on...
yes.

Edit: Ok. This is a common argument (well apart from
the "living on earth with us" bit which requires some Doctor Who levels of mind-wiping so let's discount that.

Lions see humans in the zoo, and they see the walls of theie prison. Lions definitely have had psychological problems in the worst run zoos so it is fair to say they are affected and aware.

Are they aware of the concept of zoo? Equally unlikely. And the next question is how much more intelligent is a human to a lion. the answer is not comforting to us as a species.
Show HN: Containerd Provider for OpenFaaS
There a secondhand iPhones (it's also better for the environment). Otherwise no alternative than using a desktop computer and forego some smart conveniences.
K
kk
Ask HN: Best data storage strategy for SMB
What is the current go to data strategy if you are too big for Dropbox but not yet enterprise level?

We are a fast growing architectural design studio. We’re currently about 60 designers mainly co-located but with some remote workers and people often work from home.

The designers are mainly working with CAD and increasingly Point Cloud files. Often with multiple people accessing the same files in short periods of time.

Up until now we have been using Dropbox but it is driving the team insane. Sync speed, lack of file locking, clunkiness of selective sync and conflicted copies being the biggest challenges.

We have a web dev engineering team but no one with deep data storage knowledge.

This feels like a common situation for small to medium sized business. How has your company handled it?

- Stick with Dropbox?
- Set up your own data center?
- Outsource it to a local data specialist?
- Use enterprise cloud vendor?
- Something else entirely?

We are willing to spend money on the right solution but just currently unsure what that is.
> The 30K of JavaScript is completely optional. Turn off JavaScript and you see the content-only version, turn it back and you'll get the full experience with all the dynamic components. By implementing the page in this way the added SPA functionality won't break the page if the client does not support JavaScript.

While I explicitly applaud that, the layout of the page is slightly different depending of JavaScript is enabled or not. So why do they use JavaScript for the layout there?
Show HN: Inlets – 2019 Year in Review
I don't have Apple music, but the YouTube integration mentioned seems like something Apple wouldn't offer.
Amazingly bad advice yourself, listing Brave and Cliqz as privacy-focused alternatives before Firefox.
A simpler and easier way to calculate the day of the week for any date is the First Sunday Doomsday algorithm: http://firstsundaydoomsday.blogspot.com/2009/12/quick-start-...

(There’s also a earn-by-example page: http://firstsundaydoomsday.blogspot.com/2011/01/learn-by-exa...)

Using Sundays rather than doomsdays simplifies the arithmetic. Another improvement the above approach incorporates is the odd+11 rule for calculating the year code.
Shub.one A new business social media platform
With everyone complaining about Facebook in every way! and LinkedIn becoming a jobs platform.... there is a new alternative platform start up for business and professionals, not a lot of profile on there but it is quite good
It's not the people who write the code, it's their management. If they were paid to write secure privacy centric code then that's what would happen
Red Hat works by following open source trends. With Kata we have been following it upstream very closely since the Clear Containers days, as well as having people being involved with the project, and now we're productizing it.
So you are saying that we should feel like monarchs because we have TVs, Netflixes, Games, gadgets, toys etc.

I would argue that many people nowadays feel more like slaves than monarchs since they can hardly even afford healthcare in many cases, they probably won't have a pension due to current demographics, they have to hand over half of their salary to various land lords, tax lords, pension lords, healthcare lords and other various fee lords.

True, It does feel like Feedalism again, but for many not from position of monarchs but serfs.
The main advantage that keeps people using YouTube seems to be discoverability (and of course momentum). Would it be feasible to make a search engine that aggregates across YouTube and some of these alternatives to facilitate gradual transitioning, or are there technical/policy limitations to doing that?
I appreciate seeing your comments. The Fermi paradox and these similar ideas seem the modern equivalent to assumptions the sun revolves around the earth. We need more research and infrastructure in this solar system to really progress on this.

Imagine if we had thousands of microsats in orbit around the various planets that we could triangulate data amongst? We need to be more aware of our solar system before we can even make reasoned arguments about life within it alone.
> Why would they stop at thousands of colonies

Why would we stop at a hundred of colonies? A couple of observations:

- in rich countries, the trend is that the birth rate is declining, the population gets "older". There seems to be a link between wealth and birth rate. Even if space conquest gives us a lot of resources, if that trend persists, the lack of people will be the limiting factor.

- there are only really two reasons to go out: curiosity and making sure that a stellar-scale catastrophic event doesn't wipe out our civilization. A bunch of colonies "far enough" from Sol achieves this. And probably after visiting a dozen of systems, the next one will look like one of the previously visited.
So... What questions are you asking yourself?
I personally subscribe to the school of thought that interstellar travel is impossible, except through some form of suspended animation or generation ships (which both have its own problems). So no warp/hyperdrives, no wormholes, no shortcuts to travel between the stars. This article dismisses that notion before it even begins, but this is the only theory that fits the currently observed laws of the universe.
It feels like you just strung together dinne fancy words and didn't provide any reasoning.
The problem with endless expansion is it requires stability over very long time scales. Sending a probe to another solar system is hardly enough. If you can send a ship say 100 light years from your home planet that’s 2,000+ repetitions of terraforming and colonizing a planet, building up an industrial base, then sending ships to every planet in reach. Under ideal conditions that might take 10,000 years assuming everything went well so you need 20 million years to colonize our galaxy. But, assuming everything goes well for 20 million years and colonization continues to be a priority seems unlikely.

It’s very possible to reach a wall where zero teraformable planets are within reach of your ships. For large civilizations that’s unlikely to totally block expansion, but it might make the path very convoluted thus increasing total time by a rather extreme factor.
I'm curious what the state of the home automation installation/service market is these days; I do home renovation professionally and have a programming hobby so this seems like a fun area to get into.
This is an interesting theory I have considered as well, however there is a reason to disbelieve it. It assumes at its core the diffusion of some form of highly destructive technology, and that the technology will be unleashed in an irreversible way before it can be recognized and “put back in the box”, or it can’t be “put back in the box”.

These assumptions individually seem strong but together they get quite weak. For example, diffusion of civilization over several planets before this technology is diffused provides a potential firewall. (For example, once the technology is recognized, an orderly exodus is made which forcibly leaves behind any trace of it.) Alternatively, the diffusion itself may not occur as well, similar to the current life-ending technologies we have now that can only be created by state actors.

It is a legitimate prospect — but hinges upon several aspects hung together to get to a point where it’s an inductive invariant explaining fermi.
Apple is getting better at providing more affordable iPhone options. You’re not getting a flagship under a thousand bucks but you’ll still have a damn good device that’ll be supported for a while.
The theory of this article is that we are not just in a gulf of space but also a gulf of time. We are after all on the relative outskirts of our galaxy, vastly isolated from other civilizations. Perhaps one day we'll be the ones knocking on our neighbor's door to say hello!
We don’t know how fragile technological civilisations are because we’ve only got one example. It’s reasonable to say the technological civilisations are highly specialised, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that excessive specialisation is fragile as we have many examples of that in the form of biological speciation.

However, the economic cost of making an interstellar colonisation ship is so vast, that from where we are it seems reasonable to assume that anyone who does it has fully automated manufacturing and resource gathering – or, to put it another way, they are post-scarcity. If you’re post-scarcity, then you’re no longer fragile, because you can have a complete backup of everything you need, including the skills needed to rebuild.

Of course, there’s lots of ways for things to go wrong, and if I were to imagine badly written control software that means the fully automated manufacturing kills everyone, I’d be accused of being too derivative rather than implausible…
Just watch the Good Night show on PBS Sprout
There are many stars and planets much much older than ours. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, the oldest exoplanet we've seen is 12.8 billion.

The terms of the Fermi paradox are are designed to cover things like this.
It doesn't even make sense to think about permissions for unikernels. There is exactly one application running. The trust boundary is at the edge of this application/kernel/VM thing, not anywhere within it.
Airbnb’s New Year’s Eve guest volume shows its falling growth rate
Show HN: A tiny web-based editing tool that can be used by everyone
Dear HN folk,

I wish you success with your personal projects and of course the best possible health.

Concerning the lambda way project, whatever introduction I make:

http://lambdaway.free.fr/

http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/?view=whitepage

http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/?view=lambda

http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/?view=prime_pattern and following…

time has gone by … and I must come to the conclusion that my interests (expressed in the lambdaway project) are far off the radars of HN folks, among others. I am not talking about the solution I am outlining in the lambda way project - I'm just an amateur - but about the goal I am aiming for:

Both a tiny web-based editing tool that can be used by everyone, a tiny tool to accompany the exploration of the world of algorithms and another simpler way to introduce programming.

This new year is beginning and I no longer expect any more interest, let alone any help. I think it's time to remind myself that I have been first and foremost an architect working with concrete, steel, and wood and not bits and bytes.
And there is so much beautiful architecture to see, study and live in! The Sagrada Familia, for instance, is less than 200km from my home … a great example of complexity built on a minimalist idea, the chain:
- http://b2b3.free.fr/confs/?view=angles_3

Best new year 2020!
Alain Marty
I recall seeing a study recently looking at using GHB for chronic pain management (which has similar effects to alcohol, but without the hangover).

IIRC, it did work somewhat, but of course the participants felt "drunk".

I suffer from chronic pain caused by small fiber neuropathy in my arms and legs, and can add a single data point: alcohol does help a bit - but the way it does so is more by "distraction", whereas opioids really seem to reduce the pain. It's also completely impractical if you want to drive, work, look after children etc (normal life, basically). But I can certainly see why people would use alcohol if they were unable to obtain prescription medicines that helped them.
I really appreciate those points.

> So in reality, implementing proper VAT system requires powerful government, and also VAT does not survive lobbyism and cronyism.

This kind of kills the VAT being feasible here in the US. We have crazy amounts of lobbying and legal loopholes and while the US gvt is powerful, that's somewhat antithetical to the founding ideals of that.
Interesting philosophical proposition, have an upvote.

It also speaks to the limitations of our senses and the way we experience the world.
Linkerd with MTLS and Traffic-Splitting and OpenFaaS
Fermi paradox. I never liked it.

It presumes too much.

It presumes that technology will advance to the degree that we overcome the speed of light. Not directly, but that's where it has to wind up.

Because no matter how you slice it, it's still four years to Alpha Centauri at the fastest possible speed we know. That means it will be at a minimum 8 years before we know if anything was successful.

And yes, for the travelers, they experience time dilation, but we here on Earth would not. That time does matter. Even with self-replicating Von Neumann probes, they still have to send that information back. That's still going to take time.

How many resources can you dedicate to a bet that's going to take at least a decade to show a return? How many of those bets can you make before you've depleted your resources to the degree that you simply cannot do it anymore?

I think we may find ourselves up against the uncomfortable truth that our cosmic range is rather limited.
If not for people, we could have had a World Calendar? A majority of the earth’s population are religious, so you can pretty easily substitute people for religious groups.
No, it's nothing like that. See my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21920909
Here's the easiest way I’ve seen [1] to determine if a year is a leap year:

If the last two digits of the year are 00, throw them away and keep only the first two digits. Otherwise, keep only the last two digits. The year is a leap year if what you kept is divisible by 4.

Examples:

- The year 1705 does not end in 00, so throw away 17 and keep 05. 05
is not divisible by 4, so 1705 is not a leap year.

- The year 2000 ends in 00, so throw away 00 and keep 20. 20 is
divisible by 4, so 2000 is a leap year.

The standard method [2] is more complicated:

> Years that are divisible by four are leap years, with the exception of years that are divisible by 100, which are not leap years, and with the final exception of years divisible by 400, which are.

[1] https://twitter.com/jordancurve/status/1012203999716618240

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/feb/28/leap-year-al...
I'd argue we should be getting works from the 90s now. 25 years is enough for patents, why not for copyrights?
Seems like re-creating pygsheets, no? https://github.com/nithinmurali/pygsheets
>No new money will be printed to pay for the Freedom Dividend so there will be no inflation.

Wow this is fundamental misunderstanding of what inflation is.
Multiplicative weights or how to approximate maxflow with O(log n) Dijkstras