skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* ethics and morals at the expense of being able to see the failure of their own policy.

How many homeless people did they have to ignore to win a cheap political argument? (a lot)
The European Commission was created by the member states to ensure that the rules that they collectively agreed upon are enforced; it is not "flexing its autonomy". Any member state that no longer wants this is free to invoke Article 50 and leave the union.
>there's also a backdoor that lets the employee contribute more

I'm not sure about backdoors but there is a catchup contribution if you're 50 or over that lets you contribute about another $6K.

401Ks are really this weird little quirk in US tax law that, as I understand the history, came about almost by accident. And they're suboptimal in a lot of ways. Of course, they're now so entrenched as a middle class benefit that it would be political suicide to touch them.

Defined benefit plans would be better for a lot of people although they have their own issues--including underfunding and, at least historically, a very strong bias towards long-term employment at a single company.
Thanks for all your work on code-d. I don't have a lot of experience with d but I really like the development experience that your plug-in provides, it certainly made things easier to learn as a beginner.
Perhaps not a "positive" story, but legit dmcas do happen from time to time and seem reasonable enough to me (or at least reasonable enough in a world with copyrights). For example look at this list of dmca notices against wikipedia that wmf actually thought were valid
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Office_actions/DM... most of them seem reasonable enough to me. (IANAL)

The problem is no effective oversight. Laws without oversight are going to be obviously abused. The DMCA is like if police were responsible to ensure their own warrents are valid.
The idea was lots of people could file for free using a private online service. Not many people at all ended up using it, since it wasn't in the company's interest to have people not pay them.
I agree with you there. My point is that these companies aren't trying to 'take as much as they can'. They're sustaining huge losses with no end in sight.
There are two 18s, the 19 should instead say 20

...

old -> fixed

17 -> 17

18 -> 18

18 -> 19

19 -> 20

20 -> 21

...
Ha! I mean, it's an $8 contact sensor, and a $10 speaker, and the Raspberry Pi I used for snapclient was already nearby and could handle it. (It was/is doing network monitoring).

I did it because, well, I wanted music in the shower. And it is nice getting the house text-to-speech messages in there too.

(Also it changes the lights in the bathroom)

Home automation is pretty fun once you hit a critical mass of sensor data. You can usually implement new features with a single additional smart outlet or contact sensor. For instance: For awhile, I had a neighborhood cat coming by and marking my patio at night (my cats, who I let out during the day, immediately ran to smell it every morning, and I could verify that was indeed the problem with my security cameras).

I bought a powered, default-closed solonoid valve for my outdoor faucet. I already had everything else--a sprinkler/hose, an unused smart outlet, motion events from my patio cameras, I knew if my doors were closed, etc.

So I added automation to: If patio motion at night, and my doors are closed (so my cats aren't outside), and the bedroom is in night mode (extra check so I don't accidentally hit my cats), and it's above 45F outside (don't want to freeze a poor thing), and there's motion on my patio, turn on the sprinkler for 15 seconds. The outdoor cat got caught once, then learned to fear the click of the outlet engaging but would dodge in time, and then never came back.
It's been almost 3 years since Trump became president. He has not gotten us into any new wars, and in general nothing dramatic has happened regarding foreign policy. The U.S. is still in NATO. There may have been some progress with North Korea. Will anyone admit that some dire predictions about Trump were wrong?
People pay $100 for an Uber from JFK to Manhattan when a Taxi is ~$60. So, yeah. People will pay a lot for the convenience.
Good for them. As for the tech workers, they need something like a guild with membership fees and staff lawyers that would sue the state for allowing binding arbitration and non compete agreements (i.e. do what California did).
It's not PC, it's slang for "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)". It was added to Merriam Webster Dictionary in September 2017.
Collective bargaining works just fine in countries that protect it. I'm way more ok with the excesses being spread among multitudes of workers than having those "excesses" concentrated in the bonuses of executives -- which is the situation we have today.

Fixing this requires having an honest discussion about how we distribute wealth between workers and owners. But it's not surprising the people who currently take the lion's share are actively preventing that conversation from happening.

None of this is particularly radical, and it's basically what Bernie Sanders is running on. His positions are solidly center-right by European standards, so it's not like he's proposing some radical thought experiment.
Only if the 2nd law of thermodynamics holds. When speculating about advanced civilizations building Dyson spheres, why not speculate about the bedrock of science as well?

There are (probably) other paths to avoiding this conundrum as well. Spitballing here, but perhaps the 'satellites' in this case can be pairs of orbiting black holes which emit the waste heat in a band we don't detect (gravitational waves).
You're right it's terrible. Don't come.
At the end of the day I think it's just a matter of cost.
If it's cheaper to let a software fail and simply fix it when it does, there will not be much interest into proving it to be correct.
If a failure will likely be vastly more expensive than proving correctness, then proving correctness will make sense.
There are simply way less instances of the second category.
I think one of the few "new" instances, which might be worth mentioning is smart contract programming, where failures can cause millions of loss and proving correctness is not too expensive.
"The entire Gig Economy is based around paying the workers as little as possible"

Remove the word "Gig" from that sentence and you're on the right track. There is a bizarre tenancy for people to proscribe the worst attributes to these newer corporations when the big old corporations have being doing this and vastly worse for literally generations.
This is actually something I thought about recently, and I've slowly began to experiment with not using deodorant. But I'm way more wary of doing so because BO is way more off-putting than greasy hair.

At first, my pits did stink pretty bad. But they did seem to get less so after 3 days. The problem is that I can't tell if my olfactory sense has just adjusted to the stink. Then I recently had a party to go to, and I chickened out and put on deodorant.

By the way, I work from home so I wasn't driving any co-workers crazy with my BO. lol

I've been using deodorant every other day for the last week and that seems to work just fine.
Very much so, if you're opposed to H&R Block and Intuit's stranglehold on tax filing.
You could use the waste heat that goes up the chimney to warm the fluid with something like an automotive intercooler and set the system up backwards, maybe?
I woke up with a mouth full of smoke thanks to this. And they are a couple of hundred Ks away!
Germany did not replace nuclear with coal. Coal consumption is at 50% of pre-drawdown levels.
Cool concept! Excited to see the regression model come out
I posted the videos because they are easier to understand. The underlying mechanism of how mercury can induce β‐amyloid production and tau phosphorylation has been discovered. Here's a paper that discusses the same ideas: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1471-4159...

And I'm not sure why you describe Boyd Hayley's work as low quality. The man has published a huge amount of work, much of which was funded by the NIH.

Ultimately I think the highest quality evidence is the actual curing of sick people. I know my claims of being cured and of others being cured are hard to believe. If you saw first-hand the transformation we went through then you would know we are on the right track.
BART is a child of the Space Age, and Syd Mead was one of its visionaries
> I spent a month of the year just flossing 1 tooth each night (ridiculous, I know!), then 5 months just flossing 1 row (better!)

Not directly related to the habit formation part, but this reminded me of something my dad used to tell us as kids about flossing and brushing teeth when we'd complain about it:

Dad: You know, you don't have to floss and brush them all.

Us (amazedly): Really?

Dad: Nope, just the ones you want to keep.
So ruined that it's one of the most desirable places in the world to live and work, and housing prices are super high as a result. California's "problem" is that it is so successful compared to other states.
Did you get your facts about wind turbines from Trump? /s
Because paying less than a livable wage means those workers have to make up the difference with government benefits. It’s companies trying to shift their operating costs onto taxpayers, which should be discouraged/forbidden.
Thanks for mentioning this, I hadn't seen it mentioned anywhere before in my (admittedly shallow) research.
The yield increases have mainly come from two sources: increased use of chemicals for pest control and fertilizer, and genetic engineering. Both of those are problematic, with consequences only now slowly dawning on most people, and heavy resistance by the industry to any naysaying in public places.

One day, we may recognize the problem and pass laws to limit or prohibit the use of chemicals. (I think the horse is out of the barn on genetic modification.) That will mean lower yields. Further, if California's droughts continue, the Midwest may need to start growing a greater variety of crops beyond corn and soybeans. There is no other place in the U.S. with soil as potentially productive and useful. Wasting it on wind farms when literally any other place will have less potential impact on agriculture is ridiculous.
If Google doesn't pay enough tax - give them the same treatment. Someone steals Googles IP - send a bored policeman to investigate. Someone kidnaps Googles' CEO kids - send a bored policeman to tell them to pay up.
>Now companies are barred from hiding their free products from search engines such as Google, and a years-old prohibition on the IRS creating its own online filing system has been scrapped.

>Under the new rules, participating companies also have to standardize the naming convention of their Free File version as “IRS Free File program delivered by [product name].”

Respect to ProPublica for their commitment to this issue. I first learned of the Free File deal from their reporting and enjoyed the HN comments on their articles.

On the 20-year fight to stop Americans from doing their taxes for free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21281411

On hiding Free File from search engines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126

On tax industry lobbying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21393758
Plot twist: the show was paid for by Big Plastic.
Huge difference there. Legitimate scientists are working on fusion research and nobody but crackpots are into perpetual motion.
>>Simultaneously, we have seen the greatest burst of prosperity in the developing world in recorded history.

Inequality rose: The top 1% share of market income rose from 9.6% in 1979 to a peak of 20.7% in 2007

The environment suffered: The average global temperature has increased by 0.8 degrees.

More worrying than these particular figures is the alignment of incentives that causes the trend. I like what capitalism has achieved in the short term, I worry about the long term where companies have traditionally maximised profit by externalising costs.
Profit maximization isn't as simple as you make out. If multinationals hadn't been as eager to optimize in the short term, there wouldn't have been as much political pressure to clamp down on them, and they may have maximized profits in the longer term.

Usually these things actually occur due to a race to the bottom, both in corporations - if they don't take the profits now, someone else will - and jurisdictions: regulatory arbitrage and competition occurs, and can make everyone worse off. For example, if one country gives tax incentives, then they all might be forced to; or if one country doesn't regulate pollution, then other countries may be forced to become lax. They're both collective action problems, and some kind of international agreement is generally needed to avoid the worst outcomes.

The EU is probably going to bring a variant of CCTB into effect eventually to avoid this kind of thing between EU economies. It won't be good for Ireland in the short term, but I think it's a better long-term approach, if it's done fairly.
Fantastic news!

Now let's have the IRS start building out their free e-file program and IDEALLY put some pressure or at least summarize what parts of the tax code are the most complex so they can be simplified.

A lot of the tax code complexity comes from congress messing with the logic of taxing folks on their income.

And yes, simplifying the tax code would get rid of loopholes like deduction that can exceed the cost of the item placed into service (!) which make zero sense AND create tax vs gaap difference that have to be tracked over long periods of time.

Another one to get rid of - phantom LIFO inventory unless the inventory is real.
HN has always been at war with TurboTax.

Edit: looks like this line didn't go over so well. To avoid distractions, I'm going to move these links to another post and mark this subthread off topic.

Links moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21924055.
A good use might be computing power whether its for storing the minds of everyone in the civilization or powering one big mind or simulating universes or maybe it's all dedicated to finding a way to reverse entropy.

If we're assuming a highly advanced civilization aiming for maximal efficiency I would hope that they have figured out how to make all of their electrical systems out of high temperature superconductors.
If you make the terrible mistake of going to graduate school and then study in any serious depth something that ends up becoming “blog/HN popular”, you’ll have (in my experience) the experience of realizing how many extremely interesting blog posts are just people mashing together one-quarter understood concepts. You’ll also realize some people are surface-level boring but extremely competent, and possibly become afraid of them and their powers.
The borked AoA vane also meant the computer was not calculating airspeed correctly. They were in an Airspeed Unreliable situation, which warrants being generous with power based on the stage of flight.

Climb-out from Adis Ababa (a hot and high airport) means you've got precious little excess in terms of sacrificial power to begin with. The MAX 8 could only take-off at all due to an unusually long runway as I recall.
I believe that’s how TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) works; ADS-B broadcasts aircraft data which is received by other aircraft, and an “advisory” is issued to the crew if a potential for collision is detected. This system operated in this case, for the lower aircraft of the two.
This is one reason I am glad gcc is retaining at least nominal support for old architectures. Clang is great for example, but c++ has changed a lot in the current decade, and clang will not target m68k. GCC allows for interesting retrocomputing experiences.

I keep saying I will power up my old Sun or my 68k Mac running a/ux and try to write something for them. Though having free time is the limiting factor for me.
> What kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from creating software that helps its citizens?

"Lobbying" and "campaign contributions", aka paying congresspeople aka straight up corruption but you can't use the C word in US politics.

H&R Block and Intuit have been greasing palms for years to keep the agreement in place and encode it in law: https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-...

> Those efforts have been fueled by hefty lobbying spending and campaign contributions by the industry. Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.
There is no reason the IRS shouldn't have a simple, online fillable 1099EZ that makes the calculations and validations for you. And while their at it, match the SSN to the w2 info that they have on file. This would take care of 80% of the population.

Just don't outsource it. I'm sure USDS could have it ready in less than a year.
There's a large backstory documented by (mostly) propublica, some of it is here: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

Essentially:
* IRS wanted to open tax software business to private companies.
* Intuit has a variety of products with similar names and each has a free offering for a specific set of tax payers (e.g. income below some number). IRS + US Gov bought the story.
* Intuit caught doing a variety of false advertising, misleading documentation, adversarial website editing, etc. They make it impossibly hard to find which is the free version of whatever you need.

So this is a big first step away from the draconian Intuit monopoly. It would be interesting to know what precipitated this change.
Australia is the biggest climate denying nation in the developed world. They will never take action because that would require then to acknowledge the climate reality.
Those benefits and taxes are why they are fighting it tho.
I wonder if there is any research on whether someone is better off not updating at all or automatically updating. I would bet that apps are better off automatically updating to remove published vulnerabilities than they are worrying about the handful of bitcoin wallet stealing backdoors. [1]

It comes down to trust. Automatically updating something like https://www.npmjs.com/package/express is probably pretty safe. Automatically updating a relatively unknown package made by an unknown person is much less safe.

Also, it goes beyond application dependency changes. What about your build server or that SaaS build pipeline you use? Key infrastructure gets hacked [2][3] and it turns out all the time you spent reviewing express updates should have instead been spent reviewing changes from somewhere else.

[1]: https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

[2]: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994

[3]: https://blogs.adobe.com/security/2012/09/inappropriate-use-o...
I found CS50’s schedule very difficult to keep up with while working full-time. I fell behind at points but I didn’t find much if any penalty in taking a little longer to finish the class. I was motivated and putting the time in to absorb the material to the point where I was satisfied.
And American wages have been stagnant in real terms since the 70s, potentially leading to malignant political forces.
Netlimiter is amazing. Using it for many years. Highly recommended.
This is either a bad joke, an incredible misunderstanding of physics. "perpetual motion machine" is not compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. There's many working fusion reactors, we don't know which, if any, designs will be economical.
Imperative Computation in F#
You'll hear differently, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLKePI0ZbnT69klhhdVXnd9-e... the US effectively functions as a plutocracy. Public opinion and interest just doesn't matter.
We do need to phase out fossil fuels, but we must do so in a way that is not only physically and economically but also politically sustainable.

As we have seen, big changes of any kind that displace or destroy the livelihoods of vast numbers of people always lead to some form of populist or revolutionary revolt. Whether it takes a "left" (populist-socialist/communist) or "right" (national socialist) form depends mostly on which side is able to field the most compelling demagogue that can best harness the anger of the masses.

Abandoning fossil fuels must be done in a way that cushions the public and the economy somewhat or we will have a full scale populist revolt with slogans like "roll coal!"
> Corporations are supposed to maximize profits.

Not at all costs. Maximizing shareholder value doesn't require maximizing profits if there is a better option that leaves the company healthier in the long term. Not being a cancer on society is a valid approach.
I’d suggest doing that operation on the outdoor side exhaust where the heat loss would be irrelevant.
I’d go further: While the philosophy stuff is fun to read, I’d probably remove it all and focus on why someone would want to hire you. In contrast the CV on your site does this quite well. If you must do philosophy, keep it on a blog part of the site. Maybe start a Paul Graham style essay section.
Thank you. Just did this and finally understand vim and I have used some weird editors in my day. This really helped to give me an overview
Opening up the full contribution level for all employees and the self-employed, and simply mandating minimums of employer contribution (to keep them from withdrawing their contributions with this change and not simply adding it on to employee income, pocketing it instead, to avoid disrupting anyone's current retirement benefit) would do a lot to help. Though yeah, touching them in any way will be painted as "trying to take away your retirement", even if it's exactly the opposite.
We've used DMCA to request GitHub takedown repos containing our proprietary software.
Just to clarify why these aren't used everywhere: heat-to-power devices act as insulation (compared to just letting the heat escape). If you have something that you're trying to keep cool, like a CPU, a system that shunts heat straight to the surroundings will always give better cooling than a system that puts layers in between. Contrariwise, if you have a need for electricity, mechanical heat engines will almost always be more efficient. Solid-state heat-to-power only makes sense in a narrow set of cases which aren't suitable for direct cooling or heat engines.
More accurate: Intuit told the federal government they would absolutely offer a free e-file tax service next to their pay service, and then they used several lies and manipulative techniques so that folks could not find it or even discover its existence.
People form governments to set the rules for their society. You don't get to define what is and isn't legitimate government on principles other than democratic consent.
The IRS is perhaps the one government agency that just does not fuck around. It's always sensible to make sure that filing for taxes is as smooth as possible, at least for those who wish to abide by the rules. Follow the money.
It's more political than technical. It matters a lot who is telling the same truth, e.g. for the minutiae of a formal meeting.
We have a huge constituency that believes that government taxes are the very worst thing to happen in human history, so anything that makes filing taxes easier gets heavy push back in order to support their “taxes are so hard and burdensome” narrative.
The only reason labor unions are legal is that certain unions have outsized political clout, in a perfect world labor unions would be illegal under antitrust laws as forcing companies to pay workers more than what a free market dictates inevitably increases prices.
With the amount of infrastructure focused around testing I think the opposite is true.

I think it's more ignorance and culture. Many people don't know about formal methods.