skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the welfare programs are functioning correctly, any decrease in overall population wealth and/or income would naturally have to raise the welfare spend. The alternative would be for the newly poor to suffer and/or die in poverty, because only the existing poor were being assisted by the programs. Incidentally that does seem to be how much of the US safety net is designed to work and we've been actively trying to push more needy people out of the benefits programs, so that's something.

This is a feedback loop. If "spend is going up" is somehow justification for cutting welfare programs or for not funding them, how does that fix anything? The ideal would be to have more than enough funding for all your programs, then work on ideal ways to utilize the extra funding. In the end if there's a surplus you can always cut taxes on the rich again, since US lawmakers are constantly trying to do it anyway.
That's pretty reductionist - it seems to me like we have many non-rich Americans who possess varying strengths of the belief that, generally, the rich rightfully earned all they've come to and in turn provide more or less proportional value to society, and that opinion informs their opinion on wealth taxes. As well, the implication that not-havers broadly can not be relied upon to express holistic or worthy opinions on their own society's rules regarding havers is ridiculous.
I'm so sorry. I've been there too and that powerlessness is devastating.

It seems like the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction from how we treated mental illness in the previous century (aggressively locking people up in institutions).

It would be a huge benefit to society if we could find a (relatively safe from abuse) mechanism to treat people who are "functional" yet too mentally ill to stop their self-destructive behaviors. I'm not sure how that would/could work, but it's a worthwhile goal.
> shitty 250k house out in the sticks

I think you might be disconnected from what a house costs in less-than-desirable areas, but there are houses you can find within driving distances of major jobs hubs for a fraction of that price. Sure, they won't be nice, but you used the word "shitty" and implied a middle-of-nowhere locale.

When I left Pittsburgh not too long ago, you could buy a house across the river from where I worked for about $30k. Yes, it sucked and wasn't a great spot, but that's a lot cheaper than $250k and I could walk to work.

I just checked and found a shitty fixer upper (so a lot of work) in the same spot for $40k. And there are plenty of nicer houses that don't need work for under $100k, and again this is just a few minutes drive away from Pittsburgh.
millionshort.com is a search engine that lets you exclude high-ranking, SEO-gamed domains from your search. You can remove the Top 10, 100, or 1000 domains from your results. It might not exclude the recipe blogs you're talking about (I dislike those as well), but is a step towards finding more long-tail search results.
Software doesn't have to be written by companies - see: GNU/Linux, vim, Python, VLC, Jitsi... and the list could continue for a long time.

People do have non-financial motivations for developing software (accessibility improvements, creating community value, solving their own personal challenges or problems).

If you think this trend is going to change, I'd suspect (but can't guarantee of course) that you might be mistaken. Costs are going to continue to reduce, and software is going to continue to be easier to build, distribute and replicate; meanwhile new generations of developers will continue to expand the pool of participants in our software communities.

There are huge parts of the world now coming online which will simply not want (or be able) to pay the kind of salaries or fees that enterprises and software developers have been accustomed to receiving for their services.

Is it unreasonable to expect good software for low cost (or even free) if we have ample people, motivation, and ability to produce it, and if we enjoy a worldwide net benefit from it as a result?

The way I'd rephrase the situation is: how are investors and enterprise incumbents going to adjust if this trend continues, and what's a good way to ensure that as an individual you can participate and thrive in a world if this continues to happen.

A hint/suggestion from my biased opinion is that social safety nets are important, and nations that provide those for their communities will free up developers and resources to build the software and services that everyone really needs, rather than having developers spend their time on (yes high-paid, yes comfortable -- but broadly beneficial towards executives-and-investor class rather than community or nation) work.
Show HN: Self Host the Internet
Sounds like you don't know a diverse set of devs. Mac/Linux may be the hot stuff for people you see at bootcamps and conferences, but there are tons of devs whose primary dev box is Windows.

I've got both a Mac Pro and a beefy PC at my desk but 99% of my time is spent on the PC. And yes, I do have admin rights over my setup.
Yeah, own the admin rights and all. With features like first-class linux kernels [1] and modern terminals [2], Windows is becoming more and more a first-class, developer-friendly OS.

[1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about

[2] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-windo...
Top 1% of the population is for example your dentist...
Where the situation really changed is more about the top 0.1%
(Cross-posted from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831)

I don't know anything about Postman, but this is an interesting case study on price increases.
No one likes price increases, but they happen. So long as you have a strong ROI use case, you can navigate those discussions with your customers. E.g., "You were getting a 50x return, but listen, we're running a business over here, and a 45x return is still pretty darn good."

The challenge in Postman's case appears to be that they ALSO reduced the bundle components. So you compound the perception from "paying more" to "paying more but getting less". That's worse optics.

What I'd offer you think about is this may be a perfectly rational and even optimal customer solution. It's unifying two different pricing actions: price increase and product bundling. The logic being that many customers weren't using all the users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and integrations that were previously included in, say, the Pro bundle.

So as opposed to increasing price by—I'm making up numbers here—12% and leaving bundle elements the same, they increased price by 10% and cut features by 2%. The end result is exactly the same, but is actually better for most customers because they will get the same level of features they needed and not have to pay that additional 2% for features they weren't using anyway.
> Nobody at the traffic light made & makes fun of a Tesla

> consumers feel safe to buy a Tesla

That's a bit of a stretch. First of all, why would anybody in a supercar make fun of a Tesla, they're not aimed at the same market. Consumers feel perfectly safe to buy a Prius or Leaf and neither of those have Tesla like acceleration, and don't need it either.

People making fun of other people because of the vehicles they drive are just insecure.

If you really think that the acceleration characteristics of a vehicle is what sells your average car then you're mistaken, most people simply need transportation and don't want to do drag races in traffic.
It tends to be selective. When the speaker agrees with survey results, then it is clearly just common sense.
I loved playing with my (former) roommate's Oculus but, even with wiping it down, wearing the headset made me break out like a mofo.
I don't understand this philosophy of "if only they could change their minds"

The current regime has broken records year over year and almost the entire population is happy with them. Chinese people are better off every single day. Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? How can you be so sure that their system will inevitably be bad for the people?

Just because an absolute right to say (almost) whatever you want is essential to the political philosophy of the west does not mean that it can/would mesh well in Chinese society.

I know you guys are going to want to crucify me for saying a lot of this but I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well. Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.
> There are lots of comments when I'm doing something socially but I just don't care

I can see how people might feel abandoned when social bonds that formed in and around drinking now have to adapt. Keep going though, your body will appreciate it even if your friends don't right now. And if the friendship can't survive you not drinking, it might not be that healthy of a friendship anyway.
I read that bcrypt somehow provides salt by default? None of the articles were clear what they meant
It's easy to say piracy is wrong when artists put in a lot of effort, and you're not paying them for that work, as is the case with books, movies, TV, etc.

It's much harder to say piracy is wrong when content creators receive next to nothing of the publication profits, and publishers are withholding information that pushes humanity forward on many fronts, including ones that save lives. The role of academic publishers is as gatekeepers and rent-seekers, and it's hard to argue that they deserve income simply because they hold this position.
So far. Remember it’s a numbers game driven by a population bomb.
I think saying software can't be correct because of things like row hammer is like saying a wood structure can't be safe because of fire or termites.
This is not likely to actually happen, but I'd put it toward finally updating our creaky infrastructure. It would create jobs and put off the eventual reckoning of a power or water grid failure.
EV design is totally different from ICE design in this regard. EV design is all about how to avoid shorting the battery across the motor. ICE UX mirrors a physical process: the throttle pedal lets more air into the engine. In an electric car you're working with a more abstract process.
>don't think there is any clear-cut answer of when a war is really for self-defense

In many cases, there is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
It's a very hard to scientifically compare drugs and their effects on driving...alcohol use is VERY widespread, so is driving, therefore alcohol use + driving is very widespread and we know just how terrible that is.

Opioids and hallucinogens and THC/CBD probably all negatively effect driving, but it's much harder to compare due to less study, less scale, and less data (federally illegal/obstacles abound to study many of those things).

Nicotine is not really a problem with driving, it's like caffeine in that sense...stimulants aren't as dangerous for machinery operation.
I work on WPF apps on Windows (it's pretty frustrating).
That is the wrong way to look at it. By this token digging holes in America is a profitable enterprise. If you pay hole diggers in America, hey all the money goes the American economy.

Whenever talking about an economic issue people have to stop thinking in terms of money and start thinking in terms of goods and services made.

The point of an economy is not to circulate money for kicks and giggles. Money is just to facilitate exchange of goods and services.

A working economy creates a large number of goods and services which the inhabitants wants and needs. You pay a worker to build a car and he makes something people benefit from. You pay a worker to make a missile and he makes something which does not improve the lives of anything. It is a complete waste of time and effort.
Yes. your advice is not significantly different than common advice on how to make it easy, and my personal experience with trying many, many things is that it is never actually easy.
> Open source is defined by the OSD, which this license doesn't qualify for

The OSD isn't an arbiter of what is and isn't. Open-source is a flexible term, and insisting that projects must meet definitions A, B, and C is just going to fragment the community and exclude people.
Rich, powerful people are not oppressed. Taxes are not oppression.
It's not surprising that monster like Reagan who destroyed millions of lives through his terrible "economic" policies has stupid quite like this.
Same here. The only thing I can think of is variable hoisting, but I don't think that's annoying enough to prefer this other approach.
> The timing of his change of heart seems politically motivated so I’d take a lot of what’s he saying with a grain of salt.

Nowhere in this article do I see evidence of a "change of heart." He didn't suddenly quit to run for office. He fought for what he believed in, putting human rights above profits, until the culture changed so much as to axe him. It sounds like he's taking his wealth and prestige to the place he thinks he will have the most power: senate
Our country literally once deposed a democratic government over the business interests of a banana company. My only hope is that historians are unbiased enough in the future to clearly mark the United States of America as the bad guys.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars#American_fruit_com...
Great to see another ANN tool available. FAISS and SPTAG were good, but this appears to be much better. Not sure if this supports "online" learning i.e. is a training phase required?
I think most Americans already get taxed on their bank balance, by their bank, inversely proportionate to how much they have, so it's not alien from that side - and it's also pretty much identical to real estate taxes which people are already used to paying... in fact a good way to sell a wealth tax might be by saying "Hey, you know how you pay taxes on your property? There are people out there so rich that they've got millions not even tied up in assets, maybe that wealth of theirs should be taxed the same as the wealth of yours - And don't forget, you don't even fully own your property, the bank has half."

It's an interesting way to consider the tax.
A wealth tax is unconstitutional. From the Constitution:

“Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.“

How do you calculate a wealth tax on a house? How about a piece of art? This is nonsensical and shows how uneducated the average American is, to support this socialist nonsense.
Hydraloop wins Best of best award at world's largest electronic show CES2020
It's justified in being called simple if companies are actually doing this.

I did find HubSpot[1]:

> We may limit or deny your access to support if we determine, in our reasonable discretion, that you are acting, or have acted, in a way that results or has resulted in misuse of support or abuse of HubSpot representatives.

I'm still skeptical because actually enforcing that clause seems like it could lead to an expensive lawsuit. The angriest customers are naturally the most litigious ones, too.

[1]: https://legal.hubspot.com/terms-of-service
I do agree. I've been there, with an aged relative who lived with us. And my wife and I are headed there, with no kids.

Me, I will die before going to a nursing home. And neither my wife nor I have life insurance, so suicide isn't problematic.
Everything you just said applies to what Uber already has. This change is objectively worse for the customer in every way.
WW1 and 2 were the same conflict. The apparent stupidity of WW1 is really a function of how accustomed we are to modern industry, communications, and some of the things hard-won by that conflict.

End of the day, it was all about resources, and is no different than today’s conflicts, which boil down to oil on the supply and the control of money on the demand side.
Step 3 of the 12 steps: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."
I don't know what the policy of Hacker News here, but this article is NOT attributed to its author and is "sourced" from the essay the author had published on Medium a few days prior. To me this suggests that the article might not have been reproduced here either by or with the permission of the author.

To be fair, I don't assume that there's any especial reason that Medium rather than
'Write As' deserves the traffic that the article might generate, but on the other hand as a way to bump traffic to your own website, republishing a popular article without permission seems a little sketchy.
You can be successful and miserable.
Perhaps. We'll never know in his particular instance how much of his ability to retire comfortably is based on his own employment vs his spouse's. All we know is that she is a "hospitality executive", whatever that means.

More generally, the time when an unskilled laborer could comfortably retire early - which did exist - has passed. It is worth reflecting on that time for both its positives and negatives.
Yep, the point as said in the original comment is that this kind of degree is usually 7k/year. 28k is the absolute max.
Car tax and land tax are two very common existing wealth taxes. I wonder why they are rarely described as a wealth tax.
> "having type annotation" should be as important as "having decent unit test coverage".

I mean this is pretty spot on IMO. I've worked with many languages, and have concluded that having a powerful type system catches soooo many bugs before you even try to run the code.

And they're usually "stupid" bugs too, forgetting to sanitize inputs etc. Even worse is when a language tries to be "smart", so you end up with "1" + 2 = "12" and no errors at all.
I almost joined the Marines (but failed to make it for OCS due to health reasons). My dad's side of the family is a military family, with my grandfather being a career officer in the Army and two uncles also serving.

I think it's much deeper than "defend the country." For a lot of people, the military is the only ticket out of their bumfuck nowhere life. For some people, it's a chance to learn some self discipline and self confidence. For some people, it's a brotherhood of warriors they're part of. For some people, it's a way to get a college education. For some people, it's about defending their nation. Of course there are plenty of people who watch a Michael Bay movie and think they'll be some badass operator if they enlist.

I think someone like Smedley Butler might have viewed the military as a place that turns boys into confident men, teaches them valuable skills, instills discipline and self respect into them, and hooks them into a network of lifelong brothers.

War is not necessary for any of this, and he realized that when we go to war, he has to send his men to die so that people with contacts in Washington can get rich. He says in the linked paper that he suspected it when he was a Marine and finally realized it after he retired.
Is /udev/random considered secure?

Edit: never mind, your article named it as a good choice
Well, we'll wait for the reviews.

The Apple Watch ECG has been shown to be very accurate.
Yes, Google isn't "don't be evil" anymore. People forget that what's left without Google is Microsoft, Oracle and the likes whose business strategy is outright racketeering.

Today I wanted to check out one of the services by Oracle - (Datafox), on the page it promotes free trial, just sign up for Oracle Cloud, give phone number, credit card all details ... after all is verified there's no service, you have to pay the says customer support rep. Can I delete my account and all the data I just gave you? No you can't, they'll stay here forever, you can upgrade to paid if not you're having this account.

At least Google gave away tons of cool technology free (TensorFlow, Chromium etc etc etc)
For site survival purposes, it's not enough for a comment to contain interesting content, just like it's not enough for food to contain nutrients. It also must not contain poison.

It's helpful when users gently ask other users to stick to the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Of course it's also off topic, but that is a necessary evil. Out-of-band control signals are what enables the system to right itself. munk-a's response was perfect.
> With the increases in alcohol use among women, there's been increases in harms for women including ER visits, hospitalization and deaths

Do people not care if men die? I do not understand why these snippets are almost always put in press releases, even when the actual numbers show that men are astonishingly more likely to die from the disease. I've seen articles about how women's rates are rising faster, when the increase in men's death over the same period is greater than the absolutely total number of women affected! Its almost as if we have to mention that women are affected or people will just ignore the problem all together. So sad.
Modern day automatic transmissions are anything but laggy and typically outperform average (and quite a few not so average) drivers by a very comfortable margin. They get better mileage too...
I do it and have done it many times. You're not sacrificing anything by buying products with fewer calories in them. Just read the label.
“How does "War is a Racket" align or jive (or not!) with the presumed reason that most young men and women sign up for the military, which is to valiantly protect and defend the country?”

It aligns with the fact that the warmongers are putting out a lot of propaganda that makes it a virtue to go to war and die for the warmongers.
> As someone who doesn't drink, I've personally had a difficult time for not doing so (professionally, socially, etc.) because there's very much an expectation that everyone does.

To a lesser extent so is smoking in Paris. When you go out smoking brings a lot of bonding opportunities that you miss if you don't smoke (standing awkwardly on the side isn't the same + passive smoking).
All the taxes you listed are tied to specific things. A generic wealth tax is saying that no matter how you got your money, there should be a cap on it. It's like locality pay, but on a national scale. I don't know if it's the right idea or not, but it's application is arbitrary enough that it's different than the other taxes.
Maybe most can, which doesn't mean there aren't many who can't. Fat people aren't a new thing.
Of course we should drive down prices to $0, that's practically the definition of progress. Our whole value proposition is the ability to offer more for less.

People should use Postman if the premium price is worth it to them over Insomnia, Postwoman, etc, not out of some sense of obligation. A business full of expensive developers is not a charity.
The recent report on the failure of the war in Afghanistan shows that it makes no sense either. And it's going on right now.
After going sober, how did you deal with social situations where either other people were moderately drinking or you were expected to be gregarious?
I think microdosing is more a part of the nootropics world. Regular dose of LSD or Psilocybin is associated with getting a new perspective on one's addition, possibly by opening new pathway connections in the brain.
If I had to give you a number, 20% (with a church being 100%)?

But it really depends on the group. There non-religious modifications to the AA program. They don't say a prayer every 3 minutes. It definitely worth going to a meeting or two just to listen to their stories.
This wouldn't be terribly surprising. My wife's internal combustion car has a CVT that emulates an automatic with gears and shift points, presumably because that felt more natural to drivers than having the engine just run at optimal RPM.