skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're making small utility software, the "friction" aspect becomes extremely important, on BOTH sides.

I wrote a small tool that simplifies a single yet extremely annoying task (because I got sick of performing the task manually).

I offered it free for personal use, with clear notices that you need to pay to use it at work, and a way to contact me for a business license. I sold one license. Several other users e-mailed me to thank me for the useful tool, including some who indicated they were using the tool at work.

I could have added more aggressive nagging, or stringent enforcement (e.g. some form of online activation that blocks you if you're coming from a known corporate IP).

I could also have decided to make the tool available 100% for free under an open-source license.

The lessons I learned from this were:

- if you offer a free-for-personal-use version, business users will only pay if the hassle of going through the payment process is lower than the hassle of using the free version illegally; I suspect a nag screen will only be enough if it's really frequent, and will probably annoy your "free" users a lot.

- the effort required to write any form of license enforcement, or to set up and maintain easy ways for someone to pay for your software (e.g. credit card) is often not worth it

--> If it's a small thing, do the world a favor, and just make it free. The money you'll earn may not be worth the additional time and hassle you'll have to put in to earn it (not just for the additional code or sales setup, but also dealing with payments and customer inquiries, taxes/legal stuff, ...).
Risky for a politician. You never know when that LLC is part of a consortium that also funds your reelection.
Right, that's why I pointed it out to the commenter that I replied too, they wrote as if the bankruptcy would start when you took the loan out...
Just say "I googled it on duck duck go". I do find it interesting how it can feel more awkward to say "I searched it" instead of "I googled it"
Bangs offer a lot more than just !g.

It's actually easier to use some Google services via DDG than via Google itself. For example, the easiest way to access Google Scholar is to use DDG and add !scholar to your search. Likewise for Google Translate and !translate. Like:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hasta+la+vista+!translate&t=ffab

Then there are all the non-Google bangs. !a to search Amazon. !hn to search Hacker News. And so on.
I have yet to see someone successfully produce a high dimensional posterior over all of the parameters in the neural network. Usually, people make the simplifying assumption of different posteriors for each parameter, which means that you can't just extract a bunch of different models.
Android development is a mess. Much of the documentation and resources you will find will be outdated. Last time I looked at the code labs from Google many where already deprecated. The Udacity courses are more current than the offical documentation. I'd recommend Programming Kotlin https://pragprog.com/book/vskotlin/programming-kotlin by Venkat Subramaniam if you don't know Kotlin. It's honestly a bad time to learn Android as the ecosystem is in flux with Jetpack and Kotlin and Android X changing everything up.
> I think the original intent was to incentivize more lending, and thus more access to higher education, by giving lenders more protection.

I think that's correct, however meanwhile the system dramatically changed and now the vast majority of student loans are made by the government without any underwriting.

The largest private sector role is poaching the best risks to refinance. Allowing these refinanced loans to continue to be non-discharable has the net effect of enabling the private sector to more effectively engage in adverse selection against the government-as-lender! It's hard to imagine anyone would actually sit down and design this policy set.
> After he graduated in 2004, Rosenberg consolidated his loans and held a little more than $116,000 in student debt as of April 2005. That number ballooned to about $221,000 over the next 14 years.

Legal usury. The article doesn't say how much they extracted of him before he got free.
Because a huge amount of the world (tm) ships things in Docker, and a lot of dayjob work targets Kubernetes in GCP which demands builds to docker.

on OSX this is "solved" by hosting Docker in virtualbox. It is possible this actually is the right method.
> just aggressively tax owners based on the land value.

What about old people who bought the house long time back when it was cheap but dont have good source of income to pay the inflated tax?
Starting to think the reason we arnt working for google/aws is we make mistakes. Whereas engineers at those companies just dont make mistakes, therefor they assume that billing caps are not necessary. Such is our lot in life.
As many other commenters have pointed out, they are already doing river cleanup with fully deployed systems in many rivers.

If anything, they don't need to focus on one thing because they've shown to be perfectly capable of attacking both challenges effectively.
and I'm sure there's an idiot somewhere out there that would agree with you.

meanwhile, the rest of humanity understands why we're ok with being labelled intolerant due to "intolerance of intolerance is itself intolerance".
The fine-grained distinction between easy and simple personified in this comment: Understood how to do thing, but too much for anyone to come at doing absent a strong drive
In what way did things go to hell?
I've started appreciating Makefiles a lot after using them more. It's honestly the simplest way to batch together tasks that might depend on each other (you can even use them to deploy applications).
> I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If indoor plumbing disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account.

Of course people would get by, but their lives would be worse and advocating for making people's lives worse is kind of a shitty thing to do.
I see a number of replies in the comments saying you could just take out the loan, get the degree, declare bankruptcy, get a job and 7 years later buy a house and be all good.

I wonder if this is just a very American thing because the loans are so ridiculously big? In NZ student loans can be forgiven through bankruptcy. See http://www.studentloan.org.nz/options.html

But the loan is only around like $30k anyway and I basically never hear of anyone purposely declaring bankruptcy to get out of it. The whole thing is pretty much a non-issue. People take them out, people pay them back. Some people used to go overseas in order to avoid paying it back but they changed the law, so that you can't do that anymore.
Well that's some confusing reporting. The title is "Dumped fishing gear is biggest plastic polluter in ocean, finds report" yet does go on to say 10%.

Greenpeace: "Ghost gear makes up an estimated 10% of the plastic waste in our oceans, but represents a much higher proportion of large plastics found floating at the surface."

https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/8248/ghost-gear-t...
Why would this fail when its already working?
PDFs are non editable even if probably easy to develop for you. Are there plans to export as HTML ? I don’t want my data to be locked in.
He who does not work, neither shall he eat. -
Paul the Apostle

... via
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...
University degrees are not actually that expensive to obtain. You go in-state, live cheap, and, if you’re poor, apply for scholarships. Loans are really only necessary if you’re obtaining a graduate degree or if you’re going to an elite school. I think loans would be available to most people in either circumstance.
Let's Reverse Engineer Discord
Of course it will. You just need to charge the land value tax to the owning entity. The same is true now for any taxes, fees or fines regarding that property.

If those are not paid, government can seize and auction-off the property.
Yes, taxes are paid in communist countries.

In the discussion about taxes vs. compassion, paying for policemen has more options between communism and complete radical free market anarchy. But it is not the subject of the discussion, policemen don't work for compassion, they don't buy food with it and don't pay the bills with it.
It's called Academic Common Market, and it only offers in-state rates to out of state students. (There's no direct scholarship or money, although sometimes unrelated scholarships are also awarded.) It's not really subsidized any more than regular in-state tuition, since it's a reciprocal program between states.
> but it's interesting to see that many things are not censored away in comparison to Bing and Google (political correctness, copyright, nsfw etc. etc.).

I am not aware that there is a censorship of things that are deemed 'politically incorrect' by either bing or google, and Yandex does comply with European copyright law and other EU legislation like the right-to-be-forgotten.
I specifically state it was a contract and you're talking about a job.

this reminds me of Steve Yegge. He did a post on the difference between employed developers and entrepreneurs, and how they're completely different creatures.

You've allowed yourself to become a pet and you've given up the ability to care about your work for food and you think it's a moral failing in others who have not.

You're to be pitied.
Will, this is more about giving someone some quick guidance in passing, that they can apply without too much, um, complexity.
David Graeber is an anthropologist. He apparently did a PhD thesis on "magic, slavery, and politics." What qualifies him to talk about the economy and the function of various jobs? I mean, hell, he's an anthropology professor declaring other jobs to be "bullshit." (But I won't go so far as to say "anthropology professor" is a bullshit job, because I'm self aware enough to realize that I probably just don't understand what economic function they perform.)
As opposed to the Catholic Church? Oil companies? A number of retailers?

Beating up tech companies specifically is getting irksome. There are many things wrong with our industry specifically, but beating them up over something true of many industries is <expletive of your choosing>.
Is Forbes now purely sensationalism?
I ran into, by total chance, his episode "King of Kings" (which traces Achaemenid Persia and the various sources that describe them) and thought I had found a new favorite but I haven't been able to get into any of the other episodes.

I still highly recommend this episode which has nice details even if you know something about the topic and would be very illuminating about quite a lot of ancient history.
> we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc),

Who is we? Who sets the price?

People obviously don’t see more value in teachers or caregivers, price should not be mandated by law
I'm an engineer and this his hugely true. I love intellectual pissing contests. If I lose a contest it's pretty hard to stay unbiased. I think I manage but to be biased is to not know about your own bias, so who knows?
This has been done in Sweden. The results are disastrous.

Is it useful to reduce a situation which clearly has multiple driving factors - to just one factor?
HN’s rules seem like they fall in line with positive psychology tenants. In the spirit of HN, downvotes seem like something reserved for mean spirited or inaccurate posts. If everyone downvotes for differences in purely subjective opinion, well, I’d just stick to reddit in that case.
One thing that struck me when I started studying pinballs in more depth is that they really had the same basic technologies in use between the 40's and the 70's, decades spent entirely on finding creative uses of EM relay logic and coils and rubbers. To the extent that those games have memory, it's just enough to count credits, trigger a score reel and serve bonuses.

And that scale of logic translated into a microprocessor makes for some pretty trivial software; the games got to skip over all the intermediate technologies of vacuum tubes and drums and core memory. So part of that initial video game boom - and the corresponding switch to solid state pinball - really was a kind of seeking out of applications for hundreds to thousands of bytes of memory, often supplemented with existing analog tech. It's a fascinating crossover in many ways with a punctuated ending: the '84 games crash and the '85 computers crash precipiated cheaper RAM and in following years, suddenly all the games started having more expansive worlds, full soundtracks, keyframed sprite animation etc. The development shifted from a hardware and manufacturing focus to a software one; and the computing devices became much more convergent and portable. And that is the trend we've been on since in the consumer space - inexhaustible cravings for more memory and higher fidelity, held at bay only by the whims of hardware teams.

But I'm looking at coverage of CES this year and see this long trend as something that's played out, with a lot of companies across the board aiming to pitch new concepts. We're in a space where people have Enough Memory. So things are getting exciting again.
> "Indigenous people" is the superset of earliest known inhabitants. "American Indians" or "Native Americans" are the indigenous people the United States. My area of Australia, we'd be as specific as saying "Wurundjeri People". There is a matching level of specificity for the United States. Indigenous people is still the catch-all term.

It might be the catch-all term! But you generally don't use catch-all terms when talking about specifics - it'd be like asking for a memorial for the Europeans who landed at Plymouth Rock. Yes, they were Europeans! But saying that, instead of 'British' or 'Pilgrims' or whatever, would be weird. I stand by my thought that if this was being pushed by the tribe in question, it would either mention the tribe by name or use American Indian.

Also, "Native Americans" refers to all the native peoples of the new world, while "American Indian" is restricted to those located within the US.

> "Set Theory" has no overlap with "New World history", I agree. The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering has a very real-world overlap with the land on which it is built.

New World history has plenty of overlap with many things that could be called "western civilization", though. Perhaps a better comparison would have been to teaching the US constitution, since that's what enabled the society that they're learning New World history within. Or how electrical power generation works, since presumably all the study materials required electricity in distribution/production. IMO those are both at least as significant an overlap as the fact that they happen to occupy the same land.
Thanks for your reply. I just want to note that what appears to be a quote in your comment ("Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools") is not something I wrote at all. If you still have time to edit the comment, I might suggest changing that so it doesn't look like you quoted me.
Was anyone arguing that the professor made them up?
> First of all, a number can't belong to anyone.

My understanding is that's not true, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number. I agree it's stupid but not up to me.

> Also, consider a generative algorithm, that creates every possible combination. Do you expect to potentially own everything that wasn't yet created? Because at some point, that algorithm will get to it.

Well yes, given infinite time, you could write a program to generate every possible sentence. If I saved those sentences on an infinitely large hard drive, yes, I would expect to own the rights to each one.

Note, that doesn't mean I'd be able to sue anyone else who ever speaks. The color of bits [0] matters.

IMO, the alternative of assigning copyright to the algorithm's creator gets really messy. If an author uses GPT-2 for writing inspiration[1], and at some point, they copy out a GPT-2 paragraph verbatim, does the author not own that paragraph? Same question for music which incorporates AI-generated samples (or just randomly generated samples).

---

[0]: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

[1]: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/30/20840194/ai-art...
I really enjoyed that 80000 hours episode with Vitalik Buterin. It gave me some new mental models.

I'll tack on another unrelated suggestion: Leslie Kaelbling's interview on Lex Friedman's AI podcast. It's probably my favourite from that podcast so far. She is an exceptionally clear thinker.

Those were probably my two favourite episodes of the year.
no one else in this conversation has the same "misunderstanding" that you do. Go ask them for clarification.
First, good job!

Second, I also made what I consider very good money (for a side-project) from an ebook using a markdown-based approach. All I will say is that I broke six figures in USD and/or Euros.

Third, I happened to use LeanPub to publish incrementally, and that worked very well for me.

Fourth, yes you can charge real money for a technical e-book. I think I have consistently asked for around $30.00, although the interface allowed people to pay less.

I always allowed people to read the book online for free, and people still paid. Did they pay out of a sense of fairness? Did they pay for the convenience of reading an offline copy in iBooks, Kindle, and/or PDF? You be the judge.

Many, many people paid more than the minimum. I have now dropped the minimum to zero, and I still get people paying me more than $20.00.

Lastly, I didn’t get into writing for the money, but I started charging because:

1. People take words more seriously when they cost money. It’s true. It shouldn’t be true, but it’s true.

2. I take writing my words more seriously when I set a goal of asking people for money.

Combining 1 and 2, I felt that whenI set out to charge money for writing a book, I would write a better book. Whether people paid me or not, writing a better book would be better for me, so I couldn’t lose.

Those of you seeking to write for money may have different goals. But those two things drove my decision to charge and to change a non-trivial amount of money.

If you had told me that by charging less, I would make more revenue, I still might not have charged less, because I wanted to force myself psychologically to write a book worth $30.
I enjoyed Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0465060730
I don't think it's a guarantee. In the UK (where tuition is capped at £9k($12k)/year), a whole heap of majors were shown to reduce lifetime earnings vs not going to university.

The difficulty is that you are going to earn a lot less while you are at university, so if you spend 3 years there earning $0, it really drags down lifetime earnings unless the degree adds a somewhat decent %age above baseline in terms of earning power.
This happens often. When I was there in 2011 or so, there was a massive one found on the Rhine because the water was low. It was something like 2 or 3 thousand pounds. It's amazing how much of this stuff will be sitting around for hundreds or thousands of years even.
Would that not just directly lead to it swallowing an amount of federal tax revenue proportional to other services that are subsidized? E.g. healthcare/education? And then proceed to munch on GDP bit by bit?
You're describing a different thing. The economy undoubtedly has many jobs that are, in certain specific instances, unnecessary. That's just an uninteresting observation that the economy isn't perfectly efficient. That's different than the concept of "bullshit job," which is more about jobs that are *categorically unnecessary," because, for example, they could be automated away.
High enough land value tax, consistently applied, will make the land cheaper and affordable to said old couple, because it neutralizes the phenomenon that land continuously increases in value as long as the population keeps growing.
> The government typically doesn't make those other kinds of loans with no credit check or analysis of how the loan proceeds will be used.

I wouldn't exactly call the mortgage lending regime careful, thorough, or prudent.
There are people with $500k+ student loan debts in the US.
I see this particular brand of whataboutism a lot. It seems glaringly obvious to me that they're arguing in bad faith.
That’s the point, just like JDBC, ODBC, DB-API, ADO.Net, etc.
> ...being deliberately malicious?

Of course. After all, 'malicious compliance' is a relative term; the alternative is to ignore the request altogether and do nothing at all!
> I'll be fully transparent, this does make the question of "well how can we judge people without insisting on equality of outcome" rather tricky. I resolve this personally by just concluding that the precise judgement of people such that we'd need a good test like that is rarely actually important in day to day life. In other words, I'm okay with wider error bars for the reduction of implicit bias.

Isn't this just "I'm OK with error bars in the direction I favor", which happens to be equity? Unless you're saying you're OK with accepting the tests we have, with error bars that might err too far on the side of "other racial/cultural groups are less intelligent".
I'm probably going to buy my next home anonymously with the help of an LLC...
Word around Cali is that almonds are basically a way to export fresh water to China in a subsidized, condensed format.

Something to think about in an arid region.
Just duck it
That 12 months is the minimum guaranteed period that your service won't be interrupted.

See the full list of deprecations in App Engine: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/deprecations/

High profile deprecations are handled carefully and we usually handle them with extended deprecation period with clear migration path/doc and communications. Notable examples in the table:

1. Python 2.5: 4+ years
2. Java 6: 20 months with existing user automigrate to Java 7
3. Java 7: 13 months with existing user automigrate to Java 8
4. Master/slave datastore: 3+ years.

Considering App Engine is the first Google Cloud offering, I'd say we have a very good track record of meet our deprecation policy and usually exceeds it.
WordPress Basics – Hosting
Medical and Law school students widely abused bankruptcy for student loans in the 60s and 70s. My recollection is that this became even more common as rates went up, (a mortgage in the late 70s could be 15%) prompting the changes in the law.
This. I was working with a startup and on my first day onsite, I was sat next to the company lawyer. He told me he had just finished up a contract that was riddled with landmines. He seemed so proud of himself.

At a later point when renegotiating, I was given one of these dangerous contracts to sign. When I brought to light my concerns, said lawyer set up a face to face with me. His first words were, "If you weren't an engineer, you would have made a good lawyer."

Boggles the mind.
> Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve workers’ economic security.

Amazed how all these articles gloss over or totally ignore what workers themselves can do to better their situation

> These statistics tell an important story: Millions of hardworking American adults struggle to eke out a living and support their families on very low wages.

>What should be done?

By who?