skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> [...] built today are crappy Chinese junk compared to things built 70 years ago, if they existed 70 years ago [...]

Ignoring the big 'if': most goods today are better than what we had in 1950. Especially if you compare the quality of goods that required the median worker to work the same amount of hours.

The 'junk' you talk about takes minutes of work to earn enough to buy. And most of the time, that's good enough. The stuff that you spend a few hours of pay on, is mostly so much better.

Another commenter already pointed out that the example of repairability don't really hold up. It's mostly because wages have increased that repairing those things doesn't make much sense any more.

Just think how much time even well-to-do middle class women used to spent on darning socks and mending clothing. Basic clothing is too cheap to measure these days.

Cars need much less maintenance these days.

It's easy to view the past with rose tinted lenses. But most things were really crappy.

See https://www.gwern.net/Improvements for more on this perspective:

> clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”; the idea of, say, darning socks is completely alien3, clothing companies routinely burn millions of pounds of clothes because it’s cheaper than the cost of selling them, and Africa is flooded by discards.

> materials science has produced constant visible-yet-invisible improvements in textiles yielding, among other things, far better insulated (and cheaper) winter jackets: instead of choosing between winter coats which make you look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or freezing (and if you get wet, freezing anyway) or exotic ultra-expensive garments aimed at mountain climbers, you can now buy ordinary (and much cheaper) winter coats which are amazingly thin and work even better to keep you warm—so much so that you have to be careful to not buy too well-insulated a coat, lest you swelter at the slightest exertion and be placed between the Scylla of overheating & the Charybdis of opening your coat to the freezing air to cool.

I submitted Gwern's piece at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865
I wish more people were like the Dan Price in this story.
I've done something similar with Google Sheets and a sprinkling of JS automation. This works well because Google Sheets is pretty good and I can embed Google Sheets in an iframe. A server-to-server POST message sends the (relevant) cells to my running application using a secret key (it's like 5 lines of JS).

Why should I invest in Wildcard's API instead of Google's? Am I missing something?
As far as I know, there was an Argentine tango orchestra (one of five great tango orchestras) led by Osvaldo Pugliese that used a similar approach. Pugliese was indeed a communist, a member of Communist Party of Argentina, I believe, and in his orchestra they divided all the earnings equally among members. Was one of the most stable tango collectives.
Inspired by discussions on 'The boss who put everyone on 70K' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22440922) about inflation and quality improvements (or lack thereof) since 1950.
The point is, you should read the article.

IP is not moot because you have a random number generator. IP may become less relevant if computers ever learn to select useful bit patterns out of sea of randomness, but even then, the legal system will handle it just fine (somebody will own the selection algorithms after all).

> What is the basis by which jury likely decides intent here? Is it any different than "arbitrarily"?

Causality. You can't determine intent from bits, which leads people to (mistakenly) believe colour doesn't exist. To determine the colour of the bits, the courts will look at the actual chain of events surrounding their creation. Because that is what matters. Not what the bits are, but how you came into possession of them, and why.
It does appear that a lot of people believe religiously that they shouldn't pay taxes. We should all start churches. Maybe get a lawyer or three involved and make enough churches flagrantly abusing the law that the supreme court has to hear a case. The Church of Satan kind of does stuff like that.

They do have other benefits but they very state to state. Like that guy that legalized his ayahuasca church in Kentucky[0] because they have a law that says you can do whatever drugs you want if it's a religious ceremony. It's stupid that you need a church for that, but also pretty rad that he can do it there. It appears to be helping a lot of people.

It appears that there are services for filing the needed documents. StartChurch.com pops up with a quick google. It looks nice.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-88xpl-5ro0
Market rate for .NET contractors here in Stockholm is ~£570 a day (~£71/h). I wonder why market rates are higher here, despite standing still for many years.
simple: cut the ceo's pay to keep payroll expenses the same
People are elected to make decisions for us. We hold them responsible at the next election. That is the currently what democracy is.
Congress Approves $1B for Rural Telecoms to “Rip and Replace” Huawei, ZTE Equip
Clearview AI, Facial Recognition Company's Entire Client List Was Stolen
I had to actually google "Visual Basic Editor" to find out why it was a thing people are still using in this century, and found out that it's the editor for VBA macros in MS-Office applications. So "Visual Basic Editor" is a bit of a misnomer...
Of course, that makes car use more attractive again.
Oh I swear when I see some ^M on a diff I sigh loudly and ask what's the problem with some people.

And I mean, why are any code editors on Windows saving with ^M endings?!
The argument still applies, yes. Nevertheless the string still contains all finite substrings, which includes all English sentences describing such numbers.

The implication is that human minds wouldn't be able to represent it either, at least not with language.
It also requires a certain willingness to compromise. In Switzerland one sees is all the way from the local government (gemeinde) up to the top (the federal level). Compromise is not a dirty word here; when politicians do it they are not (usually) looked at as 'giving in to the enemy'.
The density could be fixed in lots of cities.
Unimaginable as this may be, there are trains in Japan sporting green velour seating and wood(?) paneling. They are pristine and glorious-- a far cry from the hard plastics and vinyl we've come accustomed elsewhere to see as appropriate for public transit.
I failed the test three times in Germany. After the second time I switched school, and basically had to start from scratch. Probably ended up costing me 5000€ or close to 10000€. And since that was in 2009, with the perfect time to put everything in the stock market, the opportunity costs were like 100000€.
Top Python Frameworks for Web Development in 2020
the Safe Network is the only one I've seen that would give the average person real motivation to use it

- earning money for sharing resources (drive space, cpu cores) with the network
- 1 time cost for storing a file (possibly eternally) vs the current recurring subscription
- only 1 password needed to access the network vs the current way of every site needing a separate password

bear in mind its not even finished so maybe these things won't happen in the end
That is fine, I am mostly the same.

> And places that pay everyone a reasonable wage at least tend to have that more often than other places.

I've seen almost no evidence of this other than at the real extremes. Maybe it is differences in the UK market vs elsewhere but typically you won't find a big difference in rate between one contract and another in roughly the same locale with everything else being equal.
For me it's just the opposite – it's the one mouse that seems to fit my hand and my anatomy just right. Feels as natural to me as using a mouse can possibly be. Other mice force my hand into this typical holding-a-mouse gesture that gets crampy and exhausting pretty quickly. I don't really know what exactly makes the difference for me, but my hand posture looks completely different when using a Magic Mouse, in a way that (most?) other mice would be to irregularly shaped, thick, large for. No definite idea, but it's a great reminder of how much such things can vary between individuals.
Not much of a sacrifice when it's just a higher tax rate.
The Health Care Industry Needs to Be More Honest About Medical Errors
How to add local business on Google Maps: a complete guide 2020
I didn't knew you had an inputmode and pattern tag on the html input balise
What is `st`? :)
It's a bit weird that some people (not you) single out Uber and Lyft when talking about congestion. A congestion charge would solve the problem in a principled way, with no need for exceptions for special vehicles.

Buses and even fire engines and ambulances could just pay the congestion charge, too.
> So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here

It doesn't matter at all. As 'patio11 correctly points elsewhere in the thread[0], this question boils down to the colour of the bits.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441118
Yeah, it's even casually listed in the bar chart as a "Chinese province".
I am Thai and pretty sure this is not true.
That's an extremely insightful comment and very true.

Not that it's universally adhered to by all proponents, but generally that's very much the understanding how the system should work.

As a for example: Switzerland has a "president". But that doesn't really matter since that changes annually and another member of the federal council gets to be president.

Except representative the "president" is not more powerful than any other member of the council.
This is around the time the Washington DC Metro launched and they launched with carpeted cars. They stuck with carpets for decades and only in the past few years with the newest cars did they go to hard floors. The old carpets would get nasty and they would replace them with new carpets of a different color, leading to a sickly blend of 1970s brown seats and 2000s grey or red carpet.
Indeed. There are roughly three ways to convince people to keep the discipline needed for the collaborative work: force them, interest them economically, or have them believing the cause. Slavery, capitalism, and monastery.

Real systems usually are mixes. E.g. Soviet system is largely slavery plus some bits of capitalism and a lot of propaganda to cover the monastery aspect. Or a capitalist company with a visionary leader may be quite a monastery too.

Now, the most pleasant way to work is indeed a monastery, but the one that scales well is capitalism :) Slavery is inferior on both counts, but may work when there's no way to add economic interest.
The artist suing, however, would have to worry about legitimizing this work. If the artist suing were to win, it would be setting precedent that everything else is the archive is also copyrightable, including all the melodies that are novel.
Probably meant sublime text?
If the market hits due to Corona, or anything else, all of these startups that depend on dumping on markets to grab market share will lose their liquidity and disappear.
In most cities it would be enough to ban roadside parking on larger roads to get enough space for safe bike lanes. That's very different from banning cars.
You're missing out. As a full time Linux user (since a year), PowerShell is by far the best shell out there (once it starts after 5 secs)
My company in central London has put some hand sanitiser in the washrooms. The commute into London feels quieter, but we have to come into the office.
This is such a laughably, obviously bad idea that it's hard to credit it to anyone who's taken so much as a single subway ride. Even for modern NYC but especially for 1970's NYC.... I mean, damn...
What would the role names be for positions like this at an IB? Been interested in this type of work.
The core of SF is fairly dense and hills are nicely compensated by electric bicycles (which are also very popular in the Netherlands for different reasons).
I think what they mean by the political divisions being arbitrary is that you could use a different division system, for example city boundaries instead of province, and have something completely different, with even more contrast in densities.
How?

How can you move the offices of a company that has 2 thousands employees near to their homes, when in decades the surroundings have been optimised for that purpose: keeping big offices out of the cities.

It's not so easy to fix, it could be fixed but it would take a lot of time and money but nobody knows if it would improve people lives

Once you have done that, you have to convince people to bike
Not GP, but I suspect they’re referring to this terminal emulator:

https://st.suckless.org/
Agreed! HN and some subreddits are unique in this way. This is what keeps me coming back...
terminal emulator by suckless
https://st.suckless.org/
> The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore.

I do it, almost without planning to, with most new software I encounter. Perhaps because I learned computing in the WIMP days. To say "no-one" does it, is false.

The overall argument you're trying to counter is that the menubar doesn't aid usability and thus discounts itself from arguments of iOS vs Mac usability. This is also ridiculous. Everyone uses menubar all the time - sometimes they're more icon-y, sometimes more text-y... but they're everywhere and to say people don't look across them is to deny the existence of vision.
Yes in Switzerland and all the new cases originated in different place of Italy. So it seems that in Switzerland when people are back from Italy and having symptoms, they look for help and are tested. But as it is very unlikely that all these people were in contact with the 650 people detected in Italy (most of them were back from Milan, Verona, and not from the lockdown cities, my fear is that Italy is facing a different order of magnitude of cases. And that's why I was interested in potential model to simulate this.
Car-focused infrastructure planning was intense in NL too -- separate bike lanes were a very late addition (after the famous "stop murdering our children" campaign against pedestrian deaths)
Of the "all possible melodies" dataset? Yes. Of the "all possible melodies humans would conceivably consider music, and nothing else" dataset? Not at all.
Nelson Mandela did spend thirty years in prison for terrorism and was vindicated only in hindsight. This comes back to the terrorist vs. freedom fighter conversation; looking at the rightness of the cause, the appropriateness and necessity of the methods, the power relations context, the violence carried out by the other side, and then still being very reluctant to support the use of violence to achieve a political goal.

(What was the essential difference between, say, the occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge in 2016 by armed extremists and the occupation of the Dublin GPO in 1916 by armed extremists? Which could be considered mentally ill and why?)

(I also find it interesting that the most basic, minimal kind of critique - asking what the effect of the work is on the audience - has generated such outrage. I haven't called for censorship, I haven't even called for self-censorship, not directly attributed moral responsibility. All I said was should think about whether there was moral responsibility or not.)
>Because someone needs something written, and they hire you to do it. Or because you want to write, and then others discover that they like what you write, and they want to help you write more. None of this requires copyright, and in fact copyright make some works illegal to author, therefore it restricts authorship.

How many authors have you hired recently? Should I go hire an author next time I want to read a book, and pay him/her a living wage for the 1000 hours or so it takes to write a good novel? Hire a trope of actors, director, SFX team next time I want to watch a movie? If I am unsatisfied with the waterproofness of my jacket I am supposed to contract GORE to provision scientists and a lab to research a better membrane? I'm sorry but this isn't passing the sniff test - none of those activities scale without IP protection.

>Strawman. GP argued against particular business models that are reliant on copyright. That's not an argument against these entire fields, and indeed most of them would continue to exist without copyright.

Your assertion that I am making a strawman is silly. Those fields rely in their entirety on IP protection - books, science, engineering. Pagerank becomes open source and what is google.com? Just a commodity - never would have got off the ground. Those fields exist[0] because of defensible IP.

> Someone wants to fund research

No one wants to fund research, people want to sell the things research brings.

>Indeed, someone needs my labor and they pay for it. Pretty simple.

No one needs my labor (or yours) if they can't sell the output (unless you wait tables or lay bricks). How does one sell intellectual output without IP protection? Patreon is not a valid answer.

[0]At any level that can be described more intensive than 'hobby'. And I don't know about you, but I'd like there to be a way for the the people working on vaccines to be working on vaccines as their day job. To say nothing of media I've enjoyed consuming.
More correctly, it can produce every possible monophonic sequence of tones given infinite time, which in the article was further limited to monophonic 12-tone sequences across a single octave (any other limitations I missed?).

A melody contains more than a sequence of tones. The most heartless definition would at the very least include rhythm. For every sequence of tones they output, they only produce one out of hundreds of possible melodies for that sequence.

It is of course an interesting thought to consider the definition of decompression, but on the other hand, we should also limit the contributed idiocy to the bare minimum required to break the relevant idiotic rules.
Presumably musicians/composers using purely electronic tools such as abletron live have no problem asserting copyright already.
I had this same problem and what worked for me was to download an old version of Kindle for PC, regardless of the age of the books. I think version 1.17 works. Have copies download to it and then try the Calibre conversion again.
One question I have about the recycling aspect you brought up:
Do you think this way of recycling is actually more efficient than on a larger scale?
E.g. would it be more efficient to gather worn kimono from more people and make cleaning cloths from it?
Or did I understand you wrong?

From what I understood, you are saying that the old way of doing it was better, but I cannot help but feel, that some things are better on a larger scale.

For me the problem with modern recycling is more the frequency and the percentage that is actually recycled, not the scale it is done at.
Maybe the scale contributes to the percentage problem, but I cannot imagine the frequency being caused by it.

The frequency to me seems to be caused by the marketing and the general mindset to always have the newest, shiniest toys, or to stay on clothing: fashion trends.

To your first point, I agree that some people seem to be dismissing an entire comment based on one small remark.
Do you think the system being a feudal one contributes to the way recycling and consumption was done?
To me it has more to do with the poverty and making due, what you have.
This cycles back to reusing things you already used beyond their lifespan.
I cannot imagine an interaction that is born solely of the governmental system, but please share your viewpoint.

Also: I don't think your viewpoint is too extreme. We should learn from our history and maybe we could even derive ways to move forward.
Gotta second the ODroid H2 recommendation... Much more cost effective then then NUC/NUC-clones. Also awesome for small home lab - kubernetes clusters, etc.
Probably more than whatever your competitor in the same market would be offering them i.e. above whatever the market rate is.
Show HN: Transform public/internal webhooks with WHR Functions
Given the nature of how food is produced - you have a field that grows stuff basically - might not overproduction be a good thing? Better to leave some potatoes in the ground in a good year than let people go hungry in a bad one?
BART, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit had cushioned, cloth covered seats and carpet for decades until only a few years ago.
Australian gov officials' cavalier disregard for unauthorised metadata access
They would have to pay even more money without the benefits. Maybe.
Hey, hey, my, my, VBA will never die.

The real question is whether VB6 will ever die.
This is why dogfooding is important. Any designer who thought upholstered surfaces in a public transit railcar was a good idea was someone who probably didn't regularly use public transit. On the other hand, you have to appreciate the designers for trying to improve the public transportation experience for the users. There seems to be very little innovation in passenger compartment design, and it might be fruitful to explore new designs.
> only ~110 out of every 100,000 got infected

I don't think they have done any random sampling in the testing. If you only have mild symptoms (could be it or something else) it's best to stay home rather than risk catching it at the hospital.
I think us developer overstate how important we think this is. Unless time to market is a consideration then they will probably just accept throwing people at it and then get some poor souls to clean up afterwards.
Name already in use for those USB hack-tools.
And it will have an effect on your kids too. You might think they wouldn't notice, but they do.

Lacking money occupies your mind, you just tend to forget if money isn't a problem anymore.
Northern European Enclosure Dam
"It requires a multi-generational cultural conditioning to develop the civic mind that the Swiss have nurtured. It is also not clear how scalable it is ultimately."

It also requires ancient banking roots that enable it to sit on the largest 'pot of gold' in the world (1/3 of the entire world's foreign investment) and put the management surpluses into its treasury. And to add, much of that 'gold' was, and is, owned by some really, really bad people and stashed away in the mountains specifically because said keepers don't have qualms about the origins of said wealth.

Surplus money makes a lot of things a lot easier. (Much like the tone of a startup: flush with cash? It's all good times. Going out of business? Death marches!)

Switzerland for all its great things is a little like Lux, Norway, and Monaco, which is to say it's hard to separate their exceptionalism from their 'special status' of having huge piles of immense easy per capita wealth.

Also, to headline a post indicating 'national events shut down' which is an interesting but not particularly exceptional act, with the statement "We are the most X in the world, etc. etc." is slightly cringe-worthy. A lot of major events have been cancelled in a lot of places with similar risk exposures.
The mouse has caused a creative dark age with it's aggressive legal pursual of the extension of copyright. Every time the original mickey mouse cartoon approaches public domain copyright gets more mutated and unwieldy. Shameful.
That is why I hope that experiments such as the one that the artists in the article do aren't successful and their copyright does not hold up in court.

If it did, an actor with more resources could feasibly blanket own any cultural good of value and automatically, quantifiably argue how close any arbitrary third party creation is to their copyrighted material.
On the other hand, having money makes me less productive, since I spend more time caring about the stock market. Like yesterday alone my long ETF lost 2000€ worth, and I bought a short ETF for balance, which went up 200€. Should have bought the short ETF earlier, but I was at work. Here I am actually losing money by going to work