skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see how an obsessive focus on science and technology as ends in themselves could lead to their promotion over other values. An overt emphasis on science and technology could lead to the dismissal of other human emotional needs, or to downplaying the importance of emotional skills or interpersonal relationships.

It could also be that personality traits that correlate with obsession with science or technology could also correlate with obsession on rigour, rules and control in other aspects of life.

So I think I understand where the connection comes from, and it probably wouldn't be difficult to find examples of individuals in whom there is a connection.

However, I think you're somewhat off about technocracy inevitably leading to fascist dictatorship, and especially regarding your example of the nazis.

Focus on technology and industry fit the nazi agenda well, of course. They needed both as means for their war machine. The emphasis of economical power in general probably wasn't bad for their agenda either, because economical security has a lot of power in the minds of people. (That's true even generally, but especially in Germany at the time; there was huge economical turmoil in Germany prior to the nazi regime, so emphasizing industry and economical stability would have been very useful for getting popular support.)

I think authoritarian governments and leadership like to turn the tools they need to extend and maintain their power into virtues or moral duties. This can be work, industry, or anything that promotes social pressure towards obedience and respect for the ruling authority. The same goes for anything they can use to get what they want, but power and control are a great part of that.

The means may thus be presented as morally desirable ends, along with any personal obsessions of the leadership, of course. The leadership itself may even like to believe in the virtuousness of their means; if, for example, science or parts thereof (e.g. genetics, or at least a selective understanding of it) can be seen as support for something they want either as personal obsessions or as a means for control (e.g. eugenics could be both), you can be pretty sure that support is going to be turned into a part of the ideology even if the true motives come from elsewhere.

So while technocracy might be one very useful tool for an authoritarian dictatorship, there are many other dynamics in play. I'm not really sure fascist dictatorship is an inevitable outcome of a technocratic mindset when that outcome also has so many other necessary constituents (which generally have to do with group dynamics and other social psychological stuff) and actual causes.

Among the technocratic, there are also lots of people who are very individually minded, and certainly not in favour of an authoritarian dictatorship. Whether individualism taken to an extreme is pro-social either is another thing, but I'm not at all surprised if drawing a direct line between technocracy and the nazis yields downvotes at HN.
I happen to have this handy from a Motion:

Laws traditionally related to state and local police power – including land use, zoning, privacy, trespass, and law enforcement operations – generally are not subject to federal regulation. Skysign International, Inc. v. City and County of Honolulu, 276 F.3d 1109, 1115 (9th Cir. 2002). State and Local Regulation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Fact Sheet
Federal Aviation Administration Office of the Chief Counsel, 2015.
> breath or cough through a cloth mask it very quickly becomes wet and saturated with virus particles

The alternative is to breathe or cough your virus particles in open-air? That doesn’t make sense.
Oh wow, this is quite impressive.
Ask HN: Is drop shipping still a viable business?
Tim Ferris popularized the idea with this 4 Hour Work Week, but I wonder if today - in 2020 and with a rising pandemic - it's still a thing?

Has the market saturated by now? Is there an opportunity left? Who's doing this successfully and who has failed?
Apparently a plugin is needed for Internet Explorer, but otherwise isn’t.
My intent was not to move the goalposts, I was just wanting you to elaborate. Even though the explanation is trivial to you, it may not be that way to others.

(A corollary to this are the forum posts starting with a technical problem and ending with the OP saying "figured it out!" and no further explanation :)
I'm happy to address any substantive rebuttal you come up with to my original argument. I'm sorry that the argument is so simple that it only takes a sentence or two, and thus may seem superficial. It is not. I think it's well articulated in the comment upthread.
> You need to let go of the idea that it is immoral.

How are living standards versus the '60s? It's not just immoral, it's bad news.

If your country has too many wealth appropriators and not enough wealth creators you are going to have a bad time.
Wait, if there's negative inflation, wouldn't you want to hang onto your cash? Sounds more like hyperinflation.
Don’t think it has as much to do with fearing food shortages as it does with being bored at home. At least that’s how it was for me.
No, we are not selling the software right now.
We are using it in-house,thus becoming only tech-based consulting firm providing drawings at superior speed & quality.
But the future vision is to convert it into SaaS.
So if that candidate cannot even answer Easy/Medium Leetcode questions but got offer, then yes. Is that not clear enough?
Anecdotal - Citizen App blowing up, in several neighborhoods I know well. A large number of street robberies, gunshots heard. Unusual events, like a deadly assault during the afternoon in an area that never happened.

Before the pandemic crime had spiked for certain things, like misdemeanor assaults and robberies, I want to say 20+ percent. The politicians use Major Crimes, because it makes them look better as they go down and you can also make them go down by downgrading indictments or pushing people who report crimes so it's filed differently (if you've been the victim of robbery they'll do everything to lower the value of the items, as one example). But you can view CompStat data from before the pandemic. DAs accused the NYPD of exaggerating but DAs had already begun to decline to prosecute. Also the discovery rules just got more strict.

Now logic for the present moment: a large percentage of the NYPD is out sick, a lot of people have no income and there's no one in the street. Would you feel safe? There are regular strongarm and knife-point robberies reported on Citizen near where I live.
Actually its has a particular meaning in US labour law
can you add wyncode from miami?
Would you say that you should put it into safer things, maybe gamble with it less?
https://krishnamoorthi.house.gov/media/press-releases/repres... (Representatives Krishnamoorthi, Ocasio-Cortez, And Neguse To Introduce Legislation To Prohibit Government Officials From Profiting Off Their Positions By Trading Stocks)
Undersea Telescopes Scan the Sky from Below
Innovating on Web Monetization: Coil and Firefox Reality
New Skills a Modern Data Architect Needs
> Dark Sky is a very nice implementation, but what makes them unique, actually?

Polish is everything.
It is easy for engineers, because engineers are trained to make things correctly even when that is inconvenient.

Engineers make bridges that don't collapse (unless not maintained for decades) and planes that don't fall from the sky (unless overruled by management). By the evidence, it is not easy for people who just can't be bothered to take the time to make anything correctly.

So, there are languages for engineers to use to make things where it matters if they are right, and languages for everybody else, where apparently it doesn't. Now, all we need is for engineers not to need to call into libraries not written by engineers.
Fantastic product! Just found out about it, some nice folks pointed it out to me recently after complaining about how much I hate trying to read long Twitter threads :)
In the past 4 years I have been working for the same company and my team delivered around 20 or so projects and didn’t miss a single deadline.

Before that, in previous companies, the same thing happened. Lots of projects and no missed deadlines.

I believe it’s due to a simple thing: expectations.

Project expectations must not be around specific implementations or features, but around problems solved.

That gives the project team room to learn and adapt to changing conditions which is especially valuable when you are doing something for the first time.

For the customer, that is having his problem solved, it doesn’t matter if a button is white or blue or if it is actually a button. It matters that a specific problem gets solved when it needs solving.

Everything in addition to that is waste.
This is such a joke. France and Germany’s border closures are also against EU rules (against freedom of movement) but noöne cares.
A test for this is to code some relatively but not too simple of a program in both C and Rust using idiomatic code (don't knowingly pick some corner case for either language), compile with -O0 -g0 and be able to _understand_ the resulting output with regards to the program written. I'm not championing the use of either Rust or C and in my opinion languages should be for people not for computers.
Good, the Honda touchscreen controls in my 2016 Pilot are incredibly awful.
> There are nearly risk-free methods of making investment returns

This is a problem. The "risk free returns" are state enabled rentier schemes. They are not only "risk free", they are also "effort free".

If someone is taking a free ride they are a rentier.

If you have a lot of these people, overall living standards tank.

If it becomes the only paradigm that people can imagine making a difference, you are on the road to total collapse.
This is my new favorite metaphor, if it's an analogy to how people sing, and how a person can sing somewhat randomly (free) yet controlled. The fact that there are two sides to the party chanting against each other, and the stadion speaker blurting over it occasionally, makes it so much better.

Corallary, you need two microphones at least for simplicities sake, although the repetitivenes of the chants makes it a little easier.

Most likely this will have good use in aphasia research.
Sounds like a reasonable battlefield optimization.
Think a little harder. With root, you can install a keylogger.
I'm glad they're going in this direction. Mostly all BMWs use the screen for simply displaying informational content and for input and navigation it uses a multi-direction knob right by the arm rest and it's best most intuitive way to navigate the screen imo. Car screens are either matte and less responsive or glossy and more responsive but less visible in sunlight.
This is still my favorite anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106291
Maybe this is the start of the Epic Games business model.

Buy things and make them exclusive just so no one else can have them.
I wouldn't fly on a touchscreen plane, imagine Boeing going corporate with their airplane screens, nope, nope, nope.
3D-printed face shields with auto restart
After this catastrophe, I hope at the very least we have a national sick leave law. 1 week. For everyone. Period.
Show HN: Voxes – manage feedback and share product development
The added panic and hysteria is different. The numbers can also not be trusted.

"The figures are questionable
Angelo Borrelli, the head of Civil Protection, who announces the latest figures every day at 6 p.m., said Saturday night that the 793 new deaths have been caused “by and with” the coronavirus. “We count all the dead, we make no distinction between with and by the coronavirus.” However, one wonders whether these daily figures reflect the situation correctly. The dead are said to have almost all had one or more other diseases, which leaves a question mark as to exactly how deadly the coronavirus is. At the same time, it has become clear that a large number of people who die at home (which is often a retirement home) do not undergo a coronavirus test."
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/03/22/als-italie-het-voorland...
This is the commonly excepted folk advice people are given, however, most state laws (US) take no account of so called posted signs. There is a ‘mens rea’ requirement that for trespassing would typically require only that the trespasser knew they were on land that did not belong to them (this issue is easier to muddy if the trespassing occurs on ‘public’ lands/property).

But the statutory basis for trespassing is most often just the act of crossing into land without prior express permission.
And... parking lot boundaries you can't walk through, too.

Walls everywhere.
Hmm. I don't think the hedge is that complicated, so maybe it's not particularly relevant after all. I was just thinking of it in terms of complementary goods -- normally we'd expect suppliers to increase output when the cost of an input drops, but in this case they already ate that cost so the effect would be damped. But maybe not?

I suppose there's also a question of how long OPEC floods the market. But IDK, and you make a good point.
Nah, you can't actually download it.
Very interesting linguistically.

My Argentinian wife tells me it's similar in Spanish - a mask would mean an N95 mask or similar. And a surgical mask would not be included if I understand correctly (they are not as good as N95 masks, they're mostly just a piece of fabric).
> I work on compilers for a living.

…as I take it, for languages without undefined behavior.

> Structured assembly semantics are what C users in a lot of domains expect and production compilers like clang at -O3 will obey the programmer in all of the cases that are necessary to make that code work

No, they will not, and the people working on Clang will tell you that they won't.

> Llvm internally considers typed pointer math to be equivalent to casting to int and doing math that way.

LLVM IR is not C, but I am fairly sure that it is still illegal to access memory that is outside of the bounds of an object even in IR.

> A C compiler is way more conservative about the possible outcomes of a function call or a memory store than a JS JIT for example.

Well, yes, because JavaScript JITs own the entire ABI and have full insight into both sides of the function call.

> That code isn’t wrong. It works in optimizing C compilers. The only thing wrong is the spec.

The code is wrong, and that it works today doesn't mean it won't work tomorrow. If think that all numbers ending in "3" are prime because you've only looked at "3", "13" and "23", would you say that "math is wrong" because it tells you that this isn't true in general?
Coronavirus-Driven Feeding Frenzy of N95 Masks
I would like to hear more, but maybe HN doesn't want to. If you don't care about the risk of downvoting and this being on HN, please write so. But if not, it is ok.
It's a social crisis waiting to happen, especially if you can end up decoding more than just what someone uses their speech centers to articulate.

This is invasive to the extreme, and seems to open the door for violations of people's intimate thoughts down the road.

You may not think about it much now, but if you pay any attention to things like intrusive thoughts, or even have to deal with carefully maintaining a public face in the workplace, it should not be difficult to realize why these technologies are legitimately dangerous even as read only systems.

The real nightmare begins when you finally get fed up with Read-Only and figure out how to write in order to potentially mutate mental state.

I'm normally pretty forward-thinking in terms of embracing the March of technological progress. However, the last decade or so has shown we as a society have had our grasp exceed our socio/ethical/moral framework for using it responsibly; and the potential abuse a full read/write neural interface would enable is one of the few things that has managed to attain a "full-stop" in my personal socio-ethical-moral framework.

Not to sound like that an adult, but we're just not ready.

Before anyone points out that the same moral outrage probably occurred with the printing press; there is a big damn difference between changing someone's mind through pamphlets, and having a direct link to the limbic system to tickle on a whim. We do a very bad job of correctly estimating the long-term effects of technological advancement; just look at how destructive targeted advertising has been.

I haven't reached my conclusion on an existing preconception/predisposition either. I used to be massively for this particular advancement. Only through a long time spent reflecting on it has my viewpoint done a 180.

I'm aware of all of the positive applications for the handicap, brain-locked, and paralyzed; but I'm still reluctant to consider embracing it for their sake when I've seen how prone to taking a crowbar to a minor exception/precedent our legal system is.

Maybe I've just been in the industry long enough not to trust tech people to keep society's overall well-being and stability at heart. Maybe I'm becoming a luddic coward as I get older. I don't know, and I ask myself if I'm not being unreasonable every day. The answer hasn't changed though in a long while, even though I do keep trying to seek out opportunities to challenge it.

I hope that helps, and doesn't make me sound like too much of a nut.
> The economics of startups->dragons is such that it's near impossible for certain mass-market services exist even thought they are useful and economically viable.

That's the impression I got too, with so many good things bought by huge companies (e.g. Google) and then shut down.

I believe it might be possible to address this problem. E.g. suppose it is possible to:

1. host the service in a decentralized way such that it is spread between multiple independent hosting providers so that no single hosting company has influence over it.
2. users can pay directly for hosting. it might cost as little as $1 per year, and perhaps only for 'premium' features, but users do not want to pay then somebody else will be in control.
3. the development can be crowdfunded, e.g. say users will pay $2 per year, $1 goes to hosting, $1 goes to fund development.

My company have been working on the tech side of it, specifically we made a decentralized replicated relational database, which can also host business logic and queries; and we are now working on a infrastructure which manages hosting in a decentralized way, e.g. when users send funds to application's account, the system will automatically find a providers and pay them. So it all can function without an "owner".

I'm not sure about organizational side, though -- most quality services were made by passionate founders, it's not clear if that's going to work for a service owned by users.

More thoughts about it here: https://blog.chromia.com/towards-publicly-hosted-application...
This will help - https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Deadline
Here's what they're asking for:
https://www.coworker.org/petitions/global-retail-worker-sick...

-Guaranteed paid leave for all workers who isolate or self-quarantine instead of coming to work.

-Reinstatement of health care coverage for part-time and seasonal workers.

-Increased FSA funds to cover coronavirus testing and treatment for all team members, including part-time and seasonal.

-Guaranteed hazard pay in the form of double pay during our scheduled hours.

-Implementation of new policies that can facilitate social distancing between workers and customers.

-Commitment to ensuring that all locations have adequate sanitation equipment and procedures in place.

-Immediate shutdown of any location where a worker tests positive for COVID-19. In such an event, all workers should continue to receive full pay until the store can safely reopen.
SARS-cov-2 survives days on cardboard.

If you can’t give two fcks for the workers, do it for tour own consumers’ ass.

Amazon must enforce sanitary and safe working conditions during the COVID19 epidemic lest it becomes itself a source of contagion. More so now that home delivery is so important in the “stay home” strategy.

For fcks sake people, how big a stick do you need before you notice?!
Some people just hate Clojure for some reason.
I had a coworker of mine rewrite my whole Clojure project in Java just se we would not deploy Clojure.
The cost argument should also apply to the camera manufacturers and yet they have enough common sense to not make decisions that (to me) are user-hostile. Teslas are in a different boat - it seems that whatever they do, people will still line up to buy their stuff, at least for the time being.
Wonder if grocery store workers will largely be forced to unionize and fall under similar terms as airline industry with regards to limitations on a strike. "Essential work"
I implemented simplesamlphp idp two weeks ago, seeing we are a PHP shop it was the obvious choice. Somewhat rethinking that decision now, wondering the same thing.
The problem here is not with the technology - it's from the people implementing it. Instead of leaving the design and software to tech companies, we have car companies trying to do it on their own.

The result is terribly designed software that looks like it's from 2000.
Yes, that too, or for storing wood glue for example.
How to Work from Home Securely
He got fired for showing up to work when he was told to stay home.
I do not believe this to be unreasonable at all.
It's not a issue of semantics, but of semiosis. It's exactly that breadth of reasonable interpretations, and the necessarily consequent ambiguity, that I'm arguing we'd do better to avoid.

By the same token, "cohabitate" wasn't the best choice of word. What I mean by it is to direct our modification of the environment so that it doesn't benefit us to the active detriment of other life. One example, as mentioned by another commenter here, is to design roads so that they don't block migration routes or access to resources. Granted that that's more expensive, but it's also not without tangible human benefits alongside those of avoiding ecological derangement, like fewer citybound deer eating everybody's gardens and posing a dangerous obstacle to traffic - granted in turn that the mechanism here is higher cull rates through human hunting that doesn't happen in the city because high population density doesn't mix well with .308 rounds flying all over the place, and that's rough on some individual deer, but it also improves population dynamics and quality of life for the deer that don't get shot because they're closer to the carrying capacity of the local environment, and we have to fill that maintenance role anyway because our ancestors extirpated the large predators which previously did so.

That's one example of the larger idea, which is to recognize that an ecosystem is a system, with its own internal logic and feedback loops, and engineer our environment modifications to function as part of that system - instead of kicking the whole thing apart and then trying to figure out after the fact what to do as the pieces of what we've so blithely broken fall hard atop our heads.

Like with climate change. Or kudzu, or starlings, or zebra mussels, bison, banana fungus, novel coronaviruses...

(And anyway - between our effect on the atmosphere, and the arguable mass extinction event we've caused, is there any place on the planet which can accurately be called in your usage "pristine"?)
This doesn't mean that the OP was wrong, but that the negative interest rate policy successfully prevented deflation.
And how do you bid in a market where every house has >1 bidder and banks are lending waaayy more than is responsible?
I remember years back there was a company that had and inflatable layer ontop of touch screens for flexible "buttons". I'm sure there's ergonomic pros/cons of different kinds of physical switches but seems like we need to move on better touch screen haptics.