skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am a free market advocate, libertarian-lite, that believes that UBI is the correct social safety net. I am clearly not unique in this regard, as this actually seems to be the most common type of UBI advocate I've encountered.

That being said, the one lingering question I have comes down to a variant of inflation. I think most people think of inflation as something that only happens as a result of monetary policy, but that's not entirely true. Let's say that UBI could be entirely funded through taxation, no new money is introduced into the system. There is still a form of inflation on certain goods. For example, let's take an extreme example of redistribution: we take all of the money from a billionaire and redistribute it. One billionaire doesn't buy 100,000,000 TVs for their house, but 1,000,000 people with $1,000 might each buy a TV. 1,000,000 people with an extra $1,000 has a much larger impact on demand for typical consumer goods than having that wealth be more concentrated. Of course stricter taxation of the uber-wealthy would have impacts lessening demand for large investments, so it's not a blanket inflation in the same way that just printing money would be, but it still has all of the same characteristics of inflation within certain consumer markets.

It's all very complicated, and I would like to see it modeled. If I'm a landlord, and I know that my tenants now have an extra $12,000 a year, do I raise rents? I think the natural argument is that because the scarcity or value of my real estate didn't actually change, I open myself to being undercut by competition if I try to arbitrarily raise the value of my property to reflect increased demand. But the problem is that it might not be entirely true that the value of my real estate didn't change. When I have to call a plumber, or gardener, or construction worker for a remodel, are their rates going to be the same? Are rates going to go up or down? It's very hard for me to know for sure.

It reminds me a bit of debt. Debt shouldn't necessarily produce inflation, but it definitely does. Do you think houses would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars if the average person didn't have access to debt? Would it cost 50k+ in order to attend college? No. Access to debt dramatically increases the prices on the things purchased by the available debt, regardless of whether or not this theoretically is meant to produce inflation. My concern is that, as with access to debt, the increase in wealth will be met with an increase in cost across the board, and not due to exploitation, but because the effects are that most consumer products and services actually just end up costing as a natural reflection of increased demand.
I don't have any experience programming without visual aids; and you've probably already thought of this aspect though I'll mention it just in-case: if I were facing a similar situation, I would look into long-term disability insurance and see if there's anything I can do on that front. That way, I could still pursue being productive with blindness or deafblindness, but would have less economic pressure while doing so.

Many employers offer a combination of short-term and long-term disability that will provide income (in some cases until you retire) in the event that you can no longer work.
So 1% death rate per unit population, or 1 person in 100.

I guess that means if New York's lock down didn't reduce that 70% of the population getting infected, with a population of 20M or so they can expect around 2M deaths.
I have hired blind developers in the past and would do so again. Happy to share thoughts on an accessible workplace or discuss a position any time: alex@gatepay.co

I would also echo the comment made regarding government positions. There are quite a few compelling coding jobs in the public sector and the government seems to take their responsibilities with regards to workplace needs quite seriously.
It's almost like companies are doing more and more negative things to comment about.
It looks like the shortcut depends on what one's VoiceOver triggers key are.

Here's the Apple doc for anyone interested: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443
Tools work, of course. But they don't always work well when handled by untrained amateurs.
Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?
I have realized that I easily give up when I face a hard problem. This is hurting my career prospects. I have been thinking and it may have become an issue because I grew up in a high pressure environment, where a lot is expected from you. How do I change myself ? I have observed that a lot of times I have a vague idea of a problem I am trying to solve but I don't put in the effort to nail it down. This affects my confidence and I don't want to lead whenever I get an opportunity. How do I get out of this habit ?
Once again we ignore Asia and their clear lessons with covid-19 because they are not enough like us.

Electronic solutions don't work, even in compliant countries like Singapore they don't, it's boots on the ground that does.

Here's a good write up on Australia's attempts as they stand -

https://medium.com/swlh/some-basic-points-on-contact-tracing...
I get how losing a benefit if you start working could be an even greater disincentive than UBI. I wasn't catching that point previously, so thanks.
Most North Americans import their sewing from Asia and South America
I’m not sure I agree with this advice though I have no experience with being blind. Possibly creating/selling products/running a service would be a good way to have an income stream which is reasonably sustainable but I would worry about any graphical front end to any software product, and my general worry would be about loss of income because my expectation would be that finding a job while blind would be hard. I would expect working for a large tech company would have two advantages: 1. This would likely be the most reliable easiest way to actually build up a decent amount of capital; and 2. I would expect a larger company would be more accommodating of your going blind because they would be much better able to cope with a loss of productivity and adjustment period and they may be more nervous of the legal risks of not supporting you. If you run your own business or work for a company with little spare money, it will be much harder to have a loss of productivity or adjustment period.
I had a primal instinct to flee when I was watching this closely in December and January. Besides people wearing face masks and not eating at resturants suprisingly little has changed north of Dallas.
Both the content and layout looks really fantastic!

I wanted to ask any experienced Scala folks if its possible become really proficient without a solid background in Java. I understand that its only JVM hosted language so I guess my concern is how much Java you need to know when things go sideways - stack traces, low level debugging etc?
Make Money Online – EarnPro
it is fair that the revenue gets shared.

i don't believe that publicly funded journalism is a bad thing, or that taxes are a bad thing. i just think a sneaky end-run around the normal systems of taxation and subsidy are a bad thing. Google and Facebook should be subject to heavy taxation, and local journalism should be supported through public funding. What these countries are trying to do is good, in spirit.

i just think the government should not be in the business of deciding how much one independent private company pays another independent private company, and i don't think governments should be passing laws just for the purpose of being able to issue fines. if the government wants to redistribute wealth, they should do it through taxation, and they should be honest about what they're doing.
No country that has achieved high-quality affordable education and health care for its citizens has done it via market-based means. It probably can't be done.
Ask HN: Example Application of Constructal Law of Thermodynamics?
Does anyone know if there's a paper out there that demonstrates the application of Constructal law in machine design? I see a lot of qualitative discussion by the author of the law himself (Dr. Bejan), but it's very vague and I can't find a good quantitative analysis to empirically demonstrate the law in action.

I just want to understand the principle so I can try to apply it to my system design.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstb.2009.0302&ved=2ahUKEwi7z96Lx_XoAhWXmXIEHZ2aAAQQFjAMegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw18EXMnib9ZCzo0BO1hCS0C&cshid=1587338500599
Impact of coronavirus crisis on F1 teams difficult to predict
> people need to get from place to place, and it’s very hard to build and run an airline.

Why is it hard? Seems like the dumbest possible business. I mean I think a restaurant would be harder. There's more subtle unknowns in food than there is in carrying people from A to B.

Educate me because I don't get it.
ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture (2019)
While this is always a threat, it does not mean it is inevitable. 1 person, 1 vote is a universal principle that seems to be holding across the [democratic] world. If anything, the momentum seems to be towards giving the vote back to the few who lose it (felons, etc)
On the other side of this, I’ve heard that the software Apple makes tends to be very good from an accessibility standpoint. An advantage of not needing to look at it is that you can have your phone screen permanently off and get a massively extended battery life.
I have no icdea where you got that 34% from but it absolutely does not at all match any mortality rates for this virus anywhere in any normal setting.

As for the elderly dying more than all others by far (including younger immunocompromoised people), the numbers are plainly available for a variety of regions and countries. They speak for themselves clearly enough.By far and away, the absolute majority of all dead are those over the age of 70. Most of them over the age of 80, and even those with what would normally be comorbidities among younger populations ide so rarely of Covid that they're outliers. Healthy young people are extreme outliers to the mortality count. Even in northern Italy at the worst of its saturation of the healthcare system, the same thing was observable: deaths among younger people are outliers across the board.
Pong Plays Piano
I thought VRChat was the metaverse already? :)
> Also, because code is no longer represented visually as blocks, you'll find you're building an increasingly detailed memory model of your code.

does refactoring by other team members have an outsized negative effect on this?
I have been blind since birth. I recommend downloading NVDA, a free screen reader for windows, and getting used to using it for basic computer use. Getting used to hearing the speech as fast as possible is key to being able to use it efficiently.

You said you have hearing loss. Is it bad enough to make speech output useless? If so you would need to learn braille.

I would never try front end design as I have no idea what it should look like, but you may still be able to do it if you have an image in your head of what you are trying to achieve. You would just have to ask someone to check it.

Python is not a problem with screen readers, contrary to what someone else said. The screen reader can be set to report the indentation level. In fact I can't think of any text based language that wouldn't be usable with a screen reader. Tools are a different story. Some work and some don't.

Feel free to contact me if you would like any more information, weather it's about computers or not. rob at mur.org.uk
I check out the websites of companies mentioned in blockchain press pretty regularly. I haven’t figured out what a lot of them do.

The few times I’ve dig into a blockchain company that had a $100MM theft, it’s hard to understand where those “assets” came from, and who the customers/users were that deposited those assets, how the businesses were built, etc.

I’m guessing some are smoke and mirrors, and others are stealthy and/or opportunistic.

If there’s a list of viable blockchain companies doing business that is documented and can be understood, would love to get a pointer to it.
> GACT works much more reliably and extensively than any other system based on either GPS or mobile phone location data (based on cell towers) would be able to (under normal conditions). I want to stress this point because some people have responded to this threat saying that this is something companies like Google (using their GPS and WiFi names based location history tool) can already do for years. This is not the case. This type of contact tracing really brings it to another level

I'm curious about this, the author says they would like to "stress this point", but then provides no analysis or evidence to impress this... anyone have any buttressing points?
Build a Team that Ships (2012)
I just wanted to make an observation about automation. Yes, it has caused big disruptions on the labor markets. But, in these times, aren't you glad we have machines doing a lot of the essential work it was previously done by humans?
Yeah for charging you have a 'last 25 feet problem'. Meaning the need to run 25 feet of 10g romex from the breaker box to the charging plug.

That's not a big problem.
>> The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%

> How can we be sure until we have widespread testing?

I think we can be sure that this is an incorrect number, with the data we have right now. At least 8448 people have died of COVID-19 in New York City, and if only 0.1% of the infected die, then we have 8,448,000 infected New Yorkers. This is the entire population of the city (including those who fled to other states) and would mean that we've reached herd immunity and can stop worrying about it now.
It would still be high but it's honestly way too early to tell if Sweden is doing better or worse than Germany since the virus will likely be around for quite a while.

It's also worth pointing out that different countries haven't been reporting COVID-19 deaths in the same way. Finland, for example, have just now started including nursing home deaths in their statistics [1]. In Sweden, it's my understanding that pretty much anyone who was infected with and suspected of dying due to COVID-19 has been included in the statistics, even if the actual cause of death might have been something else.

[1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_coronavirus_fata...
Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out.

I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).
Existing social insurance schemes typically are of the form: you get $1000/mth, but, if you do any work, it subtracts from your payment. So, if you work less than $1000/mth, you're working, say, 100 hours "for nothing".

To make it worse, there is often an income point where the payment goes to zero (ex. if you make more than $800, you are no longer eligible, leaving a $200 gap). Or there are certain benefits that are lost (child credits, transit credits).

With UBI, you get $1000, but then every hour worked puts more money in your pocket.
Modern turbine blades are mostly made out of nickel, not steel. They're cast in such a way that they form a single crystal structure [1]. This makes 3d printing a no-go. Also, turbine blades are moving to ceramic matrix composite construction [2].

1. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-singl...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_matrix_composite
Counting parents without being able to see indentation sounds like hell but surely there are alternative solutions.
We do offer a custom version of our OCR reader app for Vision Impaired persons. The app require minimal interaction with the user. Just a single will trigger the phone camera, you have to take a picture and the text language is automatically recognized and played back aloud in your default language and accent with built-in translation powered by Google.

The OCR is powered by PixLab[1] and is damn good. The application homepage is https://i2s.symisc.net. If you are interested in trying the Vision Impaired version, let me know via chm at symisc dot net.

[1] https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=docscan
> In the Nordic region where I am from the Finns have done better than the rest of us because they are a prepper nation. They constantly prepare for the worst.

I am sure the Finns have done a fine job, but I don't think one can say that "the Finns have done better than the rest of us because they are a prepper nation" without studying this in detail. Being prepared is important, but just one part of the equation.

Travelling is also another important part (I am sure there are many others as well).
Looking at passenger statistics, the Finnish population seems to be traveling less by air than most Nordic countries as well. I have not extracted domestic flights and if flights are done by the citizens of the country where the airports are located, so these numbers are ballpark figures, but I guess they can give some insight (although domestic flights might cause more rapid spread of virus as well).

Numbers from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i...

Looking at the five biggest Airports in each country in: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, I get the following passenger numbers for each country per year:

Iceland: 21,7 flights per person, per year.

Norway: 8,5 flights per person, per year.

Denmark: 6,2 flights per person, per year.

Finland: 4,4 flights per person, per year.

Sweden: 4,4 flights per person, per year.

The passenger numbers correlates relatively well with detected cases when the pandemi hit the Nordic Countries (chose March 4th, arbitrarily); Sweden and Denmark changes place:

====

Iceland – March 4, 1]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 26 cases

Population-size adjusted, up to the size of Sweden (biggest country): 730 cases

====

Norway – March 4, 2]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 59 cases

Population-size adjusted: 109

====

Sweden – March 4, 3]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 52 cases

(Not Population-size adjusted)

====

Denmark – March 4, 4]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 14 cases

Population-size adjusted: 25

====

Finland – March 4, 5]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 7 cases

Population-size adjusted: 13

====

So when this awful pandemi is over, I think it is important to study all aspects of what happened in each country before one draws firm conclusions. And LEARN from the good stuff, and do more of that! :-)

Sources:

1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iceland/

2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/

3] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/

5] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/finland/
There are too many ideas in your post. Some of which make sense, some do not.

> Players of an RPG want a fun game.

I don't think you understand game theory and design well enough to be commenting. Generally, games are about learning about the world and performing pattern recognition to optimize in a constrained environment. MMORPGs have LOTS of games within them, some of which are completely player driven.

> as a society, if a lot of people like me slack off more, the real economy will suffer

Slack off? Real economy? Suffer? Soft terms that are composed into an unqualified statement. There is sentiment, but no meaning.

> Robots could save us but we are not there yet, not by a long shot.

Now meandering on to robots for some reason, which is not related to previous points.

Some forums (like this one) prefer smaller assertions with arguments and typically reward those who track down supporting documentation or revealing technical support (equations, papers, historical references, active research, etc). Ironically, HN posts are preferred when people put work into them :)
I may have overstated, believing people on average are more like myself than they are. But I think you're likely doing the same thing in the opposite direction, believing people will keep working hard for little benefit when many of them wont. Let's just agree there are different kinds of people and they will behave differently, and my argument has some merit, as does yours.

There was no anthropomorphizing in my statements.
> it's pretty clear that socialised health care is cheaper than privatised health care

Causation goes the other way. If your healthcare is cheap, you might as well socialize it, and it will mostly be OKish; if it's too expensive (as in the U.S.) you have no chance of running a satisfactory socialized system. Switzerland has largely private healthcare and mandatory ("universal") health insurance, but its costs are not too high despite it being a comparatively small country with inherently higher costs of providing such services.

> For everything else, it's your health and possibly your life at stake; you can't really say no to treatment, so you pay whatever it takes

This is not really true. There is such a thing as pointless overtreatment, and the right balance of benefits vs. costs can only be reached with increased price transparency on the part of providers.
Are you saying that you would only have one 50% job? Why not just take it as a 100% and find other ways to make best use of your non-productive side.

I would rather hire one person working 100% than two people working 50%, because there is less communication overhead.
Google doesn't directly murder people so it can't be evil. Got it.
This is a useless bit of pedantry. The exponential portion of the sigmoid curve is the only part that matters to human health, survival, and economic well-being.
Line tracking using plain CSS
I spent last summer working remotely traveling a lot of Western Europe mostly by myself and it changed my life. I'd never left the country before and here I was dropped off in Oslo at 1am by myself. Now I have so many memories and I take time most days to look at the pictures I took to try and build stronger mental imagery that I can remember. I wish everyone had the opportunity to do so.
That’s pretty common, because the area lights are often very bright. So the subpixel values are either 0 or white hot (and much brighter than 1.0). If you model the light sources with actual physical units and do some sort of exposure process for the “film”, you can get a more natural result.
While I agree with your point generally, it can still be useful to have competition between hospitals.

The NHS in the UK had great results with publishing clinical outcome statistics making people shun places with bad practices. This lead to a decline in deaths and complications.
Here is one study being conducted by Stanford professor in Santa Clara
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...
> Woah can $100k really take you 5-10 years?

In some cities for $100k you can buy your own apartment and have some money to spare.
I had a similar experience with my career, and after a lot of trying and moping, I recognized it as an opportunity to work and do what i love, without compromise. is there anything that you've been dreaming of working on?
I think most of the people who are full-time are more dedicated to the projects. They are more focused to think on how to solve a problem better, sometimes even when they are off shift.