skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The notion that we should be encouraging corporations to hoard money is crazy. We have enough problems with them doing that as it is, because executives already have a perverse incentive to retain earnings for pet projects and wasteful empire building, and there are a bunch of dumb tax rules that already allow taxes to be avoided as long as the money isn't repatriated and paid out to shareholders, which makes the shareholders prefer to collect interest on the before-tax amount in an offshore account inside the corporation rather than the after-tax amount in their own domestic account.

Corporations don't need to hoard money because viable businesses can always raise more. The exception is unforeseen systemic problems like this, but even they aren't really exceptions, the issue then is that everybody needs to borrow money at once and there aren't enough creditors which requires a policy change to make a sufficient amount of credit available.
> An alternative is fuel stabilizer but make sure you do your math correctly and don't add to much or or too little.

Why would too little be an issue? Won't it still be better than not using it at all?

> I predict a surge in cars that won't start when the stay-at-home orders are lifted.

I'm sure they're still being used to go to the grocery store and possibly trips to the pharmacists, laundromat, or pick up take out.
but it's different from being on-call. i understand that in many places, on-call requires the same payment as regular work hours for the whole period, not just for the hours worked.

and i don't feel it's an intrusion if being available is optional and not required.

it's essentially how every freelancer works. they are available during business hours. but they don't get paid if they don't get called for work by a client.
ALMA Reveals Unusual Composition of Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov
> if the company makes $100,000 in profit and I have to pay two employees $40k each, I’m barely making ends meet.

Honest question - how would paying yourself dividends change this math? Dividends have to come out of the same $100k right?
The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral (2015)
> and the US is headed for a default in the next 24 months.

Huh? In what circumstances would the US actually choose to default rather than simply printing money?
The US is currently a net exporter of oil, or at least was until the recent price drop. Saudi Arabia's capacity of pumping oil is completely based on what they view as their best interest in making money while maintaining market share. That's why they tried to take US Shale oil out, and why they tried over producing recently to get Russia to come to the table for a production cut. They've also embargoed the US in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis
Hi! I'm Henry — a new grad at Skidmore College. I focused mainly on designing and deploying ML architecture — although I'm very open to any and all backend opportunities.

Location: Chicago, IL

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Java

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V4-R5EbMdPBa3pGW4vYPAiIvd14...

Email: henry.huang324@gmail.com
I was listening to some a podcast when oil first dropped and they were saying the issue is that a lot of the small producers are on leases and then may have to pump at a loss just to keep it and try to make it up later. Or burn everything they already spent. A lot went all in and levered up and are now stuck.
I don't know if API stability is a barrier to adoption or not, but I was just explaining my experience with both platforms. For me, I don't much care how many people use Linux; I just want to use my computer how I like to, and Linux suits my needs best.
The best UI for this IMO is a toggle with three choices: light, dark, and same-as-OS.
> lining investor pockets

Investors are often normal people like you and me, using dividends and the sale of shares to put food on their families' tables.
This is only about future behavior. If you paid dividends up to last week doesn't matter.

They don't want to pay out aid to companies that then just hand the aid money out to investors.
I wonder if it is due to some ancient regulation mandating rings/pings that nobody bothered to update for current tech. When i lived in Warsaw (Poland) for a while, every single elevator i came across - including those in very old buildings - had voice recordings for announcing the current floor. I almost learned polish numbers from them :-P
Nobody knows. We know that "real" masks (i.e. n95 or better) are effective when worn properly, but many people don't wear them properly.

The evidence for effectiveness of other kinds of masks in the prevention of virus transmission is weak, at best.
Sounds like we wait for some technologies to reduce the prototype cost by two orders of magnitude. What makes it so costly?
Presumably hacking services (whether real or scams) were also banned and yet I saw them and even reported them and nothing has been done.
I hope I'm not being pedantic when I point out that the existence of cheap flights isn't the same thing as taking them. I will accept that the existence of cheap flights causes more air travel. I will not accept without evidence that the act of traveling via air leads people to having more dispersed families.
>Irony factor: it'll come from the same congress members who are now pushing the "allow people to sue China" agenda.

I think it will work something like this, the cruise ships are insured, the insurers will settle these cases and then the insurers will recover against China/Chinese owned assets.

>the "allow people to sue China" agenda.

Maybe that is a very legitimate agenda.
Yes, this almost happened to me once when I was trading futures. My broker called me several times throughout the day and I couldn't take the call. When I finally did, he told me to roll my contract forward that day otherwise I would have to take delivery of 1000 bushels of corn.
Suing your employer for wage theft because

1. They are still paying your salary, and

2. They are still granting you stock, but

3. They have suspended dividends on the shares you were granted

seems like a reach. I'd definitely be interested in reading about it if someone actually tries it, though!
https://ideascape.in/blog
For the past year, I've been writing knee-deep stories about Indian brands. The ones that don't get covered by Western media in great detail. Or covered in passing to conform to the cliches about India. And there's more to India than food and IT
> During the Arab Spring, Kuwait handed out $500k checks to all Kuwaiti males above 18 years old.

Do you have a reference for this? I had a look, but it's one of those things that is a bit difficult to search for.
I would be fine with it _iff_ pre-existing wealth were redistributed.

As it stands, the idea that my own salary should be restricted is asinine in a world in which someone else starts out with >10M. All you achieve is cementing inequality forever.
I run one on hetzner cloud that does similar traffic and it is no problem at all for them. I basically max out the bandwidth at any given moment and they never complained.
What's the reason for the shutdown? Not enough donations? Too many/few users?
I imagine this would result in things like in Spiderman Far From Home where you can be given an environment that isn't reality. Could be very malicious in the wrong hands.
As "nice" as this is, it's realllllly gonna suck on the other side when the price snaps back up and keeps going up because some oil producers have gone out of business.
The good side: the ships allowed us to have the data about COVID-19 that could not be otherwise easily obtained. One could hardly invent better "experiment setup" with the real people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_D...

But some "experts" however decided to ignore the existence of that data, and even as it was already available in Wikipedia, continued to spread the claims (which are even now repeated!) that "we know too little about this disease to do anything, so better not doing anything before we do some 'random testing'."
Hi! My name is Peter Sherman. I have been a software engineer for 20+ years. I have also engaged in regular meditation for 20+ years. I would suggest that what you're going to experience in the future may turn out to be a blessing, rather than a curse, as daunting as the idea of future blindness seems.

Now, before I am tarred and feathered alive by pretty much everyone here in the HN community, please give me a moment to explain!

You see, most people spend their lives, their entire lives, searching for something which is outside of themselves, something which they believe will make them happy.

If they find it, it very well might, but unfortunately, it's only for relatively short periods of time, and then desire kicks in, and then there's a new set of goals, a new set of priorities. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing that grants happiness, even for many years -- will continue to do that for many more. Everything changes. (This is Buddhist philosophy incidentally).

What you're searching for, might very well be within -- rather than in the external world.

So how do you find this thing within?

Well, the first step is that you have to close down the external world.

You do this by closing your eyes (note that this is no different than blindness -- but it is less permanent), and relaxing, observing the mind and its flow of images.

If you see nothing but black... don't worry, I promise you, there's a ton of stuff in there -- more than you could ever imagine, more than 80 Zillion Internets' worth of data.

You'll see black for a fairly long time, maybe it will be months, maybe it will even be years, but eventually (with continued regular meditation) is that you'll start to see pinpricks of light, bits of sound, and you'll start to get intuitions and ideas from the higher mind, and you might see flashes of images. You might also drift off into lucid or semi-lucid dreams.

The trick is, don't try to use any force whatsoever to try do any of that, or those things will disappear. The harder you try, the less success you'll have (it's paradoxic in this respect), so a relaxed gentle focus is the key.

Becoming blind, at least the knowledge that that's going to happen to you -- could be compared to knowing that one day in the future you're going to be pushed into the ocean -- and you don't know how to swim.

Meditation, closing the eyes for at least 20 minutes a day, at a regular time every day, and relaxing, letting go, but maintaining a teensy bit of relaxed, gentle focus, gentle presence ("be here, now"), is not unlike learning to swim.

By the time you are pushed into the ocean... you want to be a champion swimmer, not someone who doesn't know how to swim.

Meditation then, is like learning how to swim, if the knowledge of future blindness is like being forced into an ocean...

Anyway, if you'd like, we can talk more about this. Shoot me an email at peter.d.sherman@gmail.com, and let's chat!

Oh, and here's a great song, by the way:

Billy Joel - In The Middle Of The Night (The River of Dreams)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9HFYNITCSs

OK, NOW the HN Community -- can tar (-xvf) and feather me! :-)
Scaling to 50k users as a small startup
Posturing. They want to intimidate producers (and their investors) that have much higher extraction costs, like U.S. frackers and Canadian oil sands firms. "We can bring oil to $10/barrel and still be profitable," you can imagine them saying threateningly.
A Remote Revolution? Or a Backlash?
Doing more with less time: critical skills for productive programmers
"Sorry, but you need to do better, you pathetic sad-sack snowflake! Right now you sound like not just part of the problem, but happily part of the problem. Fix yourself."

This comment is totally unnecessary and really not appropriate for HN.
Perhaps off-topic: if you have not read "The mind's eye" by Oliver Sacks, you may find it helpful, emotionally. Keeping an (audio) journal might help also to cope with anxiety.
I can highly recommend hetzner cloud. I run all my new stuff there. Great hardware, good connectivity, good prices, and okay UI to do things in: https://www.hetzner.de/cloud
I use RSS to keep up on a wide variety of disparate blogs, as well as the news. It becomes pretty tedious to re-filter all the news on different devices and in the process I risk missing a great post from a blog that posts less often. So for me personally, not syncing RSS is pretty frustrating.
I agree with you totally. There is one problem, however. That those will be our children in which we invested, who will have to take care of them while they are old. That is not fair.
It's because someone else does in actual fact buy it for more down the road more often than not.
Yes, it was negotiable, but that negotiation was the politics of the time; the Hanovers making concessions to Parliament to retain their acceptance, while being variably popular with the actual public, and unpopular with some of the polemic writers under discussion in the article.

The massive Hanoverian propaganda effort of George IV is written all over Edinburgh street names.
>"emulating" the (fairly small) subset of the traditional Win32 and DirectX APIs required for typical games might even make sense on Windows itself, should Microsoft one day decide to deprecate

I recently tried to run some WinXP-era games on modern hardware, and had absolutely no luck on Windows 10.

However some of the games ran fine on Wine (and 64-bit Linux).

The only downside I see to emulation is latency, but for many games this doesn't matter, and it's worthy to keep them runnable like this.
The percentage of contracts that result in delivery is only a marginal factor in this case. The fact that physical delivery exists makes it so that positions must be closed out; even if the May contract is down 44% on the day and you thought you would be clever buying the dip on Friday when oil couldn't possibly go lower.
And most abnormal ones. Even now they're correlated. And when e.g. one region has abnormalities, it doesn't really affect the purpose most people use this measure for.
If these companies aren't allowed to pay a dividend until they have paid back the government aid, isn't the government effectively taking an ownership stake?
I like how the FUD over GM is complemented by the potential for biodegradable fabrics (spider-silk woven in). What will the conspiracy theorist think!
if you think about it share buybacks are like dividends but with much better tax rate for investor
In a given time budget, maybe, but that wasn't much a part of the question I answered. The question asker compared ray tracing to brute forcing finding primes vs. using a sieve -- and that's just not how it is.

Also, I'm not sure about "just as complicated". Is rendering refraction with dispersion "just as complicated" to achieve in a given time budget with ray tracing as with rasterization? I must admit I'm not well versed in modern rasterization hacks, but as far as I know that is simply impossible to achieve, regardless of how much time you have.
They are specifically focusing on the visual cortex?
>Employer should just pay more in salary, what's the difference if I rent a office or convert part of my home into office?

I wish. My experience is that companies advertise "Remote work possible" as some sort of job perk, and use it as justification to actually pay you a lower salary.
The prospect of ciliary muscle atrophy (or exhaustion) from longer term use of this is pretty scary. I wonder if they're considering how to abate that.
To me modern cruises are one of the most egregious cases of late-stage capitalism:

The original idea is sound: visit multiple destinations on a mobile hotel!

The drive for value is acceptable: make the mobile hotel as fun as the destination with decent restaurants and entertainment

But the inevitable result is catastrophic: increasingly gigantic ships that cram customers and attractions in, cost-cutting measures that harm the environment, exploitation of port towns
Shake Shack returns $10M emergency loan to the US government
We'll need to figure out what those ingredients are, and how they work, and what negative effects they have.

Otherwise, we're being extremely unwise, and setting ourselves up for serious problems later.
But KSA has no ambitions towards becoming a global military superpower. For a long time it had a choke point on the economy through its resource monopoly. Until recently that was a much more potent weapon than any number of aircraft carriers.

Russia does have superpower ambitions, which is a rather more expensive business.

My cynical suspicion is that much of the KSA military budget is really just a form of kickback - or possibly protection money, depending how you look at it - to the US mil-ind establishment.

While the Saudis are some of the worst people in the world, their ambitions are limited to keeping the ruling dynasty outrageously rich and maintaining power on their own patch of turf.

The Russian establishment is far more dangerous. It not only has links to organised crime, it also has a complement of nukes, bio, and chem weapons. And it has a very developed infowar, hacking, and social destabilisation arm, based on techniques pioneered by the US, with some home-grown twists to increase effectiveness.

This oil war and related COVID crash are going to do huge damage to the economies of both countries - and a lot of others besides - with increased prospects for instability everywhere.
this is way too complicated and convoluted. just use global css selectors.
Read a story years ago, about post-apocalypse medicine women who kept pigs. They were pre-war and expressed drugs in their milk.
> I'm a software developer, which translates to being somehow smart

LOL, no, the opposite.
Indeed it would be no mere trifle to run a city in the middle of a dessert.
Microsoft built ‘Plasma Bot’ to tell if you can donate plasma to fight Covid-19
Anyone citing that paper recently is being irresponsible. It was debunked about a week after the pre-print went up on the server.
The mortally of corona is minuscule in the 3rd world populations that have born the brunt of previous epidemics.

IT's deadly primarily in populations of people(usually elderly) who can afford the health care needed to keep chronic health issues managed through medication.

the failure of covid-19 to materialize in the slums of Nairobi or poor rural districts of Thailand caused a lot of complacency among western planners who presumed that if it did not hit there it would not affect them.
True, yet they still want a bailout from the US government...
corporate tax breaks weren't useful in 2017 (during a boom) either.

The forewent tax revenue now would have been useful for a larger payment protection program. Part of the cynicism and restrictions around current proposals stem from how the 2017 tax cuts excess monies were deployed (shareholder buyback and dividends, not hiring or pay raises)
Eliminating a planned future dividend by itself would have no effect on the stock price. What would affect the stock price is the management explanation that comes along with cancelling the dividend. If they say that profits will drop even more than analysts had expected, then that would tend to cause a share price decline as it would be new information to the market.

Stock prices usually drop after a dividend is payed out because each share now represents a claim on fewer assets.
Stellar: An open network for storing and moving money
Open-source firmware turns CPAP machines into coronavirus ventilators
No need to wonder. English is that language.

Tomorrow I can come up with a new word called 'oogabookga' which means invention/discovery/creation, and then make enough people accept it so it makes it into the dictionary, and then 20 years later, 2 other folks like us will argue about the semantics between oogabookga and invention and discovery.

That's exactly what happened with invention/discovery 20 (or 200) years ago, and we are those 2 people now.
Was this a relatively recent thing? or ages ago?

I ask as its interesting to me how much less stuff goes into a PC these days. When I built my first box around 2000, it had so many components inside:

Motherboard/CPU/RAM
Graphics Card

Sound Card
Network Card
TV Tuner Card
Floppy Drive
CD Burner drive
DVD Drive (this prob came after initial build
2 3.5" HDs

That second portion of the list is effectively gone now, integrated into the motherboard, and M2 drives are the size of ram sticks and don't take up any significant space. Coolers have gotten bigger, as have high end graphics cards, but PC cases seem to generally be about the same size, when they are holding much less.

What did you regret about a small case?
That question is what I'm struggling with. My current explanation is that Evolution doesn't even care about itself. If it becomes more adaptable to leave its clutches, then it will push in that direction. It all depends on the environment to which we are adapting. So if the environment changes to value thinking that is anti-Evolution, Evolution will still reward that drift ...

Am I making sense? I honestly can't tell.
> The DirectX family of APIs also supports audio, input, networking,

These APIs were deprecated for more than a decade. DirectSound since cca 2008, DirectInput since 2002, DirectPlay since 2004.

The APIs that are left under DirectX umbrella are Direct2D, Direct3D, DXCore (adapter enumeration), DirectWrite (font rendering) and DirectXMath.
> If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them.

This is very close to what I was thinking, but there's a slight difference. I was thinking less about people who are _underpaid_ relative to how well they are performing, and more about people who are _underperforming_ relative to how well they could be.

I imagine this to be the most powerful kind of sports scouting -- you look for the people who could do well in the majors, no matter how well they're doing now. It's trivial to say "LeBron James would be a good #1 pick"; it's harder to recognize people like Kurt Warner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Warner), an NFL quarterback who went undrafted, but was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. I'm talking about people who have more potential than they're showing.
John Conway Solved Mathematical Problems with His Bare Hands
Supply and demand: it sounds reductive and patronizing but that's really it.

Oil is not being used much because demand has been halted, while supply has been ramped up because some countries are filling in their budget holes as fast as possible.

We pretend that these are controversial political problems, but the way the world was before was the market manipulation.

You may be familiar with the story of De Beers, how diamonds had no demand so De Beers created a demand with their story, and also constricted supply so that prices of diamonds would go up. The same happens with oil in the OPEC+ nations. They fundamentally exist to collude on oil prices to keep them high by limiting the supply of oil well under their capacity to extract it.

This "balance", or lack thereof, exists at any oil price. Oil has crashed FROM 23 cents before. Its all about the quantity that exists and the demand for it.
Natural Languages Are Interfaceless
In other discussion someone pointed out about passing a gpu to a windows kvm[1] and getting the output back to linux[2]. I never tried but seems really promising, might try it someday

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22905390#22906984

[2] https://looking-glass.hostfission.com