skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author is a VC who almost exclusively funds software-based businesses where "build" generally refers to intangibles and businesses based on intangibles. He refers to Western/American effectiveness ("we") in building computers, including smartphones. His famous quote, displayed prominently on his website, is "Software is eating the world."

However, strangely, this post from him calls for building tangible assets, not software. Perhaps some of the funding directed at software can now be directed to businesses whose primary assets are tangible. What do you think.

Consider all the money and willingness to invest that has been directed toward software-based businesses. What if more of that investment capital had gone to non-software-based endeavours that America chose not to build while Silicon Valley VC like Andreeson Horowitz were busy directing focus to software.

It seems to me that his firm could be complicit in a general unwillingness in America to build tangible things. If I was someone following his philosophies over the past few decades, I would be less inclined to invest, or promote investment, in the types of "traditional" business required to build the things he calls for in this post.
> I find this essay to be extremely frustrating

Thanks, I was worried I would find HN readers to be largely in agreement with it and I'm glad I was wrong about that.

I also find that "we need to want these things" is the key problem with the article. I agree with your conclusions, but I think you've understated the case a bit.

I believe that all of this has happened the way it happened because we live in a society -- and a system -- that has been steadily lowering the value we place on human life.

When I moved to United States in 2013, what shocked me the most was the incredible number of homeless people in Seattle. This is an immensely wealthy, developed country, arguably the most powerful in "the first world". And yet, two of the "five most homeless cities in the world"[1] are in this country.

One of the big problems with the lockdown measures in several parts of the US was "what about homeless kids who depend on their schools". Do you people understand what that sounds like?

So yes, the problem is capitalism. No, not "crony capitalism" or any other variation of No True Scotsman defense of capitalism[2]. This is what you get when you build your whole system around the optimization of one variable -- profit -- and put essentially religious faith into the unproven idea that the Invisible Hand of the Market will make everything work.

Marc ends his essay by saying "instead of attacking my ideas, conceive your own". He's essentially asking people to express their disagreement in a way that validates his ideology. Sadly, the answer to his question about what we should build isn't anything he or the rest of the elites would like to hear.

What we need to build is awareness. What we need to build are societal "firewalls" against the ubiquitous propaganda[3] that inundates our society. What we need to build is a movement.

EDIT: Fixed some formatting problems that I didn't notice initially.

---

[1]: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=e56c...

[2]: It's usually the same people who won't accept that "real socialism hasn't been implemented yet" as an answer that deflect critique of capitalism by saying "Oh, that is not capitalism, that's crony capitalism."

[3]: The US doesn't have state propaganda like North Korea or China, and that leads people to believe it's free of propaganda. It's not.
> The virus has already killed over 0.1% of the entire population of New York City

Wait, what? That would be one person in every 1000? Population of 8,398,748[1] that would be... huh. Confirmed deaths, 8,448[2].

Nice, as they say on another site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City

[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
This is a great comment, and hopefully I could add some real life example around this, esp with 1) and 2).

Uber did this in Europe.

Uber pushed, fought and introduced gig-economy employment laws in every country it has operated in EU, specifically around taxi and for hire transport regulation. Uber employed a huge amount of legal and PR counsel to achieve this, with massive lobbying funding.

And what has happened? It's getting beaten to it's knees by new, mean competitors. Competitors that enjoyed all the same benefits without the millions invested.
Wow.. If we ever perfect 3D fabrication..
There is no tech company that is going to sponsor a browser that makes it harder for them to track customers.
And another:

The infection is far more widespread than previously believed because a larger percentage of people are asymptomatic than previously believed.
I think the modern US version is different:

A federal 3 letter agency unilaterally writes detailed regulations, that are for practical purposes law.

One problem is that the regulatory agency gets captured by the industry, which means the regulation ends up being a way for the established industries and companies to make competition unfeasible.
Regulatory capture seems like a red herring that everyone is fixating on here. Marc is right to mention it, but it's part of a bunch of other things and the most important part is the will of people to actually build and try new stuff, and run through walls to make it happen.
Bloggers are insufferable. No. One. Cares.
I did not know this. Makes sense now. Thanks for explaining it.
Which are still usually advisory and not legally binding advice.
Nope, never changed it.
That precedent was comprehensively reversed by the 1950s.
This is actually more subtle than one would think.

Say you were trying to talk to three UART registers at 0xA000, 0xA004, and 0xA008. It's legal to access:

*(volatile uint32_t *)(0xA000);
*(volatile uint32_t *)(0xA004);
*(volatile uint32_t *)(0xA008);

The struct equivalent of this would be something like:

struct UART_Peripheral {
volatile uint32_t control;
volatile uint32_t txdata;
volatile uint32_t rxdata;
};

struct UART_Peripheral *uart0 = 0xA000;
uart0->control;
uart0->txdata;
uart0->txdata;

As long as your structure is packed/aligned correctly, this is perfectly valid C. You can enforce the structure packing with an __attribute__ ((__packed__)) if using GCC or Clang. I think MSVC has a pragma for it.

I know that the C language spec allows for structure padding, but I'm not sure if the concept is applicable if every member of the structure is the native word-size of the target CPU.

But regardless of whether the spec specifies this expicitly or not, I've never seen a compiler insert padding in-between struct members that are already word-aligned.

So the code might be very slightly questionable if written in pure C with no packing pragmas/attributes - but even then it would probably work on almost every target. And if used with the right pragma/attribute for your compiler, it's a perfectly valid construct. And it's also a common one - especially in embedded work or hardware drivers.
And a quick search for an old Netgear manual: https://www.manualslib.com/manual/298986/Netgear-Nd508.html#...
I found myself wanting to read the Javascript section in one go after opening the first few entries, so I did:

u="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbranchaud/til/master/"; curl "${u}README.md" | sed -e '/### JavaScript/,/### /!d;//d' | awk -F'[()]' '{print $2}' | xargs -n1 -I{} curl "$u{}" >> til-javascript.md
> The actual first case was at the beginning of January.

Receipts please.

You are claiming that the timeline of SF matched other countries where deaths started much earlier and went much higher. Are you really making the claim that our hospitals were overlooking a couple hundred people drowning in their own lungs and unable to breath during the month of February?

Because that would basically have to have been true if we had community spread in early January.

> The shelter in place order means the city failed to anticipate and acted when it was too late. Like the rest of the Western world.

Your assumption is that the death rate being substantially lower in SF and California is luck and not preparation?

That stance doesn’t seem supported by the evidence.
This is super cool! I'm wondering how the car would react if:

* someone parked on the side opens their door too quickly and collide with the zoox car.

* there is a car not moving in front, and the zoox car cannot see what's in the other lane without backing to get more insight

I'm also super impressed at how it can understand where the lane is in this 5 lane intersection that crosses a tram line. Even I couldn't understand where I would have had to drive!
That's mentioned in the first setnence of the comment you are replying to
It's just sad apple does not let owners to do this with their device by default. We had to wait for a bootrom exploit.
"the info that identifies your face, iris, or fingerprint never leaves your device." - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468253/windows-10-...
From Offshore to In-House – A Senior Developer Who Moved from Ghana to Canada
We Will Beat Covid-19
> Of course the media won't cover this story widely, as it won't sell properly, there isn't enough sensationalism. It lowers panic

Actually it is being covered in the media (e.g. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/santa-clara-coronaviru... ) and the reason it’s not being trumpeted everywhere is because there are very serious statistical issues with the study that make it irresponsible to draw the conclusion that 50-85x the number of people are infected as previously thought. https://twitter.com/AlanMCole/status/1251493794039705600?s=2...
> It's bad enough that people are driving cars all over the place, car collisions have killed more Americans than all the wars we've fought put together.

Do you want this to stop? Then we're going to have this people test their self-driving cars in a real environment. The more we delay this, the more people are dying because of car accidents.
This is really neat. Great work!
It's why we should be doing massively increased blood testing and test manufacturing to resolve that question. For the last few months it has been the single most important question and they're putting very few resources behind trying to answer it.

We can't test blood properly? Of course we could. They are choosing not to, is the actual context. It's a large mistake.

How many infections have you already had? How widespread is it really? No answer, no attempt to answer at scale. At its best, it's immense incompetence in action by the authorities in charge of dealing with this mess.
This is just wonderful. Yes, the world needs more of this. Thank you for building and sharing it, Andrew!
In San Francisco, at least, YIMBY is the organization that is organized around ending regulatory capture in housing, and The Neoliberal Project (in SF YIMBY Neoliberal) is organized around broader dismantling of regulatory capture.

We mobilize people in support of reform-focused politicians and have even started running our own (Sonja Trauss in 2018 and myself in 2020).

Happy to talk more about it -- steven.buss@gmail.com
Happy to talk more about it
You see it in education. We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year olds in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18 year olds in the world each year. Why not educate every 18 year old?

Because the US has too much college education now. About 45% of the people with college degrees are working in jobs that don't require them. The payoff for a college education is often negative now.[1]

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/there-really-arent-many-ba...
I hadn't thought of that possibility. I'd thought that maybe the people with severe symptoms had gone to the hospital instead of the shelter.
> Good lane markings

did you see that 5 lane intersection going over a tram lane? I myself had no idea where I would have driven there.
How is their funding in any way affected?
Nothing I said is rooted in a belief that population growth will continue unabated. You yourself asserted that people’s wants are unlimited. That may be true, but people’s wants are never going to override the cold reality of finite supply.

Finite supply exists even if population growth declines. Finite supply exists even if population declines. Finite supply exists even if it’s untenable from a policy perspective. The expectation of continued unending exponential growth baked into our economic system will run up against the actual limits of what the Earth is capable of providing.

Again, this should not be controversial. Playing games about population growth is simply dodging the fact that even given a population of two humans, any greater-than-one exponent on economic activity will end. The logistic curve exists precisely because of this fact.
Now I've got you -
The biggest issue I have with texmacs is how difficult it is to interact with the community.

Your mailing list archive is not indexed by google (except for the narkive version, where search is broken) so answered questions are generally not visible to new users.

The default search in the list archive only searches a single month, this is useless. Searching multiple months is non-obvious.

Some project-deaf suggestions from this outsider are:

- put your lists on Google Groups so they are easily searchable and findable for new users

- just put the damn thing on GitHub and use their Issues system (or GitLab or at least something that isn't Savannah).

It might be a bit annoying for current project members to get the hang of it but I think, in 2020, it is very difficult to grow and show off a community that's based on GNU Savannah!
And? “Not fixed” and “literally infinite” are completely different ballparks.
Isn’t this general kids vs adult things? I think most (but not all) people learn less and less as they get older.

For practical, “try at home” things, internet is just making everything so much better. You can read books a lot, but if you want to learn how to make a laser from scratch (for example), no book will be nearly as good as a bunch of blog posts and forum to connect to others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22880335
Brb in a couple decades. But I was kind of hoping that the domain experts would have thoughts on the topic. I would very much like to build long-term solutions to our biggest problems, but I haven't found a whole lot of mechanisms to do so.
It's important to acknowledge, though, that most of the criticisms in this article apply even more strongly to the official reporting model. (For example, the study might have accidentally skewed towards people with symptoms, while the official numbers are intentionally and maximally skewed towards them.) So the criticisms don't argue that the real number is closer to the 1,870 on the county's website; they argue that we really have no idea how many people have been infected.
This doesn't answer my question. If you prepare for it, then you are acting as if you think it will happen. That is, if you thought it would definitely happen you would do the same thing you are doing now, therefore the two states are indistinguishable except for the story in your head - and the main point about the story seems to be "I don't think it will happen therefore I'm better than the people who do think it will happen, even though we are both expending the same effort, doing the same preparations, to avoid the exact same problem"

Chanting "cost benefit analysis" doesn't change anything.
That's a very cynical view. Doctors are by no means lower class. Most if not all of them can quit, and are not subject to "economic coercion". Yet almost of them choose to work and overwork.

I am not an "essential" and am working from home, but I donate and try to help my local community, and if I am called to help in other ways, I will.

And no, I don't actively invest in tobacco.
I disagree on the Javascript count, specifically modern, statically typed Javascript.

I might choose another language for perf characteristics that JS cannot match, but otherwise Javascript is a truly expressive lang right now.
Read "Why Courts Don't Work" by Richard Neeley, who used to be chief justice of the West Virginia supreme court. Courts don't work because a lot of people don't want them to work. If you could get a judgement in a week in a minor labor case, employers would have to obey labor law, for example.
Yes! I use c-u to clear the line all the time.
1. That's just one persons opinion. Don't treat it as fact.

2. Read the comments in that article for some counter-points.

The point is, this can't go on and thank god we're opening up everything again.
The problem is not the builders. The problem is those who hold them back: government red tape, bureaucracy and investors who prefer to put their money on another cat app.
C does support this and has for decades. Many device drivers are written in C and do this exact thing.
DAT is not new, I've been building stuff on top of it. Good to see more people are awared of it.
I think trying to put all of Europe into one EU in your argument is already where it breaks down.

Europeans don't live in a cohesive society. Italians, Germans, Swedes live in a cohesive society in their small california-sized countries.
Sweden has a higher per capita death rate than the US, for a different comparison. And the president of Belarus said on Monday that "No one will die of coronavirus in our country. I publicly declare this". He is the first and only president of Belarus and has been in power for 26 years.
UK Government's Design System
Thank you everyone for your comments. I much appreciate it!
> This overlooks the fact that Marc is in fact one of these folks who has a profoundly outsized role in deciding what he wants.

He says what he wants, but then he expects someone else to build it. He's rich: if he wants these things, why doesn't he just pay to get them built? Sure, not all of them, but just pick one and pay to get it built.

But, as you point out, he's not interested in long term investments--and that is the root of the problem. The very people who are the most suited to making long term investments--people who have enough wealth that they don't have to answer to anyone else's expectations for earnings, profits, whatever--are incapable of making long term investments.
Yes, I remember running into this on the Amiga. The later processors, like the 68020 and 030, removed this restriction.
I've been following their maps over the last week and I have noticed a lot of variation day-to-day. I have seen three different statuses for California so far, for example.
that site links to nothing, you sure you got the URL right?
Can someone explain to me the reason for including a leading zero? Is that just a stylist choice of the long now foundation?
Soon there'll be a different kind of pressure. The Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, SD is closed because of 500 coronavirus cases amongst the employees. Several other plants are idled now because they are downstream of the South Dakota plant. This is a cut of 5 % of the pork supply in the United States. Several Tyson chicken processing plants in Georgia also have coronavirus outbreaks.

Everyone thought that food shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic were a very remote possibility, but it seems they are coming, and the government can't permit that. Food riots are precursors to revolutions.
Can you open up a command prompt in-game and run arbitrary code to control your character? No? Then it's not the Metaverse.
The Palace had that in the 90s (and used a version of Forth). If anything, the Metaverse is a continuously regressing "could-have-been", where content creation has been replaced with buying skins and premade, pre-approved aesthetics.
My understanding is that the idea that wind turbines kill birds in huge numbers is based on the original wind turbines. These were much smaller in radius and had many more blades and spun much faster.

Think of a giant farm water-pump windmill. Those things were bird blenders. Modern three blade wind turbines are a different beast, but many people have not caught up with the changes in engineering.

[ Also, some of the initial wind farms using the bird blenders (e.g. the Altamont Pass near Livermore, CA) were right on the Pacific Flyway, which is a massive migratory path. ]
Why does US Congress approval rating matter? If I considered my congressperson 100/100 and everyone else 0/100, the House would get an overall rating of around zero.

Obviously since I can't elect members of the House of Representatives from other districts, I could totally approve of my congressperson and senator and it still not be my fault for the other guys in power.
I think it's more complicated than that.
> Markets would love to build more housing... But they're prevented from doing so by the regulatory state

Interesting claim. Do you want to detail this more? Most of my experience is not with the State itself being an obstacle, but as a tool in the hands of landlords and capitalists to help enforce scarcity.
>> I wonder if folks are giving up deep feature discovery by using an generic GUI SQL client.

SSMS, unfortunately, is missing a ton of features that 3rd-party clients have mastered -- instant search/filter through query results, quick aggregating of numeric results (min max, sum, avg, sd, etc), sorting on any column, exporting to multiple formats, filtering of schema objects, charts from query results -- just off the top of my head. They also enable many tasks via GUI like creating/editing table schemas, importing bulk data, pre-query variable substitution, etc.

SSMS is free, and should be installed whenever one needs to interface with SQL Server, but good 3rd party clients are generally better at 90+% of common tasks, while SSMS only needs to be used for a handful of specific features that it does very well.
The text on this page renders so far to the left that the sentences are missing words. (iOS)
Thanks for sharing! This is awesome.
My understanding of regulatory capture is when the regulatory decision makers are beholden or acting in concert with those they purport to regulate.

Most voters think that some level of regulation is beneficial and support it. Politicians who advocate for the complete removal of regulations don't usually do well in the polls, but this is a widely held belief in right-wing thought. The market will do all the regulating necessary. This has quite obviously been proven incorrect over the years. Nevertheless, the idea persists.

The next most effective way to have no regulations is to keep the appearance of regulations and have the enforcers be completely ineffectual, thus regulatory capture.

So, you end up with the externally perverse-looking, but internally consistent situation where the right will support regulators' existence and even promote their people into those institutions.
I think that to have a good opportunity to get hired for a remote role you should have a very good personal brand, your code quality and your contributions to open source projects. Some times I receive job offers from people that looks at something that I made on GitHub.

So I can say: "My tactics is to love what I do, share knowledge with others and contribute to open source projects"
A few recognizable parts:

*.5-(pos.xy;1)%size.x

This produces a vec3 of the screen-space coordinates of the fragment, scaled to a -0.5 to 0.5 range (assuming a square display) and the z component will be the scaling factor. This also happens to invert the axes, which doesn't matter.

x.xy*:mat[cos a;sin a;-sin a;cos a]

This is a standard 2d rotation matrix- rotate the position xy about the origin by angle a.

Your comment is a good description of the overall algorithm.
Both of these books are remarkably interesting for anyone who wants to understand microcoded architectures.