skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wartime economies during the first half of the 1900s were very different than now. The US Military was essentially subsidizing industry through contracts to support the war effort, increasing government spending to unprecedented levels: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/u-s-economy-in-world-war-i/. BTW, they financed this by printing money. A lot of it. They did all this because they recognized that the war was an existential threat to America. It would be interesting to see what the reaction to the flu would have been without WWI going on, but in many ways, the government reaction is not so different — simply targeted at different industries. One benefit of the reaction then as opposed to now is that less of the subsidies went into the hands of finance and more to businesses who actually employ people.

However, I can agree with you in principle. Let’s start with the banks though — who have received so much in subsidies over the last two economic downturns that they’ve actually made money. Oh and can’t forget investors, who have been kept afloat by the Fed pumping money into the economy. If we let them fail in practice, it is likely that large companies/hedge funds/investors would be much more careful. But of course, that would also eliminate much of the wealth held by people in tech. Probably yourself included? Are you ok with that in service of pure capitalism?

I guess this all comes down to what kind of society you want to build. Part of the myth of prosperity after the US turn towards a service economy and away for manufacturing has been the idea that scrappy entrepreneurs can build their own businesses. So much of society and economic policy has been built around that idea. If we remove that, economic inequality would probably be too much for the average person to bear — where will the jobs come from when 74 percent of the employers are gone? The unrest that would appear in our society then would surely make 2020 feel a lot more like 1918 as well.
> I saw talk from one guy who wanted to make the Nix package manager use commands that were more like in other package managers.

I'm guessing this is about `nix` and `nix-env` having poor interfaces and lacking e.g `nix install` – those aren't _really_ meant to do package management, because it's an imperative approach akin to Apt. I haven't touched `nix-env` for actual package management in over a year now.

You should instead be writing your system-level package dependencies and services in your configuration.nix, your user-level package dependencies and services in home-manager's home.nix, and if you just need to use a package quickly, you should use `nix run nixpkgs.hello -c hello` or `nix-shell -p hello`, and if you're trying to set up a dev env for a project you should be using direnv or lorri. nix-env pollutes your environment and causes headaches when/if you add the same packages you have installed there to your declarative files.

>I couldn't use any of my NPM skills with the Nix package manager.

You can – look into direnv and lorri, they let you handle system-level dependencies while NPM handles its own libraries, on a per-project basis. This is IMO the best contemporary way to do a developer environment.
That’s adorable! Was that in the UK?
Intelligence researchers don't use IQ, they use raw data from testing.

As you pointed out, IQ is not usable for research across time or across countries or cultures. You can only compare individuals in the same time and same population.
I think most postal routing does something akin to (initial read) -> (write machine readable code) -> (internal mapping of code to location) -> (physical routing).

And if it falls off the fast-path, remote human transcription is used at the origination tagging step.

Expect even with error-tolerant encoding, sometimes the codes themselves get corrupted (smudged, misread, etc). In which case mail ends up at (corrupted code location) instead of expected. E.g. one bit-flip, which may or may not be physically adjacent.
'Heads we win, tails you lose': how America's rich turned pandemic into profit
I guess it's finally Feynman's turn to be roasted over the coals for some inappropriate remarks he made somewhere.

In particular, I like how TLS slid it in there as a joinder to his life's work, because it totally fits there.

Well done HN, well done.
Jehovas witnesses in Finland were exempt from the military service until last year. Someone took it to court and the ruling was that you can't discrimate certain groups based on their religion. I think it's only a question of time before it is brought up as gender discrimination and the exemption will be removed.

There are some political interest in changing in mostly from the youth branches of the political parties but the "real" politicians mostly stick their fingers in their ears. I suppose it is more or less political suicide to try to change the statsu quo as would affect a huge amount of voters negatively.
If i did not have my startup that's starting to go well and hopefully i will be able to live of it. I would be an enterprise code monkey, there are still plenty of directions away from programming you can go from that direction and still make an middle class to upper middle class salary.

That is if you still can deal with the people who work in tech. I rather work with normal people who knows what they do is just an office job, other then people who believe they will cure cancer with their CS degree and CRUDy mobile app they are developing on their free time.
Recent studies have been consistent with the result that teenagers are having less sex today than they used to.
Is there any reason to not pass the mic to doctors?

"Hi all. Thanks for coming. We've been kicking around some ideas. You all know Dr. Fauci. I've asked him to share what we now know, what we're thinking. He'll also answer all your questions. Please give him your full attention."
Our next holiday abroad will be different
very well articulated. it seems that the implicit obligation to be your own PR agency has frustrated your generation with most of fame's burdens, but few of its rewards.
Quantifying the effect of quarantine control in Covid19 infectious spread by ML [pdf]
The Wikipedia page for Mojibake [0] used to have this image: https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post-env... (sorry, one has to click "ignore the SSL security issue"), someone got a Russian address to post a package to, but their email program decoded it using the wrong charset. The Russian post managed to re-encode the address anyway.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake
This is so sad... I cannot even begin to contemplate. When I was young blogging was something exciting and new. You could share your thoughts and interests with complete strangers and make connections to people you didn't even know -- albeit not very deep ones. Never once was it about status or signalling -- I mean surely there were people for whom this was important, but they were playing their status games with each other and didn't bother the people that wouldn't care about such nonsense.

It is a horrifying notion that you are only valued based on the output of your blog / FB / twitter account. I used to think that for every cultural movement there is a counter-movement that tries to invert the values of a previous generation. Are there people in your circle that explicitly reject this notion of self commodification and exhibitionism?
It ain't surprising, but rather just disappointing, that an ecosystem can't or won't learn from the trials and tribulations of other ecosystems.

EDIT: also, Node's more than a decade old at this point, so it is at least a little bit surprising that the ecosystem is still experiencing these sorts of issues.
Virtually explore new places during the lockdown
In fact, Nixpkgs is only second to Arch in quantity of packages. There was a period where Nixpkgs had more than Arch, even.
How easy it is for some to back and say that the government should be doing this or that. As these attitudes of entitlement continue to supplant those of self reliance, what happens?

"...Payroll support is then a more easily-administered form of federal UI. (Plus state UI is written in COBOL, they will literally crash.)"

Given how PPP just played out and considering the history our government has with opacity surrounding public-private finance...do you believe that such a broad strategy in US could be done with competence and integrity? If so, how?

"The point is that we literally cannot pinch pennies now: anything we "save" will hit us twice as hard as a new entitlement cost, or a cost to the states, or in reduced tax revenue, or whatnot." Could you elaborate on this premise?

"Also, retaining workers will help to ensure a V-shaped economic recovery."

There is no ensuring of anything! Positioning it as "will help ensure" is a linguistic setup strangely reminiscent of how politicians like to manipulate words (and people).

But "Money is a fiction"...what does this even mean?
Maybe this behavior is bit more sophisticated version of what dogs to when meet. Dogs like push their nose comfortably in areas we generally prefer to hide from strangers, when they like the smell a good chance this is rewarded with a doggy style session.

I sometimes think we have made the persuasion game so complicated and we could be a lot happier if everybody starts having 10x more sex tomorrow.
I am finding that the Nix package manager on top of Fedora works nicely as a middle ground:

You can use it to set up a per-project nix-shell that gives you an experience a little like docker (in terms of speed), but more convenient because your normal machine is available on the PATH (or not, if you run --pure).

I can then use that same Nix config in my CI - just use the base Nix docker image and then apply the nix-env as a pre-script.
wasn't trump a winner of cheapest (fake) billionaire by trying to cash a $1 check, or something like that?
What's the third competitor? There is no reason to be so evasive in a technical discussion.
Just because everyone is doing it doesn't make it OK.
Does the census actually track that? I just did the questionnaire last night online and it didn't ask me anything about my occupation.

Or did you mean something other than the US Census (e.g. GitHub or Stack Overflow or LinkedIn profiles)?
You can already do an inbox-zero-like workflow in slack.

In Prefereneces -> Sidebar set slack to only show "Unreads and starred conversations". This reduces the list of channels to these two things. (Edit: it might be a good idea to star all conversations that need followup, first).

Muted channels (which I make use of a lot) will still not trigger notifications, but now you'll know that, if it appears in the sidebar, there are unreads there.

I star any conversations that comes up and needs followups or actions. When I'm done with it, I unstar it and it goes away.

This has worked wonders for me and I highly suggest the same workflow to everyone.

Note that after the latest Slack update, it should be possible to make use of the groups feature and use them together with the workflow above. This way you can have multiple statuses like TODO, awaiting reply and delegated, like in the parent article, rather than a single set of starred conversations. So far I haven't felt the need for this personally.

Oh and one more thing. In Preferences -> messages and media set it to "Compact", it will declutter the UI a bit.
Because all you have to do is go to the website, follow a link, log in, and boom, easily accessible chat. Has nothing to do with the protocol.
> Capturing high-quality audio in a meeting room for videoconferencing is a notoriously complicated problem

Not from my experience of 20 years ago setting up VC systems, biggest issue was video and making sure lighting was good, and plane wall behind (sky blue was good colour for that).

Audio wise, was many desk standing mic's (can't recall main brand) but was a few.

Did have one issue once with setting up a connection to a remote french company, was no audio from there end - turned out that the technician at the other end was sat on the end of the table in front of the camera and also was sat upon the mic that was on the table. Soon solved but still, most funny.

Back then we had VC systems that could roll into a room on a cart and worked well - picturTel IIRC being one solution back then and PolyCon being another that soon overtook them as well as doing wonderful conferencing microphones.

But as bandwidth got cheaper and more accessible, many meeting rooms that would be too noisy visually for VC became accessible and the need for dedicated rooms drifted away for more client usage.

Though audio from my experience back then was the easy part.
Incident Management: The Tao of the On-Call
When you enter your passcode while enabling backup, you’re letting iOS decrypt your data and reencrypt with the key used for the backup.

Local backup key strength depends on the key. iCloud depends on the law.
Hmm, I am not particular convinced by the example.

How is this different from developing on say JVM, using Kotlin and finding a library providing DSL for HTML?

I was hoping for practical things that fundamentally impossible to describe concisely in non-lisp languages.

I wouldn't dare to challenge that lisps tend to produce concise code but being able to write 10x less code as basis and 100-1000x less on any regular basis seems too good to be true.
The show's writer has been pretty clear that he sees this story as a cautionary tale about our current governments ideological refusal to accept climate science and the politically driven lies that dominate all public discussion.

And when the ruling party has taken that same anti-science attitude when dismantling our pandemic response (as well as all other areas where the US has strong science), we now end up with massive loss of life, and massive economic losses, that would have been completely unnecessary with just a small amount of scientific leadership.

And I don't think any of us realized how quickly our science and leadership had been dismantled. There were cautionary stories telling us this in 2018 when it happened, but with all the other distraction and lying going on, it was completely lost.

Other countries hadn't realized just how far we had fallen either, and our lack of throwing up a warning signal probably made other countries think that SARS-CoV-2 wasn't as threatening as it was, because we were all used to competent pandemic response being helpers by the US. For example, during our prior president's term, we helped a lot with Ebola, which our current president criticized heavily, yet when given a chance to respond, did not manage it any better than Italy or Spain, and in fact quite a bit worse than those governments.

The cost of lies are massive. A few people in tech, including some prominent investors, think that politics is a realm where reality can be manufactured. And to some degree it can, particularly with economics. But when it comes to the physical world, such attitudes are disasters waiting to happen.
I went down the same path as you and now run NixOS. The biggest advantage is that all the tweaks you have to do every time you install are now just a couple of lines in a file you only write once. It's very hard to break the system because you can always boot a previous configuration. Everything is customizable like Gentoo but if you don't modify a package its binary will be fetched from a central server so installation is very fast.
Okay, I can agree with your framing from the sibling:

> I’m not convinced that open/federated protocols are inherently more difficult for people in general to understand.

We may be disagreeing on the hierarchy of the goals. I think the priorities here are:

1. That the protocol is open and decentralized from the operator perspective (which is ensured in the case of Matrix).

2. That many people use it.

The #1 should be important for an opinionated minority pushing everyone else. The good thing is, non-technical people usually don't have much brand loyalty in these things. It's purely perceived convenience.

That the majority of people understand and care about #1 may or may not be realistic. I see it as partially another cause. Today, we have much of de facto centralization in email while the protocol is still decentralized. It would be nice to push chat to a more or less similar state and work from there. (I would also gladly see decentralization and inter-operation of many things enforced by law, but this is even more pie in the sky.)

Still, certainly your analogy can be used in communicating with people. But the main thing I'm trying to achieve is #2, getting them on board anyway.
> I've often wondered where the point is where vacuum-tube delivery to individual apartment buildings becomes cheaper?

If you're including everything into the factoring: never.

> For places like Manhattan, it's just hard for me to imagine that over a decade, it wouldn't be cheaper to build and use a system like that

Allocation calculations never actually function that way. Your premise can only exist in a vacuum where humans and governments and corporations don't exist, only robots. There's no omnipotent creature that can forcibly pull the unit capital away from the army of tens of thousands of deliveries and centralize it to the tube system instead. It won't self-organize because the cost calculations for traditional deliveries are individualized (I pay $5 for my pizza or sandwich delivery; not $50,000 in personal taxes for a hopeful tube system I'll never get my money back out of in my lifetime), whereas to pay for the super tube system you have to slam everyone (have to spread it out to everyone) with a massive on-going cost until it's finished (which none of them will want to pay), for services maybe they'll use in the future (it'll take multiple generations to justify the cost, which you won't be able to convince individual taxpayers to fund when there is an existing functional system that is 85% good enough).

The cost requires an extreme centralized outlay of capital, which nobody can raise given the other factors; nobody can get the building done, and nobody can get through the zoning and regulations, and nobody can spare the 10x time requirement (10x worse than it should be, as all construction is these days) to get through all of it.

It requires a nationalized step-in by some large government authority. They have to simultaneously outlaw the old system (or hyper tax it to death, same thing in effect), while drilling people on taxes to supposedly build the new system (which will take forever, go drastically over-budget, and underwhelm for the value vs cost in the end).

1.6 million people live in Manhattan. Do the math for just 500,000 * $50,000 = $25 billion. That $25b figure is likely on the low side by anywhere from 2x to 4x minimum, if you attempted to tear up all of Manhattan to do it. The cost would be staggering, and then it would take decades to reach completion.

Nobody is signing up for those taxes so they can get their pizza or Amazon delivery via a tube instead.
I consider one of the biggest deal-breakers being able to snip part of your screen with a keyboard shortcut and Ctrl-V it into the client for everyone to see it inline, seamlessly. You don't have to mess around with image uploaders or open image links externally in your browser.

Want to send a file to someone? Drag and drop, done. No hassle and it works for everyone, in the same way, without having to explain anything, use an external website, install a dependency, or change a setting.

Same as with Discord, these modern chat clients support richer content, have nicer looking UIs, better UX which draw more people in.

It's more fun to code bots for them because you can make them do amazing stuff, as the output doesn't just have to be plain text, but it can also be rich content like charts, embeds, propmts that can trigger multiple actions by selecting a reaction emoji, you get the idea.

Just overall a great, low friction and _modern_ experience.
Most web development toolchains depend on Node.js, which compiles on a single core.
Mainstream media outlets employ people who know the difference between these words; they're editors and journalists, and words and their meanings don't escape them. Because of this, I infer intent when I see these terms conflated. Its "the power of the pen" -- they write the words and hence choose the words. I'm probably wrong about there being intent, though.

Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions to this that don't feel draconian. Mandating the use of words is absurd. I'd like to think that widespread education on the topic would help. But then, that didn't work out too well for "hacker vs. cracker" in the past, and given how many people can't get they're/there/their right, this might not be possible to solve.

Removing the requirement that media outlets make a profit might help? But I have no idea how to get there from here. I'm hoping someone will post a reasonable suggestion I can support and put into practice in my small corner of the world.
Kinetic energy goes as v^2. 2x speed is a 4x car crash. An extra 10 mph is worse at 60 mph than at 30 mph. (40^2-30^2 vs 70^2-60^2). Same 10 mph change, but 2x increased pain.

Momentum goes as v. When you throw something behind you (here propellant), you get the same change in velocity regardless of how fast you already are. But how much energy you take from the thing thrown, depends on how fast the two of you are already moving. A 10 mph change in velocity gains you more energy at 60 mph than at 30 mph. Same throw, but 2x the gain.

Planet gives kinetic energy to you as you approach, and takes it back as you leave. Planet gives kinetic energy to your propellant as it approaches, and then is "WTF propellant, where did all that kinetic energy I loaned you go?! You're messing with my orbit here! You're not running out of here until you pay it back." You: "bye propellant, bye bye planet..."
The greatest minds of our generation optimizing for the marginal click instead of studying science, what could go wrong?
> 2 of them are still alive, third died of unrelated causes;

I’ve seen a number of different ends (continuations?) posited for these 3 guys. I tried to research and found about as much evidence that they lived happily ever after as they died immediately (i.e it’s a black hole of conjecture based on the particular writer’s feelings towards the Soviet Union).

Can you point me towards evidence?
Forgive my omission I didn't have designers in mind when I wrote that.

Here is what I think: I would place designers closer to the engineering (necessary) side of the spectrum. Designers do in some cases build tangible things, are very technical, and they approach refinement from angles of impact that some engineers may be unaware of.

I do think there are quite a few interpretations of what a "designer" does across many industries. In the field of software did you have in mind architects, UX, product, something else, all of the above?

The definition of engineer includes design in both it's noun and verb form:

"a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works."
"design and build (a machine or structure)"

But the definition of designer makes no mention of engineer.

As such, I would enforce that my designers are actually engineers and stay away from "pure" designers that do not have the technical foundation necessary to validate their designs. Design in a lot of ways is an emergent property of the engineering task at hand - unless we're talking about purely artistic pursuits.