skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no question that this could be done. In fact, I think that this is a fairly reasonable policy. It effectively amounts to a flat tax on wealth to fund UBI. Personally I would prefer a progressive tax to "flatten the curve" more at the top, but I'd settle for an inflation-based UBI.

But that is NOT what is happening at the moment. What is happening at the moment is almost the exact opposite: money is being injected mostly at the top in order to prop up asset values, with a little bit coming in to the bottom via the $1200 relief checks, and the middle via PPP.
The Athens Affair [2007]
Difference Between Const and Final in Dart
Secure Your Nodes: Migrating from Parity to Geth
We "let" people die all the time due to unhealthy choices, many of them being economically convenient. Do you have similar outrage over having a lower life expectancy than any other comparable western nation?
Completely agree. The micro thing is rooted in a desire for simplicity, which is laudable from a theoretical perspective. Small is simple and simple is nice to work with. But in any production software it's usually a pipe dream.

Kind of the whole point of software is to take a bunch of complexity and make it simpler for the end user. The fact that the software visually looks like shit or is difficult to work with because it's difficult to reason about is a rather unfortunate side-effect, but usually has no bearing on actual business success.

There are lots of things we should try to do to reduce software complexity and make it easier and safer to work with and change. But trying to force simplicity by way of size usually has the opposite effect.
Nouriel Roubini: The coming greater depression of the 2020s
And it continues beyond. I tutored in a graduate business program. And math was absolutely the stumbling block for the students I was tutoring. It was all pretty simple stuff. Graphs for economics, solving equations, very simple differentials to find maxima or minima (didn't really need to understand calculus because these were such simple cases), etc. They were pretty much all totally lost.

It was really frustrating for everyone. I just wasn't in a position to basically teach them a few years of high school math from zero foundation.

And you'll see the same pattern in pretty much any of the books written over the years about the challenges the author faced in the first year of their MBA program.
seems like a contradiction
True gifts are freely given, not forcibly taken.
U.S. Puts Amazon Foreign Websites on List of Platforms Blamed for Piracy
This was an excellent read! I'm looking forward to the additional discussions (e.g. Nim's new runtime) described in the conclusions.
I'm not sure how they can be considered to be doing much, or any, good, when effectively they are passively siphoning off profits and despite all the "good" they do, as a class they get rapidly richer every year. That has always been a conundrum behind Bill Gates' charity. Of course, it's not really a conundrum. The charity is just tax-advantaged PR or tax-advantaged complementary investment masquerading as goodwill.
I scaled revenue to $50MM/year as CEO. My big secret to marketing success
> anything to pay people in stock, since it just siphons off value from all existing stock

wait what?
> With RSUs going down, even less people will be able to buy housing, driving the price down.

If we use the SP500 as a benchmark for RSU valuation, in 2020 those regressed, at their lows for the year, to mid 2017. They are currently at September of last year. In the past year, SP500 is up a quarter percent. I don't think tech workers were doomed in 2019, and nobody was buying a house on the assumption that RSUs would appreciate at 50 percent per annum.

> If we have layoffs, in FAANGs, I suspect a lot of folks will not be able to pay their mortgage.

Indeed million dollar mortgages are high stakes. If foreclosures actually become an issue I imagine the politicians will step in to bail someone out. Maybe the lenders, but probably homeowners directly since they vote. It's entirely possible we see a democratic congress throw out the SALT limits from the tax reforms.
It wasn't just large government shutdowns. It was local governments taking action, people traveling less, businesses cancelling/denying trips, people eating out less, etc. All of that started weeks before the large scale shutdowns.
I think Keybase does a decent job here.

You can invite someone to a team by email, and they need to install the app, pick a username, and follow the join team instructions.

It's probably technically not as easy for a one off situation as onetimesecret.com, but the app download, setup and chat are pretty familiar UI models for many people.

In the long run, it gives you multiple ways of sharing that secret. Encrypt it and stick in the wiki, use an encrypted git repo, exploding messages via team chat, etc.

That being said, a real password manager is the proper tool here. I personally like LastPass, and it does require registration but has "1-to-1" sharing in the free version.
It's newtons method that he rediscovers. Are people not taught numerical methods these days? We learned it quite early in the much more general context of finding zeros.
It's monthly. I'm not sure how confident the author can be about getting accurate data that quickly, or how significant it is even if it is accurate.

A moving average of last 12 months, if you really can get monthly data, would make more sense to me.
Please, don't forget about the Dock!

I personally hate when apps crowd my Menu Bar when they don't need to e.g. Dropbox, NordVPN, Keybase etc. I always try to disable the Menu Bar icon for an app if possible, and if I can't I will delete the app if I can find a suitable alternative.

There are so many advantages to a dock icon:

- Richer, colorful icon

- Support for badges, configurable by user

- Won't be hidden by the system (macOS will hide icons in a crowded Menu Bar)

- Can be hidden by the user (Dock Autohide)

- Icon can be repositioned by the user

The Apple HIG makes it pretty clear that most apps don't need the Menu Bar, and should use the Dock instead. But we're in a vicious circle where users have been trained to use the Menu Bar (even though it's inferior), so that's what developers do.
Without a lockdown, most of the country will eventually be infected. NYC currently has 21000 excess deaths, so extrapolating that to the rest of the country would mean 21000*328M / 10M = 690,000 excess deaths. That's assuming that nobody else in NYC is going to die of Covid 19, even after lifting the lockdown, so this is an extremely conservative projection, and it's already close to 1M deaths.

What's implausible about this? Is Covid 19 less lethal outside NYC? Can R remain below 1 anywhere in the country, without a lockdown?
I think a better way to put it is that nobody should have a billion dollars more than another person. The wealth isn't the problem if it's distributed evenly. The problem has always been inequality. It would be a fantastic world where everyone could do anything they wanted and have as much agency over their lives as possible.
Essential doesn't imply
"Not replaceable".

With 22 million out of work, it's easily to replace an "essential" meat packer. It's far harder to replace an engineer or doctor even if they aren't essential

That's why white collar workers make so much money in the first place...
«kills 20% of all people is stupid. You just made that number up»

I did not claim that. I just took this percentage from the hypothetical situation you used to build an argument (you yourself said if 10-20% die then it wouldn't mean much to the economy.)

«4% of a population dying also does not mean the economy contracts by 4%.»

Yes it does. Basic economics. With everything being equal, the size of an economy is linearly proportional to the number of persons. A population half the size of another one will buy half the number of cars, half the food, will spend half on entertainment, etc. So if 4% of average individuals die worldwide, consumption (thus the economy worldwide) is down 4%. Like I said, it's basic economics.

«Lastly, you've assumed that a 4% annualized economy contraction from one month in a quarter means that we'll see 4% by just keeping this going»

No I don't assume that. Read again what I wrote. I am only talking about the impact of a certain percentage dying, not about the impact of the lockdown.
> I'm not saying all of them, but at least a few made their money off of the backs of others, being ruthless in business

No, that's all of them. You don't become a billionaire by being nice and non-exploitative.
There's truth here, but - and this is getting into subjective territory - it's my belief that none of the other candidates came by those platforms through conviction. I think they measured what voters wanted to hear, measured what kind of brand they could sell for themselves, found the intersection, and constructed a campaign around it.

Now, that doesn't completely invalidate the point! There's a genuine "economy" of votes around "I take a stance for X, you give me votes, I continue to take that stance, you continue to give me votes", which can function even in the midst of cynicism. But it's much less reliable or efficient when that's the case; when the politician, as a person, doesn't base their platform in their genuine beliefs. In fact I think the prevalence of this mentality is one of the major causes of our current situation.

There's almost nobody left among our politicians who has any real conviction. I think John McCain did. And call me naive, but I believe Bernie Sanders is authentic when he's talking about these topics. He's been doing so since the seventies. Career-politicians who do nothing but appease voters might do an okay job at running the show, but they will never truly change the system that got them elected.
I think there's two confounding factors there, in the US parking is usually plentiful and right out front (or visible), so you're always seen in the vehicle you pull up in. It can be a part of your identity, both for yourself, and socially.

Americans also spend a lot of time in their cars, I went from a short commute to a long commute (1 hour each way), and found I got almost exponentially more critical of my car the longer the commute.

Suddenly the practical vehicle I didn't mind driving 15 minutes, was an eyesore to look at after an hour, and the NVH (noise, vibration, harshness) wears on you exponentially with time.

I started browsing cars to buy that would have been borderline financial suicide for how much I made, just because of how important the comfort and aesthetics became to me.

Couple this with their tendency towards financing things, and how cheap automotive related expenses are in the US, and it's the perfect storm.

I ended up changing jobs to one 10 minutes from my house, and it's downtown so parking is just done at various pay lots a few blocks from my office so nobody ever sees what I drive, and suddenly what I drive is irrelevant again, I was back to being content with my 15 year old Camry.
Also the idea that a significant amount of billionaire wealth is moved by "inspiration" rather than naked financial calculation is incredibly naive. Unless they somehow lucked into this, they are billionaires for a reason: naked financial calculation.
Plenty of people must be buying new cars in the UK - the average age of cars is only 8 years, and if you buy a used car it will be a UK model.

That’s quite different to somewhere like New Zealand, where the average age is twice that and almost nobody buys a brand new car - instead most cars are imported second hand from overseas.
Ask HN: How did productivity in your field improve in the last 10 years?
We constantly get new releases of shiny new libraries and frameworks, new languages, even new programming paradigms, but I'm curious as to how this accumulates over the years. Every time I read a comment here along the lines of "this stupid Electron app would've been done in Delphi back in the day, take 1 megabyte of memory and half time to ship", I wonder how much of it is glossing over all the unseen complexity of non-functional requirements, long-term support and other things - and how much of this sentiment is actually true.

So, what's a typical project in your particular industry and niche? Real project, for real customers (or consumers), not a hello-world tutorial. What non-obvious requirements and limitations does it have? And how long and expensive would it be to deliver the same project, for the same market, using technology and tools of, say, ten years ago?
> still 5 figures a year minimum

Speaking from personal experience, if you did decently well academically in high school, you can get upwards of 16K a year in grants alone (Pell Grant ~6K, State Grant ~5K, University Grant ~5K) if your situation is documented poor based on your parent's and your tax returns.

My state school (UT Austin) charges tuition of about $5.5k/semester if you take >= 12 hours of classes a semester.

Of course, I realize this advice only applies to those who are demonstrably poor and perform decently academically. But college is (better than) free if you fall in this category.
Insomnia Designer
I attended a low performing inner city high school and went to an ivy. I still feel that way.
People's livelihood and the basic functioning of society shouldn't be a "gift".
Just above the billionaire cards it says: Top Donors This Month. So Dorsey donating this month likely put him at the front.

I totally skimmed right past that and didn't read it either because there's no filter for overall or any other period. Perfect example of design flaw that a designer would argue is the user's fault cause "ITS RIGHT THERE!"
This is probably true. But given that we presently live in a world where billionaires do exist I dont think it does any harm to know which ones we can feel appreciative of. At least, that's how I use a list like this.
I would add Bayesian Optimization as a very strong member of family of derivative free algorithms. It assumes a black-box function, which also can be noisy (not all derivative-free algorithms can work well with noise). One of my favorite categories of algorithms. And its a fairly active area of research today, for applications in hyperparameter tuning.
Because Dorsey donated more money LAST MONTH.
I do not want to make trite comments about how US economy is not the same as S&P500, but I will point that those losses were largely gained back for now. The US economy is still going ( and that is despite lockdown ). Hell, government could declare no business is essential and it would still go on in the form of black market.
The factories may have been automated, but the supply chain has not.

The most common job in the United States is retail salesperson, followed by cashier, office clerk, and food prep. Of those, only office clerk can reasonably be done from home. Maybe. In some cases.

Yes, those are considered "service" jobs. That doesn't change the fact that the chicken is only in the supermarket meat case because a person physically put it there. There's no big automated conveyor belt running from the chicken farm, through the slaughterhouse, and winding up in the meat case.
It is often the case that soft social pressure is the best way to enforce desirable behaviors amongst people.

Within friend groups where there are no formally established laws or codes of conduct, there are certain implicit standards of behavior people are expected to abide by, and part of why they do is because of the threat of social ostracism.

In a broader scope, in ancient societies social ostracism was often used to deal with those who violated the norms of society; in Athens ostracism was an official punishment.

I'm not saying we can or should literally expel billionaires who don't put their liquid wealth towards philanthropy, but far too often we focus on formal, legal means of compelling the super wealthy to part with their money, such as through taxes that are easily avoided.

Social pressure put upon the super wealthy using tools like this could be more effective than people expect. There is the threat of social ostracism, but also the reward of social approval granted to the patrons of philanthropy.
We Should Abolish Silicon Valley
It doesn’t matter to me. I am reading original Sanskrit texts and Brighu Samhita and some KP padhathi. Parashara and Jaimini. So I am calling it Vedic astrology.

Re your second point. I don’t know how it would work either and that’s what I want to find out. Predictive AI might seem like God but we know it’s numbers. It is not scientific to discard something before it’s tested.

If I were to write a sci fi short about it...i would say that it seems like some kind of source code or predictive AI machine. Or someone outside of what we consider our reality is running a simulation. But this isn’t fiction. It has centuries of practical and real life application. It’s worth looking into it.
> HackerNews does not appreciate marketing spiel.

Really? What do you think this link is? It just goes to a landing page to sell you and get you to sign up. This is an obvious advertisement, why do you only notice when someone makes it a comment instead of a link?
> All taxpayers (since they will have to make up for shortfalls) and recipients of defined benefit pensions (since they will have to accept reductions in benefits) are also indirectly exposed to changes equity prices.

But that needs to be put in its proper context. Even if you have a small amount of stock or indirectly benefit from stock prices in some way, it'd be stupid if you let that mentally tie yourself to the stock market.

For instance, shortfalls in taxes do not necessarily need to be made up by "all taxpayers." With progressive taxation, they can be made up by some taxpayers (which will likely consist of most HN commentators, since software engineers are relatively wealthy).
Public's perception of Warren Buffet is really puzzling to me. He seems to largely escape the scorn for billionaires, even looked at as a 'good guy'. Whats his secret?

We seem to hold CEO of coke more culpable for filling oceans with plastic than coke's shareholders like buffet who profit more from it than the CEO. Really bizarre phenomenon.
I think it's frightening that people like you are missing the bigger point here: X% of the population was going to die anyways, and these numbers are getting skewed out of proportion. Triggering a major recession will cause more deaths and despair over the long term. Start thinking for yourselves rather than believing everything you hear.

Hospitals are now FINANCIALLY INCENTIVIZED to lump as many patients as possible into the "Covid" column. Look at the stats on the sudden drop in historical "Other" column deaths in comparison to the "Covid" column (for this year)...they basically align perfectly....which tells you that hospitals are flagging people who were going to die anyways as "Covid" related.
It doesn't cost cash, I think they meant.
Agreed, though the stock went up after this news, Google and Amazon could have acted faster.
Rather misleading.

For example it has Jeff Bezos donating 10 billion to a new 'Bezos Earth Fund'.

However it hasn't yet issued any grants so as of today, he has merely moved money from one place he controls to another one I assume he still controls.
This is inherent to the structure of HN. Fix the system, fix the discussion.
> I doubt there will be any "unrest" beyond the protests.

> No school means poor kids roam the street like packs of feral dogs asking for money for food around here.

What was that quote about society being three meals away from anarchy?
> Why does it have to be clear?

Because it's part of the binary interface. Changing the binary interface prevents existing programs from interoperating. Everything breaks until the software is recompiled and that can be a major nuisance at best and impossible in the worst case.

Simple, well-defined and stable binary interfaces are a major reason why C is still widely used. Uncertainty in this area is never a good thing so people will actively avoid language features that introduce it. Looks like enums aren't favored for similar reasons: what is the underlying type?
Better than job searching while you currently have one?
Best summary of the state of react I have read so far after programming with it for 2 years. You should write an article about it!

Stuff like this is rarely part of the sales pitch for any framework. You only find out after being locked in neck deep. Still from all the browser gui frameworks I think react is the safest choice.

Why? Well it is reliable and scalable enough and create-react-app makes the whole experience acceptable. It will not get you into trouble.
Choosing any of its non-mainstream competitors might get you into deep shit if the project fails.
Choosing any of its mainstream competitors like Vue or Angular seems like not a big improvement over react (if it even is) and will make you go into defensive mode anytime a junior dev knows that feature x would have been easier to implement in react.
Yes, that could work, though I think if you make it too easy for people to use it for free, then many will do so just as the path of least resistance, at least until you make an issue of it. Just putting some kind of minor barrier in the way is enough to make paying the easier option, and it doesn't require any monitoring or enforcement.
Another amazing resource is [1]. Seriously one of the best purchases I have ever made, and I spend a lot more on books than I should.

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/algorithms-optimization
Apple patent imagines adjustable tinted windows for your future car
They use a similar trick with std::string in libstdc++. The string object has a pointer to the null terminated character string, right before that string is a structure that contains the reference count. (I think libcello could add reference counted objects that way)
Lyft lays off nearly 1k; puts an additional 288 on furlough
I've been wondering what hyperinflation looks like in the 21st century. Just add some zeroes on our phone screens?
Is this desirable?
Union effects on productivity and wages [pdf]
This almost seems like a metric chosen specifically to get Dorsey on top since he recently made a single massive donation while people like Gates have contributed a much larger amount over a much longer period of time.
I think https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

Is most like what you are asking for? Haven't used it but I've heard people say happy things.

Even has a flatpak -

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.xournalpp.xourna...
We’ve had those flare ups before. Watts riots, early 1900s labor riots and repression.

They’ve had them in France, they’ve had them elsewhere. That’s a kind of unrest but not the kind I think we’re talking about.

I think what we’re talking about is the kind that results in overturning of the power structure. I don’t think we’re near that. I think 99.9% of the people do not want that outside of people on the extreme left and extreme right, interestingly for quite different reasons.
My dad used Lotus 1-2-3 almost every day since the DOS days and he's super fast drawing and doing stuff with the keyboard (not so much nowadays with Libre Office or MS Office) and he is used to do almost everything with a spreadsheet: floorplans, leaflets, diagrams...

Don't even try to get him to use a CAD or vector drawing software :D
The Lancet study was a randomized trial with > 200 patients that showed no clinical benefits of remdesivir but did reveal some adverse effects. That's worrying. It's not the game changer that azidothymidine was for AIDS/HIV.

The issue with remdesivir in mild cases is that it's expensive to produce (six steps, two at low temperature, outside the capability of many contract shops) and that multigram amounts are required for a course of treatment. It's not what you want to have for that group.
Love this and especially the Kubernetes features.

One question - is everything in the original Insomnia in Insomnia Designer too, or are they completely different?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23020812