skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What role do you feel private citizens should take in discussing public policy?

I agree that my projections won't be as accurate as, say, the top modellers'. (BTW, I'm working on the next iteration of this article that will tie in Ferguson's model which is IMO very high-quality and what I will use to better characterize the containment case, since I agree with the criticism that I need to do a better job characterizing the "other side" so to speak)

Where I disagree is the incredible notion that only "scientists" or epidemiologists are equipped to propose/discuss policy. That seems very backwards to me. We need experts, scientific, economic, etc, in order to help us make predictions about the ramifications of various public health interventions. But when it comes to an ultimate decision on policy, that requires knowing what our _values_ are (i.e. what we're optimizing for).

I don't see many epidemiologists trying to forecast the economic cost of lockdown, or trying to debate the ethical merits of these extreme measures, nor the constitutionality therein. They're not fully equipped to do so. Neither am I, as we've already said. But each of us as private citizens needs to look at the data and the projections, and then look at our personal values, in order to determine what we feel is best.

Or to put another way, what I would call "the cult of expertise" has a bootstrapping problem. Let's say I accept that I should follow whatever the experts say without question. The hard problem of expertise is, how am I, a non-expert, supposed to evaluate who is an expert? Or which of the experts specifically I should trust?

When we decide someone is an expert we are making a value judgement based off of our own heuristics, biases, preconceptions, etc. There's no getting around that.

To be clear, I am not "arguing against" the concept of experts. Or claiming that I know more than them, etc. All I'm saying is, it's not enough to just say "let the experts handle it", because the problem of "who is the expert?" is intractible. So instead, we make the best effort that we can.

--

Finally, I want to say that, as I've said elsewhere, if my argument is truly so riddled with flaws and holes - and this thread has pointed out a _lot_ of flaws, which I am currently trying to address - then it should not be very hard to show why my conclusions are incorrect. It really shouldn't require having to resort to credential-waving, etc.

Thanks for engaging. I truly appreciate it.
> That's an interesting analogy that I've never considered, given we treat corporations as personlike entities. Why don't we have a capital punishment equivalent?

We do, it's called charter revocation. It's basically never done any more because even though the corporate form is a privilege granted by the public, it's become essentially an unconditional gift.
I don't understand how you have identified this as the problem. Sure, states haven't coordinated on lockdowns, testing, or mask purchasing. But it's not because they're struggling against the federal government, it's because there's no official policy to coordinate with.

Seems to me like our main difficulty deviating from normal is the fact that a 20% decrease in demand kills off 10% of businesses within weeks and causes 20% of people to instantly get behind on their rent. There's no slack in the system.
Being "prepared for black swans" is a bad idea. Of course, you want your system as a whole to be as antifragile as possible, but one should never prepare for black swans, but rather buy insurance (so to speak): hedge, diversify, minimize impact. For example, we can imagine a world where some other pandemic is being spread. One that, instead of attacking the lungs, attacks the kidneys. All of a sudden we'd need dialysis machines -- not ventilators. See how preparing for some specific black swan is misguided (as we can be hit by any other, equally unlikely, black swan event)?

> In testimony before a Congressional Committee, it has been asserted that a prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population.

Okay, this sounds like an interesting assertion. Can we back this up? Is this just alarmism? Where's the data?

> Yes, $300 million dollars for a stockpile of 30 HV transformers is far too expensive to prevent 90% of the public dying and the rest reduced to cannibalism.

I see. So now we're assuming some off-the-charts assertion, which is dubious at best[1], is absolutely true. The cannibalism is thrown in for extra flair. Gotta' get them clicks somehow.

> Update: I forget to mention that I’m far more worried about accidental nuclear war, bioterrorism and AI run amok than I am about solar flares.

Anyone that's seriously worried about "AI run amok" (whatever that means) doesn't understand the first thing about AI.

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a25883/nor...
Thank you, I didn't know that website!
Faxes rely on modems. modems rely on precise timing and aren't able to cope with any slippage.

There's actually a protocol, T.38, which is used on modern VoIP based systems to allow faxes to be transmitted. At each end it actually decodes the fax data and sends it as ordinary data packets. Implementations play some tricks on the fax modem at each end, in order to prevent it dropping out of sync if the data packets are delayed. You could communicate with one of these from phone, but you'd need a T.38 gateway a the other end.

More practical is to cut out the middleman and use twilio's fax gateway at $0.01/page (+ sip trunking cost, which should be similarly trivial): https://www.twilio.com/fax/pricing
That's what the US troops are there for. The US needs the Saudi dictators to maintain their influence in the region.
> Food / grocery delivery is still to expensive to be the "norm", especially for the middle class.

The biggest thing for me is just how arbitrary the pricing is. If I make an order I know is $8 at the drive through, and it costs $16 on DoorDash, and then there's a $7 fee, and then I have to tip $5, and then it still takes an hour and a half to get to me. Nah. Never that.

I'm learning how to cook now; I make a mean smash burger.
Thanks I’ll I’ve those a try, don’t think ipv6 has been configured at all.
Ya, and they were diversifying into tourism which is also bust.

I’m sure they’ll survive though. Their wealth is in the trillions.
I'm not suggesting that we should stop reviewing dependencies. I'm pushing back against the idea that internally structuring a large repo or project via independent modules necessarily explodes the burden to review.

It may be the case that this preference for well modularized code leads to lots of disparate small packages in the ecosystem, but within the scope of a single project, I see no reason why modularization poses any intrinsic risk.
Wealthy people have to be more productive as they are paid more for their productivity.
You can buy kits that send video over coax including power for somewhat reasonable prices:

https://leopardimaging.com/product/nvidia-jetson-cameras/nvi...

I haven't tried them, but am considered them for project.
I wouldn’t be quite so hard on the law here.

The law is based on precedent.

Fax was a new technology. For the first time a signed document could be sent over the wire in minutes, instead of having a courier go via train and take days. This is 100 years before computers were common.

When computers became common fax was already well established so there was no good reason to add a second exception.
We punish corporations in ways which adversely impact jobs all the time, even though we don't do charter revocation.
It's interesting that the site presenting this story has, by their own declaration, 382 different marketing-related cookies, which you are required to accept with no alternatives if you want to browse the site.

I'm not trying to say that they are not entitled to report on FB's privacy violations or something, they are reporters and it is very good that they are doing so.

It's just amazing to what extent journalism sites are trying to monetize. Old newspapers could only dream of the kind of advertising revenue that sites like this probably have.
Yes and programming languages are human interfaces to machine instructions, so context sensitivity can be manageable and even desirable to human users of the language, even if it makes the implementation of the language interpreter more complex or less elegant. Programming language designers make this trade-off all the time.
Who are the owners of big public corporations?

If you have an IRA, maybe you're an owner of Facebook as part of an index fund.

But do you really own the fund? Or does the broker/bank own it for you?

Does the index fund manager own the stock, such as Vanguard or Blackrock? Or is it really owned by The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation for the fund?
A growing force at virus protests? Anti-vaxxers
> Any higher-level abstract mention of Levenstein distances (e.g. of Unicode codepoints) is properly supposed to be taken to refer to the Levenstein distance of a conventional (or explicitly specified) binary encoding of the two strings.

This doesn’t match any definition of Levenshtein distance that I’ve ever encountered. I’ve always seen it defined in terms of strings over some alphabet, and the binary case is just what happens when your alphabet only has two symbols in it.

Quite naturally the problem with Unicode strings is that there is are multiple ways to treat them as sequences. One obvious way is to treat them as a sequence of Unicode scalar values, but that’s by no means what you’d want—maybe a sequence of grapheme clusters may be more appropriate, and you also may wish to consider normalization.
I'm reminded of a classic Sam Kinison piece..... https://youtu.be/wAgUICswZuY
There is still software powering your static site. That software has to live somewhere or on something. Maybe you upload it to GitLab Pages, then you're relying on the cloud to power your static site. Maybe you upload it to your local server where nginx is running. But something is still running it, and if you're doing it yourself - you can run it in a docker container.

I've taken both routes. I have a static site that uses Hugo to generate - just like you mention. It's distribution pipeline is a Docker container inside of GitLab CI/CD. So that it has all the tools needed to both run hugo and upload to AWS S3.

Other static sites I have are generated into HTML, dumped into a docker container with nginx. Then are pulled on relevant servers which run everything else in docker as well, along with the front end load balancer. It would actually be Significantly more work to NOT have the static site in Docker.
STE-PING-UP. STE-PING-DOWN. THEN. A. SKIP

C D E
E D C
D E C

Practicing a musical instrument is not fun. Playing a musical instrument is fun. Practicing is mostly repeating scales and other patterns.
I'd say software doesn't always win out on it's merits, there's almost definitely some social aspects regarding what does and does not get adopted. I do agree the commercial interests probably played the largest role, though. I think beyond the initial knee-jerk one might have towards this it's pretty comprehensive and there's interesting points here that are at least worth exploring.
Looks like Saudi regime is in big trouble. They won't be able to balance their budget with oil prices so low and they won't be able to make payments to thousands of their princes.

I did some searching and found few interesting data points:

>For dozens of oil producers, the plunge in oil prices is devastating. No major oil producer can balance its budget at prices below $40; according to the International Monetary Fund, with the exception of Qatar, every country in the Middle East requires at least $60, with Algeria at $157 and Iran at a whopping $390. The average Brent price of oil over the past month has been a hair above $20. [1]

and this from 2019:

>Top oil exporter Saudi Arabia would need oil priced at $80-$85 a barrel to balance its budget this year, an International Monetary Fund official said. [2]

Given that WTI is at $19 and Arab Light at $21, there's going to be lots of internal changes in ME in the coming years. Probably a few wars too.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-29/covid-...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-economy-imf/saudi-a...
True, but once you start applying that at the level of Facebook the jobs factor starts to really add weight.

Personally I'd much prefer executives to become automatically liable for wrongdoing by their companies.
I don't think it was intended as an attack, but rather the GP's own experience with YouTube time-wasting. It's certainly mine.
Pachinko is basically Japanese slot machines. It's an addiction, so it's doing pretty well.
Sadly it might cost Berkshire even less to just reinsure against the risk.
Radio spectrum is precious, so virtually any type of radio telephony is significantly compressed, either in terms of raw audio bandwidth or by applying lossy digital compression — often both. This applies to both 2-way radio and cellular telephones.

There are radio-fax standards. Marine weather reports are a good example that's still in use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiofax

However, the fax machines we use on our telephones were not designed with this in mind. The protocol is neither tolerant of the reduced bandwidth nor lossy compression from cellular networks... not to mention jitter if the call passes over a packet-switched network.
And then trump redefined it to be about legitimate news sources exclusively. We’ve really been in upside down world for four years.
More often than not that's a meager payout for what tends to be a career destroying move.

Very rarely do whistleblowers pick up real money, it has happened a couple of times though.
Japan to Draw Up UFO Encounter Protocols After U.S. Footage
Investing a nominal amount in strategic backup equipment that you might never need is hedging.

An event that has a low probability of occurring but that (if it occurs) will be highly catastrophic is exactly the scenario that calls for hedging. Most critical systems have already diversified by building in redundancies (generators) and an insurance check wouldn’t be very useful for keeping the rest of us alive.
Saudi has been investing heavily in the US stock market. At somepoint they were holding TSLA as well, despite relying on oil for their living.
He allures to it in the article but DS might be first in a genre of similarly immersive experiences. I’m hoping other games are made that deliver such a rich experience but with better storyline perhaps.
It's fun seeing these. As batteries and motors get better, they get more agile.

I'm disappointed that there's no force feedback. They're still using dumb PWM servos, which is a 1970s technology. There are better servos, from Dynamixel, where you get info back. There was a project called OpenServo [1] to smarten up dumb servos by developing tiny new controller boards for cheap RC servos. But that project seems to be defunct.

There are lots of good legged toy robots in the $300-$400 range, but without good feedback you can't do Boston Dynamics type stuff.

[1] https://hackaday.io/project/158267-openservo-20
Needed, past tense. US foreign policy used to be shaped around our need for Saudi oil, and IMO hasn’t properly adjusted to the fact that America is energy independent again. The realpolitik question now isn’t “how can I secure Saudi oil” But rather “what’s the least I can do to reduce any risk of terrorism”.
You could spin up an AWS ARM instance in about 30s.

Or just have Jenkins etc trigger the launch of one when your build job needs it.
>Many places I apply to want people who have experience in software development or they want to hire a junior for some super low pay.

That's because you are a junior developer and you're only worth a junior engineer's pay. Sorry if that's harsh, I'm a bit blunt; but it's not a value judgement or a criticism, it's a statement of fact. Go work at a place that pays you a junior engineer's salary and learn the industry skills you need to earn a better salary.

>I've got lots of projects I've done in the last year.

That's really great, and it'll give you a leg up on the other junior programmers who are applying at places. But projects don't confer industry experience with a team, which is what places are looking for. It's a world of difference between "I've done projects on my own and I can complete them," and "I've worked with engineers, product managers, managers, designers, non technical people and together we have shipped software." All of the stuff you're doing is setting you apart from your competition, but realize your competition is for junior roles.

To answer the question:

>Is there hope for me?

Absolutely. You seem smart and driven and capable of communicating. In my 14 years of coding professionally, I've worked with people who studied communication, linguistics, a foreign language, creative writing, IT, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, music composition, etc. Some of the best engineers I've worked with had no formal training. It's totally doable. Being able to teach is a really good indicator of at understanding complex issues and being able to communicate them, all valuable skills for a software engineer.

Also, don't get discouraged during the pandemic. A lot of places are buckling down and if they do hire, it'll be an experienced person who normally wouldn't be on the market but is because of the virus. It's gonna be tough for junior engineers for a while until the economy spins back up.
Yep. Also, see if there's a game that teaches you the thing you want to learn.

I learned orbital mechanics from Kerbal Space Program.

Assembly programming from TIS-100 and Microcorruption.

And … whatever the heck I learned from Factorio. Logistics? Abstraction?

If there isn't a game, you might try and make it a game. See how fast you can solve the example problems in the textbook. Get the high score on your flashcards. (This doesn't work for me, I get more interested in designing and building the game than playing it.)
What's missing with No-Code tools
Guessing tech companies learned their lesson in the 90s and started sending lobbyist to Washington.
Scripting GUI for Plan9 Like Tcl+tk
Show HN: Simple chat app build with GUN (decentralized db)
YouTube Top Official Mocks Content Creators 'In Their Basement'
I'm excited for Below Zero. Bought EA Subnautica just to give Unknown Worlds money (loved their work on Natural Selection 2), and wow, turns out to be one of the best gaming experiences I've had in the last 5 years.
That's a really shitty comment. The author is a long term Rust contributor and has spent their time before on C-land a lot. Yes, he knows how a linker works. Others don't.

He took his time to write down something, because some beginners asked him on Twitter.

Someone posts it on Hacker News and you shit over it like this.

If the post is too mundane for you, so be it. You're not the audience.
The Saudi budget is a quarter of a trillion dollars. “Trillions” doesn’t last very long at those levels.
The Jetson Nano[0] seems like it would be better for students, it's only $99.

[0]: https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-...
> I described ~10 common mistakes I see in financial models a few months ago: twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1188979329935409152

Mirror: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1188979329935409152.html
You seem to start with a tone of disagreement about something, but overall seem to be agreeing with what I said, that in context, around here, $168K is not very much, especially when it, on average, would be more than one earner.

Why do you tell me to "keep in mind" essentially the very point I was making?
Yes the oil industry is going to take years to recover from 2020.
Up until very recently my grandpa would use fax to send complaints to just about anything. It was about as stereotypical grumpy old man as you can imagine. He's a good person, just old-school formal when he writes. Comes of as a bit ... harsh.

I thought it was going to end when they dismantled the analog network, and his fax machine with it, but somehow it just got worse. You see, on fax machines you rarely got spam, but on email that's another story. It's hilarious to see the email exchanges he has with some spammers. They've met their worst enemy.

He is more than capable to identify spam, but he doesn't fully understand that, while sent to him, it's nothing personal. He takes it very personal. Very personal. Like, call me late in the evening or during work hours (unheard of for someone in his school) to discuss this outrageous claim that someone made about him. He, like a lot of senior citizen, has a lot of free time. So he naturally replies back. And we're talking full page replies, going into great detail about how they are bad people for doing this to someone like him.
Coursera dude. If you can't find something on there you don't know already you know enough already.
My experience suggests that it is entirely possible. When I started college the plan was to major in Aerospace Engineering, with a minor in Psychology. (My university required that you do a minor in a field completely different from your major.) When I got to my junior year I discovered that I really didn't like Engineering that much, so I switched to a major in Psychology with a minor in Computer Science.

When I graduated I got a job writing computer programs for the Psychology professor I'd done my senior thesis with. After a couple of years I got a job as a software engineer with a defense contractor, and the rest of my career was spent working for defense contractors.

So it is possible to get a job as a computer programmer without a computer science degree. I would think that there would be a lot of software involved in Mechanical Engineering applications, and your degree and software experience would make you a good fit for those kinds of positions.

On a side note: I've often thought my background in Psychology was a big help in in dealing with my co-workers.
When you know a piece and play it, it can be fun. But the way there can be frustrating and tedious. You'll make mistakes. You'll learn slower than you'd like. You might repeat the same section a hundred times before you feel satisfied. Some days you'll even feel like you've forgotten how to play certain parts properly. But you do it anyways because you know it's rewarding and satisfying at the end of the day (and with a certain level of discipline), not because it's fun moment-to-moment.
Source code can be found here: https://github.com/vnglst/svelte-gundb-chat

Let me know what you think!
Btw. had a very nice chat with the creator of gundb (Mark Nadal) right inside the chat app. That was pretty cool. He also tweeted about it here:

https://twitter.com/marknadal/status/1253446569665257473?s=2...
> Comedy answer: iPad Pro

I mean, the iPad Pro does have a relatively beefy processor. If only you could run arbitrary code on it.
> Genuine question: why there are folks still using fax?

In healthcare, because despite the technical reality that it is electronic, it's not considered “electronic media” under HIPAA, so security and transaction & code sets standardization rules that apply to electronic transactions do not apply to transactions conducted by fax.

It's a giant compliance hole in HIPAA that entities in the healthcare space ruthlessly exploit. (Various incentives to move to mechanism that are considered electronic under HIPAA have chipped away at it, but the compliance hole still keeps people using it.)
This may sound strange but I would recommend practicing lucid dreaming. If you can manage to stay focused and awake in a dream on a regular basis, you'll find that staying focused and awake while not dreaming to be trivial. I was surprised to discover this at first, but it makes sense because it's extremely rewarding to have a good dream. After a while, the line will blur between what is real and not and it won't matter to you if you don't know ML or not because you'll be in control of your inner narrative.