skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're in the midst mass hysteria --- the kind of thing you normally see in history books. What do you expect? What's more disturbing to me is seeing how otherwise-reasonable people are excusing bugs in this model (bugs that they would never accept in other software) with flimsy rationales presented aggressively.

You have to keep in mind how people actually think. Most of human reasoning capacity doesn't go into the beautiful work of intellectual exploration. Instead, most of the time, we use the faculty of reason for the crude and dirty job of finding support for our preconceptions. When facts conflict with one of these preconceptions, we invent excuses to discard the facts --- the smarter the person, the more elaborate the excuses. Facts seldom change anyone's mind.

In certain circles (including, unfortunately, circles composed of smart and influential people) it's become taboo to oppose the lockdowns, in part because the pro- and anti-lockdown positions have developed certain partisan connotations in the United States. At the same time, the weight of accumulating evidence (empty hospital, declining infection rates, repeated large modeling errors, high serum antibody prevalence, a very steep age curve, and large economic losses) is beginning to make the pro-lockdown stance untenable. But a lot of pro-lockdown people, having become emotionally invested in their position, are unwilling to back down. Consequently, we see a ton of elaborate excuses for discarding, ignoring, and suppressing information that further weakens the pro-lockdown position.

The HN community is composed disproportionately from these circles, many of which claim to make up the "respectable" part of society. The HN flags on this article are part of this process of rejecting ideas that conflict with dearly-held preconceptions. The author of the code review post makes valid points and the snide dismissals in the comments on this article say more about the makeup of HN commentariat than they do about the code review itself.
GPS Project and Why It Was Allowed for Civilian Use
RankScience (YC W17) Is Hiring SEO/SEM Sales Account Executives (Remote)
Ooh, I'm going to try out this argument on the next liberal UBI-er I find.

But, I think we already have done the experiment, and I don't think it's worked out the way you expect. Modern-day Westerners live like the gentry. We have luxurious fabrics, fresh vegetables all year long, we can video conference whoever we want (instead of posting letters), we've got servants to do household chores: Miss Washing Machine and Miss Dishwasher; Mr. Word Processor (secretary), Mr. Spreadsheet (finance), and Mr. Printer (typeset output). As a result we have enough leisure time to spend 3 hrs on our pocket tricorder and 4.5 hrs watching moving pictures (TV), on average, every day! [1] Instead of spending 7.5 hours producing amazing works of art and science, we entertain ourselves. (I suspect the original nobility acted a lot like this, too, given how productive the nobility in books like Jane Austen's or The Great Gatsby were--they sat around all day having a party)

On the other hand, we have created the nobility you were looking for: government grants fund much of the basic science, and a fair amount of arts (via universities)

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...
Chargebacks usually result in Uber banning you till you pay them back.
These variable names are all what you typically see in mathematics-heavy numerical computation code. Sometimes it’s better to let the index symbols be just symbols rather than assigning long names; otherwise it’s going to be even more difficult to read and understand.
I'm sure some of it is good, honestly. But I think it's especially important to go to primary sources when people are talking about politics because (on all sides!!) people will often use imprecise language to make you think that something is worse than it actually is.
AMA with Stanford Negotiations Prof on Negotiating Your Career
Where I work nearly everyone uses Vim. We work in less popular languages that new kids on the block (VSC, Atom) don't really support. It really either Vim or Emacs. I think most people choose Vim because it is the default "Terminal based Editor" in most peoples minds.
Abolish Money
Free beer German brewery gives away beverages it can't sell
If your product development process constantly places you into dilemmas where a development effort requires a commitment to cost and timeline that could damage the company if either is overshot, they either:

A. aren't testing enough / at all or haven't given any consideration to what is the smallest change needed to deliver value

B. have serious organizational problems around coordination

C. are running a company completely unsustainably
What does it mean? Is it a sort of Lesser-Affero GPL, where the runtime is open source but it can be linked and distributed with other Anvil proprietary apps?
For literally years my plan has been that the first thing I’m doing when moving out of the Bay Area is setting up a hive.

That step is taking a long time though...
Utility - few or no dependencies. Absolutely no dependencies specific to the project. (array flattener, 2-way map, etc)

Helper - function which makes some really common project specific code more DRY (createApiError, genCommonConfig, etc)
That may be the way to go but our office cheaped out and got discounted T490s. It's a great laptop minus the screen and trackpad...but management doesn't want to spend more than $800 on a laptop
Show HN: Affordable domains, straight to your inbox. (With Bonuses)
It ends up being the case most of the time but of course it could be better.
Everything you say is correct. Your acid test is great. And yet, we agree that the machine is stuck.

'Does your startup implement every single feature of Windows / Excel / Postgres / AWS and then some? No? Well, then go back to work and come back when you have something truly innovative.'

There is no charity. 'What you did is fairly incomplete, but the ground you covered so far is promising. Here's a list of challenges. Where would you start addressing them?' Maybe the answer will come 10 years down the road, in some University unaffiliated with the original author. In the current system, there is zero investigation of anything else but well trodden orthodoxy.
Your GPS receiver is not going to be able to "see" the current satellites. All of the other people who share this spectrum do so "horizontally" if you will, this frequency band isn't reflected by atmospheric effects so omni-directional emitters are not visible to antenna that are looking "up" to the sky. The problem with this proposal is that the company wants to broadcast DOWN from satellites which these antennas will see and it will reduce their sensitivity to neighboring signals in the same band. Since you need 4 - 6 satellites for a good tracking lock on GPS, the likelyhood is that you won't be able to get that because of inter-band interference.

Can you fix it? Sure, you can add a $10 - $50 front end selector on the GPS devices to increase their selectivity to GPS only bands. That will raise the cost of "having" GPS across the board and legacy devices won't see the benefit so they will become useless.

It is hard to imagine that any technical voices at the FCC thought this was a good, or even reasonable, idea.

And on a humorous note, "U.S. Space Force Gen. John Raymond." I chuckle that the Space Force already has generals but of course it does, but not ones that "came up through the ranks, from Spaceman 1st class."
Ask HN: How can I learn to think more like a programmer?
While I was reading "Eloquent JavaScript", I came across this absolute eye-opener (to me at least):

https://eloquentjavascript.net/07_robot.html#p_MtO6TwqB5I

In this chapter the author demonstrates that it is wrong to solve a problem by creating a series of objects that do stuff. He shows that the right way is by abstracting the problem into its most essential elements. Do not try to emulate reality with code, but make it its own, abstract thing that solves the issue instead.

This chapter and its code felt like pure poetry to me.

I very much want to train myself into thinking like this. I've been an amateur coder for more than 20 years, and this chapter has finally shown me a path for growth in abstract thinking (and not in becoming more proficient in a language or framework, which has been the larger part of my programming related learning all these years).

Also, I have always been more of a systems kind of thinker (interconnected things modifying each other's behaviours, emergent behaviour as a result), but I am convinced that what is demonstrated in the chapter I linked to is another type of thinking that would also be very beneficial to me outside of programming.

Sorry for the rambling, but I'm a bit hyped.

So my question is this: is there a name for this kind of thinking and how I can learn to start thinking like that?
I don't buy that explanation. A lot of traditional mall and department store retail is suffering, but other kinds of retail is doing great selling to middle-class Americans. Examples include Home Depot, Lowes, Walmart, Target, and Amazon. They are winning because they offer more convenience to customers as a result of their size, selection, and online presence.

Besides, this article is about a luxury retailer, not the kind of place middle-class Americans go to.
If you're having trouble clicking the links above, these should work:

Blog with demo video: https://spencerdailey.com/2020/05/07/how-to-give-each-of-you...

CurrentKey free on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1456226992?pt=11998...

Featured app, Broadcasts: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/broadcasts/id1469995354

Sorry about that, thanks!
I sometimes wish Git properly records copy and move information. It turns out Git's heuristics for detecting copies and moves work about 95% of the time, and for the remaining 5% it's mildly annoying to read a git blame with every line from a move. You can blame further across that move, but that's manual. If copy and move information is perfectly recorded, I'd have more incentive to do these kinds of code reorganization.
Our Broken Unemployment System Is a National Scandal
would ios_base::sync_with_stdio(false); also help?
Lots of bashing in this thread, but to clarify a bit:

The Dart VM is roughly based on V8's internals. Running dart alone would be similar to running node, which needs to initialize the VM, parse the code, and run it. This is obviously slower than a pre-compiled binary.

dart2native brings it half-way to native, by doing parsing and initialization, and saving a memory snapshot right before executing the main function. This greatly reduce startup time (and is the same technique that makes Flutter apps start fast), but still not as fast as a binary, since it is loading the snapshots and doing some initialization.

This is usually fast enough, because once the initialization is ran, the following code will run fast. This is a constant initialization loading time, and doesn't represent anything.

Saying 22ms doesn't mean anything, and feels like a misinformed statement.

Dart overall is a pleasant language, and it is somewhat unique that it provides multiple ways to run. You can run with dart, dart2native, dart2js, and I believe there's one for ARM (for Flutter). This allows you to choose the best for your target platform
The Rise of the Valkyries
Yes, and to the couple of my clients who are governments of AMERICAN cities, that answer is clear. (And that was my original premise).

I am no cheerleader for NSA surveillance. People who know me in real life are probably tired of hearing me talk about it (and privacy/security in general).
This is one of my favorite subjects, and I love the idea of negative and positive heuristics. On the other hand, has anyone ever seen this happen?

> But, according to Lakatos, when the time comes, a revolution is driven by logic and method, not irrational mob psychology: ‘the Kuhnian “Gestalt-switch” can be performed without removing one’s Popperian spectacles’.

Even the consensus adoption of General Relativity took decades (long enough for an entire generation of older scientists to die), and the author provides no other examples to back up his claim that "results were mixed" in the history of science. I'd love to hear some counterexamples.
Bowie lived around the corner from the data centre and could often be seen popping in, of an evening, to swap out a defective drive or two.

(Possibly.)
> I wouldn't call trying to build and maintain a prosperous society a "road to hell"

The phrase was "road to hell is paved with good intentions". "Trying to build and maintain a prosperous society" was the good intentions part. The hell part is the reality that the next generation lives in after wealth redistribution has been forced: we've seen it over and over again, every time it's been tried.
Remember that Emacs is competing with things like Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text, etc. If you tell people that it's easy they're going to try it, bounce off, and conclude you have no idea what you're talking about. If, instead, you tell them what you like about it more than those others they might find they agree with you.
> Clang has it although I've personally never tried it due to the horrible rigamarole of setting it up.

-% scan-build10 make
scan-build: Using '/usr/local/llvm10/bin/clang-10' for static analysis
...
scan-build: No bugs found.

What could ever have driven them to such a long and convoluted setup process?
I'd also consider a Helper to be something that may have application-awareness. Whereas, as you stated, a Utility would have no serious dependencies and is otherwise "dumb".
But emacs is not against vi. When I taught a class where I started by introducing emacs, the first question I got was how to make it have this color text and that hentai page background.
> If this is true then that’s a sign that we are measuring the wrong things when we talk about “the economy”.

Not necessarily.

Consider savings, for example.

Are high savings good for an individual? Well, yes, of course, they are! But every dollar saved is a dollar not spent. If everyone starts saving as much money as they can, this will damage the economy, lower spending, and will make everyone poorer (it's difficult to save money when your income derives from other people spending it.)

Debt is the opposite of savings in this respect. If you go into debt, and spend, it's good for me, as the person deriving income from your spending. Vice versa, if I go ahead, and spend that money, it will eventually be good for you, as your income is another person's expenses.

Does this mean that we should all max out our credit cards tomorrow? Well, obviously not... Just like we should not all become wealth-hoarding Tolkienesque dragons.

It's not clear where exactly the optimal point on the savings-spending axis
lies. It certainly lies on different points for different people, depending on your personal wealth, skills, social class, luck, or your personal value system, etc. Some people benefit a lot from a healthy economy. They obviously want everyone else to spend more. Some people benefit very little from a healthy economy. They obviously want to spend less.

It's not a trivial problem to solve. I personally think there are some kinds of debt that are way worse than other kinds of debt. High-interest debt is problematic. High-burden debt (Like mortgages) is also problematic. Debt that inflates asset prices (Like universal student loans) - also problematic. Medium-low interest, medium burden debt (Like most car payments)? It seems less problematic to me.
If you turn off message key backup, all it means is that if you lose all your devices (and thus your keys), you will lose your history. Otherwise, if you have at least one device active on your account, it will receive your message keys and gossip them (if needed) with your other devices. You can always do a manual offline backup too for safekeeping as a workaround.

> If I understand correctly, sounds like security is based on the complexity of your recovery passphrase and an implicit assumption that the passphrase doesn't get transmitted to the server... is that correct?

If you use cross-signing, then yes - your signing keys are stored protected by the recovery passphrase on the server. We also support gossiping them between devices (same as message keys), and there's no reason for them to have to persist on the server. We just need to hook up the UI to expose that as an option and we ran out of time to do that before shipping the initial release. It will follow shortly.
That would allow the thought the upper executives aren't infallible. An upper exec can never show vulnerability, especially to something like a business plan.

And that has ripple effects if they deal with vulture capitalists as well.
How why? New physics?
It used to be. But on a lot of default linux installs its not installed by default either.

then you have to pick a emacs...

https://askubuntu.com/questions/297170/how-to-install-emacs-...

For some reason I now have 2 versions installed on my pop-os, (I know to pick the first one when I launch from a gui..)

I love the editor, I really like the macros, and can move around and do my editing quick.

but I've been using it 10+ years and have NO idea if I'm using it correctly.

Certain modes aren't installed depending on and its just kinda obtuse. "Space emacs"? How do install a plug-in again..
where is my .emacs config file? is it init.el? ...

sigh..
Dropbox posts first quarterly profit
I've tried this before. It's hard work to write everything you encounter down on paper. Thank god for laptops.
It's an interesting practice, a sign of a time when information was a more precious commodity and had to be seized when it was found, lest you forget. Thankfully, it's easier than ever to do today with digital tech.

"Commonplace books were used by scientists and other thinkers in the same way that a database might now be used: Carl Linnaeus, for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the system used by scientists today)."

Nowadays, a browser bookmark system plus a few other tools like Calibre serve the same function for me; to store all the information I come across into a single repository. It's an important task for any knowledge-seeking person today to figure out how to store and organize the vast amount of useful info there is to find.
The promised green-space would have been awesome. In all, I'm thrilled that Toronto won't be the first guinea pig testing out a privacy-flexible smart city. If it works well in other places and everyone's happy, we can get the new improved one with the quirks fixed.
Why Computers Can't Count Sometimes (2018)
I wasn't arguing that those things aren't pushed, but rather that they're rarely pushed with technical merit. See: "...which end up being the optimal choices?"
I can imagine a few ways emacs could be improved, but "a new direction for it," I can't.
Isn't this exactly survivorship bias?
GP brought out the tired "Give people who aren't afraid the freedom to choose" argument, which misses the point: The Stay at Home order is not about those freedom people. It is about the people those people will infect.
You won't because the super delegates + plus press control over friendly outlets prevent candidates the public loves from winning and gives them candidates they are told they should like. And even though they look good on paper they never feel right. Then the general election happens and the other party wins because whoever their candidate is they generally have populist support. Once in a generation people do get the candidate they want but they give themselves a serious disadvantage each year.
Yes, writing them on something decent like a BBC Micro :p

<flamewar>
It's so lightweight that it seems into materials and makes them brittle.

Also, it's so light that you need bigger tanks, which adds weight. Of course, with a big enough rocket the effect of this is minimal.
I get that range anxiety is an irrational fear, but I genuinely doubt that it’s why people don’t buy EVs. I suspect that resistance to change is a more common cause, with range anxiety being a convenient excuse.

Besides, any solution to range anxiety has to be tuned to the social benefit it would generate. I’d be more a fan of simply making gasoline more expensive, since what we really need is not people using EVs, but people not using fossil fuels.
Fantastic read and very elaborative.
Oh man, you really overestimate the CCP's media competence. Take a look at the state media and propaganda in China. It's all very traditional, very straightforward, mostly fact based (even if cherry-picked). Even the infamous 50 cents army is pretty stupid, and not what you think it is: https://www.quora.com/Does-the-50-cent-army-really-exist-and...

CCP influencing online discussions in the west? Hahahaha! As someone who's neutral (not even supportive) about the CCP, I can only hope that they become that competent within a decade. Those idiots still have no idea how sophisticated communication with western audiences needs to be. In the mean time, western media walks all over them, even with stories that are easily debunked.
Germans are scared because there are reactors which have been overdue for years now and because of of accidents and underreporting that happens and threatens them. No sane person would blame them. This is no backwater terrain in some former soviet republic. This is the middle of Europe.

Luckily, they'll finally be decommissioned now as France turns towards renewables: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...
The article covers this question, they think it is just a factor. A funnel towards Alzheimer's that a lot of people still end up getting to the bottom of.
Publishing TypeScript NPM Modules Using NX and GitHub Actions
>Light sailing is the only existing in-space propulsion technology that could allow us to visit other star systems in a human lifespan.

as this article shows the light sailing requires unobtanium to make the real light sail. Whereis nuclear explosion propulsion - project Orion - can me made with existing materials. Of course bringing into orbit the required several millions tons of cargo to build the ship from, majority of it being the tens of thousands of nukes, seems to be an endeavor behind our current capabilities.
I’m a fan of the Dutch equivalent geldnerd.nl, mrmoneymustache.com is on my list. Thank you!
It's not at a loss, it's just at a rate they couldn't support if it were there only rate.

As a thought experiment, suppose there are a few local zillionaires start making "platinum" orders to local markets each day, with a $1M delivery charge. Will the markets stop accepting otherwise-profitable peon orders? No. That part is easy. But what will happen to the price of peon orders as the markets compete? They can afford to lower those prices a bit, since their fixed costs are spread across all customers, and the zillionaires are already paying the lion's share.

If you doubt this, imagine you run one of the markets and your competitor drops the price of his peon orders by five percent. Are you going to allow the competitor to take all of your business, forgoing the profit you'd otherwise earn?
I wish Vim users and Emacs users would unite to improve Spacemacs. It's really a great idea IMO, have the editing power of Vim with the flexibility and elegance of the Emacs environment.

Unfortunately when I tried Spacemacs (coming from Emacs) I kept bumping on rough edges with vim command emulation which ended up with me switching directly to the real vim. It's been about a year now and while I still think I was right to finally make the switch to modal editing, vim feels like a clunky and hacky environment compared to the power of Emacs.
Your comment about the hidden impact of cancelling snacks reminds me of this article: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...