skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I really dislike how when debt collection gets talked about, the debt collectors are the evil ones. Never mind the person who signed a contract to pay x interest in return for y money and didn't pay it back.

Those are usually pretty predatory contracts. Consumer credit isn't like my mortgage, where someone reviewed my past five or more years of finances and decided my income and assets actually justified the loan. Hell, my mortgage has a much lower interest rate than most consumer credit (eg: car loans, credit cards, etc.).

Those high interest rates are rationalized as reflecting the risk of default on the debt. Ok. So if someone is going to default, you charge the next sucker more interest, because I don't see why you should be made whole off garnishing someone's paycheck when you choose to make predatory loans to risky borrowers.

De facto, the whole thing is just privatized taxation with extra steps: the "borrower" pays a monthly tax to the "creditor" for the privilege of existing while poor, and in exchange, they are kept, deliberately, in perpetual debt.

The only loans that the government should help you collect on are those designed to be paid off in full in the first place.
You don’t need to have intelligence. Intelligence is just a form of fitness, but other species have had ecological hyper-fitness before (look at what happened with rabbits in Australia). All of them display the same behavior: massive growth and then overshoot and collapse. We’re exactly on the same path right now. I don’t think is very plausible to make an inhospitable planet livable.
What a coincidence -- as a shopper, I'm moving to alternatives to Amazon, as well.

Partly C19 related, but I was moving away from them in the before-times, as well.
When I started my first programming job the CEO told me that programming is 59 minutes of feeling like an idiot and 1 minute of feeling like a genius. It's really stuck with me, and has so far proven true.
When there's no personal risk, you mean.
One is the actual primary source.
From the website:

For Competitive Service roles: All United States citizens and nationals (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands) are eligible to apply.

For Excepted Service roles: All United States citizens and nationals (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands) are eligible to apply, and applicants must not be current GSA employees or contractors.
Or maybe it's "those drivers who can afford to buy a (long range) electric do, and those that can't buy diesel"?

There's still a significant price gap between comparable diesels and electrics.

Norway's experience (60%+ market share for electric vehicles) suggests that if the price is comparable, and charging is convenient enough, the majority of buyers will choose electric.
Perhaps you should consider that the commenter is fully self aware, but just disagrees with you at an ideological level? Conversational tone on HN would be better if we didn't make assumptions or statements about people's self-awareness, intelligence, and just debated the substance of the issues.
> Visual studio (most ides really) is good enough at that.

No. It's not.

Emacs's electric-indent is so close to the Right Thing when you're coding it's incredible -- getting almost perfectly formatted code as you type. Other editors have autoindent, but it never seems to do the right thing. Other editors also see fit to insert closing brackets/parens/quotes, and then miss detecting when I typed the closing punctuation so now I have three brackets/parens/quotes. It throws me off. Just highlight the opening punctuation mark when I close it, the way Emacs (and vim) does.

I've given Visual Studio Code a chance. Lots of chances really. Each time I find myself struggling with it more than I should, and needing that Emacs flexibility much more than I anticipated going in. Initially I feel more productive, but the more I worked with it the more it gets in the way, inducing friction and slowing me down. And then I want Emacs back.
Even with Catalina, or are you on an older OS?

Catalina just seems to have killed an inordinate amount of stuff...
I'm not prepared to take the unlimited downside on that, but I did largely get out of the market recently. The Dow hit the 7000s in the last recession, and every indication is that this one will be far larger.
> As for me, this will be the last year I shop for products on Amazon for the foreseeable future, and I may never come back, and I will be encouraging others to do the same. I'm one of those people who love shopping on Amazon, well not anymore.

Your sacrifice will be honored for many ages to come.
It's great to see someone self-hosting, and I noticed your note about seeing a blue header if running ipfs. I'm running ipfs with the companion extension. However, I can't resolve your dnslink.

ipfs resolve -r /ipns/notryan.com
> Error: context deadline exceeded

I tried the ipns multihash too:

ipfs resolve -r /ipns/QmZaQZyPXjyXWB2FZUUXV9Ft5qciCDMX6CPP2FmiuPSyAq
> Error: context deadline exceeded

You may not be forwarding your swarm address port, 4001 by default, to your laptop.
I'm pretty new to ipfs so take this with a grain of salt.

edit: It's worth noting that I can access other ipfs content using my gateway :)

edit2: I also noticed you're hardcoding the local gateway port to 8080 for your header background image. This port is configurable, mine is set to 5080.
Covid Death Rates: Is the data correct?
There are several downvoted comments here attempting to express the common idea that this virus has impacted different regions in very different ways. That observation alone is not an argument against there being only a single strain of this virus, but it is a valid observation in its own right. There are plenty of half-explanations that rely on cultural differences (hand shaking, masks), climate (heat, humidity), and various other factors, but so far no one has proven precisely what factors make the biggest differences. That piece of information is one of the most valuable things in the world right now and we do not have it.

The other big factor is the different government responses, but these are all over the map. Specifically, the lack of a lockdown does not always equal a high rate of transmission, and the presence of a lockdown does not always result in a low enough rate of transmission to avoid a crisis. This is something we should all be curious about.
South Korea's peak testing rate per capita is lower than the US's per capita testing rate now or at any point in the last month or so. Same when comparing to many of the European countries. Their testing was fairly substantial compared to what other countries were doing a few months ago, but it wasn't "mass testing" in the sense that the US press and experts are currently advocating. (Most of the tests were focused on Shincheonji members, even though infections almost certainly weren't - they just made an easy target). It was, however, enough to indicate that testing and contact tracing was missing a substantial chunk of infections which were spreading within the community. Somehow they managed to stamp those out by tightening social distancing measures without a full lockdown or mass testing, and there's no good explanation for why this worked.
What I like about UnixBench is that it covers I/O as well as raw CPU performance. (So you'd want to make sure it uses the SSD, not the SD card.) And it's open source (edit: actually checked the license now; looks like it's GPL2).

I'll let others weigh in with other benchmark suggestions.
I just wrote a small function to convert Unix epoch timestamps to date-time strings. Just to be able to make sense of timestamps in some log files I was looking at.

I find this kind repetitive thing frequently comes up in the course of one's work. Not a big deal to copy and paste in a web site to convert the first few (or few hundred) times, or firing up the python interpreter. But once it becomes apparent that I will have to do this again and again it is great that Emacs gives me a way to add that small function to it.
It's always odd to me when someone is talking about a public backlash and this is the response.

Did they say anything about legality? Facebook is free to do what it wants and the public is free to criticize it.

Legality isn't a magic shield against criticism.
> It amazes me how unself aware some HN users are when it comes to giving Government more power.

Completely anecdotally, I can feel a pretty big shift taking place. At least that's what it feels like online, which may not be at all representative of the overall population. A new generation has come of age, and they are far more comfortable with concepts like socialism and even totalitarianism than the previous generations are. It was evident before COVID19, but since the pandemic began it has become even more pronounced.

It's fascinating, really. Maybe scary. It's weird to get a little older (I'm Gen X) and feel like the culture of your society is shifting out from underneath you. No wonder old people seem to trend conservative.

Edit: And the hive mind does not care to recognize it. Welcome to the new world, introspection not welcome.
Tim strongly implied that Brad and every other VP leveled engineer is behaving morally unconscionably. It’s nice for Tim that he can afford to torpedo his job for a Democratic Socialists of America publicity stunt, but what other response do you expect from people like Brad? He is an ethical person who prefers to actually improve people’s lives by making real goods and services more affordable and accessible instead of this empty grandstanding.
From the ASAP dissertation (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-908.pdf):

> Reference counting, like asap, is a safe, synchronous memory management strategy. However, rc
approximates waste by unreachability which is less timely than asap’s approximation by Access.

I think a more careful reading of the work is required to distinguish the precise meanings of "unreachability" and "access" in this context.
I think government and scholarly articles are very hard for common man to understand because they use terms and abbreviations which can be understood only by practitioners of that field. For example BBC carried an article about a black hole discovered near our solar system and at the end included a link to the paper published by the researchers. I understood the BBC article but the scholarly article was super hard to understand and I couldn't go beyond the first paragraph. Similarly the comedy shows on TV also have laugh tracks to tell people when to laugh otherwise some of jokes are too complicated to be understood in short duration.

Here is the BBC article. You will find the link to the scholarly article at the end.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52560812

edit: grammar
Fair enough. Let's just turn Amazon off, then.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted and I 100% agree. And furthermore, I would be very surprised if your point is not eventually echoed by senior leadership, at least internally. This is the only correct course of action, and based on leaked documents, senior leadership made a reactionary misstep in the opposite direction (that ostensibly they regret, once it was leaked) and doubled down on it. The fact that said member of senior leadership even publicly recanted his original idea indicates that folks understand that mistakes were made. The question is how the company is going to respond and rectify them going forward.
The author never really expresses the intent of the writing, so the reader is left to assume it is meant for them -- experienced programmer or no.
The only thing SO was ever good at was SEO. They muscled their way into the niche that Usenet was filling and did a worse job of that to begin with.
Great, I agree in principal, but run the numbers.

Is it worth spending 1h of the day learning new things then 7h teaching others? I say that is wasteful.
I still don't understand in what way Amazon warehouse workers are being treated worse than an average American warehouse worker working for someone other than Amazon.
Maybe in the first 6 months or so after writing it.

After that, I occasionally go back through old code asking "what have you done for ME lately?" and an eye towards dragging it behind the toolshed and going "Ole Yeller" on it.

My code has to continually prove its worth to me, or else it's gone. Code is a liability.
Why not use twitch directly as it already has those filter-options?
Pumped hydrostorage is the obvious exception: it's cheap and widely deployed, and has been around forever. It's major problem is that the cheap price depends on favorable geography.
> As a consumer, Shopify just doesn't cut it because of discoverability.

Fair point, but it's not that hard to do a Google search after an Amazon search. I usually check Amazon first, and then the manufacturer's website to see if they link to the Amazon storefront. If not, I jump to a 3rd party reseller.

For me, it doesn't matter whether or not a specialty storefront is a Shopify one. I would pay a premium for that extra trust that I'm getting an authentic item. For instance, I buy my fountain pens from Goulet Pens [1] which is Shopify but you would never know it. I've tried buying fountain pens and consumables off Amazon but have received enough fakes to drive me toward specialty storefronts.

But for dish soap and other stuff that are not worth counterfeiting, sure, I get them off Amazon. Fulfilled by Amazon is slightly better, but I've still gotten duds.

I just hate wasting money on counterfeits.

[1] https://www.gouletpens.com/
it’s a quite famous US historical reference.
And.... Over 98% recover from it, it's been around for over 12 months and it's no more dangerous than any other cold or flu virus.

The question is when as any government (puppet shows for the "chosen ones") ever told the truth? Not when has it told a lie?!

What do people with power and control want? Always more!
I am old enough to have been writing software since 1976, and still do, although I am mostly a manager of managers now. My view is that dates are unfortunate (but sometimes unavoidable in the real world). But estimates are useful. They help flesh out risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity. They provide a set of approximations against which you can plot a glide path. And of course they must be frequently updated in the face of a changing reality. But that constantly evolving glide path is the “current best known” ship date, and that is very useful information (actually you can go deeper and look at its rate of change to give a better approximation).

It’s the job of engineering management to convey to upper management that these dates are projections only with certain levels of confidence.
For those who aren't a fan of monospaced text at 120 characters wide, there's a PDF link at the bottom of the page that includes the tables and an FAQ list:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
I was just about to try to grab this and try to contact them to return it, but the WHOIS records say it actually is still registered to them, and it expires in 2023. Phew! Maybe they need to update some DNS records?
This is completely anecdotal, but my brother first taught me to program when I was 5. I definitely didn't practice for 5 hours a day, but kept programming over the years and am a programmer now.

I'm a senior programmer but am pretty average in my estimation. I maybe QA test things better than the average programmer but I am not what I'd consider a 10x programmer or anything. I've met programmers who started later in life and are better than I am. Maybe the only benefit I have is that I'm usually decent at architecting systems.

With that said, there are plenty of kids who start piano early and never really become virtuosos. It may help to become a genius if you start earlier, but it still seems to be rare.
This exactly. If animals with intelligence didn’t exist there would still be nothing to keep an imbalanced species from taking over and wreaking destruction upon other species.
Ask HN: Metrics for F&B Investment
What metrics do investors look for before investing in an F&B product?

I've heard everything from thousands of units sold to consumer validation from a successful Kickstarter.

What metrics would you want to see before considering an investment in the F&B space?
Canadian cops take down teenage girl in stormtrooper costume over toy gun
You can be correct, or you can get traction.
I think a lot of technical people don't understand this. They get mad at people like say, Greta Thunberg, for not being purely clinical, accurate, scientific and dispassionate. But, meanwhile the people working to make the world believe climate change is fake are emotional, manipulative, and actually get traction against pure, reasoned, calm argument.

So do we want to be correct, or do we want to win?
I initially jokingly searched for pizza, but was blown away when I found a ton of great looking frozen pizzas. There seems to be a shortage of chicken breasts in my area right now as well and some of the options here look nice. This app seems very useful to me and I will probably be ordering some items today!
Seeking recommendation: open-source project for lawyer learning to program?
Hey! I'm a lawyer teaching myself to program. I've been working through SICP [1] and online classes, but now I want to get my feet wet and pick up some real experience.

I'm looking for an open source project that I could contribute to. Any recommendations?

Possibly relevant:

- I am based in NYC/NY bar qualified
- Experience working with finance data/SQL database

In an ideal world, I could find a project where my legal background would be helpful, but really the goal is a good learning environment/friendly community, so all ideas welcome. Thanks in advance!

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html#%_toc_start
Amp your remote meetings with BWAMP
Fantastic! Thank you for this. Agreed on most of your points, and stoked to give your scripts a try soon. :)
Yo how do I get spam mail I want some tbh
If you know how to get spam that I can reply to on my email then feel free to do it: margaretfisherbusiness@gmail.com
UFC (Live Event Tomorrow) Wants You to Watch Brawls, Not Its $5B Lawsuit
Thanks for making those videos! These are the kinds of videos, I think, the newcomers need to see to get value out of Nix.

Can you please share what screencasting software/setup you're using? It seems pretty effortless on your part to get your picture-in-picture move around.
Technically ya, its just the route im going through to get this data probably has some rate limits that I'd like to avoid hitting. Need to figure out how to poke at this in a friendly enough way.
It’s part of the Amazon mythos: “it’s still day one.” It’s intended to keep the company flexible and responsive to new opportunities.
That may be true, but she doesn't have the presence that Bray does. It's understandable that he doesn't want to be the face of it, but I feel he's doing the movement a disservice by quitting in protest and then _not_ working it. Whether he likes it or not, he's had a significant, long-term impact on the world and has been in the public eye for decades. Being able to put a graphic on the screen that says "Tim Bray: Internet pioneer quit in protest of Amazon workplace environment and worker treatment" is far more likely to gain traction with the average person, who is who they need to attract, than you can do with Cunningham. Even if Bray isn't as well spoken as she is.

It's unfortunate, but that's the way it works. One comes across as a person who saw something wrong and wanted to be part of the change, even at their own expense. The other comes across as a disgruntled fired employee (whether that's true or not is irrelevant when you have seconds to convince someone just to pay attention to your cause).

I don't think he's wrong to want to stay out of it and let others directly involved lead it, but I feel he hurt things a bit by shining the spotlight on himself (which was unintentional, to be sure) and then turning his back on it.
All the more reason to focus on space travel to expand the our resources!
To be fair, it often feels like the interpreted narrative by the financial press is made up on the fly with little regard to whether it actually makes sense in context.
We _are_ nature and have no more control over our destiny than ants do.
Thanks for the evil-collection link! I hadn’t seen this before, but the sudden switch out of having vim bindings in various buffers has been one of the pain points in starting to learn emacs.
Yes but who’s willing to get off at the next station, not the passengers who’ve been on it from the start and not the passengers who just got on and are getting a taste.
So what? Tim already said he doesn’t want to be a martyr, he’s just saying that he couldn’t continue to look himself in the mirror if he kept cashing the cheque.

I could see your point if Tim didn’t point out his own privilege but he does _in both articles._
GitHub Theme for VS Code
Nice, easy and useful. A like from me
I mentioned it in my other comment but I think what you're after is TinkerForge [0].

It's expensive but you can for example toggle mains electricity on and off with some super basic electronics skills and about 5 lines of Python [1] (or many other languages). You can add GSM functionality with a regular USB modem, though the API isn't quite as nice [2]. WiFi is much nicer [3].

[0]: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/

[1]: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Kits/HardwareHacking/Remo...

[2]: https://github.com/Tinkerforge/red-brick/blob/master/program...

[3]: https://www.tinkerforge.com/en/doc/Hardware/Master_Extension...
Have you read Bertaud? His central thesis is how urban economics, as measured by data collection, must inform urban planning. Sidewalk Lab’s plans were very congruent with his ideas.
Inform is not a descendant of Zork, it has no connection to it besides producing output files in ZMachine / Z-Code format, which is well-specified so that anyone can write a generator.

As far as programming the actual story goes, it's an independent implementation based on entirely different principles (Zork was written in MDL which was a Lisp).
Came here to say this - I almost never think much of the code I wrote. But when I see a moment in time that I took the care to do something for future me, it's almost the same as looking at an old photo of myself, and thinking, 'Hey, I didn't look half bad back then!"
All the time.

The old joke is about us looking at code we wrote six months ago, and being horrified at what we see. And I've had more than my share of that.

But what's ALSO happened, many times, is I look at old code I wrote... and I'm IMPRESSED. Just blown away by the beautiful elegance and power of the abstractions I came up with, the sheer intelligence of the approach, the insight and lucidity oozing from the code.

"Wow, I wrote THAT?!" Because I was deep in a coding trance when I wrote it. So deep "in the zone", that when I come out, it's not easy to recapture where I was. Not even the next day, and certainly not months later.

Interesting how it works!
Dancing to Numbers
You could apply the same quote to diminish Tim Bray's "sacrifice" as well. They can both feel they are doing the right thing and be at odds.
Concurrency is a "proposed extension", per section 6.4 of the referenced thesis. Among other things, it is noted that cooperative concurrency with explicit yield points would be somewhat feasible, whereas anything more general than that is very much an active research area to say the least.
> Like most myths, it’s both false and true.

That doesn't _mean_ anything.
This article is somewhat out of date. Grindr was sold by its Chinese owners after some of the concerns about privacy/security. https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/grindr-sold-china-national...
If a language like this were to take off, I could see linter-style errors pop up that are not currently possible.

"ERROR: maximum memory usage computed to be XYZ MB, which is higher than the speicified limit of 500MB"

Now that would help keep the RAM bloat down!
Exploring opportunities in South Africa's township economy
Getting Started with AWS Secret Manager