skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> it doesn't work for humans, with our faulty, hostile wetware.

Do you believe there is a future of humanity in which we don't figure out how to handle this? Does this seem like the kind of thing that can be figured out through group discussion, or is it better approached by strong leadership?

My personal philosophy is that we should operate like a game with players and refs. The refs technically have power, but aren't allowed to tell the players what to do. The players do not get to make the rules.

I think people should very clearly delineate between phases of their life where they are taking responsibility and focusing on society (refing), and phases of their life where they're just enjoying it (playing). No mixing the two. Either serious mode, or fun mode, but the moment you mix the two you get a conflict of interest: players should not ref. Fun people have a hard time being taken seriously, serious people aren't much fun.. it's just a bad thing to mix.

At the same time, refs need to know how to play. If a ref hasn't played for a long time, then their heart can't really be in the game. So refs are somewhat obligated to just let go sometimes, and later maybe they'll come back, remembering that the power is not what's important; the game is what really matters.
"find the actions that minimize a system's energy" That sounds incorrect.

The path taken by the system between times t1 and t2 and configurations q1 and q2 is the one for which the action is stationary (no change) to first order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_action

The reason for this is quantum mechanics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation
I don't know about the awair specifically, but it's worth being cautious about cheap air quality monitors. There seems to be little good standardized testing of them, and sometimes even major brands can have abysmal accuracy. See for example the EPA study "Evaluation of Emerging Air Sensor Performance" [1], some of them have very low or even zero correlation with reference monitors. It'd be nice to see some more uniform independent lab testing and marking standards there, or maybe there already are? I've rarely been able to find comprehensive evaluations however. At least it does look like the EPA is looking at them more, last year there was a very interesting webinar overview [2] of research being done on them.

There are plenty of fully dumb plain monitors too, but since you picked a smart IOT one I'd personally really want to make sure it'd work LAN-only and supported a wide array of integrations. From a quick glance it's not clear the Awair does that, and it does not have HomeKit support for example.

----

1: https://www.epa.gov/air-sensor-toolbox/evaluation-emerging-a...

2: https://www.epa.gov/research-states/low-cost-air-quality-sen...
not 12. 15
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "mapping the world"? I haven't played Minecraft in a very long time, but I thought there was a built in map of some sort? I'd like to hear more as it sounds like we have similar play styles!
Why would work from home in the suburbs be better than work from home in the city?
Before COVID I lived this, and it's really the best of both worlds. You have one day a week where you meet with your coworkers and demo stuff, talk about stuff, grab some good food in the city, grab a smoke outside, ride the train. It's a nice "day off" as-in out of the ordinary.

I think this is the right balance.
That’s mainly because they have better things to do. Where do you think more money is to be made? Worry about your typing or be very good at meeting people?
Those were theories to describe specific phenomenas, not facts.

Knock knock, science 101 is at the door calling for you.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet: Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter - this book was a game changer for me - I read it in college over a partiularly rainy spring break and its content has changed the way I think about just about everything.

Systems Thinking: A Primer by Donella Meadows is also an incredibly thought-provoking non-fiction book, that really makes you think about the world and the systems we create differently.
A credential becoming less exclusive doesn't necessarily mean the requirements are relaxed. Could mean the requirements stay constant and there are more people shifting their priorities, seeking to obtain it and succeeding.

Of course in the real world, supply will react to the increase in demand and those looking to make a quick buck will offer an inferior credentialing service. For example: the fairly recent glut of web dev bootcamps (Of which I am a graduate of one, it can work occasionally).

And then things get complicated and every firm tries to filter out unqualified candidates with wild interview processes which leads to countless blogs about the whole situation including the article featured here, which is, at least, tangentially related.
The Efficient Market Hypothesis is complete BS. It's only relevant in academia, and it'll stay that way since there's no profit to be had going to academia and arguing with professors on their home turf about it.

You can see that it's BS by just looking at Warren Buffett's investment returns, all collected from exploiting long term market inefficiencies.
There never really was. It was always a charade. The only real “benefit” of the current system is that seigniorage profits are accrued by primary dealers rather than Treasury.
"Mindset", Carol Dweck. Or her more scholarly one on same topic, "Self-theories"
Report shows coronavirus rates spiking in heartland communities
This is a really bad idea..

Firstly, home is not an effective place of work. I come home mostly to be with my family and not take my problems from work to home.. Aren't there many studies done on the same, why work shouldn't be brought to home and stuff..

Secondly, if the employer provides all the required setup (monitors, webcams, speakers) and support for electricity backups and stuff then I might be willing. The point about electricity backup is very true especially for developing countries.

Thirdly, I'm actually working more (double time) compared to only working 8 hours. This also has to do with my time management but people are actually lazy at home and very hard to be dependent on them..
Anecdotally — I have a lot of friends and colleagues in the music industry — I wouldn’t say Pro Tools is more prestigious. It seems pretty split on people’s preferences and old habits die hard, but a LOT of top composers and producers use Logic.
Anectdote, but I've worked for both a company that does PTO accrual and one that does unlimited vacation. I was not paid out anything at the latter (this was less than a year ago).

From my perspective, unlimited policies have a lot of upside on the financial front — they don't have to keep accrued PTO cash on the books. Of course, it has a benefit to workers, but only to those who take advantage of it and don't feel pressured by management or their peers to meet a certain number. It's been my experience so far that my peers at unlimited PTO companies take less time off, and that their "time off" is less valuable (meaning they are not completely logged out/tuned out of work) because it's coming from an infinite pool. At the end of the day, I think the balance of these policies shifts towards the financial side of the business rather than the employee's side.
I may not like having a tiny desk crammed in a huge team in a loud noisy space, I do still like seeing my coworkers daily and attending meetings with them and going out to lunch with them. Working from home is isolating and lonely for me.
There's a way to encrypt the boot partition and have GRUB ask you for the boot partition key, but you're limited to LUKS1, and the decryption process is slow as molasses, since it's implemented inefficiency directly in the GRUB code, because the Kernel's faster code isn't loaded yet. It's also probably full of side channel leaks. Signing the kernel and ramdisk is probably the better option...
Maybe it's not as efficient, but:

1/ The tools/processes/humans can only get better at it

2/ It will cost the companies much much less to have remote employees, so even if each individual employee get less done it is still worth it.
> does this mean the federal government is owning more and more share of private companies (at least their debt portion)?

Of their debt portion, yes.

> is now trending toward the economy operated by quasi-government-owned companies?

No, as debt is not usually ownership (there are structures that allow it to become that). Companies just increasingly owe the government money, but that would happen under any traditional bailout scheme anyway.

> Is it imaginable that eventually, the US government owns the majority stake in these quasi-government-backed companies, moving the US economy further away from market-based capitalism?

Majority? That is a long long ways away. Top shareholder? It is true in Japan, so it is plausible. The Fed is not buying stocks at the moment.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Bank-of-Japan-to-be...

The more concerning issue is that ETFs change management fees. Why is the Fed supporting management fees instead of buying the debt directly?
Based on the reporting at the time, it sounds like it was unintentional; they were capturing the raw packets to a debug file that wasn't even routed for post-processing.
Piggybacking on this:

What stops the Fed from doing something like this and then subsidizing it with negative rates on traditional notes?

Disclaimer: not an economist. This could be a really, really stupid idea, and it would clearly only work with literally the strongest world economies that are capable of charging entities to hold their money for them. But it could work well as a crisis basic income solution when everyone else moves to park their cash.
I guess we'll find out what the judges the locals voted for and the juries summoned are made of. Even then, their decisions can be overturned by a higher court or appealed so that basically means nothing. They can say "criminal municipal code violation" and a good judge should say, no, that's not how this works. I guess it is LA, though...
Rising atmospheric CO2 is a very real concern, and I am very concerned about the long-term mental effects of atmospheric CO2 rising into the 900+ range.

But short-term, the effects of any rise from 350 to 400ppm outdoors is going to be vastly dwarfed by indoor factors (in some poorly ventilated buildings like old schools, PPM can rise to 2000+). It's far more likely that what you encountered was due to poor ventilation than due to overall global CO2 rise.
yep. I think i agree.
I'm curious if there have been any models of the economic impact if high salary remote workers were to disperse themselves across the US to lower cost-of-living cities.
'The website [0] for Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks is down and hackers claim to have 756 gigabytes of data including contracts and personal emails.

'A screenshot allegedly of a Madonna contract has been released, and the criminals are demanding payment.'

'The hackers known as REvil or Sodinokibi previously attacked foreign exchange company Travelex with ransomware in January.' [1]

'Cyber-security company Emsisoft says the hackers have posted images online of a contract for Madonna's World Tour 2019-20 complete with signatures from an employee and concert company Live Nation.'

[0] http://www.gsmlaw.com

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51017852

Travelex hack previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21979655
Unless there's an open and free alternative to Citrix, not gonna happen.
Originally, I required a GNU toolchain from the RISC-V organization for both assembling and linking. Now, I don't need any external tools (except QEMU to run it). Everything you need can be downloaded using Rust's configuration tool rustup for RISC-V. If you take a look at my github, you'll see that I added a .cargo/config file that will build AND run the operating system using cargo.
Every time motorcycles come up in any topic ever, you can tell within the first three words of a post if the author has even the faintest idea of how to ride. It's very frustrating when people who don't even drive try to tell me how the laws should be to "make me safer", despite the fact that virtually all of the danger while riding a motorcycle responsibly stems from the fact that damn near everyone driving a car in 2020 is staring at their phone more often than not.

My father-in-law hates that I ride a street bike, and he frequently texts and drives. I'm like, you are directly creating the scenario for me which you are warning me about. The complete lack of realization of this makes my eyes bleed.
I am paying ~200 dollars per year for my IDE. What price would be justified for a auto-complete plugin for bespoken IDE?
There's also a talent gap. From my experience, a lot of tech workers in Vancouver simply couldn't meet the bar for the stricter US immigration. With the current stricter enforcement on H1-B and the lax Canadian immigration system I expect to see a downward pressure for wages in Vancouver as more of the B players are relocated there.
The utility of partial WFH is much, much lower than full WFH. With partial WFH I still have to live within reasonable commuting distance from the office, while if I’m full WFH I can leverage the difference in cost of living away from the office.
If I could keep my current compensation and move to the low cost of living area where my family is located, I would reach financial independence 10-15 years ahead of my current trajectory with Bay Area rents/costs. I'll settle for the minor inconveniences of WFH any day in order to get a decade of my life to spend with family or to work on my own projects.
"Breaking Open the Head", by Daniel Pinchbeck

"DMT: The Spirit Molecule", by Dr. Rick Strassman

"The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge", by Jeremy Narby

"The Law", by Frederic Bastiat
Read the book. I was in the same camp as you. Most of his writing is just hack nonsense. But, some is well written (The Stand, Misery, Shawshank, The Green Mile, Cujo, for example). He's just inconsistent.

Seriously, read the On Writing book. It really set his theory up for me to understand exactly why he's inconsistent. You can read his books and tell when he's thinking and processing, versus when he's writing to pay for a car or house or whatever.
I'm well aware. But considering that Turkey, the modern successor state of the Ottoman Empire, is negotiating its way into the EU, while the UK has just finished making a dog's breakfast of negotiating its way out of it...
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and the rest of the Maddaddam Trilogy. I read it a few years ago, but still think about it all the time. The writing is vivid and visceral, and the characters have an emotional and spiritual depth that you almost never find in dystopian scifi. There are also some spooky parallels to what's happening now.
There are tools like automatic captions + manual tagging that can make search much better. The tools are out there, just not well adopted at this point.
This was my experience as well.

When I started as a developer, my team was fully remote (I was the only developer in NYC, most of the rest were in Portugal or elsewhere in the US.) I found it very difficult to ask questions remotely for several reasons: I never knew if I was intruding on somebody else's time, and explaining things over Slack isn't as effective (in retrospect, I should have made more use of video and voice chat). YMMV: some people are probably more bold in asking questions remotely. For newer developers, this is important.

You really can't overstate how useful it is to just plunk your laptop down in front of another developer and ask questions while staring at the same screen.

At my current company, I'm usually co-located with our other developer, which made the process of clarifying things for both of us a lot easier. As I've gained experience, I've found it a lot easier to ask questions remotely: we've made great use of various voice/video/screensharing functionality for this purpose.
Very simple: Google shareholders don't want to be tied up to that extent in self-driving cars.

By keeping Waymo separate, shareholders can make their own choice as to how much they want to invest in search/advertising vs. self-driving cars. They're drastically different risk/reward profiles.

Obviously this isn't something a company usually does, but that's because either a division is small, or it has significant links to the rest of the company, or there's a clear joint strategy.

But Waymo is expected to be huge, and there's really essentially zero link to the ads/search/cloud/media that is Google's bread and butter.
I don't regret working in an office, especially early on since it lead to faster learning.

That said, it's fantastic to see Twitter do this. Especially given the commutes some are making in the bay area, this is a huge quality of life increase.
I never suggested the straw man you mentioned in 1. You made that up on my behalf to argue against, which is weird.
Egan is a close second for my all-time favorite sci-fi author. Some of his books read like mathematical dialogues or transcriptions of lectures (lots of the Orthogonal Series is conversations between professors and their grad students reasoning about physics of a world that we don't live in), but he also delves deep into mathematics and fringe ideas and presents them in a vista where you can enjoy the absolute splendor of the abstractions.

He also never thinks small. I thought I knew "the point" of Diaspora about 6 or 7 times, but then he just "zoomed out" and made the last point look small and trivial by comparison. The opening chapter of that book is so abstract and yet describes the birth of a consciousness in a way that feels understandable, believable, and internally consistent.

If you love finding interesting puzzles to reason about, then I strongly recommend Egan's books!

I haven't read Permutation City, though. I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue :)
I was already sick of getting sick 3-5 times a year just being in an open office, the fact that I'm more aware now that I can get something that will do more than knock me out of being able to code for a week is a huge deterrent to me ever wanting to work in a hamster cage surrounded by hundreds of other people with hundreds interactions with whoever.

I mean, I'm not a germophobe or something but I already thought it was gross how often I got sick and I'm 100% certain it was from my office environment, now I have a real reason that "suck it up stupid" doesn't just brush away. Every winter someones kid gets sick then it just blasts through the open office. Then it happens 3 weeks later, then again, then again..I'm pretty sure I got sick 3 times earlier this year, maybe 4.
Some additional interesting discussion about this book on previous HN threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19765019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6947257

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153778

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581696

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9560567
Not to forget the markup they charge from customers on the prices.
Paid 10% more even on a pick up order from a restaurant downstairs.
Learnt that the service is best used when you cannot drive to a certain place.
You've been duped into thinking capitalism is something that it isn't by people who don't want you to know what capitalism has always been.
Sending a wasteful amount of code to the browser? Maybe there's a better way
My company is WFH right now, but my team is distributed across 4 cities anyways. I've mentored a handful of junior developers and it seems to have worked well, however, you really need a culture which supports it. Active video/screen sharing time, solid onboarding documentation, RFCs which describe processes, etc.
"Green The Planet" is a very good example that immediately came to my mind.
I'm not married to the indoctrination of a perfect royal family, or the global Crown/Commonwealth concept, so maybe that helps me see it without any cognitive dissonance.
Accountability doesn't mean never doing anything wrong, or even lying. What it means is that they can be held to account. I'm not saying they did or didn't, I watched your video, but nothing in your video changes anything I said at all.
Cultivate your can-do attitude
IonQ CEO Peter Chapman on how quantum computing will change the future of AI
Generating Synthetic Data for Healthcare
Sharing data safely is one of the biggest challenges in the healthcare industry today. For hospitals and health organizations, being able to compare and contrast new patient data with other medical organizations in their area and across the world can help doctors quickly diagnose patients and provide the best treatment possible.
Coherence X – a tool to turn websites into chromium-based hybrid apps on macOS
I think what you’re getting at is technological stagnation (at least in terms of the utility users draw from protocols) but a succession of rolling waves of network-effect-driven client adoption. And that’s the key point: if the user experience is essentially indifferent to underlying protocols what drives these waves is the relative ease of getting in contact with the group of people with whom you wish to converse. I don’t think Skype has been supplanted, it’s just been accosted... and, ironically, who drives this is not those who has several different applications on device suitable for connecting to different people who use different networks, but rather by those who insist on having a single application and that thereby force others to make decisions that suit them because they have a single option.
TBF to Google, that's something anyone can do. If a person really doesn't want their activities known, it's incumbent upon the person to not do those activities over an unsecured wifi network. That's the radio equivalent of shouting your browsing history in public.

(This is one of the oldest privacy arguments and extends outside the radio spectrum. Philosophically, if you stand naked at your own bay window and I walk by on the street and chance to spy your genitals, and the fact they were seen bothers you, who screwed up here?)
WFH also works for those young people that don't quite live in the middle of the city - say, they would like to live closer to where they play (the ocean, the mountains, on the road, etc).
> disrespect of focus

This right here is my beef in a nutshell. My attention should be under my control. For example, I can't believe that leaving audible cell phone notifications on is becoming normalized.
The Witness is a stress-free puzzler taking place in a relaxing Iyashikei environment - and cross-platform now too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_(2016_video_game)
My even more cynical take is that companies are finding employees are way more productive working from home. I think part of it could be that with COVID-19, a lot of us are looking for an outlet for our energies, and so are working harder than normal.
My setup is a Shure SM7B, Cloudlifter (necessary for SM7B), and Focusrite Scarlett. It sounds really good.
The Irreplaceable Thrill of the Rock Show
Or even have the funds to start your own company rather than spend it on rent / housing.
No one wins awards and medals for battles that don't happen.
Yes, the group is not "pro-tech," it's "pro-trust" AKA anti-antitrust. They're anti-regulation that they don't write themselves.
I am made sad by the knowledge that the people who are now gloating about this place being bad and having lots of old people die, while another place is just dandy and hasn't had a problem because of it's greater moral character have called things really early. The next wave of lockdowns will not be as successful as this wave, indeed it's really doubtful that many places will be able to impose them
I'm still jealous. At 15 I had a 10 MB hard drive and 4 color graphics available to me. While I am happy about who I am, I do wish sometimes my childhood had better technology available.
Reminds of that Office Space clip, "What is it exactly, that you DO here?".