skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They seem to be very bad at their jobs.

On the contrary, I'd argue they are mostly good at their jobs.

Their job isn't to help the average American. Their job is to serve Capital. They get paid by the rich, not by average Americans.

They are doing a good job at that. Look at the stock market, it goes up while Main Street is in turmoil.
>> what happens when all of that capital has nowhere to go? Is there back pressure?

Perhaps what happens is that expensive (i.e., in terms of fees) investment vehicles end up investing in easily available assets (e.g., Uber stock, which is public.)

Anyone know if SoftBank earns carry on this part of the portfolio? Why would LPs want SoftBank to have any funds in a publicly traded asset and pay fees for that?
Show HN: TechTalks – A tech community event platform with slides and videos
I read the critique in depth. Let me summarize the claims:

1. The developers had a couple of bugs that cause non-deterministic outputs in weird settings. It's a randomized model so this isn't a disaster, but obviously it would be better to have all non-determinism derived from a single seed. However, none of the bugs point to scientific issues. Still, these are real bugs that should be fixed. And indeed: another team pointed out some issues, they triaged the report, and it appears that they've been fixing these issues.

2. The code doesn't run well multi-threaded, and so the scientists run it on a single core. This seems like a feature the developers have de-prioritized. The critics make a HUGE deal about how using a single core is inefficient, but at the end of the day: if scientists can get simulations done in a reasonable time using a single core, this seems like a valid prioritization of limited development effort. The critics know better, obviously.

3. There aren't a bunch of unit tests. But as the authors point out code is in development and being altered continuously to reflect new developments in society and new knowledge about the virus, so it seems hard to develop unit tests that won't become broken as the underlying components change.

4. The critics seem to have a strong grounding in epidemiology. I'm just kidding, they claim to be pure software engineers, but still insist on spending a significant fraction of their critique disputing the calculation of R0 and lecturing the epidemiologists on how they think it should be calculated. This is a giant red flag given that the critics' sole stated expertise is software engineering.

5. The developers are continuing to add features to simulate new aspects of the ongoing pandemic (e.g., new code to simulate the impact of contact tracing apps) instead of fixing every minor issue in the code. Given that we're in the midst of a deadly epidemic that is putting human beings into the ground, this seems like a completely unavoidable resource allocation decision to me.

6. The critics can't even be bothered to pretend their criticism is objective. E.g., the piece concludes with "on a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded." Yeah, sure, you're a totally disinterested software expert here.

I guarantee you if you look at any piece of software -- commercial or scientific, no matter the budget -- with the politically-motivated goal of tearing apart the author, you will succeed. I can say this having spent years doing security and expert witness code reviews for some of the biggest and smallest companies in the software industry. This piece isn't a critique, it's just a hatchet job. And not even a particularly creative one.
Why? Note that the project is a fork & mix of several other projects of high quality, so as long as the other projects do not die...

Having said that, I am not sure why someone would use this compared to other completely free or open source engines.
My understanding is that we are spending over 2 trillion in stimulus, it doesn't seem like 35 billion or even 700 billion will come close to paying for that.
There's obviosly more of the same topic in https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=atomashpolskiy , but just accepting "5 links in total to 3 different pieces of J. Corbett's investigation on BGMF." at face value, can you elaborate why do you think that posting five links in total about the same investigation is acceptable behavior?

To me, the first time is absolutely reasonable, repeating it a second time is a bit shady, but making the third, fourth and fifth posts are clearly crossing the line to spam, no matter what the topic is. If the community voted that it's not interested in the first two submissions, then that topic should be set aside, not resubmitted again and again.
Governments fund road construction with large portions of federal grants. The property taxes of many communities are nowhere near enough to maintain all of the infrastructure that they have built indefinitely.

So we are constantly building things we cannot maintain with current tax rates.

Also, roads don't generate enough economic activity to offset their costs.
Python vs. JavaScript for Pythonistas
I can say this:

1) A product like this is definitely needed. I find iOS' password handling intuitive, yet it always flummoxes my parents.

2) Perfect tagline!

This is just a tiny nit - but the webflow slug kind of turns me off a bit, but that's likely just me.
But then the school would be ranked as a low cost institution, and carry a stigma that many parents and students would want to avoid. There's a reason USC is raising tuition right now. Signaling that it's worth it...

My daughter is going to school in the fall, and I ran into this pricing strategy immediately. Her choice of college started tuition at over $50k/year, but offers "scholarships." These aren't Pell Grant etc, but scholarships that apply only to this institution. You get a scholarship for touring the campus. You get another scholarship for being a state resident. Eventually, you're effective tuition rate is cut in half.

This strategy is brilliant because it works on 3 axis; first, the parents feel like they're getting a good deal (since the effect of anchoring the tuition at $50k is hard to resist). Second, the school can appear elite since it charges a high tuition. Third, the student (and parents) feel good because their kid "earned" scholarships.
We need more of these and less js livbraries
The Leskovec papers in the readme are pretty good (classical pieces) I would really recommend reading them.
>Yes, kids take time. Lots of time. So if you believe that more time at a work is better, and that it's a zero-sum game (i.e., time with children will take away from time at work), then yes, having children will be bad for your career.

>There's no doubt that children can be maddening, frustrating, and time consuming. Especially when they're young, they demand lots of attention. But in my case, all of that frustration was easily counterbalanced by the joy, excitement, and fulfillment that comes from having children, speaking with them, and learning from them.

All of the above!

One way I try to think about this is by looking at all the people I've worked with who are at the top of the ladder. CxO, EVPx, GM, etc. The vast majority of them work crazy hours, travel all the time, are constantly attached to their email, etc. They only way for them to do that is to sacrifice time with their families and have a partner who basically does all the family stuff.

If that's what you want AND you want to spend lots of time with your kids, then kids are going to be an impediment to that. If that's not what you want, then I think it's question of finding a balance between what you want out of your career and life. Most certainly if your kids are very young and you want to spend time with them, your career might move a little slower.
How is that a constitutional question?

The whole point of 230 was to answer that: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider".

Some courts had said that filtering makes the provider a publisher and liable for the content. Congress passed 230 to reverse that.
There's a common standard for DVDs and a competitive market in them; if one maker won't sell what you want, another will. Apple should be either nationalised or broken up like Ma Bell, and the threat of the same should hang over any market where a handful of players capture enough marketshare to become a de facto cartel.
I can. R0~5.7 has dropped below 1.0 in many mask-averse stay-at-home regions, which I consider compelling evidence of efficacy in an adverse environment, under common-sense priors informed by the medical literature.
This problem has a simple solution. Don't host your stuff with giant corporations who's only motivation is avoiding conflict and making profit.
I think that calling something a pyramid scheme here is intended to be descriptive rather than a specific accusation of wrongdoing.

If something is in fact a pyramid scheme it doesn't much matter if the people in charge are smart enough to do it intentionally or are just really bad at math. Either way eventually the party ends.
256MB RAM? How extravagant! My first computer had 3kB.

This is just the nature of “induced demand”. We might expand the power of our computers by several orders of magnitude, but our imaginations don’t keep up, so we find other ways of using all that capacity.
Echoes of Paul Virilio
>Generally I have left out the integration step because it can easily cause instabilities, even with a wind-up preventer.

Funny, in automotive we always left out the derivative component not the integral which IMHO is the most useful component of the controller.
> There is plenty of money, we could tax something like 5% of stock buybacks and completely rebuild our entire society from the ground up

There isn't plenty of money in fact. Your 5% tax would get you $30 to $50 billion depending on the year. You're not rebuilding much with that. You can build a few miles of NYC subway with that, and maybe a quarter of a high-speed rail line in part of California.

You need to fill in the trillion dollar budget deficit first of all, which overwhelmingly consists of rapidly expanding entitlement spending deficits where we're not bringing in enough tax revenue. There is only one way to mathematically accomplish that in reality: raise income taxes dramatically on the top 1/3.

That only gets you back to break-even. It doesn't pay down the federal debt ($600b per year in interest) and it doesn't provide any expansion for spending programs new or old.

The US is already spending as much on its total government system (Federal + State + Local) as what advanced welfare states in Western Europe spend in total on their government systems. And we're getting a horrible return on that money almost across the board. The first thing we should do is improve the effectiveness of the money we're already spending while we attempt to bring down the deficits. For what we're already spending, the whole of the US should look like Denmark or Sweden. Why doesn't it?

Everyone likes to say one thing first in response: military spending. Ok, slash $150 billion off of that to bring it down to 2.5-3% of GDP type levels (and freeze it for a decade). Next you need another $850b to $1.2t minimum each year in new tax revenue just to balance the budget this decade. It will require immense income taxation increases. There are no other sources that can come close to filling that epic hole.
Yeah, it's a good example.
Wrong. Actually I got this:

https://imgur.com/a/BLWsNYd

I guess you're partly right tho. Less on the X37-B, but there are a few "Area 51" and "Tonopah" articles. Certainly active disinfo and infiltration of the UFO/Truther/free energy movement was a thing. Used exactly as you describe, to drive people off the scent of actual tech, and discredit them.

For your viewing pleasure I've included a few links to UFO videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=0CYFEZFNl6E...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnUpJw5sahg&milpo=town9

https://youtu.be/JAEi9rltoqU?t=11

https://www.youtube.com/user/myparanormalufostory/videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKC_Iaw9EN4&feature=youtu.be...

https://www.youtube.com/user/MrAntonioUrzi/videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UbGpJQ054 [particularly interesting Cali find. looks like a jet but makes NO sound and no woosh/boom and no shock diamonds]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFN7KofHpcY&t=1s [the Beaver Utah video]

But I guess you could be right. Considering if this is a military disinfo op. How hard would it be to fake these videos? Probably very easy.

It gets difficult tho when you have real people (like Antonio Urzi, and Slattery, and Sam Chortek and Jimmy Chappie) coming forward with video and saying we saw this and filmed it. The reason is, because if those guys are part of a counterintelligence campaign, they've just publicly revealed themselves, so it should be easy for a group to put some surveillance on them and work out are they really disinfo agents, who are they meeting and communicating with, etc.

I agree that anon videos could be faked, but I'm not sure how I'd run a disinfo campaign that includes public figures, some of whom keep producing videos, and do so in front of large groups of people. Any ideas?

BTW, I love MacArthur Park. Beautiful area of LA.
From what I've read, things started going wrong when an (ex?) official of the US released information the Dutch shared with their American allies[1].
Details on when or why access to the Russian networks was lost aren't readily available (secret service and all that) but I do remember reading about the intelligence agencies being not particularly pleased with the way the information was publicly released by their allies. It makes sense that someone gloating about how there's an ally of theirs in your network will make you take a second look at the traffic flowing through your network if you're waging cyber warfare.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-d...
The End of Time Management
Thanks! (Though it'll be more exciting when it does its own BDP calculation rather than stealing the kernel's socket buffer size. :) )
> I would say HCQ is a "lead" in the pharmacological sense

Agreed. I hope it gets proven effective too. This is a hot button issue for me because a family member needs HCQ for lupus and now cannot obtain it because of the statements of said government official. His words have caused actual harm, and this isn't the first time.
> The only solution will be regulation.

What's the problem exactly, and how would regulation work to address it?

I feel that people gravely misunderstand capital, interest rate, and so on. Capital accumulation is not the same as expanding the money supply (so taking out a loan) - even if both are somehow denominated in USD. If we have too much financial capital - as you pointed out, chasing returns - that just means its real value depreciates compared to other things. (Eg. capital goods, labor, return generating assets, etc. - That's why we see asset bubbles, and investment in a lot of ventures, that then pays huge salaries.)

But it doesn't matter how much money chases how little, the important thing is the real growth, aggregate demand (total compensation), technological change (productivity), and so on.

There's back-pressure (falling profits, slowing growth, recession, depression, shrinking economy, rising unemployment, a vicious cycle), but also there's always a place for financial capital to go. Namely there are always new ideas to try, there are always things to invest in.

For example, there are always more riskier and more longer term investments, such as education (lending people money to retrain and switch to a higher paying job - a bit like student loans, but a lot more like coding bootcamps). Infrastructure (public transport, energy, housing), and so on.

Profit (real capital) comes from economic surplus, and that comes from technological change (economies of scale, efficiency, etc). And fundamentally it seems advanced economies are very resistant to switch to more efficient forms. ( http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/time-spent-congestion --- and it took a pandemic to try to make home office really viable; see also how much money people spend on healthcare, yet how inefficient it is)

Without real economic surplus a bigger money supply is just inflation. (That's why some people freak out when they see central banks doing quantitative easing, but they forget that central banks look at inflation, and they do QE to keep inflation above 0.)

So eventually, either we invest in big changes to go up the efficiency ladder, stagnate, or worst case the promised new projects don't deliver (because there was not enough aggregate demand to subscribe/buy/rent/use the new shiny thing, or it was not green enough, so it was not a good market fit), eventually the financial sector starts to run out of equity to risk, and we fall into the debt trap that caused Japan's lost decade.

(And that's why central banks all around the world are able to just foot the bill, because it doesn't cause inflation as long as that money is basically just gets rolled over into new loans/bonds/etc. most of it goes nowhere.)
Thanks. It was me alone, and I’ve spent about 1.5 months on that, because quarantine.

Indeed, there were many small problems I did not expect, I underestimated time by a factor of 3.

The geometry/math/GPU issues were expected and planned as I have decades of programming experience in the field. What I did not expect was the amount of smaller issues, like missing Unicode keyboard input on Linux, or missing direct D3D12-D2D integration on Windows.
How do you know whether you need to fix Impostor Syndrome or Dunning-Kruger?
It isn't though, even though the irs has that information for most people we have to fill out tax forms as if the irs had nothing.
>They had joined for far less and during far more stressful conditions.

The classic chicken & pig scenario.
We've had this for years with Waitrose, who just give you a scanner that you can take round the store. I think more recently they let you do it on the phone. Then you just pay at a special checkout and leave. They also have no-scale checkouts where you scan and leave (these are still attended). Usually if you buy something very expensive it'll flag up for a "random" check which always happens to be the expensive item.

The handheld scanners are easy to use. All it has is a trigger for scanning (which everyone knows how to do), scroll buttons, and a delete button if you make a mistake.
Climate change will make allergy sufferers suffer a little bit longer each year
This prior article goes into more detail: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

The author is a civil engineer that got involved with trying to make the budgetary ends meet in his town.

He concludes that the suburban development is easy and cheap to build, but it's too difficult to find the maintenance, which is why we have a huge amount of infrastructure that is falling apart.

He advocates for more sustainable development styles, that depend on less infrastructure, such as neighborhoods that are designed to be walkable for everyday needs.

I agree with him on aesthetic grounds, to me there is nothing worse than the suburban development style where there is nothing to do at your house except drive to big box stores. I want walk ability to my everyday needs, without having to drive. So I don't know about his economic arguments (but trust that he's done his homework), and really I just want more walkable neighborhoods for health and humanity.
Amazon's Accounting Makes Rich People's Income Invisible
"appreciate"
Yeah. It’s sad really.
> why someone would use this compared to other completely free or open source engines.

Such as?
If Google specifically says in it's Google Play TOS that keywords related to COVID-19 are forbidden, then the decision is correct.

Stop hating on Google! Google is one of the few companies that provide quality services for end-users "for free".
The author makes it sound like a warning label is missing from the C++ tin. Maybe. But what tool should he have used? I haven't seen this code but is there any doubt it would look just as bad in Java or Python, maybe with fewer segfaults? Or FORTRAN.
Create a custom hook to change status bar styles with react-navigation
These visualization are very satisfying and provide some wonderful insight.

A few minor bugs:
- The gray area is always too small, so there's plenty of area of the canvas that never gets cleared.
- Perhaps this is intended, or maybe it's caused by by the demo running at 144Hz, but the drone is always swept away by the wind for me. It doesn't even stand a chance to fight it.
One of the most popular podcast apps, Podcast Addict, is dealing with this right now as well: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/05/18/podcast-addict-pull...

https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1261651512947691520
It was an attempt to explain the economic structure that would allow food to be exported from a country during a famine, not necessarily to rationalize and certainly not to excuse. The fact of the matter is that these kind of economic structures were not unique to Ireland of the time, nor would they have been absent in Ireland under a native non-colonial government.
By using CSS variables, only a few lines of JS are needed- small enough that they can be inlined in the HTML.
Thanks for the reference. It is a subject I would like to know more about.

Let me comment, though, that I've never before seen a review that says that a book from a reputable publisher is bound with the pages at random: https://www.amazon.com/Color-Ordered-Systems-Antiquity-Prese... . In addition I see that there are three reviews, two 5's and a 1, and Amazon says "5 star" is 53%. Hmmm.
Key quote:
"I’m not an expert in epidemiology."
the basic thesis of strongtowns is that property tax in less dense areas is not enough to cover the cost of infrastructure. I'm not sure I'm convinced by their conclusion, but it's easy to see why a stretch of road in a city generates much more tax revenue than the same length of road in a suburb.

the city block I live on has about 30 rowhouses, each of them worth about $300k. a similar stretch of road out in the suburbs might have ten larger detached homes that are each worth about the same amount of money. if the property tax rate is the same in the suburb, the government is drawing on only a third of the tax receipts to maintain that same length of road.
I get what he’s saying, but the “non-experts” using code to represent their models should also let outside help come when the need arises.

When your model predicts an apocalyptical scenario and government is taking drastic measures based on it, it’s a good time to expose your “non-expert code” to the software engineering communities (and all other associated fields) to take a look.
Yeah, I imagine anything that needs to produce output continuously independent from user input, while quickly responding to user input, needs this kind of loop.

At the same time, while most games these days need it, I don't see why a purely turn-based game would need it. If you only produce output when the user gives input, you probably won't need it. Those kind of games are rare these days, but roguelikes are still getting made apparently.
Didn't the Fed recently create a couple trillion dollars to inject into the economy?

I'm not sure why you'd need additional taxes at all, when it seems that deflationary pressure is so great that you can summon up trillions with little inflationary consequence. $35 billion/year seems like nothing compared to this.
Tutorial: How to send automated emails to new Bubble users
Very cool! On my device, the actual canvas is a bit bigger than the area you're clearing, resulting in this[1].

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/orrXwZT.png
"This number is below 1.0" is not, by itself, an argument that some particular social policy was necessary or effective. An argument that lockdowns were necessary would at a minimum need to address the questions of "would a less strict policy have sufficed" and "will the long-term outcome after lockdowns end be different".