skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> gets them out of bed in the morning

I always thought you should do it as best as you could too.

It took a bunch of time in the real world before I could actually grasp the concept of over-engineering in a meaningful way.

The first example of over-engineering I could "get" was when someone (jwz?) ranted about over-engineered high-end audio. The deeper you look, having $1000 00-gauge cables just won't make anything sound better. It's marketing.

The second example was japanese motorcycles. I started realizing that there was an envelope. If you made something bigger and stronger, the weight would go up and the acceleration would get worse. If you made it all motor, acceleration would go up, but handling would get worse. Some of the fastest bikes were actually lighter less powerful bikes that could still accelerate, but also go through turns.

as an example, before the s1000rr era, BMW made big strong durable motorcycles... that weighed a lot and handled in a very mediocre fashion.

(as to safety - yes, bringing safety or security into the equation ... you change the equation)
For one: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.08579
From a logical standpoint, questioning whether Consciousness "exists" is ludicrous. Consciousness is the foundation of our capability to observe the world around us and make conclusions about it. Protons, electrons, atoms, molecules and other phenomena do not exist outside of our Consciousness and we cannot prove absolutely anything about the world that is not a part of our Consciousness. Therefore, if something is to be questioned, it is our strange desire to prove the existence of the only thing we are directly experiencing all the time - Consciousness. It's like a computer program becoming aware of itself and trying to find that awareness in the source code. It's not there.
Supposedly. Given their secretive wealth hoarding activities, I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually a giant Scrooge McDuck style vault of cash for them to swim in.
Well folks, in these changed times it seems that the last artefacts of the old world have been firmly cemented in history, as Couchsurfing International Inc. decides to unilaterally charge its members, eroding away the last remnants of community spirit and hammering the final nail in the capitalist coffin it built for itself.

The fact Couchsurfing didn’t warn or consult the community it hosts that the company was switching to a paid service, effective immediately as of 14th May 2020, only underlines the already poor track record of the management. Just in case you weren’t sure how mainstream the service went, they’ve gone and removed all doubt.

In order to simply message old friends through the site, people who you warmly welcomed into your home, who kindly hosted you in a strange foreign land — or who perhaps changed your life — you must now pay a subscription fee. Users have essentially had their accounts frozen unless they pay the fee immediately.

The bosses of Couchsurfing know how much these old connections mean to some members, so in one final hustle have blocked messaging and even referencing, forcing those who have no other communication links to sign up for at least a month to speak to their friends, and hoping for a little bonus before the gentrified party is over for good.

It also means those that use the site only for hosting, in other words, offer their homes to others for free, have to pay the fee too.

This should kick out the remaining ethically-minded members. Leaving only noobs and those that want to save money when travelling to run the whole show. To be fair, $15 a year is not a lot to ask. But the way they asked shows everybody exactly where Couchsurfing stands.
> While the restaurant preparing "partial" pizzas to ship to coordinated orders is obviously fraud

How so? They're making the pizzas the way the customer wants them. The 'objective' tastiness is none of the delivery middleman's business. And there's nothing wrong with offering a bad pizza for $24, as long as the customer knows what they're getting.
First of, sorry for your depression, I hope you can break out of it.

Now

>Besides that, he's a contrarian. With COVID, we're faced with a situation where there is an extremely strong pressure to conform. There's one narrative being pushed and there's no real dialogue

This might be a European perspective, but what do you mean with "no dialogue"? Our media has been full with people pushing the viewpoint that we should reopen faster, that the economy should go before saving lifes, that "Sweden is doing fine". These were given a voice and then everyone else told them it's a stupid idea and get lost. There continues to be dialogue about this. People are challenging rulings, suing governments for damages etc.

Or maybe you mean that there hasn't been "the ability to do whatever you want without getting fined"?
I've been following Netflix for really long, and whatever downgrade in their UX is absolutely deliberate on their part to hide their library's flaws.

If you really wish to go back to the original view, you should consider giving Netflix dvd a try. You get DVDs and on top of it the original site with five star ratings, predicted rating and most importantly the ability to sort by predicted rating in any genre!
That will play into the hands of certain parties, as it will serve to eliminate certain demographics.
Well yeah. For example I run an app that monitors my internet connection all day long. How do you run that in the browser?

Have you tried compressing videos professionally or producing 3D content without a native app?
I'm going to call your straw man. My sex life is obviously not worth the lives of millions of people, but how many times have you caught the flu, in your life? How many people have you infected? The flu kills older people too, so how many lives did you put at risk? Could you actually be indirectly responsible for one or more deaths without knowing? How can you quantify every time your activity has put the lives of other people at risk?

Here we're talking about the mental health and wellbeing, the livelihood and life work (eg small businesses) of billions of people, being sacrificed in the hopes that this will save hundreds of thousands. You can argue that this is for the greater collective good, but how do you put a value on lives, or on everyone's mental health? For the sake of argument, how much is the lifespan of the average American due to job losses, foreclosures, bankruptcies, etc.? What kind of effect will isolation have on young children, who are being told that they can't play with other kids their age, during critical phases of their brain development?

I think it's perfectly fair to ask where we draw the line as to what is too much government control in the name of protecting the collective greater good. How much do you think your government should be allowed to control your life in the name of the greater good?
All work is not essential.
> Wait a minute... You're pretending like trade is only "fair" if selling happens in both directions. Doesn't that fly directly in the face of what trade means?

I am confused by your question. How is this relevant to anti-competitive behavior of the CCP?

> You buy something, but you get value in return. That's why it's not called "donation". If the thing you bought is not valuable to you then why did you buy it in the first place?

Again, what does your patronizing clarification have to do with competitive marketplace where all parties can play fair? I am genuinely asking instead of just raising rhetorical questions. Literally the first line on Free Trade wikipedia page [1] says:

"Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports."

I thought I was talking about "Free Trade" as in freely be able to compete in China just as local companies. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade
Their app is also pretty bad, to the point it became standard to just exchange whatsapp numbers right off the bat to make communication possible.

Couchsurfing has a great community, but it has been resting on its laurels for too long.
What makes electrochemical and chemical reactions in a brain so special that you see a reason for them to create consciousness? Or is it a lack of complete understanding of those processes that makes you think so?
That is indeed very unusual, I've never heard of an experience like that! I wonder what happened, maybe they were all part of a group or something?

Middle aged women make up a very small percentage of Couchsurfing, and when I see them they're usually hosts only. I get a ton of requests, and I think it'd be more likely for me to get a message from an astronaut than two middle aged women.

I just checked my references and my friends' references and didn't find one woman over 40. I really wonder what happened in your case!
Not really. If you really start digging you realize that there isn't much "you" there left to be conscious. To a great extent I think consciousness is largely a bit of an illusion. Most of what people typically think of in terms of consciousness is really the contents of their attention. But you don't even truly control that attention. The decisions to switch from one unconscious information stream to another are themselves unconscious information streams. In essence, I'd argue that upon inspection, "attention" is the apparent last vestige where any consciousness may reside. But even deeper inspection reveals that it itself is quite an empty concept.
> China has completely blocked US services from Google to Uber

Western social media platform are welcome to participate in China if they follow local laws - in this case onerous censorship requirements, which every domestic company comply to. That's what project Dragonfly was for, but internal Google politics killed it. Bing still operates fine in China while Google and Facebook still makes billions off Chinese adsales. For some reason people find it appalling that US companies have to operate by foreign laws when operating abroad. As far as I know, TikTok keeps US data on US servers. I'm not sure about Europe, but data siloing regulations is becoming the norm as countries realize the importance of domestic information control. So yes, the US/EU should do the same and if Chinese companies don't want to comply they should get booted from the market.

Uber's story is more complicated. At the end of the day, Uber and many Chinese rideshare startups got out competed by Didi Chuxing. One narrative is various local and national regulations on ride sharing made gave domestic entrants and unfair competitive advantage, but Uber had a strategic partnership with Baidu (to circumvent Google Map block) which had every interest in Uber succeeding.
Microsoft Visio set itself to English on my computer even though its (Microsoft Windows) system language was set to German. The reason? It didn't recognise the region-specific language setting "German (Austria)". There was no way of setting or changing the program language other than reinstalling the whole thing with a different system language set.
The costs for public health insurance is 14-15% of your income with a lower income bound of 1061,67€ and an upper bound of 4687,50€. Thus the minimum cost is 148€ and the maximum is 656€ (for the exact same service).

In addition you need to pay 3% Pflegeversicherung (nursing care insurance).

https://www.krankenkassen.de/gesetzliche-krankenkassen/krank...
I dunno, even at physical restaurants or cafes I often have issues where they didn't hear my order correctly. Just today I had a guy repeat my order (thank you to people who do this, it's the only way) and he'd forgotten the cheese. Phone calls to ethnic restaurants (as with GP, no offense intended) are another layer of trouble. With my local noisy Indonesian restaurant we had a 50% miss rate on our orders so usually just go in person now.

Written text is just so much nicer. And I can send the link to family still in the office or whatever and co-ordinate.
Just to point out what may not be so obvious, the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators".

For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically, it's the department for all of the IT people at the University. It's enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that's just one of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. There's Facilities. There's Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW these days. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.

These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. (Or were necessary prior to covid, now? who knows?) Be that as it may, honest people can debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the overall cost structure being discussed. At Wisconsin, due to a multi year campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20.

Just pointing out that if you want to bring costs under control, getting rid of some dean and a professor is not gonna get you there when you have 20 or 30 systems analysts, programmers, db admins, or campus cops on that same payroll.
you have to admit - having to replace the battery, even only once a month, is a huge impediment to adoption.
YouTube livestream Bitcoin scams getting out of control
What are the near term implications of this? I was under the impression that this was always considered a pretty extreme option. Between this and the plans for the TSMC fab in the USA I wonder what suddenly shifted in US - Taiwan relations.

Does this mean that Huawei loses the 5G competition because they are not going to be able to get the chips they need fabricated?

Is China going to try to split up Huawei into a bunch of "totally not Huawei" companies?
You can't eat luxury SUVs like the model X during a pandemic.
There's the Mechanical Universe theory and then there's the Everything is Conscious theory.

It's interesting to see the steps taken to arrive at that.

- A person has thoughts, yes

- A chip has thoughts, yes

- A dog has thoughts, yes

- A mouse has thoughts, yes

- A fly has thoughts, yes

- A microbe has thoughts, maybe

- A virus has thoughts, maybe not

- An atom has thoughts, maybe not

- An electron has thoughts, maybe not

It's a blurry line between life and matter, and perhaps consciousness goes down to that level too.

I'm still a "Mechanical Universe" guy though
Example here, they have a ton of these already with different people on them

https://youtu.be/eNaT3_mpGt4
I have my language set to "en-GB" and still many websites (including Google, when not signed in) default to that of the country I'm in.
I don't follow, which one of these is supposed to be the strawman of mine you are 'calling'?
Of course there's still place for native applications: movie players (VLC), audio players (Winamp), animation software (like Blender) come now to my mind, and if you look around you find more and more. The web has shifted long time ago its initial purpose: displaying and sharing documents to be a common platform to run full fledged "desktop" applications in the browser. The problem is what you want to develop and the intended audience of your application.
How Many Is Too Much? Exploring Costs of Coordination During Outages
And stop having bars on sites that stick with me while I am scrolling.

Not to mention the infinite scrolling insanity.
I think they have abstract resources, which are imprecisely but meaningfully summarized into their budget. Monetary policy can solve a lot of problems, but it can't substitute for producing goods and services.

Masks are going to be a part of our lives for a while, most likely for the next year or two. If you expect a full reopening to mean no masks, you should recalibrate your expectations.
If you really want to make a game that doesn't give the user a feeling that they've played it before you do need to make your own engine.

You can tell in seconds that a game feels and renders like another game using the same engine. Sometimes the quirks and unique characteristics of a custom engine are what give a game its charm and X factor.
“The Future of DevOps Is Resilience Engineering” Incident Retrospective
How is faulty logic? It’s well established law. It’s been to the Supreme Court! See Harper v Virgina Board of Elections
Covid-19 projections based on ML by an individual have been most accurate
If Ballmer were still in charge they would have just outbid IBM for Redhat.
Couchsurfing is like a master class in how to destroy community engagement in your business/project.

So, back before the ubiquity of 2 or 3 social media sites, CouchSurfing was a quirky place to meet travelers and let them crash on your couch. One of the things that made it work was profile reviews and couch requests. The second thing was the community forums.

The profile reviews and couch requests acted as a quality filter. Bad reviews lead to much lower community engagement. An interesting profile and good reviews, combined with community instruction on how to compose a good request, leads to acceptance of couch requests. The system works as long as the community polices itself, teaches its values to new members, and encourages good behavior.

The community forums were a huge part of facilitating all that. Profiles would often include instructions on how to behave, but the forums filled the gaps by adding social pressure to enforce standard conventions. They also ensured there was constant user engagement and content, which we know from modern social media sites is imperative for a vibrant community.

All of that got flushed down the drain when Couchsurfing reorganized and annihilated their old site. All the community engagement fled to private Facebook groups. That caused profile quality to crash, and the result is anti-community behavior, like how the majority of single men on the platform now host only single women, which besides being sketch as hell, just makes it harder to find a reliable host.

After I literally flew across the country just to have lunch with the Couchsurfing team and discuss the community problems I'd collected, I got the impression that they were not going to change. My concerns were mostly considered bug reports, and the problems that drove the community away were never addressed. Years later, it looks like no work has been done at all.

I was grandfathered in as an older user so I never even realized they started charged you to send more than a certain number of couch requests. But why would any new user seriously commit to a community now? It can probably still be a place to meet amazing people, but you can also just meet amazing people anywhere you go in the world, without Couchsurfing.

The saddest part of all of this is that now there won't be an amazing platform to show people how insanely generous humans are all over the world. Hopefully BeWelcome or another site can pick up the mantle and restore the old ways, so we can go back to showing more people the inherent goodness of strangers - when those strangers are tied together via community and purpose.
This is extremely combative and any message is lost through the tone.

The first is a logical fallacy and the second is conspiratorial. What was the alternative, not offer exams?
Yes, of course - Couchsurfing has fifteen million members and has been around nearly two decades IIRC.

Nothing has happened to me or anyone I know (or anyone I know knows.) And I don't think anyone should be afraid of things like murder, kidnapping, etc. While pretty much every high profile app/website these days has a big tragedy happen, Couchsurfing only had one - I actually think that's very low for the number of times people have Couchsurfed. (If you're thinking of Airbnb as the safe alternative, it's had far more gruesome and tragic events.)

But the thing to be careful with using Couchsurfing isn't a microscopic chance of murder, it's creepy hosts. There are always hosts that are clearly using Couchsurfing as a dating site. The way around this is just to read profiles and references.

Of course, everyone sets their own comfort level. Maybe a woman would only want to stay with other women; or maybe only with families, or with gay men. Maybe you'll only want to stay with someone if you'll get your own private room (you can filter for only those if you want.) Or only by verified profiles with 20+ references. Then there are red flags - Does a man have only references from women? That's a red flag.

That's the beauty of it: it's a completely choose-your-own-adventure kinda thing. If you want to stay with a family with kids in the mountains you can do that; if you want to join a clearly wild local on their quest to do illegal activities that will leave you with a hell of a story to tell, then that's also possible.

I would encourage anyone to still think about it no matter how old they may be - some of my best hosts got into CS late in life. It's possible to Couchsurf in a "paranoid" manner (for example only staying with families) it just takes a bit more effort and planning :)
if it's simple, why do you need to include a new dependency? Especially one as complex as an ORM?
Operations in the Cloud
I was a long time soldier with many kids and it ended up my wife (sort of) asking me to choose between work and family. My opinion: if Your work is anything dependable, You have to neglect family to be good at work. If Your job is anything regular, "family and career" can be done really nice.
Yeah, git-annex has a lot of cool features that I have yet to see in other systems. I still use it for some things. My main pain point on MacOS was that the symlink mode didn't work well with some apps that didn't understand symlinks. Obviously this is not git-annex's fault, but it still made it so I couldn't use it. I think I could try again at some point and see if I could get it to use reflinks -- maybe it's a version issue.

I also had weird conflicts with the line ending (the whole CR/LF annoyance) on some of the metadata files git-annex used which I couldn't fix, no matter how many .gitconfigs I tweaked. Again, this is not really git-annex's fault, I think.
I want to add my own anecdotal experience to confirm yours - it worked out well, even when I was a novice (& when hosting novices). It was also easy to not be a novice anymore - just host! There was always demand for hosts.

The real problem is the same that has been plaguing the web in general - there seems to be no more room for just doing good stuff while trying to break-even or even making a modest profit. Everything has to be a "startup" with the possibility of making its founders millionaires (or more).

I got on the internet in the early/mid 90s when the web was new & for a few years it was mostly non-commercial and ran by enthusiasts and hobbyists acting according to the hacker ethos of sharing, openness, decentralization & world improvement. You could see these principles for years even behind decidedly commercial sites such as craigslist.

It didn't last for long but that's the kind of ideology couch surfing originally started in & it's sad but unsurprising to see where it ended up in.