skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think your argument mixes up things you can control (skill) with things you cannot control (impulsivity), if the latter could be controlled it wouldn't be impulsive.

First, we're not talking about a binary distinction; things aren't either "can control" or "can't control". It's a continuum.

Second, if it's really true that you can't control your impulsive behavior, that still doesn't change the fact that that behavior will make it virtually impossible for other people to deal with you in certain contexts. It's still up to you to recognize the impact that your behavior has on others, and to make choices about what you can realistically do or not do--or about how much work you are willing to do or how much risk you are willing to take to be able to participate in certain activities (for example, if it turned out there was a drug that enabled you to control your impulsive behavior, would you take it in order to enable you to do something you wanted to do?).

> I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people.

Ok, so what "alternate or semantic constructs" could the programmers of HN, for example, put into their code so it won't exclude people who can't control their impulsive behavior?

> we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.

It's not that we don't have a "universally clear way" to do this. We don't have a way at all. "Sucking at discourse" is simply not something we know how to accommodate for. The only way we know of to deal with it is for the person who sucks at discourse to learn how to not suck at it.

Perhaps at some point we'll have an AI or something similar that can mediate such discussions so all parties can participate. But we don't have anything now.
This is epic, even by the advanced standards of bureaucratic stupidity. Hats off to the Nigerian scammers, now that we no longer have a fourth estate to alert us to such ineptitude.
One (edit: another) problem with that thinking is that the U.S. is a uniquely capable financial entity with an associated population, while your other examples are merely political entities.

To a certain extent we have an opportunity to experiment now. Might as well learn what we can.
Editing your comments simply because you were shown your mistakes is ridiculous. Own up to your mistakes please.
Except that SAT test prep has a very small impact on scores. And the fact that there is an enormous amount of free resources. What
Tesla drops lawsuit against Alameda County
EnQlave: Post-Quantum Secure Ethereum Wallets
As there was no realistic possibility of the course of action you advise preventing, as you put it, the tanks rolling in, you are suggesting there should have been a no-deal "brexit" from Hong Kong with the establishment of a government-in-exile.

As it happens, there has been a Chinese government-in-exile in Taiwan since 1949. Its practical influence on the governance of China itself since then has been zero to two decimal places, and is unlikely to increase in the future.

I am not at all sanguine about China's oligarchy, either for Hong Kong or the world, but geopolitical fantasies are just a way of avoiding facing the facts.
> The DoorDashes and Uber Eats of the world are doing tremendous business right now, as is Amazon (and they have the Flex delivery service). Instacart was also hiring some 300,000 people.

If I needed cash in a hurry I'd probably do Instacart. I've browsed their subreddit - some shoppers are making $250-300 a day delivering groceries right now. If you can successfully cherry-pick those big Costco orders you'll typically get a $25-50 tip, in addition to delivery fees.

During this pandemic our household is ordering about $300-400 of Costco a week, since we're cooking everything at home, and tipping an Instacart delivery person $40-50 seems like a good tradeoff to avoid having to risk getting Covid-19 in a store.

Of course, the reason this is so high right now is that it is essentially hazard pay. You're putting yourself at risk of getting sick so others don't have to. Provided you are not high risk (<50 years old, no pre-existing health conditions) this might be an acceptable risk.
Vanilla CSS has custom properties[1] (which are more powerful then SASS variables) and there is a proposal for the `&` nested selector[2] which you can get with PostCSS[3]. All you are missing are mixins, but there is a PostCSS plugin for that[4].

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/--*

[2]: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-nesting-1/

[3]: https://postcss.org/

[4]: https://github.com/postcss/postcss-mixins
I hope they don’t replace one standardized test with another standardized test. Although, that’s exactly what may happen. It is not far fetched to create a more personalized project based testing that factors in race, ethnicity, socio economic status, gender, etc.

Also, if all colleges are created equally, endowed similarly, we may not need a test and follow the K12 model of going to your local college because it is as good as any other college. It is about time we solve education along with healthcare and create equity in the system.
You’re vastly overestimating the competence of the average computer user. There’s a sizeable minority of people out there that don’t know what file extensions are, and even if they do know about them, they might not understand how they work (hence students attempting to convert file types by changing the extension).

File extensions are an implementation detail that, ideally, end users should never be forced to think about. There are graceful solutions to this problem; the College Board just didn’t do their due diligence.
We're working on some futurology like technology, and something like this will be possible by the end of the quarter. If you'd like to follow along:

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof (core tech)

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/_saas (open source "SaaS" to replace all those services you pay for today, and the primary example of building applications in hof-land)
Why would people making individual purchasing decisions tend to coincide with prices going down for essential goods like food and clothing, but not for healthcare?
Yang’s UBI was never intended as a replacement for a safety net which was gravely miscommunicated / twisted by our outrage media dynamics. What he’s advocated for are completely universal programs without means testing that build on top of UBI as a presumption such as his (somewhat weak, yes) disability program. His entire thesis of the economy is that people both rich and poor are suffering enslaved to a dehumanizing economy that ironically destroys human potential and suffocating itself (the very opposite of one trend of capitalism in the past few hundred years) and destigmatizing assistance across all lines is important toward resolving the human toll politically.
Professionally edited essays, strong prep schools, and expensive extracurricular activities will definitely favors rich kids.
> recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions

That's actually a great comparison. I wonder if it will ever gain traction.
IBM had their own Basic, 4 of them really (collectively called IBM Basic) that was a barrier for the clones[1] (eg, Compaq, Dell, etc) because they wouldn't license it. (You probably used one of them, basica if you used the classic PC)

Microsoft made GW basic and smited IBM by putting it on the clones Except for the IBM machines. They also intentionally made it slightly incompatible with IBM's basic. Then they held the GW basic source hostage so IBM couldn't resolve the inconsistencies, couldn't backwards engineer it because of the licensing, and thus put them at a losing negotiating position since Microsoft now called the shots because they controlled the software. (I wonder if this slight is in the comments, let me go look, that'd be great[2])

Microsoft also held the DOS source code hostage and it was a huge stickling point in the OS/2 and Windows work and was a significant reason Microsoft was able to steal the show from IBM. IBM even sent over a bunch of engineers to get DOS 2 to work because DOS 1.1 was a complete mess. But they didn't have the rights to walk out the building with the source they wrote due to a contract oversight.

Bill Gates was a true software Napoleon, it's really quite something.

Now they're releasing all of it. It's a strange coincidence to pick the three they burned IBM with 35 years ago...

Maybe they're trying to shake off the old days, maybe they're putting a final stick in IBMs eye, maybe it's genuinely unrelated, who knows.

Smacking around IBM is my preferred reading because the idea of doing one final power play, against IBM for God sakes, 25 years after it became unarguably 100% meaningless with the release of Windows 95, I personally find hilarious.

---

[1] The only source code left in the timeline we don't have is Phoenix, who cleanroom cloned IBM's BIOS in 1983 (using a Chinese Wall) which allowed the clones to really take off. But they've been pieced off and sold as a fleamarket to HPE, Absolute, and Marlin, so who knows when we'll see that source.

[2] I'm going to make the bold claim (after 10 minutes of poking) and say either they removed the incriminating things or the claimed intentionality of the incompatibility is now provably just a rumor (as in they lucked into it through implementing an imperfect clone)

There's evidence for both I guess. For instance, GIOCOM.ASM has a reference:

COMPAQ=0 ;Include IBM 1.0/1.1 Bugs for compatibility

But this isn't cited anywhere else. It's just hanging. They have a bunch of other vendor specific things like ZENITH, TSHIBA, they all have logic, this one is absent any logic, it's just an orphan. Shrug...

I just tweeted @ BillG and asked him --- snowballs' chance he'll respond but who knows.
The license fee is based on the number of devices performing the conversion; each institution gets a number free; it's less than a few dollars per device.
Maybe they throw a hissy fit at the mention of Taiwan, but do they give a shit, really?
You link does not say if it's profitable.

Revenue != Profit.
I read an article, that I can't find now, that convincingly argues that the SAT is one of the most equalizing factors for privilege. Impressive extracurricular, recommendation letters, and even grades are easier to buy than a higher SAT score.

Prep helps, but prep has a limit. A Golf tutor, high tier equipment, admission to private school with a large golf team, etc. are more easily bought.
> Though 25 years later can't pass FAANG whiteboard interviews with just an EE degree!

Nor could I. But I think that's ok.

I remember trying to make a game using a BASIC interpreter on Sinclair ZX80 Soviet clone and failing. Yet, here we are on HN taking about tech and leading lives in tech, whatever that means for us.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but I'm glad for that experience and where it got me. And, I guess, I'm glad that you're here as well, stranger.
Maybe they should just pay the $5 fee...
I've built whole apps out of active_scaffold. Really powerful, but still able to be flexible.

https://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold
Unsure what you mean by "the full pattern." Do you mean you could work out what the entire grid was, from just half the twos alone?
Cool! This seems pretty high quality for documentation search. I've gone ahead and added it as my main web search engine for Dash App. Here's a few tests I gave it. I think these tests are all moderately ambiguous, so it's acceptable if the result isn't necessarily on the top.

- "componentdidmount" -> React Component documentation

- "express request" -> Express API documentation (monolithic documentation page)

- "quaternion lookat" -> Unity3D docs for "LookRotation" (the correct method name)

- "strings replace" -> go package is second result, adding "go" to query makes it first

- "dataframe read_csv" -> pandas read_csv documentation

It didn't handle these as well:

- "browserrouter" -> nothing useful, react router documentation appears to not be indexed

- "python readlines" -> official documentation on this isn't in the top 10 results, and the 12th result is python2's version

- "numpy normal distribution" -> a bunch of stack overflow questions that don't even talk about np.random.normal

A meta-note: my Mac changes "numpy" to "bumpy" (or "lumpy" or any other word it can think of ending in "umpy") and several other annoying autocorrects. Maybe disable autocorrect on the search field?
This feels like BS. Sorry! K12 is free. There should be no problem expanding to college and beyond. Also, see no reason to not have a good universal healthcare that is detached from your employer. These are smart ideas worth pursuing.
Is the TL;DR here just "webpack-dev server doesn't verify Origin headers for hot reloading?"

Is there a whole group of people that are just learning about Websockets for the first time?
It is not that they do not learn anything during that year. Also, many of them later got admitted to some 'easier' school and got their credits transferred.
Seattle. And housing prices here are astronomical. My home has nearly tripled in value over seven years.
This is probably true, and really it hurts.

In this Trumpian era we like to talk about the 'integrity of institutions' and yet so many are boldly willing to do away with the results of baseline objectivity when it doesn't suit their agenda.

Because of course, the 'agenda' is what matters, not Truth or Objectivity.

Hmmm ... I wonder if we could have a place, where like ... 'free thinkers' could be free to talk about ideas and be objective without worrisome authoritarians creeping in. Maybe we could protect such people with things like 'tenure' so that they would be free to not have to follow some specific ideal ...

Now that would be interesting!
Ah, right, yeah, fair point. My apologies.

I vaguely recall reading something on HN a while back, but also didn’t want to get accused here of linking to a biased source as I’m not real familiar with the leanings or any of the ones I found in that search.

Bit lazy, but had my reasons. Will try to do better next time.
Wouldn’t this continue into college? Well off families can have their children simply study in college, and provide money for extra materials. Other students will have to get jobs to service their on going tuition.

An example of how merit based systems also favor the rich is the UN internship system. You are an unpaid intern in Genova, one of the most expensive cities in the world. If you pass, you have an easy path through the UN but only the rich can afford that.

I think the real issue is money is useful beyond buying hedonism and comfort.
Words have meaning and that amounts to a lie en masse. Because the word "president" has a specific meaning in the English language, what you describe is not "creative", it's "collusion".
As cool as this is, enough with the FPGAs and the RISC-V Arduino clones. A real, relatively inexpensive (e.g. sub $100) RISC-V SoM/board that can run Linux is desperately needed (with at least at BeagleBone Black performance levels).

I really like the idea of RISC-V and I'm willing to make the investment in software (and in fact have done so with QEMU), I just can't get any real hardware (for a non-silly price).
> I think the problem with standardized tests is that they're standardized; you can prepare for them.

Honest question: what is it about the standardization that fundamentally makes standardized tests easier to prepare for vs. non-standardized tests? It's not like either sort of test re-uses questions year-to-year, or that non-standardized tests have mystery subject matter.

The standardization is that everyone gets the same questions, or a mix from the same pool of questions. That aspect doesn't seem to make preparation any easier or harder, unless you're talking about the standardization making elaborate cheating schemes scale better, but that's not generally considered prep.
Being Laid Off
What does it mean to be an engineer, laid off. It means I am studying algorithm challenges to get a job I have been doing for 20+ years. I will do it because that is the tacit agreement we all have made. To torture our fellows in the name of "not letting unqualified people in", so that we can feel deserved of those big checks.

--You can't virtual whiteboard a dp solution to my lss problem with contrived memory constraints? Sorry I just can't take the risk of letting you write code on my team. Excuse me while I go back to copying and pasting stack overflow into my oauth library I'm rolling for scratch for some reason.--

We have all seen the coder who talked a good game and nested 10 loops deep and bragged about how much work their code was doing. But apparently detecting them is impossible without puzzles in high stress environments.

Being laid off means I have to stare you in the face knowing full well I have more experience and make better decisions than you in most practical situations, but you will turn me away because I didn't catch your gotcha question where you cleverly described a scenario that could be solved using a single server. But instead I designed a system to scale to several thousand tps quickly, and forgot to ask scale requirements because this is the third architecture interview today and all have been aimed at the scale of your org.

Being laid off means that I am suddenly responsible for adding interview puzzles to my skillset after spending 11 months saving my company millions of dollars writing real software.

I have learned all my skills on the job. Truth is I will do better if you put me in a room with better people. If you measured the ability to develop expertise rapidly you would see that I'm unparalleled, if I may. But you want me to tower of hannoi your fizzbuzz.

I'm gonna go play animal crossing and see if I can forget writing this post. I need to start doing leetcode questions in the morning.
Old-timer geeky note: ah I think you meant QBasic? The Basic that was included in MS-DOS 5.0?

"QuickBasic" was the commercial compiler (like QuickC and QuickPascal), whereas "QBasic" was the stripped down IDE with interpreter that a Gorilla throwing bananas based on physics.

Memories.
> The problem is forcing your users to endure a closed, licensed format.

Lightning was a huge win for consumers because it was years ahead of the incompetently designed clusterfuck that micro-USB was.

> Apple's hate of standards is anti-consumer, and that's why the EU ruled against them.

Apple’s “hate of standards” is in part the reason the USB-C ecosystem exists today. They contributed quite a bit to its development.

The EU ruled against Apple because the EU is full of bureaucratic idiots that care more about looking good than actually knowing what they’re doing. The circlejerk that the EU is always correct needs to end.

If the EU ruling happened a few years ago we’d never have had Lightning and we’d have been stuck with the piece of shit known as micro-USB. Thankfully, Apple was allowed to innovate independently as any remotely reasonable government would allow, and created a connector that would later inspire USB-C.

> What particularly ircs me is that Apple has acknowledged that USB-C is the superior plug by going all in on their laptops. But they can't let go of all the money they make selling licenses for third party cables on iPhones.

Catch-22; if they change the cable people like you complain that they’re trying to obsolete accessories, and if they don’t change the cable people like you complain that they’re trying to profiteer off of accessories.
A difference, though, is those domains are almost entirely about doing: you don’t have to understand buoyancy or the biology of the tongue to swim or cook. Math is almost the opposite: this day, the mechanics of math are nearly entirely automated: there’s no real reason to manually work out answers except insofar as it helps you understand the principles. The main reason to study math now is so that you understand what your computer is doing, so you can instruct it more efficiently. So, first principles in math are significantly more important: someone who can do the mechanics of calculus or long division but doesn’t understand what their doing is just doing slowly and unreliably what a computer can do instantaneously.
Maybe the could just not take the money out of my paycheck in the first place? Why do I need management fees and inefficiencies to get money that was already coming to me?
I saw something recently that was supposed to be a tearjerking story about a doctor who is just drained by all the crazy conspiracy theorists that are persecuting him. But the whole story was a conspiracy theory about Facebook and Google creating viral conspiracy theories, with no particular motivation or mechanism. This seems to me like a whole genre, it just stood out because of the anti-conspiracy theory fillip.

I can hardly think of anything I've read in a long time that attacks conspiracy theories, specific ones or in general, without promoting an unbelievable one as an alternative. Or demanding one by implication.

If you absolutely are going to reject the idea of a conspiracy being responsible for general insanity, it seems like maybe we should be looking for an environmental factor, analogous to leaded gasoline.

Everybody has been worrying about cell phones causing cancer, maybe the radiation just makes people crazy instead? Or maybe there is a virus that unlike Covid doesn't cause lung problems that people notice?
>I can't believe seemingly smart people still think consumers want vr

If Henry Ford asked you what you wanted in 1890s, it sounds like you would have said "a faster horse"
Giving even more incentive for high schools to inflate their students grades. Give them all straight As so they have a good shot at the UCs.

I don't see how you can eliminate having some sort of admissions test. It's too easy to fake most of the other criteria they want to use for admissions.
> provide coverage for $5000/year with a $10,000 deductible, instead of $10,000/year with no deductible.

that's the wrong way to think about it. The above makes an implicit assumption that by doing this you "save" $5000/yr because the insurance company is "more efficient".

That's wrong - you actually cost $5000 (this being the "profit" the insurance company makes if you _didn't_ need the medical treatment that year). Under the gov't version, if you were healthy, you're "free". You only cost when you actually need the medical treatment.

Healthcare should not be done under a private insurance model. Any profit made by the private insurer is a cost to providing medical treatment, and does not contribute to the outcome. By making medical treatment a tax payer funded scheme, the cost of an unhealthy society is spread out amongst all. Not only does this give the gov't buying pressure to lower the margins of all medical treatments, it also makes a policy pressure for gov't to give preventative measures for good health outcomes (like legislating low sugar foods, or incentivize exercise and good diet etc).
Ok but then how are we to distinguish Corporate Censorship from Corporation Chooses Not To Publish My Opinion?

If your minority opinion on Covid is welcome on Platform A, but banned from much larger Platform B, both of them being private entities, does this count?

If it counts, how is that different from the New York Times refusing to publish my dissenting opinion on the local galleries, which I am free to publish on my universally accessible blog?

If it’s just that “not publishing what I want them to publish” counts as censorship then (as per my first, unloved comment) I think it’s a perversion of the term. Many places have real censorship, as in “publish this idea and you go to jail.”

If I’ve got it wrong, please, enlighten me.
my hands are cold
Like https://readable.sourceforge.io ?