skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife and I are both programmers, both enjoy our jobs. She works for Google, my job is less prestigious. We don't need two incomes to live very comfortably. Our solution is to work fewer hours (both on 4-day weeks now) and aim to donate all of my salary to charity. So far we're only around 40% because we're trying to spread the money around and it gets awkward to give over $1000/mo to smaller organizations, but we're adding new charities on an ongoing basis.

Volunteering is a good suggestion, of course. Trying to inject a new insight into the conversation here, perhaps it's simply that what you're missing is a broader scope to your life direction. Volunteering is one way to achieve that, but as tech people we can also change the world with our work - are doing so whether we realize it or not. The question is, how? And do you change it for better or worse?
Off topic, but this (from RPG's Worse is Better) sounds very familiar:

> Part of the problem stems from our very dear friends in the artificial intelligence (AI) business. AI has a number of good approaches to formalizing human knowledge and problem solving behavior. However, AI does not provide a panacea in any area of its applicability. Some early promoters of AI to the commercial world raised expectation levels too high. These expectations had to do with the effectiveness and deliverability of expert-system-based applications.
Lego Technic Bridge Girder SLJ 50018 [video]
I'm not sure what to say apart from, "Yeah, think outside of the box just as often."
I've seen some indications that many people in the public health field feel that everything that affects morbidity and mortality is potentially within scope for them, including, for example, intentional actions like assault or murder.

A difficulty with this view, at least potentially, is that it seems to allow everything in the world (certainly almost every area of public policy) to be in scope for public health, because almost everything in the world has potential to affect morbidity and mortality. At one level this broad view seems obviously correct, but at another level it seems obviously crazy (or at least likely to bring the public health profession into conflict with everyone over weighing in on every kind of decision that anyone ever makes).

In the past there was a fight between some CDC researchers and Congress over something about handgun policy because the researchers were studying something about guns and violence that made some gun rights activists nervous that there would be an argument presented under the banner of public health to limit access to guns. I believe the conclusion was that they told CDC to stop studying this, which, again, seems to me to be susceptible of some mix of "there might be a lot of legitimate reasons to have this information" and "does the public health profession get to weigh in with claimed expertise on every issue?".

I think it's a legitimately thorny conceptual problem because if you think of health as something like "flourishing" or "people having success in living the way they want" or "eudaemonia" or something, almost every public policy question can be conceived of as a "health" question. (Or even, maybe, "minimizing all-cause mortality"?) But if someone says that the policy answer to each question is therefore obvious because a particular profession thinks it knows what would maximize things it thinks it knows how to measure, I imagine a lot of the public is going to say that this doesn't match up with its notion of what health is.

Edit: after writing this, I had this weird imagine of public health as like a superintelligent AI that's super-focused on one goal and doesn't understand, or doesn't care very much, that people might have other goals too. We think there's obviously something that's going to remain outside of the scope of the AI's interest, but since the AI is smarter than we are, it discovers a way that that thing is actually relevant to its interests according to its utility function, after all! (I realize people have also had this kind of concern about other institutions that are happy to define their scope of action more broadly over time, such as profit-maximizing corporations, or militaries. The corporation says "we need to figure out what actions will maximize profit" or the military says "we need to figure out what actions will maximize our capacity to win wars" and perhaps the scope and ambition of their actions are soon larger than anyone would have expected.) I feel like this analogy is actually weirdly apposite, at least for some audiences. :-)
Authentication Security Controls You Might Be Missing
Interestingly I was reading Charlie Munger's Biography - Poor Charlie's Almanac - over the weekend. My recollection is that it took Munger almost a couple of decades of living, reading and contemplating to start formulating his system of models and it did not gell for another 10-20 years.

He uses them not on the spur of the moment but in analyzing investments and this process can take a while (think weeks or months and not days).

These systems of mental models sound fascinating but I fear that unless the model has come from lived experience it will just be intellectual junk found - eaten, digested and out the rear rather fast with the only effect being intellectual blubber in your cerebral cortex. What one needs is a system of tutelage that might take a few years during which you can try out and codify these models one-by-one. Your list might be different than Munger or whomever but it will be tailored to your context and enable you to draw upon it with fluidity akin to a muscle reflex.

On a related note, I recall, from a Buddhist class on ethics, that Buddhist monastics have hundreds of rules that they have to observe. The story goes that when the historical Buddha formulated the order of monastics - there were no rules. Overtime in response to various incidents the rules were formulated and those incidents are recorded. The monastics are taught those stories that lie behind each rule to inculcate some notion of lived experience and a guideline for when/why that rule is to be used.

A list of rules is useless sans lived experience or a tradition that creates them is rather useless. You are better of throwing away the list and trying on your own supplemented by good reading. Charlie Munger His speeches and his reading recommendations are a good place to start.
I buried a wooden ship in the sand at the beach when my little boy was 5 years old.

We were digging sand castles when "he found it".

Back at the house when his grandfather was having a closer look at the ship, grandad "discovered" an old map and little key inside the ship - strange we hadn't noticed it earlier.

The map had a big X marked on it - also down at the beach near a big cave. I happened to know just that area....

So we went down there and dug in the sand and found a wooden treasure box wrapped in a metal chain and padlocked. When my little boy tried the key in the lock.... it fit!

Inside the box was overflowing with jewellery and coins and weird little trinkets. He had discovered buried treasure!

In fact I had bought the wooden ship, and the wooden jewellery box from the local opportunity shop and also bought $5 worth of shiny junk jewellery and old overseas coins and trinkets and filled it up. I then bought a chain and padlock and wrapped it up and buried it.

He's 11 years old now and still doesn't know the true story. Credit is due to my friend who did this first - he buried a pouch in the sand for his kids to find - I just expanded on the idea with the ship and the map and the treasure box, chains and padlock etc.
Everything is politicized, especially that which affects the economy and elections. The pandemic will continue even if public health experts are not willing to go against the grain and admit protests will lead to more infections and more deaths. These experts may be succumbing to pressure and there is clearly backlash against non-woke voices within the left.
I agree totally. It could also be that user data is being used to make more profitable products not necessarily better products for the users.
There were many other signs being held. You’re choosing to focus on the people holding a haircut sign.

In any case as a legal matter it makes no difference. Government restrictions on 1st amendment rights to assemble and protest can only survive strict scrutiny if they are viewpoint-neutral.

As soon as governors are deciding which protesters to fine/ticket based on their agreement or disagreement with the contents of their protest signs, as a matter of law the protest/gathering ban is done for. (See the recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision where justice Roberts ruled that, at the time, there wasn’t evidence that church services in California were being treated unequally with other equivalent non-religious services. When the case comes back up again with Gov Newsom’s approval of protestors marching outside, but not Christians marching in religious processions, the ban is going to fall apart in court).
Interesting! For folks who like this idea, I recommend looking up Ryan Fugger's Ripplepay (https://classic.ripplepay.com/). That was inspiration for Ripple Labs, who unlike Offset did go the cryptocurrency route (XRP).

I appreciate that Offset is not spawning a cryptocurrency where it doesn't need one. There are other projects influenced by Ripple and Ripplepay which are also not their own currency. For example Synchronized Network Accounting Protocol (https://michielbdejong.com/blog/20.html) and Interledger Protocol (https://interledger.org/).

One of the thought provoking ideas in interledger is that a single payment can be delivered in packets. Meaning that if Alice is making a payment to Bob, some of that payment might go through an intermediary Ivan and some of that same payment might go through Isaac. I haven't read much about Offset, but I saw that it described payments as atomic. Interledger specifically decides not to be atomic. This is not what most people expect with payments, but giving up atomicity gets other nice qualities. For example, if Alice is making a large payment to Bob, they are not limited by the liquidity of any one intermediary. Like data finding an efficient route on the internet, a payment can find an efficient route over interledger.

Glad to know about Offset. I'll add it to my list of interesting network money projects.
This seems like a really effective way to set up a page for shaming "laggards". It would be interesting to track over time how many github issues are just links to this page.
Its fun and games until you find out one of the things you bundled into your static binary has a remote code execution CVE that is being actively exploited in the wild. Good luck tracking down all the artifacts and making sure they are rebuild with the patched version - till the time next CVE hits and you can do it all again for every static binary bundling the affected component.
Yes, that looks like exactly what I had in mind. Thanks for the reference.
Wait a minute. If you're not gonna have police, how will you handle things like murders, rapes, robberies, or kidnappings? Do criminals just get to do their thing without fear of the law?

Maybe we're supposed to form a citizens' posse to hunt 'em down like they did back in the Wild West?
Economically determinant policing. I guess Twitter putting their HQ in the Tenderloin is some techno-libertarian experiment. But given the last few years of jury selection rounds I’ve attended, the testimonies from Twitter SRO tenants are not pleased with the progress.
The Netherlands. I assume for some more Northern European and Scandinavian countries it's about the same.
>It's broadcasted live (big mistake). End up with lots of ems and uhms.

On the other hand, expecting heavily edited presentations is probably not realistic. Heck, most presentations at company virtual events are pretty lightly edited.

I record podcasts with people who are fairly senior and have a lot of experience speaking (and are considered good at it). I can still spend a couple hours cutting back on the the umms and you knows. And dealing with just audio is a lot harder than video.
Rediscovering One of the Wittiest Books Ever Written
Sidecar works great with touch-enabled input as well—I personally use it for Photoshop/Illustrator projects, and it has completely replaced a traditional tablet (one less thing to carry).

Regardless, this project looks incredibly cool. The cross-OS support is a killer feature.
Xmake v2.3.4 released, Better toolchain support
I can't help but wonder if the aggressive nature of U.S. police officers are out of fear that people might have guns - and that it just starts a cycle of escalation along with citizen rights being ignored. It is a real contrast to NZ where officers are smiling, friendly and disarming when they approach you - this would be the norm here even if you are a patched gang member.

We do have issues, here in NZ (racial profiling being one of them) but I am glad we don't have any additional issues brought about by the police having an overriding default concern that citizens could be armed.

I may be over simplifying it - but it is the biggest difference I can see.

To try to add some perspective for myself I compared some stats last week between NZ and the US.

You are __97x__ more likely to be killed by U.S police than you are by NZ police.

I came to this conclusion through looking at 5 years of NZ data and 6 years of U.S data. As a side note it seems to be agreed that the U.S deaths by police is under-reported due to there being no National database and processes in place to collect the data. On the flip side, keep in mind that NZ only had a sample of one police caused death over 5 years, so the NZ stats would change drastically with any increase in deaths.

I really hope the conversation can move to gun control - assuming the U.S. police professional standards to the public would more easily change if guns were off your streets.

The stats were derived from this following links:
Sources

https://www.police.govt.nz/about-us/publication/tactical-opt...

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

I also wonder if that the high number of ex-military in the U.S. police force also plays into the military-mindset of 'us versus them' approach towards the community.
North Hollywood Shootout (1997) – A tipping point in police militarization
I don't know if it's precisely the same thing, but invariants in the form of conservation laws are quite handy in physics too. They let you take problems with complicated details and turn them into accounting problems. One of my favorites is the optical invariant, which relates the area and divergence of a light beam. It provides a way to work through problems very quickly, say, during a meeting or when considering design options.
Covid will last for decades, the virus will become a new common way to get sick. Theres simply no lying about the numbers, the virus will kill old folks in massive numbers, disproportionately those of color as well. Sad to say many lives will be lost, I hope some positive change is wrought despite the spikes in infections we are bound to see.
Virtually all C programmers, for one. Most Go programmers, too.
I mean, containers are basically just that and people seem to like them just fine.
Intro linear algebra in 18 pages [pdf]
The thesis of the book isn't that eliminating policing will solve the problems that create violent crime, but that policing itself doesn't prevent crime or fix those underlying problems. I'd really suggest giving the book a read.
I think Youtube's monetization does it... they want to earn cash from their guides.

Is there any money in "Youtube for Articles?"
Apollo Preliminary Drawings
You've caught me there. I'm having trouble even locating a source for why it's even called the Conway knot! The wolfram page has a few references of about the right age, but I don't have access to them, sadly. It being a long-standing question about a knot named after him, I'm fairly certain that he'd take a crack at it. But alas, that's no proof.
"Interesting to see that it took 15 years to get where he is today."

If I had started it in 2000 it would've taken 20 years to get to where it is (OK fine, would be) today...
Thank you for sharing. Your journey also resonates for me as a humanist. The only difference is that my belief lies in other people.
Pay Now or Pay Later – Legacy Computer Systems
At work we make and use https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk . While they're are certain framework-y things going on (we recommend our build system, our `ob` swift army knife command, etc.) nothing is obligatory and all the functionality is in separately libraries, and put effort to "bud off" ideas into separate repos etc.

I bring this is up as I think it's a good example of firstly absolutely not compromising on the end developer experience to compete with the monolithic framework, but secondly trying to beat them without stooping to their dirty tricks wherever possible.
I'm torn, a little bit. Against your point: The current protests are at least mostly respecting the fact the disease exists, and encourages masks. Also, these protests are much more organic than the "re-open America" protests. And the left-wing who got mad at the anti-public-health protests never called for cops to shoot them or round them up. IOW: We respected their freedom to be out there, no matter how fucked the cause.

Toward your point: I fundamentally don't respect most conservatives, much less those who think they need to protest against public health measures. So to an extent, yes, this is a lot more important than what they were complaining about.
Are you trying to say that the LA riots didn't include police brutality? Or just that the violence from the rioters was more extreme than this year's?
Yeah. I think I could get into something like this that I can have playing in the background that I may or may not be giving my full attention to but that is technical enough so that I stay focused and in a learning/working mood.
You can ping me and I'll add you to the invite list.
It’s going to depend on how you judge those moral hazards and how much the money means to you and your life goals. It’s a lot to weigh up. Remember though you can always join them quit later if you find it goes against your morals too much.
So no one is going to talk about how the Model is a mathematical model which follows Bayes Theorem in it's core. It updates it's priors based on new evidence presented every day.

The whole point of the Model is to detect things which are uncertain by nature. Being wrong is not bad, it's good TBH.

CMIIW.
Contact tracing a protest makes no sense anyway.

Taking down a list of people who dined at a restaurant during a certain time period is one thing.

How are you supposed to contact trace a 10,000 person protest? No one is going to know the random people they happened to be standing next to and chanting at a specific moment.

If these protests are super spreading events it blows a huge hole in any attempt at contact tracing & targeted quarantine/isolation. Hopefully it turns out the virus somehow can’t spread well in these conditions otherwise this is a huge setback for a country that just sacrificed so much to reduce the virus prevalence.
Not yet, we are pretty much stealth but will announce here when we have first public beta.
> Let's not pretend we didn't just see 57 police officers resign from a volunteer position because two of their own were caught on camera pushing a 75-year old man to the ground and held accountable because "just following orders".

I have a slightly different take on this, and to be clear, seeing that video was absolutely shocking and made me feel nauseous and even light-headed.

The officers were part of a unit that was specially trained by FEMA to do exactly what they did;

> "The unit’s training is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA’s, Field Force Operations course. It’s a three-day training which covers skills including baton-holding positions, mass-arrest procedures, and riot-control formations, according to the website." [1]

Suspending the officers is deflecting the blame from where it really lies. The state (politicians) deployed that team to do exactly what they did, and knew or should have known that people would be hurt as a result of those tactics.

I guess you could imagine some sort of active riot scenarios where people are under attack by a mob, and where those tactics are specifically necessary to essentially rescue hostages..., but the situation they were actually deployed into was not remotely that from what I understand.

I think of it this way. When we look back at Tienanmen Square, do we blame the person driving the one tank at the front of the column, or do acknowledge that every driver in every tank was not strong enough to refuse to follow those orders, but ultimately the leaders of the regime are to blame.

That's why I think making the story about the officers is actually missing the point, and further blaming the other 57 officers who resigned doubly-so. The officers are resigning because they are being hung out to dry to take the blame for the leader's mistakes. I was hoping to see the "57 officers resign" story used to pivot the blame onto the police and political leadership rather than reinforcing the notion that the blame is just on bad actors / bad apples.

There are systemic issues with the system, and this is a perfect example of where officers are being trained to act in exactly the wrong way, and then being deployed inappropriately. These weren't rogue officers. The criminal case to charge is not so much assault by an individual officer, but reckless endangerment by the people who made the decision to deploy an aggressive riot control team out into the general populace.

[1] - https://cdp.dhs.gov/find-training/course/PER-200
I really hope conda stays on the user end.

Like, I understand it's great for managing package dependencies/setting up environments etc for a single project. But I've found it's an absolute nightmare for building docker images/generally doing build stuff when it's involved.

Not to mention conda installs seem to take waaaay longer than pip.

apt + pip works far more sensibly and reliably in my experience.
Medium?

I'd think there's money there, just not sure for whom.
Thanks, I too feel it is important work to be done, as hard as it is.
I find this a fascinating dividing line in the sand between two types of people - those that care about the principal purity of an idea (and intent) and those that care about the pragmatic implications of it (the outcome).

Clearly the medical professionals were right in their interpretation of how humanity was going to react. Subjectively, this choice saved some countless amount of lives - especially if you imagine the cascade effect that could have happened if a tipping point of healthcare professionals were not able to work and save others.

AND YET, the way people like you write about this on hacker news, you make it seem that the crime of lying to the population for their own good is worse than ANY possible benefit that came out of it.

Now, I don't want the government of health authorities to lie to me either. But I live in a society of millions of people. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

I find a libertarian "fuck everyone else, it's a pandemic every man for himself" subtext beneath every post whining about the lies of the health authorities kind of appalling. I don't think this attitude contributes to the betterment of humankind, and is a regressive detremental expression of our most basic primal instincts.
Another reason to vouch for books is, it takes painstaking amount of research, collection, compiling, citations and proof reading before you would read it. Not like someone spotting in the blog comment about a (logical) flaw.
Not all tech content is BS though. Choosing whom to follow makes a huge difference, I follow Raymond Hettinger for Python, Blog posts make as a quick reference but fails as foundation building block.
> Those aren't police

... from Latin politia "civil administration," from Greek polis "city"