skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very silly; the worst case of a fetish for creating metrics to try to make something "objective" when the determination really needs to be made on the totality of human experience and moral reasoning.

The "ship pollution to poor countries" is a great example of this -- hey, we have this metric, and according to this metric, it's a net win. This is one path to doing monstrous things in the name of minimizing a metric, rather than actually making progress.

To convince yourself that the task of "value of human life" is futile, the following thought experiment suffices -- there are different penalties for deliberately causing the death of another (and distinction based on the quality and recency of those motives) vs. negligently causing a death vs. recklessly causing a death, in all justice systems invented by humans.

The article says that attempts to do this have "shown puzzlingly great variation across individuals and contexts", but then attempts to reduce it to new and interesting metrics instead. Uncertainty is the fact of life; this pursuit is meaningless except as a post-mortem examination of the impact of an action taken in ignorance of the metric. If the metric is involved in the decision making in any form it immediately becomes useless and counterproductive.
Many foreigners seeking to immigrate to the US see anything short of total open boarders as white supremacy. Americans caring about, protecting and developing our own workforce is the great evil of our day.
Riot is absolutely huge. It's estimated to be worth around 20 billion dollars.
> None of the opinions you offered are similar to Tom Cotton’s apologia for “sending in the tanks”

What makes this matter? Precisely, why?

Does not the radical character of this editorial highlight, as starkly as ever, that this is grossly at odds with the official opinion of the Grey Lady?

Do you somehow impute a net persuasive power to its appearance in those pages? Do you therefore believe the publication presents an increased risk that such a scheme will be carried out? How?

Do you perhaps believe that many dangerous racists will find themselves emboldened by its publication, as if racists with a military-police fetish were notorious for subscribing to the Times and justifying their opinions with what is written on its pages? I think not, sir, though you may find them watching Fox.

The Times could write a thousand opinion columns to their decent readers, warning that Republicans aspire to quash protests with the military; their combined weight would be as nothing compared to the Republican himself telling you in his own words, putting to rest the possibility of doubt.
Therapy and looking inward, through whichever method one prefers. I'm talking about feeling unfulfilled, feeling lost, etc. These aren't things most people can solve with work.
No, it's a crowd of people like I mentioned.
Analysis of Covid-19 outbreaks: how they happened and how they can be avoided
NAFTA was in the 90’s. The cancelled visa program in the post you’re responding to was 10-20 years earlier.

The visas in question made it easy to legally hire foreign (mostly Mexican, I’d guess) agricultural workers. That would have reduced the cost of farming your family homestead.

Canceling the visas presumably encouraged many of those workers to accept lower wages to work farms in Mexico. The old visa program was effectively a subsidy for US farms; ending it created more competition for US farms. Arguably, it also made NAFTA more likely to happen, since it moved agricultural production from the US to Mexico, and people have to eat.

Suspending the H-1B and green card programs will have the same long term effect on the US tech industry.
It’s always interesting when people compare Go to other languages they always use file size of binary, as if that’s something that anyone in modern professional engineering considers.

Another good example would be to statically cross-compile a non-contrived program into ARM64, 32-bit linux, and Darwin without needing google!

And if you think you have your binary statically linked, go test it in the “scratch” docker image. You may be surprised at how difficult it really is.
Of course any format can be decoded in js or wasm, that’s not an advantage and doesn’t tell us anything. The most important thing for a format is probably vendor buy-in. Why would anyone choose this over HEIF, which also uses HEVC (optional), is backed by MPEG (like it or not, MPEG represents the industry), and has vendor buy-in from Apple and Google? (I know it’s not supported in the browsers, at least not yet, but you can also use a library.)

Also, the latest news entry:

> (Apr 21 2018) Release 0.9.8 is available

Edit: Spoke too soon. “Official” HEIF JavaScript port measures ~500-600k gzipped, so 56k gzipped is an advantage.

https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/tree/gh-pages/js
Amazon Announces $2B Fund to Invest in Climate Tech Companies
Hmm. Your last paragraph sounds like an OODA loop.

I think the "orient" phase of the loop can be viewed as either fitting the observations into your existing narrative, or else deciding that they don't fit and constructing a new one. The second option is more expensive, so people try to make the first one work even when the observations don't really fit.
As a near-native English speaker, I took German in various degrees from middle school to college. Along the way, I peppered it with French and Spanish.

I was terrible with the romance languages, like nearly failed. Oral, written, reading, you name it. Just terrible all around. Couldn't get it. I'd freeze when trying to construct a sentence orally.

German, on the other hand, I found to be pretty easy. Being the parent of English, the grammar is essentially the same. I'm the kind of person that needs to know the rules before I jump in, so nailing the grammar is essential. Immersion programs like Rosetta Stone requires a leap of faith, which frankly scares me.

The vocabulary and verb conjugations were hard, but that was mainly a matter of straight memorization. The pronunciation is very consistent - way more consistent than English. Learning German actually helped me understand English more.
Yep reddit is increasing its conformity and intolerance to dissent at a very quick pace, maybe because it's election year? But in the past such forays have been one way only.

As the subs where you can speak with some degree of openness are ever smaller, it's not worth the time anymore.
Reading these makes me sad about the law in my country, Finland. The lowest tier of OP ($7 for no reward) would be illegal here.

We have a law called "Money Collection act", which states that to gather donations (i.e. payments with nothing in return), you have to get a permit. This permit costs money, is not given to individuals, and is given only for non-profit activities.

So this means that if you see a donation/sponsorship button on a software project where the money goes to a Finnish person, it is illegal (unless they have obtained a permit, which is highly unlikely). If you see a patreon/sponsorship with rewards, it's a grey area. The only clearly legal way is by selling actual things, and of course then you quickly need to set up a business.

I host a free project myself and I've had to set up a business (sole proprietorship) and sell things in order to get money for server costs. Even though people have been interested in donating, I can't do that legally.
This is definitely an accomplishment. Someone show this to Kernighan.
This will fuel the "remote anywhere" trend that's already underway. If a H1b engineer in US suppresses wage growth, wait until the same engineer can do the work for 1/3rd the cost from his own country, especially when everyone in the team is remote.
Ok WASM looks pretty epic. Google Earth browser version works pretty well and this QT example feels pretty native qt.io/web-assembly-example-slate

Any idea of how popular WASM is? I don't feel like I've ever interacted with any WASM app in the wild which seems pretty sad given the possibilities and how bloated websites in general are.
> wondered how hard it would be to do a physics engine from scratch

It's extremely easy to get started with the basics, and then there's a long ramp of increasingly difficult features you can implement. So if you're doing it for fun/learning, it's a great project.

One of my first programming projects when I started learning Java in high school was a 2D physics system. Just took the equations from my physics class and implemented them in code and bam, you have particle physics. And then I figured out how to make those particles into circles with collision and added infinite lines for them to bounce off of, without really knowing what I was doing.

Then in an early CS class in college my team for a project did a similar engine but with arbitrary equilateral polygons for colliders. We had someone who already knew the math for doing those intersection checks, so it wasn't too hard.

But yeah: things obviously get hard at a certain point, but it's not one of those projects where you don't see any satisfying results until you've mastered it.
You'll still have the address of the fault in si_addr. Addresses are addresses, both in AMD64 and ARM64. What's the difference?
Trump Made $70k by Praising Foreign Leaders and Bashing the Fed on Twitter
Isn't the best way to try to see if the Standard Model breaks is by pumping more energy into it? (And watching for the decay channel anomalies and whatnot?)

What are other ways to check its predictions?
Also https://regexcrossword.com/

Very good practice to reinforce fundamentals after you're done regexone
the HTTP benchmark is not fair since the crystal implementation is setting the content type explicitly while the Go implementation is auto detecting it.
It may depend on what country you're in, but in the US if you're just some rando, "donations" are still taxable income. The form GitHub sends you for filling purposes is the same one used for contractors.
So Stephen Miller is a white supremacist now? He must be hiding it pretty well, since I've heard through hundreds of hours of his podcast with Raheem Kasam and he has never said anything remotely racist.
Most companies play the game and apply for your green-card right away though.
Beatport Bassline: Electro Sound Pack #112 (2020)
They would be if the employee was genuinely worth the hassle. Plus you can imagine most companies would put someone on a contractual basis if the “chaining” wasn’t implicitly part of the visa, which may, in itself, render such an idea moot.
It's also not a proof.
Tolerant of everything except intolerance et-all.
The James Webb Space Telescope is an interesting case. It has gone hugely over budget. The original budget was $1.6 billion and is now around $10 billion. In 2010, the journal Nature called it "The telescope that ate astronomy" because its expanding budget was stopping other important astronomy projects. [1]

The JWST is also hugely behind schedule, to the point that XKCD mocks it [2]. Originally scheduled for 2007, the launch date repeatedly slipped. The latest date, 2021, is now in doubt.

I think there's a big risk that this CERN supercollider would have the same cost and schedule risks.

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2010/101027/full/4671028a.html
[2] https://xkcd.com/2014/
No offense taken! If anything, I'm annoyed by her, not by you quoting her.

I meant the "in my book" part. But thinking about it, it's important to give the context: she is trying to sell a book, and why I don't want to speculate whether it's her primary motivation, it is /one/ motivation, otherwise she wouldn't mention it all the time.
Those are not the key features :(

Key questions: (1) Is it encumbered by any patents? (2) Does a formal description of the algorithm exists, to allow for independent implementations? (3) Does a MIT/BSD or at least LGPL implementation exist? (4) Has it been submitted for standardization?

Technical merits are of limited value if you can't deploy them.
That's definitely not the reason, given that symlinks are still a thing.
That's exactly what the commenter's point was.
Bruises heal and prisons have limited terms. Twitter lasts forever.
Four year (post high school) degree required would do wonders for the level of competency
easily weeding out the common whack jobs. Will still get the high function sociopath but they will have to be more careful navigating within a majority of competent peers.

hell employers (especially state employers) require degrees and ridiculous experience levels just to wield JS on a crud app.
So just checked out one of your videos, and you seem to have a good process.

I recently bought a mic and a nice webcam (March) to do recordings and live streams, but got hung up on recording processing, etc.

Don’t know if it makes sense for you to do a meta video on that, or just share your thoughts on the OBS software and post processing, or if that’d be something worth reaching out to you on.

Like you, I’m very engaged in OSS, so I’m happy you’re seeing success!
The time has been a blessing in disguise.

In February we started caring for a family member suffering from psychosis. This time has allowed me to take daily walks with them to help with recovery and keep track of mental health (every service is closed due to covid, so have to take it into my own hands).

This has made the transition to living with us much more tenable I believe.
which part is bad policy? that part where the US is in the midst of it's worst economic recession in modern history, with record unemployment across the board, and so they want to pause foreign worker programs to allow a larger pool for US workers?
Show HN: Interactive and scalable dashboards with Vaex and Dash
wait, what? so if they are ignoring wayland wont default ubuntu users on gnome not get these benefits? seems odd to do all the surveys and research but not actually check what distro/compositor respondents use?
How did you conclude this? The paper says 10.1% of the produced face are Black.
Visa/MC don’t host and distribute petabytes of data for card holders. They don’t provide hundreds of store fronts with localized content and marketing. They don’t provide extensive developer kits and support anywhere on par with what Apple does.

The payment processor argument means you really don’t have any clue to what Apple App Store services are or do.
This is the behavior of a monopolist, and Google needs to be broken up. Google and the various sub-entities get away with no customer support or completely inadequate support and they are a vital part of the Internet.

If there were competition, then there's no way with Google not being able to answer urgent customer support tickets. Because they are a monopoly, they can get away with saving money on customer support. All their subentities like Chrome, Gmail, etc are funded by their search and ads monopoly.

The only way this gets better is by breaking up Google, and forcing them to actually compete. If Chrome had to earn money the same way all the other companies did without having the hundreds of billions that Google makes, it would be a totally different product. They would need to earn their money the same way Firefox does, and would need to earn a portion of their money from things like extensions, and then they would need to compete with better customer support. But because they are a monopoly, they don't have to. It's basically a form of raising prices with no recourse, except what they do is deny services to competitors by having no support.

The only solution is to break Google apart, and force the parts to earn money the way all their competitors have to.
> Let's say I publicly claim to be Scott Alexander. The owner of slatestarcodex with the email address scott@slatestarcodex.com also claims to be scott alexander? Doesn't the latter claim carry far more weight?

It's just an email address. It could be Scott or it could be someone else. Yes, common sense would say it's Scott, but the reporter would have to still prove it's him. If you claim to be Scott, too, that will also need to be checked out.

Many people will take that information and run, but if you're writing for a national outlet, where accurate reporting is everything, your editor will say, "Yes, that might be Scott, but how do you know? What proof can you provide? If we get called out for a fact error, can you refute that claim?
CVPR 2020 Highlighs: Here’s a Few Things You May Have Missed
This is one of those things that mark where the Linux desktop experience falls short. I've been a trackpad user since 1997 when I bought a keyboard with a built-in trackpad for my home-built OS/2 system, and the superiority of the experience on Apple hardware has been a significant factor in why I've stuck with Apple as my primary OS since 2001. I've occasionally had to use Windows for work since then and the trackpad experience has gone from unusable to acceptable but it still hasn't caught up to the Mac and Linux hasn't caught up to Windows.
When in life outside of imaginary scenarios can this calculus actually be done? The entire idea here is ridiculous and relies on a predictive ability that nobody actually has.

It's like the trolley problem -- the reality of that problem is somewhere between "how the fuck should I know what this lever does, I'm not a trolley engineer" and "what if the people move".

If one person, Bob, seems likely to you, a police officer, to murder another person, Alice, then you don't say "well, Bob has greater expectations of higher lifetime earnings and Alice is too risk-averse". The idea that you can look at this outside of the direct context by examining a metric is ridiculous on the face of it.
It's not Apple's format, it's MPEG's.
That was the idea years ago, but they completely abandoned it.

https://archive.vn/KojNR#selection-7875.0-7947.5

Brief recap on its current state of affairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqx4wdn4Odc (18 minutes and change)
While Andrew Ng is devastated that an H1B worker and their family has to pack their bags and return to their home country, one American worker will have the opportunity to enter the job market and feed his/her family.

EDIT: Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation where many engineers on HN are H1B workers themselves or start-up owners/affiliates who benefit and profit off of H1B workers so it's obvious that I'm against the tide here. For all the haters, tell me why my company needed to hire a large group of QA engineers to do manual GUI testing when this does not really require much more than a high school GED, if even. Honestly, look deeply past the corporate lobbyist agendas and your own personal biases and tell me H1B policies are not effectively a ploy to get around cheap labor. Yes, they are great when used properly to find rare and top talent but anybody who has worked in the industry knows this is rarely the case.
Invisibilia is more about human factors than business ones.
Stay in the main folder and run:
cargo run --example foo
You say this like it’s that easy. We have remotes working in Singapore and Australia, and it is a far cry from “easy” to work with these people either due to timing constraints, language barriers or other aspects that disrupt fluid communication.
Not quite; you can put an upper bound on the "badness" of unknown harms, because if it was bad enough, we'd have detected it already.

For a reductio ad absurdum proof, imagine that microplastics kill you on contact. This would show up in the death statistics very quickly. So in practice we can say with confidence that the possible unknown harms don't include mortality effects above a certain level.

There's definitely room for effects that we'd consider to be serious like "reduces male sperm counts by 50% over decades of exposure" or "increases cancer rates by 100%", but it's certainly possible (indeed, the correct and rational way of approaching this problem) to attempt to bound the upper limit of harm based on what we should be able to detect.

Note, I'm not commenting on the object-level question of _whether_ the benefits outweigh the costs or whether this is known; I would like to see a citation for that as I've not seen such an analysis. I'm just addressing the meta-level question of if it's possible to know.
One of the difficulties of working on any improvement in the free-desktop ecosystem is the difficulty involved in getting everybody on the same page. It's interesting to realize that the chops required to write the code is not necessarily the same as the experience required to push a project to completion. This of course shouldn't be surprising, the product management role is present in every high performing organization, what's surprising is that it's taking so long for the open source ecosystem to realize the importance of this.
Are you really doing the test in the wikipedia article over and over? Why not convert a complex polygon to triangles? Things like this were established in computer graphics in the 70s.
Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/
The employee would need to be skilled enough, to generate enough excess value, to make it worth it for everyone (the employee, the company, ...) over hiring a local worker.
I've looked at and seen similar data. It's a problem too. However, let's put the data aside for a second and look at the perception of these scenarios.

In one example, you can fight back legally and protect yourself. You can be confident if found they'll go to jail. You can be confident that they have to hide who they are.

In another example you may not fight back legally and protect yourself. They will likely not go to jail. You know exactly who they are and they keep coming around your neighborhood.

We need systems in place to make people safe because of and from the people who police our streets.
Sure, you wouldn't send them to private school on that income. But it's far from a necessity; <10% of kids are privately educated.
What in the world....mind sharing tips or any links where I can learn more about this?
I agree, it's going to be tough problem to navigate. I can't even come up with a vague ideological solution for it, let alone a good mechanism that is fair and robust against corruption. It's like being stuck inbetween one ideal and another. Freedom of information vs stopping the bad being caused by misinformation.

My optimistic side would hope that putting education in schools about misinformation and how to critically think about and analyze journalism could at least help the issue.
Thanks for the morning laugh.
If your job can be done remotely, you will likely face more competition, not less. Restricting the H1-B will only lead to companies following the talent back to their countries with lower costs of living.

Moreover, the current restriction has barely any bite. It only restricts workers who are not in the US from getting a visa until December 2020.
Indeed the benchmark was dismissed on Reddit coupe of days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h0knmi/go_vs_c...
@thawkins Thank you so much for your inputs on our pricing model!

Our current model do not have multiple plans for one customer https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#multiple-plan... as @apple4ever mentioned.

However, it's extremely important for us to hear from you. We recently clarified our Pricing Philosophy and Collaboration on pricing with you is part of it: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#pricing-philo...

We definitely take your inputs back and consider to build into our next iteration on the pricing strategy.
Show HN: Synth – Make a testing database in 1 click
Update Frameworks for Windows Applications
Aha. And now you understand why we don’t have universal healthcare, crumbling infrastructure, and so much cash in the hands of the wealthy that interest rates are near zero.
Novak Djokovic tests positive for coronavirus
My pixelbook touchpad works incredibly well (better than a macbook IMO). Is there any way that work can be integrated into this project?