skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that was the inevitable consequence of terms for Senators. It is clear that a person appointed by a red governor cannot represent the blue governor who administers the purple state for several years starting six months later. State-appointed senators with fixed terms have little natural legitimacy; it is not a sustainable model.

If you want the senate to represent the states, you need the German system - there, the Bundesrat (Federal Council) has as its members the premier of the state (and, depending on the state's size, some number of ministers). Its members and balance can change whenever there is a state election (which are not tied, US style, to federal elections).

Now, while they will represent the interests of the state governments quite well, be aware of this - the premier has an interest in transferring power from the state governments since their power as a member of the federal upper house is greater than their power as a member of the state lower house. They can use their federal role to create an obligation for themselves as state ministers, and then tell state parliament "Oh, we have no choice; the federal government has said so. Please fall in line with this policy that I want and you do not want."

The paliamentary system is repugnant to the American sense of the separation of powers. But since American separation of powers prefers to give legislative power to the executive, it's less obvious that making governors members of the Senate is repugnant. This would multiply the problems above.

Perhaps having a recallable delegate who is effectively a member of the state cabinet without portfolio would be palatable; but still, such a delegate would be entirely at the mercy of the state governor (or it would work), and we then would still see the benefits to the state governor of creating legislative obligations that state congress still has to fulfil.

To me, it seems that the Australian senate does a good job of representing the people of each State. Since the interests of States can be said to be the interests of the people of each State (rather than the interests of the State governments) it therefore discharges its responsibilities adequately. The key here is in having many five or members per state elected at once using a proportional method like STV optimised for small electorate magnitudes. Since the majority of any state will be made up of a roughly equal number of blues and reds it encourages them to work together at the expense of the small number of extremists or against each other with centrists and sometimes fringe members. Constantly changing coalitions (per bill) mean negotiation skills become important. But how adaptable it is to a federation of 50 states - I don't know.
This is a completely valid asessment. While I do not personally see much of a problem with valves implementation, I'd still prefer no DRM at all.
No, not correct. It's less of a debt and more of a duty, and less of an apology than an acknowledgement, and not a guilt but a recognition.

I didn't own slaves, I didn't commit genocide, and neither did my ancestors. But I benefit from slavery that did exist, and my ancestors benefited from a genocide. Do I owe anything to the victim? No, because the victims have been dead for decades if not a century. But a failure to recognize ones obligation or duty to the rest of their community to bring an equity about such that their children or grandchildren don't even consider such questions - that's not nearly at the scale of destruction as our history has wrought but it does continue the cycle. If you want future generations to break from it, it starts by reconciling that your status is derived from the status of those who came before you, and that's not necessarily a good thing.
Well, there is a term called "cop magnet", used for nice cars in USA or any other country.
It's not a decision you make every single time you order food. It's lifestyle.

Put in just your 9-5 then bail or put extra time and effort in to your career. Many high earners in cities are doing the latter. You take the time you'd be using not only be getting your food but cleaning, mowing, looking after your car; all of the work that isn't your job, and use it to earn more instead. The higher you earn, the more this makes sense to do.

Hours are interchangeable. Sure if you order food at 7:30, get it delivered at 8, and you spend 7:30-8 watching Netflix then yeah the next best alternative for that half an hour was $0. That's not where the trade off happened though. It's when you left work at 6 instead of 5. It's when you answer that phone call or email you otherwise wouldn't have later that night. It's going out for drinks the next day with that weird guy you shared an office with until he left a few weeks ago to work at a company you really want to move to.
Because they are handling their communication terribly. A while back there were headlines about this precise topic, i.e. WHO saying that asymptomatic transmission is rare - it caused quite a stir and a number of articles followed explaining the nuances and this distinction.
Covid Guard is a platform aimed at collecting and analysing anonymous health information to get a real-time overview of the pandemic and prevent new outbreaks.

We leverage a source of information still untapped in most countries – the symptoms of the population – which can provide valuable insights without having to rely on limited resources, such as swabs or serological tests.

By using the platform, users directly contribute to the safety of their own community while receiveing constant updates on their areas of interest (through maps and customised reports).

Our aim is not to directly identify those who may have contracted COVID-19, but rather to statistically determine high-risk areas and identify anomalous patterns days or weeks in advance compared to conventional solutions (i.e. contact-tracing apps). That way, we allow authorities to promptly focus their efforts on the most critical areas, making the most of the tools at their disposal.
Heaps of links in these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
No, we deal with 99% accuracy in humans by designing all our human-based algorithms to be resilient against mistake (and still mistakes in the end result happen very frequently). This is completely different from the way we have designed our computer systems, because it's way easier to do this with flexible agents like humans than with inflexible agents like computers.
People aren't wearing enough hats for what purpose?
“But I learned something” Is an extremely low bar for evaluating an outcome.

“But I learned something and applied it to make the next effort a success” is the natural valuable contribution...that we (quite tellingly) almost never hear about.
Notably that set of fonts excludes most linux installs, given their licenses.
But the problems where we apply human labour are vastly different from the ones where we apply machine labour. In (most) tasks where we apply human labour a few errors are tolerated.
Ask HN: What's one productivity tip you can share with the HN community?
This is very accurate.

Where I used to work, we developed and supported a SaaS app based on PHP with PostgreSQL and Apache. We had two self-hosting customers who ran on Windows Server with SQL Server for the exact reasons mentioned, and they were our most troublesome customers. Performance tuning (and hence regular complaints that 'our' app was horribly slow) was a particular issue - mostly due to their admins' lack of relevant experience on both the stack...and Windows Server(!). The whole setup was a pain because we got so much flak, despite the premise of 'self-hosting' being that the customer had sufficient smarts to support the infrastructure and stack and we'd just support the functional and development aspects of the app.

One customer also had the system so locked down that for remote admin we had to connect to a jump box via VPN + RDP and then jump from that to the server with another RDP connection. Fetching large log files through that setup was a challenge.

Partly for our sanity, we persuaded one customer to let us migrate them to a Linux server; that went very well and really cut down on angst all round even though we then took responsibility for platform support.
> OTOH the standard library sort can be improved if you know the distribution of the numbers you're sorting (e.g., small numbers can bucket sort, small lists can use a sorting network, etc). If this thing can efficiently almost-correctly-sort because it's better at these types of pattern matching, we can just run a final pass of insertion sort to make it useful!

I haven't read this paper, but that strategy was exactly the strategy behind "The Case for Learned Index Structures"[0]. The idea was you could train a model to predict the location of a row based on a primary key. After computing the model, you could then go through every row and compute a bound on how far off the model is from the actual row. To perform a lookup, you start off at the model's guess, then look around based on the bound on the model for a row with the given primary key.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01208
> (steamos and the "failed" steamos console)

I agree that steamos hasn't been a big success in the market, but I'm pretty sure Valve intended it as negotiating leverage - BATNA [1] - when Microsoft came out with Windows Store.

So long as Microsoft isn't declaring "No app stores except ours" or "30% cut of sales to us, no exceptions" steamos has been a success from Valve's point of view :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
> The question is whether or not the abuses that might occur as the result of analyzing publicly available information are worse than the harms that might come from not doing so.

How many criminals announce their plans on Twitter in a way that law enforcement can use to prevent a crime? From my perspective, it seems like the potential for crime prevention is small compared to the potential for abuse.
You sew your own shirts and milk your own cow I presume?
> I hope the parliament outright rejects it for what it is.

Unfortunately, there's not much hope for this. As the article states: "The proposed law is already the result of lots of back and forth within the government and many expect it to pass when it is presented to Germany’s congressional body, the Bundestag, after next week."
This is obviously a matter of taste but I enjoy Java more when I stay away from Spring.
It's not. Modern CDU/CSU are basically where the social democrats were about ten years ago.
In a central area of a city? Absolutely.
As I understand your comment, you are arguing that according to Scott Alexander’s principles of free discourse, the New York Times publicizing Scott’s real name should be no different from a random online writer arguing a controversial view, e.g. neoreactionary views. Thus, you say that Scott’s objection to the New York Times publishing its article proves Scott’s hypocrisy, because he allows discussion of neoreactionism but not of his real name.

I think that is an unfair comparison. Controversial ideas such as neoreactionism are part of the “marketplace of ideas” in that both arguments for them and arguments against them can be publicized. Someone who encounters a neoreactionary idea can research additional arguments for and against the idea and use those arguments to decide on their own position.

Unlike an idea in a marketplace of ideas, publicizing Scott’s real name on nytimes.com, a site highly-ranked in search engines, is irrefutable. No matter how many people subsequently post to their own websites arguing that Scott’s real name shouldn’t be publicized, it wouldn’t change Google’s behavior of showing the New York Times article about Slate Star Codex when a psychiatric patient searches for “Scott Alexander [real name]”. Rather than two sides of a figurative ideological war fighting until the stronger idea proves the victor, publicizing Scott’s name would be one side leading the battle with a nuclear bomb.

Additionally, Scott’s real name isn’t an idea that can be argued for or against, not is it relevant to the New York Times reporter’s ideas. Scott suggested in his takedown post that he wouldn’t object so strongly to his name being publicized if it were actually relevant to the article:

> If someone thinks I am so egregious that I don’t deserve the mask of anonymity, then I guess they have to name me, the same way they name criminals and terrorists. This wasn’t that. By all indications, this was […] going to be a nice piece […]. Getting punished for my crimes would at least be predictable, but I am not willing to be punished for my virtues.

Thus, Scott’s takedown of his blog does not prove hypocrisy or ‘[discredit] the “rationalist” ideology’.

I also doubt that the takedown is an “emotional, illogical” action on Scott’s part (no comment on his community). As zucker42 suggested elsewhere in these comments, Scott’s takedown is probably “a game theory influenced attempt to prevent the NYT from printing his name”. Scott saw the upcoming NYT article’s inclusion of his name as a danger to his career and personal safety, and used his blog’s readership to threaten the NYT with bad PR if they followed through with that apparently-dangerous action. Seems reasonable to me. At worst, you could accuse Scott of overestimating the actual danger of the NYT’s action and thus threatening the NYT with a disproportionate amount of bad PR.
I think it's pretty brave telling the world that you didn't think about a problem with common knowledge and went full engineer on this. I mean, I think at least 10% of us here could've hypothesized that they might be asking the user for a review.
Even if that was not-done at that time, they should've just used the b&n app from the beginning and not after the multiple days of escalation.

Probably all due to the stifling effect of a single character email

I do get it though, in my own company we constantly compare ourselves to the competitor, but we never actually do a competitor analysis, it's like we're scared or something to use their product.
I guess that is true for any Eastern European country, especially if there's an easy way to avoid taxation.

The cost of life is low for anyone working in IT, especially remotely. However, I wonder if the infrastructure makes it worthwhile. The roads in Sofia have probably not been repaired since 90s. And there's no public transportation routes available in Google Maps.
That's actually a major part of the problem. Efficiency (or more accurately: low opportunity costs) lead to higher induced demand via the Jevons paradox. Fast flights => more passenger miles, at roughly 40 gallons per passenger.

World Bank, passenger growth 1970--2018: 0.3 to 4.2 billion.

(Not paxmiles, but closely related, and available data.)

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR
Most high earning people have the ability to influence their pay through expending time and effort.
I think it has worked that way since day 1. At least I was using it on Mojave
What? I'd be surprised if that was only 100m.

Every TI, the prize pool surpasses 25m. Which means that just by buying compendiums and treasures, people have already paid 100m (25% is contributed towards the prize pool).

There's also multiple compendiums per year, or battle passes or whatever depending on the year.

And there's a lot of random loot box releases, Arcana items etc.

On top of that, Valve extracts an extra 10% (or is it 15%) of the trade value of every item that gets sold through the steam market. And those items are sold and bought A LOT.
I think many people think soft skills are not real -- that if you are good at a hard skill such as theoretical calculations, you are automatically good at soft skills such as explaining it to a lay audience.

Feynman had a rare talent for explanation, which few physicists have. This talent is just as real as his talent for physics.
Thanks for the kind words. I stopped using reddit some time ago but good to know there are still good people there like you working to uphold standards. I am on keybase and I'm always happy to chat with fellow reasoners: keybase.io/memexy.

I dislike getting swept up in groups and that's what happened to me on reddit and other social media sites so now I make sure to deliberately talk with individuals without worrying about performing in front of a group.
> If you're going to argue that "it's what their constituents voted for" you have to apply that evenly: the consituents got so fed up with this issue that they elected legislators who changed the constitution. No easy feat.

It's two different questions -- does the system do what the constituents want (possibly yes), and what do we as the present day constituents want? The answer to which is not, from what I can gather, the status quo.

> They did, they made it such an issue that their legislators ended up ratifying a constitutional amendment.

Technically they didn't. It was the then-appointed Senate who approved the amendment (and by and large without having been replaced with different people), and they only did so out of fear of rising populist sentiment and what would happen if there was a constitutional convention in that climate. So they were basically doing their job and moderating populist sentiment, but apparently the anti-populist safeguards weren't strong enough to constrain populist sentiment from weakening them even further in that way.

> This applies equally in both directions. "It was that way first" isn't a merit, especially when "It was that way first" also applies to slavery.

Your argument was "celebrate that the constitution can be changed" as if any change is inherently good. But change can make things worse too. Before there was slavery there was not slavery.

Your main criticism also seems to be that the seats were going vacant, so the solution I would offer would be to hold a popular election but only if there has been no appointment within six months. Then the seat can't go vacant long but you're not, in the common case, taking away the seat of the states in the federal government.
I personally enjoy writing SQL as a novice programmer. The basics are easy. Getting to know all the intricacies of what executes how fast and such is HARD.

Also: Designing a system that is prepared for unknown unknowns is practically impossible. Initial design is not too bad, but the continuous adjustments kinda suck.
> She's a damn great milliner. She won 1st prize in The Worshipful Company of Feltmakers of London competition, in the 90's.

> She worked for Philip Treacy.

> She's been in numerous magazine and newspaper articles.

It's noteworthy when someone wins awards or achieves elite status in their profession in a country/culture that is different from the one into which they were born.
They care the minimum amount required to shut up their vocal employees on this issue.
Infrastructure can be prioritised.

Right of way is (mostly) cheap.
That is if you assume that critical thinking is a goal of this educational system, not producing malleable effective work drones cheaply, or the slightly loftier goal of making sure USA stays ahead in advanced technologies.

It has other aims too, like reducing crime indirectly and allegedly making social mobility more possible.

Neither from which critical thinking skills requirement follows directly.

If it were cultivating American spirit of dissent combined with cooperation and multicultural integration, the critical thinking, analysis and reading skills could follow from that. But this seems to have fallen by the wayside...

Dissent without critical thinking leads to quarrel, anarchy and dissolution.
> The reason for that is that the concorde used afterburners (basically, pump fuel into the high speed exhaust for extra thrust) which are incredibly inefficient.

To put things in perspective, Concorde was using two Olympus engines designed originally in the 50s.

It was already a marvel that they can run for such a range at Mach 2.0 when designed 70 years ago.

A lot of things improved since. Most fighter jets can supercruise at supersonic speed without afterburners nowadays.
This is harder than it sounds.

Waving your arms around explicitly conflicts with the very fine motor control required to play an instrument accurately and expressively.

You need between two and 12 or so (including feet) channels of very precise movement data to make a useful musical instrument. VR hardware isn't designed to have that level of precision.

Of course you can have virtual pads/buttons triggering samples, with a few faders for control of effects. But that's more like sample-based DJing than instrumental performance. It might well have commercial value, but it's a very limited subset of music production as a whole.
Why Are Chinese Tech Founders Giving Up CEO Positions?
27GB? Or 2.7GB?
JioChat is a WhatsApp clone from the maker of the popular Zoom knockoff
> People get the government they deserve.

It's strange to say this when you are proposing to take away their direct vote on the matter. If anything, the current system is what gives people the government they deserve, by having voted on it.
Are there any video tutorials? Can't really understand how to use it.
Home Router Security Report 2020 [pdf]
Infographic for much larger ants, if you prefer (via TinEye):

http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full...
Program IoT systems using Python with this VSCode plugin for RTOS
Why? Isn't the CPU will cost more than GPU because of more general instruction set?
Couldn't you try it in a virtual machine? Do you have any hardware that can run Virtualbox?
I work at a leasing company, and we somewhat frequently have around 5-7 joins when getting data such as where to send how much money for work done at another company.

The most I saw was "only" 10 though.
Are you sure? Modafinil isn't much fun. I mean, it's fun the same way antidepressants are if you're depressed, but it's the opposite of habit-forming and if you mix with alcohol or caffeine you only get the bad parts.
https://books.google.com/books?id=wtQkDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA235&lpg=...
<redacted>

Obviously, the OP was talking about the perception of Germany today and I think we can safely assume that no Ex-Nazi personnel is currently working at the German secret service. And coming to think of it, why wouldn't someone whose qualified to spy on others be rehired to do the same job in Germany after the end of GDR? What do you think secret services do?

Regarding "environmentally friendly", this point is correct but you're omitting that Germany just recently passed a law to get out of coal until 2038. The energy produced in Germany will then be pretty much exclusively renewable which is not a small feat for a country with such a large population.
We the American people who are bound by the legal treaties our American government entered into. The same American government that existed for the past 200+ years and currently represents myself and all other Americans.
Don't try this at home without a blood pressure monitor.
Note that Valve first introduced lootboxes in TF2, where it was not purely cosmetic.
"Democracy" and "the will of the people" are abstractions, and pretty crude ones, at that.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have democracy, but we should acknowledge that it is far from perfect. As Churchill said, "Democ­ra­cy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment, except for all the oth­ers."

Democracy is also not a scale-free process. Very different dynamics play out in a democracy the size of a city versus a state versus the size of a nation.

It's hard to explain briefly, but basically all of these separations of powers are designed to avoid some of the worst aspects of democracy. They happen to look less "fair" in an abstract sense, but it's more important to have some practical safeguards than abstract fairness.

A lot of our most heated political battles are playing out at the federal level (and have been for a long time), and I think that's a consequence of the 16th and 17th Amendments. If some of these battles were playing out in the states, I think our society would be a lot less polarized.