skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They actively harm the profitability and yet they exist at all levels.

> The incentives are fundamentally what shape the systems including the corporations.

These are key observations, and sadly I suspect there's a Prisoner's Dilemma style thing going on which makes corruption, sexual harassment, bigotry, and office politics somehow "rational" and individually maximising behaviours (for corporations, as well as the individuals they're composed of) whenever any of the competing corporations are known or suspected to be behaving corruptly.

Combined with the combative nature of thinking/reporting about corporate results - where for example FAANG stock price performances are compared to each other, assigning winners and losers, without any relevant incentives or accolades for the entire tech industry having grown the value of the entire sector. A corporation with a 15% YoY increase is deemed a "loser" if some of it's competitors manages 20%.

And we've spent well over half a decade demonising anyone who criticises Capitalism - thus deeply entrenching incentives that are poor for society as a whole, but which have "less poor" outcomes for the corporations prepared to be most ethically barren.
> In the USA goverment and even private entities are collecting massive databases of everybody's data. But there's this panic about a centralized service providing identity.

The existence of centralized identity is what enables those databases. They're all indexed by the centralized identity. You give Facebook your "real name" and location and the same thing to your bank and they correlate them in a database. If you were using a different identity for each one they couldn't do that.

On the other hand, creating some kind of national ID authentication system would make it much worse, because then things would require that. You couldn't sign up under a pseudonym, so now even the things that are currently separate or that you can keep separate if you want to would be forced into being correlated with everything else about you in those databases. It's an attack.
I buy all sorts of fine parts off ebay/aliexpress. A lot from China. No issues so far. All work within expectations. But I'd never base a product on any of them. Nor go fine tolerance / high expectation either. Not without very high trust. There is such a thing as a savvy* buyer who has a suspicious and not naive mind.

Then again, hardware is a hobby for me. My level of "buyer beware" means a slew of parts cannot be purchased from ebay so maybe that is a factor?

I can't fathom anyone using ebay for serious products that would be sold to a supported customer with any kind of actual warranty. The mind boggles. I have, however, dabbled with alixpress and found speaking Chinese useful to the extent I made a short run of my own gadgets with humble success. No I'm not a hardware company. Just had an issue that needed a gadget so I made it happen.

* No flash memory or any similar memory devices. No FTDI gadgetry. No battery of any kind. Nothing that involves oddball power supplies. I parts bin any power supply "ebay-direct-from-China" as I don't trust any of them.
I think the extent to which corporations are or could be controlled is debatable. What I don't think is debatable though is that an AI with superhuman intelligence would be, necessarily, as controllable as corporations.
Ubuntu LTS. I find most things just work. I started with Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch -> Ubuntu
> Corporations are shareholder value maximizers.

The logic goes that organizations, in general, should focus on what they are good at, while the government should pass regulation to incentivize socially good behaviors.

What we need to work on is having a stronger government that's less influenced (monetarily) by corporations, to set boundaries, set incentives, and police corporations to good behavior.

To be honest, we often highlight all the places this goes wrong, but all the industries that don't get a lot of press are good examples of this working well.
VLIW stands for Very Long Instruction Word, not variable length.
399$ is a low price. It is not the lowest it could be, sure, and Apple will indeed never lower their margins to chase volume.

But like they did with the SE, they will lower their parts costs to chase volume. Like they did here, by keeping the same iPhone production lines that built the iPhone 8 going (I'd presume it would be the same production lines that built their phones all the way back to the iPhone 6).
There are various chrome extensions that do it. I used to use Facebook purity, but it ended up being easier to just remove the div using ublock origin
f(x) = media(msg).

super well done.

the malibu shoot too.
$1 billion dollar revenue opportunities are child’s play for large tech companies. The profit margins are what matter.
Would not consider myself advanced but I have been using Linux since Fedora Core 4 (my first distro). I then used Ubuntu and Debian, where I stayed on Debian for years.

For personal computing I have been on Solus Linux for a few years. I love it. Everything just works and it is really polished. I get newer packages rather than having to deal with debian backports.

For servers I would choose CentOS due to familiarity with RHEL at work and maturity of documentation.
Also an insomniac. I’ve ran into “sleep anxiety” over the past few years which, for me, means becoming anxious when I think I’m supposed to go to bed.

Things that have helped:

- Minimum of 10K steps per day

- Weightlifting and HIIT

- 0 light in my room (windowless room)

What has helped most:

- Letting go of a rigid schedule and just letting tiredness dictate when I go to bed.

My lifestyle is a luxury I can afford because I don’t have kids. I imagine being a parent would really make dealing with insomnia much more difficult.
I was born not to sleep. Newborns typically sleep 22-23 hours a day. I was sleeping for 1-2 hours. I almost destroyed my family. If you have children imagine your child only sleeping 1-2 hours day.

From birth until I was about 12 I lived on 1-3 hours sleep a day, but I slept every day.

When I hit puberty I started having days and days of no sleep, my record is 11 days without sleeping I was 15. From 14 until my mid 50's my routine was get 2-3 hours of sleep, then be awake for a 3-8 days, then get 2-3 hours of sleep, then be awake for 3-8 days, wash rinse repeat, over and over again.

I once was working a trade show setup in my late 40's, round the clock prep, my company had 3 shifts of people doing all the prep work, I was there for all 5 days every shift. That's when my co-workers realized that I was actually awake, most people think that I was sleeping and didn't know it, or get cat naps, lied etc. Because nobody can even consider being awake that long but the thing is that when I get sleepy I actually fall asleep, it just rarely happens and when it does happen, it doesn't last very long. Usually I'm just awake.

Yes I went in for sleep studies but I needed to be wired up at all times, and it's a real drag being wired up and then trying to sit in a room for 6 days until I get sleepy. I did it twice, once for 5 days another time it was 4 days and both times I didn't fall asleep what they learned is that the normal cycles that people go through to fall asleep didn't happen for me. When I die they can try examining my body to see if they can figure it out.

When I was in my mid fifties I found a iphone app called BrainWave is a Binaural beats program that will actually allow me to sleep on nearly a daily basis. It's been a godsend, because being awake all the time really can wear you out intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.
Yeah, but will my company let me run a custom derivative of Arch?
What if your friend happened to search for that item afterwards? And FB made the connection because you were friends and it detected that your locations were in close proximity.
I think it's also absurd to treat the less likely of the two plausible possible winners of the US Presidential election winning as some sort of black swan event as opposed to "well within the realm of possibility".

I'm not sure even Jill Stein or Gary Johnson would really be a black swan event, given that I can list it as a possibility, but it's definitely a lot more gray than "either the Democrat or Republican wins".
Arch Linux mainly because of the AUR.
But they did have reliable refrigeration, in the form of iceboxes. They used sawdust, which was readily available from nearby mills, to help insulate. Delmonico's probably had huge iceboxes in the basement, and probably many right there are dining level. There was a whole industry revolving around ice storage and delivery, and of icebergs being towed in to the New York Harbor from other parts of the world. Even as a "space age" kid 50 years ago I noticed my older brother called the refrigerator an icebox.

The menu also omits the fact that many, many of the items were pickled, jellied, smoked, dried, and otherwise preserved. There would also have been lots of spices to help hide putrefaction.
I wonder if anyone has done a controlled experiment where you talk about completely random things and see if they show up in ads.
That’s what Tesla calls it. Source: I have had a Model S for many years and repairs I have had under warranty have been listed as “goodwill.” e.g., Torn sunroof seal (presumably, due to manufacturing defect).
And, so commonly, oblivious to any of this himself. Next stop Ayn Rand.
I've tried to expunge Walden from my mind, but I'll note that it was pretty useful getting dates in college ("university", said EU)
And even though it has an end point, when you get to the end you want to do it again because you get bonuses...
> Now with the internet this is really a non issue.

A good chunk of valuable information disappears all the time from Internet. Many thoughts expressed in personal blogs usually go away within a few years. See, for example, demise of Geocities and Yahoo Groups. While only a small part of this disappeared information is valuable, some of it incredibly useful and important.
Allthenticate
This makes very little sense to me.

> I throw a rock in a parabolic curve in a plain field. Humans can predict exactly where it will fall

No, we can predict this within a margin of error. That margin of error might be small for simple cases but if you add some gusty wind, some rain etc. it can increase quite rapidly.

> However, we cannot predict when and where exactly will a random meteor fall

We can also predict it within a margin of error just like with the rock in the plain field. But you are comparing an event that last a few seconds (from the throw to the landing) to an event that may last years or more depending on what kind of meteor you are talking about. So of course over the span of years, even a very small imprecision turns out to have very big consequences.

If you could throw the rock hard enough so that it orbits earth for some years before coming back, it would be as hard to predict where it would land.

> Knowing everything about the universe

How could you possibly know everything about the universe when some events are purely random?

> In other words, there would be less loss of information/knowledge which would be just enough to fill the critical gaps to know everything about the universe.

So you are saying we happen to live at the exact time, where, had we not this knowledge transfer issue, we would know everything? This is quite self-centered.
Which also simply mean that in a relative close we will now everything, which seems quite ludicrous.
That one went right over your head.
I do electronics as a hobby. I sometimes buy chips from very dubious shops in China for fun. Some of these sources are sketchy even by Taobao/Aliexpress standards. Then I decap the chip by boiling the package in acid and inspect the die under a microscope. More than half of them are genuine. I get some nice surprises because even the chips that I expect to be absolutely fake can turn out to be genuine.

So far I've seen a ton of fake audio op-amps.

For discrete parts like transistors things are much simpler. Just build a simple test rig and test a few parameters. If they fall within the specs they're probably good enough. Of course it's not worth it to do this for jellybeans like 2N3904, but when some parts get obsoleted without a replacement (or they're too pricey) there isn't much else a lone hobbyist can do.
If that were the case that employees don’t have any choice, you wouldn’t hear stories about farmers who couldn’t get American day laborers at any price - even upwards of $20/hour or more. There are some jobs that Americans won’t do at any price.
Or perhaps that your particular perspective is blinkered to seeing too short a timeframe?

There's a very good argument top be made, I think, that "capitalism" is the biggest and most dangerous ponzi scheme ever invented. Most people will happily participate thinking "this is fine .gif" while untapped suckers/resources keep dropping enough "return" to early "investors", but when the house of cards all collapses there will be no underlying foundation for the vast majority and only the people at the very very top of the pyramid scheme ever actually benefited at all.

Ever stopped to wonder why Musk ands Bezos are so interested in going to Mars???
Those constructs are part of the modern, legal features of corporations, but they are not the essential nature of what corporations are.

Remove those features, and things would change a lot, but you'd still have 'corporations' of a kind.

Corporations are also not primarily profit driven - the owners may are - but corporations themselves 'do things' which will result in a lot of externalities and surpluses generated elsewhere, only some of the profits may come back to the shareholders.

Corporations are:

Shareholders, Debtors, Buyers, Suppliers, Executives, Employees.

Shareholders may very well be the smallest beneficiaries of an endeavour. They have certain rights, but other groups have rights as well: lenders have first rights to the assets, and so do other creditors such as suppliers. Employees have legal rights including collective bargaining.

Buyers may have incredible power over companies such that they suck out all of the profits (see: selling to Apple).

Debtors have all of the power during restructring.

Many companies exist at the whim of the employees - like big Auto, who pay super high wages and benefits relative to the job. Possibly government employees as well.

Some Execs, by virtue of a weak or allied Board, have all the power and suck out vast profits that would otherwise go to investors.
Limited liability dramatically changes what groups of actors will do.
> I hear "but what about [insert hypothetical here that isn't actually happening]?" and there's an easy answer: "if that arises, let's deal with it then."

Can't we devise a general set of principles on which we can base decisions to remove words and metaphors from our professions and culture? "Let's deal with it then" sounds like it leads more to reflexive responses to loud voices (for or against) instead of thoughtful, collective, consideration. If principles can be agreed upon in the abstract, without the emotional baggage of specific words for any side, they can be applied and even if one don't like a specific outcome, one can recognize that it's fair.

I'm totally on board with discarding the "master/slave" metaphors in tech, they bring up unwelcome reminders of something much more serious an terrible, especially for people because of the ancestry and/or because of feelings about their role within modern systems.

I have more of a problem with removal of the word "master" on its own; "master" has many different meanings and uses unrelated to American slavery or other systems of oppression.

My biggest problem is with claiming removing "blacklist/whitelist" is an act against systemic racism. "Blacklist" is not a racial term and "whitelist" was only an obvious choice for the opposite of "blacklist" when one was needed. Black and white dualism [0], associating black with bad and white with good, long predates any use of those terms towards groups of people and continues to do so today. It's unfortunate that these particular words are so overloaded; it would be better if "white" and "black" were no longer used to refer to people but there's little interest in that and I know of no good alternatives.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism
Exploration and expansion of the Apache ShardingSphere community
If you approach the control problem the way a modern programmer would - read position sensor, adjust actuator current - you need some control loop running at some speed like 100KHz or higher. Probably doing floating point calculations. So you need a powerful CPU.

If you didn't have that, you might have to do the valve fine position control with analog hardware controlled by the digital system. That's how daisy-wheel printers controlled the daisy position. And you might have to have hardware timers for triggering events, like SOiC systems with PWM drivers. That's what you'd probably do if you were making a million cars.

If you're making 300 supercars, just throw some very fast CPU at the problem and let it do all the work. You'll never see the extra $20-$100 or so per car in the sticker price of a supercar. You can get hardware for automotive environments with that performance now. 15 years ago, you couldn't.
They have. Chinese factories have already lost business in the lower-end of the value chain to places like Vietnam. It's only just started, but the Chinese aren't immune from the basic laws of economics.
I thought these guys were a lastpass/august competitor, but they are so much more! Plans to replace all authentication and authorization with your phone! I saw a user had his phone connecting to his car, the door to his office, and then log him in to his laptop. Very cool, indeed!
The graffiti is being cleaned up and a lot of it is already gone.

The vegetable gardens are gone.
There's never enough room for everyone to move up. If you're comfortable in your role, stay there. But don't expect any more promotions.
Paul Fitts mentioned in the article came up with Fitts’ Law to describe selection difficulty as a relationship between target size and distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

While reading I had a feeling Fitts was well known for something!
I recently took two years off and drove from San Francisco to Panama. I spent a lot of time in El Salvador and in Honduras and made some observations. Police in those countries are invisible (non-existent?). You can pretty much do what you want- Honduras just built a new highway system, you can drive as fast as your engine allows. But when you get to know people, the owners of small businesses will tell you that there's another kind of protection. I would call it racket. In San Pedro Sula especially, when you stop paying for protection, your troubles start. Even on the smallest personal level: there are no meters in the center. We parked on a public street, and a 15 years old teenager came and asked 20 Lempiras for parking. My very experienced German companion wanted to ignore him, but then the teen's "supervisors" showed up. They looked like people you don't want to mess with. They politely offered the schedule: 1h is 20, 30min is 10 and left. We opted tor 30min, and the teen timed us to a minute on his watch. In exchange, he "guarded" my California plated car and blocked the upcoming traffic so that I could leave the parking spot (and that he could get another "customer"). I believe some people would actually prefer that system, but so far I liked the American system better.
I've given this a lot of thought (I also practice what I preach - I 95% post under my real name).

I advise against that, because in my experience, when you have a real name and a pseudonym account, there's a strong temptation to post all your edgy, attention-grabbing content to the alt, and all the boring content to your real name account.

Which is really bad for your main account, actually.

Note that some of the most popular personalities on Twitter - Elon Musk, Balaji Srinivasan - take this "carefully moderate your opinions unless it's a pseudonym" approach and stomp all over it. They are the total opposite of that. I think there's a lesson there, too: to really reach the stratosphere (including fame and wealth), as an unknown person, you probably need to take some risks and post risk-taking content, and associate it with a name+face where people can rally to you.

To be clear, I'm not making the moral argument that pseudonyms are cowardly or a moral failing, so don't use them. I'm making the purely self-interested argument that your content is worth money and you should monetize it under your real name, because it's the best vehicle for that.
I feel this article is more of a critique of character than it is that of Thoreau's writing.
I stumbled into Walden in my 30s and figured I'd continue my classic exploration. After a month of trying to get through the first few chapters, all I could tell myself was that I hated this book, and couldn't figure out why in hell people were praising it. I wanted to make sense out of it, get a grand picture: I wanted to extract the wisdom Thoreau was surely pouring through the pages!
I was miserable, my experience was horrible. Reading felt forced, the text itself dense and unenjoyable.
After some thought, I resolved to just get through the pages, and not try to make sense out of it, just cruising through.
From then on, the pages and the words took on a different meaning - it wasn't about an idea to be extracted, but about simply enjoying the words on the pages.
The moment I stopped trying to make sense out of the book, I started enjoying the words on their own, and they turned out to be the most beautiful friends through my reading.

"Walden" is my favorite book to this day.
If you try to analyze it, you might get lost in the weeds - I feel this is what happened with the author of that article here - there's a story in it: Don't focus on it, just let your mind wander and enjoy the pure, humble beauty laid bare throughout.
- police chases down and arrest the driver

It does not seem the perpetrator was running from the police, so they did not "chase" him. Accounts show that he was avoiding the protesters and police would him very quickly once he got to safety.
Not sure if I’d pass for advance but I first used Linux two decades ago and have used it on and off since. I use Ubuntu because I’ve become lazy in my old age.
Yeah it seemed kind of strange to me that Data Science and R&D are both not considered highly independent, I guess on some teams there is a more collaborative atmosphere but most of the data science work I have done seemed pretty independent. The people skills I agree with also, can't see how any data scientist could get by without strong people skills to communicate their results with leaders and to collaborate with subject matter experts.
COVID-19 Cases Are Rising, So Why Are Deaths Flatlining?
just to clarify:

you're saying it's ok to vote with your wallet, but not good to try and get other people to do the same?
? Being on github didn't restrict me from reading it in the least. Not sure what the heck it being on github has to do with anything.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts
That applies to plumbers as well. Which means we either come up with a comprehensive philosophy on what constitutes "value" or we go with the capitalistic approach of "what someone is willing to pay."
> Given the position of my scrollbar it seems I was only starting to read this piece

Tesla is just past 1/3 down, the page has almost 800 comments with no pagination.