skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting for a variety of reasons but my immediate takeaway is that the world is in a long term deflationary economic trend and any attempts to push against that, however successful in the short run, will fail.

Cash will be king and assets will be sold for pennies on the dollar, so to speak - provided you can remain solvent in the whipsaws and gyrations of the desperate attempts to stave off deflation at any cost.
Yes.
Ill conditioned matrices are hard to “invert” (more like solve Ax=b for a given A and b) almost by definition.
The condition number is basically a measure if sensitivity. If I change b a little, the change in x is proportional to b multiplied by the condition number.
If the matrix is very ill conditioned (say more than 1e10 for a double precision algorithm), the matrix is really singular for any practical purpose, so the problem is really ill posed.
But then our lifespans are getting longer and longer so we might be able/doomed to work forever and not need that pension.
self hosted system requirements seem much more lightweight compared to Bitwarden
It wasn't an apology, as I already said in the comment you're responding to.
what does it mean to "pay for" the continued care of the old.

Unless we have such a population implosion that we can no longer produce food or run our factories, then we don't need to "pay for" anything. We can simply decide to distribute the resources necessary for the care of the old.

The real cost of everything is the labor required to produce it, not the dollar value it receives in a market place. I don't think anyone is talking about a complete collapse in the labor pool.
> Why is immigration not the answer to this?

Because of the word “global”.

Unless you are talking about interplanetary immigration.

OTOH, the real solution is “this projection of current trends into the future is likely to be just as wrong as when people were projecting the rapid rate of global population growth in the 1960s to continue without bound, or even further accelerate”.
I did a pretty thorough review of PassBolt a couple of years back when I was trying really hard to get a company to adopt it and give up their "we store our all of our passwords on a spreadsheet" approach.

I don't have my notes any more, but off the top of my head, the big points in favor were:

- Self-hostable. The tech guy in charge just resolutely would not use any hosted service, period. In his evaluation, trusting a centralized password management service was less secure than a spreadsheet in a Windows share.

- Low cost. Password management is integrated into some MSP products but these can be a bit pricey for small shops.

- Built with PHP. Same guy was uncomfortable with Python, Node, and all that, and insisted that he be able to maintain and troubleshoot the codebase himself if necessary, so it had to be PHP.

The main failing was that it didn't have proper mobile device support, so it would be a pain in the ass for some of the employees.

As far as I know that same company still keeps their passwords in a spreadsheet. They've had several costly security incidents over the years.
I'm reminded of this Rob Pike quote from 2015 about what Go was trying to avoid:

"Java, JavaScript (ECMAScript), Typescript, C#, C++, Hack (PHP), and more [...] actively borrow features from one another. They are converging into a single huge language." [0]

[0] https://www.dotconferences.com/2015/11/rob-pike-simplicity-i...
I have a 2 year old. It was an accident as both I and my wife didn’t want children or weren’t ready. I’ve got to say that it has become the best part of my life and yes it is not easy when you’re looking in from the outside but becoming a parent changes you, you become more resilient, objevtives in life change, etc So, no, children are not a burden unless you make it to be.
Even if it was an order of magnitude less than what AWS charges, it's still not free. I pay $4k/mo to Cloudflare for an amount of bandwidth I can easily see Skypack pulling down, and I'm able to pay for that with a sizable base of paying customers.

Even if they charged $1/mo, they'd be infinitely better off than where they are now. Giving away something that's cheap is not a good business model, especially when the thing that's cheap doesn't hit meaningful economies of scale until well after it's not cheap anymore.
I don’t know what a generic is and nobody can explain it correctly. the language is fine as is and can do anything you want. if it takes a bit more code to cover what generics would have done, I don’t care. if it’s preventing someone like you from using it, maybe that’s a good thing.
Deciding how to schedule the model training seems to be the easiest possible part of such a system.
> One only has to look at how different things were 50 or so (or less) years ago before these things were as widespread.

Was the average person happier under these circumstances? That's what should be optimized not keeping things the same for the sake of it
What suggests these are targeted "top down" forces and not just a natural progression of society and technology?
That still requires rising asset prices and economic growth.
"worthless speculation about the future"

No really - trends are real, this is science, and we use them to actually estimate the future, in much the same way we try to do so with climate and other things.

"It will be positive for the environment"

Possibly not true. Low-birth Westerners are already the #1 emitters of Co2 by a margin, so it's not so linear.

" population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, "

Most GDP growth does not come from resource utilisation.

So there are definitly some upsides to less people, but it's also a tremendous risk. Never before in history has this happened naturally, and it's happening fast. This is a 'really big, kind of scary' issue that we have to contend with, and as your points illustrate, there are definitely many facets let alone the social one's.
At the height of the cold-war, the US government supported the Khmer Rouge. On the other hand, the actually socialist (at the time) state of Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. There might be a reason for that.
I never said the past was a utopia...I was commenting on the modern disincentives for having children.
Social systems are zero sum game between individuals paying in and receiving benefits from them.

Meantime the salaries are stale, salary deductions only increase, and corporations (ehem formally "charities") funnel out billions annually through tax havens and heavens.

In countries where social systems are not that mature and trustworthy (e.g. post-Communist countries) even the most qualified like doctors and engineers pick contracting as a form of the employment to skip contributing to the social systems or to contribute only the minimum required by law.

How long more is this sustainable?
Being professional isn’t cool anymore.
Interesting! I actually found the article (about the battle) pretty balanced all things considering.

The massacre is where things go sideways:
The so-called "massacre" was just a psychological blow.that the US erected, in fact American bombs caused many civilians to die mixed with soldiers on both sides. The Liberation Army buried the civilians who died from American fire, so the United States discovered civilian corpses in mass graves.

Considering many of the bodies had their hands bound behind their back and gunshot wounds to their heads, this is a pretty fantastical explanation.
This sounds like recasting the well understood, documented, and widely practised “slash and burn[0]” as some kind of “Native American Earth Wisdom”. What am I missing?

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn
ah, interesting. I guess the implication in your comment is that there are other, more capable alternatives (but not as "pretty"). What are some of the criteria where wikijs is lacking? For me, wikijs was leading in all the criteria I mentioned in my original post.
>Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.

First, a top dictating human sexuality is hilarious to read out of context. Also somewhat accurate.

Anyway, I don't think they mean there is a concrete system designed to keep people from reproducing. It's more of a feedback loop where the richest people in the world get concerned about things like global warming, overpopulation, and whatever else risks their way of life and so they use their social capital to dictate ideas and ideals that protect them. They can do this with things like think tanks or social media influencers or whatever. It's not some highly organized psyop but it's effective because they have so much economic influence.
The reason it seems like an attack is due to the hostile tone of your comments, the burner account, and the unfounded/unsourced accusation that USDS left its partners behind.

I apologize if you just wanted to discuss the merits of a startup-minded approach to government IT, but I'm honestly skeptical of your motivations. USDS ruffled many feathers among the entrenched IT interests, and I've seen what the propaganda response looks like first hand.

If you really believe that you're fighting the good fight, then I'd welcome a direct conversation. Even a phone call if you like. I promise that I'm not in any way similar to a QAnon believer.
Also not sure why you are downvoted. As a 33 year old working professional who jumped through life's bullshit tip finally start a family, this resonates.
> It is reasonable to assume that anybody writing code is using the US keyboard layout. That is the de facto standard and standards are important.

That’s not reasonable at all. You have way more people writing code outside of the US than within. The US layout may be the most represented one, I don’t know statistics on this, but I would expect it to be on the losing side when comparing US layout vs non-US layout.

Though I would agree that having access to ASCII is something you need, but any standardized keyboard layout in the world can do that via modifiers, if not directly.
InsideSherpa Virtual Work Experiences (YC W19) Is Hiring Engineers in Sydney
Does the article actually say population density "causes" lower birth rates? The title says it is a "factor," which is not necessarily a causal relationship.
The more you dig the more amazing history gets.
To me, Go feels condescending to write without generics. I may just not groke the idioms - but putting users in a walled garden that the standard library has the privileged to escape from (i.e. (Map<k, v>)) just seems to go too far in not trusting the programmer. The fact that generics have taken so many years - to still be talking about what [<( to use is beyond me.

There is a difference between becoming C++ and allowing programmers to make fundamental abstractions without interface{} hacks.
Old calculus: "I need to have lots of children so they support me in my old age. No matter the cost."

New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."

It's economics, plain and simple. Of course there's a "top" and the "top" does dictate the structure. If you doubt that, ask: what percent of your income do you pay in taxes, and what percent of his income does your CEO pay in taxes (assuming you work at a typical bigcorp)?

I'm not saying that "yolo all the way to carrying capacity -- and beyond!" would be a better policy, but it clearly used to be the policy and isn't anymore. Personally, I think we dodged a big bullet and took a little one. The "little" bullet is still going to hurt quite a bit, though.
> A typical computer keyboard

A typical NORTH AMERICAN computer keyboard.

Does the myopia of the Go compiler team know any bounds?
I feel like I could fairly easily as long as I planned ahead exactly the work I need to do. As long as I get to the point where I'm translating a concrete plan of action into code I don't need to pay that much attention.

This would be an odd change to do on longer time scales. I do this kind of now, but I'll think for a few minutes and have maybe five to ten minutes of action planned out. Not precisely code just needing translating, more of a rough sketch to flesh out.
Following this logic further, we might be best off if we reduced the population to a single person whose ideal, perfectly happy life is that of a hermit.

Philosophers have given this a lot of thought: the "repugnant conclusion" is what to Google for.
> Director of IT for the FCPS took the fall, but Blackboard was at root the problem

Rightly so. The Director of IT should have known better than to push a flawed product hard on parents/teachers, for months. I'm wondering what Blackboard's sales practices are like that they can get school's IT people on their side!
Sorry - I should have qualified my comment as relating to framing lumber - 2x4 and 2x6, etc.

1x8 and so on is usually of decent quality and relatively uniform.
When right-thinking people despise populism, who will be left as populists? I'm more worried about a Congress that unanimously passes trillions in handouts to rich people during a health emergency (and the feckless orange moron who didn't veto such public theft) than I am about "demagogues".
this is fantastic news. Yes, we don’t know how to properly adapt yet, but this planet resources are limited and we aren’t good at sharing them.

What worries me is that long term this can be reversed just like current trend is reversing away from population growth. Current trend seems to be driven by job prospects, education and costs of raising kids. But what if in a future we all had basic income? No need to worry about food, shelter or education for your children. Won’t this lead to population growing again?
This is a fantastic writeup, love the attention to detail and thank you so much for not posting it on medium.
After clarifying that what I said wasn't an apology memexy continues to criticise me because it didn't fit their standards of apology.

I accept that my phrasing was not entirely clear but given having made what I meant explicit and still being attacked I'm unsure that my mistakes were the primary problem in this case.
> As far as I know that same company still keeps their passwords in a spreadsheet. They've had several costly security incidents over the years.

Because of the password spreadsheet?
I recommend Han Feizi for anyone interested.

>Confucius died thinking himself a failure. He didn’t manage to get a ruler to adopt his solution long enough for a full-scale test. Though he was able to gain the ears of a few statesmen, he lost political fights to other advisers and so fell from favor.

No he didn't. He, Buddha and Socrates were around the same era. I believe it's called the axial age. Socrates and him both were not well regarded in their times and knew that they both would be more well liked after their deaths. I've read that they both thought their time would come later. I don't understand why they said he thought himself a failure. Nobody who travels around believing these philosophical ideas can feel themselves a failure and continue to hold these philosophical ideas.
The term appears to be almost as offensive to Canadians as the n-word is to Americans.
For this a childless couple has to live together. Not separately in one person household, not with parents, not sharing the place with flatmates.
And I bet that if Go ever gets generics, they will look extremely similar to everything everyone has been telling them for years, even though they dismissed that feedback for years as silly.

The switch from parentheses to square brackets is just the first step toward that admission.
Digital subscribers have been consistently up since they started a digital subscription [0] but I meant actual readers since I think digital subscriptions earn less than historical subscribers and number of subscribers has a lot of variability of what price is paid.

I was thinking of their profit and revenue [1] that keeps trending down (although this year is up). That’s probably a better sign of actual readers over time, I think.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/315041/new-york-times-co...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192848/revenue-of-the-ne...
pffft. no way. didn't slow us down at all and I got a 10 and 12 year old.

Wife isn't having any more for medical and conscious decision reasons. We just feel that 2 for 2 is plenty a replacement rate for our middle class efforts.
> Hopefully, a declining population will lead to an oversupply of housing.

It won't without policy controls, otherwise, housing units will be redeveloped into other uses (including smaller numbers of larger units designed and managed in a way to foster single-family occupancy per unit.)

> Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility.

[citation needed]
Because of the resulting ethnic conflict: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1409

Perhaps the new Soviet man will be free of ethno-centrism, but until then, we have to deal with the flawed people that we have.
Yeah, I'm not sure how it really works, just that I couldn't see the book (or, I guess, couldn't experience seeing the book), but that didn't stop me from reading it.

I figure our brains sort of cobble together an illusion of selfhood out of a whole bunch of partially-independent processes. Most of the time the illusion is reasonably well supported by decent coordination among the processes, but the coordination isn't instant or perfect, and the gaps become more noticeable if something messes with one or more of the underlying processes.

There are a few other odd effects that seem to me like maybe they're examples of similar kinds of mess-ups. There's the simultaneous waking/sleeping I've experienced--that was a combination of extreme fatigue due to chronic fatigue syndrome, plus a strong alertness-enhancing drug.

And there's the absolute conviction someone close to me occasionally had that an invisible person was in the room with us (even though she was simultaneously aware that no such thing could be true). I think maybe that one was the effect of a brain injury she'd suffered in a car accident.
It's absolutely pushed from the top. Nobody outside of extreme religious communities sees increasing the population as a noble goal.

At least in the US, children are effectively a tax on the working class. How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college? Why do workplaces have tax-incentivized college savings accounts? Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?

The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids. If you do have them, the trade is that you will always be financially drained. Somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Very few will ever acquire equity in anything.

The American Dream is now working until you're 70, supporting 2 kids through college, building equity in your house, then reverse-mortgaging your property to hopefully cover your final years.

You could argue that it's an organic evolution of our profit-driven system, but that system only exists because it's what the owner-class is pushing.

Either we should accept that having children is a hobby for the rich and find other meaningful ways to live our lives, or we should have radical changes in society to increase family sizes.
It’s wonderful that it’s worked out for you, but I can show you to Facebook support groups of thousands of parents that abhor and regret having children. Children by their very nature are a burden because they can’t care for themselves.

Are we arguing with the very data from this article? Clearly children are not that in demand if the fertility rate is experiencing a “jaw dropping global crash”.
Child mortality was huge, fixing that definitely provided a reason to put a break to the child bearing machine. There are still poor parts of the world where that is still the norm but it’s dwindling fast
They are a company during the high-growth phase of their business, with a proven business model where the cost of revenue is less than the revenue gained. See their accounts on the link you posted.

They are a "loss making venture" because they are investing in growth. That's why the cash-at-hand is important - if it's low then one can question if they can cut expenses quickly enough. That's the difference between WeWork (unprofitable, not much cash, unclear what they could cut to make profits) and Amazon 10 years ago (unprofitable, lots of cash, easy to see places to cut to make profits)

Shopify have over 2 years of expenses as cash just sitting there, and they can cut the marketing by 10% at any point and become profitable. That's why investors have confidence in them, and it's why customers can have confidence too.

This isn't a hard balance sheet to read - it's a rapidly growing business with plenty of resources they are investing in growth. That's the same situation Amazon was in for years - "unprofitable" because all their revenue was going into the business.
Well that is a particularly click baitey article.

My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up.

It worked kind of like this, you have kids, you want them to have as good or better life than you have. If you've defined "better" here as wealth and social status, then you want them to have more opportunities.

Getting them those opportunities (which you may have missed out on) costs money (wealth). Examples, good schools, good nutrition, good after school programs, Etc.

Also, the developing society is putting more social status points on "successful" people (at least outwardly so by their display of wealth) which incentivizes couples to both continue their careers and "success trajectories." That path costs still more because now you have to add day care and possibly a nanny or two to the mix.

Here in the U.S. there is actually an interesting empirical example that supports this, its called foster care fraud. When the state offers to pay money to someone as a foster parent, a small number of people will exploit this by becoming foster parents for many many children to accrue the state benefit for "caring" for them. As an example, it suggests to me that if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly, the result would be larger families.

I would not argue that this "proves" the supposition that child care costs drive down the size of families, but to me it argues that it is likely a large factor in the decision.
FCGI controlling Go programs, maybe front-ended by a load balancer and back-ended by MySQL/MariaDB/Postgres, can get an awful lot of work done cheaply.

FCGI is an automatic "orchestration system" - it starts up more instances as needed, restarts them if they crash, shuts them down when they go idle, and restarts them once in a while in case they leak some resource. It's like the parts of Kubernetes you really need.

Go is an OK language. Not a great language, but an OK language. It comes with almost everything you need for server-side applications. Also, the "goroutine" model means you don't have to fool with threads vs async. If a goroutine blocks on a lock, no problem; the CPU gets redispatched. If you need a million goroutines, that works, too. None of that "oh, no, the async thread made a call that blocked and screwed up the whole system".

MySQL/MariaDB/Postgres have been around for decades, and they work pretty well. You can have replication if you need it. (NoSQL seems to have come and gone.)

Get the stuff at the bottom right, instead of piling more cruft on top. It's cheaper.
Not directly, nah.