skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have access to the paper so I can't comment on its entirety, but the abstract is spot on in my personal experience.

One thing not mentioned in the abstract (but perhaps it's mentioned in the paper) is how many missionaries do door-to-door sales when the return home. Many don't, but a nontrivial number do. I suspect that that missionaries play a role in the popularity of MLMs: either because of former missionaries joining MLMs (because some missionary skillsets are applicable to MLM marketing/selling), or because a nontrivial number of people in Utah have a soft spot for missionaries and I think MLMs often exploit that same soft spot.
Silicon Valley has deep pockets for African startups – if you’re not African
And some people just like having lots of pockets and don't care how it looks.
Flagged? What for?
I've got to commend the OP here for having the guts to title this appropriately whereas Cambridge titled it "Institutions, the social capital structure, and multilevel marketing companies" when the abstract states that they explicitly (exclusively?) focus on MLMs in relation to Utah/Mormonism.
Of course the positive rate will go down as testing increases. A low positive rate means you’re detecting a significant number of the cases, which is necessary for contact tracing and isolation.
Why I Don't Mock (2014)
It is one of our weaknesses as a people, honestly. I love my church, but we have a go-getter culture that often conflates hard work (and sales is hard work, just not necessarily good hard work) with virtue.

We tend to do well in corporate culture---which says good things about corporate culture, and bad things about us.
(You know, you can get proper italics. Wrap it in asterisks. Some discover this by accident when it mangles asterisks they meant as literal asterisks.)
How to Make Elections More Representative of the People's Ideals
I have read that book. His first principles explanation of evolution is not bad. Then he just takes that template and moves it over to ideas because analogy. You can't just glibly do that. What he does there is only a few steps above stoners saying space time looks like a big brain maaaaaaaan. Duuuuude... (bubble bubble) it's like a reflection of the mind of god (bubble bubble).

To really do that you would have to show that the brain works like a genetic/evolutionary system, and that does not appear to be the case (or at least we do not know enough to say that). There is so much context there. You can't just do superficial pattern recognition and then force fit an entire theoretical model. It's lazy.

I am not saying ideas are nothing like genes, just that they are not the same thing. You can't just steal theory from another field without context. Seriously... name one case in science where that has worked. Things are what they are, and not necessarily what they superficially look like when viewed from a certain angle and lots of details are ignored.

Also as I said the pop understanding of memes is far less interesting than Dawkins speculation and basically reduces ideas to isolated grunts. It's a form of "conceptual thought denialism."
If you're interested in the dynamics of the residency match Brian Carmody has a good blog

https://thesheriffofsodium.com/2019/03/02/the-etiology-of-ap...
You should watch the South Park episode "All About Mormons". Be sure to watch all the way to the end.

(Hint: after thoroughly ripping on Mormons for almost the whole episode, almost as effectively as they ripped on Scientology and Tom Cruise in the earlier episode "Trapped in the Closet", the episode takes a 90 degree turn and ends up being essentially a rebuttal to your comment).
This is cool. Living in South Africa where the crime rate is ultra-high, the first thing that occurred to me was that this pocket design looks like it might be easier to pick-pocket while standing?
I call BS. It's not as if there's a shortage of employees or execs to go around right now

Again in my case, how many “other employees” are they going to find from the outside who have built a relationship with their largest client [1], built internal relationships with other employees to get things done, know they business domain, and have two years of experience at the company to know how to maintain the codebase? If I were that valuable and hard to replace as an IC, can you imagine trying to replace the customer service managers, salespeople and CxO’s?

[1] I was valuable enough that our largest client made a deal with the company that finally did acquire us for scraps signed a special contract that allowed them to hire me as a contractor and get access to all of the source code of the company while I was contracting.
So a hospital has to pay a 1M per slot - sounds surprisingly similar to NYC medallions right before Uber. Artificial scarcity.
Cloudflare outage and the risk in today's Internet
Weird that wiki doesn’t mention that it’s just the -oid suffix for “like” the same way we can call a non-square box a cuboid. The rest seems suspect eg anyone could’ve coined it.
Or maybe it's a way of keeping him quiet about what actually happened. The co-CEO title certainly sounds like an honorarium.
I'm really not sure those Columbia trousers are cargo pants at all, they're certainly not what I believe the article author was referring to anyway. (Quite like them though - didn't expect HN to be a place to find clothing recommendations...).
> The argument here at best is for good, proven information to be available

I believe going to a doctor is the way of accessing "proven information."

> eradicating quack therapies based on false claims that don't work because they unfortunately put people (like this man) at risk.

What would the mechanism for "eradicating" these "quack therapies" look like?

> the supposedly-evil "big pharma"

Well, can we really say big pharma isn't evil to some degree - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/?
Yeah, that's roughly 99.99% availability, which sounds reasonable for most anything you want to depend on.
In my experience, people who end up as [insert niche religion] because they grow up hearing such stories before they form the faculties to doubt them, aren't necessarily gullible people. They just have cached beliefs, and haven't had cause to prioritize rooting around getting rid of those cached beliefs. (When the cached beliefs don't actually make any predictions that would cause someone to change their behavior, they don't really tend to come into opposition.)

But yes, if you're the sort of person who consciously joins a niche religion in adulthood, you're probably the same sort of person who will believe other pitches.
Would be great if you have PayPal, as currency rates is fluctuating now and I keep my USD in PayPal :(
Religion and MLM go hand in hand, that's interesting.

I will push the concept further: Are religions another form of MLM?

In both cases, we are trading our time, effort, and money for status within a community; there are hierarchical ranks, obtained by recruiting more people and proselytizing effectively...and MLMs and religion both seek to answer tough questions, whether that be creation or health, salvation or financial freedom. And both MLMs and religion rely upon false premises, mythology, peer pressure, and irrational fears.

Lastly, If MLMs or religion had extremely solid evidence behind them, would they truly be MLMs or religion? This seems the most important linkage, these institutions (and many others) prey upon inherent weaknesses in the human psyche for their own advancement.

Downvote brigade has arrived, I love receiving downvotes for playing devil's advocate; respond to me if you're disagreeing, don't downvote and bury what you dislike.
"Stupidity"? Why are nerds so damn arrogant?

The kid survived cancer at 17 and then had it again. This shit will fuck up your whole world. He was freaking out and afraid of dying.
Not sure I am qualified as "Advanced Linux user". There are always more advanced than me and always less advanced than me.
But anyhow, for desktop I really like Xubuntu. I love the way it is so simple using XFCE and Ubuntu is quite largely supported.
For servers I don't really much care but I use centOS.
To me, it's not inherently more outlandish than stories associated with any other popular religion.
> it’s not a bad idea to try fringe approaches

Fringe approaches would not be considered "fringe" if they were proven to have an effect. Even if it improves your survival rates by merely 1%, it would be still used as part of modern medicine if there was nothing else.

The problem is that the quack makes you believe that it will work, so you're still wasting time trying the "treatment" and potentially suffering its side-effects (not to mention the financial impact). It's worse than not doing anything, since at least the latter means you've accepted your fate and can enjoy whatever time you have peacefully instead of being busy with a quack treatment.

Furthermore, modern medicine isn't inherently hostile to "alternative medicine". If you think about it, all the potential treatments being researched in labs right now (including for covid-19) are still at the "alternative" stage, and if they end up being proven to work they simply become "medicine". What modern medicine is hostile to is unproven, or proven not to work treatments.

If you think you actually have an "alternative" theory that isn't quack, you are welcome to do your research on it to at least rule out any existing reasons why it couldn't work (using existing medical literature), and if the theory still stands by then you are free to engage with the mainstream medical community or study, become a researcher and then test your theory in a safe and controlled environment so the outcome is actually valuable (and will influence further research even if this particular theory doesn't work) and not just anecdotal evidence.
This is the Surgeon General of the United States on 2020-02-29:

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
http://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm"

I don't trust anything the USA government says anymore, and will not get any Covid vaccine in the USA.
It’s not purely based on religious structure and institution, it’s also a convenient “side hustle” for large families (though that’s a religious consequence), especially with the common stay-at-home mom in Utah - Utah county in particular.
This kind of pocket in the article appeals to me and were I in search of new pants I would certainly consider them.

I used to tell my wife that one of the primary considerations I make when looking for pants is that they have usable pockets: not too big, not too small. Mostly, this is doable for me. However, when we started shopping for her I would joke about the female fashion conspiracy to sell more accessories: they don't put in pockets in women's clothes so they can sell clutches, purses and other stuff. All that aside I think it's just figuring out what works for you and there's more than one way to handle personal storage needs.
Could be.

But the only demographic I named was "people who can wear cargo pants to work", so you kind of set me up for a "no true scotsman". There are events, and clients, to which I wouldn't wear cargo pants, therefore we're in different demographics :)

It is a little disheartening to spend so much time talking about cargo pants, when I relegated them to a postscript and only mentioned them to say "I am not talking about cargo pants".

But nice to meet another michigander! Hopefully I'll see you at some meetup or event once we have those sorts of things again.
The DSP Book (2011)
edit: (I say all this as a sick person who was bed-bound for years. I was able to reverse the course of my illness after studying the work of biochemists that is considered "alternative")

The attitude in this thread is ableist.

Sick people are intelligent. Sick people are capable. Sick people can feel what is happening in their bodies. And they have a right to seek treatments they deem best.

Sick people often seek alternative therapies because doctors do not have any treatments to offer, or the treatments they do offer have devastating, profoundly life-altering side effects. Many of these sick people are going to die anyways. It is cruel to treat them like crazy conspiracy theorists because they choose to fight back in hopes of a cure.

When it gets to this point it makes sense to strike out on your own. Some have success. Others do not. But it's a battle that has to be fought unless you want to just give up and lose the life you had.

I really struggle to understand why healthy people are so hostile towards sick people who are just trying to survive. Yes, it's sad to watch sick people desperately seek for effective treatments. But just imagine how hard it is to be that sick person desperately searching for effective treatments while your peers treat you like you're crazy, and then simultaneously refuse to provide any reasonable alternatives.
Scrum really just seems like a massive reporting framework, except that instead of written reports they have oral reports, which is basically just the same as having the server logs print to a speaker.

You might get something useful if you’re around to hear it and are interested in that particular thing at that particular time, but otherwise it’s just a lot of background noise.
They're treated by the hospitals that have them like taxicab shields.
They tried but everything medicine is hyper political in this country

> The antitrust class-action lawsuit Jung v. AAMC alleged collusion to prevent American trainee doctors from negotiating for better working conditions. The working conditions of medical residents often involved 80- to 100-hour workweeks. The suit had some early success, but failed when the U.S. Congress enacted a statute exempting matching programs from federal antitrust laws

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_v._Association_of_Ameri...
Vue (and React) aren't compilers like Svelte.

The real advantage of using a compiler is that more complicated state changes can be instrumented without hacky introspection, which is probably why Svelte feels cleaner.

The big tradeoff is that it forces the use of the Svelte compiler. Which doesn't sound all that bad until you want to use something like TypeScript and realize that it's maybe a bit odd that a framework now has a tight grip over what language/tooling is used.

It seems like Svelte just recently finished their TS support, but I tried Svelte and while I liked the concept, the overreaching felt like at that rate I'd rather use ReasonML or something because Svelte JS is technically not JS, just looks a lot like it.
Sorry, you are conflating two things: placement and design. OP hasn't changed the placement of the cargo pants pockets. For me as a proverbial user, the interface didn't change. The implementation details did. Don't get me wrong, I like the approach OP took, but this is basically an iteration on cargo pants design, by making them more socially acceptable.
I am extremely biased, but I’ve always found the rust tool chain far easier than the C ones, especially as a Windows user. No need to set up a cross compiler, given that rustc already is one, and is easy to add more targets to via the JSON target spec.
I've seen stuff like this a number of times. Someone gets their opinions horribly warped by well-crafted YouTube videos and graduates to spending a lot of time with like-minded peers on Facebook groups, subreddits or discord, reinforcing those beliefs.

I used to watch a talented gamer on twitch who goes on rants about how covid is a liberal scam, constantly advocates an all-meat diet ("there's no proof vegetables are healthy"), and shares YouTube videos on stuff like that. Trying to tell him otherwise only reinforces his beliefs, and he'll parrot talking points from videos. Completely soured me on his content and it's just really sad to see.

When someone lacks the scientific training or education to know whether something is a conspiracy theory, they can really get pulled in by charismatic YouTube personalities espousing nonsense. Social media is really poisoning some peoples' minds.
I like my ergohuman chair a lot. Pretty sure it's over 5 years old now. Can hardly sit in most chairs due to discomfort. Never a problem with this one. Unlike most chairs, it has very pronounced lumbar support, I believe that's the biggest factor making it comfortable for me.

Never used an Aeron so can't compare. But the standard version looks like it has rather poor lumbar support. So I'm guessing I'd find it uncomfortable.
...in fairness, I do struggle to think what you could ever do to exceed 640TB of RAM, other than some very big scientific/simulation things (or SAP or Google Chrome;]). I mean, that's more persistent storage than I expect most people to need for at least another decade (or at least whenever virtual reality really takes off), let RAM.
This article sets some interesting historical context for the behavior of the villagers in "Beauty and the Beast".
Non-profits are also a popular legal bribe delivery vehicle here in the US
I would have some doubts about this because the LDS members who go on missions are predominantly male and from what I'm aware of, those members involved in MLM are predominantly female.

There has been a large increase in the number of female members serving missions since a few years ago though, but has MLM already been popular since before that?

These are verifiable things though, if you have the data.

There is a large amount of male returned missionaries who do stints at a handful of companies (e.g. some solar one) who do door-to-door sales though, and can leverage their former experience.
Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. Flagged the submission for this reason, it’s going to cause severe problems for lots of people, and being GIFs and so enormous they don’t even load well (when I start loading even the first GIF by itself, it spends a lot of its time loading at below one frame per second). The GIFs should be removed urgently and replaced with static images and links to videos.
If it was a state actor, they'd definitely want access to elon musk's DMs. He hasn't showed a ton of restraint in social media, and he's the CEO of a rocket company that has done some classified launches. And many of these verified users that were hacked have significant roles internationally, whether in trade like with amazon or politically like biden, or with international aid organizations like gates.
Why do they consider "sub-adult-male" lion rather than just a female lion?

People wouldn't be familiar with it due to the lack of mane, but it would certainly be able to pray, and would match the claws and other characteristics, tho not the stripes.
They need to write this for their entire audience, most of whom has no idea what plain text even means. Also it was only a year ago that Facebook was found to have stored passwords in plain text so it's definitely a concern. Twitter has an excellent engineering blog so I'm looking forward to reading more technical details there if they publish any.
No.

Google signin is used because of Chrome/Android(Or browsers in general because of Google account which many people have it atleast because of Gmail).

Apple ID( their login ) is useful because of Apple ecosystem which constitutes IOS,MacOS,etc.

So,there is no appealing reason to use your product. What if it is down in future? Also,it's closed source and not federated.

I am interested in federated login system(Probably OpenID based?)

Think it like a single self hosted login system for all Gitea(which may happen in future)/Gitlab instances or federated open sourced self hosted(or company hosted) alternative to Google signin , speaking common protocol.
"Let private corporations do it." - America
Brain drain is a huge problem for countries on the cusp -- countries where taxpayers foot the bill for most education. Forced labor isn't the answer, but taking away some of the incentives to leave will certainly help.
I'm asking as well!
I was paid by George Soros to shill the idea that reality exists.
There's quite a bit of anti-work-visa sentiment in HN, primarily because they assume it increases supply and reduces pay.

So, It's implicitly assumed that the visa ban is not the cause behind the doctor shortage - its expensive medical school, low resident pay and a limit on residency spots (blamed on AMA lobbying).

The hypothesis here (I don't necessarily fully agree with this) is if the path to becoming a doctor is expanded with removing limits on residency slots, more pay and less debt, more natives will choose to become doctors.
cool, thank you very much.
Logarithm for Complex Numbers
VPN Firm with zero log policy leaks 20M user logs
I appreciate the general point of being careful about one's information diet. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking what you're consuming is bettering you, when it's really just entertainment (I consider HN to be a good example of this!)

Regarding Youtube and music education, I feel like it's a pretty healthy stream of content.

>Does it ever feel like the same content but regurgitated in different ways?

Learning an instrument is such a challenging and broad topic, there's no shortage of things to learn. One thing I like about Youtube is that the better content can surface for everyone to access. Finding a good teacher in real life can be tricky, but with Youtube I can watch 10 different people's takes on a topic and see which explanation clicks for me.

>Do you watch this to genuinely learn? Or is it more enjoyment/infotainment?

It's both. Staying motivated, interested and enthusiastic is just as important as the learning itself. Often watching a good performance or explanation of some musical idea is what makes me want to pick up my guitar in the first place. Of course there's a balance to be found - just watching videos about things you would do if you weren't so busy watching videos isn't much use.
SMRs don't solve the cooling problem with nuclear reactors. They're still producing megawatts of thermal energy that needs to be dissipated. Mars isn't known for its flowing rivers or deep cerulean oceans. So using massive amounts of water to carry away heat (like we do on Earth) Isn't an option for cooling. It's atmosphere is far less dense then Earth's so air cooling a reactor would take vast fields of radiators.

Burying a reactor underground is not a cooling solution. Rock is not a great heat conductor. So the reactor will stay cool for a little while, to the heat capacity of the surrounding rock, and then melt because the rock isn't effectively carrying heat away from the reactor.

But not to worry we'll launch them on fantasy rockets! So long as we make the rockets out of Impracticalium rather than Unobtanium we should be fine. We can start tomorrow.

It's entirely possible to conceptualize ways a Mars/Moon/orbital colony could work. The issue isn't coming up with ideas on paper it's the actual implementation of those ideas that is actually difficult. Handwaving implementation details and actual engineering challenges is just writing science fiction. It might be interesting and entertaining but it's not actionable.
thanks for the very kind explanation.