skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But certainly I would expect accounts would accumulate warning flags and at some point be banned."

https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-style-rating-helps-bran...

Though there seems to be a bit of a conflict with such a system -- wouldn't every retailer want to say everyone is terrible, you surely don't want to deal with them, etc.
aggressively conventional-minded │ aggressively independent-minded
─────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────
passively conventional-minded │ passively independent-minded
Hold on: Hungary is not an autocratic country?

Hasn't Fidesz controlled the country for over ten years now? Haven't they amended the constitution? Packed the courts?

This is not a topic that is at the top of my mind, so I am not an expert. But Hungary being a democratic society is news to me.
> But if we're talking about a thriving society and population, surely our aims should be set higher than the very first step on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

Very much agreed.

The issues with sectors that have been outpacing inflation aren't due to a blanket "we're pumping too much fiat into the economy" but are absolutely political choices.

Healthcare: The US does spend too much here for what we get in return but this is a political choice. We could institute Medicare for All and _save_ money [0]

Education: Again political here. How much funding has been stripped at the state/local level for the universities and how much can be attributed to extremely bloated administrations? Other countries can manage education just fine.

Housing: this is current housing being weaponized to increase the value of property while artificially limiting what, where, when, who, and how much can be built at any given time. See: all of California. Housing as strictly a monetary investment now dictates that nothing is ever allowed to depreciate, only ever increase.

[0]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
This article is misleading they gloss over the key point that makes it such, "Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic."

Specifically the part after the comma after meritocratically.

That is a false belief, because the world is not meritocratically run. This leads to all subsequent false beliefs and issues of entitlement and selfishness the article discusses.

However, a belief the world should be run meritocratically does not necessarily have the same issues and, personally, we should strive to "even the playing field" and make it more so.

The writer should have chosen a better title such as "A belief that the world is currently meritocratically run is bad for you", but I bet it would get less clicks because frankly, no shit.
Deep in the WebRTC deep end [audio]
> Show me reliable quotes of saying Obama he would "have to see" about the election results, as Trump has, and I'll be more charitable.

It's meaningless what Trump says or does. It's what Congress, Senate, Military and (in the short term) various federal agencies like the secret service. The Federal government obey legal orders from the President. Come 12:01pm on Jan 20th, barring a valid electoral college vote being declared in a joint session of congress in Trumps favour, Trump ceases to be president, and the Federal entities start following the lawful orders of either Biden or Pelosi (assuming Biden wins the EC or the EC doesn't happen but the democrats maintain control of the House)

Of course it's entirely possible for the election to be "stole" by keeping all non-trump voters away from the polling booths, that's a far woolier version of the word "stole" though.
Hi Peter, Thank you for doing this. If you're on a H1b visa and waiting for your green card to be come current, can you be the co-founder of a start up? What are the implications and is there a way to set up start up so that the US citizen founder can be the primary?
At least you French have a decent and established culture of protesting, compared to us Germans...
Depends on the project. People like to say "consultant" but most of the are just staff augmentation and many of them do work that won't absorbe a lot of knowledge.
Apples fines were because EU commissioners demanded Ireland charge them higher tax rates. The courts ruled they were wrong in doing so. Not an anti trust issue at all.

Do you really want to live in a world where bureaucrats can issue fines without recourse?
Well, there are three ways you can do this, at least from what I've seen/heard.

1. Become enough of an expert/authority in your field that you're hired on the work you've done in the past. If you're a superstar that invented a game changing JavaScript framework or open source project used by millions, people aren't gonna throw you into a technical interview before hiring you.

2. Find companies your friends/acquaintances work for and get the job through your connections rather than a formal interview process.

3. Apply for jobs at smaller or less technically focused companies where interviews are a bit more traditional (and often come down to a quick chat over a coffee or something).
Ask HN: Why do so many German websites have dashes in the URL?
I notice that a lot of German domain names have dashes in the URL (something that I've been trained to not love at first sight (pun intended)).

A quick lookup gave me these:

Berlin School of Economics and Law [https://www.hwr-berlin.de/en/]
Hamburg University [https://www.uni-hamburg.de/en.html]
University of Heidelberg [https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/en]
Some Startup List [https://startup-map.berlin/home]

And even some of the top Alexa websites:

https://www.t-online.de/
https://www.wer-weiss-was.de/

Based on my basic knowledge of the German language, there is no such unusual usage of dashes in the language itself, but there are far too many URLs that use dashes. Any reason/ thoughts?
Also highly hyped, also bombed, but severely influential. IMO has a better claim to "coolest" than the Mac cube does.
This is awesome! I was searching the net to find excel like grid and now I have finally found it. Any chance it has pivot table feature?
Perhaps these authors should suggest some sort of alternative, if they wish to convince people that meritocracy is not only not the case, but is actively harmful. Else it seems no ideal is truly being put fourth, only talking down at the status quo. How would they prefer things worked instead?
Hi Peter. In your opinion, if the eligibility criteria for O-1 visa are fulfilled shortly (<1 year) before the case is submitted, how would it affect the probability of positive outcome?
Yes. This exactly god help you if you cannot hover.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23933879
> an unassailable platform of privilege to express themselves

Anyone can start a website and post essays on it. If many more people read PG's essays than other people's, that's because he has done things that attract a wider audience.
> That's pretty much where we are today.

What on earth makes you think that?
The "attempted coup" in Venezuela was a couple crazy dudes who got rounded up immediately. You think that represents an attempted coup by the American government?
Also inspired by liveview and worth Checking out.

https://github.com/unabridged/motion
Contact tracing is the way to allow individual citizens to accurately assess which jobs are risky.
Coming from where I live, it's surprising to think of any of those (pro-life, pro-gun, or Trump voter) being quiet about it, so my feeling is that they are nonexistent in your circles, not quiet. But perhaps they are indeed closeted there.

FWIW, I also thought that SV (though not SF) was full of firearm enthusiasts and prepper types, but that's probably an uninformed view from the other side of the country.
You can co-found a startup with US-citizens/greencard holders. However, you cannot own the majority of the shares since you own the board's decision :) - as long as the board can fire you...
These were not compatible with users who set the computer on it's side, or people who would lay papers on top of it. Either way it would overheat (speaking as a former tech support person)
I meant seconds in the sense of second-quality items: ones that wouldn't pass QA for their primary distribution channels, whether that's high-end department stores or their own storefronts.

That's different from secondhand items, which are items that had been previously sold, used, and then refurbished to be sold again.
All that extra liquidity is going straight to capital assets.
People think deflationary assets are a good thing (for themselves), but they tend to promote stagnation.
For an overall less pessimistic outlook for what life on Mars might be like, I can highly recommend the Mars Trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinson.

It begins with an initial colonization with 100 scientists and ends ~150 years on with some far-out yet IMO occasionally plausible ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
I'm an American citizen, but many of my current and former colleagues have moved here from other countries. On a number of occasions, those colleagues have explained something about their own immigration process. The current system is crazy.

What is the likelihood of process simplification? What are some groups that are pushing for concrete, attainable steps to simplify the process?
> Says who?

ISO
In this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23940448 you mentioned that self employment is prohibited on H1b.
Can you comment if working on H1b (also have EAD from I485 filed based on employer) and (a) consulting for another firm (in Canada/non-US) is allowed?, (b) consulting for a US firm (1099) is allowed?, and (c) being a youtuber who earns money through ads is allowed?
> "'Reducing inequality' ... would probably lead to reduced economic efficiency, as it necessarily reduces the incentives for efficient production."

this argument gets made a lot (for instance, re: the lower capital gains rate) because proponents want it to be true and its flaws are not immediately obvious, but it's unambiguously mistaken.

first, esteem from wealth is relative, and as long as there is a spectrum of wealth, the wealthiest will derive maximal esteem regardless of the absolute value of wealth. and that's the primary driver for the ambitious and greedy, not putting resources to highest and best use (which is at best a side effect). greater equality doesn't change that equation one iota.

second, it's plain to see that large accumulations of wealth are fairly unproductive, simply illustrated by the localized real estate bubbles driven by both wealth seeking safe harbor and PE-backed landlords seeking unproductive rents.

in fact, there seems to be a central optimum. relative to now, wider dispersion of wealth (less wealth disparity) seems to provide the best bang-for-buck when it comes to efficiency, putting more potential to work rather than mostly relegating it to the menial sidelines.
Fry's is the only retailer I have been to where an LP associate insisted on opening up a product I just bought new to inspect it. Yep, its a rice cooker, I should have went over to returns to return it as its condition changed from new to open box before I left the store.
I don't think they are.
> NAT is mainly privacy/obfuscation.

That is not the original purpose of NAT. What about IPv6 privacy extensions?

> Another use case is connectivity:

Ok, there might be valid use cases for NATv6 (I am not an expert), but it shouldn't be necessary for typical consumer home networks.

I have no problems with NAT as long as it a) doesn't block incoming traffic (that is the job of a firewall) b) doesn't perform symmetric address/port translation (breaks peer-to-peer applications).
I am in the process of getting a green card and waiting from my PERM approval (sent PERM in Feb) (good to know from your previous answers that the process is still working well if not better).
Do you see the next steps i-140 and i-485 impacted either by the virus of by trump recent changes?

Also is there a chance that if trump is re-elected we will see drastic changes and people in the middle of the green card process might be impacted?
Couldn't you just connect a usb-hub?
Of course, then it is illegal to “colonize” Antarctica by that definition since mining is prohibited by treaty (and many other activities are constrained by treaty as well). Not prohibited on Mars.

Cannot realistically be self-sustaining without mining.

And of course, basically no country on earth is self-sustaining, although almost any country COULD be (if your population is reduced and willing to sustain a low enough quality of life).

Additionally, a self-sustaining and independent settlement on Mars is by definition NOT a colony!
I'm not sure I find much meaning in this essay because everyone's definition of "conventional" and "independent" depends on their own bias. PG's own definition of independently minded seems to be "they have all the new ideas". If that's the case, then universities are absolutely a place of independently minded people when compared to the baby boomers and older generations.

Speaking out against racism, bigotry, and systemic issues that overwhelmingly impact POC and the LGBTQ+ community is not what I consider "conventionally minded" and definitely counts as a "new idea" when viewing it through the lens of racism and homophobia in America since its inception. As others posted, it's not clear to me what PG is referring to as conventionally minded at universities, but the issues I mentioned are typically at the forefront of political issues at schools these days.

Here's what I find conventionally minded thinking: supporting capitalism and accumulating ridiculous amounts of wealth without guilt. If you're the type of person who sees an abnormally high level of sociopaths in non-profits[1] and honestly believes the "defining quality of nonprofits is to make no profit, not to do good" has any significant basis in reality, perhaps that says more about your bias against non-profits than it does about the people in it. And that bias, to me, reeks of conformity.

1: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1124254508232663040
Your generalization of Indian colleges is not right.

India has a lot of Engineering students.

There are around 60k students joining Tier 1 colleges every year in India (IITs, NITs, etc funded by the Central Government alongside some private colleges like BITS). Very few students from Tier 1 colleges join these consultancy companies. Most of them studying CS from these colleges join product companies like Flipkart, Swiggy, Paytm, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber etc.

Consultancy companies get students mostly from 2nd and 3rd tier (mostly private) colleges. Pretty much all these colleges are in a very bad shape. I think there are over half a million students enrolled in these colleges every year. Students still go to these engineering colleges since the education is not as expensive as in the USA and it's what pretty much everyone do after high school. If it was USA they would have just left college altogether instead of wasting money on a terrible college.

Sure, the quality of education of Tier 1 colleges can be improved a lot as well. But generalizing the entire Indian engineering education as the reason why these consultancy companies are doing poor is not correct either.
Most english speakers also wouldn't be familiar with the term, but it is called 'Headlinese'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese
Reminds me of how someone went to Target to buy an iPod for her daughter, found it full of rocks and exchanged it after getting her refund rejected, only for a replacement iPod from another Target to also be filled with rocks.

https://www.engadget.com/2007-10-09-birthday-girl-gets-two-r...
The US has lots of people with a superficial understanding of Scandinavia telling everyone that their idea of Scandinavia is brilliant, easy, etc. (and btw, this is a function of generally poor policy education in the US, the US produces probably the best policy studies research...very little of this is taught in courses that people who go on to be politicians study).

If you go to Scandinavia or study comparative politics, the answer is simple: Scandinavia is Scandinavia, the US is the US. They are different places with outcomes that reflect different values and choices.

What people ignore about Scandinavia: mono-cultural society (if you tried some of the integration stuff that these countries do in the US, you would have people loading guns), huge tax burden on middle class (in the US people who currently pay no tax will have to hand over 40%+ of their income), small population, heavily monopolistic economy, significant exposure to trade/reliance on individual companies, significant natural resources (Norway has 20% of the US oil reserves, their population is smaller than almost every state in the US). Saying they are happier is very woolly, particularly as most countries in that region are societies that place significant social pressure on individuals to conform and be happy (their rates of depression and suicide are high, indeed when Sweden was the socialist paradise their rate of suicide was highest in the world).

Also, you ignore that most Scandinavian countries have moved towards the US model after decades of underperformance and then financial crisis. Even Denmark which has huge trade union membership has the most flexible labour anywhere...again, what people understand about Scandinavia is usually based on their preconceptions about America and their belief in a perfect, easy ideal that confirms their views about the world.

The US gets things far more right than wrong. It is, by far, the most successful economy that has existed to this point. No other large country has replicated that success (all the East Asian economies used Germany as their model, which has resulted in significant baggage). You can say that some stuff needs to be changed...okay, but it isn't as simple as just copying Scandinavia. That will never happen, and won't work if it did. It just makes no sense. The solution to an American problem is American, not Swedish.
Those bundles are liquidation pallets where, for whatever reason, Amazon decide they want to sell the stock for cash. It doesn't mean every returned item will be liquidated in that fashion.
Someone must have shared access to find it for you though?
I've ordered three Xbox Play and Charge kits from Amazon, two were blatantly counterfeit (came in a plastic bag, scratched and with no markings, I don't believe it's "OEM"), the other was genuine but with batteries manufactured four years before and pretty much DOA (probably used and sent back by someone?)

I had to order from Microsoft directly to get an acceptable product.
I've had the flu a lot, but that doesn't mean that I'm chronically infected with it. Every time I got sick, I caught it from a different person. Europe caught it from this intermediate condition where the core of the EU can consistently take advantage of the peripheral states, generating large trade surpluses, but have to be begged to help through begrudging one-off fixes (rather than federal institutions that work to and have the means to constantly rebalance things) whenever they crash one of them by loaning them too much money to buy things from the core.

If federalism is just exploitation, the obvious last resort is nationalism.
Why has no-one thought of this before?
And how is an example of government influence? Giving and order to censor would hurt them. This was most likely a PR stunt, stab at the ruling party or incompetent management.
Time is better spent on your app, not it's icons. Save time with iconsizer
Well it has in Venezuela, with the printing of money. But maybe you need a measure of scarcity to trigger high inflation.
I also stopped on the assertion about the successful scientist, but instead of outright disagreeing, I took it to mean that the definition of successful scientists for pg includes mostly the starters of new paradigms, regardless of the ideas being accepted during their lifetimes or not.
Unless there's some sort of large scale, organised fraud occurring, or it is so hugely prevalent as to be affecting the bottom line then I'd be very surprised if any action was taken. If you think about the amount of time and effort involved (legal counsel is expensive) then it's not worth it.
It was useful. All of the early customer feedback came from those conversations.
> Luck exists – checkmate people that value hard work!

Yawn.
You're suggesting the person would have to remain jobless for a long time for it to be a cancellation? We're talking people deliberately going for other people's jobs in a country where access to health care is often tied to employment.
Ok, this is now seriously off-track, but ...

> It will always be fundamentally hard for many kinds of potential dystopia to coordinate in a uniform way if comms have a minimum time in the minutes, days, months or years and direct physical travel time ranges from months to years/centuries to "essentially never the energy cost is so high".

I'm not sure, that works necessarily against a dystopia. What let one, e.g. dictatorship, come to power on one planet, could work the same on others. Arguably the Axis were defeated because the Allies were well coordinated. Imagine Great Britain, USA and Soviet Union could not have communicated and there wouldn't have been a Lend-Lease policy ...
Yes, this is true. I guess I wasn't very careful with my wording as I was talking in the classical sense of "there's too much money now so your dollar is now worth 20 cents across the board" inflation and not necessarily failed political policy, which housing is absolutely apart of.
AP Photographers Will Only Shoot Sony from Now On
In this case it was a known return. That's what amazon warehouse deals is.
Not sure if I'm getting enough omega-3 as a vegan but hopefully. Eat quite a bit of nuts, and ground flax every morning. I take an algae-oil supplement for EPA and DHA, but not sure if there's some other easy addition to my diet.
Reporters are leaving newsrooms for newsletters
> "Reducing inequality" is very different from democracy, and would probably lead to reduced economic efficiency, as it necessarily reduces the incentives for efficient production.

They are absolutely bound together. Ensuring that every person has the same power in the political process means that everyone has the time and energy to pay attention and be educated on what's going on the world, and that nobody has so much wealth that they can use it to buy influence. The trend towards more inequality while the working class has less and less political power is painfully obvious, especially in the United States.
> unjustified use of donation funds

There was no actual mishandling of funds, just [disagreement on procedure](https://forum.manjaro.org/t/change-of-treasurer-for-manjaro-...):

> To clarify, there has not been any fund misuse. There has been a disagreement about the process of how the funds are allocated, but no funds have been allocated during the conflict.
But a bank employee can leak data as well. Some would say more important data than some tweets
I can confirm the issues with formal methods.

I was working on a new type of locking mechanism and thought I would be smart by modelling it in spin [http://spinroot.com], which has been used for these kind of things before.

I ended up with a model that was proven in spin, but still failed in real code.

Given that's anecdata with a sample size of 1, but still was a valuable experience to me.
Once again we are presented with a false dichotomy: either embrace meritocracy wholesale or reject it entirely.

Despite the authors best attempts, the truth peeks out in the article: merit is often a necessary, but not sufficient cause for success. Not sufficient, particularly, for extraordinary success.

By embracing the healing power of "and" over the divisive and thought-killing "or", we can achieve a better understanding of reality. Yes, successful people usually merit their success. Yes, luck also plays a large part in it, especially as the scale of that success grows. Both of these facts should be given proper account as we morally reason about things.