skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do so many people aspire for meritocracy everywhere? Imagine if there really was meritocracy in the political system. All we would have is someone who would pander to the local population and eventually lean to be xenophobic as a process.

This is why in politics, candidates have to be controlled and sometimes not allowed to participate even if their opinions would be much more popular. Sometimes more intelligent people have to control how the political process works for the greater good even if it is undemocratic.

Free for all will always eventually lead to someone like Hitler. Being more tribal is an easier but regressive path to chose for humans, and humans always chose the path of least resistance, not the optimal global maxima.
I knew someone who had one of these, it was awesome
To set context, I'm Indian.

I used to work for Razorfish for about 2 years, working with our counterparts in London, Austin, and San Francisco. I ended up building a team of 50-odd Products Designers and Front-end Engineers in about a years time.

So, We used to work with lots of "engineers" from well-known other Indian Outsourcing firms. Here are few anecdotes;

Even amongst themselves, they don't respect each other individuals and teams. The Indian team in Singapore/Bangalore/San Francisco will called the Chennai/Other-Locale team as their outsource partner/team and are mis-treated. I was like, "I thought you guys were team!"

In another incident, I once lambasted a "tech-team" of a really well known India company for not even knowing how to push codes to git. I patiently explained to the team on how to work collaboratively and to push codes, send in pull request and not to email us zip files of their codes. Their head of something-something (too many senseless designations/titles) was not happy and in his mistake, sent a "Reply All" to the tune of, "Any email from Brajeshwar should not be replied immediately, call a meeting with the tech heads."

Well, I was kinda referred to someone who should be sent in when shits stars hitting the fan. ;-)
Do you have any working example, for example a github page
with one of your projects or something similar that is open and well known?
The greatest flaw we possess today en masse is that Science, as it is conducted today, is pure. Ironically, a dogmatic belief in it's purity. There is science, which got Western Civilization where it is today, and there is Science™.
I'm a little confused. I agree with some of your sentiment, but are developments w/r/t COVID not important?
> there is nothing even close to "brutal" happening to the rioters.

If you aren't going to believe me, and if you're not going to believe your eyes with regards to the multiple clear videos of police brutality, then maybe you should listen to the multiple international human rights organisations which have called for an end to the police brutality?

I mean what would even convince you that the police are brutalising protestors? What evidence are you missing? Surely there is just as much evidence for the US brutalising its citizens as there is for China or Russia doing so? (I am not saying the level of brutality is the same, mind you)

To be honest with you it's difficult to have a conversation with someone so out of touch with reality in this way: if you can't see that the US police are brutalising protestors you're maybe too far gone.

> The fact that current rioters have no real fear is because they know that the police are extremely restrained in what they do.

How many people have the police killed since the protests began?

> Getting tear gassed or (rarely) hit with a baton/bean-bag is nothing close to what real brutality is.

You know people were killed by tear gas? You know people lost eyes from rubber bullets?

> Also, the fact that you are not aware of the deep reaches of cancel culture today is because you are aggressively conformist with your peer group so you only get your information from sources that are deeply filtered.

In contrast to you, the well-read worldly individual who gets their news from news.ycombinator.com.

Go on, then: tell me about the horrific cases of cancel culture which I was shielded from in my bubble.
Without having listened to that piece, it occurs to me that one reason for specifically including the perspective of a transgender individual in the radio segment may have been that under the current administration there have been _major_ changes to our country's policies around asylum. "Fear of persecution for sexual orientation or transgender status" is one of the one of the more common reasons that people seek asylum in the US, after all. Just a thought...
Nothing can be done about luck, but a lot can be done about striving to judge people on merit instead of birth, race, relations, etc.
Most of what we do is just data input and data display. And most of that is text. There aren't really any calculations or anything, beyond some simple sizing of UI stuff.

For database stuff, an ORM with some validation rules is generally enough, and couldn't be replaced with static typing anyhow.

For anything that absolutely has to be a certain kind of data, there are things built into dynamic languages to check the type of something, and you just call it as needed on a case-by-case basis.
Unfortunately, the first proclamation (I believe the first) suspended the issuance of immigrant visas with very limited exceptions and it's still in effect so the processing of your and your grandmother's immigrant visa applications could be delayed.
Futurewei Maple Engine open sourced
Why the hate on C#? Are you perhaps thinking of languages like Ruby and Python and grouping them into the same bucket as C#?
This[0] shows an example of C# vs C++ having a 10% performance gap on ray tracing. There is also no reason that extremely performance sensitive parts couldn’t be rewritten in Rust or C or C++ and called from C# over a FFI.

[0]: https://mattwarren.org/2019/03/01/Is-CSharp-a-low-level-lang...
How as an American can I get into an EU country in current year? Is there any loophole/procedure/test/bribe one can do to make this happen?
In English the comma would be used between non-restrictive modifiers. However, this is a designation, and the industry or manufacturer denotes how the designation is to be structured. This is further compounded by being in a headline. Editors, and headlines in particular, use abbreviated syntax.
How to deploy a Go and React app on Kubernetes separalty with (silly) drawings
> It isn't exclusive but it is deeply disingenuous to say it isn't their megaphone.

That’s your opinion, obviously people took to the streets because social media can be ignored And minimized but people in the streets can’t be ignored.

I’ll return the favor to say social media is the protestors megaphone over the streets is deeply disingenuous...see how easy it is to speak past each other online, good luck with that in the street
Gavin Free of the Slow-Mo Guys talked on a podcast how he got 2 cans of Dr. Pepper instead of a dremel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-LRgWpyMEI&t=29s

I wonder what else could "black hats" do with this "exploit". Buy laptops, install malware, return them? The higher-end the laptop, the higher the chances are the next buyer will be rich, and that seems like an interesting way to access someone's bank account.
Agreed. Do note that many other languages before Rust do provide good static typing with the niceties you'd expect (and that are often missing from Java), such as type inference, sum types, etc. Some examples include, but are not limited to, Scala, Haskell, the ML family of languages, etc.
When Biden gets elected, they'll change it back and celebrate a successful democratic transition. A restoration of human rights and liberalism.

The world will be wonderful again. The press will be free again. Maybe they'll even give him a peace prize in the first year, right before he launches several large wars and destroys several nations.
The author's conclusion is also unmoored from larger context. Our society is not perfectly meritocratic--but it's certainly more meritocratic than many others. And what is the alternative to meritocracy as a guiding principle (even if we instill the understanding that our society is not perfectly meritocratic yet and we should strive to make it more so)?

The alternatives to meritocracy that exist in practice are neither pleasant nor desirable. In societies that don't even strive to be meritocratic, women often are excluded based on rigid gender roles. ("Women can do anything men can do" is an assertion that is most potent in a society that at least pretends to care what you can do.) And family and other group relationships dominate, excluding even highly capable immigrants and racial and religious minorities.

One of the things that I find striking is when Americans argue that privilege plays a role in success by pointing out that successful entrepreneurs are almost always from at least middle or upper middle class backgrounds. I appreciate the point they're making, but we shouldn't lose sight of how remarkable it is that the necessary privileges are so relatively mundane. That an immigrant, often a racial and religious minority, can come to the United States and become rich and powerful, while only having college-educated parents and an upper middle class income as privileges, is astonishing! We take that for granted. But in much of the world, its not enough to have college educated parents and and enough spare income to afford test prep classes. You need that plus belonging to the right caste or social class, having the right family ties and political connections, belonging to the right ethnic or religious subgroup, etc.
I'm going to be blunt here and say that you're wrong. There is no difference. The news may be curated and may be for a specific audience but the odds that it's just as useless to you as mainstream news is still very high. I don't say this to criticize, mind you. I'm here as well.
> And I'm one of those people who would vote for a paty like Fidesz if it was a regular country (I'm not left wing at all).

And you should be ashamed because it's parties like Fidesz that fuck up countries like Hungary is fucked up now. It is your (and your kind's) fault.
Very good point, missed that.

I suppose re: your social media point (I have long ago soured on most of it personally) that, rather than ridding away and decrying the negatives with tech and social media as a result of progress, really what needs to happen is social media needs its own set of reforms in order to have its “supposed vision” be actualized.

The route of addicting users for increased “engagement” while optimizing for nothing else has successfully poisoned the well of good intentions (and possibilities). But still, and this relates to the heart of the essay itself: I believe the path to solve this is by moving forward, making the systems better (or providing new ones). Rather than rejecting them outright. But maybe that is the raging optimist in me talking.
And a lot of people make that argument. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that this isn't some flaw in the theory - the theory is exactly that most, perhaps all, publicly-traded companies are answerable to their shareholders, not their customers. Attempts to reform or mitigate this often fall under the umbrella of "stakeholder capitalism," in which the customers are viewed as one of the stakeholders that needs representation, because they don't currently have any.
http://archive.is/15nqg
> I'm wondering what kind of wack opinion he has that he doesn't want to talk about, and these essays are providing cover for.

This is the exact thing the essays are about, though! To use a question from a previous pg essay - I'm not even asking you to share it, just asking if it exists - do you hold any opinions that you believe to be true, yet you dare not share with anyone for fear that you would lose your job and all social connections if you were to reveal that you held that opinion?
Here's some examples I found pretty quickly:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-buffer/ind...

http://www.exampler.com/writing/ring-buffer.pdf

A google search for "logging to a ring buffer" will provide more.
Thanks a lot for this. Stuff like this is really really helpful.
Given many will be made homeless and denied basic human rights such as health care, the EU should seriously consider welcoming American economic refugees. With population ageing in most western europe we need workers anyway and we generally speaking do welcome those seeking a better life and the freedom of having access to healthcare, decent housing and jobs.
Racial Bias in Startup Funding
are you talking about the time when a white woman tried to weaponize the police on a black man?
An even sneakier trick is changes to product models without changing the model name.

I’ve seen Camelbak use cheaper parts on the “same” backpack, for example.

This happens on Amazon a lot, you see reviews saying “I bought this three years ago it was great, new one uses cheap xyz.”

I think you largely are going to see every business, Amazon merchants, brands, etc get away with whatever they can to cut costs, so long as it doesn’t have widespread effect on brand perception.
Looking for just one job is not enough. To feel secure leaving silicon valley, you need a wide choice of jobs and employers in the area where you go to, in case the first job doesn’t last. From here every other place looks to have more limited options.
You get what you pay for. That holds true everywhere.
Focusing on who "wins" and who "loses" and what role luck plays has an important ideological function. It makes it seem like the outcomes of the game are unquestionable.

Like, of course it's reasonable that we're playing a game that determined who gets healthcare and who doesn't; or who gets access to quality education and who doesn't; or who must spend their days being humiliated by the institutions that they depend on for survival and who doesn't. That's unquestionable. The only question to answer is who should win and who should lose.

Not that a certain kind of "fairness" to the game isn't desirable if we're going to play it anyway, but if you can't bring yourself to ask if the whole game is fundamentally flawed to begin with, you've already given up on the kind of fairness that really matters.
Is this obsession with oversimplification of complex topics into two choices a uniquely American problem?

As an American I cant help but think our entertainment "news" cycles and narrative compression from commentators has contributed to this issue and our inability to find zen as a people.

1. Story is reported on CNN/Fox News/MSNBC/etc.

2. "Now lets go to an expert to tell you what you should think." Not give you background on both sides without taking one or the other... we are going to beat you over the head with who is right and who is wrong. No middle ground.
That article doesn't account for lot size, which generally provides more value. It can be argued that a house surrounded on 3 sides by other houses with no outside area is less valuable.
> Being an enforcer or a rule breaker is very much dependent upon what the rules are.

This gets left out of so many conversations, and is a very important point.

The essay touches on it a little with the slavery bit, but I feel like the rest of the essay downplays it.
Yeah, and local property taxes, at that.

I mean, if I were designing a system to reinforce inequality in districts and schools, local property taxes would be first on my list of policies.
Exactly!. I was about to tell a similar story but yours is MUCH better.
I run an internal service that just loads (a filtered version of) the maxmind geolite2 db in memory using it's great C library bindings for perl and on top of that I fork (so memory is shared) a mojo server and it's able to serve millons of reqs per hour on a very small vm. Response time is not much more than a "hello world"...
I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes, but given that France is on its fifth republic in 200 years, it certainly seems to be capable of changing how its governed.
There's no prohibition to helping out illegal immigrants as long as you're not paying them for work whether in the form of cash payments, assistance with housing, etc. There are some wonderful charities that do this kind of work by the way.
> The reply from Amazon's support Twitter is the indication of a far larger problem in most business. Namely, it's easier to deal with the consequences of "mistakes" than it is to not make them.

In general I agree that this is a problem. But I don't see how this is an instance of that. I mean, how are they supposed to respond? "We will find the customer that scammed us and sue him. We will find the employee that checked this item and fire him."
Walmart doesn't sell 'seconds' as you might normally consider. They do often receive inferior quality merchandise from their suppliers, often under the same SKU. This is how they compete on price. It's like the mattress business, at scale.
> this might easily change

This is a perfectly testable hypothesis in the free market. You can start a museum and market it, and see if you generate a profit. If you don't, then you have to fund it yourself (pay) or hope a handful of others value it and pay.

> often without any direct money involved, e.g. around church or school

There's much money involved in organizing people and having venues for whatever it is they do inside those venues. In these cases, the people paying for these organized singing events are what you would consider a patron. Churches and schools aren't free.

Modern instruments cost a lot of money, lots of labor to produce.

As far as just some friends getting together and signing because they enjoy it, that's obviously free. But it's not a service that someone else is providing to you, that's just something you're doing because you feel is has value. What would be more analogous would be having a civic center where people perform and.... people pay money to enter the venue and be entertained.

Some people greatly value libraries and museums. I don't. Those people should pay for them. If from time to time, I might want to use their services, I would gladly pay. If there was a membership required, perhaps I would enroll if I felt the cost was worth the benefit. This happens every day for many other industries.

Anyway, the root of the point was that people don't value librarians so they don't get paid as well as programmers. This is true. If it wasn't true, they would be paid more. I know this really hurts the socialist sensibilities of people on this site, but it's the cold hard truth.
Hiring Senior React Native – Profitable Bootstrap Bay Area Startup
A few thoughts:

- https://4returns.earth/network/job-listings/ is in the regenerative ag space - lists some tech jobs if you search for them. (e.g. try https://4returns.earth/network/job-listings/?searchval=devel... )

- Conservation is only one area, and the term 'conservation' itself is a frame I've been more critical of after reading papers like https://www.uv.es/jgpausas/papers/Pausas-Millan-2019_BioScie... which have been making me think some of the problems we have might be more with abandoning land for the city. Another frame of thinking about about is how/where you want to live and go from there - I'm really questioning whether one should live in "today's society" - that doesn't mean going off-grid entirely but living in a way that's local/bioregional oriented..

- I'm skeptical of the tech-focused effort on only looking at co2 because it doesn't account for the other problem areas (google "planetary boundaries framework" to learn about biodiversity collapse/nutrient flows and how those are much bigger problems), but there's the airminers folks: http://www.airminers.org . Again, while this falls more in the tech frame I'm not sure I'd spend time on it.

- While I disagree with some of the recommendations around 'effective altruism', it's another path worth considering if your survival requires making money at the moment. You could say, work at a mapping or weather-related company spend then leverage the experience later on for more direct action. At the moment I haven't quit my dayjob yet but am taking an "Ecosystem Restoration Design" course (https://www.gaiaeducation.org), donated to various things, and participate in a study group around these topics (https://earth-regenerators.mn.co) and feel like that so far has helped in developing a perspective before jumping into anything.

- almost forgot, Patagonia's Action Works seems to have a really good platform for finding tech volunteering on environmental projects: https://www.patagonia.com/actionworks/
Despite its headline, I gave this article the benefit of the doubt. It had a lengthy intro, which I thought was gearing up to make a novel point. But then its core:

> Abstract appeals to “free speech” and “liberal values” obscure the fact that what’s being debated is not anyone’s right to speech, but rather their right to air that speech in specific platforms like the New York Times without fear of social backlash

So it's making the same old "but private platforms" argument, while ignoring that many of these "private" platforms have more power than most governments.

The argument probably does make sense for the NYT, which has always editorialized. If the trend stopped at publishers, there would be little concern - mass media has always sucked in various ways. (Remember when the NYT marketed the needless war against Iraq? The proper response is to stop giving it a stature of importance and stop calling it a "paper of record", but I digress)

But it's fallacious to extrapolate judgement at the small-independent scale to the overall societal trend. "Cancel culture" is a critique of the effects on wider society, especially now that everyone is basically at the mercy of commercial businesses beholden to outrage mobs. Arguing that it's just free association and social mores progressing sidesteps the critique by ignoring how those mores have become more constrained, and the resulting increasing polarization.
NYT story posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23931960
I know it's taboo to discuss votes here, so please interpret this generally and not as a cute attempt at recursive self-reference. I think it's actually germane and intellectually interesting in this specific limited context.

Aggressively non-comformist comments are the most reliable way to get downvotes on HN, but sometimes they result in massive upvotes.

Passively conformist comments are the most reliable way to get little to no votes whatsoever on HN.

Aggressively conformist comments are the most reliable way to get moderate upvotes on HN.

Passively non-conformist comments virtually don't exist on HN.

Supposing these observations are accurate, it's interesting to consider why they might be so.
If you work in SaaS, http://saastr.com/ is invaluable.
Huh, honestly it'd be "cleverer" to find a broken drive (that the OS wouln't even detect) and swap it into the enclosure. Then the thief can say it was defective, or the next buyer would, and there would be less of a chance of an investigation/change of policy.
I would change that "5 years" to "5 months" (or maybe even 5 weeks), and argue that you can just as easily be that "someone else" on a long enough time-scale (and I don't mean 5 years.)
You can be Indian and still be wrong about aspects of your country. In GPs case, he was generalizing too much about Indian universities.
> "...but I do want to underscore a really important point: almost everything in software is a belief - it is something we have experience about, it is something we have opinions on, but it's not something we have hard data on. In most cases, we just don't know. But we can find out. We find out through..."

This seems applicable to everything, almost, in this whole experiment humans have going on here on planet earth, it just doesn't seem like it. To see it, you have to have (at least) the ability and willingness to look.
They learned the lesson of the Cube so well, they created the 2013 Mac Pro.