skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll believe it when I see it. Maybe.

Don't get me wrong: I totally believe there is probably intelligent life "out there". And I hope they have traveled here and that we have found signs. But based on what we know (or think we know) about the laws of the physical world we live in, it doesn't seem likely that craft from other worlds have visited us.

Maybe if you consider that they might be unmanned probes it starts to become a little more plausible. But crewed ships, and especially ones that are meant for a round trip? Unless there are habitable planets a LOT closer than we think, or the aliens have made some amazing scientific/technical breakthroughs, it's hard to imagine. Maybe if the aliens are really long lived and tolerate boredom incredibly well... or have invented "suspended animation"?
The events are sure common.

After a contractor failed to complete a program to update and combine numerous IT resources for numerous departments the state of Minnesota brought a program called MNLARS in house.

Among the failures that ended up being super costly, there was nobody really in charge of the whole program, and many people who were decision makers didn't even know work was waiting on them making decisions / they didn't even know they had the power to make those decisions. In short nobody was at the wheel...

I don't know if there is a very clear term for that, but I really like your "ownership vacuum".
> "what the government can or cannot prevent us from saying (free speech)"

To my fellow Americans, please stop repeating this; it just makes us look uneducated. The First Amendment of the Constitution != freedom of speech; it's an subset of freedom of speech that happens to bind the United States government.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech:

"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The term "freedom of expression" is sometimes used synonymously but includes any act of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used."
Is it only me or is Notion's UI very confusing? Entries of the table look like links, but when I click they just pop out in a little text field non-editable with a shadow and don't seem to be clickable. I feel quite stupid to be honest...
Lots of great ideas here -- but in keeping with all top-vintage Paul Graham essays, he takes his best points to about 130% of their validity.

So I'd like to weigh in on this assertion: "To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong."

Not so. To be a successful scientist, you need to be orderly, fast and well-connected in finding all the rest of the Next Rights, once a few of your peers (or you) have opened up a whole new river of truth by finding the first right. (See James Watson, Ernest Lawrence, etc.)

You can see this in the evolution of practically every exciting field, whether it's subatomic physics, molecular biology, paleontology, etc.

This dynamic requires a fifth state in Graham's admirably simple 2x2 grid. We need to recognize people that can be defiant non-conformists when the moment presents itself -- and then work within the system to make the most of their second and third-order insights as the world embraces their big idea.

The concept of the brilliant, isolated, irritable genius is a mainstay of a certain kind of movie or novel. But in real life, the most effective disrupters are just as good at forming large teams that lead the charge toward the next right (once they've found their breakthrough idea) as in coming up with that breathtakingly strange new idea in the first place.
Before our modern understanding of cosmology, a serious question astromers asked is "why is the night sky dark". If there truly were stars/galaxies in every direction you would expect the entire night sky to be bright, as no matter which way you looked you would see a star; and the combined light of all of those stars should illuminate the sky.

As it turns out, empty space isn't dark, but rather illuminated by the cosmic microwave background. This suggests that the space between us and this boundary in space from when photons started to be able to move mostly freely is mostly empty. Otherwise this backround would either be over-shadowed by stars, or obscured by whatever stuff was obscuring said stars.

Of course, it is important to keep in mind the speed of light implications.
What was your process of creating a US company from abroad?

What was your process of making money while you were abroad?
Every (or almost every?) industrialized nation already had a patent system. The TRIPS agreement just standardized some aspects of those disparate systems across countries.
> does it seem like most of pg's recent essays are attempts to "poison the well" against anyone who might try to hold him and his peers accountable for their contributions to the sorry state of our society?

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.

I'm extremely loathe to blame specific individuals for the state of systems.

I do think that there is a broad limiting of discourse in the intelligensia in any particular circle. The metaidea is that certain approaches are the local way, don't question them; questioning bounces you to a different circle with its norms. Maybe this is just what happens, and people are noticing it more, but I'm skeptical.
I adore these images, and deeply respect the reputation risk in getting them.

I also believe that even if we found nothing at all, it would still advance our understanding of the universe as we could confidently say what limits there might be.
Go find a PDF of "Fundamentals of Mechanical Accuracy" by Wayne R. Moore, if you haven't already seen it. That book, along with George Daniels text "Watchmaking" are some of the top inspiring works on the mechanical arts in my collection.
Care Home Visiting Guidance
Anti-terror law and censorship used against green NGOs
Is it possible that those students were masters/PhD students? Then it’s possible that that would satisfy the TN requirements
> Namely, it's easier to deal with the consequences of "mistakes" than it is to not make them

What we're seeing is a widespread use of "fractional fraud".

Transactions and business lines that are 1%-5% fraudulent are unlikely to be challenged, but have a huge effect on profitability.

The best example I've seen is Bunnie Huang's deep dive on counterfeit SD cards [1]. Margins on SD cards are like 1%, so blending in defective cards at a 1% rate can double your profit. Another example is retail trade payment for order flow. A major broker-dealer was just sanctioned for front-running its clients.

As long as your defect ("mistake") rate stays below your customer's response threshold, you can keep doing it. It is impossible to overstate how important social norms are for policing this kind of misconduct.

[1] https://nostarch.com/hardwarehackerpaperback
When Choosing What to Believe, People Often Choose Morality over Hard Evidence
Poking into peoples' property for minutiae is also pathological, and plenty of Americans have horror stories about HOAs fining them for silly things like the height of the lawn not meeting regulations.

It's one thing if you can opt out of a collective pact by picking another jurisdiction, but local busybodies are so widely spread that land legally allowed to be developed even in a short but dense, traditional American style, is so scarce that it fetches a premium, so now there is nothing between the extremes of "quiet cookie cutter suburb far from everything" and "busy noisy neighborhood of tower blocks."
I'm sure car engines have similar tolerances.
Can a "remote only" company file PERM for one of its employees?
Moreover, by the conventional definition of democracy (government legitimacy derives from the votes of some subset of the population) all republics are necessarily democracies.
The Eastland disaster killed more passengers than the Titanic and the Lusitania
A bit off-topic, but whoever is interested in such during- and post-apocalyptic scenarios from sci-fi point of view may want to check the Seveneves book by Neal Stephenson [1]. One of my personal favourites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
The EU's "financial support" means that Greece's economy will be in slow growth or recession with high unemployment for decades. That will probably lead to unhealthy governments. They would be better off if they had gone through with grexit when they had the chance.
The article is Start-Class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Internet...

>> "A very basic description of the topic. Can be well-written, but may also have significant content issues."

That means someone wrote it up on a whim and no one's come to address prior art in a way that suits the standards of Wikipedia.
Just a minor correction: data I saw indicated productivity rose overall but was cut in half for parents. Of course, I attribute this to lack of childcare, which will return at some point.
For those with global operations, temporary assignment abroad is often a good solution. And sometimes, depending on the issue, another visa classification can be a solution, such as an O-1.
As a marketing person, I've learned the hard way over the years that I'm not qualified to hire outsourced development. I've hired about a dozen over the years, and only 1-2 have been a good experience. I probably gave myself too much credit for knowing HTML/CSS/WordPress and not more, thinking I was qualified enough. Only a good to great web developer has the expertise to spot high quality outsourced talent, and ignore the other 90%.

The fault is mine for thinking I had the skillset to hire in a field in which I'm not an expert. It's the same with any field, actually. Marketers bemoan all the time when companies hire a cheap, bad SEO, but you have to feel sorry for the hiring party that was making what they thought was a value decision, even though they were not a practitioner expert.

Zooming out, you can see how decisions are made at a massive scale based on the hiring party making the decision based on the sales team or personal business relationships, while not being the subject matter expert.
If you want to tax things to cover the cost of more people then it makes more sense to tax the people.
Although the story is from a different source, the discussion is over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929044
The issue is that people tend to use "pipeline problem" to ignore and excuse real issues with bias.

So it is not about rejecting the existence of a pipeline problem, it is instead to reject this as an excuse to ignore other real problems.

That is likely what the author was trying to say.
I just wonder if the scale of effort to colonize and support humans really provides a net benefit considering how successful remote programs have been.

There's so much you don't need to do if you're not sending humans.
Does it matter at all? Won't the item be shipped from closest amazon warehouse regardless of site used?
New DNA Study Lays Bare the History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
> Phishing and other scams prey on the vulnerable.

And it would be wrong to assume that "the vulnerable" would be a disjunct group. People, i.e. everyone, will at one point or another find themselves in dire straits. When desperate, the threshold of what seems like a 'good idea', a way out of misery, will be lower. People tend to believe what they want or need to believe.
Can they be voted out in the next election?
Maybe we need a new unit of measure: the flip. Similar to how SN came up with the bi suffixes for binary (mebi vs. mega, etc.). The flip would be a small flop.
Giving money in exchange for reforms seems like help to me. You're helping when you teach a man to fish, not when you just hand him a fish to only eat for one day.
Mexican + Spanish national here. I dropped out off college to do my YC startup. I'm aware TN visas require a degree, but as far as I can see that's not the case with O-1. Even if it's technically not a requirement, would you say this will significantly affect my O-1 chances?
It looks like Microsoft is already breaking a big promise with Xbox Series X
Thanks. From a quick scan of the site and their safety information page, it seems they do not handle payments between users like Airbnb does, or do they?

And since they require an upfront membership fee, has anyone here used Workaway? How was your experience?
The post reminds me of this: https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-d...

I don't agree in your main argument, which seems to be based on the idea that whatever makes you feel better is good. I, for one, prefer to read the news and watch the occasional clip online. It makes you better informed, which is essential for many things, including business and informed voting.

Trying to be happy all the time is overrated.
And yet this reasoning is exactly why the police keeps reiterating that they need more and more power, both surveillance, and the power to interfere without a criminal cause.

Ironically this is actually true. The question is to what level you want crime to fall, and if the answer is zero, then you best let the police shoot every last person without requiring them to have committed a crime.
I'm curious – if you lived in an area where a dedicated home office room would be prohibitively expensive, would you want a single-person office in a Regus or WeWork for yourself, close to where you live?
> Agile Methods: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly (Video) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffkIQrq-m34)

Thoughts on this one? I found the presentation to be somewhat mixed.

I found the initial comb through of the agile principles to be needlessly pedantic ("'Simplicity... is essential' isn't a principle, it's an assertion!"); anyone reading in good faith can extract the principle that's intended in each bullet of that manifesto.

The critique of user stories (~35 mins in) was more interesting; it's something we've been bumping up against recently. I think the agile response would be "if your features interact, you need a user story covering the interaction", i.e. you need to write user stories for the cross-product of your features, if they are not orthogonal.

I'm not really convinced that this is a fatal blow for user stories, and indeed in the telephony example it is pretty easy to see that you need a clarifying user story to say how the call group and DND features interact. But it does suggest that other approaches for specifying complex interactions might be better.

Maybe it would be simpler to show a chart of the relative priorities or abstract interactions? E.g. thinking about Slack's notorious "Should we send a notification" flowchart (https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint-4...), I think it's impossible (or at least unreasonably verbose) to describe this using solely user stories. I do wonder if that means it's impossible for users to understand how this set of features interact though?

Regarding the purported opposition in agile to creating artifacts like design docs, it's possible that I'm missing some conversation/context from the development of Agile, but I've never heard agile folks like Fowler, Martin, etc. argue against doing technical design; they just argue against doing too much of it too early (i.e. against waterfall design docs and for lean-manufacturing style just-in-time design) and that battle seems to have largely been won, considering what the standard best-practices were at the time the Agile manifesto was written vs. now.
I’ll continue to take karma point hits by insisting that HN stop posting paywalled content.
You're the victim if you didn't realize it was the wrong item within the return period, which is a lot more common especially among people who aren't as intimately familiar with the technical details

Plenty of people have been scammed on microSD cards, a common target for this fraud, because they didn't know how to properly test them and never pushed the capacity until after the return period.
The way Amazon runs things is completely inexcusable. If you can't order directly from Amazon and get a non-fraudulent product, then the whole platform is basically going to a flea market, having all the vendors turn their backs, shuffling product amongst the vendors, and sending normal citizens through to buy what they want.

Any traceability and trust the end consumer would have is gone. Amazon may be able to trace a particular product to a vendor, but that's of no help to a consumer wanting a consistent supply of goods. Amazon also doesn't show if a vendor chooses to opt out of comingled inventory, which would go a long way towards helping end consumer trust.
Peterson was an academic and decided to fight c16 because it became an an issue in his university and he disagreed with how their policies were going to in fact compel him to speech.

It wasn't as if he was sitting in a room somewhere looking for bills to fight compelled speech..
Stay put. It appears that you are subject to the latest proclamation/ban on the issuance of H-1B visas and further nearly all US Consulates are still closed and not processing visas except in very limited circumstances.
Ask HN: Profitability of a niche mobile app strategy in 2020?
There are plenty of niche categories--at least marginally popular--that have low quality app options across the board.

I'm new to mobile development, but am wondering if anyone pursues this as a strategy: Identify underserved category where creating a better mousetrap wouldn't be too difficult. Build, submit, repeat in a new niche.

I understand one is at the mercy of the app stores, but if the app is truly best in class I imagine some light promotion + organic store search would be enough to get the flywheel of positive reviews going. To work, the category would need to be small enough that new entrants are like to get a look, but big enough that some money can be made.

Has anyone done this or have a first-hand account of the viability of niche app strategy today? Any insight would be appreciated.
You don't scrap a 737 for some worn out parts.
Is there a single instance of a hundred millionaire/billionaire having a "real job"? With "real job" defined as doing something you'd otherwise not do if it wasn't for the pressure of having a place to live and food to eat.
Boy is this true. Thank you.

Lets say I also wanted to learn some new things and be employable if this venture failed... what would your advice be then?
And frightening. Such photos really bring home the Great Silence. All of those specks which are entire galaxies, and not the single slightest sign of intelligent life anywhere, ever. The marbles roll on just as they have for billions and billions of years and will go on rolling for billions to come, dead pieces of inert matter tracing out their gravitational trajectories and burning as predicted.
"Clinton received 2.87 million more votes than Trump did."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

I wonder why people think "the wrong guy won".
What specific technology are you referring to? I'm unaware of any Polynesians technology that couldn't plausibly been independently used tens of thousands of years earlier. The accomplishments of the Polynesians seafarers was primarily a matter of skill and oral tradition (something like 4,000 years of seafaring experience, not 40,0000.)

Their most important technology was sea-worthy outrigger canoes. Numerous independent canoe cultures exist around the world dating back thousands of years ago. While canoes 40,000 years old haven't been found, I see no real reason to discount the possibility. For navigation they may have used stick charts, although that's not known for sure and the Polynesians may have relied on oral tradition instead. Either way, these technologies or their functional equivalents were plausibly available to cultures predating the Polynesians by thousands of years. There is no evidence that the Polynesians were using astrolabs, sextants, or any other instrument like that, so the relative level of technology used by contemporary European/Islamic/Classical navigators doesn't seem relevant. They used Mark 1 Eyeballs to collect information and processed that information into navigational guidance using their brains, packed with experience.

Edit: I've been thinking about the matter of canoes some more. It seems to me that sea-fairing canoes would not preserve well; the earliest known canoe is from around 10,000 years ago and was found in a peat bog in the Netherlands. Peat bogs are well known for preserving buried organic matter. Conversely the oldest polynesian canoes found are only hundreds of years old. We know they were using canoes thousands of years before that because of their oral tradition and clear evidence that they were traveling in the area somehow during that time period, but archeological evidence for the boats is scarce. I don't think sea-fairing canoes are likely to be preserved for thousands of years, so I don't think the lack of archeological evidence for sea-fairing cultures thousands of years ago means much of anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesse_canoe

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4205625/
You have to click on the little link icon that appears when you hover
Hey Robbert.. Thank you :)

And congrats on your launch too. Wish you all the best.
This tool is extremely helpful while you wait for Apple to fix your laptop under warranty (and they should fix it under warranty). I'm glad to see Apple is moving away from the flawed design in newer products. I really liked the keyboard on my 2013 MBP. Can't stand the new keyboard design and absolutely despise the touch bar.

Related: https://joecreager.com/the-keyboard-on-my-2007-macbook-still...
Talking about measuring morality by how effectively it turns intent into outcomes misses the fundamental problem of determining the goodness or badness of the intent.
offtopic: this site breaks the back arrow (takes you to blank interstitial)
They're more easy to take one concrete step to try to change. How much that will actually solve remains to be seen.
And Obama kept these going or even doubled down. Regardless of your own political lean that particular area of bipartisanship is interesting.
This video by YouTube channel Leagle Eagle has a good short summary of reports from Portland by observers (like the ACLU) and then a lengthy debate about the legality of it (consitutionality, federal vs. state law, etc.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uglv-fV1CqI
Luckily, this is already pretty standard practice for airplanes.

I worry a little more about theme parks that don't do winter shutdowns or might not have done the full shut it down for the winter procedure with sudden lockdown orders. The regulatory environment is also sketchier.
Unfortunately people would not have gotten nearly as excited when seeing nothing, and the nay-sayers would have made this very clear.

These things are always as much science as they are politics, so the reputation damage would have been real.
I would agree to this but this isn't necessarily a blanket monetary policy of spending too much money across the board and is a result of political capture by the wealthy where it's used to keep fueling the infinite growth machine for the already wealthy.

I mean housing policy in itself is entirely political: weaponized zoning laws and the lack of new construction to match the growth of the country are a direct result of this infinite growth machine. Housing being considered "an investment" will further perpetuate this price inflation because there is a vested interest in not allowing property values to decrease which is what happens when you can build to match demand.