skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doctors want money, but that does't mean they're completely useless. I wouldn't want to perform surgery on myself.

I recently read "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong, which covers the evolution of religion and various mystical traditions in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. It's a really interesting book and one of the points she brings up is that there are many historical examples of attempts at mystical experimentation that end in madness. The teacher is supposed to be a sort of life guard.

Ultimately, the book made me even more skeptical of religion and meditation than I already was. Spiritual/meditative introspection seems like a risky and dangerous process.
Maybe, maybe not, but by like 5th grade most of them seem to have one regardless. Many younger kids have one. By 7th it's practically all of them (a smartphone, that is, though yeah, often an iPhone)

Our school assigns every kid an iPad. In Kindergarten. Good idea? I kinda don't think so, though it's been useful this year, of course. But it happens.

Increasingly parents have trouble letting kids wander the neighborhood on their own without a tracker/communication-device on them, and a smartphone's really good at serving that role. There are other options but kids want to have their smartphone on them, and as soon as you want them to be able to do one other smartphone-thing any other option starts to look kinda pointless.

(just relating observations of parenting in the wild, not my own parenting approach)
I do believe that.. to the point that I believe that we're following an emotional program and I'm quite worried that extending your biology without understanding of this side of your psyche will only lead to higher pile of people at the bottom of a bridge.

I'm open to suggestion and discussion but the 20-30 shift in experience may probably be a necessary part of the parenting cycle. And I quite regret the simple and deep joy of kids. Now (as I mentioned often here) I'm not in the best moods but so far no doctor or researcher addressed how to restore this happiness to agreeable levels.
Good Sales Emails by leading SaaS companies (100 great examples)
> USPS just gets more money from the government

My understanding was that USPS does not receive funding from the government. Granted, I'm not counting reimbursement for franked mail because that seems equivalent to the sender having paid postage like any other sender would. Can you provide a link with more info on USPS receiving money from the government?
Elementary and middle school students. Local school district is virtual for the 1st quarter, but we had made the decision it would be virtual for our kids until a working vaccine arrives or the virus transmission rate is under control.

Our productivity at home will be lower and I will have to relearn fractions, but we're going to make it work.

I am disappointed we didn't use the summer to better prepare by starting to teach the kids, but it seemed like none of us wanted to do anything related to school given what is happening.
Warming Greenland ice sheet passes point of no return
Inviting employees back to the office – if you dare
> If it's truly a bad business practice, it'll lose out in the end.

Many bad business practices only lose out because they're made illegal. Protection rackets are great for the ones running them. Although one could quibble that the police is the cheapest universally available protection racket that pushes out all the competition.
Me, without a doubt. I'm too old and busy to worry about configuring my phone or making sure that it's safe / clean.

I also buy it for my parents for the same reason.
Personally, this is so different from the way I think that I find it utterly surprising

Seven billion people on the planet. It shouldn't be surprising to learn that not everyone thinks the way that you do.

I wonder if it's an age thing. When you're young and have more time than money, tinkering with the technical hassles of your phone is worth it to save a buck or two. When you're older and have more money than time, you happily pay $399 for an iPhone if it means getting hours or days of your life to spend on other things.
This is a common argument, but it's wrong IMO

iPhone is not an Android competitor, iPhone is a Samsung/Huawei/LG etc competitor

Android competes with iOS

If I could install iOS on a Samsung device or Android on an iPhone that would be different

But I can't
Tooltip-Sequence v0.2.2
So, the core issue, it seems to me, is one of outcomes. Do we want a locked down future? Or do we want an open one? Do we even want to have a choice?

That last question is actually important - maybe "the market" (meaning whoever is positioned at time) should decide. Maybe "we" already have "decided" and the rest is just that decision playing out.

But I don't think this discussion is that useful without specifics. Imagine 10 years forward - Amazon, Facebook and Google all require locked down (you do not have root) hardware to access anything they store for you/to buy anything. Maybe you can still give your Raspberry Pi an IP and send packets, but interaction with any mainstream entity requires signing your traffic with a key on a chip. ("To solve identity theft" "for the children" "do you want the terrorists to win?")

Is that a world you want to live in?
U.S. National Debt Is Now over $26.6T
Not a parent, but fwiw even the fully grown adults I've interacted with are starting to show serious deficits in social skills after months of relative isolation. I've historically been on the socially awkward side, so its kind of refreshing to be the comparatively graceful one.

I don't know if there's evidence, but if this were to go on for years I could see kids missing milestones. Having gone to school with kids who were homeschooled without proper socialization for too long, I can comfortably say social skills need to be learned. It may not seem like much, but not knowing how to interact with peers comfortably is a serious problem, especially as you start to enter situations like interviewing for a job or trying to make friends in a new city.
Delivery is just something that's FAR more efficient in the markets

Why then do private companies like UPS and FedEx rely on USPS for deliveries to rural areas?
I agree. I even doubt why it'd gone to the first page given the original blog is already up and functioning.
I'm kind of thinking that this wouldn't scale. If some of the cattle have eye spots and others in the same area don't, the predators might be intimidated, or they might just say "that's weird, I'll hunt something else". But if all of the cattle have eye spots added, the cougars might just think "f it, I'm hungry".
I would think society would stagnat.
People in power would have time and a reason to fully solids it.

Japan went through a few centuries were innovative wasn’t allowed. It was seen as a threat to the ruling class.
What's even the point of mass FBI surveillance if our cities are just being let to destroy themselves anyway? If the point is for any type of enforcement then they're doing a really shit job. So bad that I feel it must be likely that these flights are for something benign.

I'm getting downvotes but I'm sort of serious about this. Could somebody enlighten me? If the goal isn't ostensibly to protect the people then what is the point?
You mean that you had a "combat robot" in the trunk? What exactly is a combat robot? Custom-built by you?
First, I embrace your choice to not go with a locked down, un-free device. That is entirely within the spirit of being a hacker.

Second, I very much argue that if there was no app store, consumers would pay 30% less. The app store and ecosystem provide something for developers, and if you remove the app store, the developers either do it for themselves, or pay somebody else to do it for them.

Of course, if there was meaningful competition, the fees might be less, or the value provided to developers might be more. But I doubt that prices would drop the full 30%.

I say this as someone who worked in tech distribution. Great things can happen when you cut out a middleman, but it's often surprising how difficult it is to replicate the middleman's distribution advantages.

All that being said, I'm not here to debate whether prices would fall 30%, 27.2%, or even 10%. I agree with your basic premise: tech-savvy people have less upside and more downside from owning locked-down devices.
We're in a tough spot because my wife has struggled with chronic respiratory infections and is in the high-risk patient population. But our youngest has special needs and remote learning can't provide the educational support he needs (though damn the teachers are awesome and creative and trying all they can).

First three weeks are remote for all students in my district, but we'll have some hard choices ahead balancing health and education needs. Seems so much these days is choosing between options that are all far, far from ideal.

Oh, and we live in Texas where 7,500 new cases/day are still being reported.
Texas, Dallas: Nothing ground breaking, but I'll provide my anecdote as a possible antidote to survivor-bias:

I have 3 kids (5,3,1). The 5 year old was supposed to start public school this year, but her pre-school opened up a private kindergarten and we opted in.

When the pandemic first broke, we pulled our kids out for 2 months and it was hard for us and them. My wife worked in the morning when I had the kids and we swapped at noon, and finished up work after we put the kids down for bed.

We tried following some sort of curriculum for the first 2 weeks, but it fell apart pretty quick and devolved into me throwing the kids in a wagon and walking around the neighborhood then going in the backyard and pushing them on a swing. Anytime I had a meeting in the morning or my wife had one in the afternoon, we'd plop them in front of the TV then struggle pulling them away from it afterwards (google wifi is great for deus-ex-machina internet outages...).

It stings having to pay an extra $15k / yr, but for our kids learning and mental health I'd happily pay double. In my humble opinion, our teachers don't make near enough for the service they provide.
> Yes, it's legal today but should we make it illegal?

IMO, yes. We make it illegal for someone to come into your home and take your stuff, which ends up with you losing control over it (you have no more access to your stuff), so it also makes sense to make it illegal for someone to decide to not allow you install or modify the stuff you have (again taking control away from you).

The way most of these platforms run is like buying something but by doing so you also give an implicit permission for the seller to come in your house and modify or even forbid you from using what you bought if they do not like what you are doing with it.

Imagine if you bought an oven and you could only bake specific recipes that the over manufacturer allowed. And when you complained you had others telling you "just buy another oven" (until all oven manufacturers were into the game because it made them more money - especially those who are also into selling ingredients - and you had no other options, except perhaps a few cheap models that had a tendency to explode every now and then and their only usefulness is to be used as skapegoats whenever "monopoly" is brought up).

And yes, i know the above comparisons aren't 100% fitting, software isn't a physical product, it is special, but it still feels very wrong to buy a device (be it a phone, gaming console, TV or whatever) and have no control over what you can install or even -in some cases- do with it.
I also enjoy Sowell's interviews on Hoover,

Peter Robinson is a great interviewer in my opinion and Sowell and him seem to have great chemistry. (The online/Zoom episodes coming out in recent months definitely lack this fluidity).

I would recommend the "Good Fellows" podcast series which i briefly described. I like most of them sorry I don't have specific episodes in mind.
While I'm sympathetic to this idea, one thing that I get hung up on is game consoles. I enjoy multiplayer shooters, and I like knowing that none of my opponents are using bots. So the fact that the console is locked down is part of the value proposition for me. It's a pro, rather than a con.
On the whole, students from private schools had significant grade inflation over previous years, often because the predictions were used as-is. This left fewer high grades "available" for state schools (in order to maintain the whole-country numbers).
We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)
Show HN: DisRemSQL interacting with MySQL servers using a discord bot
Hiring a private teacher isn't necessarily live-in. They could easily show up at 8, leave at 2:30, or vice-versa, where you take your child to their house for those hours. Edu-daycare.

We had multiple teachers in our social group reach out to us to set this up, actually and with the cost spread evenly amongst the participating families it wouldn't have been terribly expensive.
Your trades. They don't make most of their money from S&P 500 trades but outside of that and mainly option trades are big money maker for them.
Think they'll do well...but I really don't want my money anywhere near them - as investor or investee. Move fast & break things isn't the way to go in large scale finance. The debacle about their service being down during key moments proved that pretty conclusively
Sharks and Microorganisms: A Case of Peaceful Cohabitation
That's so interesting that your kids have had such different experiences. Do you attribute it to their personality or to the way their teachers/schools are doing distance learning?
Epic has billions of dollars and a lot of customers. Microsoft has billions of dollars.

There are a wide range of other parties that dislike Apple’s policies.

Why don’t they build their own platform with their own exclusive and attractive content?

I can see two options:

1. A full blown phone. Hard to do? Perhaps, but if Apple and a Google really aren’t competitive, then it should be possible to take customers away from Apple over the next few years, especially if your device has the games that teens want and can’t get from Apple.

2. Don’t start when a phone. Make a gaming handheld with exclusive content - Epic’s super popular titles, plus XBox streaming. Sell it for $200. Basically an iPod for games, done right. If Nintendo can sell handheld consoles it’s obvious Epic and Microsoft can.

Then just build this out with phone functions, and a great browser for SPA’s etc, leveraging flutter, and eat Apple’s lunch from the bottom up in classic low-end disruption style.

Bonus: have an open bootloader - bootcamp style so that enthusiasts can hack the thing.

#2 seems like they could have a product on the market next year if they wanted.

I could see this strategy easily forking the market into iPhones for productivity and Epic devices for fun, and causing both segments to improve at a greater pace.

Apple simply isn’t unassailable if people are willing to put in the sustained effort needed to compete with them, but to do so will take a similar sustained effort over a similar time period to what it took them to obtain their position.
We were actually previously using vagrant (-libvirt) for our CI, but moved away from it to this because vagrant does not seems to work very reliably when run in parallel. For example image downloading doesn't seem to have a filesystem lock, so one would succeed and the others failed.

In general, we wanted to be able to spin up our test VMs under docker containers to eliminate issues with differences between our CI shell-runners. Using libvirt based tooling makes that pretty hard. Calling to qemu directly, on the other hand, makes this easy.

There are some other benefits as well such as having direct console access which is not provided by vagrant, but can be very useful for kernel tests.
Google Stadia should ship 1TB disks filled with 3-4 games to Starlink customers.

Edit: these customers would be unable to use Stadia properly, because of bad latency; at least you can capture them as customers.
Shameless plug: https://code.golf supports J if you'd like to compete with cryptic line noise :-)

I don't claim to understand J, I just added it to the site.
The "walled garden" isn't really the issue most at stake here, it's the in-app purchases. To me, it's hard to argue against the benefits of having a one-stop-shop safe-and-secure place to download apps on your phone which contains all your personal information.

However, to me, it's hard to argue that Apple should keep getting money from you once you've established a loyal customer base and they are giving you money.

And as a not-so-crazy take on this issue, why isn't Apple insisting on taking a cut of, say, the check I'm depositing into Chase and just uploaded a photograph of it. It's revenue, it's in the app ... why isn't Apple taking a piece of that?
Yes, for the simple reason that if they don’t, it opens a loophole for everyone to avoid the 30% cut altogether.

Also from customer prospective, I feel more comfortable knowing the payment will go through Apple.
Take it from a former mathematician, the computer "science" students wouldn't either.
We are in the same situation with kids of the same temperament. The extrovert has discovered self initiative play and done some creative things. The introvert discovered roblox and picsart and is now more social than ever before. It has sort of worked out for them.

More to your question, how would you study something like that? Previously home schooled students who had limited social interactions?
the solution is conceptually easy: carve the app store out of apple, and make it a separate company

if there is no monopoly, then little will change.

if there is, then consumers will win.
> They worked for me and they prescribe them because they work - or can. They aren't THE answer, they are AN answer - for some people.

I'm glad you got a constructive result! Thank you for clarifying, throwaway_pdp09. As with many medications, efficacy is specific to (in this case unknown) personal aspects of biology. If they knew how to test for who would be helped and who wouldn't be, the drug therapies could be targeted to exclude the patients who would be harmed.

> Some unfortunate souls will develop chronic persistent pain that will need them to take physical painkillers for a long period or even their whole lives, but these should be the rarity. Same with antidepressants.

The striking differences between those and the drug studies reported in Whitaker's book are (a) the percentage of subjects who obtain negative results; and (b) the rapidity and irreversibility with which these drugs induce dependency.

Whitaker details and examines the ruse peddled by drug companies - that depression and bi-polar are the result of "chemical imbalances" which are "restored" by the drugs. If only it were that simple! But there is no evidence to support that global advertising myth.

In fact, the drugs induce upregulation of neurotransmitter receptors within weeks, which is responsible for chronic dependency, confusion, and tragically in some people, psychosis upon withdrawl. For a better, more detailed and nuanced response, read the book (which quotes the studies).
New releases books about .NET technology
There are a ton of great suggestions and tribal knowledge in this discussion, be sure to mine this for all its worth.

My approach to this is recognize why its happening.

Its not the "dizzying array of choices" that is causing the indecision, its your thoughts about the array of choices that is causing the indecision.

The "dizzying" aspect of this is what you're brain is adding to the neutral array of choices.
If you continue to think about it this way you'll be stuck in indecision.

Recognizing that is the first step.
I feel like the core point of several arguments ITT skew towards the age old anti-trust laws without explicitly referring to it per se.
Just to make a vast generalisation with no hard evidence: I wouldn’t be surprised if it often came down to age. When I was younger, I had the desire, and more importantly the time, to keep everything I used as open source as I could afford.

Fast forward a decade (or maybe 2) and while I am still very pro open-all-the-things, I am happy to pay more for a controlled environment to run things I rely on but don’t care to spend time on maintaining and configuring.
That doesn't address the issue: those who would can't.

You don't lose anything if you don't want to.

You should have to keep doing what you already do.
> Why, if they want to carry news from other countries, should they also have to carry Australian news?

Because the law says so, because the law is very deliberately crafted as a mechanism to force Google to give money to Australian news companies.
>Nope. If a person "owns" a piece of hardware, it should be legal to jailbreak it without any consequences (except perhaps lack of support for 3rd party software) and companies that sell products that build off of jailbroken products should be 100% legal.

All of those things are true today.

The question was: >Should closed hardware (that owns its entire stack) even be legal to sell?

And the answer to that is: obviously it should be, if you care about competition and innovation. The only people that disagree with this are the tech people who have had problems with Apple's business on ideological grounds for decades (people like Richard Stallman and saurik).

But outside that one particularly small constituency, there's no good public policy reason to actually make it illegal, and plenty of reasons not to.
Essentially, it's a win-win for Epic.

If they win the lawsuit they will (probably) be able to have more control over how they want to distribute their iOS apps.

If they lose, they won't have to deal with iOS anymore. Free players cost money too, and it's possible iOS is not so interesting to Epic with the %30 Apple cut.

Also, since their business model is based on microtransactions, most of their revenue must come from whales. These are committed players who will most likely go get their Fornite fix somewhere else. Specially if Apple wins. Most gamers will always side with Epic here.
I heard once that the Eastern and Western religions have swapped definitions for meditation and contemplation, so that Christian contemplative prayer is analogous to Eastern meditation.
A Twist on Schrödinger's Cat Paradox
While the concept of mandatory carry may be politically hard, the question is a very good one.

We know how condoms protect against STDs. Perhaps it should be mandatory for high risk avenues where young adults congregate, such as music festivals and campuses, to sell condoms?

The argument could easily be made that easy access to condoms would increase risky behaviour in young adults, thereby negating the obvious positive effecs. The parable to bicycle helmets and face masks should be clear.

Luckliy, this has been studied! Turns out, sex drive is dominated by other factors than accessibility of contraceptives.

So that's an example where multiple studies were conducted, under varying circumstances and in multiple countries, before anything was made mandatory by law. Sometimes public health policy works. Sometimes it's mostly posturing.
> the same personality/kids/temperament they had pre-pandemic.

I would not stop there when considering the topic. Socialization is a process, and its goal is growth, not stagnation.

That being said, it's also gradual, making it difficult to measure over a few months.
For what it's worth (I've helped create dozens of pods), it's sometimes good to be really specific about what your pod is (not to be everything to everyone) and then post about it in your local facebook parenting groups. I'm also happy to help get the word out if you need support. I know tons of parents looking for pods:)
Nothing what you say has absolutely ANYTHING to do with you being locked out from ever running your own software on Apple devices.

This is a completely false argument you're putting up - you can HAVE all of those protections while STILL having the option of replacing protected software with less safe one.

Please stop peddling this false argument.