skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If it is true that you cannot experimentally determine the impact, that's a pretty good reason to never try UBI.

Ok, so we should never try anything related to macroeconomics? Let's also never change the tax rate ever again.
This may be a very noob tool for this game but it has served me well and even though I'm guessing most people know about it, just sharing it for reference:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth
If remote learning is leaving a lot to be desired where kids aren’t really getting much benefit academically and it’s stressing people out, is there a possibility to pause education for a year and resume a year from now?

Now, I know there is no guarantee there will be an effective vaccine, but if not we may learn enough whether heard immunity is enough by then.

Graduating a year later for everyone from K- to-be-seniors in Uni may or may not be much of a big deal. Lots of people take a year off before uni...
Naturally? Maybe not, but many societies have decided to form governments in which their citizens are ascribed those entitlements.
The direct effect of the minimum wage is to make certain low-productivity jobs illegal. Consider that for a moment: a person with limited skills and/or needs is simply prohibited from doing low-productivity work regardless of desire.

The counter-argument is that many workers do not have a choice; they will always accept wages vs nothing, but have no power or ability to negotiate.

With a minimum wage we've made the decision as a society that, in order to prevent worker exploitation, we will also eliminate certain classes of work. Some of this work does vanish entirely, while some of it reappears in the shadow economy through untracked cash payments or self-employment.

As with all policy decisions there's a messy balance here and we're arguing mostly over where the line falls. I do wish there was a cleaner way to protect against monopsony (higher minimum wages) while also providing good opportunities for low-skill workers (those who are very young, very old, have physical or mental impairments, etc).
Awakening the Eye of Shiva
As someone that deals with a chromium-based codebase everyday, i dont think this is a good idea at all.

Unnecessary overcomplication on the codebase, making it more difficult to understand. (Rust and C++ are complex beasts)

The only thing i could think of, is to replace the tools that are mostly in Python.. But this will be a lot of work.

I guess maybe Google wants to employ good Rust enginneers and need to have some "playground" for them.

Swift on the other way, will have native C++ interop, and soon will give the ability to manage the memory ownership the same way C++ and Rust does (not just defaulting to ref-count)..

Once Swift have those properties we will have one more good contender in the same arena as C++, Rust and Zig.
> The victim's family were determined that the BBC show pictures showing the extent of his injuries and quote, in full, the racist tirade he was subject to during the attack.

Sorry, I'm having trouble parsing this sentence -- could you elaborate? I think my confusion is centered on the word 'determined'.
Who are these mom and pops that are hiring extraneous workers? If they can get rid of a position, they probably already have.
Ok, thanks for the correction.
Well, that wasn't very concrete. How about this: can you give an example of a linear-algebraic fact that is more easily shown by reasoning about these diagrams than by just using the numbers-moving-along-wires interpretation to immediately turn it into regular equations?

For example, the only thing I can think of is maybe (AB)^T = B^T A^T.
I know that in economics it is difficult to do proper studies hence the "dismal science", but my understanding is that most economists agree that minimum wages don't work right? So why is it still pushed? Shouldn't we "listen to the experts"? Besides there are other tools like the EITC.
This removes "New Toyotas" from my list of potential next vehicles, though it's likely just a matter of time before all new vehicles have a direct link with insurance companies.
Great way to ruin a relationship is to insist that every petty squabble gets resolved before anyone can sleep, leading to a cascade into permanent equilibrium where tired, angry people get mad at each other and insist that nobody can go to bed.
We will have to agree to disagree.

I’m American and all I’ve ever seen from Iran is people chanting for my death and the death of the people I love. I was born in the 90s and had no bearing on foreign policy.

If sanctions prevents Iran from accomplishing those goals then I personally will consider that a good thing.
Things don't need to "keep growing." The nominal value of the market can continue going up even as its real value goes down.

Hypothetical example:

Today, SPY is 339 and DXY is 92.82.

One year from today, SPY is 500 and DXY is 45. Is this valuation higher or lower than today's?
> Europe [has] done so well in the crisis

UK, Sweden, Italy, Spain, and Belgium all have had more COVID-19 deaths per capita than the US. And France has a rate nearly equal to the US.

UK, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, and Netherlands all have worse case fatality rates than the US. And so does Canada. (But, this may be because the US has done more testing.)

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/05/8993658...
Progress Report on the Coronavirus Pandemic
> We created Filecoin because the amount of data humans generate is exponentially increasing, and we need more efficient ways to store and access it.

I don't think Filecoin can be MORE efficient than some of the larger, current systems.

I actually think this statement is misleading. It should say that Filecoin's goal is to offer storage options that are distributed (hence redundant), protected from censorship, and possibly removed from absolute control of a single large corporation.
You need to answer "who frees it" in Rust, too, it just doesn't allow you to screw it up.
Your thesis has an implication that is readily checked:

If living poverty makes people more industrious, then people who grew up in poverty should have better outcomes than people who never have.

And that's pretty well proven to by false. In fact, there's a name for all of the negative effects of living in poverty that perpetuate a life in poverty: the cycle of poverty.
If it's a treatment that is required for the patient to survive it will generally be available & free. E.g. getting cancer treatments here will be free & almost certainly expensive in the US (even with insurance they will find something the insurance doesn't cover, and/or will charge you for stuff like ambulance rides).

There may be some rare exceptions where you'd be able to pay a lot of money in the US for some experimental treatment not yet available in the public EU system but this is the exception not the rule. What you possibly won't get for free are non-critical treatments.

I will give one declaimer though that I live in Germany & the healthcare system is not in the same quality/extensiveness throughout the EU (the German system is among the best).
TINA -- There Is No Alternative [to stocks]

Outside of BTC, gold, and housing in some places, there really aren't any other choices. Government bonds are 0% or negative.
No Coca Cola? No Jarritos? No Chaparritas? No Joya (De Naranja, Pi~a, Durazno, Uva, Mandarina, Fresa, Toronja, Ponche, Raiz, Manzana o Limon)? I drank all that crap In the 80s and I am not fat. I do have root canals and implants galore.
yup they helped a spy not get killed ....
I'll answer the question for my state of Michigan, which is one with a governor facing partisan backlash over her decisions:

> - Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective?

That's how it's been handled here. We went through a phase of virtually absolute lockdown this spring, loosened restrictions this summer, and locked a few things back down again (bars were especially bad). The governor also ramped up mask mandates as we learned more about their effectiveness.

> Do the "extraordinary measures" have to be proven effective than doing nothing?

Not sure exactly what you mean here, but the regions that have done nothing have seen worse results.

> Has anyone announced what metrics we're even tracking to determine "effective"?

Number of confirmed cases, number of tests administered, percentage of tests being positive, number of deaths. The last metric is the one we really care about the most, but we can mitigate it by tracking leading indicators. Nothing more than statistical theory at play here.

> How long does something have to persist until it's no longer an "extraordinary situation"?
> Are the "extraordinary measures" persistent or limited by time, risk, etc?

Michigan has a phased approach based on various metrics and indicators: https://www.michigan.gov/documents/whitmer/MI_SAFE_START_PLA...

I would love to see this sort of prudence for other crises.
Cars have been so well-built for so long that car companies doing this crap with data (remember that Ford's outgoing CEO talked about monetizing driving data) should cause people (that care) to just stop buying new cars. Bonus: you don't have to agree to forced arbitration for any defects you encounter!
Some context: In Germany one would need to earn around €135k (about $160k) annually for a monthly net income of €6.1k. You would have to pay around EUR 45k in income tax (incl. "soli"), 3.4k "church tax", 5.5k in health + care insurance, 7.7k pension insurance, and 1k in unemployment insurance.
I think he meant US deaths because his source is a list of WWII deaths by country. That is actually fairly accurate: 170K direct, he assumes ~2x if you count indirect, so ~400K which is indeed approaching total US WWII casualities (460K or so).

Even if you don't count or differently count indirect deaths, I'd still say going from 0 to 170K in 6 months with no end in sight definitely constitutes "approaching". We'll get there before this is all over, for sure.
The reasons company do end up with experiences like this is because they optimize for what they can measure and unfortunately user discontent with such experiences is often delayed or hard to measure.

Large companies which have a diverse user base in the hundreds of millions make decisions based on how a particular change affects the entire user population. The larger their user population, the more diverse their user base is and the harder it gets to cater to the needs of each type of user. The folks commenting here are a vocal minority, an important one given many people here are probably early adopters and also have the skills needed to build a Reddit competitor, but it's hard to see the reactions of this minority on a dashboard. A problem worth solving IMO but non trivial.

Typically initiatives like this come from a team within the company who's objective is to improve a key metric, in this case let's say user engagement. Some individual in the team probably spotted the trend that users on the app are more engaged than users on mobile web browsers. They then launched an experiment to test getting users over to the mobile app. Many users who end up on reddit via SEO probably don't know that reddit has an app and on seeing this end up downloading the app which makes them more engaged with reddit. Overall on the dashboard this shows up as a win where user engagement in the enabled group is up compared to the control and given that they give users an option to continue using the web app there is not a significant user drop. At this point, a decision needs to be made on whether to ship this change or not to ship. Folks making this decision do understand that it might be annoying to some people but the data in this case overwhelmingly supports a ship decision. They talk about it, mention their reservations, but eventually make a decision given the data and don't think about it anymore. They also don't have to feel the pain as most employees have the reddit app installed and don't see this again and again.

The key thing to know here is that there are lots of incentives in the company to make this decision a ship decision vs a no-ship decision - the data, the success of the team, the success of the individual who pioneered this change but there is not enough evidence or visible push from users to not make this change. Let's say there are some customer reports for this but unless they reach a very high volume no one is going to notice it.

Posts and discussions like this are actually a great way to get your word known to companies. This will probably stir a conversation in the team that made this change and hopefully bring out some change in the experience. Don't expect it to go away but maybe they will remember your preference of not wanting to use the app.
~70% of Indians are still farmers vs ~2% in the US. Would you recommend India adopt UBI before they discover the tractor and 68% of their country becomes unemployed?

What about the seamstresses destroyed by the invention of the sewing machine?

Forgive my harsh tone - but this is such a false line of thinking "Technology X will destroy job Y" that has been around for literally hundreds of years, that it deserves condemnation as it bares no reality in history or economics.

The self driving truck is no different than the sewing machine.
The government does have the power to regulate what you do with your body when your body interacts with the public. Cigarettes are rightly banned in enclosed spaces and shared public spaces. Alcohol is rightly banned if you combine it with operating heavy machinery. I agree that drug use should be decriminalized (complex topic), and that the outright banning of sugary products is a dumb idea.
What they do have though is a large number of data centers all over the world with backbone internet connections. By turning each of them into a ground station they will have an advantage.

SpaceX is going to have to create ground stations all over the world at sites with good view of the sky, get redundant backbone connections to them, and continuously pay for those sites. Good views of the sky rule out downtown locations in major cities due to skyscrapers. Outskirts of cities will likely not have the infrastructure for those redundant connections and will have to be permitted, and installed.

The Amazon data centers are usually already at ideal locations, and are effectively self-sustaining financially already instead of being an additional cost.

I don't think any of Amazon's existing products can provide them an edge, and Starlink has quite the head start in orbit, but Amazon does have a huge head start on the ground.
> This will be the case as long as we have monetary policy based on the idea that "100% employment is the apocalypse"

Can you share where you are deriving this from? I don't think monetary policy is based on this idea. I think it is based more on managing inflation and economic growth, with employment impacts being a side-effect.

> It seems like it is accepted as fact that 100% employment would lead to hyperinflation

I also don't think it is that 100% employment would lead to hyperinflation. It's more that full employment might imply inflation has taken place, meaning that a basket of goods/services might cost more (in terms of number of Dollars). But maybe I don't understand the argument here?
If I'm squatting 250 lbs normally, body weight isn't going to do jack for me.

People choose the first option because they weigh risks differently. The risk of permanent health damage as a result of coronavirus disease in my age bracket with no pre-existing conditions is effectively nil.
From an European perspective: You are asking for a lot of trust. Meanwhile, you violate any trust by not complying with GDPR. That's an honest question: why should I grant your closed source application access to my network, if you aren't even respecting my privacy (rights) on a fundamental level?
It's like sticking your foot in the door on the small level, except translating it to the big picture, where spending a paltry few million on a custom iPod could lead to billion dollar contracts in the long-term.
What specific long-term gain will we achieve with that short-term sacrifice? Sure we can keep most gyms closed for several more months, and that might marginally reduce the spread of the virus for a while. But the virus is now endemic and will be with us essentially forever. We have to reopen gyms eventually, and then we'll be right back where we started. As long as the curve has been flattened sufficiently and the healthcare system isn't overwhelmed then what are we really accomplishing by waiting?
I think another good move here is to ban the use of cartoon characters to promote unhealthy food. It's outright targeting of the population group most vulnerable to this marketing.

In Chile they implemented regulations on the packaging of junk food and they yielded great results. They apparently saw a 25% reduction in sugary drink consumption in the first 18 months [1].

[1]: https://www.eleconomista.com.mx/internacionales/Consumo-de-b...
Low- or zero-prep junk food is also incredibly cheap. When I see comparisons done it's usually ingredient costs of healthy food to full-price junk food costs, but that's not how poor people shop for junk food. They go to Taco Bell when the tacos are like 60¢ each or less, through promotions or coupons. They buy Totino's frozen pizzas eight at a time, on sale at half-off. They buy giant bags of store brand sugary cereal and pairs of 3L bottles of store-brand soda, again, on sale. Costco pizzas (they are so cheap on a calories-per-dollar basis, for zero-prep hot food) and bakery items for the enterprising slightly-less-poor who can scrape together the annual fee. Whichever chips or snack crackers are on sale. Off-brand pop tarts—holy crap those are calorie bombs and very cheap and you wouldn't believe how many kids have a couple of those for breakfast most every day. And so on.

Even relatively-healthy-but-not-really-healthy frozen meals can't compete with the outright crap. It's so very cheap.
Is the box labelled "Almost 200 pieces"?
I've thought about a similar question: what happens if there is no minimum wage? If people are already struggling when being paid the minimum wage, what happens if business are able to lower it even more? Yeah I get the dynamics of supply demand are supposed to work here, but it just feels like at some point it's not worth people's time to work for such a low wage and they just give up and go on the dole.

I also wonder if in some perverse way, a minimum wage does some harm to workers. Basically the thinking goes like this: companies that are looking to hire labor at these pay levels don't really need to compete for the labor because they know all of their competitors are going to be also paying the minimum wage. The resulting effect is stagnant wages that never go above the minimum wage because everyone knows they only ever need to pay that.

Anyway, I support concepts like the minimum wage which are well intentioned, it's probably just time we reevaluate how to help low income workers achieve more financial security.

PS: didn't read the article, just wanted to get my thoughts out there real quick while on lunch break.
The parent said "no one is entitled to anything". I take that to mean "neither capital nor labor is entitled to a return". It's probably also useful to scope this conversation to a certain context: "in a free market, no one is entitled to anything". This is a sort of hypothetical scenario since there are no perfectly free markets, and a completely unregulated market is very likely not a desirable thing (evolutionary forces aren't stable and stability is a prerequisite for sustained prosperity, security, etc); however, it's still a useful concept to guide discussion.
If you add American's median household healthcare expenditure (~$8,200) to Australia's consumption, America's consumption is still 20% higher.

> I mean Australia beats the USA by any quality of life index out there.

I don't think it's worth it to get into an argument about which country is "better", except to say a lot of indexes are designed to advocate for the creator's goals rather than as a useful comparison. E.g. your linked ranking uses "the share of women holding seats in national Houses of Assembly". Is that really a useful comparison point for quality of life?
I expect that the next school year will be a virtual “gap” year. As the author illustrates, anything we do with remote learning is just wishful thinking.
For it to be basically unlimited inflation would mean there is an unlimited amount of cash and capital and capital in the system. That seems on the surface improbable. It strikes more as one of the formulas has gone off the chart and someone is making assumptions.
As was widely reported at that time, the three letter agencies were among the largest customers of NeXTStep, the software that forms the basis of the professional operating system that Apple later acquired to replace the original unorthodox (and barely functioning) software that Jobs hobbled together with a motley crew of hackers while running Apple during the DOS era. Enterprises of all kinds that had the flexibility (or pressure) to think outside of the box went with NeXTStep because it allowed totally custom applications to be developed in record time (using things like Interface Builder, today part of the visual layout in Xcode). It is totally unsurprising that they would turn to their long time partner Steve Jobs for help with a mobile solution and that he would do it for free to eventually sell of more technology to those long time customers from before he sold NeXT to Apple and became its iCEO.
I believe what commenter is suggesting is that the notion of "fairness" provided by UBI is too simplistic and easily fails to uphold that principle under any amount of scrutiny.

By simply asking the question "Who will pay for UBI and who will receive it", the degree to which it's "fair", "just", or "equal" becomes obviously nebulous
Home Office responds after password displayed in government building window
It's unclear whether all of those soft-drinks would be as successful as they are if Coca-Cola didn't open up that market though.
I've also come to think this in recent times. Take the modern web for example: created largely for the sake of ensnaring and exploiting those who use it, and constantly reinvented with additional complexity to the benefit of the resumes of those who develop it.

But it isn't just the web. Even a modern TV is full of additional bullshit complexity that makes life worse.
So your saying that
people are dying from cancer due to covid?

So it’s fair to attribute those deaths to covid then.

-sarcasm
Sure, but don’t expect other people to follow suit. They will hire private teachers and remote home school to get ahead.
The First Nginx for Good Hackathon
This September is the first NGINX for Good hackathon. Winner gets their project funded
Not as many as all of them, though.
I disagree...

It's the same thing as saying "the n word" to me. You're still telling someone the word and it shouldn't matter in this instance, because they're reporting on what was said, written, or done.

Context and intent matter. If a single word causes so much outrage, you need to look at who exactly is getting offended. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of black people don't find offense in it being said at all - again, if you give them the context. Just telling them "BBC guy said the word!" is a bit disingenuous.