skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm saying it is a long running conspiracy. We lost freedoms with the global war on terror, we have lost freedoms since then, we are going to lose more freedoms in the very near future. I can see the direction we are heading. And no, I'm not cheering it on as you seem to be.

> If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years.

What's poor about their job? I think they have done an excellent job. Most people defer to experts over their own experience. Imagine, one's own experience not carrying any weight with one's own beliefs! So, they have done an excellent job.
World War II R&D Spending Catalyzed Post-War Innovation Hubs
The difference is the welfare system is joint-owned and joint-controlled by you, a citizen.
The book Doing Capitalism (2nd edition) does a good job of explaining the innovation process at this national interest level, and how it proceeds down to the private sector where it adapts to business models. Highly recommended.
I imagine the situation is country-specific and I’m not aware of any good studies that try to measure it. But anecdotally, as a university student around 2010, I noticed that the standards expected of undergraduates in old textbooks, exam papers and theses seemed higher. Maybe it’s just that these sources gave me the false impression of an ideal student, but a lot has changed in recent decades. As well as the growth in the student population, by 2010 it was pretty common for “full-time” students to work part-time as well.

Hannah Arendt was probably an exceptional professor in 1955, but I wonder how this compares to a final exam for a first-year political science class at an exceptionally good university today? https://twitter.com/Samantharhill/status/1297545059466907650
Is the Pentagon not regular? It seems like it is from pictures…
> You are free to work or leave.

the underlying assumption is that these companies _still_ would want people to do work (as that is how they make profit). So by forcing these companies to take workers on at a less advantageous terms, the workers gain more.

Of course, in reality, these legislations don't have the right effects, because companies' profit motive is stronger and more creative. After all, legislators' motives are to appear good to their electorate, not actually achieve results where as companies' motives _is_ to achieve results.
> Maybe the point of having legislators is to make decisions that improve people’s lives, and so maybe you need someone whose primary loyalty is to the people (or at least, to the people that vote) to synthesize the advice of the experts?

Loyalty and expertise are orthogonal, and loyalty without expertise is fruitless. Good intentions are insufficient for good results.

> Or to put it another way, maybe you need an expert in figuring out what the public wants to synthesize the advice of the other experts?

Sure, “understanding the public interest” is one of the domains of expertise involved in public policy (whether it's the most critical for politicians to have personally as decision makers might be debatable, it's certainly not one in which they are typically undersupplied with advisors whose notional role is providing expertise; indeed, these usually, for legislators, significantly outnumber advisers with any other even notional domain of expertise other than law and dealing with other legislators.)
Depends on how they recieve it.
Liability is not sufficient when a sufficient power imbalance exists.
I think increased dead rate for the elderly largely is because they remain mobile for longer.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2020/07/28/road-fatalitie...:

“The number of people over the age of 70 was 1.5 million in 1999 while there were 2.3 million early 2019, an increase of 56%! Partially helped by e-bikes (which are not more dangerous than ordinary bicycles) this much larger group of elderly people cycles more often and further, which is unfortunately reflected in the fatality rate.”

Technological improvements that have helped increase safety of e-bicycles for the elderly are weight decrease because of battery improvements and lower centers of gravity (mid-drive electric bicycles are becoming more common). Both help decrease the number of deadly accidents not involving other traffic.
And pee?

... and I know the technic and I know it requires more time. And the people I know applying it .. were only partly succesfull. With the result of shit around. And pee.
The EU is nowhere as culturally unified as the U.S is. So the pool of resources available isn't as large.

I'd also not be so quick on the regulation front. Looking at the (lack of) environmental regulation in the US right about now or the absolute astonishing cost of any medical emergency, I'd say they went too far in the other direction.
Generally if it's "take it or leave it" and the other party refuses to negotiate with you then there is a power differential at play.

Whether or not it actually affects you as an individual is a different story.
For me A Deepness in the Sky is his best, and one of the most memorable novels I've read.

The Peace War is a fascinating exploration of "what if this one thing was possible?" and all its terrible consequences, but Deepness grabbed me much more as a story.
People are social and don't like change.

We are being forced to change and take the 'physical' out of the social.

What's not to like?!?!
It's a cultural thing. Some people can't imagine living wihout a car, others can't imagine using disposable diapers, others can't imagine not forcing women to wear a veil. Or, for example, is your trash production a private affair, or is it a communal responsibility, subject to scrutiny?

If you're flexible you can set up your outlook however you think is best. And there are of course prevailing mindsets, depending on where you are. For me, Vauban seems closer to ideal than a lot of other places.

I think often people, who find themselves closer to mainstream, find themselves judged, or fearing judgment, from the marginal "progressives" (and vice versa). I think it's normal for this mainstream-marginal tension to exist, and it's independent of whatever the distinguishing opinions are. If the tension is getting bad, it's just a symptom of people having trouble socialising; capacity for variety is a major societal health indicator. Doesn't really say anything about the actual topics discussed, like eco-friendliness in this case.
Summoning Salt & Bismuth do great videos about speed running
Sure, but it's not that severe. Meth detectors are rare, and frankly so is meth usage.
Outside of development there are very few jobs that have a competency test as part of the hiring process. Some industries have "continuous testing" through certification, and some have tests of things like physical fitness, but in general it's assumed that if you're applying for a role then you're capable of doing it. The economy isn't collapsing under the weight of corporations hiring the wrong people all the time.

I suspect there are technical tests in developer interviews because there can be rather than because they're actually a useful way to appraise someone.
That is the problem with soft skill interviews, in hard skill interviews there isn't much debate whether the solution is correct or not so your typical programmer can administer them correctly.
Sure, that's a good point and I absolutely agree that Wikipedia will neither be unbiased nor always very accurate. My idea was simply to refute the statement that somebody actively controls the world's knowledge in intentionally malicious ways, which would imo be worse than unwillingly reproducing your own biases.
I don't think the point being made was that you can't have a remote workplace, it's that you can't just find the place in the world that has the cheapest labor and assume you'll be successful.
These blunt instruments are all we have had for a century with no definitive date on replacement we have to keep legislating like they are never going to happen since they may not.
Well you have to divide the energy generation by the population. China has 21 times the population of France, so building 12x as many nuclear power plants isn't much. And France would need to build at least 10 right now, if they wanted to keep their ratio of nuclear power production.
Just a technical conversation.

I have hired dozens of engineers and have never failed do find great hires.

What I mostly do is just a conversation, which I call “geek conversation”, just like when you meet people at meet-ups or tech conventions.

With a simple talk I can first make the person relax, this allows me to have a great impression about her/his personality, passions, interests, personal roadmap, attitude towards problem solving and etc. Whenever we ponder on a more technical subject I throw some questions that might help me measure their technical level a bit, but what I care to measure is mostly awareness on things, nowadays software engineers need to be, above all, great at researching, for most roles they must have a broader overall knowledge and be able to creatively join the dots with a ton of pragmatism. I don’t care if they are able to implementing Dijkstra's or to modify a Trie in front of me, although having awareness of what problem these things solve is a good indication of some seniority.

These interviews take a lot more from me, I have to properly learn about the candidate and the role before I enter the interview and that requires people skills and real interest in the product, and of course I am not able to interview 40 candidates to find just “the best one” (which is ridiculous and something I actually don’t believe actually exists).

Yes there are roles which require the extreme algorithm coding skill, but those are a minority and it is unfortunate if your company is treating every candidate as if they were going to do that.
The original PC as a home computer seems a little weird given all the other entries, but I’ll allow it. (I started out with a ZX81, then a Spectrum, and sort of missed out on the Commodore ecosystem, but have dipped into it occasionally).
Will We See a Quantum Computing Revolution?
Well, or functions not -- sadly. It seems possible that the reason Mr Volpiatto ceased development was because the burnout he had close brushes with before finally caught up with him.

My impression is that most open source projects that do not habitually burn their creators are either strategic assets to a handful of multi billion dollar companies, in which case at least core contributors get a normal life and see some actual upside for their work; or part time labors of love of talented individuals who have either not hit the scale where they would need to engage with a large number of users or who are very good at saying No.

Even the rare super-elite developers like Zig's Andrew Kelley who manage to get full-time funding for their work via patreon/github don't seem to pull in more than a fraction of what they'd make in normal employment as a single person for their whole project.

Open source started out as asymmetrical warfare against The Man (personified to Microsoft) but by now has been mostly co-opted into a form of voluntary self-exploitation to enrich mega-corps.

I wonder if there is a way out of that.
The important property of a dedicated packaging fee is that it scales with the actual disposal costs, and thus creates incentives to use less packaging or packaging that is easier to dispose of. A flat tax like VAT doesn't change incentives in any way.
> I created excellent team

Lots of people say this however I've never seen anyone come up with evidence that their team actually is excellent.
Utrecht removes road to be ringed by water once more
Wasn’t it always like that? If someone actually believes in non-orthodox ideas will simply face the backlash, follow the path anyway and later be recognized for the extraordinary accomplishments if these ideas turn out to be worth the salt.

It’s much better to give a hard time to dedicated people than to risk giving an easy time to charlatans.

Since you can’t really judge novel ideas, you can make the process just hard enough that charlatans drop out to some area where they can get fame and money for cheaper.
> You shouldn't be blaming bad investors. They pay for their decisions with their, or more often somebody's else, money.

> Blame the collective ownership of means of production, which in form of public companies have dominated the Western world for the last 30+ years.

Can you unpack these two points? I don’t understand. It sounds like you’re saying “don’t blame the owners (because investors ARE owners); blame the owners”.
Why do I have the feeling this camera will fit in a phone in 3 years?
What metric are you basing this determination on? Is it purely about “big tech”?

It seems from my perspective that most European countries are pretty decently innovative, in particular with a variety of companies offering advanced engineering and technology services.

Is there actually a lack of innovation, or is it specifically a lack of “innovation” in the “there is no Airbnb so Europe sucks” sense?
This site is fascinating, thanks!
If you hire people with no Java skills to work on Java and the team doesn't deliver value in time (most team doesn't deliver value in time), then you will likely get roasted by your managers and possibly fired/demoted.
Show HN: Bash-Tiasft – There is a shortcut for that!
I agree, this article is well explained but it's not MCTS.
To be more accurate, this is Monte Carlo, and here it is applied to search the tree of game turn possibilities and doing stats on it. But Monte-Carlo Tree Search is a "reserved" name of a specific algorithm, involving more than what is done in the article : some kind of caching, and some optimisations.
In fact, it would be a great addition to this article to do a part 2, and explaining how to extend the code to do MCTS.
I imagine this two way trip would be a better MCTS presentation than the classic ones describing the algorithm step by step in one shot.
Thank you for making my point.

What I said was that "movement" was a building block of life and your response was "no, cause if you do polka-STYLE movement while trying to lay bricks, you'll FAIL".

Right, but what they both have in common is movement. The fact that you felt the need to add style is exactly why I'm correct.
This week I defined some aliases for the commands I use the most at work. Problem is, despite having defined the shortcuts, I continued to use the commands in the old complete form.
So I built this tool to help me build the new muscle memory for them!
Put another way, our already overpaid highnesses want higher and higher salaries, without having to work for it. So it goes both ways.
Also, you can bring back hard plastic packaging to grocery stores, they are supposed to handle it.
A manual recount was performed, and during the manual recount election workers "found" a bunch of ballots

This is exactly what happened with the Santa Clara County (CA, USA) transit tax a few years ago. It initially failed by several hundred votes (2/3 majority was needed). Over the next few weeks, they kept "finding" additional ballots, and every batch had disproportionately high Yes vote percentages on the measure (although all other races were unaffected). Then the second they reached the needed threshold, they conveniently stopped finding ballots.
Extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454958
> A huge social experiment on homeworking has been done (and ongoing) and results are in.

Sort of? Unfortunately this experiment also has included forced isolation and social distancing, and for parents where schools and day care have closed, a further experiment in what happens when parents have to simultaneously do child care and get work done.

I expect it's hard to look at what's going on now and really see what prevalent home-working looks like in normal times, when there isn't a global pandemic going on, people can still meet co-workers when necessary, and friends for normal social activities, and parents can still send their kids to school and get in a productive day of work without constant interruptions from their kids.
> Disposable nappies are one of the few technologies they decided to use.

As they don't huddle in caves without tools, the Amish use lots of technology.

They actually use fair amounts of modern technology, it's just that the things they reject are pretty central to modern mainstream lifestyle.
I know it seems utterly incomprehensible to Americans right now, but it actually is entirely possible to have a populace that is at large capable of participating in government with quite a bit more critical thinking than the bipartisan shitshow you currently have going on. Not having shitty education (especially when it comes to social issues) or a culture that's proud of its political ignorance/apathy would probably help.

Not everybody has to be your idea of an intellectual to be a part of a democracy. And not only is that okay, it's precisely the point of it being a "democracy".
All of mine were audio/transcript only. No video. The biggest problem in Gates' depositions is his body language and posture. Not answers.
I stopped reading exactly for that reason. It's like a designer toyed around with annoying things to make it somewhat "special", which distracts from the text and its message.
The central question of your original comment seemed to me to be: "We’re all ok with this?"

You've followed up pointing out that the actual central question was "So, why is it so hard, when confronted with facts about the consequences of your decisions, to really think about the meaning of your actions".

As I said in the my first reply, I think it's pretty clear that people in this discussion thread, and most people frequenting this website, are not OK with this.

And in response to the more recent comment: plenty of people in this thread are demonstrating that they are thinking about the consequences of their decisions.

But as I, and plenty of others here have pointed out, no amount of "thinking about consequences" will change the fact that the consequences of an individual's actions in insolation are profoundly different to the consequences of the same action co-ordinated across the entire society.

The voting system works (to the extent that it does work - and I must say where I live, in Australia, it works much better through being legally compulsory and therefore not subject to manipulation of eligibility+attendance), because the cost is low (take a few hours out of your day once every couple/few years) and the payoff relatively high (feel you have a stake in your democracy/society, influence policy, celebrate the victory if your candidate/party wins).

Other forms of co-ordinated activity all have equivalent factors of cost vs. payoff that lead to the intended outcome.

So I guess there's your answer: to solve this problem, there needs to be a cost vs. benefit formulation that leads to a widespread change in behaviour.
Five under my belt. None with video.
Yes. A sense of self determination is important to human functioning.
Nothing glorious :)

It was a VPS automated deployment system that could deploy both windows and linux to various datacenters around the world while also installing some 50+ pieces of software (as configured).
You keep repeating that DNA doesn't have a strong role in determining what a person looks like. Yet everything we know about development including twin-studies seems to suggest that in fact it has strong role.

For example, this scientific article published in Nature opens with this:

"The human face is a complex trait under strong genetic control, as evidenced by the striking visual similarity between twins."

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45885

These researchers who are _specialists_ on this field have no doubt. Why do you keep casting doubt on this?
It is comments like this that really shows how HN is sinking to Reddit levels. FUD is spreading like a Corona virus on a tourist ship.
One could say that C has a different type for each string size plus the joker pointer to char.
There's lots of reasons why individuals themselves might want or not want to go back in the office.

What is more complicated is why they want to take everyone else with them. My own employer is letting some people come back in the office but not insisting on it.

And all of this in the context of the trilemma: try for zero virus, accept total spread with associated medical costs, time off, deaths, and potential long term complications, or delay until the vaccines are ready and being deployed.
> The implication being that without such laws, enslavement of children, poisoning and maiming of workers, and other horrors would be totally legal in America?

Well, yes, without the laws that banned those things, they would be totally legal. That's what “law” means.

> Perhaps the real problem is the mess that occurs when governments recognize and try to control abstractions like corporations to protect people from liability.

Liability is as much a creation of government as corporations are.
I think a big reason software engineers earn more in USA is that they use more technical interviews. In Sweden I doubled my total compensation going from a typical software engineer job to Google. And from what I've seen you would double your compensation doing the same thing in Denmark. The salaries for normal jobs are still ok, but doing those technical interviews is the fastest and easiest way to get paid really well. And you don't just get a higher entry level salary, Google has very generous raises so I doubled my salary again the next few years just doing my job coding and staying at Google.

So my starting salary was close to what typical software engineers earn as a seasoned senior, and then I got to twice that within a few years. That is why I care about technical interviews.
Google search is controlled by large (Chinese) botnets. Given that Google has >= 90% of the search market, the ball seems dropped right there. For instance, a botnet includes thousands of sites including xxxcommitted, pornsextube, qastack, thecouponholiday etc

edit: thanks for down vote Xi
I know what a decade is, however I believe that it will be bad in less time than decades, plural.
I don't see how that question is relevant, and you could easily turn it around and ask: Have you ever been so poor that you would have been willing to work for less then minimum wage, but couldn't find work due to the minimum wage?
> I've also had many small edits on technical subjects (particle physics and supersymmetry) reversed by people who were self-professedly not experts,

I'm all for having experts determine the notation to be used in their respective fields...

> in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turkeychicken" to the average German.

... but that also means deferring to ornithologists on the question of what birds are called, instead of relying on your lay understanding based on eating turkey meat. If chickens were named after their meat, they might be called "Hähnchen". But of course chickens are mostly kept for their eggs, so we end up with the opposite situation where the average person treats neuter "Huhn" as synonymous with female "Henne".