skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies that are in industries which generally attract the attention of regulators because they're doing something new, exciting and potentially disruptive won't want to create unnecessary scope for controversy that will lead to a regulator feeling the need to clamp down on them (this shouldn't happen if the controversy is unrelated to the regulated activities, but people are irrational, and it does). Conversely, an activist employee will know that they will have a far more effective platform to spread their message if they do it in an environment that has more regulatory exposure, and as a result greater potential for media coverage.
A common joke in the home-school community is: "I was worried my kid was missing out on the socialization of public schools, so I beat him up and stole his lunch money".

People have very anachronistic views of home schooling. A generation ago it was fair to believe to was mostly ultra religious people wanting to shelter their children. These days, a large chunk of it is people that have no faith in public schools to educate their children, and people who want to avoid political influences that are creeping into public schools.
10% sugar?! That's bananas.
Yep - close enough for an overview.
Only one way to find out, home skillet!
> Anything that can be neatly siphoned off from that more complex imperative world, should be.

No it really shouldn't. Just look at JS. It's a complete mess. And HTML would get there in a short time if they were to adopt "anything that can be neatly siphoned". The problem is that data binding is actually quite complex. I have seen data binding done 10 different ways in different languages and they all had their flaws. It will be very difficult indeed to come up with such a standard that is actually being used universally.

If it is not, what sense does it make to add it to the standard? But for it to be used a lot, it would actually need to solve most problems in most businesses for the forseeable future.

Given the fact that the Web apparently still hasn't figured out quite how UI development is supposed to work (judging by the 1 new language feature, 10 new frameworks, 100 new libraries developed each day), it will be a very poor idea to start baking half baked stuff into a standard.
Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600 is a hardware setup for such scanning.
There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive.

That said, the right strategy is to focus on hammering the virus to zero quickly through old-school epidemiology techniques. If we had done so early, the problem wouldn't be this bad. It would have been expensive, but less-expensive than our present path.

The bright side of combating an exponential foe: Once you start to win, winning gets easier.
The sugar content is ten percent of the weight of the dough. It's crazy when put in such clear terms. I bet a lot of the bread we eat here in the US is similar, unfortunately, if not worse.
It wouldn't be Constitutional to prohibit voluntary associations of teachers. However there is no Constitutional requirement to allow collective bargaining.
> Sometimes it feels like software development has devolved into a sea of posturing and marketing oneself.

I've been saying it for a long time, but the reason that this and other problems (like high developer burnout) seem like especially bad problems that the world of "software development" is facing is primarily because they're especially bad in the GitHub culture (and as a consequence of that culture), and the developers who are experiencing the worst of it are part of that community. Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.

Much like follower counts on other social media sites, GitHub's contribution graph and profile timeline should have never been public. They should have been neat features of your personal dashboard that you alone are able to see when you're signed in—providing some form of encouragement à la the Seinfeld hack and to help you manage your work—but not for others' eyes. The gamification of "social" leads to degenerative behavioral patterns.
I'm not a fan of this framing of industrial tech. In this reading, all of our industrial technologies seem to be part of some Grand Narrative of Progress, and these tenets are Holy and cannot be violated.

> That those same crops would not be able to feed us if they were not also protected from pests, who will ravage entire fields if given a chance. That whole regions used to see seasons where they would lose large swaths of their produce to swarms of insects, such as boll weevils attacking cotton plants in the American South, or the phylloxera devouring grapes in the vineyards of France.

This depends on where and when you're looking at the world. The Indian subcontinent has ancient references using poisonous plants as pesticides. Pesticides are also more necessary in today's large scale industrial farming rather than smaller plots that were more common in the past.

> That before we had electricity and clean natural gas, people burned unrefined solid fuels in their homes—wood, coal, even dung (!)—to cook their food and to keep from freezing in winter.

Many cultures would use charcoal to light furnaces, which was a lot cleaner than biomass burning (the Kotatsu is a good example in Japan). Other cultures would heat bricks and bring those in to heat their homes.

> sewing clothes by hand, since store-bought ones were too expensive for most families

What? Specialization and commerce definitely existed before mechanization and industrialization. Indeed, the average person really didn't have access to a variety of clothes and often mended their own clothes, but they didn't hand sew everything. The Indian subcontinent had a long history of textile production.

> laundering clothes in a basin, scrubbing laboriously by hand, then hanging them up to dry

What? I _still_ often hand wash clothing. It really isn't that difficult. People in many parts of the world hand wash clothing to this day.

> That automobiles are a lifeline to people who live in rural areas (almost 20% in the US alone), and who were deeply isolated in the era before the car

People didn't live in remote areas most of the time. I'm fact, many countries still don't dump large amounts of energy laying roads in areas where only a few would live. This is really an American phenomenon that comes from a long dynamic of rural and urban (Senate, three fifths compromise, electoral college) power sharing.

Some of these are true. Plastics really have made certain applications, especially those hygeine related, much cleaner and cheaper. Vaccines have absolutely enabled more humans to live with fewer diseases.

But this reads like an ode to Western, namely American, development. That everything must be developed this way because there's No Alternative to Western Industrialization or otherwise abject poverty and deep inequality.
Could you explain? How would looking on something now prevent you doing something related (WINE) later?
I've heard for years that it was floating around, and saw some torrents that claimed to be the XP source, but I've never downloaded it myself to find out.
> Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine

Part of this is just fear talking though.

My family was very concerned about the virus for the first couple months. Then people we knew in our age demographic (20s-30s) started catching it. Invariably it's been a day or two of fever and a week or so of cold symptoms.

Absolutely people who are at elevated risk because of age or pre-existing conditions should lock down to whatever extent they feel is necessary.

But the general feeling here (central Iowa) seems to be more and more that the lockdown is far worse than the virus.

Because of that, we get raked over the coals pretty well daily by everyone in the media.

But our schools are open, our universities are open, and people are more or less back to normal life. Cases are stable. Deaths are low and mostly restricted to the very old. We seem to have settled on an acceptable (to us) middle ground. I'm sure businesses are still hurting, but very few have shut their doors permanently. I get the feeling that's a very different picture than many places.
Europe has plenty of 'sweet bread' with sugar in similar quantities. I don't begrudge resistance to industrial 'bread products' but this is just a performative headline.
> We have been in lockdown since early June and went from 700 cases per day to 15 per day so it has technically worked.

Victoria hasn't exited lockdown. How can you say it worked?

> Suppression is a good strategy when the world is devoid of a vaccine.

I have heard the argument that suppression is a good strategy because a vaccine is soon to be approved.

If we can't develop a vaccine I would hope suppression wouldn't be the strategy.
I would be curious if someone ran a health economics analysis on lockdowns.

The UK sets the value of 1 quality adjusted life year (QALY) at 20-30k GBP. Basically, if a new medical technology costs more than that they say “no, it’s not worth it” (though there are exceptions).

It shouldn’t be hard to figure out the cost of the shutdown and divide it by the number of QALYs gained.
Documents from Starlink suggest the usable footprint of the satellites is a bit over 500km wide, so roughly the size of Washington. Further, Starlink only reported positive results from inter-satellite relay testing very recently ("first successful test" about four weeks ago).

Combining these, and considering that they are operating multiple ground stations within Washington, I don't think inter-satellite relay is a factor at all right now.
The selling point: If you want to live in a big city for its job and cultural opportunities but can't afford it, then this option is 10X cheaper.

That makes this option very attractive. Especially if you choose a town franchise that fits who you are. You could join the Tech Town if you are into technology. Or Scientist town if you want to do University research. Or the Middle Ages town if you want to ride a horse and a visit a Blacksmith.

And if you change your mind on who you are in a few year, and one of the other 20 towns near a big city look attractive, you could move there. Say you want to party in Mini-Vegas town for your early 20s but then move to University town in your early 30s to get educated. That could be possible.
All Engineers are now expected to be part of a 24/7 on-call rotation
Hi everyone,

I know this topic has been raised and discussed many times before. The search results for HN provide a sample of those threads and discussions. I'd like to start another now, perhaps bringing the most recent developments and experiences to bare on this issue.

I've worked at a mid-sized SaaS company for about five years now. The company has been around for about a decade. Until recently, there has never been any sort of mandatory on-call expectation towards engineers. While our infrastructure has evolved over the last decade, and our teams and infrastructure specialists have followed those moves, there has been a relatively small contingent of on call engineers and SREs that have dealt with issues in off-hours.

Within the last few weeks and without any real prior discussion, management decided to roll out a 24/7/365 on call rotation, that's mandatory for all engineers.

There are espoused reasons for why this must happen, including: we need to improve up-time, "we want engineers to own their code for it's entire life", we need to reduce the burden on the existing small on-call group, or "because all the other companies are doing it".

I should mention that this new expectation comes with uncompelling compensation. We were told (not offered, in such a way that might be open to discussion), that for every week on call, we'd receive a personal day.

When layoffs happened because of COVID uncertainty, it was because "the market" was changing and forcing our hand. But when there aren't enough volunteers to fill the on-call group, it's not a problem to be solved by managing incentives and relying on market solutions, it's a problem where the solution includes elements of coercion and bullying from the top down.

I'm wondering what other people think and how you've navigated this issue in your own working life.

Thanks
I was wondering how to get emacs to display this.

after a maze of twisty passages, all alike:

$ sudo apt-get install fonts-3270
$ fc-list | grep 3270
... 3270Narrow.otf: IBM 3270 Narrow:style=Medium
$ emacs
...
(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "IBM 3270 Narrow" :font "Medium" :height 140 :background "black" :foreground "green")

voila!

for comparison, my normal setup is:

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" :height 140 :weight 'bold :foreground "black" :background "cornsilk")

I would like to see other good setups
True, but re-introducing lockdown doesn't help anyone afford anything. More like the opposite.
The West has very dense development. Most of the US isn't like that.

Where I live, land has to be 1/3rd the value of the home. Want a bigger house? You have to have a bigger plot or the bank won't lend the money because the value ratio is off.
Again, why do you keep making this personal? It doesn't matter if it's a problem for me or not, if it's not relevant to the business then you don't discuss it. If a topic seems risky then you don't discuss it. This is fine for the vast majority of people and companies; because they're reasonable people working in inclusive and neutral companies.

Those who can't be reasonable and insist on irrelevant politics in the workplace should should leave. That's quite literally what this policy and exit package is for. I don't see the problem. In fact those creating such a problem with it are precisely those who the policy is referring to and they should find another employer more suited for them.
People who are going to overstay at four years are going to overstay at two years so this doesn't really solve the problem while what it does do is punish the innocent.
Your point that existing systems tend to conceal complexity and embody tested strategies is well taken.

I would just point out that incrementalism is not at all guaranteed to converge to sustainable solutions. Decisions which at one point in time appear unambiguously good often lead to ambiguous outcomes. Industrial ag caused yields to skyrocket, for instance, but it also hooked us on expensive fertilizers, damaging pesticides, and land use practices which destroy long-term soil viability.

Before someone calls me a luddite this is coming from someone working on crop optimization. I'm not saying technology is bad, just that it nearly always has unforeseen consequences, and that we can better judge risks vs. benefits if we're mindful of the presence of unknown unknowns.
No, Bananas is 53%
Great citation. The title “An Elementary Introduction to Information Geometry” is a little silly. This is just a short introduction to information geometry, I don’t think there is anything more “advanced” floating around out there.

(I don’t know why the culture of pure math persists in this. I throw it in with proof by intimidation. Makes pure math types sound like they’re stuck intellectually/socially at being highly precocious 14 year olds. It’s not the individual, it’s the culture.)

Chentsov, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. There’s a result that’s worth being generally known by the data analysis community. The article looks like it gets there more clearly than others I read a while ago.
What are you doing about it? Farming?
I haven't eaten a Subway sandwich in a few decades. I don't know what all their "smeat" is made with (probably mostly water by weight) but I know it didn't provide any real fuel for work. That stuff is about as fake as food gets.
It worked because less people died. Some people (myself included) are more concerned with human lives than opening businesses faster.
> The holocaust started with forceful relocations.

Removing people from their homes is a little different from sending them back home when they enter your country illegally.

> Literal genocide is now being practiced at the border.

No, it isn’t.
Not quite. Bananas have a lot of sugar, by weight. The Subway bread is something like 8%. Bananas are more like 12-16%.

People are often surprised by the proportions of ingredients in restaurant food anyway. The reason that restaurant food tastes "better" than home cooking is often down to added sugar, salt, and fat.
I only eat subway a few times a year, since you can find them anywhere. 2am in a hospital, 100 miles from anything else in a little gas station off the highway...

The bread is often the worst thing about the sandwich. It can be dry, or soggy, burnt...the people that ‘bake’ the bread don’t really care much about it and often can’t take it out when the oven is done because they are making sandwiches.

On the other hand, my favorite place to get a sub sandwich buys bread from a bakery in town, and when they run out of bread, they close for the day. Why have someone who’s not skilled at making bread, make mediocre bread?
If the affluent are forced to use the public school system, the schools in their neighborhoods would be awesome and the schools down the road in the less affluent part of town will remain just as bad as they are now.

Look at Saratoga High School and Lynbrook High School, in Silicon Valley not far from Palo Alto. Huge funding. Donations of equipment from local tech companies. Fundraisers run by rich parents. Great facilities.

Yet schools 20 minutes away in the less nice parts of the Bay Area are still terrible.
I think their lawyers deserve a promotion for covering all their bases.
My personal favorite counterfactual/alternate history is the idea of MS keeping their Xenix product and shipping Windows for it. Windows 386 Enhanced Mode was effectively a hyper visor, as you say, and mostly avoids BIOS calls. Unix software like Merge or Simultask allowed running multiple DOS tasks using Virtual 86 mode. Windows apps as Unix processes in a real memory protected OS would have made the 90s so much more bearable.
Windows 10 can control the Linux VMs traffic because it can control Hyper-V.
Ah, good old penny pinching corporate behavior! Reminds me of Taco Bell and their “beef”. How much meat needs to be in a product to be meat? More than 35%! https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_813185
Not that it detracts from your point, but actual meat is mostly water by weight.
A lot of people that shouldn't and wouldn't have died are dead. Even more are unemployed, starving, homeless and in severe distress as a direct consequence.

I sincerely doubt that it would amount to a net win, after everything else and all the externalities get factored in (it's never done unfortunately)
I'm genuinely curious what "excellent online classes" look like, especially for early elementary school. My second grader in Seattle Public Schools isn't learning a thing (except for how to troubleshoot MS Teams).
> With industrial literacy, you can see the economy as a set of solutions to problems. Then, and only then, are you informed enough to have an opinion on how those solutions might be improved.

Yes, they were solutions - but often enough, solutions which created negative externalities (e.g. pollution) which were not accounted nor paid for when the solutions were adopted. That's not an argument that we should necessarily dump any of these solutions today because of these externalities; rather it is an argument that we should acknowledge their shortcomings so that we can be open-minded about proposed replacements.

> A lack of industrial literacy (among other factors) is turning what ought to be economic discussions about how best to improve human health and prosperity into political debates fueled by misinformation and scare tactics. We see this on climate change, plastic recycling, automation and job loss, even vaccines. Without knowing the basics, industrial civilization is one big Chesterton’s Fence to some people: they propose tearing it down, because they don’t see the use of it.

The author seems to have some bogeymen in mind that aren't referenced. Does the antivax crowd qualify as "industrially illiterate", by the author's definition? Sure. Is supporting hemp as a replacement for petroleum-based plastics akin to trying to resurrect the ivory trade? No. Is promoting mass-transit replacements for private automobiles (at least, in cities) akin to bringing back rivers of horse excrement in city sewers? No. Is promoting self-sufficient farming that shuns monocultures (see i.e. The Omnivore's Dilemma), where possible, the same as advocating for the starvation of billions? No, it is not.
I don’t want the ability to modify things and make them better because they already aren’t great...
There is only anticlimax :) The ‘executive’ screener was kindly about helping me sort them into a line of individual trays and then back into the luggage and didn’t show the slightest curiosity about any of it.
I think the point is that you can choose your own granularity, and that it tries to make things fast no matter that choice.
Ok I just want to say I love that you took my statement literally.
Why would it feel harsh? He’s giving the most employable people in the company a huge bonus to leave.
The affordable housing is not in Tokyo but outside the city with a decent commute.

Also, Japanese national debt is 258% of GDP. I don't know how much incentives are put into housing but I got to imagine the government is spending it everywhere.

The housing is also built poorly and houses are rebuilt every few decades.
You don't need to add anything to the global JS object to create a web component. It can be completely isolated and untouchable from the document's scope, except for registering a html name for the component, so that you can reference it from DOM/HTML.
Good question. Most people are focussing on the natural gradient and making it as efficient as SGD. But some have been exploring if we can introduce inductive bias in the function space rather than the weight space, using IG. But it is still quite a new field.
the article skips a lot of things that I would consider to human industrial literacy. only thing, that explains human development is a bbc documentary by james burke called connections. then you'll see things like the plough that transformed human lives.
It isn't shipped on macOS, and the Homebrew version of Git has it packaged separately.

I fired it up on a Git export of a Fossil repo here, and it's missing features of Fossil's web UI timeline view:

1. Cherrypick markers

2. Diff arbitrary versions (it shows only diff from previous)

3. Branch coloring

4. Hyperlinks to produce new timeline views: click author to get list of commits by that author, click timestamp to get a new timeline surrounding that point in time, etc....

5. Integration with other web UI features. For instance, you can create a Fossil wiki article attached to a commit from Fossil UI, but you can't attach a GitHub wiki article to a Git commit from gitk.

For another, Fossil has a feature to produce zip and tarball downloads of particular versions, which have links in the commit info page, which means visitors to your project don't need to clone the whole thing and roll it back to that version manually to get a single version. That's integrated into the Fossil web UI timeline: click a version, click Zip, done.

6. A modern browser fits its platform and offers more UI affordances than the mid-1990s Motif-inspired Tk. (Better copy/paste behavior, font rendering, zooming, native controls, etc.) Web UIs get a lot of angst these days, but like them or not, they're native citizens of the host platform these days in a way that Tk is not.
The problem with such attempts at a 'rational' explanation of why one or the other approach works better is that we are talking about an irrational issue. It's easy for 30-something people with no preconditions to think they can rationalize themselves out of a lockdown... but the moment their parents and grandparents start dying, all of a sudden all rationality goes out of the window.