skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a former lawyer, this makes a lot of sense to me. America in particular has an insane number of lawyers. The bar exam isn't actually that hard to pass (look at the pass rates for native English speakers, they're high) and there are 100s of law schools, so the market is flooded with bad lawyers looking to scratch a living. This results in a lot of bad lawsuits being filed, shoddy legal work that bears costs long into the future, and a general legalization of many aspects of business that probably often doesn't need to happen.

In addition to the all of the bad legal work, the best lawyers also often go to the "white shoe" law firms. In America, these law firms hire out their legal capital to corporate world that engages in beating down consumers and competition, which is resulting in an increasingly monolithic and sclerotic economy.
Initially, CDC recommended against face masks for fear of N95 shortages (in retrospect a mistake because non-N95 face masks can reduce the spread of virus without impacting the supply of N95 masks). The more recent shifts in messaging are likely due to our evolving understanding of COVID-19 and (sadly and hopefully temporarily) due to political considerations.
Missed opportunity: deep Deep Learning learning...
life was described as a miracle but facts like that make it even more so.. how organized processes emerges from this HF mess is .. surprising.
The docs are used for data into the advertisement systems.

I've heard on the grapevine that several fortune 500 companies are on O365 because Google wouldn't disassociate docs from data gathering, even at the level of high touch high paying customers and they rightfully consider their internal documents to be part of their IP. Microsoft says "sure" and flips a secret "don't even gather stack traces on the server" flag for these customers.
> Similarly, I don't love the "lean startup" approach of trying a bunch of stuff quickly. If you pick a good starting point (big market, competitive differentiators, etc.), and spend years at it, you're bound to have some success. Just due to the sheer fact that you're willing to commit more of your lifetime to solving that problem than anyone else is. That's what worked for us at least

This is what my thinking has shifted to as well. Play long term games instead of trying to make a quick buck.

If you're trying to do something very innovative, I understand why the lean startup method is advised so you don't waste a lot of time. But if you're going into an existing market, I'm not sure it's the best approach.
>it theoretically makes sense to level entire mountains just to create more farmland or to build slightly faster highways because it will pay back over hundreds of years

Is that not what we are doing, in the US and elsewhere? Creating massive debt, the proceeds from which are plowed into real estate development via cheap loans, infrastructure stimulus bills, etc.
It's not exactly breaking news the US by leads the world in GDP - still almost double China despite having a fraction of the population.

Per capita the US is high but not quite at the top - but almost all of those are small financial powerhouses like Switzerland or Macau.
Sure, kind of. You hit the impact driver with a hammer, but I wouldn't call the driver a hammer.
Putting aside is-this-right-or-wrong?: this is unsurprising: lawyers (many in my family), police, doctors, sales people, etc represent mechanisms to reduce more problematic inefficiencies in our society. No one (including lawyers I know) wants lawyers; but a world-with-lawyers is better than a world-without-lawyers. Doctors: why do you go to the doctor? To improve your body? Almost never; it's always to reduce problems or prevent them, a cost you only incur because of the fallibility of your body. Sales people: imperfect information in society. Police: lovely folks; would be much better if we didn't have people being assholes so that we needed police.

Then add in all of the secondary effects of exploitation/corruption of these not-productive-and-shouldn't-exist positions...

Further for every $1 you spend on an attorney, someone else has to spend $$ and the society has wasted that $$$ plus that time, none of which is productive.

On the other hand, get rid of lawyers and you're going to spend $$$ on mercenaries...
Can you not delete the message after it fails?
>The real problem is if/when scope begins to increase these processes are sufficient until they aren't, and the tools aren't flexible enough to gracefully manage the transition.

That's a good point.

I'd also add that, at least in the US, we don't have any sort of national standard for such things.

Each public health department (and there are >1,000 of them in the US) has their own set of processes and procedures.

I'd expect that the CDC has a proper database system and that data from those 1000+ entities is collated into that system.

However, state and local laws/rules require specific handling of such data and can differ significantly from state to state, county to county or even town to town.

Attempting to stand up an integrated nationwide system isn't a bad idea. But doing so while trying to manage a pandemic isn't reasonable.

That many places used Excel spreadsheets for storing testing data is neither surprising or necessarily a bad thing. Until March, no one needed to have huge databases of test results -- now we do.

Complaining that places which had , at most, a few dozen cases of reportable infectious diseases should have implemented a database that can support thousands (tens of thousands?) of test results seems rather silly to me.
Israel has the most, followed by the US[1]. The thesis seems pretty flimsy. Israel and the US rank 31st and 1st respectively in nominal GDP.

[1] https://twitter.com/pankajghemawat/status/575654688491708416
I used to commute to a city from which I live about an hour by train away. I worked from home a lot, but would travel there a lot too and every day I did, I easily walked over 10km each day, since I walked to and from the train station on both sides and in the city I'd walk everywhere too if I was going anywhere for lunch or after work, so it added up very quickly. With covid, I haven't been since early this year and I definitely miss all the walking. I try to go for walks here, but when I went to work there, it was an unconscious thing that I just did without thinking, while here its a decision I have to consciously make, which makes it a lot harder.
Ask HN: Any founders willing to outsource small projects to learners?
We are a skill-oriented learning platform (astrasum.com) and we are building a feature, AstraApprentice, through which learners practise something (design, coding, etc) by doing small projects provided by organisations and companies.

These orgs in turns can take in likely hundreds of submissions of some work they need to get done with some creativity, and use them for free. They can also find or develop potential hires based on these submissions.

We're partnering with some big-names but we really want more startups to join us.

Anyway, shoot us a message if you're interested (contact@astrasum.com)
Please don't get behind the wheel if you're drowsy.

You're shouting at a wall.

People think "drowsy" isn't a problem, the same way they think that texting and driving isn't a problem because they saw someone jump backwards in slow motion in The Matrix.

Drowsy driving is no better than buzzed driving, which legally is drunk driving.
It says it's more efficient than lru_cache with a size specified, it doesn't say that it's more efficient than lru_cache without one.
They seem to use Stripe to process payments instead of storing payment information themselves, so that might be why.
Understanding Google’s Scroll and Highlight Feature
lol. that problem is solved decades ago. the problem have always, since the table layouts, been a decent VERTICAL bleed on top of this.
Not necessarily a bad thing.

Sometimes, resistance to boom growth is wise.
NTP Server Misuse and Abuse
let's take polymer, thermodynamics and statistical physics and make a new harder field out of these..
> On the other hand, get rid of lawyers and you're going to spend $$$ on mercenaries...

The true alternative for most people is they’re out the additional baked in cost of the lawyers and they can’t afford their own lawyer to “even the odds” so it’s asymmetrical warfare.
The start of the thread was actually:

> You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep!

I would say anyone that feels drowsy has a change of falling asleep. So 50% of the population should regularly not get behind the wheel, by GC's standard.
Build a Discord Bot with Rust and Serenity [video]
Yes. I've seen plenty of sand mines, and not one of them was on a beach. Too much water. The mining happens inland.
Incognito doesn’t do much if they have your IP, email, name, user agent, etc. still links you directly to your Facebook account
Why would you write an article about your first fire? How immature can you be? "We really wanted someone who would live and breathe Canny."

Delusional owners.
Just keep colloquially calling it BIOS. Language is ours to do what we want with it. I still call it BIOS even though I know it's not anymore.
SpaceX, L3Harris win contracts to build missile-warning satellites
That's a good question. I wasn't around at the time the project was formed. At that time I was working on Microsoft's internal metrics system. Years later, I became involved as an external contributor (I had left MS) and eventually rejoined MS to work on Orleans full-time.
Ah gotcha, missed that line!
And people, even on HN, constantly say I'm being "behind the times" and "overly paranoid" when I point out how happy I am to still be on IPv4 with an address that changes every few days or when I restart the router.
Can I ask how/where you got access to that PC? Purely curious :-)
Absolutely, though of course it's not even close to leveling mountains yet.

It's much worse in some places than in the US. For example the Swiss 50 year bond is currently priced at -0.36%, and this is "high" given recent yields history. Switzerland is already buying nearly every financial asset it can with printed money, including US stocks, but the credit markets don't give a damn. Swiss mortgages have theoretically infinite duration (you never pay it back by design). Austria has some extremely low yielding 100 year bonds despite not having existed yet for 100 years (in the current form). The deflation is just too strong.
Elk in the UK are referred to as red deer, though recent taxonomy has decided they are a different, albeit closely related, species. I don't know what they're called in other languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_deer
Possibly they preferred a city named "new "? Maybe they didn't like NET York..
Theoretically and ideally, doctors improve the lifespan and health of human beings beyond what natural selection gave us. In an ideal world, the budget for social healthcare would just collapse due to incredibly effective medicine.

Whereas lawyers and police must deal with the imperfection of people and society, no matter how much it is reduced.
Not at all. Judge Albright was well-known and respected as a patent litigator before he became a judge. It's no mystery why patent litigants would want their cases before a judge who understands patent law.

It's like the Court of Chancery in Delaware being the place where a lot of corporate governance issues get litigated. It's not because of bribery, it's because that's where the expertise is.
Stalingrad Holdouts – German Resistance After the Surrender
You really don't see it?

Stare decisis. He can load whatever judicial circuit he's in with patent troll friendly precedent. The only way to undo it is at the appellate or Supreme Court.

If you can't see where the conflict there is, I'm not sure I can make it any clearer. That he actively advertised to attract court traffic to his jurisdiction should be quite alarming. That he's already "telegraphed" his proclivities should be grounds for at a minimum an ethics inquest.

A blatantly prejudiced judge bodes well for no one.
Thanks, first encounter with this expression.
Well humans can't get any better than they are now, and they're quite dangeous.

Computers are always getting better.

My money is on the computers.
Almost none [0] of the problem, such as line terminators, encodings, or escape characters, is an inherent flaw in the idea of using a text-based file to represent data. They can be fixed by just a little bit of standardization. But unfortunately, I don't think it's possible, we're stuck at here.

[0] Except type conversion, which is a real problem.
> Covid19 basically requires virus in water droplets to transmit.

“Requires” is too strong a word given our current understanding. The CDC update states that “There is evidence that under certain conditions, people with COVID-19 seem to have infected others who were more than 6 feet away. These transmissions occurred within enclosed spaces that had inadequate ventilation.”

That said, COVID-19 is still thought to spread mainly through close contact, so the parent’s Starbucks example probably holds true as a pattern.
I live in Canada (Quebec near the Ontario border) and I buy UHT milk once in a while as some backup milk just in case I run out before the next groceries and I happen to need some for a recipe or something. It was handy during the pandemic, where I tried (and still try) to minimize exposure.

I couldn't really taste the difference.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/11/05/359830235/....

>Here is another telling statistic: Brazil has more law schools — some 1,240 — than the rest of the world combined. And they have turned out some 800,000 lawyers — which means there are more lawyers per capita in Brazil than in the U.S.
Driving in general comes with a decent risk of killing someone. You probably shouldn't do it either.
due diligence of reading at least the abstract instead of the post title

> Despite the crudeness of the test, the small size of the sample and possible ambiguities in interpretation, the results provide a tentative confirmation of the hypothesis.
Also the most boring ones.
What is the reason for returning a PDF instead of showing the result in the same page?
Higher-Kinded Data
I use Notion to be Productive
Whatever else you might say about The Three-Body Problem, its physics and astronomy are pretty implausible (the sequels drastically more so).
It’s true even with distribution, see e.g.:

http://erlang.org/faq/academic.html#idp33052176

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2017-September/...
>Using excel as an alternative to CSV is fine.

Clippy the Paperclip

Hi, it looks like this alphanumeric constant is the date format used by the Democratic Peoples Republic of Arstotzka for the year 127 BC. I have changed the encoding for the file to Arstotzka standard and overwritten the original.
If the link is being updated, I think the github repository provides a much better overview: https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/
> Conversely to the paper’s implication, too many lawyers can also be seen as evidence of a society based on the rule of the law, with strong legal institutions, processes, separation of powers and other patterns of integrity, and lack of rule by decree in any form

Well, it means strong legal institutions. But...

Take criminal law, for example. Lots of lawyers mean that each criminal gets their day in court. That's good. But a law-abiding society would be better.

Or take contract law. Lots of lawyers mean that, if the other party violates the contract, you can sue them. But wouldn't it be better to have a society where more people just did what the contract said, instead of trying to find ways to weasel out of it?

Even with respect to the government, yes, when they overstep their bounds, we can take them to court, and we can even win and make them stop doing whatever they're not supposed to. But really, it would be better if they just stayed within the constitutional parameters of what they're allowed to do.

In all these cases, it's good (really!) that we can have our day in court, in a system that is at least relatively fair. The lawyers are the sign of a healthy legal system. But they're also the sign of an unhealthy society, that is restrained by court cases rather than by doing the right thing.
I mean, statistics relies heavily on calculus

No, it doesn't. Not the kind you'd teach in high school to help young people grow up and maintain a functioning democracy.
Background: (Maybe nsfw for language) http://www.dickening.com
> Putting aside is-this-right-or-wrong?: this is unsurprising

Every HN thread about a scientific study ever
Have you ever considered that you might be wrong about “these kinds of tools” not having value?
Sure, I can see that. But the application of this is such that you can expand it to include whatever sort of validation you need. When you get a list of people who imagine their future best self as being interested, you now have a list of people to whom you can more rigorously validate with. You can send them all an email asking for an interview, pre-order, etc. But regardless, this helps you build that initial list.
Anecdotal but I published a book through what was at least then Createspace at Amazon. Many of the chapters were adapted from previous blog posts of mine and the book was flagged. I sent Amazon some links and they quickly cleared it.
I'll condense this into 4 words: 'Men, Be more vulnerable'. Blasé.
Likewise. I use this pole: https://www.ergomart.com/192offset-monitor-floor-stand .

And this monitor: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/lg/32ud99-w (specifically because it's the only USB-C monitor I found that's completely flicker-free, which RTINGS tests for).

Ergomart actually looked at the specs of my monitor and recommended the right arm and parts to properly balance the weight. I'll happily recommend them recommend them.

The monitor moves easily on three axes, and tilts; cords are cable-managed through the pole. I just sit down and plug in a single USB-C cable to get video, webcam, keyboard/mouse, and power.
We were actually debating between this and the way we went. We are planning on adding custom domain support in the future!
https://archive.is/okkeX
Just about anywhere in the US?

Remember that HN comments are an exercise in selection bias.
Sure, if you can provide one!
That explains the Chinese economic miracle quite well!
This is what put me off using type hints. Now I think I might actually add them to my code.
>>Excel is the right solution in the same way playdoh is a valid building material.

I sooo badly want that on a T-Shirt.....
Yeah, I wonder that, too. Best ISP in the world sonic.net is still reselling Fiber To The Node (FTTN) AT&T 50Mbps DSL in my area. It's still really unfortunate, we only have one option (Comcast) for truly fast Internet. I will say that I would rather have Sonic than Comcast, the latter is very unreliable and the DSL has been rock-solid if you reboot the router every couple months. Really, really hoping 5G creates some competition in the home Internet space.
Higher regulation doesn't necessarily mean more complexity. It might even simplify things as things are already codified in the laws and less time is spend on searching and arguing about precedents and so on...

Also whole legal systems affects the complexity. So it's not easy to compare between systems, not to even talk about countries.
Thanks! This is actually the reason I made it. I have about 50 ideas in the back of my head and don't want to muck about making a different site / validation flow for each one.
`Orleans builds on the developer productivity of .NET` - could someone familiar with NET development specify what those things might be? I've never used .Net and would love to find out what it does better/worse/different than other frameworks. Thanks!
I could do this on my Openmoko Neo Freerunner in 2008 - ReMoko implemented that via standard Bluetooth HID ;)

https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/ReMoko
So he hid money from taxes. Shameful, but not unexpected with his libertarian streak.
Well, not entirely. They benefit from that 'baked in' cost as well, companies and individuals are less willing to be negligent or exploitative because of the fear of lawsuits.

True of the police as well: calling them doesn't benefit me much, but they do play a role in making the streets (relatively) safe at night.

In both cases we might imagine a better way of doing these things, I'm speaking about the world we happen to have.
These are pretty absolute terms you're talking in with little corresponding evidence.

Monotonous activities frequently make people drowsy. This is not some medical condition, it is a common occurrence. Driving is often an acutely monotonous activity.

I know a huge number of people that get drowsy while reading books. Do they all suffer from the same "condition"?
Old code is everywhere. I once worked at a health tech startup that was integrating with a very successful existing company. All their code was in Turbo Pascal. We were shocked. The funny thing is that their code worked great and even had a debugger. Our code was ultra modern typescript micro services and we debugged with prints and logs. Their product looked dated but was superior in every other way. My guess here is that XLS is a simpler format and the devs found an NPM package that could handle XLS but not the newer formats.
Greek Hackers Attack Azerbaijan – Cite Armenian Conflict
How 18F handles information security and third party applications (2016)
We have been leveling mountains for a long time already. https://www.google.com/search?q=strip+mining+leveling+mounta...

And the reason deflation is bad is because we got hooked on debt long ago and wouldn't be able to pay the interest..
Too American to ever be (any one of the ethnicities identified as...) African, too "other" to ever be more than a second-class American,

That's an unfortunate way to put things - as if there was a generic America. "White America" and "Black America" are each inextricable parts of America. If Black American culture is taken a "second class", and it often is, that is because of the continuation of white supremacy.

Edit: And blanket statements on the attitudes of African Americans generally are unfortunate. What is visible as the supposed attitude of group X is by no means the universal or even predominant attitude. Your post is interesting for describing some ironic contrasts but problematic for trying to universalize them.
I build it like this when I was 13 in (1987):

You get the largest screen you can afford (use it at a low resolution) Put it on the wall just under the ceiling.

Put a stack of books under the legs of the bed. This is an art in it self. If you gradually increase the angle eventually you slide down. Train the legs to "stand" like this and gradually increase the angle by tiny amounts. This way it magically qualifies as a zero effort leg exercise. (my legs got huge muscles from it)

Get thick curtains to make the room pitch dark. Switch off the lights, adjust the themes and dim the screen to the point you cant see anything on it anymore without getting used to the dark for 5-15 min. This will allow comfortable naps while coding.

As soon as a task feels complicated take a nap. It is hilarious to wake up and see absolutely nothing besides text on the screen.
They own cars?

93% of American households do - and I expect if you took away a few large dense metros like NYC and Boston, that number would jump up to about 98%
Honestly? I can't wait to see this be abused. I know, it means a big ol' wave of annoying is heading our way, but I'm curious to see who gets it right. Of course, now that we've been primed, readers are more aware, but there is an element of this that I find fascinating.
Dapr is designed to offer this afaik (https://github.com/dapr/docs/blob/master/concepts/actors/REA...). It uses GRPC and HTTP to allow clients and services of the virtual actors in various languages (C#, Java etc.) to communicate.