skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think anybody reasonably believed president Trump would have actually not relinquished power if he formally lost the election. What he was accused of however, is trying to play nasty with votes, and trying to undermine the legitimacy of his loss. To put it another way: it's not that he wouldn't transfer power, but rather that he's willing to play dirty to try not to transfer power.

The reason why it was never realistic to believe he wouldn't step aside is simply that he does not have the support to pull that off; it's essentially a kind of civil war but one he (and any other president) would likely lose almost instantly - as long as it's clear he lost the election.

And that's why it's so insidious to undermine the election, because that will eventually pave the way to actually ignore election outcomes. Even today, I suspect in all the partisan posturing some voters may have come away with the honest impression that there really was a stolen election. Since democracy hinges on the losing side accepting that loss, action that undermine that are quite problematic.

President Trump's action so far, both before the election and after, are entirely in line with the accusations against him; in essence: he's willing to undermine democracy to try and hold on to power.

Had the election been closer, it's conceivable he might really have engineered some legal shenanigans to try and steal the election. And if he had been backed in that (which isn't entirely impossible, because some of the toss-up states have republican-appointed courts, republican legislatures, and republican governors, and of course the heavily tilted supreme court now), then things would have gotten dicey. In that situation, just like in other strong-man democracies, the outcome of the election would have been rigged. Would democrats have backed down? Or would they have disputed the elections, even though formally they lost them? That's the kind of thing that breaks a democracy; because both backing down and confrontation are terrible outcomes.

To their credit - because that's how it's supposed to work in a democracy - those toss-up states did not seriously try to steal votes (although the vote-segregation thing is pretty close). And of course we don't know Trump would really have stolen the election, given the opportunity, since it never arose. But we can see that he took all possible steps in that direction at least; and that's something the US needs to deal with in the future for the sake of stability. It ended well this time; it might not every time.
I think see what you are saying, but your framing to me supports a dangerously wrong idea that seems to have a lot of currency . Trump is not some sort of wild outside anomaly, his gaining power is more of an emergent property.

Chaos monkey is intentionally outside the system, poking at it. Trump isn't this.
Young people told to isolate should be offered free mobile data, says SAGE
But why should Senate have to be reelected? This would give opportunity to a House controlled by one party to force reelection of Senate which might be controlled by the other party.

I don't think reelection should be forced, impeachments are not done often and I feel there is no need to protect against it (it wasn't a big deal this time around).

US is in a strange situation where a sitting president is almost impossible to unseat, but that may be seen as a positive characteristic. It allows US to be much more focused and stable in its foreign policy.
That very much depends on the drug. Two years into cannabis legalization in Canada, and alcohol continues to claim the lion's share of the harm from legal drug use. I suspect this won't ever change.
That‘s not the point (that fraud may happen in any election). Trump asserts that there was systematic fraud in large numbers, in a way that the outcome of the election was changed. And many of his 70mm voters may subscribe to his point of view. This will increase the hostility between the two parties in the US.

When I see Trump talk, I wonder if he really believes what he says or if he knowingly and willfully lies.

What this man has done in four years has put a great damage to the democratic culture in the US, and he badly harmed the reputation of the US around the world, especially when it comes to old allies in Europe.

Edit: If Trump was not a narcisstic egomanianc („I WON THIS ELECTION BY A LOT“?!? Wtf?!), he would have stepped up in dignity, conceded his loss, congratulated Biden and wished him well. The US is confronted with many challenges in the midst of a huge pandemic, the nation is divided, and all he has to say is he won by a lot (in big letters)?!? This is it?
URL should have been this: https://kottke.org/11/05/when-nothing-else-works-try-this
Who said anything about Rockbox?
The much maligned TPP was aimed right at China. It was big business friendly, but it also encouraged the other large economies in the Pacific to align themselves with the US instead of China.
For AAA titles I could understand that, but for indies?
They won't sell that much Windows copies, so having a Linux option is always good (see other indies, like Factorio, Oxygen not included, Hollow Knight).
> Favorite self-hosted alternatives?

Why not use Phabricator?
I've been using the v1 Bluetooth keyboard as my daily driver for almost 2 years. Solid construction and very portable, but lately I've been plagued with frequent disconnects and input lag. Has anyone had experience with the v2 on Linux?
> There is no democracy on a privately owned platform.

So, do you support net neutrality?

It's the ISP's platform, they can do what they want with it... right?
Rowan Atkinson on free speech (video, 2017)
For anyone who is looking for an alternative, take a look at https://linear.app - I've used it a bunch for side projects and it's snappy and beautiful. I know the founder from our YC batch back in the day, and if anyone is going to create a really thoughtful JIRA replacement, it's these guys.

p.s. It's fascinating how long products like Jira end up existing through sheer market penetration. I don't know a single developer who doesn't passionately hate Jira, and yet it is somehow the "standard."
lol what you are describing is responsibility. not slavery.

yes, it is a responsibility to have a house for your family, to keep food on the table, and to work for their education.

if you don't provide those things and rely on the government to provide them, what good are you? why bother to work?

you are a slave. or better stated you're a willing sacrifice. to your body and to the people you love. deal with it or rely on charity.

life isnt free. but it seems like you think union members have a life free of these ignorant and unimportant realities.

not many public companies ask for a 35 year work tenure and your nonstop political loyalty.
But how do they measure those things, fuzzy or not? And more importantly, can they actually invalidate their own hypotheses?
Well not now that it's progressed too far.

Full lockdown and masks would have worked just as well in America as it worked here in Asia if it was enforced quickly and with high adherence to the rules.

(worth mentioning everyone is -still- wearing masks here in Thailand every day and have been since early March)

Ironically a virus that began in Asia is now a Western problem because of inaction and/or lack of decisiveness.
As a Canadian, what stands out for me about the last two elections is that many Americans seem to desperately want a variety of political reforms, but neither party seems interested in providing them. Trump and Sanders both sold themselves as reform candidates in 2016, but only Trump wound up on the ticket.

Sanders might be the real deal, but he's not going to represent a major party until donation and campaign spending limits (like we have in Canada) reduce corporate influence on U.S. politics. Sanders scares away the "big money" that U.S. elections depend so heavily on.

Trump has not proven to be a reform candidate in any sense of the word. As a political outsider with control over both the house and senate for his first two years in office, he had the power to deliver meaningful reforms, but didn't. Americans desiring reform should have felt deeply betrayed by Trump's first term.

The democrats had a smoother primary in 2020, but decided on an utterly bland candidate. Biden is a return to the status-quo. I predicted that, after the last four years, a return to the status quo would appeal to many, but this election proves otherwise. This should have been an easy slam dunk for the Democrats to win, but it's turned out to be a squeaker!

If the democrats ride the status quo for the next four years and both parties were to run the same candidates again, I suspect Biden would lose. The Democrats need to pay attention to what Americans want.

I would suggest that Biden's administration should, despite running on a thoroughly status-quo platform, embrace reform. Too many Americans mistrust their own political system, to the point that they're willing to picket polling stations because they think fraud is being committed. That must be fixed. Finding ways to reduce the influence of money on politics (e.g. campaign spending limits) would be a good start. It will also be an easy sell to devolve and distribute some of the powers that have accumulated in the white house over the last several decades. If you're not comfortable with some of the powers Trump wielded during his time in office, then perhaps those powers shouldn't rest with the POTUS.

Bottom line, if the democrats try to pretend Trump never happened and couldn't happen again, they're in for unpleasant surprises.
Or the Four Seasons wouldn't/couldn't take the booking.
It never is and never has been. But that doesn't stop people from invoking it in modern society repeatedly. And I would argue that people leaving these economically dead zones IS representative of labor meeting capital in terms of mobility.
I'm a European lefty, and I always hated the American imperialism. I was kinda happy about Trump talking about pulling out of all the foreign wars.

Then I thought about it a bit more, and realised (and the last four years have shown) that if America withdraw, the Russians and the Chinese will move right in, and while I'm not a major fan of American imperialism, I'm even less of a fan of the Russian or Chinese flavours.

And the US built the UN and all the other multilateral organisations post WW2, so yeah they work for the US, but they're also pretty good for everyone else.
I don't get why they should all vanish in one go. Unless there is a problem with all the heads and all the platters then you should still be able to recover a lot of data.

But what do I know, I returned an 8TB drive three weeks ago after it started developing bads and soon crashed with 2TB of workload in less than 24h of runtime. First the OS did not see it, then the BIOS stopped seeing it and now I think I won't see it any more. Good to know it has 5 years warranty but it shattered my trust in the model.
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin outlines plans for 2023 cargo delivery to the moon
Nov 3 - Election Day

Nov 7 - News media called a winner (this is not an official act)

Dec 8 - Deadline for resolving election disputes

Dec 14 - Electoral college casts votes

Dec 23 - Deadline for receipt of electoral college votes

Jan 6 - Congress counts the electoral college votes

Jan 20 - Inauguration Day
I'm going to ask this in a sincere hope of getting an answer, regardless of how flip it sounds:

What specifically did Trump fail to do that you feel he should have done with regard to Covid? Keeping in mind that the US is a constitutional republic and does not have a lot of the same legal tools to compel people to do things en masse that other nations do.
First, the comment you replied to didn't argue both sides are problematic, just that not everyone who voted for Trump is a bad person. Both sides being problematic also doesn't imply that one side isn't more problematic than the other.

I think it's crazy that so many people voted for Trump and honestly believe he's the best person to run the country. I'd have a hard time respecting someone who didn't see how bad Trump was in a lot of ways. But I think most people on the left seem to have no idea why anybody would vote for Trump, and don't realize that is more of an indictment of the extent they are out of touch with 49% of the country, rather than an indication of the idiocy of their political opponents.

An effective rejection of Trumpism must first involve understanding and relating to the people who supported him, and I think a lot of people are lamenting the general lack of interest in such discourse.

Edit: fixed two words which drastically changed the meaning of sentence.
Sounds like unix to me.
I honestly don't believe this is a serious question, and anyone paying any attention over the last 4 years couldn't believe it is a serious question either.

But to humor you, here is a good summary from Olivia Troye, former Republican member of the White House Covid task force and aid to Pence: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/olivia-troye-whi...

Basically, Trump's only concern about Covid was how it would affect his re-election chances. And this isn't just some "disgruntled staffer". Basically everything she says backs up Trump's own public pronouncements of only seeing Covid as some politically motivated attack, instead of one of the most serious threats facing our nation in decades.

Trump has been extremely transparent that he only views events as how they will help or hurt him. That's a very fair definition of amoral to me.
In Europe, it went way down before coming back strongly. In the US, it just stayed big and grew.

The thing about doing something is you can always claim what you did was necessary. It's asymmetric. Do nothing, and if the problem doesn't go away you're an idiot. Do something, and if the same thing happens you can claim it would have been worse if you hadn't. There's always some example somewhere you can abuse to say whatever you want.

Whether someone did badly depends on expectations about how it would have gone if they had done otherwise. Like in sports, you judged less harshly if you lose to the favourite. If you let the "otherwise" happen, people complain that you let it happen.

"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done."

Note I'm saying nothing at all about what ought to be done about the virus, just how to handle the PR.
The CIA concluding that the CIA didn't do something and hide it from the public doesn't seem the best way to settle such an issue.

They also ruled his death a suicide despite him having 2 bullets in his head.

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-m...
Are there more direct methods? It seems like ammonia would be much easier to transport than hydrogen, but at the cost of another loss of efficiency is a big hit. Though it might be cheaper for cargo ship operators who have a lot of capital investment.

Looks like ammonia is mostly produced from hydrogen stripped from natural gas: https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a...
Modeling correlated polling errors is basically what 538's models are all about. They model how far off the polls could end up being from the actual result based on past elections.

The polls are never 100% accurate. The pollsters have to estimate how many of each type of voter will actually show up to vote and what the response rate for each type of voter was. It is not an exact science.
That might be the case actually. I do not buy simplistic explanations about being a simpleton bully and such.
Your comments seem fine, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
That was a very interesting article. The seperate thermal and kinetic energy usage in medieval times was something I hadn't thought about.
Ok.. I guess we are dropping JIRA
Sadly I have not found any trustworthy 'fact checkers' that are not in and of themselves also inherently biased.

But once you realize that every major news org seems perfectly willing to gaslight you fundamentally, you start to doubt basically everything you read.

If this one 'fact' about trump condemning nazis is so obviously a false story, how many other false stories are there?

The problem with this understanding is that it doesn't help you learn the truth, it just lets you understand that everyone is lying to you, and if you don't put in the exhausting work to find more information (assuming any is available) about every story you will be lied to with impunity.

When you offload the process of interpreting events to someone else, you lose the ability to tell truth from lies. When those people are so confident in their lying to do it on things like this, how many other things have they lied about?

It's a sad realization about the world.
Oh I know I didn't invent paren matching, though I did add it to my editor in the 80's. I can claim invention of #if matching, though, as I implemented that in the 80's, too. Don't know of any prior art on that.

Vim was vi at the time :-) and didn't have a Lisp mode at the time that I was aware of, and I haven't messed with Lisp since the 80's.

And yes, I still find Lisp difficult to read, regardless of how its formatted. Infix reads much better for me.
i talk to 10 dev teams a week. nobody seems to be using it, other than facebook of course.
Hopefully this doesn’t work and creates a deadly bacteria that kills all the people in the world.
This is nice work, thanks for making it a free tool. I looked at the sample on the github page.
Ah, Dominion Voting Systems! Bringing their superior voting technology to the emergent democracies of the world, all with aid of the Clinton Foundation ( https://www.clintonfoundation.org/clinton-global-initiative/... ).
The UN only "works" because everybody understands that either you do what the US wants or you have a problem. Now? As terrible as the US is, I don't see how a country like China having the space to expand its influence is a good thing, considering the CCP's values compared to the West's values.
You would have to provide a stronger definition of what you mean by "help protect health"

If you mean full on authoritarian rules where by the government arbitrarily decides by executive fiat who is allowed to work, leave their home, engage in commerce, or other wise gather in any way for months.

I would say no that is not a proper role of a government in a free society that has any respect for civil or human rights...
Why? National mutual self-interest is probably the single most long-term stable and historically workable approach to foreign policy, economics, and so forth that I can think of.
How do we reunite then?

If we are constantly going on about how bad one side is (fwiw, I basically agree with you about that), then it will only lead to more division and resentment. Based on my in group's behavior, it seems like most people who believe this think that continuing to publicly shame and wag fingers at the other side is how we get to a better world. And it so clearly is not.

I'm frustrated by this, but also truly searching for solutions or alternative explanations.
From the Coke and Pepsi websites a 12oz can of Pepsi has 41g of sugars while a 12oz can of Coke has 39g of sugars, so the Pepsi is, objectively, sweeter.

Interestingly Pepsi includes both HFCS and sugar, so what the OP describes as "too sweet" might actually be a flavor palate that lacks that bit of sugar in addition to HFCS. (The exact mix is not clear, though Pepsi contains more "CARAMEL COLOR" than sugar so it seems suspiciously like the Pepsi is nutritionally the same as Coke with an extra 2g of sugar in addition to 39g of HFCS.)
It was supposedly intended to avoid populism, but given that the electors are likely to be just as influenced by a populist leader as anyone else, it seems like it assumes a level of care picking the electors that isn't really reasonable.

Given rule changes (around punishing electors if they vote against who they are supposed to), and the recent way that electors did and didn't vote during the last few elections, it's clear that the system has no value now.
This depends upon what you prioritize.

If your goal is to make sense of the whole world, I would recommend you first:

1. Attempt to upload a 1 Terabyte attachment to gmail.

2. Attempt to purchase a 1:1 scale paper map of your home country.

3. Make peace with the laws of thermodynamics and information theory.

4. Read some of the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Mark Manson.

5. Among the stories you think are worthy of someone's attention, choose which ones you are willing to remain ignorant of.
That's just it, though. The Mueller report found tons of collusion and obstruction of justice. It deliberately referred those to the Congress.
> Be usefully integrated with confluence.

Ew.
Nah, I’m a real user. I just don’t find the raspberry pi to be very useful for me, even as a toy. Seriously, you think intel is going around badmouthing the raspberry pi because they’re threatened?
This.

My endpoints also have fields that will only be sent if you specifically request them.
Nope. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180
My description of the free market fantasy is buying a house with a nice natural looking garden Then thinking it got that way by itself. And then being confused a few years later that your back yard is all weeds and bermuda grass.

That said story from the early nineties. Some friends that worked at an engine diagnostic tools company. Talking how bad Hyundai cars were. I told them I thought Hyundai would eventually become a reliable brand. Because they and South Korea were all in. I've seen that again and again a willingness to commit to see something through overcomes a lot of negatives.

What that says to me that economists idea of comparative advantage really about that, not about much else.
> He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor.

Ineffectual? I’d argue he’s one of the most consequential Presidents of the past 100 years.

He reshaped the federal bench, confirmed a 6-3 majority on the SCOTUS, overhauled the tax code, negotiated multiple Middle East peace deals, repealed and replaced NAFTA, and didn’t start a single foreign war.

His impact on the US political system will be felt for generations. Compare that to 8 years of Obama that can’t point to any meaningful accomplishment.
> There is fraud every election

Of course. Which is why it's really only worth mentioning in the context of fraud actually changing anything significant.

Not sure why either side has anything to do with fraud in this election (I got that undertone from the post).

As always extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
How to Fix NativeScript Issue with iOS14 and XCode 12
Yelp insiders speak out about the company's high-pressure sales culture
> Sure the private sector is important, but they’re not necessarily going to move society in the direction you want, only government can do that.

Are you sure?

How about Intel, Apple, Spotify, TikTok, Veuve Cliquot and Tesla, for example?
I swear there is a very large segment of PM that believe they are some kind of "big idea" and "vision" dreamers and to get intimately familiar with the details of what they asking to be built is below them.

You would get tickets like "Support protocol X" or "Integrate with 3rd party Y" with absolutely no effort spent to answer the hard questions, and most of the time they don't even know X or Y beyond the marketing.
Author here - thanks for the nice words about the article!