skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do live in America, and possibly should have qualified that statement. The folks I was referring to were already ... middle class or higher, who understood the value of savings/insurance, and had ample opportunity to do so, and still didn't. That's what sort of... gets me. Situations where people were never earning enough to be able to remotely prepare for financial setbacks... I don't include them in my "amazement" comment. I'm generally "amazed" they manage to survive at all in today's world.

I've not quite had the situation you've mentioned with medical stuff, but have had some ER visits which end up costing thousands out of pocket on top of the ~$10k/year we spend on insurance.

For people I've known who were in software, or engineering, or law, and had high-paying careers over decades, to know they were still living that close to the edge financially, that's what amazes me. And sometimes it's bad spending habits (or drugs, or whatever), sometimes it's just poor financial education.

But to the original point - an extra ~10% year in income to many folks - even if it means a slightly reduced 'quality of life' by some measure - can have an impact on their lives down the road, but they also need to manage that extra income properly.
At 48 I bought a TIG welder. It was difficult at first, but now I can weld steel, aluminum, and stainless and it usually doesn't look like crap. It's very fun.

Then last year at 49 switched from right handed to left handed guitar since I'm left handed and was never very good right handed. I've been practicing every day for at least an hour for 11 months now and enjoy it a lot.
Yes. I found this paper which talks about it more http://www.sidthomas.net/pdf/paperpdfs/Thomas%20et%20al%20Jo...

p34 talks about its constituent properties. Crucially no one is quite sure what the exact active component is
Sorry if I haven't heard enough of this crazy talk yet to understand it.

You're saying that residential property gets a special restriction on how people who own something are able to use it or enter into agreements on how they can charge others for the use of it?

Who occupies a house then? Only the owner?
It's likely most electricity for EVs will be consumed at home, though.
Underspecification Presents Challenge for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning
I'm not a fan of the 10x programmer concept. I have worked with some brilliant people, some incredibly efficient people, as well as both medicore and poor coders.

There are things brilliant programmer can do and concepts they can realise or creativity they can apply that a poor programmer couldn't dream of.

But it's never quite so simple as 10x, never so easy to quantify as their being able to complete a given task faster or produce more work.

What I have seen far more often however are programmers finding sneaky ways to appear more productive. Cutting corners, hacking things in and - an often overlooked technique - happening to have a such a good knowledge of their own pile of crud messy code that they can in fact produce solutions _considerably_ more quickly (because you know your own mess better than other people's).

None of these types of programmer are good for an organisation, some in fact are positively toxic and very destructive. In many cases a better programmer would take longer, sometimes considerably more so. But by perpetuating this 10x idea things get topsy-turvy and it's the poorer coder who gets categorised as brilliant and the brilliant coder who gets categorised as poor.

Another aspect of the 'rock star programmer' meme (which this is a variant of) is somebody who's genuinely very sharp can often be good at coming up with ideas but lousy at implementing them and worse at taking criticism. I've seen an extreme example of this in my career.

Often the best solution requires careful thought, consideration and design. The best programmers are the ones who weigh up the RoI and, while remaining practical, think things through carefully.

Unfortunately I've worked at a startup (from employee #1 to multiple VC rounds) where the CEO believed in this meme and seen the damage it does first hand.
I mentioned this before, but I think jl's and pg's essays have been a bit hit-and-miss in the past few years. No doubt due to the fact that YC is no longer a scrappy incubator, but a venerable titan of industry. YC isn't like going to "summer camp" any more, but more akin to getting an MBA.

For example, this quote by Jessica: "A good way to ensure that you make something people want is to make something you yourself want." -- is at odds with the ethos of one of my favorite pg essays (all the way from 2005[1]) in which I feel he really gets to the core of "building what people want:"

> If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself. [...] Most smart people don't do that very well. But adding this ability to raw brainpower is like adding tin to copper. The result is bronze, which is so much harder that it seems a different metal.

I think building things that you want is a bit of a red herring. Every time I'm working on a project that solely solves my problems, the solution tends to be solipsistic and myopic. In any case, jl's essay is a great read, and I really do miss when HN had mostly startup content on the front page :)

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
This is doomer mentality. We've had people challenging elections results since the 1800s. We've had governors lock themselves in their office and refuse to leave. We've had presidents that went on war to push their ratings up. We've endured a lot. We'll endure more.
This is why I stopped reading it, I was concentrating on the "st"s more.
Pay as you go roads?

RFID tag for your car with roads reading your entrance and exit. Then a bill at the end of the month from a single body that then divides the tax back to the area that maintains the various roads you used. High traffic roads get proportional funding. You could even have seamless integration with private roads. If someone thinks they can make money out of an expensive by pass the government doesn't want to build they can.
I have to agree with you. I mean, I won't buy a computer to use at work, but if I don't like the office mouse and keyboard, I'll just order on Amazon and be done with that.
Trump can run his mouth off, but it doesn't mean there isn't voter fraud. His attorneys are the ones that are collecting evidence and will present them to the courts.
There is a famous Seinfeld episode about this very thing! Jerry writing down a joke idea and forgetting later why the joke was funny at the time.
Seems like a stretch. On the other hand, business leaders are betting on Biden:

https://www.businessinsider.com/georgia-recount-done-top-ceo...

It seems like Trump is a guy who makes people's imagination go wild. Conservatives see him as their savior (he's not). Liberals see him as a fascist (also not). At the end of the day, there's not much special about him. If people wanted an authoritarian leader, Trump would be a pretty bad choice. He's bad at PR and bad at actually accomplishing things.
> The implicit idea of offering a transition to knowledge work as a means for people who have been economically shut out to catch up is a misreading of the situation.

I agree with this premise. In essence, to argue that education is a sufficient (necessary and widespread as it should be) support is to argue that the only people who matter are those with the ability to be trained (and retrained, and retrained as the economy shifts.) And that the only thing that matters about people is their ability to learn, not their need for food, shelter, plumbing, health care, etc. It splits the brain from the body, traditionally a bleak end.
As the article itself recommends of texts, read the whole thing.
were you?
>It points out the petrol excise goes into general revenue rather than road funding...

OK, but this is incomplete. We would have to know how much the government spends on roads. For all we know the government spends more than they get in excise tax.
> As of June 2020, Apple Reports that 92% of devices introduced in the last 4 years use iOS 13, while 81% of all devices (including the oldest) use iOS 13. Some businesses are not willing to part with that remaining 8%-19% of users.

I'm surprised that so many people have the latest iOS. I was reluctant to use SwiftUI because I thought that more people have older iPhones which wouldn't support it.
Probably VirtualBox, could have been Hyper-V.
I disagree with almost every single point of this article except that buying can be better than building (note this still isn't always true, especially if you are in a very large company that would get charged usurious rates based on usage).

The other points really only hold true for things that are allowed to break. As someone who writes code that should never, ever break, and gets support tickets even for one-in-a-million breakages, testing is absolutely paramount. I can see how certain products, like a web-app, could follow these principles and benefit from not being over-tested, but it's definitely not an absolute.

Of course, my code does still break. The author is right that this is still an absolute. But the blast radius of the breakage and the frequency are both quite low because of the measures we take to prevent them.

Regarding the point about ditching QA and testing in production: both are possible. You can make QA a shard of your production environment (there are many different ways to implement this based on your tech). That is the ideal way to structure it so that it's actually pretty representative of a real environment without requiring lots of duct tape.
Are construction workers on call for the buildings they build? Maybe. But they'll be called like once every 5 years. Because their industry actually has standards.

Devs think they're hot stuff, when in reality we're probably one of the most abused professions out there. (I'm talking about regular devs, not people who were born in wealth/went to good schools etc)
How to edit build.prop file without root
> When you're junior, coachability is what gets you hired. How quickly can we train you to be effective?

All anecdata points towards luck/connections. There’s really no way to stand out at this stage when everybody’s CV is the same.
(This is a cryptocurrency pitch, in case the cry for decentralization didn’t make that clear.)
It's not doxxing when it's a public official. Also why was it that they refused to certify black communities after they already certified white communities with worse discrepancies. Also one of them was found with racist memes and Qanon conspiracy theories on their Facebook
Everybody is receiving benefits from well maintained roads, just like everyone is receiving benefits from schools. Why special taxes for users unless you want to discourage use? Just pay for maintenance from the general budget.
> the argument isn't that everyone needs to be a KE worker - it's that everyone needs the opportunity to be one.

But the key point against the argument is that not everyone is able to be a knowledge worker, so a universal opportunity for becoming one still ignores important segments of humanity as well as important needs of KEs themselves (e.g. grocery shelf stocking.)
I never said anything that implied gas wasn't an issue .. simply stating a truth bomb about EV's environmental and human costs; lithium mining being the biggest one.
“America is a shitty and immature democracy”

Immature, but one of the oldest in the world. Also it seems there’s a lot of racism embedded in the article.
it happens slowly at first, then all at once.

Y'all in US haven't seen a political turmoil. Rest of the world has and we all are just pattern matching.
Your analysis is fine but the first step, or a concurrent step, needs to be tripling that motor fuel tax. That would only just barely bring it up to the necessary level of carbon taxation, nevermind the roads.
What is the reason every media outlet is saying there is no fraud?

Can you provide examples of these first case reports of fraud please?
This seems like a pretty good solution; the infrastructure is already in place for weighing trucks at borders. Raising taxes for trucks to replace gas taxes for cars would also incentivize the use of trains, which would be nice.
This is more of an ideal than a reality. Anyone can create wealth, but it's not so simple to convince someone to give you money for it. A lot of value is generated and given away for free (Open source is perfect example. Other people might point to the work involved in raising children or running a home), and plenty of people manage to gain control of bootloads of money without providing any value (or even negative value).

A free market is an approximation of value at the best of times: at best it represents people's estimation of that value given the information available to them. But in real societies it's not even that good, it's distorted by power differentials. One of the most significant being wealth disparities. In a hypothetical society where everyone had equal wealth then a market does distribute wealth to at those people who others think are providing value. But as soon as there's a wealth disparity then people with more wealth have proportionally say over where money gets distributed and thus money accrues to what those people consider valuable. The greater the wealth disparities that exist the further away this gets from distributing money to those who truly create wealth.
According to wikipedia, a polygon with three adjacent collinear points can be convex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_polygon
If you just need visitors count, servers logs should be more than enough. If you are looking for something more complex, I am also working on a (premium) self-hosted analytics script[0]. If you go with self-hosted analytics in general it is a lot less likely to get blocked by ad-blockers all resources can be 1st party.

[0]: https://www.usertrack.net/
I think this is linked to a question I raised some months ago: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5590

After reflecting a bit about the answers I got, I've come to the conclusion that these languages and paradigms don't matter. No paradigm wins because none is substantially better. The tools/libraries etc are much more important.

There might be a time where we see a new paradigm emerge victorious (like in the transition from machine code/assembly to procedural). Or maybe programming will stop existing and we'll just have A.I.
> that almost always means rigorous engineering/planning to make sure everything lines up.

Trying to plan a software project up front is a great way to miss the mark and fail to deliver value.

Going with a "hold before tape before weld" mentality to prototyping and experimentation, we can get a lot of real-user data out of just putting something quickly out there and refining it as we receive feedback on it.

This approach is based on the fact that most of our good ideas aren't that good, so we optimise for the case where were wrong, and try to plan as little ahead as possible -- because any planning is based on imperfect information and requires speculative work that is likely to need to be thrown away.

In contrast to manufacturing where we need only to minimise work-in-progress, in development, we also need to minimise design-in-process -- also known as planning.

This is a way in which product development is different from manufacturing.

In manufacturing we can stamp our variability. In development variability is both desirable (it's how we innovate) and quite large, so we must obsess about maximising our use of feedback to guide our designs.

There's more on the perspective in Reinertsen's book on the Principles of Product Development Flow. I highly recommend it for anyone, but particularly someone who knows a bit about manufacturing but wants to effectively translate this knowledge to product development.
Well, a crisis situation (be it real or manufactured) is a perfect vehicle for driving all kinds of agendas. It is natural there is some opposition.
I think doomer mentality more accurately describes normalizing what is happening right now under "we've endured a lot". Yeah the US has endured a civil war too, my guess is most people aren't to keen to living through another one and booking it under "we'll endure more".

This is not normal, and dysfunction does not deserve to be glorified.
There is always a cost to software in production.

The issue is who pays and when?

You can pay that cost upfront - for example JPL/NASA SDLC. This will ensure you won't get woken at odd hours but then the massive upfront cost is something most business won't pay

You can sling code without tests and fix it in prod, hoping speed will help you find product market fit.

Pretty much everyone sits somewhere between the two. This article just describes one point onthe spectrum where the author feels is best practise - but to be honest the trade offs vary across this spectrum.

Probably the right way to think of this is "the total cost of making this software NASA level is 10X, and the revenue from such perfect working software would be 20X (with no loss due to downtime)

As such of you ask me to not code to NASA standards, I and my team will incur a personal cost of 5X in being woken up, stressful release days etc.

Therefore you will compensate me with payments of 5-10X.

This discussion is much easier with a Union involved
"Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km"

Wait, that can't be true. That's an insane number if correct. Here in EU a car that averages 7-8L/100km is considered to have poor fuel economy. My previous car was a Mercedes AMG that over 4 years averaged 12L/100km and that was considered absolutely abysmal by everyone, people were wondering how I can afford the fuel for it. And you're telling me that the average for Australian cars is higher than that??
Failure is our best teacher. I do spend a lot of time on that with my students. I have a professional and personal interest in formal failure analysis, and try to instill that in students. Apollo 1 saved more lives than it took, and Windows Vista teaches you everything you need to know about monolithic, slow-moving software projects with unclear goals. Dai-Katana and Duke Nukem are masters' courses in the toxic interaction of aggressive marketing and product development. I think Trump might end up being one of the best things that ever happened to American Democracy.
They have yet to present anything compelling and have lost everywhere, including in some very “red” areas.
And axle weight comes from the weight of the cargo be it human or goods...

edit: just looked up what you said, really interesting, but makes me wonder if the transport of goods in smaller lorries for instance would ultimately be beneficial when you factor in cost of fuel, maintenance etc
> The problem is that people misunderstand "international law" and interpret it as something similar to the more familiar national law.

It's far more basic than that. Enforcement of domestic laws is based on the monopoly on violence the government carries. In international law, the two parties do not acknowledge each other's monopoly on violence. They are extremely unlikely to just roll over and accept the punishment.

Enforcing international law is just war with added steps and a more morally palatable justification. Sometimes nations capitulate before war breaks out (typically because the punishment is less severe than war, or because their odds of winning are low), but it doesn't change that they're surrendering to violence.

> Russia doesn't get sanctions because it "guilty" while the US does not because they're "innocent" in the eyes of the law.

International law is largely broken. It's predicated on the idea that the combined military power of the rest of the world can overpower the "guilty" country. Nuclear weaponry means that in the event of international law enforcement that threatens the existence of a country, they have just as much ability to make the rest of the world uninhabitable as the alliance of nations does to destroy theirs. We can't meaningfully enforce international law against nuclear capable countries. This is why economy-ruining sanctions are only enforced on nations that lack nuclear armaments. Hypothetically, if Cuba had nuclear missiles, do you really think our embargo of them would have lasted this long?

It's just a further division of the world into have's and have nots.
> URLs are a mix of procedures (/tsearch, literally everything below /rpc) and function names

Perhaps you'd be surprised in knowing that a resource can be a stored procedure, quoting Roy Fielding[1]:

"a single resource can be the equivalent of a database stored procedure, with the power to abstract state changes over any number of storage items"

In general I think PostgREST's REST implementation is evolving. Also, we've had Roy Fielding giving feedback[2] on an issue before.
Once we fix that issue, we'll ask him if he thinks if PostgREST is REST. I have a feeling that he might reply positively :-]. We'll see.

[1]:https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert...

[2]: https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/issues/1089#issuecomm...
Very interested, please do!
I don't know if they hate their users or not, but after years of their "new design" (or it seems like it's been that long at least), it still is nowhere close to working properly.

Slower, content not loading at all, random inexplicable errors, half the time it fails to keep me logged in, etc. etc.
Fixed now! =)
In Germany, water used for watering your lawn is taxed differently from water you use to fill your tub. I'm sure we could mandate a separate meter for recharging cars.
I miss working at the office, yet I hope to stay remote forever.

The fact is, I had a 45 minutes commute (so 1h30 every day!) before the pandemic. That quickly adds up to almost 8 hours per week in the bus/metro.

Why not move closer to the city? Well for one I don't like living in high density urban areas. The noise level, construction work and high price makes it uninteresting to me.

So I would love the hybrid 2 days in the office, 3 days remote to have real meetings without having to go back wasting ~10% of my waking time in public transports, but I absolutely understand that some (especially with children!) might want a clean separation between home and work.
Yes, but all that stuff was bad. This is bad too. The fact that the active president and governing party are FAILING to successfully use extra-legal means to stay in power following a failed election is still a bad thing.

And dismissing this as "doomer mentality" is just inviting a more competent maladministration to try this again.