skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is an excellent question that also strikes to the heart of how we measure "productivity."
You're absolutely right... the other person was ignorant and wrong.
> But assuming arbitrary premises like this this doesn’t seem like a very useful way to learn about the real world.

See this comment is interesting, here are two ways (there may be more):

1. You have made a rather significant change in the topic.

I was talking about: "It's so interesting...there is this well known phenomenon where ~everyone has at least some bias the vast majority of the time, and in a forum thread...."

But you switched the topic, to the examination an attribute: arbitrariness

2. You have described a hypothetical scenario, focused attention one one single attribute, and then suggested/implied that the two scenarios are ~"the same". Also, in doing so, you are treating "arbitrary" as a boolean, which might cause a reader to not realize that the degree of arbitrariness is not even close to the same. This technique would generally fall under the Strawman Argument category.

These are really enjoyable conversations, let me know if you have more ideas.

There's actually a handbook (can't remember the name at the moment) of some sort floating around the internet that goes through lots of these techniques, in case you're interested in this sort of thing.
As with any industry, there are both good and bad. One of the reasons that I have created this job board is to highlight best practices and raise standards across the indie community (through creating awareness of other jobs, how they communicate to potential candidates, the benefits they offer, etc. that were previously hidden on the jobs pages of 1000+ indie developer websites).

In general, I would anticipate pay and benefits to be less than you would receive in your well-funded tech company or startup. There is upside in joining a studio that has a hit game where you not only receive a salary but a % of revenue.

Work life balance is generally favorable as many developers escape to indie games in order to get away from the crunch and routine layoffs that you often see at larger publishers and developers. And indie games on the whole appears to be a more inclusive and diverse part of the game development community. (Of course, there are exceptions.)

There are some fantastic indie studios out there that really care about their people and pride themselves on creating a safe haven for game developers.

A couple of things that I would look for when evaluating a potential indie game employer (if pay and work life balance are of concern):

- A job description or about us page that speaks to these issues, that includes a benefits/perks section, that puts in the extra effort to recruit you into the job/studio. Those are likely the studios that are going to understand that you have value and choice. They are the studios that are thinking about their people, job satisfaction, and retention. Not all indies, particularly those that are just starting up, have taken the time to think through how to be a company/employer and may simply be focused on shipping their first game (again, there are exceptions).

- A studio that has shipped a few successful games, which signals that they might have the financial stability to both offer a healthy compensation package and have had to grow/retain employees through multiple projects. If a studio is brand new, you then might want to look at who is on the team and if they have shipped successful games in the past.

- Of course, I would then look to reach out to current and former employees to gather first-hand insight into what it is like to work at those studios. You might be able to find those people on LinkedIn or in Team/About Us pages. For actual communication, instead of a LinkedIn DM, most everyone in indie games is on twitter.

Another thing of note is that there is a decent amount of contract work in indie games, which would allow you to have greater control over your own compensation and work life balance requirements.
> Beyond which we realize that we've inadvertently cultivated a debilitated fragile population that can only survive through sophisticated technological methods.

Can you think of a causal mechanism that would make the population more fragile because of vaccines? Or is it just some inocent poetry from the same old book than "everything that does not kill us makes us stronger"?
Schools in parts (or perhaps all?) of California remained open just to serve meals even while everything else was on lockdown last spring.

Unfortunately the infrastructure of school meals in the US is, like so much else, political. A sensible approach would be free (both removing the complex billing infrastructure and removing stigma of "free" vs "paying") nutritious meals for all students.

Incredibly, both "free" and "nutritious" are contentious.
No, the real reason they don't go on their own is because of the massive user base.
Yeah, and I think this drives the point home even further. You really want a risk mitigation strategy for YouTube's hostile actions against creators. It's been a slow but steady creep. So, if your business is built off the back of something like Facebook, or YouTube, or Instagram, you probably want a backup plan.

I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
I agree with the sentiment solely because most sides of the political spectrum are doing the same. Donald trump rose to the fame with calling everything fake news. Somehow everyone now believes there is fake news so they don't trust outside their own echo chambers which is called fake news by someone else.

I think it's media hacking another vulnerable parts of human beings. I see attempts to censor and attempts to fake being censored in order to hijack different vulnerabilities.
I think voting is the problem. The gamification attracts a certain type of person who for various reasons is willing to spend absurd amounts of time / effort to "acquire more points". This in turn warps the community as a result.

I understand it was an attempt to police spam. However I still think that slashdot perhaps struck the right balance (the old slashdot I mean, I don't know how they do it now). Randomly a small percentage of users get mod ability when they read the threads which enables them to vote / classify / tag spam.
At the risk of over-complicating things, perhaps there could be limits per resource type. 10Mb of images might be reasonable (e.g. for a photojournal), but only 128KB of JS, and 128KB for everything else. Something along those lines.
I've always felt that instead of J School, journalists should have majors in topics they are covering and a minor in journalism. When I was in college and worked for the school newspaper I tried hammering this to people, but all the journalism/media professors felt it was a bad idea, probably because it is such a threat to their profession.
That's the point. Live your life being ready to depart next week. Live your life being ready your loved ones to depart next week. That's not to say it's something to look forward to. Or not take reasonable precautions to avoid it. You will know worry, you will know suffering, and when the inevitable happens, you will know grief. Know that death is natural and inevitable. And yet here we are. We are here because our ancestors had the strength to raise the next generation, not because somehow individual death was defeated.

On the urban side, we are acting as if we have somehow become immortal, and that everybody must sacrifice everything, school, work, family, friends, so that some can live to 85 instead of 77. That is an unprecedented high price to ask.

Natural selection, it's cold and harsh. It doesn't fix individual, aside that the immune system is a natural selection mechanism within the organism level natural selection. It simply selects fit individuals to reproduce. We are well atuned to this mechanism, witness 'youth' or 'beauty'. Think of dental braces. In old times, without orthodontics, would be a visible marker of less than optimal fitness. Ugly. Negative selection pressure. As orthodontics becomes more prevalent, in the beginning everybody gets a beauty boost. Let's celebrate. Yet, in a few generations, in absence of any selection pressure, a larger and larger fraction of the population now needs dental braces. Teeth simply don't fit on the mandible anymore. We can handle this with technology, but it's a growing problem. Should we close orthodontics clinics tomorrow? Probably not, but that should not prevent us from recognizing the long term hidden costs of medical technology. 'Use sparingly, mostly for emergencies'.
Azure as a Dev Environment
For companies with hundreds of employees, is it cost-effective to build and test large enterprise software products in an Azure environment? I'm skeptical. Can anyone (not affiliated to Microsoft) share any experiences. For a developer used to running VMs on a beefy laptop w/ lots of memory and SSD storage, this seems like a big step backward. I'm expecting as the cost increases, the compute resources will decrease to compensate.
“allballs” is a valid PostgreSQL time literal for “midnight UTC”
The problem with bloated website is, that the cumulative time lost while waiting for them to load is (for many) measured in many, many years. Pages like google/facebook/... optimizing load time by a couple of hundredths of a second, means years of real people time saved.
Epic’s CEO Calls BS on Apple’s Small Business Program
The way I look at covid for older demographics is that they now have an additional top killer in addition to cancer and cardiovascular disease. So effectively, people are about 2x more likely to die this year* than they would have otherwise. So if their odds of surviving one year from 60 to 61 was 5% last year, then they're odds of dying are 10% this year* . The same can sort of be applied for under 40s. If they had a 0.01% chance of dying in the next year, then they now have a 0.02% chance this year*

*given that they contract covid
There is a huge part of the population that is advocating for a total lockdown until wide scale vaccine distibution is complete

and "worked" in EU is an oversimplification of what has happened with out taking into account 100's of other variables

You can not simply do a base comparison of cases and say "nation X locked down, and Nation Y did not and that is why they have different outcomes" there is no factual basis for that statement
Sure it's not the only solution to the set of problems it solves, but perhaps it's the best right now?
judging by other comments, the observatory is obsolete. I believe they regularly paint the cables on the GG bridge in order to protect from corrosion.
Like I thought of doing this project 1 month ago. I looked at the attempt out there to compile VLC to JS. I spent a few days and actually got it working, but it resulted in this monster 150 MB file. That's just not feasible.

I was looking at different approaches to a in-browser Media Player for a while. It was only about a week ago that I found SourceBuffer.appendBuffer, in conjuction with FFMPEG -f segment that I thought there was something possible.

Then I finally cracked -segment_format_options which was the missing piece. I spent a whole day on that googling around, opening Upwork contracts trying to solve that problem. Could've been 1.5-2 days, I don't remember.

Point is, it wasn't just a 1-2 hackathon. There were serious technical problems that I solved.
I think the skyscrapers in NYC would beg to differ. But there is regular maintenance on those. Which is why this sounds like more like a failure in due diligence than the natural course of affairs.

But if it is obsolete, then that is another matter.
Also explicitly. I recently interviewed for a new job. Recruiters at both Amazon and Google encouraged me to invest my 401(k) contributions in the company stock. The Google recruiter even had the audacity to (falsely — 2008, 2014) claim that Google had "never had a down year."
When it comes to declarations, the world is already moving over to Pascal's syntactic conventions in some ways. In newer languages, you see something like this:

var x: *int;

more often than:

int* x;

i.e. type name follows variable name, and type modifiers work more like unary prefix operators on types. And this is because it's less ambiguous to parse, and makes more complex types a lot easier to read, since you simply go left-to-right, instead of C's "spiraling" declarations.

The rest of Pascal's syntax is not particularly problematic, either. I'd say that the two biggest problems with it were begin..end for blocks, and having all local declarations in a block separate from code. But Modula-2 already dropped "begin", and various Pascal dialects added inline variable declarations eventually. So, on the whole, I think we'd actually be better off in terms of code readability if Modula-2 rather than C became the standard systems programming language.
Keep in mind we have no control for these numbers as a point of comparison; these are numbers which factor in efforts to quarantine and reduce contact spreading among the symptom-less.

The western world is much more cavalier when it comes to the flu and cold viruses (shopping and coming into work sick, not wearing masks on public transport, etc.)

I think the measures account for the lower flu/pneumonia deaths as a side effect.
"I’ve always found the news from my trusted sources to be reasonable and accurate until it covers something I know about. Then it seems like a complete mess."

Same. This year, with the coverage of Covid (an area where I have a certain level of expertise), I've been bombarded with the extremely low quality level of essentially all of the major news providers. They are more than willing to amplify the most speculative voices, credulously, without even basic fact-checking. The ones that depend on advertising are the worst, overall. Writers with no subject-matter expertise will take a scary quote from a single source, won't bother to make even the simplest of efforts to verify the claim, and will publish it just to get the scoop.

I won't mention names because I'll only be downvoted, but there are some extremely high-profile "scientific" media figures who are constantly broadcasting utter nonsense. And because they heard it from a "scientist" on the news, people will attack you if you rebut it. I am old enough to remember when journalists were skeptical of the people they interviewed, and the rule was that no fact was published without independent verification (read "All the President's Men" for example).

2020 is the year where the news media fell apart for me -- it is all simply entertainment now, which is unfortunate.
I think Musk recently said they are going to have 400 Wh/kg in 3-4 years. So maybe 2030.
(From another answer I wrote in this thread) Think of dental braces. In old times, without orthodontics, misaligned teeth would be a visible marker of less than optimal fitness. Ugly. Negative selection pressure. As orthodontics becomes more prevalent, in the beginning lots of people get a beauty boost. Celebrate! Yet, in a few generations, a larger and larger fraction of the population now needs more and more sophisticated dental braces. Teeth simply don't fit on the mandible anymore, because there is no selection force to prefer people with good teeth as marriage partners. Everybody has visibly good teeth! We can keep this illusion going with technology, but it's a growing problem. Should we close orthodontics clinics tomorrow? Probably not, but that should not prevent us from recognizing the long term hidden costs of medical technology. Use sparingly, mostly for emergencies.
Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
Should be 0kb for that
Youtubers take a 55% cut of ad revenue, which is about 1.8 cents per view. Youtube takes a 45% cut, but part of that is to subsidize the videos that currently don't have ads, so let's say 20% of current ad revenue is a reasonble price of Youtube removing ads from a single video.

For a video viewed a million times, it would cost a creator $6545 (.018 x 20/55 x 1,000,000) to keep the video ad free. I can't imagine anyone willing to pay that much to keep their videos ad-free.
I always think, the one feature everybody wants is speed. The same page but faster is always better.
hahaha, brilliant
Maybe the initial load is 10+s, but clicking into and out of emails is fast, and that is what matters. If that took 10s it would be unusable.
> In terms of raw votes, he's the most popular encumbent we've had period.

In terms of raw votes, the ninth most popular US Presidential candidate in 2020 (several steps below Kanye West) is more popular than Washington in either election, John Adams, or Jefferson in his first election, and the major party loser of every election 1876 and later was more popular than every President up to, and including, Lincoln.

Raw votes are a stupid measure.
Save Planet. Save Money. Get Fed.
> Humans tend to trust the first thing they hear and we tend to be less skeptical about news media especially if they seem very confident or persuasive.

This has been widely studied and seems to be surprisingly effective. When there is lack of expertise or objective metrics, people default to social proof or whatever misleading thing they could use as a measure. Many sales people abuse this and it is written in those manuals as well.
Some linux distros have gotten so polished these days that I find they require less maintenance than OSX on my MBP does. Though, most people who use linux want power not it-just-works, so I think there is going to be a preference towards the higher maintenance distros.
I had real-time video chat and played browser games 15 years ago, on hardware a fraction of the power of that today.

It seems a lot of the newer generation just doesn't realise what was already possible before, and is only infatuated with inefficient reinventions.
It's 80 cases when searching: "donald j trump"~4

This is a proximity search, to ensure it's actually turning up one of the various permutations of the name (as different court protocols may refer by surname first), rather than documents that just happen to contain each of the terms somewhere.

For fairness, "hillary rodham clinton"~4 turns up 193 cases.

Relevant doc: https://www.judyrecords.com/info (down the page, under "proximity search")
You missed my point.

I know is way more expensive but that's how every thing else is. Every next step is dangerous and expensive but it's they only way to go forward.
I'm really conflicted over this article because it makes some really good points but is missing the forest through the trees.

Information overload is very real, and people are very prone to making mistakes when digesting information from social media.

The answer isn't to kill social media or force users to solve CAPTCHAS before posting. It's to improve those critical rationality skills and the ability to analyze information.

Social media algorithms are harmful, but they're ultimately dumb likelihood solutions that do naive grouping - it just turns out that more partisan/outrageous content tends to be more exciting and elicit more key value actions.

The fix isn't to try and play legal games with social media providers, but to teach users how the mousetrap works and what are the levers they can control (and the ones they can't).
I don't really understand bringing up the "hosting video is so expensive; poor poor Youtube being exploited by nasty creators" angle.

It's a symbiotic relationship. Without content creators, Youtube is nothing. Without Youtube's massive user base, content creators will reach no one. Meanwhile, Youtube is the one making money over fist (4-5 billion dollars per quarter), so I don't understand why we should feel sorry for their hosting costs.
The messaging from medical experts has been about 99% on point. Those individuals who choose to listen to a certain lying-through-his-teeth-to-the-point-being-considered-the-norm commander-in-chief instead are the ones who are mostly doing these sorts of dangerous activities. It is really hard to have any sympathy for them. I have more sympathy for my wallet which ultimately pays the taxes that will be used by the government to fix the economy that would be a lot healthier if people listened to experts.
If only there was some common architecture to broker all these requests between objects!
> I don't even think that this is RuboCop's fault but Ruby's. Because you can write said code in a lot of different ways (like shown in the post).

Honestly, the problem is that rubocop was not designed by a community of experts. It started as the opinions of a singular person, one motivated to the point of writing a linter where none existed. As a result, it's heavily opinionated on trivial shit. Yes, you can configure it, but the out-of-box experience is overbearing.

I generally prefer https://relaxed.ruby.style which is ... a lot more chill.
I had missed that, sorry. Thanks for pointing it out.
In my state you can get some kind of understanding of whats going on, but it's so legalese vague that half the time you only know if someone got a speeding ticket, underage, or divorced.
Oh Arecibo, how I will miss thee. I had the luck to tour the observatory in the early teens with a physics conference. Someone pulled a few strings and we got the technical tour. It was amazing and full of facts, but two things still stick with me.

First, Aricebo as a space observatory was a serendipitous accident. It was originally designed just to be an atmospheric observatory. The original idea and calculations for the dish were done in a masters thesis (maybe doctoral) and, it being the late 50s and early 60s, almost immediatly got funding just like anything else at the time with physics or science attached to it. Fast forward a few years. They build the thing and realize the student made a factor-of-10 error in his calculations, but in the right direction. Arecibo was 10x LARGER than it needed to be to do the atmospheric experiments it was designed for. Turns out, they could bounce radio waves off the moon and get a response. They could hit Mercury and hear something. They eventually could even hit Jupiter. (Side fun fact: the range was limited not by the sensitivity of the receiver, but by how far the earth rotated during the flight time of the radio waves. Anything past Jupiter and Arecibo rotated out of the receiving window before the radio burst could return.)

Second, Arecibo isn't just an active radio telescope as mentioned before; it's an active microwave experiment. To study the dynamics of atmospheric plasma, Arecibo could focus microwave transmissions at different altitudes, exciting small patches of air into a plasma. It would then immediately listen to study the cooling and reionization properties of the atmosphere.

Arecibo had a strong run, providing scientific insights for over 50 years. RIP, Arecibo. You maybe have been nestled in mountains down here on Earth, but you were still a Great Observatory to me.
I agree with your prediction. I'm old enough to remember when cable was first rolled out and a big selling point for it was commercial free channels. And, as you mentioned, look at it now. Channels like TBS and TNT take it to such extremes too. A movie with a runtime of an hour and twenty minutes takes 3 hours to watch! If not for DVR I probably wouldn't watch any network or cable TV at all these days.
>Mainstream media has tried and failed to understand it for decades now.

Yes... because even after decades of industry-wide integration with the web and a generation of people working in media who have grown up with it, somehow they still can't grasp the true nature of this one forum full of shitposting edgelords.