skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A colleague took me to Tamahide restaurant in Tokyo, which opened in 1760 and is known for creating oyakodon, a chicken and egg rice bowl. (Oyakadon translates to "parent and child donburi" which somehow makes eating a combination of chicken and egg a little less appealing).

Looking at reviews today, people apparently see the food as a mixed bag - some are clearly disappointed. In my opinion, it was excellent, with the signature dish having balanced flavors that seem to have been refined for generations. I found it endlessly fascinating that a humble lunch place with a simple dish could survive for 250+ years - but it also makes perfect sense that simple things last.

My colleague (a local in our Japan office) told me that emperors of old had ordered the dish to be delivered to them, well before Japan had even been "opened" to the world. Perhaps the stories were apocryphal (he was a sales guy after all), but still entertaining and gave a sense of the history behind the meal.

Tokyo is an amazing city, though it can be very lonely for an expat.
Thank you for showing me how much I have forgotten in 15 years :)
Exploring the Gameboy Memory Bank Controller
Unconventional Advice That Will Help You Start Writing Online
Show HN: Weekly zoom meetings to talk phone addiction
Especially this year, phone/twitter usage and general scrolling feels like it's gotten out of control for me. Putting together a weekly Zoom meeting as a chance to talk about with other folks who are also struggling.

Did I need to create this, or are there already good places to have this kind of meeting?

Welcome copy thoughts.
> The Japanese companies that have endured the longest have often been defined by an aversion to risk — shaped in part by past crises — and an accumulation of large cash reserves.

> It is a common trait among Japanese enterprises and part of the reason that the country has so far avoided the high bankruptcy rates of the United States during the pandemic. Even when they “make some profits,” said Tomohiro Ota, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, “they do not increase their capital expenditure.”

I found this part very interesting; it seems like Japan’s monetary policy would present a huge disincentive to this.
Looking at the data on rolled out photovoltaics from here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

It looks like Europe as a whole is only a fraction of global spending from 2012 onwards. Germany is only a part of that.

How do you discount the counterfactual that Solar power costs were going down anyway as there was global demand anyway for solar panels at reasonable scale?

Also, do you have any reference for anyone at the start of the Energiewende saying that the aim was to reduce the cost of solar power rather than reduce emissions?

It seems that the goals are being shifted to avoid people looking at Germany spending hundreds of billions of dollars and, as you point out, achieving a result that is substantially worse than that of France, that did something similar in the 1970s with different technology.
That seems right, 1 * 1/49 * 1/47 * 1/46 * 1/45 * 5! * 1000 * 365 gets about 8 occurrences per year.
You should try out Urbit. I hear they have a community like that in there.
I would hazard to say it is only in relative recent history (and in capitalism) that new and adventurous = prosperity. For much of history, leaving behind what you know was no guarantee of success (and maybe great risk of material poverty).
And that's why hormesis works and explains a variety of phenomena that small amounts of disruptions is good to keep your mechanisms ready to take on challenges.
> Now, Microsoft says, it will removing individual user names from the productivity score entirely

> The company is also changing its branding around the feature to make clear that the “productivity” that is being scored is that of organisations, not individuals

OK, I was wrong when I wrote my prediction that the only thing they are going to do is to change the name of the feature (made in the previous comment in my comment history).
Show HN: A customized Notion Workspace theme powered by Super
Most likely the union organizers said they'd do X, Y and Z if created. That included a more standardized salary across the board which benefits those making the least but hurts those making the most.
You don't need latest, and greatest process to make chips for missiles.
Plus regular famines and accompanying social unrest.
That's correct.

Generally, when I'm building a business, I prefer not to assume that Google will eventually, at some point in the future, solve the crawling a SPA site problem and finally discover my site.

I'd rather get my 70%-80% organic search traffic today, with any boring server-side rendered tech stack.
I don't believe that lottery players are unintelligent or uneducated.

It's rational to play the lottery if you believe that it's the only way to make a significant economic change to your life.

That's a bigger problem than just education provision.
The same advice applies to screens as well. Lots more than Netflix out there.
In Poland we have a lottery that draws 20 numbers out of 80 TWICE A DAY. Other lottery is drawing 3 times a week. So a lot of drawings.

EDIT: Oh, the best part: we have this "lottery for the impatient" that has draws every 4 minutes :)
This story makes me want to tell one of my own. I have visited the PRC a few times. On one of those times, my wife and I visited a cousin of hers in Beijing. This cousin had a factory and was well connected. He wanted us to do something for him, so he invited us to drinks and dinner at a fine restaurant (in a private banquet room). Turns out that one of his buddies was the Chief of Police and he was there too. We had fun trying to drink each other under the table, and as the evening came to a close I slipped downstairs so that I could pay for everything. (I didn't want to be obligated to any of these people.) When I approached the restaurant staff and expressed my intention to pay, they were horror stricken. Apparently the Police Chief was sponsoring the meal, which means the restaurant was giving it to him and everyone else for "free". I had not truly realized the extent of corruption in China until that moment.
For me having good statistics is good enough. The question is how many flights are necessary for 737 Max 8 to overcome the bad start in its statistic. It needs to go back to 0.2 per million flights, which needs about 10 million flights more to prove itself (taking about 5-10 years maybe)
What - so I choose 1,2,3,4,5 and you choose 6,7,8,9,10 and this we both double our chances for half the pot ?

I can imagine that just leads to a lot of litigation
Me too. As a Brit in USA, especially as a scouser, I have to do a comedy American accent to work Siri et al.

Used to be the same in the store, tuna sandwich pls. Huh? What? Oh, toona!
I've heard it phrased the other way around. Positive liberty is about things that are guaranteed (e.g. health care, food, human dignity). Negative liberty is about things that may not be done (e.g. no punishment for speech, no limitations on buying guns, no environmental regulations).

We are in agreement about which type is better, so this is solely a quibble about the names.
You don't have to put the corp stuff on your device. They will provide you with a company phone that you can then use for only company stuff.
Ask HN: How do you choose 3rd party libraries?
Developers rely hugely on 3rd party libraries. How do you choose one if many are available? How much time do you spend on choosing?
Part of this was that CA’s “deregulation” outlawed long term pricing in favor of spot pricing. So it created a situation where providers could “discover” that they needed to take a plant down for maintenance at peak, only to “accidentally” raise the price of electricity.

AIUI, long term contracts were seen as opaque, whereas spot pricing wasn’t.
Professional Network Is Overrated
Very cool! Reminds me of all the fun I had with Rocky's Boots on Apple II:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots
jordan here--thanks for this appreciate the commentary
The story of what they did gets more ridiculous with every retelling.
> 1.5 million people have died

But did they die FROM or WITH covid? That's the million dollar question. Here's CDC data that says 94% of Covid-19 deaths involved one or more comorbid conditions... i.e. these are not healthy people struck down in their prime... https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Co...

Point is, just a raw number doesn't actually make a great argument.

Even worse, it's a number without context. The most recent annual death stat I could find was for 2017 which saw about 54,750,000 deaths. So '1.5m dying from covid' is less than 3% of this year's deaths.

In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, those numbers seem a fair argument for the "overblown" POV.
"everyone else who tries it will do better because Germans ate the costs?"

Yes on both your points. Sadly, German industry didn't get the benefit. Which makes it harder to convince the country to do stuff like this again.

Very different from Tesla, where a bunch of silicon valley people ate the cost (e.g. VCs, roadster, 2012 model-S) and then many benefitted as they own stock.
To clear up some misunderstandings before HN's web developer crowd gets too excited and starts throwing around scientifically inaccurate speculations:

- Accurate and precise CRISPR-based, human non-germline in vivo cell editing at scale still has some ways to go. We are not at the stage (yet) where a couple injections will be able to completely rewrite your genome. Accuracy and precision has room for improvement. In vivo needs more research (the ethics concerns and controversies is a huge barrier for this). And finally scale, which I will address below.

- A quick explanation of germline vs non-germline gene editing.

Non-germline: change just the genes in the affected area. Germline: change the genes in the sex cells (or their product, the zygote) so that the change will be perpetuated. The Stanford professor's controversial editing of the Chinese twins was germline based. Non-germline is hard because you have many many cells and right now CRISPR is still not perfectly precise. Delivering CRISPR to every part of the organ/afflicted area is still not yet well understood.

There was an article on HN a couple days ago on this. It was sensationalised and exaggerated but the point made is largely correct:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25096386
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25096982

- The technology that finally makes it to market may not be CRISPR at all. With the announcement two days ago by Deepmind, the field of proteomics, and by proxy biology, has been fundamentally changed. The impact to computational biology is akin to ImageNet overshadowing the Lisp/Prolog based expert systems, and their successors' decision trees. History has been written. The repercussions of that blog post is greater for humanity than the moon landing. You often see on HN people complaining how top minds and talent are now working on better ads systems and recognising cat photos instead of real hard tech. The cat photo recognition people just wrote their names in the biology textbooks of the future. Silicon valley loves anti-aging research. That Deep Mind blog post alone possibly added decades to our lifespan than any past effort by Aubrey De Grey et al. or the Methuselah Foundation. Biotech startups might actually be profitable now (hahaha)
Not a (serious) juggler, but I first heard about siteswap in a roundabout way, through this github repo that collects quotes about notations.

It has an excepted quote from Wright that blew my mind:

> So we decided to invent a notation for juggling. Now this didn’t happen overnight—this took some considerable time—and our early attempts were very poor. They were inadequate to describe many of the tricks we thought a notation should be able to describe. And eventually we hit on a scheme that seemed to work. And we used it to write down loads of different juggling tricks that we knew.

> We discovered that if we arranged those tricks in just the right way, they fell into a pattern. There was an underlying, unsuspected structure. As long as you had the courage to leave gaps. And this goes back to things like the Periodic Table, when Mendeley was writing down all the elements—he realized that if you arranged them all according to function, then there were gaps, and that then predicted the existence of chemical elements.

> Well, we were predicting the existence of juggling tricks. And it worked! We actually found juggling tricks that no one had ever done before.

(https://github.com/hypotext/notation)

What's so cool is that you can predict gaps in knowledge by developing a notation to (honestly) describe what you do know.
I sued to go shopping at an Amish market and it seemed that they were just very deliberate in their use of technology. They used trucks to get their stuff to the market, they had cell phones, they had freezers. I think their society is just very focused and rejects distraction.

But it’s not all golden. There were a lot of stories of spousal and child abuse but they stay hidden.
Looked at individual transactions within the economy - i.e. how this thread is looking at the lottery - those do appear to be zero sum in the same way.
Ooooh so that is the reason of all the crazy Cancer warnings that I see in California when I go. I remember at some point while boarding an airplane in California that I saw some cancer sign in the worm-aisle (what's the name in English?) that you pass while boarding
> I'd agree if this redline didn't require several departments to sign off costing $x million.

Straw man. If a small change like this costs a company any more than a thousand bucks, they are Doing it Wrong.

You might argue that $1k is also a lot to expect, but consider that the company has likely already spent north of $25k (and sometimes a lot more than that) on the recruiting process that brought them this new employee. If they're going to throw that away to avoid an internal approval process that costs another thousand, that sounds like a bad financial decision to me.
Ask HN: What effect will AlphaFold have on drug development?
Given AlphaFold’s recent success in predicting protein structure it leaves open the question of how it will impact creation of new drug? To someone not in the field it seems to give a large boon to being able to create proteins with desired structures and therefore specific effects. Unwanted side effects would still need to be screened but that’d be much easier to do if you can make a hundred proteins that target a given functionality. Perhaps this would enable the creation of designer enzymes?
Please go to Fugetsu-do mochi, if you are ever in LA. They are 117 yrs/old and follow this Japanese tradition. They need business during COVID. https://www.fugetsu-do.com/
> A dire contrast with the west which since the industrial revolution grew up so fast by respecting human rights, the environment, other nations, international law.

Well, no, exactly like the West that did many of the same things as China at a similar stages in their development, with similar results (there's a difference between the hybrid of state capitalism and corporatism with central elites in practical control of "democratic centralism" in modern China and peak private capitalism with capitalist control of notionally democratic institutions in the early industrial West, but there are also lots of similarities), and very much like what lots of Western countries did later under slightly different systems than peak private capitalism that are also similar to China's current system (e.g., fascist corporatism)

Which is exactly why "how China can do what they do" isn't at all a mystery or place the West needs to go to learn lessons. Its not that the West has never done the kind of things that China has done, but that its been there and moved on. Certainly not completely, and certainly with deep remaining problems. But a few pretty prestige projects for the elites and those willing to knuckle under for them aren't worth the cost of reversing progress on those fronts.
That's a poor analogy. Remaining sober doesn't have potential negative side effects unless you're already addicted to alcohol/benzos.

The fact is that the COVID vaccines, as with any medicine, will have side effects, and some of those side effects may be life-altering. There are valid concerns about the vaccines and these effects that cannot simply be brushed off as anti-vax nonsense.
I'm surprised so many people are excited about this. I have many concerns with the Pfizer vaccine

* 99.96% of the placebo group did not have a serious case of covid

* 99.25% of the placebo group did not get covid

* No one in the trial was deliberately inoculated - participants just lived their lives as normal.

* Only symptomatic participants were tested - this seems unbelievable to me - we have no idea what the actual incidence rate is because not everyone was tested

* Vaccines might just mask symptoms - since not everyone is getting tested, vaccine makers just have to make sure there are no symptoms. No symptoms equals no test.

* No trials done with two placebos - we need trials where both groups are in a placebo group. One gets a shot that gives a mild side effect and the other gives no side effect

* No trials done with unrelated immune boosters - we need to see how well this vaccine performs against other immune boosters. This could be a drugs or even supplements (vitamin D & C and exercise).

* Two shots were given in a trial lasting just 4 months - 4 months is an incredibly short amount of time to know whether it will be effective long term. It also gives Pfizer two chances to boost immune

* Long term health consequences of vaccine - we only have 4 months of data, which is way too short of time to see any longer term consequences

* There is a huge incentive to provide something that masks symptoms - billions of dollars are at stake. Big pharma is one of the very last companies I would trust with a novel vaccine

* No coronavirus vaccine in history - many coronaviruses currently circulate, but no vaccine has even been produced for them. It seems quite coincidental that humans finally put the pieces together for our current novel strand
Well they've named it Google Assistant. I think I'd prefer "ok/hey assistant".
No, you don't. If it's a split with one other person, you get 2/3 instead of 1/2, that's only 33% more. If it's a split with two other people, that's 2/4 instead of 1/3, which is only 50% more. etc. and always less than twice as much.

And in all the other cases where it's not a split (either you lose or you win alone), you paid twice as much.
Great summary of what's at play here.

> Given these benefits, retaining ownership of the hydropower companies in the hands of the public is super important

It's almost unfathomable to me that anyone can disagree with this, yet I'm pretty sure the status quo won't last for much longer.

I'm tempted to use some very strong words for describing those that are working to this end, but I guess it could all boil down to ideological blindness and short sighted greed.
> Collective employment agreements mandate minimums, not maximums.

Collective employment agreements can mandate whatever is negotiated
between the union and management, within the bounds of contract law and labor law. Of course they can include maximums.

What is likely to happen is that a salary range would be defined for each engineering level. The top of that range is likely to be lower than what many engineers at large companies currently earn, yet higher than what many engineers at startups currently earn. Therein is the leveling effect.

Leveling is good if you level up, but bad if you level down. Many engineers at large companies would level down, if they were to join a union. So why should they support unionization?
Oh, well. Thank you, Google! You're so nice to the stupid of us who invest time and energy into your ecosystem! It feels nice to be human guinea pigs!
Libraries to Remove Unused CSS
Too Long, Didn’t Read
So if your first paragraph is correct, what are we to make of the HR person saying "But that isn't how we use it, we would never access your personal data."? Were they lying? Or was there a real internal rule about "never" accessing personal data? A rule that was in disagreement with the $x million worth of coordinations of legal documentation?

And if your second paragraph is correct, then "Google HR lies to you on your first day as policy - if you ask certain questions" seems to be the only logical conclusion.
,,The global fleet of nearly 400 737 MAXs flew 500,000 flights from March 2017 to March 2019, and experienced two fatal accidents for an accident rate of four per million flights when it was grounded. The previous generations of the Boeing 737 averaged 0.2 accidents per million flights.[180]'' - from Wikipedia
"Use an IDE" is never an answer to shitty language design. Shitty language design is shitty language design. That said, I cut my teeth on PHP and still have a fondness for it. It's especially great being able to deploy small little backend-driven pages with rsync or sftp in a pinch. I just discovered other languages and environments I enjoyed working in much better.
Oh, as someone who's fluent in this stuff I can see the benefits.

My issue is with people who complain that a site doesn't work without javascript. All I can think to say is "ya so?".

I don't mean to sound petulant, I really don't.

But it's one of these things that the general market has decided is optimal. Not for build sizes but for building in general.
It's 2020, how can things like this be so hard?
I work at Google, but have no inside knowledge of these events.

I doubt that Google spontaneously published the reason for the firing. AFAICT, the former employees went to the press following their firing, and the "violation of security policies" explanation was the response to articles initiated by the former employees. It's not clear to me how the parent's comments are a smear, unless the statement that "she bypassed restriction in our code change system" is not factual (which I don't know, but I have no reason to doubt it).
The crusades too. Too many second and third sons this too many knights.

Inherit, clergy or war.
Weirdly cute illustrations to fight against Covid
You may be thinking of this post: https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-fact... ?
>Maybe I am missing something and the plan here is to leave Sickle Cell trait alone and only subject people with Sickle Cell Disease to what amounts to genetic experimentation.

I think you are missing some context. Most if not all gene therapies do not eliminate the heritable trait. In this case, The the gene therapy would alter the DNA causing the disease in the bone marrow, not the reproductive DNA in the testes or ovaries. It doesn't help that articles and speakers use sickle cell to refer to both the disease and gene.

To me, social controls on who can marry and who can breed with who are much less humane than offering experiential gene editing to sick and willing people. This would be followed by offering tested and proven gene editing to sick and willing people.

>that was my policy after I was diagnosed and was getting a divorce.

I think that is a reasonable and cost effective solution, but there are other options. For those with the means, embryonic screening is an option. In the future, it may be possible to remove all negative symptoms from the homozygous carrier.

There is also the topic of dominant genetic disorders like huntington's disease, which can not be prevented in children by screening partners. Without medical solutions, these people can not have children without risk. With genetic medical intervention, the carriers as well as their children can be spared from an awful degenerative disease.