skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Meritocracy is a concept that was invented to be critiqued. The word meritocracy was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young in his dystopian satire the Rise of Meritocracy. In his book, children are subjected to rigorous and highly accurate intelligence testing that selects their destiny among a set of highly unequal options. The fact that the ideal of meritocracy is widely lauded as an unqualified good is highly ironic given that Young's intention was to present us a stark warning. Prior to Young, people used the word "aristocracy" instead. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a natural aristocracy: "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents".

There are a few great books written about this recently:

- The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel

- The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy. Numerous factors propelled this transition, including the deployment of SAT testing and increased competitiveness at elite universities. This may sound like a good thing until you come to understand that we've created a modern American caste system. Caste is highly heritable, and upward mobility is at an all time low. 2/3 of Americans have no college degree, and the prospects for employment for them and their children look bleaker each and every day.

Furthermore, it's easy to confuse merit with value. With the pandemic, we have seen that our society is highly dependent on a set of essential workers, many of whom are in the lower castes. For example, a garbage collector could have an utterly mediocre existence in every dimension, and yet provide more value to society than a well-paid high-frequency trader in finance. Another good book to read about the negative value produced by well-paid jobs is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. The danger of the myth of meritocracy is that these lower-caste workers don't receive the appropriate level of esteem that they are due in our society. This leads to a politics of resentment.
>in some part or another, out of slavery

To put a concise point on it, I think this is something most people agree with. What the project seems to do, however, is change that understanding that slavery contributed to all those problems and instead claims it is the root cause of all of them.

Root cause and proximate causes can relate to the same problem but if we conflate the two we may get a very different understanding of how to fix it. I’m not convinced that every problem highlighted passes the “if not for” test. (E.g., if not for slavery, the US would have universal healthcare).

Side note: I appreciate all the thoughtful responses you’ve taken the time to give in this thread
The main thing that originally sparked my interest in PJDL was multi master, which is clearly a massive advantage over 1-wire
> I haven't studied it carefully, but it sure looks like 90% of the performance improvement is using a big cache, which is a totally obvious thing to do. Also the big x86 guys have more or less been asleep at the wheel for almost a decade.

Dude, has Intel called you yet? You've got some serious CTO chops.
It's not all business although commercial activity, or would-be commercial activity, certainly dominates. But a lot of that commercial activity, e.g. most newspapers, simply wasn't online at all at first. And the pioneers in that space found that they had to find ways of monetizing if they were to remain in business. (Which most of them weren't really able to do so they went out of business or radically downsized.) I'd argue that, overall, people have access to way more information than they did 10-20 years ago even if some of that information is paywalled, geoblocked, or in some other form of walled garden.

The Internet (including the Web) of the mid to late-ish 90s may have been refreshingly non-commercial and open relative to today but it was also much smaller.
He does come on HN and posts in comments quite often when D is brought up so it wouldn't be too unlikely to see, also he's coded his own games as well.
When using open source software, I've gotten into the habit of just reading the code instead of looking for answers elsewhere. Often saves me time and helps really understand the tools I'm working with.
I think bosses like meetings because they're not as interested, sometimes, in people following the edicts as they are in people doing as _they_ say. It's important for them to be the one telling you and you having to obey. If you just did what an email says then that's just working for the business; the machine is working. If you attend a meeting then, it appears at least, the boss is the one who controls you rather than your actions being directed to the business needs you're [apparently] working for the boss. They say jump, you say how high.

Maybe it's minor megalomania. IME that's another reason for meetings.
Not every marriage is that way, there are many marriages where real love exists for decades. Those are a great ideal to strive for! But status and wealth is and remains a big component in the dating market.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/05/sex-power/
That’s just your opinion. You don’t need large monitors to code (lines of code are 80-100 characters), and moving around and changing positions (desk to couch etc) every couple hours while working is generally better for health and concentration. Not having to hunt around for a power adapter makes it that much easier and better.
> People dislike drug comsumers because they feel drugs are a cheat: you get unearned pleasure without having to work for it.

While I can certainly imagine someone feeling this way, I've never thought this and I've never heard anyone express this perspective. I think you may be imagining too hard.
Toyota’s Chief Says Electric Vehicles Are Overhyped
The M1 runs Windows through virtualization faster than Windows runs natively on Qualcomm ARM.

People need to stop saying stupid stuff like "It's only fast because it's so intensely focused on macOS."
All problems stem from unsubstantiated absolutes.
For a plain senior software engineer position (no matter if you have 8 years of experience or 20), I would say no. The glass ceiling is at around 80K for the vast majority of tech companies in Berlin and Germany (excluding the top 5% of companies).

But if you get into management, I think 100K is doable for a senior position.
Other alternative is to be a Principal Engineer (or Head of Engineering).
Ditto. Grew up in the middle of nowhere. The Web gave me access to libraries of information and the work of great minds. It sparked my interest in computers and put me on the career I'm still on to this day. Through other Internet technologies (IRC,IM) I was able meet and interact with other like minded individuals. It's still fascinating but some of the original magic does seem lost but perhaps it's just nostalgia.
Exactly. People seem to forget that the web is just a way to instantly communicate with other humans, most of whom don’t follow the same exact vision for how things should be ran and monetized. Widespread commerce and monetization of previously 100% open (or previously non-existent) information was only a matter of time once monster-in-the-middle attacks were solved with SSL.
I think [these][0] two [guys][1] pretty much nailed both sides of the same coin.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws9nljEbBhs
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eymHKA7vncc
Yes, they are probably most useful to me for the IDE completions and docs as well. Raymond Hettinger gave at least one talk [1] where he discussed how there are tradeoffs: reasons why you might use them and reasons why you might not. At the end of the day you can pass whatever you want to a function and the only reason to use types if they make your code better—but there are other tools that might be more worth your time in some situations.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKbfWk4Xyw
Indeed, you seem to be correct. It gets a call-out down at the bottom of the page.
I’ve seen mention elsewhere in the comments how this article is flawed because, in essence, if distraction is endemic to humans, how can it be bad? I think the intent of the article is to highlight just how much we are distracting ourselves and in this we’re missing out on a very valuable facet of our lives which is our own thoughts. Taking a distracted, nonjudgmental view of our own thoughts can be powerful.

Distraction from time to time is fine but that’s not what we’re doing. We’re in a constant state of distraction. We’re missing out on one of the greatest resources available to us: our own minds.
Please don't take this as a personal attack, but I see this sort of attitude as the crux of the tech "disruption fetish". I'm guilty of the same thing often, but I have to push myself to see past the tech solution and to the human expertise it is replacing. Also this isn't so much a defence of cabbies, I don't use them and think them expensive an antiquated. It's a defence of the process being a better one than the relatively basic tech solution we have so far.

Google Maps just isn't that smart yet. Yes, you can absolutely drive a car through London on a route yourself and it'll work fine, for some definition of "fine". On the other hand a taxi driver is supposed to be able to perform to a far better definition of fine[1].

Google Maps accounts for traffic when it's bad. Does it account for traffic patterns before it gets bad? Maybe, badly. Does it account for bad traffic that it knows is going to happen because it chatted about an event in a certain place with another cabbie over tea earlier, or because it knows that there's a road closure for a race this afternoon? No. Google Maps is so far from taking into account things like this, but they are natural for a human, particularly one with expertise.

Google Maps will take you to a place, but what if the place you need is more nuanced than that? The stations in London often have multiple entrances, and walking from the wrong entrance to your platform could be 5 minutes and you'll miss your train because of it. Cabbies can take you to the correct entrance because they know this. Does Google Maps account for this? Maybe, badly. What if you need to get to the stage door of a theatre? This could be a few minutes away from the public entrance, but cabbies are supposed to know these sorts of landmarks. Does Google Maps account for this? No. What if you want to go to The Dorchester, let's hope you get directions to the hotel and not the town.

It's easy to excuse getting the wrong entrance to a location, or being off by 15 minutes on a journey, when it's just you driving yourself through London, but this doesn't work at the scale of public transport, and doesn't work if you are buying a service from a provider who is supposed to have intimate knowledge of the city.

Tech can probably manage these things at some point, but like with so much "disruption", we've solved a basic version of the problem and declared it better and stopped listening to people who have collectively been doing it for a century.

[1]: Some taxi drivers in London are crap because they can't be bothered. I'm talking about the hypothetical good, qualified, cabbie.
Thank you. I have had friends, none Buddhist, attend Vipassana retreats that are similar. No phone, computer, media, or conversation for a week or a weekend, just a focus on silent meditation. And an absence of religious trappings, so suitable for both devout Christians and atheists.
They all told me it is very challenging and a good look at themselves and their cravings for interaction. I don't doubt it.
You're right! I hadn't considered that this was the Chinese border and the driver was Chinese. Makes more sense.

That said, examining this critically: how would someone from the other side of the border observe people going up the mountain, going inside caves, and falling to the ground and dying in droves? Did he go inside the caves himself and found the corpses, and if so, why? If he didn't, how did he know how many died? Did he count people going in and going out the caves? Did he conduct a census of North Korean villages beyond the border and saw a stark decline in population, and was the only possible explanation starvation in caves (vs, say, migration)? If this is something that's common knowledge in the driver's community, the question becomes how did this community come to "know" all of this.
I've had the privilege to live for the last five years or so in locations with multiple options for ISP, each with a major cable provider and another ISP offering gigabit fiber to the home. Specifically, markets where both providers can offer high speed connections and you can realistically expect both to serve your residence.

My experience is that even this minimal amount of competition absolutely cuts through the bullshit that you get from a monopoly provider.

Classifying as utility companies may be one path to the end state we both desire, but lived experience proves it is not singularly so.

Do note that in the US, the largest influence on the monopoly position of ISPs is not to do with any inherent property of the industry, but due to exclusive contracts/rights of way that local governments grant to ISPs. Obviously, the ISPs seek this sort of arrangement and lobby for it. The regulation that can help the ISP situation in the US may just as well be restrictions on municipalities as restrictions on ISPs.
Resort fees aren't new. Perhaps they've become more common but I haven't noticed. The more common issue with hotels, which isn't really their fault, is you might have 5 different taxes added to the bill which can add up to a good 20% of the total bill.
Wow - I am amazed at the number of people commenting who might not realize I am a multiple time even recent victim of violent sexual assault - and no, it’s not just ‘mildly annoying’, it can send me into tears.

I’ve never seen such a lack of understanding or felt so personally attacked on HN before, as if you guys think I’m a pussy or something because you couldn’t imagine a case in which maybe, yes; it actually negatively affects my mental health.

To be honest - your stupid comments have affected my mental health, too; and I’m sorry for sharing. Ruined my morning for sure.

This is the most insensitive bullshit I have ever seen on HN and after ten years I might actually leave if this kind of insensitive hurtful bullshit continues. It’s not the first time I’ve been singled out for my orientation or sexuality here.

I have felt like HN was an LGTQBA+ friendly space for the decade I’ve been here but in the last year or two some of you have really chosen to show your true colours.

Fuck y’all’s insensitivity. I need a drink.
Even though I have begged the cable company to address the underlying issue, I have gone through several dozen modem/DVR boxes due to lightning strikes. I can only assume that the equipment is super inexpensive, otherwise they would have sorted the problem ages ago. They have been making a fortune on renting out marked up junk for years, but I am sure they are already thinking of some clever ways to claw that revenue stream back.
sheer genius. Expect a cease-and-desist from Apple since (A) you don’t really own your MacBookPro, and (B) you didn’t use slave labor. Or did you? ;-)
No, you can't. That was a feature that got cut. The entirety of the "branching path" system is a series of 3 questions at the end of the game.
> Classifying ISPs as the utility companies they are is the only way to end the gouging and systematic fraud.

Separate the running of OSI Layer 1/2 from Layer 3:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network

Some examples:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23734319

* https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...
Sure. I agree it has addiction potential, which is why I have the noprocrast feature turned on, and have for years. And clearly a lot of people get there "someone is wrong in the internet" fix here. But it wasn't a problem for me in the months of the election, so I didn't have the same need to quit it. Ergo I didn't.

As to the design question, I think the biggest things it's missing for me versus modern social networks in terms of addiction potential: 1) river-of-content setup; 2) algorithmic feed with personalized engagement; 3) images; 4) video; 5) wide topic variety; 6) follow graph; 7) real-world social connections in the platform; 8) on-platform notifications; 9) on-phone notifications.

> why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet

For me this platform is as close as I have to discussing things with my profession. So both with my professional Twitter account and this account, I see it as an opportunity to influence my field a bit and support younger colleagues where I can. Were it not for that, I'd just consume it in a read-only way, as over the years I've come to see on-line argumentation as unhealthy for me.
The only downside to her cookbooks is that she used volumetric measurements rather than weight. Volumetric measurements are fine for liquids, but very imprecise for ingredients that may be densely or loosely packed. Depending on how you scoop it, the density of flour may vary by as much as 50%. Measurement by mass avoids this issue entirely.

Source: https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/03/how-to-measure-flour-dip...
'The missing creator middle class' is funny because so many of these creators come from the middle class in the first place! That's because middle class teens have the time to make videos, not needing part-time jobs, and have the money to buy good cameras to record with, nice homes to record in, and holidays to glamorous locations to vlog about

There was a debate recently about how working class people are underrepresented and it's all middle class children at private schools and teens at elite universities.

That definitely seems to be the case for the YouTubers my daughter is interested in - they're very nice people but they are a bit relentlessly middle class.
> Using fewer Megapixels than competing phones because it's about the quality, not quantity, when other manufacturers trip over themselves to have the most Megapixels.

When your customers are picking a product based off a spec sheet, that's the trap you easily fall into.
Advisor or Adviser? A data-journey for one word that goes both ways (2014)
I doubt that this was the first website and webserver.
Just the first HTTP server.

Previously GOPHER did exist, also with multimedia extensions to view videos and images, and other/better types of webservers, eg. Microcosm, Memex, Xandru, Dexter or esp. Hyper-G via the HTP protocol (Hyper Text Protocol) or just via emacs. Hyper-G servers had link consistency and clients had embedded search. But worse and free was better, Hyper-G and Microcosm were proprietary.

First Hyper-G installation around 1989 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282504095_Analysis_...
That's amazingly customer hostile. In this area with Spectrum you can self-service swap out your cable modem as often as you want by logging into a support portal and entering the MAC address of the new modem and waiting a minute for their system to provision it. No CSR interaction required.
Likely their data showed their particular formulation of mRNA and lipid nanoparticles was more stable or “stable enough” at a certain temperature. Otherwise both vaccines are relatively similar so it may really come down to the lipid nanoparticle structures
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice – in practice there is” (Yogi Berra)

I do not use the "ideal market conditions" theory to describe what happens in practice, because it has little utility (except in predicting some very constrained trends).
> Well, it's entirely possible that I'm underestimating how prude America is, as I haven't lived there.

I think its incredibly distorted, the US overly sells Sex as an image to sell things and links it to everything it can.

Not least of which is porn and the Valley in SoCal as opposed to NorCal refers to the what was Ground Zero for Porn where all the old studios were based out of and was where most of the online stuff was created. Though Japan seems to have the highest production in terms of population-to-content if I recall correctly, which again coincides with bad economic situations, specifically under-employment and very low marriage/fertility rates.

Your edit was well timed, as you pretty much echo what I wrote. It's so weird... in University you're almost encouraged to do it all, but then when you get to the professional setting and you reach low level management position in an office setting you're briefed on sexual harassment so much you're almost terrified any encounter with the opposite sex will be deemed rape. It's horrible and really not that much of an issue as they want you to think it is when you really think about it as most encounters are brief and forgettable if you're busy working.
Adjudication requires enforcement at the end of the day. Otherwise, whoever has the biggest gun wins.
It definitely is, especially in the more well funded startups. I have several friends that earn that much and I've also paid engineers in Berlin that much (all of them very good seniors, tho). Salaries have gone up a lot in the last few years, but you have to change jobs and shop around a bit
One thing to keep in mind as well is that the disposable income after cost of living (and the quality of life) may actually be lower on 100k in some parts of the US than on 60k in Berlin. I'd certainly much rather live in Berlin on 60k than in SF on 100k.
Google Advertising Fraud
Google's advertising algorithm is horrible. Stackoverflow is paying good money to have their advertisements served to me. The worst part about this is that I found almost every single one of these Stackoverflow pages as a result of Googling, and I'm logged into Google and Youtube. Google knows that I visited Stackoverflow this many times, yet they have the audacity to charge Stackoverflow money to show me these advertisements. There is no excuse for this. Google is committing objective fraud here and is stealing Stackoverflow's advertising dollars for no good reason. Google should be ashamed. Stackoverflow should sue.
I know it exists, I was just using the words used by the author I was replying too. How does that change the point I was making?
Yeah this is how AT&T fiber forces you to pay for their router/WiFi combo box. The box contains an authentication certificate that is required for connecting to them. So frustrating
It's filled with enough annoyances for me to be frustrating at times.

The night light is awful and blasts you with full blue light whenever monitors come out of standby mode and then it'll be "On" but not actually on until you toggle it.

Lately explorer hasn't been refreshing properly, so when I create a new folder I need to right-click, refresh before I see it and can rename it.

Things that auto-install drive me crazy. No, I don't want to "Meet Now".

Every SAC update tries to trick me into enabling OneDrive "backup" (sync is NOT a backup) and I missed it once so all my stuff got uploaded to OneDrive.

BitLocker with a PIN and Windows Update don't seem to know each other exist. Updates auto-restart the computer and then it sits at the BitLocker screen or, in my case, reboots continuously every few minutes spinning the fans up to max on every reboot.

I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones that annoy me daily.
The EU and US have vastly different top end salaries. Best bet would be to compare countries like Ireland, UK, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Nordics, etc.

In Amsterdam the top end was around €80-90k, then it's the management path (principle engineer, head of engineering, etc.)