skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s not as complex as you’re choosing to make it. When someone tells you, “There’s free beer at Oktoberfest,” is your first thought that the beer has no monetary cost, or that the beer is unencumbered by particular legal restrictions?

Now someone tells you, “There’s free speech at Oktoberfest.” Is your first thought that there’s no monetary cost to expression, or that the expression is unencumbered by particular legal restrictions?

(Happily, Oktoberfest has both.)

>I'm just wondering in what context or culture beer is considered free (gratis).

When beer is described as “free,” it’s understood to be gratis. When speech is described as free, it’s understood to be libre. These are used as examples for more ambiguous situations, since software can be one, the other, both, or neither.

>Why not say "free as in beer, not free as in lunch"?

For three reasons:

1. “Free for lunch” is a way more common phrase, and it already means “unencumbered by schedule or previous commitments.”
2. “Free lunch” is already part of a more common phrase which states that a free lunch cannot exist, ruining the effectiveness.
3. Beer and lunch are both expected to be gratis, not libre. Exceptions (http://freebeer.org/) have to explain themselves over that hill.
It doesn't necessarily require the founder investing large amounts, Bezos began with a small investment - and a lot of ingenuity.

My own business began this year with $0 and I'm way past $100k. I had to live in my car for two months, absolutely worth it though, it helped me focus like never before. I created excellent product and then spent a lot of time both online and offline finding customers.

And now imagine you do this, and after all the shit you went through people start saying you don't deserve your money, completely ignoring the huge risk you made and the opportunity cost behind you, and that YOU MADE THE THING. What would you think?
Wouldn't that destroy any RF-capable probe?
Thoughts on Re:Invent – Internet of Things
The hungriest leech state in the US declares it's still not sated.

This doesn't bode well for California.
Probably different in different places, but in many libraries I've been to, you often interface with student part time workers or the stereotypical ancient person who still lives in a previous age and is bitter about people being impolite.

But I'm always reading positive stuff about American public libraries that they are not really just about borrowing books, but free internet, photocopying, showers, some kind of free social program to help poor people with any information related stuff, like job search or government forms.
Of course. Your capital gains would be taxed upon sale if you didn't leave; should fleeing the country allow you to avoid that?

Letting people take advantage of all the US offers while paying no tax on their growing wealth, and then letting them retire elsewhere without having put in their fair share makes no sense. Of course, we could stop taxing capital gains so favorably, as an alternative.
Not in terms of using the language either. And the reason it is used the world over is because it was dictated to developers by browser makers. That's the single and only reason.
Fair enough. How many of those languages are just considered reinventions of Java?
Thank you for pointing this out.

Many people, especially at HN for some reason, don’t realize that the Tax Reform Act of 1986 made tax rates more transparent which is why the “sticker rate” was lower.

Interestingly, the former tax rates often times screwed the middle class much more, because they couldn’t afford an accountant and/or engage in the wide range of financial maneuvers that could substantially reduce one’s tax burden.

No higher earner ever paid sticker price tax rates when they were that high.

Source: My mother. She has been a tax accountant since the 70s. The Tax Reform Act changed the field considerably.
Residency requirements are nothing more than a form of hazing.
The doctors are half-asleep while making important decisions. How can this be not be outrageously unacceptable?
Maybe, assuming it's all committed in one shot (rather than, say, a couple lines per review) and the reviewer scrolls through and glances at every chunk of code. It's some 4000 lines of code, so I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of those wasn't the case. (And all of this is assuming the reviewer was a typical one... if they were particularly known to be careless or compromised, then you don't need these either.)

P.S. Oh, one more thing: some workflows don't mandate a second review after the code is amended, so the initial code could be benign. And many don't require the merger to be the reviewer either. So this could've gotten in that way too.
The SolarWinds Orion Sunburst Supply-Chain Attack
This seems to be the Californian version of "American Exceptionalism". Yes, California has some great things going for it. But so does Washington and Oregon and Texas and Colorado. Relative tax rates matter, especially for people as mobile as the ultra-rich.
9k-Year-Old Stonehenge-Like Structure Found Under Lake Michigan
Rich Americans increasingly are looking for second passports
I hope CD Project Red devs are reading HN today. I want them to hear: if you feel that the whole world is against you - it's not true.

Many people are silently enjoying the game and you will not hear as much from them as from the whiners exactly because of this - they have nothing to whine about.

For me, this game already took the place in my personal Hall of Fame: next to Oblivion, Red Dead Redemption 2, and GTA SA.

Thank you! And you should know: you’ve proved that you are professionals. Don't let your managers make you answer for their promises. Don't feel guilty, you should be proud actually.
I think your assumptions are incorrect: individually, the people who work at facebook aren't stupid people, but indeed, the company Facebook itself, and the decisions it makes, can be described to be the actions of a stupid company.
Since I've been testing both on linux on an older laptop (Core i5-3317U, 10GB RAM, Sata SSD): Emacs + lsp (Omnisharp) is not noticably faster than JetBrains Rider. Both are slow and at times lagging on this hardware. In the end I just use Rider on that laptop since if it's lagging either way, Rider is still a more complete C# ide for me.
My laptop from work is a Dell Precision (Core i7-7820HQ, 32GB RAM, NVMe SSD) and is more powerful: it's a pleasure to use Rider on that machine.
Interesting tidbit at the bottom ...

> In an interesting turn of events, the investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor.
The source of wealth inequality is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve uses its ability to create monetary reserves to rescue holders capital at every juncture. The Fed has created a massive asymmetric system.

This year the Federal Reserve bought bonds of Apple. Why?

Taxing wealth is trying to fix the system at the end point instead of fixing it at the source of the problem.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/29/the-fed-is-buying-some-of-th...
So defund government services and avail yourself of none and a-ha now you can't be taxed!

Long live the libertarian oligarchy.
>In this case Apple is getting all the goodies about the user: their location, their usage, their connections, everything. Meanwhile, they are blocking others from having it.

Because Apple doesn't seem interested in collecting all this data in the first place. If they were, it'd be straight up hypocrisy, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Don't get me wrong, I value open platforms myself, but right now it seems like the choice in mobile OSes is largely between an open platform that leaks data like a sieve and a restrictive platform that at least has some semblance of privacy. I keep flipping back and forth and hope for a better option one day, but I'm glad there's at least someone putting pressure on the advertising panopticon.
There’s plenty of tax revenue to fund nearly all such priorities. It’s sadly squandered, in large part because voters have ideological commitments to confiscation, and no such commitments to effective government.
Not entirely true, the old track beds need some serious work to be ridable on a bike after the rails and ties are removed.

In fact many miles of the trail they are showing are undeveloped and you gotta push your bike still.
I don't like the Dutch system, having experienced it personally, but it is worth pointing out that the wealth tax exists in place of a capital gains tax.
I’d like to see if the IRS would accept the startup’s private shares as payment. It’s funny to me because there isn’t an open market to liquidate them... yet they are taxed like they are cash.
> I fail to understand Facebook's strategy/reasoning for running this campaign against Apple

Facebook and Google have aligned.[1] Google and Apple are in direct competition, and Apple is moving aggressively to the head of the pack, technologically, in the consumer space, recently starting to taunt the PC market again[2].

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-antitrust-google-fac...

[2]: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/apple-brings-the-pc-guy-back-f...
Could’ve been avoided if the people in charge knew it was false from the beginning.
Long Covid: New UK guidance published – 28 common symptoms identified
I guess that airline really feels somewhat left out as many of the "national" ones (Lufthansa, SAS etc.) are getting enormous amounts of money as Corona relief, while they are on their own. Too bad they are making up for the difference with these planes
Interesting to contrast the outcome with discussions under the Unity S-1[1] and similar threads. Some engineers outside of AAA game dev complain that certain core tenets of software engineering are hard to come by in Unity & Unreal projects, while insiders claim that the kinds of stringent quality controls being proposed are untenable, and in themselves demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of how things work in the industry. Could a launch-flop like Cyberpunk 2077 cause the pendulum to swing the other way?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261559
The better example of an abandoned route through the Cascades is the old railway route through Snoqualmie pass, which connects the metro Seattle area to the east side of the mountains. It's now a state park, and you can hike or bike from one side to the other.

As technology improved, a longer tunnel was built lower down the pass to decrease the elevation gain for trains, and the old route became obsolete. I suspect that this is not a unique story, and the question would be whether the old railway routes are still safely navigable.
They tried it circa 2012/13. It was a partnership with Microsoft/Nokia, meant to get people in developing countries hooked on Facebook at a very low price. The phone was crap though, even by dev county standards. I remember testing it, and everything took foreeeever.

On a bright side, it was the same time when FB put a ton of effort into improving their mobile web experience, realizing how bad it was on bad phones with slow networks.
Ah, yes, threatening to murder people you're jealous of. This is the content I come to Hacker News for!
Tax is not a one-time contract nor a punishment, as you are presenting it to be. It's a democratic agreement about how society should be run.

Another democratic agreement is that you are allowed and encouraged to own capital. (That's why it's called 'capitalism', to distinguish it from other possibilities)
> I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff

I don't understand why society is putting up with this. Right now if you're not in a daily COVID-facing role (i.e. an actual front line medical worker) or in a nursing home you should not be getting the shot. This makes my blood boil. There should have been laws passed regarding ordering of the distribution with criminal penalties for line jumpers like this.

There's an article in our local paper with a happy picture of one of our state's congressional representatives (a healthy 34-year-old!) getting the shot. Like WTF? There's doctors and nurses who are treating covid patients who can't get it yet. Why the heck does Congress get priority over them?

Not only do these people have no shame, half of them even have the nerve to brag about it to the rest of us plebes who will have to wait months or more to get it.
Income taxation creates a bureaucratic burden with no discernible benefit. We also disproportionately tax the poor via point of sale taxes which is just mind boggling stupid.
the hospital employs somewhere around 30k people. even if they had all 60k doses (two per person) they can't vaccinate everyone at the same time due to potential side effects, so a schedule is needed to avoid an entire department being sick at the same time.

my wife works for the hospital but has been working from home most of the time since covid started. she's low on the priority list because of this, and rightfully so. her co-workers that are treating the (sometimes infected) patients should get access first, if they want it.
> Most librarians have master's degrees

This may be true of public libraries (at least major branches) and university libraries in the USA, but is it true even of high school libraries?
Gross oversight: Veterinarians are not in the first wave of vaccinations, despite being both essential and healthcare workers. The mega corps that own most Vet clinics don't care about them, they have continued operating apace. Meanwhile, corona could be all over the dogs and cats brought in, very few owners sanitize their indoor pets before Vet visits.
> They also have their own ad platform that will benefit from this.

No, not since 2017: https://developer.apple.com/support/iad/
It was the ‘noble lie‘ to prevent a run on PPE.

The noble lie is typically a regrettable idea. Eventually exposed, it undermines trust in institutions by setting them in opposition to the public.

“We had to lie to you because you wouldn’t have done the right thing otherwise. That is to say, you are bad and we are good.”
I guess I didn't actually say so, but my implicit assumption was that you have a voting setup where a single failure isn't necessarily a problem
One more financial reason to move to Austin I guess. As if there weren’t enough already: https://www.thriftythoughts.io/silicon-hills/
I miss the NEAR keyword. I gather that Google has AROUND(n), or did at some point (one never knows with them), but damn, NEAR was pretty helpful when you had a nicely constructed Boolean that wasn't quite getting you what you needed.
Well run, pro-capital and stable come to mind. I’d go the other way and ask what’s interesting in Miami... (I spent my share of time in Miami, thank you)
Related news article:

Long Covid: Hospital patients to get checks at six weeks

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55352409
Interesting idea. Every time a vote goes your way, you accumulate more holding time on your stock. Those who lose votes will have negatives added against any compulsory holding time they’ve accumulated (since they are misaligned with the direction in which the company is headed). Status quo for those who don’t vote or lose don’t have such restrictions.

I wonder if we can frame a system starting with this approach (correcting for aspects like some votes are on really minor issues, and some are really major issues).
No, that’s not what that it is saying.

It is saying that worse candidates get jobs over better candidates because there is an artificial minority quota that must be achieved.

I helped fill a PhD position in Germany, it took 6 months to fill, because the first 19 properly qualified candidates were men. The 20th was a women, their qualifications were significantly worse than most men, but she got the job because of the quotas set by the German research foundation.

I never helped with filling a position again and this was one of the contributing factors for my decision against staying in academia.
Isn’t that sort of the whole idea here?
False. If demographic trends (how Texas hispanics shifted to the GOP from 2016) are extrapolated, Texas is actually trending towards the GOP.
> How on earth do you expect them to prioritize these vaccines if not based on age and other risk factors?

On their required interactions with many infected people, causing them to be risky for spreading the disease and causing labor shortages in the hospital if they are found to be infected.

It makes no more sense to administer the vaccine to an elderly hospital administrator working from home than it does to give it to an elderly professional of any other kind working from home. They should get the vaccine eventually, but they should not be among the first when vaccines are rationed.
Thanks, I will check it out. Good luck with the project!
Conflict of interest? Lol. It sounds like he or she has relevant expertise in the matter being discussed. Rare for Hacker News commenters.
They are claiming that their build system was compromised and the code was not under source control.

> Based on our investigations to date, which are ongoing, we believe that the vulnerability was inserted within the Orion Platform products and existed in updates released between March and June 2020 (what we call the “relevant period”) as a result of a compromise of the Orion software build system and was not present in the source code repository of the Orion Platform products.
> For many, this is more about punishing their bad guys than generating tax revenue to accomplish something.

That’s basically the point of wealth taxes, explicitly. Advocates of a stronger wealth task believe billionaires should not exist on principle, that centralization of wealth and power is wrong it itself. And they’re right.
Right. I think what I am trying to say is that by focusing on illusion of privacy, Apple can take a long view on abusing the said privacy. They are all trying to murder the other guy with whatever tools they've got. FB is using ads and data, Apple is using their device strong hold, MSFT is going after business users...etc.

It's not that one is better or worse, but I think it's important to recognize that each one has its flaws.
After the dot com crash? many of the spiders just stopped indexing new content. The altavista index became way out of date. If you weren't already in a yahoo category you weren't getting in. Dmoz didn't even have the editors to appoint any new editors... It was less a failure than a mass giving up, as if everyone had gone but forgotten to turn the servers off when they left.
I think most people are misunderstanding the likely root cause.

> An algorithm was used to assign its first allotment of the vaccine. The algorithm prioritized health care workers at highest risk for COVID infections, along with factors like age and the location or unit where they work in the hospital. Residents did not have an assigned location, and along with their typically young age, they were dropped low on the priority list.

Whoever coded up the algorithm for personal COVID-risk probably forgot to take care of null-states for the location input. Residents had their location set to null, and were therefore prioritized lower than they should've been.

It's possible that the admins purposefully created this null-state bug so as to have a reasonable fallback story in the case they got caught, but per Occam's Razor, I think it's much more likely it was a dumb, honest mistake.
There's a rumor on a Polish website that CP2077 underwent a major plot overhaul in the middle of development. According to this hypothesis, supported by some early quotes, there were initially going to be 3 mentor characters to choose from:

Johnny Silverhand (tech solutions, tech weapons),
Morgan Blackhand (handguns?, power weapons),
Saburo Arasaka (Hacking, smart weapons)

It is said that 2018 e3 gameplay presentation featured the choice of mentors.

Then Keanu Reeves turned up. Eventually the marketing team had a brilliant idea to get more out of Keanu. And since he's so awesome, why not make the game MORE about Keanu... In fact, why waste budget and manpower on the other 2 actors?

This type of problem with high profile actors is endemic in movie industry. A movie with Bruce Willis or Ryan Gosling will be about Bruce Willis and Ryan Gosling. The actors don't have to even act that well because plot will be adjusted to play into their strengths.(Look how much screen time aging Bruce Willis got in Looper and the new Blade Runner!)

(polish)
https://www.wykop.pl/link/5853285/czy-rola-keanu-reevsa-jest...

There are various speculations in the thread, including that the game is so lacking in its systems (police, NPC schedules, driving...) because they were ordered to cut them out. They were meant to be in the game initially, but major direction shifts in the development meant they had to reassign developers to something else.

Some content in the game seems to support this line of thinking. There's a quest with a monk that works slightly differently depending on which story act you're in.

There are some hints that developers really wanted to make a great game, but were gaslighted and bullshitted by the management.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-18/cyberpunk...

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If you want to know my opinion, I think CDPR also overestimated their ability. A modern, urban world works very differently than fantasy sword game. CDPR had 3 games to perfect the formula, then they jumped into completely different setting. I don't blame them, in fact I feel for them because it's nice to work on something different once in a while.
I don’t think it applies at all stages (example: spacex vertical landing).
bad or not I appreciate the topic. Maybe I should move to ExistentialerNews :)
> If I start a company and it gets valued at 30 million dollars, why should the government be allowed to force me to sell my company to pay their wealth tax?

I don't know the specifics of this proposal. But I live in a country that has a similar wealth tax, and it doesn't work that way here. When you found a company, its shares remain valued at nominal value for tax purposes, until you sell or transfer them. Only after that they'll be taxed as wealth.
I love puns and this one was excellent, thanks for the chuckle.
Really? That’s more money than we use for the unemployed here in Finland. And they get healthcare, food and house.

SF is expensive for sure, but that expensive? Where is the money going to?
There is no such thing as truly passive - the assets in this case are being used by providing capital to the markets and holding shares of companies that may or may not succeed. That’s “doing something” with these assets. The family heirloom that could bring you over the threshold? It’s collecting dust.

The stock investments incidentally ARE already taxed, whether you are actively managing them or if someone else is doing it for you and collecting a fee in the process.