skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> larger group of people abusing non-traditional power does not sound like a great "fix" to me.

Sounds reasonable. How do we define abuse? Do we have a clear notion of when consequences for your speech is abuse?

Some things are clear. Mobs threatening your children because of what you said is clearly abuse. But what about customers of your employer demanding that you be fired? There are clearly cases where that would be legitimate. Up until a couple years ago, flying the swastika and wanting to start up the Nazi party again would result in you being "cancelled" pretty thoroughly.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. It's freedom from the government taking you away because of what you said (though even that isn't universal if your speech is a direct incitement to an act, such as shouting fire in a movie theatre or calling for someone's death with an expectation that someone listening to you will go do it). You still get all the legal protections of any other member of our society.

Maybe that's a better way of coming at it? If large groups abusing non-traditional power is a problem, should we define a larger set of individual legal protections to define what the consequences of speech cannot be?
The Moderna and BioNTech COVID vaccines doesn't have any adjuvants, which is what cause the adverse reactions. You can experience symptoms (fever etc.) the next day, which are a good sign that the vaccine is working.

An allergic reaction to a vaccine is extremely rare but extremely serious. They don't have you stick around for 20 minutes because of the likelihood, only because of the consequences of something going wrong.
Personal fitness is mostly a function of how much time you can spend on it. Money helps with better nutrition and coaching, but really it helps by freeing up time to get a workout in. The workout itself need not cost any money at all.
I guess I go to different places for that. The blog itself doesn't feel like a discussion platform to me like HN, reddit, etc. Those platforms have systems, rules, moderators, etc. for dealing with more free-form discussions.

I personally never read comments on blogs and I find having a "Contact Me" link at the bottom is better. On my blog I use a gmail account and a template for new articles so I get `[Contact Me](emailto:my.email+shorttitle@gmail.com)` so they're easy to categorize.
This is obvious from Musk's twitter account. He posted a picture of the infamous s3xy shorts recently.
Would MS have written their own if Google docs had been around back then (assuming we also had broadband Internet back then)?
For what it’s worth, there is an embedded video at the top of the page that I assume is the full clip, but when I clicked it, it just showed a loading spinner. When I scrolled down I was pleasantly surprised to find gifs (that worked) accompanying the text.
> I've heard this is usually the case in the USA

Where have you heard that it is usually the case in the US? I have put money into two different housing markets (Dallas-Ft. Worth and northern New Jersey) and it was not the case in either.
This was such a kick ass idea
That library is incredible! Will definitely be using it.
The problem is consumers are unorganized and people wanting to sell things can easily induce distortions in whatever recommender system by buying labor, companies, or products. You can only temporarily solve the problem before wealth demolishes objective feedback systems.
Once self-driving is better we need to do is to create moral rules for AI.

There is a car controlled by computer. Pedestrian (child) abruptly enter into road from behind cover. The Computer knows that with current speed it is impossible to stop. Its other choices is to drive into the sidewalk killing an old lady, drive into the opposite lane risking the life of a car owner and people in another car.

A Human driver can decide on instinct, usually protecting themselves. The Computer needs to have an algorithm that decide who will live and who dies.
Bookshop.org and Better World Books are great alternatives to Amazon for new and used respectively.
Over here in the Netherlands there is a law that makes it compulsory for the employer to agree to this kind of request, unless they can prove it is impossible to keep the business going otherwise (ie, "but we'd have to hire more people" is not a valid reason). There are a few minor restrictions like having had a permanent contract for at least six (I think) months, but otherwise any employee can request this.
> They are losing it to other humans which are gaining power, financially, politically and perhaps now computationally. That's disturbing and it's part of what Jaron Lanier has been warning about for quite a while now.

AFAICT, the average EU, Commonwealth or American citizen had their agency increased since the turn of the 20th century. Advancements in health care, widespread access to education and sturdy labour laws have vastly improved individual agency.

Maybe, as a non-American, I'm missing a key factor?
> I'm sure it's in no small part thanks to the moderators.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25225775
I would absolutely never order food, supplements, OTC meds, etc. from Amazon.
I think the article is about the opportunity cost of the down payment. Since compound interest is so powerful it will usually outpace the house in value after 20 yrs or so. Plus where I live, renting seems to be cheaper for equivalent houses mortgage. Maybe cause everyone has rushed to invest in real estate and is renting out vacant homes. If hypothetically houses outpace investing in businesses, we will eventually run into a problem where no one can afford a home no? Also part of your payment in your numbers there goes towards interest so it slightly weakens your argument.
We don't need to switch everyone over at the same time. For example we could start with young (more likely to be drunk and inexperienced?) or known-bad (traffic offenses) drivers where perhaps even sub-average autonomous vehicles could make a difference.
> They'd much rather people believe conspiracy theories

The problem is when a rival state actor launches a conspiracy theory and delusional people take down 5G or other critical infra with bombs.

The Pentagon and spy agencies should totally have a public position in the matter.
> That's not 'generally' true

Yes, you're correct, I'm mainly referring to California as that's where I've been living for a good chunk of time.

Prop 13 "locks in" your property tax rate with measly 1-2%/year increases and there is barely any new construction, restricting supply. What this means is that a lot of landlords in CA have super low mortgage/property tax costs because they bought a while ago and they can "afford" to charge a low amount of rent because their costs are so low.

The biggest factor for me in regards to buying is the mobility that I need, especially while I'm young and uncertain of where I want to settle.
It's actually sad how this whole thing has progressed. Just look at this thread, anything that goes even in the slightest against the current is downvoted into oblivion. It's so disappointing, you can't say anything any more. And it's just people bringing up mild counterpoints or examples, but it doesn't matter any more, science is a religion, everything is with us or against us, all common sense and proper dialogue is thrown away for this extreme radicalisation.
Thank you... hmmm I fixed it a while ago, maybe a caching issue? I’ll check

EDIT: funny I made the same mistake in two places, but only fixed one before. Thanks again, it should be updated now.
Structured and Unstructured Games
Yes, but did IB offer rates lower than your mortgage rate over the course of your mortgage? Your margin rate fluctuates daily, and you’re subject to margin calls that could bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

I did not do the math, but it seems like you’d need to simulate a stochastic process to come out with the likelihood of winning in this scenario, similar to the various FIRE calculators out there [0].

[0] https://www.firecalc.com/
Naive question, but can't they just tie the reviews to the product's UPC Code ? I thought Amazon also has their own unique product identifiers.
Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having.

One strategy for success is to be the fall guy for everything. And then be paid for it. Journalism ultimately is this: it launders views you have so that you can express them as if they were consensus views and also, it takes outrageous positions so that you can describe yourself in opposition.
I had to move to 4days week due to covid. Must say that, unexpectedly, it was very good experience. It felt almost like 50/50 work/free days. I was more focused at work. I was more productive. Although, honestly, I don't think I was able to deliver same output as 5days week. The way I see it, you have only a few hours per day where your output is at the highest level. When you cut off 1 day you also decrease that hours. You can't just squeeze them into other days, because it doesn't work like that.

I actually learnt two lessons:

4 days a week is something I'm looking forward when I have a profitable side project.

5 days x 6 hours imo is better than 5 x 8 hours, better to be less tired and maximize next day's most productive hours than to be tired and burn out eventually
There is no way for you to make sure the government doesn't abuse that privilege when they can classify their abuses top-secret and prevent anyone from leaking them.

The use of the military on citizens is very severely limited in essentially all democracies. Hell, even in the PRC it is limited.
I avoid marketplace sellers like the plague - usually you can do a "ships and sold" or "pickup today" to weed them out.
This is very common in Germany. I worked (and work) with several people across different employers that worked 2, 3, and (this is the most common variant) 4 days per week. All folks that worked 2 and 3 days, in reality though worked 7 days, because they were working on their personal project.

I've heard (but never checked, although I did find some resources: https://www.hensche.de/Rechtsanwalt_Arbeitsrecht_Gesetze_TzB...) it is mandated by law that employer (as long as it has more than 15 employees) must allow you that.
EPSXE also defaults to an emulated bios nowadays as well, which seams to work pretty well.
I haven't seen Defold before, but the message-passing architecture looks very interesting, so thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I have a couple of random questions, in case someone who knows the answers sees this:

1. Why protobuf and not Cap'n'Proto or Flatbuffers? Last I checked, both were better at zero-copy decoding, which might be a big deal for an engine with a message-passing architecture. Cap'n'Proto has had a lot of improvements for RPC use over the past few years.

2. Why HTTP/S rather than UDP? Both in terms of throughput and latency, UDP tends to come out ahead. Was it just not an issue?

3. Why WebP for compressed textures rather than KTX2, which offers BasisU supercompression? Doing so can get similar compression and greatly improve performance when decoding to GPU formats.

4. Any plans to support GLTF2? It has potential to replace custom engine formats, at least those that don't store data for easier GPU consumption, especially if used with meshopt. Unless the Defold format stores data in a GPU-ready format, it might be a good future option, and doing so would simplify asset pipelines a bit.
> handled fine by practically any healthy immune system,

Except for nearly 2 million dead people so far and many millions with long term adverse effects.

> vaccine is a novel gene therapy.

And those are just wrong words.

> "how dare you even slightly doubt it, you monster”

Given that at some point supply of the vaccine will exceed the demand and planting seeds of doubt in other people will reduce demand further and cause them to loose health or life ... yes, voicing uninformed concerns is acting like monster.

It's fine to have concerns but just go and read science quietly till they are resolved instead of voicing them.
I’m guessing you’re in EU somewhere? If so you should probably mention that, because very normal and humane things like these (and others like healthcare, 25+ paid holidays, unemployment policies, maternity/paternity leave, etc.) are unimaginable for our HN fellows from the US ;)

edit: I’m teasing ofcourse forgive me :) But like I mention in another comment, you have to agree employment in the US is generally very different from the EU with regard to working hours etc.
Amazing, I can drop the variadic macro.

EDIT: Done, and thank you so much - it's so much cleaner this way
What does 'pro-employee' mean in this case? I saw that he advocates a $15/hour minimum wage (saying, additionally, that this is not enough). Are there other things that he's doing that are pro-employee?

(E.g. Is there employee representation on his board?)
Did you work for Treehouse?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17803163
My eldest just started her career in nursing. They do three 12 hour shifts a week. She's exhausted at the end of the day, but she's loving having four days off each week.
Many Japanese publications decided to use "哲史" [0], but it's only an arbitrary choice.

[0] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%88%E3%82%B7%E3...
I disagree. People will find ways to mess things up even if they have the resources.
If your work doesn't actually matter to the business then any amount of it is a loss, since have to pay you but don't get anything back.
Assembly != Manufacture. The US is not able to produce the screens or processors for a modern smartphone. Those are far from trivial.
You're mocking as silly a vision that some places have already achieved.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/how-helsinki-a...
This would be a good place to share that news. Right now all I see is a low-effort dismissal in response to a comment that might be flawed, but at least has some effort behind it.
> Assembling iPhones is trivial

I think it might be you who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Many startups have tried to enter the consumer electronics space because they thought assembly would be “trivial”, only to find that once the first EVT samples start coming back from China it is anything but trivial.

The tolerances on an iPhone are some of the best around. People don’t always appreciate just how strict the tolerances are for hardware assembly until they’ve tried to do it themselves.
Property tax is bundled into our mortgage payment, so even after considering the 1 % maintenance, our large house and yard worked out cheaper per month than our small rental condo and balcony. Unfortunately, we just had to replace our roof in Sept, but it only cost $6k (despite multiple quotes in the $15k range).

I will acknowledge that owning a house is sometimes like having an extra part time job. I'm forever fixing little things or gardening or changing things about the house. I consider this to be a new hobby, but if you consider it work then that's something else to consider.

edit: I put our loan details into the NYT calculator and it said "If you can rent a similar home for less than... $1,618 PER MONTH... then renting is better." That might get you a 1 bedroom condo around here, instead of a 4 bedroom house with a yard like we got.
I’m not completely sure what the parent meant, but dying IF you get hit by a bolt of lightning is not the same as dying to a bolt of lightning. I think they meant the latter.
Depends on where. In many places this would be unenforceable and in some places illegal.
No idea. The 11.6kWh battery pack for it(it's a PHEV) was definitely built in China though.
>humane things like these ... are unimaginable for our HN fellows from the US ;)

What are you doing about it?
> It won’t take but a couple of cute kids killed in a surprising matter to shut down the whole autonomous experiment.

That is sacrificing the counterfactual children that wouldn't have been killed if the bad human driver had been replaced by an average autonomous car.
Because OSM does not actually need to care about Google ?
Out of interest, do you have permanent employment and get paid based on unit of work performed?
Some vaccines have caused antibody dependent enhancement before. However that doesn't appear to be a problem with any of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2020.572681
Then maybe companies should experiment with having M-Th and T-F teams.
There's an aspect of class warfare here.

When the lockdown started, I moved out of London and back home into a relatively poor area. Most people were in favour of it then, but today I do not know a single pro-lockdown person here that isn't:

1) a student with guaranteed income from their loans

2) a white-collar worker, usually senior

3) is somebody who is retired or has a lot of money

I'm not somebody who advocates for breaking the lockdown, but I wish the people pushing for them need to realise there are real consequences beyond pure survival (like people being evicted or going hungry). Rishi Sunak seems to be the only person in government who seems to understand the economic devastation to follow and is openly worried about it.
The Art of Naming Variables
I had a 32-hour/week contract position for a while. I'm pretty sure I was within a rounding error of productivity for full time.

The biggest thing about working fewer hours was I could shift my days around to optimize for tasks. When I sat down to write code, I was in the zone to write code.
Yeah that is how it is at my work. You can step out for errands assuming you work around meeting schedules.
Software is eating the world, but that software is running on hardware
For books I've gone from buying on a Kindle to Kobo+OverDrive which I use to check out e-books from the library. But I'm one of those freaks who actually prefers e-ink devices over dead tree books.
> The Computer knows that with current speed it is impossible to stop.

Then the car was going too fast. Full stop. The rest of your scenario is irrelevant.
I switched to a three day week (and then worked for two years on this basis before retiring). Overall it was successful and I was glad that I did it. My work-life balance was great and the pay cut was expected and manageable. I usually worked Mondays to Wednesdays so that I could get two contiguous days (Thursdays and Fridays) when children would be at school (so that I could go on child-free visits). Monday mornings were just as bad as they had always been, but Wednesdays were suddenly Fridays!

One thing that convinced me that the company would tolerate it was that women returning from maternity leave often worked a three day week, so there was good precedent from a management perspective. And my female colleagues also persuaded me that it was doable.

The biggest challenge I found was having to work on projects that had frequent and unpredictable interactions with customers / stakeholders. I didn't mind occasionally swapping my days around to accommodate interactions, but there was one project that I would have enjoyed in terms of the work, but which I stepped back from because its timings were so unpredictable. This was probably the main problem with non-standard hours.
Good observation, however I would point out that china is already there with military production capabilities. What china is trying to do now is enter consumer market where there is a lot of price sensitivity. That means things have to more more efficient and optimized.
Ten billionaires reap $400B boost to wealth during pandemic
Great question! I guess we were optimistic and didn’t think about a rollback?

We work in 6-week cycles with flexible scope. This is stolen from Basecamp. I think we’ll have to wait and see if the experiment matches results longer term.

And yes, I’d say the co-founders enjoyed this freedom as much as (or more than?) our small team, so we’re all motivated to make it work!
I like to think of it as a question that marks a distinguishing level of intelligence: to have the capacity to formulate and pose the question within Searle's thought exercise is a benchmark itself; one that many humans are not able to achieve.

Cutting edge AI is roughly infantile in its human-like ability, and rapidly entering toddlerhood. Given the tools and processes we have, can we expect it to progress to childhood soon?
> There is a name for that. It's called Chinesium.

That reminds me of a scene in Back to the Future where 1955 Doc Brown mocks a failed Japanese-made component based solely on his stereotypes, and 1985 Marty corrects him and says the Japanese make the best stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1QcjsjjtRc
Propensity to move in the USA is actually _down_ recently (I supposed with the exception of the bay area right now). The USA is still by far the most frequent relocating nation - but it's way less then it used to be:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0EMOk9...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/11/19/americans...

The point about it being a illiquid asset is good though.
I did it many moons ago (in the US even!). My role was largely operational at the time so it was pretty much just close more tickets. I kept telling myself that I worked ten hour days anyway so this was just one extra day off, but it really was more tiring. I still liked it.
No, the author does not live in the US.
I think working less than 100% time, even as low as 50% time, is sort of a holy grail for software engineers, and can be well worth the reduction in pay. Any of your extra time you choose to spend on education will pay dividends in the future. I've managed to pull this off on occasion.

I'm a freelancer and not an employee, so you'd think it would be easy to negotiate such. However, I keep running into the same issue: few people need just a little software engineering. If someone needs some software engineering, they usually need a lot of it. Several times, I've been hired by customers with the promise of "we just need 10 hours a week", but somehow get talked into working full time pretty quickly.
In countries with relatively high progressivity in taxes the equation becomes even more attractive. You lose 20% of your pre-tax salary, but you lose much less on your post-tax salary. In europe the marginal tax can easily be close to (or even over) 50% so in practice you work 20% less hours and lose 10% of your post tax salary. The thing that amazes me is why people do not push for this more.
Something psychological I guess? Or maybe one group said 2x and another said 10x?

> psychological mechanisms influencing the decision-making regarding acceptable risk
Successful public figures typically write with their particular audience in mind, and often hire others to help them do this effectively, and in a way their audience understands and does not misinterpret. There are entire career disciplines that focus almost exclusively on this skill.
“First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?”
Reading between the lines, I'm able to ease out just a tiny little bit of information...
Thanks for giving us the insider's perspective, I really appreciate it.
Good reminder for 2021 planning. Also known as the Tyranny of the Urgent (Chas. Hummel). See also the Eisenhower Decision Matrix (Stephen Covey). Important stuff.