skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked for a big tech company in the Seattle area when the pandemic started. I had previously received notifications of my PII being misappropriated in attacks against my company's medical insurance administrator, as did all of my co-workers.

The Washington State unemployment web site only required that you type in the right PII when registering, which pretty much was just your name and SSN. Maybe the address would need to match too, but regardless it was all the stuff that would have been available to any breach such as the ones that hit Equifax or Anthem.

Several weeks into the pandemic I got a letter in the mail from the Washington State Employment Security Department (ESD) referencing a claim number and giving me advice on how to start up a tech business or something. I was like, "Um, why is there a claim number on this letter?" I went to the ESD website and tried to register with my SSN, only to be greeted with something like, "Sorry, looks like you're already registered with email address *pwned1337@gmail.com."

I knew right away what was going on, and I alerted my co-workers that they should go check out to see if their SSN was associated with some random email address they didn't recognize. Sure enough, about a dozen others in Washington state reported that they were hit too.

From those who weren't popped, we learned that just by providing your name and SSN, the web set would spill out your income to whoever's using it and then let them register for unemployment benefits in your name to whatever random bank account you want to link. The fraudsters probably just went through their Equifax or Anthem dumps and selected the higher-income ones in the tech industry.

A few weeks later my HR department reached out to me with, "Hi, we got a notification that you're collecting unemployment benefits. You're not planning on leaving the company are you?" To which I replied (in more civil terms), "No, you dipstick, it's the same thing that's happening with the dozens of other employees in Washington state right now, of which I'm sure you're aware. Why aren't you mentioning anything about the massive amount of identity fraud going on with your Washington state employees?" It was radio silence from HR from that point on.

I tried calling the ESD fraud hotline, but it was so overwhelmed that it wouldn't even let me get in a queue. It just said, "We're too busy, bye bye" and hung up. I figured the system would work it all out eventually, and about a month ago I got a letter informing me that their investigation into the fraud was completed and that everything was cleared up.

An article on this:

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/employment-security...
Most people don't lose their jobs/businesses/careers and kill themselves the next day or even the next month, but that doesn't mean that their eventual decline into depression and suicide wasn't triggered by that loss. And not to get into such a charged discussion, but it's also important to look at the ages of those dying of COVID versus those dying because of how we reacted to COVID.
At a minimum, you need to be reachable and possibly attend meetings. Even if I'm taking a day somewhat easy and running some errands, I'm not going to head off for some 4 hour hike.
Is increasing expenses as a YoY percent a realistic way to look at this though? My investments grow in that way, but my expenses do not. I don't think lifestyle inflation compounds in this way.

For example, if I start buying slightly nicer coffee this year.. I don't continuously keep buying nicer and nicer coffee. I buy $7/lb coffee now and that will definitely not compound into $22/lb in 30 years from a 4% yearly increase.

A much better way to look at it is net new purchases. For example, my 2002 corolla is paid off so its nearly free to drive. If I get a raise I might justify buying a new car. Now this is a significant expense that the author should look at.
You don't consider sore muscles after coming back from the gym an adverse reaction?

I don't consider it an adverse reaction, nor do doctors/scientists, because it is part of the exact process that vaccines aim to encourage: building immunity. It is anticipated, expected and, frankly, desirable.
I think Sagan's ending is highly -- perhaps uncharacteristically -- religious. It practically proves the existence of an intelligent creator ... a watermark stamped on reality. It suggests that it was the creator that reached out to Earth, and Ellie, and cared about her feelings. The ending is Ellie the devout modern priestess of a cold clockwork universe coming face to face with an animate aware personal universe. It's the mathematical version of Palmer Joss's message.

This is Sagan attempting to reconcile Ellie and Palmer, a dream of a scientific theology.
my understanding was they use russian engines because it's still more cost effective, so it's better for use in peace time for training purposes. but they do have domestic variants ready in case of actual war, where having things is more important than having things cheaply.
" This entire election cycle is a mess"

To be clear - the election is not a mess.

Even though we don't have 'state ID' the processes overall are legit on the whole.

There is no systematic fraud.

It appears as a mess because of the messaging of the President.

That said: there are obviously antiquated and non-standardized problems - literally just yesterday, Stacey Abrahams sister, a Georgia Judge, had to rule on ballots being thrown out. It's politicized.

So having ID would not so much make elections more fair (they are effectively fair), but it would give more confidence in elections.

Also - the genie may be out of the bottle and we may be in a new era where a) people try to actually cheat and b) losers of elections refuse to concede based on lies.

So it might be a good time to modernize with ID, and it would help with those problems.

....

It 'needs to be free' because the some will otherwise believe it's voter suppression.

Having a $10 payment would actually theoretically suppress some people from voting. In practice, I don't think that would be the case, but it's enough to blow it up.

Homeless people are still 'citizens' - and 'citizenship' is not based on whether or not you have $10. Which is a fair argument (even through pragmatically a side show, because you need to have an address to vote already today).

Citizenship is a right not a privilege ... so just make it free.

Politically, they could make it an extension of SS - it's just 'SS with a photo' kind of thing.
No one is accurately talking about the risks. The vast majority of people who have died have been over 60. There have been young people who died, yes. But young people die all the time of things that often kill very few: fungal infections, respiratory disease, bicycle wrecks. Now the narrative is "Long Covid" which comes from very limited case studies and papers that depend on web surveys and lots of other questionable research that falls flat once you start diving into the papers.

Meanwhile, all the things people are doing are about as effective as TSA Security Theater. The lockdowns simply do not work. We can see that in the numbers between California, South Dakota, Sweden and others. Every nation or municipality that takes a hard approach is no better off, and often much worse, than places that did substantially less. The masks are a placebo at this point and the numbers show they probably do next to nothing (except contribute to massive pollution, waste, shame and make us fearful of each other).

In 50 years, the only way I think historians will look back upon this ear is pure mass hysteria; global mass hysteria on a scale never seen before. This is not a time of honor and should never be returned to.
The real story is we could have trivially stopped this fraud by issuing 2FA tokens to every American less than the cost of this fraud.

We could also have required debit cards in place of direct payments to random banks be sent to the address on file with the IRS for the majority with correct info on file and handled the minority of exceptions by in person appointments at a government office including for example post offices where you would show government issued photo ID to receive your debit card.
Concepts vs. Typeclasses vs. Traits vs. Protocols (YouTube)
Assigning some bytes to a person is easy, but how do you authorize transactions? People will not keep a secret... secret. People will not remember a secret. People will lose cards. Smart phone adoption is maybe 75% in the US. Many people do not have internet access, a phone line, or even electricity! People have all sorts of disabilities, many can't read, and many still don't have permanent housing or even an address. The technology is the easy part.
Not sure about 20 or 30 years or "despair" or how it relates to lockdown, but from own experience (only) I can say that prolonged unemployment shakes confidence and makes you cautious taking on large dept / long-time commitment even many years later.
probably going to get in trouble for this one, but it proves your point:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/glco4u/2040...
Flamebait like "we're failing our women by making them work" is totally unacceptable on Hacker News. You started a wretched flamewar, then poured fuel on it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25575849).

If you do this again we will ban you. Please stick to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

There's room for thoughtful comments about work/life tradeoffs, how they affect men and women differently, and things along those lines. There's not room for arson.
I’d be curious to see how feasible a rollback-based implementation would be for emulating the game.
This looks good! There are some minor UX tweaks that you should do for a better starting point to the site. I'm assuming:

1. The initial site hasn't changed since launch.

2. If it has, then its been due to intuition vs data.

From my quick glance, this has potential and she should be able to sell her entire inventory €2000. It would be good to know what the digital marketing strategy has been to build awareness and drive sales from her target audience as well as a better understanding of her customer and industry.

In any case, she has something and I hope she doesn't give up.
No that's not the case. I am fairly sure that situation you describe results in a type error. The extension does in fact enforce linearity, and does not have such a trivial & universal escape hatch afaiu.

Feel free to give GHC 9.0 a try with a minimal example of your scenario!
As is often said, 33% of US health care costs are the overhead from billing.

I always admire the efficiency of dentists, somehow they can get an instant quote from my insurer as to exactly how much is going to be paid for.

Eye doctors are the same way. No nonsense, "here is what it costs, here is what your insurance pays, here is what you owe us."

I can have a little of of sympathy for insurance cos though, I once had a podiatrist bill my insurance $2000 for work that he obviously didn't do, and another doctor I visited recently either accidentally or purposefully submitted what was plainly the wrong billing code to the insurance company.

Veterinary service is interesting, pretty much the exact same medical technology, but the billing is up front, and they even offer package discounts on tests!
Some religions use a lunar based calendar. The customs and holidays shift relative to the Gregorian calendar over a number of years.
Humans are 1-2 orders of magnitude more influenced by habit instead of genetic predisposition. There are plenty of sources for that argument.

In other words: educate your children, peers and acquaintances how to escape emotional headlines a.k.a. clickbait. I know you know.
Shopify is Stripe + Ruby. Same strategic idea as PayPal

Point being: D2C doesn't solve the trust problem in a scaleable way, except for repeat purchases
> Next year the pandemic could stop

This is a red herring because taxation doesn't need to happen annually. Many wealth tax proposals focus exclusively on gift+inheritance intergenerational wealth transfers. Anyone in favor of un-earned wealth transfers from parent to child should also be in favor of taxing the rich more to feed, clothe, and house the poor.
A mere 50 mil on a website? I think the developers should get a presidential medal of freedom for bringing it in at such a low cost. Consider that healthcare.gov cost 40x that much.
Sounds like your brain is looking for the darkest sides of everything. How do you feel about life in general? Are you sure you are not depressed?
It's cool, but I don't think it would work like you think until it got like 1000x more popular.

It's pretty much common knowledge now that if you see a QR code, you scan it with a phone app, and it takes you to a webpage or something. It's maybe a little inconvenient to have to scan it with a phone at visible range, but you don't have to remember a bunch of funny codes, and if you get one wrong, it breaks entirely with no indication of where the mistake is.

Meanwhile, nobody knows that if they see 0xABCDEF, that means they should go to the URL https://0x.co/ABCDEF with the closest web browser.

It might be handier if it could generate a printable webpage or PDF or something that had the QR code for the URL and also the full URL with the short code. Now you have a solution for easily putting messages in QR codes that also has a fallback for users who don't have a phone, don't have a phone app, don't want to mess with their phone that minute, etc.
I frequently read that the problem with government is that we just need more of it. That they just don’t have enough money and power to be effective yet.
I'm sure if this person just enjoyed tinkering on the hardware in their office and not spreading code for intellectual property they don't own, we wouldn't be here.
Not quite that easy, as the puzzle was initially released in 2006 when the corpus of images to search against was much smaller. I'm sure many people over the years tried reverse searching the image, but it wasn't until after 14 years of searching and filtering through the data that a match was finally found.
Apparently it is.

I’m a bit surprised at CO being incompetent, and I’d like to hear more. Generally my observation has been that states with one party rule have been less effective than states where both parties have to compete for the approval of the electorate. Based on the last time I lived in CO, I would’ve put it in the latter category.
Surely you don't really believe this.
Not flaunting, just a fact. Not justifying just showing the math.

The cost spread across 1/3 of USA population is $360/yr - still way less than the health care cost.

My point is simply that this fraud burden is a much smaller fish
It's so stupid that they mail recipients for legal liability after the crime, but couldn't mail them and notify that unemployment is beggining before payments are made.

step 1) Verify the unemployed mailing address is the same as on the bank account you are sending to. If it is not the same for legitimate reasons,

step 2) Mail a pin code to the local address.
step 3) Collecting unemployment requires entering that pin.

I'm sure there are some edge cases to work out, but this isn't rocket science.
Just because you lack the ability to solve a problem doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.
Would anyone be able to point me to research about how the body reacts to the vaccination if it has already come into contact with the virus (assuming survival)?

For example, from a layman pov I'm assuming if I've had an asymptomatic case of covid-19, and get injected with an mRNA vaccine, my body would simply fight it off in the same way it would to any other exposure to the virus, and this wouldn't count towards an increased amount of "viral-load" that's been spoken about online.
Indeed, I still listen to the I Love Bees radio drama every couple years. I was in high school while that was happening and even took a day off school to go answer a payphone at the nearby University, where I met some older nerds :) Fond memories.
One trick that’s not really accessible to the general public: Stadia does some input anticipation and so will actually press the button for you just before it thinks you will press it, thus making it seem like a low-latency button press.
You can video chat and play chess at the same time on https://room.ai/
700 classes? To define and implement a wire format? Does it include a kitchen sink too?
Realistically, all full time employees are paid per work unit. Those who don't deliver the required work units in that time period are eventually managed out.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamewar comments, using HN for ideological battle, and ignoring our many requests to stop. Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What is a reasonable prior for the toxicity of an old tech vaccine (like viral vector, that is reasonably common for COVID) that passed P2? We have been making vaccines for a while, we should be able to answer that.

Also, how long do we need to wait on P3 before we get the toxicity result?

A really rigorous answer is that we need several years because some problems appear very slowly. Yet, we are not waiting those years. We are declaring definitive success with incomplete information. What is very reasonable, because it is very unlikely that those vaccines will have long term toxicity... but then, why are we using that prior, but refuse to use the P2 or early P3 results to make a temporary decision?

Why we decided that it was ok to try the vaccine on 10s of thousands in June, but couldn't expand that number to 100's of thousands on July, or millions by August? The decisions were taken by calgo culting regulations, and caused a lot unnecessary harm.
Defold looks pretty nice if you're looking to make more simplistic games. I wish it could target Playstation and Xbox as well though. But I heard its tools are really nice to work with.

I also like the fact that the editor is implemented in Clojure, quite a nice showcase for Clojure.
If withdrawal of aid isn't sufficient you can use sanctions against the nation in question or even against nations that opt to trade with that nation. It logically wouldn't take much to tip Nigeria into a further clusterfuck.
I literally do not care. The US spent almost 700 billion dollars on defense last year. If we're worried about how much the US costs, let's start there.
They sell a service that goes beyond registry lock.
I'm well aware of the common cognitive dissonance whereby a system which you are not familiar with seems like it should be trivial. But I'm having a hard time understanding where the complexity of these systems actually lie.

State and Federal employment records already exist with your social security number, address, employer address, employer ID number, and amount of taxes that have been withheld. I can retrieve my own copy of this record online from the IRS and my own state relatively easily.

Someone should not be able to [automatically] claim unemployment benefits for past income on which taxes have not been withheld, or estimated taxes have not been paid. That seems trivially fair. Even people making minimum wage will have payroll taxes withheld. Calculating an upper limit on the amount that can be processed automatically should therefore be trivial.

Next is the question of where to send the payment. DMVs cover a large percentage of the population. Beyond the DMV, there's voter registration, credit reports, address of record for where the last tax refund was sent, utility bills, phone records.

When I had a larger than typical refund last year, my state sent me a letter asking for copies of my and my wife's social security cards, passports, and utility bills before they would issue the refund. I felt that was pretty burdensome considering I was requesting the refund to the same exact bank account number which I had been paying them from for the last 5 years.

It's obvious the state is just totally incapable of running even the simplest of validation rules. It's just helicopter money dropping from the sky, and they don't really care who gets it, because it's not their money. It's not like anyone is going to lose their job or not get re-elected because of it.

The fact that's it's so easy to funnel all this money out of the country is a pretty wild indictment of FinCEN and the like.
When did “software” become singular?
Requiring ID? Some people
say that disenfranchisement though. I wonder where the line is for that?
AFAIK King is moving everything to Unity, so they have dumped their proprietary engine on github.
Price. Only the price is the barrier. :)
But it is getting better quickly as we speak.
Spot is 7000 USD. This is cheap enough to be useful in many situations, but certainly not in your average storage facility.
How exactly do you think the government is going to get a bunch of people on board to develop and operate a system to discriminate based on race, such that there isn't a single whistleblower? Would they just outsource it directly to the KKK or what?
Yes, I believe in freedom. That's surprising?
Definitely https://focuslite.app

I built it for myself, and really expected to make something on it. But didn't get anywhere.
I'm reminded of the Vitamin Water court case where the judge issued a ruling against coca cola, whose lawyers said the suit was "ridiculous" on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage"
Myth. US manufacturing never went away, US manufacturing JOBS went away. Automation.
Do we really have to choose just one of those?
Please help me understand. What "negative externalities" (a euphemism generally reserved for environmental destruction) is the likes of Amazon causing here? You could say that they increase carbon footprint, but that's generally false because the amount of carbon they create is quite limited for the number of people they employ. If you're talking about worker health, that's already very regulated through the likes of OSHA and similar organizations.
I have written an in-house implementation of protobuf for C++ (sorry can't share) and studied the wire format extensively.

Google's implementations, at least C++ and Java, are a bunch of bloated crap (or maybe they're very good, but for a use case that I haven't yet encountered). Don't shoot down the format because of a specific implementation, find or write a better one and enjoy the fact that every language has at least some implementation available.

Then, the author laments the wire format itself for having varint-encoded length prefixes, which can not be fixed up. That is true, but it's not that much of a problem. Most straightforward is to simply go through nested data multiple times, once to calculate the length, and again for the actual encoding (and then again and again for deeper nesting).

What makes this bearable is the fact that data will be mostly loaded into L2 cache (L1 for smaller messages) on the first pass, which makes the next pass much faster.

The story breaks down for large, deeply nested messages, but then, the topic here is telemetry which I would expect to consist of a stream of small, shallow messages.
Some of the worst public security mistakes and delays in fixes by AWS in 2020
A parallel experiment would have been to do the same informally - just work four days a week and "work" from home one day a week refusing to take meetings/oncall on that day - and see if anyone really noticed.

The megacorp I have spent large amounts of time at actually seems to have a significant population of people with this informal arrangement with mixed opinion on the part of their management mostly based on how close they are to a realist position.
Declare Var, Not War
I tried that but it's just returning GMB016 for whatever key I press
Chances are the officials don’t want to stem the problem. $18B is a non trivial amount of money to inject into a country like Nigeria with a GDP of $448B (2019). No sane politician is going to purposefully cut off 4% of the GDP, especially when the costs are externalized to another country.