skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Postgres JSON operators are cryptic and made my head hurt every time I wanted to accomplish something more complex.

I first started working with JSONB columns in Postgres around 2 years ago, I think, and had the same initial impression - the operators are certainly quite alien compared to more typical SQL, and it took me a while to figure out how to do more complex things.

I kept at it though, and now it all feels more natural. I haven't touched Mongo for about 10 years, so it wouldn't be fair of me to compare, but I love the performance and power of JSONB in Postgres. And having all this right alongside regular relational tables in the sr database is fantastic.

I often work with TimescaleDB too, which again just works alongside everything else, in one database - Postgres really is an incredible database!
> Unilever are VERY hard to boycott.

Not really, but this depends on two things: what kinds of products you desire, and where you live.

Almost everything in the link you sent is a "novelty" or "luxury" product. I read most of that page, and personally, the items I don't buy because I don't need, or I have alternatives that are eco-conscious or local. I mean look at that list: popsicles, ice cream, bullion, pre-made salad dressing, pre-made side dishes, low-cost ice cream, pre-made sauces... almost none of that exists in my house because I like to cook, so my Unilever surface is apparently non-existant (I bet there are a few things I own because there are a lot of sub-brands, but at first blush, I'm making a subjective plea).

But for that last part, it all depends where you live. I have the luxury of grocery co-ops that are sustainable and I love to cook. My parents live in a food desert in upstate new york, with only one mammoth grocery store within 30 miles, and they hate cooking. They even hate washing dishes: they buy plastic forks and paper plates and throw it all out AFTER EVERY MEAL.

But developed cultures have trouble with "not needing novelty", and convenience seems to always win, which makes the fight all that much harder.
Often when you see a ballooning of asset values--regardless if it's securities, real estate etc.--what it really winds up being is a ballooning of debt. Allowing retail investors to trade on margin is just asking for trouble. When you involve debt in trades even slight decreases in a asset values can completely clean you out. It may take another six months, but this probably won't end well.
Happened to me at my last job. Everyone was manager of something . We had chief tech happiness officer.

His job was to make python script to make devs happy. I’ve never heard of that before.

The company went bankrupt after wasting 200M in venture money and generating 10K in revenue.

Was fascinating to be part of that experience. Nothing was being done , just a bunch of people making brainstorms all day long while 10 devs were doing everything and being told to change idea every other day.

Was a relief when I quit after few months, when I look back at it no doubt it was a who’s the "coolest of the club" culture. No actual talent was there.
My philosophy is you don't know what crazy shit the govt and rich will do in response to socio-financial disasters like the 2007 housing crisis or covid 19, so it's very risky to make bets on systemic things like that.
Negative return wrt inflation. Of course, you could buy TIPS and earn the inflation rate and perhaps some spread over, ie a 'real' return.
While I can't work for free, coworkers and managers stopping and saying, "I really appreciate what you've built; it makes my job easier" is what fuels me and makes me love my job.

It feels kind of childish but honestly, I just need some kind words every so often to let me know my work matters and is noticed.
Thoughts:

You've missed some obvious issues around balancing range, special moves etc. All of which are hard to price and balance. Also, some things will not scale linearly, I expect. A particularly strong mob might only be attackable by 8 melee mobs at once. If it's a 16x strength mob itself, then maybe it wins an even "points" battle.

How damage is applied is also interesting, for example. Slow big hits vs fast small hits. Obviously continuous damage is far easier to balance, but plays un-engagingly.

Finally, whilst you could argue that health and damage are interchangable. How do you balance speed vs health? What are reasonable distributions of numbers? At what point do you create a fast ranged unit which can kite melee indefinitely etc.

basically even in a boring game, there's a lot to think about - and your playerbase if you get one will jsut be better than your devs at finding power spikes/discontinuities.
In this line, I recommend A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome by Alberto Angela. The book is exactly that: a description of a day, from sunrise to sundown, in 115 CE Rome.
Fixing the voting system wouldn't solve the American Populism problem (where promising to “pull the ladder up” is a guaranteed win among most people who've already climbed it, and even some who haven't), but it would render that possible.
Consular assistance too.
> It generally doesn't make sense for companies to get involved with Twittersphere activism

One of the unspoken trends in pop-culture activism is a seething hatred of large corporations. The current trend is that the only acceptable criticisms are those that are "punching up", meaning they're directed at someone or something of higher perceived social status. Taken to the extremes, the only safe targets for "punching up" are the largest corporations and billionaires.

This mentality is especially prevalent among the younger students I've mentored. They seem highly confident that corporations are somehow taking something from them, but they can't exactly explain it.

For example, virtually everyone is convinced that Facebook is selling their data, yet when pressed they can't explain what "their data" is, or who Facebook might be selling it to (Facebook doesn't sell data, the idea that Facebook is selling people's data is a myth). It's amazing to hear so many people insist that Instagram is listening to their conversations to sell ads (they're not), yet they can't point to any sort of background activity, battery drain, network activity, or reverse engineering reports. The supposed evil of large corporations is treated like magic.

Likewise, many of my mentees will insist that large corporations "don't pay any taxes". Yet when I explain that corporate income tax is only one of many taxes that companies pay and that the corporations they're thinking of are actually paying corporate income taxes on their earnings, they assume I'm somehow misinformed.

In the hyper-connected social media of 2020, it seems the safest and most persistent themes are "corporations are bad". This is easily bolstered by cherry-picking a small number of anecdotes of bad things that were done by corporations, yet it's missing the point that corporations do a lot of things, the vast majority of which are not "bad". It's the equivalent of saying "humans are bad" after reading about a few serial killers. The idea is especially sticky among young people because they haven't yet worked inside of corporations long enough to realize that corporations are just groups of people. They speak of corporations as some sort of sentient alien entity, or as an extension of Zuckerberg and Bezos.
The reason you're wrong is that high earners are usually not actively producing things. The business leaders are making allocation decisions, which are removed from production by 2-5 levels of indirection.

Or, another way to look at it. All the good advice about growing rich talk about "passive income". That is, by definition, income you make despite not doing anything. The economy suffers not at all if such a person decides to do...anything with that money (other than consume it).
In a tiny bit more detail - mongo uses BSON, which is effectively TLV encoded json. I'm not sure how storage of entire collections is done though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSON
Compare Tax Rates (corporate,income) across various countries
I don't think the hate on MongoDB or NoSQL itself is justified. The hate should be directed at developers or CTOs that go "all in" on it because of hype or lack of skill and the illusion that not having to deal with schemas is somehow a silver bullet.

NoSQL databases are great for storing arbitrary JSON-like structures, retrieving them by ID and occasional queries/aggregations on the inner fields of those structures.

NoSQL is absolutely not suitable for most business logic and the lack of a schema is actually a major drawback. It feels like a solution (because inserting invalid data will succeed on NoSQL compared to a conventional DB which will reject it based on constraint violations, missing fields or mismatched column types) but in reality you're just kicking the problem down the road and it will come back to bite you because your application now has to be able to deal with this inconsistent data (and in most cases that isn't accounted for with dealing with NoSQL, and the result is predictable).

I've been on a project where the main database was MongoDB and while it worked fine for the most part, we'd get exceptions when the application tries to read some records (most likely from earlier on in the business' lifetime) that had missing keys and would predictably explode. This isn't the fault of MongoDB by itself - the whole point of it is to be able to deal with unstructured data - but the fact that someone chose to use it while they actually needed structured data and constraints to ensure only valid data is inserted in the DB, which traditional relational databases do provide. Of course, it's easier to blame MongoDB rather than admit "we've been stupid and shouldn't have chosen the wrong tool for the job".
My immediate reaction was (1) virus fears were overblown and (2) inflation. I was clearly wrong about the virus but the latter may come to haunt central banks. People should be investing in real assets such as commercial real estate at distressed levels and in particular privately held luxury hotel properties.
It very much was the point. Thank you.
someone could have used that logic to avoid TSLA when it was at $50 Not that he is wrong, but heeding aphorisms is not that useful in terms of making money.
Are you just gonna parrot shallow Cold War rhetoric or what? The authoritarian socialists countries inevitable end result is the reason why socialists today are firmly democratic.

If you are curious about socialist history, which I doubt, you will find plenty of democratic socialist writers flaming the authoritarians before, during, and after the USSR. Bertrand Russell's "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" is a good one.
I work in finance and it IS a colossal pain to deal with the FATCA compliance.

There is no official guidance to FATCA and its processes, and every country has passed its own FATCA related regulations. Therefore running a FATCA compliant entity in say france requires you to comply with all french laws around fatca. Which also leads to issues with GDPR. This creates a cost of several hundred thousand USD per year just to deal with US clients for most western finance companies, per country they do business in.

Or - simply flatly refuse to offer services to any US citizens and rest easy knowing the IRS isn't going to ruin your life just because a US citizen tried to open an account without even depositing a single cent, but you didn't file your IRS stuff correctly
> But dependencies are also where truly Jurassic-scale disasters are born.

It's interesting this link showed up on the same day as How Complex Systems Fail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25550685
This is the coldest and most confused take on populism I’ve seen on this platform (as an anti-populist).
Care to elaborate on your point? How is that not the same problem?
Do it once, fine. Do it twice, dude come on. Do it thrice? Here's your fine.
"For a simple tool, use rsnapshot ..."

Even simpler is to do a dumb, 1:1 mirror, with rsync and then rotate zfs snapshots on the server side.

Two benefits here over rsnapshot (or rsync snapshots, with hardlinks) are:

1) rsync snapshots diff on a file granularity - if you change one bit of the file, your penalty is the storage space for that entire file. ZFS, on the other hand, diffs on a bits level so your penalty is just the changed portions of that paticular file.

2) Depending on your implementation, ZFS snapshots are immutable/read-only ... so neither a misconfiguration nor ransomware/mallory can destroy those backups if you lose your credentials.

Historically, people would create and maintain "rsync snapshots" inside their rsync.net accounts using 'cp -al' and other unix commands run over SSH.[1]

After transitioning to ZFS, however, we encourage all customers to just do a "dumb" 1:1 rsync to us and let us maintain and rotate their preferred snapshot schedule (days/weeks/months/quarters/years).

[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html
You can be arrested for reckless driving, spend time in jail, pay a fine, and lose your license.
While RL is about the problem it's also about the solution. Problems/Environments are formulated in a way where methods can be applied easily (i.e. Markov decision process) and thus the solutions are directly connected to the way the problem is formulated.

Deep learning is used for function approximation and is not in contrast with evolutionary computation. You can train a neutral network policy (mapping states to actions) with an evolutionary algorithm, but most of the success has come from methods that utilize the internal structure of the problem as mentioned earlier and evolutionary algorithms do not, which is what makes these optimization strategies both weak and powerful.
The blog post gives examples of how one can benefit from contributing to open source projects, e.g. "You can learn a lot from the source code" and "it can be very rewarding to see your own code helping so many people."

An article is more than its title.
Your last sentence made me think about Hanlon's Razor[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
You're chasing the money after it's already gone to those stocks.

Piling onto an investment trend late is the classic retail investor mistake - because most of the upward movement already happened and that leaves limited upside and large downside potential.

I don't recommend that as an investment strategy. It would be safer and likely better to just buy the index instead.

If you want to make money actively investing you really need an insight that most other investors don't yet have.

In a bull market you can make money picking stocks with darts, but that doesn't make it a good strategy.
Said another way, a large portion of interested parties to nutrition science are in the food industry.

I imagine that you could replace any science and the closely related industry to it in that claim. Is that not the case?
> Systems like approval voting or STV when used with single member districts do not reduce the two party duopoly.

What do you mean?

Suppose you have a single member district with four parties running: Democrats, Republicans, Greens and Libertarians. First past the post polling shows 48% Democrat, 48% Republican, 2% Green and 2% Libertarian. Your preferred candidate is polling at 2%.

You're then going to vote for one of the major parties because you know perfectly well that your preferred candidate is not going to win and you also know that you prefer one of the major party candidates over the other one.

By contrast, with approval voting, all four candidates get around 50% approval because there are no spoilers and no reason not to approve of the candidate you actually want, so one of the third parties can plausibly edge out both of the major parties for the highest approval and win the district. They also have a much better case that they could win which means they can get into the debates etc.

Also, approval voting makes it plausible for independents to win when they tailor their platform to the district, which just might destroy the political parties whatsoever -- and that would be most excellent.

> It can be argued now ~40% of people who vote for the loser in our current system don’t have a representative, and a more proportional system would clearly improve this.

No one disputes that the existing system is terrible. But approval voting still fixes that, because a candidate with 60% approval loses to one with 70% approval, so someone who can make more of the district happy wins. And there is no way to give full consideration to 100.0% of the voters short of direct democracy, which has its own set of problems.
Going to college, seeing a psychiatrist
Interest rates are near zero and people think the Fed will bail them out if things go south again. That’s why the market is high.
This is a nice new source for explaining my tendencies. In the past I have always leaned on the this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling

Bullet train driver method for continuing precision. Verbalize, gesticulate, act.
> Those are licensed and regulated. And I am pretty sure that if FAA sends you a notice to stop flying your weather balloon, you stop flying it.

This is not true, as for certain weights of payloads are regulated, all these 'near-space' hobbyist balloons do not need to notify the FAA about anything. It's common courtesy to let them know you are going to send something up to 120,000' but not required.
They profit off human psychology which readily devolves into hate.
Less then 200 lines of code? That is very minimal :)
More often than you think. Entire funds go in and out of existence constantly.
How is this not something that just rolls up into a COO function
Turns out that when you have 330M people with completely incompatible ethnocultural backgrounds, you end up with an untenably wide variance in political beliefs. Europeans take note; this is where many of you are heading.
2020 Reflections; 2021 Predictions
This is a classic communications breakdown.

One group mixed the vaccine, and the other tested. The first group added a filler that throws off the UV measurement. They didn’t tell the second group about the additive because they didn’t realize the second group would use UV to measure the concentration.

Neither group could have avoided the problem without access to information they did not have. Both groups under-communicated. This sort of screwup is by far the leading cause of software bugs (most bugs occur at the interfaces between teams).
So why not teach people so they can empower themselves instead of making them rely on yet other people, who may or not be scrupulous themselves for protection?

Because the government is always scrupulous and trustworthy...and nobody that's ever said trust us we'll protect you has lied...
You can find a continuous spectrum of Americans suffering FATCA and IRS struggles while living abroad.

At the end of the spectrum are these accidental Americans.

In the middle you can find e everything, e.g. your kid studying in the EU that cannot open a bank account there or issues getting a real estate loan to buy a house in the foreign country you work and live in. Essentially opening a bank account abroad is a no-go unless you lie or have a lot of money.

Then you have ultra wealthy tax evaders that were the target of those regulations. Obviously these people don't have a hard time opening bank relationships anywhere.
Hah $10k/mo is modest? I agree I just want to retire in a forest or island a few hours from a major metropolitan area.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-...

> The growth in income in recent decades has tilted to upper-income households. At the same time, the U.S. middle class, which once comprised the clear majority of Americans, is shrinking. Thus, a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling.9

> The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019. This downsizing has proceeded slowly but surely since 1971, with each decade thereafter typically ending with a smaller share of adults living in middle-income households than at the beginning of the decade.

> But middle-class incomes have not grown at the rate of upper-tier incomes. From 1970 to 2018, the median middle-class income increased from $58,100 to $86,600, a gain of 49%.10 This was considerably less than the 64% increase for upper-income households, whose median income increased from $126,100 in 1970 to $207,400 in 2018. Households in the lower-income tier experienced a gain of 43%, from $20,000 in 1970 to $28,700 in 2018. (Incomes are expressed in 2018 dollars.)

> More tepid growth in the income of middle-class households and the reduction in the share of households in the middle-income tier led to a steep fall in the share of U.S. aggregate income held by the middle class. From 1970 to 2018, the share of aggregate income going to middle-class households fell from 62% to 43%. Over the same period, the share held by upper-income households increased from 29% to 48%. The share flowing to lower-income households inched down from 10% in 1970 to 9% in 2018.

> These trends in income reflect the growth in economic inequality overall in the U.S. in the decades since 1980.
The whole article was about how that's probably not the case and it's better explained by other factors.
Now I'm confused. 0% interest rates should be inflationary, not deflationary, no? "Inflation doesn't shrink debt?" Surely it does. Equities will default or mature - erm, equities don't do either? To convince the reader you really know what's going on, it would help to be precise with your language.
You were not wrong. The initial estimates in jan-feb was an infection fatality rate in the 1-5% range, which is pretty bad and comparable to something like prostate cancer or lymphoma, yet by March/April, when the stock market bottomed, a bunch of studies such as study of asymptomatic prison cases and a study of California cases, showed a much, much lower IFR, of around .2-.5%, which has fallen ever since as more people are tested, which came as major phycological relief even as the death and case count costumes to rise.
Indeed. When there is no cost of money (to pretty much anyone) bad things are not far away.

Less talked about and also fueling the rise over a longer time horizon has been the great reduction in the number of listed companies. That is more of a driver on the fund/etf composition side than the mom and pop TSLA/AAPL day trader.
Quitting my corporate (high paying) job and getting into my own business. I now have a 24-7 thing (for now) but I love it.
lol yeah but i guess it'll grow in size with few more components.
Solar can't get indefinitely cheaper. Already, install cost is more than panel cost. The floor is probably around what roofs cost.

I wonder if BYD's new higher-density lithium iron batteries will take over stationary storage. Supposedly, the energy density per unit volume is comparable to lithium-ion, but they're heavier. The big advantage is that they're safer - the chemistry will not go into thermal runaway. You can buy them now in AU and NZ.[1]

[1] https://www.currentgeneration.co.nz/store/p166/BYD_-Battery_...
To your point, in my state, reformers have been able to change our laws to allow RCV, a much easier lift.

> ...we really need ... approval/score/range voting

Agreed. That's been my long time position.

That said, per The Democracy Nerd podcast, I'm newly curious about multi-member seats. Which might be a smaller lift in a lot of places.

https://xraypod.com/show/democracy-nerd/saving-democracy-in-...

"... Kristin Eberhard from Sightline Institute discusses her proposal to eliminate the state Senate, along with other ideas to save democracy in Oregon."

(Sorry, no timestamp.)

Eberhard claims that prior to eliminating multimember seats, Illinois' legislature was far more productive, constructive.

FWIW, I'm strongly in favor or unicameral legislatures at the state level, and I'm chewing on the notion for the federal level.