skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nearly half of adult Canadians struggle with literacy
In 1983 a group of people actually did bomb the Senate, which seems much more severe than just a bunch of rednecks roaming the halls and yelling stuff. Democracy endured just fine.
It would be better if the author had vetted this with an epidemiologist or infectious disease specialist. I am an MD and I feel that this topic is outside my expertise and that I’m not qualified to comment on it. That said the author makes it clear his views are opinion and conjecture. He poses smart thoughtful questions I hadn’t considered and will discuss with colleagues in the future.
> how to be suspicious of claims made in advertisements. That one class stuck with me for a long time. (This was in Melbourne, Australia sometime around 1988.)

FWIW, advertising and to a larger extent advocacy in 1988 and what is today are entirety different animals.

Though I do agree with your point. The number of college graduates does not equate to higher critical thinking of a nation's populace.

I did attend a journalism class almost a decade ago. Even though the powerful effects of mass media on people were likened to a magic bullet [0] It would be correct to assume that social media tech today has transcended this very capability and in more powerful ways than ever imaginable by its inventor.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypodermic_needle_model
I think your attempt at categorizing political vs non-political decisions is arbitrary and harming the utility of your computing analogy.
Most states spend a fraction of their budget dollars on family preservation efforts, even though more kids are removed for neglect than abuse.

The best solution to this kind of problem is making a more family-friendly society so we end up with fewer kids in foster care.

I don't know how we get there from here. The past decade has really taken its toll on my faith in humanity and the past year has put the world at large through the wringer and trying to focus on doing something positive seems overwhelmingly hard and entirely pointless.

America doesn't actually value having a functional society. It values "heroics" and that fact means we don't want to actually take care of our citizens simply for existing. We only want to do something after it's so bad, they need a hero to fix something and then good luck with that. It's too far gone to ever really be functional again.

We need housing solutions. We need healthcare. We need to stop enriching the billionaires and giving money to charity while not taking care of ordinary citizens and no one wants to do that.

Some people want to provide UBI -- which I think will not take care of people -- or they want to claim that people who aren't making it are just lazy or something.

Bezos gave about a billion dollars to his workers in 2020 as either Covid relief in, I think, June or as Christmas bonuses. It amounted to as little as $150 twice for part-time workers.

Then he was lauded for giving $10 billion to charity.

He could have given $10 billion to the people who helped make him obscenely wealthy, thereby providing a total of $3000 to his least paid workers and more for others and still given a billion dollars to charity.

Why do we need so much charity? In part because we don't bother to take care of our people unless they are "charity cases" and then we still don't really take care of them. (Yes, I know, he gave money to climate change. Irrelevant to my point.)

We actively turn our people into charity cases and then blame them when their lives don't work and punish them and no amount of virtue is enough to make your life work for far too many Americans.
A former Googler got called in by the Obama administration to try and put healthcare.gov back on its rails after the disastrous launch, and the things he learned about it were fascinating. He talks about some of them here

https://youtu.be/0albm_hhQzM

It's not only the pay rate attracting employees who prefer stability to income... It's an entire decisionmaking ecosystem centered around minimizing blame coupled badly with compartmentalization. The end result is employees are heavily incentivized to do things that minimize risk not for the entire project but for their individual department. couple that to the percentage of the work that is done by third-party vendors under strict contracts written before the full scope of the project is understood, and it's a bad recipe.

One of the first problems the embedded team identified with the whole design of healthcare.gov was that every team had responsibility for its individual component, but nobody was empowered to have responsibility for integration. It was possible for every subcontractor to satisfy every bullet point of their contract and the result to not actually be a functioning healthcare exchange website.
Again on 0-based vs. 1-based indexing
Stretch goal: get it running BGP.
Pravda.
I agree. Otherwise it would try to strip the background from an ocean or sky image.
I’m not trying to be obtuse - I understand the risks here - and I don’t want to get into an argument about semantics - but

Populating a variable based on the current user so as to segment them in analytics or advertising - regardless of whether it’s that the user is pregnant or they said their favorite color is blue - is different than “sharing” structured pregnancy data or favorite color data that a 3rd party can inspect.

If this sort of wide-scale actual sharing of data exists, then I’d expect to see job postings for the role of coordinating data exchange, schemas for pregnancy data in XML format, API documentation for transmitting ‘sensitive’ data to 3rd parties, leaks containing this sort of sensitive data in unexpected places, etc.

That said, the title of the article says “profiling” and not “sharing”, so maybe Facebook and Google can derive that particular theoretically opaque segmentation values from particular apps represent pregnancy status.

Or maybe an opaque, trained model outputs that for certain users with certain segmentation values in certain apps, those users are more likely to click on ads relating to pregnancy.

Edit: The WSJ article notes that Facebook has acknowledged that the latter is possible via a filed patent. FB say it doesn’t use that technique.
In my case I've built all business functions with the theory of leaving the most enjoyable work for last to keep me motivated. We'll see if it pays off.
Reality will prove them correct whether you believe them or not.

You ignore good ideas in favor of credentials at your own peril.
> Steppers are cheap and ridiculously easy to interface and get good positional control out of.

This is exactly why 99% of beginners should start with stepper motors.

Building a CNC is an exercise in tradeoffs. It's tempting to want to choose the best option at every juncture, but that's a recipe for blowing your budget. I strongly recommend that beginners start with sufficiently-large stepper motors to get things done, then consider more expensive motors as a later upgrade.

> As long as they don't skip steps. And they always do. So you end up running at 1/10th of the speed your tool could move at to avoid that

They definitely don't always skip steps. I've never skipped steps on my hobby CNC during normal operation. Only crashing the machine causes skipped steps, at which point I have bigger problems to worry about.

It's very easy to measure the maximum force your stepper-based CNC can apply before skipping steps. You can use a common kitchen scale and manually force the CNC axis to compress the scale until it skips.

In my case, the maximum stepper force is about an order of magnitude higher than the calculated cutting forces in aluminum. If someone was trying to push the cutter so hard that it was overwhelming common NEMA 23 steppers, they're going to need an extremely rigid machine. Most hobby-level machines aren't rigid enough to use high cutting forces, and unless you have a 2.2KW water-cooled spindle, you won't have enough power to cut at those speeds anyway.

As long as your steppers are sized appropriately, it's really not a big deal.

> So you end up running at 1/10th of the speed your tool could move at to avoid that

Again, not really an issue in practice. Use sufficiently-sized stepper motors and the movement speed is just fine.

I strongly suggest that anyone building a CNC focus first and foremost on keeping it simple and cheap. Get it built, learn from the process, and improve on your next iteration. Closed-loop stepper motors are a reasonable upgrade path, but the idea that you're going to be skipping steps with regular steppers just isn't true.

EDIT: Here's a video of a common Shapeoko with significant added weight moving at 1000ipm on the tiny stock steppers without issues: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1wSmXfnm6C/ The stock settings are 200ipm, which leaves ample safety margin for normal operation. 200ipm is plenty fast for rapids unless you're trying to reduce cycle times on large-scale manufacturing, in which case you wouldn't be using a hobby CNC machine.
So research into software estimation also seems to follow Hofstadter's Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”
> “Well documented” is a very misleading way to describe this summer’s violent unrest.

I’d say the murder of George Floyd was well-documented. That was my meaning.
What do you think of these?
https://www.crowdsupply.com/iq-motion-control/iq-motor-modul...
Violence against the institutions isn't great, but can you honestly not see the difference between;
- 1983, goal: end war in Grenada via terror/threat, action: set bomb off at 11pm (0 deaths, 0 injuries)
- 2021, goal: keep former President in office after losing election, kill VP, kill Speaker of House, action: storm capitol (5 deaths, over 100 injuries), bonus: incited by sitting President
Tech behavioral interviews. A thread of questions and answers
Pretending the Fediverse can't be censored is naive. New Internet protocols plus secure boot chains plus legislation will make it all moot.

The past decade I learned to lose hope in these ideas of freedom, thanks to my friends.

Just like copying VHS and cassette tapes (easy) led to copying DVDs (more difficult) and HDMI (difficult). Every tech makes it more difficult. The same will happen with distributed systems. More work for the users of those systems.

And the discussion over the past decade shows that public support will be lost too.
We probably shouldn't take "for life" any more literally than we do the "four hour workweek". It represents an idea. You might not want your boots to last forever and may in fact decide to replace them after 6 years. But if they were sufficiently well made, then you'll get more for them when you sell them and they'll last longer for the next owner if you sell or donate them.
Twitter, FB, Google all benefited from QAnon and bunch of violence that thrives on it. Election misinformation should have been removed. We have proper channels for this - ie courts.
For those cases large off heap structures of arrays can make hundreds of GB of data invisible to the GC.

One can do both.
TiL, will check it out
No memory safety in D though. That's a pretty big deal for those of us coming from high-level languages who are not used to dealing with such issues.

I can deal with a fussy compiler that makes me write code in a certain way. But a langauge that compiles fine then segfaults or worse at runtime is far more trouble than it's worth (and requires me to make a big upfront time investment before I can start writing production ready code)
Here are some questions based entirely on the procedural process of electing a president. We don't even have to get into any potential illegal actions by Trump.

The vice president presides over the counting of electoral college votes. Tradition says this role is largely ceremonial. Trump disagrees. What would a conservative Supreme Court, with 3 justices appointed by Trump, say about this?

What were to happen if the VP was murdered by a mob while the president is arguing in bad faith that he won the election and the VP is needed to certify the true winner?

Can the president pro tempore take the place of the VP in counting votes? We would likely be back in the Supreme Court to decide. What if they say only the VP can serve this role? Would Trump and Congress be able to agree on a new VP?

If no VP is in place, would the election end up in the House? Would they have time to vote before 1/20? Who would they vote for?

If we don't have a clear president by 1/20, the line of succession passes to the speaker of the House. What happens if she was murdered too? Would the House vote on a new speaker quick enough or would the line of succession go to the 4th person, the president pro tempore of the Senate?

Would this create perverse incentives for the the president pro tempore to reject EC votes if the Supreme Court decided in his favor several steps back in this hypothetical?

There are obviously a lot of hypotheticals there, but what they are meant to show is there are a lot of ways for this to go wrong and for the next president to be in doubt. Do you see how this is bad for a healthy democracy? Would you be confident that Trump would sit idly by and wait for this situation to play out without putting his fingers on the scale, inciting more violence, or potentially something even more drastic?
This is just a priority problem. There are plenty of tradeoffs that could be made to fund this kind of thing.

Fact is computer and software, services lobby groups want the business. In the US, said business can be bought, and is.
Is on-demand courier delivery of groceries now a requirement for a "functional local economy"?
He has a pretty solid epidemiological analysis.

The beauty of science is that reality will either prove his theory correct or not.
> Why is it an inappropriate comment?

This is the same as saying "Stay safe homies looters are about", or "Stay safe homies black people are about". The tone is distasteful, to say the least.

Also, it's a generalization that is harmful since nazism is a strong accusation. When accusing someone with things like this, you should be specific.

As an improvement, he should have used a more precise language in a sensitive issue like this like "Stay safe. There are some nazis in the protest, and the situation might be escalated to violence.". To be honest, this is like social skill 101.
I think for starters it's important to recognise that the expectation of a "post-government" career is itself a part of this problem. If we instead built long term competence within public institutions, including competitive remuneration and career development like training programmes, there wouldn't be a need to have a door between the private and public sector quite as much in the first place. The reward should be delivered in situ for continued constructive service, not be an upgrade to a private sector gig after holding your nose and/or making decisions you feel will be looked upon favourably by future employers.

Private and public sector employees could collaborate where it makes sense, just like companies sometimes collaborate on shared initiatives like working groups or open source projects.

Government can actually work better than it does in the US -- as it does in other countries -- but one must first accept the ideological premise, which seems to be what holds the country back.
I'd like to thank the folks who downvoted this comment to the point of invisibility for making my point for me more eloquently than I ever could. This community is a better place because it does not treat free speech as an ideal and people don't have to see ideas they disagree with. :)
Amplify is slick - and Bezos specializes in 2 pizza team startups.
The beauty of science is that reality will prove them correct or not.
> It had been a bit of a working assumption of mine over the past few weeks that if you could improve the health of the patients then, you know, the doctors or the hospitals or whatever would pay for that. There was this giant thing called healthcare right, and its main purpose is improving health—trillions of dollars are spent trying to do this. So if I built a thing that improves health someone should pay me, right?

> I said goodbye to Susan and tried to cheer myself up. I had ten more meetings with doctors all over the Bay Area—surely not all of them were ruthless capitalists like Susan. Maybe they would see the the towering genius of GlacierMD and shell out some cash.

This is pretty accurate, unfortunately.
I already know the zip format. Formats were not open then. You did not select archive tools based on the on-disk format it used; you selected archive tools based on a combination of software cost, compression performance, and network effects. Having multiple implementations of software that could work on the same archive format was a novelty which often resulted in legal battles, as the formats themselves were often considered proprietary information.
Uh.. I think the similar concepts are Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods delivery.
Prime pantry was cheaper, because you pay the shipping as part of the item price.
Looks like the wrong kind of thing? Those seem to be high speed drone motors.

Am thinking they'd not have enough torque, unless you gear them pretty high.
"Florida did a very poor job with Covid" - care to elaborate?

Death rate per capita:

Florida: 110
Population: 21.5 million

New York: 206
Population: 19.4 million
Great suggestion!

USAGE
gh gist <command> [flags]

CORE COMMANDS
create: Create a new gist
delete: Delete a gist
edit: Edit one of your gists
list: List your gists
view: View a gist
I'm running a 5x10 which physically is 7'x12'6" with Nema 34's. No lost steps over the years, aside from crashes. It will snap a 1/4" bit without losing a step. It's on a steel frame that is 900+ lbs of steel with 3 sheets of 5x10 3/4" mdf and it still vibrates every now and then. Machine time to planning/cad work is probably 1:10 which is about in line with my development work - 10hrs design for each hour of programming.
I fix my car all the time. You can fix almost all things in your car watching youtube videos. Am I just a super genious or just not intellectually lazy?
> Suffering, in and of itself, isn't a skill. You will endure iff you want to endure. That is, if the perceived benefits of enduring outweigh the pain.

This is what gets me through marathons. You hit the real hard part around mile 20 and fuck it, running another 6 is easier than going back the other way. Faster you run faster you’re done.
Vital Things to Check Before Using an Open-Source Project
Despite being hosted in Russia, I suspect that it will be deplatformed by most app stores.

Since no tech giants want to be associated with hate speech.
That's definitely the sentiment I most disagreed with in this article. It's summed up pretty succinctly in Sufferfest 2 [1, 13:20] (aptly named).

"We're lucky to be able to electively suffer like this"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4CbP_E7oo
The person you're replying to is talking about legal speech as determined through the democratic process, and made that distinction explicitly.

I'm curious why you're pretending he didn't - are you secretly a free speech absolutist trying to make your opponents look illiterate?
I've dealt with enough types of data that I feel super skeptical that you can just dump numbers from hundreds of studies into some data store programmatically, do statistical calculations, and get valid results. It's very difficult to believe that there aren't a ton of variations in how the data is gathered, filtered, and presented that need to be accounted for before any comparisons can be made. I'm not going to trust the law of averages to negate the effect of completely out of whack data when peoples' health is on the line.
Pantry was actually sold by Amazon and met expected retail parameters. The coffee beans I used to buy through pantry would have a typical expiry date - 18-24 months out.

Once that product moved to normal Amazon, it transitioned to the standard jobbers and hucksters... you’d buy a can of coffee whose best by date was 30 days out.

I think this segment is really being replaced by Whole Foods, it is somewhat constrained by the more limited selection of Whole Foods vs normal grocery.

Also, I think Amazon is getting a run for its money with Target and to a lesser extent Walmart. The target drive-up service in particular is best in class. Every mom is hooked to it, and you see people waiting for drive up orders ordering more in the car.
> If It's some frictionless digital cash replacement like a few of the central bank currencies that have been floating around I'd welcome it.

And how will you get them to people sleeping rough?

How will you deal with their being stolen?

How will you deal with reissuing them?

And that's just the first obvious questions that spring to mind.
And the media made fun of it.
Part of the ability to look back fondly may be the higher intensity of experience packed into shorter time than when you coasted. Check out the Long Short, Short Long time phenomenon. The short period of intense experience later feels like a much larger period of time, and the long period of monotony later recalls as a very short inconsequential moment in time.

For example, the 24 hour flight to your holiday destination will compress into a very short unimportant memory where the holiday itself will recall as if it were a much longer period of time than it was.
Well they work on their own timeslines :) I had to cut down a tree about 6-7 years ago. The leftover stump at the base couldnt be removed without major excavation due to the elaborate root network. That stump has attracted all kinds, sizes, shapes and colors of fungi over the years and they are still busy working on it.
It definitely gets harder as you get older to make friends, especially lasting strong friendships. My advice would be to find a hobby or a club where you start off with some common ground. Or even sports, join a casual softball league if they have them. The thing with making new friendships is that they don't happen overnight, and sometimes its hard to tell right away which acquaintances turn into friends. On top of that, peoples' stage of life changes (marriage, kids, jobs, etc), so some friends fade in and out along the way. So cast a wide net and don't let your prejudices get in the way (too much). Sometimes it takes a year or more until some casual acquaintance (or group) turn into actual friends, just from being around them enough (via some shared hobby or club, etc...) That was all pre covid... these days in a COVID world, I imagine it can only be exponentially harder to make new friendships....
It was. But now there is Apple Music.
Except bureaucracies are going to do what they do. The offensive agency will hold back information, and when an attack occurs on the defensive agency, calls for bringing the defensive agency under the umbrella of the offensive agency will be made.

Brats fighting over resources while Mom just wants to sleep. It's not their fault, it's the nature of political organizations.

Sure, you could fix it with centralized oversight and stringent information sharing rules. But eventually you're either strangling them with rules or building one conceptual agency.
Actual text. https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2021/01/07/bmjnph-20...

The analysis is a mess. Why can't they put it in a Google Colab notebook to check their calcuations?