skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm not shivering in a cave drinking water, sitting in the dark, and wondering if I'll get lucky and catch a squirrel to eat tomorrow. That is, if I can walk on my broken ankle.

I think this highlights another angle to "progress." It may be getting better in aggregate over time but there will never be a utopia.

People 200 years from now might describe our best conditions as a struggle.
Some might consider this a benefit.
That's basically the premise of the Oculus Quest, and my experience with virtual offices there are extremely mixed. I don't even find any of the apps to be particularly bad, but the inconvenience of using VR as a user shell becomes apparent very quickly. Small gestures that used to be a centimeter of movement are abstracted into larger, easier to read gestures that just tire you out. With that being said, I still found a few "professional" uses for it: I was particularly impressed by how easy it was to load up a Blender project and step inside of it.
I'm not sure what the scope of the conversation is, then. The article is a report on a novel mechanism to reduce crime (novel in the US, that is). Your claim, as I understand it, is that the absolute number of excess deaths from police action in the Black population correlates with the outsized representation of the Black population in homicides, and you don't see a problem with this (please correct me if I misunderstand). I hypothesize, admittedly through leading questions, that addressing said outsized representation through means other than policing may have a beneficial effect on the overall crime rate, which seems to align with the reporting in the article. Is there something I'm missing?
I appreciate the suggestion, but I don't think that will solve my problem of too many cats on my property.
It's a little sad that after 50 years since Microsoft and Apple were started, there still is no easy way to write a natively looking cross-platform GUI app, even with a language like Golang.

Recently I looked at couple of options of writing some Golang to make a simple GUI app that would look natively on Windows/MacOS (text area, several checkboxes/buttons), and there's no much there to be honest.
Except then they're not going to be released on account of demonstratably being an ongoing risk to society.

Of course this concern runs exactly contra to the "medical authoritarian" one further up. Frankly, which is it that means a successful program as the article notes shouldn't be continued?
There are a lot of people on this planet who do not have regular access to this.
What you're worried about is reasonable but it doesn't seem to have much to do with the article.

There's no mention of the mental health clinician and EMT in the van grabbing people, throwing them in the van, and hauling them off to be committed.

Instead they seem to be sympathetic listeners who can help with problems. Not solve, probably, and probably not permanently but anything that helps keep people from getting shot or locked up in jail is good.
Just because the entire world isn’t perfect doesn’t mean there hasn’t been progress. The population of the earth is 7 billion or more. More people live in relative comfort now than all people were alive 100 years ago. Many poor countries have high birth rates and could reduce poverty straightforwardly.
> I want the service I use to outlive me

Not sure how old you are, but Evernote's been languishing badly over the last 5 years. I don't expect them to be around much longer.

So many better options have popped up this past year- Obsidian, Craft, Archivy, Joplin, Notion, Roam... the list just keeps growing.

While 2020 certainly goes down as one of the worst years humanity has faced, it's been something of a golden age for PKM apps.
Pretty sure I didn't consent to their delivery people videotaping my front door.
Many of us with imperfect eyesight like to read still. With text on a page or a screen. Fonts are (if designed for utility) a delicate art balancing expressiveness and readability. Some hew more in one direction or the other. This one favors readability.

As a blurry eyed person in my midlife period who consumes a lot of written word, text and code I very much appreciate any efforts to make it easier on my eyes and my brain, especially in type that is nice to look at.
Reducing arrests is itself a goal.

Jail can be a horrible traumatizing experience and/or a bad influence. You don't need a conviction and a prison sentence to be subject to the harms of incarceration.
And many more who do. As a percentage humanity is living better all the time.
Strong, Weak, Dynamic, and Static Typed Programming Languages Explained
Undeniably, these are complex and depressing times for many, maybe even most, people.

However, I'm sitting at a desk, two windows into all human knowledge in front of me.

You can buy computing hardware at tens of dollars per petaflop per second.

Aging is starting to be considered a preventable disease.

Humanity is on a path–a tumultuous one, albeit–towards utopia.
And what are the actual stats on that?

I'm willing to make a pretty safe bet that there are far more people in the US who have criminal records than have been committed to institutions against their will. I doubt it's even a contest, I'm seeing rough estimations online as high as 1/4 of the entire adult male population in the US.

And I'm also willing to make a pretty safe bet that the proportion of those criminal records that actually get expunged is a lot lower than you're making it sound like.

And lastly, I'm willing to make a bet that overall, the long-term effects of even a short criminal record are roughly comparable to the long-term effects of involuntary commitment. Yes, we can have a conversation about firearm privileges, that's worth talking about. But let's also not forget that the most immediate effects of a criminal record are things like loss of income, housing, and the ability to find employment, which can have an extremely significant effect on your entire future. In comparison, most employers will not ask you questions about your mental history.

And again -- you can still get involuntarily committed to an institution after you're arrested. The only difference is that now you have two problems instead of one, both a mental health record and a criminal record.
Oddly, the biggest help for legibility for me without my corrective lenses was the spaces in the numbers, and fitting fewer entries in the same space. It’s hard to objectively judges between the two with such changes between the samples.
Hi, glad to help. The answer is that it depends on what your values are.

If you want to reconnect people to twitter (a publishing platform) who have been banned for racist hate speech or inciting violence, and the laws in your jurisdiction permit you to do that. Then you can do that without going to jail.

If you want to reconnect people to signal (a personal communications tool) who have been disconnected from it due to reasons best understood by the Iranian government, an the laws in your jurisdiction permit you to do that. Then you can do that without going to jail.

It's really just a value judgement whether you consider giving a publishing platform to racists against the will of said publishing platform is a worthwhile activity.

And, again, it's just a value judgement whether you consider giving the right to privately communicate back to Iranians who have been, effectively, deprived of it by connecting them to a service which will willingly have them is a worthwhile activity.

Your values may differ from mine. And both my and your values could differ from the majority of HN users. My experience is that perfect alignments of values rarely, if ever, occur between any two individuals.
My understanding is that this program is different - they’re not just locking people up, but the actually have the resources to offer them help.
I could never teach JavaScript to beginners. There are a million ways to do everything, there are a million platforms each with their own compatibility quirks, almost everything is asynchronous, every framework tries to reinventing the language, and almost every project ends up with a massive, complex dependency tree.

Python's whitespace rules are a minor nuisance to some, but at least there is consensus among Python devs on how to do something as fundamental as iterating over a list.

I write JavaScript all the time. It has improved a lot over the last decade. But I could never teach it to a beginner.

Don't get me wrong, though. I wouldn't teach Python to a beginner either.
Many fonts don’t make that distinction for that character which is another good reason for the choice.
Robinhood has been holding close to 1000$ hostage since the whole GameStop dogecoin thing.. I made a decent amount on dogecoin and not only are they holding my money hostage but when I was trying to sell the Coin when it peaked it wouldn’t let me sell till it was around 6cent.. but since then I have sent multiple emails with no response my money has been held by them for no reason my withdrawals are deactivated and buying stock restricted and now it’s bill time and I can’t pay my bills.. I just want my money back and I’ll never use that app again all my withdrawable cash is just sitting there Unwithdrawable and I might lose my car or house because of them can anyone help me
You mean that one anecdote does not invalidate another?
I agree. There are many comments here saying, "what if they turn violent?" as though that is a deal breaker for this kind of program. I think EMTs are a good model for this. If the situation escalates then the health professionals can disengage and call the police.

It isn't a risk free profession just like firefighting, policing and logging aren't risk free professions. But the risk of violence does not mean we should do away with the program if it proves to be successful.
"must have some reason for bringing it up" yeah because I'm literally answering the question.
And now we have Mamba, which is just like Conda. Except it has a better-documented (and more open) tooling ecosystem. And it lacks the debilitatingly slow/unreliable dependency resolution of Conda.

https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I see it as Google's attempt to offer a compromise. I agree that Australia probably isn't backing down, but it's clear Google knows it is going to have to pay one way or the other.
Reality is a bit different. On next door the most outraged / strongest voices dominate.

So very commonly now - let's say you have a bunch of kids ridding on the wrong side of the road, or someone with two off leash pitbulls bite someone, you get immediate claims of racism or similar if anyone suggests anything other than total understanding of the folks acting in what might be called an anti-social way.

The folks outraged and labeling others do drive down participation. I certainly no longer participate - despite being a significant donor to dem causes, a phone banker for what used to be traditional liberal issues etc.

Nextdoor: How fast can someone be offended by what someone else says - is probably the more correct title
The health care professionals of the STAR program are also not dealing with violent individuals.
I resonated very strongly with the Theory of problems. At my last place I was very productive. Revamping their deploy system, frontend infra, had my hands in a lot of things.

However my pay wasn’t going up by much. I left for a new company and I feel like a noob having to re-learn things. It’s prolly going to take me an year to produce more value than I get paid.

Old company prolly had to replace me and spend 200k*2 years to get same context.

Very few companies understand the essence behind retaining good people. Promoting can be wayyy cheaper than having to hire someone new.

It really pisses me off when this happens to female and minority engineers. They frequently get looked down upon and left out for well deserved promos.

If you care about diversity, retain and grow your existing team. It’s cheaper and faster.
So after 18 years that $1000 will be $1007. The interest rate on savings accounts is practically nothing.

We need financial education in high school.
> Many poor countries have high birth rates and could reduce poverty straightforwardly.

This is pretty reductive if not ignorant.
There's an SV company Citrine Informatics that claims to.
In the era of "home computers", the serial connections were usually for low-speed peripherals like modems, and a you had a parallel bus for things like hard drives. This seemed to carry well into the modern PC/Mac era.

Then in rapid succession starting in the early 2000s, we saw USB and SATA/SAS replace most IDE and SCSI use cases, and PCI Express replace PCI and AGP, along with Rambus taking a swing at conventional SDRAM.

Was there some fundamental breakthrough that made it possible to do high-speed serial busses, or was it that the costs of managing them finally undercut the hassles of signaling difficulties on a parallel bus?

The other thing I wonder about is what happened to SRAM? I know it always used a price concern-- "64K of DRAM is $10, and 64K of SRAM is $50", but given that DRAM is so cheap now, I'm surprised there's no SRAM product for enthusiasts/cost-no-object performance seekers. They'll already pay 5-10x the price of commodity DDR4 for the highest-binned overclockable stuff.
I've only skimmed the paper at present, but are all of their examples based around minors being involuntarily committed by their parents? Because that seems like a separate, if related, issue.
Right, but they're also arresting fewer people. People that likely would otherwise have been arrested. Broadly speaking i'm supportive of this initiative, but it's important that its outcomes actually be measured, and just number of arrests is not a good metric. Not arresting people is easy, it's hard to not arrest them without increasing crime. I hope it works though.
Doing good is a market externality...
> Seems like a great avenue for disarming the populace

Doesn't seem like it would scale, tbh. You could disarm a few troublesome people, but not "the populace".
Testing four search engine alternatives to Google
The FBI website statistics or statista as a shortcut to them.
Yet apple's latest headphones are quite pricey. And the mac pro.
It's their job to write something for a living :p

That's why I usually ignore "breaking" or "trending" news, or consume it in very minimal dose. Too many speculation, weird theory, a lot of he/she/they said, and not enough truth or fact.

(Also fortunately my job doesn't involve having to follow all those breaking news or else I'd gone mad by now)
I don't share the same hope. Despite sitting in front of the world's font of information there's still people out there that think a cloth masks have a meaningful effect on filtering a nanoscale particle.
Then the next step is apps that are 3D-aware, to let them draw beyond just a flat plane.
Don't get me wrong, Python is head and shoulders above Java/C# or C/C++ as a teaching language. The complaint is that, as the educator, lab/tutorial time is being wasted on trivial syntax issues that would be non-existent given a more lenient parser or better tooling (preferably the latter).
Of course you can, you ask them what you should buy and how to get in on the action and hilarity ensues.
What’s your opinion on Julia?
Here, they would give him a ride if he gave them an address, or take him to a shelter.
> The American West is burning. The Arctic is melting. Populism and authoritarianism are on the rise. Nearly a million people have died from the coronavirus. Economic inequality continues to grow, only accelerated by the pandemic.

Compared to what came a couple of generations before, all those "bad" things are either imaginary or not very serious. It's ridiculous that people are wringing their hands over them. Of course we're going to find something to worry about if there are no actual problems. That sounds like a pretty good state to be in compared to having a world war (killed 10s of millions) or HIV (killed 10s of millions) or the Spanish Flu (killed 10s of millions), or actual communist dictatorships (killed 10's of millions).

I'd say technology enabled all that good and we're living in a technological utopia which is still getting better and better. There's just some strange social effect causing people to blind themselves to the greatest achievement in the history of the Earth.
> Psychiatry does not know how to cure mental illness. At best it knows how to medicate it and alleviate symptoms while causing very serious or deadly side effects.

I realize this is just a sidenote, but I just want to address this point for anyone who's struggling with problems like depression or other serious mental issues. Getting help can be a lifesaver, and sometimes medication is part of it.

Properly prescribed by a professional who knows what they're doing, medication to treat depression can in some cases literally change your life. It's not the only way to address mental issues, you absolutely should couple it with therapy. It's not for everyone. That's why a professional is involved. But stigmatizing people who take medication to help manage their problems is incredibly harmful.
That's not true, actually. Statistically minorities fare worse in their encounters with the justice system.
Thanks for mentioning this! I’m surprised I hadn’t seen this before.
I mean hololens are the same price.
Well, I don't think hydrogen is the answer for all these reasons. It seems, that sodium (Na) can under certain conditions (very thin film, e.g. when applied to a surface with great speed of 10s of m/s) react directly with water and produce stable electric current. That is not so hard to do, e.g. hard disks, regular turbines etc. pretty much would provide such conditions :-)
The patents for such use in Lockheed-Martin rockets expired long ago but it seems based on the details, that it worked reasonably well.

Sodium is very easy to handle. There is no need for large pressure or any bonding elements. The hydroxide can be turned into sodium again by well known processes that were used on industrial scale more than 100 years ago already. This process and the "burn" of sodium with water both release hydrogen as a by-product. This could solve the winter energy storage issue. Also you could quite likely safely transport sodium in former oil tankers or by pipe if heated to a bit more than 100 °C/ or in the form of concentrated hydroxide (the "waste")... so the infrastructure is mostly there.
As you all well know, original sodium can be extracted from regular NaCl salt that we have plenty of in sea water and salt mines.

Best of all, sodium reacts so rapidly, it could under minor adjustments replace diesel in +- regular engines too. (That is also the contents of one of the patents.) That is of course not so efficient, but there is a large installed base.
I think the right answer, in the short term, is to go for mandatory licensing.

If you can't compete on your catalog, since everyone else can license it at a reasonable price, you have to compete on the best user experience-- discovery, performance, compatibility.

But they also can't whine "but what about the artists" because they're still getting a cheque.
I don't know if this dean's observation is about helicopter parenting or risk aversion as much as it's about how bifurcated and ultra-high stakes the university/credential-pedigree system has become, and how essential it is to optimize for a certain outcome at all costs.

When I was high school age, the A students went to good universities and generally ended up with a good professional career, the B students went to state schools and had an average life in an office job. The C students went to community college and limped along. The D students went to trade school and at least had a shot at turning things around.

We're moving towards a world where the A++5.0GPA+awards+accolades students will go to the top universities and end up living in relative luxury, the A students maybe will finish college hamstrung with mountains of debt, and the rest? Walmart/Meth if they're lucky, prison if they're not. Competition among students is a complete slug-fest and every parent is doing whatever they can to juice the metrics that universities demand, at the expense of every other part of the student's development/upbringing. You don't want your kid left behind in the dirt.
The point is that we aren't introducing a new system at all. The system of people being involuntarily committed without a trial already exists.
This is what I’ve done and it’s way easier from a packaging perspective but the thing that stings is Go misses out on all the data science stuff like pandas, numpy etc
Like Bill and Hillary.
Agree for the case of oncology. Disagree for psychiatry.

The evidence is mounting that vitamins may actually be just as good a treatment for most people with mild depression or other similar ailments vs SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs.

Sources:

SSRIs don't work better than placebos for mild to moderate depression Study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18303940

Low B12 and Folic Acid are associated with Depression Study https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026988110504889...

Vitamin D can treat seasonal depression Study https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/10888476

B-12 levels are associated with ability to recover from depression Study https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/147...

Magnesium helps to handle depression Study https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
health care professionals don't arrest people...so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm guessing you made this comment to be edgy.

I would hope that you, having access to both a brain and the internet, would realize that viruses are respirated in water droplets large enough to be blocked by filters and–to a lesser extent–cloth.
(Paraphrasing Sapiens): 1,000 years ago a person living in China had a varied diet, spent time catching food in a forest, was not exposed to industrial pollution, had large amounts of free time and time spent socializing with other humans.

Today, a person living in the same spot in China works 6.5 days per week doing the same task all day in an electronics factory, lives in a dorm with other workers and away from family, has no privacy, suffers from massive industrial pollution and noise.

Humans are adapted for the hunter gatherer life and this is likely the environment wherein human flourishing can be expected.

Each revolution (agricultural, industrial, information) has chipped away at that life more and more until it does not exist.

When Jared Diamond said in the 1990s that the agricultural revolution was the worst thing to happen to humans, there was outrage and he was forced to apologize. Now, that thinking is becoming accepted.
Perhaps you just don't like communicate with people. I also don't like that, when people aren't interested in what I did and I still need to tell them.
There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. Except until recently, Yeager, who passed late last year, RIP.
Those cases aren't represented in the list of top causes of death.
What's the --classic flag for? Just curious
Because there is a qualitative difference between "limited government" and "no government"?
Are there a lot of minimum wage, single parent type people that do that?

As an upper-middle-class office worker with flexible hours and cash to spare, even pursuing a small-claims case was a major PITA for me. Took a ton of time, effort, and money.
I love how you can tell which parts of aws-cli were written by different teams because of how the inconsistencies are consistent within a certain domain.
> what's stopping them from doing it again tomorrow?

Giving medical help to a drug addict is more likely to reduce the likelihood that they commit another crime than giving them a criminal record.
DKIM/SPF really aren't that bad. And you can not be Gmail and still get emails sent. Except Outlook/Hotmail/etc will randomly start blocking your emails, and only unblock your emails after you pester them enough.
For god’s sake at least let requirements install in order.
BaldPhone: Accessible interface for your smartphone, suitable for seniors