skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Bigfuckingvalue has the best sound and he's just a "youtuber".

Let me rewrite that sentence for you: "Bigfuckingvalue has the best sound because he's in a profession where having a good home audio setup for teleconferences is critical to success."

(I've never done any of this myself, but I've heard from several people that the #1 most crucial investment you can make as a youtuber is in improving your audio setup.)
The argument the author is making is that addiction is an outlier. Many many many people drink, snort cocaine, smoke cigarettes and in the author's case, use heroin, and never develop addiction.

I can understand why this infuriates people who've seen or known people who've died from an addiction but it's important for people to understand that alcohol, drugs, gambling, facebook, the internet, shopping, and everything that can turn into an addiction are not the problem. The problem is deep emotional pain from traumatic experiences.
Champagne’s universal appeal is the physics of bubbles (2018)
Cool!

https://skyline.github.com/winrid/2020
I've heard that statistic before, that 70% of drug users aren't addicted. But I've also heard that the 30% who do get addicted is less about good practices, and more of a genetic trait - if you have the brain chemistry to get addicted, you do. Most people don't, but 30% is non-trivial. If you are given a choice of "70% chance to feel good for a few hours with a 30% chance to ruin your life.", it doesn't feel like good odds to me. There surely are safer and more reliable ways to enjoy your life.
Lexmark (the printer company, also an offshoot of IBM) bought the Model M design from IBM and continued production until 1996. Unicomp, another company in Lexington bought the rights from Lexmark and has been making them ever since.
"Opioids are insanely and ~~instantly~~ quickly addictive."

Do you have a source for this assertion? I'm just a physician with a particular specialty in medically managed (as opposed to procedurally managed) pain, and I've never seen a "I took it once and was instantly addicted." I don't mean to undercut your subjective experience, but I've seen a few folks on pain killers, and if what you described was more common than "very rare", I would have by now.
Hey, watch this! I'm going to burn a few million dollars of productivity with a post!

I wanted to buy a new mechanical keyboard with a home office budget that my employer gave us, and a friend recommended I check out WASD Keyboards. (Up front: I have zero relationship with them except as a customer.) Wanna talk about analysis paralysis? The following killed a week of evenings for me:

- Go to https://www.wasdkeyboards.com/products/mechanical-keyboards/...

- Debate long and hard about the form factor. Do I need the 10-key? Yes! No? Huh, I don't really use it. But what if! Settle on 87 keys.

- Next screen: eh, black case it is.

- Next screen: wait, I can choose the color of every individual key?

- Next screen: wait, I can choose the key caps separately for the symbol, modifier, and OS keys, with a range of fonts and glyphs to choose from? Or I can upload a PDF for custom screen printing?

The end result was this: https://honeypot.net/images/wasd_keyboard.jpeg

- Light grey keys (with a retro font) for letters

- Dark grey keys for punctuation

- Blue keys for numbers and actions

- Red keys for things that control the system

- Pink keys for the function keys

- Green keys for modifiers (with Amiga keycaps for the OS keys, because this is proper)

- And a yellow key with a skull and crossbones that I've mapped to a macro that instantly locks my computer, because I work with the security team and this seemed appropriate.

You might hate my design. That's OK, really! See if you can make one you like more.

(There. And with that, I just set the US tech economy back a few hours.)
Power-of-2-Choices in Practice
Its pretty wild how many things get shut down. I was on a drive this weekend and went to pop on my Google music where I uploaded 10 gigs of music. I was met with a message that said Google music shutdown, but you can move your music to Youtube!
This reminds me of the story of Saturn within General Motors. As I understand it, it was created to compete with popular imports like Honda and was given a long leash from GM to be "a different kind of car company" (in the words of their marketing). The first generation of cars were a lot different from any of GM's previous compact offerings. GM started reining in Saturn and moving toward badge engineering. Eventually it became the same kind of car company, because at the very top it always was.
Omg, it also turns out that the Linux foundation killed Linux 3.0! How dare companies stop supporting old versions of their software!
The sort of financial gymnastics all these groups participating in hoping to leech money off gambles in the structural system vs creating real value makes it difficult for me to have sympathy for any of the parties involved gambling on what will happen.

It's like playing poker and you decided to flip one of accidentally showed your hand. Sorry, but you already joined passing the risk game and shamefully faulted out on the low risk scenario due to negligence.
kind of a weak jab. it's not that complicated to make heroin. morphine extraction is trivial; the conversion to heroin is just one more step. any chem major could probably do it if they had a way to source enough poppies without attracting attention. even if he does source his heroin through the usual channels, is that so much worse than the business practices we support when we buy clothes, iphones, meat, etc.?
If you're in a place with people you like, with sane management, and OK or better pay, do not be in a hurry to move to the next job. Positions with those ingredients are not real easy to find, and it stinks to be in a job without one or more of those.

On the flip side, if you're in a job that has toxic people, insane management, or lousy pay, don't stay because of inertia or laziness or a hope that it might get better eventually. Start looking.

Specifically about ageism: I have not seen it. I'm 58. What I have seen, though, is that I'm very expensive. I have 35 years of experience, and I expect to be paid like it. If someone want to pay me like I have 5 years of experience, that's not ageism, that's being cheap. If someone doesn't see the value in 35 years of experience compared to five years, fine, I'll work somewhere else.

For me to get away with this, I have to actually be more valuable than someone with 5 years of experience. I'm in embedded software, and it's easier for me to do so in that area than in, say, web programming, partly because the underlying stack changes more slowly in embedded. But also, I've had to keep growing in my ability to deliver what my employer wants in a timely fashion. I don't make as many design mistakes as I did before. I don't write as many bugs. I don't start down as many wrong paths. I don't work insane hours, but I still get more actually done and working.

If you can deliver more value per time, then you're worth more money. Do that and you won't have to worry about ageism.
Most "dealers" are actually charged with 'intent to distribute', a crime that doesn't require evidence of money changing hands. Giving drugs to your friends, even for free, will result in basically the same drug charges as if you were selling. The law is setup this was specifically to avoid the need to money evidence. The cops only need to see you hand over the drugs. They don't need to also see you receive any money. (Actually, you don't even need to hand over the drugs. Possess a large amount, or a smaller amount divided into little bags, and that will be enough for intent to distribute.)

Many street-level drug dealers will still separate the drug and money handovers between different people. This isn't to avoid legal issues. It is to avoid the money being seized when the cops move on the guy they see handing over bags of drugs.
> It means something different to you. The US is a big country, and your understanding of the left is pretty shallow and certainly doesn't speak for the whole country.

Although I am leery of placing myself on a political axis for the same reason, I think most people would consider me a leftist. Certainly they would think so based on my voting record, with a couple of exceptions.

Firstly, it may be - and I think is probably - the case that the average self-described liberal or independent in the US does not prioritize most culture war issues, or identity politics issues. They might instead be more concerned about conventionally leftist economic policies, like raising the minimum wage or improving safety nets.

But that's not, by-and-large, what political campaigns, politicians, or the news media focuses on. Cultural issues and (increasingly) identity politics surrounding specific issues take up an immense amount of bandwidth in the US to a degree they do not in Europe - or if an analogous issue does, the battle lines are drawn and the conversation is framed in a totally different way. Even issues that are the 'same' are often downstream of US politics.

I don't think this is an argument that there's no loud leftist voice in the mainstream media. That is maybe true, in the conventional sense. But it's not because the media is conservative or reactionary in some sense - there's a similar problem on the right; if anything, this was strongly illustrated by Trump's success - Trump brought to the forefront issues like immigration restriction that had wide support among the voting base but very weak to no support in the conservative political and media establishment. It's because the "leftists" who are actually in power, and control large 'leftist' institutions, care more about identity politics and culture war issues than they do about conventional leftist economic policies. US politics on both sides is charged along different lines than in other countries.

There's no doubt similar phenomena in Europe - it's not as though politics as represented by politicians and in the news accurately reflects the desires of the people there, either. Nor is Europe a unified block either, so we're being a little sloppy. But this is still a substantial difference.

At any rate, there's still other issues I mentioned like VAT - VAT would never fly in the US even if the "left" took complete power because liberals would consider it horrifically regressive!
With any kind of addiction, it's worth exploring what the triggers are. There might well be some underlying emotional thing that makes you eat fruit.

For me: I eat cookies because my Mom baked a lot, and I lost her early. This is a way to feel close to her. Knowing that makes it easier to not eat all the cookies. That doesn't mean all addictions are rooted in early childhood or psychological symptoms, or that your life gets fixed if you just talk about your parents a lot ;) But especially with addictions that only create mild physical addiction symptoms, it's worth looking at.
> The thing most people forget about options & RSU

These two are very different things and they shouldn't be conflated. If you have FAANG RSUs vesting every few months or every year, you can convert them to cold hard cash on a regular basis.

Options in a startup, or a company that isn't traded publicly are a different animal.
AWS CLI is pretty handy
Ask HN: Is it crazy that software developers have to study for interviews?
It seems like to get a software job you need a completely different skill set from the work you do day to day (for some roles). This is why there appears to be an accepted practice of spending a lot of time studying for specific interview questions. And, on the employer side, of asking these esoteric trivia questions that the candidate is expected to be able to think through and answer on the spot while talking, while being closely watched, and under pressure. It seems to me these question really give you very little information about how that candidate will perform on the job, and is just a waste of everyone's time.
Amen. The audio quality is trash, bits are dropped, and the mute/unmute/background-noise issues are really annoying. I know these hearings would be a bit a mess even in person but it's amplified greatly by everyone being remote and having bad equipment/etiquette/internet.
> Music scene is not good. I don't like to listen to country , rock ect.

Clearly you don't listen to rap and hip hop either
As someone already mentioned in the comments, this software was actually developed somewhat in-house by Citibank who then sold it to Oracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Financial_Services_So...
Show HN: A simple count-down timer for Perseverance rover touchdown on Mars
Yes, this.

Most important for podcasts or YouTube is sound and it is the thing everyone recommends you deal with first.
Nicotine is well established as a nootropic and use of it correlates with reduced incidence of dementia (even when corrected for mortality biases). I am at a really high risk for dementia and I keep trying to vape in hopes of that (possible) benefit but I keep forgetting to do it. Note that the logic for your health choices get weird when accounting for high odds of being a zombie after the age of 65. Plenty of room to dump externalities onto "zombie-you"
My IRB Nightmare: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
Sugar is one of the hardest addictions to kick. I've kicked cocaine and alcohol too.. sugar was by far the hardest physically. It's also hard to stay sober because it's so accessible in foods and accepted by society.
Exactly and this spills over to gambling too. All addictions are the same and people try to convince everyone that they have been thinking about it wrong.
Finally sold our old 12" MacBooks on eBay earlier this year and had to format them all. Made the same mistake with the first one, total nightmare. Once I realized the issue the other 2 were a breeze. Seems like a super obvious place to have a big warning message!
NASA's Perseverance rover team will have to live on 'Mars time'
You can withdraw USD on Bitfinex if you verify you identity, 10k minimum.
Don't even need two way communication for that I think. A radar should do the trick (although the example video only shows it from a stationary vehicle) https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2020/06/24/new-radar-...
> In your fantasy you basically stripped the Russians of all humanity to the point where they would intentionally poison a river with highly dangerous nuclear waste... and kill off an entire city.

Yep, good people wouldn't never, ever, think about doing something like that. We are 100% safe.

Meanwhile in Nagasaki...
Competition to get at the top of the hierarchy, and the fact someone will be willing to compete, coupled with the intrinsic need for control which comes with power, sex just being a tool to an end... Especially in a culture as puritan and easily offended (only "in public") as the North American culture.

All in all, it's human intrinsic nature.
Anyone play Aidungeon.io? They hooked GPT-3 up to make a Zork where you can do basically anything and the game will come back with something that's at least interesting.

It's interesting how crazy new tech concepts come in as pure text first. For example, MUDs were the first MMORPGs back in the 90s.
> Google was the first to do an office suite in the cloud.

The were the first to get big, maybe, but not the first period. The Google Docs word processor was built from the ashes of Writely, which they acquired back when Ajax was a new buzzword.
IRel40: The European Initiative Determined to Improve Component Reliability
> It wasn't the poweder it was the rifle. Before the rifle you could have armies face each other in a sword type formation and shoot, so few bullets would hit that this wasn't that costly in lives. By the civil war a good shooter could always expect to hit where he aimed.

While certain rifles were fairly accurate on man-sized targets at 100-150 yards (Springfield 1861 being the most common), being able to visually identify a target at 100+ yards, even at 50 yards didn't matter much after the shooting started. The black powder from a mass of rifles causes a thick fog to form on each side, obscuring individual targets. This leads to a lot of massed volley firing tactics (and most of the rifled muskets used were lethal to 300-400 yards) similar to what were used with smoothbore muskets of the previous 100 years. You can read a lot of stories were officers were picked off behind the lines or when riding between lines, largely because of the accuracy of these for a handful of shots (and a well-trained individual could fire 3-5 shots per minute), but this accuracy simply didn't matter once the literal fog of war set in.

The salient difference in technology between Napoleonic conflicts and the ACS is the rifled barrel both in small arms and in field artillery. The reason this mattered was the Napoleonic tactics were formed with the idea that outside 100 yards is relatively safe. A mass of bodies 400 yards away poses no threat, so you can casually march forward. The most famous example of this backfiring is Picket's Charge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Fifteen thousand men plodded forward for several hundred yards while being mowed down by masking fire from rifled muskets. Picket's subordinates ordered the quickstep and the charge a bit earlier than convention (by 1863, both sides understood the tactics they had learned at military academies to be somewhat outdated and almost succeeded for it). This wasn't done soon enough, and resulted in their attack failing due to lack of manpower. This same masking fire made assaulting trenches nearly impossible. Sappers/miners and siege artillery were required to poke holes in the lines, and in most cases this wasn't enough. The tactics that worked were spreading thin and outflanking the lines.

It's worth noting that there were some engagements that did show the power of rapid firing machine guns and rifles with magazines to offer less reloading time. The Gatling Gun, and a few similar machine guns were designed and first deployed in the ACS. While these were rare (typically purchased privately by commanders or supporters instead of being government issue), they were devastating when in operation. The first repeating rifles were deployed effectively (again, privately purchased) by dismounted calvary at the Battle of Petersburg to offer unprecedented firepower from a small group.
Oh, it's worse than that. They wanted to roll the portion of the loan with one specific creditor into a new loan, in a sweetheart deal that was going to screw over the other creditors.

To do that they needed to make an interim interest payment to that one creditor, and mark the loan as paid off to that creditor; but the system wouldn't let them mark the loan as paid off without making payment of the principal in full, and it wouldn't let them pay creditors individually.

If they'd just been "repaying" the principal they'd have caught the issue when it said (paraphrasing) "Money actually leaving, are you sure [Y/N]", but they were expecting some money to go out as interim interest (they'd got the OK to pay the relatively small amount of interim interest to the other creditors).
Super fast super property access
Spark at the AI Frontier
As a physician:

No, the 'vast majority' do not. I've supervised medical grade opioid administration to more than a few people, both acutely and chronically, and *folks without a pre-existing substance use problem* do not often develop one, especially if it's over the short term. The idea that "I give you an opioid and then BAM I want more!" is highly divergent from my clinical experience.
Kind of off-topic, but the quality of most of these streams are terrible. Zoom/whatever should add an optional overlay to the corner of every stream that displays the ISP of that user. Maybe the public shaming on these high-profile streams will lead to some change?
Yes, this. If 1% of airline passengers died we would ground all planes immediately. 30% is awful.
Some material for those that want to dig further:

1. Get Lamp, a documentary film on text adventures and Infocom, a legendary publisher of test adventure games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp

2. Twisty Little Passages by By Nick Montfort. A book applying literary critique to text adventure games.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/twisty-little-passages
Snooping around for photos on the internet. It looks to me, as someone who made gears for a living, that they are Miter Bevel Gears. (Miter - both gears have the same pitch and bevel angle)

The odd part is they are only used temporarily, then discarded at maturity.

In the real world, it takes 2 hours or so to set up a bevel gear generator like the Gleason 14.
Avoid Zoom (2020)
Agree with everything except for the music scene. If you are into hip hop and rap, its arguably one of the best music scenes in the country.
Can this run on a VDHL simulator?
We have hindsight: the changes Ballmer made to increase revenue were not 'one offs' they were substantial.

1) He reconstituted Windows and Office distribution, sales, put office on the cloud.

2) He launched XBox and more notable Azure.

So if you think 'Desktop is dying' (desktop sales were plateauing) then 1 seems like it's going away and cloud isn't a huge business then 2 doesn't matter.

But the prediction was wrong:

A) Even with flatlining desktop sales, Win + Office continued to thrive. Even to this day. It's not a 'legacy business' it's a 'healthy ongoing business.

B) XBox, in particular Azure are huge. Azure makes more money today than Windows generated in revenue when Ballmer took over Microsoft.

Ballmer's failures were mostly Search and Mobile ... both of which were sad, but also they were up against Google Search and iPhone, the best products of our era. XBox and Azure are in very difficult areas, and are doing well.

In hindsight, Ballmer did quite well, there's not a lot to debate unless someone things that Search/Mobile success should have been imminent, but I don't think that's true.

He massively grew and adapted the baseline businesses, and started a few new, huge businesses. Glorious profits all around.

Satya hasn't yet quite made the kind of decisions that will have the lasting impact Ballmer has had, in his defence, he's in an era were the 'new fields of competition' are less obvious.
I was late for Zork and only played "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" with friends. This essential command I will always remember:

Take tea and no tea
My go-to response for people who say "If you don't have anything to hide then why do you care if we know?" Is that clearly they have never bought Preparation-H or itch cream from the drugstore, or they're not thinking about how that purchase is not information their classmates or rivals need to know about.

I once told someone something about my kid, and they responded, "why haven't you told me this before???" My flat reply was, "because it's not the most interesting thing about her." I'm about 50-50 on smart versus stupid answers, but occasionally I surprise even myself. That's one of my best one-liners.

Setting aside police/surveillance state dystopias for a moment: People try to make you small by labeling you. The more things they know about you, the more labels they have. If you don't believe me just look at the sewer that flows through replies to AOC's tweets. Having depression as a teenager should not define you. Being a survivor of assault or harassment should not define you. Having a working class upbringing should not pigeonhole you. Having an itchy groin should not be ammo for somebody to derail and deflect what you're trying to do. Mind your own goddamned business and keep the conversation on topics that are actually relevant, like your embezzlement conviction or my ongoing bribery lawsuit.