skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> biggest single thing that would simplify the tax code is removing the separate capital gains tax and just counting it all as income

That's okay during times like ~1990-2020, a time of wonderfully low dollar inflation. The justification behind the long-term capital gains rate is this: during times of high dollar inflation, taxation on capital asset values turns into an outright tax on investment.

If the dollar is inflating rapidly then an investment which simply maintains its value in real terms -- neither gaining nor losing real value -- will see its value in dollars increase and will therefore be taxed, heavily. The lower rate for capital gains tax was in recognition that not all of that gain in nominal value was real income. All of the major reductions in the long-term capital gains rate (i.e. reduction of the rate, shortening of timespan for "long term", and increase/removal of cap) occurred after highly dollar-inflationary periods (1934, 1942, 1978-1981).

Without a lower capital gains rate, during times of high dollar inflation the wealthy will shift all their money into non-fungible assets (real estate, artwork, patents, Persian rugs, domain names, antiques) which aren't fungible commodities with liquid markets and therefore can't be marked-to-market or taxed until sold. This kind of economy-wide, sudden, and simultaneous disinvestment would be a catastrophe for the economy.

Not to mention the resulting real estate boom would make the homelessness problem an order of magnitude worse in a matter of months. When your money is losing value every day, buying up every apartment in sight, jacking the rent to the moon, and evicting the tenants (so it can sit empty and maintain value without any management effort) is, unfortunately, a great strategy.

Note that the 1990's were a boom time for the US (Cold War peace dividend), and from ~2000-2020 we had a massive onlining of cheap Chinese labor providing a deflationary counterpressure to our outrageous money-printing escapades. All the cheap Chinese labor is now fully online and "Fed go Brrr" is in permanent COVID-hyperdrive, so the party will end real soon now.
Thanks for the great blog post, and congrats on finding that long dormant bug!
TinyPilot: Month 8
There is an evidence that or immune system has either limited memory or bandwidth or both. See immune imprinting. So while taking once a ten year vaccine for not rapidly mutating pathogen makes it more robust, the case of regular intake for highly volatile virus is not so obvious.

There were already warning cases with flu and some other diseases.
> Like, in the sense that you can transpile any bit of Python or Lisp or Haskell or Rust or JS into C but the opposite isn’t necessarily true because not all those language support all the features exposed in C (such as goto, no bounds checking, pointer arithmetic, etc.), any algorithm for say parsing JSON can be expressed equally as efficiently in C, while a clever and hacky C-specific algorithm cannot necessarily be expressed in those higher level languages.

This isn't true though. Just off the top of my head: C doesn't expose the carry flag directly, C doesn't let you write signed arithmetic using twos-complement overflow, C doesn't let you share a value between separate compilation units without allowing it to be mutated...

"faster" or "slower" is a pretty terrible metric anyway, given that most projects do not have infinite developer time available. But it's very hard to benchmark "equivalent developer effort" between two different languages.
Online Awards Ceremony for Huawei Developer Conference Contest in Pakistan
The basic idea is that the filesystem exposes a directory data structure, which lists file names and metadata, and somehow associates this with disk locations where the file contents are stored.

Different filesystems handle this quite differently, but it's common that deleting a file doesn't actually overwrite the contents (mostly because that would take extra time, perhaps a significant amount of extra time). In most filesystems it just involves removing a directory entry (so that the file is no longer displayed as existing), and somehow marking the disk locations where the file's contents were stored as free (so that they can be reallocated for future files).

Data recovery and undeletion can involve finding the directory entries or allocation records, or just looking for interesting data on the raw disk device without regard to its allocation structure ("carving").

The exact technical details depend a lot on your operating system and filesystem type.

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

But you can learn a lot with a hex editor and/or filesystem debugger, as well as the technical documentation for the filesystem type that you're using.
Reaper (https://www.reaper.fm/) can handle microtuning: https://en.xen.wiki/w/DAWs

A basic internet search would have resolved their issues. But why let the facts get in the way of the story, right?
A federal housing guarantee. In every instance where someone cannot find affordable and sufficient housing for themselves and their family then they are entitled to the live in an unoccupied unit that meets their families needs (1 bedroom per kid and 1 for parents, at most 30 minutes by, public transit from their primary job, or car if they have a reliable vehicle and the income to maintain it) for at most 30% of their income. Their primary employer pays half the difference in cost and the property owner absorbs the rest. If this kills a business then so be it. Businesses are not entitled to impoverished workers.

Vacant properties should be taxed at an increasing rate sufficient to force the owners hand to either lower rates (and realize the losses from the new valuation from their creditors) or liquidate the property. The proceeds of these taxes can go towards the building and maintenance of affordable housing in the district their collected from.

This should encourage liquidation of speculative properties in hot markets and allow those without capitol to compete against those living parasitically off of their "investments".

Obviously this isn't perfect, and I'm open to admitting it's a terrible plan. But can we at least try something FFS? So long as people are homeless and can't afford to buy homes near their jobs I don't think anyone is entitled to profiting off of renting property.

Also worth trying:

Eminent domain land and task the national guard or army engineers with building minimally viable affordable housing condos. Attach a jobs program to train the un/under-employed from the area and scale up to the size of the problem.
23 in Norway as well in one elderly home. https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n149
US AI Policy Makes “Skynet” Systems Illegal
It claims that the operation will make a copy instead of transition the objects, which as far as I understood it would have then deleted the original objects and accomplished something relatively similar but with an extra copy step.
Quite a few of the most successful youtubers in beauty / makeup genre are men indeed.
Crowdsec: A Modernized, Collaborative Multiplayer Firewall for Linux
Royal children's paediatric, so I guess AMH-CDC. https://shop.amh.net.au/cdcbook

But it might've been specific to some editions.
American carriers tend to buy American aeroplanes, understandably but frustratingly.
Before Christchurch:

https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-coast-guard-member-removed-aft...

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/cubs-indefinitely-ban-fan...

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/07/17/mayor-suspends-4-co...

There were a few more stories, but can't find them at the moment. I remember that there was even a huge controversy on Twitter that someone from the British royal family did the OK sign. I think that was royal family, but not 100% sure, can't find any article about it at the moment

And you don't need public opinion to cancel someone. A dozen people complaining is often enough.
I can't imagine people would like seeing enriched uranium. Sure it'd make a good story, but people don't even want to see my ore sample. Deleted uranium should also be fun; I'd love to have some dice made of it: https://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/consumer%20products/dudi...
I always enjoy the reaction when I tell students that we've had provably unbreakable encryption since the 19th century.
While I would love to see AWS do this for most things, in this case, it would have resulted in a UI that said something like "Increased monthly cost expected to be $50", and I'm sure they would have read that as "Expected monthly cost change to $50"

But an estimated cost for many things in the console would be a welcome sanity check.
India’s new intermediary liability and digital media laws will harm the internet
Doesn't matter unless it's a critical path for your application. You can do things in an especially stupid and obnoxious way, as long as they're not on a common path that will affect your users.
Yeah we do want to include currency exchange rates. On certain location pages, we actually do offer this. For example for India, you can toggle between INR and USD up top: https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/India/
> 199,180 NTP Client connections from 626 unique IP addresses

This seems like an abnormally high connections/IP, even if we assume some of the IPs represent multiple clients. Perhaps it's because of retrying as the author does not seem to have sent NTP replies back?
>Since the beginning of the trials, all trials, there has not been a single death or hospitalization among people vaccinated.

The statement clearly says, since the date when trials began, there have been no deaths among all people who received the shot. This is obviously an untrue statement and misinformation.
So offer to waive half the charges. Something....
Copyright of 2018 is completely irrelevant. Auto reply says to expect delayed response, not complete unavailability, so nothing explicitly out of the ordinary.

I don't understand your mention of a BOT or much of your messages, maybe you could make the post better by writing a bit more on what happened and your take on it?
Oh wow, I should try this version. Thanks!
Safety is good business for airlines. The marketing aspect is good too, since people are not so easily fooled by product renames, once a couple of successive disasters have caught their attention.

Business decision AND safety decision. It can be both.

Now if I find out that they are planning to order the renamed model in the future.... for example if the 737NG is just a tweaked and renamed Max... then this would just be PR and nothing else.
In the context of the article, the implication of that sentence was "there has not been a single death or hospitalization [from covid]". I thought that would also be clear from the context of this thread, but maybe not.

Out of curiosity I googled those names.

Tim Zook: https://www.fox5ny.com/news/vaccine-ruled-out-as-cause-of-de... (the slug tells it all)

Sonia Acevedo: https://in.news.yahoo.com/sonia-acevedo-portuguese-health-wo... (basically, nothing conclusive yet)

We're talking about tens of millions (soon billions) of doses. I'm sure there will be some bad reactions, but there's definitely going to be a lot of simple coincidences too. I'm sure I don't need to repost the XKCD on correlation/causation here.
If you're wondering whether this is a theoretical or practical problem: I actually observed some of this effect in practice first, and only after thinking about it for a while did the larger issue (and the complexity implications) dawn on me.

I had something like a set<string> or a set<set<string>> (or map... I can't remember which) somewhere in my program a few years ago, and I was trying to improve the program's performance. I tried breaking into it several times and found it quite perplexing that the bottleneck appeared to be the set<> container. I mean, I get that cache locality and all has an effect, but it seemed to be having a little too much of an effect. Why did I find this odd? Because other languages (like C#) have tree-based sets and maps too, but I'd never felt they were quite as slow as I was seeing them in C++. So I felt something weird must be going on.

I tried to step through the program for a while and observe what's going on, and at some point, I realized (perhaps I hit the same breakpoint twice? I don't recall) that these functions were being called more often than I intuitively thought would be necessary. Which was obvious in hindsight, as less() needs to be called multiple times on the same objects (4 times at level 2). Now, this hadn't resulted in quadratic behavior, but that was only because my data structures weren't arbitrarily deep—the slowdown was nevertheless a significant constant factor at the core of my program, only linear because the data structure's depth was bounded.

So once I had realized the implications of this, including that constant-factor differences can actually turn into polynomial ones, I eventually decided to post an article about it on arXiv... hence this article. Aside from the complexity issue illustrated in the article, one of my (unexpected) higher-level takeaways was that you can't just take any utility function in a program and blindly put it into a library: even if it's correct, you probably have hidden assumptions about its use cases that won't hold true in general. You really need to think about how it could be used in ways you didn't initially expect, and this may well require a different kind of code review with an entirely different mindset than before. It really drove home the point for me that writing a library is quite a bit different (and in some ways more difficult) than writing an application.

It's possible there is more theory lying underneath this that I haven't touched on—it would be interesting if someone can take this and find more interesting consequences of it. For example, maybe when analyzing algorithms we need to consider something akin to a "recursive time complexity", too? Is there another useful notion of complexity that we can generalize here?

Anyway, hope people enjoy reading it and take something useful away from it. :)
Even though I like using “superior” languages, Python is the right tool for many jobs
Is there a page where I can see post-recertification Boing MAX safety statistics? I know that it will take years to get to comparable confidence levels than other planes, but it would be still good to be able to track it.
Show HN: Photino: Native, Cross-Platform Web UI Desktop Apps
Distributivity of exponentiation over multiplication looks like

(ab)^x = (a^x)(b^x)

You're talking about "being exponentiated", not exponentiation. This one isn't a commutative operation.
Was there ever a huge debate on what intelligence and learning really are? It's basically the storage and retrieval of information by the brain. You either know something (or know to do something) or not, and learning is the process of storing that in your brain. It's simply knowledge, it's there or not, and there is a process to load it in there.

I think the real question is how does it really work... and I think if anyone solves this then in theory they can make the system learn ANYTHING. I don't think Jeff has accomplished this. He might have a theory of how PARTS of the brain store SOME information, but lacks details of the OVERALL process and how parts integrate, and of course the CRUCIAL participation of Consciousness in all this.

Whoever actually solves intelligence and learning, in theory could put that system to the test with anything, and immediately see huge breakthroughs in any application.
just do go to AWS, it's easy
FORTRAN is faster for many tasks, and is probably more popular in high performance computing.

Also tasks that can be moved to the GPU go a lot faster. You can interact with those programs in C, but not natively. But some languages, like Julia, can easily move calculations to/from the GPU. And also can transparently take advantage of parallelism.

Julia is in the process of growing rapidly for high performance computing. I don't know if it has officially passed C there. But if not yet, it will.
30-Day Ultra Fast Keto Challenge Review, Legit or a Scam?
We have yet to provide a generalized leveling filter for our salaries – we have started on creating a normalization though. You can check out the standard leveling guide we put together here: https://levels.fyi/standard

Click on the levels to get a brief overview of the scope and responsibility.
OP here. It's a film company and a lot of those 100 people are artists and contractors. I put a lot of my own money into the company and took out a PPP loan to keep us afloat. So no, we didn't have the money to hire cloud support.
Getting a deduction for that also seems bonkers.

It's your money, you can do what you want with it, so sure, give it away to charity if you want — but WTF does that have to do with taxes? You pay taxes on your income, and then you can give away some of what's left; it's not the IRS that wants you to give it away, so why should their cut be affected by that?

I'm pretty sure the US is alone in this weirdness too, as in so many others.
Another Chrome zero-day exploit – so get that update done
Hi submitter here, I'm not associated with this in anyway, just saw it pop up in my email and I know hn has been on a cross platform kick lately so I thought it was interesting that there was another electron-killer being developed.

This one appears to be based on .Net but instead of bundling chromium uses the native OS webview which many other electron-killers appear to be doing as well.
Pot, meet kettle.

Games are still sex filled escapism. News at 11.
> What if the reversibility of a program was implemented at the function level?

Are you finding NiLang? - an embedded domain specific language in Julia for creating reversible functions. Meanwhile, it has one of the best performance in automatic differentiation (AD).

I find reversible programming particularly useful in the reverse mode AD, where reversing the tape is required in order to use intermediate information to compute gradients. The Bennett's time space trade-off is particularly useful. Traditional AD also have something similar called treeverse to trace back states, however, it involves nasty implicit stack operations and can not utilize reversibility. Reversible computing is way more elegant.
> None of us is smart enough to sanitize correctly

It's just something that isn't and shouldn't be a concern of most engineers. I don't care about these things in terms of solving them.

You entrust the collective wisdom in each area like security for these types of things.

Which is exactly why it's hard to believe a former Facebook, veteran CTO would commit some code like this.

No legitimate electrical engineer would do the equivalent.
> Maybe that hasn't affected you yet, but the available evidence says that it has burnt plenty of people.

What evidence are you referring to here?
I agree with the OP on this one at least speaking personally I'm fairly average and not even that tall (~5'6) and I've never had issues dating.

You are right on point that given a choice, most women would most likely rather date a 6'ft tall Brad Pitt however that choice is not always present for them and different women prioritize different things, you can't just lump them all in a single category..

Further attractiveness is only one of _many_ factors that they look at when making a selection and most of them will gladly compromise if you have other higher qualities.

Stability, financial security, appearances, social network, education , interests,.. all come in to play.

Basically, what I'm saying is that dating & relationships are a lot more complex than they seem.
Fair point; I'm confusing my terminology. Analogy and realization still holds.
Accepted how? Nobody is cheering. Nobody is making value judgements one way (this was good) or another (this was bad). We talk about breaches and password dumps here all the time. It is interesting from the information security perspective. The specifics mechanism of the attack is interesting, the unearthed secrets are interesting. This article centers around a reserved account. It is not that interesting. It seems the CEO reserved an account for our failure of an ex president, but this is not surprising or much of a revelation. The specific mechanism of the attack (a change that disabled input sanitization allowing for sql injection) was posted earlier and was quite interesting. Also the fact that the hashes have been cracked, that's pretty interesting too. Gab should be initiating password resets instead of fighting people on twitter about whether hashes can be cracked.
If I had to guess, I think it might be because of the language and cultural barrier. Definitely think that's more likely than any malice on the part of the BBC.
We all were complaining about the lack of innovation with iMacs, barely upgraded, MacBooks with its superficial gadget “emoji bar” as the sole innovation (and the butterfly keyboard), felt insulted with iMac Pro because it feels like “You want better? Here, pay.” It felt like a decade of maintenance, milking the cow.

All along, half of the headquarters must have been secretly working on the M1...
The MAX is a nice new aircraft that is more comfortable than the ageing NG series. More importantly, it's more fuel-efficient.

I don't think it's an obvious choice at all.
Notes on Remote Work
Just want to point out there is decent evidence that the COVID19 vaccine(s) (particularly the mRNA vaccines) have a much higher risk(s) than standard vaccines.

https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8;jsessionid=...

It's self reported, but given the risk of COVID-19 is extremely low for anyone under 50:

https://www.heritage.org/data-visualizations/public-health/c...

Note: the fatality rate is likely significantly lower, due to many cases going untested. If you're under 50, influenza is a significantly higher fatality rate.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

Just wanted to point out the evidence related to the vaccines, aka flu vaccine is definitely a good idea (especially if older). COVID19 vaccines, would not recommend unless you are in your 70's.
In the US, we're administering the mRNA vaccines exclusively (J&J is just now rolling out) and we're prioritizing nursing homes. We've administered 78 million doses. Why aren't we seeing similar events here? Supposedly, the most trustworthy stat we have is deaths. Deaths in assisted living homes are plummeting.
Or they could, you know, just do the obvious thing and give it a touch screen like their other devices.
Man, I haven't heard of ncurses in ages. I wrote my first C game using ncurses. Cool project, thanks for sharing.
Yeah, if that means lowering the asking price they WILL clear that inventory.
Sociology is absolutely infested with progressive dogma. I imagine anyone who dared to ask, let alone research, whether there were biological origins for gendered behaviors and tastes would be cancelled, if they could even get funding. So there is an implicit pressure not to ask certain questions, and any modern research into the subject is going to be horribly biased.

This idea that all gender differences are purely environmental is at odds with the sexually dimorphic specialization that we observe across time, culture, and species. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We know that hormones influence behavior. And then there are physical differences between men and women that also will inevitably combine on to manifest as innate gendered preferences. This all in addition to the verified differences in male/female brain structure and processing.

This anti-intellectualism is particularly dangerous because, as your comment illustrates, the vast majority of people who are aware of the "research" are completely ignorant of the very real dogmatic pressures pervasive in academia which suppress entire opposing viewpoints. The result is increasingly poor policy in the corporate and political spheres.