skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For example, I’ve always thought that we could “wind down” the existence of lotteries not by banning them altogether (for surely many people would be upset with such a decision) but rather 1. banning private lotteries; and then 2. having a single state-owned lottery commission, that is regulated by a law that forces it to be this type of “for-profit but we donate all profits” corp, with the profits funneled directly into public statistics education

I can't tell whether you're being facetious, but this is almost exactly how it works. (Lotteries are state-run, private gambling is banned almost everywhere, profits go to state schools.)
Microsoft and Salesforce to launch standards for Covid-19 vaccine verification
This is why lots of projects in all languages import dependencies and recompile them themselves.

Little bit more work when upgrading, but much less pain.
They're also doing it with Bluetooth beacons / pings, explaining why every store has an app they want you to install:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...
it's simple to write ONCE you understand and learn the idiomatic code.

some people call not having native string/int/whatever sorting methods is "hard to write".

some people think the verbose `if err != nil` every other line is also "hard to write"

again, there is an upstart cost, which is to integrate yourself into the language community.
I mean that isn't the argument.

Scala's problem is no unified paradigm is proposed or accepted at community level. 'Dumb' languages like Java/Go limited the style choices one programmer could take within the language, but Scala seems to encourage the opposite.
To be fair, even the mRNA manufacturers weren't that optimistic a year ago. Their development speed and efficacy are pleasant surprise.
To "use" unused variables, I pass them to the following function:

// PretendToUse is an empty function to shut up the Go compiler while prototyping
func PretendToUse(args ...interface{}) {}

PretendToUs(var1, var2)
This would be amazing! Please reach out to kevin@kitemaker.co
We are at the pint where it would be wise just to black-hole FB owned IP space on a production/corporate networks.
"Open source libraries are often abandoned, especially in Scala."

Is this claim backed by anything?
> writing controversial things because it gets more traffic and therefore more income.

This is a danger but I'd rather have "controversial" than "if you deviate from the politics of the publication that pays your salary, you get fired".

Personally, I like Sullivan, Greenwald, Yglesias, Taibbi, etc.

I think Sullivan and Yglesias are not drama queens and that Geenwald and Tiabbi are. But I like all 4, I just think the latter two need a responsible editor to rein them in a bit.
Rare earth elements are not used to make lithium batteries. This may seem pedantic but the terminology is important. Fossil fuel front groups try to disparage batteries by linking them to rare earths and all of the (largely fake) baggage that come with them.

So it's good to keep the terminology accurate.
The truth is painful and people will never listen because it threatens their identity and their lifestyle, so it doesn't matter how it's phrased. Only top-down mandates, unlike democratic processes, can solve climate change. I hope China threatens every country with obliteration unless they meet net carbon negative goals and participate in international CCS efforts to reduce GHGs immediately. No other mechanism will work because 99.9% of the planet aren't wise enough to save their own children. Those who prevent or avoid climate change GHG reductions are tantamount to firing guns at everyone else. And what do you do with someone who is trying to kill you and your family?
The norms around dating in liberal America have completely diverged from the ground reality.

Statistically, you are 3x as likely to meet your future spouse in the workplace than a bar/club.[1]

Let's take a look at the stereotypical man in STEM:

* Looks: Below 80 %ile --> Failure at Tinder[2]

* Socially: Below average --> No romantically successful friends groups to set them up

* Early life: Never cool in school / male dominant peer group --> Still single by the time they graduate

This massively raises the stakes of a workplace romantic encounter, because every other avenue has already been shut in their face.

At this point, "it's only harassment if you are undesirable" is a well known anecdote. So, uncharismatic + unattractive men are basically doomed. The alternative is to fully acknowledge the brutally objectifying nature of it all, objectify yourself and go for obnoxious outward displays of desirability. Ie. "look expensive" and target demographics that value your ability to be gainfully employed and accumulate moderate wealth.

The harder alternative is to hit the gym, learn social skills and actually learn how to be charismatic. This is way harder, especially when society actively ostracizes you. Like trying to make a fish climb a tree.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10135

[2] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
Ryan’s toy reviews I think is the prototypical example of finding a niche and exploiting it.

It doesn’t require elaborate demos or expensive equipment or deep domain knowledge.

It’s youthful exuberance, some theatrics and the right personality.
Here in america farmers hire illegals to harvest crops, claiming that no american would do the work. This has always struck me as a really terrible excuse. I'm sorry, you can't simply break the law because you'd have to pay an american $20 / hr to do the work. Sure, it means that your tomatoes are more expensive, but also, now there's a hell of an incentive to apply automation to the problem yes? If you don't like the law, maybe pressure your representatives to reform immigration instead of just hoping everyone turns a blind eye to your exploitation.
We are now at the point where everything matters. Industry is responsible for about 21% of GHG emissions globally (more than transportation!)[1]. Reducing that by using simpler technologies is a good thing to look into.

Do you really need to replace your perfectly functional doorbell with a big pile of electronics? Probably not. Would not driving to work every day make a bigger contribution? Yes. Would not doing either be best? Yes.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Talking about encrypting backups, what's the best way to do it your remote backup storage only offers rsync?
Is it just my feeling fueled by the news or is there currently an increased / above normal levels volcano activity around the globe?
JsDelivr welcomes BootstrapCDN and continues to power Bootstrap
There are some good use cases for connected devices. Some are just gimmicks, but there's no point in being smug and discounting all of them.
The fact that they were ordered to put it back, and that the decision was upheld after review. I'm sure you can find more details yourself on the council website, or if you ask them. That is, if you're actually interested in the topic and not just arguing about it on ideological grounds from somewhere far away from the UK.
In Firefox, "network.http.referer.spoofSource = true" takes care of that last bit. The only thing it breaks for me is codepen.io, which fortunately I don't use.
> This would mean that there is probably a possibility for people to "overspend" money they don't have...

They are a payments processor, not an issuer. That means they are on the merchant's side of the transaction, not the purchaser's. Their role in authorization is simply routing. The issuer is responsible for performing the authorization. The only balance they need to track is how much money they owe the merchant.
gizmos in total probably have some noticeable impact and unlike heating or food are mostly useless/not needed/harmful.
Why do you think that? A standard range Tesla Model 3 starts at 33,190 and is still an absolutely fantastic vehicle. The exact same Tesla that I bought in 2018 (Long range all wheel drive) is almost $10,000 less today than when I purchased it. As the economies of scale improve, the prices go down. As more and more manufacturers move to BEV vehicles, the manufacturing / parts will become more commodity and hence cheaper. Tesla really pushed the needle, but the VW group going entirely electric is going to massively force the issue. Their all electric Porsche, the Taycan, was the best selling Porsche of last year and this year so far. Also now that there are multiple manufacturers making serious electric vehicles, that encourages them to compete amongst each other on price.

All of these leads to the overwhelmingly obvious conclusion that EVs are going to get massively cheaper in the next 2-5 years. One of the biggest selling points is also the lower fuel prices and limited scheduled maintenance. An EV is simply cheaper to operate than most ICE vehicles, and that is not really going to change. Also note that you can get really good EVs used for a massively lower price.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with ICE vehicles, but the writing is on the wall.
The struggle of teaching AI to tell stories
Why not email and ask him? Just make sure that you are polite. He replies to pretty much everyone.
"Tax minimization" or worse, I suppose.
At this point, nearly all agricultural land was converted a century ago. The trend now is more towards decreasing total agricultural acreage if anything?

No one in America has slash and burned a forest to feed cattle for a very long time.
if you're having sex with a teenager for money, she probably has some pretty major life issues going on

Once in a year I end up in a local strip club (non-US; never had sex or something there, but it’s not uncommon for guests to “continue elsewhere”). Spoke with many of girls, and they are usually not poor or orphaned, it’s just the way of life. “Don’t wanna to sit in office for a mediocre pay”. They are yesterday’s teenagers who sometimes earn as much as local software guys or lawyers in their 30s.

Which as a 60-year-old - you should know better

As such an experienced person you’d know how different people are and how many world niches exist beyond a “normal life”.
> Pike, I believe [...], claimed something to the effect that new grads with limited exposure to real-world codebases were able to understand existing projects written in Go more quickly than in other languages at Google. I have seen that message distilled down into "Go is simple to read."

Yeah, it was Pike, and I have also seen it distilled (in bad faith) into "Go is a primitive language for inexperienced programmers, so it's beneath me to touch it". And yes, it is easier to write and read compared to other languages (old and new), but it does have some concepts that you should follow to write "idiomatic" Go code, e.g. don't throw panics as liberally as you would throw exceptions in other languages, use composition and interfaces where you would use inheritance in other languages etc. But I'm afraid people who have been indoctrinated with disregarding Go as "simple", but want to try it nevertheless (or are forced to use it), won't take the time to get into these details, and will see their preconceived opinions confirmed...
Not the same problem. Twitter has a lot more power than, say, GameFAQs had back in the day.
OWASP Top Application Security Risks
You accept that these are benefits, so why don't you want to use Docker?
It's a dynamic not entirely confined to quantum physics in the 1930s, and there's a range of graciousness involved. It's a side effect of the paradigm shifts described by Kuhn: What happens to the old guard? Some will adapt to the new paradigm, some will enjoy tenure and let their students carry the new torch, and some will join the church in denouncing these heretics who deny the primacy of the earth. (And will happily say as much in their grant reviews!)

Also keep in mind that the stakes are higher when it's the academic's core area of contribution which is under attack. Einstein's contributions to large scale physics were secure. If instead good we're playing dice at the scale of solar systems, threatening to obviate his primary contributions and consign his name to the dustbin of history, the reaction may have been a bit different.
> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time. Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo which no longer exist in large numbers. As a result I would be very surprised to learn that bovine methane production is completely out of historical context.

I think historical context is useful information, but just because it was fine at some point in the past does not mean it is fine in the current context. There are new sources of greenhouse gases and, as the dominant species, we have to make decisions about which ones are most important to us and make trade offs. Reducing the emissions from farmed biomass means we have to make less of a tradeoff.
> I guess they are caching account balances and limits in some in-memory DB. This is a common design choice for payment processing systems.

They are a payments processor, not an issuer. That means they are on the merchant's side of the transaction, not the purchaser's. Their role in authorization is simply routing. The issuer is responsible for performing the authorization. The only balance they need to track is how much money they owe the merchant.
Ask HN: Resources on developing political simulation games?
I am looking for resources on the algorithms and logic behind developing political simulation games. Note that I am not interested in the graphics or audio aspects of such games. What I am more interested is how to define the different "agents" in the game, their state and interactions as well as how to simulate their behaviour over time.

The only material I have come across till now is - https://sites.google.com/site/howtodosimulationgames/home

Are there any recommendations from the HN community?
When you try to dismiss nuclear, what alternative "clean energy" can you "turn on" when experiencing increased demand in energy? Can you turn on the sun or the wind?
Fair. I didn't know if there was any practice overlap.

For me, lisp is bigger in the meta programming. Really pulls the covers back on how things relate. Not just in how to put the code together, but how to look at the data.

Scala was my first big intro to category theory. Helped me see relations in some higher ideas. Many, though, are hard to see a priori.
This is probably to keep CO2 below 500/600 ppm, not a safety device.
I'm not following that on the assumption is he the guy that shows HN users the goatse image?

If so then please mark your link up as NSFW/NSFL.
I mean I am not going to fight kicking and screaming as language evolves. I am also for descriptive names like allowlist/denylist. I just don't see the argument for changing that phrase it in the same light as I see the argument against master/slave.
To be honest I'm also seeing this with Typescript for example. I have seen some much energy wasted just for the pleasure of using RambdaJS[1] with TS. It's probably even worse than with Scala, because at least with Scala the language is on your side to do FP.

[1] https://ramdajs.com/
>At least with a digital speedometer almost every failure mode is going to be obvious and not some subtle accuracy degradation.

What makes you think that? Bit flips aren't always obvious.
Yeah, I’ve only ever shared with people who know my name anyway, but you’re right, that’s no good.

Don’t iCloud share with the internet, got it! Thanks.
I'm one person shouldn't that be singular?
IDK, but I won't spend 30K in a car that only allows me to city travel. If I'm forced to live without an ICE I just won't have a car, and that's it.

That's fine for many people, not so good for the car industry and their direct and indirect jobs.

Buying a 6K second-hand car is not only much more ecological than buying a brand new electric car, but I have more range, I can get it cheaply fixed if I go to something like a Renault Clio, a Peugeot 206, Fiat Panda and the like.

Since I live in a flat and I don't have garage, I can park it in my street without worrying about recharging (it's just going to get me a few minutes to get to the gas station, a two minutes to get gas).

With the salaries in my area, spending 30K in a car it's just too much money. It's more than my current yearly salary. And there's plenty of people with lower income than mine.

Also, turns out electric cars come with a lot of bloat that breaks, so the most immediate upside of such car goes away.

As far as I can see, too much has to change for mass adoption. With the current trend they'll remind cars for rich countries and rich people for a lot longer.
They are all similar enough that a programmer fluent in one can start writing code in the style they are familiar with in another ... with the aforementioned set of languages, you can write one of them in another and it doesn't even look wrong.

1. Only superficially, because they all share the same basic flow-control constructs and (except for Python) the same C-inspired syntax. They all have totally different standard libraries, package ecosystems, etc.

2. I don't see what makes Go exempt, other than "wow great they didn't add generics bless the Go core team."
How to quit smoking without gaining weight
One suggestion in that case - many apps have comparisons on their landing page. Clubhouse has "vs Trello" and "vs Jira" on theirs. I found your discussion here on HN to be much more informative than your website. You might consider adding more information for the prospective customer wondering why to give you their money and data rather than going with the competition.
The writers aren't completely "sovereign" as long as they are using Stripe (and Visa and Mastercard) to process payments. It is basically inevitable that some entity in the payment system will eventually interfere with Substack even if Substack themselves hold the line.
They are looking into Sputnik, but because it is Russia we need to test it for our selves.

The same would be the case with Sinovac, with the added proviso that I would want to know if it had been developed using human tests on their concentration camp inmates.
I replaced mine with a computer monitor. It's a bit more expensive, but that's the price of not being spied on.
> The long term damage to those who catch it seems high in many cases including the young.

> While your generation may struggle with the isolation by preparing the next generation those issues will disappear reaping larger economic benefits.

It feels inconsistent that you're dismissing the long term effects of one potential problem (isolation) while using the potential harm of another (undemonstrated, theoretical long term damage to young people from COVID infection) to argue your point.
That's probably because if you run Chrome, you're already Google's executable on your system. I mean they can track you using gazillion of other, more precise meanings and this is something they shut it to keep the pie for themselves. I do not use Chrome anymore, switched to Firefox a year and a half ago - best decision ever.
Please don't think that the software in itself has any value (unless it is an extreme outlier).

Most software/saas value comes from grueling marketing and sales work after it is "ready".

Ask yourself. Can you drive the sales process yourself, potentially earning zero for a year? Do you want your day to be a on-phone sales person?

I think it comes down to the old saying "a bird in the hand..".

Unless you LIKE doing endless phone followups and negotiations with customers, my advice would to strongly consider the offer, especially if you like your potential new employer.

90ish grand is not unicorn land, but definitely not pocket money either - and from two years of sidejob I am impressed (as a company owner for more than a decade and a half).

As you write it, it seems like 4% of the company not for percent of the sales. That might be much more (or less) value.

Being employed in a good company with a noticable equity share could do wonders for your work-life balance (but is not guaranteed).

As a last point. Being rich does not make you happy. Having slightly more than enough* and more freedom will likely make you much more happy.

* = Enough is hard to quantify but if you never think about money in your daily life, but you cannot buy a new iphone (or something of similar value) without thinking slightly is my rule-of-thumb for "enough".

EDIT: missing "and" and typos
I moved away from VSCode for Go simply because code completion was taking forever or sometimes failed to work at all. I believe that may hav e been related to gopls? Have others experienced this as well? Is that fixed now?
Why not start today?

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/#toc

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/
Up until 5 years ago, my employer's primary system (government, property tax assessment, billing, and collection) was from a company that had gone belly-up in the early 90's. We fortunately had the source, but it ran on a VERY legacy database called Unidata because it had originally be developed on the Pick operating system. Unidata was/is a Multivalue Database with a built in BASIC programming language. By the time 2014 rolled around there was one programmer in the organization that understood the system, and he was responsible for all code changes. I half-joked with management that we needed an insurance policy on his life/ability to work, because if we lost him, it would put us in a very difficult position, and that software accounted for 90% of our revenue (as well as a lot of the revenue that went to all the local towns and school districts for their operations.) That employee was also nearing retirement (he is retired now.) Fortunately we were able to successfully migrate off of that application, though we keep a minimal license pool to the old system so people can validate pre-migration data against post migration data.
Daily random images for web development
> 1. The problem isn't country wide

Sorry, I though I was on the Romania subthread.
I wouldn't blame the language, I'd blame the people who chose Scala.

The impression I always had was that Scala was a research project into how various programming language features could live together and interact, hence their everything and the kitchen sink approach. From an academic point of view I think Scala was a huge success.

That people chose to use Scala in production speaks more to how badly people hate Java and want an alternative, not to Scala's failings.
Sure, in the end I asked our head of compliance to join the meeting. I made it very clear to everyone what was at stake, and that I’ve done my duty in raising awareness. If they would like to proceed I hold 0 responsibility. Usually when you do it like that no one wants to put their neck on the line. Our head of compliance take this stuff really seriously as he has to report to central bank, so him and our CEO ended up agreeing to not use GTM.

You really need to present well and be careful about arguments like “millions of websites use GTM”. I did days of research and presented that while yes using GTM on Wordpress sites that hold no sensitive data might be fine however we are a financial services and we collect customer private data. So getting everyone on the same page and presenting alternative ways of solving the problem was critical.
Remember the softwood lumber dispute (billions of dollars and years of legal wrangling) or the flak Chretien caught from the US for keeping Canada out of Iraq? I think you're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses.
What if someone doesn't own a smartphone??
> I won't spend 30K in a car that only allows me to city travel.

Right? It's like a $30K license to be a four-wheeled member of the working class.
And the Tesla Model S LR has a range of 402 miles, but it is increasing every year. Lucid Motors is coming out with a car that has a 500 mile range. The "omg range is a problem" crowd is in for a rude awakening when you can go further on a single charge than most vehicles can on a single tank of gas.