skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Subsidising private companies operating these routes, however, is a recipe for disaster. These companies expect a profit and would cut any corner to pocket the subsidies instead of doing their job. This is how it (mostly) works in the U.K., and it is terrible and expensive.

While I might defend the EU's push for rail liberalisation in general, I'm certainly not going to defend the historic GB model (Northern Ireland was never privatised, and the model of franchises carrying the revenue risk is gone from GB[1], killed slightly sooner than it would've been due to the pandemic).

That said, note a significant part of the reason why GB ends up with higher fares is much higher cross-subsidy and much lower reliance on the State budget than elsewhere in Western Europe. We've year-on-year had above inflation fare rises (and note that the rises have always been limited by Government; had there been a desire to set a lower (or no!) fare rise Government could have done so) combined with decreases in subsidy. This is highly unlikely to change even with the demise of franchises as we currently know them, as the Government desire to reduce subsidy is likely to continue.

So the GB model did achieve its stated goal: moving revenue risk to the private sector and decreasing subsidy.

The failings of prior franchises—and whether or not they're terrible—is a long and varied topic. Ultimately, they by and large delivered the service they were contracted to. There's ways in which this is an issue with the specification of the tender, and ways in which it's inherently a downside. Many of the complaints have some of their origins in Government intervention, it must be said: rolling stock acquisition was very tightly controlled from the 2000s onwards, inconsistent and often changing electrification plans, and infrastructure in many places running near capacity.

That's not to say the franchisees did nothing wrong, but often they had their hands tied in many, many ways: and often much tighter tied than British Rail ever did.

I'll argue to the end that the biggest mistake was selling off all of British Rail; elsewhere in the EU having the incumbent survive has almost certainly provided a more beneficial competitive environment.

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/rail-franchising-reaches-...
Wikidata, SPARQL, and RDF in general. And I guess semi-relatedly things like Prolog? I recently decided to fiddle with Wikidata, and it is fascinating to be able to query for any part of a statement, not just the value!

In SPARQL you write statements in the form

<thing> <relation> <thing>

But the cool part is that any of those three parts can be extracted, so you can ask things like "what are the cities in <country>", or "what country harbors the city <city>", but most importantly, "how does <city> relate to <country>".

For example, if you wanted to find out all the historical monuments in state capitals of a country (using my home country as an example, also pseudocode for your time's sake):

fetch ?monumentName, ?cityName given
?monument "is called" ?monumentName.
?monument "is located within" ?city.
?city "is capital of" ?state.
?city "is called" ?cityName.
?city "is located within" "Brazil".
Can you link some source of nuance powering siri, i think SRI was where it was built
Inflation measurements should be tied to location because housing costs vary dramatically and are a huge proportion of expenditure for most people.
Sure. I think the key to my interpretation is "even when".

> the pop-up will appear *even when* Microsoft Edge is the default browser

"Even when" says to me that this scenario is in addition to some other scenario, which must inevitably be when Edge isn't the default browser.
The extra cost is worrying. You're talking at 4 to 6 orders of magnitude increase in resource usage for the same computation.

Unless we figure out some awesome hardware acceleration for it, it's not practical but for a few niche applications.

It also has the problem that you can use computation results to derive the data, if you have enough control over the computation (e.g. a reporting application that allows aggregate reports).
Now I remember why I never converted to Windows 10.

I still have a Windows 7 machine, but it hasn't been powered up in the last month. Wine 6 on Linux is doing most of what I need in running old Windows software.
This is not his field of study. He's defending a friend of his who is credibly accused of raping a minor. It's not philosophy, it's personal interest and serves no value to the community or anyone other than RMS and Minsky.
Add to that that tech companies concentrate wealth line never before. Airbnb takes a cut of transactions not only around the US but across the world. Not everyone works in the Bay Area, but how many of the founders, early employees, and VCs do? The ones who really make massive wealth? Not 100%, but most. Same with Stripe, the same with Facebook, Google, etc. we’re pulling tremendous wealth into a small area, with technology that can scale tremendously large businesses with fewer people.

This isn’t to say that, for example, wealth from finance companies doesn’t centralize in New York and London. That’s bad too. It’s not to say that good things don’t come from these companies (though Facebook seems to be a net negative for humanity.)

But this level of wealth concentration and inequality is detrimental to the fabric of a society. We’re not better off, we’re not more innovative, we’re not healthier or more cohesive or happier when this happens.
> Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit?

I have a (completely speculative) theory that the "support the artist to keep creating the work they're giving away for free" model has a ceiling when artists become visibly a lot richer than their fans.

After all, what kind of sucker would charitably donate to a multimillionaire's private jet running costs?
If he can't stop himself from being a divisive figure, he needs to go.
No, the key difference is that in Australia you would have 2 infected individuals and then you trace their whereabouts and involve the media, whereas in the UK there’s tens of thousands of infected individuals at any given time, most of which are undetected.
What size of company are you working with - my last couple of startups were almost all hires that started with recommended past experiences from the earlier employees. Companies do have to follow equal opportunity laws though - so some standard process has to apply.
I think the parent point stands, though. Using the 100 richest individuals as a proxy for measuring and commenting on wealth disparity isn't very helpful. These people have always been outliers. A meaningful discussion would look more broadly at the top 10%, 1%, and 0.1% groups and investigate why they have been accruing wealth at a much higher rate than the bottom 75%/50%/25%
I’ve heard similar things with Lithium isotopes being differentiated by the brain?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-bra...
At this point they pretty much do. You can download an ISO of Windows 10 Pro, install it and never pay or register it and it will work fine indefinitely with no real restrictions. Last time I tried it, it just prevented setting the background image.
Spanish Voice over Company
> knowing that our health care systems will be overwhelmed and a decent chunk of the population (10%?) would die.

That's a ridiculous claim. The hospitalization rate for Covid19 isn't even close to 10%, let alone the mortality rate.
>If you know the police routinely kills Black men, any reasonable person would be afraid of them.

If you know Black men routinely kill police officers, any reasonable person would be afraid of them.
$150k is not even enough to buy a small home near your workplace in a lot of cities. Janitors had better living conditions 50 years ago than $150k earners do today
None of the people directly involved (myself included) are core maintainers beyond the weakest definition of the term, and all of us (including Sawyer) were referencing the stated opinions of actual core maintainers.
I know a woman who is the CEO of her Etsy knitting company that her daughter helps her with. So I guess you're right, anyone can call themselves a CEO.
Windows doesn't present you with any actions or choices inside the command prompt. It just immediately opens the Microsoft Store to the Python 3.9 page.
Because he's the founder of this website?
The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens
The instruction set doesn't make a significant difference technically, the main things about them are monopolies (patents) tied to ISAs, and sw compatibility.
Hey! Author here :D

I'll try to describe this in a bit more detail:
Zero-to-one is a type of product which is created from scratch. At many companies, there are existing products and you add features or improve them to grow them. There are other products where you start something completely new. Think Dropbox launching 'Paper' which is a tool to make documents.

Deeply Understanding People means spending time to interview users or run user research, derive problem statements from those discussions, and then turn those into hypotheses. This is different from some PM's who like to focus on metrics and look for patterns in data.

So I'm saying:
My strengths are product strategy (of the zero-to-one variety) and understanding people (vs metrics).

As for the style of writing, I aim to write simply and clearly. I'm obviously not hitting the bar here :) Do you have suggestions for equally good alternatives to this sentence? I'd be happy to update it.
I'm not saying your intent was evil. I'm saying the only empathy you displayed in your comment was for corporations. If you think it's evil to act like that, changing your behavior is within your power.

I'm just going to leave the rest of your China panic aside. It's deeply reminiscent of the 1980s panic about Japan's impending takeover of America. That you wind up your screed with a favorable reference to a fantasy novel elevating a "genocidal prick" [1] convinces me you're too far wrapped up in your fictions. I'd rather spend my time on the people who read the one about orcs. [2]

[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/01/what-i-think-about-at...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/366635-there-are-two-novels...
> Some of us find the alternatives to be really really good compared to Windows.

Yeah, and some of us don't. A lot of us, actually. I personally get kinda sick of the arrogance of people who think they're above everyone else because they chose a different operating system.
People normally do that when they do not have to do that.

Dog rex = em.find(Dog.class,"rex"); // 1
rex.setAge(2); // 2
// other query // 3

At 3 the update is flushed on the underlying db.
This is pure JPA. Calling merge is forcing an useless query before the update. Also, merge returns the managed entity.
I'm pretty sure that'll be the Soyuz capsule that Tim Peake flew to & from ISS on (Soyuz TMA-19M), hence the UK interest. I saw it on temporary display in Edinburgh before it went down to London for permanent display at the Science Museum.
Nvidia’s New CPU to ‘Grace’ World’s Most Powerful AI-Capable Supercomputer
but it's not like slavery because you can quit at any time. Outside of blockchain contracts should be considered 'Slavery' because an 18 year old can take out a loan that ruins his whole life because he is forced to pay back the loans by some outside entity. Investing in an individual via the blockchain makes it so you are investing because you believe in the individual, but at any time the individual can simply stop working, stop earning and enjoy a simple life without any repercussions. This makes the investment more risky for sure, but stops it from being slavery because a.) the individuals don't have to be worried about some gun forcing them to do something b.) i can sell my tokens at any time.
A Critique of the Cap'n Proto Schema Language (2019)
>Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth.

Huh? Gini coefficient can be based on wealth just as well as on income. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq.... This essay doesn't specify which one PG is talking about.
SkinDeep, Remove Tattoos Using Deep Learning
Likewise, even down to being in the Boston area. I did OK at a couple of the eleven startups I worked at, but still made even more over just a couple of years at a FAANG. Many of my former colleagues on both sides have had similar trajectories. The vast majority of the "merely rich" in tech got that way by working at companies that had already broken away from the pack.

Speaking of breaking away from the pack, that brings us to the ultra-rich. AFAICT what pg has shown is not that building wealth alone is a path to riches (nor was that his intent AFAICT). The way to become ultra rich is to be one of the "lottery winners" among a cohort of relatively minor wealth creators. Playing the lottery is just as essential as building wealth, just as with literal lottery winners. The main difference is that this lottery isn't entirely random. Even among those who make it into the first round (founders), some players have certain innate advantages over others in the second. There's little demographic distance between Gates, Ellison, Bezos, and Musk - and Graham, for that matter. It's no accident. If you want to become seriously rich, it helps if you can afford to ride out risks - or even actual losses - that would force others out of the race.
There's also the unstated implication that "anyone can do it if they work hard for it" - basically saying it used to be you had to be born into a wealthy family to be one of the richest people in the world and now you can be the richest person in the world based on merit alone (thus rich people are inherently meritorious).
That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
> The only part proved iirc were the ages), and that immediately because the person was 17 instead of 18, that word is used to describe the situation without second thought.

The age of consent there at the time was 16. It was later raised to 18 by the Child Protection Act of 2002.

This will probably come as a surprise to many people, but 16 is also the current age of consent in a majority of US states. It is 16 in 33 states and in DC.

It is 17 in six states, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, and Texas.

It is 18 in only 11 states, Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
This is a showstopper for me right now and is keeping me on Netlify:

Pages cannot serve files located in a .well-known
folder. (https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/known-issue...)

Otherwise, a fantastic product and a great addition to the ecosystem. The traditional hosting industry (think cpanel etc) hates this btw, so good job!
is Dragon really used in large scale enterprise, unlike siri,alexa for home automation, but i am hearing dragon let alone nuance famous for its AI product for the first time
Yup. My parents live up near San Francisco. Their water comes out of the tap totally clear, tastes "fresh".

I've lived in multiple San Jose homes now, including SJSU dorms, and in every one of those, the water came out of the tap cloudy and if you let any dishes/silverware air dry after washing, they have a significant amount of white precipitate on them that becomes impossible to clean off without some kind of mild acid, like vinegar. At my parents house you can get water spots on things but they're typically quite light and easy to clean off.

In addition to that, the flavor just tastes very wrong in San Jose. I lived in SJ for 9 years and never got used to it, either.

There are some sites that have PPM ratings for different cities in California and it seems like San Jose consistently rates as one of the highest.

edit: I was mistaken, please disregard.
Just like RMS is highly respected at the FSF :)
I would question the assumption that this is “not suitable for production use” means “everything is broken and we're way behind” rather than, say, “we are being extremely conservative because our customers will expect support as soon as we say it's production ready and we need to test every upgrade scenario for our large number of existing customers”. The AWS-managed ElasticSearch seems to be pretty popular and I would expect them to be as conservative about new offerings as they are with, say, RDS.
> Of the major issues around software freedom and digital autonomy today, approximately zero of them are TiVoization

According to what? It seems to me tivoization is exactly one of the biggest issues facing users these days, especially in an IoT world, so how you can draw that conclusion (and the others) baffles the mind.

I think if you really want to understand GPLv3, you should listen to Eben Moglen more than RMS, because Eben has the ability to articulate in a way that RMS doesn't, and has given some very good speeches about not just GPLv3, but on the FOSS ecosystem as a whole.

Why is it that almost always I find the attacks against GPLv3 to be so lacking in substance? (for example, using an openly user hostile company like Apple as a reason for why it was bad just seems... like blatant pandering to me, as opposed to a real argument)
Badens "autopsy" lacked tissue samples and toxicology. So, it's based off incomplete data. What data was the celebrity autopsy based off of if they didn't have access to tissue or tox screens? Sounds like a high dollar guess to me.

Ignoring toxicology is an abuse of medicine.
That's not really how substitutions work. Substitutions work by replacing what people used to buy with what people buy now.

Now your criticism remains valid, to a slightly lesser extent, because if everyone gets poorer and trades wool for acrylic socks, they get replaced in the basket. Not to artificially depress inflation, but to reflect what everyone (now poorer) actually buys.

The issue is, obviously you need substitutions. The finance example is going to be horses, so let's go with that. Nobody buys or rents horses anymore. They are exclusively the domain of recreation. So having them in the index would be lunacy.

One measure people use is the "big mac inflation index", a PPP index. That one would tell you that inflation between 2010 to 2020 is about 76%, or indeed 5.8% per year average.

But that's how the FED chairman Powell (and all those before) will dress it up these days.
Not FSF's site that I know of, but there's mentions of these "consensual pedo" stuff on his blog. As he's a visible spokesperson, that means his blog content is part of his overall role, and not something that can be treated in isolation.

I'd also push back on the post further up: It's not a particularly interesting philosophical question, and I don't think pure inquiry is RMS's goal here given his tendency to aggressively hit on women that are completely uninterested in him in contexts where such behavior is inappropriate.
I paid for it, and I didn't have to. I chose it because it works better.
Paul Graham is a charlatan. He has no great insights into the way the world works that aren't fatally colored by his own self-sense of success. In large part, the purpose of articles of this ilk is little more than to seek self-justification for the status quo, so you can sleep better at night. If that's what you seek, then this is the charlatan for you.
Looking at that link, in particular I really like the 3 tier "chance of out-earning parents" chart because it shows that while average upward mobility may have gone down, there's a sharp decrease in upper classes moving up while the decrease for lower classes is much less. This means that the rich in fact get richer less so than lower class people move up, and by a huge margin, than in the mid 20th century.

Also I like the stagnant wage growth numbers because it demonstrates that the corporations are no longer the gatekeepers to economic opportunity. If you're more likely to make money starting a business than getting a job somewhere and working there 30 years, this is good for everyone because their economic prospects aren't dictated by McDonalds and General Motors. It means a more diversified economy, more opportunity beyond the beaten path, and more creativity driving economic growth.

I'd also like to see the criteria for "upper", " middle" and "lower" used in the chart about income distribution. Judging by the first graph of "is it all bad news?" I'd say it's a hard dollar amount delimitation, a very bad metric, because while that would appear to show a bad trend, all it shows is that more people have higher amounts of money. The only way to get a clear picture is to weight income/wealth with purchasing power as the delimiter between classes.

Another note on this first graph, it clearly shows that less people are in the lower class and lower middle class, and more people are in the middle, upper middle and wealthy class with each graph since 1967, which means people have gotten richer and as a whole life is getting better for people economically. Ideally what you'd want to see is the bars to the right of each sample get bigger and the bars to the left get smaller with each sample, and you almost see exactly that. I'd like to see the same graphs in 20 years and that will tell if upward mobility has actually decreased. I'd also like to see this graph weighted with purchasing power.

From those graphs, upward mobility looks perfectly fine, I'm getting the sense it peaked about 20-30 years ago, but has not had a sharp decline and is definitely still higher than it was 50 years ago.
> I had dozen of such projects in previous decade on Windows and several on Linux and never had any problem with slow startup really.

OK. So then startup time is not slow? Well, then it's of course a non issue - but then I also don't see why a process pool would be required.

> Pattern of usage of bash scripts where hundreds of shell script run every minute is IMO not something you should brag about in systems architecture.

Yet, you just did :) Anyway, it was hardly intended as bragging, rather than just stating facts. Lots of stuff are shell scripts. Lots of user facing commands are wrapped in shell scripts. Of the ~3k commands in my $PATH, around 500 are shell scripts. You may not think this is a good state of affairs, but it's still a fact. (And it's quite unclear to me what's so bad about it - an excellent use for scripts is providing environment for other programs.)
I guess would be relevant if it was a proper vim implementation in rust, otherwise it wouldn't add anything a part from rust and immaturity.
I don't mind the start of the article. I regret wasting time reading the actual Q&A - what a bunch of trash. Filled with errors and grandstanding and mixed in with mostly incoherent ranting.

I'd strongly recommend skipping this one.
What are your expenses? 200K is very comfortable early retirement, even working in SF or NY.
Not to mention, it's my understanding that tech employees are generally instructed to avoid reading patents, because if the company ever gets found in court to have infringed on the patents, then them having read the patents will be used to show wilful infringement and therefore to award triple damages.

I suppose they could read expired patents, though.
> First it was the Epstein connection, which proved false.

This didn't prove false. The article we're commenting on is literally RMS defending Minsky who was credibly accused of raping a minor provided by Epstein. RMS is still connecting himself to Epstein.