skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it hard to believe the part where you write "the union rewarded the competent". I've never seen an education union stick up for someone based on competence, it's always connections.

Sometimes I've seen them push back against bad management, but it is frightfully rare. Bullying, discrimination, favouritism, giving young/non-clique staff the worst jobs: all good.

I don't think public sector unions are very good stewards, partly because everyone is in the union. They push against govt objectives (control wages) and politics (push whatever rhetoric of the day is) and seek to gain public support (teaching/learning is essential for society etc). Unless you're a cog in the union machine, they won't be present except to prevent you being fired or make you work extra hours.

This became very evident during the pandemic: unions stuck with (1) better pay, (2) keep leave. While (1) is essential, the real problem was (3) death. But adjusting the school year, virtual teaching, classroom ventilation, support for students: nothing, except opposition. They wanted nothing to change. It was bonkers.
> What can we actually do. How do we start fixing this problem?

Write draft legislation that would fix the problem. Propose this to your country's legislature (Congress in the US, Parliament, etc).

Push for the new law.

Form or join an organization that writes and pushes for legislation that will fix the patent law mess.

Etc.
And here is probably the most salient argument of all.

It comes down to occam's razor.

Sure, is it /possible/ that some scientist in a lab decided to use an entirely unknown and undescribed natural virus as the subject of their experiments? And use a completely out of nowhere cleavage site from a distant coronavirus that nobody talks about or really studies to do it? And then that virus escaped?

Sure.

But in order for that to be true, we need to make some new assumptions. We need to assume such a person exists, that they had that exact idea, and that it worked and they didn't tell anyone about it, or they all agreed to cover it up, and then some of them got sick (and again, covered it up) and it got out into the public, and voila, pandemic.

Or, it could have been a completely natural event that we know already happens all the time, in the contexts we know it to occur, using mechanisms that have already been described.

On a pure numbers game, on a scale of pure virus-host interactions, which do you think happens more often? People out in the provinces use bat guano as eye drops, eat bat in soups, use bat guano as fertilizer, harvest it without gloves, tour caves without any protection, etc. All of these are well-described. They are all known to occur on the scale of many thousands if not tens of thousands of events per day throughout rural China. Each one of these is a roll of the dice.

OR, how many times do we think a human contaminates themselves in a virology lab in china, working on coronaviruses? or with bats? Sure it probably happens some, but I have a hard time believing it happens more than 100 times per day in China. There just aren't that many bat colonies or virology labs.

So Occam's razor would tell us that the most likely of these two scenarios is the natural one. Is that conclusive proof? no, and I never said it was. I don't think at this point conclusive proof is possible. We're just making estimations. I've always just been making estimations.

A lab release is much less likely than a natural one, even if both are /technically/ possible.

A lot of things are /technically/ possible. On the scale of things, I think the lab leak is likely /enough/ that China should open up itself to international investigators, to show with all available evidence it probably didn't happen. But I don't think it's likely enough that we should all be condemning china, or fueling racist anti-chinese sentiment, or all the other consequences of these news stories. The consequences are right in front of you, anti-asian hate crimes are on the rise in the US, and 30+% of the US thinks the lab release is the most likely scenario.

I'm not saying we stop talking about the lab release, just that we need to put it in the proper context of probability. It is /possible/ but it really is not very /probable/.
Is there some point at which we start to think that maybe Big Tech is getting kinda creepy?
Woe betide he who disobeyeth the Party
Often the pattern is they get stolen by random dudes, who then pawn it off to the local bike fence gang, who then ship it far far away and either sell the parts or the bikes somewhere else. If you dont recover your bike in a day, there is a good chance it's in a city far far away.

Look at this crazy story to see how international it can get:
https://cyclingindustry.news/vanmoofs-pledge-to-recover-stol...
I remember going to my parents before I set them up with ublock, I thought they had some kind of malware before I realized "Oh this is just what the internet looks like, now"
Hi that's truly quite rude. I link to several, I have a zillion in my post. Are you arguing in good faith?
Healthcare is likely less expensive at that income level. An ACA silver plan in Alabama for a single person making $30,000/year is expected to cost $85/month with subsidies: https://www.kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/

That’s 3.4% of income, lower than the typical health insurance tax in European counties.
The people that take a pay day loan aren't necessarily maximizing for cost effectiveness.

Consider someone who got a flat tire and it needs to be replaced before the person can go to work. The cost of replacing a tire can be $100-$200. The cost of waiting could cost their job.

They could apply for a credit card with 18% interest and a bunch of fees - and the card MIGHT be delivered the next day. OR they can go to a pay day lender and borrow $100 NOW and get to their job this afternoon.

The tire replacement "should" have cost $100 - now it costs $121, and they keep their job.

You might imagine a similar situation for: your fridge broke and you NEED to keep your food fresh, your heater/AC broke, someone broke your front door trying to rob you.

Life SUCKS if you are poor.

Actual story: I met someone who was returning home on a bus, but was kicked off after having a seizure. She and her bf couldn't afford a new bus ticket to get home (to LA). They were stuck in Houston for at least a week, it is possible they missed work and were fired and missed rent and were evicted. If that was you, how much would you be willing to pay for $500 now? I didn't know them long enough to know if they were telling the truth, but I wish I had given them money.
Key word being UFO, if it were clear, they would just be FO's.
There's some set up required and you have to essentially handle how to route the request, handle static files, compression, etc, but it's not _too_ bad.

I've been meaning to do a write up on it and probably should, but feel free to check it out in action at the site I'm developing https://sqwok.im

There's a fastboot meeting next week that should be good as well https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ember-fastboot-ssr-beyond-ticke...
Hey, I hope you're doing okay in Ukraine!

Usually it's business - not discrimination. Content is licensed by country, so the content owners (at least think) they can get more value elsewhere.

In a way we should welcome this. We don't really want spotify to determine what content to distribute globally.

Global platforms like Steam are aggressively discounted for Ukraine, so unfortunately Ukrainian audience members * Ukrainian market value is probably just not high enough.
(Leaving aside that Tesla also actively prevents you from running your own software on its platform...)

The whole focus on hardware is just bizarre.

When you buy a piece of SW that has free features but requires a license key to unlock advanced features, everything is fine, but the moment HW is involved all of that flies out of the window.

Extra features cost money to implement. Companies want to be paid for it.

A company like Nvidia could decide to make 2 pieces of silicon, one with professional features and once without. Or they could disable it.

Obviously, you’d prefer the first option, even if it absolutely makes no sense to do so. It’d be a waste of engineering resources that could have been spent on future products.

Deciding to disable a feature on a piece of silicon is no different than changing a #define or adding “if (option)” to disable an advanced feature.

By doing so, I have the option to not pay for an advanced feature that I don’t need.

I don’t want the self-driving option in a Tesla and I’m very happy to have that option.
Ohh! Promotion hacking.

There was a broad HN discussion about this here on HN late last year [1].

And the top comment [2] is worth repeating here

Here's some of my learnings about getting promoted for those that really want to play that game:

- Only the perception of your work matters
- Attend the social events and get in good with the bosses
- The countability of your major achievements is important. Make the list long, too long to hold in the mind
- At the same time the gravitas of your best achievement is also important since that will be the soundbite that is shared about you behind your back
- Get allies who can proselytize about you behind your back
- Be the best. The difference between one and two is bigger than that between two and three, as far as promotions go
- Take credit for your work (use pronouns I and Me when talking about your work, not We) and do not allow others to take credit for your work
- If it's a teamwork situation with other people on your level, don't do most of the work, because the credit will end up being split 50/50 in the eyes of the bosses even if you did most of it
- Make a very good first impression
- Shape the narrative around the role you played in the success of the mission/team/company
- Get the bosses to make a soft public commitment regarding your competence
- Even if you have a really good boss, all of the above is still important, because they are fallible humans and aren't omniscient
- Actually do good work, it'll make the above easier

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24618707

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24622111
China gets serious about antitrust, fines Alibaba $2.75B
Including drug discovery? I'm very skeptical of that working out better than the current system (for drug discovery).
emotion note: JNRowe heavily suspires

I was going to say that cal on Linux correctly displays the weird year, then I ran "cal 9 1752" and thought I had misremembered.

Five minutes in to the rabbit hole says Debian uses bsdmainutils for cal, where on other distros you may receive util-linux's version¹. So, it is entirely dependent on an obscure choice of a maintainer whether you get the "missing" days in your output or not.

Made a thousand times stranger if, like me, you have ncal aliased to cal so that it uses your locale's week format. ncal does display the weird September for me, unless called with the -b flag for classic output. The problem is you want the -b flag if you are naïvely trying to fix the Monday should be the start of the week issue with cal.

This is my favourite quirky behaviour of at least this week, if not longer. Tonnes of sensible decisions that all interact in utterly weird ways to make very little sense without The Ultimate Shovel to dig around with.

--

Interestingly, ncal supports showing you where the changeover happened in various locations by providing the -p flag which shows some more data to expand on peapicker's comment.

You can even play around with the calendars in various locales with ncal by specifying the -s flag, for example "ncal -s GR 3 1924" to see peapicker's Greece example.

¹ https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/blob/master/misc-util... - Gory handling details
> Your compromised app can’t do much without a Xen hypervisor zero-day.

Of which there have been plenty.
I have to wonder if there's some aspect about the night vision optics that results in points of light looking like triangles.
Is the government of Florida incapable of running a webserver?
You brought it up and keep replying, so you've clearly got an axe to grind. Not a single person is denying he was privileged. Your implication is that a privileged life is a life of "little to no worries", which is frequently asserted by people who seek to attack the wealthy simply for being wealthy, but it is a deep misconception in most cases, and particularly so for a sovereign leader. I understand you feel it's important to express contempt for a rich person at the time of their passing, but that doesn't excuse falsehoods.
Top billed actors may inflate that, unless you consider that they then spend the money on gardeners and stuff and consider them part of the crew.
And SARS escaped from a lab twice. In China. The government at the time admitted it. So I’m not 100% that’s the example I’d go with haha.

It’s important to split this in two: one thesis is that it was invented or created or synthesized at a lab in China. This I’m far less bullish on.

The other separate thesis is regardless of origin, man made or wild, it accidentally or intentionally found its way through the doors of a lab in China and into society. It’s this one we’re talking about. At least I am.
If they really depend on this for takeoff weight, I have to wonder why they don't just ask passengers for their weight then add 20% or something.
https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/xt-cfv3-dma-transfer-mode/ has some benchmarks for Compact Flash cards on an XT bus. On a V20+/186+, "rep insb" saves a lot of instruction fetch traffic.

(The page also talks about breaking up DMA transfers, so a Soundblaster on the same bus can do its own DMA often enough)
EDIT: just figured out a better way to blastn it. CGG occurs 6,285,392 times in betacoronaviruses, across 84,987 described species.

CGGCGG occurs 81,218 times across same.
...but no Dom & Roland.
My different take on hacking the under desk exercise bike has been different by hanging it on the wall so that you could be excersizing lying on your back.
Don't know if it's my end, but your links aren't working. Did a quick search, is it this site you're referencing?

https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/federal_subsidies_t...
No. They is obviously Amazon, and I am expressing shock they were so successful in scamming their workers into voting against their own interests.
I'm not using the fastboot-app-server, which currently uses express and requires you to have that set up for your app, but it's the most common path. Using lambda@edge is slightly different in that I'm relying on the cdn to render the page once and then cache it for subsequent requests w/o requiring a node server.

Yep Sqwok is rendered with fastboot (mostly used for the post page seo/rich preview) Feel free to ping me @guac or ask a question and I'll respond, and also there is a fastboot meeting next week that I'll be at and it should be interesting! The fastboot team has been working on some really cool stuff.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ember-fastboot-ssr-beyond-ticke...
It is a cool story, but I had no idea that remote control arms were called waldoes when I read it haha.
thanks! it is interesting. gtx 1060 3gb is ok, but rtx 3070 isn't. and it is time to upgrade from my trusty 970
> If the meeting is on a calendar ahead of time it's not really an interruption.

Knowing about it doesn’t make it interrupt flow any less, unless you just avoid the kind of work that would require flow around it, which still imposes the same kind of productivity impact on intellectual “making” workers. [0]

[0] related: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
What toxic relationships?

This is about fixing issues where spending two hours doing boring work (manually bisecting) can be better than spending two hours thinking about the problem without necessarily reaching a solution.

Nothing about underpaid overwork, just to do The Boring Thing.

I'm also trying hard, and failing, to understand why you're talking about socialism.
I'd think you would also appreciate the idea that leaked from a lab does NOT strictly indicate manipulation -- only that manipulation COULD happen.

None of the bats they claim it came from were sold at the market. Meanwhile, they're tracking down every bat strain they can find and collecting them at the Wuhan lab.

Carelessness in handling would be the root cause whether the virus was manipulated or not. You provide zero evidence on the most important point.

Now, to the more conspiratorial point. UFO pyramid-shaped small drones hounded a US destroyer group for many hours. Any drone flyer would tell you that drones that shape are heavy and even stripped down ones don't fly for dozens of hours.

By the numbers, that requires a huge leap in material science and energy storage. This was not too far from a base that does classified research, so I doubt the cause was more than human.

The military really does keep a generation or two of technology to itself in every area it can. If they did make a breakthrough in quickly modifying viruses, would they publish it in a paper? No more so than the NSA would immediately publish their discovery of differential cryptanalysis. It became public in the late 80s. IBM kept it secret since the early 70s and the NSA knew about it long before that. That’s probably because the NSA employs the lion’s share of mathematicians in those areas (which also makes recruiting more top scientists easier).

Other countries do the same. If Chinese scientists discovered a faster and more natural looking method of manipulation, what incentive would they have to publish a paper? Their only incentive would be to hide it as much as possible and use it as a material advantage in the upcoming and growing conflict with the US.

I believe it was probably naturally discovered and leaked through carelessness, but assuming they couldn’t possibly have had a breakthrough when other countries obviously have in many other areas seems overly confident.
Ah, that was edited in after I wrote my comment, sadly.
So what do they do for men? Is there something other than "Mr" which is routinely used to identify male children?
Noah Smith had a good blog post about how the world order is likely to shift if Bitcoin reaches $500,000 USD. It would mean that many (most?) of the world's wealthiest people will have made their money from Bitcoin, which selects for a different type of person from the typical tech entrepreneur. It might breed a certain resurgence of libertarianism in mainstream politics, simply because of the money involved, and there could be financial support for ideas like these from idealists with disposable income
One of the major complaints thrown at X11 in the 90s and early 00s was the inconsistent mismatch of UI conventions and behaviours. GNOME and KDE were still at interesting-novelty status, you had OpenLook and Motif apps on the distribution CD with distinctive styles, and every so often you'd load a libXaw program where all the scrollbars were weird and you suddenly used the right mouse button in strange and exotic ways.

How did they manage to get through the project without addressing this point, and make it even worse, by offloading stuff like "screenshots" that was taken as a given to the nonstandardized compositor layer?

I'd also have wanted to see much more of a "one true widget library"-- so Wayland!GTK or Wayland!Qt are just thin wrappers on top, which would ensure you get any native theming or customizability/accessibility tweaks cross all your software for free.
Apple apparently has 308 million dollars of incentives to fix the system, so maybe that’s a good start.
> If someone is poor and has a choice between buying a stereo system and saving the money in a high-interest bank account, I doubt you'd have any problem saying that it's in their self interest to do one of those options and not the other

Curious, what would you say is better to do? I could see either one of those choices as being equally rational and justifiable. I honestly lean a little more towards the stereo. Your answer depends on your outlook in life and your interests and wants/needs in the moment. It's not so simple as objective 'data on the situation'. Furthermore, claiming that you can deduce quickly what is rational and right for someone else is a little condescending.
You're absolutely right, however let's note that no rational person would conclude that Apple actually infringed on any invention of this patent troll. This case should have gone nowhere, and the plaintiffs should have been sent home with a bill for the defense's legal counsel.

I mentioned in another comment about the Eastern District of Texas which became effectively a giant grift operation (though a recent SC case should put a damper on it). Plaintiffs sought it because they knew the jury pool would also be people who benefit from this extraordinarily corrupt, banana republic extortion racket. It was effectively like a forgettable little drive-through town that setup speed traps and decided to fund the municipality on the backs of outsiders.

There are some people who would counter this. For instance one paper notes that of jury trials, 73% of East Texas cases choose for the plaintiff, versus 68% elsewhere, "proving" that it isn't that much of a difference. The problem with this reasoning, however, is that East Texas was specifically where the cases with no merit went. It was overloaded with patent trolls and NPEs.

Actual, credible cases were seldom tried in East Texas.

Every judgment of that district should be vacated.
they still had linux kernel bugs, I remember having to port a freebsd fix to linux to get it to work in a cloud/farm application where collisions could make ALL the cards on every devices go out to lunch for 10 minutes
This is an anti-malware/anti-phishing scan. Send a link via email, Slack, or any other “enterprise” system and you will see the same.
Hey,

Let me know what proof you would want to show I am who I say I am.

Thanks
What are the several others?
The word serious was meant to be should. My phone keyboard picked the wrong word, and I waited too long to edit.
Is there any way to leave the bots on port 80? As most browsers send users to https, you could use port 80 access as a signal these users are likely bots and should be treated as such? I just mention this because I know bot detection is itself an annoying problem... maybe you’ve found one possible way to at least learn who the bots are?
Well, kinda. It’s still “you can use any OS as long as it’s Linux”. If you like the BSDs, forget it.
Hmm, bummer. Curious as to why it's not that desirable, and is there something else you would rather use?
`poetry` and `pipenv` are both so much slower than `pip-compile` for me (there are many open issues for both complaining about lock speed), and manage to update locked dependencies half the time despite me asking them not to with e.g. `poetry lock --no-update`.
Hi I've actually made a dozen or so specific arguments across this post.

You can always respond to those if you want.

Sorry if I come off as condescending but when you have this argument several dozen or hundred times, it gets really really repetitive.

And it's difficult to avoid sounding like a dick. It's not my intent, I promise.
One more time: 1929 was comparable to previous crises. 2008 came very close to being huge, but did far less damage than a real crash. 1971 was nothing like the pre-Fed crashes, and neither was anything else on your list.

You're being downvoted because you're wrong, and because you're being gratuitously abrasive. And you want to use that as evidence that you're right? As Jane Austen said, "You tell yourself that, if it gives you comfort."
Surprisingly a lot of folks on my past and current teams haven't figured this out yet. They still think the manager who promises them a promotion next year is going to be around by then.