skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The country runs on cheap debt. Everything from houses, education, cars all the way to TVs and dresses is financed with long-term payments and low single digit interest rates.

Can you point to a few examples of TVs or dresses being financed in the low single digits? I'm genuinely curious -- as an outsider, my impression of US credit was always one of a system that charged predatory interest. That impression is mostly based on seeing credit cards advertised at 15-25% APR, and hearing stories of student loans with interest rates that approached the double digits (for debt that's not dis-chargeable in bankruptcy, no less).

My point of reference are Switzerland and Germany, which have legal caps on interest rates around 10-13%. Credit agreements with higher interest rates are nullified, voiding all interest claims. As a result, the growing rate for unsecured debt is somewhere in the 8-10% region. (And, of course, significantly lower for secured debt, like mortgages or car leases.)
Those statements are synonymous in SW. Try to explain this concept to a shepperd :)
I think Musk will always be a controversial figure.

"Musk has a massive habit of either stretching the truth, deceiving, outright lying -- whatever you want to call it -- that Jobs didn't."

How do we know it's not his honest belief? That said, I don't think anyone takes (or should take) Musk's promises keeping a straight face when it comes to delivery timelines.

I doubt there's anyone who genuinely thinks he is not a major forward pushing force in cleantech and space industry.

I believe, in the long run, especially cleantech is likely to be a very important component battling climate change and local pollution. This could very well be about humanity's survival. I'm not saying Musk is somehow single-handedly responsible for this or even that his concrete contribution has been much yet, but what I am saying is that he's showing the industry a way for all this not only to be doable but to also be profitable. And that's the only way I see cleantech going forward — profit.

In even longer run we really need to get into space and learn how to live there. Both for not having all of the eggs in the same basket, but also to develop true steady state recycling.

Now whether or not Musk delivers on these remains to be seen. At least so far he has been one of the greatest hopes. Not the only one, mind you, but he really has pushed space industry and EV industry forward.

That said, I fully agree immoral behavior should not be tolerated.

How do we define how much achievement discount we should apply based on other behavior? Should the negative always totally eclipse the positive?
That's really great content compared to the low quality blog posts of strangers that we are used to seeing here. The guy has an impressive track of records, and give no bullshit non-survivor bias insights.
If your website could also qualify as geeky, join my webring at.. drumroll geekring dot net :)
That's interesting! In my view, nothing important hinges on magical free will. How could it, when people can't even articulate what it is?

In my view, everything we associate with free will: Responsibility, punishment, "do better next time" et cetera, are not only recovered when you reach for a serious answer to what free will is. It's actually better recovered than with magical free will!

For example, everyone agrees that children are not as morally responsible as adults. Even though children supposedly are as magically free as adults. How can that be? That _only_ makes sense in the compatibilist view.

Suppose someone invents a completely deterministically programmed robot that has general intelligence and understands the world, and people well. Would you sign a contract with it? Would you punish it if it broke it? Would you hold it responsible? Would you be outraged if it decided to lie to you? I definitely would.
This is the first time I see this and so at least to me, an actual counter to their points would have been more of a convincing argument, compared to accusations of shilling which might as well be FUD.
FaceChance – I updated my website, a modular social network
On your FOUC preventer: please never ever do this. If your styles.css link tag is placed sanely (largely meaning “in the head”), the document won’t be drawn until it’s loaded or failed to load. If it loads successfully, the <style> tag served no purpose. If it fails to load, the <style> tag is now blocking access to the content.

On the rest: I mostly agree.

<title> versus og:title is commonly stupid, especially because consumers will tend to fall back to the <title> tag anyway (though in theory they should differ, with <title> normally including the site name, but og:title not supposed to); og:url and rel=canonical are even more stupid, because consumers will fall back to using the actual URL, so their only purpose is cases where the content is actually found at multiple URLs. (“But og:title and og:url are mandatory for OpenGraph validity!” you say? Please, you didn’t even put the prefix="og: https://ogp.me/ns#" attribute on the root element. No one does. No one cares. And I don’t think anyone cares for at least og:title and og:url either, though <meta property=og:description> versus <meta name=description> is uglier, and you can’t even merge the two or Twitter ignores the thing.)

Why can’t we assume UTF-8 unless told otherwise? Historical reasons, mostly. The web is an old place. Rejoice that everything new is done purely in UTF-8, and be comforted that even some of the older things are slowly shifted to a UTF-8 default over time, as the impacts of doing so become smaller.

The Apple icons are a more complicated historical mess. Be glad it’s down to only one stupid extra tag now, rather than a dozen or so, for each of their different device sizes. The time has come when they could fairly reasonably merge it back into icon, since they’ve given up on all of their fancy appearance of their icons.
I've been wondering about this recently too. I've been really interested in Algorand lately - a very impressive project with lots for an HN person to sink their teeth into. Similar to Polkadot in various ways. But it has surprisingly few mentions on Hacker News.

At first I wondered if I'd missed some guideline somewhere that cryptocurrency isn't meant to be discussed here, or that cryptocurrency stories are weighted less favourably, but I can't find any evidence of that.

I remember in the earlier days of Bitcoin, Hacker News was awash with discussion of it and the entire ecosystem. And I really enjoyed reading it all!
But you see how he/they should be clearer about it?

To me, FSD is ... FSD ... what's FSD if it isn't level 5?

Sorry, to Elon fans (and I appreciate Tesla), but it's nonsense and people are fools to put up with it, let alone pay $10k or whatever it is for the "opportunity" to have it later.
I wanted to include it on the title, but was limited by the max number of characters.
I grew up in rural Canada, and perhaps the U.S. is a much more undeveloped country than I thought, but almost nothing you say applies to where I grew up.
What would you have done differently? Did you try to fit in? Did it make a difference in the long run?

My personal take is don't try to fit in but, equally, don't try to stand out. I've never liked sports, for example, and I've never pretended to. But I've also never gone out of my way to advertise my dislike for sports or made fun of anyone who does.
NimConf 2021 registrations are now open
1) How is something that kills you slowly more toxic than something that kills you quickly?

2) Don’t doctors provide severe COVID patients with pure oxygen? If it’s toxic, why would they do that?

3) How does pure oxygen kill you? What’s the mechanism?
One Commit. One Change (2016)
Contributing to Node.js Core
I personally find it highly likely that the decision mechanism emerges from physical computation in the brain.

I think it's more likely that the decision mechanism emerges from a race condition between multiple competing signals. We choose the one that arrives first, even if it takes time to be consciously aware of the choice.
all healthcare and financial service providers have no choice here.

especially for business continuity, etc audits
Functional Programming and Event Sourcing with Jérémie Chassaing
If you plan for such model beforehand you already might be lowering overall efficiency. You know that you can't get the whole thing you want as one piece, but you plan "one third now, another third in a couple of months and the last third in more couple of months". Overall you might end up with twice the effort, since you had to account for that split, but in the context of kernel it still makes sense because of all the complexity and many people working on it simultaneously. And of course it also depends on "splitability" of the thing you're working on.
I have a child that has been admitted to hospital over 20 times with severe illness (bad pneumonia, horrible saturation) with common cold (congenital lung issue).

The common cold is a 1-2 month ordeal with an ambulance ride in the middle. If someone made a pill that just made common colds less severe in the lungs, it would be absolutely revolutionary. Our healthcare system could pay $20k/year for my child to have that and still make money. Heck, I'd pay that out of pocket if they didn't.
MicroK8s: Memory Optimisation for the Lightweight Kubernetes
This can work, but it's a fundamentally quite different async model and you give up a lot of the benefits because you have stackful coroutines, which are a lot more heavyweight than the state machines which rust's async functions compile down to. There's nothing stopping you implementing this concept in rust today (a la gevent in python), it's just a seperate thing (and you still need to be careful about accidentlly calling something which does block).
The Strictness Principle – Restrict the scope. Increase the scope as needed
Simple example. Quick test on Thursday 2 weeks ago before school. Whole class negative, cool! A call on Friday from school: we have 2 positive cases, please don’t come next week. Why all the quick tests!? They bring nothing.

Do you know how many vaccine was thrown away? https://www.sueddeutsche.de/gesundheit/impfstoff-coronavirus...

Let’s don’t start with Bavarian ffp2 masks while the rest of Germany can live without them.
>If what's currently happening to Germany (uninterrupted boom since > 10 years) is decline, then let there be more of it.

If by boom you mean the boom of big business profits that don't trickle down to the workers, boom of wealth inequality, asset prices, property prices and rents then yes, but that's nothing to be proud of.

Average wages of workers in Germany have not kept up with this boom but cost of living has risen.
Jesus, no one is asking you to S.elon's.C, but your assertion was that Musk was not responsible for the explosion of electric cars (heh), whereas he really was.

----

> Do you worship John Harvey Kellogg when eating the corn flakes

I don't live in a breakfast-cereal eating culture, so I have no clue about which cereal is better, but there is no denying that Kellogg invented the cornflakes market, just like Musk did with the eCar.

-Are there better cereals/eCars? Duh.

-Were both Kellogg and Musk absolute weirdos? Yes.

-Should their products be the default choice in their sector? No, competition spurs growth.

-Does that change the fact that they created their markets? NO. They did, and they deserve acknowledgment for that.

----

By all means, buy a competitor product, i don't give a damn, we don't even have regular electricity flow in my country, EV of any kind are a far dream.

But being anti-Musk does not a personality make, and frankly it's getting cringy at this point.

It just pollutes the comment stream and makes everyone's experience worse.
Separation of Concerns in Tailwind CSS
Hated those tweets. He did seem to realize his mistake, but not to be man enough to actually admit it.
reminded the old story of "fitbit" data showing US bases in Mid East https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

Another case - in Donbass war targeting using cell phone signal has been widespread in 2014, both sides were doing it as telecom infrastructure was tightly interconnected (during early stages of the war Russian forces would for example be tracked from their bases in Russia and would be hit once they clearly in Ukraine), and according to that https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324669488_The_Use_o... it seems that it has been going well beyond the early period, and among other it also mentions drones being targeted toward cell phone signal. (Btw, Ukraine has a booming industry of amateur/early startups building drones for military use - from smallish for scouting, situation awareness and fire targeting to heavier ones used for strikes (though not anywhere close to Reaper, it is more of platoon level use mostly for dropping semi-DYI munitions) - i think there are chances that at some point it will surface as civil drone powerhouse)
‘LegalAI’ Automates Consumer Case Assessment
Tesla’s Bitcoin speculation helped boost profits by more than $100M in Q1
Not really.

If we unpack your calculation to slightly more typical human behaviour: Watching 1 stream × 10 hours/day × 365 days non-stop, one person would need 10 years to watch the whole catalog.

Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Tens of thousands of patients have been tested in double-digit, peer-reviewed RCT's, showing high efficacy:

https://c19ivermectin.com/
> These differences are - obviously, I might add - very important. And they have nothing to do with magical free will.

So why continue to use an unrelated term that has so much baggage? Why not just tackle these issues individually, on their own terms, in language that isn't laundering outmoded intuitions about some magic grounds for responsibility?
Ah thanks. I didn't notice I was missing a *.
Can confirm (as a Slovenian), the term is used through the Balkans. For example, it is present in the old Serbian song:

Četrnaeste, četrnaeste, Švaba udario, (2x) Osamnaeste, osamnaeste, Srbin pobedio. (2x)

(In the 14th year, the Schwab struck. In the 18th year, the Serb won.)

https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ko_to_ka%C5%BEe,_Srbija_je_mal...

It comes from the fact that Germany didn't unify until very late, so the people were called by the small city-states that they came from. In American revolutionary war, some British mercenaries were called Hessians....
> It's unrealistic to expect that Tesla would continue to dominate the EV market forever. It is realistic to expect that Tesla will become a significant player in car sales globally.

How could Tesla become a significant player in the overall market without being much more significant in the EV market, which is a small subset of the former?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYuMN206Jzo

Interview with Tarek Omar (the diver rescuer in the article) and location shot. Much better than reading the article.
Good question. At the beginning of the pandemic, the government response was excellent (with Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry, promoting fact-based policies).

[Quick background: Germany has a political system not entirely unlike the US with a federal level and "Länder" = state level. Health (along with police, education, etc.) is delegated to the Länder.]

Towards the end of 2020, two things happened:

People developed "Coronamüdigkeit" (being sick of the restrictions), and in the run-up to the federal election in Sept 2021 (with Merkel stepping down), several prime ministers of the Länder tried to gain a higher profile (with an eye on the Bundeskanzler election later) by opening up. So, squabbling and inconsistent policy ensued, with a massive third wave happening right now.

Throw in corruption (several CDU politicians had to step down because of shady mask deals), the delayed vaccination drive, etc., and "shitshow" seems appropriate.
Who mentioned lying? You pick out a few examples that you personally don't like - fair enough you're entitled to do that.

But Basecamp are saying that they will never have a view on anything in the environment in which they operate no matter how it affects their employees - as long as their profits are not affected - that is just bizarre and for many disappointing.
> German (and EU) administration then fails to roll it out

Do you mean they have the vaccine but can't give it to people? I thought we did not secure enough of them.

> Also weekly meetings changing (symbolic) measures,

Yeah, that is not good.

You call that "a real shit show"?

Edit: Oh nevermind. You where not the person I asked. Sorry.
don't forget the big infrastructure project like BER which entertained me a lot.

A story I like particularly is the Phantom of Heilbronn (related to another big scandal: the NSU) which I think explain what is happening: Germans have a great confidence in them and other germans. They are very suspicious when something comes from outside Germany / Austria (like France, Italy, or UK), but if it is german it must be good and seriously done!

Truth is, Germany also has a share of slackers and fraudsters doing half assed stuff, but they admit their failures and sins only when it has become overwhelming, leading to crazy scandals.
I still remember my colleagues who were proud of VW when the dieselgate came out. They were completely shocked. VW did this! They were expecting this from the sleazy french and italian, but not from their own beloved german company.
Guidelines ask you to refute content rather than accuse of shilling. If you have evidence of shilling you should email the mods instead. Guidelines also ask you to not post the same comment twice.

Disclosure: no dog in the fight and never heard of this drug before.
Not even sure what this is about... and I use both...
https://au1lib.org/book/4986767/705a3f
'It' (most of 17th, 18th and 19th and some early 20th century mathematics, chemistry and physics) is clearly a lot more abstract than the failed alchemies.

The point is that 'just keep trying' would not have been a good strategy.
I believe the study was done in Norway, but I am struggling to remember the details. The point was that no one had any problem with cycling in the winter if there were good bike paths where snow was plowed with the same priority as roads.
I sometimes take modafinil before starting a day of work.

So far there hasn't been a single instance where I did that and didn't get sidetracked thinking up a new software project I could start using technologies I barely understand to solve a problem I just learned about.

The upside is you're a lot more focused, so you can get a lot done. The downside is it's really easy to nerd-snipe yourself, and the increased focus means it's hard to stop thinking about whatever problem caught your attention.
> Responsibility, punishment, "do better next time" et cetera, are not only recovered when you reach for a serious answer to what free will is. It's actually better recovered than with magical free will!

And we've found the point of disagreement. I simply think they're not. I believe they have to be justified independently, in terms of the degree to which they tend our lives and our society in a desired direction.
I agree here. I miss having loud good faith arguments with conservative coworkers (and ones more liberal than me) at lunch time and strongly disagreeing on some issues, and then just getting back to work talking about how much we hated Oracle databases. Mind you these were coworkers from all backgrounds.

I just miss high quality political debate. What we have how is just name calling and tribalism.
You can do this in the office too, assuming it has an office gym
That’s quite different: # is <h1>, ## is <h2>. What you were responding to used <title> and <h1>. Markdown is for units of content smaller than a page. It doesn’t provide any means of specifying document metadata or similar.
> I believe most people don't care about the 0-100 speed.

You say that, but almost every single person I've given a ride to in my Model Y has come away from the acceleration portion of the trip amazed and wanting more. Older men, young kids, soccer moms, teenage girls, all get that breathy expression when you effortlessly pass someone on the expressway. And this is a Model Y, one of the slowest Tesla's on the market. A Model S P100D would have them cursing under their breath and pulling out their wallet; I know it did for me.
In general HN is critical of the whole crypto currency boom.

And often descriptions of blockchain projects is so drowned in abstract words that it is very hard to understand exactly what it does.

What is polkadot? And exactly what use cases does it support (not already supported by bitcoin or ethereum)?
Resistance to the COVID approach you admire extends beyond the USA to also many in UK and Europe. The problem is that even if a hard lockdown works and COVID is completely eradicated in one’s local area, that means that the borders have to stay closed lest new cases be imported. But many people have families or lovers across borders, they might even commute or do common shopping cross-border, and the lower and middle classes cannot afford the expensive hotel quarantine required. Tourism-based economies need travelers bringing all that money in.

(One might think that borders would only have to stay closed until local vaccination has been rolled out. However, several of the scientific advisors recommending the "zero COVID" approach à la Oz and NZ, also want borders closed – except for strict hotel quarantine – for some years into the future to prevent variants from arising, or even in perpetuity to prevent the next pandemic from ever starting.)
How to check your shell scripts for portability
Wait, is there an ethical reason you think the project should be completed? Like, it's really going to help starving orphans or something?

Because otherwise you should quit yesterday, like the others say. You don't owe them nuthin'.
First wave went well (probably in good part to dumb luck, but also because stuff just got done and less arguing about it), this made people somewhat complacent, second and third wave has been a shitshow of not wanting to be unpopular by locking things down and thus ignoring predictions, do last-minute changes when it's too late, apologizing for getting it wrong just to immediately repeat the same pattern, keeping things in an unstable and unsustainable situation for the past few months with no long-term planning (which also means the options are worse, because options that would have required long-term preparing aren't available and the available ones are badly thought out). Picking of random "target points" without apparent consideration what those actually mean outside of being some number that was compromised on and thus is now the benchmark. Way too much political manouvering with politicians pushing for "a common approach", agreeing with everyone on one, loudly announcing it, going back to their state and doing something entirely different. This dragged-out state with constant (but in many ways meaningless for many peoples experience) changes just drags on everyone while at the same time doing a bad job at keeping covid at bay.

EDIT: Random examples: lockdown laws that fail trivial legal challenges because they were made up last minute. Almost religious clinging to the belief that kids in school aren't a relevant factor (to the point of states suppressing evidence to the contrary) which lead to too little investment into teaching infrastructure and options, making each switch between kids in schools and not unnecessary last minute and painful to implement. Unnecessarily messy signup/notification processes for vaccinations (who would have thought one might need a plan to vaccinate people at some point...). Late adjustment of financial help schemes. Nonsensical and inefficient schemes to e.g. distribute masks.
This is not a general Europe thing. I live in Denmark and I only use cash to try and teach my kids about money. I can't remember the last time I paid cash for anything. I'm tempted to say it has been a decade or so.
Show HN: Bubble apps won’t look like Bubble apps, anymore