skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some ancaps prefer the term 'voluntaryist' to describe their position. Though I think it is fair to call Anarcho-capitalism a form of anarchism because it posits no state and no rulers, though laws would still exist.
> the claim that in future these are all automatically going to die off is a post-dated cheque

It's not, though. We've literally seen this development happen over and over again and it's a logical consequence of the system as is the increasing monopolization via acquisitions and buyouts.

We're not in purely laissez-faire capitalist system, certainly not globally, but trying to paint present day Berlin as an example of a social market economy in the "Rhine capitalism"[0] spirit shows a complete unfamiliarity with the practical evolution of the German economic system and welfare state during the later part of the 20th century and the early 2000s, which saw a massive shift towards free market capitalism, especially under (ironically) the SPD-led Schröder government.

> Villages in the UK stockbrocker belt have little litter, despite being composed of wealthy incomers.

This isn't a counter-example to what I said, this is an example of what I said. Income isn't the determining factor, ownership (and legacy) is. Additionally, even if they don't expect to live there forever because they're comfortable relocating to follow the money, they're surrounded by potential business partners. This again isn't about their level of income but it creates a social mechanism that incentivizes displaying "good behavior".

> Another example is cartels.

An example for something avoided under capitalism? Certainly not. This is like saying Western countries don't have corruption because money is used to exert influence by signing entirely legal backroom deals (campaign financing in the US, promises of zero-effort board positions and highly paid "speaker" engagements in Germany) instead of literally handing wads of cash to police officers.

And this isn't even to cede that cartels can't happen under capitalism, let alone under laissez-faire capitalism: they're not prohibited by the market but by regulations (i.e. laws), and even then there are always loopholes to enable corporations to engage in functionally identical behavior as long as they follow a sufficient number of layers of indirection (or are comfortable to use a pile of NDAs to hide actual illegal behavior). A recent US example widely discussed on HN was the "no poaching" agreements between large industry players to put a cap on the salaries of highly desired employees.

[0]: The term is "Rhine capitalism" not "Rhineland capitalism", btw, and it's a gross oversimplification to use it to refer to the post-WW2 German model, the economy of France in the 1990s and the economy of Germany after the Agenda 2010 reforms as part of the EU-wide Lisbon agenda -- which was one of contributing factors to the EU debt crisis, drastically raised the poverty rate in Germany, drastically cut the income tax rate and wreaked havoc in the welfare system. It was a stretch when Albert popularized the term in the 1990s (after the German reunification) and it's frankly ridiculous to still use it today.
You can't necessarily infer "is unhappy here" from "has an offer from another firm".

You absolutely can infer that if the person has come to you saying they're considering taking the offer. People don't consider offers from other companies unless there's a reason why they might want to leave where they are now.

Some people think an offer is leverage they can use to improve their current role, but really it's a signal that the person is already half out of the door and the company should say goodbye and start recruiting a replacement.
> Then why are they called air fresheners

Because “fresh" has long been considered a descriptor of particular noticeable scents, not the absence of scent (also true, though not as relevant here, of particular tastes.)
Not all odour sources are easily controllable (cooking in open plan apartments, pets, flat mates, toilets, etc.). Increasing ventilation also is not always practical, like when it's -5c outside, or you live on a main road where the air aggravates your allergies.

Also many people just like the scents and aren't trying to cover up anything.
I'm not seeing much evidence of Dijkstra being unbelievably arrogant in those letters.

This mostly seems to be two stuck-up academics caught up in sniping (very cordially) at each other over petty academic crap.

EDIT: Okay, I've read EWD692 and I get why Backus was pissed now. This still feels a lot milder than people are suggesting.
> [...] Ray tracing is already starting to be a thing in consumer products, so we're bound to get photorealism at interactive framerates in the next decade or so. No neural networks needed.

Define 'photorealism'. You limit yourself to the rendering aspect and ignore the content/asset problem and thereby economic factors.

This technique is probably one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than generating geometry and shaders that have the required level of detail in any traditional way.

Either by an artist or programmatic/procedural (Someone has to write that code too/set up that node graph in Houdini or the like). Yes, you can also just 3D scan stuff (see Quixel, etc.) but that has limits too.

More specifically for achieving photorealism by 'traditional means': consider scales.

An asset, however produced in finite time, will only hold up to some range of scales. The technique in the paper allows to get as close or far away as you want and everything will still look real. No level of detail work needed, just a few more training data.

Traditionally, if you use textures, you will reach the limit of the texture resolution. Even if you use procedural techniques – not everything is a fractal. A close up of a brick looks very different from a wall of bricks etc. Again, who will write that code?

My guess is rather that we will see a hybrid of more photorealism by traditional means and more 'icing on the cake' by methods like this.
My statements have nothing to do with cloudflare and its well-deserved success. It has everything to do with the shoddy "analysis" being posted.
" The reforms will be introduced through a series of bills, including an animal sentience bill, and will cover farm animals and pets in the UK ".

So only _some_ animals are sentient beings.
If a cat is a pet she is sentient, if it's astray it is not.
Except putting "curtailing liberties" into scare quotes, what are you saying, exactly?

This is exactly the kind of tone and comment I was speaking against. I am _pro_ vaccinations, I am _pro_ making them soft-mandatory, I was even pro other restrictions back before vaccines. All I said, in a rather moderate tone, is that I disagree with being happy about the downsides. Somehow in the kind of comments I'm speaking against, yours included, I don't see happiness that we're getting vaccinated per se. I don't see "yey, poeple won't be dying any more". I see a lot of "chastise these people".

I also see quite a lot of scare quotes and misrepresentation. I didn't say sewage was a restriction - I gave it as positive example. I didn't say (WHO would even say that?) that getting a vaccine is giving up liberties. That's stupid, really, it doesn't even make sense. I will say that not being able to do stuff without being vaccinated is a restriction. A worthy one, yes, and one I totally agree with, but by god, how can you even try to spin ... I'm not even sure what you're trying to spin, because the more I read your comment the more I realize it's just appeal to emotion and void of content.

Are you free to rant against categories of people? Yes. I just said it's not a nice thing to do, is all.
You say that. But back when WhatsApp actually was a paid app nobody bothered paying.
> Sometimes people who like problems build complex products to solve imaginary problems.

While I'm critical, I'm guilty of this. Well said.
Bear in mind that I've written almost no Java since 8, so this may well be out-of-date.

With that in mind, though, the biggest gripe I have, by far, is its needless verbosity. It always feels like I need a huge amount of boilerplate and repeated keystrokes to get things done. My fingers literally get more sore writing Java than anything other language.

Lack of extension methods is probably my next complaint, because you end up fumbling about writing a lot of code to address what should be

Lack of null-safety would be the next one, too. I'd say around 90% of my runtime errors are due to improper null handling, so this would cut down a huge source of errors.

On par would be painful deployment (and to a degree, package management). For some reason Java always felt like it needed an industrial-size team to get anything actually up and running, and needed more hardware than any other language. That might not be fair, but I think it's definitely fair to say that deployment is not Java's strong point.
“I should not have called Babel and Henry out publicly”
The PTQS1005 is a fun machine, TVOC is always a bit of a troublesome sensor but the packaging and data access are very convenient.
Almost sounds like one could grossly placeholder-mark-paint surfaces/areas by type and the NN stuff will paint over it proper content and consistent details by dreaming them from these semantic hints.
> You don't want your games to look realistic?

The creators aren’t necessarily aiming for photorealism. They want their games to look good enough and be entertaining. Adding more realism could make it look worse. Obviously if AI could solve the hard problems like global illumination that’s great. And I’m sure it’ll be possible to e.g easily add more variation to textures by using larger datasets. But changing the tonemapping to a colder palette, or just replacing the asphalt textures with smoother ones?

The creators of GTA didn’t use the sunset tones in the game by some creative mistake or lack of computing power. They obviously went for non-photorealism deliberately! It’s a stylized view of California. It’s like the burger in the commercial doesn’t look like the real one - it looks a bit unrealistically perfect because that’s actually more attractive than the real thing.
Realistic and photorealistic are tangentially related.

The comparison here should perhaps be between frames of the game that already attempted to look like the cityscapes dataset.

GTA obviously doesn’t have a ground texture that isn’t smooth because it wouldn’t be possible, or “too warm” palette because it’s too computationally expensive to have the bleak cityscapes tone mapping.

A GTA frame rendered at its current frame cost, with textures the same size (but different) and a customized tone mapping, would look more photorealistic and make the difference to the cityscapes dataset much much smaller.

The authors could likely have done this comparison since they probably have the ability to modify textures and shaders to set tonemapping. That would have separated out the differences that are only artistic from those that are lacking photorealism because of computational expense.
I think the point is if you respect each other you will find a solution without stooping to brinkmanship.
Using time() function in C & C++
The 1926 BMJ letters page [1] has correspondence discussing what they thought it was. Nothing specifically medical, but something coming up into the throat and quite possibly croup[2]. For a butcher Lights are generally animal lungs, but the 'cure' was taking a small amount of lead shot or mercury to stop the lights rising.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2523749/pdf/brm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croup which is now tackled with vaccines and modern medicine.
> This probably won't fly in Germany as Germans are very privacy cautious.

After having lived in Germany for ~7 years this statement always makes me laugh.

Some examples:

* Names on doorbells (yes, visible from the street).

* People using "loyalty cards" left and right, letting the merchants track their behaviour even if they pay with cash.

* Giving a stack of papers (including ID copy, salary statements etc) to a real estate owner to apply for a rental.
Nobody gets promoted for being humble, rather pushed out of a company for a lack of ambition. Everybody loves energetic extroverts that could argue well and with proper tunnel vision to skip thinking about potential problems if it helps the bottom line immediately.
Several of the apps mentioned in this article are still up and active on the app store...

Apple PR is well Apple PR. They're gonna spin things in their favor.

www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2021/4/21/22385859/apple-app-store-scams-fraud-review-enforcement-top-grossing-kosta-eleftheriou
Not directly answering your question, but early in lock down when working from home, I realised that I had become so incredibly productive and also *happy* by not being in the office that I decided I would never return to an office environment ever again, if I could help it.

I was lucky to have a bit of negotiating sway due to our company having just been acquired and me reporting to the new CEO who was keen to keep me on board. So I could probably have negotiated remote-only as a permanent thing, but I actually chose to quit the business last year and become a freelance consultant, working for my old employer under a contract instead (which they were happy with as opposed to losing me altogether).

So now I run my own business, choose my own work environment and tools (I have setup an awesome home office during lock down which is a pleasure to spend time in!) and contract for my old employer while building up some other clients too.

For me, I’ve spent over half my career self-employed and I wanted to get back to this anyway, but for what it’s worth, if you want to fully dictate your work environment (location, tools, hours etc) you can’t beat being freelance!

I appreciate this is not the advice you were looking for - just my personal experience in case it prompts any ideas.

To more directly answer your question, just ask! One thing I’ve learnt over the years is that we often want things but are too afraid to ask. Even if you think you know what the answer will be, ask anyway. See what discussion there is to be had.

The other thing I’d say is if you can negotiate 1-2 days remote (if they force you to a compromise) take it, because you can grow those 2 days into more from there if you can prove you’re productive in those days at home.

It’s much easier to go fully remote if you’re already partly remote, so don’t look at it as a binary thing.

BTW I’ve been on the other side of this too, helping one of my direct reports transition to fully remote. I was on board with it already but I had to “sell” the concept to my bosses in turn, but we made it happen.

Good luck!
It’s just a shame that the populace have been scared into thinking this virus is different and that lockdowns and the associated damage is worth it.
Ask HN: Best Sites to Procrastinate
I don't use any social media. After reading "Mindf*ck" I decided to quit all of them. Surprisingly if you cut off all facebooks, instagrams and reddits, it turns out the Internet is quite boring place.

What are your favourite sites where you procrastinate? Sites without political trolls are preferred.
It was derived by multiple researchers and implemented to run on computers as early as 1970 by SEPPO LINNAINMAA
I see. I don't think that all of these restrictions are really necessary to achieve the goals we both share for smartphones, but I can understand the rationale better now.

I actually agree with most of those reasons as long as there's a developer mode setting somewhere deep down to turn them off. I've only seen hidden settings being accessed on a large scale once, which was during the Pokemon Go hype, to allow GPS spoofing through the developer options; something that can't be easily done anymore.

With an off switch, normal users are protected and given a nice ecosystem while anyone else can benefit from the freedom of using their device the way they want to. This solves the technical support burden and the software quality issue, because to reach that audience, you still need to go through some form of accepted app store. If you prefer Apple's judgement for whatever reason, you just stick to their store and ignore the existence of any other app out there.

I have to disagree with you on the developer restrictions, though, and I think that's where my lack of understanding your mindset came from. The mandatory 15/30% cut and arbitrary rules (such as the ban on most parental control apps the moment Apple brings out a competitor) make it impossible for me to tolerate the other minor annoyances that come with Apple's decisions. Of course, Google has been going the same route, sadly.

Google has been applying many of the same protections, except for many of the privacy ones, and their platform doesn't suffer a side-loading problem at all. This indicates that the ecosystem would be fine if Apple would loosen up a bit, sticking to their privacy guns but allowing developers to still compete with whatever project they've come up with next.

Neither Google nor Apple have my best interests at heart, but in the case of Google I can at least work around their stupidity. I'll gladly lose access to some "exclusive" content if that's what it takes to install open source apps onto my phone.
The problem is that this is no news. They are doing it from a long time. They are now just started to admit it.
Sounds very similar to RQ. Do you have opinions on the latter and/or their differences?
There is no best way, I will tell you some options and what I did and works for me:

1. If you negotiate, the questions is what can you give to get something. The only thing you have is your work, so the negotiation can be simplified to "you work there or not" from your side and "all office, part office or all wfh" from their side. If you want "all wfh" then you have little to negotiate, if you want part time office and part time wfh you can negotiate the proportions.

2. What worked for me and a few colleagues: I am officially working partly from the office for almost 15 years. That "partly" is the key word and very subjective: in the winters I used to go to the office a few days per month, in the summer (easier commute, 30 min instead of 1-2 hours each way) a few days per week, the rest of the year was somewhere in between. In the past few years (more than one) I go to the office only when I need to be there, not when HR wants me there. My team is globally distributed, so it makes sense in my case. At the same time, I have a couple of colleagues working remote for many years, one is hundreds of kilometers away and one is one country border away; they are officially working from the office, but they are not physically needed there and nobody is looking for them, their immediate teams are also globally distributed. If this is not applicable for you, you cannot use this method.

Most companies will not allow full wfh for different reasons, some are very valid and reasonable, so the best option may be to work partly from the office and negotiate that part. I think most companies will agree 1-2 days wfh and for some people they will accept more, depending on the specifics of the work these people do and the value for this company these people bring. These are the 2 points you can use in your favor.
What do they say? That they want to be classified as insects?
This is speculation. Just because the process had been made as easy a possible for you does not mean it was easy to implement.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-l...

It contained a few key words/ideas, so it became immediately polarized. I guess given enough years we'll become inoculated against such failure modes, but meanwhile, it is what it is.
Another case of HN's "headline mangler" doing more harm than good.

The truth is that many of articles whose titles it tries to bona-fide "sanitize" should be flagged by the users anyway as low-effort content (Like listicles, which get the number in front of the title removed, and so on).

Did somebody compile a list of transformations HN does on titles?
It’s in one of the airport customs offices buried under piles of parcels from China they don’t want to process (new policies on imports from China keep changing but those packages keep arriving) and under lower priority than the Covid aid they are processing

I can’t imagine many of the staff there have iPhones nor would iPhone owners be super close to the building.
Ask HN: Effect on your business? Removing this part of Apple Policy 3.1.1
Was just reading on theverge about the anti-steering policy of Apple.

What would be the effect on your business or app if Apple remove this part of the policy.

Just asking because the people on the article seems to downplay that part. But I think it's probably the most important part of the app store policy.

"Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase."
To print all your code.
> What I really don’t understand is that Java is such a fast language but large enterprise web server applications written in Java always feel so slow in user experience in production. It just feels like something from the late 90s.

My personal suspicion is that the programming style used in Java (OOP and patterns) together with the fact that everything is a reference, and everything is implemented in Java itself way down, kills the cache locality, which is the thing that makes modern computers fast.

Yes, you can write fast Java programs, if you keep abstractions to a minimum, use arrays rather than objects when allocating, and take advantage of the JIT compiler. But these are more lab conditions (which are great for benchmarks) rather than the real world conditions. I think finally having a proper record type in Java will help to fix this.
I personally like to have a few dependencies in my projects and a simple runtime vs having a monster of a language with a huge amount a unrelated and specialised APIs (java) and still need to install some additional dependencies.

I think the barebone nature of nodejs and javascript is what makes it great. If you don't like it, don't use it, there are other languages and runtimes out there and node is a really good fit for a lot of people.
QuoDB – Search Millions of Movies by Quote
White hat – Could bug bounty hunting accidentally cause real damage?
Right now I need to maintain (and routinely check) a physical mailing address, a telephone number, and an email address just in order to set up and use various day-to-day services provided by government and businesses. When will it end?
Hah, I did the same thing in much the same way, though IIRC I didn't use a relay, I used the existing circuit board and found the place where their MCU output the signal to move the motor. Pretty nice hack, at least until I realized I didn't want a thing spraying perfume in my house.
Well, your parents should know that it was Collor that confiscated savings accounts, on the 1990 plan (named Plano Collor) which failed to control inflation.

Plano Real is from 1994, when Itamar Franco was president, FHC was Finance Minister. No bank accounts were frozen.

So, to repeat: wrong president and wrong economic plan. Seems like your sources (your parents) are a bit biased?
Having their own state banks and printing money to lend to themselves is how virtually every sovereign currency works today, so I don't find that particular aspect very convincing as the cause of inflation.
Are the CO2 levels mentioned in [2] above from an air conditioned room? This detail is not mentioned in the article. I am trying to understand if air exchange provided by the air conditioner makes any difference on reducing CO2 levels in the room.
Sure, if you don't mind that would be great! My email is my hn username @noodfive.com

Thanks!
If somebody tags me with such device and I find out, I wonder if I then can successfully sue Apple for transmitting my location without my consent (I am in Europe).