skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Self-Driving Truck Got a Shipment Cross-Country 10 Hours Faster Than a Human
In the UK the Unite union will 'represent' you if you are unemployed. I'm not sure what that practically involves though.
They actually said "this is not allowed". Sounds very much like a CS agent reiterating that the URL is on a ban list. You reading it like the CS agent is saying using a competitor is just your interpretation. Look at it like this, specifically banning something because it's a competitor would be a huge deal (rightly so). With that in mind, do you really suppose they would tell the agent that directly?
Alienation may be part of it, but it could also be due to a variance in how people perceive the world.

A health insurance company might have employees with different understandings of how the world works. Some may feel they are helping people who are sick, and others may feel they are skimming money off the top of sick people.

The former employees might feel quite satisfied with their work and the later naturally feels depressed and anxious.
It annoys me how much Elixir zealots proselytize the language as the the objectively best thing since sliced bread, and all other languages are worse. But it's a well written article.

Good on them for finding Elixir useful, but none of the benefits they talk about seem very compelling for me. Most of them are available as table stakes in other languages (rerunning failed tests as an USP of mix test, really?), or very situational/subjective benefits. I find the import system in Elixir to be very opaque, making it hard to know where a function is coming from after it's been aliased and use:d. I subjectively find explicit import statements much clearer when debugging code.

The final drops for me are the missing explicit return statement, and the extraordinarily bad tracebacks on error. If I could I would excise Elixir from our company.
has windows ever been anywhere close to linux in this respect? NO!
Those who think it's acceptable to fund government very well, and then not hold them responsible for their choices.
A good binary format would be best, but JSON is already a step up - at least it's obvious where each value starts and ends. That said, maybe it wouldn't be too hard to offer a binary-serialized JSON format as well (I think BSON is the currently widespread standard)?

On a related note, I wonder if and how a pipe could handle "format negotiation" between processes? I.e. is there a way for a CLI app to indicate it can consume and produce structured binary data? Then the piping layer could let compatible apps talk through an efficient protocol, and for anyone else, it would automatically drop to equivalent JSON (and then maybe binarize it back up, if the next thing in the pipeline can handle it).
It’s just money.
I still prefer Ant to Maven because with Ant it does what I tell it to do and nothing more.

Maven is too slow and I cannot change it.
I've seen less crazy stuff in The Onion. Truly unfortunate that people are abused in this way. I guess we is the consumer are partly to blame.
When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth.

Right, it's Trump's fault that the media and political opposition acted like children in opposing every word that came out of his mouth.

Apply that logic to your favorite left-leaning politician:

"The fact that Obama was always a natural born citizen would have been accepted by some Conservatives who thought he was born in Kenya, but the fact that Obama denied the claims that he was foreign-born made things worse."

When you're wrong, you're wrong. Try to own up to it without blaming the people who were actually right.
It might not follow the guidelines - but I given it's about an article that tries to rebut "bullshit jobs", it's a lot more valid (and funny) than saying "I think X is bullshit" in any other circumstance.
This ignores the possibility that it’s difficult to avoid winding up with at least bullshit jobs in any organization.
I don't think The Economist is trying to hide that. In fact they are pretty open about their opinions and what they support.
NASA's Juno to get a close look at Jupiter's moon Ganymede
The trick "bullshit jobs" uses is to switch between two definitions of bullshit. One definition is "useless, of no benefit to the employer," and the other is "revolving around selling bullshit" (which is absolutely beneficial to the employer).

The first definition is sort of ridiculous (no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless), but when challenged it reverts to the second definition, which is trivially obvious (of course most companies are trying to hawk crap).

Read the comments on this post - most of the arguments are just people switching between the two definitions.
Inspector General Will Have a Critical Role in the ‘UFO Mystery’
Wuhab Lab in 2015: we generated a chimeric SARS virus that attach to human ACE2
That is if you believe something can be done about the existence of bullshit jobs.

From my experience and in my opinion, when an organization pushes past the point where everybody knows everybody else and where one person can understand the whole apparatus there's absolutely nothing that can you can do but accept the reality of losing complete control and oversight.

Another aspect: the increasing number and depth of rules and regulations imposed by laws on organizations creates the need of bureaucrats that simply sign checklists without actually checking anything. You can know the jobs are bullshit but can't simply choose not to comply.

Some whole departments are there just for show. In this age you have to look like you care about the environment, social issues, etc. And while really caring would be quite expensive and in some cases completely debilitating for the business a few people making powerpoints and social media posts do the trick.

And then there's government jobs, markets ruled by monopolies, corruption, nepotism, and a million other things.
It depends how you interpret it. Someone gets to decide what a "positive workplace" is, and exactly what "casting doubt" and "nonconstructive" mean, and then they are free to be intolerant of those who go against them.
The article is paywalled, here’s the EC announcement: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...
This is the Iraq war situation all over again, by which I mean the same people (literally) are pushing the same angle through the same media outlets in the same way.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-w... : Michael R. Gordon, WSJ on the "lab leak"

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i... : Michael R. Gordon, NYT on "Iraq WMD"

The media are, in these cases, bad, but only because they've not adequately defended against the internal psyop by the US security agencies.
The article claims "the Lancet statement rejected the lab-leak hypothesis", which is a bit misleading considering what the Lancet statement actually did was reject a human origin of the virus, based on genome sampling and other evidence.

The two are not equal, the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.

Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist, then is cited as saying there is no evidence in the statement, when actually there are around 12 relevant citations in there. I guess a dozen is just not enough data for a data scientist?

The actual context of that statement also gets quite a bit embezzled with an off-hand remark about "xenophobia and climate denialism": Since the first case in the US, there had been a concentrated and very nasty effort to politicize the virus.

It was US senators and US new pundits who at first floated the claim of it being a bio weapon [0], that's what triggered said Lancet statement in the very first place. It didn't just come out of nowhere for no reason, as some people like to claim, to imply the statement itself is already evidence for a cover-up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Wuhan_...
Hah, you had a nice catch-22 in there: either I, as a parent, am oblivious to my kid's shortcomings, or I "truly hate them". Well, that's not how it works in real life.
"knew"?

That seems to be the wrong word.
We don't have a competitive market in jobs.

There are always systemically fewer jobs than there are people that want them - deliberately so as a matter of policy.

For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market.

In the UK we currently have 3.5 million without work that want it and 1 million short of work, but only 0.6 million unfilled vacancies.
Former municipal software engineer, that built a product to serve other municipalities.

That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc.

They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.
It’s how imperialist propaganda works. When material interests shift, suddenly and with one voice all “independent” western media pushes the same unsourced narrative.

If you remember the lead-up to the Iraq was, it was the same surreal experience.
JUCE also has this kind of layout.
Full statement from the abstract:

"The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations.

*Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.*

Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein.

On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations. "
Can the Stanford compiler course be self-taught given the online material? What's missing?

I've seen it available on Coursera. And a lot of the current material is available online. But I tried the Coursera one awhile ago and got stuck.

I'm finishing a CS degree but there's no dedicated compiler course here.
Politicians are not another business. and doing business with them is not legal in all Constitutions.

But this is the attitude of business to be the next king or emperor without any legal binding. Chaos and anarchy, oppression and boasting. The evolution clock goes back 10^{5} years.
the physical locations are accessible

China has blocked any and all independent access to the site, the only group allowed access was the WHO research group that somehow happened to include the most rabid opponents of the lab leak theory (Peter Daszak, mentioned in the article).
Yeah, it’s the most generous job of last resort available in most of the country
Does it really matter though ? The fist thing I would do is find how to keep people from my country safe, not worry about where did my funding go (especially since the lab's funding has absolutely nothing to do with how we can find a cure or a vaccine).
The article states that at the time people were denying the possibility of a lab leak, there was a lack of credible evidence for zoonosis. If I’m evaluating hypotheses, it’s generally better that I wait for hard evidence before ruling one out. e.g. some kind of patient zero animal population.

The lancet letter was at best extraordinarily premature.
I agree, that's why I pay the most attention to the genetic evidence. Other sections of his post, and the references he pulled together, go into great detail on that.
Objective is overrated. There's a clear tendency towards evil when you try too hard driving bonuses and promotions on objective performance metrics. The ruthless deathmarchers will always outperform their more benign peers in locally measurable metrics.

The paperclip maximiser algorithm doesn't actually require a computer, it could run just fine on a group of humans implemented as their set of intraorganizational rules.
I think you and the GP comment both have valid points. Being unnecessarily negative gets us nowhere..but I do think for the most part VC funding has made things much much harder for startups that want to bootstrap.

VCs have created a winner takes all mindset. I think this is a net negative to the entire ecosystem.

The costs are 10x more for marketing and sales than it was maybe 10 years ago. Some might say do content marketing, promote on social media etc..these are long term strategies that make zero sense for founders starting from scratch with no following.

The costs for building products have become minuscule but marketing costs have skyrocketed.
I don't get it, what's his actual point?
Thank you for reading!

Pricing is an integral part of your product! I started selling my product for $5/month, now the lower price is $199/month. I know it's hard to think you can earn them, but you have to try... at worst you can retrace your steps!

Also, a customer might find your product interesting if it costs 50 cents, but not if I they have to spend $10. Would you be willing to build it and maintain it for 50 cents?

Don't postpone a very important part of the equation, and good luck!
Be careful reading that book OP. Use those techniques defensively, NOT offensively (if that makes any sense). Following all of those rules literally and religiously requires very little empathy, and viewing other humans as “chess pieces” can affect you down the road.
Thank you for the clarifications.
A bit obtuse. My apologies.

A BAD pun is really a good one. Look at the social reaction. This might not be universal, but it's at least common across different cultures.

A bad pun is just that.
The Economist is generally pushing an agenda, and the agenda is "capitalism is always right". If you buy their conceptual framework, the idea that you can be paid for BS work can't be right since Mr. Market always knows best, and he wouldn't pay for an activity which adds no value.

However, if you don't buy the "capitalism is always right" Ansatz, then it's quite easy to see paid BS work as yet another market failure ... or worse, as a way to keep workers busy so they don't cause trouble for "the system". Which I believe was one of Mr. Graeber's main points.
> "Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder"

Incidentally, I reject this claim. I take beauty to be objectively real and not a subjective reaction to something. The latter I would call taste. (A materialist would of course object because for him, the world is just a bunch of boring atoms bumping into each other, though he will never explain how his mind, just another boring bunch of jostling atoms, is capable of entertaining such subjective delusions and why they can exist in his mind-as-jostling atoms but not in the world "out there", more jostling atoms.)

That some variation in opinion exists about what is beautiful (and in what way) does not disprove the claim. Not everyone is equally discerning, some have perverse tastes, etc.
They are a CDP, customer data platform, that tracks user behavior so it can be distributed to various mar tech and analytics tools. Its a reasonable product and on most ad block lists for its tracking.
And that's a pretty low bar for power users BTW.

Google cloud is ok for "formatting your Christmas card list in Norwegian" to use a literary allusion.

But when you come to writing specs and reports used by multiple teams word /excel is still by far the best solution.
Isnt rope the real challenge (in term of physics) of the Space Elevator ?
No. The problem is more that Graeber didn't refine the concept enough.

Bullshit jobs either 1) might as well not exist at all, and no one would notice if they didn't. 2) are hateful and harmful, and create a dehumanised environment while paying as little as possible. 3) are socially, politically, and/or environmentally toxic.

These are all different kinds of bullshit. They are bullshit jobs for reasons that should be obvious. The bullshit is about far more than alienation. It happens when the jobs lower net social stability, longevity, and prosperity, and promote short-term inequality over long-term opportunity.

Since that's the opposite of The Economist's ethical system - the one which believes in "markets", even thought markets have been proven time and again to be self-harming and unstable unless closely regulated to limit social harm, inequality, exploitation, and the development of monopolies - it's not going to be positive about this idea.

Unfortunately Graeber's book went for the headline instead of analysing them more clinically.

Fortunately this created a memorable meme which helped people question what they were doing.

If The Economist has started printing rebuttals, that suggests the meme was effective.
Re 2.

The wet market was likely the first superspreader event but the patient zero (from what we know today) had no connection to it.
You seem to be far enough ahead of other commercial offerings to slow down the new feature pace. I'd consider going from 3 contract developers down to one so that the project can have better margins. Then, when growth allows, ramp it back up.

The 3d printed case also seems like an opportunity. I imagine that's costly both from a materials and labor perspective. There would be a large one time cost to convert that to a molded case, but the per-unit cost would drop a lot. If the design is stable now, I'd consider that.
> But we're not in disagreement that the positions switched at some point, right?

I think we are in disagreement. I don't remember such a switch, nor can identify one browsing backwards.

> I think it's to be expected, what are you supposed to do about it? Should you ignore the actions of Israel, because it's associated with Jews? Or actions of Russian government, because someone could discriminate a Russian person over that? Or what happens in some Islamic country?

I doubt everyone in Israel agrees with the decisions of the state of Israel, just as half of Americans don't agree with any current administration. Even further beyond that you shouldn't equate every jew with Israel, just as you shouldn't every muslim with Iran.

Talking about China as it relates to covid is fine. Calling it "chinavirus" (repeatedly) has no practical benefit, and is only used as a polemic.

> And we're fine with talking about about "systemic white supremacy", so I find these concerns to be hypocritical frankly.

I don't equate every white person with white supremacy, including myself. I don't see the hypocrisy.
> involved in a biological attack on China.

It's very unlikely anyone was doing any research on directly using SARS-CoV2 as a weapon. It kills or maims too low a percentage of people to have tactical value, and it's too difficult to contain. (The most effective weapons severely handicap their victims and allow them to live into old age, taking fighters off the field, and turning them into long-term liabilities and living reminders for anyone who might think about fighting you in the future.)

I'm not saying SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab, but if it did, it was probably more of a basic science/weapons background research rather than an engineered weapon itself. You might want to add some SARS-CoV2 characteristics to a bioweapon, but you'd want to start out with something with greater morbidity and more easily quarantined as a starting point for a weapon.
Depending on your market, it's not about the raw popularity. If you are selling to business, many of them are running ERP systems that depend on IE11 and will never be updated. However the knowledge that IE sucks is well established outside of developers at this point. We sell into business and only officially support Chrome and Safari. When people run into common issues we tell them to switch from IE to Chrome, and 90% of the time they respond as if they screwed up not us, and that they should have thought to try in the non-sucky browser.
Microsoft made sure in windows 10 that it's almost unusable without SSD. SO you big binary blob file have random r/w access.

Most backup software is able to do good binary deltas of arbitrary data for decades. Even dumb checkpointing resolves problem of downloading 25 versions - you download latest checkpoint and deltas from there.

Don't excuse poor design and programming, when you know a file structure, creating a differential update should be short task. With a tiny bit of algorithmic knowledge you could even optimize the process to only download needed assets inside of you big binary blob - if the asset was changed 7 times during your last 25 version you only need to download the last one.
I've built https://Contact.do for myself, but it grew steadily

Tagline: No Code Contact forms (and contact links) with ZERO Spam
does this mean suspects of hacking and ransomware will now join suspected terrorists in Guantanamo?
Learn Cypher query language in 10 days
This line was highly distracting for me, "To make matters worse, the shell has been mostly left for dead by both academia and industry, considering it an unsalvageable piece of junk that needs to be replaced at the first opportunity."

Um, false?

Many people in industry use and love using the shell.

Please read, "In the beginning was the command line."

The shell is by far one of the most powerful and expressive tools we have. Yes, there are many ways in which it could be improved, but JSON? That's not it.
NPR’s popular How I Built This is a techno-optimist anachronism
> I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse

I've witnessed the same exact pattern multiple times in the last few years- often in relation to China. It's as if suddenly everyone not only shifts opinion, but exhibits the same amount of faith in it as if that opinion had been the most accepted for years.

This speaks volumes about 1) the ability of media (and possibly of powerful, interested parties) to sway the public opinion; 2) the easiness with which people align themselves to a (perceived) majority without ever looking back.

In particular, what has happened here is probably that the presence of Trump prevented half of the US from aligning to a narrative that would have been otherwise quite successful, given the political times. Trump gone, that half of the country suddenly was free to align itself with that narrative.
The Adventures of Action Item; Professional Superhero (2000)
Surely everyone arranges for a customer to call with a critical production issue just as the $ISSUE workshop starts?
It's most certainly not obvious how the relation df(x)/dx = f(x), the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle , and the square root of -1 -- a "trick" to extend the number line with a second dimension -- are related, let alone be used to create an useful construct.