skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article isn't quite arguing along the same axis as Graeber. He wasn't working with a purposely illegible definitions, and builds of a sort of taxonomy of bullshit, with one type not really related to another.

I found the anthropological perspective fairly refreshing. Instead of starting from a definition, model or theory, it starts from people's opinions. It is certainly worth exploring that many people feel their job is bullshit. People know what bullshit means to them. Grafting that onto a tightly defined (in this case marxist) concept like "Alienation" is the opposite of that.

If companies didn't have as many lawyers, other companies wouldn't need as many. If accounting rules were simpler, we'd need fewer accountants. That's one type of bullshit. Another might be lawyers and accountants who just don't do much. Those don't reduce to the same thing, as this article attempts to.

I think if a writer chooses the term "bullshit" rather than a more precise term, and that frames things. If someone makes a scientific argument, you don't negate it with a legal one.

Anyway... I read Graeber's book simultaneously with "complacent class," By Tyler Cowen. I was amused by the serendipity. Cowen's is from the other end of the philosophical spectrum. His book had a Schumpeterian feel. Both were examining areas that are hard to measure, and thus aren't "where the light is" in terms of the old economist adage. It's easy to measure the productivity of steel workers, harder to define productivity of administrative work... the kind of work that has become very prevalent.

Both note (I think) some similar pseudo data points. One was that most (other people's) attempts to quantify office workers productivity did not find that PCs introduction in the 90s had any effect. Graeber thinks about it in decidedly non economist terms. Office workers produce "paperwork," letters, memos, reports, etc. We now have a lot more of these, thanks to Dell. The "data point" is academia. Both note a (this one is more legible) a steep rise in administration/academic ratios at universities.

To me, I found the argument convincing. I suspect FB may be the most inefficient organisation that has ever existed... or close. Twitter too, on a smaller scale. I strongly suspect that if FB's ad business happened to generate only $5bn, they would run FB on that budget instead. I don't think FB would be different, acquisitions aside. That's not a proveable suspicion though.

Meanwhile Wikipedia, for all the flak it receives for expansive expenses, is incredibly resource efficient. It's also a very big site, and it runs on a budget 1,000X smaller than FB's. It runs on a smaller budget than stackoverflow, a site modeled on wikipedia. I strongly suspect that if it had been founded as a startup, Wikipedia would spend many times more.

The reason both books were interesting to me is that they consciously try to sidestep the "are efficient market theories true?" question. Its tedious and we have hundreds of years of boring articles like this one on commenting on it.
Rewards for Justice
Exactly, there are none that wants them. That should be the wake up call to all "wokes".
This chain of comments right here is one of the reasons I do so love HN.

A technical debate on the semantics of heroic rats.

Plus it actually helped improve my English!

Cheers :-)
If a company wants to improve their margins, then eventually - in the absence of other opportunities, or in an environment that pursues efficiencies - they will reduce costs.

If a market entrant wants to get an edge on existing incumbents, they will look for opportunities to operate at lower costs.

If a non-free component can be rewritten and redistributed at a lower cost, then eventually it will be, either to improve margins or by a market entrant.

This is why I expect that the article's proposition that the marketplace should expect to pay for a component will crumble over time.
I ended up in an argument with local "environmentalists" exactly over this (in quotes, because I think being opposed to high density is not very environmentalist at all):

They complained about new highrises near my local train station. I pointed out to them that those highrises would take up ~2,000 m^2 but provide housing for as many as one of the nearest local roads, that with the sidewalks, houses and gardens, many of which are paved over or mostly decking, takes up ~40,000 m^2.

As such, if they wanted more green spaces the better stance would be to argue for replacement rather than denying planning: E.g. make developers commit to buying up more low density housing and demolish a proportion of it and replace it with parkland or rewild it. The overall societal effect of not increasing housing supply as much would be a negative (and so there may well be needs for government incentives), but increased green spaces would be a positive. And if it reduced overall resistance to more high density construction to explicitly link density to replacement, I think it'd be worth it. E.g. award construction proposals with "points" in favour for whatever amount of existing construction they replace with parkland or nature that causes planning rules to strongly favour projects that increase density.

But said "environmentalists" seemed dead set on seeing bigger buildings as inherently bad without engaging with the point that absent getting rid of people, creating more space for nature means making people take up less space, and that means higher density.

To me arguing for high density is an essential part of environmentalism.
Django is already terrible. Why build a framework on top of another framework?

This is madness.
Wow this look great. Does anyone have a good recommendation for the equivalent in Python?
One of my favorite would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra

Which even today looks like it would take many years to produce as is.
No-risk, LOL.
> Eventually we may also want to enable inbound UDP to port 443, so that people can run web servers that support HTTP/3.

Apropos inbound traffic, what is the approach regarding inbound replies?

As in: Even if you do an outbound request, you usually expext an acknowledgement or reply from the server, which constitutes inbound traffic.

With TCP, firewalls can distinguish between unprompted inbound packets and replies by tracking which TCP connection the packet belongs to. This is possible because TCP packets contain unencrypted connection information that can be read by firewalls.

With generic UDP, there is no reliable connection information, so firewalls have to rely on heuristics like hole punching [1] - which are less precise and suboptimal from a security perspective.

I believe QUIC has connection information, however it's encrypted, so it's not accessible to firewalls. So does that mean, the future is hole punching everywhere, or was this changed so the connection info is now public?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_punching_(networking)
We used it to compress scanned PDFs, using mixed raster techniques. Since the PDF natively supports JPEG2000 we used it for document background compression and we used JBIG2 for text image compression. The compression ratio was impressive but the document rendering was noticeably slower even with Adobe reader …
This "neighbourhood" is currently water. I very much doubt that is the issue here.
You are pro are anti religion does not matter. The freedom to quote quoran and say Muhammad is pedo must be protected atleast in non-islamic countries.
I think those employees are:

A) Switching between the two definitions (is their job useless to their employer, or "the world"?)

B) Usually wrong - the company knows why they were hired much better than they do (and the company guards this information, because it is strongly in the company's interest for an employee to have a poor understanding of their monetary value. For most positions, the company doesn't want you to know the point of your job.)

Put it in perspective. Does the average cleaner think the floors need to be vacuumed daily? No, of course not. They probably think it's overkill, but they do it because that's their job. Is the company stupid for scheduling vacuuming once a day? No. They know exactly how clean they want their floors to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_carrier

Air Canada/France/whatever is not just a company. It's an important aspect of globalisation and the country whose flag it carries treats it as such. Transformation into a formal corporation is usually a ploy to make it cost effective. And, in many countries, is only partial, often resulting in the worst of both worlds.
Detecting bittorrent isn't that hard, and neither is detecting most popular p2p traffic. It's CPU intensive though, requiring something like snort to run basic protocol heuristics on every packet. Just blocking as much outgoing udp as possible would be the poor man's solution to a network policy like that. There's also ways to cloak network traffic, of coarse.

Of course, in practice, all of the bandwidth can still be sucked up by p2p through VPNs which are probably allowed through the network, so I'm not really sure what the problem those restrictions try to solve is.
As the cultural pendulum swings people are more or less vocal. Four years ago the woke were in ascendence on HN (being vocal on their opinions) and now the anti-woke are. I don't fully understand what drives these trends.
Found it - the absolute worst and dumbest comment thread on HN
There are very good reasons for evidence obtained by unlawful means to be ignored, even if it would help to catch a criminal.
That's still pretty suspect. The info was important enough that the courts issues a gag order, but the courts then broke it themselves?
For a polished gui as FTXUI is I am surprised that horizontal bar movement is rather jerky, as it appears to move two steps forward, one step back.

https://arthursonzogni.com/FTXUI/examples/?file=./component/...
> feel like if you had 900k in cash, and no debts, you could easily live freely. Maybe not the ultimate lifestyle, but pretty comfortably, even in the US. That's around 50k a year in investments.

It's still cutting it very close. 900k in cash will go by faster than expected due to inflation. A single person in a rural or low COL area for under $2k/month between rent/food/utilities. This isn't really leaving much room for hobbies/enjoyment. I would say that's a bit above subsistence level. Rounding up, that might be $30k/year in basic living, which, in theory would last 30 years. Inflation's going to eat in to that - I can't say how much for sure, but I have a hard time seeing most people make $900k in cash last more than 10-15 years. There will be too many temptations to spend chunks, and there will be legitimate emergencies (thinking primarily of unexpected health stuff).

"50k year in investments" - that 900k would have to be invested moderately aggressively to ensure 50k/year coming off while maintaining most of the principal.

What may be more interesting is seeing what other people might view as "low bar" COL numbers. My mental model for much of the low COL areas of the US would be around $2k/month for a single person to live without being at 'rock bottom', basing mostly on what I see around me as lowish rent, food and utility numbers. I've no doubt some people stretch that number lower, and two people sharing a space would cut the number lower as well. I'd think 2 adults could get by on $3k at 'above subsistence levels' in many areas for a long time. Rounding up a tag, that might put you closer to $40k/year, but you'd still not make that $900k last a long time, between inflation and emergencies.

EDIT: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-much-money-you-need-t_b_9... - from a few years ago, there were a lot of numbers in the $40k-$60k range for various spots in the US.
9.8 out of 10?

What’s the .2 represent?
It infuriates me when Google search result pages jump around as I'm trying to click on links!
I've heard, that people from the USA understand the term 'race' differently than Germans. A direct translation into German would be 'Rasse', a term reserved for dog breeds and history lessons.

From how I see the word 'race' being used in the USA, I can't see the difference to the German word 'Rasse'. For me, the racism in the USA begins with the insistence of separating people according to their 'race' and this race based thinking has permeated their entire culture. Doesn't matter where you look, old school liberals vs woke, republicans or democrats, they all divide people according to their race. It's even on their ID card.

And yet some claim 'race' is a totally different concept compared to 'Rasse'. I don't buy it, not one bit. The USA will never overcome racism, until they stop thinking in races.
Ok, let's extend this. If two pages are equally relevant and equally fast, will they show me the page with the fewest advertisements first?

And why is speed more important than number of advertisements?
It would be nice if any of the web vitals were actually tied to conversion or bounce rates.

I have used the web for a long time and how long a page loads generally does not matter to me. Perhaps I am alone in that? No amount of javascript squishing will matter if the network from you to the origin site is slow to start with.
Can’t you just go with Merriam Webster’s fourth definition under hero “an object of extreme devotion or admiration”.

Although the synonyms section cracked me up cause it definitely took me a second

Synonyms
“Cuban sandwich, grinder, hoagie (also hoagy), Italian sandwich, po’boy, …”
>I think most reasonable people would agree that it's incorrect to classify refuse collection and cleaning as useless jobs.

I think they did by and large (as did Graeber). The exceptions I remember listed were 1) "second order bullshit" - necessary jobs for "unnecessary companies".

E.g. cleaners for a debt collections call center - I don't think all reasonable people would believe this is socially useful. If the company doesnt need to exist the cleaners shouldn't either.

2) for example, cleaners who said that they were routinely ordered to clean things that already were clean or to do a small amount of cleaning and look busy the rest of the time. Performative cleaning, in other words.

The economist was specifically trying to misrepresent these examples to undermine the broader point, I think.
We just ran our own servers on port 443 - We tried 80 at first but I guess they did have something rejecting non-http traffic on that port, while I guess for 443 they just assumed everything not understood was https.

Also LoL worked whatever they did. Maybe that was just the admin's game of choice
would it be possible to push it down to IOCCC size? Would be fun to see it there, of course.
If we’re talking cathedral delays, Köln Cathedral was started in 1248 and finished in 1880.
It is not QR code. It is something called PayString: https://paystring.org
What I don't understand is why is reading a news article relevant to a case?
Do you really though? They do the same third-party seller thing as Amazon.
The potentials are indeed very promising. This was an insightful read
maybe they seized property with browsing history
if they can produce a warrant for this data, there's no reason why the site cannot comply. But to get the warrant must require a judge to grant it, and it must be lawful.
For years, I've made slides to report status on things (as a line manager, not a project manager) and I've tried to figure out ways to automate it. No amount of tags or epics or whatever in Jira seem to do it. It always has to be done by hand because what's actually happening is a lot of editorial curation, contextualization with other things going on at the company or in the industry, etc. (Please, if someone has a better idea, let me know!)

At larger companies, I can imagine this semi-journalism taking lots of people, because you can't just aim a firehouse of information at upper management. In theory, this could all be replaced with some clever dashboards, but the reality always seems messier.
I agree with repeated tests, they are wonderful at catching regressions - however exploratory testing is still something valuable which many developers overlook - a lot of us are happy with clicking through happy path and maybe some most obvious error scenarios, but there is a lot of applications where you can paste several megabytes of text in some of the forms - something that a more thorough exploration testing session would likely catch.
HTTP exploit requests can be pretty complicated, and the use of cURL hints that it's a dirt simple exploit to leverage.

This is an arstechnica article, their target demographic is more technically literate than the lowest common denominator.
It sounds like you're a nazi.

See how easy that was? Just make shit up like that? It's sure one of us being bizarre and illogical.
Note: the Paradox of Tolerance only applies in a "naive" (first-order) consequentialist framework. In a virtue ethics framework, the answer to "what should be done about intolerant people" is "tolerance" because tolerance is an inherent good regardless of outcomes.

However, I also think to a first approximation, virtue ethics has better consequentialist outcomes than naive consequentialist ethics does.

So I don't have an answer to the PoT; I just don't think it's a slam-dunk argument against tolerance at all. I espouse tolerance first and foremost for the sake of its ideal, and I hold that ideal because I prefer its generalized outcomes.

In other words, I can't help but notice that the Paradox of Tolerance is largely used as a tool to justify plain intolerance.
Nobody has been able to verify that Luis Elizondo worked in the programs he claims to have been.

It's weird that NYT and NPR do just passive reporting and don't really verify the background this guy. He worked first for To the Stars Academy, then History Channel. Elizondo has claimed that the Government has fragments of UFOs and Aliens are thereat. I think he is just next.

Edit:

It seems Pentagon has confirmed that Elizondo did not work in AATIP, or lead it as he claims:

> “Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI [the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence], up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history...
I understand a university lacking the IPv4 address space to allow arbitrary incoming traffic (although IPv6 can solve a large chunk of that problem), but why on earth would you block outgoing ports from a research institution? Perhaps you can block protocols like SMB or NetBIOS to prevent leaking passwords through the browser, but blocking any outgoing port just because?

There's also discussion of allowing port 443/udp as an incoming port but that's not necessary "because there are no stable servers yet". That's a terrible approach for a research institution, this university will always stay behind the curve because their IT department decides what is or isn't considered part of the "real" internet.

This is the kind of thinking that made DoH win over DoT: "I don't see a use for it and I'd be giving up control so screw you".

At my university, every device gets a fully reachable IPv4 and IPv6 address, optionally coupled with a subdomain. I've never heard anyone having trouble with this approach, probably in part because the network administrators do preemptive port scans to detect vulnerable devices. The biggest problem I have is that some gamer mouse software is broadcasting UDP packets over the entire network, ruining everyone's battery life with useless wakeup of the WiFi hardware.
Problem for what?

Graeber discusses and speculates about different flavours of bullshit, that explicitly are not intended to represent different versions of the same thing. For definition/measurement, he takes an anthropologist's approach: let people define it themselves. Both you and this article are imposing another definition of bullshit. That's fine, but it just isn't the subject of the book.

He purposely chose a playful dissenting term like bullshit. He didn't say "productivity," because he wasn't writing a book on economics. He didn't say "alienation" because it wasn't a book about psychology. He does talk about those things, but they don't define it.

The reason the book is compelling is precisely because it isn't an economics or psychology book. Economics is pretty bad at measuring economic output of accounting, advertising, HR and most of the jobs that have a high rate of "my job is bullshit" takes associated with them. That means that we don't have empirical knowledge to discuss and the "argument" keeps devolving into the same theoretical (now ideological) one that Marx and Ricardo had 200 years ago... just like this article does.

No one would be making these comments if the subject was "am I a good person?"
HOAs are usually tiny little micro governments for a specific neighborhood, so you wouldn't even need to start a new one, you could simply get involved with the existing HOA and change it.
What is anti-Apple in calling excessive swapping for what it is?

I own Macbook on M1 and I had 4% wearoff in two months of use (25TBW on 256GB model) when problem got attention so I could get rid of x86 apps which caused worse swapping.
If only it was possible to have the kind of job and money that's only available in big cities while living there. Maybe the remote revolution will finally let this happen. Oh, and the social and cultural life as well.
Ask HN: How do you discover new stuff?
I usually surf the internet in search of new everything. Nowadays nothing really grabs my attention for too long, so I am always on a lookout for new blogs, new bands, new artists. I am also hooked on to online window shopping and it is very difficult to find new products to buy.

Is there an aggregator of some sorts where I can discover new stuff? I dont really know what I want so it is quite difficult to follow specific sub reddits and producthunt usually shows me software startups which are great but not what I am looking for while "hunting".

I know it sounds a bit of a rant but I'm really tired of aimlessly doomscrolling on the internet and would love to get some direction.
I guess I should have said "fiat pegged and backed".
That’s a common pattern and turn of phrase that i never noticed until now.

You say “this is the reason ..” or “this is an example of why ...” but you are inviting the listener to see the reason.

It’s persuasive because the reader/listener actually fills it in themselves rather than you saying it.
I guess you're right, but in this context it's clear by curl's author's blog post mentioned in my original post, that cause can be easily confused by less technically savy readers.
The next great disruption is hybrid work–are we ready?
I don't do activism at work, but I certainly do sell myself to employers and potential employers.

The greatest value that I provide in my work is that I am me: I am a person, with human needs and concerns and thoughts and inspiration and creativity. I leave some of myself in my work.

It surprises me when people have the attitude that you have expressed, that you are just there to get the work done. Is your job in high tech really to robotically do the task?

It makes it seem, to me, like you are greatly underselling yourself.
What would this accomplish? Create a new Soviet Union? Why punish common Russians for the actions of the Russian "elites"? Put Putin, his oligarchs and maybe their direct relatives and other criminals on a no travel and asset freeze list and that's it. Well off Russians travel abroad to Turkey, Egypt and Cyprus anyway. I really doubt Egypt or Turkey would play by the US playbook. Why bar these innocent people from travelling, since they're just minding their own business? Being Russian doesn't make one a Putin cheerleader. Of course, a few "tourists" like the ones who poisoned Serghei Skripal and his daughter will slip through, just put them on the naughty list and carry on.
You're assuming that intelligent and college-educated are near-synonyms. I've seen plenty of evidence that's not necessarily true.