skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The railroad wasn't built all at once, either. It was two teams, one going east, the other west. The companies were paid as work progressed, they did not have access to all the funds in advance. They didn't even know the route to be taken, they had survey crews working ahead of the construction, marking the best route.

If you don't think they had a much larger logistics problem, consider the problems with supplying the crews with food, water, clothing, rails, ties, horses, wagons, everything they need, from a thousand miles away.

The most important thing, though, was the companies were paid by the mile. The faster they built, the more money they made, because that would push the meeting point further away. They had ENORMOUS incentive to move fast. And it worked.

ST, however, has no incentive whatsoever to move things along. They have every incentive to delay, invent problems, all so they can go back and demand more money.

At a company I used to work for, they hired a team of old software engineers to write a piece of software for a good customer. It took them 3 months, and arrived on time and under budget. Want to know the secret? They had a huge bonus for being on time (I think it was ten grand apiece), which would shrink away for every day late.

I asked if that was what motivated them to be on time, and they all denied it with "we're professionals". I openly laughed at that.

It's amazing what happens when the incentives are aligned with the desired results. We saw that last year when vaccine developers wanted 18 months to develop a vaccine, and Trump gave them a big financial incentive to get it done before the end of the year. Later came the usual denials that these incentives motivated them in any way :-)
Rumor has it that a very prominent British Tour de France competitor rides a re-badged/stealth gravel bike because he finds it more comfortable.
How long should you work on a problem?
Shame you got downvoted.

Although it's not conclusive that absence of religion is worse than religion itself, there's tons of evidence for it (e.g. communist & fascist atrocities, medical experiments) – I'd wish that secular believers were more self-critical and introspective.

My biggest concern of modern culture is the sense of inevitability. That progressiveness by definition is beneficial, without any sort of reflection. May things have regressed, and we should take account of the many benefits and setbacks.
How reliable is the 3% rating?

Looking at the sources used on the wikipedia page[0], it seems pretty skeptical. For one, the services for collecting the data seem to be depending on tracking APIs from partnered sites. Does Firefox typically allow those through? Is it reasonable to question whether that's a reliable methodology when one of the values of the browsers is preventing such tracking in the first place?

And it shows NetMarketShare data being as current as of May 2021, despite NetMarketShare not providing data beyond Oct 2020[1]. And the last dataset of NetMarketShare has Firefox at 7%. Publicly, at least. Looking around the site it seems people may have access to the internal API, but questions about data integrity remain (now in conjunction on whether unverifiable data from an API should be used on Wikipedia).

Is there something more I and others should know about these data collectors?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
[1]https://netmarketshare.com/ "...we are retiring NetMarketShare in its current form. October, 2020 is the last month of data."
Oh no Europe doesn't have enough too big to fail corporation that could lobby for more corporation-friendly policies
> and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents

Try searching for "followup:actionitems" in drive.

Disc:Googler.
I just want to say I like cryptocurrency, but there are some real problems with some of your points I just had to point out.

> welcome to the game.

Is this a game, or something useful, a currency system? If it's a game all your opponents are right. Truth is, some people get burned with every risk that people take, and everyone gets burned by some risk they take at some point, it is why most of us are risk averse. People get burned crossing the street.

> If they're centralized

Find me a single decentralized exchange that has the liquidity to handle high trading volume.

> It's easy to distrust a system that you don't understand

You're assuming detractors don't understand. It is self supporting fallacious logic, "if you don't agree with me that's because I know more about it than you"

As far as unaddressed points, to talk about crypto getting manipulated and pretend that heavily regulated markets like the housing market or stock market don't get manipulated is hilarious. Every market gets manipulated, but people pretend like the government solves that and cryptocurrency is the only market where this happens.

All in all I like cryptocurrency, and I don't like regulation for the most part. Before someone out there decides that this means I don't think murder should be illegal, I do, so no sense going down that line of discussion. But I don't think protecting people from predators is the same as protecting people from themselves, one is within the realm of a justice system and the other is not.
> without having to resort to wasting time in apple's walled garden

What makes you think Safari will implement this? Like many features Google announces, this will be a Chromium-only feature for ages.

Mac users running Chrome or Edge may be valid end users for this API, but Safari and iOS users won't benefit from this if it would permit developers to skip Apple's walled garden. Apple doesn't want competitors to their app store laying all the golden apps. Safari still doesn't properly support notifications, after all, and it's not because Apple can't think of a way of implementing them.
Fails both Wayback Machine as well. That's a bad look.

(I'd thought Archive.is also balked, though that now seems to work.)
Really all of the proposed benefits could be achieved in much less sexy ways. Want to bank the unbanked? Restart post banking. Want to improve transfer speeds? Copy what every other country has done and create a faster electronic clearing system and mandate banks adopt it. So on. So given we have solutions for all these proposed benefits that have been implemented before, elsewhere, I question the true motives behind CBDCs. Especially given they can do far more than these claimed benefits, ruin privacy, allow different interest rates and time limited currencies, control what your money can be used for. Etc. Why would we want to do that?
Downvoted... How dare you imply conservatives can be well informed and the media paints a bigoted picture. /s
In the US, we pay 5x-10x that amount for a crappy high deductible plan that has measurably worse outcomes than your free insurance.

It is hard to overstate how bad US healthcare is for the typical American. If you are wealthy, you have access to some of the best doctors in the world, but for the rest of us we are entirely dependent on our employer for access to reasonable health care.
As I understand it, Prolific didn't just make it hell to use the clone PL2303 chips but also the older revision of their own chips which was being cloned - their newer drivers disabled both just the same. Which suggests that using any chip from Prolific is risky no matter where you source it from.
Seconding this one. Great lightweight tent without major compromises, but still at a reasonable price and mainstream availability (unlike most of the ultralight tents made of exotic materials)
haha this never happened to me because I'm always with someone but it's seems really funny (not for you because when you come back you don't have place anymore) :)
Workers also flocked to those railway jobs, because they were better than their other options.
The British did just that during the Boer wars, against an opponent that engaged in guerilla warfare on their home turfeand had access to modern weaponry. They gained control of the country by partitioning it with blockhouses, strongpoints and barbed wire fences, scorched earth tactics, involving indiscriminate destruction of farms, and forced resettlement of many Boers into concentration camps. Fortunately, many of these tactics have gotten out of fashion. Also, this required the deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops for many years, which could be justified economically only by the diamonds mined in not-yet-South Africa.
Sure, DeFi would be really cool if I wanted to borrow crypto, or lend crypto, or trade crypto options, or take a mortgage out on a bitcoin or whatever. But for people who need to deal with a real world asset, it has very little to offer. It still cannot (and again, correct me if I'm wrong) implement a simple option to buy stock at a certain price, and is not really any closer than it was the day ETH was crowd-funded.

So, for those of us on the outside, DeFi just looks like a bunch of crypto enthusiasts finding exotic new ways to gamble with each other. It's neat and all, but I don't see how it ever really affects the rest of us.
It can happen; I prefer going with someone and also making new friends there :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27508549
Counterfeit but working seems a whole different ballgame than counterfeit and absolutely not even possible to work.

It’s interesting that they went to the bother to mimic the chip without simply duplicating the entire chip and layout.
We’re not debating whether or not everyone of every faith celebrates secular Christmas, but whether or not celebrating secular Christmas is sufficient to identify a character as Christian. By your own admission (“All the replies here saying Christmas isn't Christian seem to be from people with a Christian upbringing, even if they are atheist or secular”), it is not sufficient.

Even if no one of a non-Christian background celebrated secular Christmas, “celebrating secular Christmas” still wouldn’t suffice to identify someone as Christian, but rather as either Christian or “from a Christian background”.

And of course lots of people from Jewish, Hindu, secular etc backgrounds also celebrate secular Christmas, as many have attested in this thread.
Polyethylene is highly combustable according to the FAA https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/pdf/05-14.pdf
Translation is easy, support, marketing, sales, adapting to local regulations, integrating with local providers. And the markets are so fragmented - there are so many small countries. I worked for a B2B startup in EU - even in development I'd say at least 50% of time was spent on dealing with country specific tasks (the startup had a payment processing component so that was a large part of it).
There are plenty of private currencies in the U.S [1]. Printing them and using them are just fine as along as A) you do not attempt to pass it off as Federal currency and B) you do not refused to accept renumeration in Federal currency (the "for all debts, public and private" part) without pre-stated agreement. We agree you will mow my lawn and I will pay you 50 Disney Dollars, that is fair and legal. That said, the person doing the mowing the law owes income tax on the fair market value of the Disney Dollars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_i...
Funny. I was told at a serious tech trends seminar in 1981 that programmers would go mostly extinct by 1984 because of automatic code generation tools. Glad I didn’t quit back then.
> A periscope could be affixed alongside the head to allow the scout to manipulate the dummy head and observe the environment.

> The scout would raise the head above the trench and attempt to get shot by a German sniper. Apparently the sensation of a bullet slamming into a target held mere inches above your head while you were smoking through it was rather bracing.
They used black powder, dynamite only became available towards the end.

You have good points, but consider it ran TWO THOUSAND MILES, not 22, and still took only 10% of the time. You say "open plain", but try driving it some time. It had to go through two mountain ranges, for example.

The workers came because they got better pay than anywhere else. This includes the Chinese and Irish. It was not built by conscripts.
I'm pretty sure the developers of Element are sponsoring matrix and also running servers as business. So it's not entirely non profit, though it's definitely open source and there's no limited 'community edition' :)
Fitbod is great, but no significant updates in a year. No additional exercises in the database from when I started, can’t log over 29 reps of a weighted exercise, lots of other niggles. Has this been your experience?
>It's that Europe has less absolute or nearly no power in areas that matter a lot for their society.

Bingo. For example I, a European worker, wake up in the morning by the alarm sound of my US developed phone who's software and services are also developed in the US. I then power up my US developed laptop and use a US designed OS and read and reply to emails using a US developed solution part of an office suite also made in the US. During work, I deploy my work, which helps people book flights, to a US developed cloud solution. After work I text my friends on a US developed messaging solution and at the pub one friend keeps posting pictures to a US developed social media platform and another swipes through photos of potential mates on a US developed dating platform. Hell, even when I want to use online banking or online government services I'm still relying on mostly US tech to get the job done.

How the hell is this absolute dependence on US tech not scary for Europe's sovereignty is beyond me. If the US wanted to flex its power for shits and giggles it could just ask the Microsoft, Apple and Google to turn off their services in Europe for a couple of hours and send Europe to the stone age.
There is another article with a newer batch of tire tests here. https://www.renehersecycles.com/bq-tire-test-results/

Basically, they looked at even wider tires 40+mm and they still aren’t any slower.
Cycling teams spend tens of millions each year, with Ineos going over € 50m some time ago. Are they conservative? They benchmark their material in wind tunnels. Sometimes they bend the rules with high-tech material[^1]. There's no way a team competing in Tour de France would choose fashion over performance.

[^1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/jul/03/vortex-su...
Does it help to be another non-Chinese Oppo or Xiaomi? There's not a ton of profit to be made competing with Apple and Samsung in the West. There's opportunities elsewhere, but it's hard competing with low-cost Chinese smartphone companies in low/middle income markets, particularly in their Chinese homemarket.

Instead there's tons of opportunities investing in the mobile space. From the iPhone 12 chip built with a Dutch ASML machine, to companies like MessageBird or Adyen to name a few more Dutch companies.

I agree there's plenty of competition in the US, but there's no other single market that even came close to the US until China came along, but even that is just a large number of people making an average of 10k a year. The EU is a big market but so is 'Asia', at the end of the day, even with a lot of regulatory integration, they're still separate markets that each require their own approach, very much unlike the US. It's no surprise that lots of product launch rollouts in the EU of US companies are slow and skip lots of EU countries, compared to launches in the US/Asia. It's not because the EU has 'missed out on the tech revolution', it's because the EU isn't really a single market and it's really tricky to launch in 27 different countries. That's true for EU companies just the same as it is for non-EU companies. It's why there's hardly a European Amazon, but there's tons of local EU companies that I like just as much (e.g. Bol.com in the Netherlands). They just can't easily go beyond their borders, and eventually get bought by a US/Asia player with a massive domestic market which now has a warchest to dominate the small EU players, too.
Interesting. Granted in December 2005. So in the intervening 15 1/2 years, has someone shown a working device? Can you point me to documentation of that?
I disagree that it's a terrible idea, particularly if the alternative is Wifi-enabled devices from dodgy vendors.

It would be useful to have devices that don't talk to the network at all unless I plug them in and open a particular web app.
I've been using ugrep these days (https://github.com/Genivia/ugrep) - and am pretty happy with it.
Backing out human power consumption from caloric requirements comes closer to 120W constant output, at 2,500 kcal/day.

The range is a low of about 50--75W (1,000--1,500 kcal, effectively starvation levels), and a maximum ceiling of around 485W (10,000 kcal day, perhaps a elite endurance athlete). Well below 1 kW in all cases.
Visual Basic wasn't a great language as a language, but the VB application was awesome for developing GUIs for code you'd written in a better language (it was dirt-simple to call C or C++ functions from VB components).

The VB UI builder still hasn't been equaled for straightforward ease-of-use, IMO.
For those of you who are also gear-heads geeking out about tents and what not, I built this service quite some years back now to aggregate a bunch of lightweight focused used gear markets along with some notification features.

It’s got a lot of the cottage gear manufacturers mentioned in this thread - part of the goal with building the site was to try to bring some awareness to their services!

[1] https://lwhiker.com
But Europe is fulfilling a lot of promises. No war for over 70 years. Free access to Healthcare, education. Safety. Less people in prison, less homicides. Less people in poverty. We learned the hard way that having military superpowers can lead to a lot of misery.

Since financial markets are open for anyone to invest in anything (pretty much), I also don't get why it matters where market cap is created.

For instance: Tesla has more market cap than a lot of European ICE competitors. But what VW contributes to European GDP still is much bigger than Tesla's contribution.
And then it's a rainy day and everybody stays home from work because there's no power? Or we spin up a bunch of dirty natural gas?

This also doesn't address the seasonal changes in supply. We're realistically talking about creating energy infrastructure (and then maintaining it) that ulaverages maybe 20% capacity.

I just feel like solar proponents like to completely ignore the very real unsolved issues because solar+batteries is tidy if you don't think too much about it.
One man's bug is another company's feature
I can understand but I'm not talking about that.

Concert are different this is not the same as being alone in a bar seating. :)
I own a road bike and an e-bike. On level ground I'm much faster on my road bike (there's a 20mph(32km/h) governor on the e-bike, and it's heavier and has much more wind resistance.

However, I can haul over 100lbs of cargo and/or kids on the back of my e-bike, and can show up to work ready to go. Given that the ride to work includes climbs, and I would need to shower, the e-bike gets me there substantially faster. If I need to pick up a kid from an afternoon activity that is downtown, I can do so on my e-bike (I live about 13km from downtown, which my teenagers can do, but is a rather long ride for my younger kids to do).
Interesting, never even thought of them, and I have a few super cheap VPS' with them for years now.

Thanks!
Won't happen because of the way commercial real estate has been financed.

An empty storefront is considered "rented, but temporarily empty, and can tack the lost rent onto the end of the mortgage". A storefront with a lower rent is considered "cost basis has changed and the mortgage holder can demand cash from you".

You can't put a barbershop into that slot as the barbershop will never meet the rent.

I was seeing a lot of empty storefronts in mixed-residential builds that hadn't been rented for years even before Covid. Covid is just going to supercharge that.
What’s the difference between “fraud” and “squander my money on bullshit”?

Ponzu schemes are a crime… are you against that regulation?
The the majority of nations with the highest living standards, least inequality, highest safety are in Europe.

Those are in my personal opinion much better things to strive for than having the largest corporations and military, which I find to be more harmful than useful.

There are other things to admire about the US though, like their creativity and scientific excellence.
Sorry Millennials, Boomers Are Most Important Group for Market
My observation is that there are very little need to understand about market, you only need to know the basic where a young child could understand as lead time and basic cost.

There is a whole lot to understand but possibly never be able to fully understand about human nature.

The market, after all is just a sum of all human behaviours.

Economics is the same, human are highly irrational.

So viewing the whole thing from a rational perspective will make you feel like the market is really dumb. But if you look at it from a human perspective, in the seat of those managing their company from Fear, Greed, Risk and Security everything makes lot of sense.
I think this is just a meme sold to CEOs for a long time. Maybe we can go further back.
I've got about 500 miles on my Diverge (and the Pathfinders) the tires ride great.

- Good on the road, even cornering is decent which was unexpected with light tread.

- Great on gravel: flat, uphill, downhill, and cornering

- Decent on single track

I think maybe they get a bad rap because they are on the heavy side for the price?
When the time comes for new tires not sure if I will get another pair or try out something different.
Hence "in general" :-) Snow caves are probably more practical than igloos for a night or two but can still involve a fair bit of physical work and hence getting sweaty. Don't really disagree that snow caves can sometimes be fairly practical in the winter in the right snow conditions.
The Peril of Politicizing Science
>And further, Europe is more protectionist than the US is and that has always been the case throughout all of US economic history. It will always be the case, due to the extreme nationalism that will always exist in Europe and the nationalist forever-conflicts between nations there which also will never cease.

European Union started from "European Coal and Steel Community" which was basically a cartel. Calling anything free trade in relation to EU is ridiculous.
You also have the theoretical perfect tire vs the actual best for the rider - the more comfortable tire may be better overall as it allows the rider to perform better and for longer.
You should read Paul Graham's best essay[1] then. It is not the only possible definition of wealth, but I think it is a very well worded definition, that really helps give a sense of what wealth really is.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
I use fd and ripgrep 90% of the time before I need return to find/grep these days.
Just what I've been looking for! Thanks for making this. I'd love to see someone build a "new" userland with all the old gnu tools replaced where there's a good modern alternative.
Hah. There's always a chance to tackle Latin and Greek again.
The man who tried to translate the nonsensical 'Lorem ipsum' summarised his efforts here: https://antigonejournal.com/2021/06/pitfalls-latin-translati...
>has an encrypted drive that they forgot the password for

This scenario is indistinguishable from just simply having a chunk of random data in your possession. Let's say you decide to use shred to delete some file, any file. If you become the target of an investigation and they find a deleted file and the blocks haven't been overwritten since you ran shred they could claim that this file was an encrypted archive and jail you for 5 years for not being able to "unlock" it.