skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Birds Use Quantum Mechanics to See Magnetic Fields
Wow. Thanks for this link! This article is the real gem of this thread. Even if you just skimmed the original article, go read this one. It's the meat of the matter.

My only disappointment, is that Michael Young offers no solution in this particular treatise. Did he do so elsewhere?
where is the "archive" link?!
The airlines were given billions of dollars to keep staff employed, they took the money, and as soon as they could, got rid of the staff anyway. Then used the money to buy back their own stock, to raise its price.

Color me shocked, simply shocked that short sighted management backfired.
The article sounds like it wants to criticize "meritocracy", but it really just ends up criticizing the measures of merit that someone (strawman?) apparently has? If it were really critical of "meritocracy" it would be advocating for random lotteries for jobs, or promotions, or whatever. But nobody wants that, not even radical "anti-meritocrats." All they seem to actually want is a different measure of merit, but then what's the trade-off? We'll get a different elite and a different underclass? I don't see the point. It would be different, of course, if this guy were arguing that, for example, by using a different measure of merit, a business could improve its performance, or we could get better doctors, or our software wouldn't have so many bugs. But I didn't catch anything that suggested the author has anything at all like this in mind..
Interesting, I've written stuff very much like that before for customers that were hitting bugs. I wasn't trying to be "aw shucks" funny. I legitimately feel sorry that my shitty software was breaking on them. That they provided a workaround seemed like a nice thing to me. In fact that whole message seemed pretty good to me. It's probably not entirely that employee's fault but they're still trying to empathize and help.

I wonder how many people have felt the same way about me.
>> Access to learning, especially in the form of education, is quite unequally distributed in this country.

I don't think this is true. Access to credentials is not equally distributed, but access to knowledge and information is probably one of the most equally distributed assets we have.
In your own words:

> The problem is that people entangle their sense of identity with their opinions.

When two ethical principles are in conflict, one has to take an even harder look at the formal ethics to either choose between the principles or to synthesize a newer, more informed principle.

Typically something like that ends up in the court of law, but academic philosophy and scientific ethics researchers often contribute meaningful avenues of avoiding the need for the application of justice to redress harms by providing legislatures with more clear ethical principles upon which to build their legal frameworks for justice.
> Having 2-3 gifted students who can explain basic concepts to the "average" kids and help them with assignments takes a significant load off the teachers back

Calling @treis who claimed[0] 4 days ago that "Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job". Well, here ya go.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27563940
Also the similar problem like with other alternatives - no mobile apps.
Google? You have to specify what you are looking for in a search engine, otherwise people can't help you.
Who cares?

The point of meritocracy is to select people who can solve problems and make the world better. It's not to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy.

To put it another way, if rich people raise their children to be more capable of making the world better then why is that a problem? Let's say Einstein was only a genius because his parents bought a nice house with no lead paint. Who cares? Why does that matter? What matters is the work he did.

Now, if you want to pass a law that says "no more houses with lead paint" that's lovely. But it has nothing to do with meritocracy.
I do agree that focus on genitalia is generally unnecessary and unwelcome. In this case though we are discussing trans-women fearing people with penises raping them in men's prisons, and cis-women fearing people with penises raping them in women's prisons.

In this context, if a trans-woman doesn't have a penis then this fear is unfounded and they should be housed with cis-women. If a trans-woman does have a penis, then I think this fear is reasonable (after all, that is what trans-women are escaping when they leave men's prisons). Basically, this is one of the few cases where discussing genitalia is relevant.
This lost credibility as soon as it cited Einstein as an example of one of these "lone geniuses". He was anything but. He wasn't lone, and he wasn't a genius.

He happened to be born at a time and place in history when physics was rapidly going through change anyway. He was a correspondent of Caratheodory, whose mathematical work was essential for the development of general relativity. He was nearly beaten to the punch by Hilbert.

Einstein was smart, but lots of people in the world are smart without being called "lone geniuses".
The block concept doesn't cleanly carry over to services. Bugging Notion for exports, brings them here:

Step 2: Import blocks to {Some other cloud service}

Which just isn't realistic. Having step 1 changes nothing.
But that's anti-capitalist.
Indeed, it was only a couple days until an example popped up right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27586576
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome (also exists for firefox)
The Lego colored thumb is still an option.
Stop Using Actions in Vuex
This kind of subjectivism is so lacking in nuance, though, that the good parts that one is seeing (and, in many ways, choosing to see) are a mere reduction of the whole truth, and isn’t the whole truth of a person

So a serial killer is a good person just because he’s a nice neighbor to you? If you’re hanging out with a friend in your inner circle of elites and that friend is nice to you but is very rude to waiters and other blue-collar workers, is that friend a good person?

I’m not making a judgment of McAfee’s character here, just pointing out the myopic sense of morality. It’s so popular, too popular if I must say, among people these days.
NASCAR warmups trials, except for drones.. humans are dangerous, and proud of it
it's disrespectful to respond like that, to me. infantilizing; like I'm incapable of processing a response that is genuine.

"uwu we'we sowwy dis isn't wewking anymowe.. pwease don't be angwy wiff us"
I’m not really sure what to tell you - you don’t see the problem my example highlights? Lol. How would you feel if people with merit actively prohibited those without from improving? Still don’t care?

You’re right though, meritocracy wouldn’t be a problem if merit existed only to objectively improve the world.

Is that true?
I dunno -- if you work on software you get used to the fact that there's always something that could be better, something that could be fixed. Something that could have a smoother user experience. This is just part and parcel of the nature of the medium. Given that they likely didn't realize this was a high priority feature until the pile-on here, and given that they're likely to re-prioritize this item to the top of that long backlog... do they really owe compensation for just having a backlog?

I mean -- I kind of feel like if you're going to store your core business information in software, you're just going to have to deal with the fact that software has bugs. It's the nature of the beast. So, is it really something they owe compensation for?

Probably they owe a bugfix, that I grant you, but compensation? I mean I guess if there was an explicit contract for the feature that tied compensation to it I could see a good argument that they owe compensation. But do they owe compensation to the good people of Hacker News who are suddenly talking about DDOS-ing the feature? That seems like a much harder case to make.
Off topic, but I was very surprised to learn how faithful the HBO series was to Wright’s book that I went one level deeper and read Nathaniel Fick’s book, “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer”. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Fick’s description of events fit pretty well with Generation Kill. You don’t see that very often.
Truth in this case is unknowable because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And what we have after more than a year of people wondering about this idea is just absence of evidence.
Has anything changed in the last 10 or 20 years?

Yes. We as a society have become dramatically more accepting of gay and trans people.

Gay marriage is a reasonable proxy. Back in 2008, and even a relatively liberal state like California passed a proposition to ban gay marriage. Today popular opinion supports gay marriage. Not just popular opinion in California, or nationwide, but even popular opinion nationwide AMONG REPUBLICANS.

This is why the parents that I know today with children identifying as trans are figuring out how to best support and help their children. The parents of trans people that I knew a few years back wound up becoming homeless as teenagers because of the reactions of their parents. A typical such reaction having been, "You are murdering my son!"
Thank you. It's indeed a "tiny language", a foreign dialect of lambda-calculus made easy, a dwarf installed on top of shoulders of giants, the modern web browsers, taking benefit from the powerful web technologies they bring for free and from the huge eco-system at their fingertips.

About scope, the point is that there is "no scope", functions are like combinators, isolated in a global context where everything is defined, constants, primitives and user defined functions. You might see http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=closure and http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=lambda

About readability it's a matter of choice, 1D as in a book or 2D as in spreadsheet, who knows, and you might find more readable this one http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=fromroots2canopy.
> they told me I needed to withdraw my cash to zero (with limits that would have taken months)...

I think that some state or federal banking regulators might have expressed displeasure if you had informed them of that policy.
How long till apple pulls this down with trademark claim? Should be roughly instant.
yeah during my worse abuses of coffee i was pushing my limits in 5-6 and regretting it purely from a "sick feeling".

I don't have any issues sleeping no matter how much coffee I drink. but "stomaching it" is a different matter entirely.
My IBS looks at this and thinks "No shit, Sherlock! Actually is gonna be tons of shit after this".

Stepping aside myself trying to make a Brazilian's joke in English, a single cup of coffee (around 80mg-120mg) really give me cramps and sometimes diarrhea.
There are lots of weird and unreasonable people in the world who are not tax cheats, rapists, or murderers. Many of them are wonderful people deserving of praise. McAfee is not.
Ask HN: Next MS Windows Launch, What's Your Opinion?
It is, but maybe it helped surface a small signal that was always there but harder to identify in people who drank less, for example.
As an Aussie I appreciate the kangaroo. We still work often with 20MHz: good enough for most control applications. Not sure I'd want distributed control applications with multiple control algorithms and timing quandries, though.
It's possible to be a citizen of a country without having ever used any resources from it (it's also possible to have dual citizenship, which complicates things). Taxation isn't about retroactively collecting money for the resources you used during your childhood, it's about collecting money for the resources you're using today. Children, the unemployed, etc. are sponsored by the rest, they aren't taking a loan on their taxes.
He tweeted in preceding months and years that if found dead it wouldn't be suicide. He got "whacked" tattooed on his arm to prepare for this situation.

I don't think we can just uncritically accept that it's 100% a suicide
When I was a kid, we were told to go outside and not come back until the street lights turned on. We didn't have computers, internet, or more than 5 TV channels on our 1 family TV.

Now the media has scared everyone into keeping their kids inside 24x7... then the plague made it even worse.

How can you not expect kids to end up with all that free time being burned up in screens? Parents don't suddenly have more free time, and energy, to deal with kids than they did in the 1970s.

Many of the children in the 1st world haven't been in the same room with other children in a year. Of course it is going to be difficult transitioning to our new normal.
Those, too, can be backed up, though for a while, at least on Android, Google Authenticator could not be (unless rooted, and even then, a nontrivial undertaking). This, AFAIK, has changed.
T-10 before founder shows up here and says something like, “I’m sorry that you feel this way, I’m going to personally fix this”. That will not go well. After about, say 5/6 hours of “reflection”, “soul searching”, “meditation” - they’ll offer a better non apology. Finally a day later, “we screwed up, we broke your trust and we own it”.
You're being funny, right? -Ancient people, pfft.
15 minute checks aside, I’m pretty sure every federal prison has enough amount of cameras to keep an eye out from the local central command station…especially in 2021. Still surprised there was no evidence of this sort for Jeffery Epstein.
Except there's no global "meritocracy" where people are ranked by "true worth" in any organization, because:

1. Your measurements are noisy and biased

2. People's "true worth" would value over time, but their compensation and status doesn't always follow

3. Everyone doing the hiring has slightly different criteria

What you have is an approximate ranking which by definition cannot be a true a meritocracy, no matter how hard you try.
You attacked probably the weakest part of that entire statement.

Your claim that it's a subject for post graduate study/research might have been true at one point, but many of it's principles have been leaking into multiple levels of society, and in my opinion, to the detriment of society.

Firstly, the focus on storytelling over data that is a hallmark of CRT. This has clearly metastasized. Note the prevalence of personal narratives, and the use of personal narrative to explicitly supplant other sources of truth that's common in today's conveyances.

Then look at intersectionality. The US is literally fractured along identity lines, with people literally pulling that separation and interaction of the various subidentitites to war with one another. Look at the slow march towards "male gays are oppressors" that you see on LBGT communities AND the mainstream media [1].

How punctuality and other such professional merits are now just white people's oppression [2] and that any acceptance of such is considered internalized racism?

Reparations and separation (CHAZ, general talk) anyone? Also common themes in academic CRT.

It's pretty clear to me, building from the principles of CRT, and the common themes in their papers have punctured that academic bubble into the mainstream. We're hearing about it now because of this. I certainly don't like it.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-gay-privilege-ex...

[2] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_professionalism_...
I didn't say covid is population control, I said the media is.

And if you lived in the 15th century you'd probably be the guy ridiculing anyone who said the Earth might not be flat. How dare those crazy people!
Interesting. To me, its a strong signal that the person on the other end is not an offshored, overworked drone but someone who is treated well by the company and cares enough to express empathy.
I see the problem your example highlights. It has nothing to do with meritocracy. It has to do with social policy.

> You’re right though, meritocracy wouldn’t be a problem if merit existed only to objectively improve the world.

Merit doesn't have to be objective. All we can do is subjectiviely do our best to determine merit using whatever tools we can. If we're wrong, we're wrong (and we will often be wrong).

Being wrong is fine and inevitable. It's not an excuse to say "meritocracy is bad".
While I probably have many influences, the thoughts there are,I think, mostly my own.

While in tech i’ve been gently exploring the idea of freaking out my thoughts into something publishable.

Sometimes HN is an exercise in attempting to communicate how i think and getting feedback.
Bad Apple
The idea is that you receive the services and benefits of your US passport even when residing overseas.

Also keep in mind that you can write off any taxes paid to a foreign government so it's really just a tax on those who make lots of money in low-tax jurisdictions.
> Git + Github

You mean, you “own” copies of your data, but unless the person who controls the interface with that popular happy workflow that Everyone Already Knows How To Use lets you store it on their server, a lot of people who might otherwise be willing to collaborate with you will go “eh” and give up, and therefore, since so many marginal things require that to get anywhere, you can still just lose completely if you don't agree to the GitHub Terms of Service?

I imagine you didn't mean that part primarily, of course—but it's another thing to be aware of. There's a lot of potential for SaaSS interface lock-in—I think this is much worse for users with less technical inclination or less mental slack, but even in the realm of “people who are already developers who use Git”, this becomes a large friction source. And with more-social smaller-world flows, the coordination-control aspect has a stronger grip.

That said, it's also worth looking at how the “cloud” model is in a way reifying the folk model many users were already using. People thinking of their documents as being “in” (for instance) Word, and having no idea where they are in a filesystem or what that is in the first place, is already seared into the cultural memory of people who were family tech support in the 1990s. The default consumer cloud model is an easy extension and solidification of this: now it totally is “in” Google Docs rather than being a leakier folk-model weakening of accessing your your hard drive, and now Google Docs is accessible from anywhere. Everything is like you expect! No need to panic when your machine breaks, just get a new one and it's all still there!

And those upsides are real in their own way. But a number of downsides which are also real are less obvious and immediate.
I'm baffled by this because you're acting like not having puberty for a few years is a permanently regretful choice that can never be made by a medical professional assessing a child. If a medical professional assesses a child and determines a prescription of puberty blockers why should I give a shit?
I think you can crack down on even the appearance of corruption without paying huge salaries. I don't see why not. The two concerns seem orthogonal to me.

I think we should crack down on even the appearance of corruption in judges, prosecutors, FBI agents, etc. Does that mean we need to pay each of them so much that they are effectively unbribe-able?

Finally, it seems very strange to answer clear-in-aggregate corruption by paying the corrupt more money. I worry that if we aren't able to stem the corruption now, then giving our wealthy and corrupt rulers more money won't really help.
Not if your estate has more liabilities than assets!
Panic can happen to anyone, if you can't tell the difference between panic and a tantrum, you shouldn't be in a parental role.
The chip shortage will likely get worse before it gets better
Just a correction - my previous employer was Grape Nuts Marketing. They did a retrospective on me earlier this year: https://web.archive.org/web/20210201092129/https://kickscond...

I know this just makes things worse. But at least it could help be a decisive final blow to my reputation that you all are looking for?
> He seemed to like his dogs

We offered the McAffees a puppy shortly after they moved to TN; they came out and played with the litter for a couple hours in our front yard, and they were both very much "dog people".

Our pack wasn't aggressive, as such, but everyone found them intimidating. John was quite happy being chewed by multiple small hounds, and the rest of the pack was OK with the idea of him having a pup.

Alas, they weren't stable enough to give a good home to a dog at that time (and told us so before the pup was ready), so that puppy went elsewhere; but I was delighted to meet them both and found them decent people to spend a bit with.
Yeah I'm a millenial and I can't stand it either. Doggo, pupper, adulting, ninja/rockstar/awesome, oof, yikes, "my dude"... and don't even get me started about dressing like you're still in high school (pro-tip - unless you're are in great shape no one wants to see you in a tight fitting t-shirt).

Big reason why I'm now a "programmer in the X industry" as opposed to an "X programmer". I guess I just wasn't a "cultural fit" - yikes.
Yup. The societal shift to an “NBA-like model” has been exacerbated over the last few decades as markets have globalized. Local markets lead to redundancy, which is globally inefficient but locally optimal.

If each local region needs its own widget factory, then to become a top widgetsmith you only have to compete with the local widgetsmith talent pool. Just as there can be many high school star athletes across the world, there can be many top widgetsmiths within their local widget factories across the world, even if each is likely mediocre relative to the global pool of widgetsmiths.

Now the widget market has globalized. To become a top widgetsmith, you now need to be the best in the world. There is no room for locally optimal widgetsmiths when the market can globally optimize, just as there’s no room for most star high school athletes at the NBA.

The upside is that the entire world gets much better widgets. The downside is that you can only make a good living as a widgetsmith if you’re the absolute best in the world.
Nowadays people put the politics and social sensitivities first, unfortunately even HN crowd which should be way more objective than your average twitter warriors. Unproven accusations against a dead man who can no longer defend himself suddenly become facts.
A few things come to mind, all under the theme of "lighting a fire under their ass".

First, I'd contact your state attorney general's office. See this link to usa.gov for a contact database: https://www.usa.gov/state-attorney-general || https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/

Next, contact your representative in the House and both your Senators: https://www.house.gov/representatives && https://www.senate.gov/states/statesmap.htm

Then I'd reach out to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) with a formal complaint: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov

Filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau might prompt some movement, even though AFAIK they have no real power over anything, but reputation damage may be threat enough to get them to play ball: https://www.bbb.org/file-a-complaint

And for "the big one": reach out to journalists in the tech industry. Posting here at HN is a good first step, but I'd tell every tech journalist who's got ears (or eyes) what's going on and see how many of them pick it up. Hopefully enough to cause some real damage (because, sadly, they've made it clear that's what it'll take to get them to stop holding you hostage).

Finally, contacting an attorney for at least an initial consult can't hurt. See americanbar.org for a list of attorneys admitted to the bar for your state: https://www.americanbar.org/directories/bar-associations/

I don't envy you, and I'll very likely never use Notion now that I've heard about this. How can anyone trust them when they literally hold their own customers hostage, ally the while lying about why they're doing it?