skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am grossly unqualified to answer with any a amount of expertise. That said, I think there are a few things that contribute to or magnify depression and anxiety in rich countries:

Diet and exercise: In the United States at least, we have an abundance of cheap, poor nutrition food. It’s easier to get, and easier to prepare than an appropriately nutritious meal. I’ve been shocked at the effect regular exercise and nutrition have had on my own anxiety and depression. The poor in the country have less time and opportunity to eat well and exercise, and the stress compounds generationally.

Cultural expectations and consumerism:
Again, in the United States we’ve sold ourselves a vision called “The American Dream” which usually is constructed of home ownership, personal property, and enough money to have both free time and own what you want.

This is an increasingly difficult thing for the poor to obtain as property prices increase, wages are (relatively) stagnant, and consumer debt is easy. For the rich, it turns out that money didn’t buy happiness and while your things will fulfill for a little while, that is fleeting.

Sense of purpose:
There is a prevailing idea that if someone needs are provided for, they will contribute nothing otherwise- they’ll “be lazy”. I think This is untrue, and the reality is that people need a sense of purpose. I think most people want to work, but desperately want to feel like that work is meaningful. For many people, the work they have to do doesn’t feel meaningful, and therefore does not fulfill them.

I have a graphic I found somewhere called “Happiness Chemicals and how to get them” which outlines 4 types of chemicals our brain needs (Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins) and it reminds me that we all need to have meaningful work, have community, take breaks, and feel secure.
The article gives a good actual explanation:

Instead, volatility in demand for construction has trained builders to curb investment. “The industry has learned through bitter experience to prepare for the next recession,” says Luc Luyten of Bain & Company, a consultancy. Capital-heavy approaches to construction bring high fixed costs that are difficult to cut in downturns. Workers, in contrast, can be fired.

One of the factors of construction is "it costs what it costs". Builders are willing and able to pass costs on to consumers and so don't have an incentive for cost savings.
I think what OP did was taking it a bit far but xacros definitely have their place in C. Most notably they are extremely useful for instantiating hardware interfaces that often come with large amounts of boilerplate.

I've also found use in them in combination with `_Generic` for implementing generic containers/data structures. Of course I don't use these all the time by any means but if I'm going to be using a complex data structure I might as well just use an xacro to do a glorified copy-paste for the structs and accessors. It's all type safe, doesn't make the code any less readable IMHO, and it's surprisingly very debugger friendly.

The xacros used for this are all together only about 10 lines of code but they've saved me countless hours of work/headache over the years and I've never once seen them blow up in a way that isn't immediately diagnosable and fixable.

I understand that macros are by no means to be used everywhere but I do find that macros/xacros provide an incredible amount of utility when putting together "library" or "HAL" code where there's a well defined interface but the internals can largely be hidden from the user/developer.

Of course I'd generally just prefer to use C++ but when that's not an option or would add undue friction, I find macros/xacros to be a useful tool for a developer.
@pblithier8, maybe this could be a feature for your much-loved Refined HN browser extension!

PS: Mihir is also our first engineering intern at Pabio! :D
But then your code can't be used by anyone without your preprocessor. There is a lot of value in plain C metaprogramming because it can be compiled with an ordinary C compiler.

You can, however, use a script to generate some of the preprocessor boilerplate while still having the templates configurable and instantiable with an ordinary C compiler. This is how my metaprogramming library Pottery works:

https://github.com/ludocode/pottery

It uses #include for templates rather than code block macros, something the article doesn't really go into. It's more powerful this way and the templates are far more readable; aside from the generated metaprogramming boilerplate, the templated code looks like (and preprocesses to) ordinary C.
Producing hydrogen and storing at point of use is an option but it opens up a different problem.

With regard to efficiencies you lose several bites of the apple by taking this approach.
The whole hydrogen battery chain then becomes; electrical -> stored chemical -> mechanical (via combusion) -> electrical.

I would strongly argue a gravitational battery would be more efficient (and simpler to construct) at scale for large energy storage.

i.e. electrical -> motor (pump water up into a dam) -> motor spins (via release of water from dam) -> electrical
(or bricks if a dam can't be built efficiently)

And with the latter you need a hydrogen burning plant with variable capacity which is designed to be largely on standby throughout its serviceable life.

I'm not arguing against hydrogen cars, or hydrogen gas home heaters (the latter being great, thermal -> thermal for water heating is better than electrical -> thermal). I just don't see it playing a major industrial component of energy storage due to these shortcomings.
He has a whole video series detailing each week on YouTube

https://youtu.be/vmM75fYviLY
Perhaps. Although I do think it’s interesting that we’re now saying things like “framers get hurt all the time” and not things like “framers get killed all the time”, which would have been much more common in ages past.
That's a lot of words for "it's conjecture"
Well Boston Market's food selection is basically American Thanksgiving and Christmas food year round. You can go in and order Turkey or Ham, with sides like mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potatoes, vegetable casseroles, etc. Honey Baked ham is a company that does the same thing, it's big for prepared take out meals for the holidays.

So no, standard families in the suburbs may be making their own meals, but there are certainly many people in the US that aren't in that situation. Young people away from home, singles and couples, non traditional families, families that don't have time to cook because of jobs or don't want to. There are many people who get holiday meals from these restaurants.
Now we have electricians charging as much as software agencies.

HVAC installation costs as much as a car in warmer regions.

General handyman work outclasses all retail jobs, but you don't hear about people with two bachelors doing that type of work like you do at a Starbucks.
The article says that companies are avoiding capital-intensive building techniques to avoid getting burned in a recession. Labor costs are faster to reduce.
100% agree that 40% or even more now can’t effectively deal with information, nor can think critically for themselves. It’s so politicized that you are either camp A or B (liberal or conservative). One side being ‘vaccine is the only way’ and the other is ‘vaccine unsafe, other drugs are safe’. There seems to be very little people in the middle who can say ‘vaccines are generally safe but we don’t know the long term side effects so we must look at alternatives now for those that choose not to take it or cannot take it for medical reasons’. Also it’s important for people to assess their own risk profile to make the decisions for themselves (if they decide not to take it).
The saving habits of millionaires generate debt for 90% of the population: Study
Other companies, including where I work, are able to lock employees to teams by requiring manager approval to interview and move internally.

I would be very surprised if this isn’t a common occurrence throughout many organizations.
Is there any effective remedy to this? Would be interested to hear your opinion (which sounds like it’s as lot closer to the action than mine is).
Great article! I think I learned something new in every paragraph.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20352252 (158 points | July 4, 2019 | 28 comments)

But note that it just generate special cases of a well known formula. More details in "The Ramanujan Machine is all hype" https://www.galoisrepresentations.com/2019/07/17/the-ramanuj... (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26144665 (40 points | 4 months ago | 16 comments))
beautiful but it’s the other way around. when you look at your kid(s) you realize that you are in fact immortal (your genes not you per se but it’s pretty close).
This is a great article - I really appreciate when people take the time to assemble details from a bunch of different sources (Firecracker paper, re:Invent talks) and turn them into a useful overview like this.

Clearly Bruno got a lot of the details right, Jeff Barr tweeted a link to this a few weeks ago: https://twitter.com/jeffbarr/status/1404512248152825857
Easy to drop those allergy and autism rates to 0 if you don't vaccinate. And before you reflexively hit the downvote button, go look up autism and allergy rates in countries that don't vaccinate. Meanwhile general nutrition and sanitation has done more to eliminate disease than vaccination ever did.
Being poor absolutely fucks up being able to live, so I'd rather have a meaningful career if I had the choice versus being look at unfavorably compared to an automaton in other fields.
I seriously doubt every employee every day fears that day will be their last, if they do, they need a new job ASAP. It’s not proactive disclosure, that’s all. They’re still allowed to be told they’re doing a great job. Or a bad job.

I can see it both ways to be honest and appreciate your thoughts.
The primary reason the cost for init7 is so low is that for example in Zürich city the fiber network is owned by the city (like water pipes and power lines) and paid for by the tax payer. Any provider can provide their service over it.

Places outside the city that don't have these kinds of fiber connections aren't this lucky.
Metaporgramming is a technique that can be used for program synthesis, but it is not the same as program synthesis. In program synthesis you generate a program from a specification that can be more or less complete, for instance it can be an entire program written in some formal language, or it can be a set of input-output examples of the target program etc. Synthesisers typically search a space of programs (a set of strings in the target language) for a program that satisfies the specification.

I think what you describe is the task of putting together parts of a program according to a configuration. That's a related task and you could certainly see it as a kind of program synthesis, but because it's a common task that we know how to do well, it's not really what program synthesis research is focused on.

Some programming languages are definitely better suited to program synthesis than others. That's particularly the case with languages that have little of what I'd call "ceremony", syntax that's not really necessary to express the behaviour of a program, but are there to help the programmer organise the code, such as classes, maybe, or interfaces, say.

I don't know that metaprogramming was a dead end in AI. I hear that a lot for many subjects of AI research that are still active. I mean, if you asked machine learning researchers ten years ago about neural networks they'd tell you "it's a dead end", or "we tried that and it didn't work" etc. So, unless you're very knowledgeable about a subject of AI research my suggestion is to be cautious when extracting conclusions from a perfunctory perusal of wikipedia or blog posts etc. That's not where most of the knowledge is stored for such deep subjects as AI research.
The article does state that it’s especially bad in America, far worse than in Germany:

> Construction holds the dubious honour of having the lowest productivity gains of any industry, according to McKinsey, a consultancy. In the past 20 years the global average for the value-added per hour has inched up by 1% a year, about one-quarter the rate of growth in manufacturing. Trends in rich countries are especially bad. Over the same period Germany and Japan, paragons of industrial efficiency, have seen nearly no growth in construction productivity. In France and Italy productivity has fallen by one-sixth. In America, astonishingly, it has plunged by half since the late 1960s.
Wow, learned a lot from this post. I had a generic 80 column and Z80 card and never knew about all the Microsoft involvement in the Z80 stuff. I did always prefer the 6502 but being able to run Turbo Pascal and WordStar on my Apple ][ was a nice addition.
I think that’s maybe more due to the medical system though. Here, no one ties off and no scaffolding is used. I know someone personally who almost died not long ago. My father used to do commercial roofing and fell 30ft once as well.
I think we as readers of articles in journals could omit linking to them. We could go a step further and omit anything with a paywall from submission.
Is there a building industry equivalent of build the machine that builds the houses?

You can be a massively skilled electronic engineer, but you don't need to hand solder every board to have a great, skilled, outcome. I guess the answer is all the machinery we employ for larger buildings, but there's no real equivalent for the individual suburban home which still involves most of the manual labor.
something I learned recently is that you can use a lot of slack integrations directly with discord: https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook#execut...
Do you think most introverts are “getting to know and appreciate themselves on their own terms”? I don’t think most people are introspective while alone - not even most introverts.
Do you have data that links these two or are you speculating?
Google-Leased Office Building in Mountain View Trades Hands for $282.6MM
Valve has been using deep learning detection to analyze replays for years. Based on behaviors like reaction times and shooting precision they can flag suspicious cases. They are completely wrong thinking it is undetectable.
The article makes a few assumptions I disagree with - one of which is that the projects they list being over-time and over-budget are because of builder productivity rather than the primary contractors over-promising to win a large contract.

In addition, value added per hour can be a sign of productivity loss, but is also impacted by shrinking margins (which they note is the case - but shrinking margins has nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with competition).

Also the article says "Many building professionals use hand-drawn plans riddled with errors" - Hand-drawn plans? This isn't my experience in the UK (I design warehouses and have worked with lots of primary contractors). CAD here is pervasive, and anyone with a hand drawn plan would be laughed out of the room (unless you were literally a builder doing a quick sketch - in which case CAD isn't a replacement).

And the article then recommends... self driving bulldozers as one part of the solution? This is so far away from being safe on a worksite that it's nowhere near an immediate concern.
I'm also not convinced paper straws are going to be a sufficient replacement.
My friend is a plumber - it is hard work, smelly and dirty but does he charge $$$.
Anecdotal, but when our local government does a project, they only look at the price tag. If they can afford it, it gets approved.

Building something is very labor intensive (the way we do it here in the US; the article talks about China and other ways of building) and the actual proposed budgets should be higher and timelines longer based on how we build.

But in order to win a contract, the builder must lie and say "we can do it for this much and in this time frame," which tends to be lower than what we can actually realize.
noooo. you think? /s

everything tesla seems to be a PR gimmick. between lying for years about the car capabilities, hiding behing the fine print, terrible build quality and really bad service (god help you if you need it) I will probably never own a Tesla again.
Looks like they're a few years out of date. It hit 123 in PS a few weeks ago
>There is one on ebay right now for $230 USD shipped.

Ah, yeah, that's a better deal with the 2x onboard 10Gbe.
There’s one channel on yt that I watch a lot. The fellow builds houses, and his ability to reach down and do useful work four inches below his toes amazes me.
It's sad that even in over the ear wireless headphones the batteries are not easily replaceable. Is it too much to ask for a few discreetly hidden screws that allow the user to open the headphones up without destroying them? If that were possible, replacing a battery would take less than 10 minutes.

The same way that many good wired headphones allow you to replace the cables and earpads. That makes them last for decades as long as spare parts are available.

Now with wireless headphones when the battery dies you're SOL. You better pony up for a new pair even though the failed part costs ~$5 and could be replaced easily with good design and part availability.
Yea haha I was going to remind folks of that too. Elon was building a submarine that everyone involved told him was a terrible idea and to please leave them alone because he was hampering the effort, and Elon responded by calling one of the lead rescuers a “pedo guy” and got sued over it.

I believe his defense was that “pedo guy” was a common insult in South Africa.

Simpler times haha.
Most of the time it was an escape. That's why it felt genuine, and not like a pretext for cheesy father-son bonding time, on the occasions when he would invite me to participate. Part of it was riding along to go pick up a tool from Craigslist, but another part of it was him being in the shop for much longer than my attention span, being a craftsman, getting things done, while I understood that this is the kind of person he is, and I aspired to be the same kind of person in my own way on the computer upstairs.
Interesting that it's a Jewish university in Israel that has developed this method for [apparently] making transplanted pig organs not be rejected by the human body.

I wonder what Judaism has to say about having pork transplants?
two weeks later ???.
Destructor, copy constructor and assignment operator!
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-10912578
1. Hacker News
2. Reddit
3. Slashdot
4. Facebook (friends and family)
5. YouTube
Construction is an incredibly unstable source of income, its very feast or famine in nature. Software for example hasn't been since the dot com bubble burst
Ah, the Tucker defence!
Oh, I think I can explain this pretty easily... most construction companies aren't competitive. Construction and real-estate are two markets that are from top-to-bottom, inside-out, soaked in cronyism. I'd wager most multi-million dollar plus construction companies simply know the right people to get the contracts and as a result never effectively "bid" on a single fucking thing. Why then, if there is no real competition, would you ever increase productivity? Short answer, you wouldn't. Being more productive would require increasing the rate at which you use capital (i.e. you spend more) witout any accompanying increase in gross profits. shrug
And yet college degree attainment hovers around 33% and those who do get one earn an average of $1m more over their life time than those who don’t. There’s something else going on here.
They might be speculating, but it’s pretty reasonable. There’s been a massive uptick in college attendance and presumably a lot of those attendees would have been headed for the trades in the 60s before the “[almost] everyone should go to college” push.
Clicky: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/german-noun-gender...

Why is it an extension and not just a web page?

Why green-grey-blue instead of pink-grey-blue? [Hi from Argentina! The color selection may dependent too much of the culture.]

About the logo: It's strange that it has no third symbol for "das".
I am not using 0.1% of all the energy on the planet.

Bitcoin is.
Seriously ???.
7-11 were great for the 5 minutes their CEO actually cared about making customers happy and brought in innovations that literally forced nearly every other convenience store to consolidate into a mega chain into order to stay in business:

- aggressive expansion of corporate-owned stores

- very clean and modern toilets with a “free to use” policy

- vertical integration: nearly every product became 7-11 branded.

- better quality of food in general, especially hot items

- fresh coffee, brewed to order

Of course, they fired that guy for a penny pincher and the quality took a dramatic nosedive to the point that shitty 7-11 products are a meme now. Things like bentos with a bottom that curves upwards to make it look like there is more product than there really is, sandwiches with filling only in side the visible from the shelf, shrinking onigiri, or “strawberry pulp” that is literally a picture of strawberry pulp printed onto the cup.

Nearly all of the other brands consolidated into Famima, and now Famima is competing on quality to take advantage of the situation. It was amazing how quickly they got their act together when they realized what was going on at 7.
Which ISP are you with?
The most surprising details was [1] from init7.

>Compatibility requirements
There is no obligation on you to procure the hardware through us, and the hardware shown here is not the only possible hardware for you to use. There are also other compatible products, as long as the requisite «bi-di» fibre optic technology conforms to the following specifications (recommended: Flexoptix, more router information):

No Modem / ONT. Just a Router with compatible SFP optic. I wish more ISP do that. And not force me to use your crappy ONT or Wifi Router. They could of course go another router and provide actual decent ONT or WiFi Router. But the chance of happening, or they care about quality is slim.

[1] https://www.init7.net/en/internet/hardware/
This. My dad is a contractor. I’ve been taking some time off SWE work to try to learn some of what he knows while he can still do it. It is just hard on my body, half the days I wake up with the wrong kind of pain. Hanging drywall, digging post holes, sanding, painting, laying tile, etc. So much of the work is an ergonomic nightmare.

I think it’s not as bad in single family construction as commercial work, since the activity varies more over the day/week. But still, I can’t imagine my body not breaking if I did this for a career.

OTOH electrical work seems mostly reasonable. If one of my kids wanted to get into a trade that’s where I’d steer them.
I think part of this is because skilled trades are often more physically taxing than "traditional" college degree desk jobs.

I'm inclined towards the skilled trade side of things because I like getting my hands dirty but I understand why people wouldn't want to do a job that has you in a shop or working out in the heat, cold, or rain on a regular basis. Not to mention I imagine the injury and/or casualty rate is much higher for many trades compared to desk jobs.

TLDR: We obviously need both and they are equally good fields but I completely understand the perceived higher valuation for the safer, less physically taxing albeit often more boring and sedimentary jobs.
Many Islamic scholars say it is haram(forbidden).
That's a very low effort, and low quality comment. I'm sorry that I had to read it.

When I post in conversations like this I do it in the hope that my comments will invite robust debate from knowledgeable contributors, that will challenge my assumptions and my knowledge and help me refine my understanding of the subjects I am interested in. This comment is really so much not that, that it hurts.