skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is Eric Weinstein a Crackpot?
it's a private platform, he's free to go to any other platform, are you dense?
private platforms dont have 'free speech' you moron
This is the key comment. The article hardly stresses this point. The company is a vital contributor to Saudi finances.
> in a country which has a 99.4% conviction rate.

Brutal. Either they're really good at building the necessary evidence or they're just ruthless when it comes to criminal justice. Based on the other comments in this thread, it seems the latter. It's interesting to me how a society that prides itself on honor can act so dishonorably when it comes to human rights. This applies to their work ethics as well. They have the most fascinating culture in my opinion, but the warts are really ugly
Better performance for pirates: Crack removes stutters from Capcom PC game
Nearly all volume controls suck because by and large the software world is ignorant of the fact that loudness scales logarithmically. 99.9% of volume controls scale the output linearly.
>"Japan's conviction rate is above 99%."

Although this figure is is regularly sited in the context of Ghosn's decision to flee the country this statistic is misleading since in Japan this figure counts cases where the defendant pleads guilty. So this 99% figure applies to all prosecuted cases not just contested cases. If the US were to use the same calculation the conviction rate would be about the same. I believe it was Ghosn's team who first referenced this statistic in the wake of his escape and it was something of a stroke of PR genius as it seems to find its way into nearly all coverage of Ghosn's escape. And these references are seemingly always without a comparative context. The following is a good read on this statistic:

https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/carlos-ghosn-and-japans-99-c...
> and he's "progressive"

I know comments like this are frowned upon on HN, but I must:

lol

I get what you're saying, and I agree with your points. This bit just got me. The Khashoggi murder alone tells us all we need to know about MBS.
I don’t believe that is controversial. Most western governments that have cared to look into it have concluded that he was behind the Khashoggi murder. And what can you call a de-facto head of state who orders a journalist murdered in another country for writing unflattering articles, if not a horrible person?
Car manufacturers are easily the winners here. If your car’s audio system doesn’t have a simple knob you can grab and twist, well, that just sucks.
There seems to be no target beyond the amount of carbon to capture. Are they targeting for $ per tonne removal. Efficiency of removal? Climeworks already has technology that has removed more than 1000 tonnes of Carbon from atmosphere(0). Can we just give them the price? The trouble is cost. Climeworks estimates that at scale their tech would cost $500 - $600 per hour. Looks like this is still high and the current wisdom is that we need to bring it down to $100 per tonne from atmosphere. Also I think removing directly from power plant exhaust is probably a better approach that trying to shoot for a technology that sequesters from atmosphere.

(0) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-busin...
> i presented a detailed financial projection (using monte carlo on the assumptions/inputs) .. went over the head of the controller (and acting cfo at the time). boy was i disillusioned after that.

In my experience, it is hard to find people in the finance department who understand there are other distributions than Normal. E.g., the time I had to spend trying to convince finance people that the product of two Normals is not necessarily Normal. Or, percentiles of the sum of two Normals do not correspond to the sum of the percentiles etc.

Yet, they do end up guiding the company because money drives everything.
Ya exactly. What is his response to them being in jail instead of him? What a horrible thing to do to someone.
The Rick Astley one resonated with me. I recently moved countries and now a lot of websites I frequent switched automatically to the new country; which is really annoying.
> Saudi Arabia now has no alternative but to continue to sell off assets (the equivalent of selling the family silver, and this can only be done once), sell more bonds (taking on more debt and the interest on this form of Saudi debt is going up with every such sale), and cancel projects (which are crucial to the long-term success of Aramco)

The article starts off with an especially history-ignorant premise. Of course Saudi Arabia has an alternative. The Middle East has a long history of nationalization as it pertains to oil resources.

This is the House of Saud we're talking about. MBS is unwilling to nationalize the small private ownership of Aramco? Ha I say. I say, ha ha. Double ha. Ha ha ha ha. It's almost guaranteed that at some point in the future Saudi Arabia will re-nationalize Aramco in one manner or another.

You see, Saudi Arabia is in a demographic death spiral. Not due to de-population as in some countries, rather, the exact opposite problem. Their population is exploding higher, without an economy to match. The single most important number as it pertains to Saudi Arabia, is barrels of oil produced per capita (however you want to formulate that, whether daily or annually). That overwhelmingly determines the standard of living of the people of Saudi Arabia, and ultimately dictates the stability of the House of Saud. So how is that number looking? In 1980 Saudi oil production was up near 10m barrels per day, with a population of 9.7 million - so almost one person per barrel of oil per day. A remarkable ratio for sure. Circa year 2000 oil production was 9.x million barrels per day, with a population then up to 20.7 million, so by that point it's down to less than half a barrel of oil per day per person; a halving in 20 years. During the pandemic time frame (ie another 20 years later)? 8 to 9 million barrels per day, and now their population is up to 35 million, so now it's down to ~1/4 of a barrel of oil produced per day per person, another halving in roughly 20 years. (Even if you pop that up to 10m barrels per day again in the next few years, their population is heading to 40m regardless, so 1/4 one way or another.)

Implosion. It's very obvious what's going to happen to Saudi Arabia.

They're adding 500k-700k people per year, with no economy to support any of those people. For the average citizen of Saudi Arabia, every person added to the population tally reduces the standard of living of the rest. At this point every ten years they're adding a population equal to 2/3 of where they were at in 1980, with zero additional oil production to match.

Chaos and violent instability is coming for Saudi Arabia, you can bet Aramco is eventually getting nationalized again, whatever the reputation consequences.
I'm someone who was very active making flash games from 2006-2009 and who ran a 3rd party aggregation site for flash content. The people who I mostly noticed working on these projects were young and experimenting with pirated copies of flash. It was a community that popped up spontaneously. As far as I've seen, there won't be a resurgence. The next generation will have their own creative communities spontaneously explode and then disappear.
My pet theory is that software never ends and thus we don’t get closure. Which then exacerbates the feelings of burnout.
No. It's impossible. There was no outbreak in Osaka. A disease as virulent as Covid with only a single person infected is not likely at all.
> Unpredictable command times. I never know if running brew install or brew upgrade is going to take 5 seconds or 20 minutes. This usually means knowing if a program or dependency is being downloaded as a prebuilt binary or compiled on the spot.

Wait, does Nix solve this? And how? The author never mentions how Nix does.

I've never encountered a package manager with this capability, so just curious how such a "global progress bar" even gets implemented.
This is only true if you are a software company that makes money selling or servicing software. I work at a mega bank and we produce tons of software. It’s still a cost center, a means to an end.

The only distinction I see is that software developers want to believe they are somehow more special than everybody else.
Definitely a bit of a crackpot, but nothing like the people he's up against.
This article seems to be a regurgitation of a thread from
Reddit.
There was also the kidnapping and shakedown of Prince Alwaleed who used to be a familiar face in the news but disappeared for several years after the alleged kidnapping.

From what I pieced together on Wikipedia it seems like a number of Saudi princes were kidnapped a few years back and forced to pay billions but I don't know all the details or what happened exactly.

The company is mostly owned by the Saudi government but I guess that means, really, the Crown Prince and it seems he's very active in management despite not being on the board or listed as an executive.
> just fix HTTP

Oh yes, changing HTTP is so easy.
> Why would otherwise chaste people shout "FUCK!!" when they stub their toe?

Because in a moment of pain, people are emotional and inarticulate. Obviously.

Vulgarity serves many purposes, but the fact that the words can be used almost anywhere, in almost any grammatical form, makes them substitutes for the more specific expressions that they replace. "Vulgarity is often just a verbal tic for the inarticulate." (Emphasis added)

> Vulgarity is the strongest possible choice when evaluating one's choice of words for emotional impact.

It really isn't. And again, often the emotional impact you elicit is not the one you are looking for.

> I don't know what makes otherwise intelligent folk so damn afraid of them but that is not a part of the world I understand.

So, the thing is, I'm on your side on this. Magic words are stupid. But that isn't what this discussion is about. Yes some people have major visceral reactions against the magic words, (and FWIW your approach does zero to change that) but more importantly, poor word choice and self-identifying as an untrustworthy interlocutor destroys your message.

The people you communicate with have to trust you to not waste their time. People in the throes of emotional hostility might need psychological support, or medical attention, but they are not at the height of coherence. So readers might be attentive to your well-being, but they are devaluing your perspective on the situation because you have none.

I'm not afraid of vulgarity at all. I'm as vulgar as they come, in person -- but in written communication, the reader is not keeping up with your emotional flow like they do in person. Peppering in the carefully-placed "jolt" (this is not my reaction, but is your stated intention though this is not a quote) sends the message that writer and reader are not sharing the same conversation. It's distracting at fnord best.

> I don't understand why this particularly disgusting aspect of Victorian prudery and toxic positivity

This is a deeply simplistic take. I don't think you are in a position to label other peoples thoughts. I am not (and I don't generally associate with anyone who is) prudish, positive, polite, or repressed. Nothing against them, it's just not my social scene.

> And I'm doing what I can to smash it.

Smashing is for patriarchies, pumpkins, and web design. We're just talking about the W3C here.

My message here is that your message loses people with its laziness. You claim to think you're being impactful, but you are not. You might be categorizing yourself as a high-emotion-low-content sort of person, but if your message is worthwhile, that would be a bad thing. Intelligent people resist emotional persuasion, or at least try to.

Do with that message as thou wilt, it makes no difference to me. If you value effective communication, it's worth giving some thought. Audience is everything.
It's an open question whether anything in the evolutionary psychology field should be given the label "likely the truth."
If only deploying Kubernetes was as simple as running a golang up and etcd tolerated some latency, you could spin up a node in AWS, another in Hetzner, and a third in DigitalOcean.
I am usually one to call out unattributed art, but in this case (IIRC) the ProgrammerHumor community is the source of this trend. You can confirm this by pasting the URL of any of these images to tineye.com and sorting by 'oldest' to check when the image first appeared online, eg:

https://tineye.com/search/af9c3fe10f5da6775143aa30a421733c4f...
>> Anyone still think it's a good idea to utilize all that "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees?

As long as plantation owners and/or illegal loggers do, then all your argumentation is moot.
If this causes the collapse of the Saudi monarchy this will be a good thing.
I had the same thought. My OP was summarizing the article for GP. My personal [sense] is that RAFT stole the limelight and EPaxos never got any blogsphere love. Few actually even knew about it.
Soil could be something that is too easily overlooked.

If you had prodigious quantities of good soil, you could grow trees and food at sea, where we have lots of space to grow, especially at the equator.

The problem then becomes a floating platform, and controlling it all, but those seem less difficult.
This is funny. There is one group of people pumping carbon out of the ground and burning it. Then there is another group of people capturing the carbon and putting it back into the ground.

I'm picturing a power plant burning coal, then a windmill farm next to it powering a carbon removal process. I guess the potential power generation offset must be accounted for, even if in the solution it's coming from renewable resources.

The solution really seems to be to burn less of it in the first place.
A practical guide to reducing fear
Ironically: Google and Apple (via mobile) are doing to Firefox what Microsoft failed to do. Kill it with an integrated browser.
99PI had an anecdote about exactly that re: "Fordlândia," a rubber plantation in Brazil founded by Henry Ford. The local workers were a source of frustration because they would work one or two days, get paid, and then go home.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fordlandia/
>and he's "progressive"

You make it sound like being progressive is the only choice that's morally right.
See CPython's https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Objects/listsort...
for details about the sort. In fact, its "galloping" was inspired by a paper of which Demaine was a co-author (reference in the file already linked to).

CPython's lists are implemented as contiguous C arrays of pointers (to Python objects). Any way of grafting a tree-ish structure on top of that would be unacceptably wasteful of space and/or time. So sorting "gallops" over arrays because it's array-in, array-out.
On this note, the Ace Attorney series is one long parody of the Japanese criminal law system, which is why it's such a running theme that every defendant is automatically guilty until you incontrovertibly prove them otherwise and why the defense attorneys get treated like dirt throughout.
> What would stop Saudi Aramco from stopping all dividends and unilaterally write off its own debt?

Nothing. Argentina defaults on its debt every Christmas, and its bonds still get bought. Aramco’s are a non-sovereign corporate’s equity dividends, where most of the shares are owned by the Saudi government and royal family.
I was thinking about how to make sorting faster the other day and was toying around with the idea of a permutation sort. If you think about a list of items generally (at least) one of the permutations of the list is guaranteed to be the correct sort order. Theoretically you should be able to do a binary search to find a correct permutation since there should always be a comparison you can do to reduce the search space by half. You should be able to go faster if there is duplicated data since there are multiple permutations of the list that would work.
Yeah, this is the carbon equivalent of trying to get abs by working out more without adjusting your diet.
I sort of agree, but somebody already has to manage the "infrastructure" of their web apps, dns. They never mind adding more of their own home-grown services. If they used Kinesis instead that's another piece of infra to maintain. But you would never hear them say "what about Postfix instead". Regardless of infra, if it's new, they want to use it, even if something older and more boring would work better.

If I ever heard a dev at work say "No I won't use that new tech, it's too untested/I'll have to spend more time figuring out how to make it work well", I would shit my pants. Whereas if it's old tech, "it's not modern/I'll have to spend more time figuring out how to make it work well". It's practically software ageism...
“West's critique of the apartheid in South Africa got him in hot water with Harvard many years ago”

That seems surprising. All I could find was when he got arrested at Yale during an anti-apartheid protest. Have a link?

Israel’s illegal settlements in occupied territory should be condemned. But there is no apartheid in Israel, and the recent chanting of this term in anti-Israel contexts shows ignorance. Palestinian citizens in Israel have the same rights of citizenship as anyone else, and sit in parliament.
What do you call it when a company makes a change to its product in one market where it has large market share that drives its competitors in another market out if business?
Or put another way, do you really think Google could get rid of third party cookies tomorrow and not get sued out existence?

IANAL, but even I can see that making changes to Chrome that impact advertising is risky even if you ignore Google's own advertising interests. So far they're trying to push things along, but they need buy-in from most of the rest of the advertising industry before they feel they can do anything too radical.

So as far as Google is concerned the elimination of third party cookies (and bounce tracking protection, browser fingerprinting, etc) is definitively tied to something that replaces it. One of those things is FLOC.
Seems then you'll probably dislike apl - here's the full implementation of Conway's Game of Life in 53 characters:

life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵}

And the explanatory video behind it (quite approachable!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
But once the dust settled...would the US hold the same moral high ground that it has today had it used 20 atomic bombs?

And would the US be so magnanimous in victory had the toll been higher due to Axis victories on all major fronts (meaning that the human losses of the Axis were transfered to the Allies) up to the Atomic bombs use?
For MultiPaxos the leader is sticky to avoid additional round-trips for each transaction. Basically until a configurable timeout all transactions are attempted at the last node to lead an accepted transaction, and only if that times out or fails is a new leader of a transaction proposed.
I can twist mine as much as I like, but the radio comes on instantly and the software that cares about the volume knob being twisted starts about 3 seconds later.
I suspect those going into video game design programs have a similar success rate (if not worse.)
Poll: Do you find your job extremely boring/uninteresting?
Let's say 'extremely' means you very often find it painful to force yourself to work, and you would probably consider leaving because it's just too boring and meaningless.
The controversial part is that we don't promote horrible people and their wrongdoings. Everyone who reads international and regional media knows what MBS is.
The same thing people are doing under other repressive regimes like the ones in Russia, Iran, Venezuela and others (China comes to mind but the CCP has been quite successful in suppressing dissent): stop using open channels, start using encrypted [1] communications for things which go outside of the currently mandated narrative, assume your communications are being monitored by "the Party" so make sure to appear to be a good citizen when using open communication channels unless you're willing to suffer the consequences. Also, make sure to vote wisely the next time and hold whatever candidate you vote for to his promises. Don't just follow whatever stupid narrative you're being fed, think for yourself.

> ...if it's all being performed by private companies, in industries where there is very little choice of competitors, there's no violation of rights and no way for us to avoid having our private messages be scrutinized by some authority.

If those private companies serve as the regime's lackeys doing their bidding to monitor citizens communications they should not be treated like private companies but as state actors.

[1] where encrypted should be read as "encrypted without _NSAKEY (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY)" et al.
The People’s Bill
This is such an unfounded skynews hyperbolic sort of comment.

In no way could you provide any sort of facts for this statement.
Despite plenty of wasteful use of carbon, energy use largely correlates with reduction in extreme poverty, hunger, etc. Energy use is a requirement for most societies and for people to alleviate basic human needs.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be maximally efficient and renewable in our energy usage, but often times a reduction in energy usage requires a loss of functions that improve people's lives.
Just remember that HN loves to criticize every external revenue source they have. Pocket, Mozilla VPN, etc. "why don't they just focus on the browser".
You could say that comparing social status is innate and natural to some people, but to call Conspicuous Consumption "fundamentally human" is overstatement.

Different things make different people happy. Some people enjoy having the biggest TV on the block. Other people take pride in NOT having a TV.
Similar in hockey, a trick is to simply tap the ball into your opponents feet for a foul. And similarly allowed by the rules.

This I have no issue with. The rules make the game and at elite levels you would expect every little optimisation to be made.

But soccer also has a history of players flopping too. People who are trying to get the foul you mention, but without the cause. This is a despicable act. It is blatant disrespect for the players and the game.

I don't know if it happened in the latest championship but I didn't watch it, due to such crap in the past.
> children who think they actually earned their status

His objective achievements in that area are more than most people could claim. You think it's easy winning a power struggle?
It's referring to things like analytics, hotjar etc.

Optimisation as in conversion optimisation.

Imo, a lot of this stuff ends up being just as bad.
I like wireless charging because it enables cross-compatibility, I can use it when my phone port is wet, and it mitigates some of the cable clutter on my desk. Flat contacts would be nice, too, but exposed contacts have their own drawbacks as well.
If your country is Saudi Arabia, it is.
That seems so weird and makes sense at the same time. As in, why would they force juniors into that, and now I understand why some interviews make no freaking sense whatsoever, or the offer is way outside the scope of the position interviewed for.
I asked the same question a few years ago (tech background, needed to uplift my business knowledge/lingo). The response was "you should find a way to obtain the knowledge of an MBA, without having to do one".

As a result of searching a few years back, I ended up buying a copy of "The Personal MBA" and reading it through. This comes with the list of 99 business books, listed here; https://personalmba.com/best-business-books/

* I have no affiliation with the site, author or book. I'm just speaking from my personal experience and the benefit of business knowledge this gave me.