skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of my Facebook and Instagram is full of other people sharing good things about their lives. I know the cynical internet commenters will insist it's all fake and that they're only putting on a show, but the reality is that most people in my circles are doing quite well and are generally happy.

I'm also part of several online communities and even forums where most people are doing well.

There's nothing about the internet that requires people to bias toward being negative and cynical. The cynicism does tend to collect in certain internet bubbles and especially certain cites that cater to outrage-as-entertainment (e.g. front page of Reddit)
Show HN: Conversion Rate Boosting Guide for E-Commerce Sites
> And it’s entirely possible a Trumpy figure, or even Trump himself, will return to power in 2024.

Wouldnt that be good for this particular measure given the scores reached 'new recorded high's in his presidency.
Finland is not really a country that relies heavily on natural resources.

First page I found ranks the US as having more income from natural resources than Finland.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/natural_resources_...
You are right, I misread the article and now it is too late to edit.
Well, technological progress doesn't necessarily cause social progress, but it might allow it though.

It's a problem of values. Despite abundance, people still believe that people who don't work a 9to5 job are not worthy or good treatment.

Most people still believe in a hierarchy of people and values, and that "there is no free meal", except yes, there is: most food is subsidized and cheap.

Like it or not, "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work sets you free") was displayed at the entrance of concentration camps, and I really think that if you ask people around, they would still hold the same opinion that 100% of people should work and that nobody should escape that.

Now, work is divided between "noble" work, which is essentially office work, and "essential" jobs, which are necessary. Like in the middle ages, nobility is better valued because they're privileged.

Society is really upside down, and despite the years of communism and socialism, which are mostly dead now, it seems we haven't really evolved.
Cancer is a hugely complex problem. It is not a single attack vector like a virus.

But we are still making great progress on it, just think that the best vaccines for Covid came as fruit of cancer research.
That will undoubtedly have the opposite of the intended effect for me.

Real world interaction is where I get to learn that wild fires are supposedly being caused by migrant workers, where I get yelled at for wearing a mask during a pandemic, have my kids teased for the same, discover that people I used to think were reasonable adults are actually anti-vaxxers, and interact with depressingly insane inflated residential & commercial real estate markets.

My online interactions are probably principally responsible for maintaining the threads of idealism that are hanging on.

That said, I also spend zero time on Facebook, Instagram, etc., and near zero time on Twitter. So, neither my real world nor online world interactions are necessarily representative of much.
Its been demonstrated as both a viable political strategy and that there is a clear bloc of voters to use to support that strategy.

We'll be seeing its hints in 2022 and it will be full bore in 2024. If the holders of the old-guard strategies (McCain 2008/ Biden 2020 style campaigns) want to not get trounced in 2024, they need to make a substantial difference in peoples lives to win that election. Otherwise, 'Trumpian' style campaigns will become the norm, as they'll be show to be more effective at winning elections.

Might actually be more riding on 2022/ 2024 than 2016. 2016 proved it possible; these next elections will decide if its reproducible.
Are we going to have any arctic ice left? That’s the type of question that keeps me from being too jovial.
Feel free to hit me up :)
It is incredibly ironic that the very people that claim the system is bad, effectively cannot survive on their non-conformist lifestyle without the current system. In a way though, it's no different than a religion. Priests cannot effectively survive without parishioners giving them money. Priests likewise preach things about the modern era of morality are bad and we must change them. So if you think of these vagabonds as "roving priests" then what they are doing is of the same concept. Although the difference between a local priest and some modern hippie rhetoric is a priest has relationships with his congregants. The idealist vagabond does not. So it's much harder for them to garner any support.
So what is wrong with drawing butterflies with this wing position? Nothing! It's possible and looks good.
The currently en vogue deep and large neural networks are not only designed to have an affordable but significant evaluation cost (probably not competitive with really cheap techniques, like the partitioning and medians of this Fluxsort) but also to justify this cost with the recognition of fairly subtle patterns: wasted on rough and general worst-case guarantees, positively dangerous with arbitrarily crafted inputs.
I don't know of any, but does it need to?
A big one is 30+ year olds writing the screenplays and therefore dialogue of kids and teenagers which are always precocious and seem adult like. Which young people think they should be at a similar stage of development or imitate them.
I do this for some friends and their contacts. And while making a small presentation about what we offer with pros and cons, I added one point to both
Pro: you know the sysadmin
Con: you know the sysadmin
So as some already mentioned, it also can be a problem to trust some random company or someone you know.
This is exactly it. If you look at price changes as bitcoin approaches round numbers, you can see that a significant number of people have their limit price set to something like $10,000. When it would approach those round numbers, it would be stuck just under that number for a while. If the price cracked the round number, meaning all those limits got sold, the price would then slingshot much higher.
A while I tried to use both Arena and Chimera (a Athena widgets based browser, IIRC) mostly, but even then I was forced to use Netscape (3 or 4) for a lot of pages.
Benford's law doesn't give much of a guarantee except in highly specific scenarios. You can however show it's pretty accurate if you've got a 'smooth' probability distribution spanning multiple orders of magnitude (how much of a guarantee you can give depends on how specific you define what it means to be 'smooth').

The rigged elections example you gave was, I believe, mostly explained by the fact that the number of votes they were looking at were all roughly the same order of magnitude [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etx0k1nLn78
That's an interesting point. I wonder why you can't talk about how happy you are but you can talk about how unhappy you are?

Does it sound boastful or insensitive? Is it uninteresting to hear?
So the homeless are provided an apartment but they still have to pay rent.

The article seems to be missing some key info about how the rent is different from a normal rental.
>If that happened, who would wash the dishes?

I'm genuinely shocked to see so many people disagreeing with this premise. Very few people will voluntarily perform shitty, low-status jobs unless you motivate them. Everyone wants to hand out toys to sick kids and pose for photos, nobody wants to clean up their chemo-smelling shit and puke.

It's been a real issue in every single volunteer-run organisation I've been a part of, from local churches and clubs right up to multi-million-line open source software projects.

Have none of these commenters ever participated in a real-world community setting like this?
When Amazon is the only viable place of employment in your town, yes.

Look to Walmart- America's largest supermarket chain, and America's second largest employer (second only to the U.S. government). Rural America is a sea of "Walmart towns", where the best employment is the only employment.
Self-published books are not “real art”
I think your mixing up two different questions. This article is asking is your personal life good. Im generally happy with my own life and think it'll get better, that doesn't mean I think the world is on a good path. I think I can live a decent life independent of whatever is going on in the world at large.

Like even if there is an economic bubble what does that really mean for you? Is your long term personal life satisfaction really tied to the economy? Maybe you'll have a bad year like 2008 did to some but you'll probably bounce back
Apple startet with this approach long ago. There was no "modern" approach to solve the problem. However today there is more knowledge to tackle this.
In monkey studies, when a subordinate monkey is removed from the presence of the alpha male, its stress level goes down and it shows clear emotional signs of 'thriving'.

I wonder if that might help explain this improved outlook on life among humans since covid arose, now that so many subordinates are working from home and no longer under the mindful eye of a less-than-beloved boss.
> The most recent results, captured June 14-20, 2021, are based on 4,820 U.S. adults surveyed by web as a part of the Gallup Panel, a probability-based, non-opt-in panel of about 120,000 adults across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

People surveyed online have higher life ratings.

Edit: to show that it’s always important to understand how data is collected.
Just as a point of comparison, one of the programs San Francisco introduced during the pandemic was "safe sleeping sites", which are parking lots where homeless can have their tent without it being periodically swept by police. To that, they add chemical toilets, a water supply and (I'm not sure why) 24/7 security staff. For this, the city pays around $60k per tent site per year. I'm not sure if this is in part due to some unsavory relationship between the org administering the program and some city official.
Recently the program was extended. It would be cheaper to rent apartments at current market rates, even in San Francisco.

Our revealed preference seems to be that we'd rather have homeless people live in tents than have poor people get free or nearly free housing.
When Wearing the Wrong Socks or Dancing Is a Crime in Belarus
Any such comparison that ignores climate and cost of living is totally meaningless.

Monocle claims to consider climate/sunshine, but the top of its list is dominated by Scandinavia and central/eastern Europe that have dismal cold wet winters, with short days conducive to SAD depression. The only redeeming quality being that one or two have distant access to skiing.
> as in I don’t have to upload it as a podcast perhaps do post-processing etc to get my content out

That sounds like shirking the responsibility of not wasting the listener's time, i.e. lowering the barrier to production at the cost of raising the friction of consumption. For the app to be popular to use — rather than just popular to publish on — wouldn't you want the opposite?

Or, to put that another way: wouldn't "an edited recording of a talk recorded on Clubhouse, posted to YouTube" become a more popular way to consume Clubhouse content, than actually going on Clubhouse? And would this not kill any hope Clubhouse would have of ever monetizing, since there would be no users on the app itself to ever show ads to?

(I think this is truly the thing that really did "kill" Vine, in the end: there was no reason for most people — who are not, themselves, performers — to engage with Vines on Vine, when they could just engage with Vine compilations on YouTube. The creators saw the writing on the wall and sold it. TikTok came up with a better model, "democratizing" Vine's professionally-produced-funny-6-second-clip model into the much more widely-engaged-with "clip of a pretty person being silly with platform-licensed music in the background" model.)
Monocle, a universal, personal search engine
I don't think it's accurate to claim that ethics follows moral philosophy, and certainly most philosophers would not endorse that viewpoint. Philosophy doesn't tell society how to improve or behave. Philosophy helps question and understand, it hasn't historically been a driver of change.
You want https://www.qubes-os.org/
This article gives Charles waaaay too much credit. The Brutalist architecture he railed against was yes, bad, but it was popular because it was cheap and the UK was rather poor and in a period of war recovery.

It's hardly a surprise that you can create something nicer if you set aside a bit of cash.

Even so, Poundbury (I grew up around there) is a very uninspired part of Dorchester.

>Thirty-five per cent of homes are affordable housing reserved for rent, shared ownership or discounted to the open market. It’s impossible to distinguish private from public housing because the latter is built to the same high standards as everything else, and it is evenly dispersed throughout the town.

Is a good idea, but the reason it doesn't happen elsewhere is because profitability takes precedence over good town planning. This article does demonstrate that the "stink" of socialism can be overcome by dousing it in the perfume of royalty.
> without any charges filed on them

I take this back, what I should have stated more clearly - is that the serious charges of insurrection, etc are not filed.

They were charged with whatever petty crimes, and then have been kept for months on this terrible solitary/23 hour a day lockdown.

If these are not political prisoners, what else can be?

If one does not stand for these prisoners in our own backyard, then what does that make of us?
I will not apologize for being an American patriot, and for wanting a decrease of western malfeasance and marginal competence. But I do think that China gets it right much more often than not. Dan Wang's quoted article, and his other writings, emphasize China's ambivalence and distaste for the western (popular) concept of technology being internet and consumer-driven code. China cares more about the stuff designed by Qualcom, Keysight, Intel, TI, et al than the stuff ground out by FAANG.

And China's mind-set stems from collective knowledge of a millennia in the struggles and wars, where the long-term goals were to centralize and control and advance and be the ultimate winner.
> As we walk through the city, Johnston offers a small disclaimer, putting out in the open what he calls his one “debatable” act of spending, post-31st birthday. If you count a gift card that someone gave him back in 2012, which he used on Big Macs and coffee, then, he says, he’s been money-free for only nine years.

This raises a point that article doesn't address: what is "money"?

If Johnson trades those cigarettes he makes from tossed butts for food, is he using money? Cigarettes have been used as currency in some special situations like war time.

Likewise, if Johnson accepts a product created through the use of money, isn't he in fact using money, if only indirectly?

Then there's the big question that never gets asked or answered: what happens if every single person on earth lived like Johnson? Money is fundamentally a way to fulfill future needs and wants. Abandoning money is really abandoning a path to build a future deliberately.

Storing grain, smoking meat, or building a shelter serve exactly the same purpose as money in this context. They are ways to make the future more predictable. They also have the interesting property that they can be traded for other ways to make the future more predictable. And that leads to the main problem that Johnson seems to be trying to solve: how to stop focusing on optimizing one's future through the accumulation of things that can make the future more certain.

What does a world of people who have abandoned the idea of making a future for themselves actually look like?
Consider that maybe the social issue has lived experiences that couldn’t be safely explored in nonfiction, or maybe the importance such as being validated that your personal experience isn’t a delusion wasn’t for you.

Additionally chances are that with the way progressive pushes are going (blackface/yellowface/white actors playing nonwhite characters is swiftly going out of style) the actors may actually experience the themes being explored. I’m pretty sure black people playing black people in movies about black race relations may have personal experiences with such!
A new frontier for early cancer detection? Discussing the GRAIL blood test
My wife worked at lowes for years, and they were serious about the ".5", even. they reported to the IRS that they'd sell us health insurance for $90/mo for a family plan; but then all they could actually sell to us was a $400/mo each plan; and we never did figure out that one... before her health deteriorated to the point she had to quit that job.
It's probably a century of soot.

When I grew up, I saw a sandstone building get powerwashed for the first time in a decade.

Well, I realized it was yellow sandstone when it was clean. It was brown when they started.
>Our starting hourly wages are at least $15 per hour for all full time, part time, and seasonal employees and contractors.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits
There is no such thing as a "corporate drone".

On the other hand there is such a thing as a statist parasite (think politicians, bureaucrats, crony capitalists, etc.), and hobos with a belief they're superior to others and love to do virtue signaling as making a life decision to live until the end of their lives supported by others, directly or indirectly, is something very, very wise.
Because I would hope people would not think it's ok to kill an animal because it's pretty. This article is totally fine with that, just wants you to shape the wings like it's alive when you draw them.
Signal apps are an issue, for sure. Signal desktop can run, but it's not fun, because it's not responsive at all. Currently, the best alternative available imho is Axolotl, which is what I use.[0]

[0] https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl
I didn't think I'd be seeing great replacment theory talking points on hn. Were western European migrants ok because they were unlikely to survive the winter where they came from? No cold parts of eastern europe compared to parts of western?
Virtual wires, switches, routers, vpns.
Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Steven Weinberg Dies at 88
The job market really started to heat up for the first time since the 1990s under Trump, which I think explains that phenomenon. On the flip side, even my friends and family that support Trump were growing tired of the baseline level of anxiety he was causing with his erratic proclamations.
I found this a real pleasure to read, as the author explained the why behind almost every decision, and was quite descriptive. Def hope to read more from Joshua.
>Okay, that's wasted time, and your comment is inappropriate. So in very short and as a last comment:

Your initial comment accused me of smearing FOSS. It's inconsiderate and a literal lie. I would say that's the most inappropriate thing that's occurred in this thread.

>How hardcore^^ 358 are in mine, + many more GOG and Humble Bundle games + hundreds on CD/DVD I probably will never play again.

365. and Gog. We're pretty much the same in terms of amount of games. If you have that many games you should know absolutely there are problems. Maybe your hardware configuration just happens to be common and compatible. I use a quadro nvidia card which is not the traditional GeForce stuff. Both of our use cases are valid but you have to combine our use cases to form a holistic broad spectrum view. My use case is an indication of compatibility problems, likely with quadro. This doesn't happen with windows.

>If you tinker don't be surprised if the result is tinkery.

When you tinker you understand the internals more. When you understand the internals more you better understand the issues. I've used ubuntu AND tinkered with NixOS. So I have broader experience than you.

>It's not. You do not know what usability is.

Part of my Job description is UI design. I'm a full stack engineer from the front (browser based UI's and product design) all the way to C++ and embedded systems on the back end. Usability is my Job but also hardcore systems development. Most full stack devs stop at the application layer so I would say because someone pays me to know what usability is, I pretty much know it quite well. Lack of choice is a usability feature, Apple employs this aspect heavily by restricting hardware options; it's a big part of why apple software is perceived to be very robust.

Another big part of usability is also perception. The actual capability of a product contributes less to usability than the perception of the capability of the product. Apple again uses this strategy big time.
This is an excellent point. The scaling of social accountability is a difficult problem. In my opinion it is a root problem of humanity and our current solutions are due for disruption.
Why does it sound so much like a scam ?
The question is valid, but I disagree with your belief. If anything, I would expect the default outcome of an abundance of natural resources per capita to be Dutch disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
New track was built for the Heathrow Express, it opened in 1998. 2 × 5 miles of tunnel, plus a bridge/flyover to cross the Great Western Mainline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathrow_Express
Lets consider more common case with working poor. At the same time we see high income inequality. We see unemployment. We see that productivity is a few times higher than it was in 1930. What is the solution? I think you know it, it was done once, 100 years ago. The work day was reduced to 8 hours/day. It could be reduced now to say 4 hours/day. No wage cut. In the past, who reduced the work day? The workers organized and reduced the work day. Why they do not do that? I think they do not know that they can work less. They still think they need to work more to produce all the food, more houses, etc. While in reality they produce income inequality, lots of bullshit jobs and unemployment.

You can help, agitate, organize, join union for shorter workday same wage.
Heathrow Airport didn't open with a railway connection.

The Underground (metro) was extended to the airport in 1975-1977.

The first heavy rail connection opened in 1998.

A significant extension to this connection (trains right through London) should open in 2023.

There are also buses, which can be useful for the nearby suburbs, but are probably used more by staff than passengers. (The one time I used one of the local buses, it stopped at the freight terminal, then a staff-only entrance, then the passenger terminals.)

Most medium or large airports in Europe have a rail connection to the nearest city. Smaller ones have express buses to the city centre; at the smallest ones the buses are only scheduled at flight arrival/departure times.
I never understood comparing Finland and other small countries with the US.

Finland's population is less than that of NYC.
Lego Airbus A380 Is a Spot-On Recreation of the World’s Largest Airliner
Because they need you to sit back and go "damn what a bummer" when your investment nets you a $1000 loss, instead of it being something that would want you to sue.
That also seemed to be the norm in northern Spain not so long ago, none of my grandparents (maternal/paternal side) locked their doors, even at night.
Just to clarify, in Finland housing and basic living expenses are provided for everyone who doesn't have enough income. Still, there are people who end up on the streets for some reason, and this program is aimed at helping those people.
> yet many users that use Signal cannot even run it on their Librem 5 or PinePhone

This is really a fault of Signal, because they forbid forks and do not provide a good app for GNU/Linux phones. It's like a walled garden. I do not use Signal for this reason.
"at this point we all know..."

Sorry that's an appeal to majority.

You're wrong. Bitcoin is useful.