skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What barriers?

It's likely that you don't know that I was the 2nd employee at Amazon. I don't want to spend time here going into all the ways that Bezos sought to create barriers to entry for competitors, but Brad Stone's two books on the company get into this.

> People's preferences change. If something better comes along,

People in general are very bad at carrying out long term analysis of their preference-based decisions. People went to malls while professing to love Main St., most of them not realizing that the former would eventually kill the economics of the latter. Likewise, people's preference for online shopping doesn't actually amount to a desire to kill bricks-n-mortar retail, even though that is (likely) the eventual result. People's preferences generally express short-term feelings, rather than longer term rational analyses of how their lives, homes and societies may be affected by their choices.

> If amazon warehouses are located in "locations that are not typically the ones where people are choosing to live", doesn't that mean they'll have an harder time finding workers and you having an easier time finding workers?

That's why there's an article on HN (Jacobin, really) title "Amazon is creating company towns across the United States".

> but in metropolitan areas they're almost always surrounded by houses

Most of amzn's fulfillment centers are rural or exurban. Most of amzn's current development plans are focused on rural locations.

And I described this in order to make the point that rural areas are almost always more difficult places to generate economic alternatives than cities.

> I'm not sure why it has to be employee owned

The question was about alternatives. Jacobin authors probably don't see much difference trading one multi-billionaire CEO for another, so I was mentioning the most practical genuine alternative to the sort of economic entity that amzn represents.
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The authors stated intention was to depict a widely held, indulgent, sadistic fantasy.
political and class ambivalence is also a way to spin things. which the original comment itself did. this is a navel-gazing, meaningless criticism. if you disagree substantively you should just say so.
Seems she's a PhD who studies Partial Differential Equations. Her post-doc research institution is understandably proud:

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-scientist-wins-cycling-gold-m...
And, sadly, to prevent random people from attacking the homeless people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_at_the_2020_Summer_Oly...

With more than a minute difference to the rest? She wasn't even in the pack, incredible victory.
The Dockerization of your samples makes the repo more useful. I don't want to have to install every language on my laptop.
The bigger the country, the more diverse their population is, and empathy is less generalized. Colonizers used ethnic cleansing as a workaround, but as the population grows, it starts differentiating again.

It seems nations, like people, can get too big for their own health.
How did you get "marketing sucks" from that post?
This is interesting.

I do a veg garden, with tomatoes of course. When I water them at the end of the day I also spray the tops because I want the leaves to tell the roots...get ready, rain is coming.

I have no idea if this happens or not. But from a survival perspective it makes sense that it would.
"(I'm not sure why) 24/7 security staff."

Despite your doubts - homeless folks are not idiots. I live near a similar site. It has a no visitor policy, 24/7 security etc. I would call it a huge success relative to the surrounding homeless impacts.

The issue for the homeless and many govt run programs is that it's often easier for govt to do nothing. Ie, your stuff is stolen, visitors etc cause problems etc. A huge amount of public housing really suffered from this - despite being govt run it was worse, not better.

If you can carve a (small) space, no zoning issues, tent on pallet, secuirty for your stuff and yourself, no visitors causing trouble - you can give people some basic stability in sleeping etc.

As to the $60K - you need to be comparing to costs in SF generally for services for a homeless person - I'd estimate $110 - $150K (higher end is if you include the excess ambulance runs etc). So this is relatively competitive.
Thank you for the clarification, that makes much more sense.
Also curious why he forgot about all the migration from Africa. Everyone locks their doors here in Africa and builds cages around their houses effectively.
That's fortunate. Dalliances with the rural expanses of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho have not been so encouraging for me lately.
And solving the regulatory hurdles might also might start to reduce the homelessness problem before the city even starts giving away free units to anyone in need.
It’s $5k per tent per month - you can rent 2-3 studios for that, even in SF. A similar program in LA is coming in at $2100 per rent per month, definitely enough for at least one apartment: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/east-hollywood-tent-village...

That’s the point the original article made - they were throwing money at short-term shelters and other things, just like everyone else and the problem got worse not better. Instead, doing stable housing first and applying conditions later allowed people to adapt. I suspect that they also get to re-use units the NGOs bought to house next set of people once the initial occupants have improved their situation enough.

If one were to use the $2100 for mortgage payment as well, with taxes/hoa/insurance included, that would finance over $400k worth of unit.
Consider whether you would be safe sleeping there in a tent? And how about keeping all your stuff there too? Some neighbors may have mental issues, there may be a criminal element (crime is high in San Francisco), and others (who aren’t dangerous, or even if they are) need to be protected from them.

So I’m not sure this is best thought of as similar to normal housing or similar to a campsite where they can easily kick out anyone dangerous since they’re far away from the city. Instead you might compare with hospitals, nursing homes, or even prisons, but in primitive conditions and without the necessary security infrastructure. The costs aren’t going to be similar.

Actual walls and doors with locks would probably help a lot to reduce the staffing needed.
Typescripten, generate type-safe JavaScript bindings for C++/emscripten
I agree with everything you wrote. I hope people don't mistake the possible for likely
Is the longest program in terms of lines of code the one written in Whitespace? (14 lines). It’s also the shortest program if you don’t count whitespace.
It is nearly impossible for an entity (city or state), with a limited budget and no borders to enforce, to provide a perfect solution. The “country” on the other hand is a completely different matter..
The future of the UK's architecture will be developed in places like this (also in Dorset as it happens):
https://designandmake.aaschool.ac.uk/projects
What we think of as 'progress' depends on a lot of dangerous and unpleasant labor. It would be difficult to get people to do this labor without the the threat of homelessness and starvation.
Ample: An interface for MAME as an Apple II emulator
Aren't they lifting and moving packages? All sorts of muscle strains possible from that. Especially if there is little downtime for rest throughout the day.
Arguably a modern priest/minister/whatever is providing a service and getting compensated for it, just like any other job.
Gah, I did misunderstand some things. The picture is now worse than I realized! EDIT: and yet also better; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951017 . It's hard to get it working right but this is a really fast algorithm.

fluxsort takes a function pointer and has no way to inline it. The fluxsort.c is included from fluxsort.h (this is not standard style by the way; template files should have a .h suffix), so the compiler might choose to inline it, and the benchmarks use noinline on the comparison functions to avoid this.

BlockQuicksort makes no sense without inlined comparisons. Yes, pdqsort allows a comparison function in order to be a general-purpose sort, but this isn't the case that it targets.

Are these benchmarks run with inline comparisons? Seems pretty hard to get bench.c to inline anything since test_sort takes a comparison function as input (though I'm working on it).
Multi decade angel investor here: accredited investor requirements are completely normal, including the good faith clause.
I’d argue that progress and “people not having food, shelter, or access to basic medical help” are definitionally incompatible.
No worries, been following you on Twitter for a while now, keep up the good work!
America's “Friendscape” Crisis
Doesn't work for me. I don't even feel anything talking to a real person over zoom or voice chat. I have to be with someone in real life to feel anything. That is just my experience. Perhaps I am a minority in this matter.
It sounds like the usual inflation problem, where "ultra high priority" means "will never be done", and "critical emergency" means "please consider it if you have time".

You can call it "50 shades of red" too, where it starts with green/yellow/red color coding then everything becomes red and you have to differentiate between reds. So in the end you have to choose between "deep red" and "crimson red of the darkest night". It was a joke in France during the pandemic where the entire map was colored red, with the shade of red indicating the level of restriction.
Really? While places like Chicago and Baltimore have murder rates now up there with warzones. And where they filmed Rocky in Phili looks like the zombie apocalypse:
https://youtu.be/-FD7xxo5ApY?t=518
Same place but parental warning, this one is rough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i45JMm9hM4
I actually read the whole piece as a humorous way of giving you an overview of some of the key AW services. I had a pretty good laugh at least, and thought it did a good job of it. :)
> It's a vague as hell set of proscriptions that everybody could project their own ideas on to that got turned into a pseudo-religion.

Then you're just complaining about the nature of language, because people do the same thing with religious text, literary text, the law, contracts, even daily conversations and flirtations. This is hardly a point that you can hold against the Agile manifesto.

> I once had it used against me to justify not writing tests

If you thought of your work as a complex system where there are a lot of variables which have multiple underlying causes, then you would have been able to describe some undesirable effect as being heavily caused by not having writing tests. And really, this is why people don't get Agile--they don't see their work and their organization as a complex system.
In small towns these employers usually provide a significant boost in prosperity for the constituents. It’s in cities where I see most exploitation. Anyone who has lived in both will agree.
I'd much prefer mock Georgian than Brutalist.

I'm someone for whom Southbank and the Barbican are architectural monstrousities, who piggy back on London's success, rather than contributing to it.

Concrete + England's maritime climate has a nasty tendency to look very grubby after a while, as it gets stained by moss.
A point on the 8 hour work day, because a lot of people will instantly think "Ford", is that it took decades of union campaigning, and quite a few dead and injured in clashes with police and Pinkerton agents, to start getting traction. By the time Ford shortened his working hours, the unions had already gotten hours cut a lot and put in a huge amount of effort changing the narrative on working hours.

Most people are also unaware that May 1st as the international day for labour demonstrations is in part in commemoration of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre, and as the starting point for a renewed fight for the 8-hour working day in its aftermath, on the request of the AFL president at the time.
> the world is full of people who feel very different paying $100.00 vs $99.99

Agree, though that effect is not constrained to Bitcoin. Retail orders, for instance, follow Benford's law. This is despite well-documented psychological biases towards e.g. certain digits, whole numbers, round numbers, et cetera [1]. Benford's law [2] derives from deeper mechanics.

As you point out, however, a better control would have been not all prices in public stocks, but retail orders.

[1] https://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/2695/02_whol...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law#Krieger–Kafri_en...
One thing that may be influencing optimism about the future is the fact that the job market is tilted in favor of job seekers right now. I know this is an anecdote, but I have coworkers who are quitting and seeing vast increases in their salary because the job market in tech is tight and is seemingly not getting any looser anytime soon. Now, they weren't earning table scraps before, but when you have people earning 20k to 60k more, that has a really big impact upon how you view the future.
The majority sentiment appears to be that homeless people deserve to suffer to some degree, and that without pain they’ll never be properly motivated to get a job and rejoin society.

The fact that this never works doesn’t really seem to dissuade anyone. No city has managed to solve the homelessness problem with anti-sleeping architecture and police crackdowns, but they’ll keep trying.
tmux, ncdu, htop .. there's a bunch of utils of similar quality
Amazon calls their warehouse staff “industrial athletes” in internal docs.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/2/22465357/amazon-industrial...

> Amazon tells its warehouse employees to think of themselves not as overworked cogs in an enormous, soul-crushing machine, but as “industrial athletes,” and to prepare their bodies for that experience like someone training for a sporting event, according to a pamphlet obtained by Motherboard. The comparison is a troubling euphemism for a company whose workers have almost double the amount of serious injuries as the rest of the warehousing industry and who reportedly are often unable to take bathroom breaks.

> The pamphlet tells employees that some of them will walk up to 13 miles throughout the course of the day, burning an average of 400 calories an hour. It also suggests all sorts of ways to help workers prepare for the athlete life, including changes to their diets and sleep schedules and making sure they’re not dehydrated throughout the day by keeping an eye on the color of their urine. It also suggests that employees buy shoes “at the end of the day when [their] feet are swollen” to avoid tightness and blisters — advice that will be familiar to distance runners or multi-day hikers.
I wish there were more in depth articles about these problems. They tend to focus on “feel good” aspects while glossing over the details and trade offs made.

As I get older more and more I find that all new ideas are old ideas. As if great idea just sitting there, oblivious to everyone else, waiting for someone to pick it up.

Often someone else tried the solution but it never worked. What changed? That’s what I want to know.

For example, the article has a click-bait headline that makes you feel good because homelessness “ended”. Apparently homelessness was reduced, not ended. It’s a better outcome than before.

> In the last 10 years, the “Housing First” program provided 4,600 homes in Finland. While in 2017 there were still about 1,900 people living on the streets, the program could reduce this number to less than 1000 long-term homeless by 2019 – but there were enough places for them in emergency shelters so that they at least didn’t have to sleep outside anymore.

Also, the math is murky. The article states that the direct cost of housing is cheaper than the current expenses. It’s quite easy to figure out the cost of building new things but very difficult for those other services.

> Creating housing for people costs money. In the past 10 years, 270 million euros were spent on the construction, purchase and renovation of housing as part of the “Housing First” programme. However, Juha Kaakinen points out, this is far less than the cost of homelessness itself. Because when people are in emergency situations, emergencies are more frequent: Assaults, injuries, breakdowns. The police, health care and justice systems are more often called upon to step in – and this also costs money.

The first book I read that went into these complex issues was “Basic Economics” by Thomas Sowell. He made convincing arguments about how economics work and how of often polices designed to help people hurt them. Rent control in NY was a policy designed to help people but actually made it worse for many.
ncdu is one of my favourite tools, and Zig one of my favourite languages.

For like me who are curious:

- C version source: https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/src/branch/master/

- Zig version source: https://code.blicky.net/yorhel/ncdu/src/branch/zig

The code is nice and very well commented.
But gear tooth counts are easy to change for a different ratio. This was not mass produced, everything was made to fit this machine. So the shared gears can change within the limits.
There are no radios allowed at the Olympics, like there are at professional races (ie Tour, Vuelta, Giro etc.)

That simple. The last refresh point was ~50kms before the final, if the person there didn't give an info to the riders then they just didn't know how far she was ahead hence the confusion of van Vleuten at the finish
A friend of mine working at an Amazon center injured himself because he walks 5+ miles per shift. He also weighs like 350 pounds. He’s lost like 50 pounds already so hopefully he’ll get to a weight where he’s not injuring himself before he ends up having to quit.

Amazon isn’t obligated to provide my morbidly obese friend with a job, and he knows that, and he’s doing his best to keep on without destroying his body.
"% thriving" pre-covid was about 56%, the worst of covid was about 46%, current is about 59%. "% suffering" is about 3.4%.

Anecdotally, I started getting depressed during the start of the pandemic and again during September-December of 2020. The pandemic loneliness and cynicism was getting to me. Albeit, it never got really bad. In May of 2021, I started feeling a lot better. Because everything is open again, and everyone else is optimistic.
> Nah, these are two separate problems. First is the technological problem of producing enough food, building material, medicine, etc.

There is no technological problem. We are already wasting more food that would be necessary to feed people who are starving.

Even USSR, at the height of its inefficiency, was able to build housing for most of its inhabitants. It wasn't palaces but it did its job.

And when we need we can somehow find a way to crank out vaccine to vaccinate entire countries. And these are given out for free (of course, we pay for them in taxes, but still it can be done...)

> Then there is the problem of the political class not unwilling

I think you meant "willing".

Here, this is the problem.

When you say it is "political class", what you really say it is not your problem. And this is the cause of why this is not getting solved.

Because the problem is really you and other people like you who think it is not their problem.

If the people decided it is a problem worth solving and supported it with their votes, the "political class" would follow and solve the problem.

The "political class" responds to what is on peoples minds and to what people want. If people decide to spend their focus quabbling over building big walls or election results or vaccine efficacy, guess what is not getting solved? Anything else isn't getting solved.
They're taking a card from Apple's playbook: intentionally creating controversy. Remove some basic functionality and refuse to give it back claiming it's better this way, causing an internet debate between diehard fans and critics, resulting in free promotion and advertising. Now everyone knows about their latest product. Just like what happened when Apple removed the headphone jack, power brick, butterfly keyboard (looks nice but terrible to use), etc.
The road race at the Olympics is somewhat of an outlier in cycling. It uses national teams as opposed to commerical teams, so riders ride with unfamilar teammates, and in this case the biggest favorites were actually teammates. It also bans radios, so there's no direct communication between the coaches and the riders possible.
Common Kubernetes Errors Made by Beginners
Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Containers
Indigenous Americans, prior to colonists’ arrival.
I love my Tesla Model 3 and recognize that many non-standard Musk brainfarts worked out ok(ish) in the past (gullwing doors, weird door handles, touchscreen instead of dashboard.) But one of my biggest fears is that Musk’s ideas will eventually blow up the company. This would be bad for me as a vehicle owner who wants parts and service, and more generally it would be terrible for EV competition during this stage where “traditional manufacturers” are just utterly blowing it.

There is no way I would drive a car with a wheel like this. It completely rules out the S/X if there’s no option. Between this, the awful Cybertruck, and the decision to go vision-only and remove the radar in new Teslas, I’m not confident at all that Tesla is safe from destroying their market with a few opinionated screwups.
> hopefully they learned they don’t need social media to be happy or drugs or alcohol

Ah, but how would they have learned that? After all, they're not doing it because they "learned" it, they're doing it because you're forcing them to do it. You're never actually "unit testing" their ability to come to the right independent judgment on their own, because you don't trust them to. But because you don't trust them to, they may not develop the experience to independently come to probably the same conclusion you came to. And if they do, you certainly aren't helping them.

Rather, what they're learning is that they'll have to go and buy their own prepaid cell phone on their own and get better and better at hiding it because "Dad is an uptight Boomer so what he doesn't know about this prepaid cell phone won't hurt him" which is probably not the lesson you're trying to teach them. If that mentality gets to drugs, alcohol, and sex, you may be in for more than you bargained for -- whether you pick up on it or not.

Kids are very, very smart. They have much more time than you, the vigor of youth, the ability to see everything with fresh eyes and work things out from first principles -- and not just that, they have a whole network of /friends/ who have the exact same resources and who they can work with as a team.

You're not going to stop them from experimenting. You'll just stop them from being open about it with you.
Having worked in this sector I agree with everything you write, though I would add some qualifications:

For grid scale storage, kWh/kg and kwh/m3 (actually j/g and j/m^3) are, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant -- people aren't carrying power plants around, and grid scale investment is the classic Cap Ex/Op ex carry trade.

Also your $/kWh is an input to LCoS rather than a metric that can be used to make a judgement on its own; discouragingly, though LCoS is even mentioned in the article, it's only in a wavy.