skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m skeptical because I don’t necessarily trust the people who would be at the top of a union to align with my preferences better than status quo. Some of the orthodox opinions in the community are not mine. But it would go something like this:

Despite tech workers’ financial power, management gets away with many widely unpopular working conditions. Think of the ubiquity of open offices, or of offices in general. Or sprints, or story points, or JIRA. Or the prioritization of new feature work over reliability and refactoring. Or the infamous crunch time near a deadline. Or the unfairness and perverse incentives in a promotion process. Coworkers making more than you because they joined at a lower stock price or had better counteroffers. Theoretically, workers could get more control over these conditions.

There are also many things programmers are asked to build, which at least the loudest among us find reprehensible. This includes anything to do with advertising, personal data, aggressive sales practices, dark patterns, etc. Programmers could reduce the prevalence of these things by collectively refusing to work on them. Even informal rumblings made some headway on this kind of thing at Google.

Finally there is a more general leftist solidarity angle where programmers could “make the world a better place” by using their own indispensability to leverage their employers into better pay and conditions for others. Kitchen staff, cleaning crew, even gig workers contracted through the platforms they work on. Tech workers have a better chance of getting this sort of thing done by contract than by legislation.
You can use an append only text file as a database, but that doesn’t mean it’s a great idea.
Typo in the title: diesases -> diseases

Congrats on the launch!
https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1418719530038136833
You've made much of the $179 price in your various posts in this thread. I think the answer to that is that you're on a forum for highly paid professionals who can afford an extra gaming device at this price point. I don't think many people are deciding between a Switch and a Playdate. Probably all of the preorders are people who already own a Switch and/or Xbox. If gaming is your primary hobby and you have a good income, this is not unreasonable-- people with other hobbies (hunting, fishing, traveling, scuba diving, photography, flying, etc) will sometimes spend more than $179 per hour of engaging in said hobby and no one bats an eye.

It's also not a competitor to the NES classic or any of the third party emulator-based devices. I've already played those games back when the NES was around, then played them again on various emulators. I'm ready for something different.

I think the Ouya is a good comparison. The Playdate's story is about recruiting indie developers more effectively than the Ouya did, and organizing game distribution differently (seasonal releases instead of an app store). The fact that the Playdate sold 20k units in 17 minutes tells me that maybe they're right. But on the other hand, the Ouya sold 200k units over its lifetime and still failed so maybe 20k is not that impressive after all?

You also made several other objections: uncomfortable to hold, crank is likely to break, adults are likely to get bored in 10 minutes. None of the reviews out so far have supported any of these objections. The ArsTechnica review is pretty comprehensive[1], but there are a handful of others floating around.

I also think it's telling that you compared "Crankin Time Travel Adventure" (Playdate game) to Prince of Persia: Sands of Time in another of your posts. A much better comparison would be to the indie game Braid. Apologies if I'm reading too much into this, but if you haven't heard of Braid it makes me wonder if you're more of a traditional gamer than an indie gamer that this is targeted at?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/playdate-preview-you-...
Hello, Searchable Guy.

Just fixed that for you. :)
I actually recently started investing in better clothes. Not suits, per se, since that would be out of place for most work contexts for me. But clothes with good fit, quality, and appropriate (or even slightly more formal) for the dress codes I work under.
I guess I'm one of the "older folks" the parent post was talking about, and the "dire prognostications" I grew up with were much more severe than any of that.

I grew up with things like the population explosion predictions of the 1970s, that mass famine would kill hundreds of millions and that famine would spread to industrialized countries. That was when the population of the world was under 4 billion. Things like Erlich's bet that commodity prices would skyrocket. The Hubbert peak theory for oil, anyone remember the Oil Drum blog? And of course many, many permutations of, "if we don't do X by date Y, it will be too late for humanity. Won't somebody please think of the children"? Y is usually at least 10 years out, 8 years is a pretty bold departure for this genre.

I don't pay much attention to doom porn anymore, I guess I'm glad that the end of the world keeps getting pushed back for a few more years.
Yes, X Causes Y
I really hope some public institution will pick it up :)
If I get the essence of what you are saying... "the only victims would be both ends of the communication"? ;)
I think a fully automated amazon without a large local workforce and therefor a large local TAXBASE is going to be a huge target for regulatory enforcement.
OP here. Happy to take questions, with the caveat that my work here is mostly glue.

Some background:
https://github.com/segfall/static-wiki

The datasets I generated:
https://www.kaggle.com/segfall/markdownlike-wikipedia-dumps-...

The original author of this approach:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28013514
Why does anyone think abolishing copyright is a good idea?

Your friend writes a novel. They've never been published before, so they shop it around to various publishers, but no dice. A little while later, they see a hot new entry on the bestsellers list, and surprise, it's their novel word for word - one of the publishers took it.

Without copyright this can happen to writers, musicians, film creators, artists, and so on.

There should absolutely be limits on copyright. Disney should not be allowed to turn the copyright laws into their own personal tool. But I see so many people who get angry when corporations take advantage of copyright, and so few of them seem to consider the fact that the same laws protect the little guy against those same corporations. Unless we want Disney to literally be able to get away with stealing art from anyone and everyone, we need intellectual property laws.

As for patents, the general idea behind patents is that in order to get one, you need to describe your technique. The motivation is furthering shared knowledge - we give you the promise of exclusive use of the patent for a limited time in order to encourage you to divulge your invention. Patent law is more ripe for abuse than copyright but its general policy motive is still sound.
I agree with your general sentiment, but I'll provide one redeeming counterpoint anyway: your laptop (that you carry around to places) is at higher risk of theft than an external hard drive that you keep in a storage locker.
Yeah this has nothing to do with Starlink. The Starlink satellites aren't even visible to the naked eye except for shortly after launch or right at sunrise/sunset:

> The satellites are sometimes visible in the first few minutes after sundown and before sunrise when the sun is below the horizon, but the satellites are high enough to reflect direct sunlight.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/spacex-ufo-starlink...
It should really remain not for profit if you want to be taken seriously at what you do. At least make it a foundation if it needs a legal entity :) And be really careful who you take money from and under which conditions.

See what happened to freenode recently, how well that worked out for them :)
Hi guys - glad to see this! I agree it's a huge problem and one that I've felt several times.

The reason why I never book on TaskRabbit or Thumbtack anymore is because there's legitimately an 80% chance that they don't show up. There's no penalty for not showing up or expressing higher availability and just choosing from it.

This means that every repair or home service that I consider is a simple question. Is this worth rebooking multiple times or will I just bite the bullet and try to do it myself.

I would be willing to pay around 1.5 - 2X more than I book for if I had some guarantee - financial or otherwise, that they would show up. Just the ability to construct a simple equation in my head - "is this repair worth $X" in my head without trying to manage the cost of a no-show would be huge and would have me checking the cost of much more small repairs.
Same here.

Got quite some emails from people inquiring about my services.

But as a DevRel consultant, my target client group is on HN probably quite often.
Reminds me that at one point each page of the Apple Wiki Server that shipped with OS X Server back in the day used one SQLite file per page. Worked ok-ish.
Then why not just make them out of steel, or aluminum, or--hell--plastic?

Clearly, the composition of the medal has symbolic value beyond "usefulness". Also, I expect an Olympic medal is worth at least a little more than any ol' hunk of the same constituent materials. So it's not like they are without risk as is.
Right. You own it, but your spouse doesn't.
I see two different questions here:
Do you want more money and more responsibility?
Or do you want to be liked and accepted by your peers?

Some more questions: Do you like the person you are right now? Would talking and communicating more be very uncomfortable for your personality and cause you fear or anxiety?
(Computer) Theorem proving shows how much we take human reasoning for granted. The computer has no intuition, so proving just about anything interesting requires real skill.
I always felt like the rather disconnected nature of HN (i.e. no mail notifications, no bell to inform you about replies, ...) is a big part of what makes HN a better social media platform than most others.

Still, I agree that sometimes it would be nice to be able contact someone directly.
While I agree with you about executing snippets of unknown origin not being a good idea, I expect that the average HN user would at most need to copy the part in quotes, and they would be already familiar with the rest of that line.
This version doesn't require the knowledge of any system or programming language:

"To obtain my e-mail address reverse the following text from left to right, letter by letter: moc.elpmaxe@raboof".

Note that grandparent cpach, if you check their profile, is actually relying on the good old (dot) (at) obfuscation system, and not the base64 command they proposed in the comment.
After having just taken my first trip to the big island I was actually very surprised how sparse the retail was. Felt very much like rural America.
Plus it looks like there is a C/Lua SDK coming out soon which is cool.
This is getting more Time Cube by the comment.
Denmark also has no capital gains tax and the housing prices has also gone up like crazy over the last year.

I guess the thinking must be that if it were taxed and say you bought a house for 500k and a decade later it is worth 750k and you have to move for another job to a place where a comparable house would also be 750k$, then you can't afford the "same house" any longer because you have to pay tax on the 250k gain. The funny thing is I don't think we would see this kind of increase on the house price if it where taxed, making the point pretty mood.

Does anyone know of a country with tax on capital gains from selling a house and how the prices on houses are there?
Author of the referenced blog (and library) here. This is great!

The full text search engine in SQLite is sadly not really good for this - one reason is that it uses standard B-Trees, another is that it forces storing all token positions if you want BM25 sorting, which is a huge overhead for articles as long as Wikipedia's.

But that doesn't mean full text search isn't possible in a very efficient manner with statically hosted data! I wrote a proof of concept of making the Rust-based tantivy library work in the same way, which has a lot of internal things that can make the index much smaller and more efficient than SQLite's. It's also >10x faster in creating the search index.

Here's the demo also for Wikipedia: https://demo.phiresky.xyz/tmp-ytccrzsovkcjoylr/dist/index.ht...
I'm not sure if it's more efficient than the SQlite version in this form, but it definitely has more upward potential and is more fun to work with.

And the corresponding draft PR: https://github.com/tantivy-search/tantivy/pull/1067

I sadly haven't gotten around to working on it more and writing an article about it.

Other people are also working on using this stuff to make Sci-hub and LibGen more available by using this in combination with IPFS for distributed and "uncensorable" hosting which is pretty awesome.

Edit: Just realized that the OP demo only searches in article titles, while mine searches in full article contents by default. You can search in only the titles in my demo by querying `title:harry title:potter`
You WANT that. If significant part of population is priced out, education cost must drop. Supply and demand....
> Why does anyone think abolishing copyright is a good idea?

Because entire industries, like fashion, have no intellectual property protection—and work just fine. In fact, they're extremely wealthy industries, with very low costs for consumers.
Less chat can help robots make better decisions
Rights are laws.

In US they are written into Constitution which is the law and which is source of these rights and basis for enforcing them.

"Human rights" are part of international law which is an agreement signed by multiple countries -- a form of law.
No. Absolutely do not act as your own patent lawyer - ever - especially in litigation. It is correctly considered an arcane and difficult field even by other lawyers.
Such a pretty house

And such a pretty garden

And no alarms and no surprises
Torrents aren't great for random access which this app is doing.
It’s quite helpful, if their only concern is to survive then the only real recommendation is to bunker down and keep your head down.

Tor is great if you are in the US or Germany but in many places simply having it installed can land you in jail, having guides published by the US government and other organizations is also nice in theory but in practice this would again land you in hot water due to possession of subversive materials or w/e excuse the government or the group(s) in power would use.

If their goals are different than just survival than they need to know that they assume a high risk, not only in the times prior and during a revolution but quite often after it since the multitude of groups that tend to fight in a revolution end up fighting amongst themselves for control once the main regime is overcome.

It’s easy for people that lived all their life in a country that has a rule of law and that despite what Twitter would tell you actually respects human rights and civil liberties to give advice, unfortunately that advice can often get you arrested or even killed in the real world.
Also there is no copyleft without copyright. I agree though the term should be much more limited.
I didn't say that. I'm sure that's an honest mistake, but it's one that would be very easy to avoid.

As to the rest of your comment, I agree that Jacob Rees-Mogg is not normal. But that doesn't mean he's a phony.
I'm guessing because vaccinations are higher in several countries (UK, Germany, Israel, ?) where there are conservative governments. (And Trump did order a bunch of vaccines in the US.)

So yes, probably because of this conservative government. Even because of these conservative governments (State and Federal).

But not simply because of a conservative government.
Someone should tell Ben Shapiro that!
Except my comment was not complaining about it. It was noting a disparity in observed behavior.
Should these menial, easily automated jobs in a low margin business exist in the future?
> but it does not represent everyone else's morals

Yes, I'm sure you can find at least one person who doesn't agree. Maybe yourself. But how much do you want to bet that if you asked this question to 100 people, better than 90 of them would agree?

> For starters, the married person breaks a contract, whereas the unmarried person does not have a contract to break

I said moral, not legal. A few people only define right & wrong based on what they can legally get away with, I understand.
No, I knew that "push" was BS. The concept and the promise of the Internet as a whole was exciting but most of the startup scene (especially in the frothy late 90s) was pure land-grab easy-money types.
Then how is it that I consistently hear about how Costco treats its employees phenomenally? Amazon's revenue surpassed Costco's in 2016, so if it is merely success that gets criticized Costco should have been similarly before that point. But that's not the case, and both Amazon and Costco have had their current reputations for much longer than that.
NY isn't that happy with Coumo. Less-so for registered democrats but he's still not winning re-election which is about as accountable as politicians seem to be.

https://lmgtfy.app/?q=democrats+calling+for+cuomo+to+resign

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/03/19/new-poll-s...
But the open file limits aren't a trust issue, they're a resource issue.

If this allows avoiding the reason for the resource limitation in the first place then there's no problem as far as I can see.
Yep, you're right. The wikitext -> markdown conversion strips out some links, noticeably on the disambiguation pages, for an unclear reason.
What I don't understand is why (at least in places I worked at) CI/build systems are configured to print absolutely everything they do, who reads that?

Hopefully error msg is at the end so you can go to the end of the 100kB worth of logs to find what failed. If it's no at the end though it's kinda funny how you just mindlessly scroll through a garbage and sort of instinctively identify what 'looks like normal garbage' vs 'looks like a bit more suspicious garbage', just by it's shape
Oh, didn't realize I'd posted that. It was a dream that I remembered long enough to write it down.
C++ compilers massively improved their error messages in the last couple decades. If you were missing a semicolon, it used to give you some syntax error when it tried to parse the next statement. Now, it just tells you that you forgot a semicolon. These kinds of user friendly improvements really make compilers easier to work with.
People had a lot more freedom
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7721859/

This offers real estimates of the actual IFR (the likelihood of death if you have the virus in your system).

I'll refer you to table 3

The average HNer is going to likely be in the 0-54 demographic. Their IFR is anywhere from 0.004% to 0.23%.

The case fatality ratio you cite has a number of problems. Firstly, it's not true that the 'current' COVID fatality rate is 1/50. To make such a claim you need to define 'current'. You are citing the entire case fatality rate over the last year and a half. And even then, you're overstating it, since it's 1.8% by most estimates.

A current rate would mean taking a smaller window starting from today and determining the CFR. Given that cases are currently going up while deaths are flat, the current CFR is going to be lower than the global CFR you cited.

CFR is always higher, because most people with COVID will not notice they have it [1]. Thus, we need scientific modeling to determine the number.

Moreover, I am not arguing that vulnerable populations do not exist. Merely that the death rates are so non-uniformly distributed, that it really doesn't make sense to have a uniform policy on all age groups / background conditions. The data tell a lot different story.

[1] From the study: The exponential pattern of our age-specific IFR estimates is qualitatively similar to that of case fatality rates (CFRs). However, the relative magnitudes are systematically different, reflecting the extent to which asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases are much more common in younger adults than in middle-aged and older adults. For example, the ratio of CFR to IFR is about 15:1 for ages 30–49, about 7:1 for ages 50–69, and about 5:1 for ages 70–79 years
You can chunk the file into e.g. 2MB chunks. The CDN can then cache all or the most commonly used ones. That's what I did in the original blog post to be able to host it on GitHub Pages.
> copy the part in quotes

...which would still get you pwned for the snippet in the question I linked.

Again, I know that for someone reasonably familiar with base64 and bash it's obvious that the base64 example is indeed safe. Maybe you want to filter out people that don't have that level of familiarity (or aren't naive enough to execute bash code they don't fully understand). That's both very arbitrary and unnecessary though - HN is quite diverse. But of course, it's also up to everyone what they do or don't put in their profile.
Note that my treadmill can go down to about 0.4mph (0.25 km/h) which is really slow. Anything you can run on is usually too fast.
>Read the full article and maybe you'll understand better? If you're lazy here ya go:

Well you just casually linked a 11k word article with little context. I'm not going to read that and then try to figure out whether that article was supposed to serve as an addition to your original argument, or merely a source to back up your claim about PFOF being pioneered by maddoff.

>At the time, payment for order flow was highly controversial, and opposition was intense.

In other words, PFOF is bad because Madoff fought for it and it was controversial? That's still guilt by association, and a terrible argument.

>I don't understand why you guys are so hand-wavy about the the idea that PFOF introduces serious conflicts of interest

Because they're already obligated by law to provide best execution. They're also obligated to provide reports on the quality of execution.

>You seem to suggest that just because they are the ones bringing light to it that it shouldn't be taken seriously. Weird.

You started off by insinuating that robinhood took orders from melvin/citadel to restrict trades. Insofar as that's concerned, it shouldn't be taken seriously because there's scarce evidence.
This is almost as bad as cheating in sports. Truly the world is a foul and desolate wasteland, but full marks to the OP for dredging onward stoically through the mire
I wonder how much "first contact" is missed because of emails going straight to spam...
The point you quoted was about the US tech producing several behemoths in the turn of the century. As of today, no later company in your list is on the path of competing with the best of that generation.

You decided to read that point as an appeal to EU-US banter-if-not-chauvinism, I'm afraid that's not really a discussion I'm interested in having on HN.
If anyone is interested in more details on the Generational GC in Java, I found an article a few days ago that explains how it works. In particular, it explains how they deal with changes to old gen.

https://shipilev.net/jvm/anatomy-quarks/13-intergenerational...

And there are a lot of other interesting posts on Java internals in that series.