skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month
> Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used?

It's probably not similar to the PC you're typing on in many ways, including the following:

- Probably significantly higher bandwidth to the internet

- Astonishingly high bandwidth to Azure resources (fiber)

- Outstanding security: cameras, carefully controlled access, 24x7 physical security

- Hardware reliability automatically serviced

- Multiple sources of power (usually more than one power
utility company connected, plus generators)

- Multiple network connections typically, for redundancy

- Backups managed for you

- Can push a button and make a clone of your PC that your friend can log in to for a couple days then delete it when you're done

- If someone wanted to steal your hard drive by breaking into your house, they totally could. But getting your cloud PC hard drive image is going to take more determination than breaking through a window.

For many users, none of the above things matter. But for a lot of users, having all those things taken care of is a big win. Have you ever had a fan or a hard drive die on your pc? Or deal with the pain of migrating data off a dead PC onto its new replacement? Maybe that sort of thing happens only once every few years to you. But if you're managing, say, 25 pc's, every month you're going to be dealing with 1-3 problems in your fleet.
That's not answering though about capacity. UK's went up 8x, but they were nowhere close to hitting capacity.

NYC's hospitalizations dipped to ~18 admitted/day citywide in June and are up to ~50 now. But that's a long way from 350 over winter and far away from hitting 1700 in the initial surge.

The UK government realized that even with their high case spike (to winter level) that vaccination ensured that hospitalizations would not come close, so they ended restrictions at what in retrospect was their peak cases. Their admission rate hit maybe a quarter of their winter rate even though case rate peak was similar. (vaccine cut hospitalization rate per case by 75%).

To my point, unless we're substantially different from the UK, it doesn't look like hospitalization capacity should be a concern with this wave.
> And most western countries are still far to far from being highly vaccinated. If they were, we wouldn't need to ask for their vaccination status.

We're not talking about "most western countries"...we're talking about New York City, where 72% of the adult population has had at least one dose, and about 0.2% get another dose, every day:

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...
SumUp | Tech Lead, Software Engineering | Full Time, Equity, 160k-180k | ONSITE or REMOTE (Boulder, CO)

SumUp is a fintech company focused on empowering small businesses. We're primarily focused on enabling merchants to accept payments, and we build a number of tools including POS devices (similar to Square). As a company we've primarily operated in European markets and Brazil, but we're hiring in the US to build out our Global Expansion team which will be responsible for establishing new markets including the United States.

We're looking for experienced engineers with a history of technical leadership on big projects. We use tools like Elixir, Ruby, Golang, (among others) to work on a myriad of technical projects related to establishing new markets.

We're especially interested in engineers who have experience with hardware certification and payments infrastructure, and those who have experience working on open source projects.

We're currently employing a hybrid model for remote work, so most engineers come in to the office 1-2 days a week. We provide relocation assistance to move to Colorado if possible for you.

Send me an email at austin.tindle@sumup.com and mention hackernews if you're interested.
Majesty was a really great game that I spend a lot of time on in my youth. I'd love to see more games that work similarly: every entity is semi-autonomous - gameplay is about incentivizing, guiding progress and managing resources, but the entities don't need input to act.
So first, consider nth roots. These correspond to particularly simple field extensions. If I take two choices of nth root, their ratio is always an nth root of unity. This more or less forces the symmetry group to be a subgroup of the nth roots of unity, i.e. Z/n.

Now if you have a general expression built out of extracting nth roots for various n, that might generate some big complicated field extension. But it corresponds to a tower of field extensions which are all just extracting nth roots. Thus the intermediate symmetry groups are still all subsets of Z/n for various n.

The Galois correspondence tells you that the symmetry group of the entire extension, call it G, has a corresponding decomposition: there is an increasing sequence of subgroups 1 < G_1 < … < G_k = G such that each intermediate quotient group G_{i+1}/G_i is a subgroup of Z/n for some n. Groups with such a decomposition are called solvable.

Insolvability of the quintic then boils down to this: the symmetry group of any degree k polynomial must be a subgroup of S_k. For k <= 4, S_k is solvable; for k >= 5, it is not.

This last sentence is the closest thing I can offer to intuition. It is a very finite and tangible fact that one can write down and computationally verify for themselves. Like, you can write down the corresponding solvable decomposition of S_4, and you can see that S_5 is not solvable by verifying that A_5 is simple which itself boils down to a small number of cases.
Unsure if I could live without the right thumb cluster but would be really interested in a write-up/photos of this project.
Forty volumes of the "Journal of Forecasting" would be a place to start for peer-reviewed articles, I guess

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1099131x/current
I have been doing my best to find critical information on the viability of Thorium based nuclear reactors (because they sound too good to be true).

Everyone sings their praises, but what engineering challenges are there and are those engineering challenges large enough to discourage their development/adoption?

The biggest thing I have found is that the salt solution for Thorium reactors is quite corrosive and that is challenging to contain.

It generally sounds really promising - even the Wiki page for thorium MSR sings its praises.

Why wouldn't it work? Why isn't the world throwing shit-loads of money at this? Is China enlightened or is this some kind of meme-ware technology they fell for (or are trying to convince others to waste their money on)?
Important to note that these numbers are for graduate level students. Still wild that well over 50% of masters, docs and postdocs in the US are are not US citizens.

International students make up around 5% [1] of the undergraduate student body. Can't find the number specifically for STEM but I imagine its still < 20%.

[1] https://opendoorsdata.org/data/international-students/enroll...
No, if you want to come to NY and eat at a NY restaurant you're subject to NY laws just like you are when you pay the NY sales tax rate. You don't pay the CT sales tax at a NY restaurant.

Vaccine card or leave.

If CT wants to work with NY to create a comity law understanding or a common vaccine card (IE accept CT digital vaccine cards) the states can work together.
If this is money paid to a person that spends significant time performing a specific service, how is this different from earning money by working? Why are they calling it "universal income"? It's a very confusing idea.

There is already a way to give money to people doing something of value. Just call it a job.
Clever, but I'm curious why you don't use VLOOKUP?

It's simpler, and Lotus 1-2-3 doesn't have MATCH! :-)

I think something like this would work...

(income-@VLOOKUP(income,table,1))*@VLOOKUP(income,table,3)+@VLOOKUP(income,table,5)
The government does not have carte-blanche authority to strip people of any liberty that isn’t strictly necessary for survival. The government stripping life of all its “luxuries” just looks like being in prison (except at least prisoners are allowed to go to the gym).
> maybe in movies

No, I said "IME". Don't try to dismiss other people.
L.A., like most major US cities, does not harbor slums similar to those found abutted to some other major cities around the world. The growth of informal housing arrangements within public spaces, a la L.A. homeless encampments, maybe a reflection of this. Its possible that slums do indeed play a vital role in urban housing? Since slums have always been viewed a third-world thing, western policy makers may have neglect paying them due consideration.

Where Are The World’s Worst Slums?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q67gldZ1P_8
If you dislike Mint's business model and find YNAB limited, you might like Buxfer (https://www.buxfer.com)

We have built Buxfer to cater to power users, so it has lots of powerful functionality - budgeting, forecasting, automated rules, investment tracking and so on.

GP's feature set sounds like its for "superpower users" :) We don't (and will likely never) get too much into things like taxes. But Buxfer is still one of the rare products that has a simple straightforward pricing and caters to a niche that expects powerful features from their financial software.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder.
> but then when I try to restate your argument

The argument, nothing more, nothing less:

> One can project from SpaceX's launch history that as the commercialization of space intensifies, this figure is going to continue to grow exponentially

I have made further arguments, but this is the one that is downvoted. I imagine most of the people that downvoted were Elon stans, but what's funny is that I doubt Elon himself would disagree with this statement. He has made exactly this kind of superlinear growth with Tesla, his battery production, and I'm certain he has the same ambition for SpaceX.

> You seem to be arguing that space flight will continue to grow exponentially, consuming all the resources required to sustain that growth, unless we stop it right now, or very soon, unless we stop it right now, or very soon

Once again, I have never made this point. I am in sympathy with directing attention and capital to problems with earth, but I reserve that as my opinion and beyond this discussion.

Allow me to restate my claim so that we're both certain:

The estimate that capital expenditure for SpaceX's space projects is 2 billion per year is short-sighted, and maybe a little disingenuous, given that that figure will grow exponentially in the longer term.

It's this exponential growth we're arguing about, whether it will be 'eventually drawing from other, more worthy projects' is a morality question I did not pose. Agreed?

> It is limited by the available resources

Err, yes. I'm not saying growth goes forever, obviously, but by the time the space industry (on earth) saturates, spending on space will be many orders of magnitude more. Let alone that acquisition of raw materials and manufacturing for space can continue off earth, so I don't think depletion of resources are a problem in the very long term.

> but why not consider processor transistor density?

Because it's completely orthogonal to my point. I'm not talking about efficiencies, I'm talking about gross spending on the technology. Full stop.

> we don't seem to be increasing our spending on it

But we will be increasing this spending year-on-year, likely at an exponential rate. You disagree with this, but it seems we're both speculating. Though for at least my speculation, the current trend, and history, broadly agrees.

> I think that looking at the profitability of use cases of space flight really only strengthens my argument, and weakens the one I think you're making.

The one I wasn't making. But I'm not sure about the argument you're making? If SpaceX is making exponentially more profit, capital expenditure on commercial space ventures must be increasing. If there's more profit, it's because someone, somewhere, is fronting up the cash.

Could this money be better allocated in order to solve Earth's problems? Probably. Might space tech in some way help Earth anyway? Maybe. But will the spending for a new frontier of wealth increase exponentially in the medium to long term? Barring some major catastrophe or extinction event, it's inevitable.
Classic slippery slope fallacy. Just cause we allow something now doesn't mean we allow it always or are in favor of the general principle.

Put up at least a half honest response to contribute to the discussion
Sure, good luck with the vessel at that temp
That's too dramatic. If we were that different, research into medications would be a waste of time.
> Generally no one (seriously) programs a computer exclusively with a mouse. A keyboard is used. Surely, there must be a reason for this.

Yeah, looks like there is a reason for this. Keys are only present in keyboards and not mouse..
There was a British princess who became a nun in Italy. It happens.
> That's an incredibly unhelpful attitude.

Shrug. There is no way I'd be able to afford it, if I needed it.

The unhelpfulness isn't coming from me.
> There is hard data which says COVID has a huge range of long term side effects

If you can cite this "hard data", it'll be amongst the first I've ever seen.

So far, all I've seen are anecdotes and poorly controlled surveys of self-reported symptoms, the vast majority of which are mild. Reports of "cough" and "fatigue", three weeks after a respiratory illness are not exceptional, they're the expected case.

Just today, this paper was published in a Lancet journal, looking at symptom duration in a large cohort (259k) of children under 17. The most enduring symptoms? Loss of smell, headache, sore throat and fatigue. Virtually everything else fell to background in a week.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...
Air and oxygen are omnipresent.

Sparks and fires are not.
1/sqrt(2) |alive> + 1/sqrt(2) |dead>

Take several of these and you can collect data across several expeirments that shows they're in a superposition, but if you only have one, Aaronson's argument applies.
> By not getting vaccinated you are pushing the onus of responsibility to society. When you occupy a bed in a hospital for a preventable disease (like covid post-vaccine) you are a detriment to society. You are occupying precious resources because you were dumb

Why are you focusing on weak predictors of expected medical cost like vaccination status instead of strong predictors like diet and obesity?
Christ we're going back to RDPs. Nooooooo
> I do believe you require approximately two fully-equipped and high-morale legions to kill a singular Hippo in that game, no joke. If you see 2 or 3 Hippos in a singular area, you'll need a substantial Army to clear them out.

Are Pharaoh's Hippos related to Dwarf Fortress Carp, perchance? Because this situation sounds familiar.
Ya people worried about status always seem to be the people not in the trade.

Excluding the trades really tied to the oil industry or tough construction work… every debt-free plumber/carpenter/electrician/HVAC seems to be A-ok happy. If they have small businesses acumen, these types seem to be financial rocketships by their 30’s.
That's a similar concept, though despite their claims of unphishability, it is phishable, since the QR code is portable, and that is the only item that the authenticating device reads. The contents of the QR code simply don't matter as long as it's portable (it always will be) and is the only item that the authenticator reads. Keyri reads stuff other than the QR code.
Pretty much everything you do often enough will be automated away from conscious thought.

It ends up in a weird situation where if someone asks what the keyboard binding for, say, inserting a row into a org-mode table, I wouldn't be able to answer. Something with maybe a c in it, and a '-', not sure? Yet, once in the situation that needs it, the fingers move by themselves.

Also related, musicians don't spend two seconds figuring out how to play a note.
Here's how that'd go in the last two companies I worked for: Purchase declined. Not valid under T&E policy. Please follow IT acquisition policy for computer equipment and real estate acquisition policy for furniture. Card payment is due by xx/xx to reimburse for invalid expense.
Its not enough to have designs and test plants. We need scale, and that means at least 1 new plant beginning construction each year.

This is what the French did in the 70s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Are you implying a specific group?
Lazy and boring reporting from the failing Atlantic! Journalists love to extrapolate national/global trends from their insular professional sphere like this. Media has always been a competitive industry where psychotic behavior is rewarded, and things are probably worse than ever in a field as archaic as printed magazines. I don't think incidents like this reflect a shift in the national character as much as they showcase desperate strivers trying to knock their competitors down a peg. It's a little bit insulting to compare normal Americans to these weirdos.
Wages are stagnating in the developed mostly because productivity is stagnating:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/12/22-source...
I wonder if the same thing would be possible for Rimworld, using some level of abstraction over pawns (as input/output connections) and minimum room configurations.
The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights (Steven Pinker,)
The vaccines have full approval here in the EU. Thats why we got the vaccines 2 months later than the US.
It is also not clear, how long the vaccines protect. Some part of the immune response is considered to be quite long-term, only the antibody-count falls quicker. The thing is: we lack precise data here and we have an ongoing pandemic. Once the pandemic is over, it is much safer to explore how long we can set the interval for booster shots.
Most certainly it was.
Not all organisations realise that dropping some customers is a good move
Show HN: WordWebNav: create usable MS-Word web-pages
Happened in my city.
Or bill on the X day of the month, where X <= 28.
If there is a will, there is a way. The US invented the nuclear bomb in just a few years with the Manhattan project.

The biggest obstacle has been the anti-science FUD spread largely by environmental groups.
If you write down every step of drone delivery you should see flying drones can't do general delivery. But there is a lot of cool stuff they might do, but you have to be specific, and also write it down using numbers not hand waving.

"an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning"

How TF is this news, on Wired. How has the scene become a bunch of accountants and proud.

And it seems it was lame anyway -

"It was about 11am or 12pm and this guy just had this open can of Stella,” explains one former employee. “He took it out of a fridge and popped it open at his desk.”"

Wall Street did coke off hookers in their offices if movies taught me anything. Now we are down to one beer by one employee at 'lunch' shows morale has been destroyed. It is good proof removing lead from gasoline as severely disrupted society, perhaps we should put it back, not 80's wall street level which was problematic but at least something, half the amount of lead.
When project loom finishes, the JVM should have lightweight threads, tail call elimination and continuations, too.
> The economics make so much more sense in that world.

Actually the economics still does not make any sense in that world, but some people in some companies count things (only) using such rituals that they think it does. Which is, obviously, all that matters.
> I don't want to pay rent that way. It's a good way to get scammed because they're charging you a higher per-day rate in February than January.

Are you serious? They're not scamming you. They're giving you a discount 11 months out of the year. Feb is the only month They're charging you full rate for!
Yeah, I don't see why drones and vans would be mutually exclusve. You drive a van down the main road and have it spin off a fleet of drones for individual residential deliveries. They do their thing in 1-2 minutes - far less time than it would take for the driver to get out of the van and walk the package to the door - and then return to wherever the van is currently driving to recharge and pick up the next delivery. The drones never need more than a 1-2 mile range, they recharge while the van is going to the next neighborhood. You avoid all the congested residential streets, the need to find parking or double-park, the risk of hitting kids that run out into the street to catch their ball, the difficulty finding houses, plus all the hard work drivers need to do to walk up driveways and carry heavy packages. Also is very amenable to self-driving trucks, since the delivery van only needs to navigate the main arteries and they have drones acting as the capillaries.
I suppose if you consider software to be somehow magically different than all the other human activities which go over-time or over-budget, maybe you could claim that research doesn't apply. But I guess I'd still expect you to know about the fundamentals of the multiple researched approaches to getting experts to predict accurate numbers in the face of uncertainty and social pressure, before deciding to discount it entirely for our specific field.

But it's certainly made a big difference for me in practice, and given the gushing about Steve McConnell in another comment thread, I'm not alone.
No one is suggesting preventing non New Yorkers from coming into New York. We only ask they respect our laws. People are always welcome to visit unhindered.

If they want the full NY experience which includes eating at a restaurant they must follow the laws in NY. One of these is paying the NY sales tax, not the sales tax of the state from which they're visiting. They also must comply with NY's vaccine requirements to eat at a restaurant.

If they don't want to, they're welcome to come and enjoy all the other activities that don't require proof of vaccination.
My authentic self wouldn't be caught dead at work. I'm only at work to acquire the means to be my authentic self at places that...aren't work.
The US Supreme Court is not the ultimate moral authority. You’re responding to a comment addressing the abstract long-term consequences of a policy with a specific legal determination saying the policy didn’t happen to violate US law.
Because corrupt politicians close down existing nuclear power industries and force their countries to import natural gas.

They then get cushy roles at those foreign natural gas companies once their political career is over:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/13/russia.germany

And if something goes wrong with Nuclear, they get the blame, whereas climate change cooks the frog slowly and blame and impacts are distributed across the entire planet.
> And a lot of the die hards will probably come around when the vaccine becomes part of the normal, boring health care routine instead of something they’re being “forced into” in an emergency, You know, you go in to the clinic in the winter with a cold. Doc asks if you’ve had your flu shot. Asks if you’ve had your COVID shot. That’s a much more comfortable context for people, I think.

Have you looked at uptake rates for the seasonal flu vaccine?

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1819estimates.ht...

> Flu vaccination coverage among adults ≥18 years was 45.3%, an increase of 8.2 percentage points from the 2017–18 flu season and 2.0 percentage points higher than the 2016–17 season.

That is not a bar we should be aiming at...
Yes, the trucks can be pretty bad for noise already. The payoff of convenient delivery makes it just about acceptable. Taking the noise to another level won't go down well in many locations and doesn't offer that much more for the consumer.