skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who actually engaged with that story, I found the reporting and posited facts to be incoherent and full of holes. It only made sense if one presumed the outcome. Literacy includes evaluating why something was covered by certain folks and not by others as well as the internal coherence and the inter-relationship.
> when I was working as a 1099 contract worker, I bought health insurance for my family for little more than what an employer deducts from my paycheck.

How long has it been since then?

What most people would consider "good" insurance costs $1500-2000 per month for a family.

I've never seen an employer chip in less than 50% of that cost.
I work as a contractor without benefits. I got a 75% raise over my last job which was w2. I can easily pay for my own benefits, got the bonus of being able to allocate more to retirement via my i401k and can write off a ton of stuff to reduce my taxable income that I would have to pay for anyway working a w2 remote job. New laptop, portions of my power bill, phone bill, internet etc. I think the best part is mental, I no longer care about promotions, office politics or getting recognition from leadership. I just clock in do my work and clock out, if they want me to work more hours that's cool too, I just charge them for it at my hourly rate. I really like it. Your mileage may vary of course.

Edit: Another benefit is health care premiums are tax deductible as long as you are not eligible to go under a spouses employer plan.
This is why it's not a good idea to join the US Arm Forces. We should hang our politicians for sending our young people there for nothing. It's bullshit that we went there but we should pull the fuck out and never go back. We should also get out of Iraq and Syria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

As of July 27, 2018, there have been 2,372 U.S. military deaths and 4 Department of Defense civilian deaths in the War in Afghanistan. 1,856 of these deaths have been the result of hostile action. 20,320 American service members have also been wounded in action during the war.

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/figures/2...

U.S. COSTS TO DATE FOR THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN, 2001-2021ESTIMATED CONGRESSIONAL APPROPRIATIONS AND SPENDING IN CURRENT $BILLIONS
TOTAL = $2.261 TRILLION
I misread “Tendies”
The answers about the population not having the will to fight miss the point completely and are irrelevant and propagate racist views. Afghanistan has a pre-existing system of tribal relationships that are constantly dynamic. The Taliban are effective because they negotiated a path with the pre-existing power structures. The central government is only one player of many.

CBC wrote a brief article on this recently: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/taliban-revival-aug13-1.613...
Original article discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28152174 (335 points/437 comments)
What would having a poker face have looked like? I always assumed it would be a fiasco, we did nothing to ensure stability and the stories of afghans army being completely incompetent go back to when we first got there. My brother is a vet, and his personal anecdotes about them make them seem like toddlers.
Yeah I have worked fully remote and fully on-site, and both modes have issues.

Also since being forced remote for a year or so, most of my colleagues are happy to be returning to in-person work on an occasional basis
The Irish political/building establishment thrives on crisis and desparation: it's a sort of small time disaster capitalism in which the electorate continually collude with their betters in order to further their immiseration.

Seeing the greenspaces of my childhood filled-in with shoddy-looking, expensive housing was shocking. Fingal County Council planning department seem to be giving the go-ahead to build any and every piece of rubbish using the excuse of "housing crisis" that you mention.

I just returned from visiting Dublin (mainly the Northside) after several years away and was irritated by: ridiculous levels of private vehicle usage; broken in-carriage electronic stop announcements on the DART (light electric rail); difficulty in planning trips connecting dublin bus/iarnrod eireann/dart; bus stops without proper shelters; drivers parking on the pavement(sidewalk); lack of courtesy from drivers at non-signalized intersection. On a positive note I will say that all (especially Dublin Bus drivers) personnel interacted with on an individual level were wonderful.
This is a good question. From my observations, it feels like half the community is just following the "LTS" releases (11, and 17 next month). And then the other 50% is split between chasing the current release and forever being stuck on 8.

It's really sad because JDK 8 really is an antiquated runtime. You're doing a disservice to your developers, users, and your $$ if you're still running it.
Along with cable was PBS. Perhaps we will see efforts for publicly funded content, though dubious that civic engagement is high enough to swell it.
Opening this, on desktop, left me speechless with an open mouth: https://archive.jlongster.com/

You can explore it with the mouse cursor.
Maybe it doesn't help create life, but prevents its destruction, like Jupiter protects Earth from asteroids, or has another shielding effect.
https://flinhong.github.io/images/201607/tabs-spaces.jpg
I’ve noticed that my own Instagram feed was only showing me content from large accounts and female friends who posted bikini pics. And if I decided to keep scrolling without liking a picture it would continue showing me the same post on subsequent logins or even the second photo in the album of the post further down in the feed. The app was essentially telling me what posts to like while filtering out all the genuine content my friends were posting. So I deleted it. We need a good ole consumer boycott and government-initiated privacy probe.
One of the nice things about HN is being exposed to a broad range of opinions. As fairly left wing myself, I don’t find it particularly welcoming nor hostile when it comes to political issues. Which is a refreshing change from the normal echo chambers both the left and right can get into. However, some people interpret “there exist people with different opinions than me” as somehow being a mob, which just seems like an angry attempt to silence discussion. (I’ve seen left and right complain about that on HN, so I think it’s less about politics alignment than it is about certain personality types that can be found across the political spectrum. The right’s equivalent of militant “SJW’s” or whatever the current bogeyman is.)
Saw these via a tweet showing one in action https://twitter.com/KevindotHickman/status/14260979444413767...
So do you get the entire editor client side and you can read and write file (functionality that GitHub already had), but the big difference from Codespaces is that you don't have access to a linux box to run anything on? Sounds like an awesome little addition if that is the case.
Controlling Social Distancing with Teltonika
>I was unable to share the link below in a private Facebook Messenger group. What else will be censored next, at the behest of the government?

>Facebook Messenger group

>the government

Does.

Not.

Compute.

Error

However, I do applaud your silliness as "Facebook government" almost sounds slightly correct for some swath of people.
The World’s First AI Program
> A penny pincher is the person who goes to dinner with a dozen people and ends up spending an hour trying to "fairly" divide the check among everyone. Or, the one who says a few days later that you should treat him to lunch because he only had a single glass of wine whereas everyone else had two or some such.

Alcoholic drinks in most popular cities are $10+ per drink, if not $18+ in tier 1 cities. If someone that does not drink alcohol is called a penny pincher for not wanting to spend thousands of pennies for others’ alcohol consumption, then what is a person who expects others to spend thousands of their pennies for their alcohol consumption called?

Same situation with vegetarians going out with meat/fish/poultry eaters, since meat dishes cost a decent amount more.

Very odd to me that expecting someone else to pay vastly more for your consumption is considered OK, effectively ostracizing the budget constrained people in your network from dining out with you.
For a variety of reasons (tl;dr - _horrendous_ government mismanagement), Australia has a very low vaccination rate, even in the elderly and vulnerable. So, given Delta, they have a very simple choice here; harsh lockdowns, or get building surplus crematorium capacity. You can see why they're opting for the first.

This isn't to excuse the Australian government; it's largely a mess of their own making. But given where they are, they don't have much of a choice right now.
I was referring more to the TARP program, but your point is taken.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
> I try to pinch my nose and read both parties' propaganda machines

There is a lot you can find that isn't in propaganda machines. One essential piece of propaganda is to say that everything is propaganda, like a liar saying everyone lies. The very good news is that, while nothing will meet a standard of perfection, there are excellent news sources - you have more access to quality news than anyone in history, thanks to the professionalization and expansion of journalism and to, of course, the Internet.

The first trick: Skip all opinion pieces. They are all BS from every side, IMHO.

Despite what those propagandists and opinion pieces say, the NY Times, Washington Post, and similar publications do provide quality news (don't read their opinion sections either).
That they let people post whatever they want and if someone doesn't like it then they shouldn't read it.
> While we have always welcomed the opportunity to hear ideas from partners on what will help, including from within the football community, our data suggests that ID verification would have been unlikely to prevent the abuse from happening - as the accounts we suspended themselves were not anonymous. Of the permanently suspended accounts from the Tournament, 99% of account owners were identifiable.

Even higher than expected but absolutely no surprise.

Full name policies prevents the thoughtful, the vulnerable and the shy from communicating, not the trolls and abusers who either just create fake but real looking accounts or who doesn't care.
had no idea there was this level of dodgyness (nor consolidation) going on in the industry :(
Thanks for your comment jph, "you can hack your own mind" is a really great way to frame it!
People always say fact check the news they might be biased etc, when this is nothing new, even in the US.
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Thomas Jefferson"
This is one of the best things you can teach to the young ones. Many people believe in fake news just because it is stated on the internet.
> This form of journalism is pretty much dead in America

Nearly, but we need it to come back.

We can't depend on every citizen having loads of spare personal time to spend doing their own journalistic research on every topic. It's impossible. And we can't just let "entertainment news" become the standard. The current chaos will just keep ramping up and up until the collapse of democracy. Yeah I know, many democracies have collapsed over human history. But we need to do something to bring back journalism, not just educate people about how to do their own journalism. That's about as sustainable as having everyone grow their own food. Which is to say, not sustainable at all.
Is there a reason the desktop app requires Mac OS 11?

I'm interested in this area as marketing teams do need to create ephemeral apps every now and then. One of my favourites is the Nike Lookbook App of 2015; by far one of the best and most visually creative things I've seen. Unfortunately it was removed from the app store.

https://news.nike.com/news/tech-book
Then we will always be beholden to large chipmakers who will crumple to governments at the drop of a hat and implement whatever spyware they desire on-die.
for Elixir, it's similar. Yes, you can use Phoenix.PubSub by using Redis as your infrastructure-based MQ, but that ADDS complexity, over using erlang's native PG/PG2.
Hundreds of labs recording tests across the state and reporting the data to the CDC.

Vs

Telephone call in reporting from the paper you linked.

Which one is more scientifically reliable I wonder?
As a young nerd, I heard many times more than once “AIX” pronounced “aches”. Deliberately, mind you.
The whole reason why they come up with that complicated on-device scan instead of simply scanning their server is because they are trying to push e2ee, on the contrary.
One of the goals with solar thermal is to store the heat in a thermal mass then use that to heat a closed loop steam or gas turbine at night. No fossil fuels are necessary if the system works well enough.

There's a recent proof of concept plant using bauxite particles instead of a liquid or gas as the thermal mass. It should help quite a bit in cost and reliability. Rather than a bunch of high-pressure tubing for liquid salts and such, it works with grain lifts.

One nice thing about using solar thermal for hydrolysis is that much hotter water is much easier to split with electricity. So if you use some of the heat mass to heat water steam to 600 or 700 C, you can use a lot less of the power post-conversion.

A CO2 heat loop might be more efficient than a water steam one, so if the plant isn't dedicated to hydrolysis it might end up with two generation loops.
It's telling that the user is upset that lies are being promoted by our media, to the extent that people are attempting to insert them into children's school curriculum?

It's just an awful line of reasoning to assert that because people have lied in the past, that we should cherish lies and continue to adopt new ones moving forward
Give individual users the power to personally ignore anybody they find objectionable based on their own personal standards.
No. It's not about "shifting the centering". It's about factually wrong.

Updated: source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
Thank you for contributing something positive and informative!
As a rebuttal, this was the entire premise behind the Enterprise service bus. And it is highly regarded today as an extreme anti-pattern.
What part of harrassment and racism is meant to be conversational?

You are still free to be an asshole. Twitter just wishes you'd do it elsewhere.
I teach statistics to undergraduates...you are correct it is a VERY weird suggestion that presumes many things.

I'm trying to craft a more coherent and unfortunately long response to this whole conversation...HN is making some wild practical epistemic swings at this that are largely without merit.
Because the Taliban are an actual liberating army, fighting a bunch of traitors and foreign financed government [1] / army. Now that the main occupying forces are gone, Afghanistan is coming back to the state they always wanted to be.

[1] from the Afghan population point of view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m26jz1YyIk8

The short but very very accurate documentary above (2 min) explains why.

Basically, evolution does not reward survival of the "smartest" or survival of the person with "less cognitive biases."
What’s an indulgence letter?
Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens
You know that the government has Facebook's internal codebase backdoored and are able to push out new commits, and that they are explicitly doing so to censor the messenger system?

Wow, you could probably get a Pulitzer
Dude, why are you still arguing? You were shown to be wrong and talking out of your rear end.

Just stop already.
This is no longer a meritocracy, people around here will accuse you of privilege for even suggesting a meritocracy could exist.

China and Russia are laughing all the way to the bank while the baizuo bring down the rest of the world.
Media glosses over upsides and caveats in IPCC report
The article you include is from 2015. It only shows that a leaky vaccine leads to a higher survival rate of the host (vs no vaccine). It does not show that leaky vaccines select for more virulent strains.

>Nor am I saying people shouldn't get vaccinated.

Viral load is a common proxy for virulence. Your comments all read as casting doubt on vaccination. It's proving to be incredibly effective at reducing death and severe disease.

>But it seems even with widespread vaccination, there may be enough transmission to generate new mutations (Isreal [sic] is 80% vaccinated and they are seeing another wave including breakthroughs).

You provide no data to support this assumption. What is clear is that there will definitely be more transmission without vaccines.

>What I am saying is that the vaccines should be updated to prevent the breakthrough infections

They are being updated rapidly. That is a great advantage of mRNA technology.
What's wrong with iter and next?
I think it depends on the role. I got a 75% raise when I switched to contracting. I have a year to year contract but everyone else here on the same contract has been here multiple years. I work for a contracting company and they contract me out to a unicorn company. Pay is good, hours are good and when they aren't I get paid OT.
"Judo is a Mac Application," so Mac only
If Twitter wishes assholes stopped posting on their site they should just close shop immediately.
> but also using the U.S. tax system to great advantage, putting a very large portion of my gross pay into tax-advantaged accounts[0]

Yep, I'm not an accountant but a 401k for 2021 says you can contribute up to $19,500. But a SEP account for 2021 maxes out at $58,000.

A SEP account is something a contractor or any self employed person can contribute to. It's a tax deferred account meaning the amount you put in is taken off your income right now but then you pay taxes on it later when you withdraw it. Like a 401k, the catch is you need to wait until 59.5 years old to touch it. You can also invest it.

Being able to defer an extra ~40k of income every year is a lot. You could take that 40k and invest it. At 0% interest over 15 years that's $640,000, 3% interest yields $828,593 and 5% interest is $989,456. If you took out your 40k / year at 60 years old, you'd be paying almost no tax on it since your income will be $0 since you're retired and your 828k (middle ground of 3%) would last you another 20 years.

Then there's 15 years of not being taxed on 40k of income at a 35%+ bracket which is roughly 14k a year or another 210k (not counting state taxes which are quite high in places like California and NY). Even if you had to pay $10k a year out of pocket for your own health insurance for 15 years you're coming out way ahead.
China cranks up carbon-intensive projects as climate crisis grows research shows
How We Built an Email Tracking Solution for Our Sales Team
The Taliban are a political faction.

Yes, they are responsible for horrific crimes, but the American Government call them terrorists in an effort to delegitimatize them. Which is why so many people are now surprised by claims that the Taliban are gaining / have gained control of Afghanistan: they can't fathom how a terrorist group can rule a country. But you change their label to be more accurate, and it clicks for people.

Words are powerful.
> 99% of the accounts suspended were not anonymous... Of the permanently suspended accounts from the Tournament, 99% of account owners were identifiable.

They did not mention, but presumably these people were reported to the police and charged appropriately?

Banning someone's twitter account is not exactly a deterrent - they'll just create another throw-away one and start up again.
I have a friend who knows Apple's head of user privacy. He vouches that the guy is deeply serious about security/privacy.

Between that and Apple's principled stance against the FBI, I'm inclined to believe that at that time, they were making principled choices out of a real concern for user privacy.

I suspect this time around they have a real concern for dealing with the growing child exploitation/abuse problem, but failed to prioritize system design principles in their zeal to pursue positive change in the world.

I don't envy them: in their position, they have an incredible amount of pressure and the stakes are incredibly high.

May cool heads and rational, principled thinking prevail.
I too have thought about this stuff. In many instances, the correct solution depends on the context of the work being done. Are many people working on interrelated parts of the same project? Or, is there a small group of people jumping from one project to the next in any given day with multiple people collaborating in branches at the same time?

> 3.0 Rebase encourages siloed development

You need a strong culturally enforced habit of "commit early, commit often ... rebase early, rebase often, push early push often" with all development happening in branches that are visible to everyone (GitHub, GitLab etc) to avoid this.

I conceptually like a main branch with a clean straight-line history with no merge commits and clear commit messages. It takes discipline. The discipline is helped by a cultural environment where anyone can request changes in any PR, where teams, not individuals, own projects, where clarity of the commit message is equally important as the code, and where is a strong preference for short-lived branches and small PRs.

I also recommend opening a PR as soon as a single commit has been made in a branch and announcing the PR in a dedicated channel so everyone has a chance to follow the development.

This kind of thing is not going to work in every type of project in every organization, but I have developed a preference for it.
This is like the Apple photo scanning issue. Start with something all of society agrees is reprehensible and implement the tools of authoritarian censorship on that basis.

"We will shortly be trialling the development of a new product feature that temporarily autoblocks accounts using harmful language"

"We are also continuing to roll out our replies prompts, which encourage people to revise their replies to Tweets when it looks like the language they use could be harmful."

"Everyone has a role to play - including the government"

Who defines what's harmful? How long until merely unpopular views or any form of dissent is harmful language? Perhaps you think the current set of harmful-language-definers are infallible and on your side. What if that changes in 2024? What if these tools are in the hands of your enemy?
I read Wendell Berry quite a lot, and in one essay (I forget which) he posed a question, "where would our technology be if we had continued improving on simple things like the plow, without using combustion engines", or something like that. I think this washing machine is an answer to that question.

What if many of our machines used human power like they did 100 years ago, but were made far more efficient and effective than they were 100 years ago? One of the biggest health problems in America is lack of physical exercise. Biking for transportation, having a manual washing machine, etc would go a long way towards fixing that problem, while also reducing our use of electricity, gasoline, etc.
40% efficacy for preventing spreading is quite poor. There are other strategies of similar or better efficacy for preventing spreading like limiting contact with people, using masks, vitamin D, being on ivermectin. If you were a marketing department of a pharma company selling vaccines for preventing spreading, you would not be very convincing.
> once you're sincerely convinced that scientists are wrong ... and governement are lying to you

This is the crux. How did those beliefs form? I would argue that in many cases, it wasn't a dispassionate weighing of evidence and calculation of probabilities. If not that, then what? We might also ask - in whose interest is it that citizens don't believe scientists or the government?