skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but "communist state" is a technical historical term that is simply the shorthand tag for countries similar to and influenced by the USSR. It originates in propaganda about communism (or socialism) related to these countries, but otherwise has little to do with communism or socialism as ideological/economic systems.

The propaganda origin is two-fold. Russian propaganda used these terms to ingratiate itself both with the revolutionaries who fought against the Tsar, and with European workers' parties at the time, trying to create a positive association between communism/socialism and their regime. As the disaster of Lenin and Stalin's takeover of power and totalitarian control started to become clearer after the war, the terms started being used by European and American propaganda machines to create a negative association between the Russian disaster and communism/socialism.

The fact that this was used for propaganda and did not reflect actual beliefs about the working of these systems is visible in the way the USSR's claims about being a democracy were never taken seriously, while its claims of being socialist/communist are presented as unassailable.

To be clear, socialism has a very simple definition - "workers' control of the means of production", or, in more modern terms, "democratic organization of the workplace". Basically an economic system is socialist if most/all enterprises are worker-owned co-ops, in contrast with a capitalist system, where most/all enterprises are owned by those with capital. The USSR and most other communist countries were totalitarian regimes where those in power exerted control over all enterprises, with workers at the bottom of the hierarchy, having even less say about the direction of their work than they do in capitalist systems.

Communism as an ideological term refers to a more extreme form of socialism, where not only do workers have control of their own work, but resources are actually pooled and the entire community has a say in the direction of each enterprise, including those that don't directly work in that enterprise. It is a far more idealistic model than socialism.

It's important to also note that socialism can easily happen in a free-market system, except that labor and enterprises can't be bought and sold - only goods and services. Communism is less compatible with the idea of a market, as it implies much more direct cooperation between stakeholders.
A billion? Only?

I think some context can be helpful here. As a nation, we're happy -- hell, our elites (yes, we on HN) practically begged -- to spend $6.4 trillion dollars over 20 years to have fun foreign adventures in the sand, playing guardian of freedom and feeling real nice about it [1].

$1bn for 7% of the water needs for a major (and growing) US metro area sounds like a bargain to me. For a measly $14bn we'd cover the whole city. Defund the Pentagon, turn it into a WeWork, and let's do fun, neat stuff with our civilization. If we're gonna throw piles of money at things with low ROI, why not throw it at fusion and desalination instead of drone striking children at Pakistani weddings? 100% sincere here, not being cheeky.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on...
If you care to commit.
Once version control permits.
Bit by bit.
I've made Romania (Cluj, specifically) my home for almost two years now (I'm originally from the US). I love it here! There's too many cars zipping around this city, and rents are actually quite expensive relative to local wages, but those are my only gripes.

For the sake of the youth I really hope Romania develops further and the brain drain stops.
There is a genre of videos showing the Taliban taking over American weapons, humvees, buildings, etc. Here is one of them using the army gym https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/p5tp4k/tali...

In addition to the wasted trillions and humanitarian disaster, this might be the first time the sacking of a capital city is streamed on social media.
I was talking with the head of HR at a medium sized company. We were talking about worker shortages and she said they had raised their wages and still had vacancies. I offered to just raise them more and her response was you can only pay someone so much to manufacture a 100 dollar product. It kinda opened my eyes that there was a cap and that we will likely see prices of goods rise in response to this. Wage growth is well overdue but it will come with inflation.
A slave in either case, though.
Now-days many plumbers don't even solder copper pipes opting out quick and easy push or press fitting and/or PEX tubing.
I get unreasonably angry when Victorian cosplayers think they've found the solution to our wasteful modern life. Simply eschew modern conveniences and spend hours each week beating your clothes against a rock!

Simple, instead of grocery shopping twice a month, ditch that wasteful freezer and walk to the farmers' market down the block before dinner each night.

Was it cloudy yesterday? Simple!, take a whore-bath¹ at the sink and be thankful your meetings are on Zoom these days :)

Ok, ok, those are caricatures of the final paragraphs, but that's what I hear when the word "simple" is abused that way.

[¹] Or, "PTA", which isn't much nicer. Any ideas on what to call this that's less vulgar, but still derisive?
I think I may have said this before, but a statement like "we're likely hundreds of years away from aneutronic fusion" seems to me necessarily meaningless.

We're only a bit over a hundred years from developing quantum mechanics and relativity, how can we possibly say anything about hundreds of years from now?

If something is well enough understood to accurately predict the timeline, we could do it much sooner.

If we have no idea how to do something, then "hundreds of years" means nothing, except maybe "not proven impossible yet".
You want state paid water for pistachio farming? Farming is less than 2% of California GDP but uses over 80% of the water.
They are called piss jugs.
After how they botched up the G5 SE, I'm never buying or recommending Dell ever again. Get a ThinkPad if you want to run Linux.
Pay for cell towers, get free meme vids. Everyone wins.
Yes, it does. But the issue is also related to changes in what people eat. My understanding is that the increased demand for almonds has been particularly problematic for the region due to how water intensive it is, for example.

What’s not clear to me is whether or not we have to grow our fruits and vegetables in California. Certainly one of the issues is that for huge swaths of our farmland elsewhere we tend to grow mono crops which are often inedible to humans (such as most of our corn). Perhaps we could grow more fruit and edible vegetables there?
Free Stock Videos
Thanks... I've tried it before. I was pretty impressed, although I couldn't find any great XMPP clients on Linux at the time, there were a few promising ones. I think I'll give it another try. I love the idea of being able to save chat history locally and backup local chat history with regular backups.
Like every other part of Google support, there aren't any google employees actually involved. "Diamond Product Expert" is just a tag a community user can earn by getting enough points.
Low-voltage DC for long wire runs is kind of wasteful -- you either lose a lot of energy in the wires or you need extra thick cables, so I wonder if the best way to do this is to have a high voltage line (AC or DC, it doesn't really matter) that goes to an outlet that has its own self-contained switching power supply and a bunch of low-voltage DC outlets.

Transitioning to this sort of system would actually be simple, you'd just have to make DC power supply boxes that plug into a regular 110 or 220 AC outlet -- sort of like multi-port USB power adapters, but designed for more power and probably higher voltages: perhaps +/- 12 volts and ground.

A more sophisticated system might be that the DC power supply can supply a different voltage/current to each port, and it negotiates with the device to supply to current power. (I think this is basically how DC fast chargers for EVs work -- the car tells the charger what it can accept, and the charger supplies that the car.)

Maybe "dumb" devices that don't know how to do the handshake just default to 5v DC or something.
We’ve explored ways to handle this. One of the things we’ve considered is metered billing where you only pay for the time the seat is used. It’s very similar to Github seat model but probably closer to slacks billing system.

Other explorations we did were around finer grained permissions or a collaborator vs assignee. The reason the industry itself is geared towards seats based plans in the is to drive better revenue predictability and handle cost variability between free and paid users better but we’re seeing more and more creative changes to sass billing models.
She gave me a great many more details than what I shared, and they weren't important for sharing the anecdote.
less than 2% of California GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Agricult...
The average vehicle on the road is 12 years old. It's going to take a lot longer than 10 years to shift most of the fleet to EVs.
Ask HN: Those of you who left tech, where are you now?
I'm starting to realize that I'm a mediocre yet "smart" developer who might not be cut out for doing this long term. I find reading about software really interesting, built a number of my own apps, was able to pick up elixir professionally quite quickly and design some cool things at my last job. However, I can't for the life of me get into a place where interviewing seems natural at all and still after four years of experience struggle to get through medium leetcode problems.

I've had a taste of the "strategy" or "product" side of things and wonder if that's a better path to transition to, especially since I don't want to be a developer ten years down the road. The thing that's hit me the hardest is realizing I probably don't have the chops or mental energy to do my own startup. Just working at a startup during covid caused me to burn out and basically quit to maintain sanity.

For those of you who left tech but still make equivalent income either on the strategy, ops side etc I'm curious of how you came to make your transition and how your path changed soon thereafter.

Thanks
Santa Barbara, likewise, since 1992.

https://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system...
Git actions speak louder than code
The "Anderson" DC connector is used a lot in the 48V systems I've played with. A bit bulky but could be a good candidate.
Maybe I'm repeating what you've already said, but it is really harder to stand up for yourself when you're used to being exploited, and your employer is likely to take your very reasonable boundaries as contempt when they are accustomed to exploiting you.

We really need to empower all kinds of front-line workers to enforce reasonable boundaries with both customers and management.
Americans don't work industrial jobs anymore. All the steel mill maimings are happening in China. What's the rate within a specific profession? Has it stayed constant for e.g. electrical line repair workers? (Not just trying to deflect here, sorry. I should have anticipated your point there. I was aware of the trend you speak of.)
Would love to hear more from everyone on power management: Does your machine manage power mode settings well? Does sleep mode work? How about hibernate?

Thanks.
How much of the cost of an oil pipeline is tied up in fighting opposition to it getting made and mitigation against the catastrophic effects of leaking oil? Surely a water pipeline would be cheaper to build, given the lower risks involved and the obvious benefits to everyone living near its path.
Great article! Is there something similar to Replicache that is targeted towards simple multiplayer games? Im building a multiplayer version of a clicker game like Universal Paperclips[0] and dealing with similar the problems that Replicache tries to solve.

[0] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
I didn't know before trying to find online sources for what I remember hearing on the radio. But apparently there were/are some pretty crazy schemes people thought up out there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Pow...

(this is old stuff, what I remember from the radio was pre-pandemic drive to the office radio reporting of recent events at the time)
I mean the quoted words are from a "Diamond Product Expert", not an "UI Design Expert", so I wouldn't take that rant seriously. Hehe.

I guess it's just some team in Google couldn't decide whether or not "Do you want to delete N messages?" is statistically a good enough prompt message. They'll figure it out eventually ;)
Yes, USC-C with PD is the winning idea for DC infrastructure. All new homes should come with PD outlets. The outlets could be fed with 12 gauge copper and the PD electronics should be built in to the individual outlets.
Bringing back old-school web pins and buttons
Sounds like you need to replace your phone's battery. I get 3 days charge with pretty heavy use from my moto g power. Much of your charging woes would disappear after that, charging only at night.
Reading the file would show up as syscalls.
I think both are needed. Nothing on its own will work and we need to be doing everything that we can at the same time right now. The current models are showing if we make every improvement we can right now we are only just barely scraping by. There is no time to do everything sequentially.
> you make words in my mouth

The idiom is "putting words in my mouth". https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/putting+words+in+my+mou...
But you don't need to. Everything that uses 100W or less could use USB-C while everything else still uses mains AC.
Also, the article has many too simplistic characterizations, which will be misleading for the vast majority of the people, who have not the foggiest idea about the history of Romania.

For example "far-right military general Ion Antonescu, an all-too-willing Nazi accomplice".

The former general and later dictator of Romania during WW2, is a human who has done many bad things, but also many good things, so it is not possible to describe him just in black-and-white as being good or bad.

Despite other things about which he may be accused, there is no ground in calling him as either "far-right" or "all-too-willing Nazi accomplice".

Antonescu imagined himself as a savior of Romania and he has chosen to become an ally of Germany for the same reason as Finland, to be able to fight against the Soviet Union and recover the large territories occupied by the Russians when they invaded Romania in 1940, immediately after France was occupied by Germany and Romania lost in this way its last ally.

There is no evidence of Antonescu having any sympathy for Hitler or fascism, he was just forced to be friends with them in the attempt of reaching his objectives.

Antonescu was forced to accept the Iron Guard as a partner, as requested by Hitler. Nevertheless as soon as he was able to convince Hitler to stop supporting them, he was happy to incarcerate the Iron Guard members or kill those who resisted.

I do not know why he could be named as "far right". What was most characteristic for him was that he, as as former military, not politician, has always attempted to rule the country like you rule an army, i.e. by giving orders that must be executed by everybody without comments and he did not have much, if any, respect for the traditional democratic institutions and parties.

However, this can be hardly considered as being either right or left.

Many years ago, I have seen a news coverage about a visit made by a couple of USA senators in Romania. The senators gave a speech in which they condemned the war criminal Antonescu.

I was astonished that the Romanian officials were so servile to USA that they did not try to correct in any way what the Americans said.

All the crimes of which Antonescu was accused were true.

Nevertheless, there was a problem with his labeling as a war criminal, because absolutely all the crimes on that list had also been done by the USA president Roosevelt, during the same time of WW2.

So the correct action is to either consider that both Roosevelt and Antonescu have been war criminals, or that both have been war heroes, or better, to accept that both have been complex humans, who, during a time of war, have done both very good things and very bad things.

(Regarding the list of war crimes of Antonescu & Roosevelt, that is quite long. However the most serious crime of Antonescu was ordering that the Jews should be sent in concentration camps, as suspected Russian collaborators.

This was almost identical to what Roosevelt had done earlier, when he sent all the Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps, as suspected Japanese collaborators.)
They're not evenly distributed, they're concentrated in high COL areas.
Here come the excuses. No, I don't. My phone battery dies quickly because I use it. It's on 100% brightness (because you can't see the screen with any less than 100% in the California sun) providing GPS navigation when I'm on bike rides, sometimes recording timelapses and videos for part of it (sounds like what phones were made for, right?). Then I get to some destination and I need to have a Google Meet call with video on. Maybe hang out in a park and code for a while using phone as a 5G hotspot for my laptop and constant VPN into my office. All these are pretty normal use cases to me, the 1 full day battery life is bullshit if you actually use your phone. Then battery is dead, on the way home USB-C cable between my pocket and the phone mounted at the front. Then sometimes I dismount the bike on short notice and USB-C cable yanks and gets deformed, sometimes even damaging the USB-C port. Really shitty design. Their designers probably never bike.

They should look at Zojirushi water boiler magnetic plugs. You can yank them all you want and they don't deform. They're designed to be yanked off accidentally by children without bringing down a pot of boiling water from the counter. They just need to miniaturize the concept.
I've recently tried different Linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, PopOS) on my 2013 MacBook since Catalina is soon going to be deprecated and will not receive any security updates.

Installing the wifi drivers is annoying since the distros ship without proprietary drivers (broadcom). You either have to plug it in via cable (use an adapter) or use tethering with your phone to download the drivers after installation. But this is fine since you only have to do it once.

More problematic is the CPU temp which is on average around 15C higher on Linux than on macOS. I've done a lot of research on this but couldn't figure a way to lower it, and from what I can tell this is a common problem with people who run linux on a macbook.

You'll definitely notice it when placing your laptop on your lap. Of course you can increase the fan speed but then the laptop is a bit louder. If you can live with a slightly hotter or louder laptop then running linux on your macbook is fine, everything works. Right now I'm still using macOS until support runs out.
I have a bunch of USB-C PD boards. Each one is about 1x2 cm and costs around $1. That's small enough. And good cables exist.
Hey Mani! Great to see you here- it's been a while.

You read our minds. We are thinking about how we can integrate with Jira for a truly sync'ed experience (since several teams have suggested using our interface to make updates in Jira + since we have simple built-in dashboards it just makes it easier to use for everyone). The challenge is to design it in such a way, that you don't have to spend a ton of time configuring the integration, mapping fields or needing a dedicated engineer for setup. We're on it - in the meantime would love to hear your feedback if you get the chance to try out Tara.
I’ve waited soooo long for this! Finally I have a reason to switch from Apache my boss will agree with.
This is exactly what we did in our team, create an RBAC system to allow downstream teams to configure and request advanced stuff but with permission and logging. But then the immediate problem is that some of them has legitimate needs to modify the RBAC system itself! So we ended up creating as good as practically possible audit logging of the rbac system, tied intimately to a users authentication, and let them go wild. Worked pretty well so far (as far as we can tell that is).
In this case, the entire product uses it. Every button, field, list, is "live" with derby+sharedb and scaled by horizontally scaling redis and the DB.
That, to me, is precisely the problem.
How long ago did “Bowling Alone” come out?

I spend my time between the US west coast and certain cities in Europe. I don’t think Americans, as a whole, know how to hang out and talk the way Europeans do. Part of it is our cities… there aren’t real public spaces. Everything’s commercial, or a development. Making plans to meet people involves a singular destination.

In Europe I’ll meet friends out, and we’ll have other friends catch up with us over the coarse of an evening, and we’ll move from a cafe to a square to a park, and we’ll have been chatting and it’ll suddenly be 4am. In America it’s very hard to get people to commit to a thing, and that’s usually dinner or a bar.
> You are welcome to judge people’s decisions, using your knowledge of future events

If some thought it was a non starter, AMD thought it's a good idea that would benefit everyone. Who ended up being right? Not the skeptics, that was my point. The idea was correct and those who backed it helped move it forward. But Apple and MS did the opposite of helping.

> Apple and MS were thinking, correctly, “I bet I can deliver a working API before this committee with representatives from a dozen different companies

That was exactly my point. "Correctly" as in "let's push lock-in to hook developers on this and make life harder for them if they want to support multiple platforms". That's the approach MS and Apple were using for years. But it's not right if you care about making things better for the industry, because it's only slowing progress down. I really see no justification for using development tools like APIs for market control, it's a crooked practice.
Very good course (teaches UX from fundamentals): https://www.udemy.com/course/ultimate-guide-to-ux/

Currently it costs $75, but Udemy often has coupons/promotions for up to 95% off (I registered for $15). This course is normally $5000+. It is very thorough and well-explained. Like 20+ hours of video lectures, slides and full transcripts. Also the instructor is very responsive and active in the course's private FB group.

This course is shorter and more focused on web UI (vs more general UX): https://keynotopia.com/ux/

You can probably find resources for free, but then you might end up paying with your time. If you're really strapped for cash, I suggest borrowing books from the library: free and probably better than a lot of the low-cost/free resources online.

Don Norman's is one of the most respected UI/UX researchers. His book is used to teach UI at universities: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...

Don Norman also contributed to Apple's HIG, which is actually a very good free online resource: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

There might also be some good open courseware like this: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
It sounds like teaching, product management, or developer relations are in your future.
I work in bioinformatics and have seen the issue.

You get data from a lot of sources, and people (like me) just sometimes forget to check the spreadsheet. Often a csv file so it’s not clear it’s been generated by excel. It’s also only a problem for gene symbols (not entrez gene IDs or flybase gene numbers). Also the datasets are big, so there are 15 genes in error over the whole dataset it can be hard to spot.

Honestly genes are a constantly moving target and are kinda a pain to write software for. They get new names, split and merge over time…