skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even our multi-megawatt transmitters being detectable for tens of light years is largely a myth. Omnidirectional broadcasts need to be powerful just to be detected several miles away thanks to the inverse square law. Most powerful TV and radio transmitters won't be detectable too far outside the solar system.

It takes a lot of power (or a highly directional antenna) to send a detectable signal detectable light years away. The only unintentional signals we generate are high power weather and military radar. Those are very tight beams that sweep the sky. Any interstellar eavesdropper would need to have the beam sweep over them to detect it. Even then it would be a transient signal with no guarantee of repetition since everything is it motion.

It would be like us being a mile apart in the blackest of night and you swinging a laser pointer around. Even if I'm looking specifically for you and have a general idea where you are the odds are vanishingly small your laser pointer will happen to be visible to me. You'd have to be specifically pointing it at me to even have a hope of me seeing it.
Completely agree with your point, but I want to point out that a lot of businesses (most?) adjust pricing based on the consumer group.
Agreed, I mention that a service like levels.fyi is a very good idea. My point is more that a peer to peer discussion of salary has some potentially serious downsides and it offers an unrealistic comparison relative to a distribution of salaries.
How exactly does that work with the MIT license? If someone sponsors and gains access to the repo, they're permitted to fork and redistribute the code, right?
Fantastic. In return I will review my locals and see what they report.
I think the best way to quit social media is to make people more social in real life.
Brave is technically using this SaaS solution from the company that develops Jitsi: https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/
The 10x is in comparison to the least productive engineer. In your model they get a zero so you actually have infinity x.

Score your zero up slightly to 0.2 and a 10x is now a 2.

It’s not so drastic a claim really. The common misinterpretation is that it’s 10x the average.
There are plenty of ways to avoid 1:1 mapping between keys and access to/control of things on decentralised networks and blockchains, so really these are not arguments against blockchain just against a specific way you can choose to manage your keys.

Simple multisigs are a good start, as is key recovery via m of n (Shamir's secret sharing). More sophisticated systems have been built on top of this to allow, for instance, users to use their (singular) keys and to also allow a process, that remains decentralised, in which multiple [somewhat] trusted parties participate to recover access if they lose their keys or die.

These solutions are obviously more complex to build and interact with than a simple public/private keypair, hence why it has taken longer to develop them, audit then, and get to a point where they have a decent and intuitive UX (check out Argent, Gnosis Safe, among many). But if a big part of your argument against blockchain technology in 2021 is about lost keys, I'd highly recommend digging deeper into the state of the art before getting too stuck to a conclusion.

There was a time "I wouldn't use my credit card on a website because it's too insecure" made sense too, but HTTPS became the standard and we moved on. So it goes.
In 2003[1] in Southern California some of the workers who worked at supermarkets went on strike, and picketed certain corporations' stores. For a significant period, the remaining public had to go to other stores if they wanted to avoid the picket lines.

As pointed out in [1] a wild fire [2] ended public support of a boycott. I personally lived in the area affected by the strike, but with the hours I worked I could not be choosy enough about where I bought food to add "support strikers" to my calculations, and then the fire [2] made any extra driving related to labor organizations' wishes borderline illegal and definitely antisocial.

You will also read in [1] that the supermarkets that were struck might not as easily be affected by a strike if it happened today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California_supermarke...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Fire
Feel free to share a source
> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

it's the fact that they're undemocratic black box algorithms that make the participation very one directional (explained below). add to that the centralization and non-interoperability/walled garden aspects, as well as platforms focusing on generating profit instead of helping us make deeper connections, and you've got a big dangerous stew.

the most constructive content doesn't actually surface; things that generate 'viralness' do. there are also few tools to individually manage this social data or build any sort of coherent framing/narrative. in other words: profit-seeking social media platforms are a straightjacketed collective stream of consciousness; they are undemocratically 'governed' spaces injected with ads that come with no useful tools to organize and structure information about the world around us.

"oh but that's not what social media is designed for!"

exactly, the medium is the message. by logging into a third party facebook server to connect with friends and people i want to follow, i am constrained by Zuck's rules and Zuck's black box 'social media' functions. going back to a peer to peer setup by using the ideas of bittorrent's DHTs combined with git's version control, like the holochain framework implements, seems to me to be a way to actually get at the root of this problem: it allows us to see the immense overlaps between today's SV platforms to then be able to quickly decommodify humanity's communication and coordination technology, by publicly sharing and collaboratively improving the underlying functions of our networked apps.

although in very early stages, these projects like IPFS, DAT, SSB, and especially holochain [1], which allows for a full distribution of social media functions (and more: http://valueflo.ws), and which has forking and complete distribution mechanics built into it from the start, will allow a powerful new wave of dweb application evolution/experimentation.

[1] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
Things they would love more:

Accepting the cash price after billing the person for the full price and writing off the difference.
It will be fun to watch people be positive on this until they are reminded who we have to thank for it.

Edit: CNN hasn't forgotten, notice the obvious negative spin, with literally zero argument of how this may be beneficial: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/04/politics/hospital-price-trans...
The Panic of 1792
Bill Gates' green tech fund bets on Silicon Valley farming robots
The best developers don't add utility just by their own direct productivity, they add utility by increasing the productivity of the team (pointing people in directions that avoid dead ends, helping quickly bust impediments, etc., contributing in design discussions in a way which reduces the amount of unnecessary code that ever gets written, etc.) This is a much bigger effect (IME) than the delta in personal direct coding output.
But someone told me insurance companies are bad and are stiffing those poor, struggling doctors and hospitals.
We need both. First, Stallman was right. We simply cannot trust the magic incantations (code) of closed-source software and hardware to respect laws, in spirit or in letter. We must be able to audit all devices at every level. Second, the EFF is right, too. They fight at the legislative level. But they are fighting a defensive game. Consumers need to go on the offensive and lobby for legislatures to pass a digital Bill of Rights.
> First of all, trying out random substances or applying existing medicines to different illnesses is exactly how doctors and the pharma industry operate.

Sure, but with methodology and metrics to allow the separation of actual effects from placebo, and in some cases even just enough methodology to be able to measure anything at all.
The topic of ranking programming languages by energy efficiency has been discussed before on Hacker News. Here is the paper previously discussed which has been updated in 2021:

Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages

I'm glad to see new(ish) languages take performance seriously: Rust, Go, Nim, Crystal, Julia. Some of the most popular languages (we all know which ones) are the least performative. But they make life easier for developers, or as programmers love to say 'more productive'. On the other hand, when it's programmers who are on the receiving end of slow, resource intensive apps, they'll complain loudly.

When performance is an issue in running programs, a common response is: hardware is cheap, just add another energy-guzzling server or use a more powerful computer.

This attitude is embarrassing when you consider that in every other industry there is a push for reduced resource usage and lower energy consumption. I don't think it's controversial to say a typed, compiled language gives you good performance for free (and the reduced computing resources that implies).

Aside: When PHP 7 was released, Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, said the performance improvements meant fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity - all of which equalled less power or electricity consumed. (And remember this is an interpreted language.)

When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. You can watch a segment from his presentation below where he talks about this, including the calculations he made of potential CO2 savings:

Rasmus Lerdorf – "PHP in 2018" (extract from the 15 min mark): https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s
Extremely typical. There are cases where the highest paid employee in an entire _state_ is an athletics coach at a state university.
And this can really cause issues for people who are insured because if an insurance company decides not to cover something (very very common, even in-network) then the inflated price is what you end up getting billed for.

That is until you call the hospital and find out there's all sorts of "sliding" prices etc...

I had a procedure billed for one of these drastically larger "insured" codes which got denied based on the nature of the procedure from the insurance company (apparently too new of a procedure at the time, however common now).

It all got worked out in the end but what I realized was that hospitals are largely subsidizing the cost of the uninsured by over-billing the insured folk's insurance companies. We've set the American healthcare system up to be a cat and mouse game where those in need are represented the least.

Best insurance here is "don't get sick"
I'm sorry if this is rude, but this comment reads really strangely. You seem to acknowledge that you really want something, whilst also accept you cannot do it for a lack of time|skill and then seem annoyed that the people who do ask for some kind of payment for their work?
10x what?

As far as I'm aware, Shannon wasn't even a programmer.

I'm sure Ritchie was pretty good at coding in the language he invented; AIUI, that language is pretty similar to the assembly language of the machine he designed it for.

I don't know anything about Buterin and Dean.

I'm sure these people all had brilliant ideas and insights, that I couldn't begin to match. But given an arbitrary dev task, I doubt they'd come close to 10x the performance of a reasonably competent dev.
Thanks for posting this. I just looked to see if my local hospital had prices available. They have a webpage set up, but they give you a dummy link! Outrageous! I will absolutely be making a complaint.

I'm also going to post a review online, since poor reviews seem to get attention from them.
Ups is buying 10 evtol from a company in vermont
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/07/ups-to-buy-evtol-aircraft-to...
> Doctors are consultants, not priests.

Oh man you couldn't be more spot on. There's no magic in what doctors do and how doctors prescribe a medication. There are two advantages that a doctor can have over an educated layman: 1) Experience: the number of cases they have seen and thus can make an educated inference to what is going on. 2) Their knowledge of anatomy (all they studied during their 4-6 years education).

Having been living with a chronic condition for more than 20 years, having gone to more than 10 specialists in 3 different countries and countless of studies I've seen the limitation of Medical Doctors (they are human beens at the end). There comes a time when you get to see that you understand your body better than any doctor could.
Sometimes secrets imply protecting IP and nothing nefarious.
I don’t think it’s just people “younger than” you who don’t own any music anymore. Statistically, I’m pretty sure I’m older and I gave away my entire CD collection (as I had previously done with my LPs). I ripped the very few that I couldn’t find on Spotify. It just doesn’t make sense for me to keep all those plastic discs around when I can carry my entire collection and anything else I want to listen to around all the time. As for quality of sound, at my age I’m happy to hear at all.
Good points. On the other hand, I couldn’t fit your whole comment on one screen. I did scroll down to tap reply. Please stand by while I go recover.
to your point, Apple also earns money from a 2+ year head start on shipping thin-connector phones, shipped in Sep 2012 whereas usb-c had only reached a stable design decision in Aug 2014, so would wait even longer to ship.
If I am reading this right, they are modeling a 5ft tsunami wave on the US east cost (and much worse on the other side of the Atlantic)
‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours
Anytime I have a procedure,
imaging, anything I ask for the out of pocket price. You can save a lot of money doing this especially imaging.
> Restrict apps, but can still log in via browser.

This isn't paradoxical. You treat the browser as a less trusted security domain than a phone, which usually has a secure boot chain, strong sandboxing, encrypted disk, reliable hardware cryptography etc, and therefore provide a different/better service on the phone. If a phone is missing one of these expected components then you're not the target market for the app, I guess. (Of course, your phone OS might be perfectly good, and the stock one might be crap, but the app developers don't care.)
It might be the case that Firefox is less vulnerable in general because it is not as targeted even though technically it might have more undiscovered exploits.
Sorry, I must have missed that. Generally in Western Europe cheap food is easily available even if it's a cafe set menu, baguette or slice of pizza. In Eastern Europe you'd get a proper meal for that much.
I have an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and many more, but I don't use them actively or passively. Maybe the occasional browsing.

On facebook I made it a point to unfollow all friends so that my newsfeed is blank at any point of time. When I did this initially a few years back I felt.. weird. But I got used to it and now I visit once in a while for the facebook groups. After that I don't end up spending time on FB. For quora after I blocked a majority of tags/topics, the feed was cleaner, but it got boring to be a passive consumer. Similarly for Twitter, I blocked a lot of topics/tags/people and followed a certain few which has made it easier to scroll twitter once in a while.

I have an app (StayFree) on android which calculates the time spent on each app. When I see it now for the last 7 months, I see I have used it for 185 hours, of which 40 hours are on reddit. With whatsapp at 11 hours, the rest of the apps are below 8 hours of usage. I also have trackercontrol which blocks the trackers in my phone. In my browser I have ActivityWatch which shows HN is my most visited apart from the occasional reddit.

For me, the benefits of being a part of these social media comes after investing the time to filter and refine my experience. That does take time. Overall I feel my experience with social media has been better, I'm able to interact with people around the world and learn and ask questions. I dunno if I've turned these evil entities (social media) into my friends.

Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media sites / apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don't consume it that much? If yes then what sort of harm does it have? Is it mitigated by having trackercontrol? What evil happens if tracking my account gives these companies nothing but close to 0 activity? Are there others like me here?
A very apt description. IDD (Igor-driven development) is probably the most common software engineering methodology in use, at least in the enterprise.
I imagine google is your friend for researching lacquer.

I apply lacquer using a quality natural bristle brush; it can also be sprayed, but it is very flammable and requires a proper paint booth setup. Also, the fumes are very poisonous, so proper masking and ventilation is a requirement.

I apply boiled linseed oil to "pop" the grain, then a layer of clear shellac, then several layers of lacquer. Every few layers I do use a scraper (facedown) to knock down the dust irregularities. Both the shellac and lacquer dry extremely quickly. After the final coat I use the scraper and then 0000 steel wool to give a fine satin finish.

Lacquer (and shellac) damage is easily fixed by applying more. The fresh coating melts the old; the only hitch is in blending out the edges.

I find lacquer much easier to work with than the newfangled concoctions. Easier to apply smoothly, easier to knock down the dust, easier to polish with steel wool, and easier to repair any mistakes. Not nearly as durable, though, and a much greater health hazard while applying.
does sweeney think I'm going to be more sympathetic to him when he posts internal communications between him and Apple to twitter? It just makes him look like a jerk.
Your comment deserves a much longer response than I can give it, but you seem to be saying that it's impossible to know anything with any certainty, and that is absolutely true. I'm sure all the authors of this work would agree with you.

Coming to conclusions/guesses requires starting with some assumptions about about how the universe works. It's important not to lose sight of those assumptions and very important to have a discussion about how likely each assumption is to be true. So to the extent that anyone is saying "this is definitely how the universe is", I wholeheartedly agree with you.

However, it feels like you're being a little too epistemically nihilistic here. This kind of speculative work always starts without confirmation or any particular reason to believe it beyond how well it matches the curve it was fit to.

To quibble with a particular, this work doesn't attempt to predict the actions of super-intelligences, it's not making the claim that most civilizations will be "grabby", it's making predictions about what will happen under the assumption that some subpopulation of them decides to become grabby.
Athletics typically brings in the most revenue and exposure for a university. I do not agree with these programs being so handsomely rewarded. But it seems most of America disagrees based on college football viewership.
The courts present a large problem though. Most digital crimes happen across borders. Courts are pretty much useless for ransomware, identity theft, and everything else online when the criminals are in an inconvenient jurisdiction.

Blockchain if anything shows the failure of our judicial system. Most of the cybercrimes are enabled by cryptocurrency and our justice system is hopeless to stop these payments.
Psychologists want to charge $200-$250/hr, but insurance only reimburses $120-$160/hr. You might think these are high prices, but chargeable hours isn't hours worked for psychologists, since they have to do notes for every meeting, manage the business, appointments, etc, which reduces their total take home to something below $200k/yr, which is below a typical bigtech Eng II with only a couple years of experience, potentially not even going to college if they are clever and self motivated enough. While a psychologist has gone to school for 10 years and paid for it.

It's gaps like that that lead to the entire in/out network split.
This is the only reasonable comment made in the top 30 I see here. The rest arguing pedantically about politics, why? China is censoring, don't trust and use their phones. It's this simple. Why must most of you build up political facades just to comment on bad phones? Start from only truth.
The Unbundling of the Software Developer
My local hospital offers a cash discount of nearly 50% if you pay at time of service.
Gig workers around the world are finally organizing
Yes, absolutely people will lose their jobs.

Just like if you gut the military-industrial complex people will lose their jobs.

That's what makes it so hard politically to do anything about it.
The article describes a list of engines to embed, so this falls out of scope.

But I still wanted to highlight Opera's Carakan engine which was developed in head-to-head competition with V8 when Opera was still maintaining their own engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presto_(browser_engine)#ECMASc...
I messed around with and contributed to this project a bit. The biggest challenge I saw in day to day usage was that line numbers aren't included in error messages: https://github.com/murarth/ketos/issues/11
How does the touchpad perform? I'd love to move away from Apple, but don't want to spend the money on a laptop to be disappointed with that aspect. My experience with non-Apple touchpads has been sub-par so far (looking at you Dell), and it's one of the factors that keeps me ensconced in the Apple ecosystem.
The website hijacked the "back" functionality of my browser. Not a fan of that.
If a person gets convicted of a crime and sentenced to jail, they have to go to jail right after sentencing, even if they plan to appeal. Why is this situation different?
> I get the whole "do your research", but often it's in areas in-which I have no real capability - especially with healthcare.

Oh the system has answers – just happen to be high enough at your company, or the spouse of someone who is.

> While a benefits expert at a mid-sized company may create a narrow network, an executive's spouse, for example, may want to go somewhere not in the network. "And there's a pillow talk that happens. And the next thing you know that hospital is in the network," Ladd said.

This whole "employer provides your healthcare" thing we have going on in the US is just nuts.
I remember one lyrics website alternating normal and non-breaking space to prove a competitor was just copy pasting from their website
i think there's a growing concern about the language complexity. I hope next releases are going to be about trimming down the language, and consolidating the not-so-sexy but very important other aspects (multiplatform, compilation speed, spm, tooling, etc) following golang's example.
"If we assume that our knowledge is the pinnacle of knowledge, we are the first to reach it" is a bit tautological, no?

You can apply a very similar reasoning to an isolated tribe stuck at, say, stone-age level on a remote island. With barely seaworthy canoes. They very likely have no idea we exist, and their assumption will be that if there were better canoes, and people had them, they would've made contact. So clearly, they must be among the first.

I am continually amused by the gyrations we go through to avoid saying "we don't know".

I mean, last I checked we couldn't even account for 85% of the matter in the universe that should exist according to the laws of physics as we know them. If we can't even find the vast majority of matter, why do we think we'd do better with civilizations?