skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting old sucks :(

https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/end-life-care-people-dementia

I need to write up some kind of living will or something where, sure expend whatever is (reasonable) to return me to normal health... until I forget why I need to ask for help (that I need) or even myself; and that isn't just a rare occurrence but an always or even mostly always state of my mind having fallen apart before my body.

If my mind does fall apart before my body: I want any treatment known or suspected to fix that. Then to be admitted to any study hoping to establish such treatment. Then failing any hope of return to health... I'm already dead as far as our medical tech allows; make it painless, useful to those who might benefit from viable parts, useful to the progress of science (generally) and medicine, quick, and resource efficient; in that order of decreasing importance.
What does recognition as an organized domestic group mean?
Ask HN: Replacement Options for an Excel 'Database'
Hey everyone,

I thought I would ask HN hivemind as we are slowly reaching a limit of what Excel can do.

Ok. So. We have a shared spreadsheet on a shared drive that is used by 10+ users to capture daily cases with ~10 to 20 fields each depending on case. Each user adds about 20 cases a day. Right now sheet is at 20k entries and we already running into issues dealing with size, corrupted data, the usual excel issues..

Anyway, I think it is high time we move past this particular solution. It was fine when it was 3 of us. That is clearly no longer the case.

What would you recommend that I could do here. Its unlikely IT will let me do stuff willy nilly, but it seems I just got a flag from my boss to go ahead and experiment. There is no reason to go overboard, but it would be nice to have something that does not freeze, because someone is saving a record.

Oh yeah, spreadsheet is still used for some reporting, but that is a secondary consideration.

Thank you,
I believe it was Ben Thompson who recently suggested that it's possible a platform like Facebook is fundamentally incompatible with human nature as well. Maybe, at least, incompatible with society as it exists today. I've been thinking a lot abut that.

Edit: Not a defense of Facebook. Regardless of what I said, I still don't think Facebook is trying to be a good company (morally and ethically) and I don't like them
For me, pyenv on Mac is about 15 minute compile time with a bunch of environment variables required to make sure tkinter works properly.
> What is "the price level of an economy?" How do you measure it?

Your link has a lot of options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation#Measures

Sure, we usually use CPI, and it has some downsides, but all the measures are correlated to some degree.

Headlines regularly use the U-6 unemployment rate, but academics usually use U-3. Nothing's stopping you from using a different measure of inflation in a discussion, and I'd personally love to hear your take.
Ah ok, thank you!
Given how successful Go has been without generics, it appears generics are not essential in a modern industry language.

I'm happy generics are coming to Go, but living without them hasn't been difficult. (Like the article author, I feel like I'm jumping through more ugly hoops due to lack of a proper enum type than I am due to lack of generics.)
> First, get rid of software that holds your data hostage and cannot be controlled via APIs before you start thinking about “AI”.

How do you get your critical data out of such software in the first place? I thought the main use of screen scraping and autohotkey style automation was (or at least should be!) guerrilla data repatriation.

(Also cool as this is, I’m always slightly disappointed when I see terms like “robotic process automation” and it’s about scripted GUI interactions rather than using machine learning to optimally control factories.)
Not just Facebook that is structured like this.

And as someone said, it's very public. You must be making investment decisions without looking at any corporate documents.
And Apple have clearly decided that’s ok, because that’s how AirTags work.

Whether your (and everybody else) iPhone and gps helping tell where my stolen bicycle is, is a good enough benefit to outweigh the privacy trade off is a good question (that Apple never asked me before opting me into their global Bluetooth surveillance platform).
> Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence

Within hours of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11, before any information was in, Rumsfeld's aides were drawing up plans for striking Iraq, despite zero evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. The number one priority for the White House, above finding out who the real culprits were, was to figure out how to use it as a rationale to invade Iraq. This is not really a controversial viewpoint, it is documented fact [1].

When the 9/11 rationale for invading Iraq became untenable, it was replaced by the idea that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he'd definitely been procuring uranium from Niger. Except these were lies too (and the WH knew it, because they'd sent Joe Wilson to investigate and he'd reported back as such). When Wilson heard them saying it despite knowing it was false, he contradicted them in public [2]. In an act of retribution, the WH leaked his wife's position as a CIA agent, burning valuable contacts and networks, and endangering friendly lives.

Then they moved onto the argument that regardless of WMDs, the Iraqi people actually wanted the invasion anyway, US forces would be welcomed as liberators by gift-bearing citizens, etc. When that didn't pan out either, a final argument became that Saddam was a tyrant and that fact alone provided sufficient moral and legal justification for preemptive war (i.e. The Bush Doctrine) [3].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49856792

[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/why/
The difference for me isn’t so much the technical implementation of aspects of the operating system, it’s my willingness to trust either Google or Apple with my data. Knowing how Google and Apple make their massive sums of money, I’m willing to trust Apple with my data but I am not willing to trust Google.

Data being sent to Google—in my personal, subjective opinion—a breach of my privacy whereas—again, opinion—it isn’t when it’s sent to Apple.
wouldn’t turning down divisiveness require picking a unified POV?

What if the unified POV is not the one she wants, would she still support it?

People seemed pretty upset that FB was used to unify a majority for Trump, I mean that’s when all the complaints really started.
It's the other way around. USB-C tries to be too many things at once and this leads to confusion. They should have either mandated that it only handles the top end of the spec at the physical level and gracefully degrades if that isn't available on either end (so at least the cable would be standard), or use physically different plugs to avoid accidental frying of equipment and things just plain not working.

If the plug fits -> it should work.
If I remember correctly it was claimed that the Su57 was too good and that's why they we're cancelling serial production.
A person in these dire circumstances is likely also someone lacking the resources and ability to accomplish any of these "DIY" schemes. People in care homes are there because they have trouble taking care of their basic needs.
I prefer Ruby for quick scripting - in my opinion it beats Python in readability (sugarcoating handlers/hiding guts like not needing self littered everywhere), and seems to have more logical consistency in calls (eg: array.append(element) but len(array) in Python vs. array.append(element) and array.length in Ruby, amongst many other things).

It's definitely a preference, and Python has a lot of library support that the Ruby community doesn't (yet, hopefully), but grandparent's comment about headaches setting up Python with a simple project are pretty common.

Rarely do I encounter a Python project that "just works" - If your setup isn't exactly the same as the repo owner, and often even they don't even know why their setup is the way it is, then there's often a lot of fiddling and package adjustments needed. Not a deal breaker normally, but enough to make it more painful to quickly drop in and start experimenting with.
With bandwidth, the monitor packaging/manual can at least simply say that you need a port and cable that both say at least 10 on it.

That's much better than the previous mess at least.

The alternative would be one new logo and a requirement that all the cables have to meet all the criteria, which would in theory "only" make cables more expensive, and in practice lead to many fake/mislabeled cables that work sometimes.
Ask HN: Are you concerned about your privacy when using services like DocuSign?
Documents usually contain sensitive information and your signature. Documents are stored on server side in platforms like DocuSign (third party).
Rose city antifa in Portland has a website where they routinely harass people.

Pray tell how disorganized people set up a hosting server, domain, and website?
Babies gain a degree of self sufficiency within a few years, at least to extent of wiping their own asses. But elderly dementia patients can hold on for decades gradually requiring more and more hands-on care. When my time comes I don't expect my children to ruin their lives just to care for me.
That may very well be true, but FB is clearly not built with the best interests of society at heart, and until a platform rolls along that is we are pretty much in the same situation as where we are with communism: it may well be a great system to base a society on but all known implementations were made by people that were in it mostly for themselves.
> Every single article on HN that is remotely related to WFH has the same two camps

Not a HN limited phenomenon. Pretty commonplace now
You can get close enough to an enum by making your own type and a few values. If some fool typecasts their own values, that's on them but also easily checked for.

The way nil works is pretty simple. Unexpected cases are cases that didn't understand how nil works.

Errors as values is how the language works, and how I prefer it. No magic, make sure each step works. When I hammer a nail, I can tell immediately if I miss it, and deal with it. I don't have a catchall that sees I wasn't wearing safety glasses and makes some random hammer error.

Then again, I also don't think generics are a good thing, so maybe I'm just against change to the language at all.
Part of being a democracy means you can instantiate new legal rights. If they go too far (e.g. max 20 hour work week) then they will pay for it - business will leave the country. This seems like it is going too far imo.
> The question is, how closely do the sizes of the two objects match?

My initial guess was they were used as a retrievable projectile for hunting and eventually evolved into symbolic items, because they are just the right size for throwing; any larger would make them unwieldy, any smaller less effective. But a lot of them are exactly the same size. So there must be a reason for this precision.

"Many of the late Neolithic stone balls have diameters differing by only a millimetre. The discovery of this led to the suggestion that they might have been meant to be used together. By plotting the find sites on a map it can be demonstrated that often these petrospheres were located in the vicinity of Neolithic recumbent stone circles. Models using small wooden balls placed in a groove in parallel longitudinal pieces of wood 'sleepers' with a carrying board above have shown such megalith transport to be practical in some situations."[1]

Following that wiki section's footnote reveals this is Andrew Young's theory [2], which does, at least, explain the need for such close precision, at least for the ones that have nearly identical diameters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_stone_balls#Megalith_co...

[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130010931.h...
Suppose I don't want my router Mac address + GPS location shared with Apple or Google

What are my options? Banning guests from my network is enough or I have to physically not allow phones near my wifi?
>> It would seem that the easiest way to distinguish a flare would be to look if it's in a controlled flight?

"This isn't one of your church picnic flare gun firings". Smarter people than Homer have been working on flare technology for 40+ years.

(2003) https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2003/11/30/...

>> Also, due to low L/D ratio in the high Mach region, if your missile is zig-zagging randomly, it won't stay fast for long.

These are not airplanes with wings. These are missiles very high in the atmosphere flying complex flight paths more accurately describes as trajectories. The air is thin, the drag low, the energies extraordinarily high. A successful zig-zag maneuver could be as small as one degree left or right, up or down. And sacrificing speed to escape an interceptor is a valid tradeoff considering that, not being an airplane, the missile intends to slam into the ground/target in a minute or two no matter what its speed.
It really depends on the types of programs you are writing. A lot of CRUD style "microservices" being built these days don't ever construct any complex in-memory structures, instead deferring that to databases etc.

Also many system-ish programs, CLIs and the like also don't really need complex structures or benefit from authoring them + the algorithms that traverse them in a program-specific way.

That said, I'm not a fan of Go but generics are far from the only reason why I'm not a fan and it could probably exist as a somewhat useful language without them indefinitely.
Spending and educational outcomes are very loosely correlated in the US. Vermont is spending roughly as much as Mississippi, but it has vastly better educational outcomes. Baltimore spends more per student than the two combined, but its educational outcomes are abysmal.
The above post is almost comically false.

> Germans didn't cling to individual craftsmanship

They did until they ran out of men, and started to use unskilled slave labor.

German industry and leadership so valued craftsmen that they built socialized housing for them.

> Post-1942, Germans built submarines with blocks constructed in different places and brought together for assembly.

My understanding is that of the ones built that way, all but one sank leaving port due to not being watertight.

The reason American was called the "arsenal of democracy" was because it really was, and my post explained why.
I voluntarily deleted my Facebook and recommend you do too.

Instead of facebook, I now invite my far right friends over to my house where we can say exactly what we want in peace. And then we eat dinner with our copious children and discuss homeschooling, while marvelling at the rates of anxiety disorders in our leftist friends and acquaintances.
Without Lend Lease keeping the Russians supplied with food/logistics they would have starved and collapsed.
It's not just politics. Like someone said on some podcast recently, you Americans get top tier content moderation, while the rest of the world is a "free speech" heaven.

A few years ago a young man was brutally beaten to death on a FB livestream in my country. I reported the thing on the first day, but it took at least a week for FB to take it down. You don't need ML for that.

I'm deeply convined that FB is directly responsible for the massive number of anti-vaxxers in my country.
Yeah. People apparently believe they're above debating these so called extremists. They've already decided who's right and who's wrong. There's plenty of people who aren't sure and who will wonder what's up when some community gets censored.

I also object to the way they censor others. People act like mobs on social media. Over the years I observed lots of open source developers get mobbed because they shared some wrongthink on Twitter or whatever, or because they refused to accept some code of conduct, or even because of innocuous comments. It sucks.
Internet infrastructure, closeness to grocery stores, homes being up to date, walk-ability, close schools, access to transit, are all improved by building more dense housing.

We can also be quite certain that providing the bare minimum housing pulls in demand from those more luxurious options (wants) to the more economically practical option (needs), because the bare minimum option was never available. We'd be giving people more choices and at least some would take it.

Then if you have so many people that "demand" a certain standard of luxury housing, then they will have to compete and pay the premiums for the actual limited resources like lakefront property or great schools (living near other like-minded wealthier people). That's the realities of scarce resources, and is fine, since there's not much we can improve there. But the major gap is providing the bare minimum of housing which we are currently not doing.
Top of the HN right now is an E-Ink project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28740452 . Not sure you have seen it already.
A nugget of truth, it was nice, thanks.
Boringly Getting Rich
The same can be said of C or JavaScript or any other language that is successful. Saying they have flaws doesn't somehow undo their success.

Programming languages are a human phenomenon, as is their success. They are popular in spite of their flaws, not because of them.
I found pair programming really useful for a lot of situations like, ramping up new team members or teaching someone about some particular module and even learning together a new language, I think is also an awesome tool for team building and for avoiding knowledge silos. But like everything it also has its drawbacks, like sometimes is difficult to match agendas for pairs, to make an example. The social aspect is difficult for some programmers and also there’s people’s that don’t enjoy pairing, and still enjoy PRs more than pairing, and yes if you overcome your social barriers, you can benefit from both, nice post.
The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
I’ve been reading some oral histories from early/mid-20th century, midcoast Maine in the last month.

One theme is scarcity (and the ingenuity borne of it). People didn’t have a lot, so they needed to be clever with what they had. They worked incredibly hard, and invented/sought out tools to make their lives physically easier. They toiled for most of their lives, but they saw their known tool get easier as time went on (upgrading from jute to nylon netting, hydraulic winches instead of manual cranks, sonar instead of trial and error).

The people who worked (what seemed to me to be) the worst jobs had a common refrain: “the best thing about X is nobody tells me to do <hard thing> at <unreasonable time> in <unreasonable conditions>. I’m my own boss, make my own decisions, and it keeps me happy.” They owned all the highs, lows, and war stories of business ownership.

Also, a fun anecdote. They asked one guy “what would you tell somebody young who’s new into fishing?” He thought hard, then said “I would tell them to study hard and become a doctor or a lawyer or something, if they’re interested in money”. Made me chuckle!

Anyways, this is to say that it’s always been hard to seek out self employment or total self sufficiency. Generally, you could always trade off comfort for autonomy [1]. Nowadays, we as a society have made inhabiting that material discomfort nearly illegal, as you imply. We raised the floor of material suffering, but the emotional and psychological floor is only elastically attached to that material floor, with an elasticity coefficient that seems to vary widely from person to person. It seems to have been a monotonic transformation so far, but time will tell.

[1]: https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/hp5pmb0n95u...
> I would argue that Deepness is best read first

I strongly recommend the publication order instead. Deepness ought to work standalone, but you'll be missing dramatic irony.
What's the distinction?

Specifying an element from a set of 2^n members seems equivalent to encoding n bits of information.
Medicare doesn't use QALY thresholds to decide which treatments to cover. From a pure economic efficiency standpoint it probably should, but the politics around care rationing are so toxic that it can't be done.
AI enhanced photo of AOC's feet
Can you be more specific? Give examples of what you mean, if you can.
FB seems to work pretty well for democracy. It’s not a great platform for elites to convince the people of things they don’t want tho. NYT etc are much better for that.
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It's pretty common to have kept `/usr/bin/python` as Python2. This is the most conservative option and won't break anything that's already running. Anyone who is using Python currently will have already installed Python 3 (or knows how to do this), and is probably using `#!/usr/bin/env python3`. As an OS vendor with many (many...) systems in the wild, you don't want to switch Python versions on people unexpectedly. Especially when it's still pretty painless to keep python2 around even if there is an installed python3.

For anyone that's still using python2 (as a nearby comment mentioned), there is now at least a warning to avoid using the default Python 2.7 (/usr/bin/python). For an OS vendor, this transition takes a long time... but at least it's in process.
Not merely undaunted — inspired. They knew what could be done, in theory, and were annoyed that the hardware wasn't there yet. So they did what they could with what they had. The software landscape was a wildly different place then, and I still wonder how many good ideas were attempted and left on the ground then which would be easy / practical to implement today.
My PinePhone turned up this week.

It, ummmm, very rough around the edges, software wise.

So far I have only used the default Manjaro distribution it came with. Im both looking forward to, and dreading, working my way through a dozen or so alternative distros to find the least worst collection of brokenness and bugs.

But I 100% knew what I was buying into when I paid for it, and am very happy I have it.
Ryder's even got their COOP service where you can rent other people's trucks (or rent your truck to other people); although that's only in limited areas.

I've personally had good luck with Penske. I had a weird experience with Ryder; for one they only rent to companies now, in theory; for two, inventory management was iffy, and I ended up with a (stinky) refrigerated truck instead of a regular truck, but I got it for the regular truck price, so hey. It was a busy time of year though, nobody else had box trucks like I needed either, apparently a local military base had rented most of them.
Today I learned that both C and shell are "not serious efforts but vanity projects". The more you know...
If you don't enjoy it, then you shouldn't. Otherwise enjoy.