skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like coding got a lot more complicated for some reason. I feel the peak of programming was Visual basic.
Revenue was ~21B, =~ 28% margin.

I'm also not an accountant so I'm not about to speculate on the rest. Maybe your right and it's a factor.
Sure it would. We could pay the entire thing off with that.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent...

> The wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled about $41.52 trillion in the first quarter, according to Federal Reserve data released Monday.

Can't do it again as easily, of course.
No, I don’t think it was changed. I just think that the people who bought the tool weren’t the engineers who needed it and that for some reason the engineers never ended using it, maybe because they didn’t even knew about the existence of the tool or because they felt it was useless to them. I don’t even remember them to be involved in the project, but once again, shitty company, I had no direct contacts with the end users. Everything was proxied with their buyings dept, our sales dept, and our product « managers » (who really liked their job of not being anything more than well paid proxies between sales and programmers). With this setup, I’m pretty sure our product, as complex as it was, was probably useless to them.

But meh, I left this company and I now work at a nicer company where I’m truly motivated knowing our end users enjoy using our products.
Every piece of IKEA furniture I've owned has collapsed or fallen apart within 5 years. I've got an old coffee table I carried in on a skateboard when I was like 13 or something that I found during spring cleanup. It's solid and made of real wood. It's been going strong for 20 years now of heavy use and who knows how long it was used before I got it. I can see it lasting another 20 years easily.
If you were valuing a company you would add the value of the pension fund but subtract the present value of the pension liabilities. When considering the level of indebtedness of the Federal government, I think liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare should be included.
There are at least two distinct issues here this community is concerned about:

1. Telemetry is unethical if the users didn't provide informed consent (opt-in) for it. It's not just a theoretical point - anyone who's worked in tech sector for a while should know most companies cannot be trusted to behave ethically (especially if they took VC funding).

2. There's a certain dysfunction/antipattern that's popular in tech sector, called being a "data-driven company". It's the practice of making decisions through divination from data collected through extensive telemetry, to the exclusion of other knowledge sources (like e.g. actually talking to your users, hallway testing, or thinking things through). This leads to software being optimized in questionable directions - so in a sense, you could say that adding telemetry implies an increased chance the software will become worse over time.
I think treating the back end and front end separately is the royal road to "slow development".

Look at what Lotus Notes accomplished in the 1990s, realize all the patents have run out, and put that together with the possibilities of websockets, systems like React and Phoenix.

Another world is possible.
It's interesting something so similar looking to the Pileated Woodpecker went extinct so easily.

Annihilated by preference
Re: cheetahs, I thought the consensus was that they can sprint long enough to wind a slower animal in a pack, but a human can track basically forever, so it doesn't matter how fast we go - we can sweat to shed heat from aerobic exertion, and so on.

It's posited as the reason humans "took off" the unique physiology of infants and not being able to walk due to our cranial size at birth - because longer gestation to facilitate walking ability means our heads would not fit for natural childbirth - means that cunning and determination are what matters. To anthropomorphize a bit.
I would say that most people will not share that same hesitancy. I believe that most people do not identify their smartphone as a problem; it's a productivity and entertainment tool.

Now, myself, AR, and especially AR implants of the kind the OP was talking about, are a hard pass until they are sold to me, with no external connections other than those I can absolutely control to the finest detail. While I may want it to help me identify people because I'm bad at names, I don't want it phoning home with those names and faces and logging it for some company/country somewhere.

In other words, AR is almost certainly completely out of the question for me. Which is sad, because I used to be absolutely pumped for the day terminals and brain-laces were available like in The Culture.
Reading the comments on Haxplore using Haxplore is so meta:

https://imgur.com/a/v4tbfqP
I think PostgreSQL will at some point support Cypher.
>ignoring the fact that we'll be collecting taxes all that time.

This is all wrong and it does not ignore this. The calculation only includes the portion of future obligations that can not be funded based on future revenue estimates. It does not simply take future expenses without taking into account future revenue as that would be patently absurd.

Furthermore it only includes future obligations that have currently been committed to, so for example it does not make projections about people who will at some point in the future be enrolled into Social Security (for example people not yet born).
> Are open source developers just a bunch of suckers being taken advantage of to provide building blocks for various proprietary business models?

Perhaps. The whole point of the GPL is to give free software developers advantages and create leverage we can use against those who would exploit our labor. Permissive licenses allow that exploitation.

In the end, it's irrelevant. All this software, all this positioning for advantages and leverage, none of it will matter if the machine itself is taken away from us.

We'll never be truly free until computer manufacturing is as democratized as software development. Ideally we should be able to make computers at home.

> No. What's fundamental is freedom for people.

Absolutely. Computing freedom is a subset of personal freedom.
This got downvoted, presumably because someone probably think it sounds like a "lol, old people r dumb" view, but ... it's insightful to realize that if, on average, people's attitudes change such that they don't WANT to keep their goods forever, there is no value placed on a piece of furniture that lasts forever, and that drives cheaper, more disposable furniture to be made. I think a lot of people make the mistake of putting the cause-effect the other way around, where you HAVE to buy new furniture because "they don't make it the way they used to," but that may actually be what consumers want.
Shopify has been down quite a bit today as well.
I apologize, but this reveals fundamental misunderstandings of how inflation is measured, and what it measures, and of how US dollars enter the economy.

Look at this post to see how many different measures of inflation there are. Each of these get at different aspects of the economy:

https://econbrowser.com/archives/2021/08/measured-inflation-...

https://econbrowser.com/archives/2021/09/inflation-a-compreh...

As for money printing. Per US law, money cannot be just printed by the Treasury. It must be borrowed from people who already had dollars to lend.

New dollars enter the economy when banks lend money; that is the main engine of new money creation, and it is responsive to the economy. Usually, banks don't lend when its too risky, and businesses don't borrow when it won't lead to profitable growth.
> From one law class I took the way it was explained is this

> The original purpose of non-competes was for people like C-Suite executives, and sales people

It wasn't; the original purpose of noncompetes was for lower-rank guildsmen employed by guildmasters; we know this because there are British cases adjudicating them back to at least the early 15th Century and statutes restricting them back to at least the mid 16th.

So, take any explanation that starts with the “C-suite and salespeople” origin story as suspect.
> The meaningful number is 2033, the year Social Security is projected to run out of money.

This is the year the trust fund runs out of money, at which point Social Security won't be able to meet its full obligations, only what it can cover with current payroll taxes. Social Security can't run out of money unless the taxes that support it are eliminated. "Social Security won't be available for you Gen X'ers" is misleading propaganda spread by people who want Social Security to go away. When the trust fund is tapped out, unless we remove the income cap, Social Security will be less generous. It won't go away. If we remove or lift the income cap, this problem goes away altogether.
For those interested, I wrote a website that lets you easily contact your local, state, and federal representation. Still building it out, if anyone has anything they'd like added please let me know:

https://vocalvoters.com?category=increased%20government%20sp...

Note, the current options are all based on who was willing to work with me. If you have any suggests happy to add.
Tab separated values all the things
There's no good data suggesting that getting rid of the gold standard led to higher prices or, as your twitter account suggests, obesity.
That's very true, but the benefits of ES come on the write side of the equation. Expecting it to solve read-side problems will inevitably lead to disappointment.
> Chicago’s pension debt soared by approximately $1.1 billion in 2020, according to the city’s audited annual financial report for 2020.

So, by about 3%, and about 10% of annual revenue. (In an... unusual year.)

Buy a house and chances are your debt soars by more than 10% of annual salary, right?
> The meaningful number is 2033, the year Social Security is projected to run out of money.

This comment is excellent, except for one clarification: "Social Security" is not going to run out of money. The "Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund" will run out of money in 2033 (the disability insurance fund is solvent until 2057). After this happens -- and assuming no action by Congress -- Social Security will still be able to pay 76% of benefits to retirees based solely on payroll taxes collected. This isn't a great outcome, but it's far from insolvency.
Everyone reading this needs to watch The Gaurdian's short video about government debt with David Graeber.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxJW7hl8oqM

It's amazing how little the general public and especially our elected officials understand this.
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/truth-accounting/

It's worth researching the bias of your source before taking it too seriously. Like jfengel said, they're using funky math. Oh no I'm over 2 million dollars in debt because over the next 40 years I'll probably end up spending that much money on food and housing.

The national debt itself is basically a fiction, it has absolutely no bearing on anyone.
People believe that achieving X means the agent will be intelligent and can thus do Y, Z, A, B, C etc.

But then someone builds an agent that can do X, but it can't do anything else. So people don't view it as intelligent, since it doesn't do any of all the other things people associated with being able to do X.

So it has nothing to do with being used to computers solving new problems, it is that we now realize that solving those problems doesn't really require the level of intelligence we thought it would. Of course solving new problems is great, but it isn't nearly as exciting as being able to create intelligent agents.

Edit: And it isn't just hobbyists making this mistake, you see big AI researchers often make it as well and they have for a long time. You will find tons of articles of AI researchers saying something along the lines of "Now we solved X, therefore solving A, B, C, D, E, F is just around the corner!", but they basically never deliver on that. Intelligence was harder than they thought.
The early mathematical education of Ada Lovelace
SpiceDB Is Open Source
I love that the pricing page is simple instead of having multiple paid tiers each with their own pricing scale for # of monthly emails. I'm currently doing 100k/month with Mailgun, and while saving money on sending isn't much of a priority at the moment, I'll definitely look into this more down the road. Maybe try it out for a side project in the mean time.

I'm sort of surprised I haven't noticed this before when researching email providers.
> I found that one can live without ESP.

True, but on average ESP is highly effective. Cars with ESP are correlated with 40-50% less running off the road or roll over crashes.[0] Carrie Underwood may sing about Jesus Taking the Wheel[1], but she really has GM Stabilitrak to thank.

[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lydBPm2KRaU
It did take me a while to write this (~20 hours, I think) because I kept worrying about that exact problem, and I kept catching myself writing generic advice rather than concrete experiences.

I tried as much as possible to only write things where I could think of multiple concrete examples in my own experience.
This looks like a neat and worthwhile project, but it could do without the hyped marketing. You sold me with "reimagined desktop" and then gave me a screenshot of what looks to be a pretty typical, conventional desktop operating system. That's not a bad thing, but it's just not the reimagining I was sold on. Bit of a letdown for an otherwise interesting project!
The cost of enforcing your rights is usually beyond the means of someone working a minimum wage job.
I want to share something I have been working on for a bit now, it allows you to pull files from your github and translate them using OpenAI's new Codex model. You can then review the diff, retry if needed, and (optionally) submit a PR. This project is still a bit rough around the edges, would love to hear any feedback!
Comparing messy AI that will demonetize/remove historic retellings of traumatic events, wars, and hate crimes to 'censoring' Ron Paul is ridiculous.

Most of them moved to because of demonetization... Where swearing can demonetize a video as well as mentioning rape or murder in contexts explicitly. Yes that is horrible to punish literal historians talking about these events that really happened that we should be educated on but, how do you separate those from actually hateful content so charmin/coke/corporation still will pay you to run ads?

Letting people think the vaccine is dangerous without scientific proof when they could die without it, isn't government regulation friendly.

edit: to day I learned there's a down vote feature lol. Didn't know acknowledging a private company has interests beyond letting people saying w/e when want when it can negatively impact their bottom line would be so controversial. Also banning him for being conservative is very different from banning spreading vaccine misinformation. Then grouping that with removing historians incomes due to messy AI implementation to save YouTube's ad friendliness to keep their bottom line is just a victim complex.
I'm not seeing any good reasons here for this to be flagged.

What am I missing?
Most rich people don’t have all their wealth in cold hard cash. They have assets. You can’t force rich people to sell their assets. And if you did, it would crash the economy.
what, on an aging audi, _doesn't_ cost half the value of the vehicle to fix?

i've heard the same complaint about basically every part of an audi except the tires.
> but could simply be printed when needed. This created huge money supply inflation

This could and did happen before 1971. The US government has always been able to issue debt. And paper money, in the form of bonds, has been a staple of the country's financial systems since long before it was a country. Mostly owing to the fact that England largely prohibited the export of specie to the colonies. Forcing states to figure out their own monetary systems.

> Can you imagine an piece of IKEA furniture being used daily and lasting for >40 years?

Yes. I have plenty of of IKEA furniture that's seen daily use for ~20 years and still looks brand new. People don't seem to realize this, but IKEA does sell solid wood furniture. I have an entire bedroom set (and matching shelves) that are made of solid wood with a thin resin coating that prevents scratches and dings. The bedframe does need the screws tightened on occasion, but with the dresser, I put it together with wood glue and never bother to empty it when moving (glued dowels are essentially as strong as a mortise and tenon joint) . It's survived like five moves without issue. My old desk found a spot as a work bench in my shop as the tabletop is incredibly durable. I'd love to find another one.

My parent's house still has the IKEA flooring that we installed in like 2002. Even their cheapo furniture isn't bad. I'm still rocking these $5 end tables that I bought in like 2008. I put some dowels in the feet and stacked them to make a shelve that converts into a low table for my shop.

Not only will IKEA furniture still be around in 40 years, due to survivorship bias, they will be known for making incredibly durable furniture by future generations.
I love this so much. THIS is why CF is one of the only companies I'd ever consider working for.
Reddit-like software is open source, what's stopping anyone like you then? Talk is cheap.

>Ad supported is just one such model and it's not a very new one at that. Remember, you made this comment on server that was provided to you for free without the need of ad support.

There are job ads on HN, plus HN is even more highly moderated than Reddit. So it's a very bad example.
I don't know for sure, but I presume that the moderators can resurrect a post that they deem to have been flagged to death unfairly. I also don't know how many "flags" it takes to kill a post. I don't think they publicize that, and probably for good reason.

From what I've seen though, "bad" uses of flagging don't happen that often. Usually it's for blatant spam or troll posts. But I guess there will always be exceptions...
The post right about this post on HN's front page is titled "Slack is experiencing a service disruption". So for a second I thought CF was having some disruption (outage) which caused Slack to go down.
If you can't handle the heat get out of the Anthropocene.
Removing the income cap is really a clear way to mitigate this problem greatly. From what I understand it doesn't fix it entirely.

I wonder if we could put SS on capital gains, even at 1%. That would help this include investment gains.
Ducking awesome!
I don’t understand how social security isn’t a pyramid scheme. It seems to me like something we should just do away with.
So what about airbags? Or ABS? Those are basic safety features that cannot work without electronics.
I don't think ad-blocking is immoral, on the contrary I think it's necessary, and I despise the amount of ads thrown at us. My computers and phones have every form of adblocker/sponsorblocker available.

That being said, I can afford it so I would be a humongous hypocrite if I didn't support services when an ad-free option exists.
Could it be related to: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/21/lets-encrypt-root-expiry/?
I am wondering that myself, considering the things you hear about Tesla.

On the other hand, we can very easily make a comparison to “When will Elon or Branson fly?”.
If Musk was that obsessed with showing up other billionaires, he could have spent lots of time in orbit, long ago, on a whim. The simple fact he hasn't, shows that he is more focused on getting things done than engaging in self-serving joyrides.
That might be confounded a bit by https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/survivors/.
> motorcycles don't have back up cameras, air bags, etc.

why do you think that is?
These are age cohort averages. If you die of COVID despite being vaccinated, clearly the vaccine was 0% effective and early treatment could possibly have helped.

Either way, 70% is not incredible in my book. The 95% from the booster will not last.
We’re using Notion
I've never had much issue. Some of my softer ground shoes give me shin pains on pavement, but anything that is meant for a paved surface has never phased me. That said, I used to walk five or six miles in oxfords when I lived in NYC, so maybe my feet can just take the pain
Sounds like the limit is discretionary. From the NYT:

"Scientists do not declare extinctions lightly. It often takes decades of fruitless searching. About half of the species in this group were already considered extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global authority on the status of animals and plants. The Fish and Wildlife Service moved slower in part because it is working through a backlog, officials said, and tends to prioritize providing protection for species that need it over removing protection for those that don’t."
Productivity, on the other hand, is through the roof.
Hate to say it but Emacs org timestamps handle this easily.

This would create a recurring entry on the first of October every year.

* TODO Tax return
<2021-10-01 +1y>
Sorry to break it to you but most of HN is not well informed. Look for some threads in your area of expertise for proof of that.

Only people selling AGI are marketers and futurists.
This is a fair point.

Treating things like Social Security and Medicare obligations as unfunded debt is akin to me declaring that I have a large amount of debt because I have to pay for food and clothe myself from now until I die.

It's money I will pay, most certainly, but it's only an obligation to myself to sustain my life at some reasonable standard. Much like Medicare and Social Security, it will be paid for with money I earn in the future as I live my life.
>the vast majority of people with reasonable knowledge, myself included, accept that in general, vaccines save lives

That really depends where you are located. There are US states where <50% of the eligible population is vaccinated.

Why the qualifier, 'in general?' In what cases does one of the major US COVID vaccines reduce a healthy adult's life expectancy?
There is a vast chasm of computational complexity between Chess, Go, and protein folding, to program induction. Unlike problems where the configuration space grows exponentially, the space of valid programs is at least super-exponential and depending on the language family, (e.g. context free, context sensitive, recursively enumerable), can often be undecidable. Furthermore, many language induction problems do not have optimal substructure or overlapping subproblems, two important prerequisites for reinforcement learning to work. In these settings, gradient-based heuristics will only get you so far.

If you are interested in learning more about the limits of gradient descent, you should look into the TerpreT problem [1]. There are surprisingly tiny Boolean circuits which can be found using constraint solving, but we have not yet been able to learn despite the success of reinforcement learning in other domains. I'm not saying that program induction is impossible, but it is extremely hard even for relative "simple" languages like source code.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.04428.pdf
A pompusus title like this unfortunately reeks craziness.

That is unfortunate, because the simple message of this video is a good one: that even if you live under an oppressive regime you personally can still opt to not parrot the lies of the state, but rather to tell no lies.
> But that doesn't make "$146T" a meaningful number.

If you have to pay annuity to a relative until they die, I don't think it reflects a good picture of your net worth to ignore that number either.