skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So who is actually seeing these ads? How can those numbers be going up?

Advertising spend could be going up without more people seeing the ads. Since businesses compete for limited advertising space, they are likely to keep increasing the size of their bids for click.

Alphabet's revenue could be growing as a result of eroding the margins of other businesses, who are now forced to spend more money for the same amount of clicks.

I don't claim this to be the exact scenario that reflects reality, but it is a very plausible scenario nonetheless. A nice little lesson in why lots of things are zero-sum (even though we'd like to pretend they aren't)
The US was on the gold/silver standard from 1792-1850. Was that the reason it continued the genocide of millions of indigenous people, took their land, and then imported millions of slaves to farm that land? Maybe there are other possibilities for history other than the currency system during a given time period.

I remembered there were a series of financial crises leading up to the Civil War, and sure enough, the first use of fiat currency in the US was to solve a financial crisis caused by the gold/silver standard:

'In 1853, the U.S. reduced the silver weight of coins to keep them in circulation and in 1857 removed legal tender status from foreign coinage. In 1857 the final crisis of the free banking era began as American banks suspended payment in silver, with ripples through the developing international financial system. Due to the inflationary finance measures undertaken to help pay for the U.S. Civil War, the government found it difficult to pay its obligations in gold or silver and suspended payments of obligations not legally specified in specie (gold bonds); this led banks to suspend the conversion of bank liabilities (bank notes and deposits) into specie. In 1862 paper money was made legal tender. It was a fiat money (not convertible on demand at a fixed rate into specie). These notes came to be called "greenbacks".' [1]

Technically Continental Dollars were zero interest bearer bonds, but they were also issued to help finance the Revolutionary War[2].

So, your argument for the gold standard is not only logically incoherent, but even if it was, it's completely ignorant of the history of currencies in the United States.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_American_currency#Contin...
I used to wonder about that too, but then realize that I grew up with Windows XP and already hate with a passion Windows 10 and 11. I've lived through ~15 years of technological change, and still have at least 40 in front of me. That's inspiring me to just switch to vim and a minimalist WM and never look back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidadians_and_Tobagonians
I think we're at the point where public mandates are doing more harm than good. I am disappointed that there are so many people pushing back against simple approval of an effective vaccine because they are worried about an unnecessary mandate being imposed.
I read a lot of personal blogs. Bloggers tend to link to other blogs, so it's somewhat self sustaining. I've seen modern approaches to webrings and other reinventions of Web 1.0 sharing tricks, but none have really adhered to my habits.

All of that to say: I think it's more about habits (and breaking out of the search engine hole) than anything else. It's still very possible (and easy) to explore the World Wide Web; you just need to overcome the gravity of the big sites.
Do you mean in terms of protection, or side effects?

In terms of long term protection, I don't think we really know yet.

In terms of long term side effects - do we know of any past vaccines with notable side effects that only became known after 12+ months? Genuine question.
So you're saying a vaccinated person is likely to unknowingly infect other people around them?
Oracle competes in the database realm with Microsoft (SQL Server) and IBM (DB/2). Oracle owns MySQL. PostgreSQL and MySQL are widely used but not considered enterprise-scale.

Big companies build their software around the database, so once they have committed to a database vendor they are pretty well locked in. I don’t see any newer players directly competing with Oracle, but there are always competing products aimed at specific requirements.

Besides the database server Oracle also sells enterprise software applications. So do Microsoft, IBM, HPE, etc. Salesforce (founded by a former Oracle exec) is an example of a new-ish competitor. Salesforce of course uses Oracle.
The problem is, you don't get to decide whether your comments are flamewar or not. That's actually a rather objective question: it's a function of the responses your comments lead to—or more precisely, likely lead to, given what we know about internet forum dynamics. You're responsible for that, and putting the blame on other people ("I'm simply telling people they are wrong, and they don't like it") is an evasion of that responsibility.

Here's an observation that may help. I've noticed that people tend greatly to underestimate the flaminess (aggressiveness, provocation) of their own comments, let's say by 10x. And they tend greatly to overestimate the amount of badness that other people do, let's say by 10x. Putting those numbers together yields a 100x distortion in how much responsibility we usually assign ourselves. That's basically the problem. Objects in the mirror are a lot closer than they appear!
That's interesting -- can you cite an example of when there was a national US flu vaccine mandate? What about a local mandate?

IIRC, there have not been federal or local government flu mandates although there were local government mandates for things like smallpox in school kids (but not for the entire population).

For example, here is a 2009 policy position from OSHA saying that it does not mandate flu vaccines[1]:

However, although OSHA does not specifically require employees to take the vaccines, an employer may do so.

But if I missed an example of a historical flu mandate, I'd love to hear it.

[1] https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/2009-...
What are the top SaaS companies to choose from?
It sounds like you're suggesting the subsidies remain, but the red states get to pretend that it's not the anti-government individualism their personal ideologies demand?

If people want self-dependence and self-determination, they should strive for it - not play acting that they are independent. What they should not do is complain about the entire concept of government intervention ("socialism!") while benefitting from the exact same thing, paid for disproportionately by the groups they demonize.
Ask HN: Are we embracing escapism via metaverses?
With some of the biggest names in the tech industry moving towards developing metaverses, are we now conditioned enough to disconnect from the real world and immerse into the virtual world? The social media has proven toxic and shown to adversely affect its users. Will the even more potent medium of virtual reality infuse more toxicity in the society and force escapism on the masses?
Well I am an owner of the farm, along with my brother, which my great-grandfather purchased as a retirement project in 1950. Total area is about 7,000 acres, of which tomatoes will soon be replaced by almonds as the primary crop. We used to be the largest asparagus operation on the US, but NAFTA has ended that industry and it was a difficult 20-year transition to find almonds. There was a long-standing belief that our soil wouldn’t handle almonds due to excessive water, but that is proving to be very wrong.

Day-to-day operations are handled by a general manager that is brilliant. My brother is also out there daily working on his distillery and helping to run things. I work mostly on IT and then also handle special projects, especially financial ones.

Life is pretty good to have a large piece of land in CA. Tree nuts have been absurdly lucrative for the past two decades and it has pushed the land values up a lot. It’s put me in the interesting situation of being able to focus most of my energy into equity investing to try and balance my portfolio against the farm holdings. I do, however, attach a strong emotional connection to the land such that when asked what group I most strongly identify with, it is always “Central California Farmers.”
What about objects that cause you to lose your recently acquired prestige?
Just two quick thoughts. First, the 60-70% went out the window with Delta. Second, Australia has a well-documented history of being an unusually heavy-handed democracy.

If you don't take the most repressive Western regime as your starting point, you may find a much more measured variation of responses, and most of those measures have now been abandoned. The last I checked, proponents of authoritarianism don't usually just drop their repressive policies, yet that is the crystal clear pattern we observe throughout the developed world.
Assuming Google has a good handle on click fraud and the growth is real:

* Some % of people install adblockers, but that number doesn't grow that much.

* There are more people being reached by advertising than ever before. 7.7 billion people in the world & still only about half are online. So overall the number of users they're reaching is growing even if they lose some to adblockers.

* You currently have to install an adblocker per device or even application (unless you are in the minority putting it on your router at home). This means that adblock rates vary and a user installing an adblock somewhere doesn't mean that user is globally lost from advertising reaching them somehow.

* There are multiple modalities for ad networks (app, web pages, etc etc). Google is involved in all of them. Ad blocking has variable performance across those networks unless you really know what you're doing (e.g. in-app advertising is very hard to block on iOS).

* The price of ads can vary driving up revenues. Not all ads are priced equivalently so Google can drive value that way by making the ads more valuable to advertisers or making more expensive ads more appealing.

* Inflation will naturally increase total dollar amounts even if everything else remained constant.
From fighter pilot to robotics pioneer: An interview with Missy Cummings
I've heard "two more weeks" and "a few more months" multiple times now. And in fact, in the case of the extremely strict lockdown processes in Australia, they've extended them before.

If you peg it to # of cases rather than how many people have antibodies (FROM ANY SOURCE, given the links I provided as evidence on the efficacy of antibodies from past infection)...you can arbitrarily keep delaying the lockdowns and finding new justifications for more and more invasive processes.

No, no more six months. Based on what the scientists were saying for the entire last year about antibodies for 60 to 70 percent of the population resulting in endemic covid, Victoria and the broader USA have exceeded that. I haven't looked into western European countries yet to see what their antibody counts are estimated to be, but if they have similar antibody levels (from vaccination OR past infection), then these mandates should be dismissed immediately.
If you are on facebook, join a local Group and ask the community. This has been one of the best ways to find any good professionals.
You're misunderstanding, the numbers show 4990 million in 2021 vs 3444 million in 2020.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/L5dZ-j6Id-s/m/9...
The political rhetoric coming out of Australia and New Zealand could be written by any authoritarian government any time in history.
Ads become more expensive, conversions and ROI keep sliding down, but Google and Facebook are almost the only game in town for online advertising. Where would you go that’s not one of their properties?
A Return to the General Purpose Database
If you're using macOS Mojave or earlier, that's too bad. Webkit drank the Apple kool-aid and decided to conform to Apple's definition of which OS versions really matter. F*ck you, WebKit.
Hahaha of course not. I don't really propose an alternative. I'm just lamenting the situation and trying to provide context to the Element CEO about why the original commenter, and people like him, might not be 100% jazzed about the democratization of technology that, in terms of message _security_, is a step backwards.

Doesn't mean I'm in favor of such ridiculous things as you've suggested here.
With the operational structure we have in place, I would describe it as fairly pleasurable for me. I get to work on interesting problems when I want to, and not much else. I’d say it’s actually the size that makes this possible, we could never afford our general manager on just a few hundred acres.
I also think there's a lot of negative ROI on ad campaigns, with no shortage of new players queuing out the door to try their luck in digital space.
You might as well wait for a monkey to type it on a typewriter.
They could build a Bart extension from union city to East Palo Alto. There’s already a track.
If it provides the same value, but costs less, then by definition, the ROI is better. OTOH, if it puts you in crippling debt, but you have no prospects of a job to support that - the ROI becomes bad or even negative. So doesn't it capture all of that already?

In some sense, twice the cost for twice the benefit might be worth it to those who can afford it, because the time-wise investment (4 years or so of your life) remain constant.
Databases have more business value and stickiness than application code. A company may keep its Oracle database for decades while replacing application code multiple times.
I think this should answer your question: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter

But also, our values: https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values

Also, succinctly -- this is a real, grassroots thing. We gathered a bunch of friends and coworkers for this big idea of "what if we had best practices and a professional association for integrity work, just like we do for cybersecurity" and then worked for 10 months to do it.

We've tried hard to put all kinds of pieces into place. We're making it a place that is both independent of companies and also safe for current employees of those companies to join.

It's also cool that we can draw on this community to give expert advice to stakeholders (policymakers, journalists, companies, academics, etc). Mad that congress doesn't understand how Instagram works, or whatever? We can explain things -- as people whose training was in looking at the total information ecosystem of a platform.

A goal is to have integrity work be at least as prestigious, valued, and essential as cybersecurity, or software engineering is. A thing where quality matters, and if you do shoddy work you will be called out on it.

Does that help?
So when will we see some serious applications for this GPT-3 stuff?
Well, lists do make good bookmarks, and people tend to favorite things they want to look at later, so your comment and mine are quite compatible.

My concern is thread quality. Lists of "resources about X" don't have anything really to discuss beyond "X in general", and maybe supplying links that didn't make the list. That's not, in the general case, enough to support a curious conversation—when it comes to forum threads, "generic" implies "shallow" and "repetitive".

In this case the thread wasn't so bad, probably because CRDTs aren't in the most-discussed-topic set [1]. So as a generic submission it's better than, say, a list of Rust resources or something [2]. Still, we have to derive moderation principles for the general case, and this principle (about lists) is surprisingly reliable and solid.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The missing filter there is by which gender, obviously many man will be married to nurses because there are so many female nurses but no so many women marry male nurses.
I don't disagree but this is really only possible with sources of cheap capital. Rolling funds are not easy to maintain and very risky on the GP side of things.
Sounds like a bad pitch then. Shorten it up, better not to overdo a sales pitch than to do too short a pitch.

I don't pitch Signal, but when I do see it pitched those that are most successful pitch 1 directly useful feature as why you should install it.

Eg: Get Signal, our videos won't look like a fuzzy potato lens image

Remember, your reason should be a problem the person your pitching to has faced and would like to see fixed. If they are having trouble with a different issue, pitch that instead!
RETURNING * is a clever way to do this. What is this * from affected_rows syntax you're using here? Any chance you have a link to the docs that describes this?
yet...

read the terms carefully. They make no promises how long you'll get this for free...
Without defending that source...

There's no "conspiracy" needed:

Anyone who gets COVID and is either hospitalized or dies before/within 14 days of the second shot goes in the "unvaccinated" bucket, with no consideration for whether they were recently vaccinated.

They obviously track days since vaccination to be able to filter that 14 day period out, yet I haven't seen any public disclosures of any data.

It's suspicious in the same way that natural immunity efficacy studies were basically off-limits until the Israeli data publication.
Mort Sahl Dies at 94
Blackstone CEO: Energy crisis will set off social unrest
Think of people who are:

- Not tech-savvy and easily confused by keeping 6 different messengers around.

- People for whom multiple clients becomes a cognitive burden.

- Waste of storage space, memory and CPU power that those (hugely bloated, most of the time) clients incur, especially on mobile devices.

- People like me, with diminished executive functioning capacity, who are fucking tired of bad ergonomics of all those clients together and each individually, and who'd prefer a single, consistent, ergonomic and powerful UI to manage the torrent of messages they receive.
I'd be interested to see a historical comparison. Supposedly the (male)doctor-marries-(female)nurse pattern of several decades ago--or the executive/secretary one, to give another example--has given way to a situation where Americans tend to marry within their own profession/class.
> The issue is that vice taxes tend to be highly regressive.

For a cross-sectional view this is certainly true. At a single point in time, a high tax rate impacts people who are more economically vulnerable more than those that are wealthier. However, does the causality hold if we consider this over time?

Addictive substances use -> economically impoverished, or economically impoverished -> addictive substances use?

To me it seems many folks use addictive substances to self medicate in absence (or in spite of) a universal healthcare system. And then when economically improving opportunities come may have less capacity to claim them.

Do we look at it this way? Does it matter? General open questions.
I'm not sure how that addresses the comment you replied to.
It's one thing to click ads. It's quite another to do it for a company you own stock in.
> If they wish to enforce rules over what is stored on their server

The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that what is stored on their server is statistically uniform binary white noise. If they wish to enforce that, there are a plethora of server-side tools (like the Diehard test suite) with which to do so.
Agreed. It's worth reading. My TL;DR was not meant to imply that it wasn't.
I checked gov.cn, and see it using "Mr. Xi" and "President". For example: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/t11...

But maybe I'm not really understand your point. Are you saying there is another English word that would better describe Xi than President, or that English should add one? Are you thinking "President" is insufficient to capture his power, and something like "Dictator" would be better? That has such negative consolidations that I would be hesitant to use it.
At least 329 million Americans will die over the next 100 years no matter what we do; that's 3.29 million per year on average. So far less than 800K people died from COVID19 in almost 2 years... That's 400K per year; ~12% of all deaths... OK, this is a very rough/approximate calculation but is it worth ruining people's lives and taking away people's freedoms over a slight increase in death rate? This isn't the black plague. Personally, I wouldn't accept any significant change in my lifestyle for anything less than 100% (2x) increase in my chance of death... So I won't even bat an eyelash over a 12% increase (and I'm in a not-at-risk group so it's probably way less for me); and especially if I have some control over the risk... Some smokers take on much bigger risks by continuing to smoke; the risk is worth it to them - Who are we to judge?

This pandemic has been blown out of proportion. The media emotional 'contagion' has had a bigger negative impact on people's lives than the actual virus. Did everyone suddenly forget the emotional 'contagion' study which Facebook did some years ago? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161155795...

The result of that study was that people's emotions could be manipulated without their knowledge... How do we know that what we're dealing with now isn't just Facebook and the media putting the results of that study into practice? It sure looks that way. I can definitely feel myself being manipulated by the media and I suspect that others who are more suggestible than me are even more so and less likely to notice it...
Fine, here are the same stats, sourced from the DOJ and SFPD is in a newspaper. You can also check the CJCJ sources and data as well:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-shoplifting-ris...

Here's one with data on the stores that Walgreens closed:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Is-shoplifting-forcin...

> Also, it states that reports of theft are down. I mean obviously. If stores are shutting down and police cannot even arrest thieves then it follows that the stores are not even bothering to report shoplifting any longer.

Don't know what to say to this, other than it's an unfalsifiable claim and will always point the way you want -- Crime is always too high, because any decline is the result of non reporting. If the vast majority of the shoplifting losses are by professional organized criminal gangs, I'm surprised that the chains wouldn't report them

> ...and the data that's more relevant is that these chains are reporting that nearly HALF of their total losses in all of California, come from San Francisco.

Where did you hear this?. The only stat I can find close to this is from CVS, which says 26% of incidents (42% of $ value) of their losses from shoplifting _in the Bay Area_ come from San Francisco.
But none of these conundrums could exist if Apple had no access to the user's device, nor control over the software running on it. "Who owns your computer" is still the central question; we're just Sapir-Whorfing ourselves around it within the implicit language of walled gardens. "Apple owns your computer" is the unspoken premise, and it's not axiomatic.

Stallman was very, very right.
Go fuck yourself, you despicable subhuman piece of filth.

Unless you're a troll just trying to make Facebook employees look bad, in which case, lol, well done.
0.5% of global GDP would be more reasonable, although a fraction is an odd way of writing it.

It also doesn't tell us much other than Google and Facebook are large companies with significant earnings. You can probably provide a similar percentage for VW/Toyota, Boeing/Airbus, Walmart/Amazon, or any other pair of large companies that are the leaders in their respective markets. Indeed, if you lumped the entire Fortune 500 together, they're probably make up a sizable portion (if not the majority) of world GDP.