skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The shutdown hit oil production quite a bit. Recovery and startup lag by months.

All the Democrat candidates put themselves forward as anti-oil. If you thought Trump would lose, it would be smart to buy oil and then hold for a while.

When Biden won, the speculation took off. Signals matter.

Biden signaled that everyone must move away from gas-driven vehicles. He banned a pipeline (getting sued by Canada over that one). He banned as much fracking as he could. Even worse, he defied congress and the law by allowing the Russians to build their pipeline which will pipe money straight into Putin's pocket

The result of these changes (and others) was a lot of people shutting down oil production. Others speculated even more that the pipeline and fracking decrease would mean less supply, so they bought up the oil while the prices were still down.

With OPEC refusing to up production, there's even less reason for the speculators to sell. Biden released part of the strategic reserve, but it amounted to less than two days supply of oil for the country and nobody who knew anything about the oil market cared very much.
Obviously C-style strings can still remain an option where they are needed, but in most cases using the 4 bytes for a length field is a sane default. How many buffer overflow attacks have been enabled by that four byte savings over the years?

> "Sane" strings that discourage the developer from just coming up with a simple memory management scheme that fits the situation at hand.

"Sane" compilers that discourage the developer from considering the machine level instructions. It's turtles all the way down.

There's a reason that Python is so popular and it's not performance
> My point is the way founding fathers envisioned first amendment protection, they never foresaw the rise of a small billionaires oligarchs owning large stake of media and newspapers to promote views favouring their narratives.

The founders largely were oligarchs, heirs of oligarchs, or married into the families of oligarchs,and certainly were not people to whom the idea of someone, or some group, within that class investing heavily in media to promote their political ideas would be surprising.

> look how the mainstream media would love to cancel certain people they don’t like.

Both before and after independence, political cancel culture in the early US involved much more forceful, and often permanent and total, cancellation than what is complained about today.
I'm a bit bummed out that it's closed source - I would've liked to look through the code.
> Global diabetes prevalence has increased by 16% in the past two years, with 537 million adults [about 10% of the world’s population in the 20..80yo range]... Over this same time period, COVID has stopped [people] doing some of the things that help prevent and manage diabetes[: ]sedentary behaviour..., which was already at dangerous levels pre-COVID[, increased]. Some estimates indicate the pandemic added an average three hours to [people's] sitting time each day
Education, Childcare and Socialization need a divorce from dysfunctional 3-way
> when they went a year without a release.

Cause these libraries depend on other libraries that are probably extremely out of date at that point and have their own security vulnerabilities.

An example of a project that hasn't been dismissed as "abandoned", is https://github.com/patrickmn/go-cache because it explicitly doesnt have dependencies.

So yeah, if you have a semi-complex library, a year without a release is abandoned.
Hospitals and specialists should be made to post prices of their services … by law.
There are significant inroads that can be made, even in California's situation, with the extremely anti-Georgist Prop 13:

http://cacommonground.org/pdf/2020-12_Transit_Value_Capture....
Omicron Variant report from UKHSA [pdf]
even an hour with a turned off phone can make a noticeable difference. just some time to breath without any notifications is wonderful
Indefinitely? Mmmmmmm probably not. This is clearly a loss-leader for them to draw in more customers, so you can’t guarantee it won’t change
Quanternions' ubiquity is relatively recent. Rotation matrices ruled supreme in games and graphics and it was only after concerted effort to abolish R's were Q's made ubiquitous.

Two heartbeats later, we're bearish on Q's.
They are betting on inventing a time traveling machine. They would carry the stocks of today into the past and sell them there, then reinvest it into Apple's and afterwards would be returning back. That's what I think.
The main issue is (and always has been, in my opinion) that "Standard" pascal sucks in that it doesn't have standard libraries, and thus all of them were just a little too different from each other.

Delphi (and Lazarus/Free Pascal) have a largely compatible and sane set of libraries that include quite sane string handling (you never allocate or deallocate them, the have length, and can contain nulls without issue)

The latest versions of things include generics, so you can make lists, trees, etc of your defined record type with little to no trouble.

Separate compilation of Units means that I almost never wait for a compile... it is always sub-second from hitting F9, to seeing the thing run.

The two-way tools to edit forms are one of the most productive I've ever seen. Borland C++ built a lot of boilerplate to make up for the C++ impedance match with their VCL libraries, that you couldn't tinker with, or things broke. Delphi/Lazarus don't have that issue.

Lazarus doesn't support GIT integration directly, yet, as far as I know. If you are doing personal projects, there's no reason not to use it.
Really? They don't want to track the inflation that results from the new money just being buried in stocks and real estate for safekeeping? Isn't that an indicator they're printing too much?
Part of the cause of misinformation is that people want to believe in misinformation because it allows them to be part of their social group. The problem is that belief in certain facts will include you or exclude you from your social group and that some ideas in some social groups are not even allowed to be questioned. It's like all the bad parts of a religion that I hated: dogma, excommunication, blasphemy, and witch burnings.

- Dogma, a list of things you have to believe in to be part of the group.

- Excommunication, rejection from the group if you don't believe in the dogma. Depending on where you live, it's like killing a person.

- Blasphemy, the idea that some things are not allowed to be said out loud or even thought about.

- Witch burning, blaming a single person for all the problems of the village and then a mob of people attacking and killing that person.

Part of the solution is to stop treating social/political groups like a 16th century religion. Don't excommunicate people. Don't burn witches. There should be no such thing as blasphemy. It should be okay to ask hard questions without being accused of something horrible. Above all, groups need to embrace and celebrate a well proven proof, even if it contradicts the dogma.
Entrepreneurship Is on the Rise, Despite Covid-19
I miss being disconnected.

Before having constant access to internet or a phone, I had much more time to process my thought. I also had much more time throughout the day to think overall as there was much more situation when I had to wait a bit and no mobile phone to disrupt me. I'm trying to reclaim that, but I do miss that (and I think overall it's something that humans needs and are missing).

I also dislike Slack or similar tools for work, it makes the work day much more disrupted and it's hard to manage. I wish that there was a calorie counter on Slack where you need to burn some calories before having to disrupt someone. It would make people think twice before talking.

Finally I find the grab on technology from GAFAM sad. Things have been abstracted and ownership removed to the point that I fell more and more like a passive user rather than someone having fun hacking around. If I can't break it and fix it back, it feels like a piece of non interesting piece of junk to me. I become just a user, not an actor. I find everything they make just sad.
"Russia also does this. Inconvenient journalists are designated "foreign agents", for instance."

Inconvenient journalists financed from abroad. And "foreign agents" are not imprisoned, they just obligated by the law to remind their readers about this fact.
To clarify, from my understanding, in a libertarian society, individuals and groups would be able to hire armed mercenary groups a la private security forces, but with presumably less regulation. That's what I mean by "monopoly on violence", eg only the ruling government has the right to use violence to enforce contracts.
Yes visceral fat appears to be the real risk factor.

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-880193/v1
Readjusting expectations for pre-processing was one of the biggest differences I noticed going from NLP courses to working on NLP in production. For the amount of pre-processing learning material there is, I expected it to be much more important in practice.

I feel lucky to gotten into NLP when I did (learning in 2017/2018 and working in the beginning of 2020). Changing our system from glove to BERT was super exciting and a great way to learn about the drawbacks and benefits of each.
Exactly. This is one of the (many) problems with the vulgar "homo economicus" view of human beings. Culture and nationality are likewise factors. Moving to another country is difficult. You are moving to an alien culture with an alien language where you will be unfamiliar with a whole host of social realities, some of which may contradict what you believe. That's why immigrants usually create ethnic neighborhoods[0] and it is only their grandchildren onward who are fully assimilated into the adopted nation, usually facilitated through intermarriage which tends to water down ethnic ties.

[0] Tangentially, it is an interesting question how long the ethnic European neighborhoods, nostalgically portrayed in movies like "The Godfather", that began to dissolve around WWII could have lasted. According to one view of what is commonly called "white flight", a major factor was the WASP ruling class' social engineering and ethnic cleansing of them out of existence by dispersing them across the suburbs which hastened their assimilation ("into what?" is itself a question worth pursuing; a WASP-constructed "identity"?). The reason this migration out of the cities coincided with the civil rights movement, according to this view, is that the Great Migration of black sharecroppers from the South was effectively an instrument of mass migration into ethnic neighborhoods. Mass migration always fragments the peoples into which the migration flows. So, given this interpretation, this was not some manifestation of racism, but of disintegrating neighborhoods (the "white guys" throwing rocks in Marquette Park were apparently Lithuanians who felt that their community was threatened by this migration). Many of these neighborhoods were also Catholic, and with falling birth rates among Protestants following the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the idea of Catholics outbreeding them was not something they cared to endure.
This is more or less true in Ethiopia too. The length of the day doesn't vary much there, but by convention the clock is offset by six hours, which makes for great fun when you arrange to meet somebody and have to establish whether or not you mean "Ethiopian time". Noon to us is six o'clock to them.

They're also on the Julian calendar, giving rise to their old tourism slogan "13 months of sunshine".
LEDs. Why does everything need to be lit?

I bought a toaster, now my kitchen glows. I bought a toothbrush, now my bathroom glows. Etc, etc. Why do manufacturers insist on making things always glow?
Touchscreens in cars. Please stop this.
Pale Blue Dot Revisited (2020)
I 100% think this is right to do. The only thing this harms is the company's bottom line, and frankly it's ridiculous how much power corporations already.

Your metaphor to police corruption is also why "context" is an important thing. In that case people would actually get hurt, in this case a company loses money. They are different scenarios completely.
Programmer productivity. As long as this is the bottleneck in determining market success of a product, this tradeoff will continue.
I think this misses the mark in a few ways. There's no risk to you. I'm providing the imaginary betting money. You can't lose, you can only win. When people raise objections or complications or uncertainty because they are trying not to agree with you, then this may help get to the heart of matter.

I think X.

There are many details and complicating factors.

If I gave you $100 to bet on X or Y, which would you bet it on?

...

> I'd be willing to pay that lunch regardless and I find it amusing even if I am made fun of for "being wrong" by my friends

Delightful. It brings to mind the Seinfeld where someone bets Elaine a dinner that Dustin Hoffman was in Star Wars as a way to go on a date without having to ask. Or perhaps Stephen Hawking's bet against black holes. If he won his life's work would have been wasted, but he'd get a subscription to True Detective, or something close to that.
Users flagged this submission. I didn't see it until now.

Please don't post this sort of rhetoric to HN. It's boring and almost always based on false assumptions (as in this case).

Edit: and could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN generally? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we ban that sort of account—it's not what the site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah, I would expect it was there from the beginning, it's just never exposed as user configurable on standard firmware. Being in there from the beginning doesn't
really invalidate the claim by others it was requested by DoD or some agency therein. They are obviously a big client with leverage to have a say in chip features. Even if that part is made up, the off toggles existence still implies security concerns, since the coprocessor shouldn't have any effect on performance.
Well that is the claim that Assange is making. The government claims he tangibly helped. That has always been the line. You can't give your source burglary tools, ask them to break into something particular and then claim you were just a reporter. You may believe the claims from the prosecution are wrong or lies, but they don't seem on their surface to be crazy
> Be careful with the claim that a "protest" makes something legal.

No one made that claim.
I hardly consider four bytes to track the length of a string "waste".

I also don't really know why you assume that "sane" means "doesn't let you manage memory effectively".

That said, how many applications really are bottlenecked by string processing in the first place? I don't care if processing Unicode graphemes is slow, as long as it's correct and doesn't mangle users' names.
You have to learn the more verbose CSS properties in the first place, and the vast majority of tailwind's class names include the unique keywords of those anyway.
Language-specific package managers make sense in some cases (generally only for developers, not users), but why should every language have its own siloed ecosystem? This just leads to people implementing things in other languages for no reason.
It's a GUI OS, not command-line as I expected:

http://c64os.com/c64os/usersguide/ (screen shot)
If you happen to live in or visit the SF Bay Area, and drive on the 280 freeway between San Jose and San Francisco, you'll notice it feels a bit...odd. That's because billboards are banned along that stretch [1], and all you see is the beautiful green rolling hills.

[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11805469/why-arent-any-billboards-...
The future is unevenly distributed.

There are plenty of companies where everyone has a very mature understanding of monads and where new joiners are coached to reach that level of understanding.

And there are plenty of places that aren't using source control, CI and unit tests.
yup. We should be able to opt-in instead of having to opt-out of the slew of digital ads we see daily.
..."and here is why this is a good thing!"
Sure, if you're pushing things through a command bus or something. Otherwise you're just stretching it. If you wouldn't use it in a sentence to describe a use-case, I'd say that it's probably not a concept.

Would it? Only if you allow default values, which is a separate discussion. And even then only if your only mechanism for default values doesn't let the definitions specify what, exactly, the default value is.
It means that you can negotiate rent with your landlord or switch apartments, and all of those have gone down.

I know a lot of people who have recently switched apartments, and I personally negotiated it down.
It wouldn't be an appropriate tactic for that sort of argument.
Like in David Macaulay's "Motel Of The Mysteries".
Especially blue LEDs.
Please don't take HN threads on ideological flamewar tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29509343.
This gets into a vicious cycle. Given that lots of people are effectively paid to borrow money, that boosts the money people can bid on a house, and so that itself pushes up the prices.

Low-interest rates on mortgages are a huge boon for sellers since the buyers have access to more money, and thus they can pay more. So, for the buyers, the "get paid" part only works if they flip a house and become sellers before the cycle bubbles and bursts.

Meanwhile, buyers who want to get a house just to live in it for the rest of their lives are having to pay much higher prices, and it has nothing to do with real supply and demand. Cut out all the speculators/investors/flippers and the situation would be very different.

Maybe we shouldn't even continue the premise that a person who doesn't live at a property can "own" it.
> you absolutely do not have the right to break into systems of national security

He didn’t do that, he didn’t help Manning get any additional access, the whole basis of their case is in Assange agreeing to look at some stuff for Manning and then never getting back to
him. Assange didn’t hack or crack anything.
did not know i can bypass select contacts through DnD. this will help greatly
The argument is that someone rich enough can deduct fines from their tax, but a poorer person can deduct the speeding ticket from their tax. They will also not be able to deduct the lost salary for being locked up from their future tax bill. So this clearly creates an imbalance, rich and poor are treated differently before the law.
What's interesting with Canada and Australia is that they use a point system... that never actually checks for employability.

So you end up with "senior engineers" in Canada/Australia driving taxis and not ever being able to land a job as engineers, even though they got enough points to immigrate by being one, at least on paper.

In the US, someone has to be able to get a job above market rates (so convince an employer and the government that his skills are required) before even being considered for immigration. So I wouldn't say it's harder, at least for someone really qualified.
It’s not that simple. Oil is the most important commodity in the world. We can’t just “get away from oil” as the technology isn’t there to replace it.

Your entire lifestyle is dependent on oil. It powers global supply chains and critical societal infrastructure which is simply not optional.

Renewables and batteries are great, but they come with their own set of problems which haven’t been solved yet. For example, electrical grids currently do not have the capacity to run completely on renewables as renewables cannot generate scalable energy locally. Overhauling our power grids is a massive undertaking, and we’re going to need to use a ton of oil products to make that happen.

Attempting to reduce the worlds dependence on oil via market manipulation is not the correct or effective path towards sustainability.
This might be the first Oracle product I use. That means down the line I might have an informed opinion to share in business decisions where Oracle provides a solution. Pretty smart.
What if instead of trying to collectively, bindingly define misinfo, we simply require(?) or strongly encourage(?) putting something like this next to every ~"share" button:

"Before sharing with others, please consider: Does this come from a trustworthy original source? Is the original eyewitness known enough to be judged by you as truly honest, and competent at reporting accurately what they saw or heard? Is the full chain of transmission to you also similarly known to be honest and competent? Is it corroborated by other such reliable sources?"

That could probably be made more concise, and with variations over time so less likely to be just tuned out. And study the results to improve how it is done, over time. I read about some study or two (unfortunately, I don't think I could find now) that said this made a difference.

Maybe lying is a bad enough thing for society that we could make a law for facebook and such to encourage us all to just stop and consider reliability of our sources -- not government favoring one over another, but encouraging to think.

There are always unintendened consequences, but it seems worth discussion and/or trying.

Edit: maybe something like this could also help prevent governments deceptively propagandizing or subterfuge in others' elections, stirring up contention (i.e., general weakening) by repeating incendiary things on both sides of issues, encouraging attendance at both sides of angry rallies, etc, as has been reported so often as having been done, with respect to recent elections..... And the influence of mass fake accounts spreading unfounded things, etc. It sounds so hard to police -- unless we just systematically encourage everyone to stop and think.

More edits: wording, misc.
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. Think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawn mower"
I also started thinking if I had ADHD, but I still have one good habit surviving from single-digit age- reading books.

Despite everything, I manage to read 25-30 books each year.

And these books are always either very long novels or non-trivial, high-quality non-fiction.

I also manage to get immediate works done through time-blocking, and pomodoro (don't need pomodoro for stuff I really like).

But these techniques don't save you from being "reactive"- doing stuff that is needed right in the moment, and nothing else- behaving like primitive animals.

I can get hard, intensive work done, read books, learn hard concepts, but still lack very seriously in long-term action-taking (used to be good at this before).

Trying to solve these.
Why do you tolerate that? "Old kind" light switches are plentiful, as are sliding dimmer, probably multiple kinds at local hardware stores and certainly online. Takes 10 minutes and a screwdriver and maybe a couple wire nuts to replace.
Putin would assassinate him if he exposed too much. That's incentive enough to cater to Russian interests.
AppleToo organizer will no longer withdraw her labor board complaint
This is the one I ended up getting when my previous microwave broke. It has one dial to set the time and no spinny plate. Pull to open. Happy with it so far but we'll see how long it lasts... https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZTVIPZ2/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
If I can suggest a book: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

I had a lot of the same feelings you describe here. Reading this and actually making tangible changes to my habits helped me rediscover my love of learning.
Ultimately, the solution for me was to force myself to be bored. I set artificial limits for myself when consuming content online (for instance, I use the procrastination features here on HN and I deleted all "feed" apps on my phone, like Reddit).

I found that once I was bored, my free time became so much more enjoyable and it was easier to deliberately work on something.