skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations

There are too little countries hostile to corporations remaining today to compare, but I'd still argue that today's US has subpar QoL compared to France in the 80s which was arguably on the anti-corporation side (with price control and a state-owned monopoly for most economic activities – or, when it wasn't a monopoly, the biggest actor was state-owned)

Anyway, I'm not arguing that we should get rid of corporations, but we should dramatically reduce their power and influence on the economy, which is now at a level far above what's desirable.
I'd rather them do this and then go after ISPs too than give a free pass to both because of such whataboutism based criticism.
I find that many of the mandates are "feel good assumptions" rather than actual science. Take masks on airplanes, there have been 0 outbreaks of Covid as a result of a flight, and for good reason. Airplanes have heavy duty HEPA filters that will filter all the air in the cabin every ~3-4 minutes. On the one hand the science says that masks won't really do a damn thing on airplanes but we mandate them because its a "feel good assumption", when you walk on the airplane and see everyone wearing a mask, it makes you feel safer, even though it's not actually any safer.

Same goes for social distancing. I heard somewhere that the initial number was 10FT. But then businesses complained that it would be unfeasible so they voted by committee and reduced it to 6FT.

The last example I bring is in restaurants. I was recently in Hawaii and the rule is, if you are sitting down you don't need to wear a mask but if you are standing up you must wear a mask. Now I get why the rule is there and I'm not complaining about it, but think of how stupid this rule is from a scientific perspective.
Does edge, brave and Firefox all support it?
inb4: not a specialist. AFAIR remote control robots were tried when Chernobyl disaster was being cleared up, and the radiation destroyed the electronics. But perhaps the shielding technologies progressed enough to mitigate that.

Having nuclear stuff underground requires extremely precise geological surveys, so that the stuff does not wind up in aquifer.
...which is why rates will stay low. The bulls have no choice but to keep running.
Lazy dismissal of scientific work is something of its own epidemic on HN these days. "Ah, but this study doesn't address this laundry list of things I just made up, and I haven't bothered to look at other sources, and I probably haven't bothered to even read this study, actually." It's especially common on COVID-related studies amongst the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers on the site, but I have been seeing the same kind of lazy dismissal on lots of other posts as well. It's effectively an evolution of the Gish gallop.

I find it both dreary and frustrating, personally, and it's not terribly surprising that people like the poster above call people out on it.
Site is down, unfortunately. (At first I thought the broken link was a joke about not having a blog.)
So do cats.
>theres various ways of going around it

This kind of thinking is what got him in to this position in first place. There's a reason convicted money launderers shouldn't be allowed to run companies.
> Many filesystems also do not allow 4+ byte UTF 8 code points in filenames.

I can't even think of a single example. Most filesystems just offer 255 8-bit units to filenames, where 4-byte UTF-8 sequences are totally a non-issue. ZFS supports utf8only=on, which enforces that filenames do conform to UTF-8, in which case... 4-byte sequences are still not a problem.

What's the filesystem that doesn't allow it?
It is also ownership of said structure. If you have a thousand workers. One person can own the output of those workers. Those workers can produce 10 billion dollars in revenue and the owner gets owns all the profit and the workers pocket 1 billion in aggregate.

It's fair trade in the beginning because of high risk during the founding of the company but the tradeoff becomes less fair as the risk lowers and the company becomes more mature.
I love that expression "rakes in the grass", it brings back childhood memories of quicksand, stop/drop/roll, and stepping on rakes as being things I'd always have to watch out for as an adult, plus all the loony toon cartoons who used it.
For servers there's already Intel Optane DC Memory and it's not fast enough to replace volatile memory in most cases, but way faster than flash drives. Thus, UltraRAM might have no real benefit? Maybe we'll have to wait, also regarding the cost factor.
I don't see the point of focusing on these formalities. If the PRC and the ROC had signed a peace treaty 70 years ago, the PRC could still declare war today. Just as /u/spaced-out said, the Chinese Civil War really is over. Pretending like that isn't the case due to there not being a peace treaty is just the PRC looking for a flimsy pretext to paper over their military belligerence. Presumably it's easier to do that than it is to admit that the PRC in fact isn't a peaceful government as it likes to claim.
Dear databases, please don't get hung up about string lengths when dealing with UTF8.

If I ask for a UTF8 string with a max-length of 100, please don't apply the worse case scenario and allocate space for 100 emojis. Please give me a box of 100 bytes and allow me to write any UTF-8 string that can fit into 100 bytes in there.

100 ASCII characters. 20 emojis. Any mixture of the two.

If I ask for UTF-8, it'll be because I'd like to make advantage of UTF-8 and I accept the costs. If that means I can't quickly jump to the character at index 84 in a string, no problem, I've accepted the trade-off.
> except perhaps in sloppy implementations made without much care for following specs.

Describes MySQL perfectly ;)
Sounds like a pretty good compromise for public safety
Practice, practice, practice. Since you're willing to do the silly hat dance; some thoughts on the type of practice you could do: Program with your laptop hooked up to your TV to your empty living room, to get used to the feeling of being watched. Then have a close and trusted friend be in your living room and just sit quietly. Add a cafe background noise track playing[0]. After you're comfortable with that, stream yourself solving leetcode/whatever problems on Twitch. Doesn't actually matter if anyone comes in to watch you, but talk out loud and explain your thought processes as you work your way through each problem.

[0] eg https://youtu.be/gaGrHUekGrc
Doesn't C++ not have a stable ABI? Doesn't that kind of make it difficult to interop with it? The ABI is an implementation defined thing by the compiler, right?
Not accurate. The MS stack is very much so alive. I get recruiters hitting me up weekly if not daily with C# jobs. Perhaps the MS stack is not common in the startup ecosystem but there is no sign of it dying.

So many businesses and governments are using the stack that it is going to be around for quite some time even if it isn’t the new hotness.
What's wrong with letting employees to hear both sides of the argument, from professionals? Both unions and "consultants" are resourceful organizations. Perhaps they can keep the good and take out the bad practices in their unionization, if they ever choose to.
The narrative that was debunked was the "engineered in a lab" variant. This is what was debunked because this is what was pushed by conspiracy theorists at that time.

This narrative had various claims: that Sars-cov2 contained bits of HIV (by crackpot nobelist Luc Montagnier), that it was released intentionally, that it was actually released several months earlier during the 2019 military games in order to facilitate spread and that it is a tool to cull the population of the globe.

This was debunked and is still debunked.

One problem with conspiracy theorists is that they have an extremely low accuracy requirement in order to consider themselves vindicated. Being on the mark right is unnecessary, even being in the ballpark right is unnecessary. For conspiracy theorists, being in the same galactic sector right is sufficient to consider it a win.

The theory that it is a lab leak, possibly but not necessarily involving gain of function research, and probably by accidentally hitching a ride on one of the researchers has appeared later. It has not been debunked, though it has not been prooven either. It is a plausible possibility.

It is not popular in pro-science circles, because should it be true, the popular reaction is that research should be baned because it is too dangerous which is a stupid stance equivalent to collectively burying your head in the sand.

It is important to distinguish the two though.
> You need to start somewhere.

Correct, and you may have noticed media and political sentiment turning hard against Facebook coincidentally overnight after it was discovered that the guy who won used it in a more “clever” manner than did the one who lost. What better place to start?

Not that I’m complaining because they all need to go, but there is clear and obvious evidence as to why Facebook is facing the brunt of all of this.
Tesla Granted a Patent on a Laser Windshield Wiper Design
Not wearing masks in all social settings is more a cultural thing than anything else. Just take a look at the streets of Tokyo now: someone without a mask is a pretty uncommon sight.
When I'm driving in a low risk environment, e.g. around town, no. When I am in high risk environment (i.e. racing on a track), yes, these are required and you won't be allowed on the track without them.

Walking around a grocery store is now a high risk environment.
> They are your typical run-of-the-mill tutorials that replicate what's written on the official framework/language guide

Yep, I'd like to permanently blacklist those idiotic baeldung, w3schools, tutorialspoint, and geeksforgeeks blogspam entries that SEO'ed themselves to the top of every google search I do for anything programming related.
If you are unclear on what the word means:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Karen#Etymology_1

> (slang, originally African-American Vernacular, derogatory) A middle-aged white woman exhibiting a sense of entitlement or white privilege.

And if you are unclear what a racial slur is:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slur

> An insult or slight, particularly one used to denigrate a specific group.
TL;DR: people smoke a lot less than they used to because Big Pharma scared them enough with cancer so they are hooked on much more expensive antidepressants, other than that, there is no progress to speak of.
To further back this up. See what the ROC did in Taiwan to stamp out any lingering sentiment of independence when they arrived.[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
You don't really need LinkedIn. The quickest way to get hired is to create a technical blog, write a bunch of interesting articles, create a couple of interesting projects, and make them go viral. You'll get flooded with emails from headhunters. (This is what I did.)
Wouldn't a single application of a temp table be sufficient?[0]

0: https://brianchildress.co/reorder-columns-postgres/
My two most recent job changes have been via LinkedIn. My profile is minimal (no photo, just a short blurb and a super-old copy/paste of my resume).

The first was an ex-colleague recruiting me directly for a position he was trying to fill. LinkedIn was just the easiest way for him to find me since we were already connected there.

The other was random recruiter spam, to which I always respond with my standard blurb - basically "Is this position fully remote and what's the salary range?" They came back with a number 40% higher than what I was making then, so I pursued it.
Their culture used to promote 10 or 20% time side projects, many of which became full Google projects. That will certainly lead to some abortions.

However, at some point there are executives deciding strategy, and almost by definition they are out of touch. From my observation, the most reliable strategy is to let a start-up with passion build something great that people want, and then buy that start-up. This is what companies older than Google have been doing for decades. (Google does it too, but they were more in-house-first in the past.)
It's better to keep private diary than low standard blog.

Trying to promote low quality writing in social media is not a good idea. People unsubscribe from your feeds. You get reputation as a self-promoter. When you actually have something to say, nobody notices.
Firstly, let's dismiss this idea that C++ can avoid wasting a single cycle or byte, it doesn't aim for that. It aims for a much lower bar, albeit still a significant achievement - it says you won't do better by hand. It will very occasionally not meet this lower bar because some people like perverse challenges. That ludicrously fast Fizz Buzz implementation (so fast that inter-core CPU bandwidth alters how fast it seems) in raw machine code can't be duplicated in C++ for example. But on real problems with real programmers you won't do better by hand and should stop trying.

OK, so there are limits. Further though the fact that you sometimes want to be able to do something did not require that C++ insist upon you doing that all the time.

There are places where they didn't. HN recently discussed structure layout and padding. You can write a C++ program with explicit structure layout and padding (I think this may not be portable though) which can significantly alter performance - but you don''t have to. If you're OK not worrying about it, C++ won't optimise layout for you (as Rust would) but it also won't ask you questions about alignment and layout, they're just left alone.

But for some things they insist. Manual memory management for example. The language doesn't (in practice) provide garbage collection, so you are responsible for picking up the trash even if you don't care about that problem. Arithmetic is another, even if it's not performance critical for you, C++ insists you need to cope with the vagaries of machine arithmetic anyway and care about things like overflow and Not-a-Number.

And this burden imposes a real cost on programmers which, at the end of the day, means they actually produce slower/ bigger code than they might have.
> If the company's in a competitive market

This typically translates to "the company's successfully lobbied for trade agreements that allow us to force our domestic labor to compete against impoverished foreign workers in a developing nation with nonexistent environmental and safety standards," which is a race to the bottom for everyone but aristocrats.

I think the problem in the US is that the country is deeply right-wing when it comes to labor policy. The union/management relationship in the US is designed to be adversarial. In Germany, it's legally mandated for unions to be represented at the board level, and that kind of cooperative relationship's results speak for themselves. Here, that idea would be considered tantamount to bolshevism.
I think a lot of this comes down to personal fit. For example, I have three sets of masks:

- NIOSH certified N-95s with a head band. These are just about impossible to keep from fogging my glasses. The long elastic seems to "fatigue" after an hour or so and I can't keep a seal.

- Good KN-95s sourced from an allegedly trustworthy source. These seal much better around the nose, but they tend to leak under the chin.

- KF-94s (chosen after trying on multiple brands). These use ear loops, but they seal very tightly around the nose, and they seal tighter than the KN-95s at the bottom. They do occasionally leak a small amount of air at the bottom.

I suspect that as long as you're using certified, authentic "94+" masks with good filtration ratings, the biggest remaining factor is how well a specific mask seals for a specific person.
Comets, asteroids, rogue black holes. Now one more thing to be ever so slightly existentially worried about. Granted, the density of free planets is probably appreciably low.

It'll be great to measure these. Lots of information on planet and solar system evolution, better Fermi estimates, etc.
There's something broken about this market, not sure what's going on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/health/covid-masks-china-...
Thanks to emoji (almost)everything now supports unicode
Show HN: Episode tracking, where to watch any movie/show, search parties
Standard joke: "all our employees are above average".
In the context of collective bargaining, it is not only possible but common: any halfway decent IT firm has highly qualified workers paid and ranked well above a "normal" worker sharing the same national contract.

Everybody earns much more than minimum wage, and someone (hopefully the high performers, but don't count on it) even more than that. Pushing low compensations against minimum wage limits is simply not plausible, and paying high performers less than market value is a recipe for talent drain.

Collective bargaining is important for working hours, safety, vacation, healthcare, and other important worker rights.
> I don't think Microsoft stack offers a path to like, a mid-six-figure job at a major Silicon Valley tech company.

Maybe at Microsoft?
GUI frameworks are defined by OSes, not languages.
This could easily fall within the realm of the Supreme Court's decision in KYLLO v. UNITED STATES where it was ruled that a thermal imaging search of a home is a violation of the US 4th amendment.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/kyllo.h...
> Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state.

Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions? Why not just organize as workers and call yourself a union? Can even create a workers party, like they have in basically every other single other developed country, and then that workers party can stand up for your rights. But that workers party isn't a union. Basically every single developed country except USA has labor parties. Democrats aren't a labor party, they are a party of mostly lawyers.
Show HN: Explain Code App, the AI Understanding Code Tool
After weeks of testing and many users joining the early access list. Explain Code App is now live and available for all to start using.

I'm really happy to get this application out to everyone, as the team has been working hard to release Explain Code App to the public.

Cheers.

https://www.explaincode.app/
It's like MySQL and PHP were meant for each other.
The Bangladesh study failed to produce a significant result when simpler nonparametric statistics were used to analyze the data. There were also significant discrepancies in the follow up rate between the control and treatment groups. And even if you ignore those issues, the absolute effect size (20 cases) was tiny. The effect size was expressed in terms of the relative rate of symptomatic seropositives, i.e., normalized by population denominators, which makes it appear larger and is sensitive to the follow up rate discrepancies (see above).

Ben Recht at UC Berkeley has several good blog posts on this issue: https://www.argmin.net/2021/12/01/unblinding/
A family member was in prison for petty theft and breaking parole for over 25 years.

When they got out, they didn’t even know how to drive because it started from teenage years (abusive father).

I was shocked that the state didn’t spend an ounce of energy to at least teach these people basic skills.

Now they are forced to live in cities where they are more likely to interact with bad influences.

Anyway, I wonder if driving could be part of reform. E.g. let them be a part of the driving economy to build skills and support the nation.
I am not dismissing philosophy I am just not engaging in discussions about it on the internet. When there is no need to even bring it up in the first place our society has a general consciences about what a word means this is shown in most if not all the dictionaries in the world. You both are dismissing this by bringing philosophy to the discussion. 99% of the world does not care about the philosophical meaning of the word "fact" they are interested in the meaning of the word in the general conscience.
Never Split the Difference by Voss - https://smile.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-...
If anything, it's quite the opposite (at least in cloud): https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-market-ends-2020-...

C# for non-backend scenarios is a different story; no charts but IMO it's been going downhill since WinForms (WPF, UWP, Blazer, etc. all dead in the water).
This may be true for some crappier unions but also think about this: If a small percentage of the union members are exploiting the system and some employees of the union are benefiting more than they should who is actually losing money over this? Is it the others in the union? Or is it the employer?

I would rather have a system where a small percentage of the workers can be shitheads and lose their giant mega corporation employer money than a system where the company can just exploit ALL of its workers in any way it wants to.
- We mostly use notebooks as scratchpads or alpha prototypes.

- Papermill is a great tool when setting up a scheduled notebook and then shipping the output to S3: https://papermill.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

- When turning notebooks into more user-facing prototypes, I've found Streamlit is excellent and easy-to-use. Some of these prototypes have stuck around as Streamlit apps when there's 1-3 users who need to use them regularly.

- Moving to full-blown apps is much tougher and time-consuming.
The US once had a rich history of unions for 100's of years since the 17th century, and plenty of wars over them where the US government literally attacked union workers in wars like Battle of Blair Mountain.

The US seems to have almost wiped out this history and few people know who died for these movements and few people realize we have had bloody battles, I never really learned it in school but it's pretty darn American to have unions and die for your rights.

Sure there is corruption but literally every system does, that doesn't make people stop using it. If we had better union power we would not see the poor treatment of Amazon workers, or game testers, or retail works. Heck, one day we may make a requirement to have a vacation day, imagine how crazy that would be if vacation time was written into a work law! Almost imagine that Russia, South Africa and many other countries have literally better labor laws then America not to mention the EU.
I was quite shocked how bad our labor laws were when I looked into it further because I assumed a lot, makes it hard to be human in the US. At will employee with literally no time off is perfectly legal here, but I hope one day paid vacations (even just a few days) are requirement for all full time employees at least.