skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a difference between "malice" and "intentional misinformation".

Authority figures are not accurately representing risks and rewards of different actions and have deliberately shaped their messaging to achieve outcomes.

Direct from the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473 "CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus. Take everyday preventive actions, like staying home when you are sick and washing hands with soap and water, to help slow the spread of respiratory illness." from 27 Feb 2020.

They weren't saying this because they thought face masks were ineffective, they said this because they were worried about supplies for healthcare workers. (obvious by reading subtext)

This is a repeated pattern. Making recommendations and sharing "facts" omitting important details in order to push for an unshared outcome.

Nobody is properly sharing how risks have changed, nobody is making premeditated decisions about which risks will be associated with which mitigating actions. The goalposts are constantly shifting to match present feelings instead of setting limits based on reason and sticking to them.

The censorship problem comes in when publishers are half-way committing to a narrative which changes by the week, failing to shut down people who are just saying things a subset wants to hear in order to get money and actively shutting down others who are actively trying to engage in reasonable debate.

The fundamental problem is this:

People have different risk tolerance and different priorities when it comes to personal risk, and individual actions affecting the community. These differences in this case are ultimately fairly small but getting blown out of proportion because it's profitable to get people upset.

It is all a moot point now and nobody seems to be able to articulate or admit it yet.

There is very little community protection left available by vaccinating. Vaccinated people can carry and spread the disease, the new variants are a lot less deadly, and a sizable proportion of the population already has natural immunity from getting the actual virus (~75M confirmed cases in the US for ~330M population, with estimates that there may have been as many as 4x as many cases which went uncounted)

It's over, we lost, the outcome we have is what we got and there is very little leverage to change it at this point because the vast majority of what was going to happen has already happened and the prevention tools we have are mostly ineffective at curbing spread.
> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities.

Hmm. I wonder how we got there...[1]

[1] https://i.imgflip.com/63b63m.jpg
Since there is no DM feature, I'm going to rail on this a bit more here.

You feel alone.

- What is your relationship like with your parents and siblings?

- What is your relationship like with your aunts, uncles, and cousins?

- What is your relationship like with your old friends from college and before?

- What is your relationship like with your parent's friends?

- What change do you want to see in the world? Are you engaged with other people that want that too? I'm talking active engagement, meetings, agendas, etc.

The join a church suggestion is basically correct. Even if you don't want to engage with Christianity, something of that general shape is what you want. An organized group of similar people with similar ideas, working towards common goals, and helping each other out.

If that doesn't exist in the form that you want, you can build it.
I don't get it.

Exhalation valves are great if you're using the mask to filter external dust.

Here you're trying to filter outgoing and ingoing droplets. Filtering is still going to be most effective at the source, even if you are wearing N.95.

Adding a valve is going to reduce the utility of the mask a lot for this application.
It seems like the real problem here is people living in colder climates, not the user interface? If people moved to somewhere warmer like California then this wouldn't be an issue.
But being authoritarian is still morally abhorrent.

You may want to look into what the term "authoritarian" actually means.
Probably too much nutmeg in my diet.

(No, it's a silly Long Now thing.)
Uh. Really? On the ceiling? Or have I screwed up my perspective entirely there?

If it's actually on the ceiling, I either know it's there, or I'll be into pulsing my brakes manually before I bother to find it should I actually need it.
Would you start a business in a high crime neighborhood, or in a low crime one?

If your dad was put in prison while you were growing up, would your standard of living go up or down?

Other things drive inequality. For example, if you would be paid $12,000 for a job, and $10,000 for not working, which would you select? Would your standard of living be higher or lower?
The one idea I question here is advising Microsoft to acquire Zoom. Microsoft has almost as bad a track record with chat/videocall apps as it does with cell phones. Plus, Zoom has perhaps already seen its best days. It was in the right place in the right time, but the public is fickle. If Apple ever gets around to putting enterprise features into FaceTime, the entire product space will be disrupted with unpredictable results. Better I think for Microsoft to spend a couple of billion at figuring out what went wrong with Skype (free hint: reliability and call quality) than to throw $150b at Zoom and just repeat the same mistakes. BTW Microsoft, why does your Skype website still feature a "Shang-Chi" movie tie-in? Is anybody paying attention to keeping your landing pages up to date?
America's Favorite Pickup Truck Goes Electric
For long term scientific correctness, what the hacker news crowd could help with tremendously is reproducibility and that means versioning and continuous integration with data, for research software. In context of a paper or doing research, you have to write software anyway.

The other one that pops to mind is probably statistical calculation helping services.

Maybe there are lots of other things as well - I haven't been involved with scientific research in a long time.
It's a nice addition sure, but hardly a necessity.
The difference between IST and any US hours is my current pain. I have to get up at 5am (and sometimes even 4am) for a meeting that still requires the developers in India to stay late. I get maybe 2 hours of overlap, and everything else has to happen via async email.

In the past, we worked with HP's consulting arm, and they moved us to their Costa Rica workforce because time zones matched up better. I think both sides were happier on that.
You're only as old as you feel. I feel like I'm ancient.
> The thing that gets overlooked here is this guy had to have an above average understanding of all this to even get into a position to make this mistake

You'd think so, but you'd be surprised.

> This guy was pretty far over on the right side of the bell curve when it comes to Ethereum knowledge.

No, that's not true. Even people at the beginning of the bell curve know that you don't send half a million worth of anything around without verifying first that what you're about to do, is correct. You first do that by reading through everything and double-checking. And after that, you do the thing you want to do, but with 1% of the value or less, and verify/double-check again. After that, you do what you actually wanted to do.

The ecosystem is very new, has bunch of sharp edges everywhere and there is no recourse if you do anything wrong, so going through this process is something you learn very early on.

> They fact that it happened to a guy who knew probably 95% of the esoterica he needed to know to complete the transaction successfully

This is obviously not true, as the person seems to not even have search for "How to convert X to Y" before performing something they know they might not be able to undo.
What may the new James Webb telescope discover?
You might also like "Fluid Engine Development" if this stuff is your cup of tea. I believe there is complete code with it.
https://fluidenginedevelopment.org/
The issue for me is I have elderly parents one of which does have a health condition (serious) that makes some breathing and other issues hard. They wanted to fly out to visit me. The absolute best way to avoid covid for yourself in my view is an N95 masks with a vent, because you can actually wear that thing for hours comfortably.

I have friends who treated folks with covid wearing N95's and did not get covid.

So I really wish we could let folks make the personal health decisions here a bit more. If you want to wear a bubble helmet with filters in it - go for it. The full respirator (almost always with an exhalation valve)? Go for it. The N95 with an exhalation valve? Go for it.

Instead, delta airlines says no full cover, no N95 with exhalation etc. So now you have people who don't want to wear masks forced to wear them, and they are preventing folks who really DO want to be protected (while on a flight) from fully protecting themselves. This is all in the name of "science" which really is not science but "public health" mumbo jumbo.

It goes back to this issue of basically not realizing folks have different risk profiles / tolerances. If I'm allowed to wear my N95 with an exhalation valve for 4 hours, I frankly don't care if the guy 2 rows back has his mask off his nose.

This mistake is lecturing everyone (often with bad info) and then blocking folks from solving their own problems. remember when the anti-body rapid tests had to have a chip, an iphone app and a medical professional in the mix?

And no, I don't believe in those cloth masks, and surgical masks on a plane for 5 hours? Hard to imagine that being highly effective.
I wasn't social media that eroded the trust in research and science, it was the introduction of politics.

We need to separate research from politics. It needs to be a separate pillar of the state. You don't want reseachers chasing funds continously and doing short-term research for local sponsors. You want sizeable investments in long-term research projects, high autonomy and following of the scientific method. This way people would trust the results.
Microsoft is an enterprise company, has a bureaucratic manner and bureaucratic ways of doing things, for example going all in on the XML craze of the late 1990's and early 2000's. There's a lot of ceremony in their projects, TypeScript being a notable exception (at least one that comes to my mind.) It reminds me of a complaint that is interesting to me about India being in love with bureaucracy and paperwork [1]. Somehow it all works and I think they are making strides to be more nimble, but I wonder if it's part of Microsoft's DNA.

[1] It’s 2021 and the Indian bureaucracy remains the greatest impediment to progress

https://theprint.in/opinion/its-2021-and-the-indian-bureaucr...
If all that effort didn't come at the expense of user agency, I'd be inclined to agree. Instead, it looks like an increasingly toothless justification to prevent people from undermining the App Store's profitability. The security theater isn't as convincing when their puppets are falling apart in their hands.
Yes. The defroster is basic safety equipment.

If your smoke detector manufacturer changed how the test button worked with an over the air update, and as a result you failed to correctly test it, who would be liable?

Much in the same way, if someone cannot figure out how to use their defroster because a UX engineer decided to make it just so, the Tesla owner just drives off with a mostly iced up windshield because, and the Tesla owner gets into a crash because it's 7:00am on a cold winter Monday and they're running late, does Tesla share some liability for changing how basic safety equipment works?
Yes, it's perfectly fine for a man to use the wife's stable income to indie dev as long as both parties agree to it. I would discuss the plans and agree to some guidelines and metrics so that it's not open-ended.
Do you pay out in crypto?
A couple of additions:

On non-disc road bikes, the tire size is limited by not only the width of the rims, but also by what the brake calipers can accommodate. For example, newer Shimano rim-brake calipers can accommodate tires up to 28mm in width, whereas older versions only up to 25mm in width. With disc bikes, the tire size is limited by what the wheel and frame can accommodate.

Gravel bike tires are all over the place, with companies making frames that can accommodate 700c, 29", and/or 27.5" wheels. And thus tire variations can be quite overwhelming.
Stuff only intellectuals can believe, basically.
That question is the type of thing that a backdoored voting machine or corrupt election board could solve.

Luckily, so far there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
A friend of mine who died recently worked on Stretch at IBM. Later, he was one of the early employees of a hot cloud computing startup, in 01968.
Basic Cryptography – The Vigenere Cipher
It's the one I've seen most often in France, fwiw.
As the article pointed out, identifying MRNA as a viable option was one of Warp Speeds major accomplishments.

There are tons of technologies that had to be explored.

I’ve read this article in full several times (it’s dense).

Warp Speed wasn’t like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project.

It wasn’t hundreds of thousands of government employees working in one tech.

It was hundreds of project managers with single tech portfolios, most of which were useless, trying to figure out which tech would solve the problem at hand.

It was YComhinator investing applied to a major government project.
And if you choose something that ends with an "s" your domain ends with "s.cam".
The language barrier was 80% of the problem. Everything else could have worked out if we had been on board and the management handled it correctly. The engineers were good enough.
> Where did it come from originally, and how does it spread from person to person.

> When we started going downhill on the loose gravel, my back wheel slid out from under me and I was thrown from my bike, scraping up my arm and elbow pretty badly.
Is this true even after the warranty period? I could have used this return some smart TVs that were basically broken by software updates...
There is much truth in this post.

Perhaps controversially, I think Microsoft's real "B2B" success comes from treating end users like crap. Arguably their only successful "end user" product line is Gaming, and that (on Windows) has grown with comparatively modest investment on Microsoft's part or with phenomenal (bought, third-party IP-based) software and a bucketload of cash (Xbox division).

Microsoft's true success in the business world comes from ultimately targeting managers – be they in an IT department or otherwise. They are afforded real power over users. GPC can deny a user the ability to do something with their computer that other users can do. Permissions can be very finely grained. Office has, for many years, come with some form of document-based DRM. Microsoft as a company seems to love DRM; they invented activation, for god's sake. The net result of this is that they know what managers like, which is, in fact, to manage. They centralise. They absorb. They have created a huge, confusing, proprietary computer-verse completely orthogonal to the rest of the world (except inasmuch as the rest of the world needs to interact with it).

A lot of their product line boils down to implementing MBA newspeek in disguise: clearly; writing good web software is difficult and a good business-orientated app features database, GUI and user-interaction parts – thus Dynamics CRM is born. It's not the business's "core competence" to redevelop those skills -- they're hard. Tie it in with their other B2B offerings and you have central control over both employees' performance, and customer's offerings, in a very tailored, swish way. Sure, other companies can do this (looking at you, Salesforce) but this is just one example. Salesforce can't also do, say, long-term archival storage on Azure for less than a cent per GB, and won't provide you with a calendar-and-meeting-filled video-chat app that is "free" with your existing subscriptions.

All of these things tick boxes. They provide "return" on the "investment" of paying the microsoft tax. The broader their product offering, no matter how shit it is to the poor saps that have to use it, the cheaper it effectively becomes. That's the true success of microsoft: they've always been big enough to do things well enough, conglomorate enough stuff, and amortise its effective cost over lots of different offerings. The net result looks good on an Excel spreadsheet, features that managers care about are there - and they keep getting business. (And end-users be damned!)
This is in part due to blue politics in universities pushing for more and more genericism in education, suiciding their skill output. The other part is the companies that should be involved in education and funding educational programs simply don't care to. This is the one single way to know if the "shortage" is real: is the company willing to invest in education? The answer has been no. Fewest scholarships, fewest interns, they don't fund programs, and they treat students as cash cows.

It makes sense when looking at the numbers. No use in putting money into U.S. education if they don't have to. The law allows them to import workers from elsewhere, parasiting off of their social educational programs and never having to pay a dime to them.

The solution is clear, we have to make it more economically viable to invest in the U.S, and that is by removing or severely limiting the mechanisms by which tech companies employ foreign workers. Or alternatively we start actually taxing these companies.
Because when steps are added the naive engagement metric trends upward. The owner of the temperature control or the hamburger menu can show their boss that people are looking at and using the “product”. More taps, more time. It’s a data driven decision making fallacy.

Users want to spend as little time engaging with the UI but that’s hard to measure. The best way to minimize engagement time would be to just remove everything. But then there’s no data. So the thing that can be measured is chosen.

When people learn the UI the engagement metric trends downward and a new UI is designed which “fixes” the “problem”.
>I think analytic departments would disagree with you

Well, according to us continentals, who, if not invented, highly developed the thing for 2500+ years (both philosophy and analytic philosophy, it's west-adopted spinoff), analytic philosophy is not philosophy either.

It's more of a technical than a philosophical field, or, if you wish, it's a specific philosophical application of logic, math, and co. that mistook itself for the essense of philosophy.

>what poetry does is defamiliarize language. It's impact is emotional. It isn't philosophy

That's not some general truth - just an specific school/idea idea about poetry's function.

Aristotle, for example, considered poetry more philosophical than history - because it captures the essential and distills it rather than bundle a development with the non-essential, random, and contingent (as history does).
I guess the problem currently is that the incumbents aren't actually getting replaced. Doing a good job is just a means for a small number of people to make an enormous amount of money while everyone benefits from their quality for perhaps a handful of years before they're bought out to be eaten or destroyed by the existing big players.

There is a problem with competing with big players for more than a few years because they figure out ways to push you out of the market before you can beat them, with only a few exceptions.

That is the problem with the environment which needs to be solved.
The poem of 21,000 verses that will be launched from Chile into space
The Thais have similar concept as well (third gender), but it isn't the same as the western Transgenderism construct.

> I find it all rather fascinating and hard to reduce down to silly dogma.

The phenomena itself isn't what I'm talking about. The specific belief that "Transgender women are women and they were born that way", and the enforcement of that belief, that is dogma.

Similarly, the belief that "some people are homosexual and some people are not, they are born one way or the other". This isn't consistent with reality, and isn't what other cultures believe. However, this is considered foundational, unquestionable truth in our culture.
I didn’t even realise it could be a temperature, as it has no units, and temperatures are in Celsius over here: 70 is just not possible, unless it’s about the engine oil temperature…
Beancount and the concept of plaintext accounting look really interesting.

Any recommendations for guides or short books to get into accounting for personal/individual finance as a total beginner?
> Notion: Office 365 for people below age 35. At a minimum, Office should aspire to the ease of use that Google Docs has (Office 365 for people below age 45)

What? Employees use what the company bought. Every company I have worked for has used Office 365. Teams is fine, but Discord is the best. Yes Slack sucks too compared to Discord.

Office 365 now has all the collaboration features of Google Docs and has had for some time.

Trust in MS is also huge in enterprise. Nothing can also touch the management of computers and servers with AD/GPO or Intune. MacOS only has janky MDMs and Chromebooks are not used in real jobs.
God I adore having an all-analog dashboard. Everything takes a single action. Everything can be done by touch. Instead of freezing or blowtorching the car trying to hit some goal climate, the air is always the exact temperature I want when it hits my face. There is no screen to wash out, no vent motors to break. It's glorious.
I see no proof that apple is any better at this. I run into all kinds of issues on my apple products including downgrades in features and bad UX.
Double-spacing. As in, between every line of code - a blank line.

To make it "less crowded", and allow space for future comments, I was told.
The crab-bucket mentality you talk about, at least in what the belief of business being bad respects, comes from the cultural influence of Catholicism, and it’s pervasive in all LA. I’d dare to say it can be found in Spain/Portugal as well.
<shameless plug>

..and if it's really REALLY your cup of tea, join my research lab and do a PhD. :-)

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~c2batty/

</shameless plug>
I'm an advocate for my open source. Here's what I do:

1. Have a Twitter account and follow folks who would be interested. Some follow back.
2. Write blog posts about it. Spend some time to make it high quality to increase the chance that search engines rank it higher. Also, high quality improves reputation and confidence.
3. Tweet every time you blog or release.
4. Tweet about subjects of interest related to your software.
5. Engage in the community around the subject of your software.
6. Contribute to the community - #GiveFirst (maybe this should be first).

While I mention Twitter (I feel like it's one of the best channels), there are other social media channels to look at - whatever makes sense for your situation. There are meetups, YouTube, and other ways that you can generate content that people might care about. Also, my situation is open source and not a product for sale, YMMV.
The interesting thing about trust is it takes much longer to build than to spend.

Given the level scientific institutions have been spending trust over the past few years I'm not sure how this problem can be alleviated within our current framework.
> Discord + Google Suite

I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services

I cannot explain what puts me off, but Google's (gmail) login page and way better switching between apps feels way better.

Also I have feeling that MS account is more "formal", idk how to explain it.