skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?

I grew up around a lot of poor people. One issue in the US is healthcare. If you make <13k (or whatever your state limit is) you dont qualify for government healthcare. Also, 13k is too little to actually purchase private healthcare, so there is a "donut hole" where it makes sense not to work below a certain wage since you get less with income than with no income.

The solution here is obvious to me -- if you provide some of the benefits without means-testing (i.e., the "U" in "UBI") then people are incentivized to work even bits without risking losting healthcare/foodstamps.

Another example was in college -- if you earned even a bit of money, your student aid often went down commensurately. At that point, why would you work? You were no better off unless you could make a LOT of money. I realize this has changed over the past 20yrs.

Also, as someone who's gone thru this -- this is a very delicate process. You do one thing wrong, and you're in bureaucratic hell for months without benefits. The "safe" thing to do is to earn nothing -- God forbid you earn a thousand here or there and lose medical care. The whole system of means-testing makes no sense. It seems to be more a way to create jobs for bureaucrats.
> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?

Nobody HAS to work, correct. If they only want to survive, they don't need to work. Everyone gets money for food, water, shelter and education; no questions asked.

If you want an iPhone or eat something nice, you should probably get some money though.

Universal basic income isn't much usually, it's enough to survive, enough for a livable life.

That's paid by taxes of the majority of people that will still work, because people usually want more than just to survive, so they'll work. They'll just not work at Starbucks for 10 years to pay their student loan, they'll find a job that they like, a job with meaning.
worth 500 million after he graced it with his presence. Its a repurposed shipping container
I’ve had and others have had a different experience. The user experience with many banks doesn’t match the technology or regulations.
> yes it's annoying that a lot of them are built just once

how is this a point people are hung up on. nobody is telling anyone they can only build a set once. hell, Lego has even started offering "alternative instructions" for certain sets to encourage you to take it apart and rebuild it.

You can do whatever you want with LEGO after you buy it and it has never been a better time to be an enthusiast.

People just like complaining about now vs. the Good Old Days (tm)
> Every time, liberal progressives hop on these movements and attempt to sanewash them; every time, the radicals proudly push towards extremes.
The trouble for these radical movements comes, often, when their vision meets reality. Mass protests fail to materialize. Workers of the world fail to unite. Autonomous zones collapse into violence and murder.

The problem here is liberals want to reshape movements without actually understanding them. Modern liberalism isn't really about understanding core issues and looking for solutions, it's about "sanewashing" as the article mentions which fundamentally runs counter to movement ideals. I think a lot of more radical people would be willing to work with liberals and vice versa if liberals (who IMO generally have more power) would listen more first.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-fox-lodge-21178

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-and-houses-11008

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/creative-suitcase-10713
Sometimes in the inner cores, yes. But many North American cities are new. Built mostly post-war. For example, Calgary is a city of ~1.2 million now. In 1946 it was ~100,000.

More than 90% of the city was built in the post-car era, and the main city planning stage (in the 50s and 60s during the population explosion) was of course, heavily car-centric. That's the legacy we're still living out, with similar stories in cities across North America.
The radical position is, if nobody wants to mine coal, then we will need to either not use coal (great idea, saves a lot of Co2), or make the coal mining job better. Of course nobody wants the dirty, unhealthy and dangerous job that capitalism designed, but that does not imply that it is impossible to design a job that extracts coal and people genuinely enjoy.
> Actually defund the police means exactly what it says.

…to you. Not everyone agrees and the simple fact that this discussion is taking place and you are defending this slogan would seem to render this purported clarity moot.
Even if we zero out every US billionaire (imagine that for a second; take 100% of their wealth and leave them with exactly $0) it would not even cover 1/5 of the US national debt.

We can't see taking their money as a viable long term solution to UBI. Our debt is out of control and our day of reckoning will come eventually. Nothing is free; markets will correct for UBI and people will become just as poor as they were over time. Existing UBI studies cannot take into account for the _universal_ aspect of UBI because they are controlled studies — there will be unintended consequences.

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/02/viral-imag....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/us/politics/national-debt...
As a low-ish level MSFT employee I laughed at this line:

> The move promises to bring Amazon’s base pay more in line with other big tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.

As a ~62/63 (almost senior or senior) at Microsoft my peers at Facebook, Google, and Amazon can easily make literally twice as much compensation a year in salary, stock, and cash bonuses.

Microsoft isn't even in the ballpark. If I didn't absolutely love my job there would be zero reason to stay at Microsoft.
I can't even grock the writing to get a feeling from it. They have 3 kids and his dad has 3 kids also? Or are their 3 kids the dad's grandchildren and the author of the comment has 2 siblings? And the dad's wife passed away, I assume is not their mother? But why would that be relevant? And since he is a boomer, he is at retirement age probably? His kids must be fully grown right?
Are they advocating for that? I thought that, for example, doing a secure boot from a trusted disk image, and consequently not allowing to touch any system-critical components, as well as a good process sandbox model could ensure that cheating is very, very hard, undetectable cheating even more so - and the rootkit-like behavior of anti cheats could be constrained to the sandbox - let's say that the anti cheat software replaces common software libraries with introspectable versions with something like OverlayFS, but since the whole game runs in a Docker container, it cannot affect the rest of your system.

Generally speaking, I was also livid when I learned about how Riot planned to solve cheating in Valorant with it's own rootkit - and I think Microsoft isn't crazy about the idea either. My two cents are on this being one of the major reasons MS decided to make TPM mandatory for Windows 11.
To stereotype a little (or not so little), Americans do their once-in-a-lifetime trip through the classic European cities and walk wide-eyed along the narrow winding streets, and eat ice cream along the many small town squares/piazzas/whatever, sighing happily.

And then they go home and vote for widening their local stroad, as if that would in any way contribute to solving the suburban hellscape problem.
> The world itself leans left

No, by definition, it does not lean in any direction on the political compass.

> at least compared with the US Left/Right divide

More precisely, the overton window of the US goes from center to the far right.
It is actually an idiom originating in England in the 1500's.
There are already many countries with generous welfare states where one does not have to work and could theoretically live off the government, yet they manage just fine.

Even if universal basic income was a pipe dream (which I vehemently disagree with, and again point to the examples above as evidence that not needing to work does not lead to societal collapse), I don't see why enabling everyone the freedom to work on whatever they want should not be a goal.

If it were up to me, taxes would be funded via land value tax (commonly referred to as the fairest and most efficient tax since there's no deadweight loss), and the proceeds would be distributed uniformly to the population as a citizen's dividend.
TL;DR

Nick Brown was a 50y/o CS/IT employee who wanted to cross-train to human resources and wanted "evidence-based stuff". He encountered lots of fantastic positive psychology claims that were being accepted wholesale as "quantitative". He traced the math behind a critical one back to a computational fluid dynamics paper, which the debunkees had used equations from with no context. (allegedly because of the use of "Flow" in positive psychology!)

He cold emailed professors asking for feedback, wrote a 3000 word critique, got help from a mathematician and psychologist in smoothing the writeup, and ultimately got it published in a top journal and the offending results recognized as flawed. The general crusade continues along with co-crusaders Sokal and Friedman.

The result in question was the legendary 3-1 positive to negative tipping point between flourishing individuals and languishing ones.
I'm amazed both with the number of messages I get from Amazon about job openings and the aggressiveness of them. Add on how many are for ill fitting or basically Hail Mary type positions (During the height of the pandemic I got one wanting me to move to Ireland to work in an Amazon office there. They even acknowledged the oddness of the situation but they were really desperate for people to fill those roles).

Seems like Amazon was blown through most of the labor supply and now can't find workers, not because they don't exist but because they don't want to work for Amazon. Doubt more money is going to fix this though perhaps pushing for more visas will let them get some workers who haven't been burnt by Amazon yet. Amazon simply has a bad culture which must be fixed. Even then, it'll take time to repair their reputation.
Says a lot that they need to trot out an old photo to keep the myth alive.
That's a good one. Maybe even demanding "competent police" would be a good aggressive tack. If there's footage of police killing unarmed people in their homes or in broad daylight, then we should absolutely demand more competence and professionalism from them. That puts police unions in a tough spot of not being able to argue against that.
Correction: javascript is warm dog doodoo.

Typescript tries to fix a lot of the problems JS has, but still inherits a lot of its problems.

> especially when you consider the insane performance compared to Python

In my experience, people who complain about Python’s performance don’t actually have experience with software optimization. Aka, the same people who decide to use C++ “because fast”.

Even if you only look at synthetic benchmarks, there is not a single thing that would make javascript stand out as a good choice for high performance computing, V8 or not. But even if you find yourself in a situation where you’re stuck with javascript and have to optimize a particularly nasty hot path, the types of techniques you’d need to rely on aren’t going to be all that different than what you’d have to do with Python (with similar results).

The difference is that the Python environment can almost always outsource processing to a C library (maybe even hand written assembly). That’s really only possible with typescript if you’re working with Node, but I don’t think that’s what you’re referring to considering the context of this thread.

> and the fact that it can run in the web.

AKA, the only reason to use Javascript pre-Node. Post Node, you get to share code throughout your whole stack, but even then that’s rarely the best objective choice, and the benfits of using a single language tend to be overblown in my experience. For example, an Elixir/Erlang backend would be overwhelmingly more beneficial to any project than the minor conveniences of a single language (and I think Erlang is even slower than Python)

When/if web assmebly becomes more popular, I think JS/TS will finally die because web developers will finally be exposed to good languages, and will not want to go back to the mess that JS is/was.
Uber will set up a program where you rent your self driving car to them while you aren’t using it. This lets them have their customers keep paying maintenance and depreciation (and only the ones who actually do the math will realize it costs them money).
Visualized like this it feels like security through obscurity, but there must be reason for this.

I did wonder why initialization is like:

1. Initialize hash value h0 to h7: first 32 bits of the fractional parts of the square roots of the first 8 primes 2..19).

2. Initialize array of K constants: first 32 bits of the fractional parts of the cube roots of the first 64 primes 2..311
I see threads elsewhere full of "I joined a FANG hoping to make amazing algorithms and push computer science forward but I'm just building dashboards and changing button colours", so I'm not 100% sure the work content is different.

In 5 years, I'd expect a WITCH engineer to be exposed to and deeply understand many industries and companies. I'd expect them to learn to handle stakeholders as well as code. I'd expect them to be exposed to many different vendors and tech stacks.

But mostly I'd expect them to get really good at making a big impact very quickly, with limited time and people.

When I compare that to a guy getting paid $1 million a year to run a team of 4 people who build youtube revenue dashboards or something, adding one graph a month, I know who would want working on project I cared about.

The WITCH engineer was just unwise enough to be born in India right? Probably went to the top schools there, has an MBA and a masters in compsci... Just... Indian, so worth less for some reason.
Well this is a good thing, you literally can't abolish work u less youd be willing to bring back slavery or we get start trek warp engines feedi g replicators.
That is one tiny yacht. (-;
"Why was Doreen Ford, of all people, able to appoint herself as representative of a self-proclaimed movement 1.7 million strong?"

This shouldn't be a surprise. The news interviews many people about a variety of subjects. Either the network frames that person as wholly representing the group, or the viewers imply it. It's convenient, and perhaps even useful in some contexts, to assume that all the people in a group/movement have the exact same ideas and goals. But once a certain size is achieved that is rarely the case.

I work and don't support the antiwork movement, but have some sympathy for the anti-workers. I think a lot of this is about the perverse incentives. There are many jobs where the pay is low while the profits are high. I don't see anything wrong with the thread about easy jobs that was mentioned.

In my own job I have basically given up on trying to get ahead/promoted/whatever. I've been repeatedly screwed by the company, a company that has a reputation for being a best place to work and doing what's right. Why would I continue to work hard or try hard when my experience tells me that it won't pay off? I am looking for better jobs, but if this place is supposed to be so great, I doubt there are better places out there.

For those curious, what I mean by screwed over is that they violate their own policies and contradict themselves. Stuff like giving me a bad rating because the department requires that a manager pick a bad rating to balance out a great rating for someone else. And stuff like saying you can't go from a bad rating last year to a great rating this year, event though policy says the rating should only consider the current year. Or working as a tech lead and then a senior dev for a year each when just a midlevel dev but not being promoted. Being told that you would have been given a great rating, but you "slacked off" the last month, which was the month when you were on PTO for 2.5 weeks for your wedding and honeymoon and you put in extra hours before leaving. The list goes on.
suckless.org's surf [1] is based around this ultra-minimalist single-tab, no features concept.

I personally prefer qutebrowser [2]. I use it with the "all tabs are windows" mode, leaving tab management to i3wm. It is by far the most customizable browser I've used and, unlike surf, I haven't found many pages it can't render correctly.

[1] https://surf.suckless.org/
[2] https://qutebrowser.org/
For anything historical, you really need to objectively put yourself in the context of the people you're looking at.

Rome had cruelty laws for how to treat slaves. I'm not an expert but perhaps if the slave did their job then floggings, torture, and crucifixion were illegal, but were allowed if they broke the law.

People will look back and probably think US execution is terrible and cruel while currently, a large portion thinks its acceptable. Heck, they may think we're cruel for eating meat or running over crickets with our tractors. We just don't know what lense we'll be judged by yet. We should afford the same understanding for past peoples while not condoning it.
Shameless plug: https://bas.codes

I just started to share my knowledge I have as a developer and trainer, so there is not much to see here, yet. I think the best article so far has been the one about slicing (it got a huge traffic spike from reddit): https://bas.codes/posts/python-slicing

I would love to hear feedback to improve my writing.
Thanks for the feedback and I am glad you'll use it for teaching (which was the main goal of this project)! The padding part it's briefly explained on the "dynamic" notes on the left column, but yes, can be improved. Typing on the input gives you some sense of what is doing on the background, specially if it jumps to two blocks.

The "for each chunk" is also implemented (which was one of the most difficult parts to synchronize with the UI), but I agree too, I should come up with some way to represent it better. Thanks again :)
It definitely is worth looking into. By reducing complexity around the interactivity portions of an application and all of the dom manipulation, it frees frontend developers to focus more on the aesthetic portion and the user experience itself.
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Is The Forest just a play on the name Amazon, or is it a reference to some content about Amazon the company? It's hard to google for.
>Most of the ThinkPads' unique features, as I’ve realized upon writing this article, are long gone.

It’s painful to admit, but I came to the same conclusion for similar reasons.

I’ve owned ThinkPads off and on since 2000, most recently an x280. I still have a rock solid T400 in my workshop, and a modded T440s (added trackpad buttons), but I’ve sold off all the rest and am now pondering whether to buy some version of the X1 Carbon. I've given up collecting old gems like the x230 because, despite all the wonderful features, the screen and battery just don't cut it for me anymore.
PAIP is absolutely great in terms of lessons for software engineering. i do not think you need to know lisp before hand in order to digest it. what's more you can now read it in nice markdown format [0]. however an even better solution, if you want to work through the book, is to convert markdown files to org documents [1] and enjoy the book interactively via org-babel [2]. for those unfamiliar, this is like having a book released as a jupyter notebook, except better. in any event if you are interested don't be afraid of lisp, it is a super-easy syntax to learn

[0] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

[1] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/5465/how-to-migrat...

[2] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
But what about the Eqyptians? It took management skills to organize the army which built the pyramids and the infrastructure of that time.
I remember past threads about this but can't find them. Anyone?

Edit: the list so far - thanks caaqil and setgree! I feel like there were still others, if anyone can find them...

Nick Brown Smelled Bull (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791302 - June 2015 (1 comment)

The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515822 - March 2018 (213 comments)

The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085639 - Feb 2015 (15 comments)
Do you think the problem is that I want the function name mysql_real_escape_string for myself? No, I just don't want thousands of confusingly named, completely worthless and/or actively harmful functions to always be in scope.
Yes activism is hard, which is one of the reasons why social media gave rise to slacktivism instead. It's a low effort gratification that is reinforced by ones social network.

It's one of the issues with subreddits as they get larger. Low effort "look how great I am for standing up to my boss" posts win the day.
This brings the idea of modern work much closer to slavery, minus the physical cruelty. It also brings up uncomfortable taboo questions, like if some people actually desire to be the slaves of a benevolent master.
"The married father of two had graduated from Cambridge University in 1981 with a degree in computer science, and spent most of his career as an IT networks operator at an international organization in Strasbourg, France."

Pretty early in the article.
> "At the start of the pandemic, I noticed people sharing Gates’s 2015 talk. The general sentiment was one of remorse and lamentation: the tech-prophet had predicted the future for us! If only we had heeded his warning! I wasn’t so sure. It seems to me that Gates’s prediction and proposed solution are at least part of what landed us here. I don’t mean to suggest that Gates’s TED talk is somehow directly responsible for the lack of global preparedness for Covid."

It seems more probable that Gates' enthusiasm for preparing for and preventing this future did indeed hasten it. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is a kingmaker and gatekeeper for biomedical research worldwide via its massive network of associated NGO funding agencies. Gates is one of the primary sponsors of the GAVI initiative to push vaccine research. The development of vaccines is, ironically, a primary motivator for gain-of-function research. The connections between NIH and gain-of-function at the WiV are pretty well-established at this point. And the connections between BMGF and Dr. Fauci are also on the public record. Bill Gates is also an important player in the extremely influential globalist institutions, the WHO and the WEF (among others) and his 'war gaming pandemics' was absolutely something that was funded and organized by these supranational organizations. This is relevant here because there is the pandemic (the pathogen) and the Pandemic (the response). In this Pandemic there was a coordinated set of policies distributed via the WHO and WEF to its partner nation states for implementation. If you ever wondered how so many different countries in different places with different populations could respond almost in lockstep, checkout Operation Lockstep, one of Gates' beloved "war games". Without attributing to any one person too much power to affect the world, Gates in particular is a meddlesome, megalomaniacal billionaire who seems to pop up in all the places where global governance by technocratic elites is pushed on an unsuspecting population. It's hard to resist the impulse to attribute his obsession with viruses to some kind of psycho-drama going back to his Microsoft days working in vain to secure Windows from software viruses. Let us hope at least some of his more ruthless business instincts are safely in the past.