skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article seems thoughtful and within the range of what we treat as on topic. "Opinion piece" can cover a lot of different genres—for example, blog posts are mostly opinion pieces. We don't want shallow articles on garden-variety political ups and downs, but thoughtful ones on deeper topics are occasionally ok. They don't cover those on TV news.

How to handle political topics on HN has been a hard problem over the years, but we've converged on a set of principles that have proven to work pretty well. I've written various explanations of this—here are two, which contain links to many others:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490
Just that Thiel is not a "software guy".

He's a lawyer and economist, a National Master chess player, and a (multiple) startup founder (PayPal, Palintir, etc), investor (first outside investor in Facebook). And he is actually also a "hedge fund guy", but he does not seem to be a software guy of any sort.

As far as I can tell from a very great distance, he is highly intelligent and has been demonstrably successful across multiple domains of expertise, and certainly smarter than your previous remark would seem to imply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel

EDIT: just saw your kind response. Perhaps just read through the above wikipedia page. He's obviously a very polarizing individual, but whether you personally like or hate his politics, it seems pretty clear that he's a pretty brilliant person -- as smart as Reid Hoffman on the other side of the aisle (whom he is good friends with.) It seems wise to be friends with (and have friendly debates with) people who disagree with you, especially if they are very smart. Iron sharpens iron. Thanks for elevating the level of discourse!
I forget why I went into their building, but I always remember a giant T-rex skull in their entryway. I'm not making this up, am I?

I did find this press release, but it really just raises more questions than answers anything. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ubm-electronics-and...
Ask HN: What was your Covid experience like?
I’m recovering from Covid. My experience was pretty tame compared to what I’ve heard of others. My primary symptoms were heavy fatigue, nasal congestion, and headache.

I did not experience loss of taste or smell. Also weirdly I did not have much of a fever, if any.

I’m vaccinated with Moderna.

I’m curious what others experienced.
Precisely and when one party has a business lawyer for a sibling it gets even more expensive.
Thanks for the regular reminder that non-programming related threads on Hacker News are filled with completely uninformed comments and are best left unclicked.
Yes. Not going back, and that's more or less it.
Nautilus has a print subscription :)
Nah, it’s great. I kinda miss the segregation between home and work, but I was already working in a different office from the rest of my team so working in the office didn’t get me anything in terms of efficiency.

I’ll take the time back from not having to commute over having some face time with people I don’t know all that well anyway.

My advice for someone having trouble would be 1) try and get some more time away during your day - go get lunch down the street or at least step away to your kitchen and don’t pay attention to work while eating, 2) work somewhere other than where you rest or have fun, if you can (so no working from bed, for example), and 3) make sure you get out of the house sometimes; maybe don’t get groceries delivered, for example, because getting them in person means you get a chance to change scenery.
Definitely the opposite for me. I never wanted to work from home and for the first 6 months expected I'd go back to the office when I could. Now I'm ready to quit if my job requires returning to office lol.
Robots. The answer is robots.
I'm not aware of any locomotives that captures power from braking.
Winter Olympics Robots serve food, cocktails and clean
Original source: Tony Cunningham, rec.humor.funny, 7 August 1991

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/knG5ONlInXM/m/...
Nice to have such an easy and sheltered life. Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s had actual threats, for example, bet you didn’t have a rando follow you a couple blocks and pop you as you’re fishing for your keys, kids chase you yelling “Honky” (white guy here), etc.

On the other hand, SF is the only place I’ve heard someone shot to death (6 shots right outside my window, counted) so it’s in competition.
But if you are poor, you either don't have a computer, or you bought a $150 new laptop at Staples which you thought was a great deal, but is ridiculously slow, has a 5 minute battery, and gets destroyed by a 10 year old Thinkpad X230. Being poor requires you to buy lots of reasonably priced junk just to get by. Your daily life is just full of substandard things that wastes time and money, and increases stress.

And internet isn't free if you have outstanding payments with the sole internet provider in your area. (This is not hypothetical, by the way.)
Not in this case. As Jacques notes, there’s the legal barrier but there are also a few other unique factors.
The metaverse: Where we are and where we’re headed
they missed earnings by 4.4% wasn't it?

Largest network in the world @ 17 p/e. With $50B in cash
I would say though that it would be nice to have social events with my coworkers again. They're all great people and I love socializing with them. I was never the type to chat at the office though since I'm always trying to get stuff done when I'm there. So, I'm looking forward to the restart of happy hours and hope they'll set up some retreats and things, the last thing I want is to go back to having people try to chat with me while I'm working.
> The best way to handle problematic speech is more speech, NOT less.

This theory is an interesting one. This concept is enshrined in our law. I used to think that this was true, but now I'm no longer sure. For the concept to work, it requires that our populace have an open mind and actually be receptive to different opinions and points of view. Sadly, in the last 30 years or so, we have become less so.
You’re taking a utilitarian and relativistic view on this, which feels disingenuous in this context. He is already backing people who {support, condone, downplay} violence that has already happened.

I don’t find it debating on good faith to ignore real violence by countering with hypothetical violence. Furthermore, he could easily advocate for a more hawkish view on China - a wildly popular view across the entire American political spectrum - while using his platform to disavow the real violence already done against Americans (that is also dividing us at a time when we need to have a united front against China.)

So, sure, we could do mental gymnastics to find some weird, hypothetical justification, or we could just look at the evidence in front of us.
After starting my first job out of college as a software engineer I have yet to meet my colleagues in person and it has already been almost a year and a half. The team I am on has been working together for years in person so they have great relationships but since I only interact with them online and almost always over Teams chat I find it super difficult to connect. I make sure to set up video coffee chats with people in the company but it still doesn’t feel the same . At this point I doubt I will ever meet my first work colleague team since I am planning to change jobs. In a grand scheme of things it isn’t a big deal but this Covid thing has really impacted some mile stones like senior year of college, graduation ceremony, and now young professional life.

The solution: I think there should still be an option of remote work, since most people don’t need to be in the office at all time but everything about the “office culture” needs to change. Maybe office size should be smaller, more WeWork team meet-ups or meet at coffee shops, meet in the library or public space what ever but having a big empty office might not be the ideal going forward. This is an exciting time and I do hope after the pandemic is all done with that we can start figuring it out
It looks like it might be related to "frost flowers"
https://www.weather.gov/lmk/frost_flowers
The only thing worse than school is not being around kids your age.

Also, as far as I can tell, “school sucks” is very much an Anglo thing. I went to primary school in English, in continental Europe, and in Latin America. The latter two were great, but my school in an English speaking country was awful, basically social Darwinism, and well described by Waters, Orwell and Hollywood.
Spotify is a bad comparative example - it has had it's own PR problems. The narrative is questionable.
TIL about console.table. Thanks for sharing!
I went this way a couple years back, but one partner is intractable.
The only thing I miss about being in the office is the ability to read faces. I’m a pretty anxious person and tend to read too much into short emails/Teams message, wrongly assuming someone is upset with me.
I suspect there's a good chance you're going to wake up one day and find that you're an older man, so you might want to prepare yourself for the kind of social change that often comes with that.

That said, I'm actually dreading return-to-work to a certain extent, because it's optional at my company right now, so I've been able to make my office into a nice little interruption-free cocoon. I spent the summer outside with a laptop and 5G hotspot, but the weather right now isn't really conducive to that.
Modern schooling and corporate structure are largely influenced by industrial era england and to an extent germany. We do a lot of needless things just because there is a recurring expectation of results in exchange for effort. Actual value has nothing to do with it.

The careers, values and goals of society as a whole have changed but we still have elementary and high schools and the college. Different classes of careers for different classes of education. Similar career growth structure and managerial structure and so on.

I am not saying most education is useless. Just that it might be ill-optimized. Early education should focus on basic reasoning and developing skills that allow the student to research, absorb and implement information. Middle education should focus on exposure to various fields and aspects of contemporary adult life. Late and undrergrad education should focus on a specific career trajectory.

I don't see why a Bachelors degree in an optimized education path cannot be obtained before the age of 18 for most people.

It shouldn't matter whether or not a 5th grader is good at algebra or chemistry but that they have had enough exposure to make an informed decision about it later on. But they should also be exposed to farming, military life, software development, etc...
I loathed every second of school, but society needs some sort of daycare facility so the parents can work though
Ask HN: Any offline privacy-friendly sleep and fitness trackers?
I would like to analyze my sleep and probably fitness activities as well.

I consider any cloud-based apps uploading my intimate data to the Internet unacceptable.

If possible I would like the tools to be serious (not just a phone app analyzing your sleep sounds - something monitoring actual vitals is preferable) and hackable (i.e. export the data or even real-time export over the LAN).

Any suggestions?
How is 1918 education and career attainment even remotely comparable to 2020?

Show me the relationship between knowledge/information and career in 1918 vs today. I can’t think of a bigger difference between that time period and now.
Yes. It's 1920, not 1620. Here's a page from a 1920 census:

https://raogk.org/census-record/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2...

Here's a tax return form from the same year:

http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/1040forms.nsf/WebByYear/1920/$...
I think it's a case of defining what you know, and asking questions for what you don't know. But, of course that's easier said than done. Maybe you chase after a red herring, maybe you ask the wrong questions. But I think asking the right questions comes from expert understanding of the fundamentals of anything, which is really hard, maybe for a lot of new fields, impossible because no one has established fundamentals, unless you're really smart. Maybe you permute the thing, or its joined with another thing, so it really becomes it own new thing.

I personally hate the non-magsafe charger because I trip over it and yank the laptop around, but I can see the trade off in being able to use a single charger for everything. Because of that, I see the magsafe issue being a permutation, because by changing the environment that laptop chargers operate in, with the addition of usb-c, you've changed the game.
German bridge demolished using 120kg of explosives – video
Isn't the quintessential libertarian belief some flavor of "I believe you deserve the maximum possible freedom to act and speak"?

In which case it seems entirely possible to be a libertarian and have strong personal beliefs of wildly different flavors.
>Brett Victor - Inventing on principle: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc

This gave me a sharp moment of clarity, thank you so much for this!

I'll work on the wording over time, but here's a rough sketch of my principle:

My principle is that no person should ever be forced to blindly trust a computer to do the right thing. Computing shouldn't be either blindly trust the black box, or get nothing done.

Nobody should have to hand over their wallet to buy an ice cream cone, you can just take the exact change out and pay. Why should you have to give a program access to everything when you just want to edit one text file?
Surprised not to see Walter Bright, I don’t know his score but seems like the in depth answers get a lot of points.
Most people who get started as an independent contractor “steal” their first client from their employer.

People will say this is wrong, people will say they didn’t, but I’m telling you this is just how the world works.
…followed a decade later by The Great Depression.
Or maybe another great war could destroy civilization, and it's best not to play around it irresponsibly.

Most of our ills are coordination failures. I believe solutions are complex, because society is growing more complex.

But we also need to find ways to reinvent ourselves so that we won't fall prey to the various instabilities we are subject to -- political instabilities, environmental instabilities, even AI safety instabilities. What is needed is a clear vision of our shared goal: to maximize the well being of all conscious creatures. As long as most of our system design is not aligned with that, we will be in significant danger.

(To be honest, just existing in the long term is just so darn difficult -- something few people realize -- that even with such systems in place there are no guarantees)
No your lack of socializing is killing you. Don't blame remote work, that's just incidental. Go join a sex, sailing or running club.
I personally love it, though, I have my family at home, so it's great, I get more time with my youngest son!
Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, the UK, etc etc.

There's a lot of countries out there with high earners who aren't in the EU or USA ;).
I'm struggling to come up with a definitive answer (mostly because there likely isn't one), but here's a few observations I've made:

- Social media has pretty much ruined everyone's capacity to sit down for more than 5 minutes with another person and get to know them. I know that a lot of people harp on this, but as the attention economy expands and streamlined doomscrolling platforms like Twitter and TikTok threaten to take over more of our lives, I really believe it's the main component.

- COVID-19 obviously has left people socially averse, for better or worse. Not much else to add here, besides the fact that our idealized precepts of love are pretty obviously incompatible with a pandemic.

- Dating apps, like all technology, are a race to the bottom. Most people use it as a conduit for hookups and one-night-stands, and there's very little you can do to separate the wheat from the chaff. Ironically, trying to fragment the space has only seemed to make this problem worse (in my experience).

- People in general are behaving less inclusively. Kinda tying back into my first point, if people can't get instant gratification from sharing everything they love with another person (or disagree with one or a few of their opinions), many people see it as irreconcilable and press the button on their ejector seat and ghost you.

YMMV though, I don't date the opposite sex so I can't speak for everyone here. Those are just a few of my observations on matter, and I don't even know if it's necessarily worse than it was, say, 5 years ago. Just different, and you gotta find different ways to reach out to people meaningfully in order to connect in a way that might stick.
Agreed. For me, the logistics of having a dedicated office just down the road far outweigh the costs of the commute, and I like the mental and physical separation of home and work.

But, if that commute was 45 mins, or if I had a larger living space and a worse onsite location, I can guarantee that my opinion would reverse.
> Are you suggesting all mask and vaccine mandates be removed

For the vaccine mandates, absoutely, because the vaccines are now mostly ineffective against transmission of the virus. There is no good justification for these mandates.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-director-covid-...

For comparison - the Czech Supreme Administrative Court just ruled (and ended vax passports for shopping):

> “The measure cannot aim to indirectly force citizens to be vaccinated. This would make voluntary vaccination mandatory through an emergency vaccination measure, as unvaccinated people would have no choice but to be vaccinated if they wanted to live normally,” said NSS Judge Petr Mikeš

https://praguemorning.cz/czech-government-cannot-indirectly-...

Mask mandate make sense in some situations, because they are more effective at preventing transmission, but these need to be phased out at some point too.
If you get the full edition, there’s a complete discourse on Frankl’s method (designed for the layperson). That said, I found the actual story of his experience far more compelling and much easier to relate to… at least in a way of making any problems I might have seem meaningless by comparison.
Wtf? As someone who once held refugee status under the Geneva Convention, my only remark is: you don't go back to discuss your pension. If you do, you're stupid.
As I understand the taxonomy, Libertarians are more closely aligned with anarcho-capitalists, to the point where I tend to consider them equivalent.

Anarcho-capitalists believe in the primacy of property rights above all else. It is a system which explicitly requires an enforcement mechanism - such as, ideally, a private police system, with the right to use force against citizens to protect the rights of property holders.

Anarchism is in general a utopian (but IMO idealistic, and intrinsically unstable) system where no person has authority over any other. There can be no police force because everyone has effectively the same rights. (There are lots of variations on this general theme). Anarchism has a bad reputation (the reasons for this are in themselves interesting) but by definition it is anti-authoritarian.

I personally think that most libertarians I’ve met are actually anarcho-capitalists, and not anarchists. Despite sounding alike, the two systems could hardly be more different.
Peter Thiel is a man who got lucky in the dotcom boom, expanded that fortune by merely having no shame and starting companies to spy on us for governments, laments that women get to vote, funded Trump, is now funding people to encourage war with China, bought land in New Zealand to escape to after America is ruined by himself. That HN is so fascinated by him is so disappointing. The man represents the worst of humanity in every way, we should be allied against people like him.
Couldn't happen to a more deserving business model. The whole surveillance economy is one big dark pattern. Not only does it prey on consumers, it's not even a stable way to build and support the tech sector. If our best and brightest minds are using their most productive years trying to perfect the art of invasive spying in order to serve the advertising industry, what does that say about us as a country and a society?
Spent my whole child life being tormented by school bullies. Did drugs and alcohol in college. Studied history so as to not fail.

Graduated, began programming on my own time, 9 years later I'm making $300,000 a year as a programmer.

Only people I talk to are my wife, my mom, and a few people on Discord about 3d graphics.

I can safely tell you that human interaction in the sense of "make 300 friends at school so that you aren't considered a freak or loner!" was never necessary, and in fact was an active burden.
As the news keeps going, there is more and more white power movements being tied in.

My original point stands, if you don't kick out a Nazi, your being absorbed into a Nazi movement.
The Paradox of tolerance only endorses the right of being intolerant towards intolerance; it in no way suggests that it's always a good idea to practice such intolerance. On the contrary, the actual "paradoxical" idea is that some limited tolerance should be extended even to the intolerant to the extent practical, since this helps promote the norm of tolerance in the first place even when intolerant ideas might otherwise appear to be prevalent. IOW, Popper's position is, to a limited extent, consistent with the one most clearly phrased by Thomas Jefferson: "let [the intolerant] stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
Not me. I've been remote for 6 years and don't ever want to go back.

The first time I worked remote I didn't know how to leave work. It was always there, so I worked - too much. Set some office hours and walk away when it is done. Try to find reasons to get out, even on lunch breaks or a 15 minute break.
I just saw a blurb that they've just finished pouring the last foundation for the overhead catenary system.

Currently half of the work going on right now is grade separation that includes both the future high speed rail line and the current freight rail line. So there is some method to their madness. The grade separation provides immediate benefits.

Lot of info linked here https://www.buildhsr.com/
I really hate going weeks or months at a time with my only interaction with co-workers being through emails and tickets. I wish we could have a hybrid setup where everyone is in the office 1 or 2 days a week.
I’ve been remote for 12 years. I am an extrovert. I have always missed the office a bit, but never enough to seriously consider going back to in person. I would absolutely go back for the right opportunity. Maybe I’ve missed some great opportunities because I don’t really seek jobs that require in person.

For me, remote work enables a richer life. I get to spend more time with my children, I can help my wife when something comes up, I can go to the gym or for a walk in the park, I can have lunch with a friend in the neighborhood, and I have more time to work too!

Now that everyone is working remote, it’s even better! In the past there was always a bit of struggle if I was working for a company where most were collocated in an office. Now that everyone is remote, it’s so much easier to conduct meetings, pair program, and just get things done.

Lastly, it’s absolutely possible to make deep meaningful connections with people through remote work. I consider many of my coworkers from the past decade to be close friends, despite the fact that I rarely see them in person. Remote work is no different than anything else in life; you will get out as much as you put in. Embrace it.
I'm not sure their memory pricing is competitive these days anyways.