skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completely agree with you about poverty and obesity. Those are systemic problems and are going to take something else to escape. Choices are removed for people who get stuck in those black holes, and its true that saying “use a budget” isn’t helpful after those happen. It might be helpful long before, but the forces are too strong for people who are spiraling down or stuck there. So, I hear you and I think you’re right about that. I’m not suggesting CICO is a tool to fix obesity.

Moreover, poverty and obesity are related. Poverty is affecting people’s food choices, and the cheap food and fast food we have is a lot of high fat, high sugar, high calorie, and huge portions.

CICO is more useful for people who are stable and fine, not under the poverty line and not obese, but just a little unhappy with their weight. CICO is what bodybuilders and athletes and models use, among many others, people mostly fine-tuning. (Just like how financial budgets are mostly helpful for rich people, and people optimizing their savings, but not particularly helpful for a single parent on minimum wage who’s unable to meet basic necessities.)

For someone who’s not suffering from either poverty or obesity, the difference between money/debt and calories/weight is you can only get money from other people, where you only get calories from yourself.

It doesn’t actually matter that calorie metrics are approximate and not perfect. The reason is because CICO enables a personal science experiment, and a process that can adjust and adapt to imperfect information. What it enables you to do is to calibrate your measurement first. Then, second, either reduce caloric inputs or increase caloric outputs to lose weight while making sure the other one doesn’t change, or do both. For average non-poor and non-obese people, CICO isn’t a prescription, nor is it a dangerous red herring, it’s basic consumer information that is, some say, dangerous to not know, which is why part of the important response to the obesity crisis is to demand accurate caloric labeling on food, to enable consumers to make healthier choices long before obesity. This is only the tip of the iceberg, we need better sugar and portion control and all kinds of things, but it’s a start.

CICO is like a PID controller but even simpler than that, it’s only the wires of a P controller where you are the controller. The only thing CICO says is which input to connect to, and that’s all. A PID controller doesn’t know a thing about the system it controls, it doesn’t have to. All that matters is that the inputs affect the outputs and the outputs can be measured. As long as the system output changes over time with it’s inputs, this P controller setup works. It still works when the underlying system has defects and bugs or differences in manufacturing from other systems, as long as the underlying system is responding to changes in input.
I don't find it exhausting, I find it *exhilarating*.

After years of proving myself, earning trust and strategical positioning I am finally leading a system that will support millions of requests per second. I love my job and this is the most intellectually stimulating activity I have done in a long while.

I think this is far from the expectation of the average engineer. You can find many random companies with very menial and low stake work. However if you work at certain companies you sign up for this.

BTW I don't think this is unreasonable. This is precisely why programmers get paid big bucks, definitely in the US. We have have a set of skills that require a lot of talent and effort, and we are rewarded for it.

Bottom line this isn't for everyone, so if you feel you are done with it that's fair. Shop around for jobs and be deliberate about where you choose to work, and you will be fine.
I’m sure there are women out there who go wild for fat, short, bald men with a squeaky voice. But if we’re looking in the aggregate not so much.
> Using `unsafe` to meet a deadline makes 0 sense... would never pass a code review.

I've seen unsound unchecked casts from &UnsafeCell or *mut to &mut in multiple codebases, including Firefox itself: https://github.com/emu-rs/snes-apu/blob/13c1752c0a9d43a32d05..., https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/7142c947c285e4fe4f....
Go templates are indeed weird... and Hugo is very far from the only option in this space... I never tire to link to the list of SSGs available today:

https://jamstack.org/generators/

Each option lists which template language it uses, license and language it's written in... just pick the option that best suits your taste among the hundreds of options there... they're mostly all great, Hugo really is just one option in hundreds.
Ask HN: How would you implement service mesh in a large enterprise?
How would you implement a service mesh for a large enterprise that already has hundreds of microservices? For some background, the existing microservices are deployed in a variety of ways (VMs, containers and serverless) and primarily use HTTP/JSON to communicate. Although the services are primarily hosted in AWS the implementation must be cloud-agnostic.
Oh, if you check my comment history, you'll see me complaining a bit about Julia. I'm not saying it's perfect. But numba is so clunky and fickle that I think, just in terms of comparing the two, Julia is pretty clearly superior if you don't have a strong reason to use Python.
In Hungarian "dzs", "zs" and "sz" are so called compund letters, however most software treats them as separate characters, because it would be a pain in the ass do sorting the correct way. (It would either require changing the input method, or software would need to be aware of etymology.) It's only sorted the right way in paper dictionaries.
> the whole point is that you get to keep a non-negligible fraction of whatever you earn

Australia already has this - you can earn up to (somewhere around) $18k per year and you won't get taxed. This applies to everyone. Is this what you're talking about? Because as far as I can see, there are still people under the poverty line here.

But if you're not talking about that, and you're saying that ALL should get $18k (for example) no questions asked, when someone earned $19k before UBI, do they now do the same hours for $1k, or do they keep their whole $19k? If the former, why bother working, but if the latter, you've now just given them $36k not $18k.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/grocery-delivery...
Optimized stellarators have exceeded the Greenwald limit so tokamak empirical scaling laws don't apply.

If you increase the power in the same vessel is that not increasing the power density?
Yes, a bit. But it's fun. And the motivation of fun is hardly to find in a big monothlic system.
Technology of the Oppressed
Pretty sure we hear about twitters toxicity every 5 minutes
> I would moreover argue that if a government scheme can be sabotaged like this in the first place, the government scheme is itself at fault [...]

This is the weirdest argument. I mean, you seem to be arguing for some kind of government that's not answerable to elected leaders or voters? I mean, how else would you be able to run a program that couldn't be shut down by the leadership of an organization - public or private?
>Consume public APIs as simpler programmable building blocks

Is the 'r' in simpler there intentionally? In which way are the building blocks more simple than simple blocks?
> I think Wordpress does have some criticism-worthy parts

It absolutely does -- and different criticisms have landed harder at different times.
That brings up the philosophical problem - is the English word taco the same as the Spanish word taco and if they aren’t the same, are the characters the same, or should there be an a for every language?
That’s an attempt to inject an urbanist hobby horse into a discussion of poverty. The vast majority of poor Americans have a car. It gives people tremendous flexibility in taking advantage of different employment and housing opportunities.

If anything I’d argue that transit puts poor people at a disadvantage. My wife’s family comes from rural poverty (like reliant on hunting for meat). Access to cars is never the problem. And cars mean that if someone loses their job or their housing, they can pick up and move to a different town where there might be opportunities.

The transit-dependent urban poor are completely dependent on what opportunities might exist near the transit lines. That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central planners, who are often incompetent.
> You have to learn to deal with conflict at some point.

Some become conditioned into being doormats for the rest of their lives, just to avoid conflict. IMO, it's a very bad thing.
> However, this doesn't consider the fact that the drivers supply their own vehicle as well as out-of-pocket expenses for fuel, maintenance and general depreciation on the vehicle itself.

You don’t think drivers consider that?

> The fact that they were both unpunished for finding loopholes in employment law

Is it a loophole ? Close it
> Every 1B requests/month translates to ~400 QPS, which isn't even that large

I said billions not one billion.

I guess what I find exhausting is the long feedback cycle. For example, Writing a simple script that makes two calls to different APIs requires tons of wiring for telemetry, monitoring, logging, error handling, integrating w/ two APIs, setting up the proper kubernetes manifests, setting up the required permissions to run this thing and have them available to k8s. I find all this to be exhausting. We're not even talking about operating this thing yet (on call, running in issues with the APIs owned by other teams etc)
You could just use any website builder like Squarespace.

Other options would include creating HTML pages on vscode.dev or creating a Next.js site with Stackblitz that is hosted on Vercel or something.
You'll probably enjoy this video:

https://youtu.be/EzZGPCyrpSU

Good channel too.
Right. That was my angle. Sometimes, they are ready to see after the fact. But, just like bias can enter into data collection, so too can it enter simulation.
Besides all that, WordPress is doing something that scales [1], unlike all of us techies using static site generators that only people like us can use. If we want the open web to succeed, we should be getting behind things like WordPress.

[1]: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2020/01/17/doing-things-tha...
The associations between gut microbes and disease may be valid, but simply not actionable. The gut has incredible size, and is thousands of niches rather than a bag of marbles.

The oral microbiome, however, is an entirely different story. Decades of research show causal links between oral bacteria and disease. And it’s readily accessible so it can be easily tested and modulated.

Let’s stop using “microbiome” to describe the gut only. The gut microbiome may be full of overhyped studies, but the oral microbiome or the skin microbiome are entirely different stories.
Awesome Critique of Crypto/Web3
But it's it free of bias and a good execution policy in the real world?
I agree. The only problem is that building a dating app user base is extremely difficult and capital intensive. You couldn't be cashflow positive quickly (or maybe ever).

In my large US city, even some of the big-name apps (like Coffee Meets Bagel and Match) had almost no active users.

I think it would only work if you tacked it onto an existing social network, like Instagram or TikTok, but you'd need the parent company's blessing (which almost certainly wouldn't happen).
The exception? It's standard practice for distros to compile with hardening flags, and if RH submits the bugs they find with Coverity upstream, that protects the 1000s of C projects they package.
My impression has always been that FAANG need lots of engineers because the 10xers refuse to work there. I've seen plenty of really scalable systems being built by a small core team of people who know what they are doing. FAANG instead seem to be more into chasing trends, inventing new frameworks, rewriting to another more hip language, etc.

I would have no idea how to coordinate 200 engineers. But then again, I have never worked on a project that truly needed 50+ engineers.

"Imagine that you are Amazon and for some scalability reason you have to rewrite the storage layer of your product catalog." Probably that's 4 friends in a basement, similar to the core Android team ;)
The different forms of the word are really just a constant factor. Moreover, not all endings have the same number of letters, so it's easy to distinguish between e.g. eat vs eaten vs ate.
I find it "exhilirating," not "exhausting." But I also don't think that "...your average engineer should now be able to handle all this." That is where we went completely wrong as an industry. It used to be said that what we work on is complex, and you can either improve your tools or you can improve your people. I've always held that you will have to improve your people. But clever marketing of "the cloud" has held out the false promise that anyone can do it.

Lies, lies, and damn lies, I say!

Unless you have bright and experienced people at the top of a large distributed systems company, who have actually studied and built distributed systems at scale, your experience of working in such a company is going to suck, plain and simple. The only cure is a strong continuous learning culture, with experienced people around to guide and improve the others.
Your story is close to home. I was part of a team that integrated our newly-acquired startup with a massive, complex and needlessly distributed enterprise system that burned me out.

Being forced to do things that absolutely did not make sense(CS wise) was what I found to be most exhausting. Having no other way than writing shitty code or copying functionality into our app led me to an eventual burnout. My whole career felt pointless as I was unable to apply any of my skills and expertise that I learned over all these years, because everything was designed in a complex way. Getting a single property into an internal API is not a trivial task and requires coordination from different teams as there are a plethora of processes in place. However I helped to build a monstrous integration layer and everything wrong with it is partly my doing. Hindsight is 20/20 and I now see there really was no other, better way to do it, which feels nice in a schadenfreude kind of way.

I sympathise with your point about not understanding what is expected of an average engineer nowadays. Should you take initiative and help manage things, are you allowed to simply write code and what should you expect from others were amongst my pain points. I certainly did not feel rewarded for going the extra mile, but somehow felt obliged because of my "senior" title.

I took therapy, worked on side projects and I'm now trying out a manager role. My responsibilities are pretty much the same, but I don't have to write code anymore. It feels empowering to close my laptop after my last Zoom meeting and not think about bugs, code, CI or merging tomorrow morning because it's release day tomorrow.

But hey, grass is always greener on the other side! I think taking therapy was one of my life's best decisions after being put through the ringer. Perhaps it will help you as well!
There were 37.2 million people living below the poverty line in the USA in 2020[1]. The 2021 budget for the US military was 705.4 billion dollars[2]. Let's be anomalously generous to the military industrial complex and only cut that in half, to $352.7 billion dollars - about matching the combined military spending of both China and Russia (combined population 1.5 billion people). We can direct the other $352.7 billion dollars toward those people in poverty, giving them around $10k/person/year every year.

I challenge you to come up with a reason not to do this that is not psychopathic.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...

[2] https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/FY2021-Defense-Budget/
Theory of winter-fasting and the cure for cancer
Racism justified by pragmatism is still racism. In fact, I'd say the majority of racism is backed up by some kind of pragmatic reasoning. It's the paradigm of grouping of individuals by their "race" to begin with that makes for racism.

If one takes a Japanese American citizen, who has committed no crime, and imprisons them based on their ethnicity, then their imprisonment is indeed "solely due to racism". You're presenting a false dichotomy and validating the justification for their imprisonment, for what?
There was a graph passed around when I was doing undergrad physics showing a weighted average of age at most impactful publication by field, with the results as I recall them now roughly in line with what one might expect: physicists peaked in their mid-ish 20's, mathematicians in their mid-late 20's / early 30's, and the for the other listed fields age steadily increases in proportion with the value of synthesis and experience versus a huge working memory and a razor sharp mind.

I was unable to find that graph looking now, if anyone recalls it with more detail I'd love to see it again.
In some cases, it's the hobby horse of people with barriers to driving who have studied the space and wish the US was more like it used to be and more like some other countries still are.
>The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large.

Even a "large" transfer in this s context is not nearly as much as UBI. The Alaska oil dividend was less than $1000 last year. The Gulf oil nations are the only ones that give enough free money for citizens to live off of, and in these countries are extremely dependent on cheap foreign labor.
At some point, this has to blow up in a spectacular way.
I'm no wine expert but I bet I could reliably tell red from white in a blind tasting
Great writeup, generalisation and data seperation is difficult but will more often than not improve code. Learning how to structure your code around general concepts has the advantage that there many low-level vectorized libraries available increasing compute efficiency.

This is especially true for numerical programming (numpy), stats (scipy) and ML (torch, tf, jax), but the difficulty is often in finding the name of functions to corresponding concepts. Better get good at formulating queries against the API documentation too!
I showed you mine

> The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force

That's for the average worker. Show me what happens at the lower scale. Sorry, I'm not going to read a 25 page report right now, but as this does interest me, I am going to put this in my TOREAD list - genuinely, thanks for the link.

Edit: if you want evidence of disincentivising workers when there's no-questions-asked government handouts, look at food aid programs in Africa. There's no point to be a farmer when Free is your competition.

https://cals.arizona.edu/classes/arec514/groupproject/does%2...
I agree... I run my static generator on my machine, then just publish pure HTML/CSS/JS (so there's no build step on Cloudflar) and it still takes 2 minutes to "build"... on GitHub Pages, the same setup deploys live within a few seconds of pushing my changes.
How stupid is Builder.ai?

To even think that Air India will contract an app to them when they are the parent company of TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) is extremely moronic.

TCS has a global presence, and they get contracts from the largest everythings of India (including the India Post site, the State Bank of India's site, for example). They also handle the online exams for IIT entrances, bank promotion exams, and so on. I think you get the picture.

And Tata owns them both.

It's pretty much given that if Air India creates an app, it's TCS who will build it.
I'd be kind of shocked if that was the case. Either it means that Google isn't also comparing file sizes or that whoever is creating these tiny DS files/one-byte files is incredibly lucky matching tiny copyrighted material.
All compilers covert programs in one language (say C) into another, (say assembler or machine code), and they are called compilers. The whole transpiler thing is a bit bogus, but a C compiler has never IME been called a translator.
Found myself humming the Avalon theme tune for no particular reason the other day.

Great times, to which I occasionally wish I could C9
I mean, I would be surprised if you lacked the “sense of color” altogether. But I will say that, it needs to be cultivated over time.

That the trappings and ceremonies of religion are co-opted by power-structures and televangelists and faith healers to divide and exploit and extract money from... To us religious these are true wolves in sheep-clothing.

I don't think you should seek the answer in a biological imperative to be religious. Instead try to see the Chasm. A yawning chasm saying that we are not worth it, that what we do shall not amount to anything, that all is lost/hopeless, that in the long run you are unloved and unlovable... That is the Chasm.

The experience of the Chasm is very common, and the need to run away from it is very real. Things we do to run away from it include social structures like blaming/ridiculing others, various addictions and obsessions to numb it, food and TV and relationships and sometimes even drugs. Marx saw religion as just another one of these, not evil intrinsically—but he thought the Chasm to come from folks' reactions to their own enslavement and that there wouldn't be a Chasm after we abolished wage slavery.

But religiosity in the sense you mean is better understood as the part where we turn and fight, where we take a stand against the Chasm rather than running forever. Its ubiquity comes from the common problem it attempts to solve, not from some random biological preset. Us religious folks continue because we think we have found something strong enough to fight it, whether it is Jesus or the truth of no-self or the pursuit of a cosmic Harmony or something else entirely.
Sounds like it was triggering a crash or running 70,000 logic gates?
Why use a backdoor if you have the frontdoor, the walls, the roof.. and the entire server?

Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China - https://nyti.ms/3oAvIVH

> Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government.

Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure.
A flat tax with no loopholes hurts the poor more than it would hurt you, so I think advocating for it is antithetical to the goal of helping the poor.
I think you failed at reading comprehension. I said nothing about the complexity of pledge.
Back about twenty years ago, Calvin Trillin's amusing essay "The Red and the White" appeared in the New Yorker. He later collected it in Feeding a Yen. But I imagine one can find it on-line at the New Yorker's site.
But would you know if there were seconds of consistency catching up? How?
I can see how it would be a good system for ruby or python packages, or a docker replacement.

But it seems it isn't able to blindly mirror stuff from pip, for example? Or to just package any linux under the sun, like Docker can? You'd have to have a nix-specific version of every package you want to use.

And then, the first time you hit upon a package it doesn't have, you have to develop and maintain your own version of it (as far as I understand?). This sounds like a lot of work for someone who wants packages to just work, so they can focus on other things.

I remember using freebsd at some point. The annoyance of not being able to just grab a deb from random sites and install them far outweighted any benefits I got from a cleaner OS organization and some extra features. Nix feels the same way.

I am not saying nix is a bad idea or that it'd have no benefit. Just that, for non-enthusiasts and non-early adopters like myself, it's dead in the water until there is some major support behind it.