skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Despite all of the caveats above, my belief is that it's easier to become relatively good at real life activities relative to games or sports because there's so little delibrate practice put into most real life activities.

> You're probably 99%-ile, but someone with no talent who's put in the time to practice the basics is going to have a serve that you can't return

I have a soft spot for this kind of insight because it is supposed to be inspiring and I know I should take it in that spirit, but one thing that's always bothered me is the contradictory assertions that on the one hand, almost no one deliberately practices, but on the other hand, this makes it "easier". How can both assertions be true? Any sensible definition of difficulty has to consider how many people succeed at it. If very few people succeed at a task in practice, it is a difficult task no matter how "easy" it looks in theory.

I've come to see passion & motivation as indistinguishable from "talent". Having the passion & motivation to put in the effort is part of one's "talent" and realistically is not that easy to change. Everyone knows that to write well, you need to practice writing a lot. Scott Alexander notes in his Parable of the Talents [1] that he never needed to really muster up the energy to practice writing a lot:

> I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years. But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower.

I've found this to be true in a lot of walks in life. While there are certainly people with genius intellect/ability, most of the "talented" people I meet aren't of that kind, they are just effortlessly more motivated or passionate about something than I am. For example, they often started programming when they were 10 or something and spent most of their childhood choosing to do little side projects instead of the normal variety of childhood time wasters.

I think this essay's (95%-ile is not that good) thesis is roughly this: to be good at something, you just need to care a little, because most people don't care at all. Just need to care a little, that doesn't sound so hard, right? All I want to say is yes, in my experience caring even a little is so, so hard. There's a reason why most people don't care at all and that reason is probably not "you're better and more special than most people as a reader of this essay".

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-tal...
It's not about costs, it's about getting tight feedback loops because you can see exactly what the camera is filming straight away instead of having to wait for the green screen -> post processing loop.
Hate to sound trite, but it often is the culture. If people feel siloed it's really easy to fall into not caring very much if you're not intrinsically motivated to succeed. However, on a closely knit team, where you put in the effort to get them included and owning things and be supported by the rest of the team in it, many start performing better (even if that starts by just asking for help earlier) simply because they don't want to let the team down. Not always, perhaps, but I'm not convinced that "poor employees" are innately reflective of the individual, so much as the individual + environment. Certainly, I personally have been in environments where I was a rockstar...and environments where I mentally checked very quickly (and sought to leave as such). And the former were the higher output environments, I might add; it wasn't just me being "out of my depth" in terms of skills or similar, but rather me not doing well when I was set up without any real empowerment or support structure and still expected to at least put on a show of trying.
My phone screen suffered a bad accident, to the level of unusable. 4 weeks for a repair.

I needed 2FA to access company services. Email, chat, VPN etc. Which of course, was on my phone.

I emailed IT Support from my personal email to request a temp token. My ticket was closed, with a message saying "Email tickets are no longer accepted, use the service portal."

I needed 2FA to access the service portal.

Luckily I had a co-worker on a non-company chat service, so they opened a ticket on my behalf...
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/how-the-...

> the CDC’s near-total dismissal of natural immunity. Many other countries consider recovery from prior infection as a vaccination equivalent or better, an assumption that makes both medical and intuitive sense, but the CDC has steadfastly maintained that everyone needs the same number of vaccinations whether they have recovered from a COVID infection or not. This view is countered by data showing that vaccinating people who have recovered from COVID results in more severe adverse events than vaccinating people who have not had COVID.

> .. Months later, the CDC published a stronger, cohort study showing clearly that natural immunity was more robust than vaccine-induced immunity in preventing future COVID hospitalizations, and moreover, that people who survived infection were massively protected whether vaccinated or not.

> This is a precarious situation, as it undermines trust in federal agencies and naturally leads to a trust vacuum, in which Americans feel forced to cast about in a confused search for alternative sources of information. Once that trust is broken, it’s not easily regained... Science itself is transcendent, and will outlast our current challenges no matter what we choose to believe. But the more it becomes subordinate to politics—the more it becomes a slogan rather than a method of discovery and understanding—the more impoverished we all become. The next decade will be critical as we face an increasingly existential question: Is science autonomous and sacred, or a branch of politics?
The core argument of this article is one I agree with. If you give government the ability to do whatever they want, eventually power will change hands and act against you. It’s a cycle of progressively more wild pendulum swings.

Good times create weak men. I fear what comes next.
Vinyl records are popular again.
This is happening in the USA as well.
I suspect you could use JPEG as a lossless format, you'd just have to write your own custom encoder.

In some sense, JPEG is just a really weird programming language. So a JPEG file is just a really weird program that gets interpreted by a JPEG decoder. Most normal JPEG encoders try to find a short 'program' in the 'JPEG programming language' that gets interpreted by the decoder to recreate a particular image reasonably well.

But there's no reason you couldn't ask for a perfect reproduction.

As far as I know, JPEG decoders are lossless and deterministic.

I asked this question on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71201691/does-jpeg-allow... to get something definite.

Of course, you point still stands that JPEG is not a good file format for storing UI elements. Even if in theory you could torture the JPEG standard enough to make this barely work.
Yeah, oof.

I'm more concerned about my medical right to not have germ droplets sneezed onto me in public.
I guess I like to live dangerously, but I never use a case. That's also probably the reason I bought the red iPhone.
The book Non-violent Communication is a great way to “do no harm” in challenging conversations.

As for practicing empathy and compassion I think real world experience is key. Check out anything to do with “authentic relating”. Here’s a group that offers online and in person classes: https://authenticrelating.co/

But empathy and compassion has to be there naturally (which I’m sure it is as it sounds like you’re empathizing with your friend’s situation that they don’t feel safe sharing with you).

The tools above will just help you feel into what’s already there.
But it's not a cycle. Governments have been trending towards policies I like since long before I was born.

And the people who want to hold back the progress I want, don't seem to respect precedent any more than I do. Why should I be faithful in this game theory when they seem to have already betrayed?
Couldn’t agree more with your second paragraph. A phrase that’s been drilled into me in the past year is “undifferentiated heavy lifting that’s not core to your business”.

The things you listed just don’t matter from the business point of view. They don’t care how the app works, who runs it, what cloud provider is hosting it, what tools were used to build it, only that it works when it needs to and they will happily pay the bill so their employees can focus on making the company money doing what they are good at. Zack Kanter from Stedi talks a lot about this.
Have you heard about the resurgence in vinyl record sales?

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/01...
While it hasn't been updated in a while, fundamentally https://github.com/pombredanne/django-zerodowntime would be a base for building similar check logic in a DB agnostic way on Django. It has some of the most important checks in place, but could obviously do with adding more sophisticated checks.

For Django users using PostgreSQL you can use https://github.com/antonioIrizar/django-check-migration-wtf or https://github.com/yandex/zero-downtime-migrations or https://github.com/tbicr/django-pg-zero-downtime-migrations to provide similar functionality to the library this post links to, depending on your exact use case of course.
Could also be that much of the work is zero-sum. For example ads to some extent just shift consumers from one company to another without actually creating anything (although, some might cause new demand). The stock market is exists to allocate resources more efficiently, but some of the shorter-term stuff looks more like pouring a ton of math and software work into coming up with better gambling strategies...
To point out the exceedingly obvious: vaccine mandates are not carte blanche.

They aren't even new, and the government did not have to pass any legislation to require vaccination in many domains because we already had a (century old!) body of law dedicated to vaccination.
The author actually makes an argument for why that is his belief. And it is cogent and worth interacting with rather than just dismissing.

In fact the whole first part is about how just dismissing people is problematic.
> You just have to write them by hand instead of the convenient table UI.

That’s a pretty big "just", though. Very few sites work without fiddling with rules, having to do manual text entry every time would push me towards not using it.

The UI of uMatrix is generally far superior to the mobile-friendly, simplified one of uBo.
True, but you can use that argument against most forms of entertainment. Books, movies, video games, DND, sports, etc... VR is just another thing people can do in their leisure time.

Everyone here is freaking out "oh no, Facebook is going to make something so entertaining society will collapse". I would be so proud of myself if I created something so entertaining society collapsed, lol.
Except that the CDC changed the definition of "vaccine", hence the century-old body of law is describing a different set of nouns, outcomes and policy choices.

The WHO also changed the definition of "pandemic" about a decade ago.
Can you share where the uneducated can learn more about these advancements?

I’ve always had a passing interest in this subject. Will be cool to know how folks are systemizing this field
Yea. I'd love to do that. I must think about going to a printmaking workshop and reconnecting with this stuff.
I'd start with "non-violent communication" by Marshall Rosenberg. It's a communication technique. There's a book, but there's also a YouTube video that's a very good starting point.

https://youtu.be/l7TONauJGfc

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
I used to keep a log of an even less socially-acceptable bodily function.

It was surprisingly informative! On average once a day, sometimes skip a day, sometimes twice on weekends. Almost never more than three times in the same day, unless I was purposely trying for a PB.
Yeah, browse hackernews instead of reddit!
If you think that’s a right, I don’t know what to say. Somewhere between there and biological warfare, there’s a pretty major line crossed.

If you truly want to be free from other people’s germs you literally need to go to Mars alone or something. The world is full of germs. Sorry.
The last project I did sends the important URL to the users email. It’s Craigslist-style auth and it works pretty well.
Part of the reason they don't really consider natural immunity is because everyone and their uncle will just say "oh yea, I think I already had it". Validating that with a blood draw and neutralizing titre measurement is too expensive across the population vs a quick and nearly painless needle stick mass produced economically.

A subset of kinds of people that refuse to get vaccinated are the kind of people that would just make up stories in their own head about how they already got it because they had the sniffles in January 2020 and that mild case means they're alpha. I know at least one person that is precisely this stereotype, and probably two, but the second one got vaccinated.
The author can write massive volumes intended to prove that he is a Serious Person Worth Listening To. But that does not in fact make him a Serious Person Worth Listening To.

Not unlike wearing a Mickey Mouse hat to a Senate committee meeting, comparing a vaccine mandate to the Holocaust is a signal that the author is not capable of engaging seriously with the topic. People who behave that way do not get a free pass from me just because they also happen to have mastered basic prose.
I rather think it's more like legislating that you can't sell people food adulterated with poisons, and you have to label the ingredients accurately. Oh, and it's like saying that you can't sell lead paint, even though it is a very pretty white.
> - Share your own vulnerabilities too. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. The golden rule.

Careful about making it all about you though...
How is private relay different from a vpn? A lot of fingerprinting scripts also can track you despite vpn.
My therapist has given me this worksheet, which helped me immensely in my relationships with friends and my wife.

https://www.wichita.edu/academics/fairmount_college_of_liber...
Average Body Temperature Takes a Dip
IP blocking still seems a thing, even with this new feature - the ads need to be served from _somewhere_. I am using pfblocker-ng on pfsense, which uses giant IP blocklists to filter out all connections to spam and ad-servers. I haven't seen ads in 5 years and there is no need for client-side solutions (e.g. adblocker). The places where ads appear are just whitespace.
> will just say "oh yea, I think I already had it".

In large urban areas where cities are providing free PCR testing on street corners, there is a large body of evidence on which assessments can be made. Millions of positive PCR test results are currently in centralized databases. The UK's weekly health surveillance report tracks prior infections and reinfections.
> Up to a third do not generate usable antibodies post-infection.

Citation? I’ve never seen any study saying anything like this.
Sorry not an American.. is there a break down of this data by age/vaccination status?
The idea is that this will be served from the same IP address that the site that you're trying to visit is.
Are you asserting that it is your current opinion that slavery was morally OK in the US, because it was morally accepted at the time?

(Warning: this is a trap question, do not answer yes, the only socially accepted answer is no)
I’ll start out by saying I agree with you on Tor being a layer in a “defense in depth” strategy but to imply my response to this is fearmongering is quite premature. Feel free to give a point by point rebuttal for the community. I have given quite a bit of thought to how to stay anonymous even though I use my real name and identity here, and have no real issues with government.

Tor is the definition of deceptively simple, and there are a lot of impressionable people who read articles like this on the web when they’re first starting out who could easily be lulled into a false sense of security and then start transacting on the darknet and think they can’t be touched. OGs on HN know better and remember the threads where tptacek and cperciva would routinely dismantle this notion of tor or VPN anonymity/security.
Nowhere near the same.
Question: in what pants pocket do you carry these?

I carry these in my pocket but I’m lucky if they last 30 days before the covers and spine disintegrate.
Great list! Overlaps somewhat with my own (incidentally also titled “life advice”): https://trove.to/wes/trove/de40440b-ed21-4fdb-ba61-b5f83322b...
I agree about culture being a big part. Though no clue how you can improve that in your team as a manager?

I worked for a company where my team was fine, and individual people from other teams seemed perfectly smart and capable when talking to them, but looking at their team's output, they might as well have been idiots. I image for many of them, if they had worked at a more functional organization like Google, they would have done good work. (Even if not to the standards that Google has. But certainly better than at their then current employer.)
Thanks for the explanation - I understood this partly from the article and it is pretty worrying for the future.
And a lot of people who know they had it because they tested positive.

Or are we now going to walk back the test results and claim that they can’t be trusted after forcing people to do all sorts of difficult things because the test said they have Covid?
Further down that quote, the author talks about the issues John Marbeck and J. Horace Round had faced. Also note, this piece is a book excerpt.
That's a fair point, but based on the papers I've read the post-infection immune response is weaker. Positive PCR will also identify asymptomatic people, who are the most likely to not develop useful antibodies.
>Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good

1. Overwatch, the competitive ladder, is not a casual game. Everything you mentioned for CS, happens in Overwatch too; it's a esport that had millions invested.

2. The top 5% of CSGO ranked is Legendary Eagle. There is a world of difference between Legendary Eagle and Global Elite (top .75%). And even between those 2 ranks, there are two other ranks. The top 5% isn't that good; and Global Elite itself is still a step below actual pros.
> have intensive training to minimize risk for other persons
> I wonder if we are heading to something similar...

We can't, unless there is like one standard CPU architecture, operating system etc for server, desktop, mobile phone with minimal updates....

how much to study and memorize, and about the zero-days..
It's amazing what some people can do in 20% of their work time.
>There needs to be a monetization channel that is 1) good for both users AND publishers and 2) pays just as much as current methods.

I agree, but what party would you like that money to originate from?

Ads work well right now for consumer-to-consumer (e.g. I create a blog and you view it) because there's a rich, third-party that money can flow from (a company running ads --> money to me) without having to charge you, the end-user who is more than likely significantly less well-off than a corporation.

To buck that pattern, you need the money to come from somewhere else. Subscriptions and direct payments are an obvious choice (see: the boom of SaaS over the past few years) but people are already complaining that they have so many subscriptions they lose track of them all, and spend too much money on what used to be a "free" internet.

So, I don't think there's a solution where the money comes from the end-user. However, any time you add in a third party for the money to flow from, they're going to want something in return. And unless you want that cash flowing from the site owner to that third party (...why would you?), they're gonna need to offer something else.

I don't see any solution other than "a third party pays for something users and/or the site can create for free". Is the answer to just find something free other than analytics/usage, or are there other approaches to monetize a site while still making it "free" to access?
> Except that the CDC changed the definition of "vaccine", hence the century-old body of law is describing a different set of nouns, outcomes and policy choices.

I can't find a direct link to what, exactly, they changed when I look this up. I would appreciate an official reference.

Speculating idly: I'm guessing they probably introduced some language clarifying that vaccination does not guarantee that the individual can't be infected with the disease in the future. This has always been true, and it's why vaccination policies have always striven towards herd immunity. I don't believe any court of law would consider the CDC's clarifications in those respects to be a meaningful undermining of what it means to be given a vaccine.
Specifics:
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-976069264061
Anna Sorokin got 300k from Netflix. Incarcerated individuals may still inherit. Sometimes money comes. The States are not always aggressive in pursuing such funds; but the Feds usually (not always) are.
Realistically, Congress could in fact mandate that government website implementations must be transferable between software vendors. That’s both technically feasible and in line with past government requirements for hardware procurement.
I think there was a generational sweet spot.

That is the first generation where computers were affordable enough to be 'personal computers' and in the home.

Before then kids weren't able to be exposed to computing early enough, and after then games became shrink-wrapped so kids didn't have to become technically minded to get their games running.

Children growing up with a computer at home were doing all
IIT doesn't capture much or any of what we consider important about consciousness. If it's the most coherent definition we have, we don't have a coherent definition.
The four noble truths (as I see them):

All of life is sorrow.

Escape from sorrow exists.

Escape from sorrow is attainable.

Escape from sorrow is Nirvana.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths
> The vast majority of us kill time with time sinks like playing on our phone or watching TV series - none of which are likely to be life goals.

People state a goal, but that's not a goal - that's an aspiration. The person doing the above "time wasting" is just setting the actual goal of "relax" and "hedonism", which tbh, is completely fine. What they say their goals are is irrelevant.

Not very many people actually work towards the goal they say they want to achieve. Those who do are quite likely to achieve it.
The thing is that you can host the server container also in AWS https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-googl... or Azure https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/server-side-tagging-azur...
I don't trust Apple; they are shady AF and I'm convinced they are hard at work building an AD empire to rival Google and Facebook behind the scenes. Their so-called "privacy" moves are very clearly designed to limit Facebook's and Google's ability to profit off their platform giving themselves an advantage: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...

That said, Private Relay has some interesting ideas, maybe a few trustworthy VPN providers adopt some of them.
> Google maps -> Apple Maps

No, Google maps -> Wikimapia/OSM.