skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I initially said "with credit to Graeber" but as he acknowledges in the book it's from someone else, I guess here. I just find the Kindle UI too hostile to actually bother and pull out the full attribution so settled to "from" the book so readers could locate the citation.
Not sure about other countries, but Germany's long distance trains are run for-profit. Only commuter trains are subsidized. Tracks are paid for by taxes - but so are streets.
Etsy used to be my favorite place to purchase bespoke artisan crafts and products, and it has turned into a cheap tchotchke reseller hive full of low quality, print-on-demand and other pure garbage.
Nah, I’ll defend the top menubar to the death. Infinite height and top-speed cursor speed makes working with it from the top versus from the window much more efficient for me, and it wastes less pixels (the purpose of high res monitors for me is to use all of the pixels) and gives me a working area on its right side for various utility apps I don’t want taking up space in the Dock (which has enough problems even with a relatively small working app set).

What also helps though is that an under-appreciated aspect of a typical set of Macintosh apps is how good the context menu has gotten. Typically I’m using the context menu and hotkeys much more than the menu bar because it is rare there is an option I want that is unavailable in the context menu.
I tend to dedicate -v for version data in my apps, and use a -d(ebug) flag for more verbose logging. Or even follow the VERBOSE env var convention.

With some apps it's damn near impossible to query the version, especially cross platform. I used to manage a database of that syntax with a tool called "specs".
Ok let's be charitable here. Being confused by terminology is definitely not unheard-of. I don't know how well established these terms are, but it is true that in some fields "quasi" used in some way similar to "pseudo" or "lesser". If the interviewer previously studied these as PRNG instead of QRNG, I doubt that means they're "ignorant".
Somewhat and I think highly skilled workers actually "suffer" from the worst relative compensation. Most legitimate 10x-ish developers don't make 10x what their coworkers are making, they end up producing significantly more value for the company then they're costing with the excess value going to profits and subsidizing other employees.

I personally think a model like this is pretty fair, if somebody is making 50k a year then pulling in 1M annual is pretty silly - but it makes sense to account for that difference with taxation rather than the arbitrary choices of private employers.
UBI != stimulus. The vast majority of this money went into state and local governments which led to infrastructure projects, expanded social programs, etc. which have large ripple effects in the economy. I'm not really on one side or another regarding UBI, but it's faulty to compare large scale government spending with UBI. The demand is in different places. It's also faulty to lay this strictly at the feet of stimulus when the seismic shift in the global economy and workforce also play a role.
Absolutely loved taking the train in Italy, fast, convenient, cheap, good amenities. Of course the country very much lends itself for rail (more or less an elongated territory that can run a very fast high-capacity north/south backbone, with slower but more ubiquitous horizontal offshoot rail to the various smaller cities and villages), but it was still very well done. Especially considering how much tunnelling was required.

My big concern is that we're not really moving towards a single european market nor a single european train infrastructure system. I'm not sure if it can thrive as a patchwork of different ticketing systems and different rail systems. Without it it can't compete for international travel. And without it it's hard to get the right economies of scale.
Rail infrastructure can be expensive (especially when done as inefficiently as in the US) but the actual economics of running trains are fantastic. They're the second-most efficient way of transporting goods and people - after marine shipping.

A freight train can move 1 ton of cargo 480 miles using a single gallon of diesel. [1]

Even city rail, Bart trains in SF average 249 miles per gallon equivalent.

Not to mention you only need what - one or two people - manning a train carrying the average equivalent of 700 truckloads. Once you commit to putting it up, it's super cheap and efficient, which is why we do it.

[1] https://www.aar.org/article/freight-rail-moving-miles-ahead-...

[2] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/GreenSheet.pdf
If you're middle class, with stocks, a professional job, your own house, you probably have been doing absolutely fine over the last couple of years. It's everyone else who's in trouble.
The Apple-1's shift-register memory
As someone who uses UK trains semi frequently, and German trains less so....I'd take your trains in a heart beat
Switzerland is one of the few countries that is 100% electrified (decision was made in 1902) and has 5,196 km of rail.

China has 100,000 km electrified which is 66% of their rail while the US has only 2,025 km electrified which is 0.92%

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr...
Or maybe you have too much faith in my opponents.

Will a lifelong religious devotee be dissuaded of his faith by one argument with me on hacker news?

I think the lot of you are naive, and unaware of what really motivates your views (its not logic).
France has its own issues as well, in many ways parallel to the US from what I have heard, with a sharp urban-rural divide and a legacy of colonialism that has largely not been addressed.
You think this to do with the stimulus check? I haven't heard that.

What about fuel? The billions that have been pumped into the economy by the government as covid measures?

Re UBI, its coming. But not until we have a CDBC. And it will come with conditions - be a good citizen. (Points will be deducted if you scream on your balcony when you're locked in)
I don't have any direct experience with the Chinese health care system, but there's a lot that is not covered by insurance, and bribing doctors or hospital administrators to receive better or quicker care is supposedly widespread (and therefore is or is perceived to be necessary). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/under-the-knif... is a good overview.
No pets in 1920?

Dog breeds specifically tailored for pets have been around for centuries. Go to an art gallery… you’ll find countless portraits of people from centuries past with their ‘lap dogs’, pet squirrels, pet cats, etc.
Considering the sorry state of videoconferencing on Linux they probably all immediately had Windows reinstalled.
db2 13 sounds weird
The style of writing is amazing. You would think you are reading about a flower show or a fashion parade.
But, at least for the hospitals and doctor's I work with, they all have zero interest payment plans. It is extra work to deal with, but drastically reduces the cash outlay.
Humans can be allergic to anything - re-read your post replacing 'Psychedelics' with 'nuts' - no-one gets this excited over peanut allergies - we've replaced this fear with education, drugs should be the same.
But even beyond that - fuel and other power sources have been taxed well before climate change was a political issue, and jet fuel is exempt from all of that. It smacks of regulatory capture.
You can spend it now on things that reduce your costs in the future (dry goods, energy efficiency). You can take on fixed rate debt at an interest rate lower than inflation (a home mortgage). If you want to store your wealth:

The suggestion for I bonds is the safest approach, but you can only put a limited amount in, and you will still lose a little: most experts believe that government inflation numbers under-represent inflation (the debate is by how much, if you buy an I bond you hope just a little).

Otherwise, investors look for "hard assets". A hard asset will maintain its value, going up in nominal dollar terms when the dollar loses its value. This is a reason why real estate has gone up so much recently (and gone up historically).

Most investments appreciate with inflation. Stocks however risk a rapid negative response to the current market conditions because they have already priced in the value of monetary policy being loose and it is currently tightening to counter inflation (this is more true of growth stocks). Similarly these aren't good conditions for most bonds.

Commodities and gold historically have done much better in high inflation conditions. Gold is a very simple way to replace a depreciating currency with hard money, but commodities may have better tail winds in our supply constrained environment. Bitcoin is a digital hard asset that deserves mention for investing with a speculative amount of money due to additional risks.
When Alice says "those who look like so:... are kidnapping your babies and control the banks and steal your salaries"

and a year later 100 Bobs kill those that look like so?

That's one consequence of totally free speech unfortunately
It seems like internal language (thinking in language) is also a way our brains train themselves too? I’ve probably thought 100x more words than I’ve spoken.
This is a gross misrepresentation of UBI.

Amongst other reasons, UBI would only be given to individuals. Unlike the stimulus, most of which went to industry and government.
Ask YC: What happened to the YC podcast?
Pretty much the title.

I genuinely enjoyed listening to Craig discuss with different YC founders about the ups and downs of starting up, pivoting etc. As someone who doesn't enjoy long videos, the YC podcast was a godsend, well integrated with my daily commute and routine. I genuienly miss it and would love if it was brought back, or at least an update as to why it was discontinued.

Thanks!
You can’t just look at the income from fare and use that to justify the construction cost. The train may have brought development and investment into the area that wouldn’t have happened otherwise earning tax for the government in other ways. Highways/interstates in the US would have been an infinite percentage of loss with your original assumption since they don’t produce anything directly.
I see that too. Though most of what PT and the others say is opinion too, just because it comes out of their mouths doesn’t make it news either.
Shameless plug: https://github.com/nhatcher/matrix-algebra
You do not have to do all that, simply being self employed is enough. The people getting screwed are those employed by employers that do not offer subsidized health insurance. They simply have to pay for health insurance with post tax dollars.
When they "do something crazy" then TSMC isn't there any more. Can they manufacture iPhone without TSMC?
I'm thinking more of an institutional solution, like if a research library or archive wanted to preserve the above article, with all of the original interactivity, for a viewer 20+ years from now, is there any kind of consensus on how to go about that?
It's real. You won't see this on the 10-K, you need to look at the 990s (which tend to be hard to find). Here's Blue Cross Blue Shield Association from 2017: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/135..., under part 7, independent contractors, you see "HEALTH INTELLIGENCE CO LLC". This is Blue Health Intelligence (as in Blue Cross Blue Shield Intelligence): https://bluehealthintelligence.com/. Their board is made up of a bunch of blue cross execs.

They spent 20+ million with this company, how much do you think the execs on the board get paid? No one knows because they're private/for profit and don't have to publish annoying things like a 990.
There is value in being able to check out the thing you want, in person, before you buy it for a lot of things.
Presumably they mean internal stuff like google bigtable or equivalent. (Though some version of that is now on gcp).
FYI, absolutely all the exec / management courses that I have taken specifically advise against dragging a "bad" news after a sea of explanation.

All the "exec rulebook" tell the same thing: announce the news first in simple - unambiguous terms terms - and their immediate, impactful consequences. Then provide the "why", then provide a prospect for the future.

Yvonne Wassenaar did not apply the exec rulebook, she should have.
Their benchmarks are also really cool because you can choose to filter down technologies by what you personally know or just want to compare, for example: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...

Thus, in my case those numbers might be closer to the following:

- plaintext: up to 2'500'000 requests per second, most technologies go up to around 500'000
- data updates: up to 14'000 requests per second (20 updates per request, so 280'000 updates per second)
- fortunes: up to 300'000 requests per second (full CRUD and sorting)
- multiple queries: up to 32'000 requests per second (20 queries per request, so 640'000 queries)
- single query: up to 530'000 requests per second, most technologies go up to around 100'000
- JSON serialization: up to 970'000 requests per second, most technologies go up to around 200'000

Of course, their setup also plays a part, since the VPSes that i'd go for probably wouldn't be comparable to a Dell R440 Xeon Gold.

It's really nice to have this data, but the code that's written also plays a really big factor - i've seen people who write code with N+1 problems in it and call ORMs in loops and adamantly defend that choice because "such code is easier to reason about" instead of a simple DB view that would be 20-100x faster. With such code, it'd be closer to the "multiple queries" test.

Then again, these tests basically tell you that in 90% of the cases you should go for Java or .NET, abandoning Python, PHP and Ruby for them (though one could also introduce Rust into the mix and say the same), which realistically won't happen and people will use whatever technologies and practices that they feel comfortable with.

I've seen applications that work fine with hundreds of thousands of page loads per minute (multiple requests per load) and i've seen systems that roll over and die with 100 concurrent users, lots of variety out there.
That was my impression too, it looks very much like an SC style computer music language. Which begs the question, who is this for? Someone who writes plugins doesn't need or want the high level SC style language. Someone seriously into computer music/audio isn't going to want the limitations, and has a lot of options already to choose from that are mature, if relatively unknown outside music circles.

If it were my company, I would be marketing this squarely at people with the need for high level procedural audio in a web context. This looks like it could be great for browser-based game devs, for example. I do know that Pure Data and Andy Farnell's great sound design book for it were a hit in the game dev world of procedural audio, FWTW.
For my personal interest (probably no where near the majority) I am interested in these libraries primarily for use outside of a DAW. I mean, I already have a wealth of plugins for most conceivable purposes to use in one of the several DAWs I have installed. I am also in no hurry to move the kind of things I do in a DAW to a web based app. And frankly, none of the examples I've seen so far come within a country mile of the audio quality of the higher-end plugins I have.

I'm interested in these libraries to see how we can expand on musical creativity outside of DAWs. The first thing that comes to my mind was the cute HTML 5 game Friday Night Funkin'[1]. Or games such as Lumines [2] where the rhythmic music is integral to the gameplay. And other kinds of interactive media where advanced control of synthesized audio might enhance the experience. I think it would be interesting to give people a simplified/gamified interface to a suite of audio tools with the intent to unlock creativity, especially aimed at a very young age (e.g. toddlers and pre-teens). This is a place I don't think traditional DAWs will ever attempt to target and where web-first experiences tend to do extremely well. Being able to quickly develop and deploy "good-enough" audio effects that have an element of interactivity for those kind of products/experiences would be nice to have.

1. https://ninja-muffin24.itch.io/funkin

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv4sCM5X96o
And yet wages for highly skilled workers haven't kept up with productivity increases, cost of living increases and inflation in many parts of the country, including areas like SF or NYC where you find some of the highest paid workers.
> smaller population density, therefore less stops needed in rural areas.

I see this argument regularly, but I do not find it very convincing. There are places in the US about the same size as France with much lower population densities as well. France is about the same size as Texas. Surely there are Texas-sized bits of land with similar densities as France in the US.

> Also more centralized way of thinking, so if you are around Paris: good, if you live far away of big cities, not so lucky.

The network is still very centralised, but it is much better than it used to be. Thanks to the Paris south and east bypasses, as well as progress on the high speed line in the south made things like Lyon-Lille, Lyon-Toulouse, Strasbourg-Nantes, or Marseille-Bordeaux quite nice. Lyon-Bordeaux is still a pain in the backside because of the mountains in the middle.
You can say, "bite the bullet", which means you accept the the difficulties you know will arise. It's actually a perfect idiom for this case.
If You have 10000 posts that You have to sort it in some way and the user just going to see 20 of those, the sorting is the recommendation system, people are just used to think of products, movies and songs, but in those platforms the users are the products
>>employer paid plans are subsidized by the employer, who uses them as a tax write off,

Calling them a 'tax write-off' makes it sound like something sinister is going on - just about everything a business pays to run their business is deductible, and thus a 'tax write-off'.

Do we call buying paper for the xerox machine a 'tax write-off' and thats the only reason business buy paper?

Its a cost of doing business - just like rent, payroll, heat, electricity etc - there is no special 'write-off' for providing health insurance for a typical company.
What are disconnected customers going to do? Surely they won't cut off the entire US military and DoD by terminating that cash cow of on premises.
But the only way that Etsy can measure any decision they make is with the number of transactions from which they receive a cut. If they allow mass produced items to be sold that increases the number of transactions, then that's the bottom line numbers they care about. If they force a rule that it has to be small batch hand crafted type of items to be sold, then the per transaction numbers go way down. Bean counters and stock analysts don't like those numbers, and they are after all the people any public corp are most concerned.
The thing is, you used to be able to buy a ticket from, say, Lisbon to Copenhagen, from any ticket booth, and just take any reasonable train on the (multi-day) route. But nowadays many national railway companies use yield management, so that original price is now the full price which is a lot higher, and actually you simply can't buy such tickets anymore, you must use booking systems that just cannot book all trains. In some countries such as France and Spain reservations are now obligatory for long-distance trains.

At some international ticket booths you can still book complicated trips, but if you try to book them yourself over the internet, you will have to cut up the trip into separate parts which are treated as separate trips for the travel guarantee, so if you miss a connection due to a delay beyond your control you don't have the right to take the next train if it's not part of the same trip.
>but trains are also directly subsidised to the tune of billions each year. The rail network just costs a ton to build and maintain.

Just wait until you hear about how subsidised the infrastructure for cars and trucks are.
> Acceleration is a vector.

True, but which kind of acceleration are we talking about?

A cat in the "zero g" in the experiment described in the video has no coordinate acceleration relative to the Earth. Whereas a cat falling off a ledge to the floor does have coordinate acceleration relative to the Earth.

But both cats have zero proper acceleration--they are both weightless. (Air resistance will become significant at some point during a fall from a height to the floor, but cats are heavy enough that I don't think that would be significant in most falls where cats are observed to land on their feet.) And "zero g" means zero proper acceleration, not zero coordinate acceleration. So the GP is correct and my original comment was in error: cats in both situations are in "zero g" so that can't be what is causing the different behavior in the two situations.
dear lord who writes this garbage. WTF is ESG I have now read two articles and neither of them define it.

Though since Thiel does not like it ... it must be something that is positive and not something like his kind, that wants to drink blood of children.
I see. Something has gone awry. Updated link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220225145303/https:/www.ned.or...
Modern Monetary Theory is effectively dead.

The problem is that millionaires and billionaires consume the same amount of toilet paper as us. Taking away money from them doesn't actually change the upwards price pressure on a roll. You actually have to tax away money from consumers for it to have any work combating inflation - I would like to see who can possibly sell raising taxes across the board as a way of fighting inflation.
> The choices of plans offered by companies is far, far smaller than the choices available to me on the open market.

Maybe I wasn't searching correctly, but I was recently discussing healthcare and taxes with someone and briefly searched on the Healthcare.gov exchange to look at prices. There were only three PPO plans (where you can freely go to any doctor in network), and all three were HDHPs, all from the same company. There were many HMO plans, some HDHP and others with low deductibles, but often extremely small local networks and limited choice of both PCPs and specialists.

> This makes health insurance cheaper to the employer than to individuals.

One other thing to note in your analysis is that most large employers are not buying any insurance, but actually self-insuring (funding the claims out of their own pool of money). So the employers are actually acting as insurance companies for their workers, rather than simply buying and reselling commercial insurance.

There would be additional considerations beyond taxes in analyzing whether this type of insurance is more economically optimal, for example, the fact that each company has a distinct risk pool which may not be similar to the general population, depending on the company.
It works seem that those lower standards have no significant adverse effect. They only impact trivial stuff like aesthetics.
Another cylindrical rule is the Thacher Cylindrical Slide Rule. It's a cylinder with many rules marked out on it, that rotates in a set of fixed rules. All told it is the equivalent of a 66 foot long conventional slide rule.

https://www2.humboldt.edu/scimus/NorthCoastInst/ThacherCalcu...

I actually picked one up out of the garbage bin at the university I worked at. It didn't have an inventory sticker so they had to toss it according to the rules.
This is (partly) why I started using KDE's Kate as my editor. File access is all through a virtual io layer, which supports sftp amongst many others. And I've never switched away from it - long after that project - because it's "good enough".
And some come with dozens of man pages, several of which need to be combined to find the syntax allowed by certain commands (often also needing a help command)! OpenSSL is bad in this way.