skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First up I do feel recognized.

What happens at my workplace is: we have a weekly status meeting and as annoying as it can be to listen to the same stories over and over my boss takes notice what we can easily achieve and where we struggle.
Then when one hits a roadblock our boss asks the person if they want or need help and when help is wished for or the time pressure to ship a feature is too imminent he assigns a person to help.
That person almost always is the perfect one for the task at hand.

And that is something I find very rewarding and definetly makes me feel recognized for my skills.
This seems like pretty useless ad-hominem. The US only got involved because of Pearl Harbor. At the time Long Island was "the eugenics capital of the world". The Third Reich got their inspiration from the US, although they thought the one drop rule went too far. Heck, in 1939 there was a Nazi rally in Madison Square Park. Do you think it was moral relativists going to that rally?

And truly the Nazis basically won WW2 given Operation Paperclip and all the massacres the US oversaw afterwards in Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, etc.

Sure we might not speaking German or wearing swastikas, but the American Eagle is currently financing genocide (let's use Yemen as the example here) and the only media attention we can seem to get is for Ukraine because their aggressor is our geopolitical enemy

I'm all for the sanctions against Russia before someone accuses me of whataboutism. However, I would like to see stronger international standards, as well as an ICC joined by the US. That requires the US to allow for international oversight and not have a Hague invasion clause. Are Americans willing to be held to the same standard as their enemies? If not just say might makes right and remove this pretense that it's about war crimes or human rights
The is a response to both comments above:

The meritocracy argument is usually brought up by people that are shitty colleagues. Personality is more important than being "good at your job", the latter improves with time and mentoring, the former usually doesn't.

We hire the person first and the skillset second.
This cat can communicate not only specific wants, but feelings and abstract concepts such as the passing of time. She also likes to plan her play and cuddles ahead of time and will remind her owner with ”later” if it’s not yet that time.
COVID is pretty much over, lockdowns and mask mandates are being lifted around the free world. However authoritarian governments will likely continue to use it as a lame excuse for years to come.
In Canada we ship oil via rail because the rail barons blocked the pipelines.
Yeah it would be so amazing to have a FOSS swipe typing keyboard. I still use Google KB for this with internet access limited.

I tried some options but they weren't up to scratch especially with multi language
Stop using those sites. You send the wrong message.
China is run by gangsters, essentially. They make Mexican cartels look like Mother Theresa on some levels.
I think documentation has to be tied to performance evaluation/salary, or at least not hinder your performance.

I worked at a large, well-known software company. There were very few comments documenting the code. Aside from the auto-generated comments based on function declarations, there wasn't much (any?) documentation.

I figured a big reason for this was people were paid/rewarded based on the number of bugs that they fixed, not on how much documentation was produced or other people helped.
I have good experience with Apple's keyboard for accuracy, but I do get frustrated routinely that it won't let me swear.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few
> What American expansionism are you referring to? It’s been a long time since the US gained more territories.

In Puttin's point of view, any new NATO member is yet another US territory to deploy weapons from.
My cat jumps up to pull down on the handle of closed doors that she wants to open, then pulls the slightly open door with her paw so she can go through. When the front door is locked she finds which room I am in and scratches at the door (I keep the doors closed) until I come, then encourages me to follow her to the front door so that I can unlock it for her.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/FM/Issues/2021/10/13/fis...

Downloads there include a 7+ mb .xlsx spreadsheet with extensive analysis of most countries' fiscal policies by the IMF. The April 2022 report will be out soon..
Ok, then I better understand. Thanks for the reply.

> the only thing I can think of is to just state up-front that video is not required

Ok :-) Hmm, maybe saying something like "appreciated but not required" -- since it's also good for team building, if the others get to see each others sometimes.

Sorry for the late reply
Paradox of tolerance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.

Paul Graham is intolerant of intolerants of intolerance.
I think to solve the paradox the way to go is not to solve by principle but weight on how much intolerance you are applying in order to prevent some other intolerance to someone else.

"Your freedom ends where someone else begins"

EXAMPLE

Person A: People from group X are more likely to be BAD at math.

Person B: Don't be racist/sexist/x-ist.

Person C (Paul Graham): Hey B, you are using x-ist but is the statement true or false? If the statement from A is true, then A should be allowed to say it without B calling him/her x-ist.

Well it depends on what's the approximation and opinionated consequences.
Maybe group X is worse at math by a small percentage 1% and A is removing numbers to make a larger generalization that loose its context and is just demeaning of the group X.
This is solvable by stating actual figures without implying consequences from it.
Person A should have said:
The study ALFA showed results where group X was 10% more likely to be BAD at math than group Y and Z.
I will pass you the link to the paper of the study so you can review it.
I want to disagree with him, that sometimes there is an unambiguous way for the compiler to solve such errors. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as anyone working with MATLAB will have experienced firsthand. Instead of trying to guess what the programmer meant, a compiler should just be a dumb machine that does what we tell it to do.
Argh, no, I meant the article itself <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978283>.
Patents also choke creativity, and arguably in a worse way.
If you can't remix existing ideas, how are you supposed to create anything useful if you need to come up with an alternative scheme to every component problem that has already been solved but is already patented.
Not quite, that's why 2FA is supposed to be a second factor, not just extra data in the same place.

If your second factor is on separate hardware then even total compromise of the first piece of hardware (the laptop containing the password database) is not sufficient.

The separate hardware could be many things. One is something like yubikey etc. Or a separate computer with the TOTP secrets, etc.
The United States already nationalized passenger rail-- Amtrak is the sorry result. We should privatize passenger rail, following the successful models in Germany and Japan. Amtrak should lose control of the nationalized Northeast Corridor and those timeslots awarded to bidding private companies.
I don’t think the joke is that funny but you can absolutely make a joke of this shape while having compassion for the homeless. If you strip away the context of Elon, it’s a joke poking fun at naive trivial solutions to homelessness, which if anything is mildly pro-homeless-people.
Hehe but the whole "i used to write poor sql for money, now i write even worse pandas code for 50% more money" thing wasn't
What about whatever Bayesian or Markov chain systems they used to use. At least they worked.
How do they know that there is a “mismatch” between their sex and an internal property? What is the internal property. What is the material reality that we can observe that corresponds to this internal property? FMRI and anatomical studies are not able to detect this internal property.
> I always wonder what the early c++ compilers looked like.

Pretty horrible. I attempted to use the E (education) release of cfront, and failed miserably (couldn't install it).

I then was forced to use the Glockenspiel compiler (based on cfront) and running on OS/2 (eek!) who's favourite error message was a core dump - this was at a training company, and the combination of very bad error messages and OS/2 was not popular with our clients.

The Zortech compiler was the first good one, and then Microsofts. Then IBM came out with a very good one on AIX.

I may well have got the sequencing wrong here - so long ago and far away :-)
> After all, American expansionism is what got us into this mess.

No, Russian expansionism is.

NATO expansion is among the many (some mutually contradictory) excuses Russia has give for it's expansionism.
> only thing that is accepted to pay US taxes.

That is also true of all sovereign currencies, for their own taxes. But not all countries get to borrow their own currency from foreign lenders. Hyperinflation in Germany and Zimbabwe happened because they owed money in other countries' currency.
I use Heirlooom-mailx. It is good enough, and does some things that are useful to me, and the other programs usually have stuff that I do not want.
Awesome share... A real original website designer!
Evernote started going south for me in 2014. I switched to OneNote and things were great, but it’s far more than I need.

These days I just use Apple Notes and it’s been flawless.

Notion looks neat but I’m wary of startups now. I’d probably use SimpleNote if I switched.

I also have a bunch of scattered markdown notes everywhere, wouldn’t be too hard for me to just sync a folder and use something like Typora to make adding images easier.
Seems a softer[0] touch than in 2020.

0: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818
"Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30921371

"Human Harvest (Film)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28313873
I think the author rather exposes his ideological biases in this paragraph:

> "The most notorious 20th century case may have been the Cultural Revolution. Though initiated by Mao to undermine his rivals, the Cultural Revolution was otherwise mostly a grass-roots phenomenon. Mao said in essence: There are heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them. And that's all the aggressively conventional-minded ever need to hear. They went at it with the delight of dogs chasing squirrels."

A more balanced approach would have included the rise of authoritarian fascism in Germany as an example of the persecution of the heretics, namely any who opposed the power of the Party or questioned the validity of the 'untermenschen' concept that relegated so many groups - Slavs, Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents to 'unperson' status. Indeed, Hitler's acolytes - like Mao's - also 'went at it with the delight of dogs chasing squirrels.' A rather popular book was published about this phenomenon that's worth reading, called "Hitler's Willing Executioners."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/784848.Hitler_s_Willing_...

In any case, whenever a commentator chooses to exclusively focus on fascist atrocities or communist atrocities when examing '20th century atrocities', you can be sure they have a severe ideological bias and are hardly honest interlocutors. In this context, 'x-ist' could refer to either communist or fascist, although I suspect the author is implying 'racist' or perhaps 'classist'?
No, because "they" isn't gender-specific.

When used as a singular it’s the pronoun for people that identify as non binary. You are absolutely misgendering people but you get a free pass because contra fosefx this whole pronoun thing is about power and who has it, rather than universal respect.
> America has a decent rail network

According to what metrics? For example my country has over five times greater length of railway network per unit of area. For electrified rail, which is increasingly important for sustainability reasons, that advantage goes up to a factor of 200 (!).
> Also it is no longer power that metes out punishment

There are different types of power, and what I think we're seeing is that whip traditionally those different types of power have rested in the same individuals, that's not so true anymore.

Financial and political power is still mostly where it's always been. Social power has been democratized far more and far more quickly in recent years, to the point that those same groups that have the financial and political power no longer mostly control it.

I think the mercurial appearance of how that power is wielded is also easily explained. Like any revolutionaries that take power, they are often unrestrained in it's use as they are not used to the problems of wielding it.

Whether the status quo can ever develop into a more restrained arbiter if social justice remains to be seen. As long as the young are the majority of the social scenes used in the decision process (the social networks of the moment) I doubt it, but the demographics of these networks are shifting year by year and those that have been using them longer are learning the trade and solidifying their bases, and those ones making enough money to also join the other power structures. Perhaps in another decade or two this will just be viewed as another period of large change, like civil rights and woman entering the workplace, and the social narrative will again be controlled like it traditionally has.

For most I imagine that thought has parts of both comfort and dread.
If you use master branch on git you are racist. Inexplicably the word is still ok in other contexts like chess master. Although maybe that needs to be updated too. What's the harm in changing the term to chess expert I ask you? Are you going to get so hung up defending the use of a word?
This may be as an effort to push back against Russian-backed paramilitary groups like Wagner, who have also recently gained notoriety in Ukraine. In Mali, they are helping to liberate the region as the French Colonialists withdraw. The problem with Africa seems to be that they'll sell themselves many times over without really considering the consequences: after all, as China buys up more and more of Africa under the guise of a Belt and Road initiative, how will that jive with Russia, who presumably want to "liberate" the same natural resources that China want?

https://cybershafarat.com/2021/09/26/the-wagner-group-in-afr... For background.
Time limited "rent seeking" that feeds the technologists necessary to develop the technology. In the absence of IP businesses just rely on obfuscation to try to get the same effect, except now you don't have a patent application to read and can't take someone to court for stealing your years of research.
Damn entropy.
> only the Chinese people have the power to make changes to this regime

What makes you think they have any power at all? This is not what history teaches us about totalitarian regimes.
One party is currently torturing and murdering civilians, which tends to skew the conversation in a particular direction. Once Russia has withdrawn all troops from Ukraine we can discus behavior of other nations.
I had installed Swift Key after a year or two of Swype and it was a marked improvement. Many years later, there were days where it wouldn't accurately handle a single sentence without error or correctly predict a single word. Updates seemed to clear the learned history and reset its accuracy. The Microsoft acquisition seemed to kill any forward movement on it.

I switched, after much anxiety, to GBoard. It feels much like SK used to feel. It isn't awesome that it's a Google keyboard, but at least it's accurate and consistent.
I’m reminded of Philip K. Dick’s The Chromium Fence (1955):

’I’m not!’ Walsh shouted futilely. ‘I’m not a Purist and I’m not a Naturalist! You hear me?’

Nobody heard him.

— https://web.archive.org/web/20150419173332/http://american-b...
> I don't see how someone's year of birth is related, or important?

It's related because people are incredibly biased toward liking things "as they were" when growing up. I'd be more impressed by accounts of people growing up in a time before the one they are praising.
I've been a onenote user from its inception, desktop only.

I've never lost a note yet and have all of them since I started gosh whenever it shipped. It survived moving 4 companies offline until 5th forced me into syncing it to cloude one drive so that I can share it between 3 macs and 4 windows machines and vms.

An incredible tool that I can't do without.
By your framework, we can't assert that minds exist at all, let alone anything beyond like thoughts or feelings.

The internal property is called gender.
It would require you to study the financial statements of your central bank and yearly budget of your government to see how they are financing themselves.
To be clear, I have to explicitly switch language. It doesn't do anything automatically (which makes sense since it's a different alphabet).

But my hit rate with Gboard is staggeringly higher than apple keyboard. I wonder if we're using it differently, which is what is causing the difference in experience here.
Why should space be left up to NASA? Plus, as the others said, NASA has always contracted private companies for building the hardware. I also don't really see how "funneling away" as a complaint makes any sense, if the government spends money, it's obviously going to eventually be spent on companies to pay for goods and services, unless you advocate a model where the government replicates everything any company might ever do for them. What we should want is for the government to get the most bang-for-buck, which they have been getting increasingly more of from SpaceX.

We've spent much of the past 50 years since Apollo funneling money into aerospace giants like Boeing with very little to show for it in terms of efficiency. When SpaceX entered the launch market, the US was not particularly competitive with the rest of the world for commercial launches, Boeing and Lockheed had a duopoly and had grown fat on government money, with no serious desire to improve their rockets. Even today, we're at $80B+ invested into SLS+Orion to be years late and only capable of launching once per year at nearly $5B per launch.

Meanwhile, SpaceX earned nearly 60% of the commercial launch market on the back of its significantly lower launch prices, has returned US human spaceflight capability for much less cost than the competition (who still haven't delivered), has been responsible for paving the way for all the other 'new space' startups (setting legal precedents and getting entrepreneurs interested) and has allowed NASA to do more on several missions due to much cheaper launch costs, for instance:

- DART did not have to rideshare due to Falcon 9's dedicated launch price being lower than competition's shared price, eliminating the possibility of failure in case the new ion thruster design on it had issues

- Europa Clipper will not have to spend an extra $1B to make its delicate instruments able to handle SLS's rough ride and will not have to budget an additional $2B for an SLS launch

- Saving NASA the ~$4B extra that the less capable, more dangerous but more 'traditional' lunar lander design would've cost to make.

Then add in that due to Soyuz becoming unavailable and pretty much all other western rockets in the same payload class being fully booked and in a transition phase to their next generation, Falcon 9 is saving the US a massive amount of government money that would have otherwise been funneled to companies like Boeing in another 'blank check' type project like SLS.

Even considering future developments, as a direct result of their success with SpaceX, there's a big push from within NASA for future contracts for things like rockets and space stations to be fixed cost and partially commercially funded (with the hope that eventually these will be mostly commercially driven, where NASA only has to pay to be a tenant instead of paying for the entire thing from start to finish), again improving the cost effectiveness of space activity.
Let's take a concrete example. Google India L4 compensation is 82K USD[1]. For SV, it's 268K[2]. That's >3x right now.

And accounting for 40% taxes and 30% spending (~7K per month which gives you a super comfortable lifestyle even in SV) leaves you with 30% savings, or ~84K USD which is the entire pre-tax pre-CoL salary for the same kind of work in India. Numbers are even more skewed as you become more senior.

Now one may argue with Google being an outlier. But Google is an outlier in India as well and a lot of companies pay similar (>3X between SV vs India). SV is also not special in that Seattle or NYC will net you similar numbers.

Care to cite some hard data about your statements?

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
[2] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook&track=Softwa...
Even the absence of speech has also been described in those same terms. This category of rhetorical double bind is counterproductive to progress.
I wouldn’t make a _snarky_ comment not would I “snap”, but if 9 months in something hasn’t stuck that should have, I would absolutely communicate that (as well as helping with the problem). As in “here’s how you flerble the foobaz, but FYI I’m a little concerned that this isn’t something you’re comfortable doing by yourself yet”.

Pretending that underperformance is OK doesn’t help people - it’s the kind of thing that leads to them being put on PIP “out of the blue”.
There are 67 authors on the PaLM paper. Assuming average salary of $150k (probably a large underestimate for Google employees) that's $10M+/year in salary alone. Compute is a big cost factor for this project but it's not clear if it even dominates the total cost.

In the long run this type of research will more than pay itself back in benefits to Google. NLP underpins everything they do. It would be interesting to see how OpenAI API (GPT-3) is doing in terms of revenue. They're going for the more direct method of seeking value from a trained large language model.
It's not widely known. In fact, I'd wager if you'd tell a Chinese person about it, they'd simply refuse to believe your "Western propaganda".

Money is the real motivation here, as the harvested organs fetch quite the price.
I think you're exaggerating what qualifies as a "heresy". It's different from people thinking you're wrong, loudly disagreeing with you, or even not wanting to associate with you once your opinion is known. If we agree with Graham's definition, you need to be fired for saying them.
Real patriots use they own body temperature to heat the house.