skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not miss those people, but my wording was loaded and so the point got lost in translation. I implicitly captured them under b) "[...] it's dumb to buy estates where the price is set by people and institutions that have n times your own income/net worth", where dumb is a loaded term for your >"to the point where it no longer seems rational".

>But crucially, the presence of this group of people arguably turns the bubble into something else.

I agree with this, it's not a bubble in the sense of 2008. I said so in the comment you replied to! We're in the same boat here.

By the way: I'm precicely in that demographic. I just turned 30 and do well for myself as an employed consultant, but I wouldn't consider buying the dip, unless the dip is at least ~100% of the current market prices (which I don't see happening, but who knows). Going in debt for 30-40 years has zero appeal for me, it just seems like a terrible move. The counter-argument I hear from people my age group is always the same "but then you'll never own anything!" -- then so be it, whats the point?! Even if someone gave me a million Euros, I wouldn't spend 600k of those on a house and then another 300k on renovations, that seems like a terrible waste of resources. With that kind of money, you can buy three small companies in Germany, or stop worrying about retirement, etc. Buying estate = de facto being in debt for the entire career and then some, plus having to pay all repairs, anything. I don't see how that would ease my life at all. If someone wants to give me a house, nice, but buying a house just for the sake of doing so reminds me of a signature I often read on market-ticker.org -- leave the rats race to the rats.
No, the tool presented is to copy real production data down to a test instance with support for anonymization, subsetting, etc. That's a very different approach than tools for creating fake data.
> as a country thinks a lot more critically about political things

... Did you miss the last election, where the far-right daughter of a noted neo-nazi faced off against a man who's only claim to electability was that he wasn't Le Pen?

France is not the most depressing political culture in the EU, but that's just because there's such tough competition.
"The head swapping task aims at flawlessly placing a source head onto a target body, which is of great importance to various entertainment scenarios."

I expected this to be about head transplantation surgery and was a bit confused, lol
Homelessness is mere reflection of massively risen drug epidemic. You cannot solve it simply by giving free housing etc. Even if you remove all homeless people today, you will see new ones arrive in short order.
> Everyone who wanted to be is vaccinated.

No. I'm saddened that you believe this. There are plenty of people ineligible for the vaccine, and many of them are age 5 and under.

The virus is most certainly winning, at least in it's current form. The direction we're all headed right now is that vaccinated or not you'll get it and we must assume everyone will because we stopped measuring. A more lethal variant would be catastrophic right now, as if the past two years haven't been enough of a catastrophy.
In other (npi) words, the Other is the entity that we think about when we imagine how other people in general will think or feel.

I believe in (say) the validity of money because I think that shopkeepers will accept it. But shopkeepers also only believe in it because they think other people believe in it, and those people that the shopkeepers want to pay also think that other people believe in it, including me and the original shopkeepers.

We describe this state of affairs by saying that I believe in money since I know that the Other also does.
If you have a small set of really important data to protect that doesn't change regularly then you can always make it EMP proof by printing it out.
Indeed. It's possible that there's someone maliciously flagging your link as spam, but to a great extent Facebook and Twitter etc do not think deeply beyond "does this look like spam / is this getting reported as spam a lot".

Try setting up a publiccode Facebook page and see if that gets flagged.
It's easy to block all spam, if you don't mind also blocking legitimate mail. What's harder is being confident you're not blocking any legitimate mail. I'm glad you've managed it :).

I have Bayesian filtering behind DMARC checks and a few other DNS and RBL checks. Still not perfect -- for all folk talk of the difficulties getting mail accepted by the big providers, a surprising number of companies still don't have matching forward and reverse DNS records :P.

One principle I follow is that I don't drop anything. Every message will either be rejected or delivered, with a narrow band of SpamAssassin scores that delivers to a spam folder.
I'm suddenly reminded of traffic. For a long time, governments tried to fight traffic congestion by adding more lanes. Traffic is highly parallel, so this should work, right? But it doesn't. Traffic grows to fill up those additional lanes and you're stuck with the same congestion.

Here, better traffic design is necessary. And room alternative, more efficient forms of traffic (public transport, bikes).

I do think nursing (and many similar fields) do need to hire more people, but I also suspect they have to redesign how nurses work. Less overhead, more focus on the core of their work. Streamline the processes, especially the administrative side, and not expect them to fill in for many other kinds of work at the hospital. Get separate specialists for that.
> Nobody can be sure of the numbers.

Naturally, but the other estimates I’ve seen — even recently — put him between 70 and 274 billion. A quarter to a 14th of what you’re suggesting. While anything over about 2 billion is uncountable in a human lifetime, the lower number does not feel entirely unbelievable, in the way a trillion does.
> Our kids are going to live in an objectively shittier world, to say nothing of their children.

This is complete horseshit. They will have better medical technology, better housing technology, better food technology (people ate like shit 50 years ago let alone 100 years ago), etc.

It’s only “objectively shittier” if your objective has nothing to do with human life and is mainly focused on biodiversity.
As a spare-time writer of (self-published) German science fiction novels[1], I believe I have something to say about that. I don't believe that what you say is true in general.

For me writing is effortless and a lot of fun, and I believe that it is effortless for most writers who are far more successful than me. Stephen King could have never written so much so persistently without thoroughly enjoying it. If you don't enjoy writing and have to continually force yourself to do it, then writing might not be the right thing for you. I believe this is true for any work you do - if you have to force yourself every morning to do it, then you haven't found the right profession yet.

That being said, the examples you give sound familiar and don't contradict what I say. Especially in larger projects, there will always be a point when it becomes a chore and it's becoming very hard to finish a book. It's reasonable to assume that every author has such moments. I remember J.K. Rowling once said she had this moment with the 5th Harry Potter novel - which is very understandable, writing so many novels within the same universe is dreadful and tiring. But, again, the same is probably true of almost any other activity. There is no work without some downsides and some occasional chores. For me, it's editing and marketing, which is why my novels are poorly edited and barely marketed.

There is another thing worth mentioning: Successful creative professionals of all kind tend to over-emphasize the work aspect of their profession. They're fighting an image of being lazy against people who do not understand creative work. For example, the maximum number of hours anyone could write on a novel per day is 6, but 4 or less hours is more realistic. Some of them might even fight their own guilt for being successful, believing or knowing they could have improved their works by spending more time and being more diligent. In summary, you shouldn't take claims about "hard work" in these professions too seriously, it's mostly a defense against the many people who will be openly hostile to anyone successful due to envy.

[1] https://talumriel.de
The rates usually don't go up because the lender got greedy and felt like screwing you harder. If the mortgage rate doubles, that's because your money is now worth less than it used to be. This also likely means that your income is going to grow soon enough, so you wouldn't have much trouble repaying your loan. While your remaining loan is still nominally $N, if you took a loan today for the remaining part using the paid-off equity as collateral, you could likely get twice as much and the lender would proceed accordingly.
Zadie Smith lived in New York from the late 2000's to 2020.
> The idea to get rid of having to trust centralized organizations might sound tempting, but it doesn’t work: Blockchains don’t get rid of “trust”, they just change, who has to be trusted.

> More precisely: The trust in institutions controlled by humans and bound by established laws and rules is instead replaced — by unconditional trust in the infallibility of code (“in code we trust” is a popular phrase in the scene). As code is written by humans, it’s seldom actually infallible.

> But even if all code was without mistakes, blockchains can’t do anything against threats like scams, fraud, hacking of devices with keys for the blochain or just plain old typos in a coin transfer.

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

"The perfect solution fallacy is a related informal fallacy that occurs when an argument assumes that a perfect solution exists or that a solution should be rejected because some part of the problem would still exist after it were implemented"
Exactly. I don't agree with Chomsky about much lately, but he sure is right about postmodernism. It's nothing but posturing and obscurantism.

When my fellow countryman Žižek says something interesting every now and then, I always view it as a broken clock being right 2 times a day.
Be aware that particular feature automatically add's -hook to each smybol on the left. Most hooks in emacs are named xxx-hook or yyy-hook so you put:

:hook ((xxx yyy) . <triggered function>)
If this is a comprehensive list then I’m perplexed by the medical subspecialties presented. GIM, family med, psych, and OB/GYN. So cardiac surgery, neurosurgery and other procedural subspecialties of which there are more than a few practitioners in SF don’t make the list? Or did I miss something in my cursory read?

It only makes sense to break out subspecialties if the list purports to be comprehensive.
The actual source code:
https://github.com/ramensoftware/windhawk-mods/blob/main/mod...
Thanks. There was another discussion around this topic only a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31149427
Fascinating that the body language really shines through. Also the posture is not fixable and it sort of stands out. And why the gray hair suddenly? :)
I wonder if publishing a story about how specifically hackers stand up to authoritarian regime undermines their efforts.
> When 90 (?) percent of people simply lack the buying power to participate in the real estate market, but the other 10% happily sell each other estates, that's not a bubble, the real estate market just stopped interfacing with the vast majority of the population.

This. And it was not only happening in the housing market, but also in a few other markets such as arts and certain jewelry.
What happened during the last ~10 years is that the huge loads of money pumped into the financial system by central banks ended up with only a select group of people, who just got richer and richer and were looking for ways to spend or invest their excess money. And that caused an inflation in the markets where they liked to spend it.
They can ship in synthetic ammonia from the tropics to burn, as they do oil and gas now, or get power via transmission lines and synthesize and bank it locally; or some of both.
Ignorantly pushing random solutions because "we need more trying" can be so much worse than not helping. North Korea and many of these regions pose huge geopolitical problems. The potential gepolitical outcome of a misguided "solution" isn't just that we "will help no oppressed people ever", it is mass destruction & conflict on a global & industrial scale.

Deniability based on technicalities and plausibility is really tenuous at the geopolitical level and I think it's outrageously harmful to suggest ignorantly fucking with it, as if the leaders in North Korea and their Chinese allies give two shits about plausibility when they see a coordinated cyberattack from the US aimed at their systems.

If you have no idea what you're talking about, please don't try. You are not playing with VC dollars. Otherwise, the US govt is hiring and they're looking for thoughtful and discreet people.
> if we define "labor" by "spent money"

And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon. This is obfuscating a useful distinction - labour is stuff you do, spending money in the hope of a return is investment. It's like trying to redefine landlordism as labour because you do occasionally have to do some work.

> Moreover, they can be extended by bank investments or Bitcoin investments, extending their "passive"-side

???

The word everyone is looking for in regard to royalties is not passive or active but deferred income. Writing a book is labour, regardless of word games, and it produces a capital asset - intellectual property - that you can either sell all at once or over a period of time.

> the author doesn't need to promote his books

This is rarely true of books. It sounds like he's found an under-served niche. Once upon a time you didn't have to promote apps in the app store, either.
Yes. It's a matter of national interest. Because Japan is a relatively small, cut off archipelago nation with very few natural resources. It needs to be able to generate its own energy with less raw material imports or it won't have as much power as it needs. It doesn't have tons of space it can afford to pollute. Japan wants to be able to use large amounts of renewable electricity to generate tons of value that it can trade for materials it needs to build and maintain renewable energy facilities, and for food and goods. The stuff about the environment makes for really good, convenient PR and possibly revenue stream of external funding for initiatives. If Japan can game the international green system and pull out of this population nose dive without importing an unmanageable demographic collapse into itself, it will become a superpower again and have another shot at world domination, this time through imposing world peace. If it comes to our world, Pax Japonica will be a sterile, depressing, conformist utopia where we pretend to work all day, then surround ourselves with bright colourful toys to feel awake, while drinking ourselves to sleep. It will be too much civilization; business as usual.

Edit: Hey, look, somebody wrote a book with the latin thing I said as its title, whose contents I probably summarized the thesis of without even reading.

https://www.amazon.com/PAX-JAPONICA-Resurrection-Takeo-Harad...
Ah yes, time to break out this old classic: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Sending email should be free
Apple is culling apps from the App Store that haven’t been updated in two years
Not only that, it’s popular to get “tracker” mortgages. It’s the Bank of England base rate plus a fixed rate. So it’s never actually fixed. My “Lifetime Tracker” is BOE+1.29% for 25 years. So it’s varied from 1.39% to 2.04% total charge in the last 10 years. If you bought a lifetime tracker today it would be BOE+2.7%. 20 years ago they were as good as BOE+0.25%
Elon Musk’s Twitter Buy Exposes a Privacy Minefield
I can hear my author friends gathering to beat you to death with hardbacks at the suggestion that writing a book is "doing nothing".
I would say that the 'mirror stage' is a clear and concrete idea (not necessarily clearly and concretely elucidated by Lacan) which, while it doesn't have the same status as a scientific statement about the mind, provides a helpful illustration, with some explanatory power, of how the 'self' is formed.

(Note that when I say 'a scientific statement about the mind', I would regard very little of the scientific discipline of psychology as meeting this standard. In most cases it is also far less interesting than psychoanalysis.)

Of course, many people are content that they are able to live with a 'sense of self', without worrying about how it is constructed. That doesn't mean that it's not an interesting, useful or accurate idea.
Rocket Mortgage has a pretty modern stack, and they make good use of third party API’s to aid their processing. There’s an entire fintech ecosystem that are providers for mortgage providers like Rocket Mortgage that could be impacted if this turns into a trend.
Apparently this "critical property" is not so important to all the people who use relative entropy as a generalization to a continuous distribution defined on a space with an underlying measure.

Why would they care about arbitrary transformations mapping points in the space to other points in the space?
i think it's comparable to .us

neither are commonly used, but neither are spam domains
Millions of people live in such regions and importing energy also creates issues that are visible in the events today.
Hah fair enough. I wondered if it was a non-English spelling that was all :)
Angular resolution is all very well, but what about spatial resolution? Even from the same compass bearing, a noise coming from a mile away sounds very different than someone whispering in your ear.
I’ve seen a few articles like this and it seems odd to me. Why do people assume that their data is somehow more private when a company is public? Do they not realise the previous owners and likely lots of employees also had access to the same data?

How do you think the public would react if they knew more about the typical “act as user” permissions employees at tech companies have?
It amazes me how polarizing blockchain and cryptocurrency is. It is to black/white, love/hate. I really don't ever remember a technology that has created such a visceral reaction from people.

I personally, believe there is a quite novel concept behind the trust-less consensus mechanisms. It amazes me that computers can come to an agreement in a hostile environment--fully decentralized.

How that is put to use in practicality maybe debatable. But I think arguments like this tend to just throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Some quick napkin-math

I found 17 books where he was author and co-author, all books sum up to 2924 pages. I'm sure some of these books have lots of overlap - for example, I found three books which included "React hooks" in them, so I'd assume that he copy/pasted some pages. But for simplicity and worst-case scenario, let's assume 2924 unique pages, and subtract say, 200 blank pages and similar, so 2724 unique pages.

$160k / 2724 pages = $58.73 in revenue pr. page.

Let's further assume that he spent one hour on each page. Over six years, that's 454 hours / year spent in writing books. If we further assume that he wrote those during weekdays (260 / year), that comes to roughly 1h 45m a day writing.

And then you have to ask yourself - how much do you value your spare time? How much would it cost to hire you, in your free time, for almost two hours?

If we assume that you make $50 / hr. at your work, and work 8 hours a day, 260 days a year, that comes to $104k/year - which seems like a normal salary for IT professionals in the western world, at least if you have the knowledge enough to punch out xx books on various topics.

Let's use that as the opportunity cost for this calculation - i.e, had the average IT guy chosen to rather work than write a book, at $50/hr, the opportunity cost would have come to 2724 hours (because 1 hr/page) * $50 = $136200. These are the gross figures, we haven't even touched on things like taxes, third-party costs, and what not. And all the above assumptions could be wildly inaccurate - for all we know, the author could burn through these books in just weeks, being a very productive writer. Or it could have taken more time.

So I wouldn't call it "passive income" at all. The author clearly spent substantial amounts of time to write these books, and other parts of business. But one could argue that future earnings will be more or less passive, and those are the fruits of his labor.

EDIT: And as other have mentioned, while published books can earn you income "indefinitely", most books still have a finite product lifetime. At some point the sales will taper off, and become more or less negligible.

But if you enjoy writing, enjoy the idea of helping people, and then a lot of the above kind of becomes irrelevant. For some people, this kind of work is infinitely more rewarding than "regular" work, and the payoff is more than just monetary ROI.
This is so weird to me. I've always said I work 4 days, 32 hours, and that has almost never been a problem. I've once spoken to a prospective employer that really wanted 40 hours, and although the job sounded really interesting, 40 hours was not an option for me.

At all jobs, vacation time was almost never a problem. Maybe that's more the case now that I'm a freelancer, though. I just announce when I won't be available, and although we do try to plan things so that we never have the entire team gone at the same time (unless the company as a whole plans for that; Christmas breaks are often like that), they always accept my absense. It's really notifications, rather than requests.

But this is Netherland. We've got quite a different work culture than the US does.
Not just America but pretty much everywhere. I'm Finnish, and when I read about problems of American nurses it all seems pretty much identical to what is going on in my country, except maybe for some legal problems. Low pay, angry patients, lack of resources and bad IT seem universal.
The first argument boils down to "I need a central entity to fix mistakes". That does not necessarily apply to everything.

An immutable ledger sounds like something that could be useful. Myself I can't think of any uses besides crypto, but the fact that I can't find any use for a technology myself doesn't turn it into "dangerous nonsense"
Review: Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is a mandatory game for comedy fans
We used it at freewebs.com?? As a kid, I used freewebs all the time and it likely got me into web development as a career. Thank you very much.
Distributions have their fleet of buildbots to do the latter.
I love how negative HN is. $1k for a book and I would be over the moon

Author has a full time job, think of it as a hobby like a blog.

Instead of posting on HN daily , he wrote books and made $160k…that’s a full house in some parts…and that’s on top of a full time job so it’s pure savings…sans tax.

Not having a dig at you per se but the general nitpicking and negativity in some of these comments
I really don't wanna argue covid stuff online ever again, but let's have one final comment.

It is insane, because unless you plan to become a hermit kingdom forever, you can never keep something like the omicron strain out as long as the rest of the world exists. It will eventually get in. You will eventually lose control. The death toll will eventually be the same regardless.

All you do is delay the inevitable, while your policies are additionally causing internal societal damage (economical, psychological, political, etc) that rivals any reduced death toll you managed to avoid .