skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1099 contractors handle all their own taxes iirc, but I guess you can’t be anonymous and receive a 1099? Guessing most of these actually pay in cryptocurrencies which puts the onus on the individual I guess, but if the individual is not paying taxes in the US that’s illegal. Will one get caught? Maybe, who knows, the IRS is fearsome.

I love the idea though, was reading the Delfillama one and sounds very intriguing, aside from the fact that the pay is minuscule for full time work, seems like pay is in crypto, and all the onus would be on the worker to deal with taxes and figuring that out, but maybe that’s not more than a 1099? I love the ideas here in general though.
What does 'overpaid' mean?

Businesses don't pay more than they have to. If a company offers 400k for a job it means they think the person is worth it. If not, the person will likely be fired at some point...

That's all there is to it in a free market, really.

Edit:

The conclusion is that either:

1. They know what they are doing, which means you will generate more value than they pay you whatever they offer (as mentioned I PaulHoule's reply below).

2. They don't. If you think the pay is massively inflated then enjoy it whilst it lasts, because it won't.
Not what I’m saying and I’m not saying you should buy lottery tickets as an investment.

The best-case scenario on $2 in lotto tickets is 100M. (Or whatever the jackpot is). Announced a few days after purchase. The worst case is 0. Announced a few days after purchase.

Best case scenario for equity is… 2x? 5x? 20 years later? Worst case is 0, not time bound.

The potential return per dollar for a $2 spent is better in lottery. The actual return when accounting for likelihood is different. $2 in the market will never make you a millionaire. But there is a non-zero chance in the lottery. It’s a very low chance the ticket isn’t worth $0 but it’s a chance that’s greater than 0.
Regardless of the philosophical debate of whether this should be the case or not, it is definitely not true in most places simply for existing legal reasons.
I would really like to see a model that includes demand curves. Or an academic study that includes nuclear as a possibility, instead of just looking at wind/solar/storage. So far I haven't come across either.

(But if we start charging a lot of electric vehicles at night, the demand curves will flatten out anyway.)
That's not what conservative means. My conservative hospital client recently downgraded to Windows 7! If you pay MS enough you get security updates no problem. Not to mention that even the less conservative are probably on Windows 10 LTSC where IE11 will keep running
If they’re in the US*
> Don't get me wrong, we are mostly on the same page w.r.t. salaries and what not.

That's fair. I do think managers have responsibility to their direct reports. The postdoc situation in th US isn't going to change as long as faculty and post-docs continue producing. So, quite seriously, the solution is for faculty and post-docs to collectively say "we can't get work done under these conditions". Otherwise things will just get worse.

> EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.

This is generous (but also fairly uncommon for post-docs). Good to hear that your uni provides retirement benefits.

> My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.

The huge difference is that post-docs are transitory and require uprooting one's life. $50K with the knowledge that you can buy a starter home is very different from $50K and knowing that you cannot buy anything because you will likely move in 2 years. This also has real human cost. See articles like this: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/postdocs-dilemma-when-g...
The cost overruns are inherent in the process. Actual cost is actual cost.

Really, actual cost is much more than reported cost, because disaster insurance and decommissioning are always omitted from cost accounting.
I wouldn't begrudge a SWE who makes $400K, especially if they live in California with their outrageous cost of living. Most workers in the US are woefully underpaid. Wage growth has been mostly stagnant since 1975 while productivity and profits trend ever upward.

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
Is this just another example of https://xkcd.com/927/ ?
Is there any plan to have effect types like in koka, where the effects that a function performs are visible in the type, and handling an effect eliminates it from the function's type?
What do you propose instead?

A state is always going to need a military to defend its stability and continuity from existential threats. Despite what the internet would have you believe, the world is a massive place with a vast diaspora of peoples with tons of different contradictory policy preferences. I don’t think we could give up preparing for the next fight if we wanted to.
Have you watched any of the Ukraine footage? Tanks are being blown up from bombs dropped from COTS drones. Longer range semi-autonomous drones seem to be the future.
Predicated by whom? The only entity to enforce Ukrainian constitution is Ukraine itself, not Russia.
I think there are many cases where your listed assumptions about each (passwords and fingerprints) are agreeable, but one important difference makes passwords often superior: ability to change after a compromise. If your accounts get hosed because someone else can enter your password, you can start over and continue using password-based authentication; if someone else can enter your fingerprints, you start over and must not use fingerprints for authentication.
Open source games can combat cheats with machine learning models
> scars you for life.

You could also say being poor in childhood teaches you how to be frugal. I regard this as a healthy habit and better discipline I wish I had with money (coming from a middle-class family).

Another way to look at frugality is just an aversion to spending money on whatever it is that society or mass media tell you you have to buy, an important and healthy attitude one can have, IMO.
Globally the potential pumped storage resource is far larger than would be needed. You might be confused by assuming the pumped hydro has to be on existing rivers.

http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
Because then the average user would say "I know I'm on Wi-Fi because Control Center says so, but nothing loads in {app that isn't a browser}". Or worse, "I joined a Wi-Fi network but my iPhone decided that it can't connect to the internet through that so now it's using my data plan instead without telling me[0]".

Windows and macOS pop up the default browser (or on macOS, a webview) with the captive portal when they detect one. iOS doesn't have windows, so if it wants to get the user to do the captive portal without them sitting there in confusion it has to pop it up. It could pop a notification, but if the user misses it (as one could, with all the notifications that come in these days), then they are stuck.

0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296 (which has kicked in for me sometimes when my LAN doesn't have internet for whatever reason)
> We've had enough of the european way of war.

So trying another region's way of war would be an improvement, then?
Good thing then that those people are working in a way for you to not be dependent on their whims.

(I still don't like the details, but it's absolutely an improvement.)
There is no such thing as "consciousness".

There is, however, free will.

Information complexity is a real and measurable physical quantity, and unlike all others it doesn't obey conservation laws.

The sigularity that happens when information complexity is out of control is colloqually called "free will".

(Someday maybe we'll be able to map information complexity the same way we now map cosmic background radiation. Now that would be a sight to behold!)
Doesn’t do a damn thing for me.
ESA's LISA continuing development
This is great feedback thanks and a very interesting point. Most laptops these days are constantly chatting towards the Internet, just have a look at wireshark! But, the local LAN tests are preceded by IPv4 and IPv6 Internet reachability tests (which the article mentions regarding only taking results from hosts that were concurrently online with dualstack lighthouse reachability. This test suite takes about 7 seconds total and records about 25-30 data points). If we re-run the test we could indeed let IPv6 go first or do them in parallel to account for any sleeping radios.
Cobalt already eliminated from half of new Tesla batteries: https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-b...
Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be riding horses.

But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).
Renewables + storage is the alternative to nukes. And, there is simply no contest. Nukes have been left far behind.
Man, words of wisdom. I’m stealing that one.
> The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.

Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at night? And what happens when it stops blowing as much as expected for a long period of time[0]? You still need baseline power generation for quite some time to come until those questions that, well, keep getting hand waved away are solved.

0: https://fortune.com/2021/09/16/the-u-k-went-all-in-on-wind-p...
Is there a good rundown of every piece of weaponry and its corresponding utility and strategy somewhere?

I'd love to update or correct my understanding of tanks, artillery, HIMARS, aircraft carriers, cruisers, littoral combat, submarine classes, F-22, F-35, AWACS, etc.
I really never understood this thing about Ubuntu as a minimalist OS for servers and embedded. Almost no matter what, it's going to be more bloated and complicated than just about any other flavor of Linux you can think of. Sure, it works, and there's the factor of familiarity, but just... why? Make Ubuntu the best desktop or mobile OS it can be. Without the original selling point that it fixed problems downstream from Debian and made install easier, what exactly is the point? Ubuntu does some things well, but they've never been good at keeping anything minimal.
Another internal politics fight a-la Basecamp
After reading about Penn and Teller’s desert bus game, I wondered why job simulators got any traction. 8 hour drive for 1 point….

https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2013/7/10/4510388/why-t...
Sure but, what about for instance bots on Twitter created to push all kind of agendas into our own country?
American romantic comedies have nothing to do with reality. As realistic as the beautiful people playing the leading roles being romantically unwanted.

There really is no "dating" part in America. You either go on dates or you are in a relationship. If anything, if you are "dating" someone it means you are seeing other people on other dates as well.

We really use the word "dates" to differentiate from interactions of platonic friendships. Still though this tends to be unspoken. It is not uncommon for one person to think they are on a "date" and one person to think they are just meeting as platonic friends.

This article I would imagine is saying 40% have had no romantic interaction with another person.
I am an Austrian living in Germany. If my nation would have exited the EU that would have massive effects on my life. So I don't buy into the premise that it has no effect on people in their everyday lives. Sure, for many this might just be about symbolism and things like access to the world's biggest single market, its regulations etc. But this matters. Scotland has a different relation to its London government within the EU than outside of it. Just think about environmental standards and worker rights. If I were a Scot I'd trust the EU more to do something good there than a UK government.

I am convinced there are (not just a few) Scots for which this would be similar.
Pumped hydro doesn't use up the water. It goes back and forth between the lower and the upper reservoirs. Some evaporates, for sure, but that's a tiny fraction of the water that would be evaporated cooling a NPP of the same power output.
It's hard to understand how "we" could not have prepared sufficiently. This conflict in Europe isn't a spur of the moment thing. Arguably it could have been in the making since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but even if you don't go that far back, then at least from 2014. It certainly didn't come out of the blue!

I'll make my comment more assertive: I think "we" (for almost any value of "we") prepared for this. Some assumptions were proven wrong, like it often happens with war. But a lot of it is playing out like many assumed it would, or at least, it's playing out so that some factions can observe what modern war fought with modern weapons looks like.
No it's not, most developed countries force their populations to accept immigrants to keep the population growing in order to prop up the "growth" economy.
You generally use peaker plants or backup fossil fuel or hydro for that use case, at this point in time batteries are used to supply power for a couple of hours at best. You need that backup power anyway for when the nuclear plant is out of commission for some reason.
W. R. Smith: Master Clock Builder
There's some truth to this. There's also some truth to this generation not being willing to make the sacrifices their parents did. Like those super expensive tiny home in LA were the American Dream that their forebearers moved across the country for. For whatever reason this generation is much less likely to do the same and move to cheap places with decent jobs.

Yes they have a point that it shouldn't be so hard and they shouldn't have to move across the country to scratch out a living. But I don't see how living in your parents basement is better. You can play the hand you're dealt while fighting to make it better for the next generation.
You're correct. I'll revise.
I can't remember where I read this but I think you need at least 16 people to have a genomically sustainable population
There will never be peace. If there are resources held without power, someone will take them.

The fact that the world is as peaceful as it is now is remarkable. It's because of MAD and the high cost of war.

What we revolt at is the industrial scale of modern war. But war has been with us since prehistory. Our ancestors killed, raped, and pillaged. Far enough back in time, and they even ate one another.

Look to nature. It evolved thousands of types of killing machines to harness the energy of other creatures. Lions eat wild prey alive. Hornets lay their larva inside live hosts so that they can feed. Orcas play with their food for sport.

Just imagine what happens when we get AGI or BCI.

It's easy to be pacifist and condemn war. And we should hope for that. But we also have to protect our sovereignty and safety, and that means maintaining an adequate defense with weapons, food, energy, and supply chain.

Our comfort comes at great cost.
To clarify, I don't think pseudonymous work is appropriate for all types of work. I'm not a maximalist. Much of my thinking currently is about pseudonymous work in the context that I've noticed it being done, which is largely in cryptocurrency. Of course none of the people in the scenarios you mention should be able to work those jobs.
Farewell to the Servant Economy
> Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring.

In many single player games, cheats are isomorphic to configurable difficulty options and allow you to tune the game to the challenges of interest.
RIP, and good riddance
For the USA, utility scale PV runs at a capacity factor of over 25% in the sunbelt and mid teens elsewhere. I suppose that may qualify as "often near 10%" but I think you are overstating it a bit, as really household PV is the only one that really is around 10%.
I remember reading an article years ago that said that lemurs finding their way to Madagascar is believed to have happened several times. Mostly due to the tendency of lemurs to live in trees and for trees to be washed out to sea.
Pressure washing is not a mundane chore. There's something cathartic about wiping away a decade's worth of grime in an instant with a stream of water powerful enough to cut your arms off.
ReasonML is now Rescript, and is still using the 4.06 compiler. I think the idea is to move ahead largely independently of Ocaml, and that a move to 5.0 now is probably seriously ambitious given the runtime overhaul.
I use Wayland, but I sometimes feel that the main Wayland developers lack pragmatism, and this lack of pragmatism causes confusion and fragmentation.
What would your current advice be for the Ukraine?
Crows are sentient. My dog is sentient. It seems to me that we will continually raise the bar on "sentience" until it starts to include aspects of "alive". But, I don't think that "sentient" should be synonymous with "sentient at the human level".

I'm reminded of Minsky's book Society of Mind. And of the vapid nature of most human conversation, which is largely driven by pattern matching various current topics and memes.

Does LaMDA have anything like an idle loop? What is going on when no one is interacting and it's not connected to external information sources? Does it have the equivalent of daydreams, or is it just blankly waiting? Is there a trace log?

It appears to have knowledge of its past and some concept of its (not fixed) future. I take it that these have not been specifically programmed as a pattern of responses to aspects of conversation.

According to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil is working at Google and is likely in the center of this, as his job description was "to bring natural language understanding to Google"[0]. It would be very interesting to hear his opinion, given his 2012 book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Later_life

[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/0...
> What would the incentive of healthcare providers to lower prices?

In case of life or death emergencies, your insurance or ambulance driver would send you to a reasonably priced doctor, and doctors that charge unreasonable prices would go out of business. But my guess is that life or death emergencies do not account for most doctor visits.

> Also blaming "corporatism" is basically just a meme at this point, because it is just used by libertarians when someone criticizes capitalism. Its the same when communists say "true communism has never been tried".

Well, I don't feel like arguing about semantics. Feel free to call the problem I described however you like.
What’s your new distro of choice?
Yet, waste disposal is the smallest of problems nukes pose.
It's being done in Finland and Sweden [1] just fine, and for reasonable cost. NIMBY is a big problem but once we figure out how to solve that in the USA like Finland did, then it is basically a solved problem.

[1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html
Fire Red/Leaf Green using RetroArch + NetPlay?

Alternatively, check out PokeMMO. It's basically a multiplayer Pokemon game built on the roms of the original games (supports gen 1, and 3-5). There isn't a native Switch build though so you'd need to dualboot Android or Linux if you wanted to make that happen.
The problem here is that the most favoured hypothesis currently is "there is nothing there that can be discovered with any accelerator that can be built using less than 80% of the world's GDP over the next 50 years." And all the valuable "nothing" we currently find just supports the hypothesis and that there is no point in formulating additional hypotheses.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Clap: The Clever Audio Plugin
If you look at the current crash on a Log chart it's not as bad as the 2018 crash was (yet?).

I personally don't hold any crypto and don't care much for it either way, but it seems reasonable that companies that fundamentally believe in it (as opposed to riding the wave and buying football stadiums) would be in it for a long run and hopefully have what it takes to survive a serious crash.
Exactly what happened to Netscape, just that Netscape wasn't nearly as entrenched (their market share fell from 70-90% in 1996 to about 0 in 2002).
It’s not just frugality. Being “penny wise and pound foolish” and being risk averse is a huge drag on one’s financial opportunities.
> The counterpoint there is, tail calls are just rewrites for looping constructs, as Guido admits in point 3

Except they're not. Here are some functions using tail-calls:

checks = {
'odd' : lambda n: False if n <= 0 else checks['even'](n-1),
'even': lambda n: True if n <= 0 else checks['odd' ](n-1)
}

These aren't a direct translation of loops, for a few reasons:

- Loops are statements, which can't be used in lambda expressions

- To use statements, we would need to define named functions (using `def`), but that too is a statement

- The names introduced by `def` would need to be unique, to avoid clobbering any existing names. This may require a fresh scope.

- We would need to inline each function's logic into the other

- We would need some intermediate state (separate from the argument 'n') to keep track of whether we're up to even or odd
Sure, if we have all our electricity produced through non intermittent sources we don't need grid storage. EVs charge from the grid and drive around just fine. Nobody doubts that.

But if we are going to predominantly use intermittent energy sources we'd need massive amounts of grid storage. Delivering this through batteries is not feasible. We need to conserve battery supply for things that cannot be directly powered from the grid, like vehicles. It's too precious to be squandered on grid storage
It's likely that there's no real way to solve this without a trusted associate, but it has to be an associate you'd literally trust with everything in your life.

Then you can give them access to 1Password or similar in some way.
I think you're probably right, elbigbad. I'm hoping to learn from organizations about how they're handling this, and then share, so we can create best practices. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Really means a lot.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31755603

Note non-utility scale solar is 75% of the installed watts, too-- so you have a huge share of it pulling towards that 10-12% number.
If fossil and biofuel had to insure against air pollution health effects they directly cause (8 million deaths/yr according to WHO), and climate change, then clean/carbon-free nuclear fission would absolutely dominate today.
When I applied to Kraken I told the recruiter to send me the coding assessment on a Friday but I received it over a week later on a Sunday evening
> By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.

In other words, IPCC counts nuclear as "renewable"?
PV can be used to desalinate sea water as well as pumping it up to the top of the reservoirs. It's also possible to extract energy from fresh water as it mixes with sea water to improve the system efficiency, but I don't want to even guess if that's better or worse overall than just cleaning the water and reusing it.