skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure that could work, but it looks like 5x the complexity and political will required.

I can't speak to the political will, but in terms of complexity the inverse is true: a universally-applicable LVT and universally-applicable UBI is far less complex for everyone involved than trying to navigate a bunch of ad hoc taxes and exemptions.

> Also, I'm not fully sold on UBI, because I haven't heard a convincing argument on why it wouldn't lead to persistent inflation.

It leads to inflation when

1. it's funded through government moneyprinting instead of a solid tax system, and/or

2. it gets captured by landlords who jack up rents in response to the new demand

LVT rather explicitly and directly fixes both of these problems; it provides a maximally-fair and maximally-efficient tax revenue, and it feeds land value increases back into the tax revenue (and therefore UBI disbursements) instead of letting landlords capture it. It's a self-balancing system with no room for inflation to happen (at least not through either LVT or UBI).

> we want people to stop speculating on houses and use them for living.

Which is yet another thing which LVT explicitly and directly addresses. Specifically:

> Assuming we can agree on the premise, tax the behavior we want to disincentivize as directly as possible, be clear about why we're doing it.

The behaviors we want to disincentivize are land speculation and rentseeking. LVT is the most direct disincentive to both, and we Georgists ain't exactly shy about that being the key reason why we believe LVT to be necessary for a free and equitable society; the economic properties are just a nice bonus :)
I'm pretty skeptical (and that's putting it mildly) of any website that uses affiliate marketing links. I can't see how objectivity can survive in that environment.

A concrete example is frequent flyer/travel blogs. I vaguely know the guy who runs the UK's largest one, I've met him in person several times, fairly nice bloke. He's worked very hard to build his site, publishes high-quality content, and is often the first to write about new places and routes of interest. His site has a thriving forum and allows comments on his posts.

He also pushes credit card offers and his site is littered with affiliate links.

Hmm, you say, that's OK, it doesn't necessarily mean he's lost his objectivity.

Except, his articles will say that the best way to book flight or hotel X is via offer Y (coincidentally in affiliate scheme Z, which is where the "book now" link sends you to). Then someone in the comments will pipe up to mention an alternative cashback route that is objectively better. He will delete that comment and any replies to it. So those who aren't aware of what's going on believe his article is the objective truth, and keep feeding the beast by clicking on his affiliate links. They miss out on all the better deals because they involve booking in ways that no-one's allowed to mention on his site.

This has happened over and over again. To me, affiliate marketing is basically a cancer.
It is an interesting comparison, but if you want to be fair to him, it would make more sense to make generous assumptions for the energy cost of a piece of paper, rather than guessing at a max.

The solar power for the pi -- we could be generous to him again, and say that it is hypothetically possible to power either setup with solar, although there is something to be said for the fact that he has direct control over what he plugs his pi into.

On the other hand, a chalkboard could be used for first drafts.
Honestly if it weren’t so depressing I’d enjoy the schadenfreude of watching Californians sacrifice one sacred cow - science (economics), for another - their social mores.

I’m constantly amazed by my friends who can get into the minutiae of Covid epidemiology or climate science, can’t or won’t embrace the most rudimentary economic concepts and principles because it conflicts with their social beliefs
So to make things clear:

A junior is an engineer that has less than 2-3 years experience professionally, and about the same time building and learning how to code by themself on their spare time.
An Intermediate engineer is a Junior engineer with a good attitude - that says: I am still earning, and I am humble, and I listen more than I talk.
A Senior Engineer Has 10+ years of experience coding, and developing solutions.
He has navigated all the corporate BS, politics, and quit several teams of arrogant Junior con artists, or poor project managers - and is tired of all this BS. A real Senior engineer can code the entire solution by himself in 6 months , instead of a team of 5 juniors over 2 years.
A real senior engineer - worth 10x the salary of a junior, and at least 5 time the one of his direct supervisor - for one reason:

You can remove everyone in the product team that doesn't have at least 5 years of experience developing code. And you will have better results at delivering your product.

In your case, you probably will end up with zero employee.

Now how much money are you offering this Senior engineer?
Will you pay him/her the equivalent of the whole team you just fired? Or just advertise a "competitive (LMAO) " 170k$ package with amazing bonuses...

Which is like what.... only 40% more than the Junior that costs more time than it actually saves?

Maybe start respecting what it means to be a performant senior engineer - Most of them died of depression, burnout - or jumped in the management wagon - because they were too tired of corporate BS and saw no points in even remotely trying to deliver technical solution in an environment where they don't have decision power - while at the same time - nobody in the hierarchy above (and under them) slightly understand the blueprints.

When you realize the value of this rare person, you can think of multiplying the salary package by at least 3.

Then, you can do your interview rounds.

The heck! if I ever want to work in a tech team again - that either will be at a market salary (understand getting paid 5 times less than what I technically worth) for an ethical projects - which is rewarding for my soul and self respect - OR - I will get a 500k$/y for a basic coder job at Google/FB/etc.

Maybe you are not looking for a senior engineer, maybe you are looking for an intermediate one.

If you come to hire a senior engineer at that salary, be warned: he's not a senior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning
Yes, I am aware of Org-jira, but at the time, I chose to make my own wrapper around go-jira. Unfortunately, I don't remember anymore why exactly I selected that path instead of extending Org-jira package. Perhaps that's a good argument for "every programmer should have a blog". Maybe if I had one, I'd write about the reasons.

I have no doubts that if I ever get to work with Jira again, I am definitely doing it in Emacs (or via some other way that works for me). I am a software developer, not a power user, not a weak user, not an A/B testing subject. If a software vendor forces me to use their product inefficiently because "customers don't know what they want", I am either hacking my way around it or deleting that crap. But I must admit that sticking to this principle is getting harder every day. There's way too much crap now.
I had never made that connection, but I think you're right. It really is the professional victimhood that grates on people.
My favorite one is a wondergel, which has since been bought by purple:

https://purple.com/seat-cushions

It's pretty heavy but super comfortable.

There are also inflatable ones you can get that are way more portable but also way less comfortable
I wonder if a lower cost service like VPNs could reasonably create an “endowed” account: basically pay enough up front that when invested, the returns on the up front cost are about the same as the monthly cost. If you’d need to make €60/yr, you could probably achieve this with a one-time €1,500 payment. Does it make sense for anyone to pay that much up front? Maybe not. But for people that REALLY want to see the business model succeed and/or are way too wealthy considering their mental laziness, adding an option to pay a totally absurd amount once and then forget about it might be useful, even if that payment is way higher than any normal person would pay.
For cycling related stuff I like DC rainmaker. He is mostly positive but at least he actually uses the equipment to review it and does a deep enough dive to let me form my own opinion.
That's not ideal. I wonder what the wet bulb temperature was recorded at
> When you're hiring an accountant, do you give them 4h take-home assignments? How about hours of interviews with your accounting team to suss out their accounting skills and critique their style? I mean, how DO you determine if they're real accountants or one of these fakers I've heard so much about that can't even do some simple books?

I've been at two startups, and both gave the accounting candidates take-home tests. Not an accountant, but on some interview loops.

Edit: Im not advocating for take homes, just noting that they exist for accountants.

> Or how about lawyers? Do you ask them to write up a fictional legal brief or some boilerplate that the rest of your legal team can scrutinize to see if they're an A player? How about a multi-day interview just to make sure you've asked all the tough legal questions? No? Then how can you know that they're not going to drag your fragile company down with their poor performance and gasp have to be fired! The horror!

This is my former career. Having take home tests would absolutely be an improvement over the legal hiring process.
Am I the only one thinking this thread should be immortalized as the ultimate example of how poorly HN readers read things before shit-posting about articles? Sigh.

A) He says in the SOURCE not the published, in literally the third paragraph.
B) Count the damned sentences in the first handful of paragraphs. 2,3,3,1,4. He's clearly not saying you should do the stupid one paragraph per sentence nonsense in the published article.

This is a great idea for those of us who like writing prose in vim. Will adopt!
> How on earth does that mean "companies have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs"?

The fact that there's draft.js, and a myriad of other existing editor libraries out there already, all of which could've been contributed to instead.

If a startup chose to base their technology on a library that is released by a major corporation, they face the risk of getting "rug pulled" (or the library updates incompatibly and now you're locked in either to using the old version, or painful upgrade to the new version).

Of course, they don't have to choose to use such a library, but if they don't then there's a community of people who then questions them on why they are spending time replicating a technology.

The point is, if a startup chose to use this library, they face the risk of having to expend time keeping up in pace (and associated cost of doing so) with facebook.

This equivalent scenario exists in someone writing against libraries released by microsoft on windows, and that's what spolsky is complaining about.
You're not thinking things through which is sadly pretty typical of most people.

Let's create a scenario where the changing of an icon which is visible on your phone to anyone around you might actually present a danger in a certain country.

What if your app changed to have a gay pride flag and one of your users lived in an extremely homophobic country where any signs of support of homosexuality could actually result in fines or even jail time?

The poor user (Who may or may not agree with your ideology) who has been using your app for months has no idea that your icon is literally going to change without their knowledge or approval.

But you didn't think of this scenario, did you?
You make a good point about discarding the source of random noise that the one-time pad is being applied to, and just focusing on the thing that's generating that one-time pad.

But I still don't know where to draw the line and how to justify it.

If that source of random noise mapped to a Turing machine running consciousness.exe for a short period of time by sheer chance without a one-time pad being applied to it by an external observer, would that classify? If we observed that this mapping held true by sheer chance as we observed additional bits in this random noise source, what about then? Does it make a difference that it's a random noise source that happens to be corresponding to a Turing machine for a period of time, and not an "actual" computer? And if that matters, what about the point that actual computers aren't perfectly deterministic, either?
They’re just mad he’s a crypto billionaire
Tangent: You might appreciate the premise of "harbinger customers"[1]. The theory is that there actually are consumers who are a bit out of sync with the collective and do indeed consistently value/buy products that lose out.

I suspect I'm a fellow harbinger. I thought Apple was cool in the 90s and that Microsoft was on to something in the 00s-early 10s (including Win8/Phone), so I'm at least a solid 5+ years off (or, as a positive spin, simply much too early).

[1] https://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/harbringer-of-doom.html)
Oh yes. Mac OS X started doing that in Mavericks as well
Source?

That's a highly rural ZIP Code whose principle town is home to Grinnell College.

That hardly strikes me as likely to be a consistently high-crime area, most especially of violent crime.
> You left out the Senate, which is split 50/50 and likely won’t be shortly.

While you are correct in that the Republicans have a good chance of flipping the Senate, my claim was about non-democratic institutions.

I think it's fair to count the Senate as a democratic one. Since the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment [1], Senators are directly elected.

> Not to mention the federal judiciary.

I'm not sure about that. According to Ballotpedia [2], 403 of the current Article III federal judges were appointed by a Democrat president, while 391 were appointed by a Republican.

> If you want to stick to soft power, we could talk more about that. But if you want to include hard power, then your argument holds no water.

That's probably the root of our disagreement. Soft power is still political power. Tocqueville had warned us about soft despotism. [3]

One test to determine who's in power is to see whose values are more dangerous to make fun of.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the...

[2]: https://archive.ph/r4f5t

[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_despotism
And lets face it, none of the other platforms ever had a Guru Meditation Error
In Britain they send people to jail for jokes.
There’s a Philip K Dick line that goes - “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”.

Reality shaping is like that - but coercive and in reverse. How much do I need to nudge your perceptual world with ubiquitous, desirable lizard-brain augmentations before you stop believing in reality?
Feedback Assistant is not a support channel. It also is not a new name for Radar. You can find support channels under “Requesting Support”: https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

You are not limited to 2 technical support incidents per year. You can purchase more. I think it’s pretty fair.
The upside is, this is literally the answer! Just remove this step and the rest of the hiring process is more or less fine.
The picture Brad paints is totally plausible. And it sounds extremely challenging to help students learn within that context. But I can't help but wonder: is every school in Baltimore really like this? Are there no high schools where the majority of kids pay more attention to their teachers than to the media/comms on their devices?
> We built a social network for pets. [...] Every story update is appended in a homemade "blockchain" running in WebAssembly in the Lambda worker.

Dear God.
I learned that from the timeless guide book, 'Windows as she is administered.'
My only interaction with Nextdoor these days is @bestofnextdoor on twitter. I highly recommend this arrangement. https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor
> All I want is the possibility to view other people's posts and zoom on the pictures.

Check out Bibliogram[0], an alternate front-end for Instagram. Most of their instances[1] are partially blocked, but you can still view the recent posts and zoom in on them.

[0]: https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram-docs/tree/master/docs/...
> nothing says the higher density one must have a higher or lower value

Local population (incl. the density thereof) is arguably the driver of value, moreso than any other factor besides sheer size and maybe location (in exceptional cases, e.g. adjacent to a coastline). If you could build a store or a restaurant anywhere, then all else being equal, would you build it where there are 10,000 potential customers within walking distance or where there are merely 1,000? Likewise, are you going to move where there are lots of places to eat and shop or where there are few? Generally people want to be where other people are, and this produces a positive feedback loop between local population and demand for land; there are exceptions, of course (some people like to live away from population centers instead of in the middle of them), but they ain't numerous enough to meaningfully suppress that feedback loop.
That is probably because almost everything in Whole Foods is grossly inflated in the first place. Source: I used to work from them when I was in my late teens/early 20s.

We were instructed to inform customers that are pricers are higher because we are a smaller operation than competitors like Wal-Mart and other large changes, thus Whole Foods had to pay more that the other vendors for many of the same products.

The systems we used left me inclined to believe that the story we were instructed to explain, if true was... not the full picture to say the least.

However, this was years before Amazon even thought about taking over, so I cannot comment on how things are since the acquisition.
Been a happy customer of Mullvad for years now. It's a great product.
This article seems like it's reaching. I don't think "money" accurately describes what cryptocurrency is because most people who use USD don't trade on the FOREX markets, but most cryptocurrency users are primarily focused on the exchange rate of BTC to USD, not it's functionality as a currency. It's better described as a security, and while it can be used as a medium of exchange its volatility can make that expensive or inconvenient.

As for this:

> Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols. You put up some collateral and can take out a loan for extremely cheap, because there isn't a bank in the middle to take a cut.

The reason loans on the blockchain are cheap is not because there's no middle-man but because they're over-collateralized so there's no risk. One of the reasons the bank charges you interest is that they're taking a risk that you will not pay back the loan. AFAIK this is not possible in DeFi.
This is because Nextdoor is “moderated” by your local neighborhood gestapo.

Nextdoor, as an institution, actively seeks out people who pathologically engage with their platform and then gives them power over people geographically local to them. This results in moderation-cliques that decide what can and cannot be posted in their local neighborhoods.

It somehow manages to be worse than this site when it comes to suppression and censorship, and to be honest I’ve almost totally lost the desire to interact with either.

I’ve hit peak moderation fatigue, I’m tired and quite frankly offended anyone thinks they can tell me what I should (or want) to see. All their algorithms are corrupt, all the systems that rely on manual, human moderation are biased and useless. Curation is an iron grip around my throat and I want to cut it.

I’m to the point that I’d rather drink from the firehose of “misinformation” than thirst in the desert centralized of approval.

Edit: originally posted this in reply to a comment down-chain, but by the time I finished typing “you can’t reply to this anymore”. It’s getting meta at this point
Dang. Makes sense, since it's such a defining characteristic. But dang, I would love to read that :D

Guess I'll just have to get a job at Notion some day and dig it up...
Why not? It’s for emphasis.
why are you carrying 5l of water?
Apple does not need active feedback mechanism. It just needs a list of gotchas to avoid for their next generation of products. Their customers of previous products can go f off or buy the new products.
I think the idea is that money reaches the company, the company then increments how much time you have left on the account, then deletes records linking payment to the account

Like you show up and give me $5, tell me it’s for account XYZ, I go into my admin console and increment the remaining usage time, but don’t write that you were the one giving me $5

There’s a window of time where the link exists of course! But you can get rid of it.

(I Hope that they are not storing things like an account start date or too many payment records… it could easily be deanonymized through time stamp correlation and the banks/stripe/PayPal have the data)
I made sure that the credentials are stored in GPG encrypted file and could only be decrypted on my machine. github.com/agzam/jira-okta-puppet/blob/master/src/jira_auth/auth.cljs

Basically, it was no different if I'd have to login manually, then open browser's dev-tools, and copy&paste the token. Arguably, my automated approach made it slightly more secure, since there's no clipboard involved.

It was stupid, I should've figured out the proper way of authenticating, but something was missing, I either needed to ask admin to give me OAuth access, or some other bullcrap. Well, you know how the saying goes, right? "It ain't stupid if it works".
Same. In a few decades I'm going to look up the obituaries of the Oculus Home software dev team and savor reading about them dying. It says the headset is connected despite showing an amber light, it refuses to play audio from the headset instead of the pc speakers, it refuses to set up the play area without having a PC monitor facing the play area, it makes you reset the play area every time so much as a housefly fart touches a camera.
Arizona has been recharging it's reserves since the 90's. https://www.droughtfacts.com/risks.aspx#:~:text=The%20answer....
it certainly seemed like the culture was ready for a catchy name for the concept, and even if it indeed hadn't been independently coined previously, people were ready to accept it

nowadays though we've got zuckerberg pretending like he invented the term 'metaverse'
For all the hate Microsoft gets, this is one area where they've got it right.

Microsoft's dev support framework, while not directly interacting with MS engineers (usually), the community of MVPs, Regional Directors, and even now the occasional Dev note in the opensource work MS is doing on github, has lead to a great ecosystem of support. This trickles down to Stackoverflow, the old Alt.Net crowd (and the associated .NET user groups that still persist), and the MS dev blog'o'sphere mean this type of issue is much rarer.

*edit: oh and I forgot the UserVoice pages, where the community can vote on issues, and they'll get assessed by the product teams.
> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.

Let us know when the laptop sells.
I can't upvote this enough, there's money in that and whoever owns the infrastructure stands to make money off the data.
Just out of curiosity - how much to they cost?