skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very accurate. I think the two big changes recently (10-15 years) have been around monetizing content and distribution formats.

For monetization, vast amounts of stuff moved behind paywalls and other walls. The obvious one, distribution platforms are walled and inaccessible to Google; probably their biggest existential risk. On smaller scales, many specialists started to monetize their knowledge. Instead of dumping it for free on forums or blogs, now it's on Substack or many other outlets. What remains free is increasingly free for strategic reasons, so it's either ad-monetized (with poor incentives for quality) or released entirely for branding/promotional reasons.

Distribution format is another factor that I only recognized very recently. A lot of content/knowledge is now accessible only as videos, podcasts, or similar, where in the past there would usually be a text version. If you only want text, you will miss a lot - stuff is on YouTube now, instead of small forums.
> Very good point -- I completely agree. From my place of privilege (again, not saying this about anyone else) I think I often considered emotion to be completely useless and to just set it aside. Thank you for the reminder that both emotion and logical thinking should be acknowledged.

Same hat, which is why I bring it up: If it can help somebody else figure this out before their 30s, it's good. In particular, emotions are great to help figure out priorities and set direction: If you don't feel anything, it's really hard to decide what you want to do with your life, for example.

> banning abortion is treating a symptom rather than the root of why unwanted pregnancies occur (i.e. lack of sex education, dysfunctional family/societal dynamics, etc.)

I mean, it is. Banning abortion is basically the only thing all pro-lifers agree on. To address the root of unwanted pregnancies, we'd all have to agree on the causes AND that unwanted pregnancies are the main concern. (For a certain percentage of pro-lifers it's more about discouraging non-reproductive sex than about preventing the death of the fetus).
The only place the Socratic Method works is in the fictional dialogues of Plato, where Crito or Meno or Phaedrus or whomever are set up as obvious straw men, answering "yes" or "no" as Plato chooses, to questions most modern readers (and probably more than a few of his contemporaries) would answer differently.
Ask HN: Why can't the government forced standardized bottles and containers?
Climate change and environmentalism has been on my mind a lot lately and it's got me thinking ways to solutions to tackle it. One solution I thought of is why can't the US government force the standardization of bottles and containers. Imagine if the government create a standard for two types of bottles and containers; one for consumables (drinks, etc) and the other for non-consumables (shampoo, liquid soap, etc). Within these two categories, there will be different sizes, 16oz, 28oz, etc. The only type of material that can be used is glass and aluminum. If the government mandate all companies do this, then companies who manufacture bottles and containers will compete on price since everything (design, sizes, material) else is standardized. Initially the cost of the bottles/containers will be higher but overtime it should go lower as manufacturing companies compete on price and consumers start reusing existing bottles/containers. With this mandate, now I can take my used shampoo bottle and refill it at the store (assuming stores offer this). Recycling would be easier as aluminum is profitable for recycling and glass can be washed and be reused. Government can mandate stores that sell things in these bottles/containers to take them back. We can even have some form of CRV to encourage people to return/recycle them. What kind of disadvantages are there to standardization of bottles and containers? Can the government realistically create such a mandate?
what do you think of the documentary cowspiracy?

in any case if most of the grain production isnt going for feeding humans, it is quite ridiculous.
Push button gear selection was available for many cars between roughly 1956-1964 also.

https://www.macsmotorcitygarage.com/the-motor-citys-push-but...
Just as a note that when the parent comment was posted, the comment section looked very different. It was almost all vitriol. It was genuinely discouraging and disheartening to read, and ugly was the correct adjective. I really resonated seeing this comment, and was pleased to then see it and similar comments basically within minutes jump to the very top. Ie suggesting that others resonated with it as well. The comments being made now are significantly lower temperature, and I think this comment is partly responsible for that de-escalation. Although I do agree that absent that context it comes off as inflammatory--it's a shame that there's no way to see that context in online comment threads like HN!
Back in highschool, about midway through the semester, my economics teacher was like "Yeah, no one really knows what they're doing, and here's evidence", and showed us a recording he had of two economics experts on TV using the exact same evidence to argue for opposite outcomes.
The problem with zoning is that at some point we realized that it was harmful to have industrial land use like factories and dumps right next to residential neighborhoods. And then we assumed that there must be a spectrum with landfill on one end and single family homes in the other, with every other possible land use being some level of bad. When in fact, we need to zone industry that creates sounds, smells, chemicals, or other environmental hazards into its own non-residential areas, but everything else should be allowed to self-organize.

Commercial (retail, office space, professional, services) is not industrial-light. It is not something to quarantine. It is integral to a healthy, functioning, tax-revenue-generating neighborhood. The more commercial and retail are mixed into neighborhoods, the more desirable those neighborhoods are.

Of course it almost goes without saying that most of the rest of what we mean when we say zoning is also counterproductive if your goal is a functioning, financially solvent, culturally cohesive city: single-family-only, parking minimums, setbacks, etc.
Yeah and the conversation you started is "people who care about anonymity aren't serious about it."
> Implying anyone who needs anonymity is simply holding an unreasonable position is simply not fair.

Neither of us did.
India has a lot of farmers running their own plot of land, but they aren't very high on the list of agriculturally efficient farming. The average farmer is only doing 1.2 hectares where in the USA the average farm size is hundreds of times greater and far more efficient.

I think it would be economically better, though politically impossible, if India experienced a great deal of farmland consolidation. How is a guy that only farms 1.2 hectares supposed to increase his income? Buy a farm truck or tractor? Increase efficiency? He's stuck doing everything by hand and making $1000 a year.
Yes these kind of discussions are often useless to me because they ignore the things in life we don't choose. They're written as if someone has complete agency and is just choosing between easier and less reward versus harder and more reward. For me at least the real difficulty is dealing with broken systems and all that's needed of you from them, when rejecting the system can mean complete failure of the worst kind.

People don't let others steal their time because they're weak, it's because the system is so broken.

It's not so much "do I put this effort into building a ship and charting new territory" it's "do I chart this ship into pirate-infested waters when then outcome could mean death, and shipbuilders are defrauding people about the safety of materials?" The correct analogy in contemporary society often isnt builders or explorers, it's refugees.

Yes I'm cynical. I wish I weren't.
Yeah something like that came to my mind as well. Even if that is the case it seems a little odd to blame the news subreddit specifically and not their own poor decision-making. It's like if someone who panic sold during the covid scare blaming the news.
https://hnreplies.com/ works very well for me.
Fair enough. I think the issue is we need to get people involved in making it open, decentralized, fast and easy to use. We need DevOps people to make it easy to do things like host your own mail with CalDav and CardDav, email labels, nice interface, etc.

Web standards should be focused on markup not scripting. Scripting should be encompassed into secure markup containers that don't sacrifice security and privacy.
It’s that way because the folks there with control (in this system, the voters, though often ‘influenced’ by local politicians and power players) want it that way.

If someone has a setup they consider nice, or even just wants to not get stepped on by a bunch of other changes, they’re going to work hard to protect it. It’s human nature.
Your numbers are screwy and the metric you're calculating is the wrong one.

Installed solar grew by around 130GW in 2020 according to this https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv which implies somewhere on the order of a billion square meters so you're out by a factor of at least 1000

and there about 20TW of electricity production to replace. So we need 120x 2020's output to replace electricity.

Other uses of fuels are about an order of magnitude more

So the delta is about 100-1000 given a decade of production. Less if we start to reign in the gratuitous waste of the west.

The output of your calculation is a testament to how grossly inefficient corn ethanol is. Not an endorsement of it.
standard issue nalgene water bottle at birth would get my vote.
It's like saying ELIZA is sentient.
The article is a fun read; it’s informative and has a humorous bent, and it avoids coming across as pretentious or lacking detail.

The site’s “paywall” is just a banner over the full content of the article, making it amenable to Reader mode. It’s like a 2 minute read. Just read it.
Because people generally have elevated rights when it concerns themselves? E.g. I have the right not to be touched and it will (generally) outrank your right to touch me.
Free for services that use Sign in with Apple. Need iCloud+ for generating addresses outside of that.

Also, 99 cents a month for the cheapest plan isn’t too bad for everything it gives you. If you’re in the iOS/Apple ecosystem, it’s a worthwhile purchase.
Yep, that's it right there and most people don't know how much electricity goes into aluminum either, for example. Or that long term fixed prices contracts rose 30% last week while already on the order of 5 times higher than usual. This speaks to the risk being priced in about the fact that things probably aren't going to get better soon and could get worse.

> I've seen people in the US blame it on Build Back Better spending, seemingly unaware that BBB didn't pass.

Ouch.
They’re disposable. The whole service is disposable. That’s the whole point.

This isn’t a redirect to your existing email a-la-iCloud+ “Hide My Email”. You close the tab and the address is gone.
It doesn't. It concerns companies and not you as a person. You can remember whatever you want. Companies are not allowed to do that anymore, as they've repeatedly shown that if they remember your data forever they (intentionally or not) do bad things with them.
Astronomers Radically Reimagine the Making of the Planets
If there's an excess of noise, then there is no effective hurdle. A bit of natural unavoidable friction (e.g., uploading song) is not a hurdle.

We do have more choice. Unfortunately, there's been a disproportunate increase in friction / noise.

A net loss, which supports the article's theory.
I really need you to explain to me what "tied up" means. If I buy a $100 million dollar piece of art, that $100m doesn't disappear into the ether, it goes to the person who sold me the piece, who can then spend that on whatever they want.
People think "yeah, the text message SAYS not to give it to anyone, but they say it all the time and this is Plaid, I mean come on, it's Plaid, I can trust them, right?" and they think that even more for a Bank Employee (TM)

Everyone should have a policy of never giving out personal info or confirming any digits until they HANG UP AND CALL BACK on the corporate number to discuss any issue.
Howso, given that function point analysis comes from requirements and doesn't even need code to exist? (Are you sure you know what function point analysis is? It sounds a lot like "sequence points" or "branching points", but in reality it's more like "story points"...)
> "...he corporate stuff is so loud."

yah, money shouts, it doesn't merely talk. that's a consequence of (implicitly) deciding that money should have a voice in the first place. we explicitly sanction this via a gigantic industry, advertising, in which google has a prominent position. until we collectively decide to deemphasize this whole industry, at least in part by cultivating the small and interesting, the web and the internet at large will be dominated by money shouting.
> Unfortunately the same people use the same argument against use of synthetic wombs for humans.

Care to expand on this? I am not aware of any opinion on this other than general undefined revulsion. Has anyone articulated an actual argument?
Unpopular opinion: written languages need to modernize. The printing press and typewriter forced the Romantic language from a format optimized for hand writing (cursive) into a format optimized for the modern world (print).

I think other languages would benefit from having a "print" format.
It's not a personal attack at all. You have a well reasoned post to a spitball of an idea. I've been poor, very poor, the poor that requires government assistance to live and I've been uppper middle class. The thing is the friends that I made when I was poor, are still poor. They are not they for lack of intelligence, but only for lack of ambition.

Positive encouragement only works so much. Eventually there much be a consequence that is used as encouragement. Both methods work toget to build up a better overall tomorrow.

I don't know the correct answer but the current methods do not seem to be working.
"Right to be forgotten" is in the context of search engines, not human brains, physical newspapers, books, libraries, etc.

Imagine, for example, that you were falsely arrested for murder and then cleared of the crime.

It's very likely this would kill your career because employers Googling you would see the articles about your arrest.

In Europe, you would have a right to hide these articles from search engines.
Less reliance on fertilizer means less money. If beans are fixing nitrogen you can't sell it.

Plus there'd need to be a massive shift in methods which tends to makemit easier for smaller, more adaptable entities
We can regulate where industrial use can exist as separate laws and get rid of the 97% of zoning that has been horrible for land use in the US
Zoning is a good idea. The biggest problem in the USA is the complete separation of residential and commercial areas and residential usually means single family homes.
Lack of enforcement/consequences, sometimes due to somewhat transparent payoffs/sops to activists, combined with a lot of tarpitting by local gov’t usually. At least that is what I saw play out in places like Palo Alto, anyway.
I agree that people who believe a fetus is a person ought to be more opposed to abortion than gay marriage or contraception; but it is also true that people who believe a fetus is a person ought to favor easier access to contraception (which provably reduces abortions), and they generally don't, so here we are.
Zoning is almost all bath water. We can regulate where industrial use can exist as separate laws and get rid of the 97% of zoning that has been a disaster for the US socially, economically, and environmentally.
It's not a separate issue. It's the issue GP was referring to.
Reddit is not so simple to pin down. On the one hand all the 'bad stuff'. On the other, a huge selection of really interesting niche subs where you can find intelligent, valuable and even expert information and guidance. The big subs are not everything that is Reddit. The real treasure is found in the specialist places which very few people know about, staffed by enthusiast hobbyist mods and devoured by equally passionate readers.
Probably because it’s hard to function as a nation (or a person) if you are constantly being hypercritical of any hypocrisies. We would all drown in a sea of self-hatred and convert to vegan monks with no cars or possessions.
I would never deny a bias. But an organization like google doesn't have a singular mind or objective. it's full of a bunch of contradictory tendencies and opinions and motivations. And market forces aside, I think the bulk of the pre-Ruth/pre-Sundar leadership had a very pro "open web" opinion at least. And I'd say that even post-IPO they were able to mostly keep their mission statement (“organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) compatible with their advertising revenue stream and market forces as a whole.

I just think that became untenable with the rise of Facebook and the rise of mobile. Or rather, they could not maintain the growth rate and long term security that investors demanded of them and at the same time do what they were doing. So they did what the market "demanded".

I think they're kind of lost now, though. I think we saw "peak Google" a few years ago.
Ancient Carthaginians did sacrifice their children
I don’t
know the answers but at the point a web crawler archived something (Google, Archive.org etc) it will be available forever pretty much
Big news old man: skinny jeans died a few years ago and now the mom jeans of the '90s are back in
I was born and raised in farm county. You wouldn't want a pig farmer to move in next door. Yes too much zoning is a bad thing; too little is bad as well.
If you have power and are wielding it to make things worse in order to gain more power, then yes. Stripping you of all of your power later is morally and strategically right.
I guess it's a rhetorical tool, what would be better, no zoning laws or the current zooming laws?
That's chilling.. The only long-going thread of attribution would rely on stylometry - a good fit for ML though..
The fact that the wealthy can invest into assets at will doesn’t seem problematic to me.

Who would be better at “investing” assets into a new venture: Someone who is wealthy and has a track record of operating successful businesses? Or a government bureaucrat representing the “will of the people” who ultimately makes his salary off the backs of taxpayers?
Yep, that's me!

It's a niche project (even more so when I started it to salt/hash passwords client side during the expensive SSL days) so it's almost never worth advertising :)
Liberty Lite
But a significantly different Strahler number.
And religious organizations in America shouldn't be tax exempt. If you don't like misinformation then don't legitimize psychology since it doesn't treat most religious beliefs as a psychological disorder.
More than once I've been asked to demo features that are not completed.

Once was by someone who told me to do this verbally. He was not formally my manager but some nepotism was happening at the company. I wasn't able to push back on most things with him, this is one of the few things I pushed back on some directly, and then just didn't do it. Also, this was all told to me verbally - I didn't really trust this person, and am sure if someone had noticed I hadn't really completed any of these things I was claiming to have finished, he would have disavowed that he had told me to do this.

On the other hand, I was under a good lead once where we were getting a lot done but had two weeks where were just doing prep work. The lead said to do a UI mockup and to mention during the demo that the UI was a mockup because "they won't understand any how" but it was the only method of some to understand we were making progress. In this case I did demo the mockups, saying they were mockups, since I did trust this lead, and we were making steady progress, he just wanted demos to show something UI displayable every sprint.
Not quite :-) I believe it is part of the equation. I don’t think it is the nature that work occurred applies value — rather the demand for something that someone has sacrificed something for exists — in art, generally a work that has sacrificed time to create something aesthetic has a demand that provides its value. It’s value is subjective to the buyer, however the astute buyer is more likely to buy the 1000 hour work over the mass produced out of nothing thing.
> They absolutely did not consider the “large geographical nation” that the US has become, because it did not exist as such at that time.

You are making the same mistake as in the earlier part. US was already pretty big at the time of US constitutional debates to make direct democracy not possible.

> They didn’t do that. Why should we?

You're more than welcome to do that, but understand something, all the past constitutions/republics/democracies is data, which cannot be easily replicated and controlled for. You're going to come up with a new political system which ignores literally every negative lesson of the history of past 3000 years then you will need to explain how are those concerns not necessary.

Founding fathers were, really really really worried about things devolving into a military dictatorship and violation of individual rights. There are plenty of reasons to criticize them for not caring enough about the individual rights, but none that their concerns were unwarranted.

Just to give you an idea of the concerns we need to care about:

- Build a system which is democratic in nature and works for a large country like ours.

- Make sure that it prevents the democracy from violating individual rights.

- Make sure that it does not become a dictatorship (like how Roman Republic ended and became a dictatorship when Julius Caesar declared himself the permanent dictator).
Self-host your blog on a Raspberry Pi
Stabilization would have just meant replacing paychecks. At least in the US, people on unemployment were getting an additional $600/week on top of normal unemployment pay. Something like 10-20% of the workforce in the lowest bands made more on unemployment due to this scheme than they did from working.

It's not a stretch to question if there were additional motivations.
Ah, always nice (though rare) to meet a fellow member of my species, Homo Economicus. You aren't female perchance? You don't have to answer that, I already know.

You specified size in ounces, why not metric? I'd read up on that a bit and if you don't lose all hope after that, come back and we can talk about the rest.
Exploiting and destroying the commons is a repeated game.

Moreover the spoils of doing it once make it easier to do so again.

What possible reason is there not to take those spoils and return them to the commons from whence they were stolen?
Yes, their proposed implementations of that act look pretty onerous and unnecessarily difficult to comply with

But I’m fine with one agency of the federal government having a private database, shareable for some investigations, which is the direction its going

I hope it gets handicapped or repealed
Abolish arbitrary zoning, reinvest in smart zoning & pollution laws. Reset residential zoning to be a pretty much blanket zone type for any safely engineered residential building type.

No one should have significant pollution introduced next door by a factory or power plant replacing a mall or shopping center in their neighborhood. Solve the problem by having real rules, end the ability for some local council person to essentially gate keep what is allowed and what isn’t. It’s probably a massive bribery center too.
<nit> The philosophy behind hospice is that you are *not* hooked up to all sorts of medical equipment. Rather, you only receive the minimal treatment needed to make yourself comfortable as you let your illness run its course. </nit>