skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> can one argue that the optimal amount of online sex trafficking and child abuse is greater than zero?

No, this fraud argument does not apply to child abuse or sex trafficking. The reason is because the fraud argument is talking only about direct financial loss of fraud compared to direct financial loss of enforcement. The fraud argument doesn’t actually work if we’re talking about individuals losing their savings, it only makes sense if you assume the cost of fraud is borne by banks, and that it’s a marginal cost and does not bankrupt anyone.

There is no amount of money that makes the damage done by sex trafficking or child abuse okay, and there is no reasonable way to convert the damage done by these crimes into money. To suggest that the optimal amount is non-zero would only be an externalizing of the damage and costs of such crimes, and to essentially reduce our morals to money. And that’s exactly what this very argument does in other contexts; it externalizes non-financial damage, and sometimes financial damage too. This argument is made in other contexts, and it’s sometimes wrong and/or full of assumptions that aren’t true.

We could imagine extreme hypothetical situations that might clarify the argument or how to think about it - is it equivalent if 1% of people suffer a 100mm knife wound or 100% of people suffer a 1mm knife wound? The 1% would all die. In the other case, everyone suffers a mild inconvenience they forget about by tomorrow. Despite the equal amount of flesh damage, these are not remotely equivalent, and thus can’t be compared or declared as optimal. The type of damage done matters, and the number of people affected and amount of damage done to individuals matters.

Beware arguments that reduce negative outcomes to money. These tend to favor businesses (who are biased to prefer less regulation) and tend to externalize all the indirect costs and the costs to society. This is exactly what has been done with regard to pollution over the last century - it has been successfully argued that the optimal amount of pollution is non-zero, and we’re starting to see the consequences of that and pay costs for decisions made long ago. There was a pretty good paper I read [1] that re-evaluated these arguments for several specific large public works projects in the 50s through 70s, where the post-facto costs and outcome benefits calculations were shown to be different by orders of magnitude compared to when the decisions were being debated. IOW there is good historical precedent-based reason not to trust someone who claims the damage will be minimal or equivalent to the case where we put some effort into minimizing it.

[1] https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
I have my doubts that it will ever launch - the way things are proceeding, they’ll miss October, push to ‘23, and will then end up with parts and systems ageing out due to wear and duty cycles - the rollback to the VAB alone incurs significant wear.

Meanwhile, starship will see its first orbital flight (likely not before a few RUDs) while SLS just grows mould.

That said, the whole purpose of SLS was to provide jobs and to retain technical expertise in the US, which it has achieved - actually launching the thing is almost besides the point.
Everyone here is so incredibly focused on money as the primary motivator, which I guess given the thread question makes some sense. But I'd like to just put in a little word for money not being everything, and client type / work type actually being a really important part of the equation.

HN is a forum where increasingly I see posts every single day about the high level of misery in tech / how can I get out of this rat race / high levels of stress / undervalued / etc etc.

I charge £500 a day. It's not much compared to some of the rates on here, but I work with lovely, interesting clients in the non-profit sector. My clients love what they do and I do good work for them so they love what I do. I have long term, low stress, friendship-like relationships with my clients, not shouty / nasty / high stress ones. I've done this work for 12 years, and had to work with maybe a handful of assholes during that time.

FWIW I think there is a "lower budget bar" under which demands are insane for the money being offered, and we should all avoid this work unless we actively want to take a race to the bottom. But - I think there is undoubtedly a "higher budget bar" over which the stress level and expectation is made exceedingly high. This (I would imagine; I don't know, I've worked in non profits my whole life) is probably also equated with sector - if you're in a FinTech environment I would imagine you're looking at high budgets but also an insane number of highly pressured assholes shouting at you all the time.

What am I basically saying? I guess - yes, charge enough (and this is probably more than you think it should be) - but also, look at the bigger picture of your work / sector. Think about happiness, work-life balance, client motivations, etc - and use this to inform what you charge and how you charge for it. That'd be my advice.
Perfect, I'm wondering how are you sourcing the jobs. Do you source the jobs manually or automatically?

I'm working on the Remote Jobs API service[1] for the job board developers. Each and every job is manually vetted and carefully curated from 40+ sources. If you think it will be useful, let me know. Happy to set up an account for you.

[1] - https://remoteleaf.com/remote-jobs-api (Founder here)
With the caveat that I charge a bit less, and have only had two clients (but kept them each >1y, and have gotten other client interest I did not have bandwidth for): Keep up with the talented people you worked and want to school with. If you are in your 30s, some significant fraction are managers with budgets. At any given time, a few will have a need which is too time-sensitive for the whole hiring cycle (which can take >>$10k and still return a dud).

If they remember you as dependable and all-around competent, they would be thrilled to be able to deploy their budget against the problem nearly instantly.
I'll be putting this on the proper place as well, but the Windows install instructions don't produce a working install. Whenever I try to do anything with Elixir at all (including ask for the version) it immediately crashes.

Luckily WSL generally works, though the Ubuntu package repositories haven't been updated yet, which isn't surprising with the holiday weekend. Mac works great.
Caesar cipher for KRYMSKA BAVOVNA, translates as Crimean cotton.

"Ukrainians ironically call explosions in Russia or in occupied territory 'cotton'-bavovna - бавовна, ridiculing Russian media use of a word хлопóк (a bang) in a sense of explosion, which is written in the same way as cotton - хлóпок"

source: https://twitter.com/olgatokariuk/status/1557042276869734401
What's the difference between this and the pre-pandemic remoteok.io?
Apart from stock buybacks that seems like stopping wasting money. Preparing for apocalypse would mean significant pivots and investments to those.
This is similar to the choice between a salary (quite predictable) and a startup (maybe a lot, might just as well be zero). Or, in a company, between doing consulting or in-house product development.
The initial SpaceX Falcon rocket was entirely privately funded, at a total cost of of ~$100 million. The first 3 launches were failures. The 4th launch was a success, and the rest is history. And that vessel would ultimately go on (through various again largely privately funded innovations) to revolutionize spaceflight.

The same is now true of the Starship, which is again being entirely privately funded. The cost is certainly going to be much more than $100 million, but also nowhere near the absurd extremes of cost that Boeing imposes on the taxpayer. At this point "we" have spent tens of billions of dollars on this catastrophe. And the icing on the cake is that if this monstrosity is ever deemed flight worthy, it will likely already be obsolete.

It's quite difficult to understand why giving a company billions of dollars a year, unless they succeed, does not seem to be leading to great outcomes. Maybe we should just give them more money. That'll fix everything.
There’s also the overall economic argument that Proof of Work is actually just the least obscure version of anything else: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

Overall I’d just argue that because PoS doesn’t involve external resources to create blocks, the cost of producing a block won’t be well understood and thus there will be opportunities for rent extraction - which we’re already seeing with Lido staking.
There's a distinction between creative -license and -arrogance.
Uh, cmucl required an existing cmucl, SBCL was explicitly forked of that to simplify the bootstrapping by allowing any standard compliant CL compiler as host. On MacOS Clozure CL might be the obvious choice.

Well, that's the idea at least, I haven't actually tried it (long time ago, I did compile sbcl with CLISP on Linux/x86-64, which worked fine).
Paragraphs 1 and 3 are both a bit off the mark.

P1. It is well-known that the working classes during the industrial revolution engaged in learning for learning’s sake, sometimes going so far as to hire people to read to them while they worked. The intellectual cultures which have existed during different historical periods are more nuanced than you think. For ancient cultures, we have exceedingly little information—-discoveries are consistently made which reveal to us that our intuition about what these societies were like is usually incomplete or wrong. It’s tempting to extrapolate the current cultural moment but this isn’t always a good idea.

P3. Universities which are wholly funded by the state do not necessarily need to focus on profiting by maximizing the amount of job-focused career training they provide to students. The current incarnation of universities may make it seem like this is the case, but this is a pretty contingent viewpoint. In Europe, it is possible to get a college education for free or next to nothing. Although, there are also private universities which recognize that it is not always strategic to hit the rails with profit maximization: NYU decided to make their medical school free recently. There’s also the example of Walter Reed’s medical school. Clearly, there is also a difference in degree here: back in the 70s it was possible to get an excellent college education and pay for it with money made working over the summer. Not the case so much anymore.
Guide vidéo d'installation d'OpenBSD de A à Z avec l'environnement GNOME
Science, like all institutions of the West, has been turned against its own population and is working to destroy them and all of Western Civilization because that's what the people who are paying for science want.
What do you consider recent history? The design work for GPS started about 50 years ago. Shaving bits off of the L1 transmission also leads to a small but real improvement in acquisition time. Every bit you waste on a counter that only changes every ~20 years means receivers have to wait that much longer to get the latest ephemerides (this is less of an issue nowadays since cell phones can just download almanac and ephemerides from the internet).

Weeks worked nicely as a time unit due to the periodicity of the p-code signal.

If you have any doubts about the competency of the people who designed GPS, IMO it's worth checking out the Woodford/Nakamura report that considered a lot of alternative implementations. From an engineering perspective, they had a lot of tradeoffs to consider but typically took the direction that made the system more user friendly but harder to implement (like not requiring receivers to have atomic clocks or transmitters). It's also interesting to see how that sort of info was presented in the pre-powerpoint days
No, it's a real pain, and doing a lot of ostensibly ordinary things is always harder than I expect. I end up having to block out my entire day if I have to work on a moderately complex one, and it would always have been faster to use a cross platform language like C# to make a shell application in retrospect.

I admit that for the simplest of jobs it's fine, I guess.
USSTRATCOM tweeted “Deterrence” I can’t feel anything other than we’re definitely living in the stupid timeline when nuclear weapons are tied to memes.
Honestly most extroverts are nothing like what is described.

What is described sounds far more like someone with bipolar, sociopathic or some other well established mental illness in that they have no conscience or empathy.

and/or

people with average to below average IQ who are just smart enough to know how to crime well but not smart enough to realize or use more productive non-criminal methods to gain what they want/need.

Historically we used mental asylums and prisons to keep such people away from the broader population. Those methods worked pretty well but have largely been abandoned. Going for the root cause and obvious mistakes that removed amelioration of those root causes are the way to solve the problems that result.
Wouldn't some of them have rollover counters or adjustable epochs, etc?
For me it was the other way around: I went to prison to stop programming. Well, sort of.

When I was drafted (involuntarily) into the Israeli Military, I worked as a programmer. It's much cheaper, you see, to have a programmer who doesn't get paid - assuming you can filter our those teens who are good enough to be able to do the job.

Now, I was only 18 years old. During my military service, my political consciousness developed, and I started thinking about what the Israeli military was doing with the product of my work, and for what purposes. I also became quite critical of the various foreign clients of the technology we were working on. It got to the point where I not only thought what my unit was doing was illegitimate, but in fact, I lost my support for the regime.

So, I quit. The thing is, quitting mandatory military service is a bit more difficult than quitting a civilian job... and in order to quit, I had to go to prison. Or rather, officially, you can't quit, you can only be discharged; and for that to happen you have to resist enough for them to believe they won't get any work out of you, and then they typically discharge you for "inappropriate conduct", or for being determined to have an (inspecific) psychological problem.
I remember when Vancouver real estate crashed and stagnated in the 90s after the Japanese property bubble burst (asking with the American west coast). It might not come down with respect to inflation, but other things can catch up, especially with a larger bubble in China on the horizon than the one Japan had.
> Sorry, I thought we were doing the "my opinion is the rightest, because i said so!" thing.

Except mine isn't an 'opinion' and is based on Mastodon's own statistics in daily active user numbers, registered users, user behaviour and the claims, and comparisons made at the time when it already launched and was pitched as a Twitter alternative, especially on HN. [0] [1]

Fast forward 6 years later, 94% of people registered are still not using it. That is virtually no-one, other than the tiny tech circles that even still need to post on Twitter since there is still little to no-one on Mastodon.

That is a fact; not an opinion.

> But no, it's not a failure. "low user numbers" does not automagically mean something is a failure

It is a failure and I have repeatedly shown that the numbers don't lie after 6 years of operation. If it is not a failure, then what I am seeing here is the complete denial of this failure.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17788060

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15514987
Another trade off:

Liquid hydrogen is very low density, and requires extremely low temperatures.

This means that you need a much bigger tank for a given weight of fuel, and that tank needs to be insulated bc liquid hydrogen must be kept below 33 kelvin.

Both of these downsides can come close to negating the upside of increased ISP.

But the upside for SLS is that they already had engines that can run on hydrogen. Like you said, trade offs all around
Being aware of... context? In this day and age of reactionary posts and total lack of empathy? What is that?

To be clear, fully agree. If you include a person who doesn't fit the time and style of where they exist, you need to give me a reason or I won't believe it. Reality is very often unbelievable, and good fiction/immersion requires believability, not reality. (Sidenote: this usually has nothing to do with race and more often how they act.)

For music and literature though, I think it's mostly that the mediums are not visual and so defies our culture of memes or quick messages. Hard to point at a screenshot of text and get likes unless it's under a sentence long. Also, good readers know good writing, and reading is dense enough that the general public won't read. So there's no real reason to go after books.
Would you stop working? Or would you take a break until you found something you truly wanted to work on?
Yes -- they dropped the "Mega" in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games
YIMBYs Triumph In California: What went down in the legislature this week
The HTTP server/proxy is only going to handle TLS termination. It can also handle basic resource authentication in a pinch. But for all other auth tasks need to be done by the application. Just because a user can access a URL doesn't mean they have access to a particular row in a database or write access or something. The user data may not even live locally and be provided by an external provider which is also beyond the scope of the HTTP server.

I don't know why you would think it's the HTTP front end's job to do any of that. It's all clearly the domain of the back end application.
What is a “duty” ? - https://youtu.be/A-brgkkjnHc
There's plenty of example. Stripity stripe is an example of one of the better integrated examples and even I've been a bit frustrated with it at times. We're currently stuck on a slightly older version and last I checked, it didn't support the latest version of the stripe API. And that's an example of a library thats relatively well maintained. If you want to use authorize.net for instance, you have to roll your own. (there's a hex package but its still very much in beta). If you wanted to do banking and use Synapsefi, be prepared to roll your own.

Now it wouldn't' be any harder to write these libraries in elixir vs ruby or laravel. The difference is there are well polished libraries for both those platforms you can just drop in and use. That makes what could be a week of work in elixir, about half a day in ruby by virtue of the work largely being done for you already.

If the library doesn't exist for either, then I agree, elixir isn't going to be any harder to integrate.
Permitting is the big barrier to wind energy
Rick your story is so inspirational, congratulations on how far you’ve made it and being able to help other people.

Good to see you here in the community.
Its like the saying that any form of government works well if everyone is altruistic. Maybe Germans or even western Europeans as a whole are just more altruistic than the US? Individualism and distrust of power are pretty core to the mindset of a decent portion of the US going back to colonial days. I'm not suggesting blindly trusting power is a great idea, but perhaps thinking that way, then acquiring power makes you more likely to abuse it.
"justice involved individuals"

Do you find prisoners/former prisoners get any benefit from new labels like this?

Timpson Group uses non euphemistic language: "people who have criminal convictions", and proactively hires them.

https://www.timpson-group.co.uk/timpson-foundation/ex-offend...
I wish the capable society found a way to build a reusable rocket, now that it had been amply demonstrated as doable.

Very expensive expendable rockets is a guarantee that only the military, colossal communication companies, and a few lucky science projects get access to space.

Imagine that ocean ships were expendable, only good for one ocean crossing. How many geographic discoveries would have been made?
totally agree.

But sigh, policymakers aren't dummies, and there's gotta be a reason they chose moratorium... my guess is that rental agreements are private contracts not directly reported to the government and therefore impossible to support. There's better reporting on your local coffee shop than your average rental.

IMHO this lack of direct reporting is insane given the $ involved but I'm also not sure how you fix this... let alone in the couple of weeks that the govt had in 2020...
The Epic Fail of the internet is that it gave people voices even when they are mentally ill or prone to criminality. Look at most of the worst of the internet today and you can distill all that down to these two things.

Why was the early internet great? Number one reason was its exclusivity and lack of these base elements. Internet for all gave everyone equal access including those who should not have.
I would not call anything in the fragmented, legacy US financial system “trivial.”

It took us a decade and counting to get chipped cards, longer to get contactless pay, and even then we don’t really use the PIN part of chip+pin. Something like FedNow is only coming next year.
This has to be some of the most awful, lazy journalism I’ve ever seen.
Increase the payout with a correspondingly lower probability and you're basically lowering the expected utility--down to some point where it crosses the sure-fire payout.
"word for word". I don't think you understand what that means. ...unless you're equating the word "terrorist" with "Palestinian", in which case you should be offended at yourself.
It only takes a day for a company to lay you off.

The interview process my major companies are often designed to convince you of prestige and the illusion that they are coveted, but if you really look at how things work in the corporate world, we are individually a product that they buy into as consumers. If they undervalue the product, and the product is something they don't really need for whatever reason, they will try to haggle.

If they need you as a product, and you develop and know your value, you can negotiate better, from a position of strength. Personal growth and confidence is a continual process of building and renovating, but it always has a peak, and even ebb and flows throughout. There is never one clear path to success, but rest comfortably in knowing that all you have to do is survive and grow, carrying only what matters for each role you need to play in life.

Your life isn't linked to a job, it's linked to survival. Never let an employer convince you that you are not worthy of a job, and never let a job be the only value you have...

Work to qualify for interviews at companies where you get interviewed by execs, not by middle and lower management. The friends you make in those roles carry weight. A big part of success is the "Grey Hair" rule. Accept that when you are young and less experienced, things will be harder. It gets easier to navigate as you grow grey hairs and more experience if you work efficiently and effectively (not furiously). Resume formatting and a cover letter aren't really what get you the job. Your experience, personal product, and presentation does... Don't overthink the process... Overthink your personal life goals (What you want to accomplish in your personal life, not in work for an employer).

I am not usually a positive person, I am a practical one. The world is a lot less intimidating and more easily understandable when you focus on what you can control... Work to live, don't live to work.
IMDB disagrees! 6.2.