skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a friend who argues that well-implemented UBI and a strong social security net would unlock the full potential of capitalism and i tend to agree.

No one would work awful jobs for terrible pay because why? No employers would keep ineffective employees onboard because why? Unions might become obsolete because bad employers can't exist (people just quit). Anyone would be at liberty to try and start a new business because they never have to risk their passional safety.

Right now many employment situations are like an abusive relationship, staff (and bosses) are getting hurt, but they are afraid to break up. People with strong safety nets and personal wealth can leave terrible relationships much more easily than people who depend on a partner for everything or live in a society where breakups are taboo or illegal.
Nope. "Megacorps" have economies of scale that small businesses don't have.
>Probably my most useful class.

Ditto.

My teacher was hardcore. He was a graybeard who was around before Codd's now famous paper. He worked with some of the old pre-relational hierarchical databases.

We had to take SQL queries, turn them into relational calculus and algebra, turn that into a query plan, then come up with an estimate for the time the query would take to run given various hardware speed numbers and the size of the data.

We had to implement our own (primitive!) database engines, including various join algorithms.

To date it's one of the hardest, yet most rewarding, learning experiences I've had.
I think this is a stretch. Binary triggers are tricky to use, and aren't nearly automatic. They're slightly more automatic than semi-automatic, but much, much less usable.

In terms of illegal weapons, yes. There are illegal fully automatic weapons in the US without taking your example into account. I'm talking about what's legal.
Not the only source but https://www.hurun.net/en-US/Rank/HsRankDetails?pagetype=glob... for a full list of billionaires (according to Hurun).
Civilian nuclear energy has little to do with nuclear weapons. If the goal was nuclear weapons, you would do it very differently. This is not about nuclear weapons.
I dont have first hand knowledge, but I've been in the space for 10 years and wrote Go, Java, Kotlin, so here is my take.

Kotlin made a huge effort to stay compatible with Java. You can call Kotlin code from Java and Java code from Kotlin, so orgs could migrate their apps piece by piece. The only real incompatibilities that I've experienced were when going from C code via JNI into Kotlin. All sorts of really weird issues creep up.

There was no boiling the ocean in any of the large apps I worked on at Amazon and Meta - just add Kotlin and see how it goes, it's a really easy sell to tech VPs. First we added Kotlin just for the unit tests, then for small features and eventually with Google releasing Jetpack with Kotlin extensions, for all new apps and features.

Kotlin also improved upon existing painpoints in Java and provided a ton of syntactic sugar for things that were tedious in Java. For example, proper get/set syntax for fields, data classes with autogenerated equals/hashcode, explicit nullability for types, val with 'final' semantics to get rid of all the final variables, fields in interfaces, top level functions, etc. All the functional stuff in it is nice too.

Go is much leaner than Kotlin. The VM or performance is not an issue - Kotlin generates entire classes for simple syntax, to make things convenient and compatible, but the bytecode is pretty bloated.

I imagine that Google had sufficient resources to make a Go<->Java translation layer (though Go would have needed generics) but transitioning a huge API like Android is already a large effort, and if the language isn't fully compatible with the existing code, it would have added an order of magnitude of complexity, so Kotlin was a much easier sell.

In my opinion, migrating to Dart would have been more practical than Go (as evidenced by Flutter), so thats the real head-scratcher. It would have been easy for Java devs to learn Dart because the OOP concepts translate directly.

Other factors:

Google already had a relationship with JetBrains because of Android Studio.

The Oracle Google lawsuit was happening at the time and I speculate that Google needed to show to Oracle they can move off of Java. Kotlin happened to be available.
No, the issue is quite clear here, hotels dont want to pay a living wage for labor. How much clearer can it be?
That was a fun read, and I loved that little joke with NPM packages.

I find SQL, Regular Expressions, DNS, Client-side caching, CORS, TLS, and a few other things to be a MUST when hiring people, because most of the over-engineered crap can be avoided with a little bit of expertise with these. I spend most of my semi-leisure time with some good Regex books and golfing too.

Modern databases are amazing. Every few months, I take pleasure and not shy away in refactoring some complex and frequent queries into SQL views, carefully replace data logic (but not business logic) into stored procedures, and replace certain batch scripts with one-off queries.
The politicians make money via insider trading, so of course they propose a income tax as opposed to a capital gains tax to "tax the rich". Many of them have been in power for 40+ years, if they were going to tax themselves it would've already been done.
I took several classes on it and I still didn't really 'get' it until I had to work on challenging problems in the real world. Granted, my education was not great quality overall.
In the US, I'm not sure I've ever had a desk worker more than glance at an ID. Many places do require one though--had a heck of a time checking into a Travelodge of all things once because I had lost my license. Not sure how much of this is hotel rules and how much local regulation.

Makes me wonder how this works when you use digital check-in.

It's true in Europe they often copy your license and, in some countries, I believe there's some registration with the police that the hotel handles.
> But it isn't an investment unless they expect to make their cash back plus a profit.

If that is the bar you're going to use for "investment", then no power generation spending is ever an investment. Not coal, not batteries, not geothermal, not renewables, nothing...

Because none of the above make their cash back plus a profit; they're all subsidised by taxpayers.
> I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious : avoid items with the minimum legal manufacturer warranty.

I have to admit that particular strategy hadn't occurred to me - but it's a good idea. Of course, it has to be an actual part-of-the-standard-deal warranty, not the hard-sell extended warranty that's really just an add-on insurance policy...

(Wondering where I find a box of staples warranted to pierce more than five sheets...)
That proves nothing - Catholic schools are still schools, after all. The point is that the Catholic Church has a systemic child abuse problem that includes, but extends beyond, its schools.
Do some research into Japans track record on building Nuclear. They’re one of the few countries that didn’t let green peace idiots ruin their regulatory bodies so they’re still able to build nuclear plants in the same amount of time it takes to build a coal burning plant.
Anyone reading the files and ignoring both Musk and the corporate-owned media would arrive at a similar conclusion.

You need to do some mental gymnastics to assume this stuff is OK.

In 2014 we learned that the NSA paid RSA $10 million to put a backdoor into their encryption products. This stuff is not new.
Get a Zojirushi water boiler. They're fantastic and high quality, you also don't have to wait for water to heat up every time you want to use it
Your distro's overworked maintainer isn't reviewing 15+ million lines of code included in Rust.

Most likely they get the precompiled rustc binary just like rustup, and LGTM-YOLO the package. If they try to be diligent, they maybe take extra 150K lines of mrustc code they can't reasonably carefully review for backdoors either, and then use it to bootstrap the several sets of 15M lines of code they won't look at.
The rules aren't very clearly written, but your numbers are the 3 first columns you add to during your turn. Beyond that, if the numbers produced by the dice do not fit neatly into those three columns, you get busted.

I believe the numbers are added by adding two dice as pairs, so if you roll 3,4,5,6 you can have the options of 7-11, 8-10, 9-9
I’m much more interested in how a language model could be leveraged by an interactive fiction language. Obviously there is a lot of potential, but integration of scripted rule based logic with a machine learned logic has always been difficult.
Distance basically drops to zero when you lose line of sight too. You can find references to Lora being used from a balloon with 40km distance and even from orbit but you will never reach that even on a perfectly flat plain (the ground affects the signal unless each antenna is quite high off the ground).
Japan's renewable resources are actually quite poor. Unless tidal takes off or deep offshore wind gets a lot cheaper it makes a lot of sense to restart existing nuclear.
I just don't see it. Were I to go shopping at wal-mart, and if I didn't understand anything about failure modes, I might, but I find it very easy to find things that last.

Partly because out lifestyle now is lighter on things, and we need fewer of them. I don't need a juicer because... I don't juice.

Another factor might be that we still have an obsession with "Power". Look at how impact drivers are reviewed, based on how fast they screw some insane fastener most people won't ever need.

If consumers prefer and recommended more powerful stuff rather than stuff that's better at protecting itself, stuff is gonna break.

My vacuum does shut off if you run over the wrong thing. That's not a case of clogging and choking, that's a sensor detecting that I've given it something it's not meant for, protecting itself. I would take that any day over something that would happily self destruct on something, or even chew up whatever it hit.

My Rite in the Rain pen never has issues and very well could last my whole life with no refills. There are bad pens out there, but I have no memory of any time when cheap ballpoints actually worked correctly.

I have not had any experience with a new washer or dryer for very long.

However, new appliances are lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. If the scrap is recycled, they may well be just as good as old ones in terms of cost and environmental concerns, even if they break faster.

There are certain categories of things that may be worse overall, but in general, there's close to nothing I'd prefer the old version of.

However, there are probably lots of things where the cheap version now is worse than the old version. But that old version probably cost $40 in today's money and the cheap version cost $20.
> Does this address your comment better?

Much! I'd say that there is always a counter-example. However, even RSA was generally recommended as "insecure" because people can't bother to do any research into the correct values of the parameters. The algorithm itself is secure, but most libraries didn't have sane/secure defaults until like 10ish years ago.

That was the point I was trying to make, you're making a bet that what we know today will still be true 20 years from now. The algorithms you mentioned are symmetric, IIRC, and basically any symmetric algorithm is secure as long as you have a one-time-pad or don't know any of the cleartext. That is, until someone finds a flaw with it.

I remember working on my first 'ciphersaber[1]' when it was discovered it was insecure.

> Most operating systems can run software from 20 years ago.

I was mostly referring to main-stream OS's. Linux and OSX, for example, cannot run software compiled 20 years ago (I'd love to be proven wrong, but my experience hasn't been so great!). On my modern Windows 11 PC, I can still run my first game engine demo, written and compiled in 1998 (I've since lost the source code). Or via WINE on my Linux PC, probably.

I'm sure there are niche cases out there, but the vast majority of people don't have access to those systems and OS's, while anyone can (currently) run a basic version of Windows for free.

[1]: http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/
I've got my selling salts, please tell me which coffee grinder you own?

And by the way, since the topic of "where do I find the good stuff" keeps coming up, why is there no site that is your one-stop recommendation destination for finding quality appliances, tools? We all know we can no longer trust Amazon reviews.

Consumer Reports has been around for ages but I don't feel they've kept in lockstep with the changing times. Maybe the Cool Tools site? But it seems a little too casual and not as rigorous as CR, too eager to direct you to Amazon as well. I don't know really. Just spitballing.
Is there any money involved? Would the protege pick up stuff for the mentor?
Mixed feelings. Nuclear is a necessary evil in the energy-transition.
You might be interested in https://www.codementor.io/ but it costs money.
This is pedantry, and incorrect at that. To invest in something simply means to spend some resources and expect a material result. Energy independence, carbon neutrality, scientific progress, etc. are all material results one could hope for while "investing".

If you think another form of energy production is better, that's a perfectly reasonable objection. Twisting the discussion into a debate over the precise definition of "investment" is silly.
The 2013 Mac Pro looks inspired by the Berlin Aquadom. Rename the "Mac Pro" the "Mac Pathfinder" with a business model where customers buy two, one for the desk and one for the EV or robot in the air, water or on the ground? Include seamless A.I. tech for modeling and scaleout to cloud for number crunching. Cover the spectrum from enthusiasts to pioneering pro wannabe with unlimited spending capacity.
What you store going uphill is potential energy, not kinetic energy.
Yes, every external force that has influenced the US is unique in some dimension.

To me the biggest difference between China and Japan is that China is much more likely to challenge the US among all dimensions of power, whereas my understanding of Japan in the 80s is that they simply started to be slightly competitive in an economic dimension.

So I do think that there is a higher likelihood that China’s rise opens up more debates about certain deep assumptions we have in the US than Japan’s did. And some of these may be about the primacy of private property. Private property is not a law of physics but it is a very deeply set assumption we have. The idea that housing is an investment more than it is a human necessity is something that may be worth questioning more and more. If investor owned housing in the US keeps trending up (already around 20%) then at some point it will likely be helpful to have another successful system to point at and learn from for solutions.
The explanation is terrible —- and I’m not sure if I could do a better job —- but once you get it, fun, addictive game.
> Are you really saying that the iPadOS version of those applications is so superior to any of the other competitors that people buy iPads just to use the iPadOS versions?

It isn't just these applications providing all too common functionality, it is the application centric iPadOS that makes them more than the sum of their parts, also. Apple's implementation of iPadOS and their tablet implementations of these common applications cause each to rise to the level of killer app, and, definitely, beyond all doubt, massively drive sales of the hardware just to use those particular yet common apps in Apple's implementations of them on a tablet. There's no great reason Android on third-party tablet, or whatever is running on Amazon's tablets, can't achieve the same, but they simply haven't. Android more or less sucks. Apple sucks, but with iPadOS + tablet app implementations, much much less.
You’re taking too narrow a definition.

Investment:

> Property or another possession acquired for future financial return or benefit.

Invest:

> to commit (money) in order to earn a financial return

> to make use of for future benefits or advantages
invested her time wisely

> to involve or engage especially emotionally
were deeply invested in their children's lives

Clearly you can outlay capital now for a future benefit tomorrow that isn’t just your original capital back + the investment. Making sure you’re energy supply is stable so that your economy is working better and your national security is a bit more stable seems like a clear ROI even if you don’t make your capital back + profit directly (it does have potential indirect financial benefits too though).
Here’s a recent podcast episode that looks at Rust and Ada with some folks who work on Ada Core, https://rustacean-station.org/episode/067-quentin-ochem-flor...
Could also be compensation for a medallion system the government was forcing Taxi company’s to buy into.

Force people to spend X00,000$/car to enter a market and then let ride-shares ignore that requirement that’s going to push all these companies to bankruptcy simply because the newcomers don’t have to pay interest on these loans.
The earth is on a trajectory for <2.5C just based on current technology and policies. The technology and policy path we're on (including developed but not yet implemented tech and policy) is likely to limit warming to <2C, but 1.5C is nigh-on unachievable. Assuming we don't hit any runaway conditions (which is an unknown unknown that we probably won't realize until we're already there)...the vast majority of the world will be just fine. And if governments can get their heads out of their behinds and pass marginally sensible immigration reform, the people who are displaced can move to locations where there are massive demographic bombs going off (most of the west) to stabilize their workforces.
I thought so too until recently, but they are raising the stakes with Patriot missiles and "need to win" rhetoric, so there is a certain chance it will keep escalating.
I think that's hugely dependent on whether you believe the cost function for prison is linear? I would expect most people to say no. The difference between 0 and 10 years is much greater than 10 and 20 years.

If that is the case, then putting 10 people away for 10 years due to greater certainty of conviction, but also more lenient sentences, has greater social utility (as a detterrent) than only putting one person behind bars for 100 years, with 9 others getting off scot-free.
Checking is the only reason that hashes are provided.
I think the issues you list for nuclear are exaggerated. The real problem is the cost and complexity of construction, which could be solved with mini reactors where the technology is still not quite there for mass production. The licensing is also a problem at least in some countries, as getting a permit is very difficult it makes sense to only build massive power plants.
Yeah, sometimes there are plastic gears designed in specifically for this, in blenders and kitchen appliances, some lathes even have a set of several copies of one plastic safety gear. But sintered metal gears in planetary gearbox of a cordless screwdriver which fails faster than it's battery (Einhell) - not acceptable.
When everyone is manufacturing crap, there's value in non-cheap, good, honest products.

Too bad all of our manufacturing went to China, a culture that has no concept of honesty. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/in-china-honesty-is-not-th... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-...

I recently replaced a knockoff Leatherman (which of course broke without being old) with a real one. It worked so well, I bought two. https://www.leatherman.com/ I first discovered these when I worked in the USAF in the 90's. They're not cheap, but one should support quality products with your hard earned cash.

I also needed to replace my belt recently. Discovered https://ansonbelt.com/. I'm not sure where they're manufactured, but they're quality belts with a unique self-measuring system and a latching mechanism.
Tesla offers discounts in Canada/Mexico, raising demand concerns
What the MBAs "found out" pertains to the consumer, not the product. Discovering that something exists is not the same as creating it.
Two big recent reasons for the shortage are retirees and reduced immigration, and the follow on effects of those. For instance, the people you are wondering about that "sit at home" are probably moving in with a relative and helping them. And there's a fair chance that relative retired earlier than planned, or was negatively impacted by covid, or both. Covid hit the old primarily, but that age group was helping out with families and communities, and now they need someone to help them.

And a longer term effect that has been going on has been a general reduction in working age males in the workforce. That one is more complex and worrisome. There's some recent research about them if you google for it.
Sorry to hear that.

We had a few cordless vacs - each one has died due to the battery. No replacements available :/ Even the very expensive Dyson.

So far, my Dewalt cordless vac (which has a replaceable battery, by design, since it's a Dewalt) works OK. It's a mini shop-vac, but we pull it out for various household uses as needed.
One perhaps continued to this day, if maybe in a different way (we'll know in a few decades) : toxic fluorescents and most diode bulbs not having separated transformers (they are DC !)
According to [1] the cost of such a large wind turbine is about $1 MM/ MW. Assuming a capacity factor of 40% [2], a 12 MW turbine would produce about 115 MWh per day, or 42 GWh per year, or 840 GWh over a lifespan of 20 years. That's about 1.4 cents per kWh. But that's excluding other costs (installation, operation, transmission). It appears to me this is the dominant cost, so overall I think it would come to less than 3 cents per kWh.

[1] https://www.offshorewind.biz/2020/09/21/rystad-energy-less-i...

[2] https://windeurope.org/about-wind/daily-wind/capacity-factor...
I have the original refrigerator the previous owners installed when we purchased the house. It's from the 1990s. It is sometimes loud, but I am afraid to replace it. I am sometimes awed by the new, sleek fridges in the home improvement store but then Admiral Ackbar's voice rings in my head and gives me a +8 to my Will save. So far so good.

Every 2-4 years I replace the dishwasher, dryer, and washing machine. The first replacement dishwasher caught on fire; we are on dishwasher #4. The current washing machine has a leak, the water sensor* which somehow functions after being there for over four years (four!) notifies me reliably.

* Samsung has discontinued the water sensor
Immigration only inhibits wage growth when unions and workers rights are obliterated to the point that they can't fight back against corporations and make them pay a living wage to everybody. Don't act like immigration = wage growth being inhibited, that is absurdly fatalistic about there being no alternative to the status quo.
FFmpeg in the Browser: Run Video Encoding and Conversion on the Fly
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Four things procrastinators need to learn (2018)
Spot on. Even at the 'nicer' grocery stores in the US, can openers are made of the cheapest materials I've ever seen. At the moment you pick it up, you just know its going to break before a year from now.

By now, you'd think we'd have reached a minimum viable quantity of products that have been ubiquitous for so long.
Offshore wind is already extremely cheap. Way, way cheaper than nuclear and can get online much faster.