skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So one persons intuition works better at working out exactly what too much wealth or a healthy society means, than a feedback system of about 7bn independent entities kind of trading freely and making decisions, and for example awarding Jeff bezos 100bn for making almost all products available within 24 hours at the lowest possible margins, almost never making a profit, and employing 400k people extra during Covid.

Yes I’m sure these independent “experts” like yourself have a much better grasp at “fairness” and we should all believe that 100bn is too much.

Could you just scientifically deduce for me where the limit is? If I have 100m is that ok? In your expert opinion? Or is that too much? Should we cap at 1m? I’d love to see your maths on what constitutes a fair amount of wealth.
technically I guess it should return sNAN (so app can check for it if it want to handle it differently) and raise exception if sNaN is used in (non-comparison) operation
Bivalent Covid-19 Vaccines – A Cautionary Tale
After 35 years, software engineering remains a moderate challenge but programming is no longer interesting.
On one hand

> There are now around 10,000 family offices

On the other hand

> And yet with so much extraordinary client discretion, it can almost feel like this $6 trillion industry doesn’t exist at all.

10,000 family offices x 10 staff on average (made up number, the article mentions 100 people in one of them) = 100,000 people, which is not a small number of people.

How does an industry that is at once so discreet and employs so many people find staff? How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? Honest question, where do I find these jobs? Connections, you might say, but I find it hard to believe that 100,000 people could all have personal connections. Surely some of these people must be cold hires, people with no previous connections to the owners.
Someone who co-founded a company that literally became the verb for “search for shit on the entire internet” and helped connect billions of customers with tens of millions of companies could easily have created a significant multiple of that value for the world (literally well over a trillion dollars of value that Google has created) and kept a fraction of that value created for themselves. I don’t see the grave injustice in that part of the story.

If others are capable to create a trillion dollars of value, I want them to be enjoy a significant share of that.
In 30 years this is truly the first time anyone said "well-documented". "Very well documented." Yes. Actually a lot of credit goes to the inheritors of this project (Magnus Jacobsson, Matthew Fernandez, Mark Hansen, and a boost from Steve Roush and Costa Shulyupin) for bringing some sense of order and self-respect.

It's thrilling someone else noticed the Nocaj et al. Simmelian backbone paper. There is a directory somewhere on this computer of an implementation in graphviz that Emden Gansner wrote a couple of years ago. (It should at least be uploaded to graphviz gitlab so we don't ever lose it.) All we need now is a summer intern to finish the job. Sometimes it's natural to miss Bell Labs and even AT&T Labs a whole lot.
If we assume, say, 600K homeless, that gives us a $166K budget per person.

(If we somehow spend that, per person, our main challenge would be keeping it secret so as not to disincentivize people who have to work for $166K; we need them to pay taxes.)
As an engineer, I've had both a fantastic people manager, and a fantastic project manager. They were godsends. They were also abnormally engaged and empathetic. They both sweated the technical details of the project we were working on and used that understanding to operate as very effective negotiators and shit umbrellas. As a result we were clear to move forward very quickly on multiple fronts and ended up having the capacity to pick up a whole bunch of slack from peer teams that had marooned themselves.

Good ones have tremendous amounts of value to contribute. Bad ones are the productivity equivalent of a ball-and-chain. Unfortunately, the cross-over point into net positive seems to be located noticeably higher than mean competence.
I use a (variant of) the Dactyl too and it's been life changing for me. I've always struggled with RSI and used to only be able to code for an hour or 2 at a time, but these days can spend all day/night typing (with small breaks to stretch) without any issues at all.

I 3D printed adapters for my chair arm rests so the keyboards sit at the front of each rest, right where my hands naturally want to be. I can then recline my chair a bit and type for hours without sitting forward/hunched over the desk.
Except socialism demands rigid control.
It's not lack of available homes that causes homelessness, it's lack of available treatment (addiction & mental) that is the underlying issue.

I'm not an "All-In" podcast fanboy, but they touch on this on the latest episode and I think they actually have it right.
> Many readers come away from the first book stunned at how believable the technology feels compared to something like Star Trek or Star Wars.

I cannot believe this to be true. While I'm wary of the "no True Scotsman" aspect to the term "hard sf", TBP and it's sequels are about as hard as jello.

Honestly, the author would have been better off allowing things to just be hand wavey instead of poorly explaining everything.
This would be one approach.

However devils advocate here - I took an essay question verbatim from a humanities assessed exercise, and very quickly (think seconds of effort) created a prompt and got Chat GPT to write text each time it was prompted, until told to stop.

I copied the output (which I'd requested references to be included in), and gave it to the professor who set the question.

They very quickly confirmed the language model essay was considerably better than their human students' essays. It was more coherent and readable, better answered the question set, was more "on topic", and even better structured - it followed a structure that introduced a position, then substantiated the position, gave some mention to alternative viewpoints, and compared and justified the position in relation to them.

The topic wasn't hard, you could easily Google copious essays on the topic, but the output wasn't pulled from the web verbatim (even in parts), and it was better than the actual students' work!

The biggest failing was the references - language models generate plausible and readable text... So it invented lots of very interesting and plausible sounding references, none of which existed. The titles sounded relevant. The authors were appropriate to the subject matter, the journals or publication venues were also appropriate and relevant. It's just that none of them actually existed!
Dan Perry [1], the opinion author, makes an interesting observation regarding the socio-political mindset that views the world through the prism of an "elite" controlled reality.

"It is now fashionable to disdain the “elites.” That’s another item in the toolbox of autocrats. It is also an excellent way to hasten chaos and poverty."

I am highlighting this specific aspect of his opinion piece in context of a recently [dead][flagged] submission to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375277

I found it regrettable that that post was flagged. Not because the writer was making sensible point. No. Because this line of thinking can be trivially dismantled if subjected to the bright light of sober analysis, and would also provide an opportunity to point out the distasteful implicit idea that is masquerading as righteous indignation or constructive social commentary in this line of thinking.

The central idea behind "elite" controlled society is that the masses are but children without agency that dance to the diktats of a paternal "elite". The cited dead post went a bit further and somewhat nostalgically looked at the "old elite" and their "noblesse oblige". We used to have 'good parents' but alas now we have 'irresponsible parents'. That is a barely disguised expression of an infantile desire for a 'strong guiding hand'.

It is not only a shameful mindset for a thinking adult human being, but also the precise mindset that will trivially slip into authoritarian and autocratic tendencies. Such tendencies can fester if informed discussion is suppressed, and will only serve to reinforce the distorted and patronizing narratives.

[1]: https://danperry.substack.com/
Family Office

I don’t think the author knows about “family offices”.

The secrecy and nondescript nature is exactly inline with what family offices are, because family’s don’t want other people knowing about their investments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office
This is kind of conflating different types of pollution. If you breathed just the exhaust, you probably wouldn't notice the PM2.5 particulate as you would be too busy suffocating from CO2 exposure.
Many things that make intuitive sense to most people are wildly wrong. Reorganizing society to accommodate the grab bag of misunderstandings and prejudices that make up the intuitive sense of most people is usually a mistake.

Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing.
Training Status such as "Unproductive" is calculated on your Garmin hardware device. Garmin Connect only displays what the device calculates. (I think that is a flawed approach, but Garmin is primarily a device company so that's just how it works.)

If you know that you're going to be running in challenging conditions like snow that reduce your pace then use the Trail Run activity profile and set "Record VO2 Max.” to Off. That should prevent it from changing your fitness metrics.
The job of a family office is not to act as a private hedge fund. Well, not necessarily. View it more as a "family management" office.
All else being equal, people get better at things they do more of, and part of the interview process is finding out how much coding a person has done.

I'm sure that mother would give amazing answers to the other parts of this interview.
Every time I see something like this, I'm also reminded of this demo of the Xerox Alto from a few years back. I'll link to the start of the most relevant piece: https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=549

I'm always struck by the useful directions that desktop computers were going in the 70s, and how computing could be so much better than it is right now. But we've veered so off-course from all of this, away from composability and towards independent boxes ("applications") that can't talk to each other at all.

Emacs is in some ways the best thing we have today in the other direction, but it pales in comparison to what's possible.
This has basically nailed the stuff my wife developed “out of nowhere” toward the end of 2021.

Wow.

I wonder how one convinces doctors to take that seriously?

It’s been a real nightmare.
Triggers Broom - https://youtu.be/56yN2zHtofM
I didn't call myself an expert, or say that it was fair.
Yes, but that is not in opposition to what I said above.

Hours were certainly logged fraudulently, I’m not debating that. I’m saying that rather than firing her, I would have asked a lot of questions about the situation and if I pushed her to feel like she needed to.

The software they were using sounds like what I have seen myself in the past, and it is a huge burden to try and justify every moment of every day the way they want you to. It’s basically a guarantee for burnout and lack of loyalty.
I pronounced it inks for the longest time
What comes after Blink?

pours one out for Opera 12 (Presto)
It's honestly great. I also have done a fair amount of go (and before that a decent amount of objc) and it feels in the same vein as both of those but with some nice additional compiler helpers.
That's what the whole post is about - they're doing it. They're changing standards and making things better. Honestly, I think that of all sources of pollution, cars are the ones that are seeing the clearest and most visible work. We can see it in the market - electric cars are increasingly taking market share. We can see it in government - California just banned gas cars completely as of 2035.

Yes, ICE cars are big polluters, but all the evidence seems to pretty clearly show that we're in agreement on that as a society and are taking active steps to get rid of them.
The math is trivial to explain this (in theory).
Even if the bivalent vaccine wasn't significantly better than the original in boosting against the new variants, that doesn't mean it won't be better as the virus continues to diverge.
Aside from factual concerns, ChatGPT has a very strong tendency to produce text with low information density. It's absolutely not what you want in an encyclopedia article.
> Read the Manifesto again.

I did, and here's the direct quotes:

> Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.

As I said, the cycle length is shortened, yet...

> Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.

...design is not removed from the process, but kept as a cornerstone.

> Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.

This one might be a bit more of a stretch, but I see here the benefit of designing a simple, elegant solution rather than doing work straight ahead.

In any case, I don't fully agree with the agile manifesto, even when correctly implemented. Particularly this quote is the bane of my existence:

> The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

Which you can identify as the very opposite of the ever popular 'this meeting could have been an email'.
> Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing.

Not ours[1]!

Edit: At least, not yet. I, for one, welcome the application of this logic to our current scheme.

[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/
Anything that dared go beyond "vaccines are safe and effective" was conspiracy theory.
Unease and woe are the two feelings I'm left with after my quick layman reading of the article.

Think I am most concerned with the reproductive implications, which seem under researched. Coupled with the unrelated decline in sperm count the past decade... I'm hoping my ruminations are just me catastrophizing.

Can anyone more medically and scientifically literate provide some context to temper my doom and gloom?
They do mention part way through the article how much of a stretch the term has become

> Admittedly, the variance between these entities shows how the term “family office” has lost some meaning.
> If you knew more about the details of binary64 aka float64, you could confidently say that "2.3" means 2.29999995231628417969 […]"

Then I think writing

let f = 2.3;

Should be a compile error. The compiler should force you to write the “snapped” value in order to not mislead. :)
I laughed at the "family office business" being a "6 trillion dollar industry."

The term "family office" is about as descriptive of a company's line of business as "trust" or "llc."
In my opinion, we're already in the midst of an AI catastrophe. Social media algorithms that decide what content to show, along with what ads, etc. are unregulated AI that are mediating our society on a previously impossible level of intimacy.

The Stasi couldn't keep up with the level of monitoring and influence that these systems already have.
It seems about the same amount of reasonableness/strawmanness as capturing the exhaust in a plastic bag and breathing that.
> the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring

No one's hands are clean, rich or poor, to be sure, but the assumption is unwarranted and aggressive in its broadness. One does not assume particular guilt based on broad assumptions. Besides, these aren't liquid assets. Do people think these guys have a $100 billion dollars just laying around in a Scrooge McDuck-style Money Bin? That's not how net worth works.

> a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich

Allow?

> (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.)

This is unrelated. It construes wealth as a zero sum game. There is no such tension between wealth and poverty unless some kind of injustice was involved in robbing the poor.
Everyone talks about how docker desktop will be replaced as it's a commodity and I agree. However I see no one talking about the value Docker hub brings which is now bundled with all paid users.

By paying we didn't have to migrate anything and are now building and pushing every commit on our app as a 800mb image (I know its a little to big...). We are storing hundreds if not thousands of images and uploading / pulling TBs.

This kind of usage appears much pricier in container registry offered by cloud vendors
You're right, CO2 meters are only good for detecting stuffy air.

> But it isn't worth measuring something if you don't have much control over it anyway.

Turns out you can do a lot about CO2. Open a window when it gets too high. With some fiddling around I determined how much to crack the window to keep the levels decent.

Particulate levels can vary a lot. It's why I try to live not next to an arterial. Even a short distance away makes a big difference.
> what's your point supporting dictators?

Where was the US embargo when Saudi dictatorship murdered and dismembered a journalist on foreign soil?

Sounds like you k ow nothing of history, US currently supports about 20 dictators around the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khash...
The last sentence of the second paragraph literally reads, "The organization at the center of one of the industry’s most epic feuds and divorces is cloaked in secrecy ... which is, by design, the central value proposition of the entire family-office industry."
My consulting company looked into a related idea- having escrow as a service, supporting a 3 party protocol, for a funder, a doer, and a manager- where two votes are needed to release funds either back to the funder or out to the doer. Our assessment was that it was way too early, but at some point it will be quite valuable to have these financial protocols- like disputes- available for parties to just use. Good luck!
Dont you think it's more because Chrome is backed by a trillion dollar company and it's kinda the go-to browser nowadays because everybody believes Chrome is faster than Firefox? I have a bunch of friends using Chrome, but they all say it's for speed, not for switching profiles?
Just basic common sense would do.

Everything is dangerous and has some risks, but usually weights the risks against other things, we see what are the ways to mitigate them, etc.

If you say that gas stove is bad for indoor air quality, how does it compare to making toasts or having carpet and a bit more dust or living close to roads with lots of circulation.

When it become a religious fervor, when there is only one side of the coin, that’s where there I see a problem.
As always, it is difficult to assess this sort of thing without a reference to the flu. As far as I can tell, in daily life we are continuously encountering people with various chronic problems and systemically under-calling the impact of them. It is a total coincidence if a body is functioning at full capacity.

If COVID increases the hazard ratios there isn't much I can do. As far as I can tell, everyone is going to get COVID. There is no avoiding that. It would be interesting to know how much worse it is than a typical flu though, just for academic interest.
Moreover, could only do that $4 T confuscation once while the $6.8 T expenditures would continue on year by year.

Moreover, if just dumped the $4 T into ordinary consumer expenditures, i.e., houses, cars, Walmart, Amazon, etc., then would get some inflation which would mean that the $4 T would do less good than a simple view would have anticipated.
It is and isn't. Just like the state of an electron. To truly know if it is sarcasm or not, it will cost you one cat.

However, it's no less serious than the GGP's arms in the air upsettedness about calling the 'gram insta. oops, see, i called it two different shortened names back-to-back. uh-oh, somebody's going to be upset!! ;-)

If you don't pronounce INXS as INXS, you're doing it wrong.

Edit: the name I just gave up trying to understand is Musk's kid's name. talking about a name that a kid will grow up to resent their parents about.
That would be alarming if true, but it's a bit hard to trust the authenticity of the leak here.
It's all tradeoffs. For me, not having to deal with passing state past a trailing try/catch clause and not worrying about errors potentially bubbling out of one layer into another are worth the extra "if (res instanceof Error) { return res }" lines
> > At the end of the day we're still here talking about him.

By the same token the whole world was talking about Osama Bin Laden on 9/12/2001, that must have been positive for him?

In reality there is bad publicity , because although even haters know your name , it would take a 1:1 face to face meeting to turn them into supporters and you will never be able to meet everyone
What part of that value helped someone who is homeless?
That's fascinating - even as a kid my sense of smell has been near-nonexistent. Whenever I've read descriptions of powerful smells in books, I've always written them off as overly flowery language.

Reminds me a little generally of how some have an inner voice when they read and others don't.
Fascinating read.

I'm glad to see these findings get serious attention by researchers. It was really frustrating getting dismissed by my local physician when sharing symptoms like sugar sensitivity, fatigue, and focus issues. It was like being perpetually tipsy for months. It was a big shock as a knowledge worker to have to relearn how focus.

I hope they further study vaccines as well. In my anecdotal case my long covid symptoms resumed, along with additional symptoms like body bruising / bone pain for several weeks. There may be classes of healthy adults that react differently than expected and we can learn how to improve from the evidence.
Isn’t that the definition of reactionary?
Why? Loads of private investment funds beat indices.
The iPhone Keyboard – Make It or Break It (2022)
But if you say banned them across all ranches, they would raise prices as would their competitors so the profit position would be basically the same.
Sayings like "no safe amount" makes for great virtue signaling and worse than useless public policy.

While "no safe amount" may technically be true from a scientific perspective in a world where we can measure infinitesimal amounts of things a policy line needs to be drawn. At some point the average net effect of the poison is going to be so far below the noise threshold that caring further is a wash or of negative benefit.
> is ALWAYS targeting U.S Is a torpedo of the Russians, North Koreans, Venezuela and Iran.

Where is the proof for these preposterous claims that North Korea and Russia are in bed together?