skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Self-employed gig workers aren't protected against illness or unemployment. No paid time off, no sick days, no pension, no maternity leave. And on top of that the majority earn below minimum wage.

Gig work is understandable for students or people who want extra income but it shouldn't be someones main source of income.
Study reveals scale of ‘science scam’ in academic publishing
This is a bit silly. Imagine life without even commonplace things such as easy access to food, or corrective glasses, or sun cream, or Paracetamol, or a Polio vaccine, or a car, or a bike? You don't need to be rich to access some of the biggest jumps in quality of life in history.
> The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning

I disagree with this take. My personal anecdote is that I am far, far better at mental math than I was in high school because I ended up in a job where doing a lot of ad-hoc calculations was just a day-to-day thing. I started out using a calculator, but eventually got to where I didn't need it most of the time just through sheer repetition.

I think AI tools (the kind people are worried about right now, anyway) will be used in a similar fashion to calculators. After learning the basics, it will be a tool taught as an assist for streaming ideas into and getting out a well-formatted and coherent output. People who write a lot will eventually find the hassle of using the tool to be more trouble than it's worth. People who don't will still know how to use it to and know how to recognize when the output doesn't make any sense.
Yep, I'm all up for it. Just replying to parent.
What would it even mean if we created covid 19 in a lab and it was accidentally released?

Perhaps this may provide enough precedence to codify more specific laws, regulations, certifications, liabilities and consequences that affect funding availability, multiple levels of insurance requirements and lab safety requirements. Additionally there could also be more consequences for side-stepping direction from leadership to cease and desist research in a particular area when the risk was already deemed too great. The attitube of "It's easier to say sorry than it is to say please" should not apply to high risk research regardless of how much money could be potentially gained.

In my opinion this is important to address sooner than later. Covid may be a short walk in the park compared to the risk we are about to experience with Precision Medicine [1] also known as dual-use biology.

Would anyone be held responsible?

Proving intent is difficult without emails, contracts, voice conversations, etc... Even if these audit trails existed it is more likely to be covered up to protect all nations involved from international blow-back. More likely these people may be quietly found negligent and lose the ability to fund or manage future projects. They and their associates become a toxic investment risk thus possibly discouraging future behavior assuming only negligence was involved. A new set of people take their place and the world rinses and repeats.

I can not prove intent but I can see incentive. One need only watch V for Vendetta to see the parallels.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734114
I've done it once in my career 20 years ago and I didn't like the experience. I had an evil thought to pretend to trip and spill it all over the nurse when I was handing it to her, but my better angels prevailed. I passed of course but I won't do it again.

It seems this is much less popular today than it was 20 years ago. It was prevalent back then.
Next step: ban automation.
To me it doesn't make sense. Why doesn't this exact same logic apply to individual success?
No offense but you are almost certainly using it wrong. Consider the following:

1. Use it when you know how to do something but don't want to.

2. Use it when you don't know something, and don't know how to find the answer.

3. Never trust. Verify.

Clearly, this means the examples that impress others will often not impress you.
Plus they say minimum wage rose just this month. I'd expect to see at least a little lag between wages that are legislated directly and those only influenced by that legislation through market pressures.
“Trillion-year timeframe” itself reads like a caricature.

Even the Long Now folks are looking at the xx,000 timeframe which is… approachable by comparison.

Nothing survives a trillion-year timeframe.
Main reason is that gas was heavily subsidised and promoted for a bit when they were pumping it from the North Sea.

That was obviously short term stupidity at the time, but has only become more so with hindsight.

Compare with Norway that also has North Sea gas, but heavily pushed heat pumps and is a market leader.
Subtitle:

Revised award to EcoHealth Alliance will no longer involve studies of hybrid coronaviruses

FWIW. I don't know if that will make anyone feel any better about it.
That's not what orthogonal means. Your counter-examples are exactly what orthogonal means; they are independent attributes.
>> What would it even mean if we created covid 19 in a lab and it was accidentally released? Would it change anything? Would anyone be held responsible?

Nothing. No. and No. "Scientists" were proposing research that would create essentially the Covid19 virus. I'm not sure if they ever got funded, but maybe that was being carried out at the Wuhan lab. The facts are: people wanted to create Covid19 (or something nearly like it). We found out what can happen if that type of thing gets out (whether it occurred naturally or in a lab). Those same people want to carry on with exactly the kind of "research" they were doing before, as if we've learned nothing from a global pandemic caused by a virus just like the ones they want to play with.

The fact we can't prove Covid19 came from a lab is beside the point. Given what people are working on, it may as well have been a lab leak since the result would be essentially identical to what happened, and they refuse to understand that - quite intentionally it seems.
github has had service issues at least for the last 3 days.

Fun times.
hey so im really curious

do you actually believe Trudeau is a communist? i was speaking to a Canadian guy I work with and he seems to actually believe that
> Even here on HN people created sockpuppet accounts to call me out.

Lots of political and financial interests behind it. For them it's existential as they can't survive in a free and decentralized space even with paid content and bots.
EcoHealth should not be allowed to participate in Federal grants. If there is a reason we don't have confidence as a society where Covid came from, it's because of efforts taken by Ecohealth to short-circuit reasonable scientific inquiry. EcoHealth doesn't do science and should be banned.
Most of the people I know who do gig work do it because it is so flexible. They often have other things like childcare or schooling that take a large part of their time.
>> an average of 28 hours

I wonder if this hours figure is calculated the same way the gig companies calculate minimum wage.

I.e. that 28 hours represents only time spent in performing the delivery task. Any waiting around beforehand when not assigned a task is not counted as working hours for the purposes of min wage calculation. If this is true (and that needs verifying) then this 28 might be a 40 hours where the person was unable to get on with their other life duties even if they weren’t technically working.
When I was younger I had a very expensive full blown audio system in my car. I would drive around blasting music so loud you'd feel it shaking your bones and punching your organs (don't worry it was a pretty rural area). A totally visceral experience.

I absolutely cannot do that anymore, given the damage it eventually did to my ears, but man, If I could heal my ears so I could go back and do that again...
If you are only making around £7 an hour it's not going to matter if you work 28 hours or 84 hours. The takeaway is that people doing jobs that wouldn't otherwise exist.
A didactic poem on software project management
In a coding world, chaotic and wild,
Where errors were silenced and work was beguiled,
A project, a mess, with no structured way,
Turned into a comedy, or so they say.

They turned off TypeScript errors, oh what a sight,
Like blindfolded warriors, ready to fight,
Bugs emerged, unseen, with sneaky disguise,
Waiting to pounce, to the team's surprise.

No structured planning, no tickets in sight,
The path was unclear, like a moonless night,
Requirements and designs, a constant change,
Like a swirling tornado, no chance to arrange.

An integration partner, oh, so unreliable,
Their promises, like whispers in the wind, so pliable,
The code clashed, like dancers without a beat,
Errors multiplied, like rabbits on the street.

And then, in a panic, new developers arrived,
To fix the mess, though they barely survived,
The project, already late, in desperate need,
But adding more chaos was not the right deed.

The team struggled, coordination a mess,
The codebase a circus, causing much distress,
Deadlines were missed, frustrations ran high,
A shit show at the fuck factory, oh my!

But amidst the chaos, a lesson was learned,
A wake-up call, like tables that turned,
Structured processes, requirements in place,
And turning off errors? A big-time disgrace.

So let this be a tale of caution and wit,
A reminder to avoid the chaotic pit,
Embrace structure, communication, and grace,
And let your projects find a smoother pace.

For in the realm of coding, it's wise to know,
That chaos unleashed will surely blow,
So strive for order, clarity, and glee,
And create software that's error-free.
Have you guys tested this on the iPhone SE 2020? There is some weird element hanging out at the bottom of the screen below the bottom bar.
I'm definitely not defending Python. I think that language is a mess as well. There is no law of conservation of programming language derps, unfortunately.
An example (not the best one maybe but I'm not the right guy to come up with good examples immediately) from a year ago:

We have to integrate company M and W (one is a marketplace the other one is a big store, think Walmart or something).

Company W mostly uses software similar to SAP-whatever and have a small team resposible for building 'helper' services in place where SAP can't do the job.

Company W can't communicate with M in any other way except through your generic http API they provide.

So every now and then M has to send a request to W and W has to prepare a pretty large XML response. (obviously the data is split in some way and we are not talking about tens of GBs but even so W has has to fetch the data from more than one data source, process it and send it)

In some cases you can simply have a cache\a view\whatever for this (so you only have to fetch prepared data) but in some cases you can not.

PS: this is if we are talking about HTTP communication. Or maybe some real-time communication where you can't really respond with "hey, we are getting your data prepared so just wait for a bit and re-request it with this nice jobID at a later time"
FWIW, OC48 was commonplace in telco rings when I got into the business in 1996, we installed a crapload of Fujitsu FLM-2400 hardware, but mostly as transport for DS3's and the occasional STS-3 or STS-12. We certainly didn't have customers ordering whole OC48's for themselves!

But perhaps the article is blurring the notion and counting it as an OC48 if that's what was entering the building, even if a given customer only leased an OC-3 worth of it and the rest just passed through. That was certainly common, and some customers themselves were confused about the notion, so I could see the details being handwaved here as well.

As another data point, I worked on what I'm told was the first OC192 ring in Michigan, in what I believe was 1999, which included a brand new building that MCI had just constructed behind the old train station. (Fiber often follows railroads since they're straight-line easements connecting population centers.) That was the first time I encountered the notion of polarization mode dispersion compensation, which had been implemented as textbook-sized modules that slotted into the node. I was told that each module contained a bunch of fiber and some micro-actuators to stress it and try to warp the fiber into applying a complementary amount of PMD to what had happened in the OSP, restoring the pulse shape.

The Nortel TransportNode OC-192 hardware itself occupied a full rack just to break the OC192 down into OC48s, and then there were two more racks of OC48 hardware (each a half-rack) to handle customer-rate circuits. (A year or two later, when the Cerent 454 condensed a full OC48 terminal into an 8U or 6U chassis, everything changed. Cisco rapidly gobbled them up and stuck "15454" labels on them, and the rest is history.)

It likewise blows my mind that what was a whole rack of equipment then, today fits in an SFP+ that I can conceal in my palm, and a fraction of an ASIC to drive it.
The missing number is how many of them are working another job.

I haven't taken Uber in last couple of years, but prior to Covid I took it ~weekly in Ottawa & Toronto. Not a single driver in years of travel for work, had it as their sole employment.

They're usually in a hurry, but delivery drivers I had a chance to chat with last few years also primarily use it to supplement their income.

So people may be doing 60 hours a week, just not solely via gig work.

Edit: I've Re-read the article, the 28 hours a week you quote is immediately followed by a clarifying "comprising 60% of their total earnings" -- so it looks like indeed they are working many more hours a week total.
For what?

I dunno, to prevent overflowing hospitals from having to turn people away because everyone who ‘did their research’ conveniently start trusting doctors again when they get a bad case.
The fact that some of the world's most annoying people (eg Musk, Thiel) are throwing money at this should clue you in to the point: it is about maintaining the current economic structure and, in "ideal" world, living forever (eg transhumanism, mentioned in the article) to "enjoy" it for the very few on top.

Honestly I draw some comfort from our own mortality because the very worst people ultimately die too. If we ever achieve effective immortality, part of me believes that could be truly catastrophic for society.

> We can now begin to see how longtermism might be self-defeating.

Karl Marx talked abou tthe contradictions inherent in capitalism and that it was ultimately unsustainable in the 1840s through the over-accumulation or cconcentration of capital. Marx predicted a response to this being a revolution by the proletariat, which has thus far not come to pass, but the tool for squashing uprisings has been and continues to be fascism.
You are correct, thank you. I was on my phone and dyslexia is a cruel partner.
Are you referring to "experts" in the field such as Peter Daszak?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_%28COVID-19%29?w...
Wanting more work isn't going to make a lunch rush happen again. These folks make no money at all waiting around, and can only make a nearly worthwhile sum when there is demand.
1. The primary definition that is used in PoliSci is the one Fareed Zakaria coined in his paper in Foreign Affairs in 1997 [0].

2. "Socialism" is an economic not a social philosophy. Note how I said "Socially Progressive/Conservative" not economically.

Outside the US+Canada and increasingly the UK, there is a consensus among both Cultural Progressive and Cultural Conservatives that welfare programs can and should be expanded. It is a major pillar of both Christian and Islamic religious political thought (traditionally, capitalism was viewed as negatively due to ursury being a sin - this was the position of the Catholic Church until the 60s).

This is why the German Welfare state (Staatssozialismus) was started by Otto con Bismarck [1] with support from the Prussian nobility as a way to undercut the labor movement in late 19th century Germany. This same doctrinal evolution is used to this day by Socially Conservative parties like the CDU, Likud, BJP, AKP, Fidesz, and the PiS, as well as by Socially Right leaning autocratic leaders like Xi Jingping and Vladimir Putin.

3. The line you cite from the Wikipedia article is incorrect. Even the citation used by that line conflicts with what was written. On a separate note, this wiki page should be restricted editing wise - it looks like it is being given bad faith edits on both sides of the aisle (sadly unsurprising as most people only first heard of the term "Illiberal Democracy" in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential Election, so it's now a victim of culture wars as well).

[0] - https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~lebelp/FZakariaIlliberalDemocr...

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany)
I took the go to mean whether something is a conspiracy and whether something is a fact aren't tied. You can have any of the permutations. I think very often you get what looks like conspiracy when there is actually no communication between parties, rather it is swarm behavior, each ant acting based on its observations and motives. But sometimes the ants have to chat, then it is a conspiracy.
> our one party with two names

... If you're not a woman, gay, trans, black, poor, ...
> China got back to productivity faster though, and gave their population time for a vaccine to be developed and distributed.

Wasn't China famously locked down long past the point where the rest of the world was back up and getting on with life? By the time we got to Omicron the vaccine appeared to be doing next to nothing and China was still locked down.
The entire thing with worrying about GAI starts with observation that it is a WMD, so powerful we can barely conceptualize it.

A smart enough AGI, unless it's perfectly aligned, will end humanity (or worse - there are worse things than death), most likely by accident or just plain not caring. But it doesn't stop there. If that AI is self-improving, it could easily turn into a threat for the entire galaxy, or even the universe, unless it meets a stronger and better aligned (to its creators) alien GAI...

That's the alignment 101. But I worry people don't talk about alignment 102: a perfectly aligned superhuman GAI will not destroy us, but its very existence will turn us into NPCs in the story of the future of the universe.
Thanks, I am so going down this rabbit hole.

It's for an X230, I wanted 802.11ac wifi in it.
it would take you about half an hour. absolute minimal syntax and fairly obvious semantics.

of course, learning how to use it properly might take a little longer :-)
Whether this applies depends on what situation you are supposedly replacing by writing.

If you replace intense IRL dialogue and discussion, with writing, this might be the case.

On the other hand, if you replace just letting your thoughts fade in the void, with writing them down as coherent though out ideas in writing, I would argue that the writing has actually both triggered retention from memory (thus exercising the memory), and helped you critically assess and make your own thinking clearer.

Thus, I think writing is an extremely helpful tool for processing your thoughts for most knowledge workers who are not already involved in constant dialogue with others (which is most of us I guess).
Helping improve the quality of life and equity for those on the far left side of the bell curve.
That's called not having a minimum wage.

Are we just now rediscovering why minimum wages are bad?
Inflation slowed in April, marking 10th month of moderation
It's a "fact" when it's supported by a majority of evidence and withstands scrutiny over an extended period of time.

Which conspiracy are you referring to?
Yes, if the company has the money then they shouldn't put people's lives at risk to benefit a few CEOs and stockholders, that's insane and it hurts society at large
Wouldn't that just mean automation is inevitable anyway?

The scenario isn't "If you ask for more I'll automate you." It is that they'll automate them anyway when it is convenient for them to do so.
You’re correct, I should have said he didn’t get to extreme wealth from having a 1 in 1 billion super outlier IQ. As to your point we don’t have a specific score, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any evidence whatsoever. A very high SAT score does suggest a high intelligence but he didn’t win a Putnam prize or show similar extreme outlier performance.
If we are going to let this persist we should really just get rid of the minimum wage all together. Having a minimum wage for some jobs but not for others is just silly at this point.
Right, this is the idea that implicates the kookiness.
I think what makes it a popular codegen target has more to do with

- The places it can run

- The ecosystem it can interop with

Not that it's a bad codegen target otherwise- it's high-level but performant for being so high-level, it's garbage collected, first-class functions, low-level primitives are available for optimizations, etc. But these on their own don't make it super unique
I am an old 60+yo fart still happily coding - I design and develop software products for clients and for my own company. Maybe I am an exception but I've never felt that I need anything specific for my age. I also am quite comfy with young developers when need to interact / collaborate.
it's not necessarily the target audience, but it's who's making these videos generally — mainstream american culture has always had a major yuppie component as a primary feature, google has embodied this for quite some time
just going by the author's bio and credentials would suggest it's pretty high
You need to view it with a browser that supports Emojis 15 - https://emojipedia.org/emoji-15.0/ - a modern phone should work
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are way better off today than they were before World War 2 lmao

They have the same issues Japan does now (birth rate, long working hours, etc), but they’re not radioactive wastelands like people assume. In a lot of ways their infrastructure is better than the best cities in America
Your Body Killed Cancer 5 Minutes Ago [video]
Minimum wage earners who are working 40 hours a week find out that they could work half as many hours and still earn that much. They also get flexible hours and the freedom to decide what gig to do. Card-carrying Socialists are teaching them how exploited they are, by The System, encouraging unionization.
Britain has delivered long-range ‘Storm Shadow’ cruise missiles to Ukraine
Wasn't Bard released publicly yesterday? I think it requires a login, and is still labeled as experimental, but is now available to anyone.

https://bard.google.com

Edit: The comment I was replying to appears to have edited their comment to make this one no longer relevant.
airborne aids isn't the doomsday scenario, airborne ebola is.
A similar thing actually works with Bing Chat. Just open a local text file with Edge:

https://twitter.com/MParakhin/status/1653164069032169473

Parakhin is the Bing manager.
Are you forgetting that the lockdowns had to happen because authorities (Trump, not CDC) pissed away a month of exponential growth doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on "ignore it and it will go away" instead of jumping on measures to reduce Rt? They only blinked when faced with the imminent prospect of having hospitals spill out into parking lots full of people slowly dying for want of a respirator.

The pandemic was incompetently managed, but "ignore COVID harder" is the exact brand of incompetence that made the pandemic worse than it had to be.
Whatever Happened to the Theory of Everything?
I was thinking this myself. I'm old and salty and I use the same resources as everyone else.
It seems clear that they take the concept of "species" (which scientifically is a fuzzy concept, and where each "species" is without any inherent goals as far as we can tell) and transpose it onto a much simpler concept, which can have goals much like individuals (hence the orange).