skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why has Britain become so poor?

> Even eastern Europe is catching up with our sluggish GDP. Our politicians have been slow to act, but economists say there’s still reason for hope.

Our finest journalists can't even get through the subheading without failing. Our politicians have been acting - thats the problem.
Not only is that judge statement not where she claimed it to be (2023 toc judge paradigms - i think she actually pulled it from past media coverage of the 2022 toc), she had to scroll incredibly far to find a paradigm incendiary like this.
Exactly the same for me. One of the main reasons I moved my family out of the US.
Therapy is to our modern life as Confession once was to the past.
It wouldn't be Hacker News without the constant stream economically-illiterate ideas for "improving" our lives in the comments!
What are you planning to play on that thing?
Rapamycin's Role in Cancer Prevention: Insights from Mikhail Blagosklonny
I read that in Mitch Hedberg‘s voice.
As a Brit that left a long time ago, the problem is the British long since stopped valuing people that actually do anything, and want the entire economy to be gambling/speculation on if others will succeed at what they are doing. They have now been learning, surprisingly slowly, that eventually others that used to fund this speculation start to wonder about the value of a middle man to do it when they can do it themselves.

On top of this the absolute waste of talent in the UK is prodigious. The education system has been a wreck for decades, to the point it simply has to be a deliberate ploy to reduce social mobility.
JFC lots of it is nimbyism

> The Lower Thames Crossing, a tunnel project to connect Kent with Essex under the Thames estuary, has held five consultations since 2017 and still does not have permission to build. To date, more than a quarter of a billion pounds have been spent on the planning application — more, Dumitriu tells me, than it cost to build the Laerdal tunnel in Norway, the longest road tunnel in the world.
What do you mean, "it's not quite science or medicine"? Medicine isn't infallible; it gets big things wrong all the time, often for decades.
inflation is making it more expensive to rebuild

State agencies regulate the insurance industry

insurers say they can't increase rates enough to cover the damage occurring
> The truth is more like "the rich pay most of the taxes."

By itself, this doesn't really mean much; it certainly doesn't address "fairness". For example, even in an inverted regressive tax system, the rich could still pay the most in taxes. This is simply because they earn the most money. And the larger the ratio between rich and poor, the easier it is for the rich to pay the most in taxes, yet still not be affected as substantially by taxation.

Take an extreme example to illustrate: there are 9 earners making $100 per year and 1 earner making $10,000 per year. If the tax rate were 90% for the low-earners and 10% for the high-earner, the high-earner would still pay the most in taxes (more than 50% of total revenue), but few would call this system "fair".
I just started my first engineering job. Help
love this substack haha
> but I also started programming in 3rd grade in the 90s, didn’t go to college so have no debt, and live a pretty non materialistic punk rock life.

Likely luck then; would you be in the same place if you didn't happen to be interested in a field that makes big money with no formal education needed?
"an hour or two"

https://imgur.com/a/mzQpB1u

minimal prompting - just variations on "handheld electronic cyberdeck, netrunner OR cyperpunk"
The British media, The Times included, have had a big part to play in all of this. For them to behave with their usual convenient amnesia of their past reporting is a bit too much for me, at least, to accept. It just isn't fit for purpose any more. (I tried subscribing to The Times not long ago on a special offer and cancelled my subscription long before it was over. It is immensely pro-Tory and obediently unquestioning of the government. Just today I saw on their front page an article implicitly shilling for the government against encryption).
"bwdif" is a hybrid of "yadif" and "w3fdif"
It's not worse than their predecessors. That belief is a combination of looking at the past with rose colored glasses and extrapolating the issues of a handful of cities to the entire country.
I'm surprised that WCCF tech is getting on the HN front page. They are known for just running with any inkling of a rumor, or even just jumping to their own wild conclusions and running articles on that.
I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. While some lament the loss of this golden age their grandparents experienced, a much greater number of people around the world have seen their living conditions improve markedly since the time of their grandparents.

That doesn't take away from the point that ideally no one should have to work themselves to the bone just to afford a humble lifestyle, but if middle class people in developed countries are really asking for perspective, I think it's worth bearing their relative privilege in mind.
>practical tools for coping and alleviating symptoms

Can you share some of those or are they rather personal?
How do you compile Emails on OSX? I use `brew install emacs-head@30 --with-cocoa` and I feel that org-mode is bit laggy. Is there a better way?
Trends in alcohol consumption from middle ages to modern world tell a story
Is making products that are AI, worth it?
I'd like to read them, his stuff does seem entertainment heavy. And I spot some errors in places I have expertise, if small ones.

Not this Shapiro right? This one is mostly agreeing with Zeihan. https://www.dailywire.com/news/bank-on-it-ben-shapiro-predic...
It skirts away from the “why” of those, however, looking at first order effects as causes.

The “why” is conceit and arrogance - an unshakeable belief in British superiority, that it can never happen here, and that there will be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.

That, I see little sign of changing. I write this as a Briton who has turned his back on the U.K., rather than hold out hope for change.
I'm a civil engineer, and let me just say I'm extremely skeptical of several of these:

I doubt that there's ever going to be superconductors used commonly in long range power transmission. The economics just won't make sense, the conductive properties of the material are not the only ones that matter: (lifespan, toughness, flexibility, etc. matter a LOT.)

Fusion reactors will be a lot easier to construct when you don't need such ridiculous cooling needs, but I still don't get why we don't just build more fission reactors. They work great, and we could have been carbon neutral decades ago. You think fusion reactors will solve the construction cost problem?

Imaging and other sensors I think will be huge.

Man, mag lev trains aren't ubiquitous in the states because of the cost of running them. They are just almost impossible to build in the present political climate where the extreme cost of right-of-way acquisition through eminent domain needs and environmental regulation and litigation come into play.

It's already way too expensive to just build roads out of rock. No way we replace roads with magnetic rails.
>plus save enough to retire comfortably

Individual saving for retirement was cooked up in the 80s. You used to get your pension and be set.
It Is not a "theme for Linux". It is a theme for GTK-based DEs.
no. jacob shapiro of cognitive investments.
All true. I wouldn't expect ProPublica to expose the "other" nonprofits, which provide steady employment at high wages to politically favored people. Like the Clinton Global Initiative pre 2016. Or the NGOs who've turned homelessness into a reliable source of government grants.

If you go to Charity Navigator, you can find the percentage of the charity's income that goes to "administrative expenses." I seem to recall that CGI had about a 90% figure, but this:

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/311580204

shows more reasonable numbers: 18.3%. They're based on the 2019 IRS form 990, so it's pretty far out of date.

Re this "once a week guided tour" stuff: I'd be totally in favor of regulations outlawing that. If the taxpayers gave you an exemption for it, then the taxpayers get to see it.

Edit: since the usual HN reply is "do you have a citation for that?" here they are:

https://sfstandard.com/2022/04/27/the-standard-top-25-san-fr...

The largest is Episcopal Community Services:

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/951945256

which shows five people making $100K or close to it.

The second largest is the Tenderloin Housing Clinic:

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/942681706

with five people making well over $100K.
I didn't even know who Hotz was, but that YouTube rant on this very issue made me extremely skeptical.

Should someone who will just drop a GPU vendor if they get flustered really be leading a ML framework?
The shortfall in housing is such a key factor here, as it drives higher childcare, healthcare, and general labor costs: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

And housing may just be a subset of the problem of not really being able to build anything anymore that's shared with the US.
> the O button being just a slight up-and-to-the-right movement from where my thumb is naturally sitting.

It reminds me of the Yes/No vs. No/Yes debate in the OS UI world. In windows we get Yes on the left and No on the right, which exactly the same as with the PS controller.

In Linux this is often reversed and only when you make the change you notice how much you get used to it being one way or the other.

I wonder what the order is in Japanese Windows and if it affects Japanese PS controller users at all.
Is the average salary six figures?
> from where they cannot be eliminated.

Ultrasound breaks them down, a fast non invasive procedure, much like women having an ultrasound scan (and skip over any effect on the foetus). Either way though, you'll end up with shards in your kidneys.
Talking over each other? What form of debate did you do? In policy there only one speaker at a time, and no one interrupts the other team's time to try to talk over them. That would be a sure loss, assuming the judge didn't straight end the round immediately.
I see this too, and not just post-COVID. 10+ years ago we used to have "Let's Learn This Now!" where the developers would agree on particular subject and then learn and discuss it on our own time, and occasionally it would lead to improvements in our development. We went through Ruby (on Rails), Angular (nope, not even) to React (meh), queuing (ZeroMQ mostly), Asp.NET MVC, Redis, Docker, Octo, NoSQL dbs - the list goes on (even custom mechanical keyboard building). It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to have all the perspectives and interesting ideas shared.

Now there is only a few of us that still attempt this, as the rest are not interested in anything beyond their job description. Honestly in the last 10 years the phrase "That's not my job" has entered the company's phraseology when previously it was perceived as an opportunity for growth or even just cross training. Hell, that's 90% of how I advanced up the ranks - taking on new responsibilities.

A dev manager we had a while back, who has been managing developers for 20 years, told me that a lot of the problem is passion vs money. Many recent developers are in the industry because they heard that software development is good money, so they got a CS degree. But they're not as interested in the continuing education that is a necessity for the career, and only those with a passion for it thrive. He sees them dev'ing a few years, realizing it's not for them, and then trying management, and then dropping out of industry because they're not interested in the effort to excel.

But if you have a passion for software development, love tech, and the whole 9 yards, work is just doing what you like, and you enjoy it (well, when your company isn't screwing it up - that's a different problem).
Many advanced economies have decoupled energy use from economic growth.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling
People have been choosing partners for money since forever, that's certainly not a new thing
What? The original argument made is absolutely a valid kritik and a far stronger link by the way than the one you are presenting as a strawman
Well, considering it was trained from content created from how people actually write, yes?
A big part of the challenge is that most of the areas that might have been inhabited before the last ice age are now underwater.

Really hard for early artefacts to survive being under the ocean for 10k years.

Nonetheless, I think its fair to say now that we can at least push back the timeline for early civilized settlements to at least the time of Gobekli Tepe (~10k years).
I am a long-time Emacs user and used to maintain my own config, but I switched to Doom Emacs [1] a year ago. Doom Emacs is like a pre-packaged/pre-configured emacs distro. You still need to configure the features that you want to use, but it's a lot easier (and faster) than having to do everything from scratch, and definitely if you already have some emacs background anyway. For me, it makes the newer, more advanced, features more accessible. Since switching, I started to use Emacs more again.

[1] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs
They robbed Peter to pay Paul and now they complain that they're facing the penalties....

The ones who get to complain are the "Peters" whose futures were stolen so their parents could live high on the hog, no?
Building My Own YouTube Algorithm from Scratch
Yesterday, I live streamed myself building my own YouTube Algorithm from scratch. This is an effort to self-host my own recommendation system since I have no control over whatever YouTube's doing. All done in a chrome extension using (basic) NLP and web scraping (next video will utilize llama to further the recommending).

Here's the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78G7IQzBc4

TLDR:
I walk through a way of building a self-hosted recommendation system. I'm writing a script to track my own behavior with the metrics I actually want vs whatever YouTube is doing. Storing it locally so I can easily manipulate it when I want to (remove or add topics over time). And fetching videos my scraping Youtube search with a search query from the topics I'm storing over time
- END TLDR

This is a derivative of a project I released last year called myAlgorithm where I made this generically for any sort of website. You can check code out on my Github (https://github.com/jawerty/myAlgorithm)

Overall, these past few weeks I've been producing content around web scraping, fine tuning LLMs, using word2vec on your own scraped dataset and more. I want more engineers to learn how to source their own data and build AI tools on top of it without the need for endless APIs.

If you have any questions about this stream or any other streams I've done lmk and there's plenty more to come!
Back when I was a regular listener to talk radio, the ads for PE snake oil were absolutely ubiquitous. They aired more than any other product I can remember (except maybe Bose Wave radio).

I never knew how to feel for this target audience. It sucks people are vulnerable to obvious snake oil ads. It also sucks that PE is a thing that's important to people.

Male body shaming is weird and oogy.
"Our politicians are rarely serious about anything except managing public opinion; they have let every trivial concern take priority over the biggest one of all, economic growth."
First, I just don't get how after knowing about freud and his views anyone can trust freudian therapy. Second, I also don't get how people trust strangers with intimate details of their thought life.

I suppose if being happy and functional is your goal, it makes sense to do whatever you can to improve your chances. Personally, I prefer to experience reality and find truth even if it isn't happy or beneficial. I never hear them give advice that makes people unhappy or ask people to sacrifice for others. Furthermore, fundamental views and values I hold are likely very different from any therapist, so they can't qualify to advice me (and many others). Based on what I know about human nature, it's pretty damn scary how much people trust therapists.

Check out century of the self, a documentary I found on HN actually that documens how freudian psychology and modern marketing and capitalism aligned and worked together in the 20th century to create the world we are in today:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
I think it’s because we’ve realized we’re not building a better future but rather Yet Another Online Ad* System.

* “online ad” can be replaced with “gig economy” if you like
Here's an example: https://paperswithcode.com/task/coreference-resolution
The summary actually does it’s job:

> Kevin said that he had undergone five surgeries with Elist, including two upgrades, a revision and a removal, and his penis no longer functioned.

Still, Kevin had always found the surgeon to be caring, if a little preoccupied. “He reminded me of Doctor Franken­stein — the intensity of him wanting this thing to come to life,” Kevin told me. It sounded strange, he acknowledged, but before each operation he’d been filled with excitement. “You just feel relieved that you’re fixing something,” he said.

At an appointment earlier this year, Kevin said, Elist promised to fix him again with a sixth procedure, but one of the surgeon’s assistants discreetly advised against it. Kevin thought he could spot “the other experiments” in the clinic from their loose-­fitting sweatpants and the awkward way they walked. There were so many men waiting to see the doctor that they spilled into the hallway.

…

I think I’m of the ideal height, with the ideal penis size… so there’s a requisite for this entire article that I just won’t understand. But that last paragraph would scare the hell out of me if this was something I was interested in.
You are talking about a service that appears to have had a single documented outage event over the span of eleven years.
Especially hard to do global finance when suddenly you cut yourself off from the regional international governing body.
Plantago major, European plantain, is thought to be one of the first species brought to America by the European migration. It is still known by what the natives called it - 'white man's footprint'.
Eric Brewer's calling, and would like a word.

Availability and correctness are fundamentally opposed. The word "reliable" is contextual.

A backup service that is always available but serves up garbage is not as reliable as one that serves me the correct data, but only on Mondays.
> our politicians are rarely

> serious about anything except

> managing public opinion

I'd like to underscore that this issue persists also here in the United States. I know it is true in California and San Francisco (I presume other regions across the country are similarly afflicted).
We also heavily restricted immigration until the impact of the Immigration Act of 1965 started to accumulate in the 70s, 80s, and beyond. There are lots of correlations one can come up with to explain the change in balance between capital and labor and it is doubtful that any single variable is responsible for the majority of the change.
What is funny is that there's been a consensus for many years in Europe that Hominids arrived in America at least 30,000 years ago. There were several artefacts that made the hypothesis very plausible. But most North American scientist were vigorously opposed to it, until this recent proof that's harder to deny.

By the way, this is unrelated to the GP post which was about hominids walking out of Africa, more than 1M years before entering America.
overpass turbo is a tool I didn't know about, which does some of the heavy lifting here -- and could do even more in other cases, his example of "skate park within 100 meters of a dog park" makes me think. i didn't actually realize there were public databases available with that kind of granularity, coverage, and coding.

The ability to have ChatGTP generate the query is actually pretty huge.

I wonder how long until there are AI tools where you can just say things like "give me skate parks within 100 meters of dog parks in Boulder CO", and it will identify the tool to use and generate the query and execute the query and just give you the answers.
Credit card fee fight pits payment companies against retailers
> if Wikipedia, ever in our lifetimes, goes under, it won't be because they weren't given enough money

I agree, I think it will be because they'll accept more money from commercial actors on the terms of whoever these actors are – Google currently does not seem to force any conditions on WP, as far as I can tell.

> If you want to do a good deed donate to the Internet Archive.

I agree with this as well but I consider both Wikimedia and the Internet Archive as extremely important.

Charitable causes always are at risk of "wasting" money. But the reason for that is that in a purely capitalistic sense the cause itself is not profitable.
Its not about caring desperately about "in mice", it's about respecting HN as a feed of articles that represent their titles.

The underlying study that this PR hype piece is advertising does not, and correctly includes "in mice".
>Hard to believe that a few system crashes per day was the norm.

It certainly wasn't for me! At the time I had my first it job in a local pc repair shop and we had a series of 24h burn in tests. If the newly installed pc crashed during it, there was something wrong with the hw. My personal windows 95 definitely didn't crash more than once every few weeks of heavy use. Programs did crash, explorer did crash, but the actual BSOD was quite rare.
We know a bit more than that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_human_settleme...
I disagree with your premise - just because someone doesn’t make money on their work doesn’t mean it’s not good. We live in a capitalistic society, where the laws of supply and demand rule.

You’re able to make good money in carpentry by simply showing up, because there aren’t many carpenters left. Just like my cousin is able to do the same with landscaping. It’s all work fewer people are doing.

Other friends of mine, some of the most talented and hardworking people I know, have tried their stints on broadway, television, journalism, etc. and are struggling massively. Is it because they aren’t good? Of course not. It’s because there are 1,000 people lined up behind them who are just as good. And there’s another 1,000 behind that group who aren’t quite as good but are willing to do it for poverty wages.
French AI