skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really feel that “unexpectedly using an electronic device to view sexual activity and dissemination thereof without explicit written permission per act” should be somehow actually illegal, but nobody cares.
That’s not a good argument because what if you stole something from a store ALL the way in the back covered in dust that literally no one even knew about. Would you say that’s not theft because it’s not a loss of value?
Wait I should consider .NET?
Too convoluted.
I have said this before and attracted downvotes for it, but here goes.

There are two possible arguments here to try, and I have only ever seen people lobbying against this change use the one, less persuasive argument. That argument is what I will call the "incentives" argument: that change in the rule provides bad incentives against doing R&D. This argument goes along the lines of "this will cost jobs for R&D workers" or "this will reduce the competitiveness of the US." The other possible argument (that I have not seen cited) is that "R&D" work can be operational, and that forcing capitalization of R&D expenses is a bad accounting practice. This Twitter thread only argues the former.

The glaring problem with the incentives argument is that it gives up the point that the ability to operationalize R&D work is a subsidy for technology and software companies. This is equivalent to asking for a subsidy at a time when startups can pull $100 million with no product and other technology companies are reaping record profits. That is not a particularly persuasive argument, and it triggers bad emotional reactions from people. If not for the SBIR companies getting absolutely shafted, the responses to this argument I have seen from non-tech people range from "fuck you" to "deal with it."

The accounting argument is boring and sort of technical, but also a lot harder to argue against and doesn't trigger a negative emotional reaction. All of the people making the rules will understand it, and the IRS could even make the clarification on what is and isn't "R&D" on an accounting basis without an act of congress. They have kind of done this, but have not been pushed nearly far enough.
What if your physics problem involves the same physical quantity twice, like speeds and masses of two bodies? Then single letter variable names are no longer unique nor meaningful.

f(v_1, m_1, v_2, m_2)

For the derivatives I would prefer writing

d_v_2 f

instead of

d_3 f

when counting arguments from 1
I think CN intelligence agencies set their espionage sights a bit higher than "generic outliner app" users.
As opposed to European or American leaders who don't cling to power and don't want to enrich themselves?
Replying to myself since I can't edit: thanks for the feedback. I am compelled to look into the course after reading all the replies here.
Years ago I gave up on DuckDuckGo because Google returned better result. Lately I gave DuckDuckGo another shot. It isn't better than before but with the deteriorating quality of the result coming from Google, now that DuckDuckGo's quality apparently isn't any worse than Google.
On the other hand, someone keying your car is a lot harder to detect.
It may not make any significant change in the numbers applying for k-12 positions, but do people really need to go through the torture, indoctrination, and expense of graduate school to teach k-12? Won't a handful of undergrad courses, seminars, and internships suffice in addition to whatever other degree is pursued? As it is now wannabe teachers already have too much time, the most precious of all commodities, invested in ramping up to teaching.
Is there a reason why Google doesn't allow you to block specific domains from your personal results like Kagi does? Is it a performance thing?

Simply being able to block low quality domains from showing up again would go a long way to cleaning things up.
...if everyone only wants one thing and that thing happens to be so cheap that everyone can afford it, neither of which is the case.
Cut out the words "Russian propaganda" and the post you're replying to makes perfect sense.
It's dystopian at least in the sense that somehow everyone just decides to play along rather than use it as a jumping off point to question institutions. Why does the POTUS have a high likelihood of becoming a war criminal or at least get to inflict death on thousands if not millions? With a governing system like democratic confederalism (which uses delegation instead of representation and builds on free association) there would be no POTUS and there would be no one individual capable of causing so much suffering. There wouldn't be state leaders sending soldiers to their death because the soldiers have the ultimate say.

It's also deeply flawed because it follows a very shallow analysis of human suffering. If we conveniently ignore those without empathy (as the AI does in the story), taking a life is a traumatic experience and to be forced to do it so viscerally and to be forced to do it so detached from any actual purpose just makes it worse.

The euthanasia example comes to mind: yes, removing a feeding tube likely causes more suffering than killing under anesthesia but using a knife serves no purpose other than as a deterrent. I understand the author's personal situation and personal decisions regarding his son color this portrayal but it feels more like the author stepping on a soapbox than a coherent part of the story.

I guess you could argue that the AI emphasizing life rather than lack of suffering can be explained with the four words but the story doesn't frame it as a genie problem. There's no need to use sacrificial animals for example except for the implication that they're the greatest deterrent for the given person - but the story doesn't show deterrents that don't involve slaughter. Presumably people who wouldn't be squeamish about the blood sacrifices are somehow excluded from positions of power.

If anything I think the problem the story ignores is that the exact people in positions of that cause the deaths of millions are the people that would likely go through with a blood sacrifice in order to maintain their power. If someone is willing to murder a person with a knife in order to be the POTUS, wouldn't that exclude them from being asked to murder a person with a knife to deter them from causing the loss of lives at the push of a button? I'm pretty sure the idea isn't even novel, I recall a hypothetical of the POTUS being forced to kill a person with their own hands in order to launch nukes (which would likely spell death for millions if not billions) for example.
The analogy doesn't hold because piracy in that scenario would be going to one of those subscription-based restaurants and getting their food but not paying. We go back full circle to the comment you were replying to.

You could argue piracy is going to the chef's place and eating their food before it gets to the restaurant for distribution, now the chef is angry too.

Not a good analogy.
That's not strictly correct.

Bug fixing, for example, is not covered by Section 174.
$250 for Windows?? You’re off by an order of magnitude, just buy it from a reseller:

g2a.com/search?query=Windows

I’ve never had a problem with that site.
I've reflected on this a lot over time. My conclusion is that it would be pointless. That would be akin to companies like Google and Walmart looking to a wildly successful mom and pop shop for business advice.
If you trust that button is actually wired up to anything, then you put way more faith in people than I believe is warranted.
Most of the problems you had were self-imposed to be fair.
Maybe in this case it should be spelled yacc shaving.
>repeatedly and unashamedly asking old people whether they are dead.

Mortifying
Same story with Blizzard - I used to be the biggest fanboy, spending thousands of hours with SC,WC3,WoW and Diablo.
Ever since they got acquired by Activision it’s just been very disappointing.
Now I don’t even check out their new releases anymore.
DDG still often returns results that closely match the exact search term, something Google seems increasingly determined not to?
I bought a Ubisoft game, and got to play zero times (it won't run). I can't get a refund.

Is it legal to sneak into the movie after buying the ticket and being refused admittance without cause? Probably not.

Would a jury convict? Probably not.
As far as I understand it, it’s normal to deduct most all kinds of payroll as an operating expense, and historically that’s included software developers too. The way it was explained to me, the tax man gets his bite when the people receiving the paychecks pay their own income taxes.

The recent changes mean you can still do that for most staff EXCEPT developers, even if the devs are doing operational work instead of work that feels more conventionally like R&D. So you have to come up with a bundle of cash now to pay tax on most of the developers’ salaries, even though they’ll give it back to you over 5-15 years.

Essentially you making a free loan to the government for a decade or whatever, except the money’s probably not free to you.

Of course I can think of situations where the development effort really was more R&D than operational, and the revenue stream matched: the first few years operated at a loss already, and the deductions might have more been useful in 5 years when the revenues were flowing in from a mature product. But I think they might have ways to carry forward losses to future tax years or something to deal with situations like that?
You seem a big deal (karma wise) so I don't want to get banned by saying my usual "understanding of schizophrenia is all wrong because the voices in our heads are really disembodied others." Read my last comments and tell me if I'm out of line. I was press ganged into Americas thought control hooligan army fifteen years ago and I've been fighting thought control ever since. I am a first hand source.

This is a growing problem because it's real and modern understanding is backwards.
That's part of how systemic racism works. It leads to stochastic events where systemic "incompetence" punishes members of a minority group.
You are correct. This isn’t really about income. It is the principle of the thing. Spotify is redistributing subscriber fees and ad revenue from the struggling artist to the record labels and superstars.

As I said in another comment, I’ve cancelled my account so in my case it is costing them more than they are saving. I’m also no longer sending fans to Spotify and this year not all of the music I release will make its way to Spotify.
My observatiom has been that a lot of unschooling families have parents who do it because of their own neuroses and are otherwise ill equipped as parents. Conspiracy theories and fringe religions are common. Emotional manipulation and abuse is common. Isolation and poor social skill development is common. Important childhood experiences are restricted. Often these parents don't want their children to succeed and leave the nest.

I'm glad you had a good experience, and I am sure there are a lot of people who do when their relatively well adjusted parents commit to homeschooling their children. I just suspect most homeschooling experiences aren't like yours. I've met several families from very different backgrounds with a similar outcome to mine.
Do you think so? There are already several sad examples of political leaders who insisted on people of their favorite race or sex. The bridges collapsed.

The problem with the system is that the political leaders are spending other peoples money and they'll make decisions that don't always line up with the bridges staying up.

The advantage of degree programs is that they add another layer of bureaucracy to mix. Yeah, that's a pain but it might be necessary with the political system.
Finding product reviews is next to impossible. Only a few people like DC Rainmaker fill a very specific niche.

It's back to good old word of mouth for me.
"I'm not dead yet!" - Monthy Python and Holy Grail
Yeah, in regards to HBO Max, I signed up a couple years ago specifically to watch cartoons like Close Enough and Infinity Train. Not only were both those shows canceled but they were purged from HBO Max for streaming entirely.

I managed to buy legit copies of Infinity Train on Amazon, but now the only way that I am aware of to watch Close Enough is piracy.

The recent Amazon “pay us more or you get ads” thing feels a bit rent-seekey to me. I don’t watch Prime enough to justify paying an extra $3/month, and so I think what’s going to happen to me is that I just stop watching Prime entirely.

What really frustrates me is that companies are basically stopping releasing Blu-Rays, particularly for TV shows. I have over 400 legitimately purchased movies about about 40 complete series in Blu-Ray; I am more than happy to support creators by paying them a reasonable compensation, what I don’t want to do is pay those creators forever for the privilege of watching the same thing over and over.
> However I doubt they'd leave such an obvious loophole. Surely the IRS's definition of R&D includes all types of software development activity.

I literally just linked to the IRS' definition that says not all software development activity is included.
> We know what the internet has developed so far, and it's not all positive.

A backup communication system in case the Soviets took out the phone system? What's non-positive about that?
Any Americans here retired to Malta? It came up on some lists of best places in the world to retire. Would love to hear your experience.
Because they tried that already and it was gamed to death.
I don't know. This is becoming conventional wisdom but I think a reverse argument is equally true: aspiring language designers get too bogged down in bytecode generation or gc that they are unable to make a compelling language that adequately differentiates itself from existing languages that already do those things well.

Are you actually claiming that handwriting a recursive descent parser for most popular languages can be done in afternoon? Unless the language is a lisp, I find that unlikely in most cases. You can write a parser generator that generates a recursive descent parser. Writing the grammar will almost surely be significantly faster in the parser generator dsl than a handrolled recursive descent parser.

To improve your language design skills, you need to design multiple languages. Parser generators will get you a prototype faster and allow you to explore the language design space. You can target a high level language to do the hard parts. Once you are satisfied with a language, then maybe it makes sense to design your own custom bytecode or gc to solve its unique problems.

I do agree though that optimizing parsing at an early stage makes no sense and many do get bogged down there.
"One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.

"I still have two boxes of DVDs. I definitely understand the gamers perspective with that. But as people embrace that model, they will see that these games will exist, the service will continue, and you'll be able to access them when you feel like. That's reassuring"

This is the longer context. I understand where he is coming from but people like to own things so that they can enjoy them later without getting the company involved again. Sure the save files are there but if the company changes their terms and services it just straight up stop offering them in their subscriptions what good are they? The guy claims that they support multiple mediums now but at the end of the day that's a business decision and they could decide to not sell DVDs or things like that anymore.
Most states could see earthquake damage in the next century. See those at risk
https://archive.ph/HJqpf
Tantivy – Fast, OSS full-text search library in Rust
Agreed! I ended up talking with someone halfway around the world for an hour.

We discussed what we did, some interesting differences... and it also turned out that everyone everywhere has at least a few gripes about their project management system (whatever it is).

We're all more alike than we are different. :) Thanks to author for making this!

PS: If HNers are uncomfortable talking to strangers via voice, maybe write out a script with some discussion prompts. It's a learnable skill, and something you can absolutely get better at! (Said as someone who started with crippling fear of talking to strangers, into my 20s)
I wonder if law enforcement have access to the camera footage? This makes it every car a mobile CCTV on wheels?

How difficult would it be for Tesla to implement ANPR and upload every number plate spotted together with GPS coordinates, to a central server? The chances of them doing it are very low, but it's still interesting to consider such possibilities.

Maybe 20 years from now they could implement facial recognition? That would be an absolute nightmare scenario. If every car has that many cameras, essentially privacy is finished, it's worse than Orwell's 1984 book.
nobody "uses it", the whole thing is a ponzi scheme scam and despite looking for years, I have yet to find a single instance of a bona fide retailer or market / market place that accepts bitcoin other than scammers, spam list sellers, and forums selling breached data dumps..
The author's description of diskprices.com:

> He created a website that looks like it was made in HTML with total disrespect for the user experience [...]

As I try to read more of the post:

> Create an account to read the full story.

> The author made this story available to Medium members only. If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Please tell me more about this "user experience" and "disrespect".
There aren't blocking automatically after heavy exchanges overseas as this mean you couldn't even use Microsoft and Apple services. But they do probe those servers and basically test if they will relay any network request. If they will, then they are a VPN and they will be blocked. Only two VPN providers have found a way arround this those are IVPN and Mullvad. The later use UDP over TVP obfuscation.
> decided to pirate it instead of the convenience of Prime video I wouldn’t have felt an ounce of guilt.

You shouldn't feel an ounce of guilty. Really. They've failed you and still got their money. You had to spent extra time to pirate so you'd get the level of service you already paid in the first place.
> then give me a payment plan that allows me to pay for an expiring subscription. Simple.

All the streaming services do that. You just subscribe then immediately cancel. You’ll get service for a month until your time runs out.
Cognitive dissonance. We're used to the Silicon Valley model of closed-source subscription apps (Dropbox) that silently opt-in your data into their AI training models.

https://nitter.net/Werner/status/1734890651378975007
Gamed how? I can see how feeding users blocking decisions back into the ranking algorithm would be abused, but they don't have to do that.
Google: We need all your personal data so we can give you a better experience.

Me: Ok, please block Pinterest, W3schools, ...

Google: Sorry, can't do that.
I've found that some old PC titles are available on Steam, DRM free (if you're willing to futz with the install directory -- they're running open source game engines and proprietary vintage assets; you can just copy the assets out).

Typing this reminds me: I should look into switching to GOG for such purchases.
Dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013497

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39031691

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39040559
I had a Spectrum +3. I can still recall vividly the smell of the unboxing on Christmas morning. Actually I had slid the box out of the wrapping paper a few weeks prior when my parents were out. Just to look at it :)
Sorry, I jumped in because I hadn't seen it before. I agree it's difficult to generalize at this point, I just chafe at the suggestion that homeschooled kids do better overall since I've heard it my whole life and my experience was so different.
Part of your point seems to be that the OP, being a software engineer, should not have to pirate Spotify since presumably they have access to money. But that's not really the case for all devs, and moreover, nobody who isn't a dev is able to make a tool like this in the first place.
That's the question isn't it? If its entitlement as you say, why feel it with a podcast and not books?
How I voted [with my wallet]:

Recently purchased an N64, Ocarina/Mask, Mario64 (&Kart), Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong, SmashBros, Conkers

This was hundreds of dollars that I won't be spending on your online platform, and it's all because you disabled Steam on Windows7. Happy 2024!
I don't think wearing black at funeral is signalling anything other than respect?
This is an insanely expensive cluster built to show a benchmark. 68 node cluster serving only 15TB storage in total.
I'm not concerned about the quality of hiring at businesses -- they are sufficiently strongly incentivised to hire productive employees, not ones whose net effect is to lower production. I think the incentives on everyone involved are faily 'naturally well-aligned'.

I'm more concerned about how universities have positioned themselves gatekeepers to the employment market backed by state-granted degree awarding powers.

I think this is an extremely artifical situation with extremely negative social concequences. Vast amounts of money are being funnelled into universities for little gain.

They are, if you like, the App Store of the jobs market. Taking a 30% cut on just getting hired. It's insane, unsustainable, economic madness, and social madness.
'I dreamed of blocky pixels': the sweaty, sociable early days of gaming
That’s why I’m back to pirating almost all content these days.
For me personally, I learned and performed much better under teachers that I knew had some passion for the subjects they taught. Unfortunately that’s more difficult to measure.
I’ll take the under
> Military housing and accommodation needs urgently improving. MoD contracts for poor service providers need to be cut and offered to better managed contractors.

> Pay needs to rise at least in average with other public sector bodies, if not far higher given the skill sets required and the risks to life which we routinely ask our men and women in uniform to run on our behalf. The government needs to improve the offer, and create working conditions more in-line with expectations of the society of today, whilst balancing the need to retain combat lethality.
Wow this is really well made
what was the name of that law, Murphy's law?
I dated a girl from Ballston Spa roughly 15 years ago. Visiting her folks, I was at the time shocked how right wing the place was. Especially since I'm from the South and had heard stories all my life about how liberal the northeast is.

I don't thing anyone who has actually been to these places should be surprised about this. The wine store owner from the opening anecdote probably didn't much socialize outside their own circles to be taken by surprise like that.
all the best teachers I had in public school were people who got into teaching after having an actual career because they had actually lived in the real world. Most of the "teaching" is just stuff mandated by the government and taught via lesson plans created by the book companies.

another issue is that teachers get promoted based on years in the system or by getting more useless degrees, rather than on how well they actually teach their students