skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article makes a pretty direct claim as to what is funding the dis-savings and it doesn't appear to be government "handouts" that you are seemingly disparaging.

> overwhelmingly it’s holding gains that “fund” the perennial dissaving of the bottom 80%.
Here's the quick quote from the article explaining why this is "sustainable" over a long-period of time:

> "While many have suggested that borrowing is what explains households’ ability to keep spending (it is, some), overwhelmingly it’s holding gains that “fund” the perennial dissaving of the bottom 80%."
Let me give you an exercise I really like for this.

Imagine a file with endless list of URLs. For each URL check if it contains an image. If it does, identify the top 6 colors and store it memory so it can be printed/stored later.

In something like python this can be as short as 20 lines of code:
- open the file
- read line by line
- validate if the URL is valid
- call the URL
- check if it's image
- if image, read pixel by pixel and check the color
- store it in dictionary/hashmap

Here is what I look for:
- does it compile/work?
- what language did you choose? (like python is fast to write this in few lines but hard to introduce concurrency)
- have you introduced some kind of caching for the URLs? (so you don't waste resources)
- are you checking if the URL is valid or you just run them all and wait for errors/timeouts?
- are you checking the file type from HTTP header or body of the file?
- how do you handle errors?
- are you attempting concurrency? If yes, how?

I actually done this exercise myself in dozen or so languages to see what choices I make based on the language. Obviously one can spend significantly more time on it if they really desire, but the design choices are visible from the beginning.
There's no mention of GPS and NFC, I assume it lacks these modules?
And the paper specifically mentions that they correct for that by counting the scores higher for people who come from unprivileged backgrounds.
SAT is well-correlated with 1st year GPA, but not well-correlated with eventual job placement (although it does correlate pretty well with eventual income). However, 1st year GPA is well-correlated with 2nd year GPA, which is well-correlated with 3rd-year GPA, which is well-correlated with 4th year GPA, which is well-correlated with eventual job placement, which is well-correlated with entry-level salary, which is well-correlated with mid-career salary.

A pretty useful model for life is that it's a series of contests, and doing well at the previous contest gives you an advantage for the next couple contests, but only the next couple contests. By the time you get to mid-career, nobody really cares what your high school GPA was. However, because each contest determines which set of subsequent contests you'll face, performance early on can have outsize effects on eventual life outcomes. You typically won't be applying for CEO jobs if you worked retail your whole life, unless you lie your ass off and bullshit convincingly to executive recruiters.
Why eat when one can hand that money to a landlord or the bank?
Improving the State of Cosmos Fuzzing
> As poor people can not afford more.

Then you gotta make it affordable for them.

You can still have elite schools for the absolute best (though I would question that certain self-styled 'elite schools' are really principally selecting for that and not e.g. wealth or family connections), but that doesn't mean that you cannot raise the bar on public and affordable education (including traditional schools and universities but also via other means, e.g. self-teaching via online resources). These are two competing goals and often people only focus on the one to the exclusion of the other, but they are both important.
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah I'm gonna get rid of that whole subscribe to the channel thing in the future videos, you're right it just make people drop off.

I am using a mic, although either it's not very good or the settings aren't optimised but a few people have said to me it sounds bad. I'm going to look into it. I also don't have the most exciting voice which doesn't help
This headline is pretty misleading, to me at least. "Bottom 80%" implies the poorer 80% of Americans, but it is actually referring to the bottom 80% strictly in terms of (apparent) savings.

> Personal Income isn’t the only source of household assets. The two big missing pieces are holding (capital) gains on assets, and borrowing (which adds both assets and liabilities, in equal amounts, to household balance sheets). Adding these two additional measures does shift most bottom quintiles from spending deficits to asset surpluses in most years.

> While many have suggested that borrowing is what explains households’ ability to keep spending (it is, some), overwhelmingly it’s holding gains that “fund” the perennial dissaving of the bottom 80%.

So this is actually mostly explained by richer people who have significant investments in addition to their normal income.

Edit: The BEA says Personal Income "does not include realized or unrealized capital gains or losses." So if you sell stocks, a house, pull money out of a 401k, none of that is included in Personal Income.

Also, I think like ~20% of Americans are retired? Presumably most of them would be considered dissavers here, except for those who retired with almost no savings and are living solely on Social Security.
This is what the world subsidized by choosing to trade in us currency-and honestly I'm okay with that. The isolationist Maga has turned over the multipolar rock and revealed the ExEmpire crawling beneath. It could be so much worse..
IT Professionals and most other white collar jobs are draft exempted in Russia [0]

To make up for the unfairness, mobilized Russian soldiers are being paid Russian/Eastern European white collar level salaries ($2,500/mo) [1]

The issue is if you're a Russian contractor working for a western company, how is the western company supposed to pay you? Russia's banking system has been decoupled from the west, and even Asian banks in China and India (major trading partners of Russia) are hesitant to fill the gap out of fears of secondary sanctions.

If you want to earn dollars, best to move to a Russian speaking country that isn't sanctioned like Kazakhstan, Georgia, or Bulgaria or to an easy to move country for Russians like Turkiye, Serbia, UAE, etc.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-excludes-some-it...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/opinion/russia-ukraine-wa...
Ok, this actually looks interesting
Rust web frameworks have subpar error reporting
> Native applications are just so much more expensive to develop and maintain.

Quality isn't free, yes.

> Given the nuances of different platforms, it’s also very difficult to keep different versions in sync.

Don't tightly couple applications and backend service versions (where a backend is even needed, otherwise make it all local) and this is not a problem. You should be using open (relatively stable) protocols wherever possible anyway.

Web apps "solve" platform differences by completely disregarding them and expecting users to adapt to the application instead. This does not make them better.
> The error you're making is in limiting this cost to redistribution between income levels.

You are ignoring the fact that we have taxes already.

Even if you think that there is other redistributionary harm to taxes, if we found some magic tax that didn't have any dead weight loss, and also only effects rich people, then we could at a minimum replace all existing taxes with that magic new better tax.

(Perhaps total taxes could even be reduced! Because there is now extra room and value created because of the zero dead weight loss!)

Therefore the point stands that if this is the case, then it would still be a massive win to find such a magic tax.
I'm the opposite, the older I get the more paranoid I get; maybe it's the lifetime of reading news stories of people getting scammed.
Self-employed since 2009 (can't believe it's been that long). Started out doing dev-for-hire work with a friend: web sites and mobile apps mostly. Along the way we built up a "war chest" to self-fund something of our own, then grew it up and sold it off. Rinse, repeat. Currently we have a small company (10 people) in the VR sector.

Self-employment is definitely not for everyone, but I love the freedom and flexibility. It'd kill me to go back.
Oh, thank you! I will absolutely check this out.
Speaking locally, my "low cost of living" area is now quite in line with most "high cost of living" areas when it comes to buying things, maybe even higher for food items as I recently experienced while traveling (it was cheaper in a big city!). Sure, rent and mortgages are still low (for now), but they're creeping up pretty fast too. Wages here are abysmal because it's "low cost of living", but it's really not these days...
Nice article!

The hand-annotated code chart reminded me how 1989's LPMUD from Sweden wrote the author's name as "Lars Pensj|" since "Pensjö" couldn't be done in 7-bit ASCII. I guess it would've been "Pensj@" in EBCDIC.
A perennial topic at lots of IT/devops standups these days is how to get rid of SaaS overhead, so this isn't a sure thing either.

Bottom line is that developers and IT pros are cheap. I know because I am one. We always try to find a way to not pay for things and especially to avoid any kind of lock-in. I'm allergic to anything proprietary or anything with a SaaS, which is ironic because that's one of our company's products... makes me think perpetually about how to fix this broken market by offering a way to pay for good tools and products without either proprietary lock-in or eternal rent (and centralization and all that entails). It's a very hard problem, and it's not really a technology problem. More of a biz/legal/economic problem.
Solo founder at Emysound[1].
Started 10 years ago as an open-source project, building an algorithm for audio fingerprinting. Added a commercial offering, selling storage built specifically for audio fingerprints, targeting enterprise customers. Since the offering was too technical (it's hard to sell solutions to problems that are too narrow and domain-specific), pivoted to more "business-oriented problems". This last year's pivot is a chance to finally grow. Running a business in single-player mode is, at times, too stressful. Aside from the technical part, which I very much enjoy, I need to wear marketing, sales, and customer support hats.

[1] - https://emysound.com
[2] - https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting
I suspect asphalt has some important gains on the security side, especially with ABS.

I’m surprised security is not discussed at all here.
I guarantee you can’t hear the difference between FLAC and 256kbps lossy either. The point is that you have the actual, canonical data as it was released by the creator.

You don’t need a massive HDD array, I have my whole collection of 10+ years of Blu-ray remuxes on a single Seagate Exos drive in my NAS.
Yep. And STEM students have higher SAT scores than lib arts. And Asians have higher SAT scores than everyone else.
Vanguard talks about this in terms of “return of sound money” in their 2024 outlook: https://advisors.vanguard.com/insights/article/vanguards-eco...
Hah I remember seeing this issue. It made me chuckle. I also do wood working part time, it's kinda funny how similar software and woodworking are. I'm hoping to open up a hobby shop one day that teaches both software and woodworking. Congrats to you on following your dreams.
Grocery stores and food suppliers are raising prices to enrich their own shareholders. Simple as that. Search for "greedflation"
Pricing depends on the country but have addressed that in another comment! The privacy policy explains how we store data but will make this clearer and more upfront. I store recordings separately from user info in an S3 bucket and the database is hosted in digital ocean. Recordings are sent to OpenAI for ephemeral analysis and transcription.
A lot of the time, you're quite backwards. On the contrary, cell and cable companies have been fined or smacked for describing their fees as "taxes" and similar on bills. The FCC mandated that they were not allowed to call anything a tax unless it went 100% to a government agency.
Yes, counter-culture is counter-culture. It was meant to make normals uncomfy.
Is this evidence for:

A) Marketing efforts aimed at getting people to spend are far better-funded and more effective than those aimed at getting people to save

B) Relentless increases in the cost of living, vs. steady-at-best sources of income, have pushed most Americans into net-spending mode

C) The long-term future is regularly portrayed as being bleak enough that many people have stopped caring much about their long-term solvency

D) All of the above
Repair also serves companies better in the long run because one of the big results is that it ends up training the next generation of builders. If you talk to engineers it's pretty common to hear about how they loved to take things apart as a kid and learn how things worked. You don't get the equivalent of a child restoring a classic car or fixing the plumbing with their parent with software. Not to mention that companies themselves will get bug fixes or upgrades from the community who are doing things with the product that the creator never thought of.

Not having the software open and right to repair just seems to me like a classic benefit in the short term, detriment in the long run. And like you say, worse for the public at any timescale. I do want to protect developers, but I think we can do this in a way that doesn't produce so much fucking junk.
Agreed that it's not a good strategy, but unfortunately all too common amongst tech companies, especially startups.
For comparable driving ranges, EVs are necessarily larger than ICE cars.
I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy.

Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.
Probably, but you want to give the network effects to them to multiply their societal effectiveness. Long term rewarding them is less about assisting them individually but increasing their influence on the general welfare.
this clearly pales in comparison to the extended effort for 4 years of highschool that is factored into your gpa
As a certified EE I totally support your warning.

The problem with mains voltage hobbyism is that it is really easy to build something that works fine in 99% of the situations until it encounters those 1% situations that the hobbyist couldn't plan for, doesn't have the knowledge of, doesn't has the tools for etc. The problem with that is, that if you're unlucky it can literally ruin multiple lifes at once.

Experimenting is one thing (know the risks and go ahead), but putting things out there in circulation is an entirely different can of worms. I had to learn all of the VdE rules and many of them have been written in catastrophic failures and house fires. And I thought I knew a lot when I started learning those rules, and oh boy was I wrong. All electrical appliances interact with your house wiring, and there can be very weird fault conditions between your appliance and your house wiring, that are very hard to predict (and even harder to test for) by a "electricity comes out of the wall"-hobbyist.
I feel like it's grocery prices..

We are a family of 6. Our grocery budget is consistently between $2500-$3000 a month.

We shop at Aldi.
Not even accounting driven. It's MBA driven.

Accounts ask how much things cost and go from there. MBA's figure out how much things need to cost to make their spreadsheet work and tell you that's what you get.

Which is what happened at Boeing. They told the engineers they were going to develop the 787 for half the cost of previous models (we are very very smart). And it took twice as long and cost twice as much. Given that they couldn't afford a clean slate redesign of the 737 even if they wanted to. The result is the 737 Max which will cost them more than a clean redesign would have.
I’d be very surprised if 90% of OSS supporters don’t already believe this.
Russia has been trying to occupy a larger part of Ukraine for almost 2 years now without success. They don't need excuses.
Of course high scores on a test are going to correlate with academic achievement, they are both just a measure of ability to pass tests. This is like saying people who swim very well will have high achievement in swimming competitions.

The paper's summary implies that they should make testing mandatory, because when they made testing optional, they couldn't see the students who they'd like to admit. But they kind of ridiculously don't comment on the fact that mandatory testing might not make any difference at all.

There must be reasons students don't send in scores when testing is optional. But just making the testing mandatory doesn't address those reasons at all. So there is no reason to conclude that suddenly applicants would start sending in scores at a higher rate. It's equally likely they would just stop applying.
The "inverted-online-lecture-followed-by-guided-work-in-class" is the method that Salman Khan of Khan Academy fame pioneered. This was the first time technology was truly leveraged to make a leap in instruction efficiency. Salman Khan has several talks on this topic.
Related: The Light Phone https://www.thelightphone.com/ - uses E-Ink too
This got me confused as well. I read the claim and thought "how does the bottom 80% of income in the US also have a bunch of disposable income via capital gains?"

Misleading title indeed.
> A software developer should develop for a specification, he or she should not be there to entertain clients in a game of creating a product.

That's a sad view. Reminds me of a couple past managers I've had who thought that software developers were assembly line workers.

US culture note: The cultural expectation for assembly line workers here is that they "shut up and color", it's the job of the managers and engineers to do the thinking. That is, even if an assembly line worker can see that something is wrong, it's not their job to point it out or fix it. They are disempowered in this culture.

What's sad about your view is you similarly want to disempower developers. You don't want them to have input into what they're making, you just want them to shut up and code. According to you the specification is, what, always given to the developers without their input? So if the specification is non-viable they should just accept it and sit in their corners making nonsense?
> Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community

And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is completely arbitrary and tuned to achieve whatever objectives they have.
A nice reflection of how we all live better than the kings of old -- really this is a democratization of « Après nous, le déluge »
I thought we could fix the world by writing things on offical looking paper though, you are saying we cant just vote that everyone gets a free Lamborghini?
I'm OK with it, because it prevents them from spreading the stupid to their friends, and so ends up helping more kids than it hurts in the long run.

That being said, the conditions of that locking-up should be much better than they usually are in the US today. All too often prisons serve as universities of crime. Instead, these sorts of criminals should spend their days working for the benefit of their community, so as to learn the correct values that will serve them well upon their release.
A lot of it measures high-schooly type stuff. I imagine if you put a SAT down in front of me today, I'd do terribly (especially in math in spite of having advanced degrees). I just don't have instant recall of a lot of the geometry and other stuff at this point. Heck, I'm not sure I could even do long division.
I think some might say it started in the USA and was then brought to Europe after. Many things are introduced in one country and once successful the companies try to expand their market to other countries
As someone who works with lots of analysts, I can guarantee that they also don't make the correct interpretations all the time, and that you have to sense-check the results back against reality.

In either case, validation is the key step - you can't just trust that your SQL query is correct regardless of if you have manually written it, you still have to go through the data and check it.

That's where the SQL generation stuff can save time - if 50% of the time you can get to an answer in half the time, then it's great! Normally in my experience with current-gen LLM's when they fail they fail quickly, so the other 50% of queries don't take twice as long to write manually.

Then there is the other use case - if you aren't sure why a particular SQL query is erroring, these LLM's are great at telling you why and fixing your code.
Well that is the consequence of ZIRP-policy + randomly printing unlimited free money during COVID (to support businesses).

If there is more money in circulation, but the same amount of goods, of course the price of goods is going to increase.
This is a completely misleading site. On one side you post a picture of a road with high traffic, and on the other side you post a mostly-pedestrian street.

Of fucking course asphalt will look more damaged. If you try to use Roman roads for buses and trucks, they'll be destroyed completely within a couple of years (road damage scales as the fourth power of the axle weight). Cobblestone is also slippery when wet or iced.

Paving stones might look nice, but they can get dislodged, or the road can warp if drainage is not done properly.

Everything in engineering is a trade-off. You can use concrete for paving and for a small neighborhood road it'll last for decades with little maintenance. But it's much more cost-effective to use asphalt on a gravel bed, and just periodically do spot repairs.

As asphalt becomes more expensive with the winding down of fossil fuels, we'll switch to more concrete roads. But we sure as hell won't be using paving stones.
This is such a cynical and tired take. I would imagine that most people attending college at least intend to learn something and level up some ability. Many of them will also enjoy partying in their early 20s. Both can be true, and there’s not a singular purpose of attending school.
Even when it's a reasonably developed country (Italy) and when they are spanking new cobblestones can get slippery when it rains, they are noisier, and they are absolutely horrible on a road bike.
> Similar to how people complain about lack of legroom but proceed to book with airlines that have less legroom because it's cheaper

When you're booking a plane ticket, you don't have much information about the legroom amount. Maybe you can tell somewhat from the airline, but most airlines have a variety of different planes, and I don't know how to use that information to determine legroom.
Why now? Haven’t people always been greedy?
If you aren’t already familiar with relational data modeling and the various “normal forms”, do a bit of learning on that topic and design your schema.

Then you’ll want to learn a bit about ETL for importing the data, which your sources will likely provide denormalized, requiring transformation before loading into your DB.
Are you saying that Russia didn't invade Ukraine?
There was probably a time in which SAT scores are weighted highly in admissions for elite schools.

Now it's a starting level filter. You're not getting in because of top scores, but you will get rejected because of bad scores absent a massive alternative hook. People that get in have top scores and other superhuman traits.