skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Next step in the ongoing plot outlined in the Powell Memorandum of 1971. Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court to help drive that.
If God Save the King is what you’re after, just go for My Country ‘tis of Thee. Same melody but with added freedom, and as a bonus it was used as a national anthem historically.
I strongly disagree, while technology clearly helped us growing, there are always tradeoffs, even agriculture is not ideal. We can solve some problems but it is almost never « for free » and the cost is newer problems to solve. I think there is a compounding effect with population growth, and I don’t think that population can grow forever on a single planet, that is nonsense.

How much is enough? My intuition is that population stability is more important than actual number, but between 2 Billions and 10Billions is likely the sweet spot.
samaritans live continuously in samaria for 2000+ years. it's their homeland. jews live continuously in samaria and judea for 2000+ years (with some pause in 1948-1967 when they were ethnically cleansed by jordans. it's their homeland as well.

so how is that in your only palestinians can do it ? is the right of self determination does not apply to samaritans and jews, only to palestinians ?

un charter on self determination or other treaties that i referenced says nothing about location of self determination, btw. there is only right to self determination. not to land. not to state.
I don't know Goldman at all, but I know there are plenty of corporations engaging in labor fraud by giving everyone and the kitchen sink the title of "Vice President" because of the benefits under the labor laws. Doing so is fraud if it is clear the title is given to hundreds, if not thousands, of employees who actually perform no functions that warrant an executive title. I worked at a Fortune 500 company with a total workforce ~10,000 of whom ~50% had the title of Vice President and another ~25% Assistant Vice President.
For what it's worth I've worked with several and they were great.
Not a very operational definition. You can't start a hot dog stand without permission either.
No need. You apparently haven’t heard of the age depopulation bomb.

https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/beware-depopulation-bom...
Oh, this isn't good. It was one of the better options available, and the only one of those which was FOSS.
You could start by not incentivizing population growth as many states do. Why does every response to "we should probably not multiply exponentially" need to be some variation of "oH sO YoU wANt GENOCIDE?!?!11"
The problem is really negative externality and pollution caused by production and consumption. That's really the core issue of our global economy and technological landscape, and probably the greatest constraint that limits us from expanding resource extraction.

Humanity is a civilization that lives on resource consumption of truly tiny amount of energy and materials compared to the whole that's available within this solar system.
The Echo Show 15 is slower than either generation of Fire TV 4K Max and is around the speed of an older Fire TV 4K.

Echo Show 15 has a fatal flaw: the BBC News skill doesn't work with IPv6. It's just broken.

Also, it's a screen with terrible audio. It's no replacement for an HDMI output device.
yes, i am talking about samaritans who live in samaria. can you explain why they have right of minority but not right to self determination as palestinians ? according to un this right is universal for all people.
This may be a bit reductive but the article is basically saying that the larger the population the quicker progress and innovation will occur. What’s unclear though is if this progress and innovation leads to greater human happiness and fulfillment. As we’ve seen lately, the opposite could also be true. With climate change on the horizon, we may have even reached peak human happiness sometime in the late 20th century
Except the thing is… if you put Japanese officials in charge of the policies of any other city, the toilets would be as bad or likely worse.

The example isn’t just one thing, it’s a ton of things with the side effect of a strong culture of responsibility.
The thing that bothers me about this line of argument is...there already are a lot of people! We've had _massive_ population growth over the past few centuries, especially in the last 100 years or so. We have 8 _billion_ people now...and I personally don't see a lot of the benefits that the author talks about. I really don't think going from 8 billion to 10 billion or 16 billion or even 50 billion people would really make a meaningful difference in "the number of geniuses" or the number of people to populate a subreddit for a niche hobby, to draw on two of his examples. We have lots of geniuses now and we have lots of people on subreddits already.

We can already see that many (most?) societies are really quite bad at dividing finite resources/wealth/capital/land/etc. in an efficient (let alone equitable) manner among the billions of people in the world today. Are we really supposed to believe that resource management would magically become better/more efficient/more equitable somehow with even more people to divide them between? My hunch is that the vast majority of new people that got added to the global population would be relatively quite poor, whereas the global number of billionaires and millionaires would stay relatively flat.

Yes things like whale oil and bat guano are resources we've progressed past the need for...but we can't progress past the need for land. Or water. Both of which are in relatively short supply for many people, especially in places that are more desirable to live.

Large population centers have historically tended to form where they are for a reason (proximity to water, natural resources, natural recreation/beauty, desirable weather/climate, etc.), and most of the world's large cities are already pretty tapped out in terms of population. You can't magically fit a billion extra people in New York or Shanghai or Paris without it having disastrous repercussions for the people already there (and the new people). Sure we could build new massive cities in presently rural/unpopulated areas, but I think there's a reason that lots of people don't live in those places now, and if a billion-person city was shoved into South Dakota (to use an example of a very sparsely populated place) out of necessity, I'd imagine many people wouldn't be too happy about having to live there.

To be very clear (and preempt any bad-faith readings of this), I'm not endorsing the view of dramatic population reduction or anything like that. I'm just saying that the idea that massive population growth is always an inherent good strikes me as quite wrongheaded.
The population already exists. But we don’t see that many geniuses working on ambitious projects because they are working minimum wage jobs or wasting away without education in Africa, India, China, or downtown LA. We don’t have a population problem, just a utilization problem.
I want a smaller human population.
I don't think the examples were exhaustive. As I read it, the writer tries to extrapolate and generalize his principal to everything and everywhere as some sort of natural law; so it'll affect governments, unions, companies, etc...
We are still bound by labor amount, but now it's mostly the intellectual labor.

The amount of thinking happening in the world depends on the amount of human brains available, and their level of education and knowledge, in the widest sense. Solving current challenges faster is often only possible by applying a larger amount of thinking to them.

(No, the AI is not yet a game changer here.)
Fond memories of being completely blown away by the QNX disk that came with some magazine
Cities aren't overcrowded, not even close, but cars sure do take a lot of space, especially with laws and regulations that required excess parking spaces.
intelligence is a lottery at birth, assuming the education system is good enough at identify talents of all kind. and with the world especially Asian countries better at this, I think we do need more human to maintain the current talents pool.
If “quality” prevents you from going out and laying claim to a big chunk of a greenfield market because you move slower than lower-“quality” competitors, then “quality” will cost you very dearly indeed.
It is extremely common that in most of Mexico, the pay toilets have such bad plumbing that everyone knows to not flush any toilet paper at all, it all goes in the bin no matter how dirty it is.

I prefer USA toilets.
I have a 2nd gen Fire TV 4K Max gathering dust you can have. It's slow as fuck and barely faster than the first one. All Fire TV devices I've seen are slow, laggy, and shitty.
Who gets to decide who can reproduce and who cant?
I've always found this to be a very useful practice. Many projects have a few core files (or packages / modules / whatever) where most of the changes happen. Being able to familiarize new contributors (or old returning ones) with those quickly really helps the startup time on a project.

I've added architecture files to projects at multiple jobs now [0], [1] and they've been well received. They're not perfect, but they're better than nothing.

[0]: https://github.com/zapier/zapier-platform/pull/324

[1]: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-cli/blob/master/ARCHITECTUR...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
I agree it's quite surprising, but in hindsight it makes some sense:

The original implementation has 2 branches per iteration: one for the loop, and one to test whether the bit is set or not.

The optimized implementation has 1 branch per iteration.

I doubt that the fact that it's JS matters all that much given that either loop is absolutely tiny once it's compiled down to optimized assembly.
Whilst I don't agree with the article, you're ignoring that these epic machines you talk of are the product of a much larger population. These megamachines wouldn't exist, or at least not all the types of machines, if not for us having billions of people on the planet.
I'm implying that both the author of this article, and Kevin Kelly, have an anti government bias that they're supporting using examples from the private sector.

(Unions aren't the government, but I'm lumping them together in comparison to the private sector.)
>A bigger world is better for everyone

Current world isn't good enough for everyone.
This is actually the point, and is analogous to convex optimization, in that systems always evolve along the boundary of constraint, and in the linear case, it will always be an exchange of active parts of the problem.
Wrong. Other people should have fewer kids and fade away. My people must continue grow and prosper. It's simple.
Wow, that explains a lot. One trip I went on there was a older man, bald but otherwise extremely clean cut, the sort to wear slacks, loafers, and a dress shirt tucked in - casually, and quite healthy looking. He almost had a sort of super villain type appearance, somehow.

Anyhow, he had a fairly large briefcase type device he carried everywhere with him and was trying to convince everybody to come try his 'electric brain stimulation.' Surprisingly, nobody seemed too interested in going into a hotel room with a stranger to get their brains plugged into the wall. He seemed to have zapped away all inhibitions, and common sense. Sure made for an interesting character though!
"diversity" but only of the right kind of course!
>> “.. we’ll go as weird as possible and input: AI, Taylor Swift, McDonald's, beach volleyball.”

wow, the author has a pretty basic limited imagination
Even ancient Lisp was not without hash/dict processing. It was disguised in the interning of symbols, and symbol property lists.
Obamacare was an absolute unfiltered gift to the insurance companies and to this day I can’t understand how no one saw this or cared.

Yea… things were going to get better when more people were being ripped off.
How about instead of telling people to have more kids or less kids, we let them do whatever they feel like?
well, at least it wasn't The Worst Toilet in Scotland
There's a long narrow expensive isthmus between the gravity well of Earth and the rest of the solar system.

Colonies elsewhere are a fine idea if the goal is to expand the footprint of humans but there's limited prospect of that moving significant numbers off of the planet or improving the environmental balance here.

These are two almost orthogonal endeavours.
Yes we do a pledge of allegiance every day at school, and many government meetings and social club meetings.

A lot of that stuff is early adopter weirdness. You see, other nation states have things like a historical culture or common language to unite them, but the US had to invent a national identity out of whole cloth when no other nation was doing nationalism yet. We need rituals to affirm that we are the members of the in-group.
> More geniuses

I am going to hazard a guess that we aren’t missing the underlying number of geniuses. We are probably wasting a lot of potential geniuses.

> More progress

Unless the limiting factor isn’t those factors.

> More options

The west has more options than ever. We also have more people without purpose than ever before. We aren’t lacking people.

> Deeper patterns

We all want rival goods. Shelter. Clothing. Food. That’s not even getting to diseconomies of scale.

The population debate is fraught with charlatans.
Intuit re tax complexity comes to mind.
What do we get wrong about the Byzantine Empire?
Reducing population is as simple as making less babies.

Not encouraging natality, large families, and reducing immigration.
For the civil war, yes. But that doesn't seem like the most relevant war to the national anthem or pledge of allegiance.
yeah let's trash the planet at an even higher rate. let's set up more slaughterhouses to kill animals to feed all these new people, because we sure don't have enough of those /s
Proton 9 is Coming, and a Beta is Out for Testing
I wish people would mention this every time "3 laws" is brought up.

The end result in the Asimov universe was that the robots did away with space travel for humans (could be dangerous, can't have that), then obliterated all other life in the galaxy because it had potential to harm humans someday. Some people suggest Saberhagen's Berserkers were just 3-laws robots from some other species.
I think they are quite upfront about their values, and I suspect they would quite likely be OK with being labelled human-centric, as would I!
It's a predictable outcome though. Budgets, by implication, imply that resources are limited. Someone, somewhere is deciding winners and losers.

A good budgeter will ask for input to determine the next budget. They will treat savings will delight, and not penalise those who created them. They'll find out if the saving is permanently, or temporary. They might ask for suggestions with how the budget might be allocated.

As the org gets bigger and bigger though it becomes impossible to do this on a individual-level basis. So next years budget is formed with incomplete data from this year.

Some savings are because on lack-of-need, some are because not everything happens every year, some are because of incompetence. But the bigger the organisation the less likely this individual variance can be taken into account.
For certain reasons, i totally support saving the kittens! :)
Side topic… but I sure love reading about the MIC from the same people that complained about it for decades but now are jumping up and down to “Send Help To Ukraine” which is really just feed the MIC as a stimulus package.
Italy found a solution: make it a tourist attraction.
This is the answer. RSS without the full article is just Twitter. If you need to click through to an ad-ridden or paywalled website to read the content, then you might as well have just visited the website in the first place.

The primary benefit of RSS from my perspective was being able to fetch news while online and then read it offline. That implies being able to consume information without obtrusive tracking and popups and marketing gimmicks. Once RSS feeds just became their own marketing gimmick, a way to hook you back into the site's ad-driven ecosystem, they lost their utility.

Mailing lists are now the better alternative, although Substack is rapidly killing that medium too by consolidating every provider onto a single platform so they can correlate subscriptions, hijack img and href tags, and track every open and click.
<< n vs. 1U << n and a cell phone autofocus problem
This is true but it would nice to have some TLDs operated as associations or coops for the benefit of members.
Australia lags behind other countries in certain technology, but not in mining technology. There's sufficient expertise in a population of a few million. (Of course, there's a disproportionate amount of mining engineering experts in Perth.)
If resources becomes scarce, don't worry. We've just crashed the market on human value, so we can make up for it with lower wages and longer hours.
ASCII Smuggler: Hiding text in plain sight
Fleshgod Apocalypse has a classically trained opera singer.

I often hear the joke that Beethoven wrote the best guitar solos. Moonlight Sonata's 3rd movement on guitar is a fun listen .
Why do you think crime is up?
Is there a world where this can be made performant? Just my geek curiosity kicking in, as I love Postgres and SQL.
The author’s third point, “More progress’, is what I find the most compelling. We tend to think of ourselves living in a techno utopia, but in my view we are barely out of the dark ages. Disease and poverty still run rampant and our lives are frustratingly short. There are people personally close to me that live in chronic pain; there are healthy people in their 20s that die from cancer; our understanding of biology and physiology is so poor we currently can’t help this people. Broad technological progress is the only answer and this will require talented people.
That was npm, which lead to a left-pad incident.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11349870 - Kik, left-pad, and npm (2016)
He wants to be a scientist but is just a mediocre SciFi author.
The OP also claims that growth is possible indefinitely.

But somehow, we need more humans to to have critical resources necessary to execute some projects.

The contradiction is lost on the OP author.
A lot of examples in the comments are NOT the Shirky Principle.

The Shirky Principle is about how an organization wants to self-perpetuate.

The comments are just blaming any government program that might be miss-managed, or under-performing, for any number of reasons, regardless of any relation to Shirky. Shirky != Government.

Any organization can underperform for many reasons.

There can just be multiple groups with conflicting incentives.

or

"multipolar traps"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I have the exact same thought.

What would it look like? I have two ideas.

1. Multiple directory trees that use symlinks to organize files orthogonally. Your typical directory structure may have things split by client / server. But what if I want to split things based on feature? An IDE could make this a lot easier.

2. Along the lines of this post, I’d love if an IDE would make it easier to create bookmarks and navigate between them to walk people through the code. I’d love to leave a comment sometimes that I can click to jump me to another location in the codebase. Stringing these together leads allows you to weave a narrative throughout the codebase to explain how things work!

Is anyone working in these kinds of things??
These resources are abundantly available on Earth and endlessly recyclable. It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.

At some point, your problem will be heat, not energy, because roughly speaking humans are 100 watts space heater, never mind all the heat generated from making food, transport infrastructure, industrial production and extraction.

If you take a look at cities and how they're constructed, it's really a 2.5D map. The road corridor are frequently ground level, maybe two or threes. Then we build towers and buildings. So what we created are artificial canyons in cities, but we don't build entire floor of cities.

So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.

So in that sense, space isn't probably an issue.

Humans are actually pretty space efficient. What's not space efficient is all the expensive infrastructures such as cars and roads.

What will be the most challenging for us is really political, not engineering or economics or space or energy.
It's sad that traditions disappear. Like the 40 years old tradition of "knock on the head" at Ruginoasa, Romania. This video's from 2005, when men were still men and authorities weren't interfering with folklore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmWOWNx9lSk (skip to 12:20 for real action)
You don't offer help to addicts, you force it. That's the Portugal model.
You’ve got that there are a lot of unintended pregnancies. You’ve got that there is an impact on the environment by humanity.

That does not an argument make as much as the points in TFA.
Speaking of that, the rate of growth has been reduced, and in most places in the world, the fertility rate is below replacement levels (yes, including Africa and the Muslim world).

So we're going to see peak Earth population, and a start of its decline, in a few decades.
Some of the underlying logic here feels suspect to me.

Sure, more people likely leads to more production of non-rival goods, but more people will also make rival goods more scarce and harder to come by. Sure, some rival goods will be replaced by non-rival goods, but it's hard to imagine eliminating them entirely.

I don't really buy the idea that we can forever stay on this train of finding new/better/less-scarce resources every time we find that whatever we're using today is going to run out. As a bit of an extreme example, there is only so much matter in the universe, and even if we find a way to convert any kind of matter into any other with minimal energy expenditure, if the population keeps growing and growing, eventually there will not be enough matter for further growth. I suppose then the author might suggest that we will find loopholes in the laws of thermodynamics that allows us to create matter from nothing, but at some point you have to admit that this is the fictioniest of science fiction and isn't something we can support with what we know today.

Then there's just plain old shitty human nature. The larger an individual society is, the more people are going to be at the bottom of it, falling through the cracks. There will always be people who want more wealth and more power, and someone -- more and more someones, really -- has to suffer for it. THe idealist in me wants to imagine a post-scarcity society, but I'm not sure I have it in me anymore to believe in such a thing; we have the ability to feed every person on Earth, today, and yet we don't do it, because those in power are selfish and more concerned with their stock prices than in actually helping fellow humans (and we, the unwashed masses, constantly enable them). I don't have much optimism that this will change, ever; even if it does, I expect that to take millennia, at best.

On another tack: we have so many people in the world who are unhappy, beaten down, in poverty, hungry, unhoused today. Maybe we should fix that before working to grow our population more and more and more.

Having said that, I do agree that it's preposterous to think that the ideal size of humanity is a half billion, or even a couple billion, as the author points out others have suggested. We have, so far, overcome resource limitations, and likely will be able to continue to do so for some time. I'm just skeptical of how long we can continue to do that.
It fixes one attack vector (relaying), and some higher-end keys go to sleep sans motion for this reason.