skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> With what method

There has been a systemic decrease in freedoms and grey areas in China under Xi over the past few years.

Criticism and protests have always been fairly common in China, but the level to which they have been cracked down and prosecuted under Xi is stark compared to the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Furthermore, the CCP always had the ability to choose to harden the Great Firewall, but never chose to until the 2nd Xi Administration.

Furthermore, Xi dismantled a number of the checks and balances the CCP developed after Mao's death in order to prevent a Mao 2.0 from arising. The Premiership and State Council has been hollowed out, and regulations such as term limits and federalism have been thrown on the wayside.

Finally, under the guise of anti-corruption reforms, the Xi Administration has increasingly cut off average Chinese from the rest of the world by severely limiting cash and asset outflow (which is needed if you want to study abroad because being an international student isn't cheap).

China was never a Disneyland, but the level of authoritarianism in China today was unseen since the death of Mao.

> wasn't exactly a nice place to begin with

I agree with that, but the issue is selective enforcement.

People like Bo Xilai and Jack Ma absolutely deserve to be prosecuted for corrupt business practices and criminality, yet similar enforcement doesn't extend to business and party leaders close to Xi, and in some cases Xi himself (such as his tenure in Fujian).

There is a way to walk a middle ground between full blown authoritarianism and managed authoritarianism. Russia pre-2016 is a good example of how managed autocracy could work (it sucks but it's still more free than China today)

> continuation of the tradition

This statement reeks of Orientalism.

Taiwan, HK, and Singapore are children of the same traditions, yet are significantly less authoritarian than Mainland China today.

Ascribing cultural reasons takes the onus of responsibility away from the individuals who systemically undermined institutions within China.

> Unlike in a democracy (Japan) where it's leaders are expected to leave the office to someone else

This was China before 2018. After Deng Xiaoping's reforms, the Politburo made 2 term rule a requirement, and formalized the 2nd term Secretariat to Party Secretary pathway
I read something recently along the lines of EVs currently cost 40% more than the equivalent ICE cars to produce.

The only way BYD is getting them significantly cheaper is cutting range and safety.
What a bunch of gaslighting and political hackery. No way unemployment is "lower than ever"... The lockdowns were stupid, especially toward the end, and the bill for that has come due. People are not imagining that their money is worth less than ever, or that finding a job is increasingly difficult. I don't doubt that some people have lingering mental health issues to this day because of the pandemic. I see it almost every day when one or two random people are STILL wearing a face diaper over 2 years since the pandemic ceased being a real concern to practically everyone else.
I guessed that was probably the source when I read the comment. Not really one of the great strips but pretty good.
The website is completely unusable on iPhone and on iPad. It doesn't scroll, jerks back in place, parts are blank and empty... looks really strange.
That's nice and all, but the "why" is more important than the "what".

Google was driven not out of some panicked rush to protect user privacy, but to protect Google's collection and storage of user data.

Google has 10+ years of my email. It doesn't treat that like Fort Knox because it gives a shit about my privacy; it treats it like Fort Knox because it wants to use that for itself and provide services to others based off it.

You do know that Google was heavily seed-funded by the NSA, right?
GEM makes something that fits your bill.

In my state, they can be driven on roads that are 35 mph or less. That’s sufficient for many urban areas.
The fatal flaw mistake that you're making is interacting with it. By going don't recommend this channel or disliking you are still interacting with it. Interacting is a positive metric. Ignore with your brain and don't interact.
QM says QC as we envision them will work.

QM says a quantum entangled state will remain like that until disturbed/measured. If there is some limit as you suggest, that means QM is at least partially broken.
The reality is that there is much more cash in the market since the corona, which reduced the value of cash.

On the paper, the numbers look good, but the reality is shit due to underlying inflation because you can spend way less with the same amount of money.

As a result, valuations of companies also soars, not because everything is great, but because the cash is losing value.
The first link is 2023’s race. The second link is 2014 and is probably how most people learned about the race since it was on Netflix. It’s amazing to compare the two race years to see how much it has changed in terms of competition and popularity.
Death is a part ot life, and I wasn't the one suggesting to transform the entire internet.
Well, an influx of money can be a bad thing too: 1/3rd of lottery winners go bankrupt within 5 years of winning...I knew somebody who gave their kid a sports car on his 16th birthday...a week later he and his car were pulled out from under a semi truck...

Whether something is good or bad depends on how well or how poorly you use it. Its not intrinsically good or bad.
How SPARC Got Its Name
I believe Octave (also free and open source) is more compatible with Matlab that Scilab is. What are the advantages of Scilab over Octave? There is an ad-heavy comparison at https://www.educba.com/scilab-vs-octave/ .
Let's see, as arm chair economists, can we have an interesting discussion?

It could surely be a tax focused on ultra-rich, who have benefited from tax cuts by parties in power for years. Corporate and ultra-rich taxes are not insane concepts, what is the real difference in quality of life of $20M vs. $50M? What necessities of life are not met? Corporate taxes are even better, dodge those, issue large stock buy backs which will benefit largest shareholders the most -- Milton Friedman smiles from the shareholder value heavens.

Imagine the economy has a huge MCMC graph, potentially everyone is connected to each other, with edges of varying strength that correspond to possible outflows and inflows of money between people (and perhaps entities/institutions). It becomes clear that some nodes in the graph are connected to other nodes that end up keeping money in few places to "invest" and accumulate wealth, sitting there, doing nothing for anyone else, tremendous capital accruing more capital because that is how this game can work. Other nodes lead to money moving rapidly in the network and having affect on the lives of many nodes. The economy has to be movement of money among individual components of the economy, because money is the meta-resource, so just use that to stand-in for anything.
The Unix Programming Environment [pdf]
Hi-fidelity PDF from archive.org, via a recent HN comment. I read the book early in my career. Fundamental.
Sure, but parent was saying what if we manage to build QC as we envision them and then they don't work.
Congratulations to everyone who finished. I got deep into reading up on this race a couple years ago. I think about it when I'm doing my little hikes. I can't imagine. But I'm mostly fascinated by the character of Lazarus Lake, his avuncular sadism, and the rituals and ceremonies surrounding the whole race.

> With three finishes under his belt, it may seem like a fourth one was clandestine for Campbell, 44

Not sure how clandestine is being used here. Incorrectly I guess. I miss copy editors.
This is backward. Workers' benefit from (wage) inflation. The rich do not.
This doesn’t totally solve the issue of SELECT’ing first then filtering, but for complex queries I’ve found CTEs very useful (whenever the database/SQL dialect supports it).
What do you mean by the last thing that you said?

"Here's a video you me trying to search for something on YouTube"

But then you link to a short. So you made a short to complete about shorts? I'm not going to click on your short if that is your short if that is what you meant to say is "here is a video I made for you of me trying to search for something on YouTube" I'm just entirely confused by that.

The rest of what you say though I completely agree with I know that YouTube is trying to force shorts down our throat but the best thing you could do is just ignore them with your brain.
It also adds a severe amount of visual clutter between the code. Individual preference I’m sure, but I’d prefer less comments, I think. Or maybe my IDE just needs to collapse comments inside functions automatically.
An internal Google framework Wiz will be merged with Angular
Isn't this normal? Its how I see everyone from upper management
You’re imagining every firm gets 2% savings every year. That isn’t how it works.

Most firms have rising real wages: real wages rose during the 2% inflation period.

But sometimes a firm needs to lower costs. Having a small bit of inflation lets a firm do so without either firing people or actually cutting nominal wages.
> You're still thinking in terms of paying for hosting, ie a commercial web

Hosting and serving content has a cost though.
Given domains are not encrypted I’m not sure this holds true.
Attackers can already target financial websites, messaging websites, etc…
Thunder – A new compiler for PyTorch that can use many device executors at once
On the other hand lower earners are more exposed to things like credit card interest rates. Which isn't to say that that swamps the wage increases, just that the picture is complicated.
> widdling it down

Whittling. It means to carve something out of wood, with a metaphorical extension, as here, to gradually making something smaller by shaving bits of it away.
Kind of a tangent but I'm really interested in why statements like:

> if you have carbon-based life forms, you will have water and CO2.

..can lead to statements like:

> it is just way more likely than any other form

I totally agree on the observation, but what is fascinating to me is why a deductive statement can be considered to indicate likelihood in probability. It seems there is a bit of abductive reasoning going on behind the scenes which neither the deductive logic or inductive probability can really capture on their own.
OpenJDK Project Wakefield – The Wayland Desktop for JDK on Linux [video]
Moat people think their own financial situation is good while the economy everywhere else is bad: https://www.axios.com/2024/01/17/americans-are-actually-pret...

Which leads me to believe it is mostly the negative media hype which gets eyeballs. Also, given the election coming up it is good for the challenger to claim the incumbent messed up the economy and they’ll totally fix it if you vote for them.
>In the United States, unemployment is at or near all-time lows.

According to fake government stats that have changed drastically over time to sweep problems under the rug. If you believe the labor market is good, I have a bridge to sell you. Also, wages went up significantly for a bit, but nowhere near enough to match inflation.
'Little House on the Prairie' was like 'Mad Men': Cigarettes and glasses of gin
In my experience few CS students seem to take a relational databases course. It was optional in my program. Unfortunately, that means many of those databases were created by folks with no formal grounding in databases. Some folks pick it up on their own, but likely not as thoroughly as those who've taken a good course on the topic.
"After all, no one likes it when prices rise."

Excuse me? One man or woman's "price" is another's "wage", and plenty of people like it when their wages go up.
Klebb3: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=klabb3

Quantum computers are like fusion in the 1940's, "it's only going to take 20 more years".

Using arguments in line with klebb, if quantum is linearly difficult, and each qubit takes 1 year, with your thought experiment's numbers that's 1000 years between breaking 256 and 384, let alone 512.

Early on, a decade ago, I was much more accepting of the quantum camp's arguments. But now in retrospect they've oversold, overpromised, and under delivered.

These hypothetical breakthroughs may not come to fruition.
I don't think so. Most government purchase subsidies are or were phased out in China in 2022.

BYD received massive grants during it's scale-up period, mostly in the form of capital expenditures being fully subsidized or land grants. Very rarely were subsidies/grants awarded for operational expenses though it did happen.

Given the fiscal situation in China it's unlikely BYD will receive as much support in the future but you never know. Green transition is still a massively important political goal in China.

Worth mentioning the scale of support it received is not dissimilar to Tesla which also benefited from very healthy subsidies and tax arrangements with the US jurisdictions it setup in. In fact if you include their $1.3B deal with Nevada (over 20 years though) I think you will find Tesla is in the lead in government money.

Disclaimer: I'm both a BYD and TSLA shareholder
Unless you're wealthy and powerful.

I guarantee the very wealthy or politically powerful have plenty of very-well-hidden cameras surrounding their properties.

Those rules are to keep you from catching and proving the powerful doing something they shouldn't.
I'm also waiting for the day, which is pretty much here now, when you will have to use a real name for any sign up form on any website. Something verifiable and not John Smith at phone 123 456 7890.
I’m currently reading Broken Money by Lyn Alden and it has given me a much improved perspective about why things like this are the way they are as a consequence of history and monetary policy. Very interesting.
What MBA Specializations Do T20 Business Schools Provide?
15 of the top 20 MBA programs provide some sorts of specializations. Yet HBS, Stanford don't. On the other hand Wharton provides 20...

Should this affect people's decisions where to apply to and where to go to? Or it's just the schools trying to differentiate themselves...
I expected to be downvoted! It's a grim idea, that this is there is and there isn't some huge prize of "a whole galaxy" a thousand years down the line.

I would have resisted it when I was a kid, myself.

About fifteen years ago, I made an attempt to figure out how much it would cost to set up a self-sustaining colony on Mars. My target was a Mars that could make its own pressure suits because terraforming would take centuries and making your own pressure suits is a precursor to that.

I realized that you had to essentially re-invent almost every industrial process humans have today, from baking to smelting steel, because all of them rely on unlimited, free air, and large quantities of cheap water.

You need to recreate most of the chemical industry, just to create new computer chips, each one of which relies on hundreds of chemical compounds available at very very high purities and affordable prices.

After a lot of work, I was unable to come up with a figure. My best guess was $3 to $30 quadrillion dollars, if it were even possible!

And all of that to have a bunch of miserable real estate in a cold, dark, arid, lifeless, airless, radioactive desert characterized by fine, abrasive, statically charged, poisonous dust. Antarctica is nicer in every way - much warmer, much brighter, has breathable air, endless quantities of water, etc - and yet no one lives there.
Interesting, thanks for the comment. I didn’t know this when I posted.
That's a sed /d of course. Or a "Replace all in folder" in any decent code editor.

Or a sufficiently efficient "extract to method" on a decent IDE, that notices the different occurrences even with renamed variables.

Unless those lines of code were subtly edited all over the place and needed careful and subtly different replace for each occurrence, or at last review because that's what's truly evil with duplicated code. It's forks that diverged to maintain N times in your codebase.
I love this.

If the BBC is making a tv show or something out of it,
it would be awesome if they built such a place .
Obviously just parts and like a film set.

Do more and I am sure it would become a tourist attraction.
I would love to visit.

Even more awesome if they had it staffed with actors.

A lot like Dismaland
Flat taxes are inherently regressive as the poor have to spend a higher proportion of their money than the rich in order to live.
> Every user hates using microsoft products

Only because they've never had a chance to experience the competition.

Having worked in IBM and had to use the Lotus Office Suite I can tell you Microsoft won fair and square. And I'm not even talking about the detestable abomination that is Lotus Notes.
Thank you for the detail check. I should thank the syrup too :)

I'm happy to see a fellow enthusiast. Your deduction is on point.
And also, Pack is smart; it skips non-compressible files like MP3 [1], so you do not need to choose the "Store" option to have a faster option, and it speedup decompression too. Pack is the first to achieve this, being faster than Store options. Yes, it was a surprise to me too.

ZPAQ is great, and I study the Hutter Prize competition. Pack is on another chart, which is why I proposed CompressedSpeed [2]. The speed of getting to compression needs to be accounted for. You can store anything on an atom if you try hard enough, but hard work takes time. Deduplication step may get added, but in Hard Press [3].

I am curious to see the results of Pack on your data. You can find me here or o at pack.ac.

[1] It is based on content rather than extension; any data that is determined not to be worthy of compression, will be stored as is. And as a file can get chucked, some parts can get compressed and some cannot. Imagine that part of the subtitle in a MKV file can get compressed, and the Video part gets skipped. Although these features will get more updates over time, if they don't cost time,. Pack focus is being seamless and not the most compressed; there are already great works in the field, such as the noted ZPAQ.

[2] CompressedSpeed = (InputSize / OutputSize) * (InputSize / Speed). Materialized compression speed.

[3] You can choose --press=hard to ask for better compression. Even with Hard Press, Pack does not try to eat your hardware just to get a little more; it goes the optimized way I described.
NASA x59 also has that feature:

https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/digital-design-mult...
Why would you compare starting salary to the median home price? Are you suggesting every home below the median is uninhabitable?

The median home price would suggest that the median household income is at least $160k, which seems pretty good.
Would that also throw projects like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Interferometer_For_Exopl... also into question?
> Entities affiliated with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman now hold a stake worth $613 million.
Thank you!

About Pascal:
It makes me happy. It looks clean and pseudocode-like. It helps readers from around the world with different languages understand. I am happy that Pack made people curious about this old but great goodie.

Speed, Here are some reasons:
- Pack does all the steps of pack or unpack (read, check, compress/decompress and write) together and this weaving helped achieve this speed and random access. It is by far the fastest speed I get to see reading or writing random files from file systems, as fast or faster than asynchronous read operations or OVERLAPPED on Windows. To a point, it is limited to file system. For example, on NTFS, Pack can pack Linux code base in around 1.3 s; similar is done on ext4 in 0.96 s.

- It is based on a heavily optimized code base, standard library, and the FreePascal compiler, which produces great binary.

- Multi core design: even mobiles have multi-core CPUs these days. Choosing threads based on the content and machine, it does not eat your machine.

- Speed-configured SQLite. SQLite is much faster than most people think it is.

- Configured the already rapid Zstandard.

In summary, standing on the shoulders of giants while trying hard to improve reliability, speed and user experience is a sign of respect for them.
Grand narratives are different from epistemes. Grand narratives have assumed notions of absolute truth because of the power dynamic implied in those notions. See that second link. It's what postmodernism is all about. The tl;dr is epistemes = what knowledge is at a given time & grand narratives = who gets funded.

Related: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088160

Jared Diamond tried to reclaim environmental determinism from its unsavoury origins, but he didn't realise that you couldn't repair something when the foundations were rotten.
i think “disaster” is hyperbole. my brain thinks in concert with sql so it feels natural, though i will concede that the parsing/syntax order differences was an odd choice.

programmers and language users all have a mental translation layers that they use to go from conceptual->concrete using the syntax and idioms of their language of choice.

javascript doesn’t make sense in a lot of ways. calling it a disaster is hyperbole. go doesn’t make sense in a lot of ways. it’s not a disaster. unfamiliarity or disagreement with choices does not necessarily mean it’s a disaster

the only language with which i’m familiar that is a complete, unmitigated disaster is the english language, but i suppose that’s outside of the scope of this conversation
Re-architecting is also very far from free and the result of spending all that developer time is that you are indeed then hard locked into your provider's managed offerings. But even lift-and-shift will have some lock in. The classic is the egress bandwidth roach motel model; free to enter but expensive to leave.
Opinions will for sure differ because there is no "official" legislation on this, and laws continue evolving in this terms, as the web moves fast too. Anyways, I would suggest adding our software Publytics (https://publytics.net) among the list of potential alternatives, as it is privacy-friendly too and offers a very easy to use UX for both expert and non-expert users.
It's because the article and website is stupid, and is trying to make you believe public agencies are ineffective on principle.

Public agencies don't exist because of profit. They exists because of government mandate.

Also the website states it's just a single PHD that claims "I created Effectiviology to provide people with research-based information about psychology and philosophy they can use.", but it's in reality owned by 'Super Privacy Service LTD' according to https://www.whois.com/whois/effectiviology.com.

Don't trust this source.
This comes up often! A few previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483165 (2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387179 (2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10734815 (2015)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516671 (2014)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4040082 (2012)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114223 (2010)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545452 (2010)
I think the deaths of despair trend is much less related to the economy than people have postulated. But yes, a doomful online community seems like it would absolutely make this trend worse.

> And another question - if social media is so harmful, then what of all the people on this site who helped to build it? Are they villains of the modern era, magnifying unhappiness throughout the world?

Does this not describe Zuckerberg? But yeah, I'm here. But I would argue HN in particular gives a much less strong "hit" of dopamine when doomscrolling.
What's incredible besides evidence that these even existed is how little dress shoes have changed since then.