skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Rent rises (and falls, but more slowly) to exactly the level required to keep some portion of people in poverty and near-poverty, no matter how productive the local area is.

That's an interesting claim. While it does seems there are some kind of structural forces that all but guarantee a certain percentage of people will live in poverty, I'm not certain that changing rent prices is necessarily a significant factor. I tried to find evidence that changes in rent prices "keep[s] some portion of people in poverty and near-poverty."

Can you point to any references that suggest this is the case?
Could you describe how each job hop was less annoying than the less?

I know it’s a big ask.

I am just insanely curious to know.
I'll do it next time I'm flying to see what happens.
I wonder if you could use tunnel boring machines to dig tunnels to run power cables to avoid some of the NIMBY objections. Expensive sure but the tunnels will be there basically forever.
By installing the corresponding mobile apps. If access without a dedicated app is important, export a PDF.

I really don’t like treating web access as a requirement if only because it adds enormous complexity to an already-complex project and brings much higher recurring expenses to keep the hosted service online. Neither are conducive to a free product that’s so highly reliant on volunteered time and donations.

Web apps work best as closed, paid SaaSes funded by VCs, where complexity and overhead can be papered over by money.
One of the constants in this field is the people; I've continued to work with the same individuals in various environments and configurations for decades - often intentionally.
Scientists seek miracle pill to stop methane cow burps
Needlessly provocative. Sounds more like you felt attacked.

No reason for me to feel attacked, I pointed out that what you said doesn't make much sense in terms of how long have these languages been around.
I thought "uh, isn't she dead and it's Charles now?"
This article is so poor.

Could be 2 sentences.

Language designed by a king.

Also its sad that they put the years 1393-1897 first. As if it took 500 years.

On page 3 we learn that 4 characters are not used anymore. We dont learn which characters, or why just uslesss knowledge.

Was this written by AI?
Just as a personal data point, most managers I had in my now 25-year career in tech were good.

They set clear goals and expectations, provided honest feedback, both positive and negative, and quickly jumped to help re-plan when things did not work out.

They were also asking what I am optimizing for (for me at different times it was more money; promotion; interesting problems to work on; time to explore other long-term products) and as far as I could tell worked with their managers to move me in that direction, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

I did not assume any of my managers had my best interest in heart, but one of my first managers gave me some lessons on "how to manage your managers, myself included". It took a few iterations, but he convinced me that by far the #1 thing most managers want is for me to deliver things on time; not cut a few days off the project timeline. And if I learn to do that, they will advocate for my interests, shield me from corporate BS, etc.

Some specific advice from that manager was (in his words) "never promise something in 2 weeks unless you could demonstrate it today" and "do not sit quietly when you are given unrealistic timelines; counter with specific subtasks you see and how long you expect each will take". That general advice worked very well for me and helped build symbiosis with direct managers.

I did dislike a few managers, but those were generally good ICs stuck into a management role they did not like (or at least did not know how to do) and kept both sticking their fingers into what their team was doing and start timeline discussions with "it would take me one day to do this, I will give you two; go-build-this-now".

Again, just a personal data point; not claiming that most of the world works this way. I may have been just lucky.
Original article:

https://www.macworld.com/article/2525708
You can afford a small apartment on way less than 70 hours a week of work if you're willing to live in unfashionable places. Try Toledo instead of San Francisco. The people whining about costs are mostly those who feel entitled to live in a particular city with a lot of cultural amenities and nice weather.
Would be nice to have it in an HDR format if they have something beyond 8-bit in the raw data
Is IC offensive? I’ve never considered it to be. “Resources”, on the other hand, feels very offensive.
> core AWS infrastructure is still heavily dependent on Perl scripts mashed together 15+ years ago

What part of the infrastructure? The control-plane logic that triggers when the dashboard/CLI/CloudFormation request modifications to resources?
This is objectively and demonstrably untrue. I’ve had very good non-technical managers. Part of the requirement is them knowing they’re non-technical so they can stay out of the way and concentrate on the PM bits, rather than micro-managing.
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds).

I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.

Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.

Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
I've seen this being researched under the term Constitutional AI, including some robotics papers (either SayCan or RT 2? Maybe Code as Policies?) that had such rules (never pick up a knife as it could harm people, for instance) in their prompting.
Like, okay, if that's how you see it, but what's with the tone and content?

The tone's vapidity is only comparable to the content's.

This reads like mocking the target audience rather than showing them how you can help.

A write up that took said "pile of shell scripts that do not work" and showed how to "make it work" with your technology of choice would have been more interesting than whatever this is.
"They force you to give back any excess power for free to the grid."

If the power being generated is in excess of what the grid is consuming then it is worthless. I've seen people suggest installing bitcoin mining hardware directly inside wind turbines so they can consume excess electricity and make a profit.
The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.

And if you want to count the population consuming industrial goods as the population that "causes" those emissions, then China looks even better, because they are producing goods consumed by literally billions of people.
Hey, I personally produce less CO2 than the entire USA combined. I guess the USA better up its game!
"A Survey of Privacy-Preserving Model Explanations:
Awesome Privacy-Preserving Explainable AI"
https://awesome-privex.github.io/
The EU is probably more effective at stopping Italy and Austria having a go over the Tirol. The US are quite helpful at deterring Russia from doing it's thing though.
I think that this speaks to an issue that's common across the economy, not simply isolated to tech: the career lifecycle. Specifically, the notion that there's an optimal amount of time and an optimal point in one's life (both for business and employee) for a worker to be in a given position, and that it's again optimal for him or her to not get there too early and to not stay too long.

E.g., tech suffers from the former, politics from the latter, and for both fields, the effect is a warping of the good that they could be doing for society. Society should be set up to encourage "correct" entries and exits and to discourage "incorrect" ones (with allowances, during the transition, to avoid having a "lost generation" that never gets to contribute).

Letting people hang on, with their outmoded ideas, into their 70s and 80s? Forcing breadwinners to take on maximum workplace responsibility at the same time that they are most able to contribute to raising their family or building and maintaining their community? There's something perverse about this set-up. To say nothing of the people forced to spin their wheels while the 10xers load their own plates with all the opportunities.
This github page doesn't say anything about why it turned out to be amazing, seems like a fun side project.
WireGuard: Beyond the most basic configuration
> If you can’t handle others engaging in free speech with other, you’re the problem not them.

Corollary: The consequences of speech crafted to harm is an invited problem.

ref: https://archive.ph/9m7Gp
Discussion (33 points, 3 days ago, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42207110
I can not imagine there is a statistically relevant number of people that travel to Manhattan to specifically to grocery shop.
I don't think the OP is talking about whether to focus on running the race or not, but rather which race to run. As you grow older, the number of open tracks diminishes and that is the point the OP is trying to make.

While one can change tracks at any time, success is far from guaranteed. Being a distinguished engineer at 40, one cannot suddenly decide to enter the track for CFO or CEO. The track for that accepted entries 10 years back and is already over-subscribed. Only the CTO track is open at that point and only in certain companies.
This makes me nostalgic for the small internet.
To be clear he is not balancing anything. He wants to punish people he does not like.
> While planning might work for some people, having a more short term view can work for others

One thing I noticed is that what I valued in my 20s wasn't what I valued in my 30s and 40s. It's difficult to anticipate who you will be in a few years from now. It may change drastically. Keep that in mind when planning!
> device from a known manufacturer.

See, this is the problem here. You can buy a Walkman technically if you want to cough up $75 for a glorified feature phone: https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...

If you're dead-set on finding something that checks all your boxes, mainstream manufacturers won't cover it. This is one of those things where I'd search it on Amazon and sort by highest public reviews.
It is kinda insane yes. I'd rather just eat less takeout than carry glassware with me all the time on the off chance I decide to go out to eat.
All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.

This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact.

I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".
"success doesn’t translate to happiness."

I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)
Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and many other countries turned sour on importing chinese EVs in favour of some kind of protectionism. Most developing countries dont have the infrastucture for EVs. Europe hit BYD with a 17 % tariff (10% being the standard)
Too bad you're still forced to use Safari on iOS (in the US) even if you install Chrome or Firefox.
When you start a project it's worth spending some time thinking about "non-goals" i.e. features that come to mind but that you intentionally are not going to implement. It's absolultely fine and often very helpful to have clear scope boundaries so you don't end up chasing rabbits and having projects that never feel "finished."
Any life in the universe that evolved on Uranus-style systems will similarly be grateful not to be here on Earth. Their religions might go on about the perfect conditions compared to those scorchingly hot ones closer to the Sun.

Hell, penguins don’t even like the tropics on the same planet.
The number of construction vehicles doing something versus sitting around waiting for labor in that shot is impressive.
I wonder if they built that factory to be resistant to bombing and how much air defense they plan to put around it when they take Taiwan.

I also wonder how fast it can be converted to spit out drones.
Well, taken at face value, it is a bit of an oxymoron. To contribute is to be part of a group; by definition, a contributor can't be wholly independent, because they're adding to a corpus, not producing it by themselves.
If your publisher requires word documents (or _any_ word processor format), you need to find a better publisher. I can understand if they prefer word for the text-copy, which is then pulled into a typesetting app. But to use that as the pre-press format is a terrible workflow. This isn't a limitation of LibreOffice, it's a limitation of not being competent in pre-press typesetting and publishing software.
Personally I find plotly hard to beat. Unless you're doing really fancy stuff, it gives you everything you need. Seaborn also a great option IMO.
There is an equilibrium. When rents rise, workers at the margins demand higher wages or move away. This particularly applies to low-wage unskilled workers employed in service jobs like restaurants. There is friction in moving to a cheaper location and finding a new job so unfortunately some of those people will always be living in poverty.
> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy

The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.
> The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that wave energy has the potential to generate over 1,400 terawatt-hours per year—enough to power approximately 130 million homes

Let’s go! 20 years ago my alma mater had a wave energy lab. Im not clear whats taking this basic tech so long to roll out
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
Interesting how there is no option to disable it.
Even in small tech. I worked for an agency in the aughts and we would put up websites at roughly the pace of 1 a week. In my time there I'd guess I'd personally built a little over 100 websites and developed our internal framework for us to make doing so easier.

Every couple years since, I've gotten a bug in my butt and investigated how many sites still had pieces I'd clearly worked on. On this most recent occasion, I could no longer find anything. They've changed over to some open source CMS and I was unable to find anything I had built.

It's been 12 years in there since I left, but as far as I can see on the front side everything I'd written is gone. It's a strange feeling, like 5 years of my life just evaporated.
Speech is far more like alphabetic writing than it is like logographic writing. Spoken words are not single units, rather they're made up of phonemes.
> Just curious here, how much of this was written by AI?

None of it, I would guess. I'm starting to think HN needs a new guideline, against people calling anything they don't understand 'made by AI'.

> Subtract AI, most people will probably be fine.

Look at the course we're on. Radical improvements are necessary. AI is radical, whether you want to admit it or not. And it isn't getting 'subtracted' any time soon.

> Take away the plow and people will starve and die.

Not when it was first invented.

> AI is a luxury product and should be treated as such.

It is literally free (as in beer) to anyone with internet.

> I would go so far as to say that AI "copilots" and "assistants" should not be allowed to refer to themselves in the first person. Can a plow refer to itself in the first person? [etc for 2 paragraphs]

Some people don't know what a metaphor is. You might want to check the meaning of the word.
EVs on the battlefield are as of yet untested. That makes the BYD factory at best possible dual use. A bad target for Taiwan and its allies for a host of reasons.
I have to disagree with your premise.

The goal of many software engineers is to build software / systems they can be proud of. They love software and the machines it runs on.

Many people here have Arduino projects, 3D printers, home servers, and similar hobbies.

A few weeks ago, I was looking for compression algorithms for a particular use case and came across Brotli[0]. I was surprised to learn it was developed by Google. That realization hit me hard. Google used to be a hub for this kind of innovation.
Projects like Brotli aren't built to maximize personal profit; they're driven by passion and a genuine love for software engineering.

It's clear that the industry is shifting from being geeky and nerdy to being more business and management focused.

[0] https://github.com/google/brotli
> They were warned what would happen.

They also believed in "rain follows the plow."

> windbreaks on farms

Sure, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt .

But that was only one of many techniques developed. https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/11... mentions "if subject to wind erosion, it calls for stubble-mulch farming, wind strips and windbreaks." (That's a biography about Hugh Hammond Bennett, who led the Soil Erosion Service ... but not the Shelterbelt!)

In general (a few paragraphs earlier):

'Modern soil conservation is based on sound land use and the treatment of land with those adaptable, practical measures that keep it permanently productive while in use,” he explains. “It means terracing land that needs terracing; and it means contouring, strip cropping, and stubble-mulching the land as needed, along with supporting practices of crop rotations, cover crops, etc., wherever needed. It means gully control, stabilizing water outlets, building farm ponds, locating farm roads and fences on the contour, and planting steep, erodible lands to grass or trees.“'

Earlier at https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/96... you can read about the then-novel idea of contouring;

"Tillage is proceeding across the slopes, rather than up and down hill. It is being done on the contour on 15,362 acres. Farmers are finding that it not only serves as a brake on running water but also reduces the cost of mule-power and tractor-power."

Oh, interesting. In 'Predicting and Controlling Wind Erosion', Lyles (1985) writes "Despite the credit the Prairie States Forestry Project has received in ending the Dust Bowl, windbreak plantings under the Project did not begin on a large scale until 1936", and says "the cardinal principle of wind erosion control is maintaining vegetative materials on the soil. ... this practice of conserving or maintaining vegetation on the surface has evolved into various forms of tillage management, which currently go under the generic name of conservation tillage and have become a major technique for erosion control." (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3742385.pdf )

This suggests again that trees and windbreaks in general are not the primary solution to the regions affected by the Dust Bowl, but rather grasses, including crops.
Yes. I mean, assert spew should probably be maximally informative, which means it's probably going to vomit out a big stack trace. So for heavily used CLIs (especially if the users are other people), it can be nice to handle the bulk of the common errors specifically (by emitting a brief and to the point error message). Bonus points for suggesting a root cause and what to do differently to make it not happen. And this isn't just unnecessary polish -- it's easy for the cause of the error ("/homw/sfink/.config/myapp not found") to get buried in the noise and for the user to not notice when they've fixed one thing and moved on to the next.

But that's only worth it for some CLI tools. For many, I agree that spewing out an assert failure is plenty good enough.
Next one will be 20%
Some replace asserts with __builtin_unreachable - I guess that would be like filling life jacket with stones?
It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.
I blame Microsoft for that--in particular, the Ribbon (and before that, toolbars).
Prior to the invention of refrigerated train cars, fresh lettuce wasn't available at any price in certain parts of the country outside of harvest season.
He was 63 and wrote this a few years ago, “You’ve Had Your Turn –The Case for Euthanizing Everyone at Age 65”
https://marshallbrain.com/youve-had-your-turn-the-case-for-e...
> The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.

Most of those did not use coal in most of the empire in the year of peak consumption: 1913.

It was providing a lot of raw materials.
The US consumer does not buy small new cars.
Modern SV jobs are 100% a form of welfare for people who did STEM programs.
I've seen a bit of confusion regarding this. First, it's 10% of Denmark's total land area, which is roughly equivalent to 15% of farmland area. Second, the conversion of farmland area into nature and forests is mainly for improving water quality, as excess nitrogen from agriculture has essentially killed the rivers and coastal waters through oxygen depletion from algae.

Regarding global warming and CO2, the area conversion of peatlands will help, but the major change here is the introduction of a carbon tax for the entire agricultural industry. And to end confusion regarding other emissions than CO2, it's actually a CO2-equivalent (CO2e) tax, which includes a range of other gasses. E.g., 1kg of methane is 25kg CO2e.

If you'd like to read more, see the two PDF documents below, which are the main official documents. They're in Danish, but upload them to Claude or ChatGPT, and you'll have a much better source of information if you'd like to know more about the specifics and how the actual implementation is planned :)

[1] https://www.regeringen.dk/media/13261/aftale-om-et-groent-da...

[2] https://mgtp.dk/media/iinpdy3w/aftale_om_implementering_af_e...
The TV show Silicon Valley lampooned all these ideas a decade ago. The weird thing I’ve noticed is that when Bay Area tech people watch that show, they don’t seem to understand that they’re being made fun of. They think they’re being celebrated. That’s how thick the bubble is.

I've never met a person who didn't understand that this show is satire. Every single tech person I've talked to about Silicon Valley thinks it's funny because of how plausible and yet ridiculous it all is, and because of all the totally accurate details scattered throughout—from golden handcuffs / resting & vesting, down to minor things like which drinks were stocked in the show's office fridges. And I lived in the Bay Area during its entire run, so most of my network is current/former Bay Area tech people.
Long ago, Smalltalk's lack of explicit support for important aspects of programming was recognised:

"Programs consist of modules. Modules provide the units to divide the functional and organizational responsibility within a program."

"An Overview of Modular Smalltalk"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/62083.62095
brew support?