asciident

CS and DS people are getting more applied and gaining domain expertise, and can do a lot of economics work now. Academic economists, especially those who primarily do data science / big data, seem to basically be doing Masters-level data science projects for their Ph.D. The hard part in their Ph.D.s is collecting the data, which used to be a very manual job that relied on connections, but more of them are getting them or imputing them from public sources so it's not that impressive anymore.

Speaking as someone who has attended 3 economics Ph.D. defenses in the past two years.

Or cheating in other ways, like collusion rings [1], reviewers using LLMs to review, or authors putting text in their papers so reviewers using LLMs to review will give them a favorable review [2]

[1] https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/collusion-rings-threaten-the-in...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/14/scientist...

3% is actually not bad for what it gets you: fraud detection, not having to lug cash to the bank every day, reduction of theft and employee mistakes, better recordkeeping for taxes, a way to handle refunds, and cleanliness. Small merchants often use Venmo where I am, and they save 3% in exchange for that awkward dance of sending payments.

I'm generally wary of suggestions to overhaul a working long-lasting sociotechnical system. Everything that has been around for decades is patches on patches.

The the world wide web, ipv4, IRC, the US constitution, the telephone system, email, were all developed in older times, and as times change, they develop flaws which need (ugly) patches. That's a sign that they're successful, that no one company has come and replaced it and then killed it when things got inconvenient.

Think about the opposite situations: Google Groups replaced Usenet, and now it's completely dead; Google Reader took a lot of marketshare from RSS and almost killed it when they shut it down.

So let's not hastily destroy the only online communication system we have left, that's not controlled by a mega tech company.

It's an obligatory warning, otherwise people (even here on HN) will decry your methods as mainly due to privilege, and irreproducible for the average perso.

Agreed, Apple is far worse on being monopolistic and draconian, but people give them a pass because they have cool design. Everything they're doing with iMessage, the iOS and Mac App Stores, AirPods, Safari, etc. are all extend and embrace, without the trepidation that Microsoft has had.

Because each person still uses about 10 full wardrobes in their lifetime, 100,000 prepared meals, a few dozen smartphones and other electronics, a mountain of disposibles like diapers and napkins and takeout containers and masks. People need a lot of resources for even a modest standard of living.

Even more awkward is when you're having a conversation with someone who is trying even harder to get you to talk about yourself, while you're trying to do some of the same. Then it's a competition to see who can say the least before asking "and what about you?"

What does it say about people using it for research?

I don't see how that's a better example, and you missed the point. Your example is about someone doing something unethical as part of their job. My example was about someone doing something unrelated to their job duties. That's the entire point I'm making, that things done outside of job duties do not reflect the competency of the job.

If you read the grandparent post, it's about making a judgment about whether one is effective at their job.

That seems like a dangerous line of thought. Imagine a software engineer (maybe one who writes code for airplanes or medical equipment) writes some sloppy code late one night and puts it on their open source github, and the commit log is "this code rocks."

You could make the same argument that As a software engineer, you have to be able to identify and write high quality software to be effective at your job. So should your employer fire you for writing this code outside of your regular job duties?

What about if a friend shows you their code, and you say "that looks good" but it turns out that this code is vulnerable to a key security issue? Should you get fired from your security job?

I think we'd agree not, and more broadly, that making a statement or doing a task related to your job but outside of your job's responsibilities should not be sufficient to fire you from your job. Especially when it's clear you are not representing your employer, by using pseudonym.

I would be thrilled if kitchen-only joints replaced sit-down restaurants. I have about 20 sit-downs within walking distance, only about 5 are easy for takeout, none which serve higher-end food. If there were a few higher-end food options ($20 lunch instead of $10 lunch, $30 dinner instead of $15 dinners), especially without having to deal with tipping, I would carry out and eat at home a lot more. I have my own silverware, wine bottles, and napkins.

I think to be more precise, the headline should read:

"Minimum wage workers can not afford renting a two-bedroom home at fair market rent using 30% of their income"

That feels drastically different than the current headline.

Why do you think your analogy is better than the parent post? The parent post makes more sense to me. People to go stores, and the stores charge a markup. In your analogy, the mode of transportation charges the markup, which in the app store case would be the ISP charging a markup.

It's an interesting idea. Wouldn't the cost of raising funds, replacing all the signs, etc. be also damaging? What about having a clear "no speeding at all on speeds over 50mph" announcement, and start a campaign to enforce speeding even at 0.1mph over? That would quickly normalize driving at 10-15 miles under.

There's been evidence of this for a while.

1) lots of regular working people getting suspicious notices about unemployment being filed in their name

2) high numbers of these reported cases. Even though many of those notices end up unopened (old address or dead person), many of whom get the notices don't report it (they think it's a mistake or scam), and of those who report it there's no central place to report. So the actual numbers are multiple times higher

3) reports of "viral" spreading of unemployment scams, bank employees quitting because they can't do anything about fraudsters going to banks and cashing $10,000 checks over and over, and considering how easy it is for people in prison and random small-time scammers on group chats to get this money, anyone smarter is probably way more successful.

And note that that SBA money is a whole other pot of money that's probably being scammed even harder. Similarly, they're only catching the obvious cases of fraud like people getting 10K loans for farms in the middle of Manhattan.

I've tried to bring this up a few times before but it feels hopeless (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25515646, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25258782). At the end of the day, I think people don't want to hear about problems that they can't do anything about, so they try to kill the cognitive dissonance by thinking that maybe the problem isn't as big, that it's still better a good use of the money because criminals are disadvantaged groups, etc.

The root of the issue is that politicians are applauded for nice-sounding new initiatives, but as you can imagine, the execution is the hard part. Every time there is a new initiative, it's like trying to create a whole new process, which is prone to error and cheating. Things that work fairly well in general (like income tax collection, our judicial system) have been refined over many years, and tested across all sorts of edge cases.

I've seen this comparison in a few articles. It makes no sense at all. It's like if I said Microsoft's market cap ($1.942T) is larger than the GDP of Russian ($1.7T), or Apple's Market Cap ($2.125T) is double the combined endowments of every single US university altogether (about $1T). Complete nonsense comparisons.

Speaking of charging, does anyone know if usb-c charging is properly implemented? I've bought a number of new devices with usb-c and am disappointed they require the old usb-a to usb-c cable to charge. Has anyone tested with a Macbook charger, or a "smart" usb-c to usb-c cable?

It was more like them selling $300 of movie tickets (I'd watch one a day) for $10. Everyone only used them for the arbitrage.

I wish there was a way to turn off "external content", and only view content created by your friends. If my friend has an opinion about something (even if political, or a social issue), and they post it, I'm interested in reading. But I don't care if they are just posting a link to content that some stranger wrote, or a meme that someone else is spreading. It seems like social media has intentionally blurred the lines between "posting your content" vs "spreading someone else's content".

I don't know. Do you remember the Foxconn due to the low pay and abuse they were getting to make Apple products? Or how Apple is trying to restrict our software freedoms with walled gardens and lawsuits? Everything they do is about controlling the narrative, the market, the ecosystem. If they had beat Microsoft in the 1990s, we'd be in a very different dystopia right now. Seems worse than a company that makes optional ad-supported social networking products.

It looks like Umami does some of that. But I found that Google Analytics does none of it, and in fact year-over-year seems to cut back on the amount of useful information. The main advantage now is they show referring search terms, which servers logs would show, but they broke that on purpose with their search result self-referring links.

It's at least double that now. Rental cars may be triple.

Honestly the issue is that schools don't want calculators (computers) that are too powerful because there could be an app that can just do the homework for students, or let them communicate during exams, or search on the internet. So schools intentionally prefer crippled devices, hence the relatively high price for an underpowered device.

There's not really any good solution to this either without completely overhauling the system (i.e. making things worse for a few years until things stabalize and the kinks are worked out in primary school math education 2.0), so we're at a local maximum.

I don't get your point about batteries though. Calculators are heavily used by the students, so are the perfect place to have a rechargeable. It looks like it's even replaceable too. Throw in usb-c charging, and you've got something that can be charged pretty much anywhere that a phone can.

Yeah I think you're unusual.

I and my family each have price points in my head, once a restaurant charges more than that on the total line, we look for other options. $5 for good enough lunch, $10 for a great lunch, $20 for gourmet lunch, $20 for a great dinner, $40 for gourmet dinner.

Again, there's nothing that says the patches with vulnerabilities made it to stable.

Did you read the ZDnet article and look at the links that in that article in the relevant paragraph? I'm not "disagreeing", I'm saying that they are misleading the reader (and it looks like many were fooled).

The two sentences they put together are not related, but put next to each other, they make it seem like they're related. We have to be careful when reading these articles. So the researchers have made commits to stable, and the researchers have introduced vulnerabilities, but they are not referring to the same patches. So no vulnerabilities have been committed to stable.

Can you cite a source of Greg saying this? I read this article which is the closest I could find that reports this, https://www.zdnet.com/article/greg-kroah-hartman-bans-univer... which says,

"""Romanovsky reported that he had looked at four accepted patches from Pakki "and 3 of them added various severity security 'holes.'" Sudip Mukherjee, Linux kernel driver and Debian developer, followed up and said "a lot of these have already reached the stable trees." These patches are now being removed."""

However, if you click the links, you'll see that "have already reached stable trees" is about non-buggy patches, and "3 of them added various [holes]" are not one of those. So the articles seem to be intentionally deceiving the reader to think those are connected, when they're separate events. I actually feel like the media has been doing this (putting together non-related facts together in a way that readers reasonably infer a connection between the two).

Both of those reverts suggest those were just non-malicious contributions that the maintainers reverted just in case (and reapplied after review). If that's the proof, then I think you are mistaken. Maybe put another way, if someone says "noptd has bad intentions, so I'm reverting all of noptd's contributions that were committed to stable" the reverts themselves are not proof that malicious commits made it to stable, and that noptd has bad intentions.

I think you are misunderstanding what happened. They emailed the patches to the maintainers, and when the maintainers responded "this looks good", then told them there was a bug in the patch. They never committed a bad patch to the source tree. The problem is they were deceptive in their initial email, not that they actually introduced kernel vulnerabilities. No bad code was ever committed, and they had a written mandate to verify that.

Yes, your comment is the only one across the two threads which understands the nuance of the definition of human subjects research. This work is not "about" human subjects, and even the word "about" is interpreted a certain way in IRB review. If they interpret the research to be about software artifacts, and not human subjects, then the work is not under IRB purview (it can still be determined to be exempt, but that determination is from the IRB and not the PI).

However, given that, my interpretation of the federal common rule is that this work would indeed fit the definition of human subjects research, as it comprises an intervention, and it is about generalizable human procedures, not the software artifact.