_petronius

Horizons is also available as a web interface (as another commenter mentioned), and if the orbital elements output (which is what you have there and is basically this data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements) is a bit opaque, you can also request it in Cartesian coordinates ("Vector table" under "Ephemeris type" in the web ui). Apparently it also has an email interface, which is neat.

The web UI is here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/

I once did a hobby project doing 2-body orbital simulations, and was able to use this data to set up a model of the solar system, and satellites orbiting the Earth. It's quite a fun dataset!

> But it's disingenuous to mix those quality of life arguments with an argument about money.

Genuinely don't understand why you would see these as disconnected from each other.

> Tech workers in the US tech hubs live a financially/materially more comfortable life than those in Europe.

Obviously as you can see from my comment above, I disagree with this view.

Honestly depends on the company -- I have no problem despite the fact that both of my degrees are in the arts, but I also work for a very international company (English is the language we work in, it has a lot of folks in it from nontraditional backgrounds).

If you apply to work for a more traditional or more "German" company, you may find that things like the subject your uni degree is in, or formal recommendations from previous employers (Zeugnisse) suddenly matter a lot more.

As someone who grew up in the US, and works as a software engineer in Europe, I can't understand why anyone would ever choose to work as a developer in America. :)

I have a very high quality of life here, strong protections as a permanent employee (increasingly less common in other industries in Germany, but not in tech!), a salary that is excellent compared to many of my peers, and comes with a purchasing power that I imagine meets or exceeds someone in my same position in New York or the Bay Area.

I won't pretend there aren't downsides (for example, stock as compensation is rare here, and not incentivised by the legal situation), but for me the upsides win over raw actuarial comparisons. I'd much rather have my compensation in Berlin than trade it for 2x or even 4x that in the US.

(Edit to add: once you bring rent, medical insurance and associated out-of-pocket costs, and paid time off into the picture, compensation in the US starts to look like a pretty raw deal IMO.)

Ah, my friend, but you can generalize: both from the cultural (Europe in general has stronger welfare states than most US federal and state systems provide), and because members of the EU are bound to EU-wide rules on worker rights. Pluuus, since member states of the EU have freedom of movement within the bloc, companies in the EU compete on these and other factors (like salary), raising the overall standard. (Sometimes problematically, due to brain drain of weaker economies, etc.)

So while your comment is half correct, I think you should give the parent commenter the benefit of the doubt before you try and "well actually" them.

People never really left Rome: describing it as "post-apocalyptic" is IMO a bit misleading (a real post-apocalyptic cultural transition looks a lot more like what happened to the north American native cultures in the aftermath of European contact than what happened on the Italian peninsula during the collapse of the western empire).

That said, as things like coastlines and rivers changed, settlement patterns evolved, and the post-Imperial city of Rome changed size and political importance, parts of the city that had been inhabited in ancient times did empty out and came to be dominated by abandoned ruins, some of which were quarried for their marble, others left to be buried by sediment and detritus.

I think a more apt comparison here is something like what happened to Detroit, but more so and over a longer period. A good overview using the example of the Forum can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum#Medieval

> but chose to keep the citizenship into adulthood, presumably acquiring a passport or other citizenship documents

That is ... not how citizenship works. Once you are a citizen, it can be very difficult to get rid of that status (souce: born in the US, will end up paying an arm and a leg to get rid of mine). Failing to get a passport, file returns with the IRS, etc. can lead to you getting ignored, but it can also lead you to getting into serious hot water in the future.

Example: most passports list the place of birth of the holder. If you are an American citizen, you must enter the US on a US passport. Because of American citizenship law, someone trying to enter the US on a Dutch passport with a place of birth listed as being in the US is going to have to do some explaining, and possibly provide documentation of renouncing their US citizenship. "I never applied for my American passport" is probably not going to cut it. It's a huge pain!

> Also as far as owing onerous back taxes go, aren't taxes you paid in your country of residence deductible ? For most EU countries wouldn't that result in net zero US taxes ?

It depends! But you still have to file, and there are still penalties for filing late, and even if you do, IRS reporting requirements to other banks mean that many European financial institutions won't touch you with a 10-foot pole no matter if you are also a European citizen.

Ones that will (like my bank), still won't offer you much beyond current account services and a basic savings account. If you want to do any kind of real saving for the future or basic investing (ETFs, for example), you are going to have trouble. The supposed disruptors in the market for this kind of thing (Trade Republic etc.) certainly don't have the resources or the interest in dealing with you either.

Unnecessarily detailed nitpick: Data uses contractions throughout the dialogue of TNG -- there is just one episode ("Datalore" it might have been?) where they decide to make it a plot point that he doesn't use them as a way of having the rest of the bridge crew figure out that he's been replaced by his evil twin who can use contractions.

I'm pretty sure the plot point (and the ban on Data using contractions) doesn't even get a mention again in the rest of the series.

> but this conversation is taking place on hacker news, where I daresay the consensus is opposed to palantir and other companies working with law enforcement

I don't share your confidence of that assessment, but it would warm my heart to think so.

> people should be allowed to consider whether there is any internal logic to the opposing position without actually committing to it.

I'm gonna stand by this one, I think, and disagree with you, although I think I see where you're coming from.

What I see a lot more than testing for internal logic of a position is people advancing their sole, or only substantial discussion point, with the "devil's advocate, but" position. If a consistency test is what you're after, you can attempt to perform an explication of someone else's position without advocating that position yourself, and without accidentally advocating it by presenting it unchallenged.

If I can omit the "devil's advocate" disclaimer and it still reads as a position earnestly advanced by the writer, then they are not playing at anything, they are making a real argument.

Ah you see, the mistake you make is thinking I am interested in defending my position to the unreasonable. You can take any position you like, I don't have to entertain that position, or even get dragged into a discussion about it.

It's an old tactic the one you're taking, which is to carry off your arguing partner into the weeds of oratorical flourishes and pseudorationalist blow-by-blow point-making. One can make any point they like "tout court", that doesn't mean I am required (or indeed that any useful purpose is served) to spend any mental energy formulating a substantive reply.

> It deems agnosticism untenable

Agnosticism is untenable in some scenarios, sure.

E.g., when you have an oppressive status quo, and the options are to resist it and argue for change, or accept the ways things are, and thereby support them, then there is no agnostic position. This isn't a game: sometimes you simply don't get to sit it out.

> and inherently precludes the possibility of nihilism

I am quite happy to preclude nihilism entirely.

> It would be extraordinary - and flatly in tension with common sense - to believe/claim that agnosticism and/or nihilism were not live options for some domain.

I could give a lot of answers to this, but I think the simplest one is that what you regard as "common sense" is not necessarily the same as what I do, so I don't find that a very convincing counterargument.

How much power the government has is certainly one line of argument. I'm more interested in how we hold the government accountable for the exercise of the power it has.

In general, I don't think limiting the power or size of the government is the solution, although I'm all in favour of shrinking certain parts of it in very specific ways: You can make your prison management arm smaller by privatising jails and prisons, but you haven't really fixed anything if you do that; on the other hand, I would be delighted to see defence and policing budgets the world over diverted into infrastructure, schools, and housing, and there are many very good examples of how those can be managed well by both central or local government.

If the government is unaccountable, then anyway it's useless to talk about its size, it can simply accrue more power. I think America is especially (although not uniquely) feeling the pain of lack of accountability at the moment, not least because the electorate as a whole is increasingly misrepresented by the outcome of elections, there is no culture of building political consensus, and as a result every vote becomes a zero-sum contest.

It does not have to be like this.

> I think people responsible here are still the ones that decided to buy it. They are responsible the market exists. Also not a mystery since those people are mostly evaluated by how many people they put behind bars.

That's letting the people selling (and producing) the snake-oil off the hook, which I'm not willing to do that easily.

If you know what you're making is at best making lemonade out of statistical noise, or at worst actively harming people and society, and it's being marketed as an intelligent system that gets results, well then you bear a big chunk of that moral responsibility.

I don't think the devil needs any more advocates, tbh, and I kind of wish people would stop refusing to take responsibility for the arguments they put forth by hedging in that way.

> Powerful, data comprehension

Correlation, maybe -- not the same as comprehension.

> A possible solution to this is creating data points for everyone, but that has its own controversies

Or you know, creating fewer data points -- maybe even none -- in general. Why is this something that needs to be software-driven? Why increase automation? What is the evidence that policing and criminal investigation is more effective (and by what standards!) when using Palantir's tech?

I question the assumption that increased automation and digitization of every process is necessarily an improvement, or useful, and I feel like this line of argument takes that as an assumption.

> Their view is that they don't see or pick any sides, but the morality of that is up for everyone to decide, I believe if you don't pick a side, one is often picked for you.

"Not seeing sides", or not picking them, is taking a position though. Declaring neutrality doesn't remove the concrete effect of your actions, or change the fact of your material support for a given model of policing or government. As Can Duruk argues convincingly in his latest newsletter[1] one of the best examples of that is low voter turnout in US elections: that benefits one side pretty clearly, so to declare you won't take sides and won't vote is a practical and real show of support for the status quo (to take just one example).

[1]: https://themargins.substack.com/p/all-politics-is-bad-says-c...

I think instead of trying to break names apart from one input, the best strategy is to consider the various uses you need and provide that many inputs (in a previous job writing software for art galleries, this was our solution).

So for example, you might have a "display name" field, which is the formal name-of-record that you need for any official or semi-official context (title card of an artwork, or invoice info, going on the art example).

For indexing/sorting, you can have that as a separate "index" or "sort value" field (especially where sorting is something you want to control on a per-entry basis, like the library example in one of the articles sorting names using the indexing rule of the author's place of origin, or you want to sort a list of names that contain a mix of character sets).

For addressing people directly, e.g. via email or letter, you can provide them with an extra "how should we address you" field -- the best part about this is it means you don't have to guess how they want to be addressed, and is I think the most polite option, especially when you're dealing with a variety of cultural contexts in the same system.

As Thomas Mann said, everything is politics. I would add that has always been the case.

You can get frustrated about that fact, or you can use it as an opportunity for learning about how and why that is so, and gain a deeper understanding of the tightly linked systems of power relationships all around you.

Or maybe (2n)2 as difficult?

The force vector from a polar ice sheet doesn't get cancelled out by the rest of the earth though (because they aren't pointing in opposite directions). Plus, you have to account for the force of the ice sheet, plus the water it attracts, plus the water that those combined attract, etc.

I'm no good with calculus so can't run that back-of-the-envelope for you, but it doesn't seem all that surprising to me.

> society may voluntarily decide you're an asshole and show you the door

For all people who support the "marketplace of ideas" argument (which I don't, not least because there is fairly compelling research that documents why a marketplace is a bad metaphor for how ideas spread and damaging ideology takes hold) – wouldn't this be evidence that your idea is failing in said marketplace? Your comment seems to confuse a laissez-faire approach with supporting and subsidising anyone who comes along no matter how problematic their speech is.

Being anti-censorship is not the same being pro-megaphone: freedom of speech doesn't require giving everyone the widest possible audience with no restrictions.

(obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/1357/)

Sure, but hopefully the choice isn't a binary one between "lack of alignment" versus "management/leadership dictates", since that would be evidence of a rather toxic team culture.

> So, let's cave in to peer pressure or management dictates and continue down the wrong path (technically/socially)?

Seems like a very unfair restatement of what the author said. I would read that as "it's more important that everyone has a common understanding of what you are building than it is to spend time worrying about whether you have the exactly perfect goal."

Or to phrase it another way: if the understanding of the product isn't clear across the whole team, it doesn't matter if any one individual has a bunch of brilliant ideas for/about the product, because you aren't all working towards the same goal.

> The Chinese bureaucracy has millennia of experience controlling large groups of people in the same way that the Chatholic Church has millennia of experience preaching.

This at least a complete misunderstanding of the history of the Catholic church, which is both terrible at "preaching" and has never given it prime importance either theologically or practically, but also of Chinese civilizational history. Confucianism, the dominant philosophical and religious theory behind the organization of a huge period of the ancient Chinese state, recognized the right to revolution!

It also seems irrelevant to the discussion about why it's wrong to leap straight into iterating potential ways to deanonymize protesters instead of suggesting mitigation strategies.

That's a boneheaded excuse: if the comment was about improving privacy it would be highlighting mitigation strategies, not focussing on exploiting potential vulnerabilities.

This is some serious “too interested in seeing if you could, and not stopping to wonder if you should” content. What possible positives are there in exploring how to de-anonymize people whose life and freedom requires anonymity, and who are fighting the good fight?

Ah, cool. It wouldn't surprise me if English borrowed that from French, actually.

Unusual in modern orthography, and I have only seen it in the New Yorker house style (the diaeresis indicates that the second vowel should be pronounced separately, which is quite different to how that mark is used in a number of other languages that use the Latin alphabet, like German and Turkish). This is subjective, but it reads as a little pretentious to me as a native speaker, compared with other ways of marking it.

More usual is 'co-ordinating' or just 'coordinating' without marking the syllable break between the prefix and the root.

About human sacrifice, they were extremely squeamish! Bernal Díaz describes with no small amount of horror the Spaniards reaction to the human sacrifice and the ritual use of blood by the priests.

At least for the first conquistadores, this is wildly incorrect. It is true that they saw the Mesoamerican culture as wrong (particularly the human sacrifice bit), and put the conquest of territory for Spain as of high importance, but their understanding of the world was more complex than what you describe. I really recommend reading Bernal Díaz del Castillo‘a firsthand account of the conquest of “New Spain” to get an idea of how these people viewed the world!

You may be assuming you know my viewpoint without me having presented it in full, but anyway I wasn't looking to argue in bad faith, I guess I just see a strong difference between "successful company that has made money and cool products" and "added incalculable value to the world." That's a very strong statement!

The parent comment was looking to weigh the problems of the ad-supported economy and the ills brought about by that described in the article against the value Google has brought to the world, and I just don't see how the two stack up, so I wanted to understand their weighting of the latter.

Everyone seems keen to write haigiographies of companies that in all honesty I mostly find ... okay I guess? Could do better but they make cool stuff? I don't "hate" Google, but I do think that a company the size of Google doesn't need such zealous defenders, it needs a critical society that pushes it to do better with the crazy resources it has, and one of those things is to examine the ways in which it's basic revenue model is harmful.

> Google has provided incalculable value to the world

I'm not convinced by this statement, and I'd be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning behind it. Is it specific products? Specific technologies? Although Google has built some interesting stuff, I can't think of anything off the top of my head that they've done that was either a) something that couldn't have been invented without them, or b) only unique due to their ability to scale it out, rather than a true innovation.