MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krisoft | 2025-04-06 01:32:43+00:00
Genuine question: what is so great about the Golden Record?

I understand the Svalbard seed bank. That can come very handy in a bad situation. May we never need it. I have visited the LHC and it is seriously impressive. Works in the Prado are amazing.

But the Golden Record feel just like someone made a mixtape and then chucked it far away. The music on it of course is great. But will anyone ever find it? And even if anyone ever finds it, will they have the anatomy to listen to it? If we received a similar record could we do anything with it?

For example the recorded greatings. A few sentences in many languages. There is something there. Presumably an interested alien could use it kind of like a Rosetta Stone to learn the structure of our languages. But for that to realistically work they would need a lot more recording in each language and the speakers should be saying the same thing!

Similarly the “brain recording”. An hour long recording, “compressed” somehow and then bandwidth gated so it can be etched into a disk. How is that supposed to contain any usefull information? It is like you want to transmit the content of a book, so you take a blurry underexposed image of the book’s spine as it is reflected in a foggy mirror. Even if the aliens are brilliant there is not much they can do with that “brain recording”.

The whole thing is so vibes based, but on the rational level it doesn’t add up to much.
by lemming | 2025-04-06 01:34:19+00:00
An online application of this principle is Focusmate, where you schedule calls with essentially random strangers and just work together. There's very little chit chat and it's not some weird front for a hookup scheme. I've been amazed at how well it works for me. I can't really explain why, after all the other person can't see my screen so I could just be doom scrolling YouTube the whole time, but for some reason I don't. I don't use it all the time, but when I need to get something unappealing done I still use it. I've also used it for exercise, and I've had partners use it for all sorts of weird things that they had been procrastinating. I highly recommend it, I thought it would be far weirder than it turned out to be, and it's really useful.
by swatson741 | 2025-04-06 01:34:36+00:00
Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran their OS services on top of that.

Especially when I think about how committed they are to Darwin it really paints a poor image in my mind. The loss that open source suffers from that, and the time and money Apple has to dedicate to this with a disproportionate return.
by greenavocado | 2025-04-06 01:35:49+00:00
I never understood this argument. Without RAII you can easily get screwed by resource leaks without goto when returning early. In this regard, using goto is expedient. How do C programmers avoid this problem without goto?

bool function_with_cleanup(void) { int *buffer1 = NULL; int *buffer2 = NULL; FILE *file = NULL; bool success = false; // Allocate first resource buffer1 = malloc(sizeof(int) * 100); if (!buffer1) { goto cleanup; // Error, jump to cleanup } // Allocate second resource buffer2 = malloc(sizeof(int) * 200); if (!buffer2) { goto cleanup; // Error, jump to cleanup } // Open a file file = fopen("data.txt", "r"); if (!file) { goto cleanup; // Error, jump to cleanup } // Do work with all resources... success = true; // Only set to true if everything succeeded cleanup: // Free resources in reverse order of acquisition if (file) fclose(file); free(buffer2); // free() is safe on NULL pointers free(buffer1); return success; }
by kccqzy | 2025-04-06 01:37:24+00:00
I've also wanted to understand Windows NT at this depth for a while. Skip the Win32 stuff, and discuss what's underneath it. As I understand Win32 is just one personality; there was also Windows Services for UNIX in the Windows XP days and Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications in Windows Vista. The underlying NT kernel is flexible enough to allow POSIX compliance. That would be an interesting read.
by Ray20 | 2025-04-06 01:37:54+00:00
>If someone mentions it to someone else, that alone should be grounds to shutter your company.

I don't agree. It should depend on whether such a mention leads to promotion of the product. We are not barbarians to limit freedom of speech.

After any mention of a product by its user, a court should be held to decide whether this mention was advertising. Because even though the user received a benefit from purchasing the product from the company (otherwise he would not have bought it and would not have become a user), advertising also implies promotion, so the court must first determine whether this mention was made in such a way that it could potentially induce the purchase of the product by other people, and only then close the company.

And it doesn't even have to be a mention. Advertising is really mean, like a couple of days ago my girlfriend ate a pudding right in front of me. And it was the last pudding, and she ate it so well that I wanted one too. And you'll never guess what I bought at the store today! Yes, that same pudding. Unfortunately, we are vulnerable to advertising even when we are fully aware of its destructive nature.
by BrianHenryIE | 2025-04-06 01:38:06+00:00
Yep, my sister makes fun of me that her mere presence makes me more productive. (when I shared an apartment with her in my early thirties) she'd sit in my room just chatting to me and I would tidy and clean without her doing anything, whereas I'd been meaning to do that for months.

I suggested the idea of a responsiblabuddy website today to my wife – if we're both in the same town I'd commit to coming to your house on Saturday and you'd commit to coming to mine on Sunday and I'd finally tidy my shed / weld those batteries / list those items on fb marketplace etc. Then I realised I'd need a responsabilabuddy to get me to start and finish the website!

There was a guy running a co-working space in Dublin (Ireland) who would open it up on the occasional Sunday for "Sideproject Sundays" which I found great for focus.

Edit: there are no search results for "responsiblabuddy", I know I didn't come up with that term
by toofy | 2025-04-06 01:38:32+00:00
honolulu, well all of hawaii actually.

something like 80+ percent of texas cities ban them or are phasing them out with heavy new restrictions.

for example, in dallas, if you want a new billboard, you have to tear down 3. and new ones have placement and size restrictions.

houston is no longer allowing any new off premises signage including billboards. the only way to erect a new billboard is if it passes permitting and the company tears down one of their old ones.

and like i said, like 80% of texas towns across the state have heavy restrictions on new or outright ban them.

santa fe effectively has a ban on all off premises advertising which obviously includes billboards.

billboard are banned on highways in the entire country of Norway, including urban/suburban highways.

the entire state of vermont.

the entire state of maine, including cities.

all of washington dc, including georgetown.
by grues-dinner | 2025-04-06 01:38:55+00:00
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising.

While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed".

And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of whales, but instead full of a much larger number of a broader mix of smaller fish, what would advertising look like then?

For example, large categories of industry would have to change hugely into cooperative non-owning groups of smaller companies. Would they still have the same advertising dominance, or would the churn within the groups break things up?
by bitwize | 2025-04-06 01:39:03+00:00
Pair programming flummoxes me because I find it significantly harder to concentrate when someone's watching. It's like having that execrable old Visual Basic feature where it flags up syntax errors if you cursor off a line, forcing you to correct the errors before moving to a different line. Except now implemented with a smelly human flagging up the errors!

I get it. XP, and Agile in general, is all about relying less on individual programmers' focus on the task and more on external checks (a shoulder surfer and automated tests). The revolution of software development in the 21st century is building more effective teams rather than relying on super-productive individuals (the fabled 10x engineers). But I don't have to like working that way, and I don't.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-04-06 01:40:45+00:00
Lftr is supposed to be in the high nineties allegedly of fuel consumption %.

And the gas/liquid nature means separation and processing is a lot more viable

Contrast that with solid fuel rods using like 20% of its fuel, and that only of the fissile uranium isotopes. The the waste is locked in a solid form of the spent fuel rods

I'll take lftr which (theoretically) is so much cleaner.

Fusion isnt without waste, the high speed neutrons irradiate/transmute the reactor
by skissane | 2025-04-06 01:41:13+00:00
> Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux

XNU is only partially open sourced – the core is open sourced, but significant chunks are missing, e.g. APFS filesystem.

Forking Linux might have legally compelled them to make all kernel modules open source–which while that would likely be a positive for humanity, isn't what Apple wants to do
by paulryanrogers | 2025-04-06 01:42:40+00:00
IME end-to-end tests in a browser really help with services that have a lot of parts to integrate, but damn they are hard to make reliable.

One challenge is animation and timing races, supposedly Playwright can address many of those. Another is some infrastructure like GitHub Actions can be randomly resource starved, such as causing the Chrome Driver to become unresponsive. Automated retrying is one workaround, at the cost of possibly papering over rare race and timing issues.

Of course unit tests are nice and fast and narrow. But refactors could render a large portion obsolete, and they won't prove things work together as a whole.
by duped | 2025-04-06 01:43:34+00:00
Where I live this is hyper local. Some municipalities are extremely strict on ads (to the point of fining _churches_ over signage on their property) and some are overrun with billboards and ads on every corner and bench.

I don't think this is as much as a "societies choose" as "some societies have no choice." The municipality I'm in now struggles with property tax revenues and has to stoop to what I'd call predatory revenue streams (gambling, ads, etc) to make up the difference. And it creates a feedback loop.
by iamleppert | 2025-04-06 01:45:26+00:00
When negotiating with a startup, especially a founder, always ask for two offers: one with a higher equity offer and another with a higher cash offer.

This allows the other party to still feel in control of the negotiation process but tells you two important pieces of information: the first is what the “top” number is for both equity and cash. The second is how much they really are valuing the equity portion.

Depending on the response, you can argue for both higher cash or equity, or both. I often ask what is preventing from giving both higher cash and higher equity? Often times I’ve gotten both.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-04-06 01:45:47+00:00
Why would someone not then just tell every recruiter/company they are interviewing with that they already have offers are are in the pipeline at other companies even if they don't.

We've heard nowadays how hard it is to even get to the interview for many companies so theres probably plenty of candidates who do not have many other offers prepared or even close to prepared.

Another issue is timing. Theres been times when I've started the interview process with two companies but one is on a much shorter timeline than the other so now I have an offer for one whereas I am still waiting on an interview that isn't for even a couple weeks for another, if not longer.

Not gonna lie, last time I went through the interview process I just told them I have other offers already even when I didn't. It worked in my favor I believe but feels like to get the best outcome you just have to be okay with basically lying out your ass - and that goes both ways, as the employer and the employee since it seems like even the companies feel fine with dragging their asses on concrete unless you have other stuff going on.
by thayne | 2025-04-06 01:45:52+00:00
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.

So that would exclude:

- listing your house, or car in the classifieds

- buying a sign for your business (ad discussed in other posts)

- buying a garage sale sign

- buying a for sale sign, or flyers for your house for sale

- paying a realtor to sell your house

- paying a reporter or professional reviewer to write a review. Even if they are paid by a newspaper/magazine/consumer report site, money exchanged hands for something that promotes a product.

- distributing a catalog

- paying a cloud provider or VPS provider or website hosting service to host a website that promotes your product

Also, what exactly constitutes a "product"? Does a service count? If not, that is a pretty big loophole. What about a job position? Or someone looking for employment?

And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists. Word of mouth isn't very effective if you don't have any customers to begin with. I would expect removing all advertising to have a chilling effect on innovation and new businesses.

To be clear, I think the current advertising environment is terrible, and unhealthy, and needs to be fixed. But I think that removing all advertisement would have some negative ramifications, especially if the definition of an ad is too simplistic.
by happytoexplain | 2025-04-06 01:46:32+00:00
I feel like there's a lot of room in "imminent" - I wonder what precedent has to say.

E.g. probably if two guys are arguing in physical proximity and you're shouting for guy A to shoot guy B, that counts.

But maybe if you tweet, "hey everybody, go kill that guy", it's not imminent/directed enough?

I only say this because I feel like I'm pretty often surprised by how high the standards are for applying some laws, despite the title/brief description of the law (of course as a rule, high standards are good here, but sometimes they can feel so high that the law has no teeth).
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-06 01:46:39+00:00
I mean, roe v wade clearly shows it is not objective at all. There's always edge cases in life. Abortion aside, also consider the context of self defense vs. Meditated murder with a plan to hide the body.

>Again I’m amazed that people want to give the government more power unnecessarily s

Well we've done a horrible job self-regulating. This abuse of power also teaches us that ideas without enforcement is just daydreaming. If that all you wanted to do in this article, go ahead.
by renewiltord | 2025-04-06 01:47:02+00:00
For startups, I'm pretty upfront about the fact that I don't negotiate but if they go under my activation price I will simply decline. It's a one and done deal and we can revisit months later. The range of cost I'll accept is quite large (though this part I don't communicate). I don't mind working for $200k annualized on things I really enjoy and I don't mind working on things I enjoy less for $800k annualized and so on. I have an internal sliding scale and I'm quite clear that I don't really need to work on any specific thing. Then I just take the gig if it meets my internal criteria.

In my experience, it isn't about making a $20k more now or whatever. It's about making a million more because you're invested in something worthwhile etc. etc.
by disambiguation | 2025-04-06 01:47:37+00:00
What's really interesting about this is that it's not just about advertising, but rather several deeper issues that all intersect with it.

* the pervasive tracking of data and serving targeted ads without consent.

* the addictive algorithms engineered to keep users engaged in the feedback loop.

* the machinery being used beyond commercial purposes - influencing opinions, manufacturing consent, and sometimes being hijacked by bad actors.

Not to mention the philosophical and psychological implications. What does democracy mean when elections come down to who spent the most on Ads? What's the merit of capitalism if consumers can be brain washed?

Like most here, I have a vendetta against Ad-tech and go to great lengths to keep ads out of my life (i highly recommend opnSense - Blocking ads across the whole home network is pure bliss).

But should they be illegal?

Questions of what constitutes an ad, how to enforce such a rule, and my personal opinion aside: I don't think its inherently wrong for a company to promote their products. I do, however, believe that all of the above points - data tracking, addictive algorithms, non-commercial ads - are bad and should be illegal. Outlawing all of those practices would do a great deal to restoring balance to advertising and the web.
by rossdavidh | 2025-04-06 01:48:36+00:00
Perhaps she will get into this in part 2, but a key part of the problem here is that of bad incentives, wherein a software company is punished (by the stock market or if they're not public yet, by investors who want it to go public. Most software products cannot grow beyond a certain size (whether measured as users or features or revenue), which is not a problem unless you think you have to be making a billion-user infinite growth machine. But if the people paying the salaries would rather make 1,000 bets on the Next Big Thing, and if 999 of them fail but one succeeds that is far better than 100 who fail and 900 which become medium-sized, profitable companies, then overproduction is what you get.

If everyone rationally responding to their incentives, produces an irrational behavior in aggregate, you have a systemic problem. We have a systemic problem.
by msla | 2025-04-06 01:48:41+00:00
The dyslexia fonts don't work:

> Researchers put the font to the test, comparing it with two other popular fonts designed for legibility—Arial and Times New Roman—and discovered that the purportedly dyslexia-friendly font actually reduced reading speed and accuracy. In addition, none of the students preferred to read material in OpenDyslexic, a surprising rebuke for a font specifically designed for the task.

> In a separate 2018 study, researchers compared another popular dyslexia font—Dyslexie, which charges a fee for usage—with Arial and Times New Roman and found no benefit to reading accuracy and speed. As with the previous dyslexia font, children expressed a preference for the mainstream fonts. “All in all, the font Dyslexie, developed to facilitate the reading of dyslexic people, does not have the desired effect,” the researchers concluded. “Children with dyslexia do not read better when text is printed in the font Dyslexie than when text is printed in Arial or Times New Roman.”

https://www.edutopia.org/article/do-dyslexia-fonts-actually-...
by milesrout | 2025-04-06 01:49:28+00:00
Yes, happens often. Plus all the products that have been recommended by (a friend that became aware of them through)+ advertising. And all the products that only exist because of advertising.

Also: sales. I have bought things in sales that I would not have bought otherwise (because its value to me is higher than the sale price but lower than the normal price) where I was only aware of the sales from ads.
by viraptor | 2025-04-06 01:49:34+00:00
> I severely question anecdotes that pair programming does anything other than motivate you to not look like a moron wasting time in front of someone else

So... you're basically saying it works? Because that's what it does in practice. The other person is the external motivator for keeping attention on the task.

> you might be surprised how much worse it gets later in life, especially if you have been taking them since youth

Got any support for that? (Not being dismissive; never heard of that beyond the usual "effectiveness goes down over time")

> If you doubt this, there is very little mention of body doubling in literature outside of blogs:

Yup, there's still little in terms of specific research, but if you look at the papers about externalising motivation/triggers... it's close to a specific implementation of those ideas rather than a separate thing.
by 8note | 2025-04-06 01:49:58+00:00
the law includes punishments because its expected and designed in that the law is broken.

there are wve past that, laws about how the law can be written, where they cant contreve more important laws like constitutions.

the most impactful way to challenge illegal laws is to not follow them, and the court process afterwards figures out invalidating that law

however, nreaking bad laws also brings attention to them so that legislative changes can be made.
by p_ing | 2025-04-06 01:50:44+00:00
Windows Internals is the book you want.

Or Inside Windows NT, if you want "version 1" of the Internals series. Or read the Windows NT OS/2 Design Workbook - https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb....

Yes, Win32 is just one personality, but a required one. OpenNT, Interix, SFU, SUA will ride alongside Win32. And of course there was the official OS/2 personality.
by skissane | 2025-04-06 01:51:02+00:00
> As I understand Win32 is just one personality

Not really... although NT was designed to run multiple "personalities" (or "environment subsystems" to use the official term), relatively early in its development they decided to make Win32 the "primary" environment subsystem, with the result that the other two subsystems (OS/2 and POSIX) ended up relying on Win32 for essential system services.

I think this multiple personalities thing was the original vision but it never really took off in the way its original architects intended – although there used to be OS/2 and POSIX subsystems, Microsoft never put a great deal of effort into them, and now them are both dead, so Win32 is the only environment subsystem left.

Yes, there is WSL, but: WSL1 is not an environment subsystem in the classic NT sense – it has a radically different implementation from the old OS/2 and POSIX subsystems, a "picoprocess provider". And WSL2 is just a Linux virtual machine.