skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This writing is so pretentious.

That may be so, but also more information-dense, as well.

For example, what we can determine from just your excerpt:

> the sun shone hot on my skin and the wind brushed my face

There does not appear to be much overhead protection for the sun, it is an area where the sun is hot and prominent, and you are likely to need protection. In addition, the building density was not such that shade was readily available.

> Without the protection of a car or bus, I smelled every rubbish bin and felt the whoosh of passing cyclists.

The place is likely dirty, garbage takes a while to smell, even under hot sun. The pedestrian route is frequently travelled by cyclists, rather than the roads, so it is be prudent to keep a watchful eye for them. In addition, if one wishes to cycle, it is not frowned upon (or at least common practice) to use the pedestrian routes, rather than the roads. Contrast with a country like the UK where cycling on the pavement is illegal and seemingly uncommon in cities except where it is utterly necessary.

> I heard the gentle thud of my feet and noticed how the texture of the ground – whether earth, grass, cobblestone or cement – changed my stride.

Most cities are paved over completely with concrete or cobblestone. It seems that Lucca instead has a variety of surfaces despite being in the city, this allows someone to change their footwear appropriately -- in addition, cobblestone is common for some cities, but in the UK or US is relatively uncommon, and could provide difficulty for people with mobility issues depending on the ruggedness of it.

> That is walking. He is literally just describing walking.

The entire point of writing is to create a scene or describe a place. Sure, you can say instead "I walked through the streets of Lucca" or something of the sort, but that is inherently bad writing because it triggers the brain to ask "ok, what was it like", and provides no detail or information whatsoever.

That's not to mention that the entire point of these sorts of articles is to give people some taste of being there (who maybe are not priviledged enough to be able to travel, even). The alternative of "I walked through the streets of Lucca", is so sparse of information to be instantly forgotten, and does not give any hint of a reason for why Lucca is different from other places.

Your comment is effectively like looking at the story of Macbeth and saying "oh this is so pretentious, why didn't he just distill it down into a paragraph, maybe a page, tops"
For what it's worth, I don't think it's too late. Your biggest challenge will be to take it seriously, put in the time, and to be resilient in the face of the difficulties.

But I have a friend who is in his late 40s who is coming up to speed in Number Theory, and doing well. But he is serious, and is putting in the time.

With age comes maturity, that can help, but also a more set way of thinking, which doesn't. Also, it depends on what kind of mathematics you want to learn ...

... and why.
Right. I should have added more detail. Multiples of 1/8 also work.

Now, you can actually make almost any length work with proper tuning circuitry, but the ones mentioned are the most effective.
I am quite sure the reason my comment is at top is not because other readers appreciate my tone (which I don't find aggressive, although I admit it could be nicer) but because of the link.
yeah with this same logic, if I give some google/facebook/etc ads to promote my application, I am ethically in the same boat with facebook.

The difference is they are not using their dominance, like for example, putting something in facebook app to check which other competitors installed on user's phones and spy.
That's a nice visualization!
Yes. There are some missing results and tasks. The idea is the community will help maintain it by adding results, tasks and datasets
I love the smell of poetic justice in the morning!
Two thoughts related to your "what to do" paragraph:

- I vaguely recall a Fredric Brown (?) story where people turn to (conceptually, self-defense) violence against cars because they've reached the insight that the fumes are literally killing them, like cigarette smoke.

- Some people (hmmm, "some people I know") have chosen direct action and planned+participated in sabotage of pipelines and railroads (used for coal and oil transport). Several were arrested in multiple states, but the overall outcome was symbolic with limited media coverage; not really what I imagined as effective, direct action. Now, some have spent time in jail, and some are scared because they feel responsible to their young children, and what happens to the kids if their parents spend a long time in jail?
There is overwhelming consensus that the current rate of climate change, which by the way is totally unprecedented in history, can be from no other source than anthropogenic CO2. You can read the research and see how thoroughly and completely every possible confounding variable was accounted for.

The scientists who claim "current changes are, like all past changes, caused by other factors than the man-made" are not taken seriously by the mainstream, form an unimaginably slim minority and frankly are dangerously wrong.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
Big thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18613124
My experience is that CEO's don't need persuading on this issue, they are convinced but their fiduciary duties limit the scope of their actions. What they would like is sharp, clear regulation that provided a level playing field. The people who need persuading are voters.
Thanks for the detailed and balanced answer.

>we have really nice JSON handling, or whatever other format you’re using.

Good to know. Data formats and conversion between them (often, though not solely, in the context of CLI apps) is one of my interests and areas of experience, so will check out those aspects of Rust over time.

>People have moved high load services to rust and seen big gains.

Cool ...
This seems extremely reasonable to me.

Vine was launched in January 2013. Back then FB and Twitter were significantly more competitive than they are now.

Twitter must have been terrifying to Facebook. Of course they would shut down their API access for Vine. It's a no brainer.

The point of building a platform is to create more value for your users, your partners, and your own business. Not to make it easier for your competition to catch up...
In late 2018, using Rust is a lot more serious of a proposal. But, in practice, I don't think the case for Rust in the browser would be nearly as compelling if we hadn't shown that it can be done. That's one strong reason for browser engine diversity: different engines can try different things.

I think it's fair to say that a Rust proposal would have been dead-on-arrival a couple of years ago. It'd be seen as far too risky. It would have remained so in a world where Blink was the only browser engine.

It's a classic innovator's dilemma: with fewer browser engines, the fewer risks the industry will take. More browser engines allow more seemingly-risky innovations (such as parallel styling/layout, or Rust) to break through.
Artificial Intelligence and the coming of the self-designing machine
Discord definitely seems to be the preferred platform for the younger generation in my area. It just sucks that they have zero plans for text E2EE, at least the last I checked.
Seriously fuck off.
Yes. the idea is the community can help maintain it by adding results (and tasks or datasets)
I don't think this works correctly. It claims my medium sized sedan puts out roughly ~125lbs of CO2 on a 100 mile trip. Unless my car somehow generates carbon out of nothing, that's the equivalent of burning nearly 20 gallons of gasoline (at ~6.3lb per gallon) for a regular drive to a customer site.
We took a lot of inspiration from C++ and Java, both of which have some sort of flag that says “compile this against a particular version”.
Yes. Yes, actually, I have. It's neither slow, nor do I find its interface bad. Actually, I think it's way better than Chrome on Android, because I like the way the new tab functionality works (and I sometimes keep around 20-30 tabs open on mobile.)

My phone isn't even some flagship. It's an OP3T, and it copes very well with FF.
* Monopolistic action

Facebook is still far from the textbook definition of monopoly, but this anti-competitive behavior is not good.
Ask HN: Need for a human-powered text-to-speech API?
We are working with a network of US-based people good on the phone.

Is anyone interested in an API that would accept text as input and return a MP3 of someone reading the text within a couple of hours? We have a couple of US-based people who could do the job really well in a couple of minutes.

Command: POST /tts { text: "Hello John. Thanks for joining us today.", voice:"female", web hook: "../webhook/response" }

Webhook response (a few minutes later): POST /webhook/response { file: "voice.mp3", cost: 0.07 }

Cost would be something like $1 per 100 words.
Its easy to add datasets, results and tasks. the idea is the community can help maintain it :)
Agreed, the premise here is in my opinion pretty wrong. While it too would be a little hyperbolic, I’d be much quicker to argue the opposite.

Also, how successful other OSes were or weren’t at attracting an install base during the 1990s is very tangentially related to why Copland failed.

Slightly related: I’ve always wondered what Apple might be like today if Gassée had succeeded in selling BeOS to Apple instead of Jobs with NeXTSTEP. Probably a nice headstone in the Silicon Valley graveyard next to Sun, SGI etc, but interesting to consider.
Do you have any sources for any of this?

For example:

>...Americans were pretty much able to get out of Japan after December 7th.

Well... I didn't see any references specially on Japan itself, but when Japan took over Guam, they interned:

>...and 100 civilian men, including businessmen and the American Catholic priests, as well as the Spanish Catholic Bishop, Miguel Olano. According to official records nineteen of them died while they were prisoners. All of them suffered from malnutrition and exposure.

https://www.guampedia.com/wwii-prisoners-of-war-sent-to-japa...

>...Same thing in Germany. William Shirer was reporting from Berlin as an American up until early 1942.

According to wikipedia:

>...subsequently tipped off that the Gestapo was building an espionage case against him, which carried the death penalty. Shirer began making arrangements to leave Germany, which he did in December 1940.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Shirer
This is where we have real opportunity that didn't exist in the 90s. Back then, we had more diverse (and exotic) personal computing environments, but they weren't largely online and they had one other problem: incompatibilities.

Today we don't worry as much about incompatibility, largely because we have widely accepted and used standards that we lacked back then. One could build a whole new personal computing machine and/or environment and as long as it implemented many of these standards it would be entirely usable (things like JSON, XML, etc).

In fact, the only "application" one would need in such a system is a web browser (no small task, I know). That goes a long way for "bringing people in." There is lots of room for creativity at present but unfortunately little in the way of imagination or will.
Blacks comprise about 14% of the US population, but only 1.4% of the top 1% household income. That means that whites are about 10 times more likely to belong to this elite. Many on the intersectional left consider this evidence that blacks are (still) oppressed by whites.

Jews comprise about 2.5% of the US population, but about 25% of billionaires are Jewish. That means that Jews are about 10 times more likely than non-Jewish whites to belong to this elite. Nazis consider this evidence that there is a Jewish conspiracy to oppress whites.

What is the difference?

(Btw, I'm not American, and in my country, there are fairly few of both blacks and Jews, so I see this from the outside.)
Scramble scramble! Quick, before people realize ridesharing is completely unsustainable without self driving to take out the cost of human drivers, except that Lyft is so far behind in the self driving race that they basically have no way to ever catch up.
> nice way to land into the left stereotype that the poster identified

Sorry, but that post did completely ignore that racism exists, and it made the social-left out to be people who are mad about others who don't "talk about systemic racism all the time", which is outrageous. If you re-read that comment, you'll see that they did ignore the racism that occurs, and focused on the idea that social-left people are just complaining about stupid things.

> Both sides can easily believe racism exists but have pretty wide gaps on how it should be addressed.

Agreed, and that's not what I was talking about. The comment made social-left people out as caring about stupid details like "YOU MUST TALK ABOUT RACISM FREQUENTLY" instead of caring about things like actual racism

> Stanford choosing black students over equally (or even more qualified) Asian students

I'd like to say that while we disagree about how to "fix racism", this is a perfect point. You aren't picking white people like most people do, you're picking Asian students, who make the highest scores of all demographics.

> leaves a lot of pressure on black students to prove they are there for the right reasons

Talk about hitting the nail on the head! This is a serious problem. I totally agree. We have different ideas of how to solve the problem, but we can both agree that this sucks.
Ok yes, I was confused. Thank you for spelling that out for me, now I understand what is happening.
It's patchable, but requires each implementor to recompile the FW with an up to date stack. The patched stack is available on TI's site for months now.
> You can buy a lot of healthcare services for $20K a year.

You must be joking. In the US, that $20k would barely cover a pregnancy. I’m about to blow $10k on a few dental bridges. It’s insanity.
The point being that even so it's already better while simultaneously being easier to remember (because indeed, what did I capitalize again?).
> Engineers who use Go are also especially strong. If you know why, please let me know.

Because there is almost no reason to learn Go. Most shops want JS/Java/Python/C# etc... The primary reason to learn a language like Go is because you want to for it's own sake.

It's not that you must learn Go in order to be good, or that knowing Go makes you better. Rather it's difficult to be bad and still have the desire/interest to spend time learning something unnecessary.
Lakeith Stanfield’s AR Balancing Act
Some chronology:

An end of 1995 article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070610194914/http://www.busine...

"APPLE'S COPLAND: NEW! IMPROVED! NOT HERE YET!"

"Says one recently departed Apple engineer: ``There's no way in hell Copland ships next year. I just hope it ships in 1997.''"

One year later:

https://www.cultofmac.com/459054/apple-buys-next/

"December 20, 1996: Apple Computer buys NeXT, the computer company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Cupertino a decade earlier."

A little more than two years after that, already 1999:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0

"Mac OS X Server 1.0, released on March 16, 1999,[1] is the first operating system released into the retail market by Apple Computer based on NeXT technology."
Both Google and AWS have these APIs for pennies per minute. This market is going to be absolutely commoditized in no time. You thinking of using one of these APIs and slapping a front end on it?
The FCC should comply with the Times FOIA[0] request so we can come to our own conclusions. Ajit Pai isn’t exactly known for his trustworthy statements.

[0] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-18-156A1.pdf
P.S. VSCode has multi-cursor as well: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/tips-and-trick...
>they specifically don't allow you to hail a cab

Don't they? The app experience certainly feels like hailing. The app provides a virtual line of sight that shows me a map of my surroundings with nearby available vehicles, when I make a booking I can track the vehicle as it approaches my location.
Ugh, Trello is owned by Atlassian. Will this law mean we should assume Trello is compromised? Trello is based in the US, so I'm not sure how that plays out with the law.
> if anyone had developed a legal framework, it’s unexplainable why they wouldn’t get the SEC to confirm the same.

I mean it's not something I'm actually working on so it would be a waste of time and money to solicit the SEC's guidance. I've told some other people who are planning ICOs how the system works, so if they want to actually implement it then it's their responsibility to pay to have their lawyers sit in on SEC meetings and for a legal opinion, documents, etc.
>I don't think everyone is obligated to come up with better solutions but I do think if you're going to participate in the dialog, focusing solely on attacking existing solutions is counterproductive and makes me question your motives.

If all of the proposed solutions are garbage and it's a complex problem, rational people will only be attacking them.

Consider when papers are submitted for peer review. The outcome is either paper is acceptable, or you get a bunch of negative feedback. That doesn't mean the reviewers don't want the problem solved, it just means that you're solution is flawed. People who want to solve problems seek peer reviews because they want to find flaws in their logic, data, or methodology.

Critical feedback is absolutely necessary for any solution to a real problem. Calling it counterproductive is misguided at best.
Should people eat broken glass? let's hear from both sides!
Reading thru replies. Thanks for taking the time. I hasten to add that what I meant is more "what can I do with other people, perhaps collectively?"

The focus on our individual behavior is all well and good as far as it goes, but I agree with a commenter below that it can't be the only thing each of us does. I don't own a car, I live in an apartment building, I eat very little red meat, etc. But the hour is getting late, clearly, and it can't just be "let's make sure everyone recycles". Power is real: a small number of people in this world wield vast amounts of it, and they're dead-set on staying the course. My not eating beef will not make a dent in those peoples' behavior, so it's times like these when our/my American focus on "what we can do as individuals" feels maddeningly myopic. I want something more. I guess the good news is a lot of you feel the same way, maybe?
Thank you for providing this perspective, I appreciate it. That really makes sense now.
Has anyone read Mark Zuckerberg’s emails / his style? He is a very frustrating email writer.

You know that person who types out an 8 sentence email, but really the first 6-7 sentences are about how they are “just thinking about everything out loud” and “this could totally be wrong but I think that”. It’s just that, email after email.
It's actually only relevant to UX. It's not useful as an API call. You can't feed it any data, and it doesn't provide anything but a single URL redirect. It will just become a big "Change Password" button on a password manager.

In order to change the password, you have to be logged in. So the website will have to redirect the user to a log-in form, passing along the change-password form URL when authentication succeeds. Then the user can put in the old password and new password, go through an optional MFA hokey-pokey, and get it changed.

If the intent is to speed up password changes, a few optional additions would be faster than the above. The spec could optionally allow (1) the account ID, (2) the user ID, (3) the old password, and (4) the new password. The response could be a challenge and consent request for the user, which the user could then affirm and submit.

The website could still dictate how this works, but the idea is that the password manager would pass along all relevant data in the initial request, eliminating the need for the user to enter it all manually, and eliminating extra page loads. But it requires no site-specific state on the client-side, because all requests would be exactly the same, to this generic URL. Whatever implements the spec URL on the server-side would perform the login and present the password reset challenge, pre-populated for the user.
Absolutely agree, it's a super crowded space. Question is: are you happy with existing TTS API? They sound so robotic.
Opening new coal mines may be uncompetitive. Nobody's stopping work in existing ones.

It does not amount to the same thing. To avoid catastrophic warming, we need to stop all development of new fossil fuel resources, and stop exploitation of some active fossil fuel resources.

We're not doing that. We're not even close to doing that.
I wish there was a good way to try mattresses properly before buying them. Not just lie down on it for a few minutes in a shop, but sleep the whole night on it. Like a bed shop teaming up with a hotel chain to let you choose which bed and/or mattress you want to try for a night. The ones in the article start at US$1995 - I wouldn't want to spend that much money on something so important without trying it, and would consider spending 5-10% of that to try it in a hotel room for a night. I know they say they'll have a "100-night guarantee with a full refund, as Casper does", but it is a huge hassle getting that sort of thing delivered and then returning it.
If/when mainstream self-driving eventually arrives, there's a good argument that it will provide the incentive for people to move out to more rural locations where there are many reasons to own your own vehicle.

If you live somewhere that parking's easy, there are a lot of reasons to own your own vehicle which mostly depreciates based on how many miles it's driven anyway. In addition to always having the vehicle available, you can customize it for your needs (sports, kids), use it as a sort of mobile storage locker, install a nice sound system if you're so inclined. If you don't need to drive, I'd expect more people to want a customized work/media entertainment space in their vehicle, not fewer.
You may not like the process but it is completely legal for the MP to compel the third party to turn over this information and then use parliamentary privilege to publish it. If FB has sent Zuck to talk to parliament in the first place this would not have happened. Instead he told them to get lost, and what are you gonna do about it? Well, this is it.

Not sure what you mean about a formal censure. I'm not familiar with any legal mechanism for a state judge to formally object to foreign parliamentary procedure; how would that even work between a republic and a commonwealth?
>both sides

i'm still to hear the "other side" of CO2 molecules absorption spectrum, specifically in infrared. 200 years and still no such "other side" ...

https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm

"Beginning with work by Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, scientists had understood that gases in the atmosphere might trap the heat received from the Sun. "
I'm starting to wonder if telling people what they can personally change in their lives is actually counterproductive. The gains to be had there are not that great.

Sure it's good to minimize energy use as you outline. But where does it leave you in terms of tonnes of CO2/year?

AFAIK the Paris accord goals (inadequate as they are) imply a target of around 1500 kg of CO2 per capita yearly. Homeless people achieve that in the west. You won't get near those levels, hower much you try to reduce your personal consumption.

We're not going to individual-responsibility our way out of this, and I wonder if getting people to try will just give them a false sense of accomplishment.
How can you even say that? Climate science has uncertainty. There are definitely still things being debated.