skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moved from general news to specific news a couple of decades ago, mainly because I was in an opportune position to see how the general news just tend to attack something they have really thin knowledge but hold as absolute truth. This was back in the late 90s and even if the more specific news outlets that had the expertise and knowledge to explain and educate, would later come to "fix the holes" it was pretty much pointless since the majority of people would just ignore facts because the story was already told.

News has been angry and vicious for a long time, maybe it's just now starting to hurt everybody due to public exposure by social media, the vicious crews can now attack anybody who has a public surface, and everybody has public surface thanks to social media.
LOL, good ones, I guess I am an old guy :)
what does the role of anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior from microsoft play in that narrative?

maybe it’s more nuanced...
Weird Ask HN: Game to play while listening to podcasts?
I'm looking for tips for casual (puzzle?) games, playable in the browser or on the Mac for gaming while listening to audiobooks or podcasts.

My go-to games right now are Tetris.com or 2048, so something in that style.

A game where I don't need to read anything, or spend too much attention on understanding the game mechanics, and can focus on the audio.
7 Chrome Extensions Every English Learner Need To Know
This interesting video talks about that. Time stamped to 6:51

https://youtu.be/zbzT00Cyq-g?t=411
> The trade off is still there

Not really, in my opinion. Type inference especially has come a long way. If I offer you a choice between language A and language B and claim that their syntax is nearly identical and you'll use essentially the same number of keystrokes to accomplish the same task in both, but language B can inform you about mistakes you've made at compile-time instead of waiting until run-time... which one are you going to choose?

While dynamic languages afford some degree of freedom, that freedom comes at a cost. The tradeoff used to be that safety required lots of extra writing (e.g., Java). Now that this isn't the case... the freedom of dynamic typing can be more harmful than helpful.

(I still use Python all the time, so don't mistake me for a static-only zealot of some sort. But I think the landscape of type systems has changed a lot since Kay made these claims.)
Andy Pavlo from the CMU Database Group has excellent courses on Database design on YouTube. Large time commitment, but he goes into great detail about internals and design tradeoffs, and is very knowledgeable about which database systems use which approaches. The intro course is about traditional databases, while the advanced course is about modern in-memory databases.
Interesting fact is that red alder trees are used for fancy furniture, and it's the wood used in Fender Stratocaster guitars. It's also probably the best wood for smoking fish.
It seems like you're just trying to redefine Meritocracy to fit the state of the world. Saying that "Some people never had the opportunity to go to medical school and so they can't be your doctor" means that no, we don't live in a true Meritocracy, unless you can also show that all such people would not have been able to get through medical school had they been given that opportunity.

With your definition, a Monarchy would be a Meritocracy. The son of the King has the opportunity to rule because of "genetics and upbringing", he has enough skill that it doesn't lead to deposition or revolution, so he becomes King.

Of course there are limits to this in terms of genetics, and I would agree that to determine if we were in a Meritocracy you would have to look at what differentiates the success/failure of those born with similar physical/genetic characteristics as that is not something we can realistically make equal as a society.

I am also in full agreement in that I think an Absolute Meritocracy is impossible, and I think the question is are we a Mostly Meritocratic society or not, but you can't just redefine something because the definition makes it impossible.
Yes, but Japan's GDP is $3tn. Romania's is $200bn. And Romania's government is corrupt, not as corrupt as some Third World countries, but definitely way more corrupt compared to Western standards.

We need to learn to walk before we run.

And regarding high speed trains, for Romania that means 130 kmph :)
Let me compensate the lack of Richter with a Richter recording that is not [1] a Schubert composition. Variations Serieuses (Mendelssohn Bartholdy) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9qEIcgSXLU

[1] I love Schubert, best composer ever in my opinion. Unfortunately, Richter couldn't Play "Tod und das Mädchen" (death and the maiden)
But video players are legal.
Drug which makes human blood lethal to mosquitoes can reduce malaria: study
Yup, similar but not the same :-) Have a look at https://youtu.be/zpeUnWrteQM for solo jazz - the elements are definitely shared.
Amazon isn't a unicorn in the sense of people placing extremely high expectations on it and pumping it full of money. Instead they're simply re-investing the money they make. At an impressive rate, but steadily and with not so much risk if they mess up a new venture.
Ah never mind :)
People acquire child porn because they are the target market as consumers of it.

People, generally, watch video of a terrorist attack to be informed about threats to them or their country, a direct first amendment concern.

There is a direct connection between the consumers of child porn and its production that is absent in the other.
I think a stronger argument, along similar lines, would be to observe that the human skull underwent pretty drastic architectural changes in the last 200K years because of the rapid growth in size of the brain cavity. And, since the importance of teeth fell behind the importance of intelligence, not enough selective pressure existed to "fix" the teeth given the other radical skull changes.
I stopped reading/watching the news in the late 90s. I started by not reading the news for a day to see if there was anything important I was missing. Then a week and then a month. I pretty much realized anything important would filter though. For example I found out about 9/11 the morning it happened because it was in a huge font on yahoo's homepage (this was before they had news on the front page). For me I've decided I'm much better off. I'm not wasting a bunch of time on things I can't do anything about.
Ethiopia minister: ‘Clear similarities’ in Boeing crashes
I'm still waiting for WebTorrent to be implemented in more clients (including libtorrent, which AFAIK underlies Picotorrent). I'd love to be able to quickly deploy headless WebTorrent video seeds, especially if they were sequence-aware (sending chunks in order, possibly incl. MPEG DASH format, though that is patented somehow); and maybe commodity BitTorrent + WebTorrent CDNs could become commonplace.
Yes, and they are. I know people that work for the EU. Romania's government is so incompetent and corrupt that they're literally refusing EU loans or grants because they can't embezzle funds. And even when they somehow manage to get the funds, they're so incompetent that they can't manage to finish things on time and on budget. They started building a highway in Transylvania in 1999 and they've barely built 40% of it, 20 years later.

They've restarted works 2 times, my guess they do it so that each new government gets its cut.

These people are so cynical they'd just watch the country burn for their personal interest.
I'm sure many would call it crusty.
I'm stuck on the notion of "information scarcity". Maybe "constrained" would be a better metaphor?

I'm also unimpressed by any thesis that omits preferential attachment (begetting winner takes all) or transaction costs.
I recently switched to a X1C6, and I wholly agree. It's an amazing laptop in terms of hardware and build quality, but it does have a bunch of Linux compatibility problems.
I wonder how this will affect pre-sales and sales of the Boeing 797. Apparently, they're going to pull the trigger on whether to build it this year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_New_Midsize_Airplane

I think it would be a good decision to do this. Not only because the 757 design in 50 years old, there's no planes Boeing offers that easily substitute for the 757, it would fit well alongside the business direction of the 787 (which has proven itself out quite well), but also because it would be a completely new plane, with few to no band-aids. I would trust a 797 over a 757 refresh, because Boeing would be much more terrified of a new plane with so much invested capital never achieving market acceptance than an older plane that has already been sold with money in the bank.

I would also hope Boeing's sales/marketing department understands planes falling out of the sky is bad for current and future sales growth, and now appreciates the difference between a properly safe plane and an unsafe plane with lots of band-aids.
I haven't been in the situation you describe, but in my experience there are times in life were you simply cannot find internal peace easily. Changes needs to be initiated first. But it's difficult to reason about what in your situation is(are) the exact problem(s) without more in-depth background information. That said, I doubt that vitamin D or some kind of spirituality will fix it. I would suggest meeting a therapist who offers cognitive behavioral therapy, to discuss your issues and fundamental life questions.
There hasn't been nearly enough time for changes in selective pressure to develop through the population. Orthodontics as we know it was invented in the mid-18th century, and it wasn't affordable until the late 19th century. That's like, four or five generations to the present with access to medical tooth alignment.
Or there were not so much sweet things in the first place and only at certain times of the year.
> So this means that languages like Swift, for example, are not OOP?

Swift claims to be protocol-oriented, actually. [0] is a video about it from Apple's WWDC in 2015.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/408/
”documentation quality isn't always the best”

Compared to what? (Asking just out of curiosity.)
I draw almost precisely the opposite conclusion.

Having used both vim and chisels, with varying degrees of mastery.
Ok maybe monopoly isn’t the word, but what’s the word that describes how it is virtually impossible for anyone else to write a seriously competing search engine, given the resources, trade secrets and patents Google has.

Also can you give me an example of a true monopoly as per your definition. Even the US government doesn’t have a tax monopoly because there are other countries you can live in.
that sounds like some kind of kool-aid
The big idea of message passing is that it's not about message passing, I think what Alan Kay has been trying to say all these year is that we should look at how bacteria communicate, and try to mimic that.

They communicate by sending protein "messages" to their vicinity, and if a close-by bacterium knows what to do with it, it processes it, and responds by either sending out their own proteins (message passing), OR change their internals to get receptive to different kinds of messages (change internal state).

From this viewpoint, coding starts being about cultivating a literal society of objects (cells). The obvious advantage being that biology scales an immeasurable amount better than whatever architectures we ever come up with. He often gives the example of the internet as a well-designed system, it operates in a similar manner, objects (anything that can self-identify with an IP-address) can join/leave at any point, and the system itself stays alive.

I'm not 100% sure if this is what Alan means, but after having following his talks and writings for a couple of years, I think that's the gist of it.
Questions on the Future of Open Source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_passing#Message_passin...
Civ V (or VI if you hate yourself)!
I think messages are less bound to types than method calls, more late bound and more reified in some caseS.
Kaf: Modern CLI for Apache Kafka, Written in Go
It's not worth the trouble with "write once" programs that you never refactor.

I think the problem is that mainstream statically typed programming languages come with terrible or non-existing metaprogramming facilities to make up for type constraints.

Rust supposedly has good metaprogramming but then it also has a type system that is so obnoxious it's not "worth the trouble in many situations".
Messaging is more general.

A message can be asynchronous. It can also be synchronous. You can persist messages, replicate them. Distribute them.

With a method call, the "caller" control what code gets executed. With a message-send, the sender politely asks the receiver to respond to the message. Is there code executed? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the message is ignored.

So something like Smalltalk is (roughly) at the minimal end for the capabilities of "messaging" whereas it is either at or slightly beyond the maximal end for "calling a method". The fact that there is a slight overlap makes things difficult, but not impossible, to distinguish.

In the articles on Software-ICs[1], they call the flavour of OO "object/message"

"Sending a message to an object is exactly like calling a function to operate on a data structure, with one crucial difference: Function calls specify not what should be accomplished but how. The function name identifies specific code to be executed. Messages, by contrast specify what you want an object to do and leave it up to the object to decide how."

I am not sure I'd agree with that 100%, and there are tons of ways to argue against it, but I think it's a start.

[1] https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/03/software-ics-binary-comp...
Leapfrog? That's long term vision.

We're currently fighting against our government party because they want to put the lead anti-corruption prosecutor in jail as the EU is trying to appoint her as the head of the EU prosecutor's office.

We're talking about people who not only want to stuff their pockets (super bad, but let's say... ok, by local standards) but don't even do their jobs. They're like a parasite that kills the host knowing full well they'll also die without the host.

Heaps of hubris and stupidity lumped up in our politicians.
Background Thread Processing ( Learning ).

I wrote the story about Rust where the programming concepts were hard to grasp and most just give up the first time trying to learn Rust. Normally months or years later, it clicked the 2nd time around for whatever reason.
Well you stepped right into it.

You need a TON of permits to open a restaurant and you can not open in your house, it has to be in a commercial space.

Furthermore, you are free to open your own hotel. You just need to do it in a commercial zoned area since you are doing commercial things.
> ... But if you're like me, and your mind is constantly racing, you need to be fast to get your ideas out before they're gone/replaced.

I write extremely fast and use arrow keys (and all kinds of vim shortcuts).

> it's also the likely visual/mental cost of looking away from your screen to aid in positioning the hand

I never look at my keyboard when using vim.
Not a natural early bird, but I picked up the habit of getting up early because its a great way to get uninterupted time at work (without meetings, fairly silent work environment with almost all desks empty).

Now I get strange looks when I leave at 3pm.

My employer let's us punch the time clock (we can do it online, too, which means it works with home office). I think you could run a noon to 8pm schedule (being in the office after that needs to be registered with facility management).

PS: My personal (N=1) experience with being a night owl actually is, that I have no problem getting up early when I go to bed early enough. Setting my alarm clock to 9:30pm as a reminder to go to bed helps me a lot getting up early. I don't buy too much into this theory of a night-owl / early bird split in the population, because time is kind of a construct of a watchmaking civilisation. I'd assume sunrise and sunset are much bigger influences on individual's behaviour.
6 percent from the very bottom move to the very top. That is fucking incredible. They moved all the way up! 6% of them! That's a great statistic, and conveys the exact opposite of your intent. The mobility between the more intermediate strata will be substantially higher than that. Nothing you've said here contradicts my point in the slightest.
I've used vim for seven years now. My vimrc is a gargantuan 122 lines of vimL. It went from 0 lines to 300 to 750 and it's been 122 for a year now. Whenever someone asks me for tips and tricks to learn vim I reference this tweet:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/473247789728952321

Just use VSCode / SublimeText / Notepad++
Yep, this can mechanistically explain why the phenotypic variability exists, for sure.
I beg to differ. If I had an intermittent failure that would nose the airplane down, you bet I'd turn it off. I wouldn't want it to happen when I was close to the ground. I would have shut it down the second time it happened.

It's like if an engine is on fire, and I shut down the engine, and the fire goes out. There's no way I'm going to think "It's OK now, I can restart the engine." No way in hell.
Study: People in a confe room over 2h can result in impair cognitive function
I haven't seen anything blaming engineering for these problems, although I'm not saying those comments aren't out there. I think the impression I get is that Executives and Regulators are to blame. Engineering generally isn't in a decision making capacity, they are given problems and provide solutions in a pretty compartmentalized role. Sure they could have resigned if they had known what it was leading to (and perhaps that happened) but that is about the extent of pressure they can exert in these situations.
This talks about primarily asynchronous message passing, which doesn't seem to be what anyone means in practice.
His decision to start working on Microsoft may have been risk-limited, but his decision to stick around for many years was not. He wasn't wildly successful overnight.
Yep it should only ever install some high priority security issues and such, and actually I suspect it's not actually doing anything complex itself (kicking off processes that perform the downloads + upgrades, but not actually applying them?) so it seems there's something weird going on :-(
Seems https://idonthaveaninterestinggithub.com is up now
Though that is a largely vacuous marketing claim, IMHO.

https://blog.metaobject.com/2015/06/protocol-oriented-progra...
No Man’s Sky. The game originally came out in a very poor state, i refunded it. But after years of persistent and major updates, the game is in a great state now. I dont see any reason why devs went through all that, considering there are no microtransactions or any other monetary incentive to release those updates and improve the game for so long, but the guys are on their way to release another major update this year.

The game is mostly space exploration, base building, resource management, and just stargazing. A lot of things look fascinating, but not obtrusive, which allows you to focus on listening to podcasts without any distractions.

As another data point: i would say that 8 years ago, my podcast game was minecraft, but I found NMS in its current state to be way better.
With this line of argument pretty much nothing is a software issue since software is mostly there to compensate for something else: speed, errors, efficiency, manual labour, etc?

Highlighting the facts behind the design decisions of 737Max 8 is good for general knowledge but doesn’t help with much else in this context.

To follow this line of argument, I’d claim that this is the fault of old airports that didn’t have jetways so 737 had to be designed with lower body to allow folding stairways and so on...
The problem is you can't do those things more easily. The GUI has tricked you.

But think about it this way. Leaning your editor in full and taking advantage of what it offers -- no matter what editor your chose is ensuring that tool gets out of your way.

There are a lot of tedious things when editing and writing code. And by using your editor to aid, you get a lot of advantages.

1) you can do it in less time.
2) the chances of making a mistake on something repetitive goes down when you use your tool to aid you.
3) Using the editors advanced features can often make boring task fun.

I also think you are slightly wrong. While not 10x better code. I expect the code coming from somebody who uses their editor in full will produce better looking more consistent code.

EDIT: removing snark.
Sounds more like what many people would call event-drive architecture, these days.

People tell me Ruby is message passing, but it doesn't seem to match your description at all.
It's a custom EC running some pretty shitty firmware
Running AWS ES Open Distro Locally
You are implying there is an actual industry of producing child porn and filling in quotas and receiving payment in some form, I don't think that's the case. In any case, people that watch (many) speeches of Hitler are also the target market of many businesses, and yet there is a correlation between doing so and being radicalized/extremist/dangerous, and yet it is perfectly legal.
> Why are we even comparing programmers to Bill Gates ? He was an a business owner, an entrepreneur.

He was a highly skilled programmer and entrepreneur.

> The world doesn't lack highly skilled entrepreneurs who take a lot of risk.

Erm, what? It absolutely does.

> Gates, besides being very talented, was extremely lucky - being at the right school at the right time, having a mom at the board of directors of the largest computer company in the world(IBM), and having IBM make the worst business decision probably ever - feeling that there won't be much money in the operating-system - so licensing it out.

Yes, my point exactly. He was both lucky and talented and hard-working. There were tens of thousands of kids as well off as him and more, who didn't amount to a hundredth of his success.
The same reason we use all the other Vim keyboard shortcuts - to keep the hands on the home row!

I can ctrl-f way the f faster than someone who has to move their right hand down or over to the pgdn key.

I once read a great explanation about programming language wars. The author described a ladder of awareness, such that some languages were lower on the ladder than others. The idea was that programmers who knew languages at or below their level on the ladder could easily see the people below them and recognize that their languages were inferior, but they were unable to see the superiority of the languages above them. Of course the superiority of a language is somewhat subjective and largely dependent upon situation, but the concept is quite valid.

Do you use the mouse to click menus, or do you occasionally "cheat" and use a ctrl-c, ctrl-v, ctrl-s, whatever? If you use those keyboard shortcuts, why not other useful ones?
Running Multithreaded Redis Using KeyDB and Dynomite
Money's on a last minute fix to the problem and engineering being told the launch couldn't be delayed.