skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the most poignant and evocative things I've read of late. I don't want to spoil the experience if you plan to read, so just two excerpts.

> What I learned from the book is that the differences between the back and front row are more than money, marginality, jobs, and education. That is, the back row kids chose lives and educations that weren’t going to get them fancy jobs and high salaries, and they did it only partly because their schools and towns and society hedged them in. They also chose the lives that were going to keep them close to their communities, their families. I believe that, I’ve seen it. And it’s admirable.

> Looking back I had never expected to have my atheism challenged. Certainly not in the drug dens of the South Bronx, but that is what happened. Part of it was recognizing a simply utilitarian value in faith. It was a more informed scientific view of religion. The realization that what the cold secular world that science so often offers up is just that, Cold & secular. Science is not very appealing and often hard for those dealing with trauma to see what “good” it offers. [...] It became a realization that being educated and wealthy had removed me from the best evidence for the “truth” behind faith. When you shield yourself from the messy details of life it is easy to convince yourself that humans can figure it all out, that we all got it under control, or that with enough data, thinking, and computer power, we could figure it out. Maybe, just maybe, we couldn’t and can’t ever do so. Maybe there is stuff just too big and complex to understand and perhaps that is the essential truth.

--

Succinctly illustrates something that is a complete blind spot for the mythical "Silicon Valley", with it's mood of techno-optimism and focus on "technology" (sic software). I'm sure reality is much more nuanced even for people with one foot in this bubble. I don't want to kickstart a cliched thread so we can all pile on SV, but I wonder how (where from) others here get such broader perspective in life. It would also be great to hear from people in very different circumstances & geography, about how they manage their intellectual interests and their human side.
For work Y to be a derivative work of X, some copyrighted elements of X must be included in Y, as is or in modified form (such as in a translation).

Y merely depending on X is not sufficient to make Y a derivative work.

Did RMS mean that if someone configured CLISP to actually build with readline the resulting binary was a derivative work of readline? If so, he was correct.

Or did he mean that the CLISP source code and build system itself is a derivative work of readline?

There was a similar situation back in the early '90s, concerning RIPEM (Riordan's Internet Privacy Enhanced Mail). RIPEM was distributed in source form. The source was public domain. To build it, though, you had to link the free-as-in-beer-but-not-as-in-speech RSAREF library from RSA Data Security. To build RIPEM you needed a big integer math library.

The RIPEM source could be built to use either libmp, the big integer library on most BSD systems then, or libgmp, the GNU big integer library that was on most Linux systems.

RMS got upset over this, claiming that RIPEM violated GPL. I seem to recall him acknowledging that RIPEM contained no copyrightable elements of libgmp, but rather arguing that because some people who downloaded the source would combine it with libgmp, distributing RIPEM induced this combination, and so counted as distributing libgmp.

Eventually, people on whatever mailing list or usenet group this was being discussed on (I don't remember which it was) got tired of trying to explain that there was nothing like this in US copyright law, and someone (I think it might have been the RIPEM author) wrote a new public domain library that provided the same interface as gmp for all the functions RIPEM needed, but was not gmp. It just provided the simple O(N^2) algorithms for everything, but you could link RIPEM with it instead of libgmp on Linux and it worked.

That made RMS happy, because after that someone downloading a building RIPEM on Linux was not implicitly going to build with gmp.

That was kind of a ridiculous solution, but also brilliant. It was ridiculous because whether or not Y is infringing X's copyright cannot be affected by any work, Z, that is created after X and Y, at least without access to Pym particles or the Time Stone. So all of us who were arguing over the legal issues were pretty much just wasting time and missing the point.

It was brilliant because whoever thought of it saw that the rest of us were missing the point, and saw that with a day or two of hacking he could address RMS' objection, regardless of whether or not that objection actually had any legal merit, and make the issue go away.
Somewhat related:

I've been thinking about organizing a snail mail letter writing initiative. Less about fancy stationary and pens and group writing sessions, more about one on one correspondence. I'd post a reading list, or a specific topic, and we'd spend a good chunk of time going back and forth to whatever end. Maybe in time, I'd share addresses (with permission) with other writers when I notice a common thread so that the conversation can branch out. I'd like to think this would be a good way to share ideas, and to learn through the act of writing, one thought after the other. And it would be a great way to practice handwriting.

Having had the luxury of stepping away from the screen for a few months to sort out what it is technology is doing to my nervous system, I've been heads down reading Jacques Ellul, Jean Baudrillard, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Daniel Boorstin, Carl Jung, Alan Hayakawa, C. W. Mills, Guy Debord, Wendell Berry, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and all sorts of philosophy from Schopenhauer to Spinoza.

To be honest, I am having a hard time finding people to talk about this stuff with. That's where the idea comes from. On one hand, it seems like people don't read much these days. So there's that. And on the other hand, I haven't found many people who seem concerned about how our habits, behaviors, and thought patterns are changing in response to our digital environments.

Perhaps letter writing is too much to ask? I thought a physical note, and actually having a single person to write to, opposed to an unknown audience, would be a nice change of pace. That said, I suppose this might also take shape in a private Discourse community, or Basecamp message board, or something like that. A space where paragraphs and punctuation are required to participate.

If you are interested in letters, let me know? Or if you are interested in helping me whip up a digital space where we can hear ourselves think, let me know?
Larry Summers is giving an entire economics lecture on Twitter.
Having built an app recently with Spring Boot, I admire them for trying to make Spring as simple to get up and going as, say, Rails. And it's certainly better than Spring was on its own.

But in my experience it's still an enterprise-grade Frankenstein's Monster, and the developer experience is pretty bad compared with other frameworks I've used. If I was doing something on the happy path, it mostly worked. But the moment I tried to do something slightly different than they expected, I was 20 frames deep into Spring stack traces trying to puzzle out poorly written Spring code. I've done a lot of Java, so I could eventually emerge triumphant. But it was a giant time suck. Looking back on the project, we estimated we could have done it in half the time using something like Rails or Flask.
This (pre volte face) description and quote from Mann is fascinating. Echoes of the current China?

"He declared that the country’s essential mission was battling the decadent Western democracies. Mann, who believed France and England were intent upon foisting doctrines that were “foreign and poisonous to the German character,” held that the profundity of its culture meant that the German nation was itself fated to transcend mere politics. Mann went to town:"

> I myself confess that I am deeply convinced that the German people will never be able to love political democracy simply because they cannot love politics itself, and that the much decried ‘authoritarian state’ is and remains the one that is proper and becoming to the German people, and the one they basically want.
"We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history
My response is spot on, it is just that it apparently went over your head. My assertion is that the govt of Vietnam has no clue what their population growth actually is. They throw numbers out in the wind, like they toss out theories that teaching kids art and english, causes autism.
I dont remember the neighborhoods so much, but I do remember having at least 4 email accounts for geocities to get extra space. For a while, I ran a Civilization 2 mod site on geocities. Been so long ago, dont even remember the account name...
don't you just own stocks that are worth more?
A Common Lisp Library for Terminals Without an FFI
No idea why that is. I've been actually amazed at how much code I DON'T have to write using Spring Boot. I can focus purely on features/business logic. its great.
States don’t get to hold elections for statewide officials (e.g. electors) where some votes are effectively discarded because of some fact external to that state election. Adding up votes from other states isn’t materially different in that regard than performing an augury.

For the same reason, the Western states couldn’t engage in a pact to elect their governors by party slate (especially without triggering the interstate compacts clause).
I'm a huge fan of digitally purchased games. By purchased I mean games with no DRM that don't require a multiplayer server or anything. Humble Bundle and GoG are good sources for these, but you can find them on Steam and such as well.

On the flip side, physical games are no longer truly self contained. Day one patches and license keys and DRM and server shutdowns all prevent you from owning the content on the disk any more than a digital purchase.

Now if only I still had time to play games...
NASA: Not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year
I definitely agree this can happen, and I've worked for a company where what you described rings all too true. However, I joined Palantir last year, and I genuinely don't see any evidence of the same kind of dysfunctional power dynamics.

During the interview process I asked a number of questions about ethics and transparency, and the interviewers responded positively and encouraged me to continue asking hard questions, which gave an impression it's a trait they valued.

After joining, I haven't seen any evidence of people fearing to express a dissenting opinion about either technical or ethical subjects. And I've personally witnessed a consistently high level of professionalism and respect, including respect and empathy for the protesters who want Palantir to sever all ties with ICE.

I don't think Palantir continues to work with HSI due to a lack of questioning, on the contrary, I think what's happened is that deeply questioning the ethical and practical implications of continuing or discontinuing contracts with HSI doesn't lead to such a clear-cut, black and white answer about what the right thing to do is.
Sean's comment above about 'a lot of nuance' is a huge understatement.

First off, I think China is a corrupt superpower and a huge threat to the USA, and there is no comparison or ambiguity about who the good guys are (the USA).

But the Tiananmen Square thing was severely fucked up. Originally the soldiers were not allowed to fire on civilians, and they were lynched and burned alive. There are lots of photos of the corpses of the soldiers being displayed or placed in conspicuous places by the civilians.

The civilians could kill the soldiers because the soldiers were under orders not to hurt civs.
OT. From the article:

> Taniguchi is known for his parties, blasts the music of Queen through the lab as he runs the press late at night

I wonder if "Under Pressure" gets a lot of play when the press is in operation. :-)
Nobel-winning economist says forget yield curves
It's a big ask, but I've hunted for it numerous times. Do you have or know the video of the dude in the crowd holding his laptop over his head in ecstatic appreciation during the Wave release? Also the parody of the guy the Wave team later made during a semi-unrelated video

It's one of the finest statements ever made about our industry, but if it's still around it's well hidden
Valves been on the down for years. Last minute chat app trying to mimic discord/curse, and introducing laughable vulnerabilities. VR gear more expensive and less relevant than competitors, no advancement on the tech that worked (steam controller, steam streaming box). Better mods through other sites and curse client. No more valve games, holding onto a dead engine.

Valve is coasting on prior success. If discord or curse was done better steams market share would nosedive.

This is one of many mistakes that happen when you dont compete and innovate.
With debit you’re bprotected as a credit card. The main difference is when there’s a dispute, it’s your money that’s on hold instead of the banks, potentially for months.
Fair enough. I’m sorry. I’ve been pretty upset about the situation in the USA, and my last few post were definitely based on emotion rather than having a serious discussion. This isn’t a justification for the actions just an explanation of the flaws I have that led to them. I fell prey to the wizard’s third rule... passion rules reason.
PVTL's public shareholders will be getting a premium price per share at $15. Michael Dell holds the vast majority of shares and will instead be getting VMware stock for Pivotal stock.
If people live paycheck to paycheck despite wage increases, doesn't that indicate that wages aren't the root cause?
Because states are political units. If you don’t like the laws of one state you can move to another, and this extends to the state's voting power when choosing a president.

As to your innovation in voting, if you accept immutable aspects of identity as the basis for voting rights you're opening the door to some terrible ideas, like ethno-states and Jim Crow laws. Again, without embarrassment at the facetiousness, I'm also not sure how actually making the Jews have more power in 1930s Germany would've solved their problems. Would've probably fuelled grievances: "Hey, Adolf, you know that Jews really do run Germany?" Eeek!

The best way to protect minorities is by the protected freedoms of speech and to bear arms, not by weighting votes by arbitrarily chosen characteristics.
What is Google supposed to do?
JavaScript to Know for React
go to travel around the world
Larry sunk a bunch of money and pride into Netsuite because he hated Marc and Salesforce so much after being booted from that company.

He was bailing himself out financially, in ego and also catching Oracle up in the entire cloud shift they missed and failed on with their own early shitty online products
Ask HN: Why did those ideas to pool cryto mines for deep learning fail?
With cryto currency price hovering below profitable lines for most crypto mines, it seems to make so much business sense to pool these GPU resources for deep learning.

There have been quite a few attempts at it, such as https://aicrypto.ai/, https://vast.ai/, and https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/86ofw2/rent_out_your_gpu_compute_to_ai_researchers_and/. However none of them seems to have gone anywhere.

Why?
Unfortunately I suspect the majority of the population is far less rational than the average HN user, which is why quack health (or rather, "wellness" these days, likely because their peddlers are trying to avoid legal issues around implications of being medical) bullshit has always been a relatively profitable if not ethical industry. The sad thing is, the average visitor to the site would probably think nothing of it or even believe, whereas you and me both reacted with "Ugh."
I have been living in Delhi city since a LONG time and I have seen these cropping up mainly on metro routes. There is a major shift towards using public transport in general. Many people having cars have started to prefer e-rickshaw and metro combination for daily travel.

It is very cheap ( about 1 dollar e-rickshaw and metro combined - both ways - basically about 30 dollar your monthly travel is sorted ).

It is cleaner ( Being public mode, there are benefits )

It has become one of the fastest way to travel.
Here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...
I think saying that the rent is market rate doesn’t really eliminate the transfer of value away from WeWork shareholders. First, you can’t exactly calculate market rate, and rates are normally determined by a negotiation between multiple parties. When you own a rental property, you take on a risk of vacancy while seeking tenants who pay your idea of market rate. You will face the choice of taking a lower rent vs. staying vacant and holding out for more. If Adam Neumann is getting reliably paid a healthy market rate by WeWork, and WeWork is taking the hit from the vacancies, he’s getting one over on WeWork’s shareholders. Lease obligations are going to be paid out before equity. Perhaps that’s the whole point of the arrangement.
I don't know of any resources for this, though I'm sure there are some good pages on this that are googlable. Here is my experience, having owned a few tiny positions in stocks that went through a merger.

- The moment the merger terms became public, your stock got the merger priced in by the market makers - minus a small discount representing the chance that the merger won't go through. Now it's going to trade mostly pegged to the parent stock, as if the merger had already happened (or flatline, if the buyout was all in cash). To keep shareholders happy, mergers usually happen at a 20-50% bonus over the purchased company's stock price, so this is a great event for you - the parent company just boosted your position.

- Your broker will automatically execute the merger transaction for you. The stock will disappear from your account, and a commensurate amount of cash and/or parent company stock will re-appear. This should show up under "Corporate actions" in your brokerage account or similar.

- I'm not aware of anything special that will happen otherwise. The merger closing (usually in 6 months or so) will represent the removal of uncertainty, which will give your position a bump, but that bump is usually tiny. So you can sell if you have reason to believe the deal won't go through (watch out for short term cap gains), or hold, if you like the parent company.
True at one level. And some hypothetical country could actually have that rule as the law -- "investor beware" might work better than our real system.

But in the system as it is, Oracle shareholders bought shares on the understanding that Larry had some fiduciary duty to the owners of the company.
I printed using "Bread" way back when they were developing it originally. The dev (nickparker)used to frequent #reprap@freenode. It was an interesting concept but yes the nozzle collision is an issue.

Here is a video of an early print when I was helping him test. He generated the gcode for me based on his machine settings so it wasn't perfect and very rudimentary.
https://youtu.be/M3Bwo0AVML0
Intelligent Design is religion pretending to be science.
"Software Engineering" Why make anything anymore when you can do tricks with ones and zeroes, for money?
Curse & Discord wouldn’t even exist if Steam had evolved properly. They had game store + friends list + chat integrated like 15 years ago, big miss IMO.
Can anyone here chime in and explain what the purpose is of this?
A lot of packaging materials are reusable, especially something as generic as a plastic bag, cardbox, or bubble wrap; why more people don't --- even when they have to themselves ship something --- is the problem. I have a stash of such material that I've accumulated and use to ship things to others, and I give them to friends who mention/ask.
You've come this far and IMO may as well throw a bit of money at it to do it justice. Better to know you gave it a better shot than wonder what might have been. I once bought a domain and mocked up wine tasting notepads to see if there was a market for it, then I barely showed anyone and it predictably went nowhere.

I'd get some professional photos done with a couple of musicians as models. Upgrade the site. Set the cheapest pricepoint as $30ish for a three-pack (and maybe a bulk option for schools/teachers?). Then try some Instagram/Facebook advertising either as a one off, or with a $50/wk budget.

Then, after a few weeks, if it's had no traction, make a decision to proceed or bail. But at least you will have given it a bit more effort.
Singapore will no longer rank children based on exams
Yes a few product managers debating adding new whimsical features.
We're not; "personal" was just easier to write in the moment than "single long term durable account associated with Latacora".
We (radare2 project) recently added more readline-like features in our own implementation called dietline. We cannot use the readline itself due to portability issues but tried to implement the most useful features of it. See the basic documentation in radare2 book[1]. And of course, any contribution[2] to improve our implementation is welcome.

[1] https://radare.gitbooks.io/radare2book/content/basic_command...

[2] https://github.com/radare/radare2/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is...
~30 years ago I was shift manager at a Burger King, outside Detroit. Being close to Windsor, we'd get... probably 2-3 transactions per month where people wanted to use Canadian money. Not a huge deal really - at least at that time, Detroit folks were at least accustomed to seeing it, if not accepting it. The exchange rate was generally ~80c USD to 1 CAD - it fluctuated - sometimes as much as 90c, sometimes below 80. Our store policy was we'd honor $1 CAD at 75c USD.

Most people didn't complain, but now and then someone would complain - "I can get 85c at the bank!". I'd reply something like... "you're free to do that, but it's 9:30 on a Saturday night - we're about your only option - most other places aren't even open, and the ones that are might not take your CAD at all". Oh, and many of the banks wouldn't exchange $ for you unless you were a customer. All that over a $10 meal for 3 people. The difference of an entire potential dollar.

It was my job to bank the money, and we'd end up getting odd reconciliations days or weeks later indicating that that $1163.45 we'd deposited on April 16 was really $1164.32 because of the exchange rate we got when the bank processed the deposit. We probably 'made' $100 in arbitrage for the whole year, but people would complain about it sometimes, that we were 'ripping them off'.
I've only read Dark Sun, and agree it's a great book. For some more light hearted looks at the Manhattan Project, a couple of Feynman's books are great. Don't recall the titles offhand, though.
DoorDash reveals details of its new tipping model
Shouldn't this be a "Show HN" post?
You just reminded me of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series from the 90s that came in the form of self help books and structured diaries. They sold tons. Not sure if the franchise is still around.
Nice to see you are still at it. I just posted a video above from 4 years ago when I was testing bread in #reprap.

Can't wait to see more of what you are doing soon.
libedit was written for just this purpose

https://github.com/NetBSD/src/tree/trunk/lib/libedit (cvsweb appears down)

https://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/
Overstock CEO resigns after “deep state” comments