skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The data, conclusions, and implications of this are huge, and go several ways.

First: virtually nobody using information technology has any idea of what it's really doing, or how to do anything beyond a very narrow bound of tasks. This includes the apparently proficient, and it's almost always amusing to discover the bounds and limits in knowledge and use of computers by the highly capable. Children, often described as "digital natives", are better described as "digitally fearless": they're unaware of any possible consequences, and tend to plunge in where adults are more reticent. Actual capability is generally very superficial (with notable exceptions, of course).

Second: if you're building for mass market, you've got to keep things exceedingly and painfully simple. Though this can be frustrating (keep reading), there's absolutely a place for this, and for systems that are used by millions to billions (think: lifts, fuel pumps, information kiosks), keeping controls, options, and presentation to the absolute minimum and clearest possible matters.

Third: Looking into the psychological foundations of intellectual capabilities and capacity is a fascinating (and frequently fraught) domain. Direct experience with blood relatives suggests any possible genetic contribution is dwarfed by experiential and environmental factors. Jean Piaget's work, and subsequent, makes for hugely instructive reading.

Fourth: If you are building for general use keep your UI and conceptual architecture as stable as possible. There simply is NOT a big win at UI innovation, a lesson Mozilla's jwz noted years ago. (Safe archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o...) Apple's Mac has seen two variants of its UI in over 35 years, and the current OSX / MacOS variant is now older than the classic Mac UI was when OSX was introduced. Food for thought and humble pie for GUI tweakers.

Fifth: if you're building for domain experts, or are an expert user forced to contend with consumer-grade / general-market tools, you're going to get hit by this. The expert market is tiny. It's also subject to its own realms of bullshit (look into the audiophile market, as an example). This is much of the impetus behind my "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", based in part on the OECD study and citing the Nieman-Neilsen group's article:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

(I've been engaged in a decades-long love-hate, and increasingly the latter, battle with information technology.)

Absent some certification or requirements floor (think commercial and general aviation as examples), technical products are displaced, and general-market wants will swamp technical users' needs and interests.
My guess is that this is not meant for systems you'd ssh into. That this particular feature is designed specifically for use on laptops.
No, it’s too expensive full stop. There’s plenty of density in many of the neighborhoods not currently covered by rail. But it’s costing $3.8 billion per mile to build subway in New York now. DC would be less, but at these prices new subway is pretty much a non-starter.
Evil and blame free do not necessarily follow from acknowledging that some level of risk is acceptable.
The quoted paragraph says it uses a PAM module to unlock it, and PAM is independent of systemd.
Why is the result of the email test surprising? The popular meme that “email is for old people -lol” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/email-is-for-old-people-l_b_3...) is true. If you don’t work in an office environment, why would most people use an email with a reply to all or schedule a meeting on a desktop app?

People use, Slack, Facebook messenger, iMessage, AirDrop etc. Even kids often use DropBox to turn in work or whatever Google Docs uses.

For day to day use, my wife, son and I have a shared calendar that we update on our phone. If someone texts me a date, I just click on it to add it to a calendar.

Even when people do respond or send an email to people in their personal life, it’s usually to one person not a group. For groups, they will usually use a messaging app.
Will Dr. Scott Aaronson at UT Austin please chime in ?
Someone I know well cannot find and use the volume-control on an iMac despite the icons being noted right on the damned keyboard.

I've spent upwards of a quarter hour in support calls or installfests trying to get someone to open a terminal window and issue 2-3 commands.

I routinely get asked for assistance with such technical tasks as: deleting spam email, restoring sidebars and menus, resetting font sizes, locating a window that's been hidden behind another foreground window. This from otherwise nominally self-sufficient, educated, professional adults.

Though in cases there are sensory and motor impairments involved.

The users themselves consider themselves proficient. Dunning-Kruger strikes again.
It's money. Having a two-socket machine instead 2 one-socket machines, even when performance is only 80%, is saving both OPex and CAPex.
It frustrates me that the takeaway of this post, and the implicit conclusion of many software designers, is "keep it extremely simple, or two thirds of the population can’t use your design."

I think a better conclusion is "if these skills are important, design software which aids in and rewards the development of them."

If your software is designed with some UX which is hyper-optimized to get users to do some small handful of tasks you thought of, instead of designed as a simple tool they can understand, then it shouldn't be surprising if users don't learn to do anything except those tasks.
> browsers could pass these preferences to all websites [...] Or use headers?

This is what Do Not Track was supposed to be, and the stalking & advertising industry didn't care.
Hey underwater, I just wanted to follow up and say thanks. Without doing any other optimization, it seems that switching the ajax request from JSON to a big TypedArray changed Chrome's parsing time from 18 seconds to instantaneous: https://helpmepropose.live

Thanks again!
> I miss the days when I could understand how something worked just by reading the official documentation first.

This is probably why I don’t read much documentation when I’m working with a library, et al. Never thought about it until I read the parent
Jd.com launches its Pinduoduo rival, with a little help from WeChat
Median is an average.

There are three generally used measures of central tendency:

- The mean: the "arithmetic average", sum of observations divided by count.

- The median: the central measure. The single value (or averaged pair) at the center point of an ordered listing.

- The mode: the most frequently occurring measure. Sort a set of values by frequency, and pick the most frequent instance.

Most people intend "mean" as "average", but that's not strictly the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average

For our next pedant's corner post, we'll take on the distinction between descriptivist and prescriptivist definitions.
> Why change a perfectly working system your customer does have no direct interaction with?

Because you can't buy replacement parts when something breaks?
> What I'm actually trying to get at is- "are all distros that implement systemd expected to jump on every major architectural change that Lennart&co come up with?"

Yes.

> Is this not asking a lot?

It isn't. Especially since Lennart & co. have done most of the hard work.

> That's a ton of weight and a lot decisions that have been traditionally owned by the distros.

That's kind of the point. The goal of systemd is to provide a single, unified, comprehensive Linux platform and undo some of the fragmentation that has occurred in the Linux space between distributions. For example, systemd service files work the same irrespective of distro. Upstream developers need supply only one service file that can then be used on all distros.
What would explain why he completely overlooked a key primary function of money, something that decentralized crypto cannot, by design, satisfy : money is transferable debt.

Crypto currency view of money is that money is a store of value. Money is far more subtle and interesting than that. Money is has always has been a system of control. Those that can issue money, wield incredible power of the economy, and have done so since monies inception.
Oh right I must have seen a more flattering or dated video then! Seemed pretty young to me. Facts schmackts.
It seems like one of the more interesting aspects of all this, is that nobody really knows where he got his money from. There is an absence of the kind of filings there should be, if he was actually investing in some kind of hedge/venture capital fund.
Perhaps their projecting jaws were less able to exercise and clear the eustachian tubes, as any modern child (or airplane passenger) discovers early. Add to this being by themselves on the European continent for a long while and reaching equilibrium with fewer sinus problems over time by adaptation. Then being attacked brutally by diseases from a new wave of settlement out of Africa.

In North America some elapsed ~13,000 years was sufficient for the paleo population to be almost wholly destroyed by disease at first contact with Spanish explorers, by many accounts 90% dead by 1620.
Should I also learn how to repair my car instead of just taking it to the dealer? It’s called specialization of labor. Most of us make an above average wage dealing with computers and pay other people to know things we don’t know.
So that's what that is. I thought it was some business center since it was near Sun.

There is a lot of hidden history in Silicon Valley.

Another (computer oriented) one can be found reading "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" https://steveblank.com
Just a personal anecdote. I was born in a family of Theravada Buddhist parents. My late dad was an avid meditator. He'd go on week-long retreats to meditate at least a couple of times a year, and my mom also does similar. I tried meditating a little and gave up because I personally found that I am not able to stick to a routine (like meditate every day for 15 minutes). As I grow old, I became an atheist and read a lot of philosophy. I picked up stoicism and parts and pieces of everything I liked from reading. I use them to be self-aware and always try to see things as if they are impermanent. That really helps me calm down in stressful situations and be content with my life in a lot of ways. I do not meditate because I don't have the discipline, but I feel like I found my inner peace and live a pretty content, minimalist life.

I have a friend from home country who works in wall streets. She went to Princeton and is pretty high up there in management echelon. She has a fierce and competitive personality. She would always encourage me to go on meditation retreats in MA (Massachusetts), and she goes there pretty often. She also goes to a meditation group who meet near Times Square every few weeks. But you know what, I found her life to be miserable. She has had at least two mental breakdowns that I know of. She is always inquisitive of what I am doing, what job I have, how much I make at the moment whenever I see her. In my mind, I wanted to tell her, "Sister (a way of addressing someone older with respect in my culture), you're always stressed out and need meditation therapy because you are always worried about what/how others are doing. Meditation wouldn't help you much if you keep doing this." But of course, I don't want to spoil our friendship, so I never told her that.

I think I see a lot of meditation posts in HN because people here are chasing a lot of things at the same time. In other words, people here tend to be over-achievers and ambitious. I am not one, and I'm okay without meditation. I always try to take middle-path (that is the core of Buddhist teaching from my understanding) if I can; limit my wants and only try to fill my essential needs; try to always judge myself as a human (with needs/wants) first and then from a third person's point of view (to be self-aware so that I can control myself when I'm too upset/having a bad day); and in general, I just try to reduce as much "ah-ku-tho" (bad karma including greed, envy, anxiety, anger, etc.) as I can from my daily life.

Hope this lengthy post is interesting to some.
Interesting to see that Japan both has the most "can't use computers" and "strong" users...

I've personally observed (and had to help) many times where an otherwise extremely intelligent person seems to completely lose his/her brain upon being seated in front of a computer, and wonder why that is; these people can be experts in various other fields involving significant mental ability (e.g. maths, physics, chemistry), but when given the simplest of tasks to perform on the computer, like those in the article, all common sense and rational thinking seemingly disappears completely. Most people in the advanced category probably know that a computer is "a stupid machine", but could it be the "magical" nature of computing, and how it's often sold as, that completely destroys their expectations?

Relatedly, I'm pretty sure the stories at http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ are all true.
And you've illustrated another problem with online discussions, particularly since the ubiquity of social media. You assumed that my call to moderation in this debate is because of apathy, and presumed to read my mind. I'm hardly apathetic, or happy about it. 1Blocker doesn't work at all on Youtube, so I'm using Firefox for that now, where I can still use uBlock Origin. I'm disappointed, to be sure, but no amount of whinging, no matter how vociferous, is going to change this, so I'm pragmatic about it.
> Dozens of pages of emails and other documents obtained by Ronan Farrow “reveal that, although Epstein was listed as ‘disqualified’ in MIT’s official donor database, the media lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university”[1]

What's the problem with accepting anonymous donations?

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/14/how-mi...
It was a Credit Suisse report IIRC, basically what came up from a quick google search because the cited stat in the article was obviously wrong by at least two decimal orders of magnitude.
Is it fair to assume then that when you interview an Asian candidate, you will hold them to a much higher bar than black candidates? Or perhaps under no circumstances would you pass them for a role that another Black candidate is applying for?

I'm Asian, worked at FANG, have never discriminated against someone based on their ethnicity and frankly find your actions shortsided and regressive. You're fighting perceived racism with actual racism.
Last year I drove alongside the Phoenix LRT every single day on my way to work. (I don't live anywhere near a stop). His take on who uses it; based on my daily observations of watching people at the stops (and walking through that neighborhood from my parking garage to my workplace) - is totally wrong.

Yes, the developers were trying very hard to gentrify that neighborhood. But they were far from succeeding. It'll take many more years. In the meantime, the people who are there now, need it desperately. And as a car-commuter, the LRT was way less disruptive to traffic than busses.
This is it. HN (and specifically you) come through. I love this place. Thank you!
It's time programmers talked about ethics
I find touchscreen UIs to be particularly bad at this. Icons only have meaning if they're familiar, and beyond simple point, drag, tap and pinch, touchscreens have devolved into an often-arbitrary muddle of secret handshakes.

Example (as a recent iPhone user): If I want to open an SMS from the lock screen notification I swipe right, if I want to clear or respond to the notification I swipe left then select from the options that appear, but if I swipe left from a little further across on the screen it opens the camera, from whence swiping right again switches to video or slow-mo instead of going back to the lock screen. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen gets a neat little toolbox thing with commonly used options, whether or not the phone is locked. Swiping down from the top brings up notifications if the phone is unlocked but doesn't seem to do anything on the lock screen (I guess because it already shows notifications?). Double-pressing the 'home' button gets you a list of open and recently-used apps, but double-tapping the same button without triggering the physical button gets you some empty tray thing at the top of the screen which I'm still not sure the function of (maybe makes it easier to swipe down and get to notifications?)

This is random and fiddly enough for someone who writes software as a day job. I can see how it would be confusing as hell to anyone who doesn't usually use computers.
Other long articles where Toronto is praised for its bus and streetcar network, and how they feed passengers into the subway system:

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-k...

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/10/while-america...
I wouldn't wanna let it probe 'rm' :D

Perhaps the probing could happen in a VM / container image which would reset after each invocation.
Is this difficult to believe, do you delete users hundreds of times a day ?
I would follow up by saying that from 2004-2010, while I was a researcher there, the emphasis was on mixing ideas from places as far flung as possible. There was no need to fake a demo, as the ideas were not impossible, just uncanny.

Once someone like e.g. Saul Griffith came up with the idea of Kinematic Replication [1], others could easily replicate it (or at least anyone with a laser cutter at that time). Same goes for my projects. [1.25] For goodness sake, the source code and build instructions are published so that people can replicate it. These ideas are not like Caleb Harper's claims of high productivity versions of existing processes. They're fresh formulations of concepts one might not ordinarily have had the notion and resources to combine. Just look at Hiroshi Ishii's work! [1.5] That stuff is not hard to do once you've seen it done once- but try to be the originator of some of that stuff. That's where the magic is!

Take a look at my pal Brian Whitman's work [2] which was the basis of Echo Nest and eventually Spotify's recommendation engines. These algorithms are published at conferences and in journals so anyone can go in and replicate them. Brian's work isn't remarkable because it's so unbelievable it can hardly be true - it's remarkable because it dares to combine machine learning with signal processing and social media. These were all new ideas at the time and and it was up in the air whether they could work. Now they're the bread and butter of many peoples' commercial and personal activities. Anyone saying these demos are rigged is revealing their own shallowing understanding of what takes place there.

I don't know much about how the culture of the lab changed after I left and Ito became the directory almost immediately after... I do know while I was there, it was actually a bit scrappy. The original "shop" in 2004 was...a 10x20 room with a single laser cutter, single waterjet cutter, a drill press, a Bridgeport-like mill and a CNC lathe. There were tools hanging over a tattered wooden workbench. When the second building was constructed around 2008(?), shop size expanded about 10x. It went from a four floor building to 6 story building with maybe 8x the space. Ito was a kind of cult figure. I felt out of the loop bc ppl talked about him like an angel but couldn't explain to me what he'd done.

[1] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~saul/PhD/index.html

[1.25] https://web.archive.org/web/20100627183050/http://web.media....

[1.5] https://www.media.mit.edu/people/ishii/projects/

[2] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~bwhitman/
> My main gripe is with the headline phrase "Artificial Immortality". It's so far removed from that as to be laughable.

Yes, it reminds me of Woody Allen's remark: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying."
A Corpus for Automatic Readability Assessment and Text Simplification of German
I have never, ever heard anyone colloquially use the word 'average' and mean anything except 'mean'.
Interestingly, built in the same lot where the world's largest sporting goods store is currently being built (opening early next year).
I Invented a Better Windshield Wiper and a $2M/Year Business
Does not have much in common - single class of stock with the same rights vs. different classes of stock with different rights.
Maybe unwise and short-sighted. Human beings aren't perfect, even who fight racism. I think his legacy goes far beyond that point.
Create content that pleases you
Systemd has always been hyper focused on the desktop/laptop experience, and then justified for other use cases. Desktop is by a rediculously huge margin the least important use case. So something like systemd-homed does not make any sense in a server setup but I can basically guarantee it will be forced upon server setups, just like systemd-resolvd was.

Ironically the very small percentage of users that use Linux on the desktop tend to be of the more die-hard variety that don't welcome systemd's view of the world.

In the end systemd is an extremely bad steward of Linux.
Too bad MIT MediaLab is under scrutiny now. I really hope their PubPub[1] project will not die. It is the only open source[2] modern scientific publishing platform, like Authorea or Overleaf.

[1] https://www.pubpub.org/

[2] https://github.com/pubpub
Mainstream computing is utterly non sensical. Even developer tools are rife with ad-hoc conventions and arbitrary signs.

I saw this in college student who had straight As in every classes failed the programming exam ..because of a gcc flag. Student was just not aware of some synta and got stuck.
I just signed up. Is this a single dev (just you) project? Or, do you forsee hiring in the future?
This was actually the first thing that came to mind. I thought a lot of the microplastics came from these kinds of recycled plastic fabrics
If you see people in public doing something, try joining them. I discovered Archery that way, and others have joined my esperanto group like that. The important thing is to not drive between two destinations all the time. Sometimes try travelling in other ways or dawdling through the retail places and there's a good chance to find something.
If you haven't a chance to check out www.parenttv.com it's great!! It has literally brought together the leading parenting experts from all over the world into the one place and personalises to the age of your child 0-17 years old and walk you through their development and what you need to know broken down into categories ... it's awesome!
You use a lock/wait free data structure like a ring buffer as a FIFO to send the data to a blocking thread that buffers and writes to disk.