skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I think I disagree with... most of them?

1. While I do think climate change is something we need to mitigate now, political realities are very clear on this one -- people don't want to spend much money on mitigation. Furthermore, the dire consequences are still quite far away, doubtful 2020s are the years this will turn around.

2. I think for now automation will do what industrialization did before -- increase productivity which will lead to increase in consumption. I think it is only when we start approaching AGI when human labor will start becoming superfluous. Again, I don't think UBI is in the cards for mass adoption in the US or other major countries in the 20s (although I see it as inevitable on a longer time scale).

3. China IS a global super power, whether it will fully displace the US is again doubtful, they have the capacity to do it in the next 20-50 years, but probably not in the next 10. There is a lot of inertia against them basically everywhere (europe, east asia, india, etc).

4. There is literally no reason this would happen. Even private attempts on decentralized currencies (bitcoin/etc) did not produce assets that are used as money for regular transactions (not black market, not aimed at speculation). For countries it is even less attractive to start a crypto since if you have a stable fiat then why wouldn't you just... have the stable fiat? Countries LIKE having control over their currency.

5. Internet relies on hardware/infra that is currently privately owned by what are essentially local monopolies/duopolies. Unless laws that force infra sharing get passed (which in the US I just don't see happening), decentralized internet will absolutely not happen. Again, the 20s are now and we have no real movement in this direction.

6. Most people prefer meat. Currently population growth is such that meat production can easily keep up with demand. I agree that meat production is worse for the world (due to being resource inefficient) and I agree that it is more ethical to eat artificial meat due to decrease in suffering, but let's be real, most people will just eat the meat that is cheap and easily available. There is zero chance major countries manage to pass bills that would make meat expensive.

7. This one I almost agree with, I just don't think that there will be "a wave of hype" since without better propulsion/space elevators capital costs are obviously high and don't scale well (space isn't software).

8. I agree that governments will ratchet up surveillance, but I don't think consumers will be willing to put much money into privacy. I bet most people don't care (enough to spend money) about privacy, and the fraction who are OK with surveillance will only increase.

9. I mean, given that most baby boomers will be retired by 2030 I agree that they will play increasingly diminished role in the society, but I don't think it's because age/experience will not longer matter.

10. This is something I most agree with. I do hope that the 20s will be year genetics changes how we treat non-infectious diseases.
An almost constant criticism of Unity that I hear is that it's "too slow", that games made with it run slower than what their visuals would suggest. This has been such a common criticism of Unity for so long. So I don't think it's solely a response to requests from AAA studios either. My impression is that the current Unity model just doesn't scale by default (as in, yes it can be made to work but it's not the default and you'd be fighting with the architecture to do it). Or perhaps a much better way of saying it is that the default Unity architecture encourages less-experienced developers to write slower code. I've heard them say that "performance by default" is a goal for DOTS in a number of talks.
Bode's law vs...what exactly do we believe now explains the positions of the planets?
> In fact, there are so many occasions where the optimisation is so good that the end user doesn't believe that anything happened

IMO it can be attributed more to bad UI than optimizations.
Yes it takes some pain before you’re successful.
> but let's not forget what the NSA from the land of the "free" does

Collects tons of data and then does nothing with it?
Yea, but if controlling it allows a mutation that makes it more difficult to control it could cost significantly more; plus you get to say you eradicated polio without having to take R/D risk.
If you find out, make a GitHub repo ;)
"...would result in saving many human lives worth of time."

Meh this is manager-speak for "saving human lives" which they definitely were not. They weren't saving anybody. I mean, there's argument that, in modern day, 2020, time away from the computer is more well-spent than on a computer; so a faster boot time is actually worse than a slower boot time. Faster boot time is less time with the family.

Good managers, like Steve Jobs was, are really good at motivating people using false narratives.
What is new is the scale at which it happens now, in the democratic countries. And ordinary people are not aware at the level at which this invades their lives. And what is worse, you are deemed a criminal/undesirable if you voluntarily try to escape this surveillance.

Ellul was right. Propaganda and surveillance is more insidious in democracies than in authoritarian regimes.
Yeah, it seems the metaphor is about incorrectly performing a depth-first-search, when breadth-first-search is the right algorithm in general to find the optimal solution.
Thats depressing... Good luck indeed.
The fundamental problem isn't async code, it's buffering. Async-await patterns simply shift scheduling from the system (kernel or low-level runtime) into the application, but that's it. Languages like Python and JavaScript provide broken async-await APIs that do too much hidden buffering, including unbounded buffering. But that's a stupid design decision on their part, a reflection of poor interface design arguably stemming from a) bolting async I/O onto pre-existing architectures and runtimes that can't accommodate it well, and b) the implementers not having sufficient real-world experience designing and implementing such systems.

But even in threaded code you can have buffering problems. For example, Linux' default socket buffer size sysctls are arguably far too large, optimized for high throughput of a few connections (i.e. benchmarks), not for good responsiveness. That makes it too easy for any massively concurrent service daemon, threaded or not, to flood the outbound network queues.

The answer for any I/O model is to never, ever implement an in-memory input or output sink with an unlimited size, whether for buffering data, connections, or any other resource (e.g. stack frames if an event loop recursively reenters itself). That solves most of the problems right there. The remaining problems are more nuanced, and may require reducing buffer sizes as much as possible (think single-digit Kb instead of Mb[1]), and considering how various resource buffers and APIs interact (additively, multiplicatively) to create hidden buffer bloat.

[1] Especially if you're not doing any heavy processing of the buffer contents, such as audio-video processing where you may need moderately larger buffer sizes to benefit from pipelined and SIMD processing.
I think testing with multiple hardware is a good idea. For audio, I'd say that editing audio on low grade audio equipment might backfire. I've always heard that professionals listen through multiple sources to make sure it sounds good on everything but idk how true that is these days.

I've listened to quite a few people on YouTube and some musicians who clearly did their editing with a certain pair of headphones/earbuds. It comes through immediately on my speakers because high pitched whining noises made it through the edit (making it nearly unbearable to listen to) and/or they boosted the bass to infinity. (Usually indicates they never listened to their project on speakers because the bass heavy music between cuts becomes disgustingly loud whereas on headphones it's not that bad)

It makes listening to their content impossible on decent speakers but fine on okay headphones.
>Larry Niven said the money's in novels.

That's probably always been the case. But I'm certainly willing to believe it's become even more so. Certainly the SF I've found over the past couple of decades has mostly seemed to be less mainstream. Which doesn't make it bad. Just most seems less interesting to me personally.
I predict china will hit a ceiling in growth as a result of it's imhumane policies, and eventually authoritarianism is going to hit a line where the people rise up. China may go to far in it's ethnic cleansing or other bad things might come up and unless they change, they will never rise above a certain growth level. Not saying they'll become democratic, but at least better stewards over their own people. Also, I think and HOPE their social credit program fails miserably, that's the last thing we need other countries to start adopting.
> Many successful people become successful with failing businesses

I agree, you can be a successful person with a failing business. But can you really be a successful founder without having a successful business?
Write a puzzle generator in Elm and Use a laser cutter to cut them out
With unemployment rate at below 4%, where is the evidence that we have enough automation to warrant UBI?
Also, if your employer’s tuition reimbursement plan allows it, CLEP out of whatever you can towards a BS.
To wit what comprises "hate speech"

That's a rather specious argument when you have the current example of a democracy (India) simply shutting down large parts of the internet for political reasons, not to mention the widespread deployment of surveillance tech in numerous developed countries.

This isn't to say that you don't have a point, but if you're saying it's a more pressing issue than those you might be suffering from a loss of perspective. After all, 'hate speech' is widely unpopular (as opposed to being a highly popular thing suppressed by authoritarian states, and much 'hate speech' treats of the desire to operate an authoritarian state that will restrict or outright terminate the freedoms/lives of the hated subjects.
It used to be really really hard to get. It was out of print for years, not available as an ebook and not even widely available second hand.

I read it as a badly scanned version from some dodgy download site.
jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame.

Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) competence and trustworthiness, if it breaks not only do you not know who to blame but you probably have literally no idea what wrong.

Yeah, jQuery was probably better.
"...how often I run into things that are completely broken..."

That's because the shotgun approach(sick 40 developers on a single problem idc how they dole out the workload) works well for most low stakes, non-safety-critical software.

So like a reactivation portal for your Amazon seller account is very low stakes. But Boeing treating the 737-MAX the same way, would be(and was) a very bad idea.

Because that low-stakes approach is extremely bug prone.
You still lose to the first-mover advantage though. If universal assemblers are possible, then the defender with the resources of a star system at their disposal and early warning of the attack is going to outproduce the aggressor.
And Connie Willis also has a lot of great stuff. But many of the Hugo/Nebula awards over the past decade or two don't don't wow me.
> "but places like reddit are always shitting on NordVPN, both due to their ads (obv not the issue for me)"

It's a problem for me. Their ads use scare tactics and make deceptive if not outright false claims. Unethical ads come from unethical corporations. I can't see any reason to give such a corporation the benefit of the doubt by assuming their unethical behavior is limited to how they advertise.
> it will go viral with some eyeballs... Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion.

I'm only offering this feedback as someone who has been down a similar path, and I sincerely hope for the success of the project. You're expecting or at least hoping for lightning to strike. Consider the case where if it doesn't and you need to move forward. It's the intellectually honest thing to do, and will cover the most likely scenario.
Isaac Asimovs's "The Last Question" is an excellent short story and I consider it among one of the greatest works of science-fiction. It describes a fictional future where humanity creates a computer that acheives the singularity (written in 1956!), with an interesting twist at the end.

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
This horse has already been beaten into a bloody pulp, but Redux is so unnecessarily verbose. All due respect to the team behind it, but the DX of Redux is just horrible. I can only imagine how many developers simply gave up and became farmers because of Redux.

After being subjected to the "action types" modules full of redundantly named constants, having to touch five files for a small feature, I simply use Rematch now. Its API is like cake compared to Redux, while it still satisfies the same underlying pattern for consistency/testability.

"I'm going to tell my kids that Rematch was Redux"
While I found the talk more compelling, it's also worth mentioning Moxie's 2016 article, "Reflections: The ecosystem is moving", for several of the key points: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
UNSONG. Magical fantasy set in a Silicon Valley where Microprosopus (Microsoft), Gogmagog (Google), Amalek (Amazon), and Countenance (Facebook) have figured out how to brute force discovering Divine Names of God through the magic of independent contractors.

Every chapter begins with a quote from a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible, SICP, and ESR. For example:

> It is good practice to have your program poke around at runtime and see if it can be used to give a light unto the Gentiles.

The first chapter begins

> The apocalypse began in a cubicle.

> ... Upon the floor was a chair and upon the chair was me. My name is Aaron Smith-Teller and I am twenty-two years old. I was fiddling with a rubber band and counting the minutes until my next break and seeking the hidden transcendent Names of God.

> “AR-ASH-KON-CHEL-NA-VAN-TSIR,” I chanted.

> That wasn’t a hidden transcendent Name of God. That wasn’t surprising. During my six months at Countenance I must have spoken five hundred thousand of these words. Each had taken about five seconds, earned me about two cents, and cost a small portion of my dignity. None of them had been hidden transcendent Names of God.

http://unsongbook.com/
I have travelled here from the early 90s and I gotta say it seems more like a parlor trick (voice recognition plus a much larger, more sophisticated, networked Eliza) than true AI. But that's the AI problem in a nutshell: Once we've figured out how to do something it no longer seems like an AI problem.

The computer in Star Trek is just a smart speaker. Lt. Cmdr. Data is AI.
AWS Launches Braket, a Quantum Computing as a Service
Yeah, there are many others I'd add to a more general list - Carmack, Bellard, Wirth, the folks from Our Machinery, etc. I was just referencing the people specifically mentioned in the original post.
You are right. I misread it. These works that have recently entered the public domain in the US have already been in the public domain in some other countries.
In general, I find it really annoying I can't find specific short stories/novelettes available for $1-2. Which I guess I consider reasonable for older stories.

I have an older edition of True Names and I didn't realize it was hard to get your hands on. IMO it's the author's best work.
Are We Capable of Losing Our Masks?
Thanks for the nice comment about my blog!
I think if we haven't had any serious conversation about making internet service a public utility, then it seems a bit of a farce to consider talking about companies like these as integral to our modern society.

How proper internet service is still held hostage by the likes of Comcast and Verizon is beyond me, with little discussion given while everyone talks about the leverage of these three companies.
> 3. Why Fred thinks China won't have the same short term self-interest that every other country does seems fanciful at best.

I think the reason would be that most countries that make short-term decisions are ones that have democratic elections every few years and need to avoid pissing off too many people. China's authoritarian system may have more leeway with short-term pain for longer-term strategic initiatives not resulting in societal upheaval.
I guess there's no reason veggie meat wouldn't become much cheaper than real meat. It takes a lot less resources to grow a bushel of soy or wheat or GMO super-grain than a quarter pound of a cow.
Here's the thing, you either support freedom of speech and expression, or you don't.

There are plenty of gradients to freedom of expression - child porn is an obvious one, and German law against Nazi speech is another, and there are things in-between like advertisements for opioids or tobacco.

All you've done is restate the absolutist position, without addressing the challenges of that position which include: criminal speech, commercial speech, and the fact the restrictions on some speech have been successfully implemented without all the negative side effects that absolutists claim are inevitable.
Is the Golden Age of Tech Startups Over?
It is however, a highly effective tool for political purges.
They could also be finding valuable patterns in communication data and withholding it from other government agencies.
Ask HN: Technology and Science Trends for the New Decade
What technologies or research directions are, today, where deep learning (or, less dramatically, cloud or blockchain) was 10 years ago? What are we barely noticing today that will keep us all employed in 2030?
Some of these ideas are not too far-fetched. Lab “grown” meat, for example, isn’t too far from becoming a commercially viable product.
Did you mean "debounce" instead of "denounce"? Otherwise Google has failed me.
I didn't come up with this. According to the article, Roman Weil of Princeton teaches the same.
Exactly the same with me! I was enthusiastic till about 3/4 through.

My memory now is that reads like a script for an action movie.
People seem to overrate Xi's standing in the long-term. It is easy to keep a population docile with double digits economic growth. Once that trend terminates though...
Nope, there's nothing on the desktop page either. I have no idea what Workflowy is after visiting the site. There's an email list signup, a login button, and some blurbs about how Twitter and the NYT use the software. But nowhere that explains or shows what the software is.

Edit: Wait! Click on the tiny barely-readable links in the bottom corner of the page (at least on desktop) that say "List Maker" or "Online Notepad" (they both are different URLs, but link to the same page). Then you get an interactive demo.

After looking at that demo, I think Disco is ahead feature- and presentation-wise. I don't see any way to do the status tracking/people pictures/coloring showcased on Disco's landing page in Workflowy.
Every year, the countries of the world spend $1.5 trillion on military.

If we could find 1% of that to re-purpose...
> probably always been the case

Yeah was thinking that. Not sure what's changed. sci-fi authors used to get started in magazines, with limited page count, which the internet is killing/has killed.
I have the impression authors now jump straight to novels (with no short-story market, what alternative?)

OTOH Andy Weir arguably got his start with The Egg https://highexistence.com/images/view/the-egg-by-andy-weir/ and Ted Chiang here got a short story optioned into a movie.
Definitely a noob at npm, when I run 'npm install', it freezes at:

[ ......] / extract:aws-sdk: sill extract aws-sdk@2.595.0 extracted to /home/foo/serverless_apps/chromda/node_modules/.staging/...

Any tips or tricks would be much appreciated?
>grave new threat

There are two sides to the story of course. Repressive governments can follow who's up to what on social media and the like but on the other hand encrypted global communications and ubiquitous video make it much easier to expose bad stuff happening. It's interesting to watch the very good movie Lives of Others to get a feel of what things were like as recently as 1984 when it's set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
This. Planets are incubators for civilizations.
Having youtube tutorials on something does not make you an expert on the subject. He appears to not have the skills to do basic JS debugging. It's great to ask for help, everyone needs help at some point. The issue I see is starting with "The dark side of GraphQL". If you haven't found the actual issue, how do you even know what the cause is? Just because your SQL query is fast doesn't mean there is some inherent problem in GraphQL or Apollo. That argument doesn't follow. It could be user error.
Almost all technological progress begins with a national defense purpose.
And the other way around: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is given as an example of a work that's now public domain under US law, but Mann died in 1955 and his works are copyrighted in the EU until 1 Jan, 2026.
Free markets hate good software. "Good" meaning secure, stable, and boring.

On both ends.

Software developers hate boring software for pragmatic HR-driven career reasons and because devs are apes and apes are faddish and like the shiny new thing.

And commercial hegemony tends to go to the companies that slap something together with duct tape and bubble gum and rush it out the door.

So you get clusterfucks like Unix winning out against elegantly designed Lisp systems, and clusterfucks like Linux winning out against elegantly designed Unix systems, and clusterfucks like Docker and microservices and whatever other "innovations" "winning out" over elegantly design Linux package management and normal webservers and whatnot.

At some point someone important will figure out that no software should ever need to be updated for any reason ever, and a software update should carry the same stigma as...I don't know...adultery once carried. Or an oil spill. Or cooking the books. Whatever.

But then also it's important to be realistic. If anyone ever goes back and fixes any of this, well, a whole lot of very smart people are going to go unemployed.

Speaking of which...

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm
Books I like that contain things that are kinda computer-sciency:

Permutation City, by Greg Egan -- a bit of a mind-uploady brain-simluation story. Fairly philosophical, but not impenetrable.

Accelerando, by Charles Stross -- Focused on the technical singularity brought about by increasing computing power. Somewhat cheeky, a little frenetic.

Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin -- Algorithms and game theory plots regarding solving a civilsation-destroying puzzle.

Diaspora, by Greg Egan -- Post-trans-humanist shenanigans.

Other things of note:
Neal Stephenson writes a lot of cyberpunk computer-adjacent fiction. Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon all come to mind. The Baroque Cycle is a fiction series about the beginnings of computation and cryptography. He does have a propensity to navel-gaze though.

Vernor Vinge was a computer science professor. Rainbow's End and The Peace War are worth reading. Anything else he writes is worth reading too, actually.

Anything else by Stross, not just Accelerando, will have a bit of a tech bent to it, but is often not very serious and a bit handwavey.

The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet has an AI character with a backstory that forms a significant chunk of the book, but isn't super computer-sciencey.