skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right: there are at least some good reasons for packaging to exist. So, I'm going to rephrase my original question:

Why does every little thing come in packaging that is not directly reusable without further investment of time/energy?

For example, I ordered a USB hard drive a couple of weeks ago. It arrived packaged in:

* An unmarked cardboard box. Why wasn't I required to return this box for reuse? It should be a Pelican-style container that is used to deliver a shipment, and immediately returned for reuse.

* An thinner marked cardboard box advertising the device's features and specs. Why was this necessary? I already know what I ordered: I don't need to be further convinced that this is in fact the right thing.

* A set of plastic bumpers inside the marked box. I get it: these hold the relatively gentle device in place while it's shipped. The bumpers are clearly intended for only a single use: they're shaped to fit only the particular device I bought. Why haven't we developed reusable dampeners that can fit a variety of products and used repeatedly?

* A plastic bag inside the box, with the device inside it. Why?!

There are ways to build reusable substitutes for all of the single-use packaging implements we're accustomed to. Of course, these are more expensive. Insert generic rant on capitalism externalizing its costs to everyone.
Some products do have excessive packaging, but most packaging is there for good reasons. You need to consider the embedded energy and resources used to make the product, and how the packaging reduces the risk of wasting them if the product is damaged or destroyed.

There are cases where the total environmental impact of plastic packaging is very likely better than the alternatives, e.g. shrink-wrapping a cucumber more than doubles the shelf-life at ambient conditions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550898/

And if the plastic is then disposed of in landfill then it doubles as carbon sequestration.
"Betteridge’s law of headlines" I think this gentleman was ahead of his time. I think it's called Clickbait today. Both terms apply to this article. (Yes fell for the clickbait)
> But the problem is that they can't work really well with other developers (at a typical corp) who don't appreciate the problem the same way.

The key is to not work at a typical corp! :)
If you make a usenet anyone can use you'll just have another twitter or reddit. The reason usenet was different wasn't the technology but people. If it had been centralised it would've been the same.
Panera Reaches 9.3M Users with AR Campaign
Maybe if you own your own container and control it 100%, but for many shippers, that it not the case. They are one item amongst many, thrown together with everything else.

So it is worse. Your packaging has to defend itself from everything else in the container. It may get tossed around by multiple middle-men, buried under heavier objects and boxes, and has to protect itself in case an object above yours breaks and spills who knows what all over your box. And what if the container is somewhat empty and ends up on rough seas? It could get rolled like dice for days.
If you have a garden you could try decomposing it.

I have a lot of papers I use to shred, which became a hassle & I started burning them. Then I realized I could just dump them in a compost heap which does some quick work making them worthless to anyone brave enough to dig through it. Less work for me & at least I think it's better for the planet.
It's no mistake that they select the most unsympathetic people to try to weaken the protections for us all.
> Seeing how Internet 1.0 is getting cannibalized by big business and governments

How is it cannibalized? It is bigger and cheaper than ever before. To your anti-business comment, HS runs on an ICO powered platform. Isn't that business? It may not be big business but it certainly wouldn't be small if it were to replace a TLD.

> The Internet used to be filled with raw data, but in the age of centralized, walled garden curating, the essence of the information superhighway has been lost.

You mean when it was small enough so that it could be funded entirely by taxpayer money?

> It was truly something special and felt like the world (of knowledge) was at your fingertips (instead of something slimey on the other end).

Sadly that hasn't ended - governments are still burning pubic money like before, the only thing is now it's a drop in the. bucket. Ideally that spending would go down to zero but we have to be patient.
I’ve always pictured the opposite—rather than taking a GUI and bolting on “fake” command-line like features, why not have a base-class for GUI “main” windows that’s essentially already a true, fully-featured terminal emulator showing the stdin/stdout of the executing process?

Then, as you would add graphical controls to the main window in the layout builder, the terminal-emulator-interface part of the window would get squished down further until it just looks like a status-bar. (Which is essentially what status bars are: a very underpowered terminal-emulator only capable of showing the last line of stdout.)

But click [or tab into, or Ctrl-` to activate] the thing, and it’d “pop down”, adding more height to the window, if there’s room; or “pop up”, resizing the rest of the window narrower; or just overlay translucently on top, like in games with consoles.

Opening this wouldn’t give you a login shell, exactly—it’d be the stdin of the program. But the toolkit would hook the stdin and turn it into a REPL, based on the CORBA/DCOM/DBUS service-objects available in the program; and the GUI toolkit would then enhance this REPL, by introspecting these service-objects, to enable both textual autocomplete/auto-validate of commands, and the drawing of these sorts of graphical command-palettes. (But you’d be able to “shell out” to process these objects with commands, like you could in scripting languages.)

Or, to put that another way: Plan9’s Acme editor is a cool idea, making the whole editor into interface where you can just write magic runes on the walls and then activate them. But there’s no real understanding or support for those runes, because they’re fundamentally opaque Plan9 executable binaries. What would this look like if we translated it into the object-oriented world that GUIs live in? What would Smalltalk’s Acme be like? And then, what if all applications in the OS were built on top of it, the way that you can build applications as major modes in Emacs or as plugins in Blender?

Or, to put than another other way: if Automator in macOS can already latch onto a running program’s service API and tell it to do things as a batch script, why can’t I interactively access the same APIs from inside the running program itself, as an automatic benefit of using whatever technologies power Automator? Why can’t I do the equivalent of opening the Smalltalk Inspector on my GUI program?
In the problem, the people are tied down to the tracks. Or possibly glued. Or to make it even more horrifying, riveted :)
The headset works but the wire is still part of the antenna. What you want is an air tube headset. I just use hands free but it isn't always ideal.
It's never too early to spread some good feelings, though
I feel this truly belongs to a museum.
I've had a few wacky ideas for fixing the problem of overpackaging. Theory: the greenest packaging is none at all, the second greenest is the one you eat. In medieval times they would bake and transport food in a "pie", a hard shell of bread. Inedible for humans, but the pig your family had could dispose of it easily.
This looks great.

I tinkered with circuits as a
kid in the 60’s and subscribed to Popular Electronics back then—it was may favorite magazine when I was 16 years old.

I always viewed electronics as only a hobby, kind of like being a Ham Radio enthusiast and went to college to be a mathematician instead. However, I had a great elective that covered how to build electronic apparatus for scientists. After all the years of Math, it awakened my old interest in electronics and I stayed in college for a second degree in EE.

Popular Electronics was a hobby magazine and it was a lot of fun. On the other hand, a book like this one is more like what one learns when studying for an engineering degree. It teaches at a level where you can really understand the circuits you see and gives you the ability to put together your own, not just wire up projects someone else designed. I wish the author good luck it and look forward to future chapters. It could be a nice complement to Paul Horowitz‘a The Art of Electronics.

By the way, I know that many HN readers are computer scientists. That’s what I ended up being, but having a deeper understanding of electronics than most of the other software guys has opened many doors for me.
Privacy concerns. Why would you upload private information to a third party for no advantage?
The maxim "reduce, reuse, recycle" is well-known in our house-hold but, as the article points out, the reduce part is hard. Many don't realize how little actually ends up recycled but a recent trip to Cuba was informative.

Cuba doesn't provide recycling in even the major cities, but our guides instructed that plastic bottles (e.g.) should be placed next to the trash-cans on the street because someone would reuse them. When she was packaging up gifts we brought to give to school children, she tore shrink-wrap into strips and tied them around small bunches of markers. Later when we visited a family run coffee farm, we were able to buy small amounts of roasted coffee produced on that farm. Those beans were packaged in recovered water bottles that had been washed and dried.

A couple other interesting examples ... we were instructed to bring along water bottles because they'd supply filtered drinking water in bulk, reducing the amount of plastic ever purchased. When we visited a family-run tobacco farm, we could purchase cigars. The were wrapped in the hard lower leaf of the local palm trees which of course is compostable and renewable.

Reuse in Cuba was also very evident - the best example is the person we saw in Havana who "repaired" umbrellas. People would drop broken umbrellas on his street corner and he's produce working umbrellas. Repaired is in quotes because many times, the finished, working umbrellas were made of the parts of multiple donor umbrellas. Another example is the classic cars that you see everywhere (it really is that impressive) - it was a little disconcerting to hear a '57 Chevy fire up with the sound of a European diesel engine. On the outside, these cars are kept in pristine condition but a collector here would be horrified at how they're kept on the road.
A law that takes away people's rights to visit the websites they want to. Just because something's made a law doesn't automatically make it right. It also seems like it's being selectively enforced; is Ashley Madison banned in Europe? Do you think they have better privacy/opsec practices than Facebook?
the spirit of the parent post here is well-intentioned, but insufficient depth and breadth. Economic value is not rooted in physics. There is no universal value for 0.01 kg of copper, through the ages. The incremental opportunism, and market fluctuation that has been so incredibly effective at building the industrial and post-industrial world, is also miserably short-sighted when it comes to overall flows of material and energy.

So, you can't say "Recycling is a last resort" without context, and context gets too complicated, too fast.
For me, the 2 banners are related to Wolfram Alpha. Possibly generated from the backend directly, so there's no ad network involved, which can be blocked.
The effect is different for different people.
I know it's just fyi. I understand the frustration that one of your favorite parts of history is being stumped on by bad TV shows. Any kind of "YanYi" is pretty just entertainment show. Some are not too bad, some are just aweful. In recent years, these bad shows are just getting worse. I think "JunShiLiangMeng" is better than most. Characters looked normal rather than hair-dyed XiaoXianRou with no facial expressions.
Speaking from experience, the Hathi metadata is a hot mess. If I had to guess, I would say that it was largely sourced from whatever institutions catalog without a great deal of regularization.

There are levels of dirtiness in data. Hathi's metadata reached a level of dirtiness where the filthier fields could actually be mined for other data, given enough labor. While I was able to extract some benefits from this at some cost, it was no substitute for having things done well.

Many of the scans are described as "unusable" by the faculty and having looked at many of their complaints I would agree.
Academics should make their databases easily archivable then.

One thing I don't like about COS preprint sites is how much they rely on JavaScript. I'm not sure the Wayback Machine can archive them correctly. It might take a specialized bot.

The Wayback Machine doesn't work right at all on one of my own COS preprints: https://web.archive.org/web/20200211103826/https://engrxiv.o...

Maybe I should contact ArchiveTeam...
It's definitely gotten loved to death a little bit, especially with most of the northern half surrounded by huge construction projects these days.
But box is just paper, which literally grows on trees.
They are content serve directly by Wolfram Alpha.
That's not a technology problem, that's an organizational problem.
Using a server just moves the problem to a different channel it does not remove it.

You can design a practical protocol between two parties that actually works based on a large number of messages. Let’s say the generals can exchange 100 messages each of which has an independent 80% chance of message failure. That sounds really bad.

However, if the protocol is I will attack after receiving 20 messages or I will flip a coin once for each message received and attack on the specific date if even a single head shows up.

Now in your example if they receive 13 conformations they can assume there is at minimum a 99.98% chance the other party is going to attack.

There are several ways to improve the protocol based on a host of factors. But, it really demonstrates the difference between theory and practice.
In an ecosystem, all supply chains are built on suffering. Ecosystems do not evolve to decrease suffering.
Having DigixDAO Continue to Exist Would Be Good but It’s No Longer Possible
At the very least, paper & cardboard should be kept separate from plastic & aluminium. The first really need to be kept free of grease/dirt.

Plastic/aluminium/steel can be separated relatively easy… but then comes the problem of plastics themselves, separating each type.
I am an EE with a degree from a big ten university. Now turning 66. What amazes me about electronics/computer science is how much I do not know and how much I am still learning.
This is one of my least favorite genres:

"Industry X does things I don't understand. The millions of professionals working in that industry must be clueless fools, and should follow my hunch instead!"
Permanent Facebook page access token
There CPUs are not great for lots of VMs because the memory bandwidth then becomes limiting. So you don't get the full performance out of your VMs compared to having more boxes with smaller CPUs.
Deadly Air Pollution Doesn’t Respect State Borders
Not just that, but there's a good pool of tech talent due to relaxed immigration laws and being an attractive destination and an English speaking country (for the most part).
Camphr provides functionality for using transformers on spaCy. The purpose of this feature is similar to spacy-transformers.
You should use Camphr in the following cases:

1. If you want to extend or combine model with pytorch (spacy-transformers is thinc-based, while Camphr is pytorch-based.)

2. If you want to fine-tune easily with CLI

3. If you want to use better token alignment algorithm (Camphr uses pytokenizations (https://github.com/tamuhey/tokenizations) to align transformers' tokens and spaCy's tokens. pytokenizations is faster and more robust than spacy-transformers' alignment algorithm)
So I have no clue on how this works globally, but at least here in the Netherlands we recycle 90% of our glass:

https://www.milieuservicenederland.nl/afvalstromen/glas/
https://www.nederlandseglasfabrikanten.nl/duurzaamheid/recyc...
http://www.duurzaamglas.nl/glas-is-eindeloos

The second link is interesting in particular, as it states the following: "Er is ongeveer 25% minder energie nodig om scherven te smelten dan grondstoffen."

Translation: "Melting shards of glass requires 25% less energy than melting raw materials."

I also read somewhere (though can't find a source for it right now) that having separate bins for different colours (in our case brown, green and transparent) is one of the main reasons why recycling is so effective over here. It means glass doesn't become tainted that quickly.
Still waiting for your DNS to propogate :)
No Power Vacuum in Cosmos: What Founder’s Departure Entails
Troy Price, Iowa Democratic Party Leader, Resigns over Caucas Debacle
“I think the reason programming is difficult is that really we are dealing with incomplete information”

Dealing with uncertainty and incompleteness is a core part of the job.

The problem is that far too many programmers are gloryhounds and cowboys who think all that is beneath them; cramping their style when they’re trying to be the coding heroes.

This is compounded by many programmers being lazy incurious bums who have zero interest in doing anything that isn’t writing code. They don’t want to learn the user’s problem domain, so they don’t. Instead they demand users describe exactly how the software should work down to the very last detail; but if users could do that for themselves then they wouldn’t need programmers to write it for them!

Starting from ignorance, instead of writing software that encapsulates the users’ expert requirements, they write clever code that solves their own problems: entertaining themselves, and getting paid.

Writing code is not hard. Any monkey can do that. The challenge is knowing what code to write; and that’s made needlessly hard by programmers who can’t be arsed to understand their users, what they do and why they do it, learning their needs and problems in order to synthesize more effective solutions.

Instead of raising themselves up to users’ level of knowledge, they drag the problem down to their level of ignorance and whale on it with their crappy tools to give the illusion of “productivity”. Instead of being problem solvers, they’re problem multipliers.

Slap on several more layers of equally useless management, marketeers, beancounters, etc, and factor in that while deadweight accummulates expertise walks, and it’s no surprise most software projects are rolling Katamari disasters that makes everyone miserable until finally put out their misery; only for the whole process to start over again, with zero lessons learned.

--

TL;DR: Programming is hard because programmers make it hard. Because they don’t want to do the job right. Because they’re children.
I mean this,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

http://dreamsongs.com/Files/Energize.pdf

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/VisualAge_C%2B%2B_4.0_Review

Basically Smalltalk like development experience, just for C++. Too advanced for early 90's computers (it demanded very high end hardware).
H.G. Wells Envisions Atomic Bomb 30 Years Ahead of Time
Buhari don't come to our territory again, Shekau Boko Haram leader
This is just awesome. To my regret many GTK application don't care much about keyboard shortcuts any more. That's why I personally often use terminal applications. This project could actually make many applications usable again.
A great, great podcast on the whole Nintendo/Sony early saga is:

Business Wars -> Nintendo vs Sony series

Highly recommend.

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wondery/business-wars/e/544...
seems like a no-win situation, unless everyone is on the same productivity curve as you. if they moved the meeting, couldn’t that negatively affect your coworkers?

i'm a morning person and am pretty useless later in the day now. it wasn’t like this when i was younger.
While where on the topic of line-art:

One thing that would be really awesome IMO would be to make faithful reprints of old illustrations. E.g. the picture with the daemon and the snake (which reminds me of Gustave Doré’s works). Produced with high-quality ink/paper.

Does anyone have any ideas regarding how to do that? E.g. what kind of resolution does the scans need to be, etc.

Would a plotter be able to do it? The fact that the scans are bitmaps might be an obstacle since I imagine that maybe a bitmap can’t be sent directly to the plotter.
Sooo software?
Keto diet works best in small doses, mouse study finds
Show HN: Slimbox – a simple tool to declutter your inbox in seconds
> A set of plastic bumpers inside the marked box. I get it: these hold the relatively gentle device in place while it's shipped. The bumpers are clearly intended for only a single use: they're shaped to fit only the particular device I bought. Why haven't we developed reusable dampeners that can fit a variety of products and used repeatedly?

Because those would be harder to make and more expensive and likely work worse, and the benefit would go to some third party, not the company selling it. You could legislate it, but otherwise I don't see companies spending the extra money and time willingly.
What I got from this article is that the main reason to return to Usenet is the lack of requiring moderators. Wouldn't you still need moderators on a big enough Usenet instance? There's also the issue of what happens in an unmoderated community of any size (4chan).

EDIT: Also, I don't see "having more thoughtful discussions" as a good reason for needing to return to Usenet. Not every discussion has to be thoughtful, and really, most aren't.
I think you might also want to add Node.js (and "." to any JS tech) :)
“All that is old becomes new again. The more I read about the history of our discipline, the more I'm convinced that we are just chasing our own tails over and over again.”

It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, but we also don’t learn from our successes. – Keith Braithwaite
Interestingly, cities in India seem to be at a lower traffic level than 2019 too. Maybe it's related to other factors?
Netgear's routerlogin.com HTTPS cert snafu now has a live proof of concept
A 'saving…' or 'loading…' popup or any type of interaction preventing mask is a common UX pattern in my opinion in javascripts heavy apps.

We didn't care about testing the popup at all, it was just breaking our other tests in the following way.

In our UI you could click a 'save' button, then a 'saving…' popup appears, meanwhile the 'save' button goes away and an 'edit' button appears (behind the popup), and when the response comes back it says 'Saved.' in the ui.

A test for `$('div=Saved.').toExist()` in wdio works, it does a waitFor under the covers and polls the UI until that text appears. It doesn't care if theres a popup shown or not.

However moving on to the next step in the tests, `$('button=Edit').click()` throws an error 'element is not clickable' if the popup is visible when it happens to runs. Doing multi-command steps like 'check if popup is there, if not click' in general doesn't work as theres so much latency between commands. You can inject javascript in to the page that does both checks in the browsers js process as a hacky workaround.

We did upgrade our webdriver library partly to get waitForClickable() which based on the name at least sounded like it handle the above, but there were no volunteers to update the 168 instances where waitForLoader() had spread in the codebase :/
Silly objections for not to perform user testing
If this [0] is not legally-actionable and formal way of stating one's data access request, then I don't know what is.

----
[0] https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/emails/2019-11-16-sar/
this is valentine's day gold. Thanks :D