skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness, or productivity that I save from just letting someone else choose the defaults for me?

There are substantial privacy and security benefits to leaving the macOS/Windows ecosystem. Both of these operating systems include a lot of telemetry that is non-trivial to disable, and both use opaque, proprietary encryption software with a history of catastrophic bugs, including for disk encryption.

The big one though is spyware: Windows makes no farce of it, and is instrumented up the wazoo. You've got to dig into the registry to disable a lot of it, and firewall the rest. Opting out during install is entirely insufficient.

macOS used to be a lot better, but as of Catalina, even with all of the Apple network services disabled, iCloud turned off, Siri and location turned off, analytics opted out, no Facetime, no iMessage, no App Store, et c et c, it still sends all sorts of traffic to Apple, including some to no-hostname 17./8 IPs for some reason.

To get basic privacy on these systems, you have to do hours of work after install, run third party firewalls, and even then you're who-knows-how-many disk encryption 0days away from a stolen laptop meaning total compromise of your data.

This is not to say there aren't any encryption 0days in linux, but there are certainly a lot more eyeballs on the source, for a much longer time.

Conversely, linux doesn't really have anything comparable to Little Snitch or the per-app per-directory permissions of Catalina, sadly.
I am pretty happy with https://www.reddit.com/r/oisd_blocklist/ as a All-in-One Solution ...
hahaha the same happened to me, I also remember when I had to register for an internet connection, I didn't have a Dutch bank account yet and my French IBAN was too long. Simply removing the maximum character limit from the input field was enough, and I was able to submit the form, they never asked anything and accepted my long IBAN gladly. It was XS4all, so not the small ISP either.
On the contrary, legal documents are like code - you have to read them exactly as they are worded. They may use complex grammar and obscure vocabulary, but slow down, read every word and pretend it is code. There are no extra words, every "or" and "and" really is a boolean operator that impacts how to interpret a sentence.

If you are a coder, extracting an accurate meaning from legalese should come naturally. Just slow the flippety-flop down, stop trying to read it like a book, and instead read it like you are a compiler.
New? Microsoft was founded 45 years ago, Apple is 44.

Top? The S&P 500 is riddled with mediocrities and rent-seekers.

17.5%? Five out of five hundred is 1%.
The problem though is that people under 60 running through streets with joyous abandon could be what actually causes the least amount of total death in the long run.

Keeping most of the population who is not at risk from developing herd immunity is lengthening the time of exposure for the people who are at risk.

Just the fact we haven't updated our strategy at all after getting data on the age distributions is pretty bad.
> if the computer guessed at where to insert the " and got it wrong, especially if it didn't tell you what it had done, this could lead to some pretty weird side-effects in terms of program behaviour that might be harder to debug/fix.

As a lot of things, this is a matter of how often it gets it wrong.

For instance in ruby world, rubocop has an option to autofix. To your point, it makes it clear what it fixes so you can review. It’s also conservative enough to bail on anything that could have strong effects, like block endings.

That said in years using it I can’t remember any time I really regretted making it autofix stuff.
That was a typo on my part -- I meant languages like Python, not the whole universe of languages. Of course anything is possible, I'm sure there are very good languages out there, and that Elm is one of them.
Does a crime become good if the victim is big and the perpetrator is small?
It's pretty easy to extend this further. The photons that bounce into your eyes when you look at a tree are real, but who's to say they got to your eyes by being emitted from a big ball of fusion, through the 8 minute trip to Earth, and off that tree into your eyes? If someone put a sufficiently detailed screen there, we wouldn't know.

Similarly, how do you know you're not a brain in a jar? etc.

GP's point, that there's a hierarchy to truth/reality, is probably more useful. All we have are observations, and we can use those observations to draw conclusions about the state of the world. We must always be aware that it's always a map, though -- we can never know the territory.
Curate good articles because good things are worth sharing
Here are other articles I've curated articles over the months:

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-14-first-half-of-m...

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-29-articles-in-sec...

https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-15-list-of-feb-art...

What are some other good articles to share?
I respectfully disagree in this case—the last story was too recent, and this one does not contain any significant new information, so we're likely to end up just rehashing the same points (and have so far, in my estimation).

Edit: But, thefreeman above just informed me there's actual new information in this article (which I originally hadn't read, because the comments here made me assume it was the same as the last story on HN). So, thanks!
Cingulata comes from the Latin words cingŭla or cingŭlum and it should be pronounced with the soft C (like in Tchaikovsky)

> History and Etymology for Cingulata
New Latin, from Latin cingulum, cingula girdle + New Latin -ata

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Cingulata#:~:text...

It's a common mistake English speakers do all the times

The rule is quite simple: a C followed by the vocals e and i is always pronounced tch in Latin.

Latins used K for "hard C" like in "corn" and S for the s sound like in "cent"
23% is a very good return. So just invest in VC's that are in the top quartile. It's probably not that hard to find that information , with reasonable accuracy.
yeah and it does all of it behind your back without asking
Whilst reading about this I found myself thinking back to my days as a student, writing C++ with Visual Studio 6.

If you were able to install everything, including the documentation, to your hard drive you never really needed anything else (which was good, because I didn't have internet access at home to begin with - too pricey).

You had high quality development and debugging tools, and then in MSDN you had this absolutely exhaustive, encyclopaedic documentation that covered every possible topic in depth, and a good enough search function that you could usually find what you were looking for without too much difficulty.

In some ways - not all ways - those were the days.
I love this idea! Basically a vim version of "fortune". Did you compile that list yourself?
My views related to this topic are a little bit different. I don't say that one should blindly believe in some superstition but I do believe that we should try to understand the reason for it and might as well follow it. According to my experiences in life I have seen all the superstitions are made due to some scientific or religious reasons to it. We might not have discovered it yet so we think it's crazy to follow them. For eg. It is believed that we cannot leave the house with a diya in the house still lit. The underlying reason is that an object nearby due to any unforeseen circumstances may catch fire and create a problem.

Similar is with cutting nails in the night, that it would poke a bird's eye. But the real thing is that in night the vision is not as clear as day and in early days there used to be no nail cutter and people used scissors.

There are endless of these examples but unless we find a scientific or logical reason to it we are not going to follow it. So I would say if there's something that is preached by the previous generations there must be a reason to it let's not oppose it and find reality to it !!
Nutrition Coalition exposes more flaws in dietary guidelines process
I don't care about startup time in my window manager but st launches in 50 ms and alacritty takes 500 which is a noticeable and annoying difference so I'll take st every time. A lot of the time I want to open the terminal with a specific command in mind so with alacritty I ended up typing before it launched.
It does mostly, I was mainly contrasting with the big DEs like Gnome and KDE. I don't have any particular allegiance with Suckless, I just like they tool. I try to stay away from their community (mailing list etc...) because they have a rather arrogant mindset IMO, as an other comment here points out.
Saying sorry in an argument is among the cheapest, most annoying rhetorical devices.
I just signed up, and I don’t see any actual mathematical content in the course. It just looks like a “pedagogical” pep-talk with red flags like “learning style”.
And it checks them before checking for missing dependencies, so every time you fix a dependency, you have to do the whole rigamarole over again.
This is why I picked Fedora GNOME and stopped worrying. It gives me the confidence that it won't break and that I can focus on other things instead of having to tweak the system or environment for me to work. I adapted to GNOME defaults (I don't even use dash-to-dock) and it feels great, it doesn't get in the way when doing stuff.

Distro hopping and trying a lot of (minimalistic) tools are fine to learn a thing or two, but at some point you'll have to do some work, and having your mind on "how to do this more efficiently" can be distracting.
Fair enough, I missed that. I agree that it's a rather minor advantage in this day and age.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200606100522/https://www.meta-...
And the composition of each frame!

Not to be that guy, but as a classic part of the college experience my first time trying mushrooms was my first time watching Dreams. Good lord.

I think I am going to need to do a Kurosawa binge.
I think the answer is to decommericalize social media. I use Mastodon Social and it has none of these problems because it doesn't aim to monetize the users of the platform. It's an open source project developed by the users for the users. It doesn't need to keep you engaged, it doesn't need to push ads to you, doesn't need to track you, and so on. This creates a drastically different user experience that's not designed to exploit the user and turn them into a commodity.

One simple example is that Mastodon allows you to disable notifications for likes and retoots, you can just ignore them completely. So you can just see when people reply to your posts and actually interact with you. This small changes makes a huge difference in the experience. And this is precisely the kind of feature that simply can't exist on a service like Twitter because that would result in lower engagement.

There's now a whole federation of such open source services using ActivityPub, and I really think it's the future of social media. The federation is inherently decentralized, with servers being run by regular people across the globe. You can find communities that focus on your particular interests, and there's no single entity deciding how the platform should work for everybody. This approach is also more resilient to censorship as servers are located in many countries across many different jurisdictions. This is precisely the way internet was originally meant to work before it got commercialized and turned into the nightmare that it is today.

This also directly helps with the problem of Overton-window-compression and normalcy-compression that the article talks about. You have some weird kink or idea, then you can run your own server for people who share it. You can even make it private.

Some of the ActivityPub services I recommend checking out are

https://joinmastodon.org/

https://pixelfed.social/

https://joinpeertube.org/

https://write.as/

come join us and help build a community by the users for the users
JavasScript (and PHP for example) is an ecosystem with low barrier to entry and large popularity, combined with rudimentary and bad platform (historic reasons) - it's a recipe for piles of shite.

The amount of signal to noise is low because of low barrier/high user base community spamming NPM packages/and spamming ratings/stars/dependencies - it's hard to determine what's "safe" to use, and because the environment is so barebones you need to depend on a lot of third party code or reimplement everything yourself.

C++/C have a similar legacy burden and barebones platform (although C++ std lib now-days is much better, historically it was unusable which lead to a lot of code duplication) but because the barrier to entry is much higher I'd say an average C++ dev is much more competent than average JS/PHP dev and the libraries commonly used in C++ world are obviously higher quality than JS/PHP (tooling fragmentation is a different story because of the unique problems C/C++ face, but still C++ build tools are probably the most sophisticated out there - out of necessity).

Rust falls in to the category of languages designed by competent people without legacy burden and tackles a complex domain (again higher barrier to entry), most languages I've seen in this category have decent tooling and design (eg. C#, F#, Go, Dart)
Linux devs running Macs is definitely a thing. There are so many pro opensource people running Macs and it just boggles my mind.

Just why?
This wikipedia section is a good place to start seeing how it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_claim#Basic_types_and_c...

What I remember from law school is: let's say you're drafting a patent, and you want it to cover as much as possible without getting invalidated by prior art. So you're going to write some claims, and each claim can stand or fall on its own (each claim could be rejected by the patent office, or invalidated later because of prior art, without invalidating the more specific claims). So first you'll write a series of independent claims, and those will each be as broad as you hope you can get away with ("it's HTML on a computer!"). Having the broad independent claims stand is your best case scenario, because that makes it hard for competitors to work around your patent. But then for each independent claim you'll add dependent claims, which narrow down what you're claiming ("OK, it's HTML on a computer with foo," "OK, it's HTML on a computer with foo and bar"). That's your fallback scenario: maybe "HTML on a computer" gets rejected, and "HTML on a computer with foo" gets rejected, but "HTML on a computer with foo and bar" is original enough to make it through, so you still end up owning something of value. But maybe now that your broad claims are gone, your competitors can avoid your patent by doing "HTML with foo and baz" to accomplish the same thing.

So that's how the game theory works: you're basically leaving money on the table if you don't include some super broad claims at the top. Doesn't cost you anything if those ones don't stick. So we can't just read a patent and assume it actually protects every single broad claim -- but we can't assume it doesn't, either. We won't find out for sure which (if any) claims are actually valid unless there's a lawsuit and a judge or jury has to pick through the prior art and decide whether there are claims in there that are narrow enough to be original.
If you see that argument, you're making it.

The author is not pining for the good old days. In fact, he specifically says that when he was starting out, the tooling was terrible.
I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment.

Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's really cool to see the boxes), and I've sold a few boxes so far. Trying out some advertising now and working on building a presence on Instagram, since that seems like a great place to reach dog people, and the product is pretty photogenic.

https://coopersdogtreats.com/
> but it's worth pointing out that Snap is designed for end-user applications

They started building it for IoT, whereas Flatpaks were designed for the desktop from beginning.
I would like a system whereby the individual users likes and interests are used to weight everything. What we have now everywhere is basically a "majority of the moment" sorting and censoring the comments for me. I don't know who that really serves.

If the system served me, I wouldn't have to see comments from some whackadoo who feels offended because I wrote about laughing at a cop for not wearing a mask in a crowded retail establishment where everybody else was wearing them.

In my preferred system, comments from people I've upvoted in the past (and people they've upvoted in the past, and so on...) would appear more highly ranked than random nobodies. Likewise, if I've downvoted someone in the past, their comments would be ranked very low and might not appear at all if I've downvoted them enough.

This is more like real life, where people generally only hang around other people who are agreeable to their world view instead of surrounding themselves with disagreeable folks. I think a system that separates people could work wonders for social media. Let all the racists hang out together. Let all the whackadoos and Karens hang out together. What do I care?
As the author notes at the top, I think most people can directly feel the problem. We just don't often focus on it or try to solve it. It kinda fades into the background. I spend 10 minutes a day showering, an hour a day eating, and 3 hours a day randomly alternating between browser tabs - isn't that just what normal life is?
The point of simple software is that it's malleable.
One of the Go un-features that is so very nice -- the very first Go code I ever wrote, 7 years ago, still compiles perfectly.

It's great to not have stuff just rot behind your back.

(True for the language, not quite true for the ecosystem, since the switch to modules fucked a lot fo shit up, with some tooling _still_ not back to pre-modules levels of quality.)
I removed some of the stuff I don't use because the compiler complained about it after I removed the mappings and I was sufficiently bored that day :-) Being bored was actually the reason I was even looking at dwm in the first place, and somewhat to my own surprise it seems to have stuck.

I don't like dealing with multiple things on my screen (from the WM, tmux panes, Vim windows, whatnot) and like focusing on one thing, so I've had a pretty simple and straightforward "full screen all the things" workflow for years (well before I used dwm) which doesn't demand much from my WM. I mostly use tags/workspaces, tmux windows, and Vim tabs to switch between things.
It is a mistake to marginalize what a small number of people achieved. An organized team successfully "cancelled" the Actix project and smeared its author after repeated attempts-- three distinct episodes over 12 months. This was a campaign that spanned social media and github.

It is worth noting that to this date, none of the members of the anti-actix effort have contributed towards a viable alternative, nor have they attempted to resolve their concerns in the actix ecosystem. It turns out that the patrons who complained about free beer never intended to brew their own.
I 100% agree with this. When you criminalize behavior that is very common, you very naturally create conflict
I thought about 6 months whether I should call companies out if I'm really unhappy with their recruiting process. I decided the potential increase in transparancy is worth the risk.

I once applied to ING (the biggest Dutch national bank). They gave me a test like this and rejected me because I'm not responsible enough.

The irony is that I was complimented on my responsibility when I was an instructor on a coding school. This was especially in light of all the other teachers resigning because they couldn't cope with their classes.

I told ING this. I told them I'd work for free for 3 months, so they can try me out. Nope, I'm too irresponsible, no matter that I completed my 4 academic study programs in time with high marks and did extracurricular stuff.

It is bullshit indeed. IMO, the real answer is: it seems that Mettamage is responsible based on his past accomplishments. Based on the questionnaire he doesn't rank his responsibility a lot lower compared to the average person. Time will tell whether he is responsible.
Lindy effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Essential Why We Need Plan Bitcoin
You say it like it's so simple, until your OS decides to update and then the things you've been relying on are broken, yet again, or there's some new behavior that requires getting used to. I'm surprised people think the "defaults" don't get in your way because they have for me in the past which is why I looked for alternatives.
> Language doesn't develop through discourse, but through actual discussions people have

True, language is mostly shaped by people speaking it, but the way those people speak is also influenced by their opinions and the way people around them speak. The fewer people use the term, the fewer new people will start. It also provides some pressure to not use it because someone they know doesn't.

For an example of the latter:
If a term is offensive to a certain group, they will tell people about it. Some of those people might stop using it as a result. The people around them might never even be exposed to the original term, and if they are, would be told that some consider it offensive and they might stop using it too.
(for practical examples, see racial slurs, curse words, etc.)

I'm genuinely surprised how many people had a problem with my comment, as I've seen plenty of similar discussions around "GNU/Linux", "Googling", "Windows key", "sending a Gmail"...
For some of us it's just a public service. If I go to the beach on a sunny day and take my shirt off the glare from my belly could blind people. In low-flying planes. Disrupt migratory patterns of seafowl. Interfere with satellites, etc...
Once humanity is able to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, we'll have more helium than we'll know what to do with.

Also, why is everyone measuring helium in volume (litres, cubic feet)? This is highly dependent on temperature and pressure. Why not state quantities in terms of mass?
Yes, the increase in accessibility seems much nicer now than waves hand before GitHub and Arch Linux Wiki.

But I found the examples given in this blogpost striking:
https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/
One of the most prominent tech companies (Apple) released a new music program to replace their older music program. The replacement program included several easy-to-notice UX bugs.

The bugs surely aren't from a lack of attention, expertise, or resources. And while obviously it's not easy to write a program like that, I think the best explanation would sound something like "towering pile of shit".
This is one of my favorite Julia packages! A fast plotting utility that outputs right to the terminal is one of those things that I didn't realize I needed until I found it.
LunarG Releases GFXReconstruct, a New Vulkan Capture/Replay Tool
Isn't Google Assistant just Google's Siri/Alexa? Though they might have improved the concept.
Do you have any experience with the marketing part? I am kinda in the same situation but have no clue how marketing works and was wondering if you could share any insights.
Usually you tune things to your liking and compile them once, not everyday.

From my own experience and talking with other suckless users this seems to be the common behaviour.