skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is having different pieces of the operating system developed separately not fragmentation? It seems it would be merely by definition.
> How many cups have you seen in your whole life? Probably fewer.

How many different cups are there in that dataset?

How many hours have I spent looking at cups? Anecdotally, my 2-year-old spends a huge amount of time playing with cups.
To what extent is the electoral college the legacy of the "three fifths compromise"?
That’s an interesting take on Uber that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

I know Uber’s end-goal is automation such that taxi drivers aren’t necessary. What I didn’t realize is that it is route planning automation that allowed them to move from dedicated drivers to gig drivers.
What are the best scientific papers ever written?
In my experience, and of course opinion, yes. Java might also be "bad", I don't know. I programmed it for a bit but didn't like it so moved on.

The main problem with PHP, the real killer, is not that it's complex, or the needle/haystack parameters to functions changed, or the iffy string escaping/unescaping or all that stuff, it's that it's hard to know all the edge cases in the language that could cause you to write a bug. It's hard to look at a piece of code and say "that's going to work the way I think it does". Javascript has the same problems with it's string/number/NaN/coercion wattitude.

I want to be able to reason about my programs, because almost all of what I do (and I guess most people writing anything other than the most trivial application) revolves around handling data. Names, emails, files, data, preferences. If the language I am writing makes it hard to see the bugs, then it makes it more likely that there will be bugs.

There is a common counter to this, and that's that good PHP programmers know about the edge cases, but there's a hell of a lot of average programmers out there.
He has confused Secure Boot with UEFI. Secure boot requires UEFI, but UEFI does not require secure boot.
Show HN: Lottery simulator – Until won firstPrize,I bought MegaMillions
From the newsweek article I posted in the parent comment.

https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...

Fauci is not personally conducting gain of function research, but he is both funding and promoting such research. Particularly, he funded the Wuhan lab to research bat to human coronavirus gain of function in 2019 before the outbreak. One of the lead researchers successfully created a chimeric virus that is similar to how covid-19 theoretically became so good at infecting humans.

Obviously, there is good reason for this research, since that's where SARS, MERS and swine flu came from, so Fauci's foresight got him a few months ahead of the covid-19 pandemic. It is quite impressive that he picked both the vector and location prior to the pandemic outbreak. Seems like we should be giving him much greater recognition for this achievement.
It's also not even clear that Saxon is actually the origin for English; yes the Anglo-Saxons often called themselves Saxons, but it is likely the ethno-linguistic pool they came from was something closer to Frisian than Saxon. Or some sort of Common West Germanic, from what is now Schleswig-Holstein and Frisia, not Saxony proper.

So yeah there would have been mutual intellegibility, because at that point there was likely high mutual intelligibility between all Western Germanic languages. But like you said that doesn't make them the same language. And like you aluded to, it's kind of a lumpers vs splitters thing.
Pretty much this. I have family that still uses Windows, even if I haven't used it for many years. So I still have to find my way through it and debug things periodically.

Luckily my mother switched to an iPad when they first came out and she hasn't looked back. So much easier to support an appliance than a general purpose PC.
Is a heftier compile step totally fine?

The biggest difference between PHP and Java in my mind is that you start Java and pay the compile cost on server start, in PHP you pay the compile cost on every request, frameworks and language features increasingly hide this future cost in caches but caches are one of the two hardest things in computing and often act like pushing things under the carpet, why optimise the compile? It's under the carpet

As we move closer and closer to Java's model, we get further and further away from that quick PHP feedback loop of, make a change press f5 see the changes immediately and quickly

Which puts us further and further away from the kind of ideals that Bret Victor mentioned in his very good talk inventing on principle: https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII which to quote: "Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating."

Inevitably this is coming and is already here but we should recognise what we've lost
"Italy's GDP per capita is something like $35k vs $47k in Germany."

Ah, But! There are two Italys. The North and the South. The North is economically and industrially on par with any other region in Europe, where as the south is poor and ridden with systematic problems.

Hence you cannot really speak of Italy in any single context when figuring who it is economically and so on - the regional differences are stark. You can't average these out over the entire country.
He's here: https://www.themoviedb.org/person/2194514-antonin-baudry
It's like looking in a mirror.

I hit this wall last year and I realized that I had to either: accept that work gets you money and you can live with stability and comfort and pursue your hobbies, or take a risk and see what your potential is.

I'm still figuring out what starting a company is for me (is it solo founding? freelancing? product? service?) and what I want out of my life (how do you feel about never ending uncertainty? being on call 24/7 for an unreasonable client?).

What I've found about myself is that building "a business I believe in" is really me saying "I want to be paid to help people I respect". The rest is just being willing to screw up, taking risks, being uncomfortable and having really supportive people around you that will listen when things are hard and you need to cry.

Start by taking some time off (4+ weeks) and into nature. Ask yourself what you really want.
I'm not sure you could say they fully transitioned from PPC to PPC64, as only the G5s were 64bit, and laptops never got the G5. I think the x86 transition would have been easier if it started out 64bit, but that's probably Intel's fault.

More practically, the transitions so far have been like this:
68k -> PPC (With full 68k emulation) -> x86 (with partial PPC emulation) -> x86_64
That's a false dichotomy, maybe they could work on decreasing the rate of climate change instead of increasing it.
I agree that the qualifier of hard and easy is arbitrary, but think there are at least as much premises build into qualifiers like free or will for that matter.

If the original comment suggests that the self is an abstraction, my will is always going to interact with other abstractions as well. To the qualifier free is only applicable on that layer.

> But the obvious physicalist response is that consciousness has evolved as an efficient information-processing device

Pretty lazy from physicists really. Maybe they cannot help themselves indeed.

But why an information-processing device and not a free actor? Why so minimal in the conclusion?

> subjective experience

Agreed if subjective facts may just be inexplicable facts.
As a member of the current generation, I can confirm that no one drools over Haskell except hardcore nerds. We drool at Go and Rust and new JS frameworks. And Python I guess, but everyone loves Python.
It's not either/or. Good luck building the next FB/Google/MS/Amazon/Apple without exceptional tech and exceptional tech people. All of those companies had breakthrough tech combined with breakthrough business ideas.

Assuming that everything is just about UX, PM and bizdev nets you the kind of mediocrity the OP is talking about. Sometimes what looks like over-engineering to the mediocre actually enables breaking new grounds in the hands of the excellent.
i want to counter all the sensible people offering you to save money and such while you're young. let's say you want to spend a decade building your reputation, expertise, and saving money. and lets say you have to compromise in order to do this, meaning you'll be working at ok places but you won't care deeply for the work you're doing.

after about 4 years of that 10 year long stretch you're going to lose motivation/track of the grand plan and wonder what the hell you are doing with your life. if you ever get out of that depression you'll regret every moment you wasted on a plan that amounts to serving a decade of your best years in prison, so that you can come out the other end having forgotten what you were going to do, or if you do remember having lost all the enthusiasm and will to do it. not to mention you're likely to go through significant life events like meeting your significant other, breakdowns, etc.

humans are not timeless fixtures of character and personality. this fact is exacerbated by the accelerated rate of change in the world. you're not who you were last year, and 5 years from now the difference a year makes is only going to only grow larger.

do what you really want to do. do it now. do not ever compromise.
> I thought you were arguing that free will must necessarily exist because of those consequences.

I'm saying that this is exactly what most people really mean by free will [1], and that people like you who claim that free will doesn't exist are making a mistake in assuming free will is something that it isn't. Typically, you're arguing against a theistic conception of free will with "souls" and whatnot, but that's just one (incoherent) conception of free will and not the whole debate.

"Free will" is ultimately some notion of control over one's actions that grounds moral responsibility: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

If you acknowledge that being able to designate who is responsible for some undesirable outcome is a necessary condition for being able to remedy it, then you are acknowledging some notion of moral blame.

If you further accept that people's actions can be described counterfactually by their thoughts, feelings and beliefs, then that implies some sort of control over those actions.

Therefore we have control + moral responsibility, and that's free will (in Compatibilism).

If this seems kind of familiar, it should! Compatibilism was first formulated from our notions of free will from law. Notice how if you remove the control requirement (say they had a tumour driving some behaviour, or they're insane), a person is no longer acting of their own free will and so are not responsible for their actions.

This is what I meant by free will being inevitable. No society can exist without blame for breaking the law. You might define the terms to avoid terms like "blame" and "free will", as hard determinists try to do, but the ultimate function will be the exact same.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
Btw, Do you have to add them all manually ? Couldn't you just bulk download a list of all living directors and add them to your list ?
Do the movies you really dislike have the same distribution of comments? :)

I do think that that there is something to media that creates a "love it or hate it" response. It's usually trying something new (Blood Machines certainly was).

p.s.: I saw Blood Machines when it premiered on Shudder & really enjoyed it.
I am really conflicted when configuring my servers. I can see the need to deprecate insecure protocols but deliberately cutting off compatibility with old clients feels wrong.
Yes, I saw that. But he doesn't seem to have been front and center like he is with the current pandemic. I chalk that up to the remarkable fact he was able to predict both the vector and location with his funding prior to the outbreak. Fauci's got his ear to the ground!
You seem to forget the prison time.

13 months of isolation alone have a devastating effect on the human psyche and general cognitive abilities. Many of the negative effects (e.g. loss of self-worth and cognitive abilities) are irreversible.
Who knows how many fewer criminals there might be, if social safety nets, providing for people's basic needs of food, shelter, health care and education?

How do you cure homelessness? You provide homes.

How do you deal with mental and physical illness? You provide health care.

How do you give people are path forwards? You provide education.

All of these things are what our societies are for. To carry on about "law and order" and even the "rule of law" without also quoting the part about "promote the general welfare" is to completely miss the purpose.
I've written many languages (starting with ML –Machine Language).

I'm currently developing in Swift, and loving it.

I wrote PHP for about 20 of its 25 years. I never really got to love the language, but got fairly good with it. I don't miss it much.

I have used it to write some industrial-scale systems, though. It's a perfectly good language, and is still under active development and improvement; with a vast user base and [m|b]illions of pages of support.

Even though a lot of us like to live on "the bleeding edge," I've found that it's a good idea to stick with the classics for shipping code.

Nowadays, "the classics" includes JS and Python, so there are definitely good, well-supported, mature alternatives to PHP.

I also programmed C++, and ran a C++ shop, for many years. I always find the hate poured onto C++, with the annual "C++ is dead" pronouncement, quite amusing.

But I really like Swift.
I think it's probably not a deterrent to some crimes, but a deterrent to others. Probably there are lots of people who don't shoplift, e.g., out of fear of the consequences of getting caught. (Obviously there are plenty who would not steal regardless; and plenty who steal anyway). Most studies I've seen on deterrence focus on the most serious crimes like murder and rape.
After several years now of defaulting to Go, in the last month I've gone back to PHP (specifically Laravel) for a new project.

It's... comfortable. That's probably the best way I can describe how I feel about it. I've missed working in PHP, despite how much I enjoy Go.
I'm not so sure that it's primarily a class thing, I think its more generational. I was still in factories when the shift happened around -98. A bunch of mean old assholes retired and the gen-X people started to get influential in management and more assertive as workers. Very expensive project management roles started to be occupied by women and the company maybe thought they couldn't afford to lose them over some sexist bullshit. Asshole behaviour simply wasn't tolerated anymore, on any level. I have no illusion that people stopped being assholes in -98 but that kind of behaviour was kept to smaller social circles (or anonymus) for a while.
Ask HN: How do I work a stable sane job for a paycheck? Or even work part time?
I've always been into tech and computers and my first coding job was at 19. After college I did some IT & technical generalist work at NGOs because I was curious about mission-centric organizations before eventually transitioning to being a full time web dev. Because I got to code more and I was curious about developing my coding skills further and also seeking better pay. I've alternated between full time and freelance work over the last decade.

There are times when I still enjoy programming but I hate the stress of startups & small business (few people, crazy hours, the feeling of the founders personally trying to extract work from you and feeling like it's their money your salary is taking). My freelance heavy resume looks a bit weird for big companies. And to add to that during a stretch of remote work I moved to a market with fewer big companies.

At this point, I can sell my resume as someone who could be a lead or even CTO soon. But I really would just like a job where I can deliver code without a lot of politics or bullshit or external pressure. And I would like to do that while I give myself time to consider a career change. I never worked anywhere with truly big paychecks and had lots of college loans and lived in an expensive market until recently so I don't have huge savings to take time off.

My colleagues say good things about my work, I've contributed to open source, people tell me I'm easy to get along with. I know I can do it as a dev and I have, and I wouldn't mind taking less money for less pressure or working part time. I feel like my problem is almost, companies want me to be looking for upward career movement or some startup dream of theirs, and I would just like to keep coding to support myself & because I'm good at it while I think about other directions to eventually take my life in (I have non-coding side projects whose specifics are not worth getting into).
FTA: "So what determines which messages are conveyed to your synapses by signalling molecules? They are signals determined by thinking processes that can’t be described at any lower level because they involve concepts, cognition and emotions in an essential way. Psychological experiences drive what happens. Your thoughts and feelings reach ‘down’ to shape lower-level processes in the brain by altering the constraints on ion and electron flows in a way that changes with time."

I think what the author is trying to say is that our psychological experience is influencing the molecular forces. But the psychological experience is just an abstraction, a collection of patterns that exist in the 'data' of the brain's connectivity and charge states. The brain's circuitry "runs" the software and its rules. Just because those rules flip a few electrical switches here and there doesn't mean those switches don't follow logic.

This is a hopelessly confused mess of an article by someone who clearly doesn't understand computation.
The Mob Enters the Newsroom
Definitely, you can see the performance benchmark comparing workloads in this post: https://scalegrid.io/blog/comparing-postgresql-digitalocean-...
>but when I see far more in common among constituents between Eastern WA and upstate NY than I see between Seattle and NYC I can’t help but feel that rural areas are far more united than cities are.

Do they actually have that much in common or is it out-group homogeneity?[1]. They would probably say all city dwellers are the same but obviously people from NYC don't have that much in common with people from SF beside some lifestyle commonality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity
Effective team management (even when you're working remote)
Effective team management can be distilled into five key principles. And they apply even when you're working remote.
I was writing a parser recently, and I was fed up with having to look at a textual tree output. I did a bit of Googling, found Graphviz, and I had the whole thing working in like 15 minutes. I think it's absolutely essential to me now anytime I work with trees/graphs that I need to visualize.
It's working okay for one billion people already.

Chinese economic restrictions generally tilt toward keeping the majority of capital flowing throughout China and strategic investments abroad. They are definitely not geared to someone who wants to start an English-learning school and repatriate earnings back to the UK or wherever. WeChat/Alipay support this - you can't really spend that money anywhere except in China.
>My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax. Yikes. Stuff that's in comments SHOULD NOT AFFECT RUNNING CODE. Who came up with that?

Agree. The first time I ran into this, I was completely confused as to why my code wasn't running as expected. Then I noticed the strange formal structure of the comments, made changes there, and voila.

I don't understand why that feature wasn't implemented as decorators or some kind of function code. If anyone has any resources/thoughts on why this path was chosen, I would be interested in seeing them.
It's pretty easy to figure out 'why we shouldn't focus on revenge', if you try.

edit: I may be guilty of not listening to what you're actually saying. If you're saying there is something in the core of people that is delighted by revenge, therefore the current system, I agree. If you are saying that justifies a focus on punishment, I disagree.
I'll just say it one more time: the common ancestor of English and modern German was never and is still not called German. By anybody. And I did not claim that the author claimed that English came from modern German. I took issue with his statement that "English started out as German". Because it didn't. It started out as _a_ Germanic (or Teutonic, or whatever) language. Not a thing called German.

The word German means something else. Something different than the author implies, and what you imply as well.

Why does this matter? Because this history is actually fascinating and beautiful for both German and English. And the common ancestry is a lovely story in and of itself. And in many ways a reader could be led astray by thinking of English as a form of German when it is in fact its own lineage... many words have entirely different forms and meanings, and in fact English preserves things that were changed entirely in continental Germanic and vice versa.

Not to mention the influence of Old Norse, Norman French, and Brittonic languages on English as well. It's a lovely and poetic mix.
My experience is that there is an 'Advanced BIOS Options' dialog where I select 'Turn off your PC'. Then I can go into the BIOS and change the UEFI/SecureBoot options. One can usually enable 'Legacy Boot' for BIOS boot OSs. Certainly frustrating the first time.
Is this like PowerShell's `Show-Command` and the earlier Macintosh Programmer's Workbench Commando?
How Can You Make It Safe to Go to the Gym Now?
This is a decent account of how much has changed, and he conveys the sense of alienation well. But what strikes me is that he talks about the whole thing like something that unaccountably happened to him. He didn't install botnets; he was arrested for installing botnets. Botnets that he somehow sees as part of the "true spirit of hacking", from the long-lost innocent age of 2009, when pure curiosity was the only motive. In reality, the botnets of the time were a) industrial-scale commandeering of other people's gear, and b) widely used for spam, DDOSing, and crime. [1]

I am perfectly willing to believe that his sentence was egregious, as federal prosecution is often more about a prosecutorial win than any real sense of justice. But given that he still seems unable to take responsibility for his choices, I could also be persuaded that having him away from a computer for a decade was perhaps on net the best thing for society.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botn...
That is what I was thinking, too. Hell, we had iPhones well before 2010. There hasn't been any kind of tectonic shift in technology since 2010, just mild evolution. Outside of a few specific areas (web frameworks, anyone?), skills from 2010 should still be very applicable today.

Now, if the author was arguing that it's a mindfuck to be incarcerated for 10 years and it makes him feel out of place, and his mindset is no longer really tuned towards technology, that I could totally believe. Just going to boot camp for a couple months does the same thing, takes a few days to reattach to 'normal' after that. 10 years in jail would take a bit longer to adjust from, no doubt.
I think the article is the philosophical equivalent of "Does tomato cure cancer?". No, but under certain condition it appears to help.
That's actually accurate but that means your vote in illinois counts about 3x to 9x as much as a vote in california.
> Instead, it would be better if HN translated content and especially titles into the readers local language or English automatically using public APIs.

Err... no. Machine translations are awful at least half of the time. It's even worse for CJK languages.
from wikipedia:
"The last release of Yggdrasil was in 1995."