skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN commenters represent whatever interests they wish—standing up for minorities, for example. There's no problem doing that. All people need to do is stay within the site guidelines, and most commenters do. So this is not the issue.

As for HN being "no longer salvageable" - people have been saying these things for 10 years or more. Of course it could have become true after 10 years—I don't want to be complacent. Sometimes the wolf eventually shows up. But there needs to be some evidence beyond simply repeating the things people repeat.

Right-wingers think HN is overrun by Marxists and left-wingers think it's overrun by Nazis. Both sides agree that the mods do a bad job and the site is destroying itself fast. They've been saying that for years. The decisive element here is the passions of the perceiver, not the object being perceived. That's why people's perceptions are so contradictory: what they're perceiving is an inverse of their own identifications. Usually this is based on a few data points that they overgeneralize. I've written about this a lot: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 for a summary, and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for endless descriptions of the bias at work.

Of course it doesn't follow that criticisms are invalid. We try to be open and often adjust in response. But criticisms have to rise above a certain noise level—they need to clear the "randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative" bar. When you say "Many people not in the community believe that Hacker News is no longer salvageable," it's not clear to me whether you're talking about serious critics or, say, Twitter ideologues, who have been saying that about HN since at least 2013. Most of that is driven by fashion. For example, small groups bond by snarking about, or denouncing, larger groups. That's all normal social dynamics (and internet dynamics), but I've learned the hard way that if you take those statements literally, it's crazymaking, because they're not really about what they purport to be about. That's not a reliable way to improve or, if you like, "salvage" HN.

All of which is a long way of saying that if you, or anyone, wants to discuss problems with HN, that's great, but we need specifics and links.
> Amdahl's law is about accelerating one job by parallelising it,

Amdahl's law is about the limitations of improving the speed of something, but not necessarily through parallelization. Its main point is that if you have some overall task, and you then speed up some subtask within it, the improvement to the overall time is limited to the contribution from the subtask.

In context of pcwalton's comment, I think they meant that thread creation time may be tiny compared to the amount of time a newly created thread will do work in a server context. If that is the case, improving the thread creation time will have limited benefit to serve time.
> The racists on the left think that we need to pump minorities full of welfare and government services in order to better subjugate them for their own benefit.

I have never once in my life encountered this hypothetical racist leftist, and a I've met a fair variety of racists. Why would you pick this topic as one to be a whataboutist about, when it's really not that ambiguous in the current US political climate.
Additionally, America's "left" is very much the same as Europe or Canada's center/right. The argument could be made that there is probably a more even distribution if you don't use America's right-weighted scale.
> "I toyed with the idea of getting a PCB made up that I could directly solder my switches to. It would certainly have made it easier to put the keyboard together, but I thought outsourcing the manufacturing of a PCB kind of takes the edge off making your own switches..."

Totally! There are ways to make your own PCBs using presensitized boards and exposing it to light ([1] for example) to keep it DIY

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wAer7a3tU4
fish is pretty popular?
> This is how the world works

"It is what it is"
Protocols for making a DIY coronavirus vaccine
Measurement of time spent by a quantum tunnelling atom within the barrier region
How does YouTube and Netflix get approved since Apple can’t verify every video on their platform, including videos that have yet to be published?

This reasoning is beyond absurd.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll check it out.

The disinformation campaigns run by both politicians and companies is covered by Adam Curtis in his documentaries. I might as well mention his other works such as The Power of Nightmares, Bitter Lake, and HyperNormalization in addition to All Watched Over by Machines of Ever Loving Grace. The theme of control via intentional disinformation is a major one in his works.
Why assume that someone attempting this themselves won't stare directly into the light source. Without specific advise, be cautious of the worse case this might cause.
You're confounding American corporatism and capitalism. In which part of capitalist philosophy do you find "rent extracting monopoly power"? Is it in the free market? Is it in the competition? Is in the decentrlization?
(not sure if you are still reading this thread but I would love to convince you)

So if the poor get back more than they put in, how can they be disproportionately be funding it?

A carbon tax+UBi is not regressive, if the rich pay in more than they get out and the poor get back more than they put in. That is the red herring.

The break even point should occur somewhere in the upper middle class. If it was just a tax by it self you would be right. But the effective tax discount through the UBI makes it progressive.
I'm having a lot of fun with Pluto.jl and PlutoUI.jl this past week, it's so easy to use and add interactivity. There are still some rough edges, but that's what PRs are made for!
Well, they actually criple browsers by forcing them to use their sub-par web engine & don't support key web standards.
I started coding BASIC in the late 80s and built websites before CSS and JS was a thing in addition to just coding stuff in whatever language took my fancy to solve whatever whimsical project I had that day, I had a particular affinity for optimising getpixel and putpixel routines in ASM when you could still directly address video memory.

On the one hand this is great because programming is in my bones and I know whatever comes along I'll figure out.

It's also terrible because sometimes something that looks like a rebranded version of what I already know is actually a fantastic new and easier way of doing things, and it's really easy to miss something great.

This just doesn't feel like something great, it just feels like another branded corporate way to structure code that there's dozens of examples of already, it's not an improvement just an alternative, if that makes sense.
indeed it literally was the author's suggestion to search for the word 'backdoor':

>This code, to us, appears to involve the handling of memory error detection and correction rather than a "backdoor" in the security sense. The IOH SR 17 probably refers to scratchpad register 17 in the I/O hub, part of Intel's chipsets, that is used by firmware code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24084977
The fact that TikTok has something like 70 million monthly active users in the U.S. is prima facie evidence that its existence is good for American consumers, who have chosen to consume it, regardless of any potential privacy issues.

I don't mean this to trivialize China's oppressive behavior. And sometimes the right way to punish regimes like China is with economic sanctions, even when those sanctions harm us as a side-effect - I don't know if that's the right answer in this case or not. But from a purely economic point of view, tit-for-tat trade sanctions are an own goal.
The options I know of are the Pinephone and the Librem 5. They're various degrees of open source and secure. They're also slow, lack most software, require constant tinkering, and have terrible battery life. The pragmatic option is to get an Android phone you can install LineageOS on, use the fDroid store, and don't install Google services. This way you can sideload normal apps if you need them.
> CentOS 7.1+ 64 bit version

good luck on CentOS 8. docker does not maintain el8 rpms, and installing the most recent offering from Docker requires that you work around several package conflict issues.

in the end it just didn't feel good, and i ended up going down the (clearly recommended) podman route instead. however, rootless podman containers have their own gotchas...

i kind of wish i'd installed debian on my homeserver instead. :)
Same thing with cash. Imagine cash didn't exist and was now being invented. No-one would ever allow it because it can't be tracked.
In the least you don’t usually have a column of people listening attentively ready to pounce at any perceived false step. Usually 1:1 to 1:3, though it can go up if your convo is “interesting”.
Theory: web components provide a standardised component model for the web so that you don't need to rely on frameworks and a bunch of JavaScript to create interchangeable interoperable components that are no different from built-in browser components. Oh, and you can extend existing built-in components with your own behaviours.

Reality:

- WebComponents is a collection of 4 web standards, one of them is already deprecated, and v0 of another one is also already deprecated.

- The standards provide a verbose, error-prone imperative API that leaks implementation details left and right

- The API is so bad, that the official stance is "the API is aimed at library and framework developers, and you are not expected to write your components using this API". And if you look at the frameworks, they try to not even compile/transpile down to this API

- Since all WebComponents basically have is DOM APIs, the official stance is basically "yeah, they are good for implementing leaf nodes" (that is basic dump components like an simple input field, or a label) because you still need a full-fledged lib/framework for anything else

- You cannot extend some (most?) of the built-in components. And even if you can, your custom implementations will not participate in form events, so you have to create workarounds if you want to submit values from your components

- They break accessibility

- They don't work without JavaScript

- They cannot be rendered server-side

- They are not strictly HTML, but a subset of it, because you can't provide callbacks for their custom events (you can do onClick, but you cannot do onSomeCustomEvent)

- And on the social side of things, their proponents will very rarely acknowledge or discuss these issues in public (even though there are dozens if not hundreds of issues with extensive discussions on GitHub), but will spend not an inconsiderable amount of time and energy bashing non-webcomponent libraries and frameworks
Possibly, but this administration has been so polarizing that at this point, I think it's a lot more about getting like-minded people out of their chairs and to the polls than it is finding more like-minded people.

It's been year after year of polarizing decisions and rhetoric. At this point, basically everyone's dug in on how they feel about this direction for America.
[Google/corporations] exist to extract money effectively from others to make it's shareholders rich . . .

. . . by giving people something they want more than the money they're exchanging with the corporation. It's a positive sum game, at least in my estimation. But, yes, Google is not a charity, and I don't mean to pretend that it is more noble than it is. I'm not a charity either. I wouldn't do my work for free.

But I don't blame anyone for being suspicious of Google or any other corporation's behavior. It's important to verify that corporations are behaving, because there have been plenty of instances of corporate malfeasance in the past.
I should not have used the word "assertion". I meant it in the more general way of "code that checks some property", not a literal "assert" feature as built in to the language.

I was just pointing out that this bug basically requires an explicit test checking for exactly the bug. Fuzzing would not have found the check for you.
> Is this really a fight you want to pick? What does "winning" even look like?

If this kind of analysis mattered to people, the US might be doing something differently in the Middle East.

I remember reading that the goal of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was to make sure Southeast Asian countries continued to weight American desires more heavily than Chinese desires in their own policies. Apparently there's a substantial section of the US state that views it as a priority to make sure that e.g. Vietnam doesn't "flip" over to China.

But that's completely insane. Vietnam definitely will flip to China, no matter what. A Vietnam that looked more to the US than to China would make as much sense as a Canada that looked more to China than to the US.
How is NestyBox different from LXD (and LXC), as they too can:

- Run a distro including system software, systemd etc. as a container

- Run unprivileged, using uid-mapping to provide root and other system uids inside the container?

I've been using LXC and LXD for years to run system images as containers, even migrated some real machines to containers this way.
If the tagged literal approach takes off I'm sure tooling will keep up. JSX wasn't always as well supported as it is now.
I am not sure DNA is that predictive...
Does anyone know why the scale isn't more granular? Type I's apparently consume 10^16W, Type II's 10^26W, Type III's 10^36W. That's 10B multiplier between each level.
The entire apple ecosystem is a sham
One plus runs and android fork and pixels. Both have decent support with non bkoatware images that unlocked for a privacy kernel if you want.
>So, please, stop pretending it's to protect anyone (or in this case macOS doesn't provide a secure environment, right ?).

Well, ultimately, it is. If a "store within a store" (or a second independent store) gets too much traction, it will hold the platform back.

If such a store/third entity becomes powerful Apple can't direct the future and make the changes it wants (the jump to Apple Sillicon is just a recent example, deprecating Carbon, notarization, etc) but has to placate to that too, or risk the ire of tons of dependent users.

Apple has seen that play out when it gave too much power to Adobe, MS and others, and has been correcting for that ever since Jobs came back...
They might want to start censoring Apple TV to keep out the violence.
funny. tried an experiment on chrome while reading your comment. how would i find command+shift+t if i didn't know the shortcut from other browsers?

typed "undo close" on that search box. Nothing. clicked on the "tab" menu. still nothing. finally going back to the search box and typing "tab" it shows up as "reopen closed tab" and show me that it is in the "file" menu.

Weird application choices aside, Wonder why apple don't make that a central keyboard first command box like emacs or most code IDEs do. I mean, i don't even know how to go to that help search box without a mouse.
I totally agree.

In my heyday - I fucking impressed people who watched me navigate through either windows or linux with just the keyboard.

I fucking built a ton of AWS infra with just the keyboard - and that included using their UI as welll as AWSCLI

I am fond of those memories.
You're on the money.

Self-interest is an inherent human nature. Competition is the mechanism to keep self-interest in check. Everyone wants a monopoly. Our institutions and power structure have to be built to be anti-monopoly of all forms.

Rise of corporatism in America is highly correlated with concentration of power in the state. Corporations could not have achieved their scale and power w/o the state putting its foot on the scale to tilt it in favour of one particular outcome or the other. When you have a giant who can throw its weight around, all you need is a bit of smarts to use that your advantage.
FDA Exceptionalism, Commercial Speech, and the First Amendment
I don't think removing unemployment will save these particular businesses. I just acknowledge the moral hazard of paying such high unemployment.
I also think many (if not most) people would rather work. I also know personally many people (but not most) who would rather sit on the butts than work.

I recall (long time ago) that Germany's unemployment included a list that employers could use to find workers. If an unemployed person was offered a job, they were cut from unemployment. Our current system has people claiming unemployment, getting more money that working. This created a situation that employer could complain to the government, but then the employee feels "cheated" and brings those negative feelings back to work... not exactly a good situation.

The current system has all sorts of moral hazard and unintended consequences. I could provide a policy recommendation, but that's really out of scope for a small discussion forum.

I do appreciate your discussion though!
http://archive.is/H5jxM
Netflix wouldn’t have been allowed on iOS devices if appleTV would have been out first :)
Show HN: Session–a pomodoro timer app with beautiful analytics
Hello HN! It's been a while and I'm excited to release Session—a pomodoro timer app (work in 25-minutes chunk) with analytics.

Here's my thought process on why I made Session:

* I used pomodoro technique for over the past 5 years

* the offerings on the market are solid, but missing one thing: a way for me to reflect back and analyze where my time went by

Based on that, I decided to made Session. Here are some "features" that I decided to implement:

* Every session has to have an intent. User have to write what they're working on before timer could start.

* Before timer starts, user will be prompted to breathe in and out once.

* Timer starts. Time to focus!

* Timer ends. Session will ask you what you have learned on this Session and whether you're distracted. It's optional. User can skip it.

* Later at the end of the day, you can analyze your progress.

Here's some benefit that I found while using Session:

* With providing intent, I worked with less distraction.

* If I ended up distracted, the reflection prompt at the end of Session gives me time to reflect. Instead of wasting hours meandering around, it'll be limited to 25 minutes max.

* I realize I didn't work as much as I expected to be. About 2-3 hours in, I'm exhausted. With that knowledge, I plan a long break after about 2 hours to re-energize my work Session later.

The app works fully on freemium. Pro features are sync between devices, dark mode, custom interval, and full analytics access.

It syncs between iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Creating an account for now gives you 7 days free of Pro feature. Would love to know your honest thoughts!
It's known precisely how it is dangerous (well-understood side-effects) and it's understood, given those side-effects, to be safer than having the diseases it treats. Since it's not proven to treat COVID-19, and it has side-effects that can include an irregular heart rhythm, administering it to treat COVID-19 does harm without proven good and may violate a practitioner's Hippocratic oath (and, for an individual self-dosing, may just make the situation worse).
The top-level comment that was being replied to already specified "radio with kill-switch"
Current daily deaths in Sweden are averaging about 4 per day continuing to trend towards 0, vs the 0 or 1 per day in Denmark or Norway. If you're trying to argue that 0.38 per capita vs 0.05 per capita is relevant when the gross numbers are so low I'm not sure what to tell you to convince you otherwise.

Reference: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS... (graph basically looks identical between per capita or raw, pick your poison).

I'm not sure how you make a meaningful statistical difference between them at this point when the numbers are approaching rounding errors.
Totally agree re: "outrage generating machine." Outrage peddling is the easiest and most successful way for media companies to make money, and few media organizations resist that urge.
Oh no! Too late to edit :-(
> I still believe that there is never going to be meaningful NLP without a model/knowledge base about the real physical world.

I think this article is quality enough to constitute meaningful NLP. But, your questions about the amount of human intervention are key. If it takes several hours to a day to produce one of these, then it's not really that meaningful. If one person can produce 100 of these in a day, that's pretty meaningful.
The Golden Age of Data
these particular people were furloughed with pay. I won't speak for all people because obviously there are many diverse situations.
Are they minorities though? I think current anti-science stances are far more widespread than your post seems to give credit for.

I argue that the more abstract science is, the easyer is for the laymen to disagree with it. Sometimes in _highly_ unproductive ways.
I understand that you end up with a skinned webkit and JavaScriptCore - A few years ago I wrote bindings for JSC for a mobile game engine so that you could invoke native code from js in an ios app.
That aside, my point still stands that they can not possible vet content on the internet, so why should they be able to apply this to streaming games also.

Perhaps netflix would have been a better example.
Do they vet every piece of content netflix have, if not then they can't reasonably apply this to games.
That's pretty obvious -- fake news makes money the same way everything else makes money. The remarkable thing is that it's something that people would be motivated to pay for, but they don't have to. Some troll farms receive state and corporate funding, but they can make tons of money the old-fashioned way.
A better deal (money wise etc) is different than "the same set of guidelines" (code check, features wise).

They've cut apps from big companies like Microsoft (now, with their game platform) and Amazon (Kindle purchases) in the past...
Also, I am not a virologist, but this is a common phenomenon known as viral interference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_interference
How fast does Pysa typically run? If I want to run it as part of my CI system, how much additional time might I expect it to add? Obviously this varies from code base to code base, but I'm curious what the experience at Instagram is like?
That is not what "disruptive" means. Linux is popular, but it did not create any of the markets where it is used. Linux did not break any business models (the GPL might have, but that license is not specific to Linux, nor is Linux specific to the GPL, nor did the GPL come out of Europe). Linux did not change how we use computers in any fundamental way. I am not even sure what "innovation" the Linux kernel represents -- what about the Linux kernel, other than how it was licensed, was game changing? What is fundamentally different about Linux (specifically Linux) compared to other kernels?
Startups that address gaps on established products are a great acquisition target for the companies. They would not have invested such time, effort and resources as a niche startup would have. I believe chances of success for such startups are better for a good exit.
> It's really ironic how having suffered from microsoft monopolistic abuses in the past, they now do the EXACT same thing.

It is also extremely concerning how little backlash there is for this behavior, because that is what stopped Microsoft.

> Any advice ?

Last I checked, all Google phones (Pixel, Nexus) can be rooted/flashed in a supported manner. There's irony for you. You can't do anything about the binary blobs for the baseband/radio.
> Note that the improvement only happens after consuming exactly 1.5oz of cognac. Anything more than that and performance drops precipitously.

Anecdotally, this appears to be true for billiards as well.
Delivering training remotely – the same yet different