skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree so much with this popular motto that I have difficulty putting it into words. It reeks of egoism. Please, please replace it with:

"If you are the smartest person in the room, teach until you no longer are."
Bankruptcy, jail, ruined lives: inside the Post Office scandal
If you're interested in Numerical Cognition, I can't recommend Stanislas Dehaene's The Number Sense enough.

It's fantastic.
Microsoft Lost the API War(2004)
The same accusation of shallowness can be leveled at the opposite camp. Including your comment.

Yes, GMO is a refinement of crop modification techniques humans have employed throughout history. So the argument is that since those were "good", this can't be otherwise. But it's not that simple, a lot of the consequences of these modifications are at a closer inspection not that beningn. For example, the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural ones came with severe detrimental impact on the health of those populations.

There is such a thing as something being more or less natural, that's why we have this concept. It's just that it's not easy at all to formalize. Maybe even impossible. But it won't go away, because it actually correlates to an essential aspect of reality.
The failure lies in the ownership model: a telco company trying to build a walled garden. Other walled gardens failed as well of course including some that were basically much more competitive in terms of networking. E.g. AOL failed a few years later because the world outside their walled garden was more interesting. It never really stood a chance of surviving despite being much more similar to the internet at that time.

Operators trying to build walled gardens is a pattern that repeated itself until it became such a low margin business that the only operators able to make a profit were those merely offering full internet over 3G and 4G and not even bothering with the black hole of R&D needed to keep up with what was happening elsewhere. There were attempts in both standards to grandfather in a lot of stuff that is now exclusively done over IP but none of it ended up being popular. The history of mobile phone operators is just a long succession of attempts to copy things from the internet at the time and trying to turn them into walled garden things. Each of those things failed. We're not watching TV via operator provided services. We're not doing video calls via operator provided services, their game portals have long died and faded away. We're not browsing any WAP sites. Instagram wiped out what little adoption MMS ever had. None of it stood a chance.

The incentives and ownership were just wrong and the role as operators as essential middlemen just never panned out in the real world as they hoped.

Many telcos of course managed to convert themselves into successful mobile operators ultimately but their role was diminished to providing network access. My android phone has a phone stack. The only stuff that comes in via my phone number is basically recruiter cold calls. It's a small internet device with some quaint legacy features that I rarely use. Really, numeric identifiers that you have to punch in? In 2020? How is that still a thing? I remember memorizing shit like that a few decades ago.

So, minitel is merely an early and probably expensive incarnation of that. France telecom subsidized the devices and had to earn it back via regular network charges. I doubt that generated anywhere near what they hoped in revenue.
Why does the navy care about iterated games? I guess you can think of war and international affairs as an iterated game, but it seems weird.
No you don't have to do anything.

Let's say I have something like

(s/def :thespec (s/or :foo ::foo
:bar ::bar))

I can then use it in conjunction with core.match like

(match [(s/conform :thespec val)]
[:foo x] (do-something-with x)
[:bar y] (do-something-else-with y))

Which imho is an easier way to navigate these things.
What? Can the browser not just… not tell the website?
It's basically the idea of dialectical materialism. The very popular book White Fragility is a great example of this thought process.
post a comment on HN using Eww. :-)
I wanted to try that a while ago but didn't get it to work.
"expectation is the road to disappointment"
can't remember where it's from.
If that quote resonates with you, then you've never felt true fear.
I see this pattern a lot I wonder if it's been named and discussed before.

I think creativity likes having small struggles and challenges.
"A witty saying proves nothing."

-- Voltaire

The world is far more complex than any human could possibly fathom, and reducing complex subjects to witticisms usually works against those subjects, whether intentional or not.
Not at the temperatures hobbyists are soldering at. It's more of a concern for industrial soldering.

Hobbyists have to worry about the fumes from flux instead, and lead free solder requires more flux.
Played chess in high school and lost interest in actually playing the more I explored AI... I find it much more fascinating to explore Alpha's games. (Probably I'm also mentally lazier now.)
I tried to post a comment here using Eww. But only the last line of the comment was posted, as above. (this one is from Firefox)
Affiliation and Connection in Real Estate Photography
>suggested midi keyboard

Uses non-weighted keys. Nobody should have to ever suffer a non-weighted keyboard.
I read an interesting article on the USPS. They aren't just a threat to the US elections, Europeans who live in the US and want to vote are screwed as well. Next day delivery is not something that is guaranteed in every country.
Hmph.

ESP-CAMs combine a 2-megapixel OV2640 with an ESP32 clocked at 240MHz that has a Wi-Fi b/g/n + Bluetooth 4.2 baseband integrated into the chip.

Finished/working flashable boards run for about $6 apiece on Aliexpress.
As a staff engineer, you have multiple responsibilities you need to cover, and you can delegate some of them.

The reality is that in most teams you can delegate the "Deep Diver" responsibility most of the time. "Context sharing" and "Coaching" not so much.

So yes, as some comments in other threads mention, your coding/hard tech contributions diminish with time.
I didn't say 'the same bug manifested in different ways', I said 'same number of bugs but manifested in different ways'.

I.e. the defect ratio was similar, bugs in my FP program were of different type than in the imperative ones.
Given my interest in motorcycles, I'd probably be six feet under
Tracker composers did some absolutely incredible work with almost nothing, and the limitations weeded out anyone who wasn't passionate and forced those who were to push the boundaries.

Now - as you say - we have shovel-ware sample collections that anyone can buy and use, and it's so much harder to do anything that stands out with them.
Minitel was run by the French state, it doesn't get much more centralised than that! And of course far-right or Nazi messageboards would have got censored off it immediately.

(I have no idea whether there was much politics content on minitel, but I've not heard of it, and would be interested in references)
That is exactly my point. Optionality is complex and causes a lot of bugs in applications (certainly in mine, I would say it's the #1 root cause of bugs).

Which is why I'd like spec to help me with managing it. It's not obvious, because whether certain data is required or optional depends on context. But from what I've heard, bright minds at Cognitect are thinking about it, and given their track record so far, I'm pretty confident I will like the solution.
[OP here]

Amusingly, I learned about Minitel just a few hours ago when I stumbled upon this video from John Stossel's show (obligatory thanks to YouTube algorithm) where he mentions Minitel as an exhibit of government/public sector's failure to innovate and a way for the French government to 'control the growth' of this new technology before private players. Here's the video (with the exact time stamp) where Mr. Stossel talks about Minitel -- https://youtu.be/rOkkqoDJl-s?t=208

I then searched the web (through Google) for information on Minitel and this IEEE article showed up.
I think you're too harsh on recruiters. They're paid less than developers and recruiting is a numbers game.

They can't afford to spend time to get super deep technically, since it's not worth it. And I imagine that those that do dive deep just get a technical job for less pressure and more money.
They still test the sirens every month. The loudness is tuned to mostly alert people who are outside -- the expected action on hearing the siren is going inside anyways.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

And also:

"Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks."

Lazarus Long, from Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"
I was interested to see what they were doing with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_(chess)
Sounds like you need some meat (analogy aside of dietary preference) to sink your teeth into.

It's not a push because a push comes from behind. It's you grabbing onto something elevating and interesting because it's juicy.

A reasonable senior will recognize your talent, but a stagnant organization will simply extract your current value without pulling you up with that bite.

I know the analogy is bit inhumane, but the human part comes from those very human people who just want to solve problems.

Whether they be lower in pay/'rank' or higher, find the people who appreciate your strengths immediately. Don't ever be afraid to express your ideals in your capabilities and learning process.

In any organization from 10 to 10,000 you will find those folks who can take a genuine appreciation for your skillset and apply it.

The failure state should always be: "I'm departing to company Y, I wish you the best."

The success is an expression of your ideals.

The 'meat' of my argument is - at your level - don't look for the push, find the pull.

You've got this.

Edit: an -> and (Para. 5)
I know. But then you are buying hardware again. And the good quality stuff is expensive.
The adventures of 7 Parsi men who cycled across the world century ago
Amiga-era trackers carry the music equivalent to graphics limitations in older computers actually bolstering creativity.
If I recall correctly in a non-testing scenario the sirens are twice as loud as during a test. Should provide enough of a hint I'd imagine.
Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
Studying Water
Non-native english speaker here, can you elaborate? I can only find a sexual meaning to it...
It has saner defaults for a lot of workflows. Two small examples: stashing prompts you for a name (instead of defaulting to a useless name), and commiting will show the diff of what you're committing on the side (similar to commit -v).

It also gives a rather nice in-editor workflow for adding a single hunk to the git index, which makes crafting sensible commits easier.
Having been to Chinese PCB fabs recently, they're no longer extremely dirty. The major impact is international shipping.
Guess this is not very popular with the contemporary hippy crowd. Personally I do find that it applies to everything really.
Mental health is very complex, but I think it's a spectrum, with low-grade symptoms at one end, and manic episodes at the extreme other end.

I'm sure it varies a lot from person-to-person, but for me, I have a constant and profound feeling of sadness and futility, I often feel like crying, and occasionally consider ending my life (I almost fantacise about it, because I wouldn't have to feel this way any more).

One of my parents has manic depression, and a sibling also has clinical depression - I presume there is a genetic factor at play; I was brought up in a middle-class household with parents that loved me, and I seldom wanted for anything. Now, I'm a successful software architect with a wife, kids and side-business. I own my own home, I have 2 nice cars, and I have a high income. Yet I still feel that sadness, and often just don't see the point of living, or life at all, really.

Except for randoms on the internet, I've never told anyone about this. I've come close many times, but I guess the longer you keep a secret, the harder it is to let it out.

If anyone else is reading this, I'd enourage them not to be me, and to seek medical help. If you don't think you can speak to a doctor, I'd also recommend trying 5-HTP - I started 200mg 2x a day a few years back, and the change was incredible. It may have saved my life.
"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur"

"Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound"
These days, people would settle for RSU or Stock Options.
Magit is by far the best git porcelain, although the only other option is the CLI, of course.

The difference between a porcelain like magit and some other "front-end" is you are actually using git. Other front-ends hide git behind new abstractions (or rather, old abstractions, more like SVN or other centralised VCSs) and I find that users of these never really understand how git works. I've been using magit for almost my entire life with git, I don't really know how to use the CLI, but I consider myself a git expert.
I’d like to see a plain text browser with javascript and minitel / teletext style graphics.

Maybe it could be good for accessibility .... the concept of making modern websites into plain text just doesn’t work very well (I.e Lynx).
agreed. in most cases it is a lifelong battle. what worked for them will not work for all. I do like the idea of the more holistic, self-led approach though
No mobile beta comes out at the end of this year, and for other more personal computing devices at the end of next year. At least that is my assumption when they mentioned devices with more then 4gb of ram.
They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.
The Bland book: Why stand out when you were born to fit in?
Fascinating, and genuinely refreshing.

Wonder if we could go one further and have tournaments where the rules changed to a different ordered variation after a set number of moves.

Now that would be mind bending.
NSF, NIH

There are tons of federal agencies that could sponsor FOSS.

https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/

I'd love to see a program where FOSS devs could get say 2k-4k tax free per month depending on part or full time work. A billion a year would pay for just under 21k developer years or close to 42k part time devs.

Federal, state and local governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount every year on proprietary, closed source software.
960 chess is hugely popular now, and is even being used in tournaments - one of them being today. The only thing that is going out of style in chess is classic chess.

Stalemates happen less in 960.
I kind of take the quote to mean “if it isn’t a hell yes! Then it’s a no” sort of a thing. If I don’t say “hell yes!” To the prospect of marrying my girlfriend, then perhaps proposing to her now is the right move.
Not a Magit user, but vim-fugitive. The main reason I prefer it over the CLI is for (un)staging hunks or lines. But I still use the CLI a lot for other stuff.
Nice analysis! Thank you!
The Minitel wasn’t the Internet, though, and was in its time quite innovative. There are much better examples of strategic errors from various governments (and private companies as well, but it does not fit the same agenda).

[edit] in any case, thanks for the link. That was an interesting read.
I will not use a copycat service of github which is under control of the CCP.
A great analysis by Private Eye, which has been reporting on this story for a long time - Private Eye Online | Justice Lost In The Post: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i...

For the HN crowd this story shows the real-life impact of software errors and failures.
Really good article. Context sharing is really powerful.

Your job as a staff engineer involves going into a cross-team meeting and explaining in technical detail a given piece of work, thanks to which your/another team re-estimates a given ticket from 5 points to 1 point. Those 4 points of difference are your hard work, done over the course of a 30-60 minute meeting.

This is probably what people mean by "force multiplier".
Click is a very good software router to read and learn: https://github.com/kohler/click

It can be more than a router though.
When I was in college, a Monopoly game appeared on the DEC-10. Playing that for a while completely ruined the game for me. Then someone wrote a bot to play ADVENT, which ruined that, too.

My ability to play chess declined precipitously after I learned how to program, because while thinking of my next move I'd always digress into how to design a program to do the work for me.

I originally wrote the Empire game because it was unbearably tedious to play manually, but the computer took care of the tedium and what was left was the fun.
“Crusade” and “jihad” (other than in the particular religion of origin) have pretty much identical denotation, connotation, and cultural baggage.

The idea that “jihad” has problems that “crusade” does not is pretty exactly the same problem that you point to HBO getting in trouble for in regard to Game of Thrones, so it is super ironic that you present the narrative you do as a defensive reaction to the blowback from GoT.
I think this just means Firefox isn't the priority of Mozilla
>Nowadays, I get Native Instruments Ultimate — and despite sounding orders of magnitude better, all I do is toying around. I always have the nagging feeling there's gotta be one sound or effect in that endless library that's still better than the one I'm using right now.

That's why I never start a track without a finished idea in my head. I used to noodle and would get lost in the rabbit warren.
Definitely an HN favorite - but has something changed lately for you to post this now?
The key to chess being entertaining is time pressure. Watching Hikaru and Magnus play blitz is far more enjoyable than a 'normal' game.

I've been watching a lot of Hikaru's streams since PogChamps put him on my radar and he is a very entertaining player IMO.
As others have mentioned - USPS is extremely interested in mail fraud and other crimes, arresting over 5k people a year. They handle reports like this all the time.
Memento mori.
Unus sed leo.
Sure. But a lot of pro-GMO thinking is also quite glib ("we've modified crops for thousands of years so what's the problem?").

I think mostly what's behind anti-GMO attitudes is the fear of unknown and unintended consequences. We've seen a lot of those ever since technology has been invented and they do seem to have proliferated in the last couple of centuries. So, it's not unjustified, especially when messing with extremely complex and barely understood systems. It's the same for weather engineering, for example. Parable of the sorcerer's apprentice and all that...
Thank you so much for rephrasing that terrible original motto, it always has bothered me as well.
Sounds very interesting. I would love to read about how you did that.
I don’t disagree that purging unneeded code has value. That being said, software systems are so complex, isn’t it better to just leave code alone if it’s not negatively impacting the business? How many orgs have a micro service architecture that is so well tested that you can delete code from one service and demonstrate that won’t cause a failure in some other service? I haven’t seen one yet.
Rust does support PGO
Front end web development. It's so ubiquitous I don't need to name it.
Ships in the harbour are safe, but that’s not what ships were made for
IMO it kind of sucks that you're not able to add comments to JSON easily.

In TOML (or YAML) it's just as easy as prepending it with # at the beginning of the line.
Makes you wonder if any of the players mentioned here are involved. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet...
The Monero cryptocurrency's developers are all funded via the community via bounties. I think it works really well.

https://ccs.getmonero.org/ (new system)
https://forum.getmonero.org/22/completed-tasks (old system)
Unit tests are a bad fit, you need to run a test that is representative for an actual work load.

A unit test that tests code that’s cold in practice would make it look like hot code, and be counter productive.
actually this "java class-like" ordering of dns labels was in place in the UK in academic networks before the internet.
On the other hand, those documents are well organized and clearly written, which makes skipping around to just the parts you need rather easy. A wealth of example material and helper tools (e.g. lintian) are also available, and all the policy changes are versioned and described as human-readable diffs[1], so the cost of catching up if you haven't been following progress for a few years is quite low.

I think my first simple debian package was working within a few hours, and I was tackling more complex stuff within a few days. Not bad for a system that can handle the oddball installation requirements of just about any software, while also accounting for many install/configure/upgrade/downgrade/reinstall/remove edge cases.

I'll grant that it is a complicated system, and there's a lot of legacy stuff beneath the higher-level tools. I suppose my point is that the vast majority of the complexity turns out to be avoidable in most cases, and getting started is not as hard as it looks.

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist...
For me, that book was W. Richard Stevens's TCP/IP Illustrated, volumes 1 & 2 particularly.
Pretty much the entirety of human history stands in contradiction to the idea that if we were each left alone to make up our own rules we would all just be nice to each other, even if you go back to Rousseau’s state of nature [1].

You say I need a system to enforce an advantage over you but, without it, all I need is force of arms.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare
Absolutely all true, these notions actually share the same model: centrally controlled, no control at terminal / no open access for new entrants, consumption devices are locked to consume only, hard to “become center” or provider, etc. The networking model was a logical consequence (and practical implementation) of the the centrally controlled walled garden you describe.

Many hackers were trying to escape it by becoming their own providers and also connecting with other international x25 servers and foreign hackers. For example, Assange was actually from these times.

Nevertheless, it did generate much more revenue than what they initially envisioned.
Herd animals are masters of conformal mapping (with you, or a dog, as a pole)

poor example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDQw21ntR64

(Humans are also herd animals, which has repercussions for safety measures in public spaces.)
I have the same issue; I frequently get an interest in making music again, buy an instrument (because of course what I have available isn't good enough), doodle with it, then let it collect dust.

I need a band or something, idk.
Is it wrong that my utopia includes a VCS where PRs are submitted by constituents and implemented by incumbents?
I think it would be a good idea to put the first 2 words at the end of the title to make it less sensational?
I for one don't care about all-analog. My 1980's Dual turntable is connected to a phono preamp that has a bluetooth interface.