skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Although I personally don't recommend it, but have you heard of Customize in Emacs?

I have, I've tried it, and it's terrible compared to virtually any other editor's equivalent for editing preferences/settings. It's super hard to navigate and search, it's difficult to figure out the terminology if you don't already know it, it's unclear how various settings affect one another, and IIRC it can actually make changes to your configuration file that conflict with editing it in any other way. To be fair, I am not a regular Emacs user, but getting sucked into the insanely frustrating tar pit of Customize made Emacs seem far more inscrutable to me for years.

If I could suggest just one change to make Emacs feel more "modern," it would be to entirely redo the Customize section to make it behave more like VS Code's preference system: one single page with collapsible headings, clear descriptions, and perhaps a super-top-level "behavior" control that makes batch changes to make Emacs more comfortable for users coming from different editors (e.g., choosing between a Canonical Emacs mode, Vim mode, or CUA mode). It doesn't have to try to cover every possible setting -- just hit the top several dozen and then say "for everything else, there's Lisp".

> Vim is also beginner hostile, so the beginner hostility really isn't the reason for Emacs's low usage.

This strikes me as half-correct, as someone who's made serious attempts with both of these editors. They're both difficult for beginners to get used to, but once you get over the initial learning hump, Vim was always much easier for me to tweak and configure. That may sound nuts, but editing .vimrc feels like editing an INI file, and at least in my experience, Vim's plugins are much better behaved when it comes to not stomping on one another. Every attempt I've made at getting serious with Emacs has ended in spending hours trying to get two or three extensions I want to use to play nicely with each other; with Vim (or VS Code), this almost never happens.

I've long suspected Emacs's greatest strength is also its greatest liability: you can do almost anything with it if you learn Emacs Lisp, but it often feels like you must learn Emacs Lisp to do almost anything with it.

> Most people new to, say, Visual Studio don't start with "How do I download plugins".

Not to pile on with the other reply, but, well: editors like Visual Studio Code, Atom, Panic's new Mac-only editor Nova, and even Sublime Text to a degree actually make plugins front and center. It's a very different approach than what Emacs and Vim have historically taken, but I think it's contributed greatly to their mindshare. VS Code in particular goes out of its way to recommend plugins to you based on the files that you've recently edited.
Mojaloop Foundation’s open source software for payment interoperability
“What codec should I use?”
Lexical nesting? While I agree with the statement you’re making — that reading code requires you to understand more about what the code means, in that context/runtime, I also think the example you’re picking apart reminds me of the dangers of undefined behaviour in C++. If the language specification plus its test cases still has implementation-specific details, then while by all means measure or discover them, but I would both say this is not unique to Swift and is just part of the complexity that is not writing CPU instructions directly that target only one type of CPU design. Maybe I’m taking this too far, but my point I suppose is that I know what was intended by the swift code even if the exact details are optimized out from underneath me by a compiler or language library. Might as well argue that you should have full unit and integration tests for every target platform to ensure the code behaves the way you expect, and even then you’ll still hit platform-specific edge cases, particularly on the wide variety of platforms Linux supports... I do tend to trust Clang, but even it can vary greatly from (hopefully major) version to version.
Did this work in court when Alex Jones tried to claim that his show is pure comedy and stage persona should not be liable because it’s just a fictional character only played by Jones? Will Joe Rohan start to claim that no reasonable person would trust information on his podcast?

[1] https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/alex-joness-attorneys-...

[2] https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/court-upholds-alex...
A ton of people. Iran has a very different schooling system than the rest of the world.
Except the median disposable income (aka middle class income) in the US is higher than most of Europe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
There is an inherent cost to switching jobs, regardless if one potentially could, that one may not be able to afford.

It’s not just as simple as “finding a new job”. Runway for bills, the time it takes to find the right opportunity, etc, are all definite resources that are required to make the switch - which I’d argue far more people have trouble affording as opposed to your proposed statement that few people have trouble finding new jobs within their space.
The vanilla JavaScript basics to know before learning React JavaScript
Buddhism is politically quietist traditionally, but Abrahamic religions are politically activist, so Western reception of Buddhism requires transforming it into “engaged” Buddhism. It’s hard for someone raised in the West to look at Nazis and just shrug and say that they can only kill the body but not the soul, but that is more or less what Buddhists before 1800 would say.
What if Radio waves simply don't work the same on other planets .

Or one of the first things civilizations figure out is to not broadcast your presence.

Or ... Everyone else in the universe found peace by stopping at the stone age , before all this social media made us miserable.

It's just conjecture, but I imagine aliens exist, but they might not even be in a form re recognize.
I agree that age is an issue since design decisions were made before standards were agreed upon, and it is going to be very disruptive to change those design decisions. Changing keybindings is certainly going to cause pain, but even remedying terminology is problematic (e.g. window vs. frame). That's likely why cosmetic issues were popping up as potential solutions.

I agree that those cosmetic changes won't modernize Emacs in a meaningful way since it is a very low bar. I also think the article is correct in pointing out that discoverability needs to be addressed. Contrast Emacs and VS Code in terms of extensions. Both editors are intended to be extended. VS Code does a good job of highlighting extensions, while the Emacs extension manager is buried. Likewise, Org seems to be rather popular yet very people will discover it independently since the user interface isn't designed for that.

That said, some of the discussion about discoverability was disheartening. Telling people about features isn't really sufficient. They need to be exposed to it while they are working with the program, and that exposure has to be in a non-disruptive way. Tutorials, video or otherwise, aren't going to help because of that. There are plenty of Emacs tutorials online anyhow.

If the LWN article is an accurate reflection of the discussions, I think that Emacs developers have to put a lot more thought into how to progress.
I don't think anyone in the astrophysics community thinks we're alone. But the physics also suggests that unless they are extremely common it's unlikely that we'll ever detect any (let alone meet any). So practically we are alone.

Outside the astrophysics community the majority of scientists I know also believe in life but similarly don't think we will detect/meet them. But there are some that don't believe (I don't know a single person in hard science that thinks we're alone but I do know engineers and those in soft sciences that reject the notion).
> For most people, technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises.

I'd change that to: "For most people, corporate neoliberal technology is a haunted house riddled with unpleasant surprises."

Writing that recognizes that we live with the most un-free market of all time:

"We are in the middle of a global transformation. What that means is, we're seeing the painful construction of a global market economy. And over the past 30 years neoliberalism has fashioned this system. Markets have been opened, and yet intellectual property rights have ensured that a tiny minority of people are receiving most of the income." [1]

And:

"How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?" [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnYhZCUYOxs

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
Law that most people need is not number theory or quantam mechanics that it has to be super complicated to understand.

The social contract I have with society is not I that follow arbitrary rules I don't understand in return for the benefits the society gives me.

A breonna taylor situation would not be legal in any sane society yet it is today, because the people running the judicial system make laws inaccessible and self protecting.

Complicated laws and regulations need enforcement and lawyers . You legalize alcohol, FBI needs weed laws and civil rights to keep their jobs. You legalize weed , they need something else.

Today the DoJ will charge you by the page to get access to legal documents. What else are we paying tax for !!

If it is too complicated for only professionals to understand then needs to be simplified.
You are right we need fundamental simplication and radical change .

From the Justinian times codification and simplification of law has always been a mark of good civilizations. Asoka put stone pillars so people can know the law. There are countless examples. If ten commandments needed lawyers it would never have worked .

It will only happen if we doing something about it
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That's a fascinating chart. I would like to reference it in the future, but I cannot find a source for the data. Did you compile it yourself? Have you written your data and methodology somewhere?
You used to be able to access it.
And about half a cheap sword, which puts the current top comment ("steel swords and the like were quite valuable") in perspective. Iron and its upstream inputs were expensive, yes, but labour costs kicked in too for fiddly things like chainmail (100s or 1200d, and it definitely doesn't contain 200 times as much iron as the sword, more on the order of 10) and clothing. I'm hoping/assuming Bret will get to pre-industrial textiles in this series; the amount of labour involved was phenomenal even if the physical inputs were cheaper.
there is actually a good amount of literature that is published in the last 20 years on people developing diabetes after the flu. I would not be surprised if this was also the case for covid
> Up-to-date Firefox and Chrome are not the only things that autofill or negotiate http connections.

Sure. But it basically means it's a matter of time before everything else stops doing it too.

I've just tried to use the stripe checkout js from an HTTP site and it doesn't work. You can send your own requests of course, so I wonder if that's what you meant instead... (To be clear, I didn't say stripe is not vulnerable, just that you can't use their scripts as they are now - so simple id swapping wouldn't work)

Either way, I'm curious to see killginx.
In every language I’ve used with a for-in construct (or equivalent), the iterated variable is scoped to the loop. That seems to be implied by the syntax, too; it’s equivalent to “for all i in [1,9] where i mod 2 = 0”. If you saw that in a math context, you’d expect i to have no meaning beyond the iteration.

Is there a case to be made for other behavior? Or an example of a language that intentionally treats it any differently? (Unless you go out of your way to iterate over a variable you’ve declared in an outer scope in C, but then that’s not really a for-in construct.)
I will pay good money for a drone that comes with a little computer with hard drives and the only thing it ever goes online to do is email me alerts.

But nobody wants to build that because the tech world has mostly stopped thinking about how to solve problems.
Probably not directly however simpler code usually has less bugs and is quicker to debug.
The US got a late start dealing with the virus because of a failure of leadership at the very top. The president downplayed the virus and failed to lead an effective response to the virus early on. That delay in widespread testing, preventative measures like promoting masks, social distancing, minimizing gatherings, and the like should have started in January or February. Instead he left it to individual states, and the lack of a unified effort likely thwarted our progress fighting the virus.

Even 7 months into the pandemic we still don't have widespread testing or contact tracing, and there is still no coherent national strategy, and instead it is left to states which have different approaches.

In talking with my wife about it (she was not born in the US), she said that Americans really emphasize individual freedom more than in other countries, which is evident in people protesting against masks. In other countries, there is a sense of "we're in this together" and there is more cooperation with national or international efforts that help the greater good. In her home country of the Philippines, quarantine measures involved restricting travel between towns (similar to what was implemented in Italy). I am certain that would result in widespread riots in the US.
It’s a problem because it raises less revenue, since the tax base is narrower. It’s also more precarious, because the tax base happens to be the most mobile. To give you a sense, New York State’s tax brackets are structured similarly to the Federal government’s: the top 1% pay ~50% of the state budget. That means that if just a small handful of highly mobile people leave NY, the State loses half its revenue.

In contrast, taxing the middle class raises more money, which allows the government to spend more progressively.
Even beer required a large amount of energy to make, usually from trees or coal.
What is this ?
> kill all of them except .com and .org

A bit tangential, but ignoring reality for a minute wouldn't it make more sense to kill .com and .org as well and retain only the country codes (ie .us, .uk, .cn, etc)? At least it would make the various jurisdictional issues clear.

(In a perfect world, I also wish there were legislation forcing any and all local government entities to use appropriate <service>.gov.<country> domains. It is incredibly difficult to explain to the average person why a few government websites have .com or .org or other random TLDs, and the inconsistency of it all makes things easier for scammers.)
You clearly didn't read my comment. It starts with "we can debate the level in which America needs to be involved." I was not interested in getting into whether or not these tactics should be used.

My point was the OP said "these people do not pose a threat to my freedom" which is categorically false. Aal-Qaida is a terrorist group that directly caused the deaths of thousands of Americans, ripping them from their loved ones. To make _this specific argument_ against this weapon is just insulting to the victims.
I've been coding for almost 40 years and never used emacs. We all have our own tools and practices. To each their own.
Out of sight, out of mind!
> we are not special

This is a very common trap. I see this way of thinking applied to the presence of life on Earth all the time. It’s gilded in the Drake equation. It is very possible that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy or even universe with life on it. As the most powerful species on that planet, we should make responsible decisions. There is zero evidence, or even a compelling argument using existing data, that contradicts this possibility.
Yes that's my point, you reduce spending so you can reduce tax, not reduce tax and increase spending. There's nothing conservative about current GOP.
Industrial Revolution was launched with Iron, not steel. Steel was costly and difficult to make in large quantities until the late 19th C.
If we look at the wikipedia page about technical debt, there is a long list of possible causes of technical debt.

To site some examples:

Insufficient up-front definition
Lack of clear requirements before the start of development
Lack of documentation
Lack of a test suite
Lack of collaboration / knowledge sharing
Lack of knowledge/skills resulting in bad or suboptimal code
Poor technical leadership
Last minute specification changes

Notice that these issues are called 'technical debt' because they can have a similar outcome as technical debt. They can create a bottleneck.

But why the hell would we call these issues technical debt?

These issues are self-explanatory. Calling them technical debt not only seems inappropriate, it just obfuscates the cause of these problems and it doesn't provide any new insight.

None of those were called 'tech debt'--they were cited as common causes. How each case is handled may lead to tech debt.
Does the Drake equation really strongly suggest there is other life? It seems to me there are still so many unknown variables that we can't make that determination at this point. Sure, some people have some intuition about it, but intuition is often (normally...?) wrong.
I guess I don't really agree that it doesn't sound hard. Like, at some point I might have thought it didn't sound hard, but I've come to view good leadership as much more important, subtler, and rarer than I once did.
Those are $20 dishes and $3 LNBs. The dishes are just stamped sheet metal. The LNBs are highly integrated; mostly passives and a really cheap RF ICs.
Redis AOF = Write Ahead Log

Write ahead logs are the key to production-grade durability on just about any database system you ever come into contact with. There is a lot of prior art in this space, and lots of approaches in OSS you can look at (postgres for example), but if you're going to google for it, 'redis AOF' may not get you too far.
I agree with Moldoveanu that the incentive structure at many open access journals is backwards (even though I empathize with the intent of the journals). But at the same time I don't think this has anything to do with this particular crack (assuming it is a crack) in peer review, which would have happened anyway at any number of journals. I agree with you that it might be better to just publish in archives or use academic organization fees or something to cover costs of some kind of peer review system.

On the other hand, I've seen both sides of this coin. Assuming Moldoveanu is correct, every once in awhile this happens and it's frustrating as a reviewer. I was once in a very similar position as a reviewer at a statistics journal, where someone submitted and eventually published something that flew in the face of well-established findings and proofs, due to a simple but easily overlooked and consequential error in one of the derivations. When I reached out to the journal about a commentary or letter to the editor, I was stonewalled in a similar way and got the sense the journal was trying to save face over the error. I actually respected the author and think they made a simple mistake but still think it was worth a correction or at least discussion.

At the same time, I've seen cases that look and sound just like this to an outsider, where some contingent of researchers gangs up on someone with a sense of self-righteousness to assert their authority over something, but they're actually completely one hundred percent wrong about it. A smear campaign that looks just like these published refutations of Christian's claims, that look very intelligent and rigorous (and in some sense are), that are nonetheless completely dead wrong. Someone on HN would see a blog post just like this, by the equivalent of Moldoveanu complaining about the incompetence of the journal etc, how Christian is incompetent, etc, and would just assume that because Moldoveanu is asserting some claim to rigor, they must be correct, and the person not doing so is incorrect.

This case is different because of course we're talking about Bell's Theorem, so our prior about it being wrong is skewed strongly in the contrary direction. But in many cases, most cases in academics, which side is right or wrong isn't always clear. There's just one party who claims the other party is incorrect, and others just kind of adopt one side or another. Do we assume the majority is correct?

I'm not really sure what my point is, other than that indignation doesn't really persuade me so much anymore. I can empathize with it, I've been there -- but really in the end all that can be done is to make your case and just make it again whenever you're asked or the topic comes up.

Really the broader issue is about gish gallop and Brandolini's law which seems to be the norm now in many facets of life, and what, if anything, to do about it.
My point is simply that on the level of geopolitics there isn’t a difference between murder and manslaughter. You keep asserting that there is without articulating the material ramifications of that difference for the actual people who live in a country.

And I fail to see how the US fits into the category of manslaughter anyway. For instance, there has been plenty of strong and well-documented anti-communist malice at the highest levels of power in US government and intelligence. But even so, imperialist histories like to portray this country as somehow stumbling into the atrocities it has committed.
> Two of the top 10 biggest companies in america captured 99% of the market, there’s something pretty big stopping me.

Correct - and Google's very popular, but not dominant OS will already let you sideload whatever code you like, which is a big part of why you'd have a hard time competing. I'm sorry, running arbitrary code on your daily driver phone is just not the game-changing feature you're making it out to be.
Exactly this. I exclusively use search when navigating to any financial website. There's a very large financial incentive to pull off a "typo" fishing domain in those cases as well as a need to regularly check for data breaches.
> Thus, the fact that we are unable to detect any signal from even a single other civilization is quite puzzling, we should be inundated by those signals.

Or other societies realized widely broadcasting noise is bad for whatever reason. Maybe they're composed of something sensitive to certain wavelengths. Like humans don't use xrays to transmit data, maybe radio waves are harmful in some way.

Or maybe broadcasting widely resulted is a case study for getting your civilization invaded, so they avoided it it or only send signals as strong as they need to be.

Or maybe it's so consistently and universally done that we simple see it as cosmic background radiation.

Or maybe something like quantum entanglement someday makes wave transmissions for communication seem as backwards as smoke signals.

Humans have only observed a tiny slice of space over a very tiny time span--less than 100 years. It's like being born in a barren desert and never venturing out and realizing most of the world is ocean and full of activity. We don't know what to look for or where. An observer 200 light years away from earth could easily conclude that there's no life here, since all they'd have to go by is inconclusive signs of some gases in the air.