skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in my late 20s, and already starting to feel some anxiety around the nearing conclusion of what could be called my "youth". But my therapist, in his forties, has experienced (and relayed to me) the "life begins at 40" philosophy (I didn't actually realize it was something other people said until I saw this article).

It's not just wishful thinking for him: he felt that he didn't really figure out who he was, didn't really start self-actualizing en force before 40. Having known him a few years, it's clear to me that he genuinely has a very balanced and happy life, one with a family that he loves but also with his own goals and small pleasures, his own meaningful friendships, etc.

So I guess: I would tend to agree that the midlife crisis is a trap constructed by our western culture, and one that it's very possible to simply pass by. I think you just have to never stop working on yourself and asking (and listening to) what your needs are. Keep a balanced life of relationships, and pursuits, and self-care, and - yes - some accomplishments too. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't get complacent, but don't burn out either. Be in it for the long haul.
Maybe it's easy to overlook these things when you have a really deep computer science background, but coming to software engineering from a non-CS background (math degree) I found lots of valuable knowledge in CS. The most important parts for me would be:

- State machines. I run into a lot of state machines, especially incompletely specified ones. Not that everybody gets these wrong if they haven't studied state machines in a textbook and worked the exercises at the end of the chapter, but recognizing "oh, this is a state machine" gives me a mental framework, a notation, a vocabulary that other developers understand, and a better ability to understand when a problem is underspecified or inconsistent.

- Queueing theory and algorithmic complexity. These two usually come in handy from the perspective of spotting and avoiding stupid mistakes. It's true that people can do a pretty decent job from a handful of rules of thumb, but not everybody has that minimum knowledge, and sometimes a problem has a twist that an imprecise rule of thumb doesn't account for.

- Distributed systems. Just understanding the solution of a few problems in depth, and knowing from that how hard simple things really are, is incredibly valuable. Without that background, people can naively tackle extremely complex problems, bash their heads against them for years, and still underestimate the difficulty of the problems they've created for themselves by orders of magnitude.

In general, the rigor of doing theoretical problems, the discipline of actually proving things, creates habits that uncover lots of non-happy path possibilities.
Ratpoison has mouse support. I've used it, it's just a normal tiling window manager, nothing too radical.
Onion routing also requires trust that there is no collusion between nodes
It's truly unfortunate. I would love to try the Quest 2, I've heard some pretty great things.

The requirement to have a Facebook account makes it a complete nonstarter by itself. The fact that I can get locked out of my hardware that I purchased because Facebook's software decides my account isn't 'legit' enough? Gonna be a serious nope from me.
The opening strength will only work when you know how to exploit something small in opponent's opening like a miss of tempo or wrong reply, which I think is above the skill of sub 1700. All the players above 1000 know basic principles like mobility of pieces and developing centre.
Try "we're moving to Pink Pants Linux"
Just went and read your article.

Here's to hoping you've shorted Bitcoin hard.
If you look at their post history here and their github profile it's pretty obviously a troll. Claiming in this (copypasta style?) post that Linux destroyed their computer, but in another comment saying how much they love bash programming. In one comment they grew up playing Roblox, in another they have decades of experience across multiple programming languages including C++, Rust, Lisp, and Python.
Yeah, but they're not going to use a Beetle are they? :)
I deploy on linux, but dev on macOS without a vm or docker or anything. If you're not doing anything OS dependant, which most web apps don't, you can run everything natively.
> It's not like that's the only solution that's been floated. Stimulus checks would have kept people out of poverty too.

You're right, but the implications of the GGP comment's phrasing imply they wouldn't have liked that solution.

IMHO, in some quarters, the weeping and gnashing of teeth about the costs mandatory social distancing (up to and including stay at home orders) directly flows from the rejection of government relief as a solution to anything. If you take that off the table, you're left with a false choice between pandemic destruction and economic destruction.
Are you arguing that ABBYY Finereader is going to produce different PDF files once they support the new OS? Possibly they will, if only to work around this obvious bug in Preview.
Man. You have to be careful.
Pocket has been pushing too much of political content. Specially from the left's point of view.
I believe anything with a bias is bad. Right or Left. Specially such sites where people see or read. Otherwise pocket is great.
Really? Why? Seems like it would unnecessarily restrict the range of compatible clients.
Functional (FP) tends to be a "personality fit" thing. Many who do just fine in procedural and/or OOP don't transition to FP well.

FP shops have tried since the early 60's to stay viable and expand, but usually fail outside of niche domains. I'm just the messenger. FP has had more than plenty of shots throughout history to prove its mettle in the real world.

I personally have found FP hard to debug. The "naked state" of imperative programming is actually helpful when debugging, because the context is laid out on a nice little e-desk to examine. With FP you mostly have to open and inspect one drawer at a time.

One FP proponent replied, "well, then make fewer bugs." No comment, other than reminding that one can't control other people's creation of bugs even if they can control their own.
If they were available to every developer, Docker would not have been this late.
Apple can try to swing around the privacy bat right now because they have alternate revenue streams.

It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business."

The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy.

I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?
I share your disappointment. Out of 150+ comments so far, I believe there has not been a single technical comment about the actual work involved in building a version-pinned RHEL clone.

Without any experience myself (beyond some kernel build maybe 10 years ago), I gathered (from https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8) that the majority of work involves manually de-branding the RHEL sources. This apparently can't be automated, as it requires human judgement in which packages/files de-branding is required and in which it might actually break something.

Between major version jumps, e.g. from RHEL/CentOS 7->8 there's apparently also lots of work in getting the build environment up to date.

This raises numerous interesting questions, such as:

1. Where do the upstream RHEL sources live? CentOS sources are in https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/, but where do they get them upstream? I believe they're only available to RHEL subscribers, does this give RH a way to block clones?

2. Where / what are CentOS's actual build scripts / tools? Is there some howto or writeup how to make a CentOS iso (or cloud-image) on my own PC after downloading the source tree?

3. Do CentOS devs go through the entire manual de-branding exercise with every minor/major update? Presumably they are using some sort of automation/scripting/diffing somewhere. Are these processes/tools available or documented anywhere?

I hope at some point someone with some actual knowledge about this can chime in.
Yes, that's what they asked for.
In many industries, writable PDFs are commonplace and aren't seen to be a problem because people in those industries don't see any problem with using Acrobat. If you want to unseat Acrobat and PDF, I think you'll have to provide something that has equivalent or greater power.

As for multi-image container formats, I think we already have that: cbz/cbr. Just a zip or rar archive with images in it, to be displayed in order by name. This 'format' is in common use already for scans of comic books. There are numerous viewers you can use to open and browse these files. Something to consider though; accessibility. A screen reader needs to use OCR to read these files to people with impaired vision. PDF files aren't fantastic for screen readers either, but they're much better than just a JPEG. I'd love to see some sort of subtitle system for images (I think mpv could probably overlay a subtitle sidecar on a still image, but that's not widely supported.
Text-based subtitles formats are easy to wire into text to speech though.)
When I was starting to learn chess I liked the London System. It was easy to memorize and helped me get a footing in how to think about chess.
Underlying this all is a sort of scientism issue. On the one hand you have a culture that assumes the framework of a scientific framework is "truth" and that the lingua franca of risk should be demonstrable evidence. On the other is a culture that denies the realism of the scientific studies, and sees risk in misrepresentative evidence.

Generally speaking, the latter camp gets labeled as "antiscientific" by the former, and the former gets labeled as "elitist" or having conflicts of interest. It's part of a theme that seems to be popping up a lot in the last several years or so in numerous settings: which is worse, lack of evidence or misleading evidence?

This example with the salmon is interesting to me because (if I'm understanding it correctly), the compound in the tire isn't the problem, it's a byproduct of tire breakdown. So I could see a chemist in the lab sitting there saying "ok we ran our tests on X it's fine" without understanding that in the real world, X reacts and breaks down into other compounds that are problematic. It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. Within the bounds of the model, X is fine, but the model is wrong as a representation of reality, so the conclusions are wrong.

I think underlying a lot of this are differing ideas of what is "scientific", or what constitutes the universe of risks. I don't see this dynamic changing until certain cultures surrounding scientific authority change.
I didn't use pages with un-skippable Flash intros.
> There’s a a proper mechanism for executing scripts in the document context, which should be used.

Which is?

Edit: In the interest of saving time, it looks based on your other comment that you're referring to chrome.tabs.executescript, but code executed this way executes as a content script so it doesn't run in the page context and can't communicate with javascript running on the page.

If there's another way of running code in the page without injecting html I'd love to hear about it, though.
I strongly agree with this point. Most of day-to-day problems in software engineering / craftsmanship (i.e. the work most people are paid for in this industry) are not computer science problems, they are about the process of understanding your user requirements, iteratively improving your product, achieving and maintaining the appropriate level of quality, and the meta-cognitive skills around identifying when you just need need to fix a bug vs. step back and look for a way to improve your tools.

You will get some transitive learning of some of these things if you do lots of coding challenges, but I personally found a huge benefit in my formative years from building a single full-stack application over many months, much more than solving simpler day- or week-long standalone tasks.
I found openings to be very useful for players rated 1000-1500 when working with my high school chess team. The main benefit is that by understanding the typical moves of an opening, you make it a lot easier to avoid dropping a piece in the first 10 or 15 moves, or ending up massively behind in development because something tricked you. You avoid a decent amount of losses that way.
I'm probably an enthusiast, so grain of salt, but...

warning: discussion about guns

> Half Life Alyx seems to me to suffer from the same problem, a fun game with some compelling content, so great to try, but not a must-have. Exercise programs like Supernatural or Beat Saber fall in the same category, fun, cool to try, but not something without okay substitutes or alternatives.

I think HL:Alyx is a game changer. Elite: Dangerous sold me on it initially. I regularly use Beat Saber to stay fit during the pandemic -- the recent addition of multiplayer is amazing. VR Chat is really awesome. I find it's not nearly as exhausting to hang out with friends in VR Chat than a Zoom meeting.

HL:Alyx -- the fidelity, performance, and detail given to the content is amazing. But what was unique about it for me was that it made exchanges with guns actually harrowing and... more cinematic and believable. A lot of FPS' have to band-aid around the fact that the player character can soak bullets/zaps/whatever because the lack of spatial awareness of a projection onto a 2D surface means most casual players are going to be running into the middle of a fire fight and expect to have a reasonable chance to win.

In one of the opening scenes a soldier catches you off guard and points a gun right at you. In VR, without even thinking, my hands went up. In any other FPS, unless that interaction was scripted, I would have just shot back or ran.

Yet even because Alyx isn't a super hero or wearing some high-tech recharging shield, it still feels cinematic. I'm physically ducking behind walls, tossing items and using bits of junk as a temporary shield.

And it does advance the story of the HL universe so there's that... I wouldn't say it didn't change anything. It raised the bar for VR content that was lacking original content from AAA studios.

Elite: Dangerous. VR changed how I play completely. I was instantly better at flying. The added benefit of depth perception improved my reaction speed and spacial awareness. I play on a flat monitor now and again but it's too boring and awkward.

Although you can't argue with the numbers -- it's not mainstream in the way that a Nintendo Switch or other game system is.

But I wonder if that's not so much a content issue but if there were other factors involved like, say, how FB has managed Oculus or how it wasn't deeply discounted at first to gain adoption like most new hardware platforms are.
PDF is one of the best things IMO - it's like a docker container for documents. The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document.

For example, I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi. I want to rely on professional typesetting from the publishers, not some front-end engineer's vision of what the ebook should look like and how it should be presented to the user. It works only for novels and long form reading where typesetting is not critical. Basically any book that also has a good audiobook version works fine with epub/mobi since visual formatting is a non-issue. For everything else - programming books to research papers, PDF is great. Can PDF format be improved? Sure, but the level of adoption and its widespread use is more important than fixing copy paste and content migration aspects of PDFs.

What I absolutely DO NOT WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text and something that fits to the screen with user styling/typesetting. That IMO defeats the purpose of what the container is supposed to do, i.e. contain and not leak. It should most definitely have fixed physical dimensions (or pixels).
> and buy throat was constantly scratchy

When you're so congested that you even sound congested when you type. (sorry...)
I have configured i3 to be a bootleg version of PaperWM[0]. Everything tabbed by default. Alt+h & Alt+l switch windows in the current workspace and Alt+j & Alt+k switch workspaces. I can still flip to tiling mode if I need to see things side by side but I find myself rarely needing to. I have really poor vision so my use case is going to be different than most but this works super well for me. I'm only ever a couple keystrokes away from whatever I need to see.

[0]https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
While I agree with others here in that studying tactics and endgames is a better use of your time if you want to step up your game, you can still improve your opening without actively studying it. I remember when I was starting out I used to watch a lot of Jonathan Schrantz videos out of sheer interest and I ended up picking up quite a lot of ideas and principles all the while having fun. So definitely check out some [1] of his Saint Louis Chess Club lectures! He also has his own YouTube (as well as Twitch) channel [2] where he mostly goofs around and beats not only strong players but also chess engines with incredibly dubious openings.

On a different note, in case anyone finds it helpful, here's a CLI tool [3] I wrote last week which you can use to build opening repertoires. The intended use case is to 1) download the games of a chess player from a website like openingtree.com, 2) run the tool on the fetched PGN file to generate an opening repertoire, and 3) import the output into a study tool like lichess or chessable.

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

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/c/JonathanSchrantz

[3]: https://github.com/zcesur/opening-repertoire
Indeed. What's really crazy is how the "anti" side has managed to claim to be the side of the working class, fighting against a "green liberal elite". This trope is incredibly harmful; the poor don't even own cars in London, yet breathe the most polluted air.
In my very humble opinion, it's accurate: "Saving a PDF with Preview in Big Sur [Preview in Big Sur] can corrupt OCR text added by a third-party program [is irreversibly destroying PDFs]"

I understand the (fairly common, in these comments) viewpoint that this is the fault of the "third-party program", but since the PDF is readable up until Preview touches it...I find it hard to come around to the viewpoint the third-party program is relevant. Readable bytes -> Preview -> unreadable bytes is my mental model so far.

Edit: absolutely unacceptable this is downvoted to -4. I've observed for a couple months that participation in Apple-related threads, outside indignation that Apple was involved in the discussion at all, gets down to -5 before getting back to -1 a day or two later. No matter what tone is used, this happens, and it makes the problem even worse in the long run. Been here 10 years, always been a _slight_ problem, but over the last year, it's virtually impossible to participate without continuing to slowly destroy my 11 year old account. Not sure how much longer I can keep trying.
Luckily that one isn't contagious.
Mirror Link Between Two Geometric Worlds
https://rocksdb.org/ from fb
Along the same lines, for a time the Cameroonian TLD ".cm" was used where any mistyping of the TLD, like "ycombinator.cm" would go to a link farm.

Somebody paid some money to the local domain authority for that to happen.

I believe the country's authority ended that; now a holder must be a Cameroonian entity to get a domain.
I always thought with Firefox + Thunderbird, the next natural evolution would be mail service integration and SaaS mail offerings. So many companies now outsource their mail and the Thunderbird devs had so much insight into the space it could have been a natural extension with revenue diversity.

They could have been on the path of Google Apps and Office 365 before they even existed. Now, who knows.
I receive that PDF file that looks like any other PDF file.

I open it with preview. It opens fine. I close it and open it again. It opens fine.

I open it a third time and make a small arrow pointing to something and save it (as I would with ANY OTHER PDF).

It breaks.

I'm not using ABBYY. I've never heard of it. It's not on my system. It's just a PDF file that I got sent.

Now what?
>Given that it will be at least 6-9 months before an appreciable fraction of the population can be vaccinated, frequent testing still makes a whole lot of sense.

What makes you think we can ramp up production on these faster than that? You'd need a billion of them to test each America once every three months.

>As to the effort/expense, you'd think we'd be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, no?

Only if the resources used were entirely unrelated, which I doubt. Every public health offical's man-hour should be dedicated to setting up vaccination sites. Every medical manufacturing facility should be making vaccine components and accessories.

I very much doubt you could set up mass testing of asymptomatic people without making trade offs regarding resources for mass vaccinations.
Vivaldi developed its own limited url blocker and keeps pretending its the answer to killing of V2.
I guess we found Richard Stallman's hacker news account.
> automated tooling

the 'usual way' is automated tooling
Because you don't need to?
I more thought you might need to request the day off to avoid being on call, surgeons have very unstable hours.
> They are mad that the pdf’s their scanner produces don’t work properly

The PDF that FineReader made worked properly. The one that Preview made didn't.
The Oracle Prosecution
It might be cool from an engineering perspective, but it's fucking stupid from a "there are other people on the road who's lives are now in danger" perspective.
https://which.co.uk has reviews of air purifiers