skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I get older myself, this brand of cynicism seems to be a projection of death anxiety or possibly the "loss of innocence" where grand visions of how the world ought to be were not met.

1996 was 24 years ago. You are totally correct that the progress and change in this period has been incredible on the historical scale. But 24 years on the timeline of a human life is quite a significant portion, and some may feel that their expectations of futuristic utopia have been subverted, making them cynical.
Good find. I think it's worth comparing with the Edison Phonographic Cylinder EULA: https://maisonbisson.com/post/edison-phonograph-eula/

In spirit, it's similar: "We sold you a thing, but it's not really yours." Eventually, that changed, presumably because people resented not actually owning the things that they reasonably believe they owned.

It'll be interesting to see how this evolves. This is clearly different, in that "purchased" items only really exist on the Zynga servers; the burdens fall differently. But in the coming decades I wouldn't be surprised to see some consumer protection laws around virtual purchases.
> Dealing with children is incredibly taxing and difficult

No surprise it's difficult if you already sour the relationship by treating them poorly and give the kids a reason to hate you from day one. Maybe things will be better if you don't start by making up petty rules that don't help anyone?

---

In middle school I remember we had a maths teacher who was very good, in the sense that she let us do pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we weren't disrupting anyone else. This ended up working out well for both sides; those who wanted to learn and engage with the coursework could do so, and those who gave up on it and weren't interested could relax and entertain themselves to make time fly instead of being bored and dreading the class.

In comparison, we had a very severe history teacher, who'd give you spiteful extra assignments (which would escalate further if you didn't do them) if you were lacking in one way or another. Did it help? I don't think so; I remember more about dreading the class and making up excuses/strategies to get away from the class or the assignments than the content of the coursework itself, and I can say for sure that the class was universally hated and dreaded.
I think this is a case of culture clash between USA, where "overtime exempt" is a thing, and most of Europe, where it is required to be paid (of course, there are cases where people end up being pressured... or like me, forgot to log the overtime hours despite secretary going around with the sheet).

Of course that only applies to people working on employment contracts, not those who got seduced by "B2B" :|
Tech salaries in the US are not sustainable. We don't have enough planets to run economies and waste natural resources at that velocity.

Well, probably the same is true for the "pitiful" salaries in the EU. Just to a lesser degree.
This is possible in Nyxt browser, :-)
In Azerbaijan we don’t say “I'm Busy”
I usurped the throne.
I got 9/10. Not so hard. If the point was that they look indistinguishable, then the point was not made convincingly.
I think disinformation is mostly an education issue.

Things I learned in an American high school which are good to know but not everyday useful:

- Geometry
- Calculus
- Basic chemistry
- 'Art'
- History of my state (like, seriously?)

Things I didn't really learn in high school but would be immensely useful in combating disinformation:

- Probability and statistics
- How to conduct experimental trials
- How to read (scientific) papers critically
- How the US Govt works, in-depth
- Classical logic
- Formal debate
- The Socratic Method and other mental models for divergent thinking
- World religions and theology
- Basic psychology
- Cybersecurity, or really any kind of "adversarial" thinking
- Meditation and self-discipline

I have no idea why we continue to teach so much trig/calc instead of statistics. Statistics is (IMHO) harder to understand and more important, but schools spend significantly less time on it.
Which philosophers? Foucault was talking about prisons, not schools.
Oh, there's a lot more... no promises atm, but we plan on going much bigger for our next dataset.
Peter Attia's podcast (https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/) is focused on longevity and he has some great topics & speakers.
We also turn our cameras on - though I wish we didn't. There's no point. Between varying (often low) video quality and the lag between audio and video (and software recognizing it's time to switch the main screen), having all our faces on the screen is worthless, IMO. It only serves to make everyone self-conscious. And in many cases someone sharing their screen, at which point nobody is looking at the tiny faces in the corner anyway.
'Opinion pieces ... are never fact checked' - did you fact check that?
Obviously it's $1,000 trillion
MA03 is indeed Mariani 3.
We're at the onset of some kind of disruption of this norm around IP: If it's possible to automatically detect copyright violations, it's also within reach to give users tools that procedurally generate an infininum of infringing content, none of which can be litigated profitably by the corporation("swarm of bees" effects).
imo the folks involved in a company fighting for survival during a pandemic are the exact crowd that need some sweet and funny distractions here and there.
If you are serious about spending 25k, please contact me, we are working on the Nyxt browser. Email us at hello@atlas.engineer
you a whitney younger?
It should be possible to have similar UX/Support to traditional banking while having users custody their coins. Multi-sigs and digital identity would be very useful in this regard. Trusted 'recovery' parties or hosted services that intentionally limit risky transaction behavior. For example, you could have a scheme where funds in a smart contract are gated by a personal signature allowing one to spend up to $7500 in a 24 hour period, but requires secondary approval provided by a trusted company to send more (on top of your signature). If you need to break the limit there could be a verification requirement from the company or emergency override key you keep safe. Crypto will be most successful when people do not even know they are using it. Assuming no legal issues with adoption, there are more challenging taxation and liquidity considerations to using fixed supply currencies at scale than usability for the average non-technical user
Murray Gell-Mann is more credible.
Last part from the article: "But maybe I’m imaging things. Maybe the reason progress stopped in 1996 is that we invented everything. Maybe there are no more radical breakthroughs possible, and all that’s left is to tinker around the edges. This is as good as it gets: a 50 year old OS, 30 year old text editors, and 25 year old languages. Bullshit. No technology has ever been permanent. We’ve just lost the will to improve."

Yeah, that's obviously bullshit. But we also didn't lose the will to improve. The leap from where we were 20 years ago, to where we are now, isn't mind-boggling. I still remember my Turbo Pascal days, my Delphi days. Sure things to improve... But overall this experience was sufficient. I wouldn't really have trouble implementing any of the projects I worked on in the past 10 years with Delphi, or even Turbo Pascal. It would sure suck, and take longer, but it wouldn't be a dealbreaker...
This is the raw definition of a non-revolutionary progress.

The problem is that the next step of software engineering is incredibly difficult to achieve. It's like saying "Uh math/physics didn't change a whole lot since 1900". Well it did, but very incrementally. There is nothing revolutionary about it. Einstein would still find himself right at home today. That doesn't mean progress was stalling per se.

It means that to get "to the next level" we need a massive breakthrough, a herculean effort. Problem also is that nobody really knows what that will be... For me, the next step of software engineering is to only specify high-level designs and have systems like Pluscal, etc. in place that automatically verify the design and another AI system that code the low-level implementation. We would potentially have a "cloud compiler" that continuously recompiles high level specs and improves over time with us doing absolutely nothing. I.e. "software development as a service". You specify what you want to build, and AI builds it for you, profiting from continuous updates to this AI engine world-wide.
I've seen pictures of Norwegian prisons. They certainly look comfortable, but I wouldn't describe them as "open, warm, and inviting". They look halfway between a no-frills dorm and the psychiatric ward I stayed in for a while as a teenager. Certainly far more humane than American prisons, but still clearly _institutional_.
Kids lie to avoid esting vegetables. Are vegetables prison?
I imagine dentures and hair dye killed most motivation to solve the two problems you listed. Everything else, I agree with.
NYSE starts process of delisting 3 Chinese telecom companies after Trump order
What? I have to hard disagree.

There has been a plethora of brand new languages since 1996. Most of them are due to LLVM, which is impressive on its own. Not to mention Clang.

Search engine used to be considered an impossible problem (just using grep doesn’t count), but it is now quite easy to solve that problem thanks to ElasticSearch and Solr.

What about all those distributed databases we all took for granted? Open Source DB used to sucked when it comes to horizontal scalability.

As if the above are not enough, what about virtualization and containerization technology? Are they not impressive enough for OP? They single handedly spawn multi billion dollar businesses and make deployment significantly easier.

Need I say more?
That's definitely what it sounds like to me, too! But I have never seen a single free speech advocate actually say "We should repeal the part of the immigration law that says you can be denied US citizenship based on membership in a US political party." So I conclude that whatever free speech advocates are advocating, it's not what it sounds like.
Yeah, the Pile is approximately the size of the GPT-3 training data, which is not a coincidence--one major reason we created the Pile (though certainly not the only one) was for our GPT-3 replication project.
I have yet to use zoom . I hope it stays that way.
I was following a scientist who was looking at anesthesia in plants. I can't seem to find any of his published work on the topic but some pretty wild stuff. Anesthesia causing plants to stop following the sun, something like that. Ill see if I can find an article

edit /

Here is an interesting article on Plant consciousness
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousn...
It will take time, but why not take on those problems?
I agree it's very difficult to run large-scale research projects with consortia, etc. And even worse at EU scale with public money. I'm not sure whether there's a better way to balance the admin-load against all the scamming, or to avoid 'favoring' one nation's industry or other. When you do something on processors, you'll probably have to keep the door open to all big & small European actors, right? I feel all the administrative overload is a way to avoid all kinds of political problems.

Yes, Europeans complain about bureaucracy from the EU and here about the ERC, but the moment someone comes with more 'pragmatic' processes, either you see some 10+MEUR-level abuse quite quickly, or you get some blast about bad management of the tax payers money, and calls for more oversight.

I don't have a solution, and without a united EU military/defense budget I don't see anything DARPA-like emerging. And it seems only European military budgets (still sovereign) and regional budgets (regionalism being, to me, the biggest flaw in the modern EU vision) seem spent on 'low admin we trust you let's try this just convince this panel of scientists and admins' funding. While I think it's great for labs/research funding, for product derisking and creating competitive edges for the local industry, and for SMEs and overall high tech employment, you're not going to create a semiconductor industry like this.

I've seen the results of several ERC consortia projects and am sometimes impressed with what EU-based research (academics+smb+large groups) can do with so little money (on each subject) and, yes, so much admin overhead.
If you are interested, we are thinking about exploring this concept in Nyxt, please voice your support on our GitHub (leave an issue or otherwise). https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt
I'm going to say yes.

This isn't unique to Apple. Debian and other Linux distributions have also had similar discussions when considering the distribution of packages with obscene, morally repugnant or inappropriate names, as well as the package contents themselves.

Whether it's a commercial entity or a volunteer organisation, there are considerations regarding image and reputation. People can and will push the boundaries of what is acceptable, and somewhere you're going to have to draw a line.
One of the big mistakes I see in the list is choosing to ignore the developments in software that are old. For example, the author cites Python as pre-1996, yet the adoption of Python as a mainstream language largely postdates 1996.

Taking a very narrow view of software (i.e., looking only at compiler-related technologies), I can easily list several advancements that the author neglects:

* Profile-guided and link-time optimization aren't really feasible until circa 2010.

* Proper multithreaded memory models in programming languages don't come into existence until Java 5, from whence the C/C++11 memory model derives.

* Compiler error messages have improved a lot since the release of Clang around 2011.

* Generators, lambdas, and async/await have been integrated into many major programming languages.

* Move-semantics, as embodied by C++11 and Rust.

* OpenMP came out in 1997.

* Automatically-tuned libraries, e.g., ATLAS and FFTW are also late 90s in origin.

* Superoptimization for peephole optimizers (Aiken's paper is 2006; souper is 2013).

* Heterogeneous programming, e.g., CUDA.

* Undefined behavior checkers, such as IOC, ASAN. Even Valgrind only dates to 2000!
> LLVM alone is responsible for a Copernican revolution in compilers and program analysis

This is hyperbole
Ah, so around 1.9 doublings. Seems like I was wrong :)
Why wouldn't a prison have natural light?
> I thought you were suggesting that the jagged, stair-step output of a DAC is what causes aliasing, which is a common misconception.

Oh, heavens no. Just describing the naive way to draw a square wave in PCM.
> It's funny that the Chinese, who have created a vast network of online and offline spywares, gets to have a Windows stripped of all spyware! Shows how much Microsofts cares about us ordinary users.

Your point is correct consumer-wise, but saying that only the Chinese Government benefits from this is misleading. It is certainly possible to disable every telemetry - if you use the enterprise version.

(By the way, Windows 10 Home China is also like Windiws 10 Home - except that telemetry is stored domestically in China rather than transmitted to US.)
Before I go off topic, very cool and interesting app. I was surprised by the number of times I got it wrong.

Now then...

There's a lot of people crapping on schools and teachers in this thread, and as a former teacher and spouse of a teacher I'd like to point out a few things:

Schools and teachers provide a vital service. Not only do they educate our children, they babysit our children, and the pandemic has shown us how vital that aspect of the service is. I've anecdotally seen many parents on social media complain about having to look after their own children during the day.

Schools need arbitrary and often draconian seeming rules, such as refusing toilet breaks, not allowing food or drinks in a classroom, or enforcing strict dress protocols. If you truly knew how manipulative a group of children can be, when ganged together you'd understand this. Toilet breaks are often abused, with children skipping class to, for instance, vape in the toilets. I've had classes where I've spent my break cleaning up chewing gum, spilled drinks and crumbs from students sneaking snacks. When kids aren't in uniform, or under a strict dress code they'll push the limits of what is acceptable and additionally bully the poorer children that can't afford the latest fashions.

If we want schools to ease up on such restrictions then you need to invest in more teachers and other staff. I've had science classes with 35 students all with Bunsen burners merrily flaming, flammable and corrosive chemicals in beakers at their desks, and syringes or pipettes (also read as water pistols). Or my engineering class with 20 soldering irons all on, pillar drills being operated, while a couple of kids are etching circuit boards. Try running that type of class without strict rules and you're liable to see injury, loss of employment, a lawsuit and possibly prison.

If I'd had smaller class sizes, or more staff in the classroom, I could have relaxed my rules. I'd know the kids better, have built up a more trusting relationship been able to monitor who was doing what with greater efficiency.

These are kids we're talking about and they're developing, experimenting, learning, and struggling to navigate a complex social dynamic in a very unnatural environment. Without rules in place, they'll screw up. For God's sake, how many of you "adults" have had to sign a code-of-conduct agreement before being allowed admittance to a tech conference or hackathon? Even grownups can't be trusted.
That's not what I mean. The political party that won the last 2 elections, DPP, disagrees with both of your points. They believe the Taiwan government is "true" Taiwan and People's Republic of China is "true" China, and their is no overlap because Taiwan and China are separate, independent nation-states. It's the minority party, KMT, that maintains, along with the PRC, that Mainland China and Taiwan are inseparable constituents of the same "Chinese motherland."
In other news, water is evil because someone drank too much water and died. These critics are unreal.
Illinois is going bankrupt to the degree that it’s affecting the U of I. They do, however, have both an iMBA and a masters in CS through coursera.
A project at big financial company...

At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts.

Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.
The fish is the last to know it lives in water.

Often companies deal with their own staff very differently to how they treat their customers or their competition. The average Oracle developers probably has no inkling of how Oracle screws over their customers with onerous licensing, for example.

Insiders that aren't in very senior management positions may not even be aware of the high-level decisions being made by their company. You often hear stories of employees being completely blind-sided when scandals or corruption are revealed.

Similarly, I've noticed that employees tend to make excuses for their company's behaviour, casually dismissing bad behaviour that isn't so easy to ignore for everyone else. This is tribalism at its finest.

Lastly, you hear rationalisations galore from people in senior management positions, carefully avoiding any mention of the real motivations for their bad behaviour. These lies are especially important when they speak to internal staff, especially staff they're screwing over.

As a random example, I worked at a large company recently where they essentially fired their entire IT department and replaced them with an outsourcer that charged half as much. I was an outside consultant working for senior management, so I got to see the real inside story. The staff were deliberately kept in the dark, and even outright lied to.

The real reason for the whole thing was that outsourcers cycle employees through every three months on temporary working visas, avoiding income taxes and essentially all mandatory payments such as worker's compensation. The whole thing was a huge tax dodge.

I read an article in a newspaper calling this out. The article was mostly true, but I guarantee you that 99% of the people at the company would have never known any of this.

Being an insider only gives you really detailed information about your own team, perhaps a dozen people. If you're at a FAANG, this might be 0.01% of the company at large...
There was a myth going around my university that the dorm blueprints used were repurposed prison designs. Never bothered to investigate.
It's interesting that both the left and the right are abandoning the ACLU, for much the same reasons. Though of course members of both groups also join the ACLU to (attempt to) influence it. Contrast with the days when "freedom of expression" was relevant (of conversations about gay rights, abortion, uncomfortable fiction, outsider ideas) and "right" meant "moral majority" is very educational.

(Of course the left proper has never cared much for actual communists and anarchists either, except as linguistic props. I suppose deciding to fully embrace that shouldn't be surprising.)

I see no hope of rights-oriented politics surviving except as some side's puppet - we have reached our stop, and must get off - so which dynamic will win out?

(Though I doubt the idea that the ACLU isn't intentionally fascist will persist. "If three people sit down at the table with a Nazi, you have four Nazis sitting at the table" after all.)
At least where I live (Norway) your employer doesn't have a say in whether you're organized or not, and wouldn't necessarily know if you are – but you'd typically have an elected representative in companies of a certain size or with a certain number of employees.

Most unions I know of operate on a country-level.
You might like "the long way down" or "the long way round". Sounds like this expedition would have been cool as a mini series too.
inb4 Apple releases this feature natively...
Atleast someone is checking Intel's monopoly. thank you china
> School is not mandatory; education is mandatory. Ask any home schooler.

Home schooling is not a suitable alternative IMO. Social contact with your peers is important too; having to forfeit that just to not be in a prison-like system seems like a bad deal.

> Choose some good coding/math/philosophy puzzles during the evening and work on them instead of paying attention in class

So in addition to wasting 8 hours per day in class you need to do extra work in the evening?

I think in both cases we need to fix the system instead of putting the burden onto students to put up with it or work around it with the solutions that you describe.
Are multiple vaccination schemes while new Covid variants circulate a bad idea?
I'm guessing the state research institute got some funding and visibility ('dear tax payer or high-level admin that cares about public image of state research, what you paid for - our research on topic X - for Y years is now being used in industry, see?') and that's what makes/helps them run so they probably also got some things out of this.
My 23mo has learned social protocol to get what he wants and when to violate it to get it even more quickly when I have no other options than to comply. But I'm not sure that any given Zoom meeting is important enough to mess up my son's breeding.
That’s an interesting site. I liked this essay more, dealing as it does with change and technology:

https://www.richardhughestherapy.com/post/discovering-the-li...