skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am writing this to you from my NixOS desktop.

After I gave up on the idea of preserving an existing Linux install (that used a file system, namely, btrfs, that NixOS's installer does not currently handle), and just allowed NixOS's installer to nuke my block device (i.e., my "hard drive"), it was easy for me to set up and configure my NixOS install to my liking -- and I know very little about Nix and NixOS although I consider it worth learning, which probably greatly affected my attitude, which has historically had a large effect on whether I succeed or fail at sys-admin-y tasks.

Where the learning curve gets very steep is when I tried to build something from source code! I would've liked to have built Emacs 24.4 from source, because that is the version against which my Emacs Lisp code is tested, but I gave up. (I'm using Emacs 26 instead and spending time adapting my Lisp code -- something I probably never would've needed to do if I could've built 24.4 because I am moving off of Emacs.)

If you're using x86_64, there are tens of thousands of packages with pre-built binary packages, so it might be you never have to build something from source to get the desktop environment you want.
Recently I gave up on my latest attempt to read Augustine's Confession. The recommended translation that I have is still so otherworldly wordy that I feel I need something else to help me understand what he is getting at.
I don't think Amazon needs Pylance to compete against Azure... Heck, they already have a fully integrated IDE, you can essentially open a browser, go to the AWS console and do all your work there (and never leave or store anything locally).
Violent thinking exists whether or not we "accept it". By putting all the violent thinking people on their own isolated platform, we are facilitating the escalation of their thinking into coordinating actions.
A bit off topic, I hope someday GCC's build system gets overhauled. A huge advantage of LLVM is that it is quite easier to rebuild the runtime libraries without rebuilding the compiler. With GCC that's a pain, unless one takes the time to re-package GCC very carefully like https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make and https://exherbo.org/.

Maybe getting some new GCC devs in there with projects like this would help with that?
>Anyone who has an issue with this must also take issue with the others.

That doesn't follow. Someone can acknowledge that companies have the right to run itself however it wants but disagree with this particular decision. It is possibly incoherent to argue that Twitter may ban people but Visa may not ban anyone; it is perfectly coherent to argue that Twitter should ban certain people and Visa should not ban these particular businesses.

Also, I don't think it's a contradiction even to say that Visa may not ban anyone. Running a website is a form of speech. Every website absolutely must be moderated beyond what is required to remove spam or what is required by law. Telling them what kind of community they are allowed to run is an excessive infringement on their freedom of speech. This is similar to why I support net neutrality but fervently oppose any sort of mandatory neutrality on websites. It would take a tortured argument to claim that routing packets is a form of speech (particularly when these packets are encrypted), while running a website always requires taking an editorial role.

No one would find it strange if a book store decided not to carry a particular book. People would find it very strange if their credit card company refused to process a payment for a particular book.

I neither support nor oppose banning payments to Pornhub since I don't know much about the website. I have no skin flicks in the game.
Apps Ported for Android Flip Phones
If you want to talk about environmental destruction and resource exhaustion, I'm in. If you want to talk about the zeitgeist of rising temperatures, I'm not.

Some countries are over populated. Those countries should stop that. Many people live in water scarce regions. Those people should move (EG, most of California).

I'm in favor of radical environmental reforms, but I don't care one bit about CO2 emissions.
Did they? I was reading conflicting info. Some were saying that the EU was “excluded” from the change... (not sure how the distinction is made precisely)
they don't want to pay the server costs for you.
The market "spoke" by creating the alternatives to Twitter/Reddit/Youtube/etc. The established players are now using their market-share and I guess collusion to basically kick their competitors off the internet and make their functioning more difficult.

I think a good analogy might be to call "acceptable speech" a form of "regulation". Traditionally, established large companies are fine with additional regulation because it makes it more costly for small competition to operate and compete with them. Likewise with expecting and making it "the norm" for platforms to police their content and get in to trouble for bad content, they make the operating cost of smaller competitors higher (if those competitors choose to play by the same rules).

Right now we're seeing that the smaller competitors are choosing not to play by the same rules, which I think is rightfully making the established companies nervous. From a company perspective it makes them worry about their market share. And also from a personal perspective, the individuals inside those companies worry that the alternatives will allow movements that they don't like to grow.
That's a better starting point for a productive discussion, but still hyperbolic.

Moreover, do you notice that my comment is being grayed out as people who disagree are downvoting it? A lot of people who claim to value discussion really don't; not on Hacker News, and not elsewhere.
Big Tech's free speech showdown
>I have the most difficulty with the 'learn to see what others see' point. It can take me a long time to see why non-technical people have some of views they do

One way I've thought about this is a difference in understanding patterns.

Imagine that you can see a picture of a landscape. You can see the sun in the sky, rolling hills covered in grass, and a town in the distance. You can probably reproduce this picture. You might not be able to draw it well, or maybe at all, but you could at least describe it.

Now imagine a picture of some English text. You can reproduce this rather accurately. Maybe even from memory.

After that, imagine a picture of text in Dutch. You can reproduce it when you can see it, but you'll probably have difficulty recalling it. The patterns don't make as much sense, because you don't understand Dutch.

Now, imagine an image of Japanese text. Reproducing it, even when it's right next to you, would be difficult. The patterns that make up the text don't make sense to you. You don't have enough experience with Japanese to even try to put pieces together to describe it to someone. You can forget about trying to memorize it.

Now

Think about people with different language backgrounds looking at these same images. They might be looking at the same thing, but they will see something different. People who aren't familiar with Japanese and Korean might not even be able to tell these two languages apart! They look very different, but with no experience they both look like squiggly gibberish. It comes down to a difference in experience with different patterns.

This idea applies to basically everything in life. Be it understanding tech, playing sports, riding a bike, or playing video games. People's past experiences will influence what they can recognize and reproduce in those activities.

If you want to experience this distance yourself then I recommend playing some video game where you can significantly improve at the game quickly. Something like Super Hexagon. At first, you'll fail. You'll fail within the first few seconds over and over. In minutes, however, you'll fail less and less. Soon, you can go a whole minute without failing. You do this on a few different occasions and suddenly, it's difficult for you to understand how you couldn't do this right from the start. After all, the game is quite simple! It just wasn't simple for you at the time.

It's not just a difference in preferences.
But like, whenever there is positive study about computer games, HN is not critical at all. Instead, it is completely non critical, extrapolates findings, even if the n is like 5 and study weak.

My point is, some studies are knee jerkly believed and others are knee jerkly doubted.
It's because microsoft started to open source a lot of stuff and started a direction in which it sells services instead of simply licenses, and then bought the Python BDFL and cut off some projects that fall in line with the expectations of their offerings in the open source space so far.
Broadly: I agree Alex, that was my bad.

Minutely: The fact that I couldn't game it means it isn't that vulnerable.
Nix supports containers as a build target or output format, but the nix tools are considerate (easy to uninstall) so there's no need (& little sense) in putting them in a container. You could run the nix install script in a ubuntu or alpine image.

I use Nix on macOS, wishing I could replace all my brew usage with it. Working on a home-manager derived setup.

The dev workflow mentioned by tikhonj https://christine.website/blog/how-i-start-nix-2020-03-08
(including a "derivation" building a container from the example project).

https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/
One thing I'd add to this: Get used to the idea that removing one item from the list is acceptable. For me, the only way I could trick my brain into that is set the the start date for all but one task that doesn't need to be done today for tomorrow at the start of the day. Thus when I finished the items for today, the task list is empty and I feel "done". I can still look at future tasks if I'm feeling productive, but knowing I finished my to-do list for today is refreshing.

I know it's an illusion, but it works surprisingly well for me.
My take has some nuance so you will probably never see it on the likes of Twitter:

I'm against mob violence, I hate the death penalty, but I'm still okay with de-platforming. It has a use. There is a difference between "This person is inciting violence" and "This person is disagreeing with us" and the line has not been blurred yet.

I'm glad Trump got banned, because he is an Internet troll who happens to hold office.

I'm glad that a few rioters were arrested. I hope they are convicted and serve jail time. I hope they live to realize why they were wrong. If they die it means I will never have them on my side.

I don't want anyone to die. Death, unlike de-platforming, cannot be undone if it turns out we are wrong.

So please don't lump me in with people calling for guillotines and mob violence.
Substack author here. These sound interesting. Can you point me to them? I would be interested in taking a look
The discourse has always been unduly confined. We never discussed whether it was a good thing to slaughter all the Native Americans, and we're not discussing whether all our stupid wars nowadays are good, either. War is off-topic in the USA "discourse". I'm sure other important things about which I'm less concerned are also "unduly" left out.
I'll check it out. Thanks!

Edit: I didn't find anything in that particular resource. A similar work mentioning complexity is here: https://desh2608.github.io/static/report/ohio.pdf

Roughly, it boils down to a constrained search for the best mapping of precincts into districts, which is NP-hard.
> Vue has consistently been one of the best engineered and most effectively designed pieces of software in the Javascript world

I wonder how you justify that, because I'm currently maintaining a vue project in production and couldn't disagree more (honest question)
I'd say there's a clear distinction with condoms around reversibility. You have to affirmatively choose to use a condom every time you have sex.

If the government were giving out free vasectomies or tubal ligations to certain ethnic groups and not others, that would be a wildly different story.
Visa/MC are really critical infrastructure, because for many people they are the main means of payment or even the only one.

In most cases they are the only existing means for making remote payments. I would have much preferred a world in which the remote payments would not have been done by credit cards, but by wire transfers (with much lower fees than the current fees for wire transfers), but we do not live in such a world.

I am not sure about what weird conditions might be written in the small print of the contracts for credit cards, but certainly when Visa/MC advertise their services, they claim that you should pay for their cards in order to buy anything that you want, they do not invite you to pay them in order to let you buy only what they like.

So I do not believe that it is correct to say that VISA/MC are private companies that can do anything they like.

They have also obligations towards the customers who use their cards and they cannot decide unilaterally to ban some sellers, unless those are selling something illegal, which is not the case with Pornhub (after they took down what was said to be illegal content).

I do not think that making a referendum among Visa/MC customers about whether to ban some vendor or another would be the most appropriate solution, but certainly unilateral decisions taken just by the Visa/MC management are an abuse.

While I have never used Pornhub, so I have no opinion about how correct were their actions, I have paid in the past for a few other sites with erotic content and I would not like to discover one day that Visa or MC has again decided to block such a site without any valid reason.
Almost the entire thread seems like a case of "give them a finger and they'll take the whole hand"

Microsoft is a profit driven business, it never committed to open-sourcing every piece of software it writes, of course they're trying to somehow make money with VSCode, because it costs money to develop it.

If you don't like it choose another one of the billion text editors and IDEs that exist or write a competitive language server, but nobody 'lured you in' or is extinguishing anyone.
I really like the idea of Scuttlebutt. I think there are a couple of things it needs on top of what it already has;

Right now, your public key is who you are, which I think is a mistake. It's easy to imagine a world where we have a "web of trust" solution here, where you can scan someone's public key from a QR code straight off their phone, and then sign said key so other people who trust you know that the key is legit. Then you could use that key to sign future keys, allowing easy key rotation. It would also be easy to post a message signed with your private key that revokes a key and all messages it has authored/all keys it has signed.

I also think there needs to be multiple transports for posting content - if I want to send a message to my buddy Dan, I should be able to send it directly to him if he's online. If he isn't, though, I should be able to let other users whom we both know grab a copy to pass on to him later, or maybe have a "deaddrop" server or a "pub" where I can stash messages and have them get picked up by someone else later.

It needs a top-notch client, too. Something to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

But it's a very promising start, and it's the way this needs to go if we're ever going to escape the surveillance players in this industry - we need a social network that's truly distributed, based on open standards that anyone can implement.
God, Art Bell! It used to be pretty amusing, back when The X-Files was in its original run.. but if it existed over the past 4 years it would be downright terrifying.
Yes I went with 16GB. Would have been nicer to have more, but generally I need <16GB or >500GB
Left-Wing Mexican President Obrador Condemns Tech Companies for Censoring Trump
I only read marketing here: promises and a need to leave your emailaddress.
Show HNs: Real Time International Space Station Location Tracker with JavaScript
Thank you for ending this exchange on a positive note.
That's because those never were open source. Microsoft presented an open source editor, and an open source python language server, and an open source python checker, and then wants to replace those with closed source versions that you're not allowed to run anywhere else anymore.
Why is Microsoft using and a protocol that they designed and pushed for IDE agnostic language intelligence for…not that? Also, note this isn’t about “support” but intentionally preventing its use. Many third-party language servers only “support” Visual Studio Code but by the magic of LSP work in other editors that the original author may not have even heard of before. But this one can’t do that.
So why are the countries I listed Right way more progressive than the US? Is it’s function of culture something unique about US culture?
Twitter spokesman Thrusday evening:

"This Tweet is not in violation of our policies".

Source:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/twitter-says-it-...
Note that people didn't have any (new) problem with free proprietary edition of Visual Studio. VS Code is different because it's aimed at displacing free tools and marketed with misleading "open source" messages.
The Democrats survived being the party of slavery, the Republicans will survive Trump.
Really the violent people are the actual pacifists, and the peaceful ones are secretly capable of great violence? [CITATION NEEDED]
Ah thanks! Didn't realize that.
Unfortunately it isn't that simple, that only works for very basic documents, imagine a 50 A4 page contract written that way.
"the left seems to be refusing to accept that coercing people to act a certain way does not actually change what people believe."

I know coercion is not enough, but it's the only thing that can be pushed by the people with power to push anything.

As soon as I find out what _will_ change beliefs, I'd like to start doing it. Assuming that, as an individual, I _can_ do anything at all. But breaking up the radicalization pipelines is better than nothing.
That structure probably falls apart in a world where there is internal trade and multinational corporations that can do tax between regions. Now you suddenly need to negotiate foreign policy and internal trade agreements and slowly stronger federal institutions start to grow. The shared military also doesn’t live in a vacuum but also depends on foreign policy.
such a interesting programming, i like this type of javascript program synthesis.
>The point is that if you have an issue with companies taking private action over state prosecution then that should apply to all decisions.

Why? I can agree that someone has a right while also disagreeing with how they exercise that right. I have no idea why you are labeling the specifics irrelevant.
This is awesome! I've been looking for something like this for a while- I'll have to try it when my Pi arrives.
That's such an arbitrary line to draw, and a convenient one at that. I guess "Some rioters are more equal than others".
very good content, a very interesting page, keep it up!
Agreed. I recently learned its CEO has a rather shady past, see e.g. here:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-...

and I've always felt a strong pro-establishment bias on political matters. I can't say I'm an expert on Wikipedia in any way, but I wish the Wikimedia foundation as an organization would get some critical press coverage - at least as much as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple etc (which is not enough).
To be “oriented”.
Yeah, but I think the largest benefit of Signal’s Open Source model is something different - it’s that their security claims are verifiable.
According to the NY Times article, what you suggest is exactly what people have tried to do.

However, according to the article, it was really hard to get Pornhub to remove illegal videos. And since videos could be downloaded and uploaded by anyone, removed videos quickly showed up on the website again and again.

Sex abuse victims have been fighting for years to keep their videos off Pornhub, yet they show up again and again.

Pornhub is the only one making money from the videos, so I do think it's their job to keep rape videos off the site. The police can't spend all their time making sure no anonymous users reupload illegal videos again and again.
Not soccer.

In Australia there are quite a few people who view soccer as 'wogball' and a foreign sport. Just as in the US some view soccer as not being American.
The best part about Vue is it isn’t sponsored by giant evil corporation like Facebook who have enabled violence and racism for the past 4 years.

We as developers need to do better and support people like Evan out there.

Eventually, we should also hold individual engineers who work at Facebook/similar accountable to a higher standard and reject their software even if it’s open source or wonderful (React).
Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar, as you did repeatedly in this thread and are doing repeatedly on the site elsewhere. Comments like e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526385 are unacceptable, for reasons which will be obvious to you once you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

If you keep posting like that we will ban you. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've also posted some ok comments within recent memory, but the not-ok comments are seriously not ok. No more of this, please.
I've had sufficient success cd'ing into the project directory, activating my nix-shell, and then launching VS Code from inside that shell. In which case it inherits the shell's environment and most things work as expected.

There's surely a better way to do it, but I tend to prefer vim + lots of terminals over VS Code, so I haven't looked too closely at that workflow.
Not sure what’s the issue here. If they don’t feel like open sourcing this specific piece of software, that’s their right. They are already one of the largest contributor of open source software in the world.
Anytime someone mentions embrace, extend, extinguish, I wonder do they spend their time sitting around in 90's surfer pants listening to Nirvana on their cassette tape player while worrying about nasty things that were said when the protocols for fax machines and VHS players were being designed. Seriously, this was more than 25 years ago. It's like listening to dad jokes or someone genuinely still pissed about the Wright Brother's filing aviation patents.
His measurements could’ve been wrong, it’s nearly impossible to accurately measure distance and size in the air, using a tachometer to estimate speed is rather inaccurate under best conditions.

In 1947 your cockpit would likely not even have a true airspeed indicator, there would be no ground speed indicators, no radar nor any other electro optical ranging devices.

The YB-49 was already jet powered https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_YB-49

Whilst not supersonic it’s quite possible that he could’ve encountered one of these too or another flying wing variant.

This quite frankly more plausible than aliens as an explanation, the time frame of the sighting matches the period
during which the USAF was exploring a lot of flying wing designs and that it was also the first time that jet powered aircraft began to appear and when turboprops were reaching nearly transonic speeded.

So overall it’s very likely that what he saw was an experimental aircraft that was much faster than any aircraft that he encountered in the past and the slightest of errors in the estimation of size and range would have pushed any airspeed calculation into the supersonic range.