skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You could also look at the list of Google's failures.
Everything You’ve Heard About Section 230 Is Wrong
Why are all your examples software companies? Certainly not because most of the world's revolutionary ideas are from programmers. Perhaps there are benefits to domain knowledge for coming up with revolutionary ideas in, say, biology or chemistry or electrical engineering or literature or political science or manufacturing or medicine...
> Without Liveleak, you might never feel it.

Are we having problems finding horrible things to watch other than on Liveleak... because I sure am not...

I really don't think Liveleak is some paragon of "truth" or the content you describe.
That is kind of reaching for the stars. Or shall I say last straw argument.
I think a much easier winner is if you have a domain expert in one area and bring his or her knowledge to another field.
A Designer who creates a web app to design logos. A fitness guru who develops a Drink. A car maker who builds space ships.
The reference to the Copernican Model of the solar system is an interesting one since it produced less accurate predictions than the Ptolemaic Model. Improving the predictions of the Copernican model initially involved the introduction of epicycles, diminishing the value of the crazy new idea.

It took the work of Kepler (elliptical orbits) and Newton (a physical basis for elliptical orbits) to elevate the heliocentric model to the status that it enjoys today.

There are two reasons why I bring this up: one is the validity of many of Paul Graham's assertions and conclusions. The other is to point out that things aren't so simple. Copernicus did not reap the rewards of his ideas since it took the work of others to prove those ideas. In fields outside of science, there is little reason to expect people to arrive upon similar conclusions. (Even within the sciences, there is no reason to believe we would converge on similar conclusions in the same time frame via different paths.)
Oh funny, I didn't think of it that way but I guess it's about where you imagine the bible was. I visualized him waving the bible around when an arrow pierces it as if to say "god has no power here, this is your only warning, there won't be another"

But if it was in his shirt pocket, then yeah that could indeed be interpreted the other way round!
My Toshiba Libretto 30 still runs Linux fine .. with the version of Slackware I installed on it 20 years ago. Retro OS for retro computing.

Connecting it to the internet would be another matter.
I recommend reading the novel. The key line in it is “Life is a planetary phenomenon.” Basically, the argument is that at less than planetary scale, you would be confronted with things like waste products building up too quickly to sustain human life. For example, the generation starship struggles with an excess of salt (which in turn affects food production). The limited confines of the ship also produce deleterious effect on successive human generations akin to those found among species in isolated island ecosystems.
Some trees hit my deck after a hurricane last fall. When we rebuilt it in December composite was about $500 more than lumber. The price since December has almost doubled for composite from $3.80 a linear foot to almost $8.
I like that they chose the word "Grim"; in addition to meaning "dreary, gloomy" it's also one of the many names of Odin/Woden (Grimnir / Grimr in Nordic, often Grim in old Anglo-Saxon names)
Wouldn't that level of speculation massively degrade security?
You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment.

There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide how and what to work on, trusting teams to self-organize; and those companies are going to say they are agile too.

Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean? That they just let you get on with things your way, or that they are stuck in their requirement-gathering change-control-document waterfall ways?

You can choose to interpret anything a job ad says cynically.

Just like any company’s claim in a job ad it needs to be evaluated.
How to Write a Successful College Admission Essay Tips
SQL devs make >300k/yr..?

Also, what does "knowing ML" really even mean?
Untangling The Web: NSA's 2007 650-page guide to the internet
Wow, tbh watching this kind of gore had made me sick to the stomach, yes it haunts me the whole day, but I am also extra alert and gives me a reminder why one shouldn't fool around on the roads, with machines, etc
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

What about the 20 million working age on social security? Not counted.

21% of Americans are on means-tested public assistance, which, by definition, requires lack of sustainable employment. Not counted.

A huge number of students can’t find a job. Not counted.

Not that ‘employment’ is a meaningful measure of a society’s desirability.
should be prefaced with "within the context of american capitalism", because i don't think such views on personal ego and taking credit apply universally. There were a lot more crazy ideas when experimental science wasn't there to debunk them. And many science fields even today are lacking ideas, not methods, but not necessarily for fear of being ridiculed.
I think you can be considerate and powerful, but maybe I’m in the minority!
Also a favourite of mine. You know there's enough of a problem to notify me, but not enough of a problem to actually .. do anything about it?
I feel like the same thing can be said about Boring Old Ideas. If the person who is speaking to you knows what they're talking about, there's good chance that they've identified a gap/opportunity and you should listen to them.

This seems more like an exercise in listening and trust than whether the idea is crazy or novel.
I'm blown away by this:
https://www.kolibrios.org/en/
I think 50 years is a very pessimistic (and journalistic) value. There are whole towns in eastern europe build with reinforced concrete and they are still ok.
What Makes a Museum Object NFT Valuable Beyond the Scope of the Technology?
You could add a "fast" or "lite" or similar subdomain that avoids anything like the complaints that have been shared here. Not perfect (the default should be the best), but at least you could avoid this problems as a user.
Its not, but there is a saying picture are worth a thousand words.
The Wendy's in Bozeman starts at $17. The McDonald's there starts at $15.50. I know of people working at a clothing store (Athleta) making $22.

I think you're extremely off the mark with this comment.
Don’t they already do this with VMs for less cost?
Graham has a tendency to use hindsight to show that, yes, indeed he is contrarian and genius.

The Ethereum people do it, too. They use the example of old massively successful tech to prove that Eth too can catch on, but they don't cite all the failures.
I am honestly curious. What in the article do you find offensive?
yeah your library looks good, unfortunatly we are using typescript and are a dotnet shop and we have our own stuff to create the store and built that into reactjs.net.
>I also found that I was able to play 480p Youtube videos in full-screen mode and listen to music on Pandora.

Holy shit, he/she is very uninformed. Pandora plays perfectly with some CLI player (I can't remember it's name), and for youtube damn mpv with youtube-dl (my config for my trash machine) will play any 720p video fast as hell.

~/.config/mpv/config:

vo=gpu,drm
sws-fast=yes
sws-allow-zimg=no
zimg-dither=no
vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all
Agreed, but note however that, for many people, no amount of careful thinking will bring them to the latter decision in your example. They want the imprisoned to suffer - to them, that's the whole point ("deterrent", they'll say).
LiveLeak was the only place I know where I could find footage of warcrimes in Ukraine that will more than likely never be "a part of our national conversation".

Does the media tell you who Azov battalion or right-sector is?
That we have no problem funneling weapons and money to them?
Even if they did, would they show you the video of them crucifying and setting on fire a captured enemy? Liveleak did.
Indeed. Literally from the article: "Montana's unemployment rate was 3.8% in March". That's higher than it was before the pandemic! How is that even remotely consistent with a "severe labor shortage"?
eBay says open to accepting to cryptocurrencies in future, exploring NFTs
The EU approached the vaccine production with hopeless naivete while the UK and US approached it like they were at war.

Biden speaks in a nicer manner but he is still doing the policies of Trump's America First.

IMHO we in Europe should return the favour and start working with the Chinese on vaccine production. They are the only ones with an industrial capacity comparable to the US.
Funny - I’m the opposite. I’d much rather make my great rate doing indie work and helping lots of people versus being stuck in one role with a fixed salary and limited mobility.
How is this any different from the "web tech" space at large? Where investors will push towards "data-hoarding", privacy-invasion, dark patterns and/or addictiveness or other psychological "abuse", more often than not?
> the streams of thought that led from Torricelli to Newcomen were meandering ones

A very interesting history showing the development of ideas, rather than the narrative of a lone inventor.

You hear assertions that there’s less innovation these days because everything now is just an incremental change of a previous idea.

But I notice that any detailed and technical history of past inventions winds up showing a very incremental process, with many more intermediates and branches than you were aware of.

The common narrative of past innovations is mostly a romantic view. It comes from people not wanting to be bothered by a true account of the evolution of technical ideas.
What’s wrong with installing WinXP+office and calling it a day? Even if someone fulfilled your request and got an up-to-date browser etc working on your 256MB laptop Would YouTube even work?
Today that's easy to answer: Try setting up ZFS boot with a mirrored boot drive and encryption on FreeBSD, then try it on Redhat, or SLES, or Ubuntu Server.

One of the experiences is very much "native" - the other is possible, but a GIANT pain to accomplish.

At some point I'm sure, Ubuntu at least, will make installing to ZFS on a server OS more straightforward. I've got several systems doing it today, but I can tell you it's not for the faint-hearted and it took a TON of trial and error to get it to do what I wanted consistently. I also cringe every time I apply an update because I know it's not something that is getting any significant testing by Canonical or the community at large.
Why are you all upvoting this shit?

Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact.

You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.
Good luck buying a sawmill.

Every yuppie that fancies themselves a handyman and every landscaper looking for more side gigs had that same idea and sawmills are back-orded as bad or worse than outdoor recreation items.

Furthermore, milling lumber is one of those things that only pencils out to be economically in the black at very large scale or at very small scale where you focus on a high margin niche.

Then there's regulatory compliance...
As an expat living in Sweden, this sounds spot on. You can easily live very comfortably in here, and it's very seducing. Not the best place if you hold any ambitions of world domination though, which is why I'm moving to the US as soon as possible.

I wouldn't agree with the author's sentiment: "The reason why I decided to stay here in the United States, despite a couple of efforts to return to Finland, is because I like it when people smile, laugh, and, yes, even talk to their neighbors." My Swedish neighbours and Swedes in general have been delightful, though I know things may be different in Finland.

I think it's great that places like Sweden exist, and might suit most people, but those who wish to lead lives of high variance with high highs at the cost of potentially ruinous lows should be able to do so as well.
Poor people can still vote. And they will vote against anything that reduces their dividend, even if means voting against things that lower emissions.

As to your second point - moving the goalposts every time progress is made eliminates any incentive to improve. If you're committing to keeping the dividend the same over time, that means you need to keep the tax take the same. And if you're gonna take the same amount of money off me regardless, why should I pay attention to my emissions? In the limit case, of zero carbon, the carbon tax rate is infinite and you're taking a bunch of cash off people for nothing. Somewhere along the way, something has got to give.
I could probably make a Linux desktop distribution run smoothly on pretty much all the legacy hardware I haven't thrown away in fifteen years. That does not make said hardware useful, because every time I had to upgrade was due to web browsing getting slower and slower.

Edit: Quite a few other folks in this comment section seem to have pointed out basically the same thing.
The demand side is a factor too. Some companies seem to place a premium on being able to flex numbers of contract staff rather than adding and removing numbers of permanent employees. Maybe for morale?
> Physical cash is a tiny portion of the USD mass in circulation

We appear to be using the term "in circulation" somewhat differently.

"Currency in circulation refers to the amount of cash–in the form of paper notes or coins–within a country that is physically used to conduct transactions between consumers and businesses"[0]

"As of February 10, 2021, there is approximately US$2.10 trillion in circulation, $2.05 trillion of which is in the Federal Reserve Notes (the remaining $50 billion is in the form of U.S. notes and coins)"[1]

...of course you're correct to note that this ~$2 trillion is only a proportion of total money supply (assuming we can agree on which measure to use for 'money supply') but it's still a substantial sum. It's also decentralized.

How does ~$2 trillion of decentralized money compare with the total supply of one's favourite (allegedly decentralized) cryptocurrency?

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currency-in-circulation...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_dollar
Try Delicate Linux. It's archived, but the CD still has the full repo on it.

http://delicate-linux.net/

As I'm learning Cobol (banking), and Forth with 4th, that machine would be really useful to me in 2021. As for gaming, slashem will run on that for sure, and IF games run on anything with a 386/68020 and beyond.
If you stop competing then all you are left with is contemplating your own insignificance and death.

Competition keeps us busy, if we are busy competing , then we can't think.

The moment society collectively stops to think and do introspection, it would be the end of the human race, we'd all fall in a deep depression and off ourselves.
Exactly this. I have a A100 with several Minolta lenses bought online for a few bucks.
The Wendy's in Bozeman MT is starting at $17/hr. The McDonalds is starting at $15.50.

This is not a wages problem. This is a huge influx of wealthy people to the state that aren't working but are taking up property and services problem.
>But, given that Linux is a community-supported operating system that does not need to make a profit, I see no valid reason for it not supporting every computer that can still be useful.

In other words, because it is a community project made by volunteers that earn nothing, there is no valid reason not to demand more unpaid work.

>In a more enlightened society, all products would be supported for as long as they remain useful. The time has come to stop building obsolescence into our computers and make the small effort required to provide user-friendly distributions of Linux that support near-vintage computers.

The only reason this person believes it is a "small effort" is because she has never ever remotely helped doing the effort herself.

I have made such effort myself. I have been part of Linux user groups and helped lots of people. I have experienced myself what is helping enormously someone for only this person demanding more free work and time just because I have already given her free work and time.

We have given talks in the University: If you want to install Linux do research when you buy a computer so it has compatible components because life is much easier and then the same people attending buying incompatible hardware and demanding us to fix it for them, so she could do the classes ' assignments, because that's what we "enjoyed doing".
And and it has been stated gazillion times, except most media doesn't like to report it. Which leads to discussion that goes no where.
The problem: once something is removed from the tree, it is almost impossible to get it back in, since whoever wants to do that has to replay the extreme amounts of refactorings done since the removal.

The Linux kernel famously only guarantees outside stability of interfaces, but in-kernel interfaces are regularly changed - one might suspect intentionally, to make the lives of people doing off-kernel work (such as graphics card drivers) as difficult as possible so that they will eventually open source their code and ship it in the kernel.
Officer sent into ambush by man Homeland Security knew was armed and dangerous
Was the Playstation not revolutionary?
This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin.

1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible
2. Remove the people who are not domain experts
3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego.
4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad )
5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly.
6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progression of the probability space.

Currently, It seems 40%+ likely that Bitcoin will end up as an accidental Ponzi scheme with a crash based on late adopters rushing out. But there is also still a 10%+ chance that it replaces gold as a currency hedge for the next 20+ years and 5+ percent chance that it becomes a first class currency.
Paystack is live in South Africa
> Relatively few engineers actually want to do contract work.

The better contractors I've worked with all do, here in the UK. The day rates are high. The taxes are the same or lower, health insurance is optional. There's some company insurances you need and you have to get an accountant, but all-in that should be covered by less than a week of work each year.

Gaps between contracts are desirable! Having a whole summer off to live on your accumulated war chest and chill out, it's amazing.

Plus jumping on to a new project every few months keeps the work interesting, rather than stagnating at the same desk for years on end.
Sorry - you’re right. Thanks.
This article is charmingly Finnish - blunt and to the point. Only a Finn would call bullshit on a study praising their nation while also proudly praising the very high quality of life and social cohesion that people enjoy in Finland.

It is telling that the critique here does not offer an alternative approach. Nobody smiles in Finland? Who cares, you can fake/force a smile and some culture do force them.

The happiness index here is really measuring contentment, though this is a necessary condition for happiness.

In general happiness research is fraught with the classic pitfall of all psychology research: culture. What makes people happy is acceptance and respect from their fellow humans and this varies by culture. Sometimes this means money, sometimes this means performance. Generally this means living your life in the way that your compatriots respect. In that context it doesn't seem especially surprising that egalitarian and well educated Finland would top the list for happiness, though it would be hard to measure and compare such qualities.
I have a similar question, someone I know in their early 50s who has 20 years experience teaching computing at HS level.

How viable is it to get into software?

The main issue is that there is no option for them to stop working to learn full time.
That seems super unlikely to be true. Easy counterexample: the Ingalls building in Manhattan was the first skyscraper to be built out of reinforced concrete and it was built in 1903. It still stands today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingalls_Building
What about 1991-09-17? The first public release of Linux would make a good DoB as well, and does not look as deliberately-chosen as 1970-01-01.
You created an account just to say this? Damn, commitment.
They often aren’t OK. In many of those whole towns in Eastern Europe, the municipality is gradually pushing to move people out of the socialist-era concrete buildings and into newer ones. Their design means that, even if the structure itself does remain physically sound, they often struggle with ventilation, so mold forms.
While I do agree this idea of happiest people is empirically nonsense, I'm not sure I understand this bit about expectations but I think I may disagree. I can't speak for Finland, but Swedes have very high expectations. Having lived in other places and coming here, I tend to see them as exceptionally spoiled. They'll complain about potholes out on on the forest roads nobody drives, be aghast at slight political scandals or outraged that high school teacher said something a bit weird. I think that the more people get, the more their standards are raised (As a side note that's kind of a prediction of Buddhist thinking.) Also I don't get how Jantelagen is supposed to be an explanation for anything... people are still demanding a lot regardless of that. Also a ton of people don't take it seriously or outright hate it, so... more research needed I'd say. There is definitely a strong emphasis on fairness but that seems like an entirely different subject.
I never really understood this line of argument. It’s possible to engage with something openly, yet reach a conclusion about what the available evidence says about factual circumstances. Interpreting someone’s account of an experience differently than they do themselves does not mean they didn’t have the experience, or that you are dismissing them.

For example, I’m an atheist, but I don’t doubt that many people frequently have religious experiences. I just think that there are more likely explanations of those experiences than that they are caused by a god. I still find religion and accounts of religious experiences fascinating, and I very much respect that it’s a fundamental part of many people’s lives.

Having an opinion doesn’t mean you dismiss everyone who has a different opinion.
So the author complains that there are linuxes that run on vintage hardware, but they're not usable by novice linux users. The problem, I guess, is that linux on vintage hardware is too inaccessible to people coming from windows, but all the accessible distros are bloated from too much "Microsoft disease?"

Perhaps the features you want are a byproduct of this "disease" then? If you don't want bloated software you may need to get off the bloated software express train and learn how to use something a little more esoteric.

I'm running Sparkylinux on literally that exact model and vintage of Dell laptop and it works fine. It came with an installer and booted fine off of USB, I'm not sure what the problem is. How many vintage hardware aficionados are there who are also unwilling to learn anything new about computers?