skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's great, I support you using KDE. But the fact is, if you really wanted that feature in core Gnome, someone would have to advocate for it, implement it, and then get that feature upstreamed, and then someone will have to maintain it upstream, indefinitely. An alternative to that would be for someone to write the extension, and then maintain it by tracking upstream, indefinitely; both are about the same amount of work. So it's not clear to me why you're complaining about having to write your own extensions -- this is just how open source works. You have to do the same thing in KDE if you decide you want to add some new non-default functionality that doesn't exist there too. It's not any different because it's a desktop and not a kernel, or a web browser, or a spreadsheet, or whatever. I'm happy that you could use KDE and that it works for you, but from my perspective Gnome is not doing anything weird or strange that KDE is not doing, other than having a different default design of what workspaces are supposed to be.
I've not seen his livestreams before, but this lived up to expectations. Within two minutes he's gone from demoing some innovative tech to calling people the n-word and spouting conspiracies about the CIA.
> Have compression, caching and resumable downloads omitted by default for the sake of simplicity or can it still be added to the protocol?

You’re missing a word, which made this hard to read.

“Have compression, caching and resumable downloads been omitted by default for the sake of simplicity or can it still be added to the protocol?”
Like real money, it can be used for fraud and for legitimate usecases. Your generalization made up from thin air brings nothing to the conversation.
> Replace ‘blockchain-powered “pseudo-currencies”’ with “cash”, and the same is true. Better outlaw cash.

You can't be serious. Ad hoc cash transfers are regulated (can't bring more than $10k across borders without declaring, for example), supply is limited, and bills have literal serial numbers on them.
I have a 5 disc cd /md shelf radio. You could copy cds to mds with a few button presses. I used that a lot at the turn of the century.

I tried the mds a year ago and they work (the cd mechanisms is jammed) now the stereo is mainly used through the aux jack.

I will agree MD would have made an excellent computer disc format had Sony allowed it. (They had something called MD Data but it was terrible). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
Another approach might be to start by subtracting land not available for most human uses for whatever reason, e.g. up on the Eiger, or in a large national park, or on a military reservation (places like Pendleton and Hunter Liggett immediately come to mind in California).
2% of money on bank accounts have been involved in some crime.

What would you set as a threshold?
That’s your opinion. And I guess that’s all you have when you can’t talk about the tech.
Are you kidding? Seriously, is this a joke?

Literally 99% of anything I search for in Microsoft documentation these days lands me in a page where the only additional English text is the function definition with spaces added between the words! Entire APIs are 100% undocumented, at least in this sense. Security-related APIs are totally undocumented. APIs critical to disaster recovery are totally undocumented. I could go on and on.

It wasn't always like this! The C# standard library documented used to be fantastic, with multiple pages of text for pretty much every function. Now? It's hot garbage.

Let me give you an example. Not a contrived example of some obscure API that nobody cares about, but a "flagship" feature of dotnet core that was heavily advertised recently as a significant step forward in its capabilities:

System.IO.Pipelines

This is a complex, difficult to use API. How is it documented, you ask? There's a couple of out-of-date videos showing an earlier version that no long matches the current names. There's some announcement blog articles. There's one overview page that almost -- but doesn't quite -- cover enough to write a useful real-world application. The rest of the documentation reads like this:

// Gets the MemoryPool<T> to use when allocating memory.
public System.Buffers.MemoryPool<byte> Pool { get; }

(From: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.pipeli... )

I am enlightened! I understand now. Before that documentation page, I could not figure out that a getter called "Pool" returning "MemoryPool" returns a memory pool to use for memory allocation. But wow, that documentation really cleared things up!

I know I'm being more than a bit snarky, but it's deserved.

Microsoft's work is not GNU. It's not truly open source. It's not made by volunteers. MSFT is not a charity. In fact, their products in general are very expensive. I pay through the nose for this! I pay through Windows licensing. I pay through Azure hosting costs. I pay through Office 365.

What do I get for this money? Function names with spaces added.

> The best thing for me is that when I click the "Edit" button on Microsoft's documentation, it takes me directly to the latest markdown source file on GitHub and I can immediately submit a PR for corrections or enhancements.

That is the worst thing about Microsoft documentation. They've realised that they no longer need to allocate any budget at all to technical writers, because people like you will happily volunteer your own time to fix something you're already paying for with your actual cash money.

Stop.

If you're going to volunteer your time, do it for a charity. Write a Wikipedia article or contribute to Linux. Don't use your precious time on this Earth to help the world's second biggest company for no compensation whatsoever!
I think spreading new thinking on treatments for a pandemic that is killing millions, might actually be "crucial". May turn out to be right, may turn out to be wrong, but we've already seen lots of "wrong" information turn out to have been actually right, and the successful censorship of that "wrong-but-soon-to-be-right" information was in retrospect unfortunate, to say the least.
Free will implies non determinism, that is the important part.
> Though I do understand why performance oriented languages like Rust might want to approach it differently.

The thing Rust gets wrong however, is that there should be a smooth path from ergonomics to performance.
Strawman arguments like this are entirely pointless, especially on HN. Please refrain from making them because it's obvious you aren't interested in real conversation.
The parent comment asks for specifics, but you go back to generalizing porn in response.

> Porn has distorted the view of what is ‘normal’

Surely you mean some porn, but you have not clarified which types. What do you say to plain, “vanilla” porn that pushes no boundaries? As with so many things, this is not a black or white issue, and statements like your final sentence do nothing to advance a nuanced conversation about the subject.
Notice what you did here is the same subtle disinformation tactic that every major news story about crypto mining employs.

1. Compare crypto energy usage to something huge (small country, big tech companies, etc).

2. Don't put that into context of whole of human civilization. It's <1% of global electricity consumption.

3. Don't clarify that this is comparing to electricity consumption, excluding other major energy uses like transportation, heating, and shipping which are generally non electric and necessarily carbon emitting.

4. Imply that cryptocurrency electricity usage is creating tons of carbon emissions, even though it consumes electricity and only seeks the cheapest source.

When it comes to carbon emissions and the resulting climate catastrophe, we could shut down every cryptocurrency tomorrow and we'd still be fucked.

Attacking cryptocurrency for it's energy use is a horrible waste of political and social capital that could be put toward actually solving the problem rather than engaging in moral masturbation.
Ignorance is bliss, they say - it was still John, but you just didn't know it.

Also, back then when it was allowed to have more imaginative names we were also able to have actually meaningful arguments online. Now you have to be in the line of "non-entity_#83591" without any opinions on anything to not offend anyone, and mostly voicing a different opinion results in a veritable s*tstorm that has no relevance to the topic that was discussed. SJWs and white-knighting simps... /sigh.
And why wouldn’t it? CS education is rarely taxing in terms of processor/memory requirements. I doubt the curriculum is all that different than 10 years ago or more with far less specs. It’s about theory and writing algorithms. And if this is a program specializing in ML, the models are still likely to be toy, and anything more can use cloud computing like Google’s Collab.
You might not even need an egpu if you are using google collab which provides much faster gpus for free.
So, "don't eat meat, eat supplements"? How does that make any sense?
Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27492616
I am not sure it is sustainable or desirable and may have other effects, but money pretty much directly ends poverty, almost definitionally.

Those people you call out may still have needs that are not met because of drug use or mental illness, but they won't be in poverty.
That’s good advice, thank you.
Yup we should totally Facebook it
expectations is perhaps a personality problem and lack of honest communication. normal is subjective even if it is inherited from societal norms. communication and being able to talk freely is key.
It depends on the Chromebook, but having owned a personal Chromebook Pixel of the first two generations, it's because, the Pixel at least, represented something that I couldn't find anywhere else. In no particular order:

* We MUST MAKE MORE 3:2 screens. Content is not wide, except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web.

* I've done computer security stuff for a while. Chromebooks are, by far, the best computer security model I've seen. Trusted boot, hashed root filesystems, fast updates that are as painless as possible (they even keep entered text in textareas on pages). They are, by default, secure enough that I would log into my core accounts on someone else's Chromebook (given a fresh reboot to ensure it wasn't in developer mode - physical firmware attacks aren't in the scope of things I worry about from people I know). Yet, I can twiddle a few keys and get one to be a properly nice Linux laptop with all sorts of great features, that also manages to "just work."

* OS resolution scaling is amazing. Eyes tired at the end of a day? A keystroke or two and you've rescaled the entire UI to match. Throw in the super high res, high def modes on the high DPI screens, and it's good for just about anything.

* Almost everything can be done on the web today, even if one probably shouldn't. I've used them as primary computers for many years, and I only rarely ran into something that I couldn't do (or couldn't do with Crouton and a Linux chroot environment). Those things included "a handful of Windows applications" (wine covers a lot) and "some kernel interfaces for Linux Internals classes" (the kernel simply lacks things that the OS doesn't need).

I know it's popular to hate Chromebooks, but if you're willing to toss them in developer mode for a few things, the value you get for your money, even at the high end, is legitimately impressive.
If you get decent at 3/4 of this list, you're in the top 5% of infosec professionals. Not that knowing all of these is bad, but you do not need to have all of these skills to be a well paid, in-demand infosec worker. It also depends on what subfield you're going in.

Are you going to be the only Infosec person at a small company? You need to know a lot more breadth than if you're going to be the email security gateway admin at a behemoth bank.
I’m 14, and internet wise, I wish it was the 90s. I coded my website, blog occasionally, and get noticed once in a great while. I chat on open platforms, and like decentralization and freedom from corporations.
> I see a lot of arguments about these companies that are tantamount to "I didn't know how the world worked till I saw them do it and now I'm unhappy".

Just out of curiosity: which aspect of those arguments do you object to, if any? I'm not trying to be confrontational, just trying to understand your point of view.

There was a time where monopolies were "how the world worked", until the society collectively decided that it's not how the world should work. If Google and Amazon aren't actual monopolies, then maybe we need a new name and a new set of rules.
Being aware of the Pareto Principle which seems to be universally present. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Also being a gambler can help, IF you know the odds!
Similarly, there's a reason Russia is making a big Arctic push with their military, to the extent of fielding modified T-80 tanks that will function in the deep cold, special wide-tracked transporters (which existed, but weren't generally armed), etc.
A great web-based version is https://www.photopea.com
Amartya Sen: I’ve never done work that I was not interested in
Your point is well made, but for anyone wondering about this, I've found Krita[1] to be better than the GIMP for everyday use like this.

[1] https://krita.org/en/
This. For a while I did the Chromebook thing and it was actually pretty nice running android apps on it along with chrome OS but just kept slamming into chrome limitations. Looked at all the hoops necessary to sideload or try linux stuff and noped out to a regular X1 carbon thinkpad. Common Linux distros on a regular laptop is so much easier.
The sad thing is you can't just "figure it out." Most folks do "good-enough" after some coaching and memorizing a limited set of commands needed for their workflow-- until something unexpected happens.

It could be a typo, or trying something new, or forgetting/misunderstanding the intent of some counterintuitive command, or maybe cleaning up an existing problem. All those things can easily put someone in a deep rabbit hole of inside git book or, worse, google search.
Those myriad incompatible UIs are just as annoying at work, so how does "cater to business more than individual consumers" make them any better?
Once told the recruiting party during an interview that software languages and framework are tools for a job. The interview ended then and there.
Amen. I learned enough to start off in C++ from a thin white book from Microsoft about the language. Really excellent.

Not to mention that the Windows help system was better in the early '90s than the Mac's is today. Help on the Mac is a disgrace, which is why a lot of applications have just started delivering a PDF or doing all Web-based doc (which sucks when you're trying to work offline) instead of bothering with it.
For simple stuff I've had success keeping an in-memory data structure as the source of truth, and just persisting the whole thing to a file (JSON or otherwise) via a debounced function. Assuming you only have one process (or at least one main process), you only have to read the file on startup and can be pretty relaxed about your write strategy
Do you think American internet companies are following the GDPR in their European operations just for fun? Or Chinese rules in their Chinese operations?

In practice, most multinationals are not too comfortable blatantly violating the law in large markets.
Just an amazing comment. As someone who has experienced profound states of psychedelia, and having consumed vast amounts of data pertaining to such experiences, yours may be the most unique and original commentary regarding the topic that I’ve seen yet. Bravo, and I’ll certainly be returning to this comment at a later time and date.
Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were the official HN arbitrator on what is pointless or not.
It does seem a rather unnecessarily complicated task given much cheaper second hand/refurbished units could be picked up on eBay and happily run a Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu Linux.
What insight, specifically? You make big claims with no citation, and when asked for more info, you dismiss those questions. If you’re interested in helping others understand the insights you claim to have, bring some details to the table!

I’m pretty curious about the topic, and this is an inquisitive community in general. Unfortunately, the way you’ve presented your position is not helpful, especially for a group that tends to demand scientific proof or at least a well formed hypothesis.
I have yet to see a non-tiny company that doesn't have political squabbles cross-team and especially cross-department. It's the nature of many groups competing for finite resources and diverging goals. I have however seen many engineers be utterly obvious to the politics going on and getting burned by it in the end.
> SOTA models are at ~5% WER for general speech.

Do SOTA results measure performance in difficult environments though?

Presumably dealing with people talking out of their car window next to a busy road would be a lot more difficult than dealing with a relatively clear audio recording.

EDIT: It looks like the linked results are for an audio book dataset. That seems like an optimal environment where you’re going to get clear enunciation with minimal background noise.
No specific benefit or skill.

Just that I would recommend it because I felt good going through the challenges and that someone took the time to set up VMs and writeups for me.

In conclusion, it was more of a consumption thing than an investment.
Sarcastic? I can't tell.

I didn't mean to imply it was trivial, but the concept of crawling your own documentation is quite sound and should just be part of good document maintenance.

There are some plenty good crawlers already. I'm guessing one of them has a 404 report that could hopefully be used to find dead links.
You might get lucky and someone will bend your ear about Terence McKenna and Machine Elves
The Point of the Bayonet (2012)
One issue with extension is that it's not official. For example from the very extension you linked (dash-to-panel) I can find out, that Gnome 40 support issue (#1265) is not closed. Gnome 40 was released almost 3 months ago and it is default in Fedora 34. Imagine someone upgrading and breaking his workflows completely.

That would be OK for some minor adjustments, when user can live without this extension for a while. But for something as major as dash-to-panel, it should be official and updated synchronously with main project to be a proper option IMO. That's my reason to avoid this extension for now. It might be good, but I don't want to depend on it.
Hmm, but drinking water with electrolytes (including moderate salt) is more refreshing than filtered water.
He’s a compiler guy, right?
Mindfulness came to mind for me specifically. I used to jump from work to coffee meetings to fancy restaurant dinners out with both clients and friends to meet-ups at NY's Meatpacking District...to deeply enjoying the feeling of just sitting in a nature preserve, smelling sap, listening to birds, and breathing in the entire environment. (a benefit of taking a job in the burbs.)

Before the lockdown, I did an experiment where I either walked (through a forest path) to work everyday or biked leisurely to work (also thru a forest path.) [I realize having the ability to do that is itself a blessing.] In winters, the walk was difficult (ice, elements, frozen mud) but it came to a point where the morning and evening "commutes" were the best part of my day. I would even take detours to more remote benches to clear my mind.

I was incredibly productive at work throughout this 18month experiment, until lockdown.

I captured some of this on Strava if anyone is curious: https://www.strava.com/activities/3211639111
Saving Internet from Advertising
There are definitely new devs learning COBOL. I'm not sure where I saw it, but I could have sworn I saw an article or blog post about these mission critical companies paying insane wages and signing bonuses to devs who would sign-on to learn & maintain their infrastructure. And since these jobs would likely be on prem for security reasons, they don't have to pay insane Silicon Valley wages either.

Imagine living in Cincinnati making $250k maintaining COBOL? Some people are totally fine with that paradigm and will keep the system running as long as it needs to.
The best thing everyone can do is have fewer children.

This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
Hackers can join (or start) an air mining company working on how to pull carbon from the air economically: https://airminers.org/
The idea that someone took LSD and "was never the same" is a common trope, but I doubt it's based much on fact. I wrote a paper years ago in college about the difference between what "public education" about LSD said and what the medical literature said (I attended a university with a good medical school and a good medical library), and the short version is that federally-funded "public education" about LSD was mostly a lot of scare stories made up to serve someone's social or political agenda. They had little or no basis in fact.

Things like that get repeated, though. People like to repeat scare stories. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where most of the "never the same" stories come from.

I will admit that I took LSD quite a few times at the end of the 1970s, and that at the peak of that period I spent a month or two in a fairly confused and impressionable state. Someone who had known me before and who encountered me during that period might be forgiven for concluding that I would "never be the same". It was temporary, though.

I gave up on psychedelics and other mind-altering substances by the early 1980s. They were no longer showing me anything new. As the fellow said, once you've gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone.

The literature that I found in the late 70s made LSD look fairly harmless, as long as you were not already psychotic or close to it. That was peer-reviewed research, though, not news stories. It would have been scandalous at that time for anyone in the mainstream press to suggest that LSD was anything less than the scourge of Western Civilization.

Sometime around the late nineties or early 2000s, respectable researchers began to obtain permission to conduct research with psychedelics again, and have gotten some pretty interesting results, especially in areas like treatment of alcoholism, depression, and anxiety. By the way, they don't seem to be finding a lot of civilization-ending dangers in the process. Judging by the medical literature, they just aren't very dangerous.

As far as I know, based both on personal experience and medical literature, the main dangers from psychedelics are that they can be very disorienting and several of them amplify the experience of emotion. Bad trips mostly seem to be a combination of disorientation and fear, with the disorientation becoming frightening, and the fear amplified by the drug so that it becomes terror.

But bad trips end, just like good ones do.

So if you're going to experiment with them, you want to be in a safe place, in a reasonably sane and calm state of mind, and in the company of trustworthy people who have your best interests in mind--preferably mental-health professionals with some experience with psychedelics, if possible.
It’s possible though as a society we’ve lost the idea of a disordered desire. If you’ve got an authentic desire to be sexually dominated or to humiliate and dominate others, we now say “That’s ok, that’s your authentic self. It’s cool as long as everything is consensual.”

But maybe it’s not OK. Maybe it’s behavior that if indulged keeps us from living and thriving and keeps us from being our best selves.

I’m not making a moral argument here — at least I don’t think I am. Just that it might not be healthy to indulge every desire we may have. And when desires are far outside the norm, it’s worth it to be circumspect about them.