skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's just nostalgia

You could say that you 'miss the old _____' and apply it to almost everything in life and you will feel nostalgia for it, even to the point of looking for a way to get back to it and once you are trying it, you become meh and get back to the new thing, as you realize that it changed for good

This happens repetitively to me and my friends with tech/videogames, we are randomly chatting about how good it was some game (i.e) and we decide to try it again, some 20 minutes into it we are already pretending we are having fun when in reality we are bored/hating it

We might miss litle things, but it's quite hard to actually give a good reason to get back to something 'old' besides just nostalgia
Religion is not any more borderline than gender. Neither is strictly innate, but we're not OK with people being forced to change their gender for the sake of some abstract social equality. And gender, like religious values, is something that's deeply felt as one's personal expression. But this is also true wrt. many political stances.
Portals are still sometimes made to make it easier to discover independent content, you aren't the only one concerned about this. However, the problem is that independent creators often stop paying for hosting or domain registration at some point, so any manually created directory eventually abounds with 404s.
I think that most of the filtering happened because different communities operated on different platforms rather than a single huge one like Reddit or Facebook.

A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which builds a much better community. The threshold of participation is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to find the forum and then go through the registration process, both of which filter out people who were not actually that interested in the topic.

In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for anyone to read all of them and personalities of the participants don't matter at all.
At this point, it has been exceedingly clear that almost every project has jumped ship[0][1]. For weeks the leave list has grown to over 700 while the stay list is at 3.

[0] https://github.com/siraben/freenode-exodus

[1] https://isfreenodedeadyet.com/
To be fair, the reference documentation for 90s GUI programs was also excessively tedious in how it documented every single element and never quite explained how to actually do what you wanted. As prose, it was rather lacking.

Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.
Does anyone else find software engineering boring and meaningless?
No thanks. HN is uniquely not-commercially-focused, and I think most readers would like to keep it that way.
Yeah, Firefox is pretty much the worst example imaginable, because it deliberately depends on unstable (as in, actually unstable, not just de-facto-stable-but-not-yet-formally-stable) features, pretty much guaranteeing that upgrades of the compiler will break things regularly.

Firefox is effectively targeting a nightly compiler, they just use this sneaky underhanded trick to access the features in a stable release.

Hmm. It could be nicer for stability reasons if Firefox pinned a specific nightly compiler rather than using a nominated stable release plus the RUSTC_BOOTSTAP trick. But I can understand why they would prefer the stable release.

Anyway: in short, the premise of this article is incorrect because Firefox cheated.
Spam that right arrow on your keyboard to skip through and find the relevant part. I refuse to listen to all the filler drivel that’s designed purely to pad it out behind 10min for the increased algorithm love. Then we’re supposed to sit through sponsor ads when we already pay for YouTube premium. I’m all for patreon and supporting creators but it’s gotten ridiculous. Multiple “sponsor” sections in a single video and endless meta crap irrelevant to the actual video. Don’t forget to like this comment, subscribe, hit that bell, join our amazing discord community, follow is on Twitter for updates, comment below for a chance to win our giveaway… etc.
My parents have never bought a new car, and I've followed in their footsteps. Unless there's financial benefits (tax writeoffs etc.) there's absolutely no reason to buy a new car. The minute you drive out of the dealership, your car loses a quarter of its value.

My current car is old enough to vote. But maintenance is cheap and its comfortable to drive. Why would I buy a newer and more expensive car?
I asked about slavery in Reddit's DebateAChristian forum. Most Christians say that those part of the Bible needs to be understood in the context of those times where debt slavery was quite common and not considered evil. So we can't apply today's morality there. Well, at least these were the most common answers I got. There were also a person who told me that what "moral"/"good" means is _completely_ subjective (which is true to some extent), so I should not judge Exodus 21.
> Kinda like.. some folks like manual-transmission cars with simple constructions that they can modify.

Let me give you my perspective: the modern web client experience is that of a sturdy, advanced alien spaceship. It gets you from A to B and knows how to dock to all the popular alien space station airlock models automatically (aka all the HTTP/2/3/TLS/cookies, stuff that's expected by sites to work). You chuck plenty of fuel at it (RAM and CPU) and cross your fingers that it lifts off.

If you prod the wrong part of the (browser) engine, the universal constants change and you get turned inside out. You still occasionally do it because the ship can be made to block all the alien ads once you're on the space station.

Gemini is just an old ICE car with an antigrav module bolted on (the TLS engine). Its construction is simple enough that you can hold it in your head. It doesn't change the universal constants when you prod the wrong part of the engine, so it's refreshingly free of the risk of turning inside out. It goes into space just fine, but doesn't know how to dock on the alien space stations. This is fine - you knew that from the start, and the new human space stations are where all the quirky fun stuff is happening anyway. And the human space stations have no ads, for now.
> Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do.

The danger is that a lot of counter-culture movements aren't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers, poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or sex work - has massive risk of getting booted off the internet, as a result of legal requirements (FOSTA/SESTA, child protection laws), credit card regulations or Evangelical fundamentalist pressure.

Anything involving drugs faces similar risks (I'm actually surprised Erowid hasn't been shut down), as is anything going too far anti-capitalist (see e.g. Pirate Bay, SciHub, but also Occupy Wall Street or u/DeepF.ckingValue being dragged in front of Congress after the $GME shenanigans).
Considering the sheer amount of religious people, this would hold true for most people

This also makes it a less important
What good "high quality of help available to anyone" would be, when the problem is a broken compatibility promise?

You don't even have to be affecred by it on any of your programs to want to point it out and criticize it...
That seems like a perfectly legitimate question. Is it a good idea to anthropomorphize other animals? Is it beneficial to society overall to make macro-level policy decisions based on moral beliefs that are more of a personal thing?

FWIW, HN on the weekend is a different beast entirely than it is on weekdays. Even dang needs some time off, and the reduction in moderation can be glaringly obvious. Makes me really appreciate how much of the 'HN we all love' is a result of his efforts as much as it is a general consensus by participants on this site.
"They" is a bit unfair here.

The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."
What a confusing codebase. https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/d36cf98aa85f24ceef... This package documents a "minimum supported rust version" then goes on to set RUSTC_BOOTSTRAP (cirumventing, enabling experimental features). Very mixed signals - I'm pretty disappointed to see documentation say one thing and then the code do another.

I would suspect the developers are maybe not entirely in tune with the Rust ecosystem, and that would make sense, they have more important stuff to do, like building Firefox, than playing with Rust. :)
I sympathize with the comments, as a software engineer, this comment from Mike really describes my frustration with Observable's runtime:

> Observable notebooks are like spreadsheets, where cells run automatically whenever you edit or values change. That’s not how conventional (imperative) programming languages work, so sadly you can’t simply copy-paste a whole notebook into a vanilla JavaScript application.

However, I do think many others will prefer their reactive runtime; so this is by no means a criticism to Observable, they are doing great work. They are just not targeting JS-purists and that might be the right call.

As a software engineer, I love D3 but don't want to be stuck with a reactive runtime that is not vanilla JavaScript.

I got myself to build https://hal9.ai, an integrated environment to do data analysis based of JavaScript. Is not a D3 learning environment but you can certainly use it for that purpose. If someone is interested in providing feedback or helping with D3 examples, please do so at https://github.com/hal9ai/hal9ai or shoot me an email at javier at hal9.ai
He Built a $2.6B Business by Directing You to Related Content on the Internet
1. Trading automation platform (with a decent GUI)

2. Dropbox like command line functions for single user repos to be auto-synced across multiple devices
I know nothing about the NYC / Giuliani subject so no comment on that part. But I wanted to say I really appreciate your edit. I admire your willingness to check your own bias and then consider the possibility that it misled you.
That is really annoying with software.

Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.
They routinely kill each other over religious differences, so goes to show how much they agree.
> I mean that plain matter-of-fact-ly

When you find yourself having to qualify such a statement, that could be a useful indicator that what you said isn't constructive.
It seems like most folks here are not inclined to talk on the phone with recruiters. I think that is a mistake. I get pinged about once every other month by a recruiter in the FinTech space and I usually speak with them on the phone. They are usually senior recruiters who know about the industry. I find out what skills companies are looking for, what salaries they are willing to pay and other tips about hiring practices.

When I am ready to make a switch, I now have a better understanding of what's out there.

Sure, sometimes the calls are a waste of time, but its not like I haven't also wasted at least that much time in a week scrolling on reddit.

I guess what I'm trying say is don't be so dismissive about a conversation. Building a relationship with the folks who are a gateway to new jobs is not a bad thing.
> Rust is just too young and moves to fast to be used for software projects you want other people to be able to compile.

Except many people doing exactly that and it working fine.

> backwards compatibility problems

Which aren't really a problem in practice. Definitely not worse then in any other language, yes there was some intentional breakage (soundness bug fixes) and unintentional breakage (compiler bugs) but most of this was in the very early stable rust versions since then accidental breakage which isn't caught and fixed before stable has become quite rare. As far as I know rust does more to find accidental breakage then many other languages.

> They always use $latest and what is in $latest changes so fast even if your rustc is 4 months old it already can't compile code written in $latest.

What is the problem with requiring a up-to date build chain? Slow long release cycles with a lot of patch back-porting is a software development model which for many (most?) projects has been deemed to not work well and has been replaced with something more in the direction of CI. Let's be honest even if we assume slow long releases are better for compilers, they still put quite an additional burden one the compiler development process which a is feasible if you have a lot of payed devs from large companies, but not really if only your core devs are payed (by the foundation and/or companies) but a lot of relevant contributions come from people not directly payed to work on rust.

> But right now it's painful and full of pitfalls.

I don't think so, but I guess we both can agree that thinks are improving, for me to make it even better and for you to maybe make it usable for the things you currently treat it as not suited for. ;-)
This touches on something a bit different to the linked author which is people thinking the internet is something it is not. During my time at university I didn't initially use the library. Why would I? Everything is on the internet, isn't it? Not by a long shot. Once I went down the rabbit hole of scholarship I was amazed just how much information could not be found online. And this was just one tiny subject I was interested in. A real eye opener.
They need to be rebuilt. There’s no ifs or buts about that, once a server has been compromised by a malicious actor it can no longer be trusted. Even if you could just restore functionality you have no guarantees that there’s not a time bomb ticking away to hit you again at some later date now they’ve established you’ll pay out.
What exactly is the right answer here?
Actually — even better point from the post:

> If you discover that the data was corrupted during the encryption process, is it game over?

> Most of the time, yeah. If it’s database files, typically they’re gone.

I hadn't even considered what happens when ransomware tries to encrypt a database while it is in use. That's not gonna end well...
this article is saying how Apple DocC (the new documentation compiler revealed at WWDC 2021 this week) is not going to solve the problems Apple (and their developers) face. It has interesting examples.

I think it will make documentation better, not because DocC is the perfect solution, but because it re-emphasises the importance of documentation because its new. It also gives developers at Apple a standard tool, was there such a thing before?.
Upvoted, but even large cities continue to have problems with labs making mistakes.

That is, the science is sound but I feel private citizens (whether accused or accusing) need second and third independent verifying just to be sure.
There's a search engine that indexes only traditional HTML based websites at: https://wiby.me
Finding high protein / low carbohydrate plants to eat is hard. Many meatless meat products are hyper-processed. Last I looked a huge part of the population is diabetic. They can't eat grains, can eat small servings of nuts, fruits are mostly out, and greens alone aren't sustainable nutrition.
It is ironic, but not at all surprising to me, that "free speech" in the context of current Freenode means being not enforcing codes of conduct (so being transphobia-friendly among other things), but an iron moderation grip on any criticism of the network itself.
Hmm, from my imaginary buyer's point of view I don't see how much it will cost to add you as an intermediary. Fixed rate? Percentage? I mean I signed up with my Google account but then was asked to give my phone number, and... yeah that's about where my own drawbridge tends to be commonly raised, especially when I know so little. So I aborted. I mean my instinct said that maybe if I were really interested in a property I could just, like your site mentions, send a message to the physical address and then if that didn't work maybe come back and give out my personal number, maybe even after looking online for the owner. The site looks nice btw.
The internet killed bbses. Bbses were local (or not) more personal, easy to make longterm friends, meetups in malls died with the bbses.

I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world.

BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.

The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting with any user. The person logging in actual used your computer so in real time you could watch what the user was doing. Websites lost that.
It appears that universities are held to different standards of reputation than are poultry farms and slaughterhouses.
Continued small motion in a long single queue feels “fairer” than multiple queues - and may actually be.

But I also know most people prefer a driving trip where they’re continually moving rather than one where they’re basically stopped - even if the second is shorter in time.

“Apparent fairness” is an important design criteria for dealing with the public. Even if the system is actually incredibly unfair.
If we ever get around to having a Basic Income, it may help this somewhat. Creators may feel less pushed to monetize the things they make.
Is there a term for when people reminisce something and think those were the days at the same time think everything contemporary has gone to the dogs?

Like my uncle who is an old car enthusiast who thinks ambassador was the greatest car ever made in India yet if you are really objective about it was truly a bad car (wrt milege, comfort, safety, design, etc).

I feel the same reading the comments here. Really don't miss anything about the old internet, especially the era of VSNL which was a downtime provider with some internet in between. Everything is much more amazing now. Want to learn anything from programming to chemistry there are hundreds of freely "animated" tutorials. God how easy my studies would be with the wealth of easy instant knowledge we have now. Add to that the amount of crazy content created everyday for every niche, it is just amazing (you just need to know where to look).

E.g. I just found out about two channels recently called Captain disillusionment and Great scott on youtube and I've learned so much about two really different things, things which I didn't even know I was even interested in.
looks like a few more details are at https://www.the-chapel.art/
It does look like it's missing some functionality that could be key (DNS, ACLs, namespaces). But, pretty neat that it exists, given "The purpose of writing this was to learn how Tailscale works".
I think the big change, which the author hints to at the end, is one of scale. It's not that the cool kids joined the internet; it's that absolutely everyone did. The internet went from being a small town of people, to a city of people in the ~90s, to a world of people in ~2010s. The internet can no longer contain a single culture; it's too big. It will always from now on be acultural, since there are simply too many people using it for too many reasons.

As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet, no longer contains a culture because there are too many people using it for too many reasons.

Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented, the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership. Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".
That's an effect, sure. But I think it's more corrosive on the platform side.

If I start a business that makes hosting and sharing videos easier, should I sell it to hobbyists who don't have money, or semi/pros who have lots of money? And how does that affect my feature pipeline and product evolution?

The end result being... hobbyists have minimal, difficult, and (relatively) expensive platforms to enable their work, and semi/pros have well featured and cheap (or free) platforms. And that perpetuates the bifurcation and destruction of pure hobbyists.
I learnt d3 with <script> tags.
So what do you propose here? I see that stackoverflow mentions some preemptive locking for a seat in cache for a few minutes. During that time the seat is taken out of the pool for potential booking. If the time lapses without the seat getting booked then the seat returns to the pool. This avoids going to the DB and see who wins.
The beauty of the old internet was that there was no need for filtering, because it was done by the users by choosing which platforms to participate. Instead of many fragmented, special interest platforms we now have a few generic mega-platforms like Facebook and Reddit, which naturally get filled with garbage. In the old web, a place for discussion would have been a small special interest discussion forum with perhaps around a hundred active participants and a few hundred less active ones. The outsiders (i.e. the people who would post garbage) did not participate in the discussion because there was some threshold of participation (finding the website, registering, etc.). Instead they would have their own forum somewhere else with similar dynamics.

I think it's very natural for people to divide into communities of tens or, at most, hundreds of people. The modern web platforms don't respect this at all.
RSS feed https://bengtan.com/index.xml
API Security Is the New Application Security
Oooh this reminds me of hoe.nu or anada or http://textfiles.com/ ! Thanks!