skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After more thought, and an offline exchange and apology to Doreen (my comment is a lot harsher than necessary), some additional thoughts.

The main objection I and others seem to have is with the title. As Doreen noted offline, titles are hard. They're also highly influential in steering discussion on HN and elsewhere.

Given that the post is about communicating effectively, this is all the more ironic --- not a ding at the author but at showing just how difficult the task can be. And part of the problem may be that the title itself does what it cautions against: "don't be anti-automobile" is itself emphasizing the negative rather than positive in messaging.

As I noted in an earlier follow-up, many of the points of the post are well-taken. Full-frontal attack is often ineffective in politics. On the other hand, there are cases where nothing else seems to work and the only way to beat down an absolutely ossified and unyielding obstinance is a grinding war of attrition and repetitive messaging. (That's what mass advertising is.)

Explaining (but not excusing) my own response: I'm increasingly on the lookout for what I see as cheap rhetorical devices especially where used to undermine effective initiatives. I don't think Doreen's doing this at all (though I'd also not noted the author/submitter initially), but having tackled a few instances earlier today on may have been overly primed-for-battle.

The question of how to address urban / land-use issues, cost and availability of housing, and the absolute dependence on the automobile really are core, and thinking of how to wage that battle is time well-spent. My approach tends to involve digging through (far too much) history and background, trying to figure out how we got here, and what tactics were used in that approach. As several people brought up, automobile (and oil and tyre interests) did attack their competition and alternative land-uses directly, though it should also be noted not in their marketing selling the automobile itself, whcih focused largely on its benefits, pleasures, and with time, status and social perks. (The history of automobiles and mass advertising are very strongly coupled.)

Automobiles won, in addition to various dirty tricks, because almost anything involving urban travel is easier with a car than without. It's a path of least resistance. With sufficiently low cost, with alternatives removed (dirty tricks), with a land-use policy necessitating their use ... it's an easy, and positive, sell.

If I'd suggest a change to the title, it's that in messaging and campaigning about automobile alternatives, emphasizing the benefits and advantages of alternatives should be the principle focus. Even if strategy focuses on eliminating the car, messaging probably shouldn't. Be positive when advocating for behavioural change might be the key.

(I'm open to better suggested phrasing. Advertising copyrighting is not my strong suit.)

On the other hand, the title used was successful in attracting that fickle beast, attention...
> Even USSR, at the height of its inefficiency, was able to build housing for most of its inhabitants. It wasn't palaces but it did its job.

Roof over the head sure does the job. But in exchange a big portion of USSR population lived in essentially shared housing. You get a room and shared amenities (shared kitchen, shared shower, shared WC). In most career paths it would take a decade or more to be eligible for an apartment. And that apartment would be tiny. Got a kid? Great, you go up the queue and you get 1 room (kitchen + room, no living room) apartment! Got 2 kids? Nice, you get 2 rooms (not 2 bedrooms).

Of course, in some career paths it was much more comfy. A nuclear power plant built in bumfucknowhere? Well, anybody willing to go there even for an unqualified job gets a super spacious (compared to above) apartment on arrival. In exchange someone in a big city with no kids may be stuck in shared housing whole life with no chance to have his own apartment.
As a consumer, why do I care?
That's the statement I wholeheartedly disagree with.

It is INCOMPARABLY more secure in a broad sense just because you control your infrastructure.

Yes, you need to know what you are doing, but this is applicable to everything, does it not? Of course, mindlessly subscribing to bazillion of services is much simpler, but it's plainly not professional.

On a side note, do you think Dropbox is any more secure than any other service, including self hosted? Or any other service?

After years of seeing how those companies are made from inside I am personally quite free from those illusions.
There’s a lot of redundancy in the opening part of the sentence.
Not to get political but have you seen the makeup of the US Congress? The world is ruled by octogenarians that never seem to die.
Not even age... English-only speakers generally (let's say it never happened and my business is with British and Aus people mainly) cannot correctly pronounce either or both my first or last name. Some of them, especially the closer partners, want to try but we literally had sessions where we recorded me saying it and them saying it and listening to it to show them it was still different even though in their head it sounds exactly the same... and I really really don't care: I have a client calling me 'tiktok' (long before the tiktok app) because he got fed up struggling with my name. Fine with me.
What kinda gets me is the name Łukasz, because in German and English it is indeed an L and all the ones I know actually use the L (maybe unless talking to other native speakers).
> Being anti smoking worked

Really? About 30% of adults still smoke where I live, and all the teens and 20-somethings use vape pens. What's the definition of "worked" in this context?
I can't think of any other rasterizer than Freetype that has the option to enable hinting and then disable anti-aliasing. I've never tried that combination, what would be the point of that?
You should give Howard Kunstler‘s The Geography of Nowhere and Duany, et al.‘s Suburban Nation a read. (There are other good ones, too).

These will contextual like what an overhaul of the planning and codes process should look like.
You get the "read the article and grokked it before commenting" award.

(I most decidedly do not.)
Do you have a source for him being fired? Wikipedia doesn't mention Melzer being fired and Google searches for him being fired don't produce any hits.
Kind of side topic, but - do you think 5x5 is a good idea for 80+ year olds?

From what I know, at an older age, the chance of injury, not to mention the danger of injury, is way higher. The standard advice afaik is therefore to aim for lower weight / higher reps, because the risk of injury is therefore greatly reduced.

Not saying that 5x5 is necessarily incorrect, just that I would imagine a 8-10 rep based routine would be better for purposes of injury reduction (while still improving muscle conditioning, obviously).
It would probably seem redundant in the USA to use a .us domain, since the default assumption seems to be that everything is US-centric.
It's never once started on anything I own. For over a decade. The most voted-on item in its bug tracker has 9 votes on it.

RiscOS (which was a wilfully-obtuse comparison on my part, but since you're digging in [edit: in fact, creating an account on HN for no reason except to promote it on this thread], I'll run with it for your benefit) has without question already actually run on a number of devices -- though granted, not types of devices -- at least one or two orders of magnitude larger than this thing ever will, at the rate it's going.
See this is what I love about finite state machines. You get the ability to see what your states and transitions look like.

Not just you, the non-technical people on a project too. If you can't understand the state machine in your app, there's potential for a lot of unexpected states.

FSM flow charts can get dense, but in the same way we compose react components, you can compose FSM's. You don't need a single FSM for your entire application.

The router in a react app is often a state machine, and could be a finite state machine. Each major part of you're app could implement it's own finite state machine under that.

The value of FSM's is that you can discuss the business logic with your stakeholders, often in language and with visual aids they understand.

As opposed to not having it, and just making it up as we go along, and never considering the whole picture.

FSM's have helped me explain and reconcile impossible states request by stakeholders (because they didn't understand how they were impossible, because they were sufficiently complex).
So, it is really easy and almost no one manages to do it right even after instructions?

And after failing to do it right after instructions, it is the other people who are arrogant for asking to use something they are able to pronounce, not you for insisting on making them uncomfortable?

Names are just sounds people make when they want someones attention. Respect goes two ways.
A century of astronomy revealed Earth’s place in the universe
“congestion as a result of fewer lanes”

Removing a car lane for a bicycle lane doesn’t decrease the number of lanes (may even increase it if a car lane is replaced by two bicycle lanes). If the bicycle lane gets used by former car drivers, car density may even go down, and congestion with it (but that likely will induce demand)

“The shop owners are going to fight you on that. They want those cars driving past their shops”

I don’t think they get paid for ad impressions. Shop owners want people to enter their shop and buy things, not drive past it.
Yeah single-family residential zoning is an intimate part of the car dependency trap in North America.
Have a look at autolayout.js! Here’s a link to a previous discussion on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997622
Public traffic space is limited (and in major cities exhausted) supply. Being "pro something else" is automatically anti-something. If do not make the latter part explicit it will just hurt the weakest group (typically reducing space for pedestrians).
Had a native English speaker as a coworker who struggled with U vs Ü in German. No matter how we tried to convey the difference in sound, "you're saying the same thing".
It's not even a norms delta, it's a probability of any deviation from norms. The creators (https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/) even put out a survey a couple years ago trying to figure out if anyone actually understood the data. The maps have pretty much always looked like that in the summer over the past five years.
>Lets get them working consistently under well defined, standard, simple, emergency braking tests before worrying about the real world.

Automatic emergency braking is the exact wrong feature to use for your example. Either the driver sees the pedestrian, stops in time, and the automatic emergency braking is of no use or the driver would have hit the pedestrian and any effort from the automatic system is a benefit. This is the type of feature that should be deployed as soon as possible assuming it is not tuned too aggressively to stop at false alarms.
I mean, the second half of the article is almost entirely quotes from "Michael Wehner, a a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory"

Including the section

“You expect hotter heatwaves with climate change but the estimates may have been overly conservative,” Wehner said. “With the Pacific north-west heatwave you’d conclude the event would be almost impossible without climate change but in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer you’d also include it would be impossible with climate change, too. That is problematic, because the event happened.”

That does seem more compelling and newsworthy than "feels in line for most July's since I've lived here." to me? The map might not be the greatest graphic but the article still has meat right?
Thanks for sharing. The worst for me personally is 'ng'. My wife has tried a hundred times to teach me. To me it just sounds like a nasally 'n'. I tried that and get laughed at. She tries our short 'i' and gets laughed at. All in fun of course.
CCC events have ran 2G infra for ages, and since recently there was also 3G and 4G. There were even workshops where you could operate a femtocell.
Once upon a time Eric A Meyer's CSS: The Definitive Guide was the book to own.

These days, as mentioned in the OP, MDN is the best point of call for checking syntax or learning how to implement something new the right way.
Wi-Fi Speed Tests – Aruba Instant on vs. UniFi
Italian too, "gli amici si vedono nel momento del bisogno" - you see real friends in the hour of need.
I don't think it's pedantic at all. It seems to me rude of you to say so. It's a very important distinction in everyday life, including in HN comments, between saying something that isn't true, and actually lying.

No-one thinks the word "pipe" is a pipe, nor does it claim to be a pipe.

And amid your claims of words being totally unreliable and deceptive, you seem to think I will know exactly what you mean by your words. Etc. Let's agree to disagree.
> Well, I have. I want languages more like Go and Zig. People will always hate at least Go, but it didn't hit TIOBE top 10 out of sheer baseless hype and corporate sponsorship.

Given how succesfull Oberon-2 and Limbo have been in the market without someone like Google behind them, or having a biased Go advocate at the same company push for a project rewrite from Java into Go, yes it did.
What about Borg vs Restic? Which is better?
No one is reading "Markus Antonius" and pronouncing it as "Marc Anthony".

A few historical figures have Anglicized names for whatever reasons, so we use those.
I can agree with "standard in [domain]", as there are many domains know nothing about.

What raises my hackles is the lack of any qualifiers, given how rarely it's used in the projects I know about.
Can't agree more with the sentiment.

We are self-hosting everything we can and quite happy with it. From security and management standpoint it's incomparably better.

It does have it's management overhead, however for years we managed to create processes and workflows keeping it's to bare minimum.

Contrary to popular opinion I believe that self-hosting will grow, at least for solutions requiring immense security and reliability
Be careful though, not too long ago I watched a YouTube video in very demeaning tone of how to not offend people yadda yadda, but it turns out they pronounced it completely differently than a guy from school pronounced his own family name. (He was born there and emigrated, so not some generations-old mishmash).
The article brings up categorical perception when it says one shouldn't assume they are hearing sounds in another language correctly, since our brains will map those sounds to the nearest English equivalent.

What the article is really addressing is how different orthographic romanization systems map to English sounds. It's not advocating (as far as I can tell) that English speakers attempt to produce non-English sounds, which is, as you say, a difficult issue and probably not realistic without phonetic training.
When I (German) was ~15 I was blaming esp. US folks for not managing to pronounce my handle correctly.
That changed when I completely failed to pronounce Baltic and Arabic names to the name-holders satisfaction. I can't even hear where I am going wrong.
Part of the reason behind this is that it's really, really hard to hire good programmers in academia -- salaries are difficult to put into grants and equipment is easier. It may well be the case that an übernerd could get your algo a significant runtime improvement, but sometimes you're massively unlikely to actually be able to get an übernerd. On the other hand, saying "I and doing big science, give me time on this cluster" is often more of a positive thing to write.
And the contender is restic

https://restic.net/
> Sounds incredible, compared to amount of hours people usually spend to be in "pretty good shape".

3-4 hours is pretty standard, actually, from what I know. A fairly standard "beginner" routine is 3 days a week of weightlifting, around 1 hour in the gym each session.

That does lack cardio, but if you do the above and eat well for a few months, you can look and feel vastly better than before (and a year of this gets you in better shape than 90% of the population, I believe).
This is a great list! For someone starting out with modern CSS I’d add: a working knowledge of Flexbox, and media queries to enable responsive design.
Similarly, I really have to wonder about the externalities of having windows in office buildings.

While the view they provide can be nice, windows have a real cost to productivity and attention.

Edit: research actually points to the opposite of my teasing comment above. [1] But then again, maybe playing a mini game boosts productivity?

https://journalistsresource.org/environment/daylight-windows...
Should you be extradited to Saudi Arabia for having drunk alcohol or having had sex outside marriage?
You sort of just have to dive into it, it gets better with actual practice. The first time I did some practical RE i was trying to ahem crack something and spent over a few weeks on it. Then one night I couldn't go to sleep and just thought fk it i'll give it another stab, made myself a mug of coffee and voila, everything just clicked together.
Understanding Rust futures by going way too deep
Fear of stepping on something or falling or worse is not all that irrational. One might say your stance seems reckless or irrational.
Sure one laptop doesn’t matter. But if everybody in the country has one it does matter. 300 million laptops each drawing 6 watts 24/7 adds up to 15 terawatt*hrs per year, which is real power. That’s pushing 1% of all the coal-powered electricity in the country. A handful of policies like that, each of which just feels like a minor annoyance and thus pointless, but it adds up and starts to make a real difference.
> And Sweden was like "uhmmmm.... nope, we need to leave that option open"

Because the prosecutor can't give any such blanket guarantees. That would be illegal.

Assange obviously knew this and tried to play the media, which failed.
All the world's a simulation,
and all the men and women merely objects.
They have destructors and constructors;
And each one in its run morphs poly times
Like I said, it sucks that it doesn't start on anything you own, which doesn't take away from the fact that there's literally a massive list of hardware it does actually run on.

And you're right, I created an account to comment on this thread. If you think disagreeing with you on this means I'm "promoting" Haiku as some sort of shill (my two points were literally that it's an OS and it boots on hardware, how controversial) then you're entitled to your opinion I guess.
We have experienced the coldest winter since 2011 in the Southern Hemisphere (at least South Africa) this year. The summer was also warmer than average.

I wonder what less conservative global warming forecasts would look like, and whether the winter this year will be average in US and CA.
Ironically, one reason that Unisys keeps selling ClearPath MCP (nee Burroughs) it is not that a couple of companies are using a mainframe created in 1961, which anyway has had its evolution path anyway, rather there are security levels where a UNIX clone is just not desired at all.
I think the issue is that most spare computers people have at hand are old laptops, which tend to have really finicky hardware when compared to what desktops usually have.
We've already thrown out evolution, which isn't a huge deal because our environment is changing far too quickly for it to be helpful.

But even if none of that were the case, arguments that death is a positive and should be kept around have a huge burden to meet. When your argument is "we should murder everyone who will ever exist because X," then the value X had better be pretty fucking huge.
The GP specified Western Europe, so I doubt the 10th-20th percentile statistic is accurate since most Western European countries are not that far off from the US median[0].

If one takes into account the social services (education, healthcare, etc.) and general worker protections (mandatory PTO, parental leave, etc.) I think it’s clear the median earner in Western Europe is doing better than the median US worker in quality of life terms.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Yes... in the same way that you can set up a street food cart in the middle of nowhere without needing special permits. But good luck making any kind of meaningful change in your life with that unless your food cart happens to sell meth
I'm not a fan of PHP, but I remember it having some lightweight, built in API to secure SQL queries. On the other hand, using a good ORM with a mature web framework removes most common vulnerabilities, and you don't have to worry as much about your junior peers creating security holes.
Haha... That was quite hilarious actually. On a similar note, a childhood friend had last name Eld, meaning "fire" in Swedish. That did not work well when it was time for conscriptive military service....
Restic doesn't support compression and probably won't. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/21

Borg has a "lackluster" encryption scheme. https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/internals/securi...

Restic can't pull backups. https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/299

Borg can't either, but it has "borg import-tar", which might be good enough.
CMS for Web Development
I'm anti-car (cars as a regular transit method, parking lots, urban sprawl, burning up hydrocarbons, etc), but I love my car. I love working on it, I love driving it, I love the fact that I can go anywhere with it at any time without consulting a bus or train schedule.

I'm anti-smoking. I'd tell anyone not to smoke. But I love cigarettes.

I'm in favor of gun control. But I own guns.

See where I'm going with this?

I'm happy to have a conversation with anyone about the better alternative ways to live, but about 99% of the responses in this thread rub me the wrong way because they're sanctimonious, pompous and aggrieved, and want to explain the right and wrong way to live from the perspective of a child.

One major thing they fail to take into account is that people have grown accustomed to certain freedoms (like not asking permission to go somewhere, or waiting for a bus), and a naive attempt to start solving the world's problems by curtailing other people's freedoms is a non-starter.

Ultimately, you can convince people why these things are bad for society and why there are better alternatives (or why they should be given up completely), but there are major reasons why society adopted these things in the first place and when you come at it from the angle of "you're wrong, you're terrible and you suck and you need to quit smoking / stop working on your car / give your guns to the government", you're going to hit a huge amount of resistance compared with trying to make incremental changes and presenting a case for better lifestyle alternatives.
Hard to Soft Money: The Hyperinflation of the Roman Empire
Of course not. But here’s an analogy. “Nobody got fat by eating just one little scoop of ice cream.” It all adds up.
I was very impressed with the last version I tried earlier this year. It was fun to use.

I uninstalled it because I needed to get back to a system I knew better for a while. For one minor detail, QMMP had some freezing bug, but man I loved that haiku skin. I guess it's time to try it again and see how it goes with the various use cases.

> improvements to Wi-Fi networking to match FreeBSD 13

Just curious, why this match in particular? Was it a goal of some kind or is this mainly a reference freebie due to the reuse of some component?
Because he doesn't have a youtube channel (though you can hardly blame him...)

Recreational mathematics is featured a lot on youtube. Channels like stand up maths. Some of the topics Martin Gardner wrote about are being covered again in this new medium.