skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Drifting off-topic but I've wondered this myself - I've been interested in CRDTs in a "read the news" way but not a "this rises to something I'm going to implement" way.

Perhaps it's blindingly obvious to all here, so no one mentions it: Thinking about more practical and real-world problems seems like collaboration on on more complex/structured data. Today, it seems one would still have to transform that data to a large flat string underneath, and implement an editor that only performs edits that maintain the integrity of the higher-level object, while the flat string provides collaboration features. Perhaps it's possible to implement an XML schema known to the editor so all insertions/deletions keep the document syntactically correct.

I wonder if there's some other way to either generalize on top of "big string" or create another base model (somehow?)
waiterio.com an order management system for restaurants. Started as a mobile app 8 years ago and shifted to SaaS 5 years ago.
For bootstrapped solopreneur I recommend making products for piers like marketers/developers/sales/tech. Having non-tech savvy restaurateurs as customers has been an uphill battle I would probably not do again.
> In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers

You can't meet the demand by producing more workers per hour in some plant though

If you need X doctors and only have X/2, no matter how much you pay them, they won't be enough.
There's ineffective and effective learning, and some techniques are indeed better than other.

However, they always require works.

100 pushup a day is going to always be better than a single pushup a day, all things being equal.
not really. the lead-crime hypothesis posits that the reduction of crime in the 90s is due to the reduction of lead, but if the effect is really tiny, which the paper suggests, then it likely means that other factors, such as increased incarceration and or accessibility to abortion, may also be to blame for falling crime, or something else entirely.
Companies like Remote.com
Maybe the overarching moral of the story is that single-use "disposable" products aren't a good environmental option regardless of what material they're made of.
EDIT: Looks like the title’s been changed — it was previously ‘Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable?’.

Put simply, the title question can be answered as follows: 500 years of sound change, plus analogy, plus borrowing from other languages, plus a complete lack of standardisation.

Actually, all of these points are interesting, so let me elaborate:

• English spelling was ‘standardised’ (for lack of a better word) roughly ~500 years ago. Since that time, English pronunciation has changed considerably. Most prominently, the Great Vowel Shift [0] messed up the long vowels. To take just two examples, ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨oo⟩ used to be the same sounds as ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩, just pronounced longer; however they now sound more like long versions of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩. The old sound /x/ has disappeared, leaving silent ⟨gh⟩s everywhere. And the process continues today: in my dialect, final /l/ has vocalised, meaning words like ‘bottle’ should really be spelt like ⟨bottoo⟩. Even worse, some sound changes were sporadic (i.e. random): IIRC there was a sporadic change from /ɒ/ to /ʌ/ in some words, which is why ⟨won⟩ and ⟨dot⟩ have different vowels.

• At some times people liked to mess up the spelling of words to make them more similar to ‘related’ words — even when, on closer examination, there turns out to be no relation at all. Thus ⟨iland⟩ → ⟨island⟩ (by analogy with ⟨isle⟩); ⟨dout⟩ → ⟨doubt⟩ (by analogy with Latin ⟨dubitare⟩).

• Of course, a word borrowed from another language will obey different spelling rules. This is especially the case if it’s passed through another language on its way: e.g. ⟨rhino⟩ and ⟨archaeology⟩. (Ancient Greek distinguished ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨rh⟩ from ⟨c⟩ and ⟨r⟩; all four had separate letters, but Latin borrowed the former as digraphs.)

• For some reason, English spelling has proved very resistant to both standardisation and reform. The most successful attempt so far has been Websters’; American English adopted it partially, while British English did not, which of course just added to the confusion. (XKCD 927 is relevant here.) This may be contrasted to languages like Spanish, the more phonemic spelling of which is standardised and updated by the Real Academia Española.

Of course, it should be noted that English is not alone in its spelling. Irish spelling, for instance, is something I find practically impenetrable. French and Tibetan spelling systems are somewhat more regular, but both suffer from being formulated ~1000 years ago. (e.g. the well-known Tibetan name ‘Tashi’ is spelled བཀྲ་ཤིས་, in Roman letters ⟨bkra-shisl⟩, which is indeed how it would have been pronounced in the 9th century.) As always, Japanese is in a league of its own. But of the alphabetic systems, English is probably the worst.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
Productivity compared to which time in the past? If we compare productivity today compared to say 1960/1950 then we have definitely improved. We can manufacture at speed & scale. We can communicate with people across the continents like never before. We can work-from-home to a large extent than ever before. We can destroy each other at much grander scale like never before.

But like any system, any improvement in efficiency results in shifting the bottlenecks. It never truly goes away. The nature of the bottleneck may be different but its there. The things like "forms, compliance, process" are the new bottlenecks.

Technology is a means to an end. It cannot be the end itself (at a macro level). Tech is by humans, for humans and of humans. Humans will always be the centerpiece for time to come (unless AI becomes so good as they potray in sci-fi films/tv-series).
> This is what happened with the introduction of household appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for example, we do laundry more often.

I have thoroughly debunked this commonly referenced saying. I don't have a washer and a dryer any more and I can't go into laundromats because Tide delivers a chemical burn. (Even with 2 empty loads in a row.) No, I hand wash all my clothes and it takes way longer than if I did my laundry 5 times a week in my house if I had the machines.
> The media here in France reports that some industries, in particular restaurants, are having a hard time finding employees

It's the same in the UK. Farmers cannot harvest some crops because the cheap EU labour is no longer present and locals won't do it.
Tree Style Tabs exists: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Vimperator replacements exist: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl

Additionally, XUL was a steaming pile of shit, and there was no saving it. Multithreading was only possible by ripping out XUL.
> These low hanging fruit can be picked by throwing more people at the problem (increasing workforce participation or working longer hours).

I haven't read the article yet, but note increasing workforce participation or working hours doesn't increase productivity - that just increases the denominator for the productivity calculation, and unless it increases the numerator faster there is no productivity increase.
> Be useful to end users. Differentiate on that.

What does it mean today? Most people want a browser that is invisible. They use sites, not browser.
it did support jscript for IE3
i have frequently needed to do this on Chrome Pixelbook, so it might just be that Meet is generally buggy.
>Because you have self-respect and shouldn't be taking handouts if you're capable of working?

FWIW, I agree with you. But this is a moral take, not an economist’s. I think most economists would say people act to maximize utility. In the real world I think it’s both but it’s very hard to regulate/incentivize morals
Mostly because it is clearly visible and enduring pollution I think.
Have you applied at iFixit?

https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair
The best and worst of times to build a new SaaS product
I mean I guess it's nice that a mainstream press outlet is finally admitting what has been known for 20+ years--that recycling, with few exceptions like aluminum, is a big waste of energy and wealth and is a net negative for the environment overall--but only when they can somehow blame it on "big oil." Maybe we can end the idiotic ritual of sorting our garbage like hobos now?

The focus should be on reducing plastic usage overall and using paper-based materials except where absolutely necessary. The recycling catechism telling us the answer to waste is recycling has probably done more harm than good because it has prevented us from thinking properly about the problem.
And what is safe?
C has well defined, tested, and documented specifications which layout exactly how to use C safely.
Languages like Rust are more safe but nothing is just safe. If you are an inexperienced developer it is still very easy to write insecure code in Rust.

Sure, moving to safer languages is good. But it is impossible to rule out the use of a language so established that every major operating system is written in it. It is practically impossible to not use C - safe languages are normally bootstrapped by it and eventually your “safe” code will run in an environment programmed in C.
Opera is based on Chromium now, FYI.
CRDT is a general concept, editing text is just one possible application. If you have a stronger datatype, great, you can build operations on top of it to implement a CRDT system, depending on its properties.
People always have those rights, no matter where they live, their religion, their cast or what not. That's the definition of Universal.

However, they are sometimes not respected and it's the duty of the international community to lobby against the perpetrators especially when they took the moral engagement to recognise them officially.

It not the wild west, there are voluntarily agreed upon international treaties that can be brought as a base for these discussions.
You can improve the situation somewhat by using bromite/ungoogled-chromium instead of chrome, for the purposes when Firefox doesn't work.
Having learned SQL on a need-to-know basis, recursion took me a while to grok. Would have been nice to have this article back then.

Quite powerful stuff, both in the results it can produce and in the resources it can drain from the server.

Besides the typical "linked-list" queries, I used this to split a comma-separated column value into separate rows, as our DB server did not have that as a built-in function. Not pretty, but it did the job.
It might be important to distiguish doing "nothing" from not being on the job market.

It's possible to contribute to society by making art, writing, cooking, spending time with family, caring for others, etc. as well as self-actualizing via exercise, reading, meditation, and so on.
This is a somewhat blinkered perspective. It's true in a sense, but the emissions can be offset by not burning some oil that's in the ground not causing any problems. In the meantime, it is an optimal way of getting rid of huge categories of toxic or otherwise intransigent waste that will have harmful effects if they are not removed from the biosphere.
> > Microsoft’s primary offense was illegally tying Internet Explorer and Windows. They refused to sell the two products separately, and instead required OEMs to buy the bundle.

> Nope.

Yes, it was.

> That's what some people complained about, but it wasn't their legal issue (which is why today every OS vendor still does it).

No, every OS vendor doesn't do illegal tying of a browser to the OS, which involves both the fact of a preexisting monopoly OS to which the tying occurs (that's essential to the illegality, since its an illegal method of leveraging one monopoly to another market), and the kind of business methods used to enforce the tying.
I find it hard to agree with the article.
With the escalation of technology the amount of things I get done every day, like, tangible, countable things, has skyrocketed, even more as my education with that technology went up. Not just programming and admin stuff, that includes stuff like art (cheaper, takes less time, gets nicer results) which some people argued would never ever be a replacement for traditional art (I still do some traditional things but I don't have shelves full of materials anymore). Not to mention new avenues like 3D modeling, I don't need a huge studio and large chunks of rock to create a 3D figure anymore, and there are ways to make it a real sculpture if I wanted. Music composing, I don't need several hundred dollars in instruments anymore (nor a complex soundproof studio). I don't need rooms full of machinery to make code or plan complex network arrangements, etc. And for the things that still need to be done the old way©, there are better tools, information and whatnot.

Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and homebrewn programs.
Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the third point in the article ("The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt I'm special in any way. It's not like the past had no distractions, and I'd argue distractions in the past were harder to dismiss (having to personally travel to X place to do Y paperwork instead of resolving that with a quick phone call or digital process).

Sure, the pandemic made a few disasters in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy turning extremely slow, but I'd blame that more on poor organization than a side effect of technology.
Here in California every restaurant/fast food place is hiring. They all list the things they offer (PTO, 401k-no matching what you put in, and that's it). What they don't put on the signs is what they pay (minimum wage every single time), or the hours (always part time, always weekends, mostly if not always nights.

But obviously it's just that no one wants to work, it couldn't possibly be because no one wants part-time (especially because they change your days/hours and wait till the last minute to give you the next week's schedule so you can't plan around it and get another job). It couldn't possibly be because part-time minimum wage day-shifting jobs are literally worthless as these places are finding out.

I keep hearing owners whine and bemoan their lack of workers. What I have never heard of, not once, is an owner making less profit to pay their workers better to get the loyalty and hard work they want but refuse to pay for.
It's not just 10 minutes. It's every time you go to a new country, having to figure out what the local pay as go is called, finding somewhere to buy a sim, picking a plan, figuring out how to reload. Likely none of this is in your native language. If you are going to several countries consecutively it gets old. And you still can't use your own phone number. Yes, you might save ~50$ a month while travelling, but I will happily 50$ not to deal with local sims anymore. I will only do it if you need a local number for interactions with local businesses.
Very nice, when I read "double linked list" I immediately thought "what about a btree like structure?" I guess Martins idea to replace the IDs comes from the "vector clock" idea for concurrent updates
A large chunk of the recycled materials in Canada and the US is not recycled domestically and a majority of that is sent to countries with inadequate controls. So the culpability starts with the users/manufacturers.
IE only shipped with JavaScript and VBScript built-in. Other language engines could be installed (Perl and Python for example), but realistically nobody would write client-side code in a language which required a visitor to install support for it.

VBScript was the only viable contender, but it never really had any compelling advantages compared to JavaScript. JavaScript is often criticized for quirky design and syntax, but if anything VBScript was worse.

Also the pluggable script engines were based on COM, so only worked on Windows. I don't think VBScript was ever supported in IE for Mac.

I don't think Microsoft ever saw a strategic advantage to promoting alternative languages on the web. Otherwise they would have done a lot more.
I experience the same. Can't really use YouTube, can't download files from gdrive. Google was the best thing that could happen to search engines. Chrome was a godsend. Now they are what Microsoft was two decades ago (Microsoft is still full of shit, but now they are not alone).
Huh, just an anecdote, but Meet runs perfectly fine on FF for me at work. Only issue is I can't blur my background unless I'm on Chrome.
Again? This is getting tiresome.
> Is your aim somewhat different, I.e produce an “offline” way to read that doesn’t involve endless scrolling?

Not having to see the actual tweets was the goal. The problem with connecting my Twitter feed to Flipboard e.t.c is that I'd get exposed to every careless tweet/thread/flame war. The hypothesis with PaperDelivery is that the external links that appear on my twitter feed has less frivolous content since it's not limited to 280 characters.

>There was an iOS app called Nuzzel that was my daily go to for Twitter news articles. It was also giving context for the stories such as comments made by folks retweeting it,

Ah I didn't know about Nuzzel - sounds useful if it can fetch just the links. According to a different comment, mailbrew.com too seems to be able to do this.
Anki is a good way to preserve progress made, and even make enormous amount of progress(in the medium and long term), but I don't think it was going to be a complete solution all by itself.
I think people are doing more work than ever, but that doesn't mean the work is useful.

Think about how much easier it is to build a SaaS or something vs. even just ten years ago, but that doesn't mean that the new stuff being built will bring economic value.

In fact we might expect there to be diminishing returns in terms of what delivers real utility and thus improvements in productivity don't translate to a similar increase in wealth generation.
Always find it frustrating how tedious trees are in SQL. Like, relational db is in the name, so why is such a common pattern of relations so annoying to work with?
We’ve been misled for so long into thinking this is a consumer problem that needs downstream solutions. Actually I think it’s a regulatory problem that needs upstream regulation
Well, crime went down worldwide, whereas abortion and incarceration only went up in the US.
> All the confounding circumstances are controlled.

How can you control everything? These studies do not control what no one thought about that it could have an effect. Its impossible to control everything.
One can admire both. They aren’t in competition with one another.
There's at least 16 hypotheses and none of them are that popular. In fact, most people are unlikely to even know that crime has been on a downward trend at all.

The lead hypothesis has not been debunked, and if you read the article in the OP you'll find a number of unanswered questions.

https://www.vox.com/2015/2/13/8032231/crime-drop
A P.O. Box address should be fine.
Everyone churning out Tiktok, Clubhouse, and Robinhood while we need more SpaceX and Teslas. I’m unsure how to tilt the equation so solving for hard (necessary) engineering is more profitable (or lower risk) than window dressing.
I think a Google search for "clean energy ETF" yields some good results.

I wouldn't say I am 100pc invested in clean energy ETFs, but do hold them for ideological reasons.
The article's premise seems to me to be that real money is valuable because there's more to it than its properties and its form...

> But a cash token is not mere paper, and the numbers we see in bank accounts are not mere numbers. They are accounting records of legally-enforceable promises...

That sentence strikes me as the crux. But we never find out what is being promised. The word IOU is also used a lot, but we don't find out what we are owed.

Is it access to a financial system? If so that's a flimsy argument, who's to say crypto couldn't create its own financial vortex (as the author describes it)?
I remember attending a big American Physics Society conference, maybe 4000 physicists attending. They had many parallel tracks for presentations, labeled A through T or something like that. I remember reading through these and it was fascinating the breadth of topics covered, condensed matter through fluid dynamics, chaos, some astrophysics IIRC.

So at the end of the program there's some special session labeled Z and it was for "special physics". All of the talks had bizarre names filled with jargon terms "hyper quantum zener matrix dimensions".

I gather it was the APSs solution to quietly enable the quacks to talk amongst themselves instead of denying them any platform.
Ask HN: Should I be afraid of being myself online?
TL;DR: I am terrified of the possibility of being harmed as a result of exposing my (boring) thoughts on the Internet under my real identity. Should I do it anyway?

From time to time I get an urge to start some sort of "online public brain dump": Make all my ideas accessible to anyone who may be interested. That would include anything from subjects I've learned to deeply personal things concerning my views on life and society, my mental health issues and so on. (For context, I'm in my mid-20s. I have zero online presence and not much of a social life.)

It seems what a lot of privacy-minded people do is keep the personal stuff separated, preferably anonymous, to protect their reputation, career or safety. I'd like to do the opposite, and have everything in the same place. These things are really inseparable in my mind and it just feels so wrong to pretend otherwise. I guess what I really want is to put myself out there, connect with real people in the real world by being friendly but genuine. I want to openly say stupid things not to argue but simply because I actually believe in them, I want to engage in honest discussions, I want to openly retract what I said when I change my mind.

But what I've been seeing done to people who are caught making mistakes makes me very afraid of showing that I, too, am human and make mistakes and have wrong opinions. I don't consider myself to have particularly unique ideas, my opinions on most topics aren't controversial and I'm very much against being inflammatory. Still, all I can think of when I'm about to make this idea concrete are horror stories: Being "canceled", fired and kept from getting jobs, sued, doxxed, death-threatened, harrassed to the point of committing suicide... I'm no Snowden or Scott Alexander, but "the Internet never forgets".

So, HN, what are your thoughts on this? Do you feel similarly? How "yourself" are you online? Is my fear just paranoia and I should "just do it", or, in the contrary, am I being naïve for wanting to do it?

If you've read all this, thanks and sorry for the rambling.
This is a real thing that rustc does, but we do try to put effort into silencing errors that are caused by earlier ones. If this happens often to you, I would kindly ask for bug reports because I would love to avoid this from happening.
I trust it because it’s an open source project and I can see what goes in and comes out.

Of course, maybe it won’t work forever, but it works for now.

I’m not a crypto person and don’t use Brave’s crypto features, but I think it’s a more sustainable future than relying on Google’s largess.
This previous HN discussions on OT vs CRDT paper is an excellent overview of the topics [1],[2].

From the paper conclusions "Our discoveries from this work revealed facts and evidences that refute CRDT superiority claims over OT on all accounts, which helps to explain the underlying reasons behind the choices between
OT and CRDT in the real world."

The fact that the paper provided the refutation to one of the HN discussion points being made in [1] (i.e. reference to itself), regarding the claimed of CRDT superiority in its footnotes is rather amusing and the first such attempt I have personally seen in a published paper.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18191867

[2]https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02137