skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mean, there is no Canadian identity so in that sense we're welcoming. I grew up with family that spoke Ukrainian every day on one side and French on the other (and I have never lived in Quebec either). I have no idea what Canadian identity is despite having been born here. To me Canada is prairies, mountains, and small Ukrainian, French, Nordic and German enclaves/towns dotting the countryside. I can't relate to a 10th generation Canadian from Ontario.

Economically though things were way better 20 years ago. We're losing ground on every single economic metric. Almost all of my family has already left for the US or back to Europe. All of my classmates I kind of kept up with have left the country. A bunch of the immigrants I used to know left.

If you have a good job and a house I'm sure things are fine. You can live a good life here if you do have a good income stream and already own a home. You can live well anywhere. I'm currently in the rocky mountains and it is nice.

But just looking at things critically (since my partner and I are looking to settle down and have kids, she has an EU country passport, I have a Canadian one, we both have family everywhere, she just bought an investment property in Europe), our taxes are too high for the services we receive, wages are too low for the cost of living, and things are objectively worse than they were before.
I laughed
That said, like any other skill, there will be a day when AI actually surpasses humans at it.
Moravec and Tegmark convinced me of it.
(The prelude to Tegmark's fascinating LIFE 3.0 is online:
https://www.marketingfirst.co.nz/storage/2018/06/prelude-lif...)

PS: I laughed more from the xkcd link posted before by u/ignoranceprior https://xkcd.com/1263/
Amen, great article...some people never understand...
I had a phone interview the other day - it was set up through hired, an online platform where recruiters ask you to interview. The recruiter used “good time to meet” to set up the interview which I then had to accept in a Google Calendar. When he called me my iPhone helpfully automatically sent an unknown caller silently to voicemail but I saw it ringing and tried to pick up, but too late. I then called the number back - it was a Google Meet computer voice that asked me for a PIN number rather than being the recruiters actual phone. I didn’t get any PIN number and the calendar invite didn’t have one. The recruiter didn’t provide his actual phone number only an email. I tried sending an email but didn’t get a reply. Knowing that he was using Google Meet I tried to call him by Google Meet but there was no answer. I wasn’t too bothered by it but I marveled at all the stupid layers of unnecessary technological complexity stacked on top of each other that had led to this situation. Is all of that really necessary to make a phone call?
That's a good take. I agree with presentation, and I think Google fixed this on YouTube to some extent. However, they're failing at the repercussions aspect.
what's fascinating is that developers have been automating-away their jobs for decades with tools and libraries... so just add to the automation-pressure? or be some sea-change?

hard to know, economically-speaking...
When people write text they use it to represent ideas and objects and relations between ideas and objects. When GPT writes text it fits a satistical model. It has no concept of meaning. Although the result may be superficially similar sometimes, under the hood the two processes are nothing alike. GPT does not think. Humans do. At least sometimes.

Thinking is an internal process. It is not just determined by its output. When we roll dice we do not say the dice decided to land on three and seven.
I've always wondered what would happen if two friends built a game together and then the employer of one of them tried to claim ownership: "sorry, I actually only own half the game". Hand over the bits of code you wrote in a completely broken state (since it is, after all, literally only half the code), quit, then help your friend fill in the pieces again.
Opus is great!

This is what Argos Translate uses (https://github.com/argosopentech/argos-translate).
Scientists are science experts. Scientific data should help inform policy decisions. We can’t skip that step.
Then read the odometer. You don’t need to subject everyone to constant surveillance to pay for roads.
Irreversible Binomial
The day of the week thing about calendar dates is something that triggers me when I see it in the media.

It is absurdly obvious that, within the current calendar system, that feat is a math trick which can be learned and practiced. A quick Googling even reveals how to execute the calculation with alacrity.

Yet, it continues to be upheld in almost every appearance in the media I’ve seen as an indication of photographic memory.

I can pull that trick off and I definitely don’t have photographic memory. I just happened to learn it to demonstrate a point.
Nope, just crash ballast. I understand what you're condemning though: it's super regrettable when ordinary utilities, daemons, or desktop apps preallocate like like they're database servers on dedicated hardware.
If only the Kindle had been a thing in the 90s! :- )
I've heard it claimed that you aren't selling a product, you are selling a story.

If true, there's nothing to 'fix' with VCs. If you can't sell a story to them, how are you selling a story to the customers?

Look at all of the companies that we admire. The tranparency we get from some? Literally stories. Products that last or 'just work'? More stories. Hell, even my hobbies are mostly full of stories.
Speaking only of the US, you have no right to privacy in public [1]. Existing law enables both government and private surveillance systems with little recourse.

Capturing mileage by geographic area would be an acceptable solution, but mileage delta over time would be insufficient to collect and disburse road taxes based on what is needed/used/traveled the most.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy
Software is a specification. Maybe you meant requirements, but people don't have requirements - they have problems that need to be solved. It is the programmers job to devise a solution to the problem and specify that in code.
No android program?
Yes, and in fact that kind of automation has been happening continually since the creation of the first stored-program electronic computers.
But what do you do with a company, even with good tech, when they’re not able to sell a product?
Both the Tracker and the 2400. :) They do things differently, but each is great and produce results that the other would not.

And honestly the new MPCs are pretty good too, just not my preferred way of working.
I remember on my way back from Machu Picchu, I was still thinking about how relatively young it was when we were touring Lima and were shown Huaca Pucllana, a clay/adobe pyramid in downtown Lima that's probably around 1,000 years older than Macchu Pichu. What's neat is had Lima not been in a desert, 1500 years of rainfall would've ruined the place.
The current American Antifa movement sprung up in direct confrontation to a government that was intent on violating every norm of democratic governance, and forcing through regulations and laws that were borderline fascist.

Trump's America absolutely was heading in a fascist direction by the strict definition of the term ("a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition").

While there is no one single organized Antifa leadership or central planning, the participants were generally united by a truly genuine goal of resistance to fascism.

And violence only broke out when instigated by the state forces, bolstered by the knowledge that local, state, and federal governments are in support of them.
Have you ever seen the movie nerve? (Tl;dr [spoilers]: fictional online video game coercing people into doing dares based on upvotes from the internet hive mind which can't be shutdown due to handwavey "distributed" reasons. The protagonists eventually get all their friends together to launch a 51% attack to shut it down)

I think that sort of thing is the vision that these groups have when they talk about "the next" internet being built on "blockchain". Of course there are insurmountable technical problems between here and there...
My pleasure! Let me know which one is your favorite :)
Of course the United States has been very successful in the past, leading to our current position, which I don’t think is quite as firmly or permanently primary as you believe. The reasons for American dominance in the late 20th century are numerous. I’d point out that we weren’t the site of any major wars in the 20th century, unlike most other developed nations.

The “people who can’t make it while times are good” are already surviving under the difficult conditions we are discussing, so I’m not sure what you mean.

I do believe that emotional fortitude is a real thing that affects people’s ability to function under duress. And you’re correct, America currently maintains an incredibly expensive military dominance. I’m not sure how you think that addresses anything I said. My concerns are about the social fabric of the country not being particularly resilient and middle/upper class individuals being entirely inexperienced at dealing with actual physical hardships. That’s not something that a strong military or past success is going to fix for us.

The (very briefly touched upon) topic is what Americans would do if they had to endure conditions such as those experienced in the USSR, for any theoretical reason. Basically all I said is that many people would find it difficult, having never experienced that.
But what about Pop!_OS?
It wasn't true. Maclisp was competitive with Fortran in the 1970s. Wolfram didn't know enough about Lisp -- or computing in general -- to make such a claim.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20081121205217/http://ymeme.com/...
While not exactly tracker music, if this "sound" is appealing to you, here's a channel that might be of interest: https://www.di.fm/playlists/outrun
Rapid genome sequencing to identify potential vaccine-escape SARS-CoV-2 variants
This is why I like Nix. The tool should be the system.
We only stayed in San Jose for a few days. I'd really love more information on it. My experience is no doubt colored by the local area I stayed in, so a broader view is very welcome.
Ask HN: Is it worth learning F#, from a jobs perspective?
I'm learning F# for fun but wondering about the for profit side. Is there a good market for F# devs? I worry my lack of .net experience rules me out of most F# jobs.
If I recall correctly that’s not the case on Apple platforms. They do the translation themselves across raw NAND.
Difficult to say. My bold prediction is that within the next two decades, bootcamps for web dev decline as the barrier to entry of that field increases as the field matures, despite pay being excellent.

How much less menial labor does one do with modern web frameworks relative to the state of the art in 2002?
You should use btrfs with snapshots. You won't be in that situation ever again. Just a suggestion.
> I should make a blog post about it, but I guess I would need to make a blog first :)

Jonathan, you can use a google doc, or a gist, or bug in a github project to get your message out. I recommend you should.

I am a failed scientist that programmer in tech. I have helped grad students train up on unit testing, version control, api design, etc. I think modern software development needs to be brought into science so that science is reproducible. Without reproduction, we have nuthing. So I disagree, but I would love to hear what you have to say. Probably that our definitions of modern don't match and that you are drowing in sprint planning and story points, 1 beaker to 3 beakers.
What do you gain from carrying water for tyrants?

> but mileage delta over time would be insufficient to collect and disburse road taxes based on what is needed/used/traveled the most.

This is already reality.
I strongly resonate with the part about Circles being an active-maintenance-effort that even 10 years ago, when I actually had time, was more effort than I could be bothered with.

I think an interesting question is, what would it take for google to create a social network that would succeed nowadays?

They have quite the reputation [1]. If Google suddenly came out with an all-other-social-network-killer, and successfully killed all the other social networks, I'd still expect them to shut it down three years later.

... which unfortunately puts them in the position that it'll be incredibly hard for them to put out a true market-segment killer for anything, nowadays. Can't take over a market segment if no-one trusts you can be relied on, and therefore doesn't move to your product.

I say this even though I met my wife on Orkut, one of Google's previous social networks that, sure enough, got shut down.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
>programmers hunt for un-automated stuff to automate

Yup. This is pretty much how I describe my work to my wife. I find hard things and make them simple (using computers) - that makes "impossible things" hard, and inturn (eventually), I will make those things simple
Yep, and the barrier to entry follows, IMO, a U shaped curve where a field gets easier to enter past the initial development, but then gets more difficult over time as it matures and the easiest tasks continually get whittled away, until increasing abstraction of tools requires sufficiently increased abstraction of thought.
I think of this when I have a FAANG job in the six figures but people make millions flipping shit on Amazon.
Man I was just thinking about this last night. I recall an assignent in middle school where I had to write a poem with a simile in it (among ither literary devices) I lost points because there was no simile. When I went to the teacher and told her "there is a simile : 'the cat fell in much the same way as a boulder' " (or something to that effect)

I was told similes have to have the word 'like' or 'as' in them. Which is just not true but has become such a common hueristic that even English teachers think its the definition of a simile.
sigh

I totally did that on purposes though cause I wanted to see if she would dock me a point for that. I was such a little prick.
Laws allowing this might be constitutional. They would still be Orwellian nightmares. (We probably need a constitutional amendment addressing the issue - but regardless the fact is a proposed law can be both authoritarian and constitutional).

If they’re serious about this, I will become a single issue voter.
^ This is perfect statement why Arch will never replace workstations or server machines. Lot of people feel it's cool to fiddle around with file system/configuration to make it work (and they think thats cool Linux), it's not! You don't want to fiddle around with OS to make things work or just works out of the box. Debian is 100% suited for dev centric/work station centric environment once you configure, you can use it for years without worrying what might break tomorrow.
Oh sorry... I thought the question was about the Emacs ecosystem overall, not just about the core stuff.
Completely agree. Rebasing is absolutely necessary and useful when multiple developers are committing different fixes all the time.
There is a balance to be found between regressive taxes (not good) and supporting unsustainable practices (also not good). If you’re commuting 100 miles round trip everyday, you should still be paying for those roads, just as we expect you to pay for your own fuel. I would also say incomes being stagnant for the last 40 years (due to globalization and the decline in unions and manufacturing jobs) has not helped folks who live in rural areas.

Do we subsidize folks who can’t afford this? If so, how much? For how long? Important questions to be explored.
> Our supply chains despite being touted as best in the world collapsed almost overnight.

Did they though? Were there really people who had to go without necessities for a meaningful length of time? My whole point is that they did not.
r/hwstartups
A commons that flourishes instead of wilting from tragedy.

https://www.theregreview.org/2019/08/21/kadich-fixing-shortf...

https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
HIV vaccines have been tried and failed for decades now; why should Moderna's have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding? Simply because it's mRNA?

It actually looks like its mRNA-ness has nothing to do with it, other than making it faster to iterate and scale. Instead, their "new strategy" is to raise broadly-neutralizing antibodies (BNAbs) in patients [0], i.e. antibodies that bind highly-conserved sites on HIV's gp120 protein [1].

I'm still skeptical, and a bit disappointed. if patients sometimes generate their own BNAbs, why haven't we heard of anyone clearing the virus? there are long-term non-progressors (LTNPs) who don't need to take anti-retrovirals for 8+ years, but eventually most of these people do progress to full-blown AIDS. the virus has a completely nutso mutation rate, it'll find its way around..

..which is why HIV is treated with combination therapy (HAART.) it's harder for breakthrough mutations to defeat antivirals if you're defending on multiple fronts. it should be totally feasible for Moderna to make a polyvalent vaccine, which raises several BNAbs by including several mRNAs in a single shot.

maybe they're planning to work up to this eventually? and this Phase I is sort of an exploratory prototype?

0. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/04/21/mo...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadly_neutralizing_HIV-1_ant...
I now pay the rent and heat for my office which was a home. Sorry but the guy who runs my company made 22 million for a company with a stick price that hasn't been over 5 bucks in a decade. Wages were flat for 10 years. I took 3 jobs this year and am making up for lost time. I am 55. My 29 year old son has been doing this for nearly a decade...nearly a millionaire at 30. When my company starts paying real health insurance premiums and starts giving cost of living adjustments for wages. I may decide to do just one job until then I will do two with B- accuracy and attention to detail.
The reason straws are so annoying is because the replacemt really truly absolutely sucks. I’d rather have nothing than the paper straws that start composting before you’re halfway through your drink.

Starbucks solved it that way and it’s amazing. Their cold drinks now come with a lid that has a big hole you can drink out of like it’s a normal cup. No straws, no annoyance, everyone’s happy.

The problem are those stupid lids with a hole in the middle that make it literally impossible to drink without a straw. But the non-plastic straws aren’t up for the job.

So you’re stuck with a super annoying situation that just sucks.
The DIY version of this (for me) is to use one of the spare android devices laying around, install lineage (or your rom of choice), strip it down to just what you consider bare essentials (for me it would be gps, music and voice-to-text (my primary input method). Might be an interesting project, deploy an alternate daily driver designed to be used as little as possible.
You're focusing too much on correctness. Bug reports are almost never because a user has identified incorrect behavior, they are because the user has identified unpleasant behavior. The maintainer then takes that reported unpleasantness and decides whether it's a bug or a feature. If it's a bug then the maintainer, usually implicitly, updates the program specification such that the unpleasant behavior is now incorrect, perhaps by writing a test, and then corrects the incorrect behavior. But since the primary motivator is actually the user's reported unpleasant behavior, it makes sense to check that the now correct software also behaves pleasantly for the reporting user. And since pleased users may well just be using the software instead of following up in the bug tracker, it makes sense to close those issues with the proviso that displeased users are welcome to reopen them.

It's an observable truth that if you want people to use your software, it's necessary to prioritize pleasantness. It's also practically a logical necessity, unless your user community is comprised of individuals who enjoy being displeased and otherwise frustrated.
> "the people actually doing the work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic."

> There's the crux of it. It's open source, and the developers usually doing the most work seem to be the ones that are less socially... adjusted, while the 'community managers' and people broadly more interested in DEI are carrying less.

Not quite true.

The crux of my argument with sawyer was that the things he wanted to be removed as cruft were, so far as I understood it, very different from the things the people doing the C level hackery (which he's just good enough to have been a bloody effective cat herder and I'm so terrible at that I couldn't even have done that so just have to trust the people who are good at it).

On top of that there'd already been most of a year of very passionate arguments leading up to that and he, and I, and almost everybody else involved, were risking burnout from them.

Then I misjudged a conversation horribly and pushed a dear friend over the edge into flat out burnout.

I didn't apologise for that because anybody made me to - in fact, the apology he deserved was delayed by months because the TPF CAT forbade me from contacting him even to apologise and told me that would be considered harassment if I did so.

Then I discovered he didn't know that, and my friend had spent the time in between getting steadily more upset because he thought the lack of apology was because I didn't care, and I decided the TPF CAT could go fuck itself with a rake and they could sanction me if they liked for caring more about my friend than their orders, and talked to him and apologised anyway.

We had a good conversation after that, and I only wish I'd done it sooner.
This is pretty interesting. While I don't have a photographic memory like that, I do have a pretty interesting thing going for me, I can remember my life since I was a baby. Not every day and every detail, but I have memories from before I could walk. But ask me what I got up to go do and I couldn't tell you.
All of these walks move one key at a time, as if typing with one finger. When I've had to use such passwords in the past I've always done patterns like "yuihjknm,"(descending triplets), which require very little energy to type.
A theorised benefit at the guaranteed cost of perpetual surveillance. No thanks.
> Nvidia Reveals Its CEO Was Computer Generated

I always assumed tech CEOs were human, but this explains so much...
Not really dude. If I was around other people even remotely often it would be a different story but I work from home, dont really hang out with people, and wear an n95 when I have to go to the store.

It doesn't make me a bad person to be unvaccinated. It would if I was cavalier about potentially getting others sick...
>Again, I know 80% of the people reading my comments right here will nod their heads and identify with it and yet still go away and see themselves as exceptions to the rule

We need people like you. If I could, I would hire you and make you "unfireable". Your job would be to go around and make people do the ABSOLUTELY most simple work.

You could start by shadowing me and yelling at me every time I attend a meeting that I don't need to be in.
Opus is also the name of an incredibly well compressed audio codec: https://opus-codec.org