skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
how did you get users for your products?
Love this! Some time ago I created a tool to make similar one-page sites by parsing a markdown file: https://leoncvlt.github.io/imml/

It's also available as a library / on the command line: https://github.com/leoncvlt/imml
I bought all the other books of him after reading Skin In the Game.

Insanely nice book and it was easy to read!
Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?
> It's not open source versus closed source

Banks are literally closed source. Crypto is literally closed source. So, yes, it is.

> and loss of money is never irrelevant.

Loss of money from centralized exchanges is irrelevant to the decentralized consensus technology. These are completely orthogonal concerns. Normal financial institutions get hacked, and they also operate ponzi schemes. The fact that this can happen to comparable centralized crypto services is orthogonal to the technology.

> It's the alignment of what I value (security, safety, government guarantees) versus what you value, which is ... well I don't know.

I think i've pretty clearly articulated what I think the technology is for. Just go back and read what i've said.

> I just feel like people should know who they're arguing with.

Of course i'm invested in it, to a degree. Anyone who believes in a technology should be invested in that technology. You shouldn't trust them if they're not, because if they haven't invested, they don't actually believe in it.

That being said, crypto very well may not turn out to be useful for the world. It enables new possibilities for social and economic organization. Technologies like that are very rare, and they are usually transformative and tremendously economically valuable. This one could be an exception, but it'd probably be the first.
> Stockholm syndrom much?

Yes, but not how you'd imagine. I spent years as a hard core Linux fanboy. Advocating for Linux. Declaring Linux the future when many thought Windows would obviously eliminate all competition. Volunteering for install fests and wrestling various distros onto unwilling hardware.

I also spent 9 years teaching and writing training materials for RHEL, SUSE, & Ubuntu. As a result I dug deeper into core system details than most. (How many remember SUSE's attempt to achieve faster boot times by introducing an optional alternative to normal init that dynamically generated a makefile to execute init scripts in parallel? That was one of many strange rabbit holes I got to explore.)

Thankfully, I've gotten over it. I still prefer to keep Linux near the center of my career, but I've been able to adapt as "the cloud" has rendered my old school sysadmin skills less relevant. Occasionally I call on them to rescue a pet, but today I find "herding cattle" and going "serverless" much more enjoyable.

And you?
I checked, the order form lets you choose international shipping. Pricey, though...
Since all software has bugs, that doesn't make it a new problem now does it?
void* is Object.
Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, Roger Scruton

So far I never understood what conservatism is, but Scruton changed it entirely, especially it felt fulfilling after reading Burke's Reflections on Recent France Revolution.
Solving integration problems well is often harder than implementing functionality.
I haven't gotten COVID-19 (to my knowledge) but a common symptom is "brain fog"- basically the inability to clearly form thoughts in your head. I know as a programmer, being able to keep huge systems in my head is profoundly important to the job so any effect on that would be detrimental. Coupled with the added stress of the pandemic (and everything else) in general and I could see it being really hard.
I stand corrected, it seems people are even investing in the "wrong" company thinking it's Clubhouse.
Its a deliberate conflation, a sleight of hand that happens in American discourse all the time.

As an example, Americans are hostages to your incredibly inefficient health care system. Not only is reasonable discussion of public health outside your overton window, the reason it stays outside is the instant clamour of voices saying "free stuff is bad and you are bad for advocating it".

The only way to get access to reasonable care seems to be either military service or full employment. The rest of the world is incredulous that losing your job means losing access to healthcare.

That truly strange conception of "freedom" americans are always so afraid of losing is a massive illusion for the majority of a population deathly afraid of the financial ramifications of a health crisis.

Yet you have no functional way of talking about it, because of the sleight of hand discourse exemplified by the article.

I truly feel sorry for americans at this point.
Seconded.

I received this book as a gift earlier this year and I thought it might be one of the most incredible books I've ever encountered.

What I liked about it is how it paints everything in very broad strokes so that you get to see humanity's place in the big picture.

It did have the side effect of leaving me very cynical afterwards, though. I'd think to myself "We're all apes"; All those accomplishments I'm so proud of are rather silly, and had things turned out slightly differently we'd still be hanging around under trees and scared of predators.

It also had the side effect of getting me to go play Far Cry Primal afterwards, just to get a little taste of what our ancestors might've experienced.
I don't mean this in a cynical way, but how come you didn't expect a literary classic to be well-written?
Drunk people are notoriously bad at judging their impairment. The threat of DUI has an deterrent effect on people who believe they could drive safely but are still concerned about a life altering criminal punishment. This is rational given that you are much more likely to get a DUI than kill yourself or someone else. There are ~10k alcohol related auto fatalities/year and approximately 1.5 million DUI arrests.
I don't know about (2). Alsa "just worked" when pulse audio was released and PA did not "just work" for like 8 years after the first release.

Seems like software history revisionism to me.
> No they don't, they are trustless. They do exactly the opposite.

They allow anyone to build a trusted application. That is the sense in which they democratize trust. Prior to crypto, anyone building a stateful software application that ran remotely had to be trusted by their users. Their users had to have personal faith in the credibility and trustworthiness of the organization. Even if the organization was ostensibly open source, there was no way to validate what the code on their servers was doing, or where the data was going. Crypto changes that.

It enables anyone to write an application, deploy it, and guarantee to its users that it does what the code says it does. That is a new thing in the history of software. Whether or not you think that thing is valuable is up to you. That it is new, and that crypto does it, is not.
Honestly, moving my VPN management from wg-quick+ip-route+iptables to systemd-networkd was a great experience and made things so much easier and predictable. Wish I had done it way sooner. Similarly, after having spent way too much time fiddling with IP and routing in other ways (OpenWRT comes to mind), systemd-networkd made it so much more predictable and straight-forward.

Similar story with other components.

Having to read the release notes before upgrading to a new major version is a price I’m willing to pay.
> Greece are not a good team. Period.

The Greek team from today and from 2004 do not share a single member, do they?

Of course, you could argue that some institutional factors persist?
Re [1]: if you're using the camera to read the CVV, why not just flip the card over and capture the number?

If the card is embossed you wouldn't even need to flip it!
UNIX, TCP/IP, C libraries, web browsers and HTML… all are interoperable technologies. If your site works in browser X, you can switch to browser Y and it still works. If your code compiles for x86 Linux, it’ll run on arm Linux too.

SystemD is not an interoperable technology. It insists on wrapping itself around what was already there, in the guise of making it better while also making it impossible to use something else.

Abstract example: imagine systemd-plated manages access to crockery in your kitchen, providing neat features like being able to quickly pick out plates by colour (the old system never did that!). However, if you take a plate for yourself instead of asking systemd for it then systemd will take the plate out of your hands, put it back in the stack, and say “error: plate not requested via systemd”. Now imagine everything in your kitchen has to go through systemd. Now imagine that systemd is one of the biggest and most rapidly changing machines in your kitchen that breaks a lot. You’d be pretty annoyed if you ever did anything weird enough to encounter these bugs. If you only ever want a blue plate, you’re fine.

Real example: Any day now we’ll be unable to use plain LXC on Linux because systemd (1) assumes you only manage containers via systemd and (2) clobbers any changes you make outside systemd, using the lxc-* tools.
cfront in the 80s was a far simpler C++ compiler than today. And if you ever looked at the code it generated, you'd be horrified.

One major problem it had in generating C was the lack of COMDAT sections in the generated object file. This was needed for generating code for the same member function in multiple source files. C compilers would just stick the code into the text segment, resulting in multiple declaration errors from the linker.

I am not saying Bjarne was an inept programmer. He's actually brilliant, it was just a very very hard problem he set for himself, and it's amazing cfront worked as well as it did.

The cfront on DOS also was very slow (imagine writing the generated source code out to floppies!) and crippled because it didn't have near and far pointers. Zortech C++ was the first native C++ compiler, which bypassed all these problems. ZTC++ simply vaulted over cfront by making C++ simple and fast on DOS. DOS at the time was where 90% of the programming action was, so this was no small thing.

My opinion, and that of a few others at the time, was that Zortech saved C++ from oblivion by having a usable implementation on DOS. You can see that by the traffic level in comp.lang.c++ at the time - it took off immediately after ZTC++ was released, and never looked back.
Getting Nostalgic with Common Desktop Environment on a Modern Linux Distro
Schedules, not aircraft, have been notoriously unreliable.
Have you ever been somewhere cold? Starting the car and getting the defrosters and heat going is helpful when your windows are covered in ice/snow. Depending on the conditions I think it can even be extremely difficult to open a car door without hot water or a remote start. Plus, it is nice to have a warm car rather then sit in the cold until it warms up.

Even without a remote start most people will go out and start their car and let it warm up and the windows defrost so they can safely drive. Sure you can also scrape them to get ice/snow off but you typically also need the heat running for a bit to get them defogged or whatever.
The same it is for everyone since the beginning of WWW: a static page with images. The web is uniquely unsuitable for anything else.
While I’m sure there’s some portion of developers who are ready to jump to google and Facebook tools right away, I doubt it’s a majority.

There have been a lot of misses from these companies. Some big wins for sure, but it’s definitely not a perfect record.

I do think there are a lot of smart people working on hard problems (user engagement… not cancer) with large teams at these companies though. Which means they are bound to come up with some percentage of good solutions. I’m glad they share them even when they flop.
Merry Christmas from Blob Opera
They are asking user to use the passenger seat control which is hard to reach if you are in the driving seat.
May I ask how to create a Mathematics Stack Exchange clone without JS?
To the list of denying care to antivaxxer and alcoholic, would it be reasonable to add the obese?

Being fat is a co-morbidity and often a lifestyle choice.
How the mighty have fallen, how far, how sad.

Once the Google home page was a master class in good design.
Hard to take anything the guy says seriously when he calls this tweet "objectively amazing" a couple of paragraphs in:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1470899663087747072
> However, the sport itself has nothing todo with the bigger picture here.

I have a book that convincingly makes the case that physical exercise, sports, is a favorite tool of the fascist. To my knowledge, it's never translated from Dutch, but I think there must be research on this in English as well.
> Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.

Sorry, I missed this.

We've discussed this and I'm keen to give it a go in some form or another. If we continue to grow I think it'll become a necessity. However, each month has a unique theme that's consistent across the 4 age brackets. So we can't necessarily send out previous month's stock as it won't match the month's theme.

What we have started doing though is selling one-off bundles in addition to our subscriptions. These are selling reasonably well considering we haven't really pushed them. So I think we may be able to offer past subscription bundles in a similar fashion. The only thing that gives us pause is that we've noticed other book subscriptions have attempted this and had issues clearing out their excess stock. Whether that's a reflection on their product, their website, or the fact people just aren't interested in "old" stock, I'm not yet sure.
You can drive it but where can you see the speed? (I am talking about Model 3)
systemd had way more bugs and crinkles for an init system when it first started, and an init system is critical software.
Can Anxiety Cause Atrial Fibrillation?
Anxiety is one factor that triggers Afib because when you have a severe panic attack, it triggers an irregular and high anxiety heart rate 120. In addition, panic attacks resulting from some frightening causes may rush your adrenaline courses, thus resulting in irregular heart rates. Medical experts reveal that Atrial fibrillation comes with an irregular heart rate that causes an irregular heartbeat. Read through the article to understand more about the relationship between anxiety and atrial fibrillation.
I only play a lawyer on TV!
The vaccines do prevent infection with covid in the majority of cases. If you get it you spread it at a similar rate, but the vaccine does prevent you from getting it in the first place.
There's a CSS media detection feature called `prefers-reduced-data` that may be graduating from a Chrome feature flag Soon™, although I'm not sure if Google is using that anywhere on their sites today.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105118...
> Drunk people are notoriously bad at judging their impairment.

They are notoriously bad at executive function generally; deterrents aren't aimed at them.

The deterrent effect of DUI laws isn't on drunk people, it's on people who would otherwise choose to drink when they would then have to drive.
As I said elsewhere, permissionlessness and effeciency. Consequences are that you no longer need to be high frequency trader to transfer large amount of value with low cost.

Similarly, now if you want to transfer very little value without cost, your options are to be within same bank or telecom operator as your receiver. Or watch an ad.

Imagine you could transfer 0.5 cent internationaly every minute or every page load for no added cost. What kind of service would that enable? Content monetising without ads, one example. Censorship-free hosting as a service, the other one.
Curious what Rustians think about this, and if this is a key piece missing to becoming a better systems language.
Care to explain why? Pretty much every distro I know is perfectly happy to include MIT licensed code.
Not just laziness but increased attack surface for compromised credentials. Just like physical things weigh us down (spring clean or donating old stuff is liberating) so too is having another login somewhere. I wish I knew all the sites I have logins too but I dont and its frustrating, risky and worrying.
Did you also stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
Kinda hard to say it was just her. Yahoo! was already pretty much dead when she arrived.
Am i missing some irony?
I would say performance only matters if it's debilitating, outside of that it's something that few notice even fewer care about. Also I guess it can impact first impressions.

But once I'm using a tool for something unless the performance is actually preventing me from using it - I'm not going to bother switching. So no need for a monopoly - if your competitive edge is that you are faster than competition, unless the competition is dog slow it's not a selling point to me.

Eg. I won't look for VS code alternatives just because it's electron based and the competition has higher performance, vscode is fast enough for me. I will switch to a different compiler or even language if it shaves % off buid time that makes the iteration meaningfuly faster, or the tooling addresses pain points.
Reddit is intentional though. They really, really, really want you to use their app instead.

[Daily Standup]

“Hey guys, you know how we need more user data to monetize but no one wants to use our crappy app? Why not just make the website horrible and constantly nag them via dark patterns to install our app?”

PROMOTED!
It's almost Christmas. Suspend some of your disbelief!
And how many more engineers were needed just to manage that monstrosity? It's a virtuous loop: more money justified to pay engineers, to build more overly complex and inefficient systems that need even more engineers to maintain.

The money isn't the issue, as I pointed out. The issue is that such ridiculously complex systems are less agile and harder to evolve and maintain, and it's hard to put a price on that.
I made an Algolia alternative, https://anvere.net, launching soon. Currently earning $700 from an early adopting customer.
It's also an irony that people who have a slightest hint of saying China is not all good are easily regarded as traitors on the Chinese internet.
Also some people living in China know that Chinese media outlets (all state-run) might be far more biased.
But hey, I'm not playing whataboutism. It just seems so ironic to my Chinese eyes.
So beautiful but so morbid. I had to pause it as I started getting depressed.
Hilbert-Like Curves on a Hexagonal Grid and a Realization Using Crochet (2014) [pdf]
Back to old school.
That is a good point, but I think it is both.
I have same idea. How much time did you develop app?
Yeah! Somewhere recently I read someone talking about how in the 20th century male writers were writing grand books, and until johnathon franzen turned up it was only women writers were writing the books that depicted people emotionally honestly. I have no idea if this true, but it certainly true that Le guin and Alice Munro write books that capture human experience in a way that I really love
”All software has bugs, but some are more buggy than others.”

Systemd is exceptionally voluminous, fast moving, feature-laden (which is part of why it is so exciting to so many people), and buggy.
I've been drawing pictures and publishing them as desktop wallpapers for ~20 years now, selling Vlad.studio accounts with unlimited access to downloads [0]. In 2021, I earned $4761, which means ~$400/month. It's not horribly little amount, especially for Russia (where I live), given it's a side project. However, I feel I need to do something more active, rather than just drawing new pictures.

Promoting and marketing is alien space for me (as well as for many other designers and developers here, I'm certain). Please wish me luck promoting and marketing my art in 2022 :-)

[0] https://vlad.studio/
> All that is required to beat this, honestly, is a few people serving as positive role models with transparency and not abusing their authority. I can manage my little corner of the universe but I’m not holding my breath on the rest of the country.

Totally lost me in the last paragraph.

Can't everyone agree that these role models already exist? They're just hard to name because they don't do anything outrageous to steal our attention. The problem isn't that we don't know how to act properly -- the problem isn't that we need role models. The problem is that there's no reason to follow their lead.

The solution is nothing short of punishment of these people and enforcement of the law. The problem is the bad people.
You missed Iain M Banks' Culture novels completely, they are hugely entertaining. Just skip the first for now.
> Would Quantum Field Theory be unscientific if it had fallen in the hands of the ancient Greeks?

Yes. Falsifiability is not an abstract property. Something not, today, might be tomorrow. Today, idle speculation; tomorrow, maybe science.

Gravitational frame dragging and gravitational waves were both speculative until recently. Both are implied by General Relativity, which had been tested in many other ways already, so they were far less speculative than strings. That one does not, to my knowledge, predict literally anything at all, and cannot, because the mathematics is still wholly intractable.

Warp fields are speculation, but could become science or even engineering someday. I won't be holding my breath.
The two job setup is just a brilliant way of exposing the fact that almost every tech worker is in a position where pay/effort is falling as pay increases. We all know there are 10x’s but you’ll never see anyone getting 10x the pay no matter how productive they are.

So for most its better to take two jobs at 50% the effort at 75% the pay each.
You could make 1/2x where x = 4 evaluate to either 2 or 0.125, but either choice will have surprising results in some cases or to some people. Perhaps a better choice, especially for an interactive calculator, is to adopt partially ordered operator precedence, and reject the expression as ambiguous. Then the user can insert parentheses to disambiguate.

In a CFG this is easy enough to express. Here's an untested and at any rate incomplete CFG demonstrating the technique:

expr ::= term | term "+" expr | term "-" expr
term ::= quotient | product
quotient ::= atom "/" atom | atom "/" quotient
product ::= atom product | atom "*" product | atom
atom ::= number | variable | "-" atom | "(" expr ")"

But typical parser generators don't give you an easy way to provide a useful error message there.

That version of the grammar, btw, avoids left recursion, so it ought to work as a PEG, but at the cost of the wrong associativity for "/" and "-". You either need to use left recursion or restructure the syntax tree afterwards.
I'm in a similar headspace as you - not a druggy but went that shamanic route. 2x Ayahuasca ceremonies and 5 grams of mushrooms a few years ago... changed my life.

I recommend only doing mushrooms once or twice a year at most for larger dosages and once or twice a month at most if doing 2g or less. If you do it more regularly you may have diminishing returns. Cannabis I'd do at most once a month if at all. San Pedro can also be extremely good at low dosages. Alcohol is a no go.

Please be careful with dosages, set & setting, what you ate the previous weeks, how rested you are etc. Try to source good/clean mushrooms/cannabis. Always know exactly what you put into your body. Respect those plants and their power. When feeling the effects kick in, say hello to the "spirit" and welcome him/her for visiting you, like an old friend.
Archaeologists Identify Oldest Use of Fossil Fuels in Europe
Yeah, can anyone explain this one to me?
I don't see it mentioned in the article, but I suppose one of the equal-area projections [0] should be used for calculating the average color data.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-area_map