skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They don't trust users to choose for themselves.

No, they don't trust advertisers and spyware companies (the two seem inseparable today) to choose for them. Google has a massive conflict of interest in being the web's largest advertising network owner and sometimes the web's largest spymaster, in addition to owning the web's most common browser.

> What's next, are you going to disable downloading executable files, probably the most dangerous browser feature of all?

Firefox has had a relatively consistent stance on that since 1990 something and always had warnings when downloading executable files and worked hard to make sure that malware can't just download executable files it wants when it wants. As someone who remembers the malware wars of the 1990s, it was a reason I switched to Firefox in the first place!

It still amazes me that Chrome just auto-downloads EXEs willy-nilly without warnings or user consent, because I still remember what it was like the last time a major browser did that by default.

> it's what devs want.

That's my point: devs as a collective are morons. Devs as a collective include a lot of people whose salaries pay them to build adware, spyware, malware, and worse. Devs as a collective lack a major ethics body or ethics reviews and so far no dev has had to stand trial for a clear violation of professional ethics.

Maybe the web shouldn't give devs what they want?
In case nobody else makes a suggestion, try https://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+obfuscation
None of that changes the fact that it's easier than ever to seek out contradicting points of view. People just don't want to.

The algorithms feed people stuff that confirms their beliefs because that's what they like.

It's all about preferences and choices, not ability.
Misinformation has always existed.

I think the emergent phenomena that we are seeing is simply a scaled up version of the problems Plato pointed out in the Republic.

The REAL problem, is that democracy as an organization if people isn't going to produce a society of freedom and justice, no, democracy produces a hedonic society. So the question becomes, how do we LIVE with that?
Yeah, but why not reuse like... 99% of your notes? Why not just write things down only if you're going to need them again, and in a way that you will be able to find them when you need them? I'm more likely to reread a note many, many times than to take one I never reuse, because every time I need to use a cardinality aggregation or invert a conditional, I go back to the notes for that.
It does here, for example:

https://covid19.ca.gov/essential-workforce/

> In accordance with this order, the State Public Health Officer has designated the following list of Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers to help state, local, tribal, and industry partners as they work to protect communities, while ensuring continuity of functions critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security.
Funding the Roc Programming Language
> As in my opinion the wiki page doesn't explain it well enough to quickly comprehend, here's another drawing:

Contributions welcome :) Our wiki is open and anyone can edit. If you can ELI5 something to make it easier to understand, go for it.
How does that change the toxicity he has observed? It's still as present, that doesn't do anything to change his argument.
Investors hack your mind with ambiguity disguised as genius. It's just a guy marketing himself and his investments on social media. Why do you care?
> I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads.

There is so much shilling on Reddit if you knew it would blow your mind. I wish more people realized this. Reddit is the best place to shill because not only is it ridiculously simple, people also automatically assume you’re not shilling, and then once you seed the idea, everyone else will do the shilling for you indirectly.

The healthiest way to use Reddit is like Wikipedia: assume the information you’re reading is highly compromised and biased in one way or another, but use it as a starting point in your further research and it’s a great tool.

Reddit posts are not your friends. Upvotes do not mean the contents of the posts are legitimate or not shilling.

Reddit is the best place to shill and the sooner the non-shillers figure that out, the better off the entire internet will be.
That's why a lot of people here think today's Science™ is a joke. Peer-review is not a substitute for replication.
Explain to me why banks would need blockchains over federated databases. All these federated databases have strict audit trails and controls.

Banks have been using these for nearly 50 years and the systems are very well understood. Event Sourcing as a concept and WORM drives as an implementation are mathematically proven to work already and don't need the complexity and overhead of a blockchain in a regulated, audited environment.

Look forward to what I'm missing.
I really prefer the original list, which is short and to the point. Your #5 is a subset of

3. Be a member of the prevailing tribe.

Tribe can mean many things here, including: team, company, country, and I guess also gender and skin color (but there's not much you can do about that).

Same with #6 which is an expansion of being charismatic.
The only "toxic" thing I've seen on HN this week is an article with panders exclusively to HN by attacking HN for toxicity.

Faux controversy, faux outrage, and bland terms of abuse broadly applied to entire communities are the hallmarks of contemporary low thinking designed to get attention without any creativity.
related: I had an idea to make a CLIP paint.NET image editing plugin. You would make a new layer, add some green ('towards') and red ('away from') splotches to the layer, and give a prompt to CLIP. Wherever there was green, CLIP would 'nudge' the image along the direction of the gradients towards the semantic goal, keep it constant where there was nothing, and nudge it in the opposite direction where there was red. And you could do this over and over again, w/ different CLIP prompts all the while editing the semantic masks as you like. The end result would be a feedback process to use CLIP + feedback as an extremely creative and controllable image manipulation tool. But then I realized that I didn't know how to make a paint.NET plugin :) so here is a free idea for anybody who does
At least in Thailand visa runs are commonplace for a whole host of different folks. Some people I knew got into a little trouble, however by and large it wasn't frequent.

That being said, in Thailand there would be no need to for retirees as they have a retirement visa scheme that allow for renewal in country.
To be fair, the equivalent solution for the name field example would be solving it by insisting everyone specify how many names they have before letting them enter their name - there's a reason that isn't the recommended solution, people don't want to deal with minutia that doesn't matter to them, one field works fine for everyone.

The obvious solution is to just not use pronouns - it's a messy part of the language that is currently in flux, so why wade in?

Obviously, some sites are dedicated to these issues, so they can justifiably ask on sign up, but if you don't _need_ to care about people's personal details, better not to ask at all.
You may not be looking at some change in HN so much as a change in the culture as a whole.

Back in 2008, tech was full on optimism, save the world rah rah. Google's motto was still "Don't be evil". Zuckerberg was sort of fumbling and unthreatening in his public appearances. Etc etc. Everyone adored tech, both inside and outside the industry.

Now the wider world is beginning to despise us. And even within tech, a ton of people are extremely unhappy with how things have gone. A lot of us bought into the optimism and revolutionary hype about how tech would change the world, and the fall from that viewpoint to current realities has been rough. The pandemic, and the massive shift of power into the hands of tech and tech-adjacent companies, only served to drive in the lesson.

Personally, I think tech did improve the world in many, many measurable ways and I'm pretty grumpy about how the wave of hatred at Facebook et al is spilling out to undeserving targets. But as far as this particular thread goes... I think Marc Andreessen doesn't really need the help.
To be classified as Portuguese tax residents (which is very attractive for foreigners, unlike the native Portuguese who pay through the nose)
Getting Started with Python in 2022 – pyenv and poetry
Sure, but he is not arguing for toxic kindness.
It certainly makes you wonder, what other innovations could we have made decades ago, but nobody was willing to take the risk? Currently most of our innovation is directed towards computer systems for keeping track of people and data, which in many cases can be broadly characterized as systems of control. And that appears to be what our society prioritizes, whereas a company like SpaceX only comes along once in a blue moon. And Elon himself is sort of a fluke as he's a person who is both a child of wealth, and also has a curious mind and a knack for understanding engineering problems. There are lots of curious people with a knack for understanding engineering problems but most of them weren't born into money and of the ones that were, only Elon has emerged as willing to make SpaceX level risky investments. It makes sense; if you're that rich, you have no desire to genuinely innovate, since you're already set for life and by definition are one of the people who benefited from society being exactly as it is.

Maybe that's the real takeaway here: the people at the top of society by definition benefited from things being as they are, therefore those people are the least likely to want innovations that might cause real change. Therefore to the extend that society is unequal, it is also unable to innovate. I wonder if you could put that hypothesis to the test with data.
I had a similar reaction to your post as blindmute. I don't feel attacked, as I don't see myself in the people you're talking about. But I also don't take for granted that those people even exist in the way that you described them.

> But there is a whole new army of anti-vaxxers who don't care what they eat, vape, smoke, or whether they or their children are standing in a plume of diesel exhaust 24/7.

So not to speak for the other poster, but I think another way to phrase their comment would be: what makes you believe this army exists? How many of them have you personally interacted with vs saw in some form of infotainment?

I ask because your description sounds like the kind of political cartoon you'd see in a news rag, and might be bolstered by that guy you remember from highschool or that crazy uncle that you can't stand. But I don't think its plainly evident that these people actually exist in great numbers.

I strongly believe what you're saying about tribalism. I just think your comment is another example of it.
Market cornering is classic market manipulation. Google uses every asset at their disposal to maintain their 98%+ death grip on the search markets. The list of competitors bought, stifled, legally crushed, or absorbed is probably endless. The search market is thoroughly cornered.

I used the phrase intentionally and specifically. Advertising isn't always market manipulation, but it can be and is used to that purpose.

Google uses advertisement and content "curation" to manipulate consumers. This results in product preference, purchasing behavior, and market conditions favorable to Google and/or unfavorable to Google's competition. This includes siloing consumers in political bubbles and manipulation of narratives through the deliberate selection, order, and pacing of content exposure based on the intent of Google's shotcallers.

The reinforcement cycles inherent to their algorithms are used to manage the information made available to vast numbers of people, with highly detailed behavioral profiles used to achieve behavioral outcomes, whether it's buying something, voting, or preferences for or against particular policies or candidates.
I think this is very important to note and I agree.

Whether or not google search right now is as good as it could be should not be the main point of discussion.

We have to remember to acknowledge that the web google is indexing now differs drastically from the web it was indexing 20 years ago. Web pages are now less likely than ever to be freely accessible plain text put forth in good faith for public consumption. Google (in addition to dealing with big walled gardens designed explicitly to hide content from google) is trying to sift through basic spam, industrial scale SEO exploitation, and nation-state cyber warfare.

Bitching about google search being bad almost feels like yelling at the canary in the coal mine when it passes out.
The Apple Watch can stand alone as a wireless wrist-mounted music player. It almost reminds me of an iPod nano but that’s maybe still too many frills.
Looks interesting.

In the FAQ they mention potentially charging around $10/month.

Not sure if I'm being entitled or anything, but I was expecting something more like the original WhatsApp model of a few dollars a year.

Perhaps I'm under-estimating how computationally heavy search is.
I've been meaning to set up Roam since my org folder is getting unmanageable.

Before Emacs I abused a Tomboy "wiki" style journal - even there I could set up several Notebooks as entry points. Every time I typed a word that happened to be a title it would link.

Initially this was useful for discovering links between subjects but without a naming convention it became overwhelming.

Is that what you mean by leaking? Can you briefly explain these issue and how Obsidian solves it?
Yup, when I want to search anything I use a combination of reddit, HN, and Discord. My main use of Google these days is to find a website I forget the name of but roughly know what it's called. In the olden days, I used bookmark aggregation sites like del.icio.us to search for relevant content, which was generally more fruitful than a Google search.
A big thing probably not mentioned in the article that white people are treated exceptionally well in certain countries. And not to mention the whole sex tourism.
Might the inevitable arms race between bot writers and bot detectors be the missing accelerator for a general AI that has a predilection for top 10 white label brands of generic consumer products?
Question for new version of tooljet, is there any plug-ins to allow for login?

I have a use case where I have a spreadsheet where it contains user information

1. I would like users to log-in and be able to edit certain fields in their row

2. Would love them to be able to do a password reset (i'm guessing username and a hashed password would be stored on the sheet?)

I know retool is doing something like that but curious if this was on your roadmap or already done
Yeah, I'm not capable of baby talk. Too weird. I have always talked to my kids like they were adults. They seem fine.
My speculation: perhaps he means that the potential energy tied up behind financial regulation is enormous, and that web3 is a practical way to tap into that.

(If I'm correct about his intended meaning, you're confused because he's being oblique. It would be clearer for him to say "the enormous payoff of impossible-to-regulate financial products".)
I assume all private stuff on Github would be leaked at some stage and change my behavior accordingly. You have to code as if someone you don't want will be reading it. Same goes for any service advertising their service as 'privacy aware'. How do you audit those claims?

I mean Whatsapp is closed source for example and could be intercepted without you knowing, despite all their claims of 'privacy by design using E2E encryption'. Whatsapp also leaks metadata which can be even more detrimental to privacy instead of mere content leaking out.

You have to assume all secrets will be leaked (by whatever means) and change your behavior.
It's a pretty clear indication that the once stalwart effort, within Google, to produce a true search experience is effectively dead.
It almost immediately upon the real adoption curve (this seems like October November 2020 anecdotally to me) just absolutely filled to the brim with NFT shills, cryptocurrency pumpers, and “self actualization with this one weird trick” promoters of their MLM. But early 2021 it was impossible to find any rooms with anyone discussing anything but these things.
Meh.

I'll always be friendly and kind to people in real life. But I come to HN for acerbic debate about pedantic topics with really smart people that have highly tuned bullshit detectors.

I hope to god this place never loses its' edge and becomes Reddit.
I really laughed out loud at this
the new yorker did a profile of HN and its mods a few years ago and I've never been able to get this description out of my head:

> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own.

It's just such an accurate accounting of the 'house style' around here and its limitations.
The hard part of distillation desalination is the evaporation. Condensation is pretty easy, just run the vapor laden air through a long metal or glass tube and it will just happen on any nucleation sites if the condenser is cool enough. You can even use some additional salt water to cool the condenser.
Not that I know of, but there easily could be! GPT-3 could take some examples to do this with quite a small number of examples.
Any chance you can give me pointers on how to improve SEO for my sudoku site? It's been up for 8 years now and I've left it for dead since user growth wasn't happening. Thanks!

http://www.sudokuisland.com/
I pay for YouTube premium and haven’t seen an ad the entire time. It’s worth $12 a month to me. Also get music streaming with it.
I agree it's the right thing to do, but what did you win in that situation?
> Which bad actors

actors on the blockchain

> That’s a large part of the value-add of professional VCs, be it in blockchain/web3 or any other domain, that they have the expertise to discern legit teams from scam ones.

That's a tiny part of it and as useful to society as hiring away nuclear physicists to work on ad prediction and tiktok recommendation algorithms.
The idea that a genuinely Dead Internet might be an improvement over the current internet experience is a fun one, and one I don't entirely disagree with.
I've been doing the `site:reddit {my search query}` for years, and it's been great to be able to find authentic opinions.

In case anyone else does this and is tired of typing `site:reddit` all the time, checkout the Mycroft project for search engine plugins. I use one in particular[1] and alias it to `.r` in Firefox.

[1] https://mycroftproject.com/install.html?id=33343&basename=go...
~50% of US voters are wrong about the basic facts of the federal 2020 election. Doesn't matter which ~50% for this statement to be true. Misinformation hasn't been this bad in 300 years, even counting 1939 Germany. Expect similar consequences.
Indeed, and there are a few threads that hit front page on Reddit:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ssn9z8/breaking_ca...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/sssr25/cana...

However this Canadian government is targeting Bitcoin funds as well, so you'd not be able to transfer it into CAD here - and how many people actively accept Bitcoin [through physical wallet] while not using a platform in exchange for the resources people would want to be buying to maintain the peaceful protests (food, fuel, etc)?
I think you may have demonstrated his point.
This sounds almost like Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Google made links on the web the measure of how good a page was. That became the target of everyone trying to do SEO. As a result, it stopped being a good measure of how good a page was.

But in the long run, nothing will work in that environment, because every measure will be gamed as soon as people figure out that Google is using it. Google's only choice is to try to stay ahead of the SEO crowd, and I'm not sure they can do that (well) for too much longer. In fact, if the article is to be believed, they're already starting to fail.
Dynamic access patterns dynamodb for Python
Yet I know none and have lived in SV for the last 7 years. Every person I’ve met has come from a middle class family at the least. And an educated one - if not high earning as well. Anyone who has significant wealth is from a privileged background or at the least married into one.

I’m always from the poorest background, least educated, etc. I’ve yet to meet anyone who gets close to where I was. I don’t even feel like I truly was that bad off but then again - I’ve seen how low it goes and most people in SV cannot even comprehend what the bottom looks like in the US.
I'm lazy and comfortable with my big tech TC
I thought about this for a few minutes, and I think it might refer to how you need to go through an app store for iOS and Android apps, and that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, own so much of the web "property".
I finally have a reason to create an account.

I've been using Google Search since it was a cool beta site announced on Slashdot. Over the years I've built a career based on my ability to effectively search. I remember about ten years ago, people thought I had some kind of insane gift because I could immediately find ANYTHING. Not really, I just had an instinctive skill for creating effective queries.

Good search has been a huge part of my ability to develop software. I don't mean StackOverflow either. I learned to use Google to search Microsoft APIs and forums, as well as to dig up long obscure posts on the almost-dead languages and technologies I found myself supporting. Day by day, this is less and less possible. I'm losing a critical tool that has helped me be productive.

As an Autistic one of my strengths is feeling patterns in systems, and in the past few years, I've definitely noticed the garbage results described in this article.

Yesterday, my wife asked me if we have any cold meds. I said, "we have several, but let's look up interactions with your new antidepressant." I know from experience that all kinds of unpleasant side effects can arise from mixing these.

On her phone search results, there were none of the quality sites I expected, such as Drugs.com. Instead I had to crawl through a bunch of SEO garbage and psuedo-health to find what I needed. If she was doing this on her own, she might have clicked on something dangerously erroneous. The web is becoming increasingly hostile. (And don't get me started about the infinitely scrollable boomer ads that come up below a local news story)
Sports stories are frequently written by bots/AI/whatever you want to call them. Sports stats makes it relatively easy to create written text articles about games. When first rolled out, there were some obvious tells such as an excessive amount of "for the first time this season" or "set a record for the season" in articles about first games of the season. Unusual plays or quirky behavior by participants tend to be missed in these articles but otherwise they're serviceable though somewhat dry and bland.
ORDER BY RAND_AL_THOR

I'm sorry, but programming languages need to call that function either RND() or RANDOM(). Ever since I read The Wheel of Time in the nineties and early aughts, I can't associate that word with anything else.