skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It appears as if there are plurals in the words you can use to guess. I just tried PILLS and it worked. I have not yet run across a plural as the answer but I haven't looked at the word list.
Am I missing something?

The article directly says

> Researchers have used this physical phenomenon to float invisible aerosols and sort particles in microfluidic devices. But they have never before moved an object big enough to grasp—much less lifted anything that can carry objects itself.

But radiometers have existed for decades... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer
> It is an extreme conflict of interest against successfully matching users and getting them off the app.

That depends on the payment model, doesn't it? If it is set up in such a way that the app makes more money the longer people use it, that introduces a perverse incentive.

But what if, for example, people paid upfront for unlimited access to the service? Then the incentives of the app would be better aligned to the users: find them a good match quickly so that they won't come back in a long time, if ever.

That said, I am deeply grateful that I got married well before dating apps became popular. It would have been such a terrible experience for a nerd like me.
> My number one requirement for a distributed system is that the code all be one place.

This is a major source of frustration. Having to touch multiple repositories and syncing and waiting for their deployment/release (if it's a library) just to add a small feature easily wastes a few hours of the day and most importantly drains cognitive ability by context switching.
Of course, Eiffel is such a popular and widely used language, with a great toolset. /s
Shutting a program down is transparent. What GP said was that ineffective government programs, and red tape more generally, are uniformly due to some sort of devious intentional sabotage by the other side. My argument was a response to that.
I don't read that as arrogant. The full statement is:

> If the business can't afford to have downtime then they should be paying for enterprise support.

It's simply stating that it's either cheaper for business to have downtime, or it's cheaper to pay for premium support. Each business owner evaluates which is it for them.

If you absolutely can't afford downtime, chances are premium support will be cheaper.
I'd spent a month or so trying to come up with a good name, seeing which channels had success and what the drivers were. A lot of top channels have the presenter's name in it, but the problem with Ian is that most fonts don't have serifs, and the number of times I've been put down as LAN by people who can't distinguish between capital i and lower case L is infuriating. I concluded it would have to have a cadence, a rhythm, the word Tech, and some tie in.

In the end it was a bad subtitling transcription by YT on my first in person video with Wendell. Right near the end, it auto-transcribed something about me and AnandTech as 'TechTechPotato'. The tie in with chips and potatoes is an obvious one - 'twice the tech and all the chips' is a potential future tag for the channel.

About a month in, one of the community built the logo, completely unprompted. I loved it, and bought it off him.
You know what? This is a really great point. When I reflect back on my career experience (at companies like Expedia, eBay, Zillow, etc.) the best distributed systems experience I had was at companies that standardized on languages and frameworks and drew a pretty strong boundary around those choices.

It wasn't that you technically couldn't choose another stack for a project, but to do so you had to justify the cost/benefit with hard data, and the data almost never bore out more benefit than cost.
Free Economic Data with JavaScript
Yes; however, the mechanism of one is well documented and understood and comes with a predictive theory, while the other is so far just speculation of somone on the Internet.
I agree that WordPress shouldn't be written off, but we have to consider its plugin architecture, and the ecosystem and culture whereby plugins and themes get installed and used.

WordPress core is kept up to date by a responsive team. However, while some WordPress users may be content with a vanilla installation, there are many who are not.

A traditional way to add functionality and style to a WordPress installation is to add plugins and themes. These plugins and themes are not sandboxed, and operate with full privileges.

Unfortunately, there are many plugins and themes which do not uphold the standards of core WordPress with regards to security. And the people who determine which plugins get added to a WordPress install are often non-technical users who are not in a position to evaluate the security implications.

The outcome is that while the WordPress core is hardened, typical WordPress installations which use themes and plugins are still a security shitshow.

The only way I can see to solve this architectural/ecosystem problem would be to somehow nerf plugins, or at least themes, analogous to how browsers discontinued support for the old-style fully-privileged browser extensions. For example, themes could be restricted to inert HTML and CSS. But considering how WordPress gets used, this would be so disruptive that I can't ever see it happening.

And therefore, static site generators like Hugo will continue to enjoy a huge comparative advantage over WordPress in terms of security, even if WordPress core has all the positive traits that you lay out.
My take is that it's exhausting because everything is so damn SLOW.

"Back to the 70's with Serverless" is a good read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25482410

The cloud basically has the productivity of a mainframe, not a workstation or PC. It's big and clunky.

----

I quote it in my own blog post on distributed systems

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/07/blog-backlog-2.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27903720 - Kubernetes is Our Generation's Multics

Basically I want basic shell-like productivity -- not even an IDE, just reasonable iteration times.

At Google I saw the issue where teams would build more and more abstraction and concepts without GUARANTEES. So basically you still have to debug the system with shell. It's a big tower of leaky abstractions. (One example is that I had to turn up a service in every data center at Google, and I did it with shell invoking low level tools, not the abstractions provided)

Compare that with the abstraction of a C compiler or Python, where you rarely have to dip under the hood.

IMO Borg is not a great abstraction, and Kubernetes is even worse. And that doesn't mean I think something better exists right now! We don't have many design data points, and we're still learning from our mistakes.

----

Maybe a bigger issue is incoherent software architectures. In particular, disagreements on where authoritative state is, and a lot of incorrect caches that paper over issues. If everything works 99.9% of the time, well multiple those probabilities together, and you end up with a system that requires A LOT of manual work to keep running.

So I think the cloud has to be more principled about state and correctness in order not to be so exhausting.

If you ask engineers working on a big distributed system where the authoritative state in their system is stored, then I think you will get a lot of different answers...
Yep. It's 100% the buyers' responsibility to vet what they're buying, but the seller can obscure a lot until after the sale.

It's like buying a used car. You need a mechanic to really get in there and find all the rotten bits, based on where you intend to drive it (and how long)
Call me cynical but no part of that seems anything other than a PR move, and a weak one at that. He's just trying to build an image, though how successful he's been is sometimes shown though (non-malicious) comments like yours.
Much of what you say is reasonable.

Only two minor nits:

> why are humans the only creatures on Earth that have evolved those properties? Possibly language and a large brain are an evolutionary backwater.

Nearly every animal has language, for cooperation, competition, raising their young or to find a mate. Bees, whales, primates, birds, etc. all communicate strategically with some type of language.

> Given the history of humanity, I find it hard to believe that the population of a generation ship could survive as long as 100 years without war breaking out on-board. We've had large brains and language for about 50,000 years, as far as I can tell; we've been warring the whole time.

There’s been war somewhere the whole time, but not everywhere. Costa Rica, Iceland, Panama and several minor countries have no military: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_without_ar...

It’s possible to find many countries who have not fought wars in the past 100 years. If you look more narrowly it’s possible to find communities unaffected by local war in hundreds or maybe even thousands of years (in other words, they fought a war but did so by traveling great distances, not fighting each other).

A ship would be much more like a tiny, isolated island colony rather than the geopolitical tensions that dominate the news.

Finally, wars rarely result in the extinction of both sides. Even if there was a large scale conflict it would likely be resolved prior to social collapse. There would be little incentive to kill so many of your fellow crew to the point where you’re putting every survivor at risk.
I love this little IDE. I has built-in LOVE2D snippets and completions, and the debugger works great (I love stack view).
They're creating a lot of attention for little money. Strikes me as a rather successful ad campaign.
Is it overstated? Since my timeline constantly shifts under my scrolling, often showing me it of date crap, yes. Worse, many posts are ads or trending items that.. no, you would not know if there were seconds of lag in them getting processed.

You could almost argue they the small like counts have to be strong consistency. But, I often get notification of a like well before it shows on my timeline. So it is clearly not strongly consistent.
Segues? A segway is a branded mobility thing.
But it sounds like you have to get deep into this programming language, and figure it out yourself for the stuff that's not already there?

Containers and software installs etc. already have solutions that are much simpler to use. Don't require me to learn a new language or get into the weeds of how each package works.
Agree with this. Conway's Law will always hold. If a company does not organize it's teams into units that actually hold full responsibility and full control/agency over that responsibility, those teams will burn out.

When getting anything done requires constant meetings, placing tickets, playing politics, and doing anything and everything to get other teams to accept that they need to work with you and prioritize your tasks so that you can get them done, you will burn out.
Most laws have some ambiguity, it's the reason we have courts that have the ability to make somewhat arbitrary rulings, so that they can enforce a fair and just outcome that supports, 'the spirit of the law'. It goes both ways too, sometimes someone breaks a law in literal terms, but by the spirit of the law it isn't actually important. Courts dismiss cases of broken laws all the time based on that.

You simply can't codify everything, just like in software, there are bugs in law, and people will take advantage in weird and unusual ways. Courts come in and remedy the outcome of the bug, and that ruling is used in future cases to make better decisions, so you can consider that a hotfix.

> (even when paying more money is against the spirit of the law, that will not matter; only when it's about paying less money)

The literal law is to not pay people below Australia's legal minimum wage. It's not a "target wage", so going over it is obviously not relevant, it is the bare minimum. The spirit of that suite of laws is to stop companies from exploiting workers.
Ghost is nice. https://ghost.org/
Agreed. This is what is called "Socialism for the Rich".
Each negative means +1 standard deviation verbal iq.
Pyrite – open-source video conferencing
Just got an email about this. Surprised this didn't get more attention here.
> but the people working at tech companies really seem to believe that computers can do no wrong.

They confuse the computer being wrong with making a mistake.

The computer doesn't make a mistake, it does as it's told, but that doesn't mean what it's told to do isn't wrong.
Preparing for and Mitigating Foreign Influence Operations Against Infrastructure [pdf]
Coinbase's 250.000 USD bug bounty
Only if the barriers have a finer resolution than a single application. Most applications need access to more than enough data to cause problems in the case of an exploit. You need sandboxing between different components of the application as well.
Yeah, what are those countries which are geographically vast, diverse and rich and rely on transit system for daily commute needs?
Medium is the worst blogging platform, I’m really sad that it took off. I’d rather people use wordpress.com and other alternatives that provide easy comments, rss feeds
I've started blocking medium from my search results.
PinePhone Pro – Getting Started
Correlation does not mean causation. Tuition prices were already on their way up before 2007 (as the paper targets). I suspect that this is because in the 80s and 90s the data showed that a 4-year degrees increased income substantially, and tons of people applied for colleges.
The reason you are paying such high taxes is because the taxes on the ultra wealthy are so low. They have been constantly decreasing since the 70s.

No flat tax, but a simplified progressive tax would do great things for the country.
The only stupid questions are the ones you don't ask.

I'm sure most people feel this way at some point but you just need to learn to deal with it in your own way. It's not the end of the world if your mind wanders whilst watching a movie but you should also accept that your brain needs time to organise itself and it may not always do this at your convenience.

There is a reason why people drink a lot at weekends - not that I am suggesting you do the same though.
I thought that as well but my friends and I have done this a few times and most people can’t once you standardize temperature and move away from any desert wines (not a large sample size of course). Try it yourself and make sure not to let anything else get in the way (double blind where possible, all other factors exactly the same). I’ll also note that I’m not a complete noob, the group was in Napa on a wine tasting when we did this and most of us like wine and have done enough tasting and touring to know a little, maybe our pallets aren’t great, none of us are sommeliers or anywhere close :)
I’ve enjoyed building GUI apps with Odin’s vendor libraries. I do wish debugging were more mature.

I love the IDE-style debugging.
I think this gets some of the Spectrum experience, and misses other parts.

It was never really an open system. The firmware was closed source (you could eventually buy an unofficial disassembly) but you couldn't update it with your own changes. You could add external hardware, with some effort, but it was never trying to compete with a backplane system like S-100.

What it did have - apart from very low initial cost and wide availability - was instant-on (no formatting, no setting up, no downloading and installing), staged progress from beginner to expert (i.e. from BASIC to assembler), a small comprehensible system (the manual explained everything BASIC could do, assembler needed an extra book or two but was still very manageable) a very large market with very low cost of entry and high margins (you could write a game, advertise it for almost no money, and send out the initial copies from home with no duplication costs), and a supportive culture of print magazines, occasional TV news and documentaries, and computer shows. (Face to face clubs were much rarer and less influential.)

The physical case design was just plain cool. And it worked with your own TV, which was almost like being on TV.

So basically a combination of instant gratification, tiny-system simplicity with tough constraints that rewarded clever solutions and creativity, low-friction financial opportunity, cultural reinforcement and support among peers working at a similar level, distinctive aesthetics with a coolness of a sort, and affordability.

I don't think it's a coincidence that it happened not long after punk and synth pop in music. Even if their output was very different, all of of those had very similar cultural features.
Seems like only comparing a checksum is a recipe for disaster, especially when hosting an enormous amount of files. Comparing checksum (or multiple checksums) and file size would drastically reduce the amount of false-positives.
There is no such breakage at all, the assumption that casing and collation can happen without locale-specific information is invalid, Unicode isn't designed to prevent this and we'd hate it if it was.

This may not be a solved problem in a given programming language's standard library, and/or one might see a bug such as the one GP was reporting, but neither of these conditions is inevitable, here's how you do it in Swift:

"i".uppercased(with: Locale(identifier: "tr_TR")) // returns "İ"
"i".uppercased(with: Locale(identifier: "en_US")) // returns "I"

Same deal with "ij".uppercased and "nl_NL" locale.

It's not a bug that Unicode just threw its hands up and said that complex string operations are locale-specific. The more you learn about the various scripts it represents, the more you will appreciate that there is no other choice.
> At $200/tonne, you're entering "viable air capture of CO2" territory.

Yes. Since the issue is we've emitted too much CO2, the solutions are either to not emit it, or to remove it after emission. You set the price to whatever the actual cost is to remove it, and that lets the person do the emitting decide if it is worth it to emit, or if it would be cheaper to use an alternative. I view that as the reasonable minimum price.

If we were looking to go carbon-negative to start to undo decades of harm, you would want the carbon price to be higher than the removal cost.

> Average estimate is closer to $50/tonne.

Where did this number come from? I've never heard it. It doesn't line up with the goals of Canada ($50 this year, targeting $170/t in 2030), and the spot price in the EU was 85 euro in December.
Drivers have proven time and time again very bad at calculating the externalities correctly.
Arlan Hamilton wants to reroute how startups hire
It is always a pain to debug transpiled C IME.
I don't use public transit much -- I mostly walk everywhere -- and the OP only said The fact someone needs a car is itself a failure. There's no mention of public transit as a proposed solution.
Hey, maybe don't do hash checks on files less than 1KB in size? It's not difficult to solve.
Cars have a way of breaking down and causing unpredictable expenses that can push the poor into hardship. The choice between car culture and well-developed mass transit comes down to density. I might believe that even many "urban areas" in the US are still too sprawlish and low-density for mass transit to be genuinely effective, but this is not uniformly true.
Hotswapping Haskell (2017)
Similar story here. The worst part is that the locked bootloader means that I can't upgrade it myself, either.
My understanding is that wines rated 92/93 really aren’t that good, that scoring is heavily weighted
> these countries are extremely dependent on cheap foreign labor

They are not "dependent" on cheap labor. They can afford to buy cheap labor with no sacrifice to their own people. This is a benefit of UBI in a world that does not have universal UBI.
Please don’t recommend GoDaddy.

Their previous CEO killed elephants. This company supported SOPA. They literally use every trick they could come up with to fool people. It’s probably one of the least ethical domain registrars out there.

Just use namecheap, name.com, gandi.net(Amazon domains uses them I think),inwx or anything more ethical.
It definitely can be. I'm constantly trying to push our stack away from anti-patterns and towards patterns that work well, are robust, and reduce cognitive load.

It starts by watching Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey. And then making every member of your team watch it. Seriously, it is the most important talk in software engineering.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

Exhausting patterns:

- Mutable shared state

- distributed state

- distributed, mutable, shared state ;)

- opaque state

- nebulosity, soft boundaries

- dynamicism

- deep inheritance, big objects, wide interfaces

- objects/functions which mix IO/state with complex logic

- code than needs creds/secrets/config/state/AWS just to run tests

- CI/CD deploy systems that don't actually tell you if they successfully deployed or not. I've had AWS task deploys that time out but actually worked, and ones that seemingly take, but destabilize the system.

---

Things that help me stay sane(r):

- pure functions

- declarative APIs/datatypes

- "hexagonal architecture" - stateful shell, functional core

- type systems, linting, autoformatting, autocomplete, a good IDE

- code does primarily either IO, state management, or logic, but minimal of the other ops

- push for unit tests over integration/system tests wherever possible

- dependency injection

- ability to run as much of the stack locally (in docker-compose) as possible

- infrastructure-as-code (terraform as much as possible)

- observability, telemetry, tracing, metrics, structured logs

- immutable event streams and reducers (vs mutable tables)

- make sure your team takes time periodically to refactor, design deliberately, and pay down tech debt.
Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse will require tech no one knows how to build
Not to shill in this thread… but I’m 23 and thinking through a lot of the things you’re thinking about right now.

I realized recently that there are lots of “unknowns” in my life that I actually could reasonably uncover with a little bit of effort and a sensible system for discovery.

Examples: Marriage, home ownership, retirement, work promotions, children, hobbies/interests

These are things we actually can know if we’re on track for, we just don’t know how. It’s just math at the end of the day - what $$$ needs to come in and out and when to accomplish XYZ thing.

No silly online calculator understand the context of your situation. We need a solution that is all-encompassing, highly unopinionated and configurable, and that embraces uncertainty.

I’m building a little software tool for this called Wayform (https://www.wayform.io). I still have a lot of work to do, but I want it to be useful for young people like ourselves trying to find mental peace while also caring deeply about our life trajectory.
I prefer PDFs hundred times over plain HTML, both for research papers and books. HTML can only reproduce proper structuring with great pain and it is essential for most scientific content. I rather scroll sideways over not having the essential equation displayed correctly.
Disagree completely. I too was in poverty and homelessness between the ages of 4 and 16. Those government programs (no matter how poorly managed) were critical to my survival. The whole reason why I support government programs today is because those programs helped me so much.
Which semantic HTML at least attempts to solve with the `span lang` construct, although "taco" is maybe not the ideal example, but saying e.g. <span lang=fr>Jean</span> could in principle tell a screen reader to pronounce this name correctly, rather than the equally-correct English pronunciation which is a homophone of "gene".

This is another question which doesn't belong in the Unicode character specification, but should be resolved when necessary at a higher level of abstraction.