skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I legitimately don't understand where all these "Ukraine is obviously winning" takes are coming from.

If Ukraine was doing well, it wouldn't be giving out weapons to civilians [0], forming penal battalions [1], or lie about receiving NATO planes. [2]

If Ukraine was doing well, it wouldn't be inflating death counts to be larger than the US involvement in Afghanistan, a 20 year period of time. [3,4]

If Ukraine was doing well, they wouldn't need to make up a story about the Ghosts of Kyiv. [5,6]

I am utterly utterly perplexed. Where is any semblance of proof that Russia is doing badly? They seem to be encircling the capital and winning city after city. It's only two weeks in. Did we expect better after the early adrenaline rush? Do they benefit from being told this? Are we just being setup to be told this is a Pyrrhic victory for the Russians?

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/26/ukraine-russ...
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-releases-prisoners-combat-e...
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/eu-ukraine-fighter-jet-promise-fall...
[3]: https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/news-oon-kst-gertv-boyovyh-do...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
[5]: https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-ukraines-ghost-of-kyiv-figh...
[6]: https://twitter.com/KFCBarstool/status/1497366093362520065?s...
While I am an Yglesias fan, I don’t think your take is unfair. Matt often describes himself as a professional take-haver, and admits to trying to put out somewhat contrarian takes on topics. One of my favorite recent columns of his was a love letter to the “Slatepitches” that Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media:
“ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. At its best, Slate championed unpopular causes and provoked fantastic debates. At its worst, Slate seemed to be deliberately stretching to come up with indefensible ideas.”

https://www.slowboring.com/p/slatepitch?s=r
I have been dragging my feet on leaving Firefox for security reasons for so long, and just now I have come to terms with how ridiculous that is.

I’ve known about the security team, and I remember hearing that even prior to that, a CTF event had banned Firefox exploits as too easy.

I am doing it next time I open my work laptop. I mean what is the single most important class of features in a browser? Security. I feel dumb for waiting so long.

This makes me sad. I was emotionally invested invested in Mozilla and that caused an error in judgment.
Do the providers accept ruble? My understanding is that foreign currency transfers to outside was banned (capital control).
Nope, I can see why she did that.

First off, this topic attracts the Wrong People as well. By the Wrong People I mean terrifying crazy people who will never leave you alone, not merely people with wrong opinions.

Second: she's a woman in science on Twitter. The appalling sexist hate she will absolutely trigger by simply speaking up warrants at least throwing the switch so it can't be seen. This is why so many women writing for newspapers now ask for the comments to be switched off on their articles, too. Because it is endless and soul-damaging.
The team behind VS Code are all-stars and they’re backed by an established company with plenty of money to throw and no hard deadlines to meet for profitability. VS Code is also central to Microsoft’s strategy to rebrand themselves as a “good guy” to the dev community.

Most Electron apps are cost cutting measures and this is reflected in the quality of their teams and the priorities of the company. They’re made to check a box, not to be good.
Memory kind of blurs together, but probably was doing larger programs with the tape, 5-9 minutes for a 16kb program [1], felt like forever.

Also might be mixed with memories of the C64 cassette which is 30 minutes per 100kb per side [2] so 20 minutes for a 64kb program.

I remember it being torture waiting as kid, and I believe it was not always successful and prone to error reading and requiring retries which maybe never worked, seemed like 50/50 chance and eating up lots of time.

1. https://www.sinclairzxworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=39

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
I am not sure if you understood my analogy, let me try to be more explicit. The USSR tried to put nuclear missiles next to US borders, the USA did not like this. Ukraine wants to become a NATO member, Putin views this as NATO - maybe as a proxy for the USA - eventually putting military assets - potentially nuclear missiles or whatever he is most concerned about - next to Russian borders, Putin does not like this.

In case of the Cuban Missile Crisis the actions of the USSR were only a response but still not tolerated. You could maybe find an equivalent, something that Russia did first and that then caused Ukraine to seek a NATO membership, but I don't think this is important for the analogy. The equivalent of Russia backing down and not stationing missiles in Cuba for Cuba's protection would be Ukraine not joining NATO.

But I have to admit that I don't get your analogy either, would you mind elaborating?
Am I the only one reading the original study and not finding the word "sleep" in it at all?
Even nightshade greens are overhyped on risk level. The Joy of Cooking used to have tomato greens as stuffing in various recipes; you have to eat a large amount for it to be actually a problem.
California cronyism is enforced by the CEQA. If your project doesn't buy off the right people, then they will ruin it with interminable environmental-impact lawsuits, a problem largely orthogonal to any mitigation of environmental impact.

There's also a measure of incompetence, like the story the LA Times had about the high speed rail planners who asked the Central Valley farmers if they could just put their grown nut trees into pots for a few years while the rail line is being constructed. And, of course, all the financial estimates were laughably optimistic from project inception.
While the protests to a large extent took place outside of America, the Feb 15, 2003 protest against the Iraq War was the largest protest ever at the time. The protests were certainly more enthusiastic and open than what we see in Russia, you can speculate on the reasons why.
Why does Windows have a limit on environment variables at all?
And paypal this morning too [1]

It does feel coordinated. I know corporate law is kind of irrelevant in a context of war, but it feels more than ever like a cartel.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/paypal-shuts-down-its-servi...
Why does the article take so long to explain what BART stands for? Even then, it assumes a lot of prior knowledge.

This is one of the reasons I tend to read the comments on articles more than the articles themselves.
I think we need to stop worrying about what he says and just focus on what he does. He said he wouldn’t invade Ukraine.

If he thinks this is war and it’s a war he’s willing to fight then he should fire the first bullet or shut up.

There will be crippling sanctions for long enough to change Russia as we know it. And there will be endless supplies of arms to anyone in conflict with an ever poorer Russia. If Putin wants any other future then he better start negotiating.
You can always ask to borrow someone's card who doesn't live in Russia...
I’d be curious to know how many users your app has, if you’re comfortable sharing that information.
https://archive.ph/PE2c9
I am one of these Russians. Or should I say I was, because just moments ago Visa and Mastercard stopped all operations in Russia, and this essentially left us without any money except the (meagre) cash we could withdraw back in Russia.

It really feels the trap is closing in around me right now.
Thanks, I wasn't sure how heavy the gas was. So it's like carrying an extra child in the car.
The saddest thing really is that it was all for nought - the EU won't allow any new members for a generation or more, as it tries to complete the scalable political and economic infrastructure it already needs to work with 27 unruly members. Be it Ukraine, Turkey, Serbia, or whichever - nobody is getting in anytime soon, and making sacrifices towards that objective is delusional.
Given that this is Amazon's fork of ES, and given the terrible experience I've had in the past trying to run Amazon stuff locally, I do wonder if this is somewhat intentional. Although a more reasonable explanation is probably just that easy config is low on amazon's priority list since they want you using their managed version.
> If I could run the Slack or Discord iOS apps on macOS I absolutely would, along with several other apps that have both Electron and iOS apps.

To clarify the situation for any unaware readers, you can indeed run iOS/iPad apps on M1 Apple Silicon devices however not all. From memory, the policy was actually that everything was allowed to be installed by default with developers having to opt out of allowing users to install their iOS/iPad apps on macOS devices.

There used to be workaround that may still work, but I haven't tried it in some time. You can use https://imazing.com (you'll just have to look past the marketing site for a minute...) to download apps you own as IPA files. Once you've got those, you can use the built-in macOS IPA installer to install those apps, even if developers have marketed them as not installable via the App Store.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21574207/how-to-install-... for a bit more info on the process
I guess this will just accelerate adoption of China's UnionPay or their homegrown MIR.
> mainlanders do not see much to envy

This is a classic case of citation needed.

It's easy enough to do for the reverse, i.e. that the Taiwanese are not overly enthused by the prospect of "reunification":

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2021/12/30/2...
A bigger issue I see with that Wikipedia page is it doesn't list the blocking of regulatory approval of the finished Nord Stream 2 as a cause. It's only mentioned way down and more like "wet streets cause rain".

Of course, even Russian propaganda doesn't mention it. Sending kids to die to a neighbor country because of a gas pipeline doesn't have the same ring to it. They go with some kind of motherland nonsense. It's just money. Always is.
slight counterpoint: not taking sides allows for aggressors to hold their foot in the door
> (as per Transport Canada weight and balance calculations: https://tc.canada.ca/en/aviation/reference-centre/advisory-c...) of 96.2kg

That number includes passenger + baggage. The table suggests subtracting 5.9kg to get to passenger only, which still strikes me as very heavy standard weight. I much prefer the XKCD[0] rule of thumb: lady 60kg, dude 70kg.

[0] https://xkcd.com/526/
Rip the band-aid off and take some hairs with it!
Fully agree. And in general, developers won't want to spend too much money on osx-only work because other platforms have (like you said) much more users and also a lower maintenance burden.

Native Mac apps tend to require recompile and updates for every minor os upgrade. Electron is slow, wastes battery time, and is usually unsafe, but it'll shield the developer from Apple's aggressive api deprecation.
I’ve read elsewhere that the economic costs would be significant and elected leaders in the west find it politically untenable and would be fearful of being voted out of office if gas priced explode.

I would like to believe our elected leaders are not so self-serving as to put their political interests above the needs of the Ukrainian people but I’ve seen enough geo—politics in my life that I simply can’t be so naiive.
Maybe they just have common sense.
Thanks for the summary. I wish them luck with the more open approach and hopefully they will publish more at some point.

I only looked quickly but the part about artists and labels is not sufficient. On Bandcamp, individual albums can be listed by an artist but on a particular label with a small link to the label. It appears in the list of albums for the label and for the artist. This dynamic is very important for finding indie music and, as far as I can tell without being in the industry at all, artists often want to work with different people on the production as well as marketing side and everyone benefits. It often isn't the case that artists pick one label and stick with them for a while, they may have one or more that they release with more often but also do one off releases with other labels and self publish some albums or tracks. I don't know how it works behind the scene but I assume artists generally don't want all the labels that they release on to be able to edit everything, the labels should be restricted to editing the album released on that label unless additional permission is given. Of course, it makes sense for indiehd to start with the simpler cases (and it is wonderful that they are so open about what they are doing) but hopefully they are working on the more complex relationships needed to support the indie scene.
The thing i’m still trying to understand is why Mozilla management is so hell bent on crippling their flagship product? RIP Servo, among other forward looking technologies.
It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where these sanctions (not just Mastercard and Visa, but all of it as a whole) are reduced without a total regime change in Russia. This is becoming a massive divestment, and I'm not sure it's a great idea.

There's no guarantee that what replaces Putin is going to be more Western and not reactionary. For every Russian that is cosmopolitan and globalist, there's a dozen Russians in small villages that are True Believers and will see this foreign pressure for what it is: replacing a Russian president that, at least in their mind, they put there.

Even if you assume that it's going to be a democratic and Western government that rises from the ashes, I think the timescale for this is in years, not months, and I think that the impact on the average citizen in The West is going to be massive while we wait that out.

I paid north of $80 last night for 18 gallons of fuel, and it's only going to get worse. In Europe, they're staring down the barrel of a significant energy crisis next winter. Energy is everything: it's fertilizer and it's heat. And this is all on the tail of record inflation and a shaky economy.

Hot take: I think this is going to backfire and we're going to see destabilization in Europe and America before Putin is ousted. War tends to be a boon for the economy in the West, but I see good reason why this time could be different.
Thanks. This all makes sense.

I guess the bigger surprise to me is that there wasn’t anything newly extraneous or improvable as a result of the transition.

Electric guitars come to mind, they are largely the same except in two regards:

The body is much shallower. This of course is due to no longer needing a soundbox. But further, it’s because a shallow body brings the strings closer to the player and puts the arm in a more comfortable position. The large deep soundbox not only became extraneous after the transition, it was also always a bit of an unavoidable hindrance in the first place.

The body shape changed as well. This was due to aesthetic freedom as a result of not needing a soundbox.

Cameras, on the other hand, could of course change the aesthetic for fun, but I guess there is no need for in-the-moment showmanship when it comes to camerawork and camera aficionados just don’t care for flash? ;) And maybe any change would just get in the way (though arguably some guitar shapes are inconvenient as well yet nonetheless desirable to some).

In the end, I guess the physical limitations of the camera either are still present (like large telescopic lenses) or had already been condensed into a small enough size that they no longer hindered better ergonomics
In this context when one actor pulls out, the eyes turn on the others who either pull out or will have to accept being seen as supporting the regime. The coordination doesn’t have to exist for it to look coordinated. No one wants to be seen as late to leave.
I anticipate lots of gold moving physically over the next few months.
The problem for me is as much that excellent Mac apps are being replaced by shitty Electron crap as anything else. I relied on Evernote for ages but then it got rewritten as a sluggish web app and now it's just utterly unusable and I have not found anything that fits its place of being a notebook that lives in native apps on my Mac, iPhone, and iPads, and lets me collaborate on some things with my friends who use Windows and Android.

I am sort of starting to maybe substitute Scrivener for it. Which is a super-amazing native app designed for writers that sets a pretty high bar for anyone who wants to "continue to improve writers’ workflows in the coming decade and innovate in that space".

Most of the apps I've installed on my Mac lately are to change the way the OS behaves, to be honest. Like, Bartender is useful and makes dealing with all the little utilities that want to live in the menu bar a lot easier. I'm an artist and Illustrator is my main medium; Time Sink's tracking tells me that I've spent about 3.3 days in Illustrator so far this year, and 9.5 days in Safari, and everything else is measured in hours and kinda looks like a rounding error compared to those two apps.
> One thing is sure: if China still wants to invade Taiwan, they certainly have postponed their plans by a few years, maybe a decade, maybe even more.

Not necessarily. CPC is still waiting to see what the US and NATO do in response to the Russian invasion, and especially Putin's threats of nuclear escalation.

If China perceives that all the West will do is sanctions on Russia, but no direct military intervention to prevent a democratic country from being taken over by force, then China will deduce that nuclear saber rattling is enough to ensure the US won't intervene in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

That may lead them to accelerate their plans to do just that, to accomplish it during a time that 1) Western leadership is easily deterred by nuclear threats, 2) the Chinese Navy has more ships than the US Navy, and 3) US and NATO are divided into fighting a 2-front war.

CPC is also waiting to see the full extent of sanctions on and potential decoupling with Russia, how far the West will go in that regard. If CPC believes they could survive the same, again they'll be encouraged to accelerate their Taiwain plans.

The jury's still out, but it's not a given that events have already decelerated CPC's intent to invade Taiwan. That's still up in the air.
> The technique really needs a well known name.

The weak-man fallacy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
Visa and Mastercard are not issuing "sanctions", nobody told them to cut off Russia, they are willfully making calculated business decisions.
About 5%
"it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses"

Uh, no it's not a coincidence at all. It was doing coronavirus research because SARS-1 was known to have jumped from bats to humans in China and Wuhan had a lot of bats near human population. China (and everybody else) had spent decades on high alert for another bat-born coronavirus variant and it was considered a very likely source of the next pandemic. So, they dedicated a ton of resources to studying exactly that. It would be like expressing shock at the coincidence of war breaking out in the exact spot where two opposing armies have been pointing guns at each other for 20 years.
It was the earnings report that effected the drop. Users dropped for the first time in the company's history, potentially signaling peak growth, meaning it's downhill from here. I think the market acted accordingly and the drop was justified.
…in a JavaScript ORM, not the actual database.

Still interesting.
I think your comment is in keeping with Matt’s point, that virus spread among humans or animals at the Wuhan seafood market doesn’t on its own contradict the possibility of a lab leak.
What are your thoughts on Intel's new management?
Gotta justify the Bilions of $$$ spent on the new campus, while trying to prevent a CMBS collapse
> Imagine if they had social media in the 30s-40s.

I have thought about this, and given the amount of pro-Fascist sentiment in Western Europe, WWII probably wouldn't have happened. Germany would probably have gotten away with taking Austria, Czechoslovakia, possibly the lands forfeited to France after WWI and at least part of Poland.

The world would look VERY different to today. Assuming Japan stuck to their neck of the woods, the USA probably would never have gotten to be a super power (given it was WWII that really catapulted them into that category). The UK may still have reasonable parts of the empire. The super powers would probably be Germany, USSR and a lesser extent, UK, Japan.

This is the stuff of alt-historical fiction.

EDIT: apologies for straying off topic but I couldn't resist.
I also wrote a version of Bernardy's pretty printer, but I never did come up with a satisfactory way of formatting text together with code. The best looking solution of splitting on whitespace and making each word a group, either tacking it onto the current line or splitting onto a new line ends up being exponential even with pretty aggressive optimization. Everything else I tried looked bad.
> It does feel coordinated

This whole thread has been an eye opener for me, I had no idea so many people had so little idea of what 'economic sanctions' means.

Yes, yes it does feel coordinated. Have you noticed it came after sanctions were announced as well??
Arc has a very nice implementation that is bootstrapped from an impressively small number of primitives, is easy to understand, and very hackable. It was the first language implemention that I was really able to wrap my head around and modify in useful ways, as someone who (at the time) had no formal training in programming languages.

The language itself has a focus on short names. Besides that and a few minor innovations, there really isn't much to it. I think pg considered this a feature (if Lisp is a good idea, you can't expect one to be that different from another). However, having gotten a PhD in programming languages since I messed with Arc, I can't say this is something I agree with...
But the only thing they have in common is that their leaders are arseholes.
"The story goes: Marin County, worried about cost of the extension and engineering concerns of running BART on the Golden Gate Bridge, ultimately backed out of the BART District. Fin."

I want to push back on this slightly ...

The received wisdom - repeated ad infinitum - among bay area progressives is that Marin County rejected BART based on racist, exclusionary, NIMBY concerns. That is how "the story goes" in these discussions.

I have never heard anyone mention engineering issues.

The reality - which the article explains - is that both of these narratives are wrong:

Marin County approved BART and was ready to proceed and it was the San Mateo rejection that ultimately killed it.
What kind of tools do people use to work with probabalistic DL? Pyro, Edward, Tensorflow Probability, ...other?
They are not picking a side. There is only one side - and it is accepted by the whole world. So not really a choice here at all.