skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My perspective as detailed in the full message is that the sense in which meta-programming in Ruby is magic is more akin metaphorically to prestidigitation than to the supernatural.

In that sense, it does not imply "stop asking questions," nor does it imply "there is no answer." To me, it implies, "This may look like a supernatural entity is involved, but that's just a trick we're pulling. If we pull back the curtain, we'll find there's a little man with some levers and we'll see how it's done."
That seems more likely to me too. Imagine a fungus that could provide dopamine directly to the brain when a human host meets a certain condition (e.g. a certain amount of direct sunlight, humidity, wind).
Prevent the introduction of known vulnerabilities into your code
> An american doctor will never, for example, say “Hey maybe your chair is too low compared to your desk and you’re putting too much pressure on your wrist” or suggest a series of stretching exercises to do 3x/day for a few weeks until the discomfort goes away. The best you can expect from a doctor is “eh it’s not bad enough for surgery yet, come back in a few years. Take advil or something idk”

Not my experience. I've had doctors that recommended I do stretch exercises for a certain condition I had.

The few times I've been to a doctor in America (I'm not from USA) I got excellent care. They explained the whole thing, told me about options I could take etc. I was very satisfied with the doctors.

Yes it's more expensive than it should be, but that's a different matter.
The article makes a number of keen observations. I don't like how it gets summed up as "stop being boring", as if 'being boring' is a thing rather than the lack of something.

I went through a period of not having an interest I was passionate about. This normally happens but it was for a longer than usual period. I eventually recognized it and made small efforts to find new interests. The pandemic both forced the situation as well as make space to try out new stuff. One of those long-standing things was to play video games which I enjoyed so much growing up and now can never seem to prioritize. Sure it doesn't necessarily have real-world value, but it's something I could enjoy as a minor pastime as I did Go (board game) when I was on a binge.

The part that seems hard as an older adult is that we have less patience for being bad at something at the start when the going is slow. We have to find a way of enjoying the process rather than the results.
Side note: this would have been a lot easier if in response to, "do you want that snippet not to be sandboxed?" you'd just said, "yes".

What you're proposing stands little chance of being implemented, given the security implications.
Never used them though definitely wanted to based on much more interesting vehicle choices.

I swear they're reliant on customer good luck and ignorance. There is no way to get insurance for these, and most people think their personal insurance covers it. In fact, it's super hard to get the correct info out of your own insurance company and you have to go up a level on support before you get the bad news that if anything went wrong you're not covered and you'd be royally screwed
AMD Athlon XP, 256 MB DDR2, GF2 MX 200/400. HL2 ran.

Crazy. It was crazy.
I don’t think a simple, static site is a great example for an entire framework
> the amount of taxation companies had to go through and the uncertainty behind a big and complex legal system which makes an average of 8 years for civil processing .

It's the big, complex legal system that gets me, and the mentality that keeps it in place. There's some sort of minimum required level (countries with too little don't thrive either) but when I think of Italy or India I think the complexity of simply getting anything done is discouraging.

OTOH I don't really care much about taxes and never have. Most of them are on profits, and if you're making profit, great! There are of course a plethora of bullshit excise taxes like business licenses, but in the main they have never added up to a lot in any business I've run. And of course I depend on things like fire brigade, a legal system (not that I've needed to sue anyone or be sued), clean air, roads, etc etc so paying taxes doesn't seem that bad in principle. Those things need to be paid anyway, and sometimes leaving them out of taxes is far worse (consider America's ridiculous health system)
It's not quite "computation", but apparently you can wire a mushroom up to a modular synthesizer and get something resembling music out of it.

Someone has a very entertaining YouTube channel full of this content: https://www.youtube.com/c/MycoLyco. The titles are great too, like "Reishi Talks To Lions Mane About Life In a Bag" (posted 4 days ago).
If anything it would be Matrix and Mullvad. Telegram is not close to being secure and its Russian. Mullvad is more open and more trust worthy compared to ProtonVPN.
Why not just delete it and re-post then?
Despite people always piling up against big phones here, in reality, vast majority of people prefer them.
While I understand why this feature is useful in discouraging and preventing theft of AirPods, Apple seems to have toggled this 'Find My'-esque activation lock switch overnight without any communication with customers. If there had been a 2 week or so lead-up to it being enabled I don't think there would have been much of an issue, as resellers would be able to implement a human check to make sure the person trading them in unlinked the device from their account.
I'd be on board with that.
"Not knowing the price of something until it's time to pay for it" is about as American as apple pie. From retail stores, where shelf prices don't show tax, to your cellphone/cable bills with a half dozen opaque fees added on to the quoted monthly rate, to the hospital, where literally nobody providing the service knows what it will end up costing. Good luck getting rid of this mentality--it's permanently baked into our business and consumer cultures.
My project website: https://www.checkbot.io/

I was aiming for a simple and clean design, with fast loading. The whole homepage is 200KB transferred. Renders in about 0.7s on my desktop.

Main tricks: use SVG everywhere you can (the big screenshot is SVG) and consider inlining it, use minimal CSS and inline it, host fonts yourself, use CSS font swap, don't use JavaScript for content or at all if you can help it, minimise CSS/JS/HTML and use HTTP2.
Occasional pairing, especially for knowledge transfer, is great.

It's the 100% pairing, or worse, 100% mob programming (up to six people with one screen!) that I can't believe would ever be more efficient than the programmers working independently.

Sure, have a party and mob-program for fun for an afternoon, or solve a particularly sticky problem that way, or use it to transfer knowledge about the system to the wider team. Have a blast, and teach everyone something useful at the same time. By all means.

Just don't pretend (as pairing/mobbing advocates do; not you) that two people sitting at a computer can be as efficient at day-to-day coding as two people coding separately, unless at least one of the two is a junior or near-incompetent developer who would contribute negative productivity on their own.
I agree that there are times when challenging the reader's bias can be effective. Yes, that's slightly different than challenging an entire community's bias, but certainly worth calling out.

Thank you.
Lol, just what I said - accountants (plus bankers, finance guys etc).
Discussing business plans, scouting locations, splitting ownership stakes... all the fun parts of starting a business. Not so cool: years later, getting deep in the weeds bitching about raw material cost increases down to the percentage point.
I'm not sure the success of C++ has as much to do with the C++ committee as the fact that there were few alternatives competing in the same space until the past decade.
Wow, what a ridiculous comment. What you are mention is only a good environment for lifestyle businesses, not startups and growth companies who are usually more innovative and have the possibility to create massive net positives in a country's economy.
Sorry, don't have the references handy.
> computation at some level

Unfortunately that term applies to basically everything... computation at every classical level we know only requires "maybe have state, maybe update state in response to environment, maybe move to new environment based on new state, maybe repeat".
I'm now recalling the case of a woman of my acquaintance who developed a sexually-transmitted disease after her husband patronized a sex worker.

Is that not to become a victim?
Considerably more than for those with access.

Again: once an identifier is available, correlating it with other information is trivial.
What makes you say you are imprisoned in your career as a programmer?

People career hop a lot.
I don't think anyone is in denial about this, it's just not something anyone should concern themselves with in the foreseeable future. AI that can replace a dev or designer is nowhere close to becoming a reality. Just because we have some cool demos that show some impressive capabilities in a narrow application does not mean we can extrapolate that capability to something that is many times more complex.
Ask HN: Would you build it in house or quit your job first?
If you have an opportunity to build a product that extends your employer's platform into a new target market, would you build it in house while employed to make it part of your employer's portfolio or would you quit your job build it outside?
You're right. I was thinking about Airbnb, which has cleaning fees that can be pretty hefty on one-night rentals. And those are understandable because someone needs to come in and change the sheets/towels, wash dishes, etc.

But there's no "bedsheets" analog for a car rental. Yes, it needs to be washed, but I imagine most renters of Priuses don't actually care if the car hasn't been washed in a few days/weeks.
Instead of paying for what the dealer is selling you rent his car for the same amount of money. You don't actually drive it (so it costs the dealer nothing in depreciation) but now the dealer has the appearance of a legitimate income stream.
I wish Apple owned Azure, and Altras would be APUs.

The we'd have a 7-A alliteration.
The law prohibits teaching sexual orientation. If discussing families with two dads violates this law, then discussing families with one mom and one dad must necessarily also violate it. Interpretation about what is/isn't appropriate is left to the Florida Department of Education, but the law itself preserves equality. Note also that without this law, it would also be legal for teachers to teach that gay people don't exist or any manner of right-wing ideology.
There are definitely cases where you are converting integers into pointers ex-nihilo. Memory-mapped I/O is one (write something special to memory location 0x04ff0030 and it turns on the light!).

My current Rust project would probably need to hit up the exposed_addr interface, but it's definitely in the twilight of "how to even memory model" since it involves trying to reason about the provenance of pointer values in the register array passed to you by the third argument of the signal handler.
How to Make Better Decisions When Starting and Scaling Companies
> proof of personhood for crypto

But one of the promises of the blockchain is anonymous transactions, free from evil incumbent central authorities. If this needs a proof of identity then why not use existing government systems, such as passports, which incidentally, in most countries, already contain biometric information.

> testing the concept in lower-income countries has a "colonial experimentation" look to it

Yes, that makes this especially disgusting.

> HN is very anti-crypto so I expect any conversation on this topic is an uphill battle

Well, it seems every single story about crypto shows it reinventing the wheel with worse tools, poor insights, and trying to make it square.
It's in the SUN so it must be true!
The issue isn't who gets to make "day-to-day business decisions" (i'm not sure how you characterize licensing source code as open source as such, but it doens't matter).

The issue is that shareholders literally own the property owned by the company, that's what it means to be a shareholder. Including intellectual property.

Announcing you are shutting down a company, and then, without board approval, the CEO giving away what assets remain... is super sketchy and probably illegal, probably stealing from the shareholders (or even more likely other creditors, if they exist), who would probably like to partially recoup their losses from sales of any remaining assets. What those assets are you are giving away are, say, a fleet of cars, or the intellectual property of source code, legally the same.

Imagine if a car service company announced it was shutting down, and then gave away all it's cars, instead of selling them in an orderly fashion and distributing profits to anyone who was owed money, including creditors and shareholders.

Given that with a company going out of business a lot of people are going to be losing money and wanting to get what they can out of any assets... the time to release as open source is really before you go out of business.
OK, well, if that's true now, it wasn't true in the early '10s. Unless their API docs at the time were simply lying.
> Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or for x machine learning.

Because there's many recent examples of companies building databases to sell and a lot of companies are harvesting data for machine learning? I'm sorry if I'm coming across as glib or rude, but these aren't theoretical exploits. This company has apparently collected data on hundreds of thousands of people and raised millions of dollars; I don't think they deserve a ton of benefit of the doubt.

Edit: changed "long history" to "many recent examples"
If you read ”dealer” as ”car dealer”, think instead ”drug dealer” or similar.
I couldn't work it into the my comment, but an example that came to mind is a quote from Dr. Adele Goldberg:

"In Smalltalk, everything happens somewhere else."

I vividly recall that when I first installed Digitalk's Smalltalk/V, everything seemed to involve spooky action-at-a-distance.
The missing link is already explained by wild discontinuities in evolution, which are pretty much a given on the evolutionary chain of any species on earth given for how long life that evolves has been present on the planet. There's records of tribes with click based languages that can arrange very effective and powerful hunting squads using spears an overpower even herds or packs of the most dangerous animals in their regions. Yeah they look wildly different than apes, but imagine what they were doing to the other kinda differently looking apes that didn't understand their clicks but understood "pointy stick good", and that happened for thousands of years.

Whole indigenous languages went exting in the late 20th century in places like Bolivia or Australia and even during the 21st century native languages are going extinct in California. In thousands and thousands of years someone trying to re-walk Darwins path may wonder were is the missing link in evolution between something like Aztec and European remains found in the West Coast, when there's none. Species can evolve in isolation and then obliterate each other leaving a discontinuity or clique within the genus, it happens all the time, and it's puzzling but natural.
Designing a modern CPU architecture and describing one to a non-expert audience are very different skills.
So it appears not only is this posting from 2019, but the most recent information they reference is 2010. This seems to be no longer relevant? I’d love it if submissions on HN had a small blurb from the author explaining why their submission is interesting/relevant.
You've made no credible representation that identifiers will be time-variable in a non-predictable manner.

Which is required to defeat any level of time-based observational collection and correlation by third parties. As is commonly the place with present aviation tracking systems.
I'm a bit of a car guy, so I thought it might be worth trying Turo.....however even in larger areas I would rarely see anything reasonable to rent, and even the base cars seem a bit pricey. Then I read a few horror stories of getting scammed on Turo (via pet fees or other vague airBnb style scams) and running into Kafkaesque "modern customer support" from Turo which scared me off for good.
Absolutely. Emacs is a great UX layer, only lacking a modern UI rendering layer. Would be nice to have emacs with a DOM-based rendering engine.
Aaron from Deno here. Of course it's producing HTML as an output, but the point is that you can use JSX and familiar technologies like tailwind to dynamically generate that HTML at edge vs client side.

And unlike a pure static site, you can add API or form routes
In my experience, right here on HN the dominant narrative was that opposing Russian gas infrastructure was just American protectionism for frackers.

Similarly, opposing Chinese built telecom infrastructure is just seen as an attempt at American protectionism. Hopefully that continues to be a viable position, unlike depending on Russian gas.
Ten years ago only 30 % of European gas came from Russia. In the 90s it was even less. It was a deliberate German strategy to increase their dependence on Russia.

> Once it was clear that's gonna happen, and no that was NOT clear a year ago,

It was clear. He threatened Europe with shutting down gas supplies in the past, more than once. He actually did it with Ukraine in 2014. In response Germany (& Europe) became more dependent on Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYaa5Zp7qBI This was 2018. Germany mocked him instead of listening.
Other fees at checkout aside, regarding requiring a driving license no: Surely they require your license number so that they can check if you have any violations/tickets/etc? Wouldn’t you get a cheaper rental with a clean license? Makes sense to me, I must be missing something.
The same happens with hotels and "resort fees", especially in places like Las Vegas.
If we're talking personal:

- I had https://shahinrostami.com which grew into a collection of notebooks, now it's not so personal...

- Recently booted up https://polyra.com, which I'm keeping a little more personal

For my projects, I have https://plotapi.com and https://plotpanel.com
> AirBnb, Turo? I don't get it, are folks comparing the purchases directly to "other" products?

Sometimes to hotels and car rental chains. But also people glance at these sites to ballpark the cost of a vacation, get their hearts set, and come back later (maybe after booking flights) and only then see the full price.
We have quite a bit of evidence that our gut bacteria influence our long term actions and behaviour through neurotransmitter precursors.
Use of the word conscious here is interesting. Is there any doubt that fungi are conscious of what they are conscious of?

I think that we have to be careful. Speaking philosophically it's safe to say that we do not yet have a clear, definitive definition of "consciousness" in scientific terms such that we can safely assess what is or isn't conscious.

Some believe consciousness is what distinguishes humans from lower beasts. Others believe it is an emergent phenomenon of some higher order macroorganisms, dolphins but not cows, monkeys but not fish. Still others believe that plants, fungi, bacteria, and all living things display some level of consciousness.

And some weird folks believe consciousness is a property of the universe expressed in all things, which happens to manifest in forms that we understand and relate to in living organisms due to the inherent bias of observing through the lense of being a biological organism ourselves.

It appears difficult if not impossible to prove which of these definitions is correct!

What seems clear is that the idea of consciousness cuts to the very core of the modern scientific paradigm and world view, such that the inherent assumptions made in building our scientific realism allow us only a very narrow understanding of what is consciousness accompanied by a certainty that what we do understand must be all there is.

That's to say, if you've ever questioned the fundamental axioms of scientific truth you've inevitably bumped into the philosophical problem of consciousness relative to the institution of scientific realism.

So to say, when someone says "we now have proof that X may in fact be conscious!" the statement comes across to some ears as most definitely vague and exactingly inordinate!
If you also read that comment tyre fire then I suspect you'll snatch the thanks back ;) Hat tip for the thoughtful replies to the comments on your app, interesting to read as dispassionate observer.
I didn't say it's due to the committee, I just said it succeeded and had a committee. Python succeeded and had a BDFL, but I wouldn't say it's due to that either - lots of projects pull off the latter but not the former.
Great feedback. Not offended at all. And you write wonderfully, with compassion and passion.

Yes, you're right. Life throws some terrible things but a lot of those things will occur regardless of whether you're at a desk or out on adventures. I have had some hard times.

I'm a recovering alcoholic. I burned out big style at about 29 and quit drinking about a year later. There've been some rough times. I don't have a super rich family but they are supportive. I've relied on friends for couches. I've lived in tents and hammocks in the woods. Never exactly homeless but just lacking a home. The scheme, WWOOF, I worked on meant I could live for very little money.

Your healthcare point is excellent. I've lived in the UK and Canada, both of which have similar healthcare systems. The US system is just unbelievable (literally) to Europeans.

I ran out of money (down to my last 300 quid) and returned to IT about 8 years ago. I started right back at the bottom and worked my way up. I lasted 5 years and burnt out again.

I guess I went too far in the "go crazy and run off live in the woods!!!" direction. I guess my main point (if I had one after rambling this much) is don't let your soul die at a desk.

> I've always wanted to try some kind of blacksmithing! I'M SO JEALOUS!

Do it. If you have a backyard then you can throw together a simple charcoal forge with an air blower. My youtube channel has an ancient video of making tongs. One of the best things to learn, making your own tools. Just remember: "Got it hot and hit it". That's all the advice you need. And PPE. Eye and ear protection. Always.

Otherwise find a local blacksmith and do a weekend. You will not regret it.
30-year fixed mortgage crosses 5%
https://webamp.org/
After reading this thread I don't really want to get involved in either community. But I still hope the best for the software projects and wish the best for everybody that does actual development, I hope this situation can get better over time.