skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don’t object to the use of “charity” nearly so much as “open platform” in this case.

A charity that gives away some things but not other things is still a charity. A platform that is partially closed is not fully open.
> Tech is still really cool, compared to decades ago

I think a huge factor I haven't seen mentioned is continuous delivery. How often were new operating systems released? How often were new products announced? When you bought software, the devs would be hard at work working on the next version with the incentive to make it good enough that people would buy again.

Now software is continually released. "Major" updates are expected every year, and they're often free and people are expected to upgrade. Subscription models have rolled out, so while directly interacting with your customer probably leads to a better product, there's less incentive to re-invent the wheel - you don't need to upsell all your previous clients.

I would assume that all of this is leading to better products, but all of the baby steps make it all seem so lacklustre.

For example, compare the iPhone 13 Pro's camera to, say, the iPhone 8's camera. Had Apple waited 5 years to release the upgrade, the new camera would have blown. peoples. freaking. minds. However, since it's been getting slightly better each year, we instead have people complaining about how the only difference is a slightly better camera.
If a company has 9 racks with their legacy products and 1 product sounding like the ones you describe, then the job ad will mention the kubernetes all the things product/job, but if you apply you'll be maintaining 10 products where 9 aren't very sexy at all.

So unless the company is extremely young (say younger than 10 years) then there will be tech of all ages and all levels of sexy.
I agree with other people here that it's likely an age thing. You're maturing and you're seeing what was always the case. The feeling you're having, I started to get in my 30s, in the 2000s. Working at Google through my 40s only cemented it, there's only so excited you can be about moving protobufs from one place to another and then you realize the "innovation" in the tech there comes from the perfection of the execution of very boring routine tasks at extremely large scale.

The "tech" that people get enamored with are sets of tools. What you do with them is the most important thing. They have no intrinsic transcendent value in themselves. There's a part of our brain that is "tickled" by solving problems. But that stimulation only takes you so far.

Insofar as "tech" has changed the world it's really that capitalism has transformed the world in its image, and part of what we call "tech" is the ideological framework that has helped make that happen. Everything from bar code scanners in supermarket checkouts in the early 70s, to the earliest CPUs in the F-14 fly-by-wire flight system (same era), to Uber drivers using an app to manage their gigs -- the development of microprocessor technology was driven by the need for market efficiencies, not the other way around.
Lack of sleep can also be pretty brutal.
Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak Fined for Breaking Covid Lockdown Rules
Overall, red side wants things to stay the same or go back, and blue side wants things to change. If the gap between them is widening, it's because blue side is trying to change things too rapidly. Red side seems to want to go back to 1950 at the earliest; it doesn't seem to me like they're increasingly backing up into 1800s or earlier. But the blue side is increasingly pushing for things that many are not ready to even consider: children transitioning into other genders, reparation-like policies, socially enforced changes to fundamentals of language. Many reds are still getting used to the last changes, like gay marriage. Society is just not set up to handle constant massive change to traditional mores. You can have one or two things change in a decade and people will adapt, but the current velocity is not sustainable.
Good to see an article around this era of "hacking" (writing punters in VB). I haven't seen too much about it and I'd love to know if there are others.

My fondest recollection was that there was a Pokemon battling type game (Pokemon Platinum, I think?) where you could battle Pokemon over chat. The creator had hard-coded his AOL username into the binary to unlock a bunch of moves and skills. We figured out you could load the binary into a hex editing app and change the screen name - only problem was, it had to be the same length as the creator's: 9 characters. So made a new screen name, the one that stuck with me for the next 10-15 years, so I could unlock some pointless features in an AOL program. But it introduced me to Visual Basic, hex editing, and generally being interested in tinkering with computers and software.
Tech reached a pinnacle of excitement for me when I was surrounded by others making progress on things I cared about. Of course, this was during college (and online in the years leading up to it). Now, I simply don't know as many people who still care about the things I do. Those I do know are distant, as am I.

We're out of sync. We're unaligned. We've lost that magic feeling because we aren't consistent.

This lack of consistency seeps into our work and the whole industry loses confidence. Just look at the sad state of software reliability and performance, despite the numerous advancements in hardware.

That's not to say we haven't made progress with technology too. I just don't care about a lot of it. Procedural art is a neat bar trick, but ultimately doesn't strike me as a viewer unless it's explained crisply. Cryptocurrency is a scam at best, or a force for destabilization at worst. Digital currency has been a thing for years, but has gotten slower and more cumbersome in my personal experience recently. Social media is a well accepted problem. Video games seem to be in a rut, as with Hollywood (maybe I'm living under a rock as per usual?). My love for computing hardware has waned; my phones torment me, my USB ports and dongles are duds or act sporadically. Wireless tech is wrought with interference and power issues. Must I continue?

These probably sound like the rummagings of an aging man, grown discontent with the kids these days. To some extent that's also probably correct. But, I think it's worth noting that I do find a lot of excitement in this world still... Just with lower tech hobbies. Ice skating, woodworking, ultimate frisbee, music, and more still dominate my thoughts. As does the horrifying world of trying to date post-college. Maybe, just maybe, it was the hyper-focused tech driven world of the past that was the problem. Maybe, it's this new post-covid era we're entering which will show us that there's more to life than disruption and the "next big thing" every week. I can dream can't I?

It's time to settle in, buckle up, and refine what we know we want, what we have, and what we ultimately need in life.
It didn't, it's cooler than ever.

You think it's not because of some combination of you getting older, accepting the cultural zeitgeist (currently very negative in general and anti-tech in particular), not paying attention to things, not learning new things, etc.

It's extremely hard to look at recent advances in space, neural networks and robots with fresh eyes and not be dumbstruck by their awesomeness.
I think to an extent people do this unconsciously, or offenders don't realize their projection onto others is bad faith. It's habit that is mistakenly believed to be a good heuristic. I expect this triggers as they switch to "argument" mode following contradiction, assuming a posture of attacking/defending, casting nuance aside.

As online spaces are concerned, one thing I liked about forums is that communities, while large, became increasingly familiar and you could reasonably expect some good faith discussion over time. On spaces like reddit, all the tip toeing in the world doesn't prevent it. You could be Mr Rogers speaking to someone's "elephant in the brain" and it wouldn't prevent it.
I've been thinking the same. Also, with libadwaita, it looks quite good by default, and the design is more or less the same as Windows 11 or macOS.
This project was also recently mentioned in a New York Times article [0] by Cade Metz.

On the last paragraph, if you click on the link, you will find the HF space, and the GitHub repo link and also the project report. On both of these links, you will find the full contributors list.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/technology/openai-images-...
What do you find ridiculous about it? For a city with a population of 24 million that sounds pretty alarming to be honest.
Will the browser, like the search engine, decide which political perspectives I should be exposed to?
Broadcom Announces Availability of World’s First Wi-Fi 7 Ecosystem Solutions
In the sense that the need for Wireshark is a testament to the complexity of IP, I suppose, sure.
I really don't understand these systems where it's "5-stars or bust". Why even have stars if the only thing that matters is 5 or not-5. If you only care about a binary signal like that, then just make it a binary question. "Were you satisfied with this purchase? Yes / No." You'll probably get a much higher response rate, and it will be truer to the actual intent. A bunch of people that would hand out 4 or even 3 stars may still answer yes to that question.
>Decades of culture war have degraded civic discourse,

The culture wars or the neoliberalism stuff is over. It's surprising how many still believe this is happening. Culture wars ended 2009-2014 or so.

>Bad faith communication has become normalized.

Before social media we had newspapers and when tv news came along they were extremely regulated. Bad faith was the standard. The newspapers publish lie after lie and they got away with it for decades if not centuries.

>When open communication cannot be used to resolve conflict and coordinate behavior, societies are driven towards chaos, war, oppression, and authoritarianism.

Everyone knows this, it is diplomacy/talking that ends wars. The entities like Twitter who are censoring communication under false pretense knows they are breaking this rule. They also understand their objective and how this is their intention.

>There should be no illusion: today’s culture war cannot be won by any side.

The author needs the realization is that the culture war is over. They need to analyze and discover who was the victor.

Let me show the battles:

Climate Change: would you say we are doing much of anything for climate change? Even fake efforts like carbon taxes that dont do anything?

Gamergate: would you say mandolorian boob armor was a problem?

BLM: Fundamentally police brutality and racism is a problem but did BLM achieve anything? Are there any defunding police? Did the democrats pass anything?

Comicsgate: Did red skull jordan peterson really work out?

LGBT: Dave Chapelle put an end to that one single handed. LGBT can rejoice.

UBI/MMT: Just tried it in limited fashion. Nobody seriously bringing this up anymore.

White fragility: Yep, white people are all racists. We totally need to teach that to our children.

There's 1 side who won basically all of those in the end. When you lose battle after battle during the culture war. You eventually lose.

What happened is in their failure they became a religion. There are now heresies and the heretics must burn. You must pay penance for your sinning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_church_burnings

None of those church fires ever got investigated by police.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/horrible-attack-catholi...

I have never seen the government arrest so many religious leaders in my life. Our law in canada explicitly makes it illegal for police to arrest clergyman.

"arrest of officiating clergyman" is a crime that police are subject to, yet you can watch video on youtube of police breaking this law.

None of this is surprising. It's a new religion, new religions normally look to destroy their competitor religion.
I know the Ukrainian language and I know the context, I've heard the stories (about marauders). "soldiers stole their toilet seats to take home because they could not imagine the magic of flush toilets." — this is just an issue of mistranslation/signal noise:

1) Flush toilet systems are uncommon in poor parts of rural Russia, where a good chunk of their contract soldiers are from. Having proper plumbing for your private house (not an apartment, where the infrastructure is done by the state) is very expensive. That is why soldiers were genuinely surprised to see them in Ukrainian villages. Also, note that Russian propaganda always portrays Ukraine as extremely poor.
2) Expensive ceramic toilet is as good target for marauding as any.
No. Neither did I take any antibiotics at the time as we were on vacation so it was a sudden onset.
Does it show it as loan forgiven? If so nope!

But yeah people blaming the stimulus checks which literally directly went back into the economy are just...unaware of how much money was printed and distributed to large companies and shady people during the pandemic.
I think many places with a setup like you describe don't have in-house staff to manage their tech.

I briefly worked for an agency early in my career where most of the clients had WordPress or Magento sites with low to moderate traffic. They would usually only need a few hours a month each, so it wouldn't have made sense for them to hire full time programmers or sysadmins.
> Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes.

Not only is it recognized as a moral crime, but the US government passed a law to give restitution to interned people. Does that clean the slate? No. Does that make it ok? No, of course not.

The point is not that the US is perfect or even good. The point is that the US system allows open discussion, criticism, protest, legislating, etc. It has built-in mechanisms to improve itself which it has done and continues to do.

China has none of that.
> In China today you can't even discuss what's going on in Xinjiang

You absolutely can, they openly put it on their own government websites and everything even. These measures are written into public law. All of this is behind some misleading language of course, but chinese people aren't stupid. People, especially in Xinjiang, being aware of what's going on is in fact beneficial to the government, as it serves as a warning to anyone who might resist in the future.
Or it could be that if something goes on long enough it becomes life. There are a lot of things in our lives that if they just popped up suddenly in utopia, it would become a crisis. COVID will never go away completely. Responsible people did what they could to mitigate it as best as possible (Lockdowns to start, vaccines, masks, vaccines). Now we live in a world where it is one more thing that can kill you out of the many in our lives that are 100% fatal in the end.

Most people I think just want to return to "normal". We live in a new normal, but we can't live in crisis forever. I don't think that is necessarily apathy it is adapting.
What microcontroller are you thinking of?
Everyone has successfully turned this thread into a discussion about the West. Purposeful distraction.
>> I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on suspicion of mere affiliation.

> coughinternment of japanesecough

cough2022-70=1952cough

That was also like three generations ago: there are a lot of things that happened in the US at that time that the US itself now roundly condemns.

You may return with this comparison when the PRC makes a formal apology to the Uyghurs, pays reparations, and teaches about the Xinjiang camps in schools as a shameful event of Chinese history.
I get that point for sure. It's and/and. And electric vehicles (which won't be a solution to climate change) will at least reduce noise and pollution. They're just more civilized, and I think invite more civilized driving overall.

>"pie in the sky"

I think that's where we disagree. I don't think it is at all. Much of the US city infrastructure is build before the 30s. These neighborhoods could accommodate biking, walking, (and yes, together with cars)... much more easily. They don't, it's because every single road is completely dedicated to multi-lane car traffic. It's basically unsafe for others.

Slowing traffic down (top speeds mainly), would really only take bollards and paint. That is just a mental change; basically accept we need to share the road safely. It's unreal to me that such a small, almost insignificant shift, triggers such intense resistance.
Getting a high rise apartment (or office) should fix that. Or moving to a place that has a higher elevation.

(I don't think an absolute increase in atmospheric pressures has caused anyone a headache ever. Relative changes over a short enough time might do so, though.)
Biden admin gives a green light to a fuel that could be dirtier than regular gas
I think objective sexual education is not only under attack by religious reservations anymore, there are also ideological elements.

Having two dads is not normal. It is ok and it is nobodies business to judge it. But there is a difference and it obviously does not align with biological realities.

So some people (not just the kids, they tend to not judge on these topics) need to accept realities that are not the usual case. Not being the the normal case is nothing intrinsically objectionable. But it is irrefutable that procreation between two men is not possible and it is not objectionable to teach that. On the contrary you would just obscure education like religious elements tried before.
Small design studios. They still exist and they often need developers to develop “regular” websites using very down to earth stacks.

There’s a ton of business that simply need basic websites and those still need to be developed by someone.
> Nobody is building coal plants

Poland is retrofiting coal plants [1] to send anti-nuke Germany power. And every anti-nuke nation is spinning up new gas turbines.

Voters’ sensitivity to power cuts and price spikes is more vicious than their preference for green energy. This sets the rules of the game plainly: anti-nuke states, invariably, burn more fossil fuels.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-sh...
Let me just compliment your writing. It is truly a pleasure to read your blog. Thank you.
It seems like you're describing fun vs business. Tech stopped being cool when it became your job, when you fully understood that Star Tek truly was science fiction and not a distant possibility.

You can still mod videogames, but I get not wanting to look at a computer after your 9-5 of looking at a computer all day.
I loved my Time. Always on screen, awesome 8 bit color watch face, wonderful battery life.. I was pretty disappointed when fitbit decided to void all the warranties however, mine failed before the one year mark but after fitbit purchased them and shut it all down.
Russia's incarceration rate seems to have fallen dramatically in the last decade, 356 per 100 000 in 2020.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1022927/russia-annual-in...
The hypocrisy can be ignored.

The problem is that these allegations and institutions are not trustworthy.

Institutions that are controlled by the west and are applied only against the enemies of the west. Immigrants who speak out against their motherland under the promise of a better life in the west. Groups that once were terrorists, and killed by our military en masse, are now freedom fighters with a just cause.

Just ten years ago, the US was bombing Uyghurs in Afghanistan based on Chinese intelligence.

Now this issue is used to ban Chinese clothing and solar cells.
sounds like some kind of crypto-free utopia
Hey, I could have cited the untold millions who perished under Mao in that same range, but I didn't, because it's not relevant to the point: no one who made the decisions today at Guantanamo was also responsible for Japanese internment, and I'm happy to exonerate the CCP leadership today of Mao's misdeeds by benefit of the doubt. The length of time matters.
As an electronic music fan I never thought I'd discover a new artist on HN. Those first two tracks are massive. Thanks for sharing.
This is a brilliant and ambitious project. However last time I tried it a few months ago, it seemed to drop a lot of traffic once the throughput became anything non-trivial (100+ requests per second across 50ish microservices).

Maybe it's a question of UX, more likely it's a question of user error (and therefore partly UX). In any case, I can't wait for it to get better!
Not the OP making the claim, but I also looked for recent data and couldn't find any (especially for M1 macs because I just switched to one).

So I just compared them myself for my typical work and media playback (Youtube & Twitch), just anecdotal and totally unscientific though, ranked by MacOs's Energy Impact with the best being 100%.

All with the same extensions (if available, for Safari I used adguard instead of ublock origin).

Safari Technlogy Preview: 100%

Brave Beta: 110%

Orion: 300%

Firefox: 1200% :(

While Safari also used slightly less memory, Brave is the best compromise for me for now. (e2ee sync, chrome extensions and with their crypto shenanigans disabled.)

But again, not scientific at all and of course might differ for people depending on the extensions they use and their browsing behavior.
Absolutely. A lot changed with the advent of mobile devices, almost none of it for the better. Don't care if it's not in vogue to say it, lowering the barrier of entry to the Internet was a mistake. It was better when it was gatekept and companies weren't seeking to extract every possible dollar out of it.
Hedgefunds/podshops might fit what you're looking for. Depending on the size of the place, it might be a fairly lean set up (colo,minimal cloud). Usually they don't need to scale to "web-scale"
You’re not reading what 0xy wrote, so you’re just arguing against yourself. An appeal to authority isn’t convincing when the authorities themselves have been utterly clueless and entirely politicized.

0xy say many measures were essentially nonsensical and non-scientific, and then gave a perfect example of restaurant masking which is perhaps the pinnacle of COVID absurdity.

Wearing masks outdoors is another great example of something where the science was unequivocal, and yet the politicians persisted.

Non-N95 masks being worn improperly (which is essentially all of non-professional masking) was even declared by the CDC as ineffective so I think it’s safe to say the mitigations were not only deeply unpopular but also unscientific.
Freedom of the press doesn't prevent the majority of Americans getting served whole distorted picture of what happened in Iraq and the Middle East in general or just flat out misinformation, or simply no reporting at all.

Because there are very few actual journalist on the ground (and even less with any understanding of the local politics), most of the media just gets their information from gov news releases.

Eventually it wide spread abuse in one prison in Iraq came to be known and was downplayed and called isolated. People old enough will remember the prisoner on a dog leash for example. But there were many other prisons as well. And many had even worse control for abuse so we can assume what happens.

And tons of other things the US does in Middle East that are secret or so widely distorted that its hilarious to even call it news. Reliable allies turn into terrorist murderers within one strategic meeting. And terrorist turn into freedom fighters at the drop of a hat.
You'll find some on eBay and even Aliexpress.