skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep, pretty much what I pictured. Mice are small. You just grab it to restrain it and stick the tube where it needs to go. This doesn't require mistreating the animal (any more than any animal testing is considered mistreatment, but that's another discussion), just being firm and deliberate.
Engineers have to understand the business, talk with other stakeholders, design systems, write code, write tests, support the production environment, etc, etc, etc.

Why would decisionmakers want to add outsource-able ops overhead to that very full plate?
I actually agree with the Mastodon/Matrix/federated approach, I'd just be worried about hosting/network neutrality. There is also a bit of a monopoly over popular protocols, esp. when it comes to Microsoft control over windows/edge and google search/chrome.
> especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas.

Exposure to diversity of ideas is not a problem on social media. What drowns out most ideas is actually threat of cyberbullying and internet mobs, being drowned out by bots, and algorithmic sorting that prioritizes controversial content over moderate voices. Only the last one is related to moderation/editorial choices by the company and it’s rarely framed as a free speech issue.
I have about ten sites on Netlify. They're fine now but a few minutes ago they were going up and down.

Actually, my sites on Netlify have 3-5 minute outages probably 10 times a year. It's actually kind of disappointing. While not a huge deal, it's the provider I use with the most downtime. About once a month I get a flurry of alerts from my uptime monitoring tool.
Weekly reboot cron kicked in? #joking
Yeah but Twitter just isn't that relevant. And social media is a many-dimensional gradient of often questionable value.

Leaving FB properties, for example, is actually pretty nice when you've hit a certain spot in your life. Some forums give me much more than FB ever did. HN is more useful. There isn't some necessary set of social media sites everyone has to have.
Internet forum moderation is nothing like government censorship.

If you don’t like a forum’s moderation policies, you can go to another forum.

If you run afoul of your government’s censorship, they can jail you or even end your life.
John Stuart Mill was wrong. It is absolutely possible to convince someone who holds a correct opinion that their opinion is wrong.

This is a major blind spot of otherwise intelligent, thinking people: they believe that once a person is presented with the truth, it magically reveals itself to them as the superior piece of knowledge and the scales suddenly fall from their eyes. It's utter nonsense, and people don't work this way.

*Edit: To my replies, I'm addressing an epistemological assumption with this particular comment, not making a broader judgement one way or the other about Twitter's handling of speech. I don't care about Hunter Biden or whatever pet issue you have with the media.
>Trump used Twitter to organize the overthrow of the US government and almost succeeded at it.

Isn't that the whole point of free speech, to nonviolently speak out against and overthrow governments that you disagree with? Wasnt that the logic behind including it in the constitution in the first place?
Right, and not long before that didn’t have electricity before too. In 2022 in the US, living without electricity is very abnormal. Living without Twitter is… not.

If your issue is online discourse in general, then we’re in a good place: it’s very easy to set up your own website and distribute whatever content you want without needing permission from corporations.
Except you can argue that we don't have only one twitter. We have many, and potentially thousands. I can fire up my own version of twitter in a couple of minutes. I (or my group, clan, subculture, whatever) can fire up my/our own facebook in minutes. OTOH I only have one electric power supplier to my home.
Limits on free speech by government is dangerous. Private companies enforcing rules you have agreed to when you became a member, is something completely different.
Somewhat related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27171970
The gateway must have went bad and then got good again
Most people like being ruled. That's why it's one person performing and thousands sitting and watching, not the other way around. Once early adopters are gone from something, it's usually all spectators what's left, and that's when things turn for the worse. The only thing that can bring back web 1.0 is good dictatorship of sorts, where one person with strong beliefs and good moral character takes control over something big. E.g. somebody wealthy purchasing large social media platform. But we can only hope for that to happen, it's very unlikely there's a person crazy enough to do such a thing today.
This author has no idea what a government overthrow looks like.

Hint, it's not a bunch of unarmed Larpers and undercover FBI agents storming a lightly guarded capitol building.
The only way I can stomach Twitter is using a browser extension that removes retweets and likes from others, and recommended stuff from Twitter. Also removed the Trending/News area, and the Explore tab. Added a chronological timeline back too, but really don't use it much, and feel a lot better for it.

I don't think it's even necessarily about who you follow, there's a lot of pushing celebrities who are into this rubbish.
Yes. And in fact the Omicron variant seems to have evolved in mice.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34954396/
My theory: The admins were trimming a whole bunch of submissions about Musk's takeover that all appeared at once, to try to force everything into one mega-thread submission. Everyone saw the news/tweet and rushed to HN to be the one who picks up all those precious HN karma points!

In any event, don't worry about it! There are other sites on the internet.
Ask HN: Can the same individual accomplish more with programming than proofs?
Programming is a kind of fuzzy proof where details are worked out using debugging. The resulting program may not be perfect but it can be good enough.

Explicit proofs (e.g., in math and CS) are more precise but longer, harder to check, and harder to debug. And a missed detail or small mistake can render the entire proof wrong and unfixable.

So it seems that the same individual could accomplish more in life with programming than proofs.
No, it doesn't, but the general idea is that scripts are supposed to supplement the base page, not needlessly replace effectively static pieces of it.
If you "do something" about algorithmic feeds then that law is going to be written by politicians or their advisers.

If you, engaged user of a tech site, a developers forum, have no idea what that should look like, then why would the "something" from politicians work out better?
Bringing Steam to Chrome OS
The obvious question is, “What problem is he seeking to solve?”
Pour out the coffee onto the floor.

Sell the spoon.
People keep moving the goalposts and it never ends up making sense. The fact of the matter is that HN has moderation which people enjoy. You can't come in here talking about whatever you want, however you want. The same goes for Twitter. Trying to split them apart by size, audience or whatever is meaningless.
The solution to that is to break up big companies, not compel them to platform hate speech.
It's a popular, simple solo word guessing game that started as a hobby project and met with great success.

Might not mean that you should care.

But it does make one wonder a bit about the Internet Archive - and it's future ability to archive static (if interactive) web sites.
It's not open source, but the good news is it's relatively simple. My bulbs are Hue bulbs which use their bridge/hub, which just plugs into ethernet and provides a REST API.

The basic loop, run once per minute is:

- Make one API call which returns the id/on/off/brightness of every bulb

- For each bulb that is on, set its color temperature (this has to be one API call per bulb because there is no way to bulk update a list of bulbs. Bulbs can be put into at most one "room" and you can bulk set a whole room but not a subset of bulbs in that room)

As far as scheduling color temperature goes - I just define a few keyframes based on minutes since midnight local time, and then linearly interpolate to get the color temp. Over 24 hours the steps are so small that the change is basically imperceptible.
> it is likely consume a ridiculous amount of talent

He has indicated that he'll fire most of the employees[1]. In practice, I think he'll move the talent pool whose job is to optimize ad delivery at Twitter to Tesla/SpaceX/OpenAI etc... and make Twitter paid for by the users, not by the advertisers [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512974273606045702?ref_...

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512964005060657156?s=21...
I serve as a hiring manager at a startup in nyc - we aren’t actively searching for recent grads, but I could chat and offer you a sanity check about your qualifications!

For what it’s worth, I got my first internship through a family friend :)
> Is this a problem of my own making (...)? Or is this a feeling that others get?

I can understand why you "had" to rely on Google Ads. But in my opinion choosing Google Workspace/Drive falls unfortunately under "problem of your own making". None of the problems you describe is new nor unknown, and there are plenty of products that are just as good.

> I hope Google gets some real competition soon because it feels like they are falling off.

I think that that's the issue: maybe not in ads, but there is competition for everything else.
Happens almost every day for me, but I basically live on this site. It will usually only last 10-15 seconds, some as long as 2 minutes.
That's a very wild claim. How did you make that jump and why Starlink and not every other ISP?
I was thinking "building software is more like writing a book" and a few paragraphs later they slide into the publishing analogy.

I spent an entire year, 16 hours a day, grinding on a software project all by myself...and I shipped at the end. Having completed it, or shipped rather, I realized/felt that I now knew what it was like to be an author...working alone building something through discovery and pure creativity.

I have been chasing that feeling again, for years. It doesn't come from building someone else's desired solution as a team member on a project. That is a totally different experience for the developer than building from the heart.

At work, building software is sort of like building a house. In my home office it's like writing a book.
Quote: “The best laid Plans of Mice and Men often go Awry.” ― Robert Burns
Musk offers to buy out Twitter and make it a “platform for free speech”
Many of the things I cited are powers that businesses have and the US government does not have. I don't know why this is hard to understand.

Businesses are free to shoot you as well, private security guards can carry guns in most parts of the US. Businesses can also send you to prison via false police reports, which is a thing that has happened periodically.
buying twitter will not make people like you.
Do you remember why Trump was banned on twitter? He was using his social media presence as part of a plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and he was banned from both Twitter and Facebook after the U.S. Capitol building was essentially sacked due to these efforts. That sounds pretty dangerous to me.

He, and others like him, never lost their right to free speech. Nothing stops them from creating their own website (which he has), or saying anything they want on the numerous platforms that do support them. They just lost access to social media platforms which by gamified design make spreading information (and misinformation) to the masses incredibly easy, so easy that a group of people were actually convinced that they had a mandate to attack the capitol to stop a cabal of pedophiles from stealing the 2020 election, a mandate from a president who at any time was going to unleash a flurry of indictments that would expose and jail the leaders of the Democratic Party.

I don't know what the right answer is, but January 6th was an event that proved that something was truly out of control. The 1st amendment is not going anywhere, but I do support efforts to make it at least a little harder, or rather not so ridiculously easy, to spread lies that can ravage a country's democratic processes. I know that sounds anti-free speech, but again, the U.S. Capitol was sacked by a group of people inspired by lies on social media, and I think we need to acknowledge we live in a new world because of that.
Dumb question: what makes this a “hostile takeover”?

Elon’s bid was non-binding, and unless I’m unaware - he isn’t trying to actively change the board or management.

So what makes this “hostile”?
Probably because most of the users were hired to do accounting, legal work, advertising, etc., not to provide IT support.
Lol I came to say the weather in SF sucks.
Twitter had ample time before 2018 to experiment with making money, though. I'm not saying that Twitter should have known how to do that in 2006, but they probably should have by the time they IPO'ed 8 years later, in 2013.

And Glancing over their S-1, they're making money now with the same means that they were planning to in 2013.
Maybe we'll see less links to unreadable twitter threads posted here. One can only hope!
Great job Dominic and team! :)

Really neat that it has no dependencies and works with anything.
Sure. So do we make all of those “public squares”? How many “public squares” can we have before it becomes clear that they’re not?
By definition a hostile takeover is one that is done without the blessing/recommendation of the current board of directors.

Most private takeovers are negotiated by the board/management (ostensibly on behalf of the shareholders). Going over their head and straight to shareholders is when it's called a hostile takeover.

As far as Elon not planning to replace the board/management. I would say that it is a foregone conclusion that he will clean house if his takeover succeeds. He has been actively critical of their management.
> Emacs itself seems to have seen a sort of resurgent popularity and that's make me think: did we need so much time to learn?

Resurgence? Google tells me otherwise... https://imgur.com/a/urcePZq
good theory, would be interested why that'd cause a 502 though
Give abiword a try! It tried to clone office 97 as much as possible regarding user interface. Would get you off the windows 95 requirement and you could use Debian 32 bit.

Debian would also work nicely on that g3. Bring both of them up to date!

Rclone supports drop box. It’s more of a 15 minute rtfm task than an Easter weekend. If you are celebrating have a nice Easter.
If somebody was trying to make Microsoft Office look good they would invent Google Docs.

I hate to admit it but I am a boss with Powerpoint, I can get almost any kind of business illustration out of my head and into Powerpoint with the greatest of ease.

Giving me Google Docs to attempt the same is like giving Superman Kryptonite.

I think some people don't know how bad Google Docs is compared to Microsoft Word because they've got this idea that using Word is like putting your hand in a toilet so they never try it. If they did they would be singing ‘Google Docs is a Joke’ (I opened Google Docs a long time ago, don’t you know how late it reacts…)
Musk does not hold any position in the government. My understanding is that the fight for free speech is about the government censoring individuals. The first amendment of the US already protects people from that. Any private platform can do whatever they want though.
I agree with the sentiment, but only because the government restrictions on speech are tested in courtrooms that have at least some degree of impartiality and transparency.

The problem with "Free Speech with consequences" arises when the consequences are increasingly policed by private corporations. Yes, host your own web server etc etc etc, but in reality, Twitter and Facebook really are the new town square.
He tried to silence a teenager that was writing about him on twitter.
Now add third axis to it (height of the cut), and make it plot 2.5-dimensional shapes on your lawn to make life interesting for your cat and make neighbors jealous.
Key word "spamming." It wasn't communication but another dry and information-free blob of text. Communication requires something to say.
That is a laudable position of intellectual consistency! I agree that it is what the "absolutism" part means.
it's almost as dangerous as non-experts spouting bad, counterfactual objective claims and pretending they are experts
"Humans are mammals, so they are mostly either male or female" misinformation or opinion?

"Israel is an apartheid state, even one of its former ministers said this" misinformation or opinion?

"Government-funded groups like Hasbara Fellowships and CAMERA make up an operation to spread propaganda and influence our elections" misinformation or opinion?

And who should decide one or the other? If you have the names of any experts we should appoint at Twitter, Facebook etc, it would be great to know.
The Mysterious Isochronous Curve
A "free speech" platform would give users more power to control their communications with others and transparency of how the "system" worked.

Very simple things that we had with usenet like killfiles and threaded conversations are foreign things to the younger generations. Things like shadowbans and a central authority that just decides to disable your account would be non-existent. Heck, we even had a form of "blue checkmark" with finger daemons.

I have no idea what musk is thinking.
There are certain topics on twitter that if I say anything about them, even in passing, I'll get dozens of automated @ replies trying to spam something to me. Blocking accounts who use @ to spam would be an example of worthwhile moderation.

On the other hand, blocking someone for making jokes about a celebrity's weight (which Twitter has done!), is something that, in my opinion, is an example of an overreach.
I think you'll find that online media is explicitly protected from being sued for defamatory or infringing content under the DMCA, as long as they take the material down.

No such protection exists for print media.
It’s dark in that the entity who purchased and installed it is not yet using it. Telcos install big multi fiber bundles, then actually use only a few strands. The rest are dark, waiting for growth or expansion or to be used as backups. You can lease those and light them up yourself until the telco needs them back.
This is peak "whataboutism" and false-equivalences.

All of the problems you've mentioned have some element of truth to them, but are also grossly exaggerated either by the activists working to address them (you have to make the problem sound really bad and really urgent to get attention) or by people just looking to attack the US or a specific politician, party, etc.
Yep! Made a note app for tracking HN users. Fun making it build React in Greasemonkey before the toolchains matured to make it kinda trivial. It ran off of a real database because I use a few different computers, so localstorage wasn't the right thing.

Stock research platform using relatively cheap ($X00/yr)fundamental data & free pricing APIs.

Had a fun "fight" with a major pricing website for a game. When your (rate-limited! trying to be nice!) crawler needs to turn to OCR to defeat css spriting and they're leaving comments in the HTML though... a bit too combative. Fun project making it work though.

Any game with an economy I end up making stuff for. Personally, I wish games weren't so hostile to automation or user time these days!

I also once SaaS'd a weird file format translator thing on heroku for myself; sometimes old formats or algs do really just disappear!

I've made some small modules for my MagicMirror but haven't had inspiration on further stuff for that just yet.
Usually the megathreads cause it.
Once in front of my colleagues put a piece of paper with some writing closed,

I asked one of them to pick a number between 1-4 (they were drawn in a another piece of paper) he picked 3, then I asked to another write the first veggie name that comes to their mind, he picked Carrot.

I open the piece of paper that I put at the beginning, the writing was 3 and Carrot.

They were amazed, one of them got scared of the situation,

The thing is that I wrote the numbers 1 and 2 smaller than the number 3 and the number 4 was in very bad handwrite, and the most common Veggie that people think first it's carrot
You're not focusing on foundational principles - you're looking at current status quo surface level/shallow consequences of decisions.

E.g. Low moderation making difficulty attracting revenue is because that's based on an ad revenue based model.

Tesla and SpaceX aren't high risk positions - both have been proven for years now.

You're concerned about his ability to multi-task because he's successfully turned Tesla into the most valuable company in the world, and at the same time lead SpaceX to probably the most valuable private company in the world?

I'd saw your analysis is at least a few degrees off.

Did you consider what will happen to your current stock value if the BOD doesn't sell to Elon, and if Elon then sells off his shares and starts a competitor and moves himself and others follow? Do you think Twitter is anywhere near an upward trajectory that will provide you a better return than the relative stagnant value the stock has had for awhile now?
Because power without responsibility is a recipe for abuse.
There are things that are off limits, and they are widely known. You can't dress up or play as a Nazi and pretend you didn't know there'd be consequences. All Nazi-related stuff bar for historical reasons like research, or art, is off limits. I prefer my country free of Nazis, and if that means they get sent to jail for "jokes", fine by me and pretty much the majority of the population.
I'm always baffled about this as well. I keep the people I follow heavily curated, and I don't follow more than 90 - 120 people at a time. Unfollowing and Refollowing is easy, why should I amass a list of thousands of follows like some people do?

If I notice a negative pattern or drop in quality I simply unfollow, that's it. It's the big advantage over Facebook, the relationships are not bi-directional for me as an average user.

In short: I get a quality experience and lots of useful information from Twitter because I only follow people that tweet quality content and useful tweets.

However I do have to mention that the algorithmic timeline IS really bad, so I do feel like Twitter is constantly fighting me and trying to turn my feed into polarizing crap.
> The NYT can control what they print, and they are also responsible for what they print.

Nonsense

You should look at the thingy called "Opinion", and what kind of disclaimer NYT put around it
I think he's dumb wasting so much money on this, but why on earth wouldn't shareholders want to sell out to him? If I held Twitter shares I'd be quite keen to get rid of them.
SpaceX seems like a success. Starlink probably will be, too.

Tesla survived because of government subsidies and a neverending deluge of hype from Musk. Boring Company is utter nonsense and a huge failure.

That track record seems... pretty random. Maybe Musk was an important factor, maybe his engineering and marketing teams were, maybe luck was the most important thing.
The original announcement from Quartz: https://qz.com/2154695/quartz-is-taking-down-the-paywall-on-...
HN every week: Old thing good, new thing bad.

Do you believe we should also go back to not having search engines? BBS as primary information sharing? Email & IRC as pretty much the only way to communicate?

Web 1.0 was riddled with scalability problems, you are free to take what you consider the best parts of it and simplify your Web 2.0 site.