skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely

May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.

I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.

The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.

Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.

In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
I feel like there's a city vs suburbs correlation here too.

If you live in a city, (nevermind the fact that you're probably renting and paying way to much in rent consider fixing anything yourself) you probably don't have the space and the tools to enjoy taking apart and fixing things.

In the suburbs, you probably have a garage and a side yard where you have the space to entertain these kinds of hobbies.

Just recollecting: the last thing I fixed was a bolt that broke off inside a nut that was welded to a pipe. Luckily I have a workshop table, a vice, and a drill with various attachments. All of this takes space.
I replaced the Pine Phone for similar functions with an IoT router from GL.iNet (unfortunately also using a Quectel). OpenWRT as the OS. TMobile subsidiary as carrier.

It has been marginally more stable though. It has 9 days of uptime so far.

They claim to be getting T-Mob compliance certified. Although I'd check that if it's relevant.
> ather for something focused like scientific research, you can go years and years without reaching 10k messages

I don’t know what kind of scientists you’ve worked with, but I haven’t met any so short-winded
Humans individually and as as society don't go a lot farther than cavemans that learned to talk and have some technology available for them to use. You'll find that most of the humans in human society don't undertand at all how the heck everthing just works for them to be kept alive in a continous fashion. Neither they understand the critical importance of some practical technologies, even the simplest cultural technologies, like talking, having a written language, etc.

But that doesn't go without consequences, the bulk of humans in a society just fall and follow some "meme" - or several - while they're alive. You name it, family first, friends & freedom (this a popular one nowadays), earn money & respect, save your land - conquer the weak (a famous one in the 40's), make love, not war (70s), etc.

Some memes were quite useful actually, the family first thing have driven most of societies out of the woods regarding human resources for work (it carried its own problems - salary -, because the workforce wasn't anymore slaves, but family), other memes you'll find don't end too much well , like probably the "friends & freedom" which while has some perks for young adults, it is already heavily restricting societies from having a proper young productive population and at the same time enlarging it with non-productive people. Time will tell, after all some "revolutionary" memes in 70s,80s, didn't went to far after the initial years of big fuss.

But, technologies, important ones, radical change technologies. Anyone with power in the society wants "to control it", hence you have - right now - very powerful, almost unbeatable adversaries to fight with, if you want to make a really new, prone to change it all, technology.

Some of them are out the shadow, because of the fight between superpowers,their respective powers that be, have to make public the basic knownledge available (some stuff like fussion, artificial intelligence), because you need to win the game of numbers: as much brains capable attending the development to win the race.. and then control the technology (just the old game, a bit more public).

Then you think what other technologies are out there just completely out of public sight, or even fully hidden as top secret stuff, just waiting to be strictly necessary in their societies.

You know, the ARN stuff we where stuffing into us the last couple of years came just "out-of-nowhere" almost as a finished product (this is what it feels a medical technology almost completely developed: you use it in billions and just have some few millions affected with non-mortal disabilities). Now they're trying - and somehow they're succedding - in getting the genius back in the bottle, nothing has happened, you can go back to your previous technology iteration, don't ask about the other stuff ..or else
Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? Part I
Would you mind pinging me? Might have something interesting. username @ very common google email service.
It’s more like how NYC would do if Mexico bombed the Dominican Republic.
> I recall a tangent on programmers being "afraid of pointers"

I've seen that too... It's pretty funny because in so many modern languages every reference is just a pointer we can't do arithmetic with.
Google Workspace Chat! jk
I'm going to make a rather blunt argument that the difference was the arrival of New World foods, allowing for much larger populations than was possible in China at the time. We have had too many civilizations supposedly "came close" to industrialization but never did. Something more is holding them back. And since so much of civilization was the result of having a large enough population to develop the next stage of advancement, this could easily just be another case of that. Once huge populations became possibly in the 16th century onwards, the industrial revolution suddenly became possible in a way it never could before.
Depends what part of London you’re in. For me Gatwick is the faster, cheaper, easier airport. It’s also the airport with the fastest security and passport control I’ve ever been through.

I also challenge the idea that Heathrow is ever cheaper to get to than Gatwick. The Thames Link service to Gatwick is far cheaper than the Heathrow express, much faster and more pleasant than the Piccadilly line, only the Lizzie line makes Heathrow as cheap and easy to get to by train as Gatwick.
Because that is the way nature divides time. Anything else is arbitrary. The first thing our ancestors would have noticed, before the invention of time-keeping devices, would have been the phases of the Moon and how they relate to Sun/Earth cycle, ie. the seasons. Lunations so soli-lunar events, not merely lunar.
Exactly, battery life alone is meaningless.

With T550 you get a computer with decent keyboard.
With M1 Max you get a Mac.
Even the best quality Mac keyboard is completely unusable for me and the OS feels like it is fighting you at every corner, I haven't been that frustrated since Windows Vista, so even if the CPU was 1000x faster, the user experience for me is horrible.
My old Samsung T700t with 2nd gen i5 and a dock keyboard feels like usability king compared to every Mac I ever used and it also feels much faster once I swapped Windows for Linux.
I think it's an interesting thesis, and I like the point about using it to encode domains represented through it (I agree if you want to build non-overcomplicated systems, the first major factor is to minimize impedance mismatch with the domain it represents in the base structures you build on, i.e. in the 'language' you develop within your codebase to eventually express domain logic through.)

So while I have some issues with this as a generalization (because I think the reality is more diverse):

> Because the way software tools work and the way software is written is that it is all completely optimized for short-term business goals and results.

—let's assume it now for the sake of argument. What's still weak in the thesis imo is the connection from your proposed better way of approaching software development to longer-term business goals. For instance, I think one possibility is that the typical state of affairs, over a longer time-span, is that what the software itself should even be, what it needs to accomplish, which systems it interacts with etc., is volatile enough that in most cases (there are very important exceptions of course), businesses would do better long term by optimizing for flexibility in changing even the spec for the software, vs devoting more resources to ensuring any individual representation of a software concept is particularly durable.

What I'd want to know next on the matter is what evidence exists for the likelihood of one stance over the other being correct. Are there examples of extraordinary long-term success from companies whose approach to development went in the direction of durability (I'll say as an approximation)? Is it a common occurrence for companies to succeed short-term by making sacrifices in quality, and then to fail longer-term specifically because of their over-complex / incoherent, buggy software (or is that more of an exceptional case)?
True, but there’s also something vital that does not show on the balance sheet (and can sink companies):

Excellent tools spread through the best kind of word of mouth. Excellent tools that are free spread even faster and further. There’s no way to know how many corporate plans were sold because a single team member relied on Slack outside of work, or how many pro user accounts exist because someone was visiting a Slack-fluent friend.

And because there’s no way to know; the cost-cutters look at the numbers and say “cut the free plan enough to stop the hemorrhage”. Worst part is the next quarter looks great. And maybe the one after that. But soon enough the income starts dropping and there’s no “clear reason why” and then it’s too late to recover it. It has to be built again by building trust from scratch.
> without the cryptocurrency or blockchain

If only we had a way to solve this problem using a solution other than the technology that already solves this problem.
Something I notice in the Kodak calendars image: rather than having extra days, the 1928 calendar simply has 364 days, but the 1989 calendar has an extra week in the last period. Did they ever explain the rule for adding an extra week?
Organizing Knowledge by Patrick Lambe is what I started with.
Micropayments keep failing over and over again. I think it's because the friction of microdecisions of whether or not to pay for that individual transaction is tedious. "Should I click on that link? What if it's not what I want Hmm, better not for now." Biggest recent push was Blendle, which pivoted: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pio...
Ask HN: How do you balance having kids and improving your skills?
I have a toddler right now and it is sucking up too much of my time. I struggle to compete with unmarried colleagues and learn new skills slower as my free time have to be spent on taking care of the toddler.

How does other HN parents cope with this?
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc don't want a micro payment standard. Everyone dreams of not being the "dumb pipe" and wants a fat cut through their proprietary solution.
If nothing could be done, then why are you stressed, you'll just have to go with it.
Campaign pushes Cloudflare to drop trans hate site
US Corporate Profits Soar with Margins at Widest Since 1950
Maybe not what you're after, but the Logitech MK850 wireless bundle has three buttons on the keyboard which allow you to swap between 3 computer pairings, which is pretty good. The mouse has the swap button on the bottom, which is kind of a bother if you're swapping a lot.
I quite like Jonathan Blow. I think the talk mentioned in this post is kind of poor though, I remember watching it a couple of years ago in its full context (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko).
IIRC it had a bit of a "kids these days" / "they don't make 'em like they used to" feel to it. It's not untrue, but it doesn't really explain anything.

IMO, a MUCH BETTER version of a similar point was outlined by Bert Hubert in this article:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/ - How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents (Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQccNdwm8Tw)

In short, this goes beyond software; it's in general about why the incentives around specialization and outsourcing/offshoring cause innovation and expertise to die out. Bert Hubert takes the example of toasters, but it's of course very generalizable:

> The problem is that this is not just a toaster problem. This is a continental problem. All over Europe, this is happening simultaneously, where we’re saying, look, we’re not that much into actually building things anymore.

> So we’re just getting everyone else to build stuff for us. [...] We’re just thinking about things and then telling some other people how to do their stuff.

> In the end, you cannot survive if all you create is intellectual property.
Out of curiosity: if Rust isn't boring for you currently, what would it take for Rust to become boring?
Great article. Thought provoking.

Maybe an industrial revolution could not have happened in the times of the Romans, but I think maybe, just maybe, it could have happened 1000 years before them.

The bronze age was followed by the iron age not because iron is a better metal (initially it was not), but because bronze requires trade routes (copper comes from some mines, tin from some other mines), and those disappeared after the Bronze Age collapse.

Now, imagine that the Bronze Age had lasted a few hundred years longer. Just one hundred years before the Bronze Age collapse there was the battle of Kadesh [1], where tens of thousands of soldiers squared off. There were 5000 to 6000 chariots altogether.

Which means the late Bronze Age empires needed huge quantities of weapons, therefore of bronze. Egypt does not have a lot of trees, and trees are quite scarce in other places in the Middle East. Just like Britain ran out of trees and needed to resort to coal, a few hundred years more of bronze age would have forced Egypt to look for a substitute for charcoal. It would not have been coal, because there are no easily accessible veins of coal in the Middle East.

It would have been petroleum. Petroleum was known during those times [2]:

More than 4000 years ago, according to Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, asphalt was used in the construction of the walls and towers of Babylon; there were oil pits near Ardericca (near Babylon), and a pitch spring on Zacynthus. Great quantities of it were found on the banks of the river Issus, one of the tributaries of the Euphrates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kadesh

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Early
a lot of finnish choose to speak swedish, not a good look.
Yep agree. Having an active team of working mathematicians and field medalists giving feedback to the LEAN development team is really helpful in pushing automation forward.

Having said that, for people like me, who doesn’t care about formalising mathematics but do care about proving code correct, proof automation has already come a long way and is on the edge of becoming a practical tool for highly critical software.
That's just silly. We just need a web standard that hooks into the existing banking system. Put that into every browser.

Just like in 99% of the other use cases presented for it, crypto is useless here. Absolutely no need for it.
I think the real problem is that people can only really support having one chat application open continuously at a time. Maybe two for some, if you account for the non-chat things like text & email. Notification / source burnout. I have to use slack professionally, I'm not going to add another tool.

That's why someone was suggesting mattermost (iirc on a friday), as something that bridges all the chat platforms and gives you a single tool
I think we'd have to define "efficient code." Like, not doing something big-O stupid? That's covered in computer science classes and as a science it is pretty human-understandable and timeless. Micro-optimizations? Perhaps between optimizing compilers and massive reorder buffers/massive caches/clever branch predictors, there's not as much need for that sort of thing.
Has anyone had bad experience taking this drug as a treatment for depression? I’m on my third SSRI and am quite desperate to find something to improve my “quality of mind”.
> There is the point: fossil fuels are the only alternative to nuclear.

According to whom? I don't know if any carbon free grid models that say nuclear is absolutely necessary. There are some models that show that it may be cheaper to have 10%-20% nuclear generation along with other renewable generation, but I'm not sure if they have updated their models for a word where we don't have any constructible nuclear designs in the US, or accounted for current nuclear costs.

As far as shortages: 1) the current semiconductor shortage is a chip fab shortage, the semiconductor process for solar only shares the input of silicon.

That's not to say that there aren't supply chains issues, but the solar PV market is orders of magnitude larger than nuclear production capacity, and growing exponentially. The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices, and the solar PV history is a history of overcoming shortages and using ever less materials to relentlessly reduce costs.

And as far as "materials" that's only part of the cost of any product, there's also labor, and also different materials have vastly different costs.

So instead of being concerned about "materials" we should be concerned with costs. And that's where nuclear has not shown any ability to compete, any ability to learn and reduce costs, or really any ability to behave like a proper and good technology. Nuclear gets more expensive the more advanced an economy we have, which is not a tech that we want to continue to use.
I don't know if we should necessarily use slow/buggy software as examples. IMO it's very conceivable that it's written by devs who know better, but they're not optimizing for those metrics. I've certainly been in situations where I've thought "well, I can reduce latency here by 100ms, but is that worth delaying the project by 2 days?"
It actually depends a bit on where in France. West cost has Atlantic storms east side has more continental and south east close to the Mediterranean has a completely different one as well.
It is true, and your rule of thumb backs it up.

The chevy bolt has a range of ~260 miles. Divide by 4mi per hour charging and get ~60 hours of charging.

I'll allow that my bit about the bike was slightly hyperbolic.
There's not many ways to know many things with 100% certainty, but you can have a decent probability of knowing the impact the free tier has.
The unreasonableness of that particular politically-motivated action does not alter the fact that there is an objective concern here.

The decision to allow the use of twin-engined airliners on trans-oceanic routes (ETOPS) was predicated on strict reliability rules which dictate rigorous maintenance practices (for example, it once was, if it is not still, mandated that the same maintenance crew could not work on both engines of a given airliner, to minimize the risk of a misunderstanding or mistake compromising both engines.) This is a case of paying attention to details at the granularity of individual airplanes, and in that spirit, an unusual frequency of problems with one particular airplane warrants investigation.

The history of aviation is littered with the crashes of airplanes brought down by problems that seemed to have gone away - see the De Haviland Comet, for example.
Its based on a comment he made on his appearance on the Joe Rogan experience(JRE #1863) a few days ago.
Only extracts are on youtube as he moved to spotify.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3PIGLDscQ
https://open.spotify.com/episode/51gxrAActH18RGhKNza598

Also, i have to say its quite amazing to see Mark Zuckerberg on the JRE. Wouldnt have thought that would ever happen.
A 3-lisp program is conceptually executed by an interpreter written in 3-lisp that is itself executed by an interpreter written in 3-lisp and so on ad infinitum. This forms an infinite tower of meta-circular interpreters, which can be implemented efficiently.
Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).
Probably one of the easiest but also higher paying jobs of the federal government. They seriously work maybe one day a week.
I understand why html is the way it is. I can recall looking at it very early on in its development.

But I think we need more structure to how we represent knowledge get to something like a semantic web.

If the knowledge was easier to parse, it would be easier to break out of the megasites.
Doesn’t it depend where in London? For example I’d rather ride the Gatwick Express from Victoria for 30 minutes than sit on the tube from Kings Cross to Heathrow for an hour. And outside of London, from Cambridge for example, there is non-stop train service available to Gatwick but not to Heathrow.

It’s too bad Norwegian shuttered their long haul service between Gatwick and NYC/BOS. It was affordable, comfortable and convenient, so of course it went bankrupt. Now the best options are out of Heathrow (my favorite is now British Air, as long as AA isn’t operating the flight…).
This is the great fear of many come to pass - censorship by algorithm. Facebook didn't outright ban sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop stories like Twitter did, they instead tweaked their algorithm to prevent the story from spreading. We found out about it this time because Zuckerberg owned up to it, but what about next time? For all we know, Facebook, Google and Twitter are doing this right now on a range of other subjects.

It's scary to think that just 2 to 3 corporations have the power to construct a false reality around us, in a way that's virtually impossible for us to detect.
There came the trend of leaving your computer on instead of powering it off just because starting up was so slow.

So much has improved that Blow’s arguments about how much better computers used to be has an air of Old Man Yelling at Clouds to me.

Booting into Workbench off a floppy is fun and all but my current machine boots up so fast now it’s ridiculous.
You've sidestepped my question though :) Why do you think NASA made the decision to use it? Is it not possible there were legitimate reasons?

The implications you're suggesting about power, memory, and speed, or even predictability in semantics, depend on the particular language spec they implemented (it was not standard ecmascript), how they implemented, and how that implementation was used within the larger system.

It seems to me like just knowing it was javascript (for some definition of javascript) is not enough.
My toddlers were like productivity superchargers in some ways. But I guess it's worth defining:

- Level, type, and amount of competitive time needed per your chosen time unit

- Scheduled boundaries between work and child care

- Appropriate level of child care

I do remember at first I was a pretty fussy parent. But after a while things got easier as I calibrated the fuss a bit more :-)

Good luck to you.
A cheap VPS could run something like Zulip or Mattermost or phpBB or other ways to communicate. Then that open source community would be in control of their own data.
The AArch64 processor (a.k.a. arm64), part 23: Common patterns