skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love these kind of stories. I'm wondering - would an interview series with 40+ year programmers be interesting? Topics like:

* how the field has changed
* war stories from past experiences
* advice to the newer generation
Hitting 40 years next year, since the day I found that TRS-80 at the nature center.

Companies have paid me to do it, for the last 25. So I do it all week, then do my personal projects on the weekends.

But I never wanted it as a "career". I never, ever, "aspired" to be a programmer. I just always was one. It's all just playing with computers, and coincidentally businesses need it, so I don't have to get a different day job.
Yes, that is the problem that I was describing.

Facilitating/organizing mass harassment of mentally ill people should be against the law.
Lots of evidence. It’s easy to search for profitability of housing and it’s not high there. There’s a massive difference between near market or inflation-level returns and whatever’s been happening in the US.
Is it like libsoftiktok?
I am a big fan of Peter Norvig. He is one of the few whose technical skills did not stagnate in a management role. If you see his Github's Pytudes, he regularly solves leetcoding questions that are usually given to engineers young enough to be his grandchildren.
What about to people like me, who have only ever heard of kiwi farms in passing, who don't really know anything substantial about any of this stuff and want to know more? Is it obvious to us? I'd like to see what everyone's talking about when they talk about this site, and if they're right, without actually going there. Can you help me out with that?
Oh, ffs, I hate this idea that there is a monolithic writing industry with a closed-door process that’s meant to keep people out. It’s, to be honest, a load of bovine fecal matter.

There are problems, to be sure. There’s a tendency to chase after the latest trend, to assume that something won’t sell because nothing like it has sold before, or to dump a pile of money on someone famous because they’re famous (Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff), but that isn’t some publishing conspiracy, that’s human nature. And to pick a well-worn example, Harry Potter was widely rejected before it was finally picked up and became a media franchise. But none of this was some sort of conspiracy.

The fact of the matter is that publishing creative writing takes persistence and luck. Rare is the person who sends something out and gets a yes from the first place they sent it.¹ I’ve been through bios of over 5000 authors for the rankings that I publish at https://creativewritingmfa.info and many of the prize-winning stories/poems/essays were rejected multiple times before they were accepted, and these are presumably the best of their breed and are a small percentage of the nominated pieces.

It’s comforting to tell yourself that you’re not getting published because they won’t let you into their “club,” but truth be told, the bigger problem is likely that your writing just isn’t good enough and needs more work.

⸻

1. I keep stats on my own publications and of the 20 stories I’ve published to date, the lowest number of rejections a piece has received has been 3, the highest 67.² I've averaged 49 rejections for every acceptance over the last 16 years, but the past few years, that’s been closer to 25–28 as I’ve gotten better as a writer.

2. This most-rejected story got near-miss rejections from Granta and The Atlantic, both of which are highly prestigious publications.
> are you really arguing that the government leaning on people is worse than it would be for them to just outright force people to censor content?

No, I am not arguing that the government asking Zuckerberg for a regular friendly chat where it tells him who to ban and he complies is worse than the government shooting Zuckerberg in the head as a traitor and nationalizing Facebook. The latter would be worse. But both are very bad and should not happen in free democratic society where freedom of speech is valued.

> if you're drawing a comparison then the world where they were privately pressuring companies was less censorious than the world where they started openly threatening website operators with felonies.

It's the same world. If the operators would not comply "voluntarily", that exactly what would happen. But the censorship by it's nature does not like exposure, so the less overt means can be used, the better. If they can do it without loud clashes, just by everybody "consenting" to it "privately" - much better. If somebody dares to step out - the pressure would be increased, up to, ultimately, using the force of violence, if necessary. That has happened many times to journalists that dug in wrong places. So far none of the companies has been dangerous enough to employ such level of pressure - usually there's always somebody in the lower levels that can help with the problem, like CF, or Amazon, or Google - but we're just getting ramped up. We'll get to felonies eventually. Unless we manage to stop it somehow.
The law is on Cloudflare's side. It's a private company free to choose who they do business with.

If you would like Cloudflare to be legally obliged to act like a utility or public infrastructure, lobby for actual laws to regulate it.
I hate these kind of articles padded with so much fluff that you can’t find the real point the author is making. In any case, I used to think about trillion human in solar system vision and believe in it. No more. Humans are simply not designed to live outside of this planet long term. Our existence is confined to this razer thin 3 miles of atmosphere wrapping this little planet. It is amazing to see billions of humans now have millions of products at their fingertips. These products are made from raw materials and then gets burried under garbedge dumps. One has to wonder how long this party would last. Per one estimate various raw materials will start to run out between 2040 to 2100. Our generation would be truly looked at one of the most privileged aspired to provide everything to everyone.
Some contractors record a lot more detail than their contract requires. I've worked on government contracts. One workplace had a timekeeping system for DOD and a separate one for the corporate overlord. The latter was much more detailed. It was a pain to fill out multiple time cards.
The wikipedia page was actually pretty informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
That wasn't my point.

We build servers, test them, and ship them (in the US). No fucks given on the technical superiority of the `A100/H100` than parts that may be a generation older.
I have the same information, unless CF pays someone to lurk the Farms more than I do. Unlikely. This is a pretext plain and simple. Prince is full of it. There was one fedpost and it was taken down. It happens. There's no machine learning algo scanning new comments to see if they sound like plausible threats.
Sounds like policy is the only thing keeping DE from turning its reactors back on

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/could-germany-keep-its-...
Cloudflare provides DDoS protection. Suppose there were arsonists repeatedly trying to burn down the house of some neo-nazi author. Then suppose a group of people with supposedly no association with the arsonists pressuring the local fire department to stop putting out arson fires for the evil neo-nazi. Does that not raise all sorts of alarm bells for you? Or are people on HN (and the general public) really that far gone?
Well I wouldn't count mismanagement against agile then. At my work we practice SWE by managerial dictatorship and also "agile." I'm certainly not holding the failures against agile.
I've been using flux/redshift for a decade but I'm honestly not sure if I've noticed a difference in sleep quality on the occasional days when I've had it turned off.
And felt like they shouldn't be the ones judging whom to ignore and whom to not, yes.
I don't care for artificial binary categories. Thinking by analogy or by category always confuses the situation. Evaluate each unique situation on its on own idiosyncrasies from first principles and by studying the unique details.
This past week there was a thunderstorm, fried my desktop. Didn't think that was still a thing. Reading some other comments about computer weirdness: my suggestion is get a good UPS or surge protector.
I heavily agree with you that centralization on a single layer is problematic for free speech.

I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :)

Facebook in particular has this problem; it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech, and yet it has no problem buying competitors and trying to take over markets. It makes me wonder how concerned about speech these companies actually are, since they had no problem growing their companies to this size and putting themselves into situations where their moderation decisions carry so much weight.
"Origin server" is a well understood concept in CDNs.

My opinion is that if you're hosting controversial content, it's on you to provision redundancy. No company has the obligation to serve you if you piss them off, violate their TOS, whatever. So, yeah, you better be prepared with a back up host to switch to in a hurry.
This is even more impressive than LuaJIT's FFI in my opinion, which I previously thought was state of the art. You basically pass in a preprocessed header, and LuaJIT does the rest.

All this to say, I feel that any FFI that requires you to manually write bindings is rubbish.
Could we plant trees as a means of capturing carbon? How does it stack up to the existing highest tech forms of carbon capture?
No, because "child porn" includes cartoons which already don't imply abuse of children. As long as such content can decrease recidivism/prevent child abuse, which preliminary research suggest it does, it seems logical to permit it. Unfortunately I'm not sure it will ever fly with the wider public, the subject matter is just too distasteful regardless of the evidence.
Having a higher bar for kicking someone off than inviting them on seems very reasonable to me, even if you think you made a mistake before.
> nowhere else in the mainstream is willing to allow their sacred cow transpeople to have their true (and absolutely disgusting) natures revealed

Sounds like you are intentionally misconstruing facts in order to reinforce your hatred towards trans people. I think it is safe to say the people pedo projecting towards trans are the ones you should watch out for.
There's a need but don't forget that all the previous distributed OSs(Plan9, Mosix,..) didn't succeed.

So 'inevitably destinated to evolve'? No..
When you set up a Cloudflare account, you tell your domain provider (Namecheap, Godaddy, Google etc.) that you want Cloudflare to have complete control over your domain by setting the domain's nameservers to Cloudflare's.

If you want to get off of Cloudflare, you just go to your domain registrar and set your nameservers to some other DNS host, whether it be DDOS-Guard (which is what kiwifarms did with their .ru domain), the domain registrar's own, or any other. It will take a bit to propagate but should be pretty quick. Of course if you bought your domain on Cloudflare you may be kind of screwed, but I don't think that was so in this case.

EDIT: It was https://who.is/whois/kiwifarms.net so they might be screwed. Depends on if Cloudflare still lets them access the dashboard and transfer the domain to another registrar.
I don't trust any screenshot coming out of Kiwifarms since I've seen an edited screenshot tweeted with 10 thousand likes from a (now suspended) popular KF user.

You could only see it if you know what to look out for, there was a masking error on the overlayed image in one corner. And the tweet's text was most likely edited with dev tools.
Sometimes. This is only universally true if your datasets are tiny and your access patterns are simple. Moving a shitty suboptimal O(n^2) or worse algorithm locally when something linear or better is possible is going to hurt no matter where the DB is.

> but SQLite is a strange beast that needs a special diet to perform best.

I don’t see what is strange about it - for large datasets it’s the same complexity issues as anywhere else.

Not sure specifically what your comment is trying to add, since I acknowledged the type of use case SQLite excels in - those where roundtripping are a dominating cost and “k-v” stores, ie simple queries. My entire point is that those are a common but still niche use case.
You talking about Talon? It comes with all of the dependencies. Use ./run.sh to set the library path and ask on the Slack if there are any further issues.

(fwiw it's not skiasharp itself, it's just the mono/skia repo, which is C++)
I read my first Fortran manual about 1964 (my father was an engineer), but didn't have access to a computer until college in '65/'66. I always had my choice of languages, so I've used a couple dozen fairly seriously, including SAIL, BLISS, Metafont, Tex, Forth, APL, Fortran, C, Java, Python. Now it's just recreational programming when I get the itch, e.g. hand coding a string package in WASM.
"We want to assure our customers that the issue did not impact Social Security numbers or credit and debit card numbers, but in some cases, may have affected information such as name, contact and demographic information, date of birth"

How exactly is this meant to be "assuring"? Who cares in the slightest about credit or debit card numbers? The other stuff matters FAR FAR more.
This is the same argument made by anti-free speech people defending companies that censor/deplatform.

Something can be legal and wrong. Sometimes the law is out of date with reality.
D has made its mistakes (there's no way to evolve a language over 20 years and not make a mistake here and there), but we also have a deprecation process to remove them.

The people who use D tend to like it very much.
I was very inspired by a blind programmer who uses text to speech at inhuman speeds. https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/2016/03/27/autobiography-blin...

That's perhaps an extreme example of what is possible but it's incredible what people can adapt to.
Google maps is from Australia
Tips and Tools for Text Mode Lovers
Agile was a relatively good idea, I welcomed the Agile manifesto with open arms because freaking UML was all the rage at the time.

Unfortunately, Agile quickly turned to be even worse than what preceded.

Corporate bureaucracy should be fought against at all times and by all means.

If you work in software, you are valuable enough to have a say, and a choice about who you work for.

Not everything has to turn into a bullshit job.
Russia organizes fake elections wherever it invades to create a pretext of support and democracy. There's no external supervision of the elections and they have no bearing on the reality. When you have no true free speech, state TV blasting disinformation, etc. there's no real elections.

Putin repeatedly violated agreements signed by his predecessors including over Crimea with flimsy excuses like the one you're parroting.

We're talking about a guy whose opposition is all dead or in jail. You're arguing for a murderous dictator.

The only policies were the removal of requirement to teach Russian everywhere. It was a ridiculous excuse to go to war. You don't get Russian in your school let's bomb you and your neighbors. There was no Russian heritage discrimination but there was openness to the west which did make Putin nervous.

Clinton adding countries to NATO is not Ukraine's fault and has absolutely nothing to do with them. The invasion had the opposite effect on Russia and shows how stupid Putin really is because now NATO is at his door. Had he not invaded things would have been better off for him.
I wonder what is the long-term future of these tanks?

10 years from now, SLS will likely be winding down. Few see it as the long-term answer. How long it has to last, really depends, I think, on how quickly SpaceX can get Starship operational.

Once SLS is finally mothballed – whether that happens in 5 years or 10 – then what happens to all this hydrolox infrastructure? Methalox can use the oxygen tanks, but how feasible would it be to put methane in the hydrogen tanks?
Well, the Reddit community is getting worse with time also.
I agree with the point. I used Dbase III before using foxpro which help me a lot.
Lately I've really gotten into reading Dover math books. They're written with such a love of the underlying topic without much concern for practical applications (most predate modern computers). For example, I read a book about graph theory before delving into the Neo4j documentation, and the code makes so much more sense.
I used to work at a call center, most of the time the phone tree doesn't carry the info over to the call or there may be a piece of info missing that could count your call as authenticated so the rep has to ask.

There was even times where I had the previous customers account still open and the new call came in, the IVR would not populate the system with the IVR data.

Most automated systems are used to answer easy and commonly asked questions or offer some simple self-help.
The link is the man who coined the term. Would you say waterfall today is strictly adherent to NOT testing code before delivery of subassembly? That's the coiners definition.
I don't want that to be a quasi-unilateral judgement.

Also, one question. Suppose we do change the laws, and Kiwi Farms continues to operate within those new laws. Will that be enough, do you think? Because the US would have to outlaw dead naming and misgendering for it to be enough for the activists.
Free speech isn't speech without consequences. All that the first amendment protects is government making laws restricting free speech, but if you're a customer and you're doing shit that I don't agree with, I have every right to boot you from my platform. I don't have to stand idly by and not take action.
There's a huge difference between pointing out someone's real name (especially if that person is a public figure of some sort) and organizing a full harassment campaign, complete with the address of them, their family, and their job. Even more so when you're maintaining a counter of how many of your targets have committed suicide.
I think a downside of their CEO & C-level spending so much time on Twitter and HN (spending any time there at all is already "a lot" for C-suite) is that they might overestimate the size and importance of social media mobs. Practically every hashtag is botted these days, especially ones people feel passionate about.

The crux is that even if IT decisionmakers have become more left-wing and pro-top-down-control, they're still very unlikely to ever pick Cloudflare even after they complied. Best solution is to ignore.
Talon has an eye tracking mouse, the necessary hardware runs around $250.
All I read from the quote is "all revolutions are authoritarian and people saying otherwise are either useful idiots or active supporters of our enemies." Nothing about them always failing. Nothing about communism being bad or capitalism being good. Just a candid statement, unsavory to some, including yourself it would seem.
Forgot to add, the top level interactions (e.g., lead questions or email capture) require the user to choose an option on the Chat UI (via a button click) to respond, therefore, didn't really have a need to store the context/NLU. I've built some pre-defined responses to open text questions that rely on Levenshtein Distance and threshold (e.g., 90% similarity) for identifying appropriate response. Hope this helps. For stuff that's not defined, the bot says something like "I don't know."
How could Amazon force them to work there if they survived before Amazon built those centers?

Nobody forces anyone to live in depressed areas. Move. Even penniless immigrants cross the southern border and manage to move to every part of the US.
If you go on Twitter, 90% of the replies aren't happy with Cloudflare's action. They want Cloudflare to do more and blaming CEO for why it took so long.

https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1566188237986893824

Just shows how the activists are hammering Cloudflare CEO into submission. These people want complete abandonment of Freedom of Speech/Expression despite of what CEO is saying in this thread that it isn't about FoS/FoE.

I am just terrified of what holds for our future. We used to celebrate speech as progressives back in the 90's and used to defend it with fierce opposition to any supression. They say, freedom and liberty are one generation away, if the newer generation wants CCP-style authoritarianism, they will get it.
I honestly know nothing about the site, somehow before today I've missed the place existed. I can see in past history HN history it's been quite a contentious site.

If sites are making threats of violence against others, and it is not being moderated, even fascists 'I'm just kidding' behaviors, I'm perfectly fine banning them, I'm not hiding behind anything, this is my stated position.

You're just falling into a typical libertarian trap, a common failing on sites like HN. That is the "All voices should be heard, even those calling for violence and intimidation of others", it's just very suspect because the groups that tend to espouse that tend to do so say it from a position of privilege and are not the ones having acts of violence carried out against them.

Violence should not, and ultimately cannot be tolerated.
Borrowing against a Ferrari 458 doesn't turn Italian supercars into ersatz currencies, in any meaningful sense.

Money isn't just something you exchange for goods and services. It's directly linked to the sovereignty and economic soundness of its issuing authority. Imagine if a country started accepting tax payments denominated in something they have no influence over. Holding Bitcoin reserves necessarily means ceding economic power, and therefore autonomy, to a third party. For failed states without any economic autonomy to begin with, this bargain might be fine. But for everyone else on the international stage, this is a total nonstarter.

Wars have been fought over monetary authority! We've had this discussion as a species already. What we have now isn't some pathological problem that needs to be disrupted. It's actually the outcome of a rational evolutionary process over thousands of years. Does it have problems that can be improved, yes. Should it be thrown away in favor of a new system built from first principles, absolutely not. That would be a new dark age, a dystopia.
So all it takes is for a malicious actor to engage in false flag operations against me and CF will completely walk back their abuse policies and terminate my services, even if I act the best I can to moderate and remove the offending content?
I'm not saying what happened on Kiwi Farms was a false flag because I don't know that, but neither do you. It's hard to process just how antithetical your actions today are compared to your words 3 days ago.
You started this thread by telling the OP that "I have at least twenty more years of this left, and maybe fifty years" was "not the way it works".
> I suspect where I differ from the CEOs of companies like Cloudflare/Facebook, is that I think the solution to that isn't to get rid of moderation, but rather to enforce antitrust and break up their companies. :)

I'm not sure whether Cloudflare deserves antitrust action. But, yes, Facebook is concerning.

Of course, you've got to acknowledge the flip-side. Sometimes it should be left up to the government. If your internet service is a natural monopoly (perhaps augmented with protections of a franchise agreement from the government), it's especially problematic for them to be making moderation decisions.

All in all, it's hard.
Ok, well these things were posted publically on Twitter so there will be many first hand accounts and possibly backups from trusted 3rd parties. Shouldn't be that hard to figure out. I have personally seen some of these tweets as I watch Destiny from time to time and she comes up.