skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cursive is faster than separate letters. However, our need to write is sufficiently limited these days that it's not worth learning another system to speed up writing. However, kids should be taught to *read* cursive until we reach the point where the people who write it have died off.

I have watched this in a different context in China: The government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if alive they aren't very active in society. The young generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and the schools don't teach them anymore.

For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and the like are identical, all that varies is what is said. Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch dialects to something she knew the person she was speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was trying to avoid would not. The written form was standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't understand each other they can communicate by writing. This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger and write the character on the palm of the other hand.
On the other hand, if it’s been championed since Nixon, that means his problem is not solved.
> This business unit has a pretty aggressive roadmap as management and HQ has no real understanding of these blockers. And post COVID, budget is really tight.

Sounds like someone needs to push back against management first and foremost. Without this understanding the only thing you'll succeed in doing is denting that $20m revenue stream with very little appreciable benefit and the higher-ups will understand even less what you're up against.

Get that message right first and small doors may open to better budget. Then approach as others have said, piece by piece, or as Martin Fowler describes as a StranglerFigApp (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html)
>Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe

Both are true because "spent" fuel isn't reprocessed because mumble mumble nonproliferation, yes?

In the mean time, obscene amounts are being spent on fusion, which will never even compete with fission on any metric.
Cool!

Let me ask you this, though: why shouldn't I be a L.O.A.D.?

Also, who's the L.O.A.D. when I and a counterparty are editing a contract someone else drafted a template for five years ago? Am I expected to use my negotiating 'gun powder' to fix clarity issues?

Ultimately, the ethical responsibility is to choose the best client representation over the most readable contract, right? Those don't always overlap, do they?
For everyone commenting "laypeople aren't the intended audience", this monstrosity was a recent Texas constitutional ballot proposal, i.e. all voters in the state were asked to vote on it:

> The constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide for the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount of ad valorem taxes that may be imposed for general elementary and secondary public school purposes on the residence homestead of a person who is elderly or disabled to reflect any statutory reduction from the preceding tax year in the maximum compressed rate of the maintenance and operations taxes imposed for those purposes on the homestead.

I have an Ivy League education and I still could hardly understand it, and I still think some of the language is ambiguous (i.e. I think "the reduction of the amount of a limitation on the total amount" can be interpreted both ways).

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2022/03/25/the-lang...
What is the difference in copyrightability between a file format and an API?
This is exactly the kind of sales model that helps everyone, though. If this frustrates you then you aren't thinking about it hard enough. The author offers the library that generates these images for free with a GPL license. If you are interested in the end product but don't want to / can't spend 8 dollars you can build it yourself easily thanks to the work the author did and released for free. If you'd rather not break out the IDE or can't then you can give the author a small amount of money to do it for you. Everyone wins. There are no losers in this situation.
I'm not. Just advocating for less generation of garbage in general.
It feels like over optimization. The base load of my house is around 1kW which is still completely irrelevant in the scheme of how much owning the property costs. The literal cost you’re adding as well as the mental cost of having to switch things on and off all the time shouldn’t be ignored. There’s a timer on the outlets for the soldering gear though, that adds a bit of peace of mind.
It's also a hell lot more fun if you're Arab and atheist esp if you carry a religious name, you will be targeted all the time, and try to explain yourself and the associations that you might have with your background culture/religion.

A lot of fun, I tell you!
> In school, we learned something called "loop writing", literally translated

Yeah, this is what we call cursive.

> What is the alternative; what do Americans do when writing by hand?

We write the "printer font" or "capital letters" that you mention.

> I still write notes and messages on paper all the time, and I can't imagine bothering to spend twice as long on it.

Firstly, most people don't write on paper that much anymore.

Secondly, this is sort of like when people on hacker news talk about using a tiling window manager like i3.

They can't imagine going back to a regular window manager, they are so much more productive, etc, etc.

But at the end of the day, tiling window managers remain niche because swapping between windows isn't a bottleneck in the workflow of 99.9% of people. They mainly contribute to making someone feel more productive rather than be more productive.

In other words, writing speed isn't a bottleneck in the workflow of 99.9% of people so it just doesn't matter much if we do it inefficiently. If you were a court stenographer required to write by hand or something, then cursive would be a good investment. Otherwise, meh, not much point.
Basically only religious persons names their kids Mohammed, those who quit the religion will not put the burden of that name on their kids. I suspect the same thing about Jesus even in the Spanish world, Christianity is very popular in the Spanish world as well.

But to be fair I have met way more Muslims than I have met Christians so I am not as sure about it, but Mohammed is for sure a religious name meaning they had religious parents.
Tangent: Montreal francinization laws are such a pain in the ass.
There's another explanation which should be very realistically considered, but which people are (probably intentionally) blind to: they're not as dumb as you think, and you're not as smart as you think.
Small communities that do not tolerate thought control.
Rust is good at all those things. Just not using the reference/ownership patterns that people are used to. There's a lot of mental overhead in managing lifetimes that becomes quite taxing if you start the wrong way.
Sorry for my tone.

Op mentioned someone doing a simulation that claimed that scaled up solar+wind+hydro generation with only 5 hours of storage capacity would be sufficient to meet the needs of Australia. That seems odd given that cloudy, windless conditions can last for days in many cases. You would at least need sufficient storage+hydro capacity to cover several days worth of shortfalls from wind+solar.

Battery systems are great. Pumped hydro storage is great. But I'm unaware of such systems coming anywhere close to the capacities required in the near term.

At this point, the hydrogen infrastructure is years away. It looks like hydrogen storage underground is sufficiently proven to be feasible, but there are a host of other issues in the hydrogen energy chain that need to be addressed, most notably green generation at scale.
Is this a site for a social platform?
Lawyer and contract-drafting teacher here. The biggest problem with unreadable contracts is that we have too many L.O.A.D.s: Lazy Or Arrogant Drafters. (You can decide for yourself: L.O.A.D. of what?) There's a relevant Dilbert cartoon: [0]

To simplify contract language, the biggest bang for the buck comes from SSSP: Short, Single-Subject Paragraphs, which are much easier to read; to review and revise during contract negotiations; and to reuse in other contracts.

(It's not unlike modularity and orthogonality in software.)

For more ranting on that subject — with some pathological before-and-after examples — see my online course materials (this version isn't pretty; I'm almost done refactoring it). [1]

[0] https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-08-28

[1] https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
My working memory file is just a giant txt file that is synced using git to github. It's free and fast (because a text file editor like Sublime is fast and can handle a very large text file). You can also use it offline. The conflict is handled by git, which is familiar to a programmer.

It also feels more permanent. I used to use other note taking apps where the notes were thrown away after migrating to a new app because it wasn't that convenient to transfer between apps. Plain text can't go wrong in this matter.

I used Dropbox Paper and Google Docs before. Once you reach certain size, it is very very slow.

The caveat with the text file is the lack of fuzzy searching capability... but it's tolerable so far.

PS. I've built my own git sync: https://github.com/tanin47/git-notes -- it is written in Go.
That's actually a great way to classify it and makes sense.
> Is the graph even real, or is a graph from a random blog good enough because it supports your viewpoint?

It's Google's chart. Search for "covid", then select Israel from the country drop down.

The poster you replied to is asserting that this chart should look much better by now, given the promises made when the vaccine when it was introduced. I don't see why you need "a long detailed scientific paper" to agree or disagree with this.
>Hard science, i.e. math and its applications, teach you how to think, reason, etc.

Although, especially in high school but to a more limited degree in intro level college courses as well, you still end up memorizing a lot of formulas in a course like physics--one issue being that you probably haven't taken the calculus yet that you need to derive those formulas. Of course, you often end up knowing formulas you use all the time off the top of your head anyway. But you presumably could derive a lot of them if you had to.
Re the timing, yes, I agree. But, remarkably, it was still on sale for a long time. I think I obtained an eval or review copy of it at some point, but I didn't really know what to do with it -- my ST experience is fairly minimal. :-(

I suspect, but do not know, that part of what killed it might have been the Mac OS X migration to Intel (and around the same time, Windows' move to 64-bit). I think MagiC ran on PowerMacs and used some of the OS's 68K-to-PowerPC translation somehow, but that stopped working after Snow Leopard.

I didn't know what it was written in, but I can say I'm not shocked. ;-)
I have no idea why that doesn't work in practice, apparently it's rare for it to work.

In abstract I like unions and unions have helped me out, if I had become a cop obviously I'd be part of the Union, and I suspect union negotiators were persecuted in Chile for very very good reason in the elite's view. Like those guys would actually negotiate hardcore, knew all the tricks, well-read, not intimidated by glances or ugly looks, knew what to charge...basically a union negotiator. Negreated the negreators, well and that's why they were persecuted. Strictly money in that case.

It's never spoken openly, nobody ever brings up union negotiators. Think hostage negotiator. And working in the interest of the company, don't want it going underwater so it can keep paying wages. And also making sure the business stays competitive, but actually. In one case in Uruguay there was a strike, sort of the workers took over the factory and started working again right away, cut the management out completely, kept it going fine, hostile takeover so to speak.
RIP CSS `color-mod` function
I truly wonder how much raw data GCHQ will receive and how they even remotely attempt to sort through it, plus all the myriad sources of information to integrate into intelligence reports. What an interesting challenge.
> Documentation, when it exists, is usually a band-aid covering up bad design. Pretty documentation seems like lipstick on a pig.

The above two ideas are incongruent, but anyway, you do realize that system design can't be self-evident for complex systems? How for example would you have no documentation for the Linux kernel?

Either you're mis-communicating your point or not thinking of anything larger than tiny systems.
I've no love for the police and the abuses by same.

I was making allusions to White Nationalism and Christo-fascism that are waiting in the wings to make their play.

Case in point: election workers being harassed until they quit is low grade terrorism, but it's real and it's effective.

Proud boys are a threat, and ironically are closely aligned with the police. It's messy and I'm not sure how to "fix" it.

> Federal judges rubberstamp every fishing expedition search warrant put before them

Is this in any way related to the investigations into a former president?
I think that if your memory file is too big, you are implement the idea wrong. It is supposed to be a daily thing, not a permanent memory.
A chest is much better. The reason is intuitive: if you open it the cold air remains inside except for a little turbulence at the top and, of course, the new air that pours in to replace whatever you’ve just removed.

Whereas, when you open an upright one, cold air immediately starts pouring out the bottom of the opening, with warmer air coming in at the top to replace it.
No idea about whether it is of benefit, but it definitely takes more learning as you can only write decent cursive by muscle memory. Block letters can be written at any pace, cursive must flow.
If you're in California or the EU, submit a CCPA or GDPR request, respectively.
While the parties are usually laypeople, the drafters and readers of significance are almost always lawyers.

If you decide to try to bring a claim against your mortgage lender, will you have a lawyer read your mortgage agreement before you file suit? Surely.
It wouldn't disqualify the person, but since everyone in research has way more applications than they have positions they just select those who are statistically less likely to clash culturally.
I was subscribed to his newsletter for a while but his style just didn't click for me, it felt kind of trite.
I think in the later books in the Enders Game series (Speaker for the Dead, in particular), Ender speaks to his AI companion via subvocalization.

So perhaps a little sensor on or in our neck will allow us to speak to computers silently.
Your citation was paid for, in part, by Broadband for America — an industry lobbying organization backed by the likes of Comcast.

Lobbying efforts, lobbyist-funded legal opinions, and a captured regulatory body don’t a valid legal/policy argument make.

Yes, congress has given away massive privileges to ISPs and none of the responsibilities; that’s the whole point. That was a mistake; the gift of privatization of a public good.

Thanks to heavy lobbying, ISPs have avoided being classified as common carriers entirely (irrespective of their sitting in a monopoly position).

> Your analysis stops at the point of passage of some hypothetical legislation removing section 230 protections, which is not really the point of my question about free expression. What is the actual downstream systemic effect on what speech users are allowed to express, and that providers are discouraged from permitting?

The downstream effect is that providers either have to take responsibility for what they claim is their own speech, or in exchange for the privilege of a shield from liability for what they post, serve the public good regardless of use or user, and operate their sites as an open public forum.

I think it’d be an incredible improvement to the state of public discourse.

If this particular comment section is any indication, there are large groups of people living entirely in information bubbles that have no idea what their ostensible opposition actually believe, have seemingly lost the ability to actually critically read and understand opposing viewpoints, and whom argue voraciously and without exception against straw men solely of their own devising.
Modern freezers really aren't that bad. Chest freezers being better than standing, because less of the cold air escapes when it is opened.

The US requires all consumer appliances to have an Energy Guide sticker (the yellow and black thing) which estimates an annual KWh use and cost at average electric prices. My cheapo 4cuft chest freezer uses about 200 KWh annually, or about $25. Not nothing, but $2 a month isn't going to register compared to most things.
Yes, get a cheap IoT plug supported by Tasmota and enjoy monitoring, toggling and time-based schedules without "phone home" features :-)
They're not even really new or untested, just being done at a different plane of abstraction. Running a system efficiently across multiple machines requires different implementations of familiar abstractions than running on a single machine. Even the single machine approach has changed dramatically in the last 20+ years. We started single program, went to single user, to multi-user, to multi-processor, to multi-core, to NUMA, etc (not necessarily in that order), and a significant subset of systems are now multi-machine, even if you ignore the internet. All of these new paradigms tend to have similar base requirements/optimizations that would kind of be pointless to reinvent versus simply adapting to the new infrastructure style.
I wrote what I was expecting: The same type of results from the online tool I used.

My comment was pretty clear, not sure why the two responses I got decided to give me advice about prompts.
I like the drive-by-wire throttle in my bike. The traction control it enables has saved me a few times. Like when hitting wet leaves or a moist metal grate.

The yellow light blinks, you crap your pants a little, and survive the little skid without even a story to tell. Much better than scooping yourself off the pavement.

More expensive bikes even have rain and sport modes that modify throttle response. All impossible without drive by wire.
Show HN: Top HN Posts August 2022
Nixon was the last “liberal” president. Not really surprising no meaningful reform has been pushed through since him
Yes. As others stated, for non-fiction still my go-to is physical. Ideally I like to have the two, so I can "ctrl-f" if I want to find something fast.
Also for example I bought a copy of "Python in a nutshell" because I can read it on the train very easily.
My first experience was with Arch Linux right when they switched to Systemd. I hated it, but I didn't really get what it was, not knowing what an init system or a process even is.

But I was then quite surprised a few years later when it was just the normal thing for me when people in Debian were basically fighting a war over it.
Good point at the beginning about how serialization of complex structures works, but false conclusion.

Good writing, just like good code is well-factored and self-documenting. Easy to understand identifiers, short functions.

What you suggesting is the equivalent of writing a module using a long string of function calls, some of which have very non-obvious meanings, and claiming that there isn't a way to factor it out.
> chapters related around real-life stories of success to drive the points home

I’m so torn on this. Because this is the fluff of (American) business books. The endless stories, all suffering from survivorship bias, unnecessarily inflating the book. But sometimes, a good story helps.

One of my favorite books about running a small software company is "Rework" from the 37signals guys. I also read "Getting Real", which came before, is kinda the same book plus stories.

I enjoyed Rework without the stories a lot more.
Yea, but it keeps my food cool and thus edible for several days longer than it otherwise would. Power usage of a device isn't the problem, power used not doing useful work for me is.
I used to have multiple files, but that didn't work well either. It's nicer to have everything in a single file where you can scroll through quickly. But as mentioned the fuzzy search isn't there though.
Fuck Adobe.
It triggered the auto-renew while on vacation for a year, I cancelled within a week later, and was forced to pay a massive cancellation fee. One of the worst companies I've interacted with, will never use their products again.
The OP is making a utilitarian argument. You can’t argue that utilitarianism is a defunct philosophy because people once used it to justify slavery.

If you are making this argument, please share your philosophy that no bad person has ever used to make a point
It needs power or it degrades faster? Sounds like a great reason for me to never buy an OLED tv.
In light of the fact that China is on track to lose over 500,000,000 in net population over the next 80 years due to ‘enlightened’ government policy, these leaders are comically bad.

All one can do is laugh at the hubris.
I don't see the problem.

Manufacturers have been selling "options packages" for decades. You can either buy the base bike for $15,000, or one with "premium package" for $18,000.

It's obvious to everyone that the extra doodads you're buying don't actually cost them $3,000 more. It's just a way for them to segment the market and charge more for those who are willing to pay. The alternative is, they sell a single configuration for $17,000.

Now they're just saying, hey, most of this functionality is in software anyway. Rather than pretend that the $10 sensor needed to enable the quick shifter costs $3,000, they're going to put the $10 sensor in all the bikes and charge you for the software required to use it. And like most software, you can get a free trial before you need to decide if you want it. So what?

It's also quite possible that these extra features actually don't require any additional hardware at all. The bike already has wheel speed sensors, accelerometers, etc. for the "base" ABS functionality and the advanced stuff you're paying for might be entirely in software.
I'd be curious about the math. It's really weighing the period of training and how often that training period is inflicted (turnover) against the productivity gains of overworking people.

E.g. if a business can force everyone to work through their half-hour lunch without pay, they're getting an extra 130 hours per employee per year for free. If it takes them a week (40 hours) to train a new employee, they can have 300% turnover for that role (replacing the worker in that role 3 times) and still net 10 free hours per year.

At 2 weeks of training, they net 50 free hours at 100% turnover and break even at 150% turnover.

At 3 week of training, they net 10 hours on 100% turnover, and would be better off letting people have lunch if turnover is higher than 100%.

Skipping lunch is a weird way to measure it, but it's hard to generalize "how much more productivity do companies get if they micromanage employees like Amazon does" or something like that.