skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tried vpype and the hatched plugin now.

Works, but is very basic. It fills black areas with lines without any regard to the shape of the area. The result looks very "rasterized". One could come up with way better algorithms that take the shape of the source into account when filling it with thin lines.

Maybe I'll have to code my own solution.
If you want a story into the other "operating system" that keeps the NYC subway system running (or from another point of view, never advancing), see this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...

"Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks"

and how it's actually very about how managing a software/IT project can go wrong.
The way I imagine this working is: you buy X,Y and Z. If enough people buy these together (along with other things) the algo will deduce that if you buy X you also probably want Y and Z.

It will recommend them. This is not new and there are plenty examples.
> The CA high speed train started as a ten billion dollar promise.

No, it didn’t.

System cost estimate referenced in the ballot booklet for Prop 1A was $45 billion. $9.95 billion was the Prop 1A bond issue, which was explicitly never intended to represent full funding.
My dad had problems clicking through, it wasn't as intuitive for him as it was for me and my sister.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this one but quite frankly it's where the PHP developers all slithered off to. It was inevitable.

I avoid to the point of refuse to work with any JavaScript platform at all. They are a universal shit show.

Edit: honestly I stand by this comment. I literally have spent hours this year dealing with fucked up messes in nodejs, package security issues after repos were hacked and code made it into NPM that displayed banners on commercial sites. My comment is toxic yes but quite frankly both communities are as well (PHP and NodeJS) and utterly earned that ire and discontent. The fact people lean on the stack and produce stuff that handles critical aspects of people's lives is utterly frightening. So yeah toxic, I don't care. Feel free to be annoyed. It's still a turd, just been rolled in glitter.
I think escalation via social media is valid if you’ve exhausted all other avenues and have not been satisfied. I’ve done it personally with mixed results.

I do not think posts on social media are indicative of a complete failure of the customer support system.
Seriously, stop being obtuse.

Suicide is a serious decision with serious consequences. It should be treated as such, not as some flimsy debate topic about bodily autonomy.

Have some empathy and tact when discussing such serious topics.
How to Use Twitter for Thought Leadership
I’m in the same position. Need to eat dinner in the evenings for family reasons. Social elements of food are significant.
There are free as in speech non-software licenses for copyrighted works like CC.

As for you telling me what software I can run on my server, that sounds like the opposite of freedom.

You can tell me what I can do with your data, and that's entirely in the EFF's wheelhouse of advocacy.
Worse: not following the instructions quite right and brick your router. De-bricking requires buying a new router or finding/ordering a jtag cable adapter.

They sell routers openwrt pre-installed. Better guarantee on security updates for your router.
Absolutely this.

I mean, we probably can't prevent it getting worse because of the 10-20 year lead time on CO2/temperature, we're locked in to that.

But if we act immediately now, we can reduce the rate at which things continue to get worse in a couple of decades time.

And even if the situation is runaway, that would reduce how rapidly things run out of control.

Efforts to do that are probably going to have a much bigger effect than a lot of adaptations people are talking about, since some of the changes we're in for are so vast that there isn't going to be much avoiding them.
Scientists will say whatever they need to say in order to get funding. "Science" should be looked at with as much skepticism as the media
Just add a simple exception for THIS case.

When Amazon has had to do this 1000+ unique times, then we can have the debate of whether their extra work is worth the lost lives of kids. Probably still a loser of an argument IMO but let’s just take a simple first step yeah?
The company is Nikola, an EV company more famous for the founder creating a gravity powered smoke and mirror show than for any actual products.
I'm kinda torn should Amazon be selling high-purity dangerous chemicals or not. On other hand it makes life easy, but on other maybe somethings should have some control in place. That being specialist store who might look at order and give some customer support.
Any feedback from HN on our demo?
Hi, I am building out an app called Nomad that will offer hosts and guests zero fees, mandatory self check in on all listings and no cleaning fees.

Was hoping for some feedback from the HN community and hopefully any investors interested in funding our seed round :)
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to remember (maybe false memory?) that 10,20 years ago the produce section was basically large piles of loose fruits and veg, and you would pick what you wanted. There would also be a few bags of potatoes, oranges, and apples, sometimes in a mesh bag, sometimes plastic.

Now everything seems to be these damned individually wrapped plastic containers holding apples in some strange array. I first saw them at Costco and now they're everywhere.

They're not even cardboard, they are plastic or styrofoam.

Strawberries used to come in these little very thin plastic baskets that were mostly air, now they're in these massive plastic armor containers.
This comment is profoundly ignorant of the nature of anthropogenic climate change. It doesn't mean that "things will get warmer and happier for everyone."

It means severe water shortages, mass migration of climate refugees, xenophobia and the resulting political turmoil, huge increases in lung cancer from wildfire smoke, frequent flooding, destruction of infrastructure to the tune of billions of dollars, mass extinction of species, etc.

We don't even know what happens when certain feedback loops get triggered and a flywheel accelerant effect begins.
I was recently in New York as a Brit and was really happy to see the OMNY system which just allowed me to use contactless to traverse the turnstiles (for everything but the JFK SkyTrain) with no issues, similar to how metro transport works in the UK for example. I don't think there's a requirement for it to be a US card, but instead any contactless card will work?
The real issue of plastic in the ocean has to do with the fishing industry, but lets just pretend that's not even there and instead focus on PR stunts
Ad-hominem attacks aren’t a good way to conduct any discussion.
For those commenting about grocery bags, this is not about those. It is about those little thin plastic bags we use for produce and meat. Paper makes a lot of sense there, though you can’t just scan the barcode through a paper bag.

Those thin plastic bags are too likely to get dropped or blow away and get into the environment where they clog up waterways and choke animals. They end up in oceans where turtles mistake them for jellyfish.
Here is a darker, but better, version of this thesis, from a pre-instragram time:

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit.

It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you.

It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
> Seriously, stop being obtuse

I get that you don't agree with me. But having a different opinion doesn't make me obtuse. That's just slinging around an insult.
> But please: why don’t you tell me how to be better parent to prevent this?

I’m not going to do that, just like you shouldn’t be trying to force the rest of us to pay the steep costs of assuaging your parenting fears.
> afraid they are they may actually do it in a moment of insanity.

That's certainly not a universal experience. There are rational and valid reasons a mentally ill person may want to die and other people should not deny them that right. It's inhumane torture and a complete disrespect of their personhood to disregard deny their capacity to so reason and force them to live in suffering.
If a family owned market sold these items to a 16 year old - and a man Bezo’s age were working the register, and looked up the store policy and concluded this was a permissible sale- I think people would not accept that.

And yet we accept automation unblinking, even though automation includes the above scenario.
This. Most mainboards can be configured to boot the moment they receive power, no need for a power button.

It's also worth noting that any internet integration can be disabled on all Shelly devices.
I still think you're mostly conflating "the C++ standard library provides bad implementations of this stuff" which is famously true, with "generic solutions are just bad" which is at least non-obvious and I'd argue generally false.

> copy and paste and refine more.

That doesn't get you better algorithms, which is what you need. If you start with the C++ standard library's unordered_set implementation in a source file and you "refine" that you won't get from there to absl::flat_hash_set except in the same sense you could start with the footage from "Grease" and end up making "Bugsy Malone". Start over with a different design.
The combination of items is a suicide kit, but as far as I can tell Amazon didn't have a literal "suicide kit" item (chemical + drug + scale + booklet) in the catalog, it's just about "others who bought this also bought...".
And if you wish to see some code, while simplePDF is not open source, the code for the embed widgets (thin iFrame wrappers), including the chrome extension, is available here:

https://github.com/bendersej/simplepdf-embed
I’ve never in my life trashed a plastic bag that wasn’t filled with garbage. Now I gotta buy plastic bags. How is this helping?

I recently drove through Lancaster, CA. And the amount of trash there from the taco stands is just insane.

How about we focus on those things first? The things we actually find next to the road instead of annoying people.
They aren't right just because they're old. I could easily write the opposite comment:

I don't want to sell the greybeards' skills short, but I have less faith in them than the new generation (the most skilled part of the new generation; don't ignore sampling bias). The new generation has learnt the lessons of the old and improved on them, whereas many oldies stick to outdated technology like Autotools, Perl and Bash in the name of "if it kind of works half the time I can't be bothered to learn something better".

The bellwether for me is when devs doggedly stick to plaintext logs because "that's just how we've always done things".
Litter is a much better argument than "save the climate turtles" or whatever is usually mentioned.
A Newsletter from 1994 about the “InterNet”
Looks less annoying to me than not being able to cancel.

Although in the US people still subscribe to "newspapers" where you can subscribe online but have to wait for hours on hold on a hotline to end the subscription...
I think there's a lot of people that want things to be fair at the individual level ("that person gets time off for a child, but that other, childless person works the whole time")... but don't see the greater "benefit to society overall" part of it. It's not necessarily that they're being greedy; it may not even be something that would benefit them directly. They just never consider that they're paying a cost for the greater good, because it's not in their view of the world.
Anonymous, and many other unrelated protesters, used the V for Vendetta mask when protesting against Scientology not just as a symbol but rather because of the cult..er church well known tactics of harassing anyone who opposes them. They usually followed protesters until they put the mask off so they or their car license plate could be photographed easing the identification.
Thank you for your response. It has been helpful.
I mean I don’t automatically believe this bullshit based on the source - it’s coming from a law firm with very specific priorities in producing a narrative.
Having known about 60 minutes scandals over the years I am just as likely to believe they withheld this story because the facts didn’t even meet their questionable standards. Some emotional grieving parents and a law firm are all you need to them turn that into another media circus.

Maybe their recommendation system was aggregating. Or maybe it was just suggesting specific things the user had viewed or purchased recently.

I’ll withhold judgement until less charged “facts” are out in the open.

For a forum that so often likes to cite Gell Man amnesia - how about fucking now?
I was tangentially involved in the back-end data part of a web project in the last few weeks.

Right from the beginning, I told anyone who would listen that the underlying data was in UTC. So far, so good.

They get to T-24h for the client's Big Demo Day...

...and someone in London, UK notices the front end UI times are all an hour out (that would be because the UK is still on summer time, UTC+1). I happened to be in Germany and after finally being given a login for the UI found that, wonder of wonders, the timings were two hours out!

<groan>

So we had to bodge the API to fiddle the times forward to UTC+1 for the purposes of the damned demo.

Someone is presumably going to find this in the repo waaaay in the future and ask themselves "wtf were they thinking?". I wish I knew the answer.
This doesn't likely meet the standard for negligence on Amazon's part because it would need to be definitively shown that Amazon's negligence to prevent harmful recommendations (themselves not necessarily illegal) was an essential and substantial cause of the suicides.

§ 401 of the California Penal Code, cited in the complaint, states:

"(a) Any person who deliberately aids, advises, or encourages another to commit suicide is guilty of a felony.
(b) A person whose actions are compliant with the provisions of the End of Life Option Act (Part 1.85 (commencing with Section 443) of Division 1 of the Health and Safety Code) shall not be prosecuted under this section."

(b) doesn't apply here, as stated in the complaint. Did Amazon meet any of the requirements of (a)? Sodium nitrite is also used for a variety of other valid industrial purposes. They're not alleging intent, but they are alleging that Amazon breached its duty of care by facilitating the sale of the product and by automatically recommending other products to use in conjunction the chemical to ease the suicide.

The core problem with this case is in proving causation. Typically, in cases involving state suicide-assistance statutes that do not involve physician-assisted suicide, the causal chain is far more obvious: it typically involves a person verbally encouraging or furnishing the suicidal person with supplies, suicide pacts, and other similar cases. The theory that a retailer or an e-retailer can be held to have breached its duty of care or that it substantially caused a suicide is unlikely to hold up. It's rather like blaming a hardware store for selling rope. Unless they can prove that Amazon violated the statute, and even if the court considers the negligence claim to be adequately plead, they're not likely going to be able to prove causation.

This is also a much weaker argument than those used to try to hold brick and mortar gun retailers liable for suicides, because some of those theories can at least rely on 15 U.S.C. § 7903 (5)(B) if the person who committed suicide indicated at the point of sale their intention to cause harm to themselves or others.

Amazon and the brand will probably settle the case, but the impact will probably just be that Amazon itself will make life harder for chemical retailers. If there are more controversies they may also just regulate content like "how to kill yourself" e-books more stringently.
I wonder which specific ML models they're using, and if it's something along the lines of Whisper
I think you misunderstand my point. The "tracking" I mentioned is only "actions per {time unit}", for all users. Basically aggregating how many times the "/api/checkout" endpoint is hit. It requires no cookies, it requires no checking of any individuals behavior. The only point of it is if action $FOO decreases dramatically then $FOO might be broken.

At no point does that require cookies or personal data or personal tracking. My point was that you don't need cookies or personally identifiable info to be able to make sure a website runs well.
> humans, and human crops and animals rely on boring predictable weather that they evolved for.

Do they though? Or are large variations in weather over the course of a century actually really normal, and mother nature is just a cruel mistress that is constantly decimating populations and then giving them just enough reprieve to recover before doing it again? It's really hard for me to have any confidence in "climate science" because I see how horribly wrong other areas of science are _all the time_ and the only way to be proven wrong in climate science is to wait for decades or centuries to see what happens.
There is also

https://www.json-buddy.com/
By far the most common litter in my neighborhood is face masks. Maybe we ban non-reusable face masks first, which contain elastic (petrochemical)?
I want to be as optimistic as you, I do. At the moment I'm not though. My perception of things like the push for replication or pre-registration is not as a one-way ratchet towards progress, however slow moving, but more like pushing down on a blob of mercury. The problems aren't actually solved but simply get moved around by an academic community that deep down doesn't want to improve, only to create enough of an appearance of improving to dispel criticism.

For example, there was a big push to give people access to the raw data. Researchers were made to sign data availability statements. The appearance of improvement was created. Then one day someone decided to test if these statements meant anything and discovered they did not; compliance was extremely low [1].

This seems to be how it goes. After over a decade of noise about P-hacking and low replicability in the social sciences, estimated replicability of studies has hardly changed, nor has statistical power improved much [2].

And these are the subtle problems that people don't mind talking about because the problems are sufficiently opaque enough that the general public doesn't pay much attention. During COVID we saw just how deep and serious bad science can get. Climatology isn't better. P-hacking is an irrelevant concern if you aren't even comparing your hypothesis to actual data to begin with (c.f. computational epidemiology), or if your response to a hypothesis/data mismatch is to edit the data (c.f. surface temperature datasets). Poor replicability is likewise irrelevant if the supposedly top researchers in a field can't implement a model that can even replicate its own outputs, and literally nobody anywhere within the institutions cares!

The core problem here just doesn't seem to be something you can fix with this kind of incremental approach on top of the academic basis. You get the temporary appearance of progress in one or two fields where noise is being made, but it's fake and falls apart the moment someone examines it deeply or looks at a slightly different field.

Ultimately, academia doesn't institutionally care if the output of its professors is correct, only that output happens and gets attention. You can't fix this by requiring more forms to be filled out; these people are smart and have all day to find workarounds. For as long as their position and status in society revolves around creating mass/public perception that they're doing intelligent work, vs actual hard-nosed evaluation of said work by independent but deeply interested outsiders (e.g. companies that want to build things), we will continue to be disappointed by the failure of reform efforts.

[1] https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(22)00141-X/pdf

[2] https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
Do you have to be useful? Figure out how to be happy, and be a good person, a good happy version of you first, then you will naturally be useful to the people closest to you, and to yourself, and that is a very good thing.

So much of society pushes us to be "useful", and in fact we are (most of us) dutifully join the march through the education system and into the workforce, allowing the system to fill us with information that it deems useful for its own perpetuation. So you are already playing a "useful part" from the point of the system in which you came up.

Given that, sounds like you are really more asking about "significance". How can you do something "significant". What is significant for you? That's what matters. There's always millions of super critical and significant problems in the world that you could solve: only matters is what ones do you care about yourself. If you don't care about it, you probably cannot really have an impact in significant way.

So I guess you have to maybe find out what you really care about first. Then the answer may seem natural to you about what to do. How can you find this? I guess, get more life experience and try many things, and reflect on your experiences, thoughts and feelings to know yourself better, and to know the world better: then you can make better choices for you in it. :)

But if just not overthink, disconnect from your own mental and emotional drama. Do meditation and yoga. Let your life be happy. Watch some Sadhguru videos on youtube. You can probably not figure things out when your mind is racing in this kind of way.
Yes that happens, but I am not arguing about whether we get faster from repetition. I am saying that after a sustained practice and repetition, there exists a hard limit. Pianists cannot play at 100000 keys/minute.

I spend solid 6 hours a day on vim. Almost every day. I don't look at the keyboard or what I am typing. I don't even think about what I am typing.

However, searching for 2 letters is a constant time operation and cannot be optimized away with repetition. You still need to go search for a word that starts with "ha" if you're trying to moving to a word "hackernews". THAT takes time and mental compute. This is very different from not looking at keyboard keys or your argument about a pianist.

Whatever that search time is exceeds the ease of using a mouse (for me). Trust me, it is not about practice.
>Those corps chose to make the web terrible a little bit more every day: tracking

Tracking can make sites better because it gives them data to improve the site.
Because it's not entirely their fault. Providing easy access to suicide is dangerous to people who suffer from mental illness, children or no. They may have well been seeking help for their children, but then along comes Amazon and sells them easy access to something they can use in a moment of psychosis to harm themselves.

Saying that Amazon is not culpable is like saying Amazon would not be culpable in an overdose death if they were selling heroin to children in withdrawal, because the parents should have been more careful. Sure, they should have, they can't discharge the blame. But the source of the substance is also culpable.
> The Forgotten Operating System That Keeps the NYC Subway System Alive

It's OS/2. Hardly forgotten.