skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did a my first paid software development pretty much exactly 30 years ago, specifically I was hired to port a word processor from the Amiga to the Commodore 64. So my experience is mostly related to the word of 8-bit home computers, already a dying world by then, and I wouldn't be able to tell how working in an office was like as a was still in school at the time and it was a side project.

The source code is here, by the way: https://github.com/mvindahl/interword-c64

Still, a few general observations about that particular corner and that particular time of software development:

- There were multiple successful 8-bit platforms, all of which were very different from each other. Different makes of CPU, different custom chips, different memory layout. You could be an expert in one and an absolute novice in others.

- The platforms were more constrained, by magnitudes. A very limited color palette, far fewer pixels, far less RAM, and far slower CPUs. For a semi-large project, it could even become a challenge to keep the source code in memory and still have room for the compiled machine code.

- On the upside, the platforms were also far more stable and predictable. A Commodore 64 that rolled out from the factory in 1982 would behave identically to one built five years later. Every C64 (at least on the same continent) would run code in exactly the same way.

One thing that followed from the scarcity and from the stability is there was an incentive to really get close to the metal, program in assembly language, and to get to know the quirks and tricks of the hardware. Fine tuning an tight loop of assembly code was a pleasure and one could not simply fall back on Moore's law.

It was a simpler world in the sense that you didn't have to check your code on a number of machines or your UI on a number of window sizes. If it worked on your machine, it could be assumed to work everywhere else.

Another thing that I remember is that there was more friction to obtaining information. The internet wasn't a thing yet but there were text files flowing around, copied from floppy to floppy, and you could order physical books from the library. But a lot of learning was just opening up other people's code in a mchine code monitor and trying to understand it.

Some of these things started to change with the Amiga platform, and once PCs took over it was another world, with a plethora of sound cards and graphics cards and different CPU speeds that people had to deal with.
Syncthing isn't a real backup, it's a live copy with delayed synchronisation.
Those things you say are well known are in general new to me at least. What are the main references/links for these arguments?
I say this every time one of these pops up: Just do it yourself. Just get a $5 Linode or a Cloudflare account, make a Hugo/Pelican/whatever site and go.

These niche microblogging sites are so small and insignificant that you can never ever trust them to survive (or even persist). Just do it yourself from the very beginning and you'll have a much better time.
And Oxygen (the default theme), used a depressing gray. On KDE 4, I used Fusion or Cleanlooks (a port of the Clearlooks GTK theme).

KDE 5 went the other way and Breeze looks great. I sometimes try other theme but always come back to Breeze. I even used Breeze on GNOME and found it better-looking than Adwaita.
That's the elder Futhark isn't it? It was out of fashion during the Viking age.
Instagram fixes outage that told millions their accounts were suspended
Japan’s empty villages are a warning for China
They provide the capital so that building exists. If there weren't a chance or probability for it to generate income and to increase in value. A few would pay for it in first place and even then only for personal use. Thus resulting to system where to start business you first must outright build the building with loans or buy from some failed place. As no one would build for you to rent.
I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts.

Elon has proposed selling blue check marks for $240/year. That's a lot of money for a lowly academic and nothing to a rich kid who wants to shout about their chosen topic. If that happens your heuristic for quality is going to break down very quickly.

This isn't a criticism of Elon's idea. Blue check marks has always been a verification that the account isn't an imposter. They've never been a mark of subject matter authority. As a business strategy selling them makes a lot of sense; even more so if people believe they're buying credibility.
On the other hand, our progression has allowed us to overcome challenges that could have been extinction-level events otherwise. Who’s to say what happens if we stagnate and don’t get a COVID vaccine out in time to largely stunt the disease? What sort of knock-on effects might that have had on other areas of progress?
Yeah, imagine if Windows was made up of many simple and interchangeable components for which alternatives were easily available from sources other than Microsoft? Don't like services? Choose among half a dozen alternative background process management options, without affecting logging or file system layout, or listening to inbound network connections...
In every possible way!

Whole books could be written about this. I limit myself to a few areas which are important in modern software development.

Set theory
Set theory is encountered at every turn. Arrays, merge, filter. Especially in the SQL area the creation of collections is nothing else than set theory.

Functional Programming
If you understand the basics of mathematical functions, you can easily get into functional programming and also realize how extremely lousy the clumsy explanations of others on this topic are, when they try to deal with the topic without mentioning mathematical concepts.

Nuances
Apple's Swift language uses the keyword "let". It comes from mathematics: let a = 3. People without a mathematical background often grumble, which is why the otherwise common term "var" is not used. A subtle test on math from Apple and thus also an homage.

Sorting, graphs
Hardly anyone needs to implement sorting procedures by hand, but knowing them can be very helpful and used to be very, when every millisecond and every byte counted. It is similar with graphs. An extremely powerful tool, and very simple in the basics.

Data Science
DS is, in simple terms, applied mathematics, not magic.

Compression algorithms, 3d games, matrix multiplication, generative art - I stop at that point. Apple/Google Maps wouldn't exist in the form it does if it weren't for graphs, generative art, and much else.

In short, math helps very much in every way. If only to realize how little others understand about it and want to fill the vacuum with marketing terms, as from my point of view just in the field of Data Science.

If you just want to cobble together a few buttons for a frontend, you can get by just fine without math. Otherwise, it helps a lot not to neglect the subject, because it's fun.
Also confidentiality can be broken.
Well I have 25 years of experience with configuration management, including over 10 years having lead the development of one of the major tools in the space, and I don't waste time doing configuration management on my laptop, I just back it up. You can go ahead and do configuration management of your laptop if that gives you enjoyment, but it is entirely over the top to say that is an "unhealthy attitude".
It is best what we have and doing pretty good job https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/03/Famine-death-rate... and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-w...
Reasoning about the whims of an all-powerful being, whether through logic or thousand year old books is rather obnoxious.
The only thing you need for MAD is for someone to underestimate the other side's dead hand capabilities. Which is happening as we speak.
I'll bite, because we're humans. Humans are complex social creatures with many needs that we fulfill throughout our days. Being efficient is good, sure, but being efficient through the alienation of individuals from their communities, their culture, and themselves trades away something essential.

I used to believe efficiency above all else. But as I've gotten older I've come to realize that efficiency is only good to a point. After that point we lose what makes us human.

Same with profits and performance.
In my experience, most news nowadays has an agenda: selling itself. Newspapers and the main tv news have become far more clickbaity and far less informative. These used to be fairly decent sources of news; nowadays, you'll learn what some folks in your country are shouting on twitter, how b-rank celebrities are messing up their lives, and what's happening in the nation and in the US. Perhaps 2-3 tidbits of big international news.

You'll have next to no clue what's happening in middle nor South America, Africa, China, India, the rest of Asia, or the Arab peninsula.

In short: a lot of news nowadays has the agenda of selling itself and takes time to select stories and spin headlines for this. It has become genuinely harder to stay reasonably informed about what's going on in the world.
Since you'd get more pay without these protections, you can save the excess for a rainy day.

People should save for a rainy day, anyway. Why must the employer be their parents?

I don't buy the idea that people in a free country like the US somehow found the one and only job they could ever have.
I'm loving the related diffoscope utility (new to me)

[1] https://diffoscope.org/

It did a fantastic job of highlighting the few changes in a tree of XML "one liner" files (each file one ~ 25 Kb text line).
Even victory formation, this is an ultra cautious time waste.
It’s also a thing in association football (soccer). Teams are praised for passing the ball around aimlessly denying the opposition possession to defend a lead. It’s boring to watch, unless it’s your team.
Technological solutions to social problems are the root of all evil.

The solution doesn’t lie in the cryptocurrencies or similar systems.

This only results in more cat and mouse games, nothing else.

Ah, we also waste a lot of energy, I bet this is not important in the midst of climate change and energy crisis we’re having.
Hypothetical; somehow the total dollar impact of the divergence from an ideal timeline, including the cost of detection, correction, and the related punishments / restitution etc is totaled. For figures that are emotionally priceless the actuarial figures used in major disaster calculation will be used.

However the crime example also isn't very useful. Crimes aren't discouraged based on money cost, but a cost that is emotional and related to maintaining order and stability for society.
Do not believe in universal advices that magically change your life. Including this one.
Ansible is like a fifth wheel on a car, since all of the configuration can be done inside of OS packages, and orchestration can be done via SSH (which is exactly how Ansible does it). Put those two together and Ansible is a solution to a non-existent problem.
Mozilla continues the war against Firefox users in an effort to make it ever more Chrome-like.
Previous discussion from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884191
Arguably Twitter still doesn’t have mass-market culture fit outside a few bubbles. User growth has long been stuck. Their recent study shows that active users drop off at an alarming rate.
I wonder why those countries that "stimulate" their economies tend to do poorly.
You wait a bit until it is merged and you get it with updates. Then you click on it in settings.
> Gnome is the boring, serious, stop-fiddling-and-get-things-done UI.

Gnome these days is the my-way-or-the-highway kind of uncle.

They're actively hostile to user theming, for example, and keep removing features simply because they don't think users need them, like desktop icons.

Their file browser is horrible to use. Their image viewer is anaemic.

They keep finding new ways to dumb their applications down, to make things less "confusing" for the users, I suppose.

They adopted MacOS-style headerbars, but ignored Apple's solution to the lack of functionality that brings ~ their Menu Bar.
Why would anyone invest anything for something that doesn't produce profit? Developed properties sell because they are expected to generate profit. And in future higher such. If they didn't it would make more sense just to sit on pile of cash instead of deteoriting building.
Operational information regarding OpenSSL 3 vulnerability
> virtue signaling

I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote. And if you've had the luck/misfortune of becoming famous, should you not use the attention and reach you wield to focus on issues that you think are important in society?

> Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month.

A) They're not for validation. They're to combat fraud and misinformation through impersonation.

B) This is far from a done deal. All we know is Elon in his infinite wisdom is considering this, thinking - like you - that this is a pure ego play for people. He still may pull the trigger and destroy the very concept. Or the people at Twitter that he doesn't fire and don't quit change his mind.

It's a terrible idea, and I - an Elon skeptic - believe he's smart enough to figure that out eventually.
Forms give you validation errors or warnings instantly tho
Yes, I stopped reading the news, and for some time I felt "bad" about it -until I read this article:
http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when...
>thought that systemd was generally hated?

If it was generally hated there would be a lot more support for the distros that don't have systemd. There isn't. Except for alpine, all of them are extremely niche, half of them are dead, the other half barely have enough people to stick around for a release a year. Even alpine is kinda niche, it's mostly used as a way to make lightweight docker containers, rather than as a distro that stands on its own, the fact it uses musl as its libc means you can't use it on a server that has nvidia gpus for machine learning, you can't use it on a desktop where you need a browser capable of DRM, you can't use it on a personal computer if you ever intend to install a video game etc.

I have -yet- to hear anyone in my life actually use something like Devuan, the systemd-less fork of Debian, in a production environment.
Six years after their first release, instead of standing on their own as a distribution, they're still deeply angry and obsessed with systemd and this is the level of professionalism they exhibit on social media :
https://twitter.com/DevuanOrg/status/1586963662295687169

Of course, one of the twitter comments underneath is "systemd macht frei".

One of the things the official devuan account retweets :
https://twitter.com/jaromil/status/1544618996833583104
"It's 2022 and the master of systemd is now working for Micro$oft https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lennart-Poet... this the last bit
@phoronix
omits. This is a classic cybernetic strategy: to become the master of a feedback loop you create and continuously adjust the framework in which nodes interact."

I think that says enough about the sort of irrational people we're dealing with?

People who hate systemd are very, very vocal, and highly unproductive.
On the junior colleagues: be careful how you measure they outperformed you. Features per month isn’t the only measure. Maybe you are thinking things through more or have more responsibilities or help others on the team more. Maybe your code has less bugs.

I have slowed down over time. I think some of that is not so much age but the complex stacks we need to operate with these days.

Also I have fatigue. That reduces the period of continuous concentration.

I do not have alcoholism. I have stopped alcohol though I don’t miss it (don’t need to be in a stuper on top of fatigue).
>> Yes, we took the wrong turn.

As long as there is scarcity there will be competition and a "rat race"

I would say we have two real scarcities left remaining: energy and the conjoined pair food/water.

It can be argued that that the latter is entirely dependent on the former and the failure of modernity was our collective inability to adopt/secure nuclear power in the period between 1940-1970, the global adoption and security of which would have pushed us very close to a post-scarcity economy and the major cultural (re)evolution that would entail.

Instead it was weaponized resulting in its demonization by reactionaries and the poisoning of it as "toxic" in the public discourse and we are now stuck in Adam Smith style economies of warfare that will eternally just create new scarcities in new cycles. I would imagine major warfare will soon begin towards the middle/end of this century over habitable space and water scarcities all problems of our own creation.

Just my $0.02
The discover page is currently just a bunch of manually curated posts from the platform. I don't want to create a feed of the latest posts because a lot of folks are just experimenting on the platform and it will end up being an overwhelming, incoherent feed, something that i'm trying to actively design against.

My goal is to have people invite their friends and other people they know to write on the platform, and follow their nicheless blogs. When that is the case, the default feed will end up being populated with posts that will be more contextual. However, I will admit I am not sure how to reach this goal just yet. It's still early days and I'm still experimenting.

Happy to hear any ideas :)
The element/attribute distinction is because HTML is a markup language, where the primary content is text and markup is used to add structure and metadata.

You can eliminate attributes to get a simpler format, but it isn't really a markup language anymore, since the distinction between text and markup is removed. It is just a generic data structure, like JSON or s-expressions.
I use Syncthing as a transitory step in my (mobile photos and videos) backup process.

I also set it as "receive only", so any accidental deletes don't cascade.
I saw a couple of people move to cohost.org. Some people are moving to Mastodon.
The problem is when you are using propaganda as the source of information that the life of your family depends on.
The problem is how loosely or tightly the parameters are set.

Too tight: all actions lead to at least one person getting injured in the far future.

Too loose: some portions of the demographic are expendable to achieve the goal.
Maybe what you say it's true but according to a survey[0] it's the most popular app/site U.S. teens use after YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. And excluding YT, the two others and Snapchat have about the same usage.

[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...
I dunno, I just feel like in my time playing pretend DevOps, I've just ended up learning how to use Terraform/Puppet/Ansible/whatever and now all of my infra actually is cattle, even though I think 9 out of 10 devs in my shoes would have gone the pets route.

It was some extra work to set up, but now I feel supremely confident in the hardiness of the infra, and can scale it at will with some small tweaks.

Is it perfect? Heck no! But I know for a fact when I go the "pets" route it ends up being more work in the end for me than just biting the bullet and learning a new tool.

I just like knowing stuff! I enjoy diving in and getting my hands dirty learning the "best" way to handle a use case, or at least setting things up to be well understood if I ever have to pass it off to someone else more qualified than me.
Ask HN: Are you looking to automate your Cron Jobs?
Are you tired of writing Cron jobs again and again over your database? Do you want something to be more GUI based where you can just make rules and set the frequency of the Cron job and it starts to run automatically?
> this change generally undermines their trust in SourceHut

It does. What are you going for next? Gambling software? Piracy software? Redsec tools?

Understandable to ban crypto specific software that enable scamming (and general scamming software). But to generalize an entire ecosystem?
New PWR production is a resource-constrained, overly expensive non-solution that does nothing except indebt the recipient and make them dependent on the producer for fuel. You'd need to increase Uranium mining tenfold to provide the initial fuel load to match current levels of renewable installation.

By all means invest in breeders, but the very precious U235 reserves should be kept for CANDUs to produce necessary isotopes for other purposes until there is one that works.
cant wait to see what you do next!
"GDP is a concrete measure that is difficult to fake"

Government expenditure on services is included in GDP at cost. Transfers to individuals are not.

Transfer the same to an individual in return for their hours and it will be included in GDP. Instant boost of GDP with no material change in output.

It's very easy to fake because GDP isn't all transfers, it's just some of them and like all dividing lines the one chosen is largely arbitrary.
Europe is working on this and the EU recently passed laws to open up digital ecosystems and improve competition and market conditions for smaller players.

While these won't directly apply to other markets and may not even be that successful, such legal precedence have a tendency to spark regulatory and legislative action around the world.
First, what does "massive growth in government" even mean?

1. the amount of money it spends

2. the amount of interference in the workings of the marketplace, usually called "unfunded mandates" where they put burdens on businesses

> I feel like you're hinting at some kind of alternative that I can't possibly guess at.

A much more limited government.
> The obituaries are on the side as well, which is convenient

Indeed, I always check to see if my name is in it.
tbh I'd rather it didn't try to replace twitter, it works fine the way it is for me
You as a private person are the last entity to be cut off from the power grid.

It’s the big consumers in the industry that are cut off first.

Oh, and the fact that the grid has become more unstable is even reported by the German federal agency responsible for the power grid.

According to them, there was a new record last winter regarding the number of interventions from the grid operators.

See: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Sac... (page 8)

I’m not going even to argue against all the other bullshit that the author in the original article is coming up with.
Terminal user interface
What happened over at Gitea? New drama? I'm ootl
Thanks Leke. I currently have no clue. I don't want to pursue the advertising route unless I absolutely have to. I might try and take some inspiration from Twitter Blue and create something similar in the future. The platform is still in its early days though, so I want to see where it goes before making any rash decisions.

Got ideas? I'm happy to hear them!
For example look at the "New" in the dark screen. N/e too wide compared to e/w.
We stopped using Lerna.js for monorepos