skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think you can just cut funding to NASA and expect them to become more efficient. They'll just do less with the same efficiency they have.

The issue here is that a lot of what NASA does is not driven by current market needs. They're doing speculative, curiosity-driven R&D, on the extreme end of the "exploration" arm of exploration/exploitation tradeoff. Even though evidence to date tells us NASA spending (and space exploration in general) has a huge RoI, and there's good reason to suspect it'll continue to be huge indefinitely, it's not easy to quantify in terms and on time horizons the market understands[0]. NASA having less money just means less R&D being done.

Now, I agree the way they go about things could be improved in terms of efficiency. But, unlike with for-profit companies, budget is the wrong knob to turn. Something else must be changed. I have no idea what[1].

Also, one has to be careful comparing e.g. SpaceX and NASA in terms of costs, because for the former, rocketry is a service they sell. NASA isn't there to be in the business of affordable rocket launches, it's there to be in the business of expanding what's possible.

--

[0] - In particular, the market has a really hard time dealing with the idea of work that enriches the society at large - which, from company/investor point of view, is just enriching random third parties.

[1] - In a sense, using money for this in the market economy is a way to side-step figuring out what the problem is - the threat of running out of money makes the companies individually try and do something, and either it works or they die. Obviously, this approach can't work in non-profit R&D.
One thing FP, learned with a suitable language at hand, teaches is, how often we unnecessarily reach for classes, when simple pure functions will do just fine and will be better testable, easier to understand, more reusable, and more composable.
That's a bit silly. I was a Linux user from 1996 to 2015ish, then went to use macbooks almost exclusively. Apple's UI immediately made sense, even if it was remains tad unoptimal for serious use, when comparing to UX masterpieces like i3 and sway.

KDE has always been bit of an awkward horror, and I've given it a shot now and then for their whole existence. The latest incarnation, Plasma, is quite a lot better than it used to be, granted.
You can reduce everything to being religion if you do it this way to the point of the comparison being useless.

HN? Religion. Weight lifting? Religion. Dental hygiene? Religion. Voting? Religion. Functional Programming? Religion. Punk? Religion.
Isn't it happening all the time? Web3, crypto, AI, kubernetes, microservices, docker, server side rendering, SPA, react, graphql, backend in frontend, DevOps, DevSecOps, fullstack, mongodb, new features in mongodb that mimic sql, Restful, mobile, django/rails, agile, kanban. Some of them make sense, some of them make sense for some of the people, some will be forgotten from history. And those forgotten, will reemerge as a newfoundland
The problem is they can't possibly know if they are correct or not, we just don't have enough information about the actual future and what effect actions now might have on it.

Plus it doesn't take into account our individual competencies and nature. It doesn't matter how much I think curing cancer is more important than my current job, I know absolutely zilch about curing cancer. Also I have no idea if I'm actually right about cancer being a top priority, or if curing it is even possible. Meanwhile sick people that doctors and nurses can save using known techniques are dying right now.

Effective Altruism as a principle is fine, it makes a degree of sense. We do need to invest in long term projects, but all this talk of 1% chance of this or that saving humanity is fiddling while Rome burns.
With so many mature distros available, I don't think it's true anymore. Valve has also proven it wrong by launching a mainstream linux device that just works out of the box.
I whole fully agree with you.
That being said, this last sentence…

> Someone needs to explain to the developing generation that this isnt the future.
Tesla has used space characters in internal emails to identify leaks
This is a reminder that the excellent pyenv [0] project can help you manage all your Python versions.

- Set global and per-project python versions

- Not written in Python.

- Shims your PATH

- Linux, Mac, Windows

[0]: https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv
Mastodon is not decentralized, it's federated.

So no, it wouldn't fit any common definition of web3.
Building a private LoRa network (2017)
2016 is accurate. and thank you!

with danger of nitpicking: it's more meta programming that has drawn me to lisp (rather than functional programming). the most recent post on my site describes an aspect of this (datalog for drawings as graphs in common lisp). i figured the distinction is worth pointing out
Fast enough since one most of the time is wasted waiting for io (database, disk). For most situations it is better to choose the tech stack you know and then optimize it afterwards.
Another hard disagree here.

My daily driver personal laptop is a macbook, it's the best machine I've ever owned & my next laptop will most likely be a macbook. My work machine is also a macbook.

But they are not intuitive nor highly "usable". After many years going through various osx/macOS transitions, it's an OS with objectively bad ux in many ways.

That's not to say it's bad software. Apart from the hardware of my personal laptop being great, I also like the OS for a few reasons. UX has multiple components outside of intuitiveness & ease of use:

1. reliability. Things work. It has its bugs but generally speaking the utility functions within the OS work well much much more frequently than windows or linux. Peripherals work. Suspend/sleep/hibernate work. Wifi works. Bluetooth works. Everything works. Without fiddling.

2. Builtin apps are sensibly functional & comprehensive. Disk tools have been built-in & better than Windows forever (even Linux usually has none unless you install gparted). Preview supports pdf editing & annotation (& saved signatures!) - these are things that literally every person needs at some point & I'm not even aware of any windows/linux apps that do these other than paid Adobe Acrobat. That's absurd. Screenshot/image preview support better image annotation than Windows (& still trying multiple linux utilities for this that don't have any annotation at all). Very basic day-to-day shit like this has actually been priorities and covered.

3. Unix-y stuff is good enough. I'm a linux guy so this is still a bit of a step down but it's actually fine. Anything that takes place in a terminal is very comparable to linux (& the builtin emulator is a lot better than what comes bundled with many linux DEs).

But. Everything about the macOS desktop experience is terribly unintuitive and bad. Maximising doesn't work (not configurable, ctrl-click remains hassle forever). Multiple windows within one app is badly supported. Finder window closing behaves different to everything - alt-tabbing to it rarely brings anything to the fore. It took them years to add a way to manually lock your screen without a hot corner.

All of these things are bad for both experienced users & new. There's no trade-off: you don't get some hidden benefit by learning to work around these difficulties. They remain bad.

TL;DR: People use macOS for good logical reasons, despite its objectively bad usability.
Do whatever you want with your own code bases; my responsibility is to make the ones I work on maintainable by other people.

/shrug
Not him but I share the same opinion. I've recently tried Windows 10 and 11 and the thing is trying to make you sign in to a Microsoft.com service from the moment you finish installing it. Dark patterns everywhere during the setup and in order to create a local account you must do weird stuff like inserting invalid Microsoft.com accountname or disconnecting the computer from the network during setup. Are you sure you want to have the """limited""" Windows experience?

Third party software also doesn't help. I shit you not I had to install some Asus software that legit started sending me offers through the main OS notification widget.

Using Windows is like walking through a very crowded Chinese market with lots of nagging merchants trying to pull you in plus AI enhanced security cameras everywhere. SIR HAVE YOU TRIED THE NEW EDGE BROWSER? WHY ARENT YOU USING EDGE?

It's an ad platform that can run program nowdays. I might start calling it BonziBuddyOS.

Now if you compare it with the clean default desktop macOS popular Linux distributions offer out of the box it makes a lot of sense for someone to avoid Windows.
I love this.

I sometimes regret not studying pure math in college, and going down the software engineer (ahem, code monkey) route. There's so much mathematical beauty out there to be discovered and admired.

But I guess money's better this way.
Tokugawa Shogunate
Most of their concerns are addressable by external apps like Rectangle, AltTab and Maccy. Try those, they are free and open source 10x productivity boosters!
The biggest existential threat to any civilization is its own state, surprisingly absent from your list.

A further and more generalized abstraction is that the biggest threat to any civilization are self-interested power centers of any kind. Those can take the form of states, corporations, unions, billionaires, etc. Any entity that begins to operate in its own interest and has vastly disproportionate power when compared to the individuals of which the civilization is made.
When I was writing the article, I used recordings some very helpful people have made of the original DX series patches. You can find some for the DX9 here: https://yamahadx9.com/downloads.html

I figured it was easier than creating my own cable for the DIN cassette interface on the DX100, or TX81Z units that I own!
I take your comments under advisement.

It's true that many of my discussion comments here – especially recently – have been about Wikipedia fundraising.

There are several reasons for this. For one, this is a topic I both care about and am knowledgeable about, and it's also something people often ask questions about in the resulting threads here. My submissions on other topics don't generally result in a lot of discussion of this type.

Another reason is that there simply has been a lot of controversy on Wikipedia about this topic during the past year. My contributions here have mostly focused on aspects of Wikipedia, as this is the area I am most knowledgeable about – from my work as a Wikipedia volunteer and as a contributor and former editor-in-chief of Wikipedia's community newspaper – and therefore the current controversies around fundraising often come up. (This said, many of my Wikipedia-related submissions have nothing to do with fundraising.)

And to be clear, I did not start the Request for Comment on Wikipedia that this thread is about.

There is a lot of great content here. I regularly read other threads and will endeavour to contribute more broadly to discussions. Regards.
You're right. I just assumed they worked in a tech or tech adjacent role.

OP if you're working as a newspaper printing machine repair person disregard everything I said and get a new trade :P
> convince your kid to brush his/her teeth every after meal. all of it is sales, which is more about emotions than logic.

Cute story: I was having trouble getting my 4-year-old to brush his teeth until one night, I had to idea to show him this children's Q&A book that had a page about "why do I have to brush my teeth?" The little cartoon bacteria convinced him that brushing his teeth was a good idea. It was like a light switch in his head; I finished the page and he said, "daddy, I want to brush my teeth now" and walked off to the bathroom.
1) Why do we have a reason to believe there’s a cap to intelligence?

2) No, you don’t need to assume it happens via adding hardware

3) No, you don’t need to assume it can expand by itself

4) We’ve already seen people connecting AI systems to open internet and open internet to command and control of physical systems (cars, utilities, soon weapons systems) - turns out there was no convincing necessary

5) Nanobots also not a necessary assumption

Also, incentives, not charisma, are what steer human behavior. Consider for example if the Bitcoin whitepaper were written by an AI? No escape necessary. No convincing necessary. Yet the idea has managed to marshal enormous amounts of capital, computational power, social power, and even some political clout. IMO there’s no reason to believe the AI looks like a robot terminator rather than an incentive-generating piece of information.
I do some of this in data science when I'm giving strategic support to teams. Be aware that managers generally see you as a cost who doesn't bring financial benefit to the team (whilst the team are desperately asking for practical training so they can deliver quicker).
Find ways to couch your offering in business benefits - you've helped teams avoid expensive bugs or via pragmatic refactoring they've responded to market change faster. Finding believable examples IMHO is actually quite hard.
I've found managers far more open to strategic support (to help the team "go in the right direction"), with things like teaching code reviews and best practices bolted on as secondary benefits.
> Edit, disclaimer: I co-founded a cooperative to help skilled IT people to work independently as freelancers, giving legal advices and a network.

Interesting. Where can I learn more?

I think it would be great for Europe (or at least for Sweden) if bright and productive software engineers stopped working for peanuts and went freelance instead. Would love to help push the needle in that direction.
Join them. The management clearly doesn't care.
The c stdlib is more tightly coupled to the OS then any particular Compiler; and is not changed when you select a particular dialect (though the language standard dose specify what stdlib must support).
That's pretty much what epub files are. You can unzip them and then read the html they contain. You can also use something to strip the html tags and only plain text will remain.
Regarding Turing completeness: It may be of interest that the "PRE" rule allows us to both alter the tape (the input, we're processing) and to switch rule sets (as we are specifying a distinct rule for reprocessing). As rewriting also allows us to simulate the position of a read/write head (by inserting some reserved characters) and this may be matched by rules, as well, there are all the elements of a Turing machine.

(Notably, this is not the only possible approach to problem solving that may be attempted using ELIZA. E.g., the palindrome problem used as an example in the article, doesn't require multiple sets of rules to incorporate state. We could do it also by simple reduction: If the input is a single letter or exactly two instances of the same letter {"A", "B", "A A", "B B"}, it's a palindrome, output this as the final answer. Else, if the first and the last letter are the same {"A … A", "B … B"}, discard them and redo with the remaining middle part. If this rule fails as well, it's not a palindrome, also a final answer.)
MongoDB is web-scale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdnDXsqiPYo
The only practical thing I can think of is things where businesses have to cooperate on something and pay a third party some amount of money to be the trusted ledger.

Like, for example, partnerships to exchange customer loyalty points. But even that has perils, as you could set an exchange rate but somebody has to administer/manage that. And once you're back to a managed ledger, you might as well use contractual terms for trust and a database since a blockchain isn't adding much value.
Humans have very strong instincts against exploitation by peers. I think the appropriate answer here is: "Sure, let's seize the wealth of approximately everyone in a western country." Singling out a particular group, even though it's less seizure in total, raises people's hackles for reasons entirely unrelated to whether redistribution is a good idea.
What motives might they have for suppressing this information?
Overhyping hydrogen as a fuel
>“This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.

I'm still astonished that this is even legal in the US, and even more surprised that there has been 0 talk of employees pushing back in a groupal way (strikes? walkouts? anything?)
Even Windows is the right choice for lots of people. For example, if you want to play some new game, chances are it will work best on a Windows machine with a monster GPU.

I agree with you though - all of the modern OS’s are mostly good enough and have been for quite a while. It feels like a solved problem.

The person who wrote the comment on Reddit may love KDE, but that doesn’t really matter if they need to run XCode. Application requirements drive OS choices and the OS may dictate the hardware.
> Depends on the site; if they coded it correctly and met accessibility guidelines, it would support text sizing of 200% or more.

I agree. But the cold, hard truth is that it just doesn't work.
I would like to follow the HN crowd, but I have no idea if and where they are on mastodon...
Oh man, just want to say what a massive help your videos have been. I’d tried getting into Rust several times before finding your channel this year; and now I feel like I finally get it, not just the how but the why.

Please keep making amazing content for as long as you enjoy it!
Because that's how progress slowly happens? If I have an issue with something, and come up with a possible solution, and then ask why it's not actually done like that... Either other people tell me I'm wrong and explain why, or they agree and things get better.
> Mastodon is not decentralized it's federated

Are you saying that this federation is not a form of decentralization?

I'm pretty sure that Mastodon is not centralised like Twitter is.

This is akin to the pedant/trolls who usually pop up and say "the USA is not a democracy, it's a republic!" in conversations that compare the USA's regular elections to dictatorial autocracies.

https://act.represent.us/sign/democracy-republic
You might want to look at the Lenovo X13s Snapdragon [1]. People have, with some unofficial engagement from Lenovo's Linux technical lead, gotten Linux running on it [2][3]. It is basically a laptop version of the Microsoft ARM Developer Kit, and was released early this year.

1: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/thinkpad-x13s-(13-inch-snapdragon)/
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/vh1xse/setup_linux_on_x13s_snapdragon_thinkpad_megathread/
3: https://youtu.be/YWRbNogRBTw&t=1755
Is it theoretical? In other words, are you making a positive assertion here that the benefit of EA is not actual, and if so, can you cite evidence?
I love the App Store product and what it offers, what I don’t like is the bureaucracy that grew around it.

Because Lunar uses lots of private and reverse engineered APIs, it isn’t allowed on the App Store, so I had to replicate a lot of the distribution myself:

- payments and refunds
- license activation
- anti cracking measures
- automatic (and rolling) updates
- making a website for the app
- SEO (the App Store is quite good at this)
- error reporting and crash data collection
- anonymous analytics
- making sure I’m not mishandling any user data

I mostly opt for the App Store nowadays because it saves me the hassle for all of the above, but it comes with a number of pains and disadvantages:

- no trial mode for one-time purchase apps
- the sandbox is very limiting: no private APIs, no full disk access, no Accessibility Permissions etc.
- the review process is more annoying than helpful
- the user ratings can hurt the business a lot when the product is harder to understand and users leave an angry review because they didn’t read the description before buying the app

For the trial thing I have my own solution where I publish a trial-only build on my website and a link to buying on the App Store when the trial ends.

The sandbox, well I found workarounds for most of my needs [1] but I still skip building some ideas because I know they would never be approved.

The reviews are as annoying as ever [2], I even got my name in a Wired article [3] because of that. They can be very discouraging.

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/window-switcher-app-store/

[2] https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/App%20Store%20review%20timeli...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...
Thank you for the clarification (it’s not nitpicking). I hadn’t read any of your posts recently - I’ll have some reading up to do I see :)
Ah, yes. The infamous 1024-week (19.5 years) GPS epoch. I take back my "two decades" claim.
That's a hopeful upside, that, say an 18 is learning data technology, programming etc. via crypto.

My concern is whether that's what they are learning; too early to tell, of course.

One thing I'm also thinking is that crypto functions like "wokeism" in the sense it seems a parallel right-wing version of the same kind of cultural reformation.

At the same time large retail biz profess their diversity credentials, their heads of research explain how crypto is on some timeline. At the same time a 20yo engages in activism for X, another engages in crypto for Y.

Do we need to "end the patriachy" or "put metriocracy on the blockchain" ?

My concern isnt just the skills issue, but also, everything bound up in the culture around it.

I think we're seeing Tech get to a level of cultural prestige that invites on-mass young-buyin, and mass cultish movements. No doubt finance experienced similar in the 80s.

But, I think, as finance people eventually learned to inculcate some level of cultural scepticism; tech seems it has yet to do so.

In otherwords, we're unprepared for this coming's generation having bought into a tech-culture landscape which is composed of scams.
It would be better if you could do it that way but your workflow surprise me a bit.
Maybe it is because I use column view in finder so folder and sub-folder are both one click.

I use mac because I like (Next/Open/Gnu)Step so maybe that is why things are more intuitive for me.
This.

Mastodon basically shards data via instances. If someone shuts one down, the data there is gone.

Plus, it's not permissionless. Most instances are invite only.
Virtue ethics is dead as an ethos. The stated goal of practically all modern morality is good outcomes. This doesn't seem offhand implausible to me.
It's a reference to this tweet: https://twitter.com/shutupmikeginn/status/403359911481839617
There are really interesting use cases of "Web3"

As an example, consider domains.

Ethereum Name Service domains are currently one of the most popular. If you use these domains, you instantly have access to the 10,000,000 people using MetaMask, and the 50,000,000 people using Brave Browser. They're actually very powerful when considering the centralization of normal domains.

They allow you to create decentralized domains that are

- Easy to remember

These are better than onions because they're easy to remember. There's no centralized host that can try to change the address to trick other people.

- Censorship resistant

I don't think people here are unaware of how domain seizures have impacted services. The domains are controlled by records on a blockchain.

- Controllable by a single person or smart contract

Domains are controlled by private keys or smart contracts. A small group of 10 people could democratically control a domain when they don't trust each other. A DAO could control vote out the CEO that controls where a domain points, and elect a new CEO. There's lots of use cases here.

-----

I could write more, but I'm just trying to show that it provides use cases that Web2 does not currently.