skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My mother has an impressive library at home and I wonder what I will do with it someday. Ideally I would have a library take it as it, including the fantastic and less fantastic books (some are rarities, some are worthless).

We were trying to talk her into that already with my brother, but first she looked at is as if we started to run naked in the street, and then kindly asked us to mind our business :)

We managed, after years of effort, to talk her into using a digital reader (I do not remember how we managed to do that). She was always against, and then tried for a week, which turned into two and it is now two years she is using this almost exclusively.

Which is good because she is reading one or two books per week and loves to build the queue of what is left. Least time I checked, it was 100 books.

My father once decided to put some order in her library, starting with a small set of shelves. He sorted the books by size (or alphabetically, I do not remember). It was at a time my mouth was at the hospital, we drove her back home and discovered with her the cleanup, and a proud husband.

We sat comfortably with my brother with some imaginary popcorn to watch the scene what my father was fleeced alive after my mother realized that all her mess (that she knew by heart) was gone.

So yes, books are difficult to get rid of for some people.
> Natural languages are considered dead when they lose their last native speaker. Similarly when the last person being able to use a programming languages dies, we can consider that language dead.

Someone "able to use a programming language" more directly parallels someone able to speak a language at all, by which measure Latin would not yet be dead. If you're going to draw the line there, that would be what linguists term an "extinct language".

It's hard to draw parallels to natural language because there are no native speakers of programming languages. The closest parallel I can think of is that a language can be considered dead when no new projects are started in it. Once you've reached that point, the remaining work in the language is maintenance, which is comparable to people studying and translating old Sanskrit texts.

Alternatively, a language can be considered dead when it has stopped changing and frozen in its final form.

By either of these measures a lot of these still aren't dead, but my bet would be that COBOL counts.
Depends on the instance. I have signed up in hachyderm.io and its okay
Microsoft’s takeover of GitHub was more or less a model takeover, though (and, well, very surprising to those of us used to the old Microsoft). People had concerns, but they largely didn’t come to pass. This is very much, well, the opposite of that. If anything, Elon-Twitter is even _more_ of a mess than people had expected.

I think my mastodon account is at about 30% the following and follower count of my old Twitter account. But it’s largely the _interesting_ 30%; I stopped using twitter a few weeks ago and don’t feel I’m missing out.
I'm mostly using Firefox on Arch and it doesn't suffer from this problem. It updates when I want it to update, meaning when I do my daily update with my distros package manager.
Okay so I tried to join his new mastadon server and it says I can't.

So...what?
Those have never done well. They want the angry/upset reaction they can't get in an echo chamber; the Parlers, Truth Socials, Gabs etc. will never give them this.

They're already asking Musk to stop lefties from being able to even block them; it's the same phenomeon as incels. Free speech was never enough; they want an audience guaranteed, too. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1604052966839062528
> Be generous; you even said in your previous sentence you don't know if it's common or not, so how do you know developers refuse to implement basic compression? If it's that easy, I'm sure there are plenty of AAA game studios (including mine) that will hire you to just implement basic compression.

The thing I said I didn't know whether it was common was keeping assets in compressed form in memory. I admit I don't know much of the specifics of how game rendering works. What I do know something about is the extremely poor compression applied to many video games in their on-disk form. I'm willing to grant that your studio may indeed be an exception to this, but the general principle isn't possible to deny. Just by enabling lossless Windows file compression on a game folder, you can frequently see the size of a game on disk drop by 50% or more, as I discuss in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042164

Surely a lossless format designed specifically for encoding assets would be even more effective and fast than generic Windows file compression!
Never heard of these “short snorters” before, but the tradition surrounding it reminds me of military challenge coins [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin
It's fine for my use case. I only go to twitter through links, mostly from here and Reddit. IMO Mastodon has a slightly better interface for linked to reading but it's six of one, one half dozen of the other at the end of the day. Occasionally I read replies on tweets and always regret it...
This needs proper data because a lot of people argue the opposite. The other is then just called gaelic or gaa.

Also, soccer was invented by the English, let the virus spread, then switched back to football.
There are many Mastodon providers, just like there are many email providers.

How fast it is depends on the provider you use.
> How does one find a good Mastodon server?

Hm, what makes a good server? I think for me, I want: not going to disappear, high uptime, low latency, moderate moderation.

You can measure moderation by going to most server's /about page, to see which servers they've limited interactions with.

I'm on hachyderm.io. It's good, but could be better. I expect it will remain at least at this baseline level of quality, so I'm too lazy to search out other options.

My wife is on wandering.shop. I'd say it struggles much more with latency/availability, but is still fine, especially if you use an app, which can paper over some of the latency issues.
This website is heavily left leaning, like most of the internet these days.
> I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person

What a weird thing to say after he killed twitter with his "process". Perhaps this dumpster fire is the best view yet into what he really believes, and how he really runs his companies. Elon is a modern day Kissinger
I really wish I could see Twitter's internal dashboards. One thing I have a hard time estimating is, outside of my bubble, how is Twitter doing? Are these things hurting Twitter? Is the controversy helping it?

I can't imagine what would motivate the decision to ban Mastodon links. Were they really losing users to Mastodon? That would be a huge problem, but not one that banning links would solve.
I’m not so sure. I left a month ago and apart from the current tire fire, I’m just glad not to be using it. Or anything else. It was almost strictly a waste of my time, and I’d really lost sight of how rarely it wasn’t wasteful.

At this point it genuinely seems as though doing nothing would be better than using Twitter. It produces a convincing illusion of being entertaining or even useful at times, but for me it truly and wholly lacked any significant utility or fulfilling elements.

Apart from HN, I’m totally off the social media train and fairly content with it being that way.

I suppose PG has more use for social media than I do, so the case may be a little different. Even so, I doubt very much that him returning to Twitter (or anyone for that matter) is inevitable.
Disclaimer: Novice, who also signed up. I've barely looked into anything, this info is just my experience.

So it's mostly like email. Logic that would work for email i think works for Mastodon. Just like with email you can generally email anyone and anyone emails you, the same applies to mastodon in my experience. However, if a server is being too <insert reason here> for your server's admins, they may block the entire thing. I don't know the finer details of how blocking can take place, but my loose belief is that you won't see posts from blocked servers. Though i may still be possible to explicitly follow someone on a blocked server.. i'm unclear there.

This amount of moderation will obviously vary from server to server. It is one of the criteria you'd look at for choosing a server.

Likewise local community is another, if you should care. There is a special Local feed, which i've found to be quite handy if the server you're on is specialized to a content type.

As for choosing your server, i think the above two points are useful metrics to help you decide. However if you're just looking to dip your toes in, pick any server. You can always decide to switch later, as you can set your old account to indicate that you moved to a different account. I've seen several accounts like this and it seems to be sane and easy.

So far i've been quite happy with Mastodon.
Both coaches duel with pistols.
I get it is bad but isn't Soylent Green where they turn old non-sick people into food with a nature documentary in color as payment?
Which instance are you on? Mastodon is decentralized, there may be servers that are overloaded whereas other are fast. Like email.

I haven't noticed any big differences in speed, i use both Mastodon for iOS and Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ ), a PWA. Just add it to your homescreen and it will behave like a native app (and sometime in 2023 Apple has said they will add push notifications to PWAs).
Are you confusing Paul Graham with Peter Thiel?

PS: You're posting this on pg's site.
He could have seen it earlier but I appreciate that he is able and willing to change his angle.
Then maybe you should refrain from commenting?
Code is the base model in more recent iterations [0]

[0] https://beta.openai.com/docs/model-index-for-researchers
There are of course always exceptions. It's funny, I'm on the reverse of that, I'm the dad, have pretty bad kidneys (30 years of kidney stones will do a lot of damage) but there isn't a hair on my head that would think of accepting a kidney from one of my children so that I can live longer.
Yes, you're right :) I'm still just star struck with how well he did the whole tournament, is all.
I simply do not subscribe and except things like Netflix only use products that offer perpetual license
Batteries are a thing, and continue to improve & diversify. The same arguments about pace apply here, too.
Footheadchestknee ball doesn't quite roll off the tongue as well, so nohandball it is.
Well, when it comes to Elon vs 8B people, money could be one metric.
I do think there’s a fundamental difference between sport (where we explicitly want to create a level playing field for fun) and the economy (where we’re competing with each other, but also against the universe).

We might find that there are some tasks where having people take on risky enhancements really helps “team humanity.” But certainly wouldn’t want “takes on risky enhancements” to become a trait required to get by.

I’d look at it as like minimum wage or OSHA. You could provide yourself a competitive advantage by working for less than minimum wage, or by being willing to work in an unsafe environment. But as a society, we’ve decided that engaging in that race to the bottom is not something we want to do.
This is correct, but you can still post any URL in your Insta posts, it just won't be clickable. Twitters rules expand that to the text itself, as well as "obfuscation". For example, posting "instagram dot com/username" is not allowed on Twitter.
You're being downvoted because HN is a lolbertarian paradise, but this is correct. He wants the Parler audience.
It's not short-sighted, Twitter is simply championing free speech.

Free speech is defined as the intersection between anything-thats-legal and anything-that-doesn't-upset-its-owner.
Great, let’s make a subscription based service to help people easily self-host…
I'm a super bad swimmer and my skin is hypersensitive to chlorine but this sounds like it is worth investigating anyway, thank you!
>It's news to me that that users are not allowed to mention other social networks' accounts on Twitter anymore.

Isn't that a mischaracterization though? The new policy they announced, as far as I've seen, only applies if the account is "solely" promoting other brands. [0]

> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.

[0]: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126541959168...

EDIT:

The tweet linked seems to be the mischaracterization and not this take.

Reading the full policy[1] does say that, while their tweets don't.

[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
When I disagree with someone, I do not necessarily think they're stupid. That's a needlessly polarizing mindset.
only if people haven't been paying attention to the absolute shitshow that musk was doing with twitter. elon is not a smart man even if he cosplays one.
> but +/- 30% pricing pretty much wouldn't affect if I take them or not

But it's enough to prefer Waymo over Uber and that's all it takes.
This isn’t official is it?
Enhance Firebase Emulator Logs with pretty, color, and quiet
A Node.js app that enhances the Firebase emulator logs: pretty format, color, and "quiet" feature to remove system logging.
Still nothing compared to the billions so many VCs have lost on crypto this year ignoring those far more obvious red flags. No matter how bad Elon damages Twitter at the very least its actually still generating revenue. I cannot tell what crypto generated.
Latinx can never be the right word.
I've been looking for a meaningful challenge-coin like something to keep on my person, and coincidentally been wanting to look into stoicism more. Thanks for the link.
Being deaf is an inherently negative aspect. You either have the ability to hear, or you do not. If you do not, it is a dis-ability. No one wants to lose an ability to do something.

Someone who lives an extensive period of time without an ability may have learned how to live without this ability. They learn to cope and affirm their life with its faults in their current state. Offering the ability they lost and have learned to live without may be declined because of the affirmation of their life as it is. It could be declined because the transition is uncomfortable as well. Either way, being deaf is still negative, they've just psychologically coped well.

If you had the choice, would you choose that your child be deaf or not? That you be deaf or not? If one isn't deaf, would they choose to become deaf or not? This entire argument results from academic nonsense that anyone outside that context can see through.
Pick any other one, sign up there, then click the "follow" button on his profile for instructions.
Where is "here" exactly?
(a b . c), as an object is an improper list.

The printed notation is a dotted list.

By an informal metonymy, the internal object is called a dotted list. It's only an informal usage among Lisp coders. The correct terminology is "improper" for the object and "dotted" for the spelling.

Note that (a b c . nil) is dotted, but it's the same as (a b c) which is proper.

Unfortunately, the Common Lisp specification encodes the "dotted list" informality in the Glossary. Common Lisp does things like that.

Furthermore Common Lisp uses "dotted list" as an essential term denoting a subset of of "improper list". An "improper list" is circular or not terminated by nil. A dotted list is only the latter.

That's in spite of the fact that a circular list will print with the dot notation: #1=(a b c . #1#)! Circular lists are dotted when completely printed, under the circle notation.

Another problem is that the append function and others support the idea of a non-nil atom being an empty dotted list. For instance (append '(a b c) 'd) will work and produce (a b c . d). Yet the "dotted list" definition excludes such an atom. If we go by the presence of a dot, that is correct, but then we know from circular lists not being dotted that that isn't the criterion.
Right because it’s really hard for someone to set up a git server somewhere and change the origin.
Did he change his angle, or is all of it (the initial statement, the leaving, the clarification) just a rich man's self-interest, and no real semantic content?

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604557444247539712
It's not one app, it's many servers, individually hosted. The one paulg chose appears to be slower than, say, the one I'm using:

https://mas.to/@paulg

https://mastodon.social/@terretta
OK, but to be fair[1], that's what we want, right? Our thought leaders should change their minds when they turn out to have been wrong, and correct. pg is doing good here, and that needs to be celebrated and not mocked. We all get stuff mixed up.

[1] And for the record I think pg indeed ignored WAY too many red flags for WAY too long in this particular case.
Most people older than 40 are living on borrowed time given the medical progress of the last 100 years. I would have been dead twice without now.
>were likely reviewed/edited by a third person

or else just had the benefit of more time to think about them. i certainly know i say some dumb stuff, but if i write it down and think about it for a week before saying it to anybody else, i'm going to censor like 90% of the stuff that comes out of my head.
Such as? The stuff that actually makes sense (e.g. "I think therefore I am", the veil of ignorance, trolley problems etc.) can all be explained in less than a minute.
Large distributed systems that have already been built can often limp along for a very long time before falling over. I would give Twitter at least another 3-6 months for stuff to start breaking.
There’s another one: the medium is the message
For sure. Given that Musk was fired from [deleted, see note 1] and PayPal, you'd think they might have had more questions. But people look at failure much more carefully than they look at success.

I think the next wave of interesting questions is around the extent to which Musk contributed the apparent successes, SpaceX and Tesla. We won't know for a long time, as a lot of the people in the know have a strong incentive to keep quiet. But one possible explanation is that he is good at PR and using hype to raise money, but is not a competent manager without help. Consider, for example, this bit from someone who says they were a SpaceX intern: https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...

I asked a former SpaceX person about that and was told it seemed right, that SpaceX worked because everybody believed in the mission and worked hard at managing Elon so that they could get the actual work done.

[1] I incorrectly thought he was fired by the board from Zip2, but they just refused to make him CEO. Thanks to dontknowwhyihn for the correction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042958
I think about this a lot as well, but I always come back to the idea that many companies raise venture capital and they need consistent revenue to be able to raise future rounds. They get that predictability with the subscription model and in exchange they provide a product that gets consistent updates and new features.
I agree with your sentiment though — as a consumer, I don’t love how I don’t have much control over the products I use. I might subscribe for a certain set of features, but those might be removed or changed down the road as the company’s needs change.
But ultimately people have come to expect that their products just work indefinitely and it takes a ton of resources to make that happen, hence the subscription.
Do you have any other ideas for models that enable a company to continue making money after the initial purchase? I don’t think I’d be opposed to a model where we pay for each time the product delivers value. Some examples that come to mind are paying per news article or paying a small fee each time I save a design in Figma, etc. But I think that gets super complicated to explain to customers and it makes it hard to justify charging enough to not only support that specific feature while also earning enough to invest in future product features and improvements.
QuickCheck (not NN) generates test cases.

GPT can already comment on code.
You can join any other Mastodon server, and still follow him even though you're on a different server. Just put his handle (the one you can find on his site) on the search bar of your Mastodon server after logging in.
Musk seems to be speedrunning into Howard Hughes status.

He has so much wealth that, like Hughes, he could alienate every business contact and still spend the rest of his life making leftfield investments and watching movies naked in a dark hotel room. (Well, replace watching movies with tweeting, I suppose.)
I don't think anyone would say that in Spain, as long as they are not having a stroke.
Not updating isn't a solution. What works for me is a systemd service that does a snap refresh on boot. At least I have some controll on when it updates.
Ask my mom!
no i’m not confused, and yes i’m aware where i am
I am also disabled and it's a farce to pretend that it isn't abnormal and negative. We're in the era of pretending we don't know things we know and its asinine. I really hope modernity survives this era of enforced stupidity.
Using Twitter must be what it feels like to submit oneself to an authoritarian regime
WOW!! That is extraordinary. I had no idea. Curious what 2026 will look like.
The Jedi Fails Because of Emotions
i've had the same thing happen in both chromium and firefox. what i hate most about snap though is the constant popups telling me the close the application. but closing the application doesn't actually trigger it updating, it basically wants you to close the application and then wait several hours until their cron job to update or whatever runs again. so I just get these constant pop ups
Another asterisk on Free** Speech Absolutism.
> its roots lie in Spain's colonization of South American countries.

They forgot Central American countries :(
LIDAR _and_ high resolution/detail 3D scans known ahead of time.
There is always a tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176
How do I pick one?
Right? Mass random firings of employees in multiple incompetent waves, blocking and expelling journalists and activists, re-enabling known hate-speech accounts, walking out of press conferences when questioned, spreading QAnon adjacent conspiracy theories... none of this annoyed Paul Graham enough to leave.. and in fact he defended the guy...

But blocking links to Mastodon? That makes him leave? Like, uh, fine, but... maybe he could have not mocked us for pointing out the dysfunction weeks and weeks ago?

Between all the crypto implosions happening and this, wealthy Silicon Valley investor types and their hanger-ons are really having a "moment" these past few months. Sheesh.
It's my feeling that most will be back. But the frothy frenzy will have to burn itself out first.
“Blind review” has blind once but view twice. Ableist!
Hm on the one hand we have survivorship bias, plus the fact that capital accumulates more capital near-automatically at some point, as well as his relative lack of qualms with committing fraud (that he's gotten lucky about going un/under-punished).

But on the other hand, he built some impressive companies, he is the richest person in the world, and he has a lot of gumption, y'know?
> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

It's important to know that moving between servers is fairly well implemented; a few clicks and your followers will automatially migrate over to the new one. Your first pick doesn't have to be final.