skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate Snap, but from what I experienced, I also don't think that the problem is related to it but some shitty logic in Firefox.

Regarding the "excuse" that it is the package manager that updated the Firefox in background, I saw it repeated a lot of time to deflect the blame, but it is totally not true in my opinion. On my system, I don't allow automatic updates. I have the notification when updates are available, but the system/packages are never updated without me doing it. And still, I noticed multiple times that Firefox breaks suddenly, like that, when nothing was updated on my system for some weeks and everything was working fine.
Worth pointing to but in this case it's not a disagreement over X, it's Elon breaking the law.
The false flag was so damn desperate. It’s natural that we can’t look away. Especially considering I was raised to believe desperation repels people.
Definitely not! It just seems a bit ‘risky’ to use another centralized Twitter-like when Mastodon seems to be working. I’d rather we gave it a try than another centralized service.
The city in the quote above is Oslo. Somehow I omitted that from my comment.
How is it hilarious? I doubt the average English person is a massive fan of Canary Wharf and it’s owners.
Would be cool if there was low resource mastodon server to run for a single user.
PG used to post here but he left because of the negative comments as I remember. A couple of users got banned as well. Twitter allows you to just post and forget without much blow back except for the weird subtweets where people take you out of context. As such successful tweets tend to overgeneralize to avoid nuance or imply that there is nuance but not discuss it. A lot of YC tweeters do this. The problem is we have to take them at their word.

What would be more interesting would be to discuss specific things as evidence for a more general truth.

For example there is a huge criticism of the social sciences in this website (and in general) but none of it is specific criticism of specific hypotheses. (Yes, yes I know people will argue that there are no hypotheses in the social science literature and it is not testable etc... but that is a weak argument and not always true).
I think Musk is intentionally creating controversies, as he can roll them back anytime after a poll. These antics get a lot of press coverage, and no longer impact the price of Twitter shares, so he can play around as much as he wants.
That looks to have some pretty radical politics at its core. No thanks.
I agree he holds those opinions. I just don't think his intent in buying Twitter was to put it in the tank for the right.

It's not clear to me that he had a fully formed intent when he made a bid for it. And a big piece of evidence there was that he tried to weasel out and was forced to buy it. Another bit of evidence is the way he has obviously been impulsively half-assing pretty much everything he's done since he took it over. He does not look like a man with a plan.

But to the extent that he had clear intent, I think it was more about hubris. There's this phenomenon in the food industry where a rich person will basically say, "I have eaten at a lot of restaurants, so I'd be really good at running one!" So they will spend a bunch of money on launching and unless they hired competent industry experts and deferred to them, they'll create a clusterfuck. I think it's a similar deal with Musk: He was a dedicated and successful Twitter user, and he thought he could run it better. Turned out it was harder than it looks.
It might be that I am too biased now, but when I visited twitter today the only feed that I saw (default ordering, whatever that is) was the blue mark tweets.
Anyone else experiencing something similar?
Is there a way for me to export if I decide to self host later?

I don't have the time to set up a Mastodon server right now, but part of the appeal of Mastodon is having more control over my data.
I don't pay for any subscriptions, outside of video streaming services. I guess I'm fortunate that I've never wanted to do anything that didn't have a one-off purchase option.
He hasn't left Twitter. He's just using (and learning) Mastodon while Twitter pretends to have this ludicrous linking policy.
A minor memorial for Leo Laporte’s terrestrial AM radio show
> It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time.

> Owning software is worthless to me because their effective lifespans are so short anyway, usually just a couple years, before the ecosystem has moved on and left them behind anyway.

I find it strange that these two sentences are in the same comment.
Well I mean Trump was the scariest.
Thanks, I appreciate it, and am happy to hear that your own experience was far more positive than our own.

I take comfort that my father's wishes were to spend his final few months at home and die there. It took a herculean effort on behalf of all of us to pull it off, pulling 24 hour bedside shifts for months took a toll. But we all have zero regrets about it, and despite the grief, was a very beautiful way to honor and support him.
I don't agree: there were so-called respectable (because no one saw them as loons, nor sociopaths) people spreading lies and misinformation to fuel panic and subsequent engagement, without any sanction. Not the former POTUS, nor the people quoted in the Twitter Files.
I'm talking about professional fear-mongers like Dr.Eric Feigl-Ding.
Personally I wouldn't want a removal of said posts (nor of the others), but the dissonance, at least with these people, was great.
I'll make sure it is sell-out proof then :)
It's so much worse when a subscription business fails. You can lose access to your data with very little notice to migrate. At least standalone software keeps working for a while after the company maintaining it is gone.
They also start moderately but not wildly successful companies and then leak fake tax returns to look more successful, like Kylie Jenner.
Sorry but what's his mastodon account? I can only see this stupid blocked message:

> Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
I understand the need for recurring revenue especially for things that offer cloud services. But I also would like to get off the cloud where possible.

I like hybrid subscription models. Where I pay monthly for support and updates and once I've paid off the price of a version I could stop paying and just not get any additional features, support, ect. I'd even be okay if this strips back a few features. I think Jetbrains offers something like this?

The thing I don't like about subscription models is that it makes it restrictive for who can use certain tools. I love messing around with the Adobe Suite for fun, I use it in a professional setting maybe once every couple of months. I can't justify the almost $1000 a year price tag.

I would love to be able to give adobe money. I would love to use their product. I just can't justify it as a non-pro user.
Or water or nuclear or wind or solar.

Not everything is burning dinosaurs.
Also applies to 100Base-T which is still a usable solution for basic networking.
I’m not sure what it means to say we “need” that or not. but you could say the same of no downvotes, “do we need another twitter?”

Are emotional upvotes a problem, or just the downvotes?
Just last month, he was passionately defending Elon Musk's decisions running Twitter, on Twitter, from all those annoying plebs who dared to speak their minds about it, not even having ran any companies themselves.

The topic of "the article at hand" is, inevitably, his incompetence.
PG still has an excellent batting average and is more insightful than not even on Twitter.
Depends on the software really. I dont hate it tho. I'm not sure why I really care if I own the software if it's a commercial product.
Here's the problem: https://mas.to/@paulg/109536476979036192

I can see that he's replying to somebody, but can't actually see the conversation (presumably because there is some problem with the servers all trying to talk to each other to reassemble it?)

This is terrible.
> It looks and feels just slow and sad

Honestly, this is the same feel I get when I visit Twitter. Thing is - I don't have an app, so it's always slow.
Sure, but does that really matter? Second class doesn't mean they aren't investing in it... and some of the coolest use cases for F# (Fable ecosystem) falls outside of MSFT's scope entirely.

It's a small community with great libraries/support, and you can generally bet that the folks who are excited by it and want to use it are pretty strong technically.
>Wow. That would be "nearly every modern gas vehicle in north America".

>Seriously. Running a cold petrol engine under low load in freezing conditions only for heating i just simply a bad idea. Never understood how this is even remotely OK in the US. This is illegal in most of Europe. And for good reason.

My German BMW 7 series definitely had remote start (and an auxiliary heater too). Maybach GLS has an auxiliary heater.

These are hardly uncommon features in vastly cheaper cars either. Various Webasto systems have been around for ages, often installed by OEMs.
You have to start reading about Gates before he spent millions to wash his reputation and adopted a disguise of philanthropist to buy a stairway to heaven. Anything before he left Microsoft, with the corruption scandals, the insults, the patent trolling, and so on.

It's getting harder and harder to find though. I should have saved offline compiled files.
Yeah, it's pretty frustrating.

I initially tried the https://joinmastodon.org/servers thing in November, but the things proposed seemed like very niche communities.

I just tried the https://instances.social/ link -- the top 2 hits for me were very small instances (fewer than 5 people), which I wouldn't have much faith in joining.

Actually, I guess I should have mentioned how I _actually_ chose a server. I used https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and joined the first fast-enough server that most of my existing contacts were on.
On what level do you mean? 2fa already broke at one point (no clue if they fixed it I don't use two-factor as my twitter account is not terribly important)
>So yeah, why is that? And is anyone else tired of the constant barrage of subscriptions for things that should be one off purchases?

It's extremely tiresome. And surely the only motives are profit and control.

It's gotten so bad that now auto manufacturers are charging monthly subscriptions to use features that are built into the car that you have already purchased.[0] It's a disturbing trend that will eventually have to fall short somewhere down the line.

[0] https://www.motor1.com/news/597376/bmw-heated-seats-subscrip...
> When lidar says the path is blocked and video says it is not, you essentially have to either trust lidar and stop unnecessarily or just ignore lidar and go anyway (and then what was the point of the lidar?).

If it's actually blocked then decision becomes stop and prevent harm or go forward and hurt someone.

I don't think it's a very good counter argument.

Edit: without meaningful data as to which is more meaningful I'd lean towards LIDAR being safer because there's less info (depth) to infer, and to me color seems less important than depth, barring stuff like signs and lights. Which shouldn't be hard to correlate between the two.

But without more meaningful data this comes off as a "you should x people people did x anciently and it seems like that worked"
I don't know, I've heard so many stories of people that, after 90+ years, are just bored of life. It's unimaginable to me now but I've only been an adult for a small fraction of the time they've been and so maybe you can really just run out of things to do.
Yes, the helplessness is terrible. It's one of the things I've really had to face up close recently and there is no really good way to deal with it.
Ask HN: Search Engine for Podcasts?
I have so many questions that the answers are in podcasts. To find that answer, watching the whole podcast is too time-consuming, and sometimes the answer doesn't come in one podcast, so I need to watch another podcast, which takes too much time. Do you know any search engines for podcasts? Thank you!
I worked at Zip2, and am pretty sure Elon was not fired.
> How could two whole continents

> Lose their name to one constituent

> Where were we when the U.S. went

> And took the word American away

> But to be fair to them

> Their other name options

> Like U.S.A.ers and United Statesians

> Were pretty bad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7iqSMy4CzE
Anders Hejlsberg.
> I blame organized religion

You have no idea how accurate and profound your statement is. The mid 1800s religious extremism still survives in the US and plagues its public discourse and institutions in the form of anti-intellectualism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism#United_St...

The American anti-intellectualism is far stronger compared to all the forms of anti-intellectualism across the world, and its surprisingly wide-reaching - a lot of the anti-intellectual behaviors of the religious American crowd of 1850s survive today and manifest themselves in different forms. From opposing science to conservatism in silly things like the resistance to the metric system and more.
A lot of software doesn't need to be a service.
TikTok isn't on the list of banned social media links.
I feel that there's a fitting SMBC on this topic.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-29
The user experience is quite different though?

And I think there’s value in decentralization even without the granularity of a server-per-person. Sure, some Mastodon servers might go down, or some admins might do unwise things, but damage should be limited. the entire network - I hope - would not fail.

Of course, I’ve lived through the death of Usenet, so perhaps I should not be so optimistic :-/

Edit: not to mention the arguable centralization of email, blogging, and perhaps soon podcasting :-(
How can they brag about freedom of expression and then forbid promoting their competitors through their site? [1]

They are well within their rights to do so, but that's the exact opposite of competing purely in the market of ideas.

1. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
This is beginning to feel like the Freenode takeover drama
He didn't exactly say he's leaving Twitter. He said he disagrees with the moderation policy and gives a link to his Mastodon account.

That part about this being "the last straw" implies some change of view. Read in a certain way it could be a goodbye.

Kind of ambiguous and non-committal.
Snap getting more invasive was the final straw, which led me to move a startup away from Ubuntu LTS, to Debian Stable.

(Was already leaning towards moving, because a rough monitoring of security updates over several months showed Debian was strangely more trustworthy. Snap making things even worse for some of our systems made the decision easier.)
What hyperbole? We've got a policy that is link-banning while unbanning people who are holding "legally allowed opinions" (nice edit) like Mr. West and other racists.
Agreed, well said.

Elon's had a busy productive life, and my take on my University friends who've had busy productive lives is that they now have the self-insight of a baked potato, roughly. No doubt because they haven't had spare time to reflect on their actions or motivations. But that doesn't mean they can't self-correct, it just means they usually have to run into a brick wall or two before they do. I'm guessing he'll correct this latest boner.
The key word here is maintenance.

Most things you own you also maintain yourself. It doesn’t hold true for software. People expect software to work for some time.. On their new device, after the OS update. Bugs need to be removed, new features built.

You can and will fix your car. You will maintain it too. And you will happily pay for it. Same with the house you own. You might even renovate it, add a new level.

It is not possible to own and maintain software that way.
One of my favourite board games is called Burn Rate. The premise is a parody of silicon valley during the boom. You compete with the other players for talent (each employee is a card, with varying skill levels).

You could slow down other players by attacking them with “bad idea” cards that would tie up one or more of their engineers for an amount of time. To defend against bad ideas, you need a good manager (one type of employee card).

I could be misremembering some of the details, but the wisdom of the above game mechanic has stuck with me :)
See also Donald Trump, 2016.
> almost all the time, the display is sRGB, so that’s your gamut;

This is becoming less and less of a safe statement. On the one hand "yay HDR"!

On the other hand, we're in for many years of weird bugs. For example recently I've been working on an app that I want to look good in HDR and I tried to share screenshots. Everything looked good to me. People on the other side were complaining about weird colors. Several hours of investigation later I realized that Windows was switching color spaces in my screenshots. Pressing the print screen button gave me a subtly different result than what I was actually seeing and of course I didn't spot it when emailing off the screen shots.
> "We must kill all the [insert ethnic group]"

To be fair, that has always been allowed to say on Twitter as long as the target is either white, men or both.

The only news is now you’re (equally) allowed to spread that kind of toxic hate towards other groups as well.

Is that a good thing? Possibly not, but at least it is objectively more fair than it used to be.
Not sure if I am missing something, but this is something I can do without any extra extensions installed? Out of the 27 accounts I am currently following, 20 are accounts from other Mastodon instances...

I do have to search for the account on my local instance to start following them instead of being able to click follow right there, but that is a minor annoyance
Paul's first comment [1] in the referenced tweet says: "Do you think Elon will fail and Twitter will go out of business?" and finished it with: "Bet your reputation on a prediction now".. it's a heavy prediction and a bold statement to bet your reputation on!!

1. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593199305384685573
Thank you very much, that might be just the thing for me. I really need a way to balance all this out and it has to be something that I can do on a schedule and indoors so it isn't weather dependent. The best so far was a trainer bike on a stand.

Of course I will need to become a better swimmer.
HN relatively deweights posts that get a lot of argument without a lot of insight. Things about politics, or tech involved culture war, or continuous divisive news stories disappear from the front page quickly.

I would classify that as ‘generic moderation policy’ rather than censorship
Opa Klaus
The mechanism is not friendly or intuitive but:

1. On your own instance ...

2. Paste "@paulg@mas.to" into the search dialogue and click the magnifying glass ...

3. Paul's profile will pop up in the results under "People".

4. Either click on the person icon to follow directly, or ...

5. Click on the avatar / profile name/description to view the profile page itself.

If you do click the "Follow" icon from mas.to (and don't already have an account there), you'll be prompted to do what I've described above.

Keep in mind that the Fediverse is, well, Federated. Someone else's home instance is where their bits and their configuration live. Your instance is where your configuration lives. You subscribe from your instance for that reason.

Some instances block others, in which case the profile won't appear, though odds are low that mas.to is among those yours has blocked.

(I've been on Mastodon since 2016, yes, this was confusing at first. I've since sorted it out.)
What’s the best general server to join? I noticed the one Paul joined isn’t avaible to join anymore?
In Defense of Melancholy
I created my twitter account when sending tweet via text was still a thing. Never really used it, so I'm not the right demographic.

But I do think your approach is the right one. I hope you succeed a breaking even and generate a margin for your time.
Why would NSA stop using AWS just because WaPo wrote something about NSA? It doesn’t make sense, really.

Only thing that should really matter to NSA in regards to using AWS is, does AWS offer the products they need, at the price they want to pay.
What is it you were looking to partake in? Racism, violence, fascism, colonialism, white supremacy, religious extremism, nationalism, homophobia, or transphobia?
When I think someone is stupid, I don't necessarily disagree with them. That's a needlessly polarizing mindset.
Yeah, but he's making it even worse.

Now one might argue that Musk wants to ignore advertisers entirely and target the actual users. That could be an interesting thing to try. But when why is he naming and shaming and whining about advertisers? If he decided to change business models, then it doesn't matter whether Apple advertises.

If he's aiming to profit from the users, he's also doing it wrong by bringing back all kinds of formerly banned unsavory people. This will over time reduce the market share to the very specific audience that's in line with his preferences, and probably invite trouble from the EU.
Personally I don't get either the Musk cheering, or the hatred. I cared little about him.

And about muting, I put myself on a smallish Mastodon instance but I've had to mute, filter and block loads of people these days to prevent any inch of politics from appearing in the feed. I hope like this I can have a "curated" experience that is more enjoyable (I used to have an account somewhere else, then the instance turned into political activism and I just deleted it).
> It's always "free speech for me, not for thee" with these people.

That's what pretty much everybody is doing at this point.

Elon's critics rightly point out the problems with his arbitrary rule by fiat, but who among his critics are proposing anything more principled than his behavior? By and large, people are calling him a hypocrite without articulating any more principled vision for how social media platforms should be run.

> You don't get this anger when the rules include in a clearly written way: "if I don't like what you're doing, for any reason, you're out" (also known as the escape hatch clause).

This sounds like basically codifying the current Elon Musk mode of governance. Are you really suggesting that the Internet would be better if every social media site was operated in this way, as long as it is explicit in the rules?
I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives.

I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out to be. He's eccentric, definitely, but that should be news to no one. Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. Those two facts are sufficient to explain most of his behavior.

He could still salvage the situation. He's the sort of person it would be a big mistake to write off. And I hope he does. I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly.
Obsession with weird/extremist polarizing politics is a cancer. I don't think you're necessarily going to become incompetent just because you decided to get involved in city government. The critical thinking capability that keeps you from wasting time on QAnon and conspiracy theories is the same stuff that lets you accomplish useful things in the world.