skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you know what life was like 100 years ago in the US?

35% of households had access to electricity.

About 20% had some sort of indoor plumbing, running hot water would be even rarer.

Most people heated their houses by shoveling coal or feeding wood fires.

Society was even more racially segregated and legally codified and brutally enforced by the government.

In warmer rural areas it wasn't uncommon for hookworm to be endemic due to shallow dug latrines.

1/12 children 10 to 15 were working instead of school.

Most adults did not graduate high school and illiteracy was not uncommon.

This whole subthread is quite strange. I'm still not sure what societal collapse GP is seeing.
You DIDN’T learn SQL in school? Probably my most useful class. I hated it at the time, I was a desktop and embedded dev, and this was before SQLlite roamed the earth.
I always used to think of it as a clever way to ramp up the bitrate right before the actual content started.
lol I thought you were talking about China
Tesla sends Shanghai boss and aides to jumpstart U.S. output
You need to be a bit careful about these figures. There can be a big difference between the percentage that is collected and given to a "recycling" company, and the percentage that is a tually recycled.
Councils are usually bound to report the former, not the latter.
So a council that got its residents to carefully separate the waste, collected it, and then gave it to a recycling company that put it all in a skip and tossed it in a landfill in Nigeria would still get a great recycling percentage.
I have empathize with the author's plight, but I don't have much sympathy for him buying multiple coffee grinders and throwing them all out because he bought cheap ones.

> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.

A Baratza encore will last literally forever, and if it doesn't, you can replace everything in it.
I said unconstitutional, not illegal.
I echo the sentiment of this article. Im nearly 40 and for most of my adult life I’ve found that most things are frustrating to use, have unnecessary tech bolted on (and that’s coming from a technologist), and in many ways barely work.

My fancy Bosch dishwasher can’t clean a dish if there’s a tiny bit of food on it. My GE dryer takes two cycles and at least 1.5 hrs to dry some cotton clothes. Don’t get me started on Bluetooth headphones. My coded garage opener takes 3 or 4 attempts each time because I guess the button push don’t register? When I want to watch TV sometimes I need to sit through a system upgrade which means I have to wait to watch. My town voted that cell phone towers are ugly, so there’s basically no cell service anywhere and most calls have between 1 and 5 drops (I live on Long Island, not in rural America). Every year there’s at least $1-3k of maintenance on my 4 year old “luxury” car. My smart lock works well as long as my fingers are perfectly dry and perfectly aligned. I replace my towels once every year or two because they completely fall apart. My “learning thermostat” doesn’t seem to learn anything even though I’ve been setting the temp at the same every night. I replace my jeans at a similar rate to the towels because they get holes in knees and pockets. Holes develop at the same rate in a $25 pair and a $125 pair. Self checkout at every store is a horrendous experience and I’ve never successfully checked out without the support person scanning their badge to fix some absurd error, like the weight of the item placed on the bagging area scale not being the weight the machine expects it to be.
Mean while Samsung,
Samsung notes
Samsung file manager
Samsung blah
Samsung bleh
Samsung blush
I wish Netflix et al would deband their video streams. Yes, I know, the problem wouldn't exist in the first place if they hadn't over-compressed the videos.
Aside from initial purchase price, more expensive tires are the other thing working against total lifetime cost of EV's vs ICE vehicles. More than offset by all the other savings on gas, maintenance, repairs, moving part replacements, fluids, brakes, time wasted stopping at gas stations, etc.
No, W10 looks butt-ugly compared to W2K.
This. Rust is quite pleasant to use and once some barriers are overcome quite productive. Not Python fast dev speed, but easily Go levels of productive for me. I rarely fight the borrow checker unless building tricky data structures. It will still stump me once in a while with lifetimes, but the trade off is so worth it to have memory safety guarantees and know there are no foot guns like C code would have. And if you are just cranking something out you can write code a little less idiomatically and of efficiently for quick scripts or smaller throwaway CLI tools. Rust prefers a more functional style but you can just as easily make it not so.
Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralised Social Media Service?
> Metal, vs plastic gears.

Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.
I am going to finetune a content moderation model based only on the principle that it should, at all times, ask itself: “what would dang do?” and then do that
> There is no chance of a return here that outweighs the expenses.

Considering the risk?
thats who I have! havent looked in awhile to see what I'm paying for
That's purdy. I see what you mean about the geo.
Well the full title is technically "Why would anyone use another centralised social media service after this?", but I don't think that'll fit in the title box here.
Sounds like the ancient dice game Farkle. Great party game.

https://farkle.games/official-rules/
You're looking for something like honey that no one can resist - kryptonite is Superman's weakness; he avoids it at all costs.
there's an entire universe of not for profit organizations that hire staff and dont have ads....
It depends.

You probably have a typical coffee brewer. Those aren’t too picky about their grind, but they take up a lot of space and only do one thing. Most don’t last long.

You could instead get a V60 for about $10 and a nice hand grinder, neither of which take much space. Combine those with an electric tea kettle, and you’ve got nicer coffee in a smaller footprint. The tea kettle still takes up space, but it’s a tea kettle. The grinder is the size of a pepper mill, and the V60 is an indestructible little plastic cone. Tired of cranking the grinder by hand? Hook it up to a drill.

You could use a blender-style grinder with a V60, but you’re going to run into trouble getting it to work right.

Everything is a compromise.
Two reasons:

1. Newer fridges have much more complicated air flow patterns requiring more fans and elaborate designs (my fridge runs all its fans for 2 seconds to homogenize air every time I close its door, for example).

2. That fan is a standard fan in GE line-up which happens to fit that bill. It's not a fan made extra robust and reliable because it's going to end in a $4000 fridge.
Who was the guy that said "humanity signed its death certificate once MBAs found out that they can literally sell trash as long as it is cheap enough to make it inconvenient to return"?

No one? Was it just me then?
Nice. Switch from discussion to insults. Anyone who doesn't agree with you is clearly an idiot who doesn't understand things.

Yes, I do understand the connection between corruption and money laundering. That touches on one form of corruption. There are many others. If I were to eliminate corruption, I'd take measures like:

- Extend laws like FOIA and Open Meetings, dramatically, so we have a much clearer understanding of government. In particular, I'd extend enforcement and penalties. Wilful violations should be criminal.

- Extend such laws to cover non-profits as well. I should be able to ask a church, a university, or any other organization exempt from taxes for documents, or sit in on governance meetings.

- Put in stronger whistleblower protections, and eliminate a lot of the power of NDA / non-disparage / etc agreements

- Increase SEC-mandated transparency measures

... and so on. Those have nothing to do with money laundering, and to me, are strict wins.

Very little of the corruption I've seen involves bags of money. Most corruption involves things like (not directly financial) preferential treatment. If I give you a raise you don't deserve, give your child preferential treatment at my school, or cut a sweet deal for your company, that doesn't show up in a Paypal transaction.
Musk is an exception meaning that the products/services of the company he is at the helm of are used by very few people in the great scheme of things. His wealth is mostly based on people believing in what he says and his cult of personality.

Looking at the history of the Forbes Rich List:

1990-2016 : Bill Gates. Microsoft used by billions of people

2016-2020: Jeff Bezos. Amazon used by billions of people

2020-2022: Musk. Products used by 4-5 million people

2022-????: Bernard Arnault. Products used by billions of people (Not Louis Vuitton but the retail brands which are part of the conglomerate)
Ask HN: How to show ChatGPT to non-technical friends?
Hi everyone,

I'm generally very impressed with ChatGPT* and want to convey the magnitude of it to some friends in various other fields (medicine, teaching, stay-at-home parent, etc...). However, I'm having trouble finding a good example of how to do this. Having it answer questions, write short stories/poems, or explain concepts generally gets a "Oh, neat!" but I feel like the weight of it doesn't really sink in. Has anyone had any luck with certain prompts or ways of presenting it?

Thank you!

*There is another answer I'm somewhat expecting from the HN crowd, which is that ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion/etc are actually not that impressive - as an AI research engineer I'm pretty biased/bullish on it, though, so you'll have a hard time convincing me of this :)
You're not wrong, but that's not my point. If people want to spend money on X, that's up to them. But it isn't an investment unless they expect to make their cash back plus a profit. So as soon as people want to pretend it is an "investment" there very much is a simple better option: whatever costs less and generates more revenue. On that basis Nuclear is never the right answer.
The problem still stands. Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Unilever, P&G, Tetrapak, etc. are overwhelmingly producing new plastic from petroleum.

Recycled plastic also gets brittle as you recycle it. Nothing in this Plastic story is anywhere near as 'circular' as it is with glass or metal recycling.
The downward spiral of shopping by purchase price. If it can be made cheaper it will sell and here we are.

Commercial kitchen equipment is out there and available if you want it, designed to last. It will seriously cost you to get it though.
That's true. When you see the raw data coming from a CCD it doesn't look good. I understand a lot of voodoo is required to get the beautiful digital images we have come to expect.

But for some time now that magic was employed with a perceptual goal to make the raw data look "correct".

I'm not sure if I would object to fake depth-of-field or fake film-grain if it were done absolutely convincingly or if I just dislike the whole idea of trying to add "artistry".
How to build a microstartup as a solo dev
An interesting book for pointing out that actual scientific progress sometimes doesn't follow strict methodology (see e.g. Mendel's approximations). Alas, like most writing from the 60's/70's, it overstates its case through heavy sophistry that may go well with polemists and (pseudo-science) hacks, but not in real life.
Assuming it's good food $10 a meal on an apple salary seems pretty reasonable.
So if I understand you right, APL treats strings as arrays of whatever. This makes sense and isn't particularly hard to understand. Is there a way to treat Unicode strings as arrays of graphemes, instead of bytes or codepoints?
Sentences for federal drug crimes are based on substance weight, not value.
You can certainly sequester it in rocks like peridotites and basalts. These are accessible in places like north Atlantic, Oman, Norway, etc. And they mineralize, i.e., become solids and stay there forever.
Energy diversification, not missions to end co2 emissions, should be prime energy policy. And every industry player in energy market should be put on notice. It’s competition and innovation that will solve all sorts of problems from safety to emissions to efficiencies, in each of the respective energy sources.

The Bush admin listened to established industry players (a key factor in their unpopularity) more than new innovative markets to determine policy. Obviously this was not the right way to go (at this time). The Obama era admin took enmity and idealism in energy policy to the forefront and that hurt a lot of people because it artificially put them out of business (and gave rise to Trumpian anger).
Tools are no longer tools, but instead toys.

Cheap imitations of an artifact from a bygone era. Where playing with it too much or too hard will it break.

They're more of a display item than an actual appliance. Only meant for looking at and instilling the idea of a useful tool. But don't dare use it!

The reason is producers don't care if it works or not. The product is successful so long as they can trick enough people into buying it.

The mental, emotional, and financial exhaustion borders on psychological warfare from foreign advisories.

America needs to reboot it's manufacturing base with a focus on absolute best quality hands down, no excuses, survive nuclear winter American made products.

Let's break this wasteful Earth destroying, GHG creating cycle of madness!
Those considerations were precisely why the phrase "even blander" was chosen and it's not clear to me from your post why expanding the number of people who can capitalize on the same storytelling ip would lead to greater variety rather than more homogeneity.
This is just a jurisdictional turf war. SEC calls them securities and CFTC calls them commodities. The courts will decide. Re FTX via CFTC:

"The complaint charges all three defendants with fraud and material misrepresentations in connection with the sale of digital commodities in interstate commerce."

https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8638-22
I mean, yes, I would assume a lot of people here are smarter than Elon Musk, and certainly far more familiar with software engineering.
I totally haven't heard this story for 20 years already. /s

Such stories were used explicitly by the fossil fuel industry at those concerned with the new plastics back when they were introduced.

https://www.dw.com/en/plastic-recycling-a-myth-as-packaging-...

I will still stand by the argument that recycling is impossible. Entropy can't be reversed in any way economically, chemically, or socially.
> I also own a lot of supossed 25.000 hours-of-life Leds, that failed after 1-2 years of incidental use. Also annoyes the sh* out of me.

Of all the compact florescent and LED bulbs I have bought, I has died because of a faulty component prematurely, and one has a whining driver. Other than that I failed to reach end of life of any of them. So, I never bought the second round because of that.

Oh, I killed a couple of CFLs because of heat, possibly.
For what it's worth, some things in my lifetime have seemed to get much better, and cars and refrigerators happen to be in that class.

Many other things seem to have gotten worse though, like clothes and linens. I suspect there's some pattern to those things that have improved and those that have declined, and everything in between, but I couldn't explain it.
Last numbers I looked at had Unsubsidized Battery backed solar as already significantly cheaper than unsubsidized nuclear at scale.

Things presumably look slightly different in Japan, but this is looking like political rather than an economic decision. Right this moment they have some cover to save the industry even if little is going to change any time soon.
Yes, it seems to be a foundation of 4 bar 4/4 section(s) with other time signatures over the top, but resolving to the foundation by adding beats. I think people feel comfortable with a 4/4 foundation.

I did a really simple track by repeating a 4/4 phrase and a 7/4 phrase on a sequencer which was liked far more than anything I actually put effort into!
Here in australia (sydney) we’re still paying $1 per rideshare ride as ‘compensation’ for the taxi disruption.

If that isn’t regulatory capture? I don’t know what is
Check out the history of light bulbs, an actual amazing conspiracy few people know about :)
I have the exact same sentiment when it comes to the Baratza line of products. I have the Preciso, which is similar to the Encore. I have rebuilt parts of it twice and you could build a unit from parts if so desired. In fact, they should consider offering DIY editions ala Frame.work for enthusiasts.
If you're open to it, I'd love to hear more details and context around these stories.

Email is my profile, if you have the time and inclination to get in touch.
My house came with a large high quality washing machine from the 80s I’m pretty sure, or maybe even earlier. It crapped out at some point last year, and we were about to buy a brand new appliance, but I did some research, got out the multimeter, and was able to diagnose a blown fuse caused by a faulty part (replacing the fuse just blew it out immediately). I ordered the part online and installed it and now the washer has been fine since then. I don’t think this would have been easier with a newer part.
It's a matter of shopping wisely and, at least sometimes, of spending more money up front. People always reach for the smelling salts when I tell them how much my (hand) coffee grinder cost, but that thing is almost certain to outlast me.
Besides echoing the survivorship bias warning in other comments, I'd like to point out that just a bit of skill and will can turn the fate of a lot of this 'crap' around.

Dull peeler? Sharpen it. Now you have a sharp peeler that can probably last 10 years with occasional attention.

Dead grinders? I'm sure at least one of them could've been fixed and extended its life significantly.

Sure, things are getting less and less repairable, but most still can be fixed of some common faults. It just takes a pinch of skill and a bunch of will.
- Reach out and ask external and internal.

- Go to other teams and build relationships and ask for mentorship.

- It's your team's more senior members explicit responsibility to mentor you.

- Ask your company what they offer for training and mentoring.

- I _think_ some people charge $0 on mentorcruise.com.

Not having technical mentors really hold me back from getting the staff/principal level so as a manager now (one reason I switched but not the main one) I push hard for to enable mentoring for my teams and the org. Push hard to find one.
> some kind of uncanny valley, where it’s just enough like natural language that it seems like a certain sentence or grammatical construction should work, but it doesn’t.

Luckily, the target audience of Inform are people who like adventure games (people who are used to playing "guess the verb").
Pro-Soviet, not "pro-Russian."
As a Python user, I had my a-ha moment with Nim when I realized I didn't need a repl.

With Python, I used repl all the time. There's bpython, ptpython, ipython, and probably a couple more great repls because repl is really important for Python development.

Nim's INim is no match for those. But here's the great part: with Nim you don't have to test code snippets all the time. I get all my error messages before they happen. This felt liberating after Python.
Multiples of the carbon in plastic is released in it's production.
Japan is already in this position. I don’t think the change is about weapons.
The US Postal Service is finally getting EVs
https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/

It's not mentoring per se, but the list of people I speak with ranges from CS students asking for advice regarding their career to industry veterans. Sometimes we talk only once, but some of these relationships have lasted for more than a year so far. The latter are rare, still fairly casual.

I'm in the same boat as you, but I'm trying to focus a bit more on the product/business side of things. I've been mentoring engineers for 10+ years (and introduced the practice to several orgs). The irony is that I've ben struggling with finding a mentor for myself. The impromptu way seems to work better.

Also I second the comment made my sshine: "I go up to them, and I ask them." I sometimes reach out to people in my area just to learn about their work. We generally meet in person. This has been a bit harder since I left London, where it's hard to avoid interactions that are _not_ networking. But it's still doable even in my current location.
Ideally: Travel point-to-point, rather than constrained by roads, turns, intersections, all competing with similarly-constrained traffic. Congestion en route would largely go away (although we would probably adopt "lanes" of travel analogous to what the airlines use) and would be replaced by congestion at popular destinations (again, much like the busiest hub airports).

I think a more feasible variant of this is a small platform on which the pilot would stand or sit, or from which s/he would hang, lifted and driven by the equivalent of multiple battery-powered drones.
JitPack (NPM for Android) is down for 10h with no response from the team
Many companies are unable to create builds for Android/Java projects while JitPack team remains completely silent.
I wanted to see a video of construction and was not disappointed when I found this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-DKZTMPqoE
I use bookmarks to enhance this. I save a page and then rename the bookmark to some letter codes, for hackernews it's "hn: Hacker News", which makes typing "hn" bring up the bookmark no matter how cluttered, or recently cleared, my browser history becomes.
Not really. Even if you assume crazy high energy prices in the future you get a larger return on your investment using cheaper technology.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
The more I think about this, it’s actually the same problem I described above. The issue is a failure to evolve based on new information.
I had a knife. It wasn't a simple piece of metal - it had a nicely sculpted handle with that horrible tactile silicone coating which gets gross and sticky over time and is really hard to clean (mild abrasive such as bicarbonate of soda will either clean it or remove it - and frankly I'm good with either outcome!) A few months back this knife fell to pieces when the handle split, causing the blade to do an interesting backflip maneouvre that I'd have preferred to spectate from much further away.

While I'm ranting about kitchenwares, I'm getting tired of saucepans with a life expectancy of less than two years - they're another item I'd expect to last decades. But again the existence of the cheap crap makes it harder to find the better stuff, and certainly hard to have any confidence that what you're looking actually is any better, and not just the same crap with a higher price tag.
Japan.. having nuclear weapons.. that's not a pivot.