skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The big take-away is that explicit study of grammar rules, and even vocabulary to some extent, is kind of a waste of time. They encode information in a format and region of the brain that generally isn't accessible to the areas that are used in fluent communication.

The way our brains have evolved to build up a functional language model is by observing lots and lots (and lots) of examples of the language being used for communication. Which implies that, even from the very beginning, graded readers, level-appropriate dialogues, etc. should be the foundation of a language study program and not, as most language instruction courses and apps make it, just a little bit of icing on top.

The primacy of input is also kind of a big deal, and, at least for me, it took a long time before I was willing to let go of forced production exercises such as "translate this sentence into your target language". Perhaps in part because they're so endemic to language learning resources. You can't abandon them without also abandoning Duolingo and most formal classroom programs. But the problem with these kind of practice exercises is, we now know that it's normal for there to be a long delay between when someone can comprehend a grammatical structure, and when they can use it in a natural setting. (Anyone with kids over a certain age should be familiar with the phenomenon.) Forced production relies on - and reinforces - that aforementioned misplaced encoding, and there's a mountain of research demonstrating that skill in performing those sorts of exercises simply doesn't correlate with the development of communicative fluency.

Tangentially, the transformer architecture that's taken natural language processing by storm has some interesting similarities to the leading model among SLA researchers for how language is represented in the human brain. Which isn't the monitor model itself, but might hint at a mechanism for a few parts of the model. Acquisition order, for example.
You might see whether your local community college has good classes that supplement what you already know, and what companies hire software interns/co-ops/newgrads from there. (Long ago, this, and luck, was how I jumped from self-taught, to a co-op student at a first-rate engineering company, and maybe it can still work.)

And some colleges/universities have options for students outside of a Bachelor's degree program. These might or might not teach better than a community college. (But "Harvard Extension School", for example, will probably get past more resume screeners than a community college.) Both might teach you more than a bootcamp. And, again, look for something set up for internships, or with relationships with specific employers.

Beware that the field is absolutely flooded by everyone in their dog, and it's hard to distinguish yourself. I suppose the upside is that there's so much not-so-stellar work being done, that a newbie could their foot in the door at a typical place, survive while they contribute, and grow from there.

But this flood also means that people hiring will reach for a kind of gatekeeping (to narrow down the pool of candidates, and to try to cement themselves as a superior in-group), which, at the moment, means you probably need to practice for Leetcode hazings.

If you have a lot of time, doing open source is an option to eventually stand out, but if you do this, pick something in a space where people are hiring. ("I wrote a JIT compiler for a dynamic dialect of Haskell that targets GPU" wouldn't even get you considered for 99% of jobs, and most of the remaining 1% would insist you regurgitate Leetcode algorithm as performance art so they can "verify that you know algorithms" or so that they "can see how you think". "Yes, I looked at your GitHub, and it didn't have many stars." :)

Also keep in mind that Copilot-like tools integrated into IDEs are going to let a lot of low-skilled developers launder open source code, to pass off as their own (justifying it as "I let the tool do the boilerplate, so I can focus on the more difficult, higher-level problems"). I don't know how the near-term evolution of this will play out, but it might be best as a force multiplier for low-skilled, low-quality work. You might want to be thinking about how to be on a path to eventually stand out for high-quality work, for which companies won't trust this generation of automation (even if they were willing to gamble with a Copilot-induced GPL lawsuit, and VC due diligence doesn't start smacking down for this).
Possibly Earth-like worlds, just 16 light-years away
If you substitute "windows" for Linux, you have a true statement.

All the (mostly rando) laptops in my house (5) which were shipped with windows pre-installed, with broken features/drivers were wiped, and Linux was installed. Many things didn't work under windows. Wifi was the big thing that failed under windows. Then the more generalized networking stack, which was stock, was unable to connect to the internet, despite getting wifi working.

With Linux, none of these were issues. Sound worked well. Networking just worked. GPUs just worked (though there was was some stupidity with nouveau and 2060 bits early on, that's been the only GPU issue I've had in the last 15-ish or so years running linux on laptops/desktops).

I migrated family to MacOS, as it was easier to support than windows, and like linux, it just worked.

Your mileage may vary of course, and you may be the occasional unlucky user with an odd problem. But really, none of the problems are worse than windows, and from my perspective (using computers since 1979 or so), if you start with a well designed distro (Linux Mint, Pop!, elemental, ...) you really won't have a problem. FWIW, Linux Mint is a reworked Ubuntu, with better defaults, drivers, codecs, etc. .

I know people get worked up over this and often try to make jokes about "this year is the year of linux desktop" ... but its been my daily driver for 23 years, its been my desktop/laptop OS as long. Its figuratively all over but the shouting.

So argue against it if you wish, there are many other windmills you can tilt against which might bear better argumentation. This battle is over. Ordinary people are using it, migrating to it.
no no, you see, when it happens on linux, well that's linux not being ready for prime time

when it happens on windows, well, it's probably $mfg's fault
Default macOS/iOS password manager. Chrome doesn't use it, but everything else does.
The “recovery paradox” explains why you’re burnt out
I do wonder if Valve has tried to discuss with Microsoft what it would like to see out of Windows in the future (potentially Windows 12) to make it a useful OS for a Steam Deck device.

Some sort of advanced suspend/resume functionality similar to the Series X's Quick Resume would be a killer feature. And I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't mind having native Game Pass hooks into a device like that
I use KeepassXC distributed via NextCloud.
Have you activated tlp? That should double your battery life, I use a T490 and had to install that to get battery life comparable to when running Windows
> How do you see yourself in five years?

[Sighs heavily and pulls a tarot deck from laptop case]
Hope it comes soon, this would be the most important Postgres enhancement for many years.
Yeah, these are all valid points.
Most systems that run Linux are unsupported by the vendor who refuse to provide support. This is the dividing line I find. The vendor might provide source code to the community to make their widget work with Linux but it's provided as-is and unsupported.

I found this out with a dodgy NUC recently. Intel support told me that Linux is unsupported so they can't help. I had to install Windows and show the same issue before the issued the RMA.
This is where we disagree I guess :)

To me they made the sticky window feature worse. It is still there but it is more finickity to use. I don't want to have to slow down and gently bump the window against another in the hope it works.
Personally, I read my code three times. The first time it looks normal, the second it looks like a horror script, and the third like a comedy. Thus, I achieve amusement.
Where are you getting "14-18% returns"? The formula in the parent post uses 1.07, which translates to a yearly growth of 7%.
Pretty much. Just put a fucking mp4 file with the show or a movie on my harddrive and fuck off, then I will pay for the service
It has been a while since I studied solid state physics but yes, exactly correct.

The fun effects of semiconductors rely on the electronic properties of certain solids (or their electrons, equivalently their absence ie ‘holes’) which take place at a small scale, hence the use of quantum mechanics.

Some of these effects can manifest at larger scales, and can be modelled classically too.
I've never been paid overtime in my entire career, and I've definitely worked overtime. Maybe if your boss is nice you get a PTO day.
> What you will find is that your speed initially drops to maybe 10% or even less of what it was before, but after a while it speeds up again and at some point you'll be typing faster than ever before because fixing mistakes takes a lot of time.

I've never been entirely convinced by this argument. I will always make mistakes, so I could argue that I need to be able to quickly fix those mistakes, so I should practice doing so to some degree. The implication that fixing your mistakes somehow trains you to make mistakes seems tenuous.

I will admit that for me, my "end goal" allows me to see what I'm typing and requires me to correct my mistakes. If, for instance, your end goal has you not even seeing the text you're typing then there's probably no reason to go back and fix your mistakes.

This is where the musical instrument comparison breaks for me. If your goal with an instrument is a performance, then with a musical instrument you can't fix your mistakes during the performance. You will still make mistakes, of course, you just won't be able to fix them.

That said, if you're making a lot of mistakes then perhaps you're getting enough practice fixing them and should stop. It's just that I don't necessarily accept a hard rule that you should carry on regardless and the outcome will be better. I've never seen any research on this subject.
This reminds me of an interview I saw of Tyler Joseph from "twenty-one pilots" where he describes the basic process of song-writing. I can't find the link now, but the premise is that, it is not enough to just sit around and wait for inspiration to strike - you have to be prepared to take advantage of it. So you practice writing lyrics, practice your instrument or a production technique, even when the immediate output of it seems like crap. You practice until you don't have to think about the thing that you're practicing, so when you're actually "inspired" by something, so to speak, you can just immediately rely on what you've practiced instead of not being able to reach that sound you heard in your head.
I've had about 2 decades of experience hearing that gaming on Linux is here and being disappointed. I started hearing about Proton and how it was really doing it this time and I was skeptical as always, but I figured it was worth a shot based on who I was hearing it from. And I'll say that for me, Proton is it. Not only does it provide awesome compatibility, it's basically just a checkbox in Steam to enable. I'm sure you can still find issues; even Windows can't provide 100% compatibility with decades of games, but for me, it's arrived.
All of the games on my Switch run on linux flawlessly :)
You don't need to be a multi-person team or have a lot of security experience to host Bitwarden.

I'm very positive Bitwarden won't get hungry for money looking at their revenue models, but there's always Vaultwarden you can self host. It's pretty popular and secure. I'll be deploying soon for myself.
Any books you could recommend?
There are distros/DEs that get within shooting distance of the Windows experience but don’t quite achieve it. The devil is in the details.

There’s nothing that replicates macOS unfortunately. Many point to GNOME, but it’s much more like iPadOS than macOS, or to elementaryOS but it only shares some aesthetics with core features like the global menubar or super-based (as opposed to control-based) key shortcuts being entirely absent. For the latter there’s hacks like Kinto[0] but this is the sort of thing that really needs to be part of the DE.

[0]: https://kinto.sh/
Ask HN: How can you give people something that they cannot grasp?
Imagine anything you want or you are capable, how would you make sure the information will stay forever unchanged?

In quantum state, if you will. I started with the theory that everything is every so slightly positively charged and worked my way back only to find the last paradox in the universe -- you cant test reality. If you try, you will get loopy and in a loop and restart it.

This way I ensured, that I can pass this lass bit of ever so slight positivity to allow you to understand the truth about superposition and oscilation.

It will take a while, but you will all get it.
SCP-WIKI as linked above is nice to explore, it is quite varied in style.
1Password on Windows/Mac/Linux/Mobile

Used keepass and pass for years but got fed up with them. Switched to 1Password this year and never looked back.
I had a similar experience with tail recursion that I only fully grokked much later when I had to implement some stack-trickery in C for a computer game. I realized then that tail recursion was typically optimized as a jump to code within the same stack frame rather than creating a new stack frame.
I would use Keychain with it’s iCloud sync if I didn’t occasionally use non-Apple devices.
I would love to see someone with electronics experience use Dreams for a while. My total electronics experience is Snap Circuits and Ben Eater videos, so I can't make as rich a connection to electronics as you might hope from an article like this. Maybe there are techniques from real-world circuit design that would actually transfer to Dreams, who knows?
U.S. Pours Money into Chips, but Even Soaring Spending Has Limits
My mom as a teacher never got above cost of living raises after she got her masters early in her career.

Her retirement is a combination of a government pension and social security.

My dad as a factory worker just got shares of middling performing consumer goods company (Proctor and Gamble) for his retirement.

They bought a house in 1978 in southern Georgia where they still live. It only increased in value along with inflation.
What specifically amuses you?

Todays http servers may have any number of request altering/enhancing "middleware" calls between the incoming request and the actual business logic/function.

How do you ensure that your api works as designed if you only test (pure) business functions? Or do you re-create the middleware chain of functions manually for you test?
Ask HN: Why can't we write a single system in multiple languages?
I hate having to make a choice on language at the onset of a new project. Each language has various great features for certain tasks.

I was wondering today why we cannot have some platform which would allow me to call across languages. If we take a basic example and say that I want to have Node/TS and Python files in a single system - what is the most ergonomic / efficient way to do this available today?

Why is this concept not more popular? Is this a bad idea?

If this is a good idea, what do we need to improve upon what is available today?
Power prices were negative in Germany two days ago. Sadly back to ~100Euro today. https://euenergy.live
90% of games work flawlessly on Linux. 10% of that 90% work better.
One of my major goals for 2023 is to migrate as much as feasible from passwords to tokens or at least passkeys. NitroKeys or YubiKeys for that. Process has already begun, but I definitely hope to see that accelerate big time (at long, long last) this year. Feels like there is serious industry momentum from the big players this time, and that cost, UX, support in frameworks to make it easy for non-sec webdevs, may all finally start to reach the tipping point. US Government is onboard now too, having dumped lots of obsolete terrible advice for a refreshingly great set of modern guidelines and updating government service sites in general for good uniform login with hardware token support. Ideally I'd like to see that become more universal for various web GUIs/access for services too (OPNsense in particular, which I now use for firewall/gateway services and is probably one of the more security critical bits of my infra).

Passwords though will have a very long tail even in the most optimistic scenarios, so yes password managers aren't going anywhere for a while yet. What I use right now is 1Password 7 with a slow migration towards Bitwarden clients and a self-hosted Vaultwarden server. I still have a standalone license and still have shared vaults in Dropbox, I will not be moving to the electron based 1P8. So end of the line on that decade+ journey I'm afraid, I'm disappointed with what happened with them but so it goes. Bitwarden/Vaultwarden seem solid to me so far though, and have client support across a range of devices. Nebula or Wireguard make keeping a bunch of selfhosted services accessible in a reasonably secure way pretty easy, and almost more importantly once setup have been rock solid reliable for me. Wrapping my head around them and making sure I had it all figured out certainly took a bit of time early on, but once setup it's Just Worked™ without being touched a single time ever again. No specific 3rd party dependencies is attractive.

If you have family/friends/coworkers to deal with though obviously the needs of the group are going to have to factor in on some level, and you may find you need to either run a few different things or compromise somewhat/pay more.
There has been rumors about Game Pass discussions with Valve at one point but I have not seen anything about that recently.

I feel like most likely not, that seems like something that would benefit Microsoft and not give any benefit to Valve. I know they have stated before some concern regarding the windows store or something.

Game Pass is also the reason I installed Windows on my Steam Deck. Being able to sync game saves between my PC, Xbox, and Steam Deck is just way too powerful. And the obvious benefit of the games in game pass.
Newly discovered mass extinction in the past was likely caused by climate change
To whoever flagged me for stating an "unpopular opinion", take a flying leap. This is elementary level deduction.
…and how did it become a better product?
it’s not possible to use Linux on the desktop, or to only use Linux on the desktop

Does anybody say this? I've always interpreted the phrase "year of Linux on the desktop" to mean a year when people who wouldn't list "computers" among their personal interests were noticeably using it on their desktops. That still hasn't happened. There are a lot of "year of the -" things I've seen come, when things that were used by professionals and nerds entered common usage and parlance, like burning a CD or installing Firefox (granted those have come and now gone).

You ask a normie "what's your opinion of Windows 10?" and they'll have one, good or bad. You ask a normie what their opinion of Linux is and most of them won't even know the word, let alone have one. That's why it isn't and may never be "the year of Linux on the desktop".
Strongbox on desktop and mobile. It uses keepass file format to store databases but I prefer the ui.
Open Source Mouse for navigating 3D environments
An alternative mouse for use in 3D environments, such as blender work. Allows user to move in 6 degrees of freedom.

Files available to 3d print and build your own. Great alternative to the commercially available 3DConnexion mouse.
We are already cut of from general evolution as long as we have a society that relies mostly on factors externally to genetics. Those factors are so much more rapid and impactful than the slow evolution by procreation and death statistical processes that it makes little sense to even consider them.
btw i just freestyled this shit, look at my other posts here on hn

try to disprove just one of my comments, I wait
1Password, it “just works” most of the time, the desktop and mobile UI is nice and polished and it works pretty well on iOS. I’m happy to pay for that. Previously was using LastPass and 1Password is definitely nicer and more polished.
Speaking is meant to exchange information. You're not exchanging any information when the other side agrees with you and knows everything you're saying.

An advocacy group is ineffective if all its members have this mindset. With signaling mindset you have no chance to convince anyone of anything. I'd rather get someone thinking differently a little bit confused than lament something with people who think the same. It doesn't reinforce helplessness.

I have many anecdotes with somewhat low chance of moving opinions. Few people will admit changing their minds, but sometimes they will agree with you but still offer a weaker counterpoint of the opposing narrative.

You can't flip someone's opinion 180° on the internet, but you can get someone on the other side to acknowledge a counter point.
Is the calculation just that the cost of litigation will be less than the full contract lease? I don’t understand how that could work.
Well, Linux has had a rough decade. The messaging around Wayland was like a stubbed toe for many users, with a lot of people trying it and denouncing it for being unfinished (a completely fair criticism). Now that Wayland is starting to get finished, the 'just works' quotient is increasing quite a bit for Linux, and people can share their recent success stories with a bit more impunity.

It's not unreasonable to assume Linux is bad, it's only unreasonable to assume nothing has changed since the last time you tried it. Make of that what you will.
I am also an early adopter, having downloaded Slack Linux via 2400baud dialup modem.

To get work done, I have largely spent time on macOS in the last 10 years, but I do have Linux on 4 laptops. Recently I have been experimenting with running Ubuntu using Parallels on my M1 iMac and the experience mostly being in Linux but being able to switch screens to macOS as needed is so far pretty good. Ubuntu has excellent support for ARM64.
I'd say it looks like nothing so much as Project Oberon:

http://www.projectoberon.com/

This is a good quick overview:
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/

This is a deeper dive:
https://people.cs.ksu.edu/~danielwang/Investigation/System_S...

This is Wirth's "Plea for Lean Software" (re-laid out on my own blog)
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/88032.html
I’m working on running windows in a VM with near native performance and then running that under gentoo.

Not technically divesting myself of windows, but having it abstracted from my bare metal will give me a certain peace of mind and smugness. I think anticheat freaks out on one or two games I don’t play doing it like that.
Give KeePassXC and the browser extension a try.
A Drug to Treat Aging May Not Be a Pipe Dream
TYOTLD means that when you say "how do I run the standard tools that anyone doing what I am doing uses", you are just pointed to where to install them. If you are pointed to a free, open-source tool, it is because that is what everyone uses now because it beat out any paid, closed-source alternatives.

TYOTLD means that Microsoft's office suite runs on Linux, or that MS Office has been replaced by something that does across the entire world of office work.

TYOTLD means that all of Adobe's tools runs on Linux, or have been replaced by something that does across the entire creative industry.

TYOTLD means Linux won and Microsoft and Apple are both bit players.