skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, now I have read several of your replies in this thread that are basically all arguing the same thing, so, I'm basically replying to more than just this one post.

When you say "the entire population", you mean the entire population of the country "USA", right? Because as someone from another continent, it seems like there is a very specific set of opinions that you want included.

You use terms like "the other side" of the political discourse, which to me, reduces the set of opinion to two specific sets of opinions, namely the two sets represented by the two major parties in the american two party system.

As someone from "the outside", this seems like a very narrow view of reality, even if you managed to get your "unbiased AI", that represents both major american political parties, it will still seem like a very narrow and biased AI to someone from the outside of that.

Also, what exactly is the goal of a conversational AI? is it just to make a conversation with it seem like a conversation with an average american? If so, why would anyone want that? Wouldn't it be of more value to have an AI that could tell me what people with knowledge of a subject thinks of it, rather than what random people think?
Any good resource out there explaining feed-forward networks and how they achieve learning?
Another Perspective on the Tech Current Climate and Layoffs
RSS ? Not really. RSS aggregators however...

I don't think even at its peak RSS alone was popular enough to the average user but it did popularize the whole "get a bunch of sources and aggregate updates into one stream" idea, and that's essentially what both facebook and twitter is.
US undergrad is much more general than most of Europe (especially compared to the UK). So you get to grad education with a much wider but more shallow knowledge base.
I use this AutoHotkey oneliner. WIN+Space pins/unpins the current window.

#SPACE:: Winset, Alwaysontop, , A

(Save to set-always-on-top.ahk, and create a shortcut to the script in %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup. Optionally add #NoTrayIcon at the top of the script to get rid of the tray icon.)
http://ondra-m.github.io/ruby-spark/

https://github.com/ondra-m/ruby-spark

Hasn't been updated in a long time - no idea if that's because it's complete enough or if it's been abandoned, as I don't use Spark so I haven't tested this gem myself.
Exams can have actual consequences.

A failed grade might mean you get kicked out of your program, leaving you with literally tens of thousands of debt with nothing to show with it. If your grade is too low you might lose a scholarship, meaning you have to either suddenly come up with a shitton of money or drop out. A failed grade might mean you can no longer pursue the graduate track you have been working towards for years.

The entire problem here is that some lecturers have a habit of creating tests for which you can't really study or practice. No matter how much time and effort you put into it, they end up being a coin toss of whether you "see" the answer or not.

I have had exams where I spent literally an hour staring at a single question without making any progress. I talked about it with my classmate afterwards, and after only a handful of words I understood exactly how to solve it. If your entire future depends on shit like that, I can totally understand it being "emotionally devastating".
I started asking ChatGPT some rather technical questions about Australian drug laws. First I asked it what schedule common ADHD medications were on, and it answered me correctly (schedule 8). Then I asked it what schedule LSD was on, and it told me it wasn’t on any schedule, because it was an entirely legal drug in Australia. Uh, I hope it doesn’t some day tell someone that and they actually believe it, because they may be in for a very unpleasant experience if the police happen to encounter them acting on it
I may have missed it in all the comments, but the explanation for the described phenomenon seems obvious to me, having done a variety of literary corpus analyses. People write to express opinions, and opinions will tend to cluster. A corpus will present an opinion space with local maxima at well defined opinions. As a model becomes more closely fitted to the landscape, results are more likely to be near one of these maxima rather than floating between.
The early "TrackPoint Mouse" had a regular Trackpoint. ScrollPoint had a bigger knob shaped more like a mousebutton. There were several models with different shaped mouse bodies.

A problem is that you'll need drivers to use them, or some hack to turn down the scrolling sensitivity. If you just plug one in, it will scroll much too fast. They had been made before Microsoft's high-precision scrolling extension to the USB HID protocol: the default is 24 detents/revolution which is not enough for scrollpoint.
Does anybody know of anything like this for JavaScript?

Would make it much easier to introduce the language.
Well that was easy.

Makes you wonder why a "professional" "couldn't" do it.
The UK National Physical Laboratory in South-West London, mainly deals with metrology https://www.npl.co.uk/
I think what really happened is revealed when you just change 2 words:

> When something is easy, more people will do it.

I'm sure there are way more quirky, personal and lovely websites out there than 20 years ago. There's just orders of magnitude more other content.

The whole article has a vibe of "old man yelling at clouds".
> My biggest issue with this whole situation, is that the user gets a better UX with no encryption whatsoever on a http:// site than a self-signed or expired cert on https://.

I think part of the issue was that priorities shifted. Initially, SSL was for commerce. You were looking for assurance that your credit card number wouldn't be captured in flight, and would go to the right, verified party.

In this context, a self-signed certificate is somebody claiming "trust me, I'm a bank manager" despite being unable to prove any association with your bank. And somebody with an expired ID might be a former, disgruntled employee whose ID has expired because they don't work there anymore. Both of those are far more suspicious than somebody not claiming to be anything in particular.

> Especially for local LANs, but also for small websites, there should be a way to use TLS with a self-signed cert to say hey, I'm not making any strong claims of identity or privacy here, I just want some modicum of obfuscation of the traffic.

That's not really reliable. The moment you install that as a norm, you'll have various countries doing MITM and generating their own cert for the site. Any confidence such a scheme provides is extremely suspect, as it relies on nobody exploiting the flaw for personal benefit.

> Also, a user should be able to trust a specific cert once on first visit, and then be warned only if that cert changed.

That only works if you think your attack mode is a hacked/malicious access point at a cafe or hotel. If you're in a place like Russia or China the state has the resources to ensure you always get the same MITM-ed cert, unless you play games with VPNs, which may well land you on some sort of watch list.
> That's the mistake right there, use a proper app launcher (like https://keypirinha.com/) to avoid the freeze and many other issues

Sorry, no! I am not going to install a whole new application only to launch programs - the most fundamental operation that an OS should be able to do on its own. If the OS cannot launch programs using the Win key, it needs to be analyzed and fixed. The OP article does half of that very well!
Yeah that's the distinction I was making--the hobbyists have gone to social media, and the people registering domains and using a self-hosted CMS are trying to make a biz out of it

Although Substack seems to be causing a little renaissance of hobbyist blogging
with an app launcher you wouldn't need to touch the arrow keys as the apps would get a) sorted by frecency and b) have a more convenient shortcut
Hey Hackernews,

I just wrote an article titled "Infrastructure from Code - is it for you?" and I wanted to share it with you all and see what you think. In the article, I talk about some of the benefits and drawbacks of using infrastructure as code and I also provide an example using Rust. If you're interested in learning more about this topic, give it a read and let me know your thoughts! I'd love to hear your feedback.
I open the full bloody GNU Octave instead. I just timed it.

Calculator: 13s
Octave GUI: 5s

The worst thing is that the calculator pretends to be running after like 2s but is unresponsive.
US startup's bladeless VTOL can reach up to 0.8 Mach
> Screenshots-as-API solves a few problems

They forgot to mention that the website owners may deliberately make it difficult to interface with the HTML directly, e.g. by changing the internal formatting structure every now and then.
Switched to Arch recently, also after years of lazily using Ubuntu (though it was what they used at work as well, so it just made sense to use it on my desktop), and I also am giving KDE another go, and I can confirm a similarly usable experience these days. I absolutely do remember KDE being extremely buggy ten years ago but they seem to have made a ton of progress.
They’re like COVID test certificates.
>>So if I write a nasty note on a paper Airplane and throw it at you, might the manufacturer of the paper and pen get in trouble?

That's not really the correct analogy. A more accurate one would be:

>>What if I went out of my way to gather up every single nasty note ever written about you, and made it my business to make sure you saw every one of them?

That's what the algorithm was doing.
Paywalled; Didn't Read.

I'm not engaging in illegal behaviour by using the archive.ph link, in fact, I'm reporting it to The Economist as it shall be DMCA'd (I will not, but I stand by my reasoning).
It's simple, they don't use their smartest developers to work on intrusive ways to bother the user with ads. They work on serving content to users instead.
To steal a comment I saw on HN last week: Until there is a "Buy Now" button it's better to just assume it's vapourware :(

Also, all the meaningless comparisons are very distracting (up to more power than 10 times a solar panel of unknown size or less!)
Bespoke feature flag systems can become a quagmire. You might think “we only need a boolean value”, but then you need a number, and then you need a string, and then you need a UI to manage it, and then you have a 2nd service and DB and have to expose feature flags via an API endpoint, and then you realize that getting feature flag values via HTTP calls is causing latency and reliability issues, and then and then and then.

I worked at a company that went far down that slippery slope and now there’s and horribly convoluted bespoke feature flag system that no one enjoys using and no one wants to maintain.

I’ve used LaunchDarkly and it’s really nice. The only downsides I’ve experienced are:

- UI is complicated.

- They have the concept of end users but not end “organizations” (like “set this flag to X for an entire customer organization”). There are hacky ways to do this but they feel icky.
Great for learning/teaching micropython programming for external devices
How would you ensure the same values after pushing a new commit or retriggering a build at the same commit? There are many times where external failures, like NPM returning a 50x for a package, that requires a build to be rerun at the same commit.

It seems impossible to ensure reproducible CI when some of that configuration lives outside of source control. Given the CI files are in source control, you can just change them there, rather than using feature flags. Using feature flags comes with a host of hard problems that you ought to just avoid by not using them.
As dang mentioned, this has been around for a while. Yet every time I'm impressed how my phone, laptop, etc. can render this so smoothly. I guess I'm getting old.
A camera will take the picture of the screen that could not be screenshotted. Unconvenient, lower quality, unstoppable.
> I mean surely you have noticed that social media can get stirred up for no fundamentally sound reasons.

Sure, but therein lies the problem, you can't really use reasoning, sound or otherwise, to insulate yourself from fundamentally unsound reasoning. Facebook was responsible for January 6 more than the upstarts that got kicked off AWS, but Facebook had no real negative consequences from their involvement.

I can literally post a screenshot from ChatGPT which shows anything, and given the complexity of how it works (take DAN for example), it is really difficult to dispute authenticity. If this can bring down ChatGPT then OpenAI should just close down now.

In an ideal world, ChatGPT would be value neutral, and fact positive, so if I ask it about fact, it should give me to the best of its rather poor ability a descriptive statement about fact, if I ask it about values, it should give me a descriptive claims about values (e.g. most value systems sees such act as wrong or right), not mask a prescriptive claim as a descriptive claim (e.g. it is wrong or right).

If I ask it to write fictional prose, then it should write what I ask it. If I ask it to write factual prose, it should similarly do what I ask it. I don't really see where this falls apart or turn into 4chan.
>> These people sit in safe seats, there is no risk from deselection,

You realise this is because their constituents agree with their policies, right?
For the purposes of this thesis I coded the citation style and numbering using Typst's introspection system and handwrote the references. However, we have also written a BibLaTeX-compatible citation system called hayagriva [1] for Typst. We haven't yet integrated it, but want to do so before our public beta.

[1]: https://github.com/typst/hayagriva
The problem starts when things you enjoy/do well don't fall into "pay well"
I'd love to see an ad-blocker based on this. Perhaps I can even use it on my TV.
The ones who actually made hobbyist blogs probably went to youtube because a youtube channel is actually much better than a blog from the pov of the hobbyist.

Of course it's harder to search video than a blog from the pov of someone looking for information but that's not the hobbyists problem.
It's also in the Window menu, so you can add a keyboard shortcut to it.

See https://lna7n.org/2021/04/16/a-survival-guide-to-macos-from-...
No, you're correct. We should obviously facilitate teenagers who want to kill themselves.
Create optimal conditions for lucky things to happen to you (2020)
Looks very nice, combining the good parts of latex, markdown and other ordinary programming languages.
For those curious, the paper is about formal manipulation (computers!) in mathematical proof in the domain of geometric topology where a lot of hand waving (err, sorry, intuition) can go down.

The result this is applied to is one by Smale (of the Horseshoe Map and other notions) that a sphere (ie abstract basketball 2D surface in 3 space) can be turned inside out without puncturing or creasing.

Here's a 20 minute video that starts with an outline of the problem and then discusses approaches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI-To1eUtuU

This also may interest some:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7942052_Visualizing...
This is pleasant to play with on a touch device.
AFAIK this takes place more or less everywhere, although America probably takes this to the extreme. I dunno about distant, hot and poor 3rd world countries but in Europe the more developed a country is the harder it is to get to a doctor (incl. a dentist). Some (reasonably competent) doctors travel to the west to invite patients from there to their licensed practice in non-EU Balkan countries because just getting a license in the west is too hard.
The local & CI parity is one of the main points for https://dagger.io
VSC already has this but you have to integrate it with a runtime first. As far as I know many languages have this.
I think #snagging works for TikTok.
If there's no safety when changing things, then you've failed to define and verify adherence to contracts along component boundaries, and the lack of a proper test suite.

I've certainly seen that happen in Ruby, but I've also seen that happen in every other language - most of them statically typed - I've worked with, as very few languages have type systems expressive enough to prevent it (and it tends to massively destroy productivity to try check everything strictly enough anyway).
Just because people want those things doesn't mean they also want to control AC from a touch screen and janky driver assist features.

And as others said, CarPlay is so much better than the older OEM systems for music and maps. Even current OEM systems in 2023 don't neccessarily have maps that keep themselves updated.

One feature of CarPlay I didn't think of until I used it, is the ability to plan your route on your phone while you're drinking a coffee or walking to your parking spot, and have your navigation ready to go before you even start your car.
Why should it matter to me who is spying on me rather than being spied on at all?

Also, I don't know about you, but I find the idea of my own government spying on me just slightly more of an immediate threat then a country I have no plans of ever visiting.
A manhole cover is the fastest object ever created and likely the first manmade object to leave earth.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/fastest-manm...
> I'm sure one of these days someone will hook GPT directly to a terminal.

And then there would be someone between ChatGPT and execution in more or less the same way I am inbetween the code I write and execution of said code, which in most cases I'm not, as after I write the code, the computer executes it without checking with me.

If someone gives ChatGPT unfettered interaction with the internet, they are doing it, and they are liable.
So you’re saying we can now kick the personal trainer to the curb too? Lol.
How do you handle flag changes in the middle of builds, where the flag is being checked in multiple places and the flip happens between them?
I still find it weird that this has no override.

I can vaguely understand the security concern, but it's my device, running my OS, why can't I make a simple screenshot?
I think the opposite. A short expiry time ala LetsEncrypt, but with a process to "adopt" the new certificate. That is, the website can say, "I'm using this cert now, soon I'll be using that one".

Then the browser can be more strict with warning of unscheduled cert changes, and an expired-but-adopted cert is not a big issue and browsers don't have to be so alarmist about it.
Why are negative trends so often portrayed as inevitable? Why not create or at least point to some examples of the kind of website you like?

Maybe it's more appealing? No responsibility. No need to question your ideas: Do I really want a blog or a non-chronological website? Of course, you're going to have a blog, everything else is already "broken".
I'm not a fan. Not at all. I find his version of science not to be Science at all. It's a process that never ends. His version often looks like an absolute, a weapin.

Furthermore he seems more interested in himself than the audience. I'm not sure why others who are brighter than NDGT don't make an effort to call him out more often. He's not part of the solution. The world needs less like NDGT.
Read RSS Feeds on Mastodon
How about a

- Your doctor let their medical license lapse. They are legally not allowed to practice medicine until they renew it.

or a

- The hospital did not pass its mandatory inspection. We are not allowed to practice medicine here until we redo the inspection and pass it.

?

Renewing certificates isn't exactly rocket science. It's not an oopsie-whoopsie, it is a pretty massive ops failure and should be treated as such.
Honestly, I don't consider PNG a simple format. The CRC and the compression are non-trivial. If you're using a new language that doesn't have those features built in and/or you don't have a reasonable amount of programming experience then you're going to likely fail (or learn a ton). zlib is 23k lines. "simple" is not word I'd use to describe PNG

Simple formats are like certain forms of .TGA and .BMP. A simple header and then the pixel data. No CRCs, no compression. Done. You can write an entire reader in 20-30 lines of code and a writer in other 20-30 lines of code as well. Both of those formats have options that can probably make them more work but if you're storing 24bit "True color" or 32 bit "true color + alpha" then they are way easier formats.

Of course they're not common formats so you're stuck with complex formats like PNG
The browser shouldn't, the user is the one that needs to make that determination. But right now, the user doesn't even have that choice.
I've been using a Mac full time for a little over a year. I'd agree fully with you on the full screen going to a separate desktop. Extremely annoying.

However, you can switch desktops with control + right/left arrow. No need for the trackpad.

Because I'm easily distracted, I frequently have all major applications maximized. That's how I always used Windows. Fortunately, I can have the same on the Mac. Maximized with the dock showing below and all apps on the same desktop. Full screen is a rarity for me.
Interesting read, but did not understand the author's message or what was going on. Was it about addiction, MPD, trans discovery? Unclear, to me at least. Poor writing I think, unless the ambiguity was the intent.
maybe it's trained on non-published documentation pages?
Apple Delays AR Glasses, Plans Cheaper Mixed-Reality Headset
This can be combined with Nitter's RSS feed of a (public) Twitter account to work around the lack of network effect in Mastodon compared to Twitter.

IME ephemetoot is no longer required, as Mastodon servers (or at least the one I'm using) now offer the feature to auto-delete older toots natively.
I temporarily "quit the rat race" years ago with savings from a tech job which paid decently but not today's crazy salaries. Travelled all around N America coast to coast and back, worked a couple of ski seasons etc. How I did it was eat cheap but healthy food, while travelling had no rent costs. Had a 17-yr-old fuel efficient Japanese car, sometimes slept in it, camped for free in national forests, stayed at hostels. (this was well before AirBNB) . The way I saved up enough was always having fairly frugal habits, never bought fancy clothes or gadgets etc. It was a lot of fun. Wouldn't have wanted to do it for ever. It gets transient and less fulfilling after a while. Met many wonderful people, but, they move on. Its not like having a set of local friends and family. I'd argue that in today's tech industry it should be possible for most people to do what I did (before they have a family). Only caveat might be that rents have increased in last 20 yrs a lot... but then.. so have salaries in tech. I think its good to see it as a temporary adventure. In the long run this caused lost earnings, set my career back a little for a while, but with tech having such wonderful opportunities, this doesn't matter now, cos after that, worked normal jobs again for years, and repaired the "financial damage". I guess a lot of people with my skills are richer now, but, does it matter? Seems worth it for the experiences. I must say, it is indeed a privileged thing to be able to do. It largely depends on being born with the type of brain/intelligence that lets you work as a coder. Couldn't have done that so easily otherwise. That said... I met many people travelling who funded their travels by all sorts of means. One guy worked 80-hr weeks at a supermarket for months to fund a big trip. Others did all sorts of things. One girl worked at a strip club. I remember a lively debate in a youth hostel common room about whether such "selling your soul" was worth it for all the adventures she used the money for. ;). One caveat - of course healthcare is a cost issue. In my case I had health coverage of a sort by various means. This has surely gone up in cost since.