skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's fundamentally a different sort of activity to listening to poetry, playing basketball, attending a lecture, or writing a CRUD app.

I disagree. Team sports (playing basketball) are just as much about choreography and also the connection between dance and all other activities you mentioned. The feeling of being part of a "well-oiled machine" is the sense that the choreography is successful. This feels good because most of the time a group of people wouldn't care for doing what you expect. It's affirmation.
This article is great, and it reminds me of a rant I've been wanting to make for a long time: why the hell does everyone these days insist on building every web app as an SPA?

I started my career in Rails. I'm sick of Rails these days as I've worked with it for long enough to become intimately familiar with its flaws; these days I'd pick Phoenix over Rails any day of the week. But still, I'd rather spend a million years with Rails than five minutes with most of the React SPA monstrosities I've had to work with recently.

I get it: if you want to build a super-complicated, dynamic front-end, there's only so much you can do with the classic Rails-style approach (server-side rendering of HTML templates with some vanilla Javascript, or perhaps jQuery, sprinkled on top). Once you get past a certain level of complexity I can understand the argument for having totally separate "frontend" and "backend" applications where the frontend is built with something like React and the latter renders nothing more than a JSON API.

But why, why, why has the entire industry seemingly decided that the latter, complex approach is the default, perhaps even the only, way to build a web application? The last four companies I've worked for all used the "separate FE/BE" approach for every app, and at all four companies it was a terrible, unnecessary choice that added exponential amounts of complexity and slowed development to a crawl for no discernible benefit. Time and time again I'd get frustrated because the most simple, basic features would take ridiculously long to finish, be a nightmare to test, and be full of infuriating little subtleties and footguns that made the implementation fragile as an eggshell. Even something as simple as adding a <form> would take ten times longer than I knew it would have taken me in Phoenix or Rails.

And yet when I try to explain that I don't think we need the "separate FE/BE" approach for the task at hand, people look at me like I've suggested we don't need electricity. It's all they've ever known and they can't imagine there might be a better way, or at least one that isn't so agonisingly, pointlessly complex. What's happened to the industry? Why has web development become like this?
This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly.

Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B startup not understanding the complexities of how the buyer and users differ and asking questions such as, “Would you use this feature?” is a poor PM.

Don’t let one bad experience ruin your perception of the role.
What cell phones ever had an FM radio?
Chromium 110 and 111 for Vista/7/8.0/8.1 backport
Additionally, they must not be empty to maximize throughput of consumers which benefit from batching. If there's only ever one item to grab, consumers cannot amortize fetches across a batch, which impacts throughput, without any inherent benefit to latency.

(Imagine sending a TCP packet for every individual byte that was enqueued on a socket!)

Same applies if you have any sort of load shedding on the consumer side. If the queue is empty, it means you've shed load you didn't need to; when the next brief drop in load comes, you can't take advantage of it.

(Fun analogy: this is why Honda hybrids typically don't charge their battery all the way while driving, to allow the chance to do so for free while braking.)
They only made it illegal after the point where most families didn't need it.
Cough phoenixframework.org cough
CME Impact Imminent, What to Expect [video]
>It engenders trust, builds community, and generally builds relationships

But that's what competitive games also do. You cannot play basketball without trusting, collaborating, communicating with your teammates. Those are the pillars of teamwork. Also synchronicity is core to them, so much that researchers have taken noticed (https://www.popsci.com/nba-basketball-synchronous-movements-...).
Made me think of Joaquin Phoenix's job in Her:

> Theodore Twombly is a lonely, introverted man who works for a business that has professional writers compose letters for people who are unable to write letters of a personal nature themselves[0]

Thinking about it now, it's sort of funny how in that imagined future, humans are writing personal letters for others, when the technology that makes OS1 possible, exists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)
Off-topic but I just finished hiking in Swiss Jura mountains (albeit in canton Vaud and not Jura, namely part of Cretes du Jura ridge hike), beautiful forests which remind me of nature back home in eastern Europe.

One question - why did watchmaking industry started/thrived in those rather remote places up in the mountains? I get that not everybody wanted/could be in Geneva, but remoteness helps little when doing business, apart from driving costs down. You need very specifically skilled people to get to those remote places. Some small village(s) say near Yverdon les Bains would make more sense to me, in the past and now too. On the way back saw new big glass&concrete building of Vacheron Constantin literally in the middle of nowhere, in between 2 forests and small road.
> It doesn't matter.

According to who?
There is quite a lot of inherent complexity of web as a platform. If frameworks were any more abstracted they would be too brittle for a lot of use cases.

Btw, use Sorbet for Ruby static typing. It's very ergonomic.
This is a very long-winded way of saying “you should have enough capacity to process all items in the queue before the queue fills up and everything explodes”.

I agree. But that’s not the argument the post is making, nor does it support the position that “queues should be empty”. No, they shouldn’t. It’s fine to let a queue build up (and thus not be empty), then process all the items in the queue in a short time frame. There are efficiency savings if you are able to do this.
What this shows is just how important it is to get photos of as many local places as you can in your area and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. I've been doing this and have been making a solid attempt at documenting South West Sydney (focusing on the City of Liverpool currently).

You can see the results via Wikishootme:

https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/#lat=-33.918668614845444&l...
Yes, but - if you don't understand how the web works and that it's made of HTTP and JSON and databases, you're probably going to find yourself trying to solve a problem you don't understand very quickly. I've always wanted to build a nice chair or cabinet, but I don't have the tools or the experience. It's not the tool's fault.
‘Russian Math’ Became a Must-Have Extracurricular for Overachieving Parents
I think it's short sighted to picture a 'centrally' planned economy as the only alternative to capitalism. I'm not an expert, but if you read Marx directly, he didn't say much about the structure of what proletarian ownership would look like. I think it's safe to say market structures.m can coexist with democratic ownership of the economy: see unions, coops, etc.
> Wow. Stable diffusion is progressing exponentially. What prompts and/or model was used for to generate this? (Prove me wrong.)

When you zoom in, the pedestrians have the right number of fingers.
I do the same, but sometimes I wish I could give better feedback.

"Dear British Airways, I booked with SAS instead because you assumed a Linux user with Firefox was a bot."

(Or maybe it was the other way round, I forgot.)
Study: car evolution trends (2015)
>Decoupling components

>This way, the producer doesn’t need to know anything about the consumer and vice versa.

Both components needs to agree on shared data, down to what each field actually means. The producer is just not saying What To Do with the message.

Take an example of processing a purchase order in multiple, asynchronous steps. While the webpage button spins there's a whole dance of agreed messages and expected outcomes that needs to happen in order for it to work. And there is no decoupling in sight.

My take is that Decoupling is a vague word. One should design distributed systems assuming that coupling is manageable, not inexistent.

>you could submit the task and ACK immediately allowing the job to finish in the background.

That's bad practice.
Agreed. My 4 year old went through a phase where she loved the original Disney Peter Pan. Disney themselves have included a disclaimer at the beginning of the film now, but for my daughter I made sure to discuss with her that the portrayal of the Indians wasn't particularly nice.
> And don’t get me started on lindy hop vs west coast swing.

The sad thing is that (for the most part) I don't think the westies really hate on the lindy hoppers much. You can see, admittedly older, clips[1] of dancers throwing in a bit of lindy, balboa, and shag in top level comps. Of course, this is Sylvia Sykes, so maybe that's an exception.

---

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psOWt0oyx9k
I don't know but I hope that Chomsky is less wrong. Because if statistical methods reach an asymptote, we will have no choice but to try to better understand the principles and foundations.

If statistical methods do not reach an asymptote, I don't think we will have the incentive to reach a deeper understanding
There's something about dancing that people get really weird about if you don't want to participate. As if it's their god given duty to convince you that, no, you really DO like dancing, and you'll have a great time if you just loosen up and have fun. I wish people would just respect "no thank you" and stop trying to push people to do something they clearly don't want. As is, I have to avoid events with dancing.

And no, it's not an elitist "I'm just so much smarter than the people dancing" thing, like the post seems to imply.
Strongly disagree. Errors should be things that someone needs to look at. It's not necessarily a problem, but could potentially be. Otherwise you end up with the situation described in the article, where a newcomer to the system has to slog through a lot of noise in order to understand what is going on. But even experienced people will have trouble seeing the real errors in a sea of red.

A few times I have insisted on escalating every error in order to improve a noisy program. A client that breaks connection with us isn't an error, that's a notice. An upstream database that breaks connection with us so we can't process a query, that's an error. It's not fun but it gets better.
Solitaire 3D
There's a advocate subreddit for a HSV-1 vaccine (therapeutic & prophylactic), the same virus mentioned in the article.

It's likely you have it dormant and is associated with many other ailments not just Alzheimers.

The subreddit gives a good idea on the current progress: https://www.reddit.com/r/HerpesCureResearch/
Looks like

if (!Monitor.IsEntered(_x))
throw new InvalidOperation.

Will do the trick in C#
"I'd far rather be happy than right any day"
On a big airliner yes. V1 depends on the runway length so a smaller aircraft will easily reach Vr before V1. Because most runways are made for the biggest planes.
Features of a Dream Programming Language
You can limit how much different people's wealth is without preventing markets from working.
I am reminded of this suddenly https://youtu.be/6ofYNHRcspM
How do you vote down a link?
Scintilla is a free source code editing component with a permissive license
I actually tried to build a 100 to 200 MHz end stage using stripline to get rid of all of the hand wound inductors to replace them with silver plated traces but never could get it work in a predictable manner and I lacked the math background to figure out what I was doing wrong. The people that can do that sort of thing intuitively are magicians to me :)
Brainfuck has 8 opcodes, while flipjump (like subleq) has 1 opcode
True, but those experiments are inevitably restricted to the aspects of consciousness available for indirect observation and comparison.

There is no way to distinguish between an unconscious machine mimicking the functional aspects of consciousness we are able to indirectly observe and compare to our own experience and something having the same experience.

We could easily (and I think almost definitely are given the current pure symbolic manipulation track) be doing the same thing as a jungle cargo cult constructing an air strip out of sticks. Studying that won’t tell us how planes work.

Obviously advanced AI is more sophisticated than that and may have more legitimate parallels to consciousness, but I think it’s fundamentally impossible to know what’s a core part of the conscious experience and what just looks superficially similar to the output of conscious beings.

The current generation of AI are clearly not at all conscious and are “just” (don’t want to diminish the work) very good parrots generating image and text output from a given input in a way a whole bunch of conscious humans already have. But we’re already getting cargo cults and people who are anthropomorphizing and considering them comparable to humans.

There’s a danger in studying artificial models of an underlying phenomenon to learn about the phenomenon. That method of study is inherently very limited and extremely difficult to keep calibrated to the underlying phenomenon.
They'd work just as well if the expected rates of profit were lower, due to profit taxes.

Money is invested because people with money chase yield, if yields are positive, but lower across the board, that money would still be making the exact same investments.
I think it should be marked as being from 2017. Also, I don't see much point in this article. It just butchers Norvig's article into a bunch of quotes even though his article is quite accessible and not very long.
Yes, it was a proper old fashioned blacksmith - though he did have an electric blower - we weren’t pumping the bellows :)

It was exhausting - towards the end I could barely lift the hammer.

I did it here - https://www.hotmetalworks.co.uk/

The museum it’s in is worth a visit as well - especially when they are running all the steam engines.
https://archive.is/U3Uvl
Not sure you've got the right angle on that... Did openai replace the associate dean here, or did the associate dean replace their secretary and writer.

I think the latter. No way they would send anything without high level approval. That still happened here, except the AD completed the task directly with OpenAI, and the secretary and writer didn't get involved.
Build it and Show HN
Another way I’ve seen this done is to start a new branch in git clearly labelled as “experiment/thing”

Which can be reviewed/ saved for later / deleted. Without any pressure.

Also “proof-of-concept” to help learn or figure out how something will work.

Helpful if you want to try something that isn’t directly linked to an open ticket/issue or even just an issue under discussion and not part of the main backlog.
And while capitalism has increased inequality, by quite a lot, it also elevated the poor in the process. Living standards are better across the board.
What you're describing is the modern definition, but Marxists use the word to refer to what we would call capitalism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_(Marxism)#:~:text=Ca....
I think the thing to note about today's large language models is that they aren't purely statistical. The topology of the neural networks behind them has been explicitly defined by the creators of those systems. They are not 'tabula rasa' as some might suppose them to be.
The game continues. Back in 2010 when I was writing the first in-browser bot detection signals for Google (so BotGuard could spot embedded Internet Explorers) I wondered how long they might last. Surely at some point embedded browsers would become undetectable? It never happened - browsers are so complex that there will probably always be ways to detect when they're being automated.

There are some less obvious aspects to this that matter a lot in practice:

1. You have to force the code to actually run inside a real browser in the first place, not simply inside a fast emulator that sends back a clean response. This is by itself a big part of the challenge.

2. Doing so is useful even if you miss some automated browsers, because adversaries are often CPU and RAM constrained in ways you may not expect.

3. You have to do something sensible if the User-Agent claims to be something obscure, old or alternatively, too new for you to have seen before.

4. The signals have to be well protected, otherwise bot authors will just read your JS to see what they have to patch next. Signal collection and obfuscation work best when the two are tightly integrated together.

These days there are quite a few companies doing JS based bot detection but I noticed from write-ups by reverse engineers that they don't seem to be obfuscating what they're doing as well as they could. It's like they heard that a custom VM is a good form of obfuscation but missed some of the reasons why. I wrote a bit about why the pattern is actually useful a month ago when TikTok's bot detector was being blogged about:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/10755l2/revers...

tl;dr you want to use a mesh oriented obfuscation and a custom VM makes that easier. It's a means, not an end.

Ad: Occasionally I do private consulting on this topic, mostly for tech firms. Bot detectors tend to be either something home-grown by tech/social networking firms, or these days sold as a service by companies like DataDome, HUMAN etc. Companies that want to own their anti-abuse stack have to start from scratch every time, and often end up with something subpar because it's very difficult to hire for this set of skills. You often end up hiring people with a generic ML background but then they struggle to obtain good enough signals and the model produces noise. You do want some ML in the mix (or just statistics) to establish a base level of protection and to ensure that when bots are caught their resources are burned, but it's not enough by itself anymore. I offer training courses on how to construct high quality JS anti-bot systems and am thinking of maybe in future offering a reference codebase you can license and then fork. If anyone reading this is interested, drop me an email: mike@plan99.net
Half an hour trying to force one of the models to spit a manga-style picture of a character... with correct number of arms and legs. No successes so far. It's frankly disgusting most of the time, prob due to uncanny valley-like effect - it's kinda close, but not quite there. Not to mention, I'm sure I did not put "amputee" in the prompt, but I got a few pictures that should be honestly tagged with "guro"... and I wasn't even trying for NSFW!

Same experience with code: Github Copilot is 90% right 100% of the time. Its suggestions for comments and docstrings are so bad I would never accept them in a code review, basically your old "a++ # adds 1 to a"; the generated code is always wrong, and the bigger the chunk of code generated the more wrong it is. It's kind of OK as a replacement for Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V and for generating boilerplate... which shouldn't be there in good code anyway.

I suspect that for every impressive output we see there are tens of thousands of trash outputs someone had to wade through. Further, the less popular your prompt and the smaller the representation of what you want in the model, the harder it is to get something even remotely resembling what you want. Though, I'm not a "prompt engineer" (WTF is that...), so maybe I'm just using it wrong...
> The main issue: spamhaus block lists, they are hostile to all self-hosted people

Allow me to correct that for you.

There is nothing wrong with spamhaus. They provide one of the best anti-spam options amongst all the commercial providers.

Spamhaus have many lists, I suspect the one you are referring to is the PBL, in their words "DNSBL database of end-user IP address ranges which should not be delivering unauthenticated SMTP email to any Internet mail server except those provided for specifically by an ISP for that customer's use.".

We are in 2023, I think it is beyond any sort of doubt by now that a significant proportion of spam and phishing mails originates from home internet connections because people can't be bothered to keep their computers up to date and virus free, so they become part of a botnet.

So the fact of the matter is that even if Spamhaus PBL did not exist, someone else (or the MX operators themselves) would very soon fill their place by blocking the very same ranges.

Added to which, most home ISPs don't even provide reverse DNS ... so again, even if Spamhaus PBL did not exist, you would likely STILL find yourself being blocked by other measures that most sensible sysadmins implement on their servers.

Hell, many home ISPs just block outbound port 25 these days anyway !
It seems like this would not do anything to address the UDP portion of the proposal.
Hmm, this is a fun game.

"To add some context, the group that promoted this initiative is a fringe ultraprogressive one. Among other things, in 2020 they were first calling border closures racist, then denying the harmful effects of lockdown, then promoting riots and arson in the streets. In 2021 they did an antiwhite campaign and in 2022 they are openly collecting money for war."
And if the beam fails, everyone is expected to die? Nevermind the feasibility of such a beam.

These are highly implausible ideas. On the order of aerial battery swapping. You can imagine such things, but they won’t happen in any sort of practical way. Far less than just figuring out a greener fuel.
Tell HN: I love my family and friends more than you, coworkers
I’m astonished by the amount of people that are OK with going back to the office because their companies say so. They usually claim things like collaboration is way better in person, socialization is much needed, if you spend 8h/day with your coworkers then they ultimately become almost friends, productivity seems to be lower when WFH, etc.

My bet is that most of the people who thinks like this are probably in their 20s. I’m not in my 20s anymore, and I couldn’t care less about all the claims above. I’m a professional that takes his career seriously (I didn’t study CS for the money, over here they don’t pay that much either), and I study every day to become better because I just like it… but I have zero empathy for companies that want to micromanage me and for coworkers that want me to be their friends and share food time.

I have more important commitments in life than being physically around my coworkers sharing an open office space, yet I can successfully and professionally do my job. I understand companies wanting us to go back to the office (they are businesses looking for revenue, they are not our friends), but it really causes me pain to see how many employees do not mind at all going back to a way of working that diminishes quality of life.
Rodriguez, famous for his one and only published work, has been called a Christian Seneca:

https://archive.org/details/PPCV-Manresa
That uboot is pretty old, but not as old as the one on my armada 8040 boards... they can't even boot a modern kernel properly without having to compile uboot and ATF and upgrading the firmware.
Use LUKS to encrypt it.