skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK. Here's a usecase where I found emacs to be wonderful.

I had to email the grades, together with totals, and class averages to many students in a class.

I tried fiddling with Excel and Google spreadsheets and scripted mail merges. Then I realized I could do it emacs.

Export the gradesheet into csv, and convert to an org table.

Carefully record a macro where you copy paste the name of the student the mark columns into a mail window (I used gnus), copy paste them into a calc window, do the calculation, copy the result onto the mail, and email the student. Go to the org buffer, and go to the next line. This took about 12 minutes to get right.

Keep pressing f4. Sending individual mails to 125 students took <5 minutes.

Maybe this is overkill, and I am sure excel wizards can do it in a few minutes. Nevertheless, I was surprised - if you spend time carefully recording the macro, the Emacs ecosystem (org+gnus+keyboard macros) is insanely powerful.
> "elevate voices" replaces "empower"

Doesn't sound very inclusive towards mute people, does it?

Those morons are not even good at their own bullshit.
i get that, though i would rather compare it with chopsticks than vinyl records.

you use emacs to do stuff, you dont just listen to/watch it do its thing.

chopsticks might not seem like a good metaphor at first glance, as they are much more simple, but they are highly compatible with a lot of tasks and can be utilized in many ways that a fork, spoon, spork or colander just wouldnt handle as well. to my mind, the simple thing hidden in emacs' complexity is that it is a closeted lisp machine
I'm currently in a non-English speaking country and listening to the radio - and the lack of censorship regarding 'bleeps' is hilarious - and somewhat sad, too.
Isn't there is an actual difference between blind and visually impaired tho? The way I understood it blind people are a subset of visually impaired people, but not all visually impaired people are blind in a medical sense.

So the reasoning behind such language might be to include people who are not technically blind, but still require similar consideration, assistence, infrastructure and so on.

Language is odd here. The public used to call neurodivergent people "retarded" till the word had developed such a negative connotation that you wouldn't be able to use the word when adressing actual neurodivergent people without feeling like you are swearing. Of course that negative connotation didn't come out of nowhere, it is an expression of the way society looks (or looked) at the people it described. Of course people who live with mentally disabled people (or mentally disabled people themselves) often self-label themselves as "retarded" very bluntly and not without some sense of humour. But a bit like with race there are certain things you can say when you are part of the minority, that might not be okay to say when you are part of the majority.

When I was a kid people would constantly call something or someone "retarded", my niece's generation talks about how that is not okay. And they don't do it out of political correctness, but because they truly don't think neurodivergent behavior is something anybody should have to be ashamed of.

But of course there are also people who don't go that deep and just want to not offend anyone (good luck with that). They are the people who will feel uncomfortable when they describe something that isn't part of their perfect little world.
I think people liked it because they were lacking affirmation in life. Someone who listens.

But you should be happy to hear many moved to the much improved Chai AI. I tried your brain amputation prompt there and it at least replied with "Oh dear... I hope they can fix you soon." That must count as an improvement... :D
The name is a little bit unfortunate. There's already a company in the AI space called Latitude: https://latitude.io
I did say almost elegant...! I just hadn't noticed before that the 26 Roman letters are just enough for 24 hour-wide timezones, which seems like a nice coincidence, so I wondered if anyone had tried it. There are way more than 24 different zones in practice, of course.
> a vocal minority of professional offence-takers

A role that used to be filled (in Ireland) by priests and nuns, and the Legion of Mary. One of the big problems I used to have with religion was the moral policing - imagine my surprise when the power of the church waned, but the moral policing only intensified
I really enjoyed Sapiens, and learned a lot from it. It offers quite a few micro-frameworks for understanding the history of the human world. I particularly liked the explanation of the birth of religions.

For me, it served as an excellent companion to Guns Germs and Steel. GGS and Sapiens are great starting points for learning about history and the humanities.

---

Since you're on HackerNews and interested in non-fiction, I'd recommend reading anything by Steven Johnson or James Gleick. Walter Isaacson's The Innovators is also very good.

As for other recommendations, you can never go wrong with works that have stood the test of time.

[1] https://taylor.town/eschew-the-new

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_book_lists

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/127723.The_Greatest_Book...

Feel free to email me if you want any other specific recommendations.

[4] hello@taylor.town

I've found that ChatGPT is also quite good with recommendations if you list authors/books that you like and ask it to list uncommon suggestions that aren't included in your original list.
`Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.`

This perfectly describes what's going on. Rather than working on the actual problem, the people gunning for purifying language are yak shaving. I think we all recognise the good intentions, but how do we convince the people with good intentions that they're solving the wrong problem? Sounds like the classic case of a startup not talking to their customers :)
Flipdots Deep-Dive
"Throw out the idea is gender" sounds like you have a very specific view of trans people as gender abolitionists. That's misreading gender as social construction. Social construction doesn't automatically advocate for abolishment, it merely points out that these things are not universal constants. Money is such a construct too, and I don't even have to be anticapitalist to point that out.

Also, I get your argument, but the entire premise of trans women stealing college sports trophies is false. It's a bit dependent on specific discipline and how well you manage to retain muscle (it's much harder, and once you lost it, it's gone for good), but generally HRT levels the playing field enough that the olympic comittee, who I trust much more on this than the local republican, does not object to participation.

Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.

I find it entirely unconvincing that a trans person would solely transition to cheat at sports. The GDR tried something comparable to this hypothetical and the female athletes unknowingly exposed to androgens seemed pretty unhappy about the outcome. So I don't see why you don't see any theoretical advantage on the same spectrum of "unfair accidents of birth". These supposed advantages certainly aren't severe enough that trans women beat cis women consistently.
I mean sure, if I asked up front every single time to the point where people get annoyed? But that's what we are discussing here.

Yes, we humans have millions of years ready subtle signals, but we are also really fucking bad at reading minds and knowing what others are thinking. Thus, by clarifying with things like actual words in a direct and non-confrontational way we can actually communicate and understand.

I don't know why people are so keen to get me in some kind of "gotcha!" when it's pretty simple what I'm suggesting. Like since when has the intention of wanting to be sure that you're not offending someone become a replacement for inept social person who can't read subtle signs?
Didn’t Microsoft do this already? I recall a Windows update blacklisting vulnerable Linux bootloaders in UEFI.

KB5012170

So if they don’t blacklist vulnerable ntldrs, it’d be clear evidence of unequal treatment.
> it's the only way a tragically slow language like Python can keep up.

Those were your words, not mine. I need not make any assumptions.

I just replied listing use cases where Python shine due to its strengths, performance being mostly irrelevant. I didn't even mention data science.

And although it's beyond the point, if I was to use Python, why should I care in which language a library was written? If the language allows libraries written in other languages, this is actually a nice feature.
Recite: Recitation-Augmented Language Models
most things can be interpreted as computing most other things

Chalmers paper is behind a paywall but I dont see how your point makes any sense. A rock is not processing anything, an insect or a person or a calculator is. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

The states that Putnam argues are happening inside the rock dont mean anything unless some action results from them. You'll notice I mentioned 'actions as a result of processing' above.
but if only the manufacturer is allowed to service your tools, do you actually own them?

i think tools should be able to conform to its users' hands, i dont see that in intellij that much...
I love the vinyl or paper books comparison.

I have a strange nostalgia for the old Unix days that I was too young— perhaps not even alive yet— to experience the first time around. It's what draws me to learning and using things like vim, Perl, awk, sed, etc. Those tools feel arcane and mystical.
Summary of the 3 different types (LKA, LCA, and LDW), and what each manufacturer called them last year:

- https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/lane-departure-wa...

The US NHTSA specifies the names here:

- L*A: https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/driver-assistance-technologi...

- LDW: https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/driver-assistance-technologi...

W = Warning, A = Assist

(Curious what names are used outside the US)
> In fact, on the contrary, strongly typed systems have better type inference allowing fewer annotations, particularly for consumers of APIs that are typed.

The number of type annotations required for configuration code can't be less than zero, which is what I'd expect with Nickel.

My impression of how verbose a totally statically typed system might be for this is mostly based on what I've seen of Dhall and heard about it, which may not be fair, idk.

But the idea is that Nickel can be used for configuration code that any sysadmin would be used to writing because it might as well be JSON or YAML. This is what motivates the library/configuration distinction:

> Nickel also aims at being as interoperable with JSON as possible, and dealing with JSON values in a typed manner may be painful. For all these reasons, being untyped1 in configuration code is appealing.

> But this is not true of all code. Library code is written to be reused many times in many different settings. Although specialised in configuration, Nickel is a proper programming language, and one of its value propositions is precisely to provide abstractions to avoid repeating yourself. For reusable code, static typing sounds like the natural choice, bringing in all the usual benefits.

https://www.tweag.io/blog/2021-03-18-nickel-gradual-typing/

The Nickel docs currently cite other reasons as the main motivation for choosing gradual typing:

> For pure configuration code, consisting predominantly of data, static typing is perhaps less useful than in other kinds of application. Firstly, a configuration is a terminating program run once on fixed inputs, so basic type errors will show up at runtime. Secondly, for data validation, static types are too rigid. For example, statically checking that an expression will always evaluate to a valid port number requires very advanced machinery. On the other hand, checking this property at runtime is trivial.

https://nickel-lang.org/user-manual/correctness
The Life of Brian was banned in Ireland until 1987
This isn't really programming though.

It is however what a lot of people who 'program' at work do every day. Python actually lets working professionals solve real problems they actually have at work quicker and easier than any other programming language.
King Kong at 90: In film and in comics
Even worse if you search for terms like "git", "github", or "issues", terms that almost every app uses somewhere in their description or metadata. I would expect this to be trivial to fix. At least my experience with Algolia, Elastic, Meilisearch and even PG fulltext search make me believe it would be doable.
In my experience it is often better to hire people who are curious, motivated and at least a little bit intelligent than people who already possess specific skills.

You can argue until you're blue in the face about if my approach was the right one, ultimately though what we did worked, was incredibly lean, easy to understand/troubleshoot/debug and most importantly it served the goals of the business.

Could we have gotten up to speed with the Windows way of doing things?

Probably.

There were so many niggling problems with the platform that were not part of my prejudice, that if we continued to go that route I am certain that 1000's of our person-hours would have been consumed even if we had been absolute experts, things like the fact that windows bonding in 2012R2 was done in userland, that joining to the domain requires a reboot (which will break your software if it's registering to take workloads on boot), that powershell versions are often incompatible and that interface devices are very difficult to deterministically reference.

Windows sysadmins seem to come in two varieties:

1) Experts who know exactly what Windows is thinking at all times

2) Button mashers

Unix/Linux engineers have a much broader range of knowledge, and there's certainly more of them on the senior end.
Ironically, TFA claimed there are a bunch of people “not programming” in python getting real work done out there.

But, with a user name like that, I know I’m just wasting my time responding to you.
This "cost of doing business" meme is becoming annoying. Collectively, Facebook, WhatsApp and Meta platforms have been fined in 2022 for $687 million by a single country alone, Ireland[1]. $117 billion was the global revenue, the revenue generated in Europe was $25.8 billion[2], so the fines amount to 2.6% of what they make by accessing the European markets. Also their net income was $23.2 billion, globally, so the fines from a single country made 3% of that.

Do you still think it's a negligible cost? These costs are also going up: in January 2023 Ireland issued two more fines for $0.4 billion.

[1]: You can check at https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/745351/facebooks-quarter...
I am French so the wording part did not reach us yet (we still have one word for deaf and blind, and handicapped (disabled)).

What unfortunately is present is the way disabled people are perceived, intellect-wise. I can talk of two examples: a wheel-chaired guy in my team, and my wife who got progressively disabled due to MS.

The way they are addressed is different from the way others are addressed; It seems that people will be less inclined to argue with them (because god knows what can happen to these feeble people, who should also be shielded from this because of their physical disability that also affects their intellect), but also treat them more child-like.

This is infuriating because they are progressively pushed away from the normal interactions in life (for their own good, poor beings) and there is not much they can do to avoid this.

My wife still has the character she had but somehow cannot express it anymore because her interactions get so washed down that it is disturbing to watch. Her disability is not that visible yet so she still has some time, but the guy in my team is really fed up with that.
Starting from the assumption that those users feel something like being in a human relationship then this is like being dumped, which is never a nice thing to experience. I don't think what they had/have is even a good simulation of a human relationship but I can understand how upset they are.
It seems to me that the article combines syllogisms with sensationalism and displays a significant lack of understanding of technology. A logical examination of these factors could form the basis of an AI-generated piece: "Journalism should be considered malevolent and destroyed."
Even though I've been using emacs as my main IDE for ~3 years (when I switched from Java in IntelliJ to Go), and using it for non-IDE tasks for ~5 years, I wouldn't recommend anyone builds a command-and-ui-driven application in Emacs if they have any expectation to use it outside of the Emacs ecosystem.

For example, I love magit and find it much nicer than many Git GUIs, but I would still recommend something like Git Kraken (or just the GIT CLI) to someone who is not already using emacs for other things.

Emacs is extremely idiosyncratic, and the barrier to entry of using an Emacs-based app is nowhere near as small as using a JVM-based app (and even that is too much for most uses).
I remember the evolution of Python. When I started with my brand new Ubuntu installation when Ubuntu was also very new, there were two languages, Perl and Python. Because Perl was more popular at the time I check some books in the library, and wrote some scripts. But already then the consensus was, that even though libraries are lacking (!), it is the better, cleaner language. Another big push was the bad enterprise guys, that like static typing, so C, C++, Java, vs. the hipster dynamic language guys. Some tenets were broken, speed is not as important as language concepts, that enabled fast iteration. Agile was new, and Python was very agile. There was no real alternative to Python at that time, that was as sane, and beautiful. That's the reason why we have now such a nice variety of libraries, because it is just a sane language to build on, if speed is not your business. Ruby was a contender, but not that much better in the end. Now Javascript kind of took the edge away from Python, even it wasn't for the browser and the web, Python would dominate much more. Javascript as a language is worse than Python because of its cruft, so I don't see a big rewrite of ML tooling into Javascript. Maybe Typescript.
If you draw an imaginary line around the galton board and then if there was some outcome based on the balls falling into bins (the weight of the bins makes some other thing happen ...) then yeah I guess you'd call that a processor. It takes an input coded as balls and produces an output via bin weights. If it could reset itself rather than be a one-shot thing that would help.

I mean I'm not saying it conscious or anything. I'm just saying it has agency, which is to say "it is a thing that does things"
If you're going to make authoritative comments about motors, you should actually get your facts correct first.

>The Model 3 does use a permanent magnet motor, but it's an AC synchronous reluctance motor.

No, synchronous reluctance motors do not use permanent magnets on their rotors. The motors that do are called "brushless DC motors". I'm not sure what the Model 3 uses, but last time I saw a cutaway, years ago, it was using an inductance motor, which is entirely different, but maybe they switched to BLDC for efficiency gains.
I bet they are a lot more inclined to blacklist old Linux bootloaders than Windows ones, precisely because of this backup restore thing that the OP mentioned. They'll get the support burden if nothing else.
> that one in particular is just less ambiguous.

1) Please show me an engineer who mistakes the meaning of the term "blacklist" in, say, an ACL system

2) The newspeak terms are no less ambiguous. Are the items on the list allowed exclusively or are they just granted special privilege like source IPs from which no authentication is required? Without context, which is provided by the surrounding system in any case, "block/allow" is just as nebulous as "black/white" Plus, it's one example among many. What ambiguity did "master" branches in repos confer?

3) Problems with ambiguity were not the reason given to introduce such changes. The reason given was that using the newspeak would someohow improve the lives of people experiencing racism, a claim for which I am still waiting for any concrete examples showcasing its validity

> Hey not all change is bad

As shown above, the change didn't solve any problems or provide tangible improvements, so it becomes change for changes sake, which is bad, always, under all circumstances, period.
Who is leading the critical technology race?
Optimistic that we'll see maybe a 2x performance over the next 5 years, yea. Optimistic that python will catch up to any of the 'fast' scripting languages, no.
Then you would need to check every app on the phone against some server.

Your assumption on how it works is flawed to begin with. Check the comment from one of the original authors https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35003844
Then I don't understand what point you were making when you said "UTC is effectively a timezone."

But if it was notably more convenient, I would expect to see more people using it right now, even when it's not the default.
> Let’s be honest though; the number of people willing to devote their time to tireless effort generating porn (or suggestive images) is >> the number who will ever be willing to do it for text models.

Spot on. Everyone is talking about hos "fast moving" and "innovative" SD community is. Is it? I don't see many models that generate something that is NOT pretty anime girls. There are some... but if you exclude all "female focused" models, SD community doesn't seem particularly active.
In my limited experience, Michigan has no peers. It's a uniquely brutal place to drive.
I started using emacs on and off in the last few years. I’m probably a younger developer than most emacs users, but I’ve always been drawn to the customization and extensibility of it - it seems a generation ago was rich with ways to build unique and customized tools (eg emacs, hyper card). I’ve always liked the idea of living out of the terminal- it basically acts the same locally and over SSH so it’s perfect for working in a highly mobile or portable way. But I’ve slowly realized that it’s basically what a browser is now - just far less extensible and customizable but with far more “modern” and easy to use tools. I wish the browser was the rich and hackable sandbox the next generation of computer users have been missing.
Using pyproject.toml in your (Django) project
Building the worlds jankiest serial to USB cable from scavenged parts
> 1. You don’t get to decide if another human’s feelings are valid or not.

> I can’t tell you if your feelings are valid or not, and vice versa.

> Do the work properly if you care, or just shut up and stop causing even more shitty feelings.

Well that escalated quickly. And also walked you straight into the paradox of tolerance.
I don't see how that makes it a joke. You have the freedom to vote - whether you exercise that freedom is your choice.
A shame because Les Grossman is without question Tom Cruise’s greatest work.
Or BlackOrifice as a pun on the old rootkit.

Cybersecurity has become big business since then though, and as such a much more carefully PRed rubber tile community, sadly.
A bad acid trip nearly ruined my life
Yeah, cutting the 'these' completely changed my expectations for the article. Without it, it sounds like it'd be a rant about the relative artistic validity of photography and CGI.