skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>State level policy depends on public support or opposition.

Arguable - I'd say even unlikely in most real world situations. The US has recently had a wildly unpopular president who showed remarkable indifference to said public opposition. And relying on the media to gauge public support, or inform the populace in objective terms about the actions of their representatives, is inadvisable. It is not difficult to find instances of the same media organizations arguing both in favor and against public policies depending on the elected official enacting them[0][1]. In that regard, mainstream media seems more akin to a tool of propaganda, shaping opinion and manufacturing consent after the fact, than a useful organ of democratic governance.

The issue is that the control the population realistically has over their representatives in a democratic republic like every (?) modern democracy is by necessity of the size of said governments extremely limited. You can't have a referendum on every issue, so for the most part all the public gets to decide is if someone did a good job over the last X years. I recommend reading Democracy for Realists for a more in-depth look, but suffice to say that that level of interaction is far too coarse to guide public policy on immediate, subtle, and complex issues like Ukraine, COVID, or Chinese foreign policy. If something is not a core issue (i.e. something that the parties have split and staked their identities on, like women's rights, access to guns, immigration, etc) or is so universally desirable that everyone just wants more of it (i.e. visible short-term economic growth - note that long-term economic growth is generally not rewarded by the electorate), policymakers have essentially no incentive to actually care, because their voters won't care enough about those issues when it matters to sway their vote one way or another.

To your last question; the public's opinion of a decision doesn't influence whether a policymaker will make the decision. The point of the media is not to inform the public on what their representatives are doing, it is to shape the narrative of politics in the country. The actual decisions, the policy positions, are for the most part incidental to that. The causal arrow goes the other way. See also: [2][3][4]

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/BaldingsWorld/status/153358567932...

[1]: https://www.racket.news/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american (search "Khashoggi")

[2]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/01/marc-edwards-...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/c1fk5l/newsweek_in...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model
Age can be a key factor too. I asked a VC once what were the key things they looked at. They came out with the expected answers, passion, vision , plan of execution and then said age. I expected they meant a someone in their early twenties to be then be told 'nope', if some middle aged industry vets walk in they immediately sit up in their chairs a little more.
Not everyone who does CS becomes a web dev

For example in my current programming job I don’t do anything involving networking or databases
What do we do with all that productivity gain though? Back in the days of "swap money for product" capitalism the answer was "more product, yay", but now a considerable part of the economy is completely disconnected from that mechanism and is only competing in the zero sum game of visibility as a service. If Facebook employees magically got 48h per work day all we would get were steeper walls in the dopamine traps we already have. And given the resource constrained nature of life in a gravity well, even the old "more product, yay" isn't quite as yay as we used to think.

Edit: sorry, I completely lost myself on a sidetrack

Actually I believe that your assessment is spot on, only that I would weigh the drawbacks a little different, in particular everything that involves new hires, even more in particular those new hires who are new to the field. This is a long term cost that is very difficult to predict: how will "second generation" remotes work? Is there hidden knowledge implicitly present in those who started in person that can diffuse from formerly present to pure remotes, but not from one pure remote to another?
Honestly, I feel worse for checkout girls locally - people are more often replaced by improvements to low hanging fruit, and not the emergence of apparently incomprehensively profound.

The truth is that we're impressed by this because it's magic and we don't know how magic - but it still getting way more magic really fucking fast.

Right now it's still and idiot if you're not telling it what to do. Hypnotic babble.

(If you want to be scared or relieved feed it some time series stock data (if it's good it'll end up fighting itself, otherwise it's either stupid or a liar).)

There are some uses easy use cases for it - I really wouldn't mind a GPT bot replacing outsourced call centres.

Improvement of quality and an improvement in service, and no direct impact to the local economy.

Other than that, this all has the booming feel of every other damned tech buzz, can we just cool down on sensationalism and not try and imagine another multi-billion dollar sub-economy into existence?

We already did that with bitcoin, and now we're seeing the end of the magic trick; let's not do it again.

How about a calm objective and public analysis by under-excited experts before we start mining land that simply isn't there?
That's interesting. I've seen a couple of rotated PNGs before which I assumed were caused by Discord stripping the EXIF and orientation data.
Found a PNG like that without EXIF from May 2022 so I wonder if Discord stopped stripping or if it was stripped on the person's device somewhere.
Like FB there is most likely millions and millions of bot accounts. When in doubt, go with the 80%/20% rule.
Yes! Check out axate.com. It's a tool that publishers can add to their site, which enables them to charge per article or per day/week as well as offer subscriptions or ask for voluntary contributions.
Interesting. In the Big Tech companies I've worked at, the manager is the people-oriented equivalent of the technical team lead and controls promotions within an org structure. Why do you need one? Generally to free the technical lead's time up to deal with people concerns less. In smaller companies this doesn't matter as there just aren't that many people to deal with but at a larger company, a big technical project can interact with enough different stakeholders that you need a dedicated people manager to deal with them.

Managers are also expected to help their direct reports grow by offering them feedback. Manager feedback and regular performance evaluations eventually lead to raises and promotions which then builds up a manager's experience level. This often becomes a target in itself where managers try to optimize to promote their direct reports at the expense of more holistic growth so they can get a promotion.

Each team gets a manager because the manager controls promotions at the company and maintains employee standards.
Definitely works on macOS, I think Linux too. It’s SDL-based.
SwiftyEdit 1.0.0 Released
Evidenced by the fact that they disagree with the progressive orthodoxy of the moment.
Perhaps take a look at how many trucks and SUVs are sold and exclusively operated within cities, vs on farms or other rural areas.
The difference is that web browsers don't block you from visiting websites that your favorite site's owner doesn't want you to see.
inkscape allows you to modify and save SVGs in plain SVG format. You can also right-click an SVG and modify its properties in the inspector window.

SVG is a very impressive, extremely clear format with many bells and whistles such as text-to-path and animation built-in.

The only improvement I can see it might need is a better compression functionality that can selectively prioritize symbols to load first if the SVG is sufficiently large.
> Sure, but those things can be learned on the actual job. So after a few years, the CS student knows both the theory

So a CS degree is useless in industry. By the time you learn how to build things that work, you know how things work.
CostX introduces a newly designed user interface to customize the grid fields
That's funny, because as a child I was completely terrified by the prospect of a black widow. I thought they were basically like a small demon in spider form.
SVG Native was supposed to fix that [1]. SVG Native uses only one coordinate system, no CSS styling, no filters, no animation, no scripting and no text or fonts. However, it didn't get much interest and it's starting to look like a dead version of SVG.

Maybe there isn't any need for a simpler vector graphics format because no one is using TinyVG, either.

[1] https://w3c.github.io/svgwg/specs/svg-native/index.html
Like others are saying, there’s a huge risk of getting bit. I have a family member who was bit on the foot while cleaning his basement. He still walks with a limp 20 years later from the damage it did, and is lucky he didn’t lose his leg.

Other spiders get left alone around my house, but not widows.
I just read the JEdit.org homepage.

I am really intriuged by this comment over there and also your recommendation:

jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it.

Would you please point me to a good resource to learn more about JEdit for someone with Emacs/Vim background.
Credit Suisse Official Statement
I disagree. Theory is harder to self learn whereas anybody can learn about putting together a CRUD app w/ React & Postgress. The students lack experience with the practical/applied side of CS because they lack the interest in it. Anyone else would have done side projects where they could have applied what they learned (my code got substantually better after I went to college).
Do you consider an ASIC a computer? How about a sufficiently large number of NAND gates, arranged a certain way? They can perform computation but are not programmable after the fact.

My computer science degree covered a lot of topics that didn't require a computer, for example relational algebra, discrete mathematics, and introductory formal logic. Of course, the practical usages of these are often best done through a computer and programming, but it's not a requirement.

In reality all computer science degrees I'm familiar with make an attempt to expose students to relevant programming languages, it's simply practical and students demand it, but the details of coding style, how to use git, or similar topics may not be relevant in a computer science degree. That stuff isn't so hard to learn if you have clear guidelines and they have some baseline amount of intelligence which is one thing a degree tries to validate.
I didn't say it couldn't.

A single article cannot gaslight you, in the original psychological sense of the phenomenon. Even a collection of articles cannot gaslight you.

The medium is not relevant. The relationship, the bond with the gaslighter is. The desire to try and set things right with that person, and keep the relationship. Gaslighting is a process of interpersonal dynamics, not any single act.

A discussion around usage of the term definitely is not, regardless of whether if you disagree with "what everyone else says". It is simply an argument, or a matter of personal opinion. None of it contains even traces of the accusation that your sense of reality is disturbed.

An actor that lies to you, or a coordinated group that lies to you, and you believing the lie, does not constitute "gaslighting" in the original sense either. A gaslighter plants little seeds that make you doubt your overall perception, doubt if what you experience is real. Examples of typical effects of gaslighting are psychotic episodes, questioning whether you live in a simulation, anxieties around whether you are a split personality and just don't remember "your other personas", paranoia, etc.

Yes, obviously language is a living thing. I am not claiming you cannot have whatever other definition of the term. The article talks about the original phenomenon and its use in psychology, and how it differs from modern use. Nobody says you cannot have your own understanding of what the color "orange" means to you. If your definition of "orange" also includes "red" and "blue", you do lose the ability to communicate and discriminate between orange, red, and blue things.
The people who want to boycott Harry Potter are as toxic as it gets.

They attacked Pikamee. If you don't know who Pikamee is, that's like stamping on puppies.
> Approximating continuous functions is likely quite the same as what people do too.

In a very broad sense, if you just mean "the human brain also just approximates some class of functions", sure. However, human brains can surely represent many classes of non-continuous functions as well (tan, lots of piece wise functions, etc). And, crucially, some of these are necessary for our physical models of the world. So, if neural networks are limited to only representing continuous functions, that is a strong indication that they are fundamentally unable to mimic the human mind.

> You think there isn’t some mathematical model under the hood of how the brain works too?

Of course it does. I do believe that the mind is simply a program running on the physical computer that is our brain. And I am sure that some day we will be able to create an AI that is human-like, and probably much better at it, running on silicone.

That doesn't mean that we should believe every program running on silicone, despite somewhat obvious fundamental limitations, is going to be the next AGI any day now. That's all I'm trying to point out: neural networks are not a great model for AGI, and backpropagation/gradient descent as a training algorithm even less so.
Mass unemployment without adequate social safety net would be unfortunate.
Multiplayer 3D chess game built with react-three-fiber and socket.io
The iPhone wasn't the first touchscreen smartphone, it was just the flashiest (previous ones were oriented at business users), so IMO we certainly would be in the same place, just slightly later and possibly with more choice (maybe Nokia would have survived with Symbian/MeeGo, maybe Microsoft would have managed to pull off Windows Phone, etc.).
You are now entering a pretty minor argument of semantics. Extended lockdowns vs non-extended?

Melbourne did lockdowns for effectively 4 months, longer than any single Chinese lockdown. So even on that point you are incorrect. This isn’t misinformation.

It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK (for a variety of reasons). There is not enough of them, that’s the problem.
Put me in the movie!
I tell you what its not, being a great engineer. That can help in someways in understanding the technical aspects, but the amount of startups I know who have written incredible clean code with beautiful architecture who have run out of funding compared to the folks who wrote a janky frankensteins monster which they sold to customers, is very high.
JUKEBOX MUSIC COLLECTION

Computer: You're also collecting music?

Thompson: It's kind of a personal/research hobby/project. Let me explain it from an external point of view. Basically, I'm just collecting music. I'm getting lists from various sources—top 10s, top 50s—and I try to collect the music.

Right now, my list has around 35,000 songs, of which I've collected around 20,000. I compress the songs with a Bell Labs-invented algorithm called PAC [Perceptual Audio Coding] and store them on a jukebox storage system. I started this before MP3 was heard of on the network. PAC is vastly superior to MP3.

My collection is not generally available because of the legal aspects. I went to legal and told them I was collecting a lot of music, but I don't think they realized what I meant by "a lot." Anyway, they said that in the case of research there's something similar to fair use and that they'd back me, but wouldn't go to jail for me. So I can't release it generally. But it's pretty impressive. It's split-screen like a Web browser; you can walk down lists, years, or weeks.

Computer: It's a personal hobby.

Thompson: It's hard to differentiate since, if you haven't noticed, almost everything I've done is personal interest. Almost everything I've done has been supported and I'm allowed to do it, but it's always been on the edge of what's acceptable for computer science at the time. Even Unix was right on the edge of what was acceptable at Bell Labs at the time. That's almost been my history.

Source: http://genius.cat-v.org/ken-thompson/interviews/unix-and-bey...
That is US specific, I can assure you that without programming knowledge across several domains there is no graduation on many European universities.

https://www.di.fct.unl.pt/en/education/integrated-master-com...

https://tecnico.ulisboa.pt/en/education/courses/undergraduat...
The reality is someone have pay for those beautiful infrastructure, not going to be the incumbents due to political arrangment, then it’s the vulnerable newcomers shouldering all of it. Just think about those terrifying condo prices.
Not sure what a ledger would change to the problem.
The machine's multiton magnet was so gigantic that, according to university folklore, a decade earlier administrators had to blast a hole in an exterior wall and recruit the football team to maneuver the block of iron into the building.

Well, folklore or not, I know someone who specializes now in moving labs from one building to another. She told me the exact same story, except than in her case the problem was to get the machine out ( some kind of accelerator as well, and it had been built on premises). She had to make a hole in the wall too!
For years I had a plague of brown spiders on my deck. I finally called an exterminator.

He laughed, and said I didn't have a plague of spiders. I had a plague of carpenter ants in the deck, and the spiders were there to eat the ants. I pushed a screwdriver into one of the support beams, which looked perfectly fine. To my horror the screwdriver went all the way through the beam! The carpenter ants had completely eaten away the interior, it was just a painted shell. I had no idea why it had not collapsed.

So came the job of sawing off the old deck to replace it. Instead of falling down into a pile of lumber, it fell down into a pile of dust. It was loaded into a truck with a shovel.

Years later, when I decided to build a custom house, it had a concrete deck with an iron railing.

Moral: if you've got a lot of spiders, they're there for a reason. The real problem is hidden.
For twitter allergies: https://nitter.net/brdskggs/status/1637114268876144640
Do you give money to Firefox? As long as you are not paying money to a company, you should expect a little bit of "creep". Have you made any personal investments in producing privacy respecting software?

I don't know where you work, but I would go talk to your devops or SREs and ask them how important telemetry is to keeping things running and even more important than that, ask the business folks how important it is for informing business decisions.

I promise you that sometimes telemetry is really just telemetry.

This read is fairly satisfying to me: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/

The financial statement was also interesting: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

Established in July 2003, Mozilla Foundation (the Foundation) is a California not-for-profit
corporation that exists to improve and protect the internet as a public resource by working
with thousands of volunteers to 1) keep the internet a universal open platform and 2) promote
continued innovation on the internet. The Foundation supports the development of open-
source, standards-compliant, free internet applications useable free of charge to hundreds of
millions of users. It also a) develops foundational technologies that can be used to build the
values of openness and interoperability into the internet; and b) fuels the movement for an
open internet through educational work that connects open internet leaders with each other
and mobilizes grassroot activities around the world. The Foundation is headquartered in San
Francisco, California

Advertising revenues - Mozilla also offers advertising services in three formats. The
first is the New Tab / Tiles advertising service, which places links to sponsored
content when a new tab is opened in the Firefox web browser. The second format is
through Pocket’s email product, Pocket Hits. Pocket Hits may include paid
advertisements, which are placed in email newsletters that get delivered to global
Pocket users. Lastly, Mozilla also sells web advertisement spots on content that
Mozilla licenses and syndicates from publisher partners across the web.

It is pretty easy to be jaded and cynical. There are many big tech companies that are definitely your enemy. Mozilla is pretty low on my list of concern and they are contributing way more than they are damaging.

Mozilla is also a non profit.

If you think your exposure to Firefox is a big privacy risk, think about google and your email, think about your phone backups or other backups, think about your non signal messengers, think about cloudflare, AWS, and GCP, think about your DNS provider, think about your photo album on your phone and how OCR is run on it to generate searchable tags and facial recognition is done to determine your social graph.

If nothing else, Firefox is supporting uBlock which is the single most important piece of privacy (and security) software today.
Ouch, money existed long before the concepf of government did, really.
You sure about that?
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Was better bidirectional audio advertised as a feature of Bluetooth 2.0?
What forum are you talking about. All of Mastadon? Doesn't each instance have its own rules?

> As someone who'd consider themselves progressive by the yardstick of 10 years ago but not measured to the new progressives of today ...

> The New Left has become unrecognizable to me

That's an expected phenomenon. What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.

When people are young, they challenge the corrupt system. As those changes are enacted, those young people grow older and become the system. Then a new generation sees that 'progress' of your youth as the old, corrupt, scelerotic system; they have nothing invested in your achievements; they see the system's flaws and push to change them.

The formerly-young-challengers, now old-system-members, say 'that's crazy, outlandish, outrageous, etc.' - exactly what was said to them when they were young.

Oh yes, I know, 'this time it's different'. 'These kids really are outrageous.' Those words are also exactly the same as before.

If you want to be progressive, you need to keep seeing the flaws, not accepting them, and keep pushing for change. The moment you stop, say 'far enough we've done a good job', you cease being progressive.
Computing is running a program. That's what computing is. An algorithm is a program. A computer is a machine that performs the algorithm, so we don't have to. The Turing machine computes the answer by running the instructions (the program, the algorithm).
Maybe not enough memory? Although 8192 x 8192 x 4 (RGBA) is 256 MB, which is quite reasonable.
We don't yet have UBI (and worse, countries are raising pension ages, which is the closest thing we currently have to a UBI) so everything everywhere being automated all at once is going to be messy.