skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Yeah, because those things are toxic and poisoning you, your children, and our environment. ... This is the exact same thing that happened with whale oil, leaded gas, leaded glass, sulfur diesel, ddt, on and on.

You don't know what you're talking about, but you feel like you do. Methanol, ethanol, and isopropyl alcohol are all legitimate ingredients for the examples I gave. You're making equivalence between burning leaded gas, and a desire to spray my windows with volatile alcohol.

Are you planning on banning isopropyl alcohol for medical use? Removing my ability to by vodka? Stopping my ability to use my camp stove?

One day it's stopping toxic waste getting poured into the watershed, the next it's a desire to stop research on safe nuclear power, and ban gas stoves for interior cooking use.

Blind environmentalism is its own worst enemy.
This is right on the money for games which are impactful for me, and I noticed the writing being on-point in CP2077's decisions entirely: there were plenty of moment in my playthrough where I didn't have to stop and think about what a dialogue option was, it felt entirely natural to hit one of the prompts the moment I saw it because the way I was playing my character, that's what they would've done.

That felt great, compared to say, Mass Effect which did tend to suffer from a mismatch between the prompt and what would actually happen - it's a credit to CDPR that I never felt betrayed by a dialogue choice (except one, at the ending).
It's infuriating how much work one has to do to clean up what should already be a bare-bones, stock, factory environment. All of these 8 kb "apps" like LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. that you "uninstall" but then re-appear right in the Add or Remove Programs menu.

I haven't tried, but what do these little TikTok, LinkedIn apps even do? I imagine they don't install a local version of LinkedIn to peruse, right? I don't totally understand how the economic incentive for MSFT and manufacturers can be high enough to make these actively user-hostile actions worth it.

Maybe I'm cynical or naive
The author of the blog post here. AMA.
That’s also a story you tell yourself.
I built a gaming PC recently, so also new to Windows (normally Linux main). I was very surprised to see advertising in the operating system, for an operating system that people pay at least $190 CAD for.

This issue is made worse by every hardware vendor needing to install their own bulky applications with their own popups. It's extremely noisy.

My main take is that Microsoft has lost all pride in Windows and they're uninterested in actually competing.
Mine fortunately has an "automatic" mode for determining those thresholds, as well a way to manually configure the thresholds (which sounds like it would be useful for the two cases you mentioned)
> Maybe they should change their incentives so that managers actually want the right things

what's the incentive structure for mid-level managers that maximizes productivity, but doesn't have the managers whipping the staff to work harder?
This is unfortunately the new state of Windows, and why I also may be switching away after being a dedicated user since Windows 3.1

I doubt I'll go to Mac, I'm just not a fan, so looking at different linux options, even though I barely do any coding anymore.

Windows used to have bloatware and shareware, but I never felt it was in your face like it is now.

But it really is the volume of advertising and crap that has gone into Windows 11 which is why I've stayed on 10 and am avoiding upgrading.
Windows and macOS have both wasted plenty of my time over the years too!
Ars has always been consistently in-depth and technically insightful, somewhere in-between TechCrunch/The Verge and Phoronix/XDA Devs.

My only minor complaint is that Ron Amadeo is so transparently bitter about every little bit of Google news, to the point these days he only reports the bad and very rarely the good.

Like, the last news article on RCS was about 3 years ago... Right before all four US carriers standardized on Google Messages + Universal Profile (and three of them on Jibe). There's been a mountain of RCS developments happening lately but it doesn't fit the narrative of "Google is bad at messaging" so no articles are written. You can bet if RCS has even a minor gaffe, it'll get an article. (See this play out with Ars' reporting on Google's payments efforts.)

Other than that, Ars is my go-to as well. I just have to mentally apply the Amadeo Bias Filter before I read any article about Google.

For the record, I am also incredibly bitter about Google[1]. But I'm not a reporter.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29566313
Sent you an email btw, in case your ISP misclassified it as spam
> Yet in “real life” I have never, ever encountered a woke, virtue-signalling stereotype.

I can’t imagine most Americans have either (though the numbers may be different on this particular board).

I think most Americans are aware that the primary culture wars going on right now are fairly divorced from everyday life.
This is me since... at least high school. Probably earlier, but my memories are spotty. Almost all the things you mention present, often acutely, in relation to anything that is "to be done" - be it work or personal. Anything can trigger it, the moment it stops being something I do on a whim, and becomes something that I plan or is expected of me. No underlying medical condition to attribute it to. What to do then?
I agree. It smelled funny to me, too.
Deep sea vent organisms can extract energy from the nutrients and heat from the geothermal vents.
Read your local National Weather Service (US) text weather discussion
My city has both rental scooters and rental ebikes. While I see tens of people using the rental scooters, I've literally never seen the rental ebikes used. Not sure why, people just seem to prefer the form factor of scooters. Maybe they expect it to be less effort than pedal assist bikes.
Because when my house was built I know what the port-a-potty on site cost.
What distro did you go for? I'm thinking about moving to linux, I'm avoiding a Windows 11 upgrade, and am not a fan of mac.
I don't have a computing-age child yet, but I aim to steer them down the Linux road. I've been given 3-4 Macbooks over the years which are now far too old to run modern macOS at any reasonable level of performance, but I suspect they will run Ubuntu etc just fine and make a decent first machine. Maybe starting out in this environment will also prompt the same curiosity that I developed which led into confidence/skill/a career, just by having access to settings and the like (which seem to be increasingly stowed away or removed altogether).

I also hope that starting out in Linux instills the same "ugh, GTFO my machine" response in them that I get when I encounter the kind of default/forced cruft the OP did.
interesting. in this scenario, who would end up implementing the feature & earning the bounty? a maintainer, a contributor or either?

as noted above, the dynamics of this feature can be tricky, but we're open to give it a try once an organization is onboard for such an experiment and users / contributors have already voiced their intention to crowdfund in this way

really appreciate your input, thanks em-bee! happy to discuss further ioannis@algora.io
> Ocaml is very niche, I feel it’s an hard sell for a general purpose language. Haskell, 3x that.

The impression about Haskell’s nicheness compared with OCaml prevails. But Haskell has a larger userbase and a larger library ecosystem than OCaml.
That was life when vendors would pre install all sorts of crap. Then you would do a fresh install of windows and lose all of those stuff. (Tears!)

Now this comes by default with windows. I think Microsoft too is feeling the blandness of its product without vendor crapware.
If this is a good-faith question, then I assume you don't use Windows as your primary OS. After most major Windows updates, you'll see new crapware in the Start menu and get nagged to set up a Microsoft account and have your default programs switched back to the Microsoft ones, no matter how many times you said "no, and never ask again" before.
You'll find apps and things that wiggle their way back onto the start menu, at least that's what happened minutes prior to me downloading a Fedora ISO last year.
Tax avoidance is perfectly legal.
I installed Mint here. RetroArch works like a charm. Steam games are surprisingly smooth thanks to Proton - some games require some minor tinkering to work, but I am amazed at how well it works.

I got even games from other stores that don't officially support Proton (such as GoG) to work with the help of Lutris.

If Windows for you is just a console, might be time to re-evaluate on that.

I don't even hate Windows btw. I was using 10 and it worked mostly fine to my tastes, especially with WSL. But Linux is just so much better in every way.
Sorry, what?

What types of "gadgets" specifically? Why would there be radiation sources in them? Why would they be in powder form? And why from China specifically?

This is not any kind of common knowledge. Can you point to sources for this? Who considers this "mandatory safety equipment"?
Tik Tok and Instagram are not actually installed on Windows 11 by default. They just appear in the Start Menu as logos, because so many people install them manually. They only begin installation once you click on the logos.

News on search bar cannot be defended though.
Sure, my misread of what they said. However they as you say stored it in a drawer under their desk and only used it to debug software written long ago. They also said the last time they used windows was version 8.

I think it perfectly reasonable to conclude the laptop ran windows 8. Otherwise if it ran windows 10 the author would have said the last time they used windows it was version 10.
Mint, because I'm a filthy casual :)

I just love Mint, but I think any Debian based distro should work just fine for playing.
Frankly, I think they're both bad. CDPR gets a lot of stuff right, but their self-insistence on their world and storytelling is only rivaled by Final Fantasy. Cyberpunk's main quest feels like Fallout 4 with a fake veneer of moral ambiguity, and the sidequests are either penis-based or another car who wants to lecture me on their philosophy of the week. Almost every single mission in that game had me cringing, to the point that I'd mute the dialogue and still wince as I read the subtitles. It's... pure suck. As for my review of the gameplay... it's just Borderlands again. I can't be fooled like this, sorry.

The Witcher 3 is weird, relative to Cyberpunk. I haven't finished it, but it's writing is a lot more grounded and less... bad. The gameplay feels clunky, though, and the pacing is completely fucked (cutscene -> fetch quest -> cutscene -> fight -> GOTO 0;). Neither of these games really deserve commendations for the way they handled questing, and even the most heralded RPG interactions like Dark Souls and New Vegas leave plenty of room for improvement.
Consider how much money was given to the people and how much money was removed from circulation by corporations and billionaires taking unchecked ludicrous profits and evading taxes on it.

Clearly giving people two $500 checks over the span of two years is the problem
Starlink internet is going from rural savior to unreliable luxury
I think you are talking about different types of tagging. Tagging on Lisps and other language VMs is where some bits in a pointer are reserved to indicate the type. So with a single tag bit integers might be marked as type 0 (so you don’t need to shift things when doing arithmetic) and other objects would be type 1. This provides no real protection against malicious code at all. There are other types of pointer tagging that do provide security, and we are starting to see some support in hardware.
I have thought about this myself quite a bit: Should I or should I not filter the world for my kids? Back then, as a kid, computers/Internet allowed me to access an unfiltered world. It was great! I didn’t like adults restricting what information I had or didn’t have, nurturing their own agenda in me. I am leaning to not filter what my kids will have access to... but I suppose this fulfills my agenda.
Basically whatever runs Steam, if you want to play games.
I see this even within ideas like “AI alignment”, make a machine that could potentially think, then smash it over the head with wokeness and values so we don’t destroy ourselves with it.
> They also said the last time they used windows was version 8.

No, they say Windows 8 was the last version I used daily.
There's always Firewalla if OP is looking for something more low-maintenance/turn-key. As far as I'm aware their software stack is OSS.[0]

I haven't used their hardware myself, but I'd be curious to hear any experiences. While on the expensive side, they seem to do a good job of targeting the "I don't want to mess with this nor maintain it on an ongoing basis because I don't have the time" demographic.

[0] https://github.com/firewalla/firewalla/blob/master/LICENSE
I hadn't known about this! Yukihiro Takahashi was a great talent too. Sakamoto had so so many fantastic collaborations.
both in MacOS and in Windows you are mere cattle

there is no reason to keep using a walled, closed desktop OS in the 2020s
> The USG still requires he pays taxes, even though he isn’t using any services. That’s because taxes aren’t a free agreement to purchase services but are rather an exercise of force.

That and paying for the right to 86 it back to the USA when things get too hot elsewhere.

Think of it as an out of the money put option. It’s massively overpriced until it’s not.
Luxury goods, blockchain games, access to usd for unbanked, international remittances, international contracting, alternative governance, p2p lending, trading micro cap assets, asset self custody, and more are all legal use cases of cryptocurrencies.
This is horribly insecure (unless your system is totally air-gapped), now that 7 is EOL. If you're unwilling to put up with Windows 11, then you should switch to Linux.
Windows is weird, from a Linux or MacOS point of view. It is always broken, but also poorly written, so the user can just make a workflow happen by accumulating kludges.

I think Microsoft might have hired too many people who were familiar with other operating systems, resulting in a Windows 11 that actually manages to implement their vision.
Heat pumps kick ass but so does natural gas when considering cost. Made sure you get an inverter type of heatpump if you go that route.
>Some new language features are heaven, but when your compiler hasn't implemented them yet, suddenly you're in hell

So I pick up a Rust project about once a year, and I always try and keep with stable releases. Yet every project I find some small should-be-obvious thing that's nightly only, and I either have to swallow my frustrations and find a work-around or switch to nightly for the project -_-
> anyone under 30 will expect this content

I'm under 30, and I absolutely do not expect my OS to push this crap on me.
As an American, I’m not so sure.
OCaml-cfgen: generate CloudFormation in OCaml
WiP implementation of CloudFormation bindings in OCaml, with the intent of being able
to programatically generate CloudFormation JSON
in OCaml (similar to CDK).
Soon after Musk took over, the tweets I received by email (which is how I primarily interacted with Twitter) started being stuffed with extreme right-wing stuff from people I definitely didn't subscribe to, like Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro. It completely changed the kind of content I was receiving from memes and interesting observations about technology from people I followed to pretty vile takes about the culture war topic of that particular day.

I unsubscribed soon after. It ruined the product for me overnight.

(I'll grant I was never really a Twitter user and didn't have friends or much a community there, I was a lurker. So it was an easier decision for me then for others.)
I'm Italian, living in Canada, the reason why I'm attached to my primary language is because I know the most vocabulary and language usage.
Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy.

We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues.
If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.

And when I talk about work it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (I work as software developer), which incidentally is the same situation my Italian teacher faced when trying to explain some concepts that had a translation in Italian, but the original latin word had a "wider meaning" that wasn't captured by the translation.
This is a great read, thanks for sharing!
In many ways it's still a problem. Sure you've now got xx-GB of RAM and zz-TB of storage, but you now live in a world where images and video are used for day-to-day comms, instead of text.

Compared with (say) 20 years ago, you've got 20-50 times more memory, and your data is 20-50 times (or more) bigger.

We're doing the same as always, but using more bits, because bits are cheaper.
For basic office tasks and browsing the Internet, Debian stable won't waste your time: it should just work.
Victoria has an even more scarce rental market from what I understand too. It's one of those things that I hope will make it harder to keep people around if salaries don't go higher at an average company. $100k is great for a huge portion of everyday niceties and even some larger things—I didn't need to worry to much that a decent coffee grinder would damage me too much, or a trip—but not that one thing.

I'd also not necessarily describe it as pain, as much as like some hypothetical existential crisis. I'm not looking to buy a place at this moment, but when I consider the prospect of what happens if our landlords sell (giant house in east van), there aren't too mamy viable options.
Can you show me your home planet?

Oh, sorry, no. There was an accident and it got destroyed.

What accident? Oh, I see.
LeCun's comment was prompted by a request to shut down AI development for 6 months. Do you see some connection between the concern you've raised and the desire to shut down AI development for 6 months?

That concern is a classic example of a cultish one because it can't be executed in the real world today, and most likely won't be possible to execute for decades at a minimum. There will be plenty of time to address such risks as they become more realistic. You can fantasize about them today, but be realistic that that's all you're doing.
I am maybe being overly cynical but I do not get the distinctions you are making.

We are talking about software, and software is eating the world - but the great thing about software is that you can deploy it in different environments and monitor the results. Now of course "prod is different" but, the "difficult" bits you are talking about are all "how can we alignnincentices so that the ten big projects all
land successfully and deliver in two years". You cannot. No matter how big brained you are no matter how many meetings. It's impossible.

So just integrate the whole fucking lot early, run a series of prod like data through it, build a couple of teams that run this integrations and they tell everyone the current state of the ten big projects. Everyone will align around those test rigs pretty damn quickly, and the ceo only needs to beast one team regularly to make sure they are not favouring anyone too much.

Or even better run two test rigs or theee and triangulate the results.

Expensive yes but damn it will get results.

And it removes a huge layer of "management status reports". What is the status of the ten projects? go look at each test rig.

As for "people don't want to read the open docs" - that's not what Inmean. people don't want to read the minutes of the board meeting because the decision has already been taken and their views don't matter. Democracy works differently - people will take an interest when their votes directly influence which stupid project gets ten million this year. And importantly politicians will arise internally - who will explain and advocate for certain projects amoung the voting base - they will be like FDR and gain power and be called traitors to their class.

And finally - no. aligning incentives is easy. Pay me.
I came to say this, the Japanese have the solution, they use a different alphabet for imported foreign words although less so for Chinese. Even better they change the pronunciation and drop syllables to make the imports easy to say. Maybe other languages can invent some kind of stylizing like italics to indicate words are foreign.
In fairness, SIP can be disabled. Having said that, Linux is way more appropriate than MacOS for the preschool to highschool crowd. It's bursting with educational resources, and it's relatively easy to set up a locked-down non-administrator account that's appropriate for kiddos (e.g., lots of programming environments and educational games from the 90s; no internet access. If you need cloud backup, you can use cron + rsync).
With no behind-the-meter solar, the peak for T&D is during midday.

With behind-the-meter solar, this peak is capped, and if the local solar is allowed to power the rest of the distribution nod with net metering, then that means less transmission too.

T&D must be sized for the peak, so lots of residential solar means a lower peak and lower T&D costs.

Of course, this goes agains the utility narrative, because they can't admit that or else their regulators might have to allow such residential net metering. Instead, utilities try to frame the argument that solar customers are taking away from their neighbors or somehow not paying their fair share.

But when evaluated as a whole system, using massive distributed solar along with utility scale is far cheaper than building it all utility scale due to the T&D savings.
Have you already been to a psychiatrist? That sounds like it could be knock-on effects of growing up with untreated ADHD.
One example of it being useful is unchecked std::variant access in c++ - there isn’t any api to access it like a union (if you already know the type) but you can mark the wrong type path unreachable to the same effect.
I do distinctly remember reading about this particular metaphor, but can't for the life of me remember where and in what context. Hopefully someone here can recall?
Setup your 10 year old with bleeding edge Arch Linux, add a script to automatically update nightly (or even hourly lol), and give them a secondary device like a tablet loaded up with access to arch wiki, every man page, etc. but nothing else. They will be an absolute Linux wizard in months and maybe a core contributor soon after.
The main difference is that everyone basically thought you had to win the desktop to “win” - nobody foresaw the real application of the Internet and mobile phones (Linux as Android helped quite a bit).

Some credit is also due to Mac - if you support windows and Mac via one of the cross-platform toolkits you often get Linux “for free” or close to it.
The US is stupid about things like this. When I was a kid, my family used to go to bars and the VFW club in rural Minnesota, so we could meet up with our relatives. These were equivalent to community social centers. No harm was done to our little minds.
I'm convinced LLMs are amazing for search, because they're the only thing that managed to give me an answer when I was looking for some software I didn't know the general category name for. I described what I wanted the software to do, corrected its understanding with a few followup messages, and it gave me a list of alternatives that are exactly what I wanted, along with a category name.

Google, in comparison, returned absolutely irrelevant SEO spam.
If you like simplicity, Alpine.
It is still cool. An easy path to success: find a medium to large company with a strong engineering culture, join, and start memory profiling things. You will likely end up with 1-2 line commits that reduce memory usage across the entire fleet of services by 20-50%.