skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Well that and it’s hard to distinguish if you’re early in exponential growth or linear.

That's true, but not really saying very much. Any differentiable function is locally linear around a neighborhood of any point where the derivative exists.

> Also exponential growth does hit some kind of ceiling relatively quickly.

Well... that depends. Much like how markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, exponential growth can often remain exponential for much longer than it takes to create a problem. Conversely, sometimes it can't remain exponential long enough to prevent a problem. Exponential growth is a hard beast to tame.
You seem like the type of person who just eats food for energy and survival.
There are many honest people in the space. Unfortunately, they don't make for good headlines.
I have experiencing on both complex React projects and complex vanilla JS projects (think the scale and complexity of Figma). Vanilla JS lends itself to being more performant. Anything that happens in Vanilla JS happens for an explicit, developer-defined reason. Things don’t rerender unless explicitly asked to. This can be both good and bad. While Vanilla JS tends to stay way more performant as complexity scales, “stale state” bugs are much more common. It’s a tradeoff.
It reminds me of AOI series[1] where they were stopped by the planet-scale war/rebellion. The book series is so-so, but a good cautionary tale and few interesting ideas. I am afraid those devils that calling themselves publishers won't stop before crossing any line just to keep their reign.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/169314-the-justar-journal
Did you include your $3.75/hour pay to imply it was a low salary?

$3.75 in 1975 is $20.97 today. A quick search shows starting pay for a mail carrier today is $16/hour. The federal minimum wage is 7.25/hour which would be $1.3/hour in 1975.

You were actually paid very well at $3.75/hour compared to today.
it's custom, built with figma.

we have a library of assets that our design team use. I can ask if they can open source it if you would find it useful
It is also a lot more expensive to produce. Lego is just injection molded ABS plastic.

Meccano/Erector (or the Czech Merkur) are all metal, die cut/stamped out of sheet metal and using actual screws. Moreover, the French factory being closed was practically hand-making it, it was not at all automated. So as economically inefficient and expensive as it gets.

Also these types of construction sets just aren't as amenable to the usual licensed IP - you can't really make Batman or Star Wars figurines out of sheet metal. These sets don't really have a history of mixing a lot of plastic parts with the usual metal bits. It doesn't work well together and also the result looks a bit weird with all those holes. In addition, the types of shapes you can make out of it are more limited due to the way it is manufactured (or it would get very expensive if custom bent/shaped parts were required). Whereas for Lego it is just another mold being used so they have a lot more flexibility.

Meccano/Erector or Merkur are really most suitable for what they were originally modeled after and designed for - mechanical machines, engines, contraptions, etc. Lot of real-world machines were prototyped with Merkur - e.g. the first contact lenses were made by their inventor using a Merkur machine.

Sadly those types of toys are not as much in vogue today - or need to be full of flashy electronics, connected to a phone and ideally licensed from Disney to be able to sell them ...
I think this is more likely to indicate how few North Koreans have mobile phones than how many iPhones are in use
It's not a minor use case. According to Forbes[1], 37% of all games purchased on Steam never get played.

Collecting definitely doesn't have to be based on scarcity. Board games aren't scarce (some are long out of print and rare, yes, but most aren't) yet I know people with vast collections (I myself have about 500 board games, and only maybe 3 or 4 are rare enough to be worth any significant money beyond its retail price). If 500 games is not a collection, then what would you call it?

500 board games isn't even necessarily a lot for a collector (it is for me, as I don't have the space to store them anymore and need to sell like 200 of them, but yet I keep compulsively buying new games anyway, I bought 2 more just this past week). I know another guy in my area that has over 2000 board games in his basement.

And I (and many other board game collectors) don't play the games anywhere near as much as we buy them. We may justify the purchase with 'oh this would be good for this group someday' but mainly it's just an excuse to get it onto our shelves.

Before I started playing board games solo, I'd say about 80% of the games I bought I hadn't played since I bought them, sitting on the shelf (for years) for the possible right board game night in the future for them to be played. Or I played the game since, but someone else's copy, since between my friends we often have 2-5 copies amongst us.

Now I mostly buy games I can play solo, and I've played a good chunk of my new purchases the past two years at least once.

Buying yet never playing is so common in board games, in fact, that there's a term for those unplayed games: 'The Shelf of Shame'[2]

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/04/17/nearly-37-o...

[2]: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2199795/lets-stop-calling-i...
What you describe is not "quite easily" at all. It is more of "can sorta kinda overcome the distance, sometimes".

Songs did not spread as far nor as easily as they do it now.
Careful, Reddit is rumored to IPO later this year so they've been turning the enshittification screws. Expect to see less and less legitimate opinions, more and more corporate manipulation and ads, and likely a lot of LLM-generated astroturfing as the profit engine dials up to 11.

When you can find older stuff or well-reasoned opinions on Reddit, it's a goldmine. But sadly that doesn't justify the pricing Reddit's owners surely want to see in the IPO so it'll likely get crowded out by short-term profitable long-term garbage priorities.
You think that someone was sitting on advances in ai for years before publishing so that they could warn billionaires that they need to build bunkers and that their stuff was still SOTA after that delay?
I'm not convinced they will ever be a standard for "ownership"

They may have a boring but practical use as UUIDs in decentralised systems. Without wading through a sea of scams it's difficult to find anyone doing anything in that space.
Large language models do are no “A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer” they are stochastic parrots and don’t even parrot facts reliably.

I teach 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade kids to code. Mostly code.org does the work of introducing code through play but the value of the teacher is in classroom management. Specific to programming, the value I bring is debugging experience and empathy. Instead of saying “you fix your problem like this” I focus on trying to understand/empathize with why the problem was made to begin with and then using that info to guide them to the correct fix.
Periodically on some of the slide rule discussion lists (there used to be one on Yahoo but now is on Groups.io), there is a discussion on the possibility of making new slide rules with modern processes. The discussions typically come down to several points.

First, there are a large number of vintage slide rules available for fairly cheap, and they clean up / restore fairly well. Typically the case (if it has one) will have someone's name written on it, which some don't like. On the other hand others like that it adds a bit of individuality and history to the piece.

Second, there was a run from Think Geek, but they were a bit less fun to use. I have one, the scales were printed on clear film sheets that got glued to a plastic body and the edges that slide aren't that crisp and a bit sticky. And there are a number of scales and arrangements for different purposes back in the day that this one doesn't have.

Third, their are new-old-stock rules available, but they command a premium price ($150 - $500 in many cases). And it is a dwindling supply. Plus, if you spend that much on it, chances are you won't want to use it as that would devalue it back to $20 - $30 territory because it won't be new in box anymore.

What I'd like to see is a build of the KeLon slide rule -- this was the last slide rule designed by K&E, but never got out of the prototype stage. There is one blurry photo of it, most of the scales are from other K&E rules but there is a unique "Constants" scale at the top that gives common gauge points (pi, sqrt(pi), HP/KW, etc). You can't make out the labeling but from the relative position you can figure out most of them. That would probably be the one that I'd copy if I try to hand make any.

(Picture of the KeLon: https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/KECollection/KeLon/keLon.h...)
This isn't even as bad as all the other things out there already. We're going to have a term for someone who's in a relationship with an AI soon enough
Ah yes, I'm sure you have a solution from one of the most difficult problems ever?

It's easy to condemn the system but without a solution you're just barking in the wind...

Just to be clear, I also think there are major issues with "the system", but I also don't think this is an easy problem to solve or everyone would be living in magical happy land already...
A quick Googling shows that, in the US, at least up until 2013, you could obtain a LPFM (<100W) license from the FCC for free.

https://www.prometheusradio.org/startup_costs

So it kinda seems like it was a thing?
Why would you want to hang onto a TV for 15 years? Half of the tech you mention will be obsolete.
Fun fact: Merkur was used to build world first machine for casting soft contact lenses :)
Are Vanilla Forums OSS having problems?
Having problems connecting. Is it just me or are there problems?
I think it depends on the app. Some apps have a lot more interaction with the platform than others. E.g. writing a camera app in Flutter is going to be like 80% platform native code. Writing e.g. a GitHub app is probably going to be 0%.
Tables does not render reliably across platforms. This is because the algorithm for sizing columns and cells was never standardized.

Back when tables were the only tool available for layout, professionals combined tables with 1x1 pixel transparent gifs which could be scaled to force cells to have a fixed size.

I guess you could argue that tables combined with spacer-gifs are reliable. But solution exists which are just as reliable, much easier to use, and better for accessibility.

> It is hard to track down where a style is coming from.

This is an orthogonal concern. If you don't like CSS inheritance and cascade, you can just use style attributes directly on elements. I believe Tailwind uses a similar approach through class attributes.
Inefficient is not the same as problematic. They turned what otherwise would be a linear increase in memory usage into an exponential increase, which expectedly resulted in memory exhaustion problems.

There are plenty of problems to go around this approach and overall system design, but the weakest link is undoubtedly how JSON was used.
Related posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495827

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35491114
More info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495827
I think we're on the verge of few-shot believable voice impersonation. Between that, realtime deepfake videos, and AIs being more than good enough to solve CAPTCHAs, it seems like we're at most a few years from having no means of verifying a human on the other end of any given digital communication unless someone figures out and implements a new solution quickly.
Do you happen to live near anyone making alcohol? "Whisky mold" is a thing. When people talk of black material forming so quickly it is an option to consider.
Debate with People who enjoy tinkering about technology
My goal is to make 1 simple overview

`Lists of awesome RSS channels related to startup, science and technology.´

These are my examples of existing lists.
Please comment a list or must read website.
Thank you in advance.

1
https://blog.feedspot.com/startup_rss_feeds/
2
https://github.com/tuan3w/awesome-tech-rss
3
https://www.startuptimes.net/rss-feeds
4
https://feeder.co/discover/startups
5
https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/22lrgt/which_rss_feeds_do_you_follow_for_startup_ideas/
Cool! I look forward to it. BTW - is fuet super tasty?

edit: I checked^0 and it says it will be operational by end of May 2023. Do you know if this is still right? on track?

^0: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/schengen-borders-...
The exit of all exits.
> (although TBH this is less a "here's how they found" and more a "here's what they found", if I'm being extra pendantic)

Yeah, I guess I'm a bit extra pedantic when it comes to the titles, because I agree the most with this, the article doesn't seem to actually go into how they found it out, meaning the original title was misleading after all.
Having a real hard time with Poe’s Law on this one.
It's no secret that Lego is marketing to adults. The botanicals sets are explicitly designed for people who want to decorate their home. Many of the "creator expert" sets show adults building the sets in the ad material.

When I was a kid, I didn't treat the licensed sets as "special collectibles." I had Ferrari/Bionicle/etc sets, and all of that stuff got mixed into the same bin eventually (except one of the Ferraris, which I still have to this day). Not sure why a kid would treat any given branded set differently because of the branding, I kept the Ferrari because I like it.

Sidebar: a standard measure in the Lego community is "price per piece," and the licensed sets do tend to be more costly. That's not a hard-and-fast truth, though. This blog has a great breakdown from a couple years ago: https://brickbucks.net/what-is-lego-price-per-piece/
On iOS, Apple Mail supports 92% of the tested HTML/CSS features, while Gmail supports only 36%. What browser engine does Gmail use to have such poor results? Isn’t it all WebKit on iOS?
SD-LAN vs. LAN: What Are the Key Differences
lol I was just thinking this, literally just a few minutes ago. I saw a rough benchmark test between Rust and Node, and the memory consumption over time stayed completely flat with Rust while Node just skyrocketed. Pretty interesting.
Stop being pedantic; you know what I mean.
Creative tech firm Talenthouse is close to failure as debts mount
At a certain amount of scale its net “simpler” if the analytics people are free to do their jobs without worrying they will bring down “the app” and vice versa.

OLAP has certainly become overcomplicated but collapsing everything into big monolith dbs again is an over correction IMO.
From any and every place where they gain or lose money. If Amazon gave 10% coupons on every single product and raised their minimum wage by $10, they wouldn't become negative profit and would arguably be creating more "real value" by paying workers more and allowing people to buy more. But the overall company profits would decrease.
No it is not stealing - Roy found a completely separate market for the works, acquired his own marketing within the art world, and was successful selling into that market. Comic books, as much as I love them and have been a collector for decades, via salaries purchased that art from the comic artists, and it is the failure of the comic publishers to realize or capitalize on their potential art world value. Roy Lichtenstein made that comic art have the art world value via his shows and marketing of his work. If not for Roy, comics and comic art may have have transcended the ghetto it lived and nearly died, if not for VFX.

edit: you down voters are allowing the emotional argument get to you. Think this logically. Realize the time this occurred. And realize the legal positions of a successful fine artist and that of a "scummy comic book publisher" and there is no contest, the fine artist will win every time - in our culture at that time.
Don't you get it though?

Advanced Linux Programming is just C programming!

Joke aside, you are right 'Hello World' does seem disconnected from 'Advanced'
As Tech Jobs Disappear, Silicon Valley Veterans Reset Their Careers
I loved Meccano as a boy, and bought some for my son last Christmas - what a huge disappointment! As you said, it's plastic now instead of metal, and not even good quality plastic. It flexes too much, and soon showed white stress marks. Difficult or impossible to tighten things properly, one piece comes loose as you're tightening another.

Also, yes, the instructions for their building ideas were crap by comparison with Lego's.

I'm 100% certain it was a legitimate Meccano set, as we bought it at a brick and mortar toy store, not Amazon.

We stuck to Lego after that.
What about the value of people being able to do things they previously never could? I personally know people saving 30+ hours and thousands because they no longer need to employ others to do work for them. They simply prompt chatgpt. Hell, I even use it to generate website copy for clients and it's basically an instant result. LLMs and crypto shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence in terms of use cases
I think you've set the bar too high and I'm concerned you'll burn out with this plan. I'd recommend to pick a focus area and have a project in mind. If you don't have a focus it's too easy to drift and you'll only learn superficially.

Since you mention learning python and C, I'll recommend a couple sites with problems you can work through.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer/

https://projecteuler.net/ (math heavy)
Both of your observations are due to constant relentless cost optimization within the postal system. Local post offices, for the most part, don't postmark mail at all. Everything gets batched to the regional processing center where it goes through the big automated sorting machines.

I seem to remember a "local only" box in the town where I grew up but that hasn't been a thing for decades now.
The road itself gets torn to pieces as well. Furthermore, tire and road wear scales with the 4th power of the vehicle mass. Heavy trucks and buses cause far more damage than cars. But all that damage leaves dust all over the road which cars will scatter all over the place.

Lastly, as pointed out above, EVs weigh a lot more, so the damage they cause will go up a lot, thanks to that 4th power scaling.
Wages, globally, are up at least that.

Right now, wages in the US are much higher than most other parts of the world, but the fundamentals behind that are quickly disappearing. If I can hire equivalent talent in the US for $100k, EU for $50K, and Asia for $10k, that's a market friction. It's slowly levelling out.

As that's happening, and cheap goods / services from outside the US are no longer cheap, our purchasing power goes down.
It might be the cynic in me talking, but I doubt this wave of Balenciaga ads is just the outcome of a random guy overusing a set of parameters. It would be trivial to find any other theme to exploit, but this is too focused on a single brand and relentlessly pushing it's name. It's guerilla marketing no matter of where you look at it.
I think there are 3 factions in a world where AI took out most jobs (with UBI of course):

#1 There will always be jobs requiring humans - jobs that require human interaction. The supply will be much smaller, but so will be the demand.

#2 By the time AI replaces all jobs, we will most likely have a very realistic VR with multiplayer capabilities. I think that many people will live adventures in such world and spend most of their waking hours in it. Metaverse sucks but it's only because it's so artificial. If you could have tech that could integrate with your senses directly, giving experiences on par with the sharpest lucid dream... that's going to be much different and for better or worse, a lot of people will get sucked into it. Of course, it's going suck - life is about yin-yang, endless pleasure is not good. People who will end up spending the majority of their time in such VR will not be unlike drug addicts, unless they will also be doing activities that require mental & "physical" engagement (I think one of the coolest thing that could arise out of it are new sports that would not be possible in the real world), however, that yin-yang balance would be hard to achieve when there's no evolutionary pressure combined with overabundance of simple pleasure that's just available all the time.

#3 Walking the path to mastery in some pursuit - i.e. artistic, athletic, a craft. There's pure joy in just getting better at something and enjoying every day of practice and most importantly - feeling challenged which is a primal need. It may be competitive as heck to get some recognition or play in the big leagues (which would be more like #1), but that would be just a bonus from that perspective.

If AI leaves us nothing to do, then #3 will always be available. AI will not take away our own engagement but engagement requires effort and so, I would bet that a significant majority will overindulge in #2 to their unconscious doom - I guess it will still be a pretty cool experience though and it's not like those people will not have a choice to get out.
> I’m not sure you are wasting your time by not learning Rust. I think the value of programming languages depend the most on where you live (and where you want to work) and very little on global tends. In my area of Denmark there is virtually no Rust jobs and there haven’t been for the past few years, there are even fewer Go jobs. Plenty of Java, PHP and C# jobs, and basically everyone uses Typescript. Rust has seen some uptake in a lot of the C++ community, but you’re going to need to be a proficient C++ programmer to get at those jobs, and you likely will for at least a decade.

It is the same for me too, almost zero Rust jobs where I live. However, I still benefited greatly from learning Rust, making me a better programmer overall. Now I think more about memory allocations, ownership, how I am passing the data around, and mutability.
First of all, from what I've heard, Costco and Trader Joe's are, at worst, middle of the pack among large companies as far as greed goes. And assuming incorrectly that the thesis is that all large corporations are equally greedy, then using a couple of specific examples of corporations that are less greedy to disprove it, just makes for a terrible argument.

Second, it's exactly that kind of differentiation (offering a niche product that the larger, more generic stores don't want to) that makes it easiest to avoid being undercut and run out of business by larger players.

Now, if you said you had several different small local grocery stores thriving without any specific niche, that would be somewhat more surprising.
There should be a law stating that the air quality inside cars should be at least as bad as the air quality for pedestrians/cyclists.

The last thing we need is a Darwinian advantage for polluters.
We will just get ChatGPT 6 to solve it for us. Done.
Never mind, I managed to open a page on the site, and it looks like they died last year. Shame.
HN has no concept of following certain individuals, and is a niche website aimed at a particular audience. I mean in things like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.
I’ve personally always learned better when it’s in service of building something. Pick a language (e.g. python) and build something you’d find useful or interesting.
The pursuit of personal growth and corporate success, embraced by many, feels dissonant to my soul. I am unfulfilled by the superficial allure of exclusive gatherings and tailored suits. My heart seeks a different path, one where the whisper of the wind and the solace of towering trees can nourish my spirit. For it is in nature's embrace, not in the race for achievements, where I find my truest self.
Will definitely try all the dishes without pork in them! Thanks!