skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On one hand I'm pessimistic about personal computing these days. The rise of Web applications and smartphone/tablet platforms really stole the thunder from traditional desktops; ads, subscriptions, and app stores seem to be a more reliable source of revenue for Microsoft, Google, and Apple than traditional one-time sales of software licenses with regular update cycles. Windows seems to be increasingly laden with ads, and macOS seems to be increasingly locked down (for example, the introduction of notarization). There seems to be no end in sight regarding the degrading of the personal computing experience. Personal computing used to be about empowering people through tools that made them more productive and more creative. However, it seems that the business models prevalent in personal computing these days are about building advertising and subscription moats, user productivity and creativity be damned.

The Linux desktop ecosystem has been putting up a valiant fight for the past 30 years. Even with its shortcomings, it is amazing that we have an ecosystem of free, open source operating systems and applications that are of sufficient quality that millions of people depend on them. Yes, Microsoft Office may have more features and be more polished than LibreOffice, and yes, the GIMP may not hold up to Photoshop, but the fact that LibreOffice and the GIMP, among others products, are able to compete against their much better-funded counterparts is worth something.

However, one of the things that concerns me about the future of the Linux desktop is the sheer complexity of the software stack, combined with the fact that resources are often spread thin and funding is often limited, if available in the first place. The constant churn in the Linux ecosystem (e.g., the move to systemd, incompatible GTK versions, the move from X11 to Wayland) does not help matters. I know part of this has to do with the fact that the Linux desktop ecosystem is more like a bazaar and less like a cathedral, but I think a desktop environment can really benefit from cathedral-style development where there is a unity of vision, design, and infrastructure.

At this moment I'm inspired by Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute's STEPS project from over a decade ago, which was a research project that attempted to build a modern desktop from the ground up with just 20,000 lines of code through the pervasive use of domain-specific languages for specifying layers of the system (see https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2012001_steps.pdf for the final report). Software would be easier to maintain and extend if it were simpler; this, combined with component-based software design in a manner similar to Apple's OpenDoc vision (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E), is vital in my opinion for open-source projects that cannot compete directly against the Microsofts and Apples of the world for labor.
Dumb question: would mercury evaporate on the moon?

For some reason I intuitively expect the lack of atmosphere to mean that any liquid would quickly bubble off. But I'm not sure that makes any sense as I think about it.
Is the standard of living really much better in the Middle East than what Norway offers? I haven't seen any exposés on modern slavery in Norway like I have on the Middle East fiefdoms, but maybe those canny vikings are just better at hiding it?
Ireland is a lot like Washington State, in size and population, and the size profile of the cities.

(though Washington has more real wilderness, and Ireland has a lot more small farm rural, but Seattle and Dublin occupy very similar weights in the regions)
We've banned this account for repeatedly abusing HN with flamewar comments, breaking the site guidelines, and ignoring our many requests to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Has anyone tried giving equity in the resulting property to the neighbours?
I live near Tullamore and it's horrifying how car-dependent even brand new estates are. My kid goes to school there (we drive, sadly, because I am hell-bent on her being in a secular school and not the local ones) and I was chatting with another dad about grabbing a coffee. We realized the only option even remotely near was an Applegreen a 22 minute walk away. It's a wasteland.
All author affiliations are Chinese institutions. For Americans it's probably not coming to a pharmacy near you. I don't have a sense of the global vaccine R&D landscape but I don't belive western countries ever got any chinese covid vaccines
Same, Workplace is sorely missed.

Slack is good at synchronous communication, it’s a substitute for Workplace Chat.

Where I’m at now there is nothing similar to Workplace, which is great at asynchronous communication. On Slack content scrolls up the page and loses its engagement quickly. Also if someone does make a post that gets super high engagement in a channel I don’t regularly check, nothing will surface that post to me.
Great point and it's a step in the right direction.
I'm not disputing your point at all, but an interesting thing that happened at my school was that we weren't called "customers" but rather the president of the school would refer to students as "commodities". For a long time they'd treated us as such but hearing this was the blatant example of it.
I wish I could care about IPv6 but I've never used it, my ISP doesn't provide it and I've never once seen it deployed in a business environment
> I mostly agree with your point but I would say the exception is when the success of the company is closely tied to their security practices or their security features are their business.

The problem is bad security practices don't become clear until it's too late for the customers. A company can coast on reputation for a long time, while its stuff fails to keep up in non-obvious ways.
Note that "favorites" are public - I can view your favorited links and comments and you can view mine. (You like arthropod illustrations huh?) But your list of upvotes is private, so you can treat that like a private list of favorites.

more: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
I think on some level the relative rareness of the stuff that gets preserved, means there is a natural distribution left for the 40%.
No mention of dust. The lunar astronauts complained about the stuff. There's some weird stuff due to electrical charges not being able to dissipate.

I do hope we try it though, speaking from my inner 12 year old.
The other part of it is - there is no hope of things changing any time soon. There is no generational change happening, the old people are still in charge and will be for a long time. Until they start to actually go away nothing will change.
Actual Amiga with FPGA-based open source accelerator board is my preference.

But such a thing doesn't exist yet (proprietary solutions do, but fuck that).

PiStorm is the next best thing. That's a fast CPU running an m68k emulator, acting as a real Amiga's CPU.
Touch, animations, styling, portability, rendering performance, cleaner abstractions…

GTK4 is very nice.
In the guide on how to make "Harry Potter by Balenciaga" the author shows you how to rip the audio from a vanity fair clip and upload it to a voice cloning service, explicitly including how they clicked in the little box that affirms they have "all the necessary rights and consent" to clone the voice of Daniel Radcliffe... so I'm sure the industry is taking the potential for misuse seriously! /s
How would I not participate in supply and demand? I'll sell to the highest bidder, whatever that is.

Though I suspect I'll take a loss when all is said and done. I was stupid enough to buy a protected structure and thanks to heritage's intransigence I now have a thatched cottage (recently rethatched!) with a beautiful 120 sqm extension with huge windows, high ceilings, engineered wood floors, heat pumps, insulated foundation.... and no insurance. Because of the thatched bit...
None of that seems like particularly nice behavior in retrospect. We could maybe also agree that the typical motivation behind taking things home was probably not to benevolently preserve historical records for future generations, although it’s nice that things worked out in this case.
Oh, I thought it was just me! All the Airbus planes have horrible autopilots that gradually rise and fall, in a barely noticeable way. I found myself feeling irritated and wished the source code was opensource so I could have a look at it.
Let's assume that it's hurting girls.

Why would that be?

Because we raise children wrong.

Women often complain that when men post photos of themselves on dating sites, that they do so either with buddies, or holding some trophy of some sort.

But that's simply because men are taught from a young age that their value is measured in what they can provide or achieve. Girls, on the other hand, are taught that THEY are valuable. We can go back hundreds of years and find evidence for this, as arranged marriages were usually a transaction between the parents of the couple: usually livestock, goods, and land for the hand of the maiden. Nobody's paying for a new son. Likewise, there's no show called Groomzilla where bridegrooms lose their minds attempting to plan a wedding.

In 2012, the "thigh gap" started becoming a popular trend among girls and women in the US. For many women, attaining such a thing is a nigh-impossible feat. Their bodies simply aren't built that way. Very few of my male friends thought that thigh gaps were even attractive at all. But women don't dress and exercise and eat for men, they do it for women and womens' perceptions.

Compare that to today. Our popular media is dominated by a rainbow of ethnicities with bodies to match. The Kardashians are bobbling around with breast augmentation, butt lifts, botox, microblading, and lip filler to seem more "exotic" and women are following suit. Nowadays it's not such a bad thing to have a naturally big butt with thick thighs, and many more women are on the internet proclaiming their weight to the public to show people what XXX pounds looks like on a X'XX" frame.

It's been 9 years and the thigh gap girls would be out of place today. Many would consider it unattractive.

It's not social media.

It's that we teach girls that their physical appearance and their wardrobe is what gives their lives value. That's what you have to fix. Everything else is just vigorous hand waving in an attempt to sound intelligent.
I'm on a slack channel of (mostly former by now) developers using the Twitter API, and the general feeling is that Twitter is dead for most. A few lucky ones are able to afford the new 42k/m price point, and everyone else has been kicked out without any respect by Twitter, and won't be coming back.
Our mRNA vaccines were 'better' from what I understand.
That is exactly why I disdain psychology. I don't care what term you use, you think a conscious descision of a person is a sickness. You ignore morality and ethics as a neccesary component of a person's thought life and in this society where psychology reigns so much chaos has resulted. Much of it because of freud's hostility to anything moral or religious.

People who abuse children are in a position of power to do so. They violate the trust given to them for their pleasure. They know right from wrong, they know the concept of innocence, they know their actions cause harm. The thing psychology in it's inglorious ignorance leaves out is the concept of knowing your actions will affect someone adversley and you would not want that thing done to you. They are evil because they knew what they were doing and the harm it will cause and did it anyways because they know they will get away with it. You know what one good way to verify this is? They hide their actions! A person who had no idea they were causing harm will not hide their actions. A person fit to stand trial knows right from wrong, a convict chose wrong and for this crime that person chose to harm a child for their own gain.

Keep in mind, I am not claiming that it is impossible for a person to have been brainwashed and traumatized so much that they are no longer in control if their own actions and cannot process concept such as harming others or innocence. Such people can pleas insanity and if found insane they will be locked up seeking treatment. That is not the typical priesr or gym teacher that abuses children.

> Seeing child molesters as purely evil and irredeemable does nothing to help us prevent child molestation.

Yes it does and your thinking in my opinion is what has caused such an explosion if this crime since the 20th century. Recognizing sane people who commit horrific crimes for what they are allows society to deal with them accordingly. If society acknowledges evil then society much also choose to be evil and ignore it or destroy it. Suddenly no punishment seems sufficient and humane treatment becomes impossible (as it should!). By how much do you reckon this crime would decrease if they were tortured in horrible medeival ways and their torture was public and streamed on the internet and tv? I'd reckon by at least 90%! So society had chosen to feel good and humane over protecting its most innocent members! And part of the cause is psychology telling you feeling good about yourself is the most important thing.

You just cannot ignore the concept evil and act surprised when it is rampantly spreading.

But psychology is not alone, the catholic church excuses the acts of priests and blames it on the devil much like you blame it on sickness. Any system that refused to put the blame entirely on a (sane) perepetrator is at fault.

In politics you saw the so called "evangelicals"(not all of course) who supported trump no matter how much harm he caused and look at he has done to america!
Yeah obviously the US is huge and there’s plenty of nature to be found, but somehow we’ve just forgotten to integrate that into our communities and walkable areas completely.
I appreciate your concern for the HN guidelines and have banned the other account. However, fairness obliges me to add that you also broke the guidelines by repeatedly perpetuating this flamewar.

"Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And probably an entire floor or more of the building was dedicated to flooded lead/acid batteries for uninterrupted power to the telephone network.
The training corpus is the problem. An extra trillion tokens is (ballpark) an extra million KJV bibles worth of text formatted for ingestion. And you probably picked all of the low hanging fruit in terms of quality prior vetting
and being in a standard format for ingestion in your first trillion tokens of training data.
Fingerprinting Linux process trees with Rust
I’ve challenged this idea in the form of writing a Prometheus exporter for process trees started on Linux. One may wonder what processes are started on Linux machines and if things are expected. Generally, it’s difficult to see if the process is intended to be run or not. This utility aims at making low-overhead monitoring of every process launch to remove noisy parts of process trees. Events are provided through Linux kernel Process Events Connector . This small utility is the attempt to mine useful information about process trees in a concise and low-overhead method, running a Rust application in the user space. The other alternative could be built on top of the Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology, but it’s kernel-space arcane magic. Why not? Well, better next time. eBPF programs have to be verified to not crash the kernel. Trying that in Rust is probably better with the bcc crate.
Posten is a mixed bag. Ease of access at places like grocery stores, and general service is great. But delivery can often be weirdly delayed. Sometimes we get notice of bills _after_ they're due. But overall, I prefer it to the US postal service I'm used to, so it doesn't feel like a slam dunk example to me.

Spend some of that money on training and paying more GPs, and you'd have my interest...
What are the chances of meteorites being a threat? Without an atmosphere it is easier for them to reach the ground and cause damage.
Seme – Stack – Space – an attempt to break down the layers of applications
i remember campus cops, being quite hardass, about inability to produce ID.
physical ID is not as volatile, or prone to malfunction, as digital.
A normal, linear conversation. Like traditional forums.
Putting telescopes in higher orbits should handle most of that.
I'd say that's not necessarily bad, more of a double edged sword. Many marginalized groups do need these kinds of support. They fall into the categories like 'I like playing games instead of sports, so what', 'I like watching niche foreign shows with subtitles'. At the end of the day, many ppl do benefit from increased connections. Many groups(both negative and positive) wont even exist with current technology.

Personally, it's a net positive for me.
I've definitely been seeing things trending in this direction.
"other countries have delivered large increases in housing supply with popular support."

Such as? Just pure bs
Comparing the impact of some toy app that calls a bunch of tools to ChatGPT is an insult. They should call it prompt engineering automation.
But you also had Samantha Fox singing "Touch me now!" while surrendering to the spirits of the night ;->
I agree it's an industry wide thing.

The Microsoft-specific variant of it is something I've seen up close. One of the issues always struck me as confusing interface and implementation. There isn't a good recognition of the fact that when you write against an API, you code against an abstraction, not a particular implementation. If your interface is good enough, you can do the rewrite treadmill thing to justify your current bonus or whatever, but you can point the old interface at a new implementation without most callers knowing the difference.

So, I think a good example of this working relatively well would be Windows audio. The WinMM API still works. They rewrote the audio stack a couple of times, and introduced new APIs such as WASAPI and I forget the newer one. Winmm isn't broken. It may not have access to all the latest features, but it works.

In contrast, all too often they discard an entire API because they want to rewrite the components underneath. But the I in API stands for interface. A good interface can survive rewrites of what's underneath.
The way to answer all these questions is that infinity is not a number, it's the absence of a limit.
Haven't read it, though quickly skimming doesn't give much hope. All this talk about "hoarding" and not enough about how it's default-illegal to build a house until you satisfy every church biddy around. We need as-right zoning. I'd weep for joy if Ireland passed sensible ADU rules like California.
I'd rather just manipulate zoning laws to prohibit soviet style apartment blocks from appearing in my little slice of heaven
Warning: This post deals with reality. Reality is often offensive, so you will probably be offended by this post.

We are not taking them because America is (unfortunately) polarized into 2 camps.

The Liberal camp wants every black and brown immigrant they can get. The Liberal camp also does not also care about pro-America loyalty or the ability for immigrants to support themselves.

Edited to add: The Liberal camp wants people with darker skin because they see them as being oppressed. I have personally seen great discrimination by US ICE against immigrants with lighter skin colors.

The conservative camp wants no immigrants because immigrants vote for the Liberal camp.

(Almost) nobody was willing to take the farmers from South Africa.

We in Texas did take in the pretty girls with light hair from Ukraine, but that was totally unfair to only take pretty girls with light hair.

(Almost) nobody cares about the Chinese.

This is one problem with a 2 party system. Our founding fathers warned us, and we did not listen.

Edited to add: I wish we would take the immigrants that help the USA.
It is. They're just difficult because their wingspan is too damn big to fit in most airports. If they had retractable folding legs like us sardine passengers in economy class, they'd fit like a champ.
Same issue in auto repair. It’d be nice to use port/starboard when referring to stuff in an engine compartment or on a car in general.

Is it left as in I’m looking at the engine or left as if I was sitting in the car? I think it’s the latter, but I always forget.

Can’t use driver’s/passenger’s side for orientation either.
It's still happening. Remember the Universal Music fire? The scope of the damage from that is still a subject of debate: https://variety.com/2020/music/news/universal-music-fire-arc...

Even worse is that we have music labels intentionally and methodically destroying generations' worth of music with dynamic compression, making despicable "remasters" the only thing available to modern listeners. What happens to the originals? Is anyone tracking their provenance?
In the short term, you get a pretty-much-objectively-better employee. In the long term, hiring too many of this type of employee hurts the company culture in a way similar to the CEO being surrounded by "Yes" men. It creates a paralyzed indecision culture of over-engineering. The binge-and-purge nature of tech is to reach this state and then do massive layoffs to address it.
I think the recently cancelled au pair system was as close as Norway got.
To a US suburban resident in a single-family lot, any apartment building is a Soviet-style apartment block.
When A and B make a deal, it can negatively affect C. Over time, this builds up and can also hurt A and B later when they are “the C”. But most decision makers are pushed and don’t understand that everyone acting in their own individual self-interest gets them short-term wins but can create a downward spiral systemically for everyone.

Example: the Great Depression as farmers all were in a race to the bottom due to automation, laying off farmhands and producting a glut of products. The US government had to step in and pay them not to plant, thereby breaking the downward spiral of everyone acting in their own individual self-interest.
The A340 was badly timed. ETOPS restrictions were loosened, making the 777 the better product for the vast majority of routes.

The A340-500 in particular had great range and was used on the longest nonstop routes for some time, but it was replaced by the A380, 777-200LR, 787-9, and the A350-900.
I disagree, they made the decision to use datasets with restrictive licensing, jumping the alpaca/gpt4all/sharegpt bandwagon.

They also chose to toot their horn about how open-source their models are, even though for practical uses half of their released models are not more open source than a leaked copy of LLaMa.
This was my first thought when reading the article.

> The lunar far side is permanently shielded from the radio signals generated by humans on Earth. During the lunar night, it is also protected from the Sun. These characteristics make it probably the most “radio-quiet” location in the whole solar system as no other planet or moon has a side that permanently faces away from the Earth. It is therefore ideally suited for radio astronomy.

Maybe we need to treat this as a "pristine natural resource" and put some treaties in place now where we agree to limit how much we "pollute" this area with RF signals, before it's too late?
Ticket prices are high because demand in the front of the plane is low. Economy class tickets have to go up a lot to make up for empty first and business seats.
Most common case is probably trying to pass `and` to something that applies it to a list, `fold` or `reduce` or similar, and being told some variant of "no deal, and is a macro, not a function" with workarounds like `(reduce (lambda (x y) (and x y)) list))`
Couldn't you just transform the weights in some predictable way and then untransform them before use in runtime? The weights at rest would be completely distinct from the meta weights.