skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hello! I can relate and agree to everything you said. Especially the "Family historian". When my family all got together last summer for the first time since 2019 I lost track of the times I looked up things in my journal when the conversation went to "do you remember when ... happened?". I am originally from the UK so I also captured a lot of the Brexit stuff that happened from the start of 2020. Honestly it is crazy how much happened and that I captured so much of it.

Just like you this was the first time I stuck with journalling and to be honest I am not sure why it worked this time but not others. Perhaps maturity? :D Or perhaps it is the streak feature which is motivating like you said. I also went easy on myself not setting any hard-to-achieve goal of N words per day. While most days I write quite a detailed entry there are a few days where I only wrote two or three sentences as I wasn't feeling it for whatever reason.

You make an excellent point regarding trends that I totally forgot to mention when posting earlier. I too have found quite a few trends, almost all health (or wellbeing) related. Things like how much better I felt on the days I did intermittent fasting. Or that having my coffee black first thing was much easier on my stomach than with milk (although I'm not lactose intolerant it certainly upsets my stomach if I have it in the first hour or two after waking up for reasons unknown).

These trends have led me to making changes that one could argue have been life changing as they have given me more energy, mental clarity or resolved long standing annoyances that I couldn't pin point the origin of.

Sitting here thinking about journalling now I feel perhaps my initial call that it isn't really life changing is perhaps not quite true. At least not totally. There are certainly a few small changes I have made that have improved my quality of life quite a bit and this has prompted me to add a todo for tomorrow morning to do a bit of analysis to see if there are any other trends I may have missed.

A nice thing about Day One is the tags/hashtags support. I started adding a bunch to entries almost every day to track things so sorting my entries is reasonably efficient.

One last thing I wanted to mention is didn't bother with the template feature to begin with but I set some up a while back to prompt me to capture things like when I ate, how much exercise I did, how I felt that day, how well I slept, etc. It is amusing to look back and know exactly what I ate on some random day and especially helpful when you identify otherwise random things like your burrito bowl and quality of sleep!
This really is Apple at their best. In fact it’s technology at its best.

Nice to have something to comment on that doesn’t elicit any cynicism!
That's a fair point, I only had a land ecosystem in mind when writing it, sure there would probably be plenty of sea life in there.
This isn't something to preach on a thread, though. It's how people should treat every discussion. Otherwise why aren't you pasting the same message into every comment thread on the site?
I recommend looking at “Make: Electronics” by Charles Platt.

I read Electronics for Inventors, and have even pushed myself through respectable chunks of AoE, but Platt’s book really helped to drive home some concepts and spans a mere 350 pages.
> Since house cats are one of the biggest threats birds face in the wild—they kill somewhere between 1.3 and 4 billion birds every year in the U.S.

The Audubon society lists domestic outdooor cats as one of the biggest threats to birds.

https://www.audubon.org/news/how-stop-cats-killing-birds
Hotels suck for other reasons. If you're travelling as a group you often don't want to have separate hotel rooms with no shared space. If you're travelling as a family you might have kids that need to go to bed before you. There's much more of a trend to build serviced apartments now - which solve most of those issues.
The pervasive "Let's never do anything, just to be safe" mood is what I dislike the most about this era. It is suffocating so many possible paths to progress.

"You never know" is always true, Don't use it as a crutch.

Note: I'm an old man complaining about this era, not OP.
This spring, I completed a data structures course at a large state school. We used Java at our university because Princeton did, and I imagine Princeton did because of the ease of segmenting concepts into classes because Java bytecode is the same between the students' devices and the machines which were used to grade their assignments (our grades were determined as a fraction of the number of test-cases our code would pass).
You might want to check your Task Manager if you've got a windows device provided by your employer.

Even in europe you quiet often have CarbonBlack installed (cb.exe) as an Administrator, which provides the employer with full access to everything you do, including screengraps etc.

You just might not be aware that this is true over here as well, even if its technically illegal for the employer to do so. they usually dont care any way.
and "about to do something stupid" is bit of an exaggeration. Professionals rarely do things that are flat out stupid. It can be intimidating to disagree with people up the food chain or with a reputation for always being right or celebrity.

It takes courage and tact to disagree with someone in a productive way. Going in hat-in-hand, looking at your shoes, isn't going to get you far but nor is calling someone's idea stupid and berating them one-on-one or in front of others.

Packaging feedback as a question like you put it is a good tactic and one i use. I also like to open with an understanding of where the person is coming from. This shows you've actually thought about it and understand, and who knows, maybe you don't and so you open the opportunity to get better informed on the decision. Something like "I see where you're going, you chose X because of reasons Y and Z, do i have that right?". Then once confirmed, you go into "well have you thought about A, B, and C? It seems to me this is a better choice because of <reasons>". The "it seems to me" is important because you've opened the door to admitting you may be wrong as well. "it seems to me" is a lot more disarming than "well everyone knows the right decision is X".

There are certainly personalities that will say this is overly worded and emotional and it's better to just say "you're wrong, i'm right, do X". When it works great, most of the time it won't and it just breeds resentment or at the very best breeds fear.
> No, it's not in a "unique and dominant position". Open source code is freely available online, it's almost trivial to build a bot to scrape OS code from anywhere on the web (GitHub included).

Absolutely wrong. GitHub is doing way more than just hosting code. It hosts bugtrackers, CI and much more. For most FOSS project it's the ONLY place where you can go and submit a bug report.

It's not just a repository, it's a communication tool and refuses to interoperate with other platform.

This is monopoly, just like NPM and Linkedin. Microsoft never changes.
I mean, ability to parse information, compress it into the latent space, and then regenerate it is what humans do, but I wouldn't call that reasoning.
These people taking advantage of it at home(nearly everyone) are very likely doing the same thing in office. What the heck is wrong with having Netflix on and eating a hot dog while you work? You didn’t mention they didn’t accomplish what they needed to.
Some genius ported the Spring framework to PHP (and called it Symfony) and we have to live with the BS from Java world in PHP land. Anemic models and lots of indirection. What a sad world we live in.
This verge article is very confusing:

"Apple’s new accessibility features can assist those who’ve lost the ability to speak.... users can create a Personal Voice by reading a set of text prompts aloud for a total of 15 minutes of audio on the iPhone or iPad."

huh? I presume it's for people who anticipate losing their voice due to a medical condition, never the less the article is really badly put together.
The old twitter stood up to authoritarians but also banned DMs that talked about true events in the west at the best of the US government, so it was kind of a buckshot with no coherent strategy.
Banking’s super highly regulated for good reason. It’s an inherently risky business built on borrowing short (I.E. your depositors can “call” their deposits at any time (see Silicon Valley Bank for a recent example of depositors calling short)) to lend long (E.G. a 30 year mortgage).

Considering 2008, the recent LIBOR scandal, and all the fines levied against large financial institutions for having bankers communicate at all for work purposes outside of captured communication lines (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal, text messages) of course everything a bank employee does on company time is regulated.

The SEC is watching as best they can the fundamental liquidity providers of the world’s largest economies.

Because when they fail, failures spread, and shit goes chaotic really quick. But if they’re not there in the first place all the money that makes our world go around doesn’t… keep moving and everything slows down.

You can argue whether or not we should be slowing down as a species or whatever but that’s a different argument and orthogonal to the conversation.

Banking’s highly regulated, and incredibly onerous about tracking all communications for discovery. If you’re a banker, you don’t have the luxury of mixing private and personal communications on the same devices.
if you need some frontend(React, Vue) work done, i'm in that mid range. Email in my bio.
You might be interested in David MacKay's old conjugate gradient implementation in C that also only uses derivatives: https://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/c/macopt.html

(It was written in another time, don't expect it to be nice. My 20-year-old Octave/Matlab wrappers on that page have almost certainly bit-rotted, don't expect them to work.)
People boldly write off everything these days. It's just the way of the world at this point and it's very pedantic.

Some things are very hard to prove or disprove. Some things people have argued very hard against and are simply unwilling to hear contrary information.

Even when there is a study, people will find fault with the study. In many cases, warranted fault. In others, not so much.

People simply decide what to trust and what not to trust. If I see a guy in a blue shirt walking down the street, stop and talk to him for a minute and then go on my way there's no way that I can prove that to you. The distrustful skeptic can always find a reason that they don't want to believe it.
Honestly without needing to personally use the accessibility features, I think I might be taking a look at the new layouts, because I really yearn to make my device more minimalistic, there is just to much going on in modern devices.

But Bravo to Apple once again for doing excellent accessibility features and continuing to improve them.
It’s funny but a lot of JS haters are Java devs. Which also don’t know a thing about JS, or at least think JS looks like in the 90s, with callback hells and whatnot.
Would be nice to buy some tokens and use them around the marketplace. Something similar to how OpenAI has. Different API's might use more tokens depending on complexity
WALS is great! A warning though: the individual data points aren’t always completely reliable. I regularly attempt to track down specific language features listed in WALS only to find that half of them don’t correspond to what’s in the source (which to be fair is quite characteristic of big linguistic databases). That being said, the overall geographic trends in the maps are still pretty reliable, and the accompanying ‘chapters’ [https://wals.info/chapter] are amongst the best free linguistic resources I’ve yet found.

From the same group, there’s also https://glottolog.org/ for general information about language families, and https://clics.clld.org/ for lexicon organisation. All these are part of a broader set of linked datasets listed at https://clld.org/datasets.html (I’ve found PHOIBLE particularly interesting, which collects phonological information). Again, the same provisos apply: generally helpful on average, but take specific data points with a grain of salt.
A few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927509 ("The new .zip TLD is going to cause some problems", 80 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35917362 (".zip is now available as a TLD", >90 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35920336 ("The .zip TLD sucks", >300 comments)
Well yes, because transformers just predict the next word to use. Their advantage is the concept of attention in order to better predict the next word (by deciding how relevant much earlier words are to the overall conversation).

The transformer architecture isn't capable of general/unstructured thought like we are, but I'd love for someone to build an ideation model that feeds into a transformer when it needs to get input/output from the outside world. Abstract concepts will give us stronger AI, not 6TB of text; that should be reserved exclusively for communication purposes.

It's like when you're thinking of something, but you can't remember the word for it. Then you remember the word. Transformers only work with the latter, what we need is something that can operate on the "something" without having to know the word for it (which is only relevant when talking to a human anyway).
This also matters for load balancers. With SSE or chunked encoding long polling, it's possible to lose the client connection without the load balancer closing the connection to the server, at least for a while.

WebSockets make it easy to do periodic heartbeats from the server, which puts an upper bound on how long a client connection can be in an uncertain state.

This also enables client presence data, even if the client only ever receives messages.
had a large exhibition on Caravaggio

What is interesting and telling is that they showed a 'name' like Caravaggio, and not any of the countless contemporary painters who are every bit is technically skilled as Caravaggio was, and perfectly capable of emulating his style. If the classical visual style was still relevant in itself, every art gallery would be showing off those contemporary artists.
This “book” has been in a “coming soon” state for several years now.
Seriously, how many people here can cuneiform?
Would hexane be another example?
>A bit more annoying is the blocking of Stackoverflow

If you care about your organization you would stop using stackoverflow. The license on stackoverflow responses are CC-SA. How many are copy and pasting these stackoverflow responses directly into their proprietary code base? Even reading the responses could taint your codebase.. but I haven't seen that level of litigation in 20 years
Recommended reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Though it was written in the 1970s, the way that people write software and the invisible laws that govern that process still hold today.

This book describes those invisible laws and is worth reading if you are managing software development.
Also heat and get your hand whipped.. and the hand whipping is actually the most painful and leaves a permanent mark for few days (so you can keep mocking your visiting friends/colleagues for the rest of their trip :D).

See it in action here: https://youtu.be/JEfCGsXIeRY
Same here and don't interpret it as an accusation, more of an "huh, that's interesting", mostly cause I had the suspicion that this was partly written by ChatGPT and was able to detect it, I'm not entirely sure what made me realize it.
Ansible Semaphore
Yes and no.

For the first three months of the year I was religiously journaling. Pretty much every single day, with weekly and monthly reviews. Then towards the end of the quarter when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get my project finished on time and that I was miserable I completely burnt out and stopped journaling and haven’t gone back to it yet. Journaling felt like work and it also felt like it was making my mental head space worse - it was constant, hyper focused reinforcement of negative energy and would just remind me of everything I was failing at or failing to do. I was succeeding at many things at the same time and writing those down but the journal was something of a relentless OODA loop for self improvement which meant I was constantly dissatisfied because my life was fixated on achieving the next goal rather than trying to enjoy the process. It didn’t help that the main problem I was working on was a frustrating nightmare.

I do want to start journaling again because it can lead to insights but I might have to experiment with it to find something healthier but I’m not sure what that would look like. All that being said I’m not sure my biggest insights come from journaling so who knows if it is that valuable. They probably come when I respond to questions like this on the internet or interact with people.

Thinking about it, in a way maybe it has helped. After burning out I kind of came to the realisation that I really am sick of being where I am and doing what I am doing which has lead to me selling up everything I own in order to go travelling. So maybe the journaling served its purpose of hammering home to me how dissatisfied I was with life and how I needed to make a radical change. The insight didn’t come whilst I was journaling but the journaling indirectly lead me to the insight. Maybe I’ll take it up again when I finally get out of the country in a few months.
Agree. Seattle's "bad weather" is overblown. It's livable all year, compared to e.g. Austin which is too cold in the winter and hot as hell in the summer.
These are very soft words for the ongoing biocide.
If you look at animal farms and insecticide even a word as drastic as "animal holocaust" might be appropriate.
UMA may turn out to be visionary. I really wonder if they saw the AI/ML trend or just lucked out. Either way, the apple silicon arch is looking very strong for local AI. It’s a lot easier to beef up the NPU than to redo memory arch.
Micron Updates Data Center NVMe SSD Lineup: 6500 Ion TLC and XTR SLC
> maybe because I'm not in the US? Or haven't spend much time at BigCorp?

My wife works at a BigCorp and I work at a small but established company. The differences in this arena couldn't be starker. I was given a laptop (and assembled my own desktop) and told to set it up according to my preferences first day. My wife has many metrics that she knows about tracked through her locked down MacBook (and I'm sure many more she doesn't know about). For my case I can't even think of how they'd track me while I work from home; for hers, she already knows that they do.
I think OP's point is that this is Hacker News, not Tech MBA news. S/N ratio has slipped a bit but NH is still the best place that I know to find tech news.
One big hurdle to jump will be the need for fundamental change in government regulations for food production.

The requirements are ridiculous particularly with meat production. I can't sell cuts of meat unless the animal walks off the trailer at a state or federally regulated processing facility. Getting in line at the processor is not easy and though lead time isn't as bad as it SAS during the pandemic response, it can still require planning months ahead on exactly when you will process one animal.

Beyond that, there are very real animal welfare concerns if you ever look into how those facilities work. Animals walk of the trailer and spend their last hours extremely stressed, stuffed into concrete holding pens and chutes with other animals they don't know in a building that must smell unmistakably of death.

The meat is processed in very specific ways, including spraying it with bleach. There's no way around that, and may stamped USDA has been treated that way.

I do understand how we ended up with so many regulations and health concerns, but they are all byproducts of an over-centralized system that attempts to produce an entire country's worth of meat in one place and distribute it nationality so that every store shelf looks the same. Those regulations have grown so l large that is nearly unsustainable to attempt to raise meat on a smaller, more local scale.
China just destroyed hundreds of thousands of tech jobs due to ideology. Ideology trumps reason for true believers like Xi. They are struggling now with massive youth unemployment, but the CCP believes the struggle is worth it.
Can the World Make an Electric Car Battery Without China?
Just an FYI, practically anyone is a VP at a bank. You have to go higher
Anecdotally speaking it came with paying taxes not with accumulating wealth (though I wish it were the latter).

My first contracting job where I had to pay quarterly tax estimates (apologies for the U.S. tax-code specific reference) literally changed the way I thought about the world. Instantly financially conservative.

By far the smartest thing the US government ever did was take your taxes out of your paycheck so you "never see it".

BTW this applies to personal taxes not corporate taxes. Still think we're going about inflation completely wrong by raising rates and not raising corporate taxes. But the U.S. has been on a genocidal campaign against the middle class for decades now and we keep electing the same politicians so I guess we get what we deserve.
Only reading the first paragraph is pretty simple though.
> What about the employer’s side of the story though?
> ....
> I know checking “results” is what should be happening, but guess what? That’s actually pretty difficult and open to all kinds of debate.

If you don't know definition of "results", then how can you be sure that making people tired will somehow achieve the results?
In the end do you need "results" from work or do you just want to make people maximally tired?
Think Siri+ChatGPT trained on all your email, documents, browser history, messages, movements, everything. All local, no cloud, complete privacy.

"Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."
The question is whether there will be models that can’t fit into an iPhone that apple will miss out on because they find cloud based personalization so abhorrent.

Agree these are tremendously good features and having them run locally will provide the best possible experience.
Indeed. It's a royal pain in the arse and completely justified from a customer protection and, for that matter, industry protection pov.

This is definitely one of those cases where, if you don't like having your work activity monitored, then finance is probably not the industry for you.
I find it interesting that they are not waiting to talk about this at WWDC since I assume these features are tied to iOS 17. I wonder if that means that the simplified apps won't be available to developers (I don't see an App Store so I guess that makes sense).

All of these features do seem really awesome for those that need it. Particularly the voice synthesis. I honestly just want to play with that myself and see how good it is and I am curious if they would use that tech for other things as well.

The whole new simple UI I can really see being a major point. Especially if it includes an Apple Watch component and can still be synced with one for the safety features a watch has. Particularly fall detection.

Edit:

Maybe I missed it but this brings up an interesting problem. Is the Voice Synthesis only stored on the device and never backed up or synced to a new device. Can you imagine your phone breaking or you needing to upgrade after you lost your voice (but you had previously set that up) and you can no longer use it?!?

I fully understand the privacy concerns of something like this being lost. But this isn't like FaceID that could just be easily re-created in some situations. So I really hope they thought about that.