skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will take the contrarian position here. This is bad policy and shouldn’t happen.

First, making recreational drugs illegal is a good policy. Drugs are addictive. They intentionally disrupt your normal brain function. Some people are more affected than others and commit crimes while taking drugs. They disrupt the normal functioning of society. The more people that take drugs, the worse it is for society. Look at the opioid epidemic for a recent US example.

Second, the government should not send mixed signals about drugs. It should not at once ban them, and also facilitate their “safe” consumption. People cannot understand this mixed message. If drugs are bad and shouldn’t be consumed, why is there an official channel for “safely” consuming them?

The result of this double think will likely be further moves toward legalization of drugs, their subsequent proliferation through society, and the further decay of society as a result.
I restore and wrench on vintage motorcycles. I also balked at first when I read this, but I think it comes down to bad storytelling rather than a shady mechanic.

A motorcycle that has been sitting for 2 years does NOT need a complete overhaul, as you point out. But there is much-better-than-even chance that the 1983 motorcycle hadn't had ANY major maintenance done to it up to the point it stopped being ridden. It was probably parked in the first place because it stopped running due to lack of maintenance. And everything the mechanic listed that needed to be done likely hadn't been done in decades.
I was as shocked as you, and was absolutely infuriated over the bank telling me that they couldn't manually override whatever was going on. I can assure you it was a real thing that happened, and I did cancel my credit card and get a new number, if I remember I tried that at least twice.

I found the email from NPM when they fixed it, though in the email they still claim that my card details were stolen and it should be closed, ignoring that I had done that multiple times already. The email is below. Apparently there were 28 charges, so it must have been around 2 years that this was ongoing, I was dealing with some major issues at that time so I had to put it on the backburner for that time.

As far as digital wallets and virtual cards, I have none of those things. I may be a programmer, but I haven't gone techy with my finances, I just have a checking account and a credit card, and this charge kept appearing on my credit card across at least two card cancellations. Having said that, I have no idea what would happen if a fraudulent digital wallet or virtual card was set up that I was unaware of. The issue did start in 2015 though, so I'm not sure if those even existed back then.

Email from <Redacted>@npmjs.com:
"We've completed the investigation into the charges we believe linked to your card ending in [Redacted]. We've refunded each individual charge for a total of $196 (28 refunds at $7/each). You should see those credited back to your account within a few business days.

We've canceled the subscription the charges were linked to, and removed the billing details. That said, we'd still encourage you to notify your bank that the card information was stolen and that the card should be closed.

Thanks for your patience while we worked through this on our end. I understand it wasn't ideal and even frustrating at times. I'm sorry for that.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you. We’ll be here to help."
We need as many ways to theoretically cut emissions as possible. That way, no one way will ever have to be chosen by a majority of people. So we will never have to actually do any of them. And we can keep polluting but pretend "it's not my fault because I supported <insert random niche idea>".

No one wants to admit they are happy to just ruin everything. So we all need to pretend we want action. But in order to prevent any action happening we need to pick different things.

The Nuclear people won't vote for solar expansion, the solar people will deny windmills work, the windmill people will refuse to condone nuclear. That way EVERYONE can claim the moral high ground AND use nice cheap, reliable coal. The same applies for everything (electric cars? No! Hydrogen!. Hydrogen? No, public transport! Public transport? No, electric cars!).
> Proper engineering degree teaches about gathering requirement and analyzing the problem space to understand what really needs to be done.

This. I don't even think you have to bring a degree into it, honestly. This is just at the heart of all engineering (software or otherwise).
It may have memorized it, but recollection with accuracy is not it's strong suit.
And for those of us with no interest in following the mods, can /r/Startrek be opened again? If the old mods moved platforms, there’s no need to keep this private.
While there's insight in your observation, comparing old books to current blog posts is like comparing current books with old bar talk. There is plenty of high value sources in print.
I don’t see this approach as a viable one, but time will tell. I never subscribed to the Startrek subreddit, but having it on an isolated website instead of been agglomerated on a solution like Reddit will have an engagement decrease, especially when people who subscribed to the sub still participates in other subreddits.
> SO is down, but ChatGPT memorized

memorized SO, also known as "stole". when i (and everyone else) write for SO, i give them permission to use what i write, but never did I sign up for the GPT theft of that data.
My experience is that applications get slow when they are loaded down with bajillions of layers of unnecessary bloat.

It's not because of micro-decisions such as whether to use reference counting.
Writing is hard but a cursory proof reading would immediately spot that the first line of the error is completely unrelated to the description.

What other more subtle errors are also there?
There was a time like 5-10 years ago where Python was really popular for grassroots web projects. Nowadays this is mostly node looks like.
Birds of a feather.
That's what I am thinking of doing if things go for worse. I am planning to do in 4-5 years time. I already have enough to buy a small house in the country side back in my home country. I could be building my own projects for fun.

I think you nailed it. My current fear arises from the fact, I am at one of the highest HCOL cities in the world in comparison to wages. This makes the fear more imminent, as I basically would have to move if my salary goes significantly lower.

That wouldn't be the case where I am originally from, in Scandinavia.
How would we tell the difference?
My local motorcycle shop charges about $200 per mechanic hour. I would love a $1000 bill!

On the bright side, I’m learning more and more about sidewalk mechanic-ing. It’s a lot of fun. Very flow state in that way that programming just hasn’t been able to scratch in years. You go to replace some mufflers and what feels like 5 minutes was actually 2 hours.
We have that in Austria, at least at Vienna. You can bring your pills and powders to an organization called CheckIt! and they will inform you of what exactly was in your samples. They are also sometimes at big parties and raves where people can immediately get tested what they bought, with them announcing unexpected or dangerous results via the loud speaker system.

Not just not offering this, but keeping it illegal, is shameful.
Churn in social media is probably good. Places get big, overly commercialized and stale, people's desire for socializing stays constant, so they'll constantly move and create new spaces. Changes and transitions suck, but finding a new place and seeing it grow is also great.
I recently asked Claude+ a social science question (nothing controversial) and it answered much better than ChatGPT. Chatgpt didn't want to cite studies and seemed uncomfortable even being asked about the topic and deflected while Claude seemed to genuinely try to answer the question.
Ask reddit, they used to have an API.
To me, this is the critical difference. Google is so large that if you end up in some tiny edge case, that "tiny" still includes tens of thousands of people yet Google is so large and impermeable that there exists no person that you can call. The only success stories involve people who personally know Google employees or who have social media accounts that get so much attention that it brings embarrassment to corporate Google. Google is too big to be allowed to exist.
Reddit buying third-party apps to adopt a few token niceties and then kill them wouldn't be a middle ground. Anybody who uses those apps would see exactly what the game was and be just as outraged. It would still be a tantrum, figuratively speaking, just a more expensive and passive-aggressive one.

"Incompetence and lack of awareness" is what you get when management starts taking their community for granted.
Visual Basic had control styling and the ability to even create custom components as well. For example, I created a textbox control with built-in validation logic in a matter of minutes and was able to drag/drop the control like any other native control onto forms.

I never cared much for VB as a language - but the IDE around it and the ability to very quickly create complex GUI applications was phenomenal.
> Like jython, and pypy and other implementations, it never caught on because compatibility with cpython is one of the most important criteria for people dealing with lots of python code.

I think this is more an issue of popular packages were developed and tested against cpython and there wasn't enough effort available to port/test them against anything else. There's no special magic in cpython that Python programmers love, they just want their code to run. If they've got a numpy dependency (IIRC it doesn't support pypy but I'm not going to look it up so I may be corrected on that point this is a long parenthetical) they can't use an interpreter that doesn't support it. Even if it worked but had bugs it didn't have in cpython, they're still going to use cpython. Most people aren't writing Python for its super duper fast performance so they're fine leaving a little performance on the table by using the interpreter that their dependencies support. Whatever that is.
As the happy rider of a 1979 Suzuki GS850G, can confirm.
Good, as long as they migrate to their own hosted instances of Lemmy, Mastodon etc. and don't use the "default" or "official" instances.
Ask HN: Mac App Store way to install latest-compatible app
Just recently I was trying to install an app which requires macOS 13.3 while I am on 13.2. For various reasons I am not rushing to update solely because of this app but I'm also certain it doesn't have any real requirement for the latest OS. My question is simply: does the App Store (macOS or iOS) have any way to allow installation of prior versions, possibly based on "last compatible with your device/OS"?

One way I've seen this work in the wild is for developers to upload a new app for major version bumps, i.e. "FooApp" works on 12.0+ but "FooApp 2" requires 13.3+.

I am aware that this carries a slight risk of distributing software with known bugs and that it is against Apple's interest of having everyone use (buy) the latest and greatest.
I've commented[1] above that the high-res scans were done by ASU, for example the cover of the book is this scan: http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/gallery/Apollo/9/Hasselblad%205...

And on that page there's a download button for several version, with the raw image (the link has a .TIF extension) being 1.3 GB big...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36333601
Yeah definitely. My default thought process was always, ok I'll just get a cached version, but now it's like - lemme see what GPT-4 thinks about this problem first.
Yes it is a legal issue. AMD cannot implement CUDA.

However, they have gone around that by creating HIP which is a CUDA adjacent language that runs on AMD and also translates to CUDA for Nvidia GPUs. There is also the HIPify tool to automatically convert existing sources from CUDA to HIP.
https://docs.amd.com/bundle/HIP-Programming-Guide-v5.3/page/...
Much easier to say "subreddits can no longer be private"
$1k is a reasonable ballpark estimate for something like that sight-unseen from an experienced mechanic who understands how to manage expectations and prevent getting into situations where he's over-promised and under-estimated costs.

When you err in the other direction it tends to produce worse outcomes for everyone involved, with the mechanic often ending up eating the difference.

(I've worked as an auto mechanic in a former life)
Freelancing in Computational Design: Monetize Computational Design Skills
The freelance market for computational design is vibrant and ripe with opportunities for skilled professionals. As businesses increasingly recognize the value of computational design, the demand for freelance designers in this field continues to grow.
I don't want to be too descriptive, but it's not a CRUD app - it's a multi-proc app where each process acts as both a client and server (obviously in separate threads) connected w/ gRPC bindings and has an internal DSL that must be abided to. A communication framework of sorts governed by some very specific rules.

Also, why is there some notion it can only do simple things? My understanding is it's trained on a large portion of existing opensource work beyond just SO posts and the like. It seems too many folks saw it produce code w/ some bug or hallucination. The correct response to this is not "welp, my job is safe". It's to feed that error back in have it correct what is broken. If it builds the wrong thing, explain what is wrong, provide multi-shot examples.

You could conceivably create an agent that takes the generated output w/ tests, runs them locally, then feeds the error back in until there is fully working output. Right now the context window limit would be an issue compared to using the web interface. Perhaps OpenAI or Github will provide that capability as a feature.
Completely agree. Take for example that guy who wants to remove one word from Wikipedia. He has the hours and hours and hours necessary to navigate those polotiks and then the hours and hours and hours necessary to impose his sensibilities.
Not to be a jerk about it, but this is why you shouldn't have stored the books in a warehouse owned by a company that could lock the doors at any time. This is the opposite of why the 'net was invented.
I see. I suppose there are different ways to define homelessness too. If i couch surf, I would say I am homeless but if i start tossing the owners $250/mo to let me crash, am I now a tenant? We need agreed upon ways to calculate these problems. "no long term permanent residence" doesn't work either because it would not be accurate to include wealthy nomads.
What makes this post more interesting is that Reddit might now be ushering in a new era of the crawler arms race
Bean counters: how Russia’s wealthy profited from exit of western brands
I use the WebToEpub browser extension, it's great and worked very well on the Rustonomicon which uses the same template:

https://github.com/dteviot/WebToEpub

Just make sure to unselect chapters that aren't part of the "book"
With that amount of experience I imagine GPT is explaining stuff you already know and is thus saving you time.

For something completely novel, or as someone with little experience, it’s going to be harder to get that kind of result in terms of understanding the requirements, writing the prompt, and comprehending the output.
It was reddit's own mistake of allowing the same few hundred mods to moderate a significant percentage of the top 10,000 subreddits.
Show HN: Video Tap – Turn your videos into endless content
It's near the bottom:

"What is the status of the project?

This project is a Proof of Concept. About the only thing that works currently is Geekbench. It's amazingly buggy and incomplete. You should not rely on it for anything serious."
The example is good, and look where we are. Regulation brings immediate partial results to a problem, but doesn't solve it.

I agree that the problem should be resolved, but those methods are only put in place to please shareholders and the law. The hard path, of education and compromises (and possible lower revenue) no one wants to take. Those services exploit "mental and moral malleability", and for that there will never be enough regulation to solve unless you take down all services.
What was the other option, realistically? There are barely other options today, never mind 15 years ago.
Something that Reddit admins and users constantly miss is: "its the mods that make a subreddit amazing".

People openly talk about this as the reason that HackerNews continues to be such a vibrant community.

Replacing the mods will change the community, full stop. Could be for the better , could be for the worse.
Indeed; gambling as a business model, be it betting apps or gacha games, relies on hooking in "whales" (gambling addicts) for most of their profits.
OP here.

I was working on a feature for a webapp that I thought should be doable in a day, but I spent roughly a week on it. When I was done with it, I looked back and thought: wait, why did this take me the whole week? I couldn't come up with a satisfying answer.

So I just decided to accept that I'm not that productive. Maybe there are things I can do to improve my speed of implementing features, but for the time being, this is my speed.

I was going to make a writeup about coming to terms with that.

But somehow as I was writing (originally on Twitter) I linked it in my head to the way I hate modern dev culture: the docker and the webpack, etc. Programming is already hard, why make it 10x harder with all the tools that require complex configurations, etc?

I remember raising this point on HN and other places with other developers, and that there was always push back from people who swear by these tools.

So it clicked in my head: I hate these tools because I'm already slow as it is and I can't take it when these complexities slow me down even further.

Then as I spent more time thinking about the content, I thought this a manifesto worthy content.

But in terms of the points mentioned: I'm dead serious about all of them. Although what I actually mean might not be obvious from first glance.

When I said I write objects as-is, it appears that most people in this thread thought I'm writing individual files. This is not what I'm doing. I'm using a B-Tree backed key-value store and doing binary serialization. I also have a scheme where I make use of the properties of B-Trees to make indexing/querying possible. I have a whole write up about this topic: https://hasen.substack.com/p/indexing-querying-boltdb

For using HTTP as a medium for RPC, I also have a writeup: https://hasen.substack.com/p/automagic-go-typescript-interfa...

These alternative techniques took time for me to develop, so you could say that it would have been faster for me to just use postgres/docker/aws etc (the standard stack). But this is my point: I really am too stupid to learn them.
> I also wonder if more organizations could unlock more value by just having a 1x programmer

They probably already have such programmers. Actual 10x programmers are exceptionally rare. Having an entire team of them is extremely unlikely.
Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians.

Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of absolutely brilliant algorithms inside a missile defense system and it's all super secret. Or someone who did amazing work on a compiler Carmack used or brilliant work in an OS kernel that you're never going to know about, or some AI code, or something deep within a stock exchange's platform.

Carmack's perceived greatness is elevated because almost 100% of what he has worked on is directly visible to the average consumer.
books rot over time, and when there are billions of books being produced daily it's not reasonable to expect all of it to stick around
I would not get overly focused on this use-case. It is more difficult to think of use-cases that won't get disrupted than those that will.
That was always the case; Tesla has showroom and service facilities all over the place, and handles financing. That's the model the big traditional manufacturers want to move towards.

It's not back to square one; it removes a middleman layer, one that most folks hate dealing with. You buy a car at a set price that's the same for everyone from a salaried employee, not from an intermediary who'll make up a price and pocket a commission off screwing you if you're not good at haggling.
No, pebbles in the shoe would just draw attention to you by people looking for someone with an unusual gait.

While I don't know if that detail about the U.S.S.S. is true (it probably is), there are "tells" if someone is consciously or subconsciously thinking about a firearm on their body.
I had a recent job offer that included a rather restrictive non-compete. They were actually really good about just dropping it when I pointed out that it's not permissible under Ontario law.

It feels good that there's positive progress in this direction.
From the README:

> Is ZLUDA a drop-in replacement for CUDA?

> Yes, but certain applications use CUDA in ways which make it incompatible with ZLUDA

> What is the status of the project?

> This project is a Proof of Concept. About the only thing that works currently is Geekbench. It's amazingly buggy and incomplete. You should not rely on it for anything serious

It is a cool proof of concept but we don’t know how far away it is from becoming something that a company would willingly endorse. And I suspect AMD or Intel wouldn’t want to put a ton of effort into… helping people continue to write code in their competitor’s ecosystem.
Is quantum computing a realistic possibility, or is it going to be 5 years away for eternity?
contrarian substack clickbait
After burning the current one, books and all.

Granted this had to do with the fact that unlike any other agreed upon standard protocol, Reddit posts are not accessible except by indirect means, i.e. you can’t download the contents of a community the same way you would with a git repository or an email server and migrate it elsewhere.
sad but probably true, everybody in charge is invested
1. Humans evaluate, determine, and select which causal effects to attempt/apply, among the selections in their known agency.
2. The world, given its complexity and chaos, is non-deterministic.

Humans determine their actions (will) where fate (determinism) isn't prescriptive of their course. Humans don't have a monopoly on will, but we do have our own. If you've ever survived, it's because you chose to eat. Eventually, even decisions like these which you may feel are implicit are also subject to be reversed if we want to and will.
Google says amphetamines are schedule II, so that's in line with your statement.
"After a long and hard discussion together with the Snoos, we have decided to shut Reddit down. It wasn't us, it was you."
Because of the use or abuse of macros, different C codebases can look very different, and to learn it you have to figure out all the quirky macros. If people stick to standard C with few macros and verbose variable names, it's really not bad.
Soft packpedalling for PR purposes because the backlash does cost reddit a lot, even just in bad PR
Was all over the news in Germany today:
https://www.welt.de/geschichte/article245860994/Archaeologie...
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/menschen/3000-jahre...
https://www.schwaebische.de/regional/ostalb/archaeologen-fin...