skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival.

fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng
e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory.

what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders.

how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers.

(i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)

[reposted from the star trek thread, probably belongs in this one more]
promotion & hiring are the 2 most important acts of a manager. in that order.

those 2 will solely make or break a company.
How popular was your small east coast college library?

I have a theory about this. Which is that the upper/upper-mid class in particular cares more about the image of a pristine library than they do the actual effectiveness/reach of that library. This theory shows itself quite a lot through how people talk about libraries: not in how many students find what they're looking for, how happy librarians are, how many grades or careers have been improved. It's bathrooms and walls.
assert!(cond) in rust is basically

if !cond {
// I ad-libbed the exact error message
panic!("Asssertion failed {cond} was false, line/file information, etc")
}

panic!(message) is "either throw an exception containing message, or print the message + maybe a backtrace and abort the process".

You can use compiler flags to guarantee that it aborts instead of throwing an exception, you can't use compiler flags to guarantee that it acts an exception, sometimes rust will just abort the process (for example if you panic!() while you're already unwinding because of a prior panic!()).

If nothing catches the exception (and that's usually the case, by convention), the runtime will print the message, maybe a backtrace, and kill the thread that paniced.
They will indeed need to revoke the affected certificates within 5 days, per the Baseline Requirements.

Also, the affected certificates won't be accepted by Certificate Transparency-enforcing browsers (Chrome and Safari) because of the precertificate mismatch.
this is similar to another point that in the vast majority of companies that make software the returns to technical skills are rapidly diminishing, in reality.

In most companies it actually is, in a completely non-cynical non-political way, your 'social' skills that begin to dominate your efficacy in improving the company's bottom line past a certain floor of tech skill.

That involves understanding and working with how the whole company works as a machine top to bottom, including the relationship with customers. There are times when that maps to problems with technical solutions but more often than not that's not the case.

That's the fundamental reason in most companies you really do need great social and communication skills, and often business sense too, to become more and more senior on the (quote unquote) technical career ladder.
Sorry I was trolling I guess it was too subtle, anyway thanks for posting that funny bing search here, I was following the bing reddit ever since the sydney fiasco but I guess it's set to private for the protest now. Also I think those two essays I put are silly, and when I read the simulators essay I thought it would be clear that was the best interpretation and that every academic would be climbing over each other to say they thought of it first, but no instead we got blurry jpeg and stochastic parrot.
Inferencing neural networks is a big one. It's hard to get near real-time performance without it. Depending on the use case of course.
That's awesome!! I wonder if let's encrypt runs sanity checks before/after issuing certs too?
It is funny that you mention that. I've been feeling increasingly self-conscious about my own writing on the internet now because that's how I naturally write and talk, so I wonder how many people in the future are going to think it's just another AI comment written by ChatGPT.
Not all ads are sales ads. This is especially true for huge industries with a few major players and strong industry associations & lobbying groups. Double-especially true for such industries that also have a serious negative-externality problem and are facing significant regulatory risk.

A quick image search for "[name of fossil fuel company] ad"—plus, just having seen lots of these ads over the years, in the wild—suggests that much of that spending is about PR and influencing policy opinions of voters, not trying to sell me some particular product.

As you keep writing, the fuel that's needed will be purchased anyway, so the main effect of this would be reducing the reach of corporate PR (i.e. bullshit) campaigns. Seems like a cheap and easy win to me, and a service to their readers.
> the concern trolling around here regarding federation

I clicked, excited. I closed the tab when it required me to select a server. I don't want to read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera.

This is a real and recurring hurdle to the adoption of these technologies.
Mixing biochar with concrete actually makes it harder (or you can add less cement to it), while storing CO₂ (biochar is a viable CO₂ pit).

Can't link the sources because mobile, but if you're interested look it up, it's really interesting. It's being certified in France right now.
I think Haas is basically right, that the structure flows from the community structure, and that it's not clear alterations would be a net win. pgsql-hackers is producing the kind of docs only they can, but many usful kinds of docs they cannot produce (per Haas's theory, e.g. more narrative in nature) are delegated to the relative anarchy of the Internet, in blogs, comment threads, stack exchange, and such.

While there should be a lot of hesitancy at the implied assumption that any particular arrangement is at the efficient frontier -- most situations can be improved in most or all dimensions -- an exchanged loss in the kind of documents that pgsql-hackers is suited to producing is hard to replace.
To be fair, the web developers are the ones actually typing in the code and deploying it. They must share at least partial blame.

This whole "Don't blame me! Boss told me to do it" attitude is rampant in software.
Of the tips in this article, I think this one is simultaneously the most well-known and the most underrated:

> Getting a job gets you a professional network, which you can try to turn into a friend network.

Getting a job isn't enough to start building a network. You have to do well at that job, be a good person to work with, and step out of your comfort zone to meet new people.

I've seen a growing number of people learn the hard way that your behavior in the final months of a job leaves a lasting impression. One of the most motivated engineer ladder-climbers I know was very good at interviewing and getting new jobs, but he developed a habit of burning bridges on the way out: After about a year at the company he'd gradually diminish his work output and spend 80% of his day searching for new jobs, interviewing, and negotiating bigger raises at his next job hob. This worked for a while, but after 4 or 5 rounds he had built a reputation for slacking off for a few months and then leaving companies. Word traveled, and he discovered that new jobs would only hire him with longer vesting schedules and sign-on bonuses that had to be paid back if he left before 2-3 years. Eventually nobody well-connected wanted to hire him because they had heard so many stories about him underperforming and bailing at the 1-year mark, despite interviewing well and performing great in the first few months. He finally moved out of state to start over in a new network.

What I'm saying is: The strongest networking you do might not feel like networking. It's years of accumulated reputation. Word travels and people check references. Reference checking felt like it was paused for a few years when everyone was hiring as fast as possible, but now I'm getting reference check calls/texts/DMs more than ever before.

I've had mixed results with networking-focused activities. I've met some good people at networking events, but you have to actively filter out the loud professional networkers and seek out the other people like yourself. The best contacts are not always the loudest, most outgoing, most extroverted people at these events. In fact, some of those people are sharks who are only interested in networking as far as they can use you for leverage, clout, or your connections. Tread lightly.
> I need high contrast.

Me too! That's an independent issue, though.

Normal HN text has a contrast ratio of 19.34:1, which is great.

In contrast (ha ha), greyed-out text has a contrast ratio of 3.54:1, which is terrible.

So, HN should definitely fix text/background contrast ratios ASAP, whether or not they add a dark mode.
Users aren’t leading the blackout, mods are.

This is a fundamental issue with your analysis. Reddit mods are integral to the site’s operations, and they aren’t employees they can just order around.
An artist friend the other day posted a meme to the tune of "Artists will be displaced when clients are able to express their desires clearly. I'm not worried for my job."

Programmers are really artists that way. Our job is not to program computers. Our job is to figure out the client's needs. The implementation on the computer is a matter of craft. That is, it's a skill we've practiced and honed, but it's not the essence of our job. It's not the artistry, any more than holding a paintbrush is the artistry.

It's why I've long discouraged programmers from thinking of themselves as computer jockeys. A lot of developers pat themselves on the back for skills that aren't really that important -- jobs that computers can do better than we can. That was true even before AI, such as the interminable worry about "optimizations" that are better solved by compilers, libraries, and hardware.

I don't doubt that some artists will be replaced by Canva, with worse but acceptable results, and that some developers will be replaced by AI. But there's still a lot of room for us human beings to do what we're actually good at -- being human ourselves and knowing what other humans need. The more you think of yourself as somebody who writes code and are not a "people person", the more you should rightly worry for your job.
I was just reading the other day that The Artist Formerly Known As Prince changed his name to a glyph to circumvent contracts with his music publisher, to enable him to produce more material than they wished to publish (for fear of flooding the market).

If Carlson's argument is successful that exclusivity contracts are inherently First Amendment violations... that sounds like it would have some very serious ramifications.
honestly, if someone could clone the functionality of facebook groups from a UI perspective and make content super searchable, this would be the ideal replacement.

I know there are tons of discord servers, but for older posts etc, it all seems to get lost in the stream.
I've been coming in and out of the Python ecosystem for years as it isn't my primary tool but often is a piece of a project or something along those lines. Is it just my limited exposure, or is there a sort of stagnated, low-key 'GUI lib cold-war' going on in the Python space?

Many libraries, and framework-type things seem to have come and gone, while none have really 'taken hold', so to say. Is this the case? And, specifically, what is the big hurdle to a widely accepted GUI library in Python?
Which one keeps the other insides cages and performs lethal medical experiments?
The GIL is not held during IO, which is what most web applications and web servers should be spending the vast majority of their time doing.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/threading.html

If that’s too limiting, preforking and other forms of process-based parallelism are a tried and true approach that has been used for years to run python, ruby, PHP, and once upon a time Perl web applications at enormous scale. The difference between threads and processes on Linux is relatively minor.

Saying that python doesn’t work for web application use cases because of the GIL is frankly sort of bizarre given the large number of python web applications in the wild chugging along delivering value.
It depends (unfortunately) on what you mean by a Python project:

* If you mean a thing that's ultimately meant to be `pip` installable, then you should use `pyproject.toml` with PEP 518 standard metadata. That includes the dependencies for your project; the PyPUG linked above should have an example of that.

* If you mean a thing that's meant to be deployed with a bunch of Python dependencies, then `requirements.txt` is probably still your best bet.
How real is this problem though? I have no idea how they're organized because I'm usually led to whatever page I wanted to see by Google anyway.
I didn't say ban, I said remove, not that I think there's much of a difference. I hope they do it too, although I expect for entirely different reasons than you do. Funny to see "Reddit Delenda Est" come full circle in a way.

I think mods might be a bit like members of US Congress. I expect that if you asked redditors if they think the mods on reddit are good, they'd say no...unless you asked them if the mods of the subreddits they use are good, in which case they'd say yes. Not convinced that removing the mods and reactivating the subs will go as well as you seem to.
Renewables are not enough to replace coal and gas, so you just need nuclear. Even if the big energy conglomerates didn't get the construction contract (which would be crazy), they'd get you on distribution instead of generation. Or they'll get hand-outs from the government if they start to fail, because they're too big. One way or another they'll get your money.
YouTube channels work with RSS readers :)

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
Nuclear research obviously should have been stopped. I hope that goes without needing to be said...
I always point out the readme pages of projects on github. How many times has that made the difference between you using the project or not?
> Calling mods privileged is hilarious.

They have far more power than regular users, they are by definition some of the most privileged users on the site. If a mod makes a decision that's it for regular users, there's nothing they can do about it.

> It’s a pretty thankless task

Reddit mods have earned their reputation. It's not surprising it's not only thankless, but generally despised.
Raise your kids or watch the world raise your kids for you.

If you think that certain media is imparting negative morals on your child, then it's on you to control that. On the other hand if you think it's unusual, but ultimately harmless, then it's also your prerogative as a parent to allow them to watch it.

But the whole stance of "I can't control what my kids are doing because they'll resent me if I do" just sounds like an excuse to deny your own agency over the situation.
I don't disagree with you, but this does seem like a pretty obvious move for Reddit.

I don't think Reddit cares about appeasing moderators. Though with or without this move it will be very interesting to see what will happen to Reddit if there is a mass exodus of moderators. Moderation is IMO the hardest problem in social media, all other platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc) are objectively terrible at it. Reddit on the other hand with moderation at the micro level vs macro level seems to work. But its 100% on the backs of charitable time from unpaid users. If that falls apart, I can see it having a devastating effect on Reddit as a whole.
The technical writing community refers to this approach as "docs-as-code". Just mentioning that keyword in case anyone wants to research the space further. There is a famous Write The Docs talk on the topic. I think the same author turned that talk into a book.

Fabrizio Benedetti did a cool analysis of various common docs-as-code architectures: https://passo.uno/docs-as-code-topologies/
Once in a great while, I find myself in the market for a cobbler, aka shoe repair shop. They do exist in my metro area, but they are indeed few and far between. The extant ones are very old businesses and they're usually run by some old codger who won't be selling or handing on the business to a successor.

The last shoe repair shop I used was very nice, had merchandise for me to purchase; I picked up a few aromatic cedar shoe trees, some polish and brushes, and had a couple pairs of shoes repaired very nicely. The owner was the only worker there and utterly overwhelmed; he gestured at his backlog which was immense. He cranked the 80s hair metal while he worked. There was supposed to be a shoe shine service, but no shoe shine boy to do it. He was kind to the homeless and passers-by, and people could sit and hang out in his store if they wanted.

He was murdered by a homeless fellow while trying to be kind to him. The homeless guy had gone to use the bathroom, and found the owner's gun lying on the counter, and for some reason used it against the owner himself. I will really miss that owner and his store.
I couldn't find anything for Greenpeace, but I did find Friends of the Earth (which like Greenpeace, also split from Sierra Club), was split off "because of the [Sierra Club's] positive approach to nuclear energy. The founding donation of $500,000 (in 2019 USD) was provided by Robert Orville Anderson, the owner of Atlantic Richfield oil company." [1, 2, 3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28...

[3] https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/
It's endlessly fascinating to me - I basically assume that everyone here knows how to do computer stuff, at least at the enthusiast/power user level. Nobody at that level should have an issue with a system that requires a bit of extra configuration or a really, really tiny learning curve.

And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!"

I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it because there was just no quality interaction on it at all, with people I agree with or otherwise.

I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have several quality conversations a day about things I'm interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your habits a bit, it's fine and it's better.

I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem they're describing exists in a much worse form on the silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.
UML is completely crap as a design language. But it can sometimes be useful as a documentation language.
"They intentionally disrupt your normal brain function"

So do lots of things: Art, advertising, roller coasters, sex. Pretty much anything worth doing "disrupts your normal brain function". And then there's the biggest, manipulation of brain function in history: religion.

Frankly, a life lived in stubborn abstinence is a life wasted, sacrificed on the altar of bullshit self-righteousness. Judging others is an easy way to get your kicks off, but it's not exactly the most healthy. Or in other words "Take a chill pill, dude".
How A Toilet Plunger Improved CPR
Renewables are just not serious – Our leaders just don't believe in them
You can play the episodes in any order, so I expect most people tried all of them.
Yeah, definitely better to just blindly click through a ToS on some private corporate social media service...
Ask HN: Job opportunities for self taught developer
I am a competent self taught software developer with a strong grasp on Typescript using React on the frontend and express on the backend. Currently I am learning to create Shopify apps and checkout extensions. Previously I had been working in the (legal) medical marijuana industry for quite some time, so I don’t have any related real world software development experience to point to on a resume. Is there a path I can follow for shifting into a career in software development? Are there any companies willing to take a chance on someone in my position?
Got polyfills? These don't work on my daily driver Firefox nor on the version of Chrome my managed work laptop is locked to. Assuming it is this feature

https://caniuse.com/?search=scroll%20driven%20animations

It seems like it is still locked behind a feature flag in Chrome.
The crux of the problem right here. Modding is ultimately a power trip, and no mod wants to give up their power. A "head mod" of a popular subreddit wouldn't just join a random lemmy where they can't assert their power.
The first thing I tell people is ".clone() it, Box it, Arc it. You can make it faster later."

Experienced devs see an Arc<RwLock<T>> and are tickled by the "obvious" performance impact, but then they try to use higher ranked lifetimes before fully internalizing the rules and get frustrated. The Rust Way there is to look at how you can reframe the problem to minimize the pain, because that pain is a symptom of an ownership web that's too complex.

If you use the wrapper types while you learn the language, it makes it easier to focus only on learning the lifetime rules, instead of trying to learn the whole language at once.