skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Open source is not a panacea, as evident by the graveyard of open source protocols and products like NNTP, IRC, phpBB, RSS, Diaspora, GNU social, Hubzilla and so on.

The problem with open source is that it's indeed open, but due to decentralization, it can't innovate rapidly, as there's no central party to push for change. No innovation means it can't respond to evolving community needs and it gets abandoned in favor of the next closed source alternative. This is how RSS died, actually: when Twitter showed up.

The bottom line for me is that open source is only suitable for established "end stage" products and services which need no rapid evolution. Until then, startups need to carry the torch.

In all cases, you need intelligence. In the startup leadership creating a commercial, closed product, or the consortium evolving an open standard. Intelligence solves a lot of problems. Lack of it causes many problems. As seen with Twitter.
> Carthage was trying to conquer Rome. They had no choice but to keep fighting.

Not really. They could have reached a negotiated settlement. Both the first and second Punic wars ended in a negotiated settlement (of course very much in favor of Rome). Carthage would likely have been ok with Rome agreeing that all of Spain would be in Carthage’s sphere of influence. Worst case, they would return Sicily which they gained in the first Punic war.

Rome’s decision to keep on fighting was not one necessitated by survival or maintaining independence.
And I'm still waiting for the day when Firefox will finally fully support MS Teams and FaceTime.
The moment you started providing a paid service you became a business. The legal status, as in company, independant, or whatever, depends on your local laws.
I liked the book and agree with a lot of it's conclusions, but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.

Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe looking back was actually valuable?
I love this. Will this have the postage stamp from a particular country though? That's probably hard to implement, but it's what's magical about postcards to me
I live close to Pickwick’s / Poor Richard’s Pub and my friend would always want to meet there for a beer. It’s a fine place, but with the amount of options in LA I figured he was an Office fan but after a few visits I asked him and he said “I’ve never really watched that show. Why do you ask?”

It made me laugh. I guess I’ve seen too many super The Office fans to just assume he liked this odd little pub on Ventura.
It's so funny reading this after scrolling past a bunch of Western Europeans (what I assume you mean by "around the world", since that's almost always what's meant) talking about how they can be arrested for not carrying identification on them at all times. As an American, it sounds like your judges and politicians haven't even tried to keep them in check.
I was talking about this book with a friend and they worked for the state qualifying people for government benefits. Think food stamps, welfare, etc etc. They said their job was a bullshit job. Why? Their reasoning was if you eliminated all the people who have to qualify people for benefits and just gave benefits to anyone who applied, you would end up spending less time and money.
Thank you. The focus was on simplicity and handling less complex scenarios. In my current projects the business logic lends itself to sitting outside the FSM/State Trooper. The logic dictates the transitions at arms length to the FSM. The FSM does not carry on any particular business logic, it just enforces the transition rules from one state to any number of possible states - hence why I've included the metadata aspect to embed info about the reason for a transition.

Re the visualization, I think that would be cool. I might give that a shot.
The Story of Ampersand.

https://sharegpt.com/c/J1U3T7m
Energy Harvesting via Vibrations: Highly Durable and Efficient Device
I honestly think the author doesn’t understand the jobs that are presented as bullshit jobs, and here’s an example:

> In some countries, such as Brazil, such buildings still have uniformed elevator operators whose entire job is to push the button for you. There is a continuum from explicit feudal leftovers of this type to receptionists and front-desk personnel at places that obviously don’t need them.

This example speaks to me because I recall many years ago using an elevator in Rio de Janeiro which had an operator, and although his job was ostensibly to push the buttons, he was in fact part of the security apparatus - the friendly outer layer of a defence-in-depth strategy.

Not bullshit at all.

Now that’s not to say that organizational dysfunction doesn’t exist. I’ve seen people get hired and then the project that motivated the hiring has lost funding and the person has been idle. I’ve seen managers go on long-term sick leave and their +1 being too busy to find a replacement or provide supervision themselves, leaving teams directionless. I’ve seen people work really hard on bad ideas that didn’t fail fast enough.

Those people absolutely described their jobs as bullshit, but it was circumstantial bullshit, not an intrinsic property of the job.

The other angle here is grand purpose. The author denigrates some jobs because they achieve some allegedly amoral outcome. You might think that cosmetics shouldn’t exist, or that if they exist they shouldn’t be advertized. But that’s a value judgment to say the least, and a wholly different argument to declaring the whole supply chain to be made of bullshit jobs.
I am pleased about my new knowledge of small electric vehicles. Your pointer lead me to https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/13/what-a-lovely-surprise-... which highlighted how much fuel costs in Zimbabwe, leading to interest in these cars.

Thank you to all who answered my question!
The Age of Chat
Wow, good find! Thanks for the link.
Then why don’t we go back to assembly? There is even less magic there, every line is trivial to understand, isn’t it?
This is useless in any real situation. Gives you a false sense of security but no one will take a copy seriously.
Covid got him. Like so many others.
For me basic formal logics means learning the symbols (conjunction, disjunction, implication, equivalency, not, etc.) and the rules of inference to maniuplate these symbols and using these rules to prove new things.

How can you teach analysis without that anyway. It is absolutely essential for set theory and how would you e.g. define the reals (in a "proper" math course, not engineering) without a good understanding of set theory?

If you don't believe me, here is a link to the contents of a first semester engineering math course from some german technical university: https://page.math.tu-berlin.de/~joswig/teaching/notes/Joswig...

The symbols should be enough to tell you what the contents are.
Try looking up medical queries, especially for anything more complex than a regular flu.

The first page is just the same few domains. Meanwhile, websites dedicated to the disease and often maintained by supportive communities languish at the bottom of the pile.

Why? Because Google decided that “authority” of domains is important, not the content. So a generic article on WebMD will rank higher than a forum page filled with mountains of information from actual patients and medical professionals.
It already [almost] happened twice.

Kazakhstan had plans to introduce country-wide MITM with certificates signed by a government agency, whose root certificate would have had to be marked as trusted if you wanted to use internet [1].

Many Russian government websites including the largest retail bank had their certificates revoked due to sanctions, which forced the government to start their own untrustworthy certificate center, whose root CA is trusted out of the box by Yandex Browser and has to be trusted if you wanted to access these sites [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_a...

[2]: (In Russian) https://www.gosuslugi.ru/tls
A foreign drivers license is only valid when accompanied by a passport.
Yeah, I was being somewhat polite with the way I stated it... A PD who meets you at the last minute and just shepherds you through plea bargaining wouldn't be a surprise, and horror stories of them dozing off in court and the like abound.
In the US this is completely untrue. Research universities basically never have layoffs. In contrast, Google alone has in the last year laid off more people than the combined faculties Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford.

Private sector layoffs are harder in Europe and academia is less well funded, so it might be true-ish in Europe.
I wouldn't classify that as wholly accurate. Yes there is a substantial rural community but that's quite true for lots of Ireland. Letterkenny in Donegal has a sizeable tech sector for a small place although one with an unfortunate road network far too small for the traffic it gets. Internet was pretty standard when I lived there, nothing to write home about but not slow. Amenities aren't going to be extensive of course so if you're used to a city you'd find it sparse.

The other aspect is, while Donegal is more remote to the rest of the Republic, Derry in Northern Ireland is a city right beside it and is generally considered part of the overall area. North west that is, it's not within Donegal itself.

I can't speak for the islands though.
I just used it too. And I think it’s actually faster to go back and forth via text than to enter data in a web form.

I can text faster than form enter. And the transaction is saved for reference.

It’s probably also cheaper to build since you don’t have to design and host a web site.
I'd conjecture that the training corpus also tends to be at either end of the spectrum (good and bad, little in the middle). People don't tend to share pitch decks unless:

* They're bragging, showing why it was so good.

* They're reflecting, analyzing why it was so bad.
Apple people are always like this. They always find justifications for their company. If you ask an Apple guy why does the mouse have the charge port on the bottom, making it unusable when charging, he'll say Tim Apple has perfectly engineered the mouse to optimize for the right amount of time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
Yes, I think an English creole is more likely than any other existing language.
The problem is that it could also happen at any time in the next 10,000 to 100,000 years.
Chances are there is more to the story here. We're getting third-hand information after all.
That sounds like a good first-step, when the biggest concern might be relying too much on a PCIe PCB card edge connector as a structural element, as a tower case is bouncing up and down perpendicular to the vertical motherboard.

I was thinking of travel environments more hostile than that, when I might really like a road/flight case with shock absorbing. Without custom-fitting a case, rackmount is a good choice, and (with short depth) has the flexibility of looking like a presentable desktop/under-desk if you want to unrack it when not on the road.
I have no doubt there are a great many people employed doing things like maintaining and policing the boundaries between organisations.

For example, the process of making retail purchases and delivering the right item is highly automated - think of what happens when you place an order on amazon or ebay or any other major retailer.

But when a big corporation wants to make a purchase it's manual, manual, manual, manual. Manual e-mail to ask the supplier for a quote. Manually send that to the purchasing department, who'll manually copy it into a purchase order, then manually e-mail it to the person who wants the items, who'll manually forward it to the supplier, who'll dispatch the goods to the customer, who'll manually e-mail someone to say they've been received, then the supplier will create an invoice and send it by e-mail, to someone who'll manually enter it into the finance system where it'll eventually get paid (After 30 days? 90 days? Who knows) then the supplier will get e-mailed a PDF and they'll manually match the payment up with the invoice.

A great deal of manual labour, in other words, to accomplish what Amazon can do for a cent or two. And a lot more opportunities for human error too, when for some unfathomable reason the item descriptions are reworded for the purchase order, or the product is dispatched without the recipient's name or to the wrong building.

Why? It's certainly not to save money, the suppliers who'll deal with this stuff understandably mark up the products for their trouble. To spot fraud perhaps - but if you've been doing the job for years without spotting any fraud, I can well believe the job would seem pointless.
David Graeber was such an interestingly polarizing personality, since the people who like him and the people who dislike him seem at times to fall under politically unconventional lines - or maybe the polarization isn't about politics at all. Some people react to public figures based on those figures' strong personalities, but it's surprising that that might be the case with Graeber, since he was pretty damn mild mannered and affable when one actually observed him in interviews.

The guy who rants maniacally about Graeber in every. single. thread. about Greaber's work hasn't commented yet. I hope he's okay.
Wasn't (isn't) double clicking the title bar the maximize behavior for Windows and Gnome too?
Gmail has been so bad at stopping spam and useless email that I’ve had to essentially abandon one of my email addresses.
love it! shutup and take my money/adoption/usage/attention! ha

no but seriously, sounds like a good/useful plan/approach. please let me know if you share out a spec or impl sometime

BONUS points for a Golang or C lib
You're in luck! We're offering a brand new moral-spinedectomy operation, guaranteed to turn mushy humanity into glorious ~~psychopathy~~ - I mean leadership!

Got a CEO who just can't do the right thing (for the shareholders)? We offer up to 20-way split billing so the whole board of directors can chip in for the surgery!

Four-hour recovery before your CEO is ready to do ANYTHING to meet quarterly expectations, no matter how cruel and capricious! Or your money back!
iTunes was progressive. AppleTV is garbage. Apple makes toys for adults; nothing we can't live without.

Solar is accessible to the masses.

Cloudflare seems useful, until you need them. Never trust a company headed by a lawyer.

Netflix makes good stuff, but the bad softcore lesbian porn in every show is getting tiring. (Protip: an obligatory lesbian romance does not make boring female characters interesting!). Wokeness and all, TV is better than the cheesy 90s-00s.

TVs themselves are cheaper, but that's not the result of FAANG. Most computer parts are cheaper than in the 90s too.

Software is sortof better. The nightmare of fucking with IRQ settings to get SoundBlaster to work were behind us, but have since been replaced now replaced with virtual environments, cloud bullshit and virtual environments within cloud bullshit. We had a decent run of software that "just worked" until recently.

Google Search is garbage now. Used to be revolutionary.

AI is cool if you like motel art and corporate literature. And ignore the misery of out-of-work creatives.

Your washing machine is the same as it was in the 70s, only now the basin of water is turned sideways and a bunch of expensive computer chips are stacked around it. Laundry reinvented, now with more mildew and electrical problems!

Microwaves are exactly the same.

Food doesn't cook itself, but you can buy a fridge for $10k that shows you what's inside-- from the outside. Glass, reinvented. You can access it from Bulgaria though!

Flying cars? Still working on the self-driving part.

We don't live longer, and life is no easier. The promises of Big Tech are underwhelming.
I only have an iPad these days, I now use Windows; but when I did use MacOS, has Apple fixed your first bug? Can you resize windows from any edge or corner now, or must one always uses the lower right corner only to resize the window?
> too many people think that their values or rules are universal.

That's why travelling is good?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65787391
I use it with Teams every day. The only thing that doesn't work is notifications (and I blame Microsoft for that). What else do you find isn't working?
What happens when a channel abruptly closes? Or when it throws an error?

Erlang VM guarantees that [1]

- all processes are isolated. Fatal error in one process will not affect other processes. Crucial: it will not affect the VM.

- If you set up process monitoring, and that process dies for whatever reason the monitor will be notified, with the actual reason. This lets the monitor (the supervising process) decide what to do next: restart, do nothing, stop entirely etc.

- Other relevant things like processes suspended when waiting for messages, or running out of reductions (number of allocated calls and messages) so that other processes can be executed, a bunch optimizations in the VM about CPU caches etc.

So what you have is "kubernetes for processes, inside the VM".

And the reason you don't have supervision for either Go or Rust is simple. Both Go and Rust for some completely asinine reasons decided that an unhandled error should kill the entire running application, with no chance of recovery.

And later they both awkwardly bolted on a half-assed solution to catch panics. That's it. That's the extent of error handling and guarantees in those languages. Of course no one builds supervision trees there.

[1] Of course it's not a 100% guarantee, nothing is, but other languages don't have even that.
Every US auto company (and many/most manufacturing companies) has had net reductions for decades now. That's not short term net reductions.

Plenty of white collar employers have had net reductions too. Most of the dotcom era companies net reduced all the way to zero.
Texting a number makes it accessible from more devices out of 336 million, uploading a photo makes it accessible from fewer devices out of 7 billion.
Unpleasant as it is for those who lost their jobs, the country seems better off now. The sheer overwhelming bureaucracy that built up over hundreds of years really did need to be trimmed.
It’s because China has two faces which are often being viewed simultaneously by foreigners and locals alike. It wants to project peace through power outwardly and put on its best diplomatic display but internally they are training their children to want to kill Americans.
That’s interesting. In your context what is “knowing the answer”? To me it seems like they “knew” a given statement was true but they didn’t know how to prove it which makes me wonder how they knew.
UX when snapping to the right of the screen will suffer because the toolbar will forever be stuck to the top left of the screen. As such, I don’t believe this is a well optimised use case and might be why Apple doesn’t want to “emphasise” this particular use case.
Everyone thinks inclusion is bullshit until they're the ones being excluded. Talk to some older devs and you might learn they've latterly come see the value in "bullshit" HR policies against discrimination.
I was waiting for support to download YouTube videos with YT Premium on FF desktop and the other day the button just appeared! Not sure if was something missing on FF end or YT just didn't want to support it before, but yeah, no more waiting.
I think it’s less important what we think and more important how contemporary Roman leaders would have thought about it. Are there any writings on how they saw it?
I'm not following your logic. Could you explain what happened?
If there was the political will for it, nothing about our legal system makes it impossible to prohibit admitting confessions as evidence in court. We could just say "those are never evidence, the prosecution isn't allowed to introduce them or even hint that they have occurred".

Police could still use them as a lead, to track down real evidence. If the culprit claims to have disposed of the murder weapon and they discover the weapon where he said it was, that's real evidence.

But more generally, eyewitness testimony itself (of which confessions are just a special variant of) should be inadmissible. Professionals giving professional testimony from notes and reports they have compiled should be the whole of it.
“ Via a survey of 250 investors and 250 business owners…”

Who cares what humans think. What did GPT-4 think about the pitches?
Well, the argument is that these conventions are exploitative (copyright basically forever) and therefore do not have moral force. Also that certain countries used copying to go up the economic ladder and then kicked the ladder.
For me personally as a home cook I do best when I learn some of the concepts and then I can use whatever I have instead of trying to get a bunch of specific ingredients.

For example one of my staples is braised chicken and vegetables. I know I can use any of certain vegetables I might have (mushrooms, onions, celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, potatoes or sweet potatoes, shallots, etc), any of a couple liquids (water, chicken or vegetable stock, red or white wine, beer, etc) and spice it up with (heavy cream, fresh or dried herbs, mustard, garlic, pepper, bacon, butter, lemon, etc). And I know roughly how I want to cook it: flour the chicken and cook until brown and crispy in a pan, take it out and brown any firmer vegetables, add some spices, add the rest of the vegetables and my cooking liquid and bring to a small boil, put everything in a big oven dish, pop the chicken on top, bake at around 400 for 30-50 minutes until the chicken seems done, add any last things that might burn like cream in the final 5 minutes and then plate up and eat.

Now I don't have to go to the store and look for anything, don't have to worry too much about measuring ingredients, don't have to worry about cook time or technique. I can whip up a big family dinner pretty quickly with whatever I have on hand and experiment a bit with different flavors with confidence that it will turn out good.
You can discover so many things on Mac by Option-clicking! It’s used in many places to give an ‘alternate’ function to buttons and the like.
Anthropology is not science and economics is far more quantitative than any humanities ever will be. And more importantly, economists usually have the honesty to call their opinion an opinion and separate it from the statistics, whereas any metric used by a humanities person usually comes in the form of a number they attached to their opinion to present as a fact.
The Chinese view on IP is very different from the western one, but in some ways it's just as "open source". These articles give a good overview:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807651

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5703946
It's very difficult for a non-Chinese person to get citizenship in China. Chinese people like interacting with people of other races, but it goes without saying that China is for the Chinese.

Racism doesn't require a sense of superiority, but rather a preference for race(s). I'm not offended that I can't get citizenship in China. Do you think they think they're better than you?
This seems like a Microsoft problem.