skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This blog post was written by a lawyer that writes shell-scripts to automate presumably job related tasks, but it reads like he didn't even read the article he's critiquing (https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/practice/profession-sitting-on-...) because he hates that he’s lumped in with lawyers that don’t embrace technology. Despite being a lawyer that lurks on Hacker News, I can admit that I’ve found the article's point mostly true.

The clear thrust of the article Neil is critiquing, right at the top:

- "A study of attitudes to lawtech carried out by The University of Manchester, University College London and the Law Society finds that a lack of understanding by, and encouragement from, senior managers is proving a barrier to the uptake of technologies such as artificial intelligence."

Neil's framing:

- "Pretty much every day, I read something to the effect of 'lawyers are clueless when it comes to tech lol' ... sigh"

From the article:

- "less than a third (32%) use even basic lawtech, such as legal databases and contract review software."

From Neil:

- What on earth is "lawtech"?

From the article:

- "'The legal profession is at a crossroads, with new technologies that promise to transform virtually every aspect of the legal services sector starting to gather pace,' she said. 'However, our report suggests that this transformation might not be as rapid as some would think. It is clear that there is a business case for adopting lawtech, but people are not necessarily equating this to how it will benefit them personallySenior managers and leaders within law firms need to think about creating a clear connection between the benefits to the organisation and the benefits to the individual, if they want to get the buy-in they need from their professional colleagues.'"

There are some lawyers that get tech, but many more have only a very surface level understanding, if that. Especially the “senior managers” the article is directed towards. I understand this article is directed at the UK, but my favorite example of this is SCOTUS justices learning that text messages are routed through, and stored on, intermediary servers. Chief Justice John Roberts, during oral argument in Ontario v. Quon (https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...): “I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing” followed by Justice Scalia: “You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?”
None of the species that have gone extinct (which are over 90% of all species that ever existed) reduced their rates of reproduction voluntarily.
I see, so "Wokism" really means "anti-Trump" . Why didn't they say so.
I'll have to play around with this. Here's something similar for microrythms that I found on GitHub a while ago: https://github.com/davetremblay/Marathon
> Celebrating someone's death means you would have killed them yourself if there was no consequence, am I wrong in saying that?

Yes, I think that you're wrong -- I do find some of the memes amusing, but I'm not celebrating a person's demise. I find humor in the absurdity of it all. Most, but not all, of the memes that I've seen have been making fun of the sub itself and not the passengers. Yes, I find a photo of a ps2 controller attached to a propane tank amusing, but that's about the sub and not the passengers.

HN is a a bubble, and the people here live in a different world than a lot of the rest of the world. On the same page, the ultra wealthy live on a different plane entirely. Surely you can see how a person struggling to make ends meet might laugh at the short-sightedness of a person willing to spend as much as they earn in years on a deadly weekend excursion?
The article indicates that dropping the price failed to reduce transport by car, but Denver did an experiment in 2022 in which fares were entirely dropped and according to reports cited in this Denver Post article, the experiment reduced nitrogen dioxide pollution by more than 7%.

https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/31/rtd-free-fares-ozone-y...

Honestly it's better than I'd expected as my personal reason for avoiding public transit in Denver isn't cost, it's inconvenience and massively increased travel time. I'm inclined to say adding cost complexity would do more to discourage ridership than increase it.
Any self-reapecting pizzeria will cold ferment for three days before attempting to make pizzas with it.
st is actually one of the worst terminals available. For all their purported minimalism, it has abysmally bad performance. See https://danluu.com/term-latency/
I am right there with the author, all the way.

I run a machine with lots of RAM and a hefty CPU and a monster GPU and an SSD for my Linux install and...a pair of HDD's with ZFS managing them as a mirror.

Wat. [1]

I also have Windows on a separate drive...that is also an HDD.

Double wat.

My Linux is snappy, but I also run the most minimal of things: I run the Awesome Window Manager with no animations. I run OpenRC with minimal services. I run most of my stuff in the terminal, and I'm getting upset at how slow Neovim is getting.

But my own stuff, I run off of ZFS on hard drives, and I'll do it in VM's with constrained resources.

Why?

While my own desktop has been optimized, I want my software to be snappy everywhere, even on lesser machines, even on phones. Even on Windows with an HDD.

This is my promise: my software will be far faster than what companies produce.

Because speed will be my killer feature. [2]

[1]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

[2]: https://bdickason.com/posts/speed-is-the-killer-feature/
Imagine where those wages would be without a glut of H1B's...
Why would I want to do twice the work in the same amount of time if I am paid by the hour?
Every real estate transaction I've done has involved two sets of lawyers mailing Word docs to each other with me cc'ed with names like "Purchase and Sale (2) - Copy - Latest".

I actually mentioned to my last lawyer that there is established and well used technology that can show changes between documents. She seemed uninterested and a couple of days later I had to email her about a clause that got dropped in one of the Word doc email tornados the day before.

I see no mention of any kind of version control in this article. It seems crazy to me but I guess that would drive down billable hours.
I’m wondering if you have ever been to Australia. I went once and noticed there were a lot of Astra aliens, then I understood how it got its name!
can you elaborate on a comparison to existing offerings?

Heroku has been handicapped for nearly half a decade, there are a lot of people that already know of alternatives and have changed their system design to accommodate the alternatives. How does Fly.io fit in with Vercel, or Netlify? As opposed to people keeping their Heroku apps on life support
Not sure what I'm saying.

Correlation v. causation isn't all that well known here.
> I honestly haven't seen much of that on HN at all.

dang is an excellent moderator :)
Yeah, I lived in Vancouver until last year too. I'm aware of that kind of post, and many of my friends who recently graduated from uni worry about that too, but it's a stretch to claim they're sobbing and depressed and in tears over it.

Second, nobody is saying their retirement plan is euthanasia other than as a joke, or a dogwhistle.
Unless you hit a job on some consult firm which offers special knowledge about all these!
OctoBase: Local-first, collaborative data engine written in Rust
Any chance this might interact with Block Protocol in any way? https://blockprotocol.org/

The obvious immediate benefit to this would be native editing of Wordpress blocks for your website. But if this became standardized and usable both locally and on the web, it could open up all sorts of interesting use cases.
Correct. I was using lead chelation as an analogy for the medical management of PFAS contamination.
Why does he even care about pi/2? Shouldn't the wrapping of the input (due to the use of fixed-point) make sure that sin(pi/2) == sin(0)?
People have definitely diluted the word trigger, and it is impossible to tell the difference between someone referencing a traumatic experience or something akin to annoyance or being distracted. 'Triggered my anxiety' where anxiety is also diluted to 'something I would prefer not to deal with'.

In this case, it seemed like the phrasing was enough to distract them from a discussion that didnt need to be derailed
I think you misread: GP claimed that PTFE is a type of PFAS, and separately: PFOA is also a type of PFAS. And if PFAS is the problem, it wouldn't be useful to ban specific classes like PFOA if they are just replaced by different classes of PFAS.

I'm not sure about the last claim: it isn't clear that all PFAS are equally bad, so replacing PFOA with a different PFAS might be worthwhile. It seems hard to study, but with Europe banning PFOA, perhaps we'll get some more insight.
So, I had to try this. And look what happened on a 2015 Macbook running Monterey (edit: but check the thread below for possible explanation):

ojs@MacBook-Pro-4 /tmp % time ./a.out
Hello world
./a.out 0.00s user 0.00s system 1% cpu 0.268 total
ojs@MacBook-Pro-4 /tmp % time ./a.out
Hello world
./a.out 0.00s user 0.00s system 72% cpu 0.004 total

It's really that slow on first try. The binary was compiled just before running it, and it's the simplest possible hello world using C++ std::cout, compiled with -O3. C version with puts behaves just the same.
Reddit does something similar, but optimized for string length: elements have ids like "t3_15bfi0" where t3_ is a prefix for the type (t3 is a post, t1 a comment, t5 a subreddit, etc) and the remaining is a base36 encoding of the autoincrementing primary key.
While I do agree with lifestyle changes, it is very clear at this point it doesn't work for the majority of people.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, or something like that...
I start with the objectives.

They need to apply everything in the objectives in a real-world situation.

If you can not apply something, start by learning what the terms (vocabulary) means. If you can not find definitions, ask ChatGPT.

Then try applying the knowledge in a trivial use case - copy the example from a YouTube video. This will often mean spending hours setting up a scenario where you can use that thing. An example of this is setting up a virtual network of VMs to trace some packets for a CompTIA Security+ certification.

After you copy that example, devise your own example. For example, when studying for an Adobe Certified Professional cert in Premiere Pro, I enhanced / fixed some nearly 40-year-old home movies ripped from VHS.

The system takes a lot of time, but if you can understand the terms on the objectives, then copy simple examples, then do your own projects, you will always pass the certification exam.
I don’t think lawyers want version control of contracts. They want what is outlined in the contract to be the final agreement. An agreement with a bunch of history attached seems like it would be worse.
My concern is that such research may fall into private funding, i.e. completely dark to citizens.
Doesn't it depend on the type of failure? Apparently it didn't break but might have deformed to the point that the seal was compromised.
Not a coincidence :)
The children yearn for the mines...
The biggest gatekeep by the lumber industry is that a 2x4 is not two inches by four. It is close to 1-3/4 by 3-3/4.
> Consider this - the flying saucer craze really took off right after the United States developed the atomic bomb - wouldn't such an event pique the interest of an advanced civilization?

No? Why would it, any more so than what came before? We're talking about a civilization advanced enough to detect a few little atomic firecrackers on a planet light years away (in the best halfway-plausible case) in a universe full of REALLY BIG atomic firecrackers, then make a series of recon visits just for the hell of it I guess (must not have limited resources, like, at all) all using physics we're not even on the verge of discovering yet and that would seem to sharply contradict what we have discovered, but also leave no to-us-detectable trace anywhere we can detect, in their visits or with their sensing equipment or their civilization itself, but also also be pretty bad at hiding from us in some kinda implausible ways, but also also also good enough that we can't quite prove they're real (so they... kinda care about being hidden, but not much, or they've carefully selected exactly enough stealthiness to confuse us but nothing more or less, on purpose, for... reasons?). Plus they have to be inclined to care in the first place, enough to visit over and over (but if they can detect an a-bomb from light years away, instantly... why bother to enter the atmosphere?). But not to contact us or attempt conquest or any of that.

"Maybe they left probes here a long time ago, so seeing the a-bombs wasn't so hard" OK, but you've got the same "they're perfectly stealthy except in some very specific ways that don't seem like they'd be hard for a civilization like that to solve" problem, and most of the rest still holds, too.

The "it's aliens" explanation just doesn't make sense to me. It's a whole series of near-impossible or implausible things, required for it to even be possible. Like, it's not technically impossible that Russell's Teapot exists, but... it totally doesn't. I judge "it's aliens" barely more likely than "it turns out god is real and does miracles sometimes".
Not everyone can make this change — the causes of obesity are not well understood. For the morbidly obese, exercise carries risk too — to joints and the heart, for instance. A large weight reduction (whether via GLP-1 antagonists, gastric band, or exogenous trauma) can both motivate and make easier other changes like the ones you advocate.
You will also have a brick in your colon. Not good advice.
You kid, but it’s a valid argument. I’ve known a good few Canadians over the years who went down to the U.S. for work experience and some have even lost their PRs because of some newer policy requiring that they spend half their time in Canada. It’s something that really backfired hard. I’m actually really sad and disappointed for Canada that it is like this. Historically it’s much easier to leave the country than enter it if you’re a skilled person.

This is a big deal. Back in the early 2010s, software developers moving to SF pretty much willed into existence the tech industry up there. Before then, companies would start in SF and move down to the valley. If skilled folks want to move to your area, it can be a boon, and if I’m not mistaken, Canadian tax policy is better suited to redistribute the gains from that than U.S. tax policy.
Privacy is binary you either have it or you dont and to argue that there exists a "balance" is disingenuous.
Very few Windows users agree.

They always claim they'll do weird things to Windows, and then they always backtrack. It's this odd self-harm theme thing they have been doing for the past two decades or so.

I wouldn't worry.
Not OP, but opening almost every link as a new tab, and keeping old tabs around because you don't have a great bookmark organization system.

I am trying to break myself of these habits, but they do have some benefits. For instance when I do a web search on a complex topic, I often scan the results, opening the most promising looking results as tabs. Then I look through the tabs comparing them. The trouble is I never remember to close them when the task is done.
Not all work is equal. Some will require partner time - others lead to longer more lucrative relationships. Being capable of handling more load means you will earn more money in the long run - usually a goal for most business owners.

Not to mention, you might not require a small army of paralegals and secretaries anymore... fewer staff can get the same load accomplished.

It even opens the door to charging flat-rates for certain services, instead of by the 1/10th hour or whatever.

The point is, doing more in less time is always better... even if you decide to kick back and relax with your newfound time.
After five tries, give up
Why UChicago became the headsquarters of free market fundamentalism
At least we have to step down into the shared reality sometimes, to deal with customers and the real-world problems that they pay us to solve.

Lawyers only drag their customers up into a constructed reality. They're paid to solve problems in lawspace, not in the real world.
I've been going through the sales gauntlet lately for a new company I'm working on, and it's ROUGH!

I hacked together a prototype using free tiers and easy-to-access sandbox environments and guess what, we're gonna transition to the paid tier after getting some feedback on the MVP. At this point, it doesn't matter if a competitor's sales person can give us a better deal "because it's the end of the quarter" merely due to the fact that the code has already been written.
Yeah, this idea makes me uneasy as well for the same reason. The natural conclusion would be to have DB frameworks automatically do this based upon code type names and that definitely feels like a leak, handing the world at large a roadmap to your internal system architecture.
I'm not so certain. Up close, paintings are complex 3D sculptures made from a palette of materials, (not colors), each with varying levels of translucence, different reflective properties, different textures, etc. and they can be combined and moved around in infinitely complex ways.

Might be possible in a few decades, though.
Trump is Trump, I wouldn't use him as an example personally.

The guy who wrote this article in the Boston Globe is "a professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College" - seems like it wouldn't be worth him making this up.

And he doesn't describe seeing distant lights in the sky, but a flying saucer hovering over him and aiming a light on him- what could he be misidentifying?
None of what are an sphere.
PeerStreet Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection
Worth noting that because he's using a hydraulic press, the load isn't constant.

It deforms, fibers break, and thus the load decreases as the deflection stays relatively constant in that time frame.

With external pressure the load doesn't decrease. Fibers break -> deflection increases -> more fibers break. There isn't load relief as long as the vessel is still holding pressure.
This already exists, and is the CN rail line to Hay River. The young folk eventually float down to Edmonton or Calgary.
That if a hundred servers are generating (uuid, timestamp) tuples that are subsequently merged on a single machine, and sorted by uuid, it would have almost the same order as if sorted by timestamp.

This property is useful for RDBMS writes, when the UUID is used as a primary key and this locality ensures that fewer slotted pages need to be modified to write the same amount of data.
Paul needs 3 bugs every minute. Overfeeding him looses the game

Don't be like me, don't overfeed Paul
> the recent environmental disaster accompanying the 4/20 launch

"Environmental disaster"? A bit overdramatic, isn't it? The amount of "debris and dust" was absolutely minuscule compared to regular human activity in a developed country like the US.
Insulin resistance causes weight gain, and insulin can cause insulin resistance right? It's complicated but not implausible.
I can try and explain it. The definition is not going to rely on any kind of hard values or studies, because it is a soft cultural term used for name calling.

Passions that are seen as childish usually tend to lack any sort of practical utility. Action figures and games are ultimately just timewasters. Kids learning to build stuff with woodworking tools would seem less childish because that is a useful skill compared to building things out of legos. Often, a skill that would otherwise be practical becomes childish when it is simplified to be impractical, and thus, easier for kids to learn.

Even in the world of fiction and literature, which can easily be argued to be a timewaster regardless of quality, the stuff that is childish is also generally seen as overly simplified. Explicitly this is done by ratings boards that don't let certain content be present in kid's movies and books. Implicitly, writers and directors can and do simplify and dumb down their work when creating something made for children. It is possible for someone making a work for children not to rely so much on simplification, but the reality is that this happens far less often then proponents of the "Young Adult" genre would suggest. Just go look at the shit you find in a bookstore if you think I'm wrong.

I wouldn't call being anti-intellectual childish by this definition, though, because there is a practical value in realizing that intellectuals can say incorrect things at any time.
Depends on what you mean by "anywhere". If your only goal in life is to see Linux take over the datacenter, well you should be happy. But if Linux ok the desktop is more of your goal, then I think that the corporations have actually been a detriment because they prioritize changes that help the server ecosystem, even if it makes the desktop shittier.
This is true. You can think about this fairly simply as you just have to think about the amount of energy traveling within a transistor and what that energy's proportionate level is to a cosmic ray. Smaller IC's are more likely to be hit (cross-section is higher due to density AND that we operate in fields, no need for a direct physical interaction of the mass).

But that's not why they cost so much. Rad hardened ICs are built differently. They are built on a sapphire base: Silicon on Sapphire (SoS). Process is more complicated and expensive.

That said, there are more people looking at commercial off the shelf (COTS) and just building redundant systems because 2 COTS CPUs can be cheaper (and more powerful) and because ECC has gotten much better. But this is really only for LEO right now, but may be used in deeper space missions later on. Realistically it is just going to be dependent on how much your ride costs. LEO is cheap now, so risk of failure is dramatically reduced. Your ride is still most of your cost though.
Presumably switching to de-prioritizing off-label prescriptions?
Not even about technology. All the books in the list are about Southern California Internet culture.

Empathy Diaries and Darwin Among the Machines don't seem to rate, being much more rooted on the East Coast Harvard/MIT cultural bubble but both changed how I see computer technology and its role in society.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628761
maybe we need a new title. Just like we have PM and TPM, we need T-Lawyer :)
> By that reasoning we should rewrite all these tools in JavaScript or Ruby, Python or some such. Clearer (than C), more readable and readable/reviewable to far more people.

> Edit: to be clear: I think that would be an extremely dumb idea.

I dunno if it really is that dumb.

Why can't sudo be rewritten in Go? The performance difference is not likely to be noticed and there's no runtime platform dependence (as with Python, et al).

And, with managed memory, you'll have even fewer memory-safety bugs than with Rust.

What exactly makes Rust a better fit for sudo than Go, bearing in mind that Go is a whole lot safer than Rust.
Surely it isn't the military that requires this? I couldn't find anything on a 25 cm limit, but I don't the military is a regulatory agency.
Well UUIDv7 can be consumed as a UUIDv4 in the same way, its just 16 bytes. The point of the standard is to define how the particular bytes are chosen.
My plumber prefers copper pipes. He's replaced a couple of leaks (in PVC pipes) with copper at core junctions in my house. I never knew it was dangerous.