skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like because there isn’t a direct economic exchange, we still want to squeeze that transactional milieu into the equation to answer “why would somebody do something if they aren’t paid.”

So the only possible result, because the assumption is that nobody does anything is that isn’t selfishly compensated, is that there MUST be a psychic - non-priced - selfish benefit to the user. That might be true but I’m not sure that you can use those interchangeably because the latter has no pricing mechanism.

Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.

No, I actually think that there’s another organizational structure here that we’ve just not seen or have a name for. Namely it’s where volunteers provide labor for privately owned property, have some control over said property but receive zero of the excess economic value produced by the mix of property holder and labor.

Procedurally:
1. Reddit the organization fronts some amount of capital to provide the platform

2. Volunteers then stake claim to manage and curate limited sub-properties (sub reddits)

3. Reddit the organization sells advertisement placement within the volunteer properties - completely separate from and without the collaboration with subreddit moderators

4. Reddit then keeps 100% of the advertising dollars and zero go to the moderators (or for that matter active members who arguably make the bulk of valuable contributions via content that drive revenue)

Contributions to “open source” that are not on publicly distributable licenses would fall into this category also.

Note here, I’m not using this particular point to complain about the structure - even though I believe it’s not a good structure. I’m simply pointing out that this is a structure that exists for which we don’t really have a coherent understanding of in my opinion
Use the argument ($1) if supplied otherwise default to /bin/bash.

It's why I avoid using stuff like that because I won't remember how it works in 6mths.
> now keep redoing something slightly different every fortnight and enjoy your constantly half-broken system.

Yeah, if any of that is even remotely true then something is horribly wrong with your system.
i feel like you’re missing the elephant in the room.
Good summary. Clear, concise, real. I wish we had advocacy groups sitting on corners with signs saying this. Seriously. People need to wake up, and they need a concise understanding to latch onto. I say it like this, "Perhaps social media where you upvote, downvote and like is just a shitty idea, for businesses and people. I think people WILL realize this, and I am hoping it will not crash software engineering, but I think it will, but most people building shitty software will leave the industry, while the useful software will continue. So it's important to be with an employer in an industry that is legitimate.
Police want robotaxi video footage to help solve crimes
It's called that pejoratively against the post-roman era because petrarch was, in the fad of his time, a classical antiquity fetishist and considered the romans the "light" against which the darkness was compared.

It isn't used by modern historians because that concept and the light-vs-dark dichotomy isn't useful, as a historical practice. The idea that all local order collapsed with the roman empire is simply mythology, anachronistic veneration of a hierarchical system of power.

The romans were at least as violent as anything that came after. The idea that they provided unique stability in exchange for that violence is the roman justification for it. Vestigial propaganda from 2000 years ago. We are not obligated to accept it and in fact modern historians typically do not.

The facts of history may not change, but our understanding of it develops like any other academic discipline. Maybe don't reject a generation's worth of development in a complex field because your surface-level appraisal makes you sad.

> Do not say, “Why is it that the former days were better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this.
Uhh, it’s definitely our lifestyle and healthcare system, which promotes passive treatment rather than early identification of diseases, primarily heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Alzheimer’s too but early identification of this is still not a reasonable expectation atm.

Also, fwiw, the article talks a lot in terms of comparisons and where gains can be had in relative terms. But in absolute terms, those 4 items above are still going to be the most crucial to really moving the needle on life expectancy.

You named all the really headline grabbing ones though, so good job on that!
Buy a $20 SpO2 monitor, and realize that your blood is already saturated with O2. You'll find that you're generally between 97%-99% to begin with, so what is adding oxygen going to do? The amount of oxygen that reaches your tissues is a function of the carrying capacity of your erythrocytes, and unless you're very sick or in an extreme environment, that isn't driven by ambient O2 levels.
Doh, I must have confused some provider's policy with the law for the 24 hour thing. Still I'd make the point that the processing of a DMCA notice and the takedown generally happen simultaneously (regardless of delays), as opposed to say giving the uploader enough time to respond with a counterclaim and avoid an interruption in service.

That is a very interesting case! The part about the DMCA not applying to most Youtube takedowns (because the legit uploader has given Youtube a license) is particularly surprising, despite being a straightforward implication of the law.
Ie my original plan to stay in BigTech for four years and go back to my comfortable life of working for smaller companies.

But I will see if the pay/bullshit ratio is high enough to be worthwhile after my four year anniversary next year and all of my initial stock vest is completed.

But at 49 years old, my shit tolerance level is very low.
The main energy export of Texas is natural gas, which is responsible for a significant portion of the decrease in greenhouse emissions in the US[1]. Furthermore, Texas has led the nation for 17 years in production of wind energy, and accounts for 25% of US production[2].

If you are going to act joyful for the suffering of others, you should at minimum get your justifications correct.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296
[2] https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=TX
> OpenAI is a serious threat to Google's 1%, because it can give better answers

For now.

source: old enough to remember Netscape vs Microsoft and many other examples.
I remember this as well from the mid-late 2000s, it was like drawing on the bathroom wall but for the internet.
Remember that obesity and its attendant maladies were the leading co-morbidity in COVID deaths, but that was conveniently memory-holed for fear of fat shaming. I read a post about the 14-year-old or close girl who died from COVID. The parents said she was healthy, and yet the photo portrayed an obviously obese teen. Nature and reality do not practice tolerance in these cases. Maybe some shame is not an absolutely bad thing.
I agree, and I think this conflict is actually visible within the essay. One particular parenthetical jumped out at me:

> So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you'll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don't avoid love.)

PG never explains why love is an exception. Perhaps he thought it was obvious. I disagree.

I agree that familial love is important to the overall human experience. But this isn't an essay on how to live a fulfilling life, it's an essay on "how to do great work," for a so-called "very ambitious" person who wants to achieve "great work" at any cost. In this context, familial love is no less of a distraction than anything else. History is littered with eccentric artists who prioritized their work above any human interaction, and achieved fame for it.

So why does PG say not to avoid love? I believe it's because deep down, he realizes that "great work" isn't the most important thing in life—but he isn't quite aware enough to acknowledge it.
If mods are the landed gentry, then he is the autocratic king....
Actually, I work at a job that perfectly fits my desired work/life balance and desired code shipping frequency/schedule.

You seem to be assuming that people working at Twitter don't have the ability to look for another job, if they are unhappy.
Sure but it wasn't even a Common Lisp initially.

I see there are still comments attributing to Spice project in CMUCL source. But it's hard to make how much of the code is still original. E.g. reader is one of those files but it certainly seen major rework, seeing all the unicode support and whatnot.
Cyclorotor
If you like this type of thing, Sebastian Lague made an update to his brilliant chess engine video https://youtu.be/_vqlIPDR2TU

Very insightful and a lot of fun to watch the improvements.
After multiple Google services being closed, awful, etc... I'm urgently wanting someone to Fork android and not attempt to bring it back to the Google branch.

I'm not sure how difficult it is to keep an OS going. What upgrades have I needed in the last 6 years? Security sure, but outside some phone system upgrades and messaging, I'm not sure what we even need to upgrade at this point.
Don’t let the HN bubble fool you. Most of the 2.7 million developers in the US are making between $80K-$170K in most major cities outside of the west coast.
I think he kind of covers that by having first pass estimates done by the TL and having a rubric for complexity.

Granted that metrics are dangerous, this seemed like a reasonable stab at solving some of the problems (assuming it was done carefully).

Of course, it's no substitute for hiring the right people and having a less anxious upper management chain.
One piece of America's low average life expectancy is our high infant mortality rates. We have the highest mortality rate of any wealthy nations at 5.4 infant deaths per 1000 live births. (Compare 2-3 / 1000 in Western Europe [2]). And that rate is highly correlated to race and ethnicity, nearly double for infants born to Black parents [3].

1: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/08/health/child-mortality-rates-...

2: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/infant-mo...

3: https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/...
I’ve been thinking similarly[0] about the community ownership/moderation problem[1] and have come to a similar conclusion that I think the next “reddit” will need to move away from moderators and fiefdoms if it wishes to succeed. When the moderation team is great the community flourishes, but too often communities are not well run, and badly led communities eventually crush a platform’s success.

- [0] https://www.scottgoci.com/killing-the-king-why-do-communitie...

- [1] https://www.scottgoci.com/from-pioneers-to-landed-gentry-exp...
Also available for Firefox!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-n...

Source code:

https://github.com/pinoceniccola/what-hn-says-webext
That's fascinating! Time to update my Blogpost on git hooks and go down this rabbit hole !
My opinion is that a moderate approach is required, maybe a new solution needs to be discovered.

I think ESM modules are most of the times desirable by developers of small to mid size packages. These developers want to have their packages used both on server and in browser.

On the other side heavy duty packages which are able to generate production loads (see Fastify) should use CommonJS. In my opinion production loads should not have importable elements, stay private and rather just run and get the job done. At the same time it is really not that important for such loads to have good loading times for the micro packages used.

This is debatable, but yet another aspect to consider: server side production loads must use CommonJS.
Only Twitter was an advertising company. And for that to run smooth, you apparently need a lot of staff.

From people that ensure your Kelloggs ads don't appear below literal neonazi movies, to people that close deals on large advertising campaigns, to people that ensure the place where those ads appear (Twitter, the product) actually keeps running.
And nobody would call those open.
Wait, you mean these internet points are fake??
> land use policy is implicated in a decent chunk of this. America’s fatalities per kilometer driven are very average, but we drive a lot more than anyone else, including residents of Canada and Australia

Nice call-out there!
> The majority of modern scholars avoid the term [Dark Ages] altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. Despite this, Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use, particularly in popular culture, which often simplistically views the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

It's named the Dark Ages because 11th century scholars wanted to feel like their time period was enlightened and great compared to the past, not because there was some deep, thoughtful analysis.
This was very illuminating thanks, learned something new
> Other way around - by having to actually directly compete for customers, instead of just having to convince a few large corporation prices would go down, not up.

This is backwards logic. Those few large corporations have the bargaining power to negotiate lower premiums. Individual consumers have zero bargaining power.
This is not a healthcare problem, this is a lifestyle problem.

The US has led the world in lifestyle changes, which I would argue are almost entirely economically (capitalistic business) driven.

Incomplete and in no particular order, there are the government diet guidelines which have at times been primarily driven by certain industries (agricultural organizations including corn growers, sugarcane growers, dairy producers), including pharmaceutical industries... And then the energy industry + auto industry, which has led to more time sitting in cars, combined with the explosion of the fast food industry... And the soft drink industry where Coke began by promoting its drink as a health elixir... and on and on.

Of course, the "solutions" to many of the mistakes have been more industries pushing fixes like artificial sweeteners, "health" drinks, energy/sports drinks, low-fat processed foods, diet pills and fads, and other finance-based attempts to sell a new thing rather than address the real problems.

The rest of the world will follow suit in terms of health decline. It's already evident, as other countries adopt US patterns of prepackaged foods, fast foods, sugar (and fake sugar) drinks, cars, etc.

An easy way to spot this is to go to a country (like Netherlands, where I've been for some years). The older folks tend to be generally lean; many old folks here still bicycle. The < 30 crowd, particularly the 12-20 crowd is fatter and more American shaped. Go to parts of Asia and you see the same thing.

As comfort, convenience, and easy bad (cheap) choices expand, so do the bodies of the people. The younger ones who grow up with this have a different lifestyle than their parents or grandparents. While the older populations are indeed getting less healthy (increased body mass, reduced exercise), the change is slower for a number of reasons. Meanwhile, the kids who grow up with this new lifestyle start on a bad trajectory and know no alternative.

WALL-E pretty much illustrated the final state of the current trajectory we are on, both in health and ecologic terms.
The Flappy Bird programmer got harassed by people complaining he was a vile predator because a relative of theirs got addicted to it. People need to take some responsibility for their lives, and those of their own children.

Yes there can be predatory practices, but that's what laws are for. Bad behaviour should be curtailed, and I'm sure there are cases where Disney may have crossed the line, but simply becoming or being popular isn't a crime, or certainly shouldn't be.
I think more important than even preventing these laws from being passed, is that we propagate the remembrance that things haven't always been this way, lest these legal regimes be taken for granted and remain unquestioned. (I guess I'm getting old too with talk like that)
Apple's reputation is focused on its consumer business. Financial news is unlikely to affect consumers' perception of them.

I doubt that Apple's reputation would be hit on this unless Goldman launched a PR battle to get Apple to let them out of the deal.
Sorry I'm late replying to this but I think you raise actually a very valid point. I went and read the Feynman article and I have experienced this myself in the Irish education system. People tend to study only for the exam without understanding the problem.

Survivor bias is certainly a factor here and thanks for pointing it out!

As for the affluent people I'm sure that does play in also. The developer i advocated for however was extremely poor and came from the favelas. I only knew about this after and I realize for sure that is the exception but I think it furthers your point of survivor bias!
If there isn't, lets make one. We could self host it, lock it down to invite-only.
The specifics matter … a lot.

A fun use case for this new found freedom would be a Smash Bros style fighting game with out of copyright characters.

Imagine classic steamboat Mickey fighting it out with classic Peter Pan.
There is also a distinction in the brain between long-term and short-term memories. It is not so beyond belief that the brain stores short-term memories into long-term memories in a separate process (Perhaps sleep, whose lack thereof we know is linked with memory recall issues).

Recurrent neural networks 'learn' continuously by changing their weights (In effect) based upon the 'previous state'. There are papers showing that attention mechanisms in transformers basically provide a 'weight' update function so that models can 'learn' to accomplish a task based on a few examples. In other words, transformer networks 'learn' to train themselves based on the examples given. It is not so beyond beliefs that recurrent neural networks do the same thing. They learn to set up their internal states such that future tasks can be affected by previous input and patterns. In fact... playing around with models like RWKV, you soon learn that this is a fundamental part of the model. If you start talking to it in a certain way, it will start echoing that back. Clearly it's 'learning'.
Ask HN: What's your take on the surge of UFO/UAP sightings, discussion, etc.?
Are aliens here? Is this a distraction from something else (and if so, what)? Something else?
A person never getting banned from a subreddit isn't some badge of honor. All it shows is they're a good sycophant who never says anything that would make the lords mad. How can such a person know he has a backbone at all, if he bends to all power?
> For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation

You can control political conversation, you can control criticism of products and companies, you can pump up stocks, you can encourage the spread of useful rumors within industries, etc...

There are people paid full time to manipulate Reddit (and other networks.) The people and states employing them must be fools to waste so much money for no economic reward.

edit: this is aside from the people just trying to feel powerful, who will obviously be everywhere. It's hard, unpaid work. People doing it will tend to either be very strange or being paid from some other source. No different than Wikipedia, honestly.
Ask HN: Self taught developers, do you feel like you're ever able to “Catch up”?
Especially if you're doing work outside of the web development space.

I'm a math major that's been a front-end developer for three years. I used to not mind lacking a formal computer science education, but I'm starting to realize that's because the problems I have been working on have, frankly, not been very technically interesting.

My current big interest is accessibility, and that eventually led me to doing open-source contributions to the accessibility module in Chromium. I've done around 5-6 bug fixes, 2 improvements to tooling, and 1 moderately sized but straightforward enhancement (it's just updating an ARIA attribute to support multiple IDREFs instead of one). It's opened my eyes to the world of programming outside of web development and helped me grow as an engineer, but as I interact with more and more talented people it's making me woefully aware of how much knowledge I'm missing. It doesn't help that my best friend DOES have a formal education and works for a relatively popular Linux distribution, although it is cool to hear the technical problems they deal with.

I'm currently motivated to fill in my gaps because I think it's cool to help push the accessibility of the web forward. I want to become a better engineer so I can do more in that space (planning to use https://teachyourselfcs.com/). But at the same time, it's demotivating when you're surrounded by people who have been coding since they were 11 or whatever. It's probably also not great for my self-esteem that I've been unemployed for a little less than a year (quit my last job due to some unrelated trauma/depression that's more or less resolved with lots of therapy).
I am a humanist. Women are neither lesser nor greater than men, just as the yin is not lesser than the yang or vice versa. Women and men are not the same--our bodies are undeniably different. There are strains of feminism which blame men collectively for all ills in society. I do not view such ideology as "unequivocally good."
Definitely, those are quittin words.
I also desperately want something like this to succeed. I want to be able to see others' reactions on all NYTimes articles, for example, not just the handful each day they enable comments on, or the occasional one submitted to HN.

And I want it to have all of the standard functionality -- hierarchical comments (like HN and Reddit), upvoting and downvoting, auto-collapsing tangential threads with less votes (like Reddit), giving more weight to users who are consistently upvoted, etc.

But also, I'm not sure if URL's are exactly the right pieces of content to associate with. Not only do you have the problem of determining canonical URL's when sites themselves don't provide them as metadata, but there's a lot of content out there that isn't a webpage: TV episodes, TV series, movies, podcast episodes, podcasts, music tracks, music albums, and so forth. Right now the closest thing there is for some of those (some TV episodes, some podcast episodes) are official posts in dedicated subreddits.

It almost makes me wonder if it would need some kind of dedicated URL scheme that could be managed by Wikipedia or MediaWiki or something, like tv://startrek-strangenewworlds.us.2022/s02/e03#tomorrow_and_tomorrow_and_tomorrow.
Why would it be so localized to one country? Does Germany have a unique enemy compared to other NATO countries?
They also did a historical survey of various such efforts: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f86L7vgHUW9wSLNNSunh....

72 entries.
Dissenter was one such service, and it caused enough of a stir that its extension was banned by both Google and Mozilla.