skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't have to be a sociopath to fall for this.

"Make online learning material about stuff you know" doesn't seem like a shady endeavour.

It is a very recommendable activity, especially if you happen to like teaching.

But I would never bet on getting rich from doing it.

I think it's only borderline scammy; game-theoretically you can say that it's a losing game for certain parties, but I don't think that makers of the kinds of learning material that is profitable are evil, just because it's profitable for recursive reasons. From their perspective they're just having luck because everyone wants to know how to make videos, how to talk, how to structure things, and what sites pay well.

It's like drop-shipping: This is a great idea if it weren't because the profit margins get eradicated by everone doing it.

Some cities arose around healing springs; the traffic alone could sustain roadside businesses that eventually formed cities. Maybe the spring didn't cure cancer, but does that make the roadside hotdog vendor shady?
> The most ironic part here it isn't the school and education there that makes them exceptional.

You see this all the time. People think it's the institution that makes the person but it's actually the person that makes the institution. It's the problem with admitting people into an institution that can't play at the level of everyone else there. A lot of people actually think that by simply going to the elite institution that the non-elite person will somehow end up with the same abilities as the others.

You can give me all the resources an elite athlete will have access to but at the end of the day I'll never be able to play at their level. For some reason this is widely understood. But when it comes to intellectual capacity, many people think everyone is the same and it's access to the institutions that they are lacking.
https://archive.fo/lIMgM
Didn't ever really realize this until you said it...

WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, messenger, and Facebook all in one app. Horrifying.
I experimented with the regex-automata crate in the past and it's the only one I found which can be used for text editors because the direct access to the underlying DFA makes it compatible with any text data structure. The usual regex library APIs expect the input to be one contiguous string.
You're assuming that people who are admitted to Ivy League schools a) have higher IQs than average and b) have parents with higher IQs than average.

Neither of these need to be true. It's a incestuous system where it's easy to believe that people of average IQ have been born into privilege for generations and succeeded only because of their family wealth and connections.
There are a number of counter arguments that I don’t see represented in this article. For instance:

1) this argument makes the implicit assumption that the “number of years before a species goes extinct” is anti-correlated with “the present population of the species” meaning that the greater the present population in comparison to the historical population, the less time we should expect the species to survive for. This is already a contradiction because in reality it is the opposite. Species abundance is directly correlated with species longevity. Necessarily so! In order for a species to go extinct all members must die!

2) there’s no particular reason you should take the emergence of anatomically modern humans as the start point. We represent a continuous lineage of related animals going back to the last universal common ancestor of all life. By naive copernican principal, you may expect our lineage to go on for another 4 billion years! This is not to say that this is likely, just that the copernican principal is entirely subject to what you consider the starting point to be. If you say you care about “homo sapiens and their direct descendants” rather than “homo sapiens” you get a very different answer.
The patch is totally open source, and the project is rather high profile. Where exactly is the additional risk here?

From a security standpoint, What's the difference between using revanced's open source patches and downloading literally any open source software from GitHub?
I'm fine with people in the Alps taking their car when it's raining and windy. That still leaves 99% of the population who can take their E-bike for short trips.
I find this site to be quite extensive :
https://computingthehumanexperience.com/books/
It's a runtime environment, like the JRE or Mono CLR. By your logic, the JRE is an emulator because it has a "java virtual machine."
Don’t worry, it doesn’t. Being a grown up is amazing.
I also came in through the side door, and also saw this happening.
The news is meaningless distraction designed to trigger an emotional response in an effort to maximise engagement.

Big events travel by word of mouth. I don’t need to actively be reading the news to find out about them.

I’ll take blissful ignorance over living in a state of permanent anxiety.

Fill your mind with ever changing news of little to no consequence and you’ll have no time left to do anything that might genuinely impact the world in a positive way.

I don’t vote either.
Was .ts or .tsx not available or something?
The idea of a D&D campaign centred around this is hilarious
These issues didn't have the software as some kind of cause - MCO failed due to the spec mismatch. Another example of this is Cassini failing to initialize Huygens fully before separation, and many others - these were not software issues as software was compliant with the spec. AFAIR early Proton-Ks failed due to the process issues - impossibly high cadence (typical at the time) and the lack of integration testing with Block D, and N1 3L's issue with KORD was external interference caused by fire.

Edit: I stand corrected - the MCO failure report [1] says that the software behavior was against the spec. So yeah, it's a software failure indeed.

[1] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/MCO_report.pdf
> I really appreciate the aforementioned large controls, title bars (often integrated as toolbar menus) and resignation of menus in favour of dedicated pop-overs.

Heh, those are all on my list of things I hate about Gnome. Funny how different people can be.
Let's remember what Microsoft said in their DDoS's blog post:

"We have seen no evidence that customer data has been accessed or compromised." -

https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/06/microsoft-response-t...

There you go, this news article is the evidence of intrusion + data breach
Would be cool if I could integrate it into a CLI, haha.
Ask HN: Where do you find quality book summaries and lists?
There are a few blogs, like Derek Sivers' (https://sive.rs/book) as well as Graham Mann (http://www.paulgraham.com/books.html) that have what I find are thorough book summaries that capture the book contents well. Additionally, I find the set of books they review to have a high signal to noise ratio. Are there similar sites you have to share?
> There are constantly tweets in my feed from guys I don't follow with greek or roman statue profile pics, posting about how western civilisation is in decline

I've noticed that and I wonder what their agenda is. To radicalize western men?
ReScript solves this problem with a much much simpler type system and stronger inference at the cost of forcing you to handle nulls and undefined as Options.

I get that typescript's decision was to model js's behavior exactly in the type system. But now having seen the costs of that and how much can be gained by relatively small constraints on js I think it was a mistake.
I liked this one about how the increasing precision in manufacture enabled the adoption of new technologies

https://www.amazon.com/Perfectionists-Precision-Engineers-Cr...
It’s more surviving than living on Mars.

AFAIK a journey to Mars will be a one way ticket.
My biggest one is time blocking.

For me it's about blocking everything else, blocking hacker news/reddit/youtube is a huge productivity thing for me, so deciding that I am not going to be part of social media and i'm going to centre my life around the things I want to be and creating as many big time blocks to focus on that as I can. The rest of the time is for me to be more playful, but in order to do anything, I need chunks of focused, clear time.

Noise cancellation headphones, binaural beats / focus music and a timer. Then I shut the rest of the world out and just work on what I need to work on.

I'm a pretty chaotic person with my thoughts, so I have to make the choice to focus on something for set hours and then I try to stay as focused as I can during that time and then have unfocused time when I can do whatever I want/indulge my thoughts and curiosity.
I guess the best explanation is that I liked engineering but it didnt 'fulfill' me. It's something tough to explain.

In any case make sure you know what you are getting yourself into ( speak to medical colleagues ) as medicine has changed a lot in the last 5-10 years. I suspect in 10 more years medicine will be completely corporate run, as things are going now, small practices are being absorbed and being merged into larger and larger groups.

Also I agree with the sibling comments by Arch and snakes.
I’ve asked it to write code as a black box: I sometimes purely run code it generates and see if the output matches. If it matches enough tests and special cases, it’s done, I don’t even waste time to understand it. The main thing is the tests.
> One of the key parts of democracy is being able to vote people out.

The problem is you can vote people out. But the same two parties remain.

> Think of any authoritarian country, and how much the people would love to get rid of some arsehole at the top.

'Authoritarian' countries exist because most of the people support it. And when most of the people are against it, authoritarian countries change.

> The US has managed to vote out presidents that have wanted to become dictators!

Which presidents wanted to be dictators? If someone wanted to be a dictator, they wouldn't run to be president in the first place.
I'm curious, is there a reason this might be relevant?
Not sure if this is what you're interested in, but a friend recently recommended reading these two in tandem:

"The Image" by David Boorstin, and "Palo Alto" by Malcom Harris

Both offer views on the evolution of technology, but from authors with somewhat opposing viewpoints.

"The Image" is particularly interesting to read today, because it was written in 1962, with the advent of TV, and back then one of the core concerns was edited video and how it was becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate fact from fiction.

Interesting overlap with some of the concerns around LLMs
This is something I would like to explore. If I had to guess now, I would think that the management of many open handles on a single file by the kernel is going to be more limiting than ssh.

But I'd also wager we can go quite far with a single cheap VPS. A few thousands user does not seem impossible at all.
Yes, this is the serious issue. Not that people step on the wrong pedal.

The issue is with the inverter design. All Tesla cars on the roads use the 12V system as a voltage reference for the accelerator pedal position. If you turn the wheel while the car isn't not moving, it sources over 100 amps from the 12V system which causes a voltage drop to near 0V for hundreds of milliseconds. If the computer initiates a recalibration of the ADC during that time period, max throttle will be close to 0V until a later recalibration, which will immediately launch the car at very high speed. It also explains why Tesla says the pedal was pushed. It wasn't, but the software thought it was.
Surveys show that vast number of people are working what they believe to be pointless jobs - and yes it makes them unhappy.

So no, people do not need to be creating value to be paid.

And of those who think their jobs aren’t pointless, still most of tasks can be pointless. My job isn’t pointless as a whole, but still about 60% is spent on stuff that should not be needed and helps no one, especially not the business. Ok technically it helps one incompetent person in the cto’s office who rose beyond their competency level feel important.
i think these analyses tend to focus on the impact of education on earnings because earnings are easy to measure. i would wager that it's more common for high achievers to chase after prestigious schools because they are high achievers and they are driven by being 'the best' rather than chasing some expected lifetime value/return on investment.

that, or that they think it'll look good on their tinder bio (college applicants are teens after all).
"That is unfortunate."
America does not have low economic mobility. Last I looked at the statistics, it's not top of the pack, but it's not low, either. Another thing: The primary driver of low economic mobility, at least in the US, is lack of that ticket to ride - a degree from a good university - and the poor kids who do go to an Ivy league university end up having high economic mobility, again, due to receiving a degree from a top university. This is really just a nitpick of the part of the article where they said that low economic mobility is a reason why Ivy league universities don't want to admit poor kids. Low economic mobility is not a factor. What they meant to say, probably, is that starting with family money will mean that a rich kid will end up with even more money than the poor kid, on average, and that would be correct AFAIK.
> I have never in my career had to do anything like designing a large scale system.

Giving large scale system design interview questions for a role where someone never has to work with large scale systems would be a weird cargo cult choice.

However, when a job involves working with large scale systems, it's important to understand the bigger picture even if you're never going to be the one designing the entire thing from scratch. Knowing why decisions were made and the context within which you're operating is important for being able to make good decisions.

> I've worked with the Linux kernel, I've written device drivers, I've programed in everything from Fortran to Go, and that's what I want to keep doing. Why put me through this?

If you were applying to a job for Linux kernel development, device driver development, and Fortran then I wouldn't expect your interviewers to ask about large scale distributed web development either. However, if you're applying to a job that involves doing large scale web development, then your experience writing Linux kernel code and device drivers obviously isn't a substitute for understanding these large scale system design questions.
It was announced as an anti scraping "feature" but the reality is it's about encouraging signups, tracking for ads and starting the sales funnel for upgrading to Twitter blue. Every other social media site has done the same at some point to increase logged in users.
right! very good point, then it's all about context.

Maybe would be easier to put developers to do the business job for few weeks as interns and not writing a line of code until knowing how to work in the business today, and then they could understand what needs to be built perfectly. :)

Edit: Which in startup world would equate either to be a domain expert on what you are building or talk a lot to users to gain that context, which is the YC advice if I'm not mistaken. makes sense.
I agree with you in theory, but most large enterprises will never, ever be able to make rolling OS releases happen for political and even structural reasons. When the EOL comes, they pay for extended lifecycle support and hope for sunnier days in the future.

For those enterprises, the value of the stability RHEL provides goes UP as time goes on, because the longer you wait, the more risky and costly it is to migrate to the new version/solution/etc.
Germany hasn't learned a thing. https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2023/07/berlin-verkehr-...

All that most Germans want to do, is to drive in their SUVs and park everywhere. That is what they vote for. Meanwhile they vote against nuclear (I'm scared) and wind (Verschanden meine Landschaft)
Yes, A groggy morning party pooping half thought.
So? Take the bike when the weather is nice and the car when it's not nice. That still reduces the kilometers you drive by a lot. Nobody forces you to bike when it's 40°C or -20.
Would a history of science interest you? I enjoyed "The Scientists" by John Gribbin so much I've read it twice.

https://a.co/d/epMV64I
We're not talking about protesters.

The riots were sparked by a completely different event, but "C'était pour s'amuser" https://www.bfmtv.com/police-justice/emeutes-sursis-et-brace...

Comments on the Telegram chats don't suggest more maturity.
> Why do you need to have a constant "perception" of government outside of election day?

If you know why you need it on election day, you know why you need it the rest of the time, because voting is only a small part of effective democratic engagement (and even if it was the whole of it, its inconvenient to have to cram and process a couple years of information with necessary context the day of the election.)

> you have a few options a few times a year.

You have a lot more options and a lot more effect other times: democratic engagement outside of elections is a big part of what decides what the choices are in elections.
I find system design interviews generally provide significantly more signal than coding interviews, but still less signal than a lunch interview.

It's a test of breadth and depth and it takes an apt, possibly experienced interviewer to navigate the candidate's domain knowledge effectively. The goal isn't to build some elaborate, buzzwordy house of cards, but to understand where tools are appropriate and where they are not, to think on your feet and work with an interviewer to build a system that makes sense. And, just like the real world, criteria should shift and change as you flesh out the design.

In particular people trip over the same things every time: reaching for things they do not understand, not understanding fundamental properties of infrastructure (CPUs, memory, networking), and cache invalidation.

When I interview folks I always preface the prompt with an offer to provide advice or information, acting as if I were a trusted colleague or stakeholder.

If you want to be low level, then I'd question why we're conducting a large system design interview anyways. We could certainly frame it as a small system design instead, and focus on the universe contained within the injection-molded exoskeleton of the widget.

If you say "column oriented" I'm going to ask you to explain why. I'm going to challenge what the load balancer is doing or what you expect it to do, and why.

Building large systems in the real world well, and watching them scale up under load with grace (and without contorting your opex to have only lunar aspirations) is somewhat akin to watching your child ride their bike for the first time after the training wheels are off. It feels good. Just like seeing your hardware in the field produce a low failure yield.

There is satisfaction in doing good work, or at least their should be.
I don't care about how they were intended to look, I care about what the best look & feel is for me.
This is a really interesting idea.

What if we took it one step further and somehow modeled a more complex business endeavor as the "map" and interactions with the game elements effectively issued real-world orders to the team, sent emails, invoked AI, etc?

I am thinking something like a 4X game UX where you complete an entire B2B webapp integration & consulting package over broader timeframes. Not just writing one document. The whole saga. All participants can log into this "game" and "play" it. Certain participants may have different views or capabilities depending on real-world org roles.

Being able to visualize strategic elements of an abstract business domain in a gaming-style context might be a new thing that warrants deep exploration. The user interface for RTS games allows for rates of interaction and decision making that I have never seen with any other style of computer interface. The UX loop around an FPS is marginally faster in absolute terms, but the complexity managed in a typical RTS/4X puts it into the dirt by comparison.

Just watch someone using GitHub issues vs someone playing SC2 in a semi-competitive stance. The energy difference is extremely obvious. Clearly, doing serious business won't ever look exactly like someone managing a photon cannon rush, but I think there is definitely a spectrum here we can move further down.
Yes they do: https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--...
The host owner (there's no root on Plan 9) can change those permissions and edit the file if need be.
+1 for "The Information".
i can here specifically to recommend this book. Such a great read, i would even venture are saying a must read for anybody even remotely interested in computer science.
I agree that toxic elitism isn’t new, but I do also agree with the author that it has intensified.

Only a few colleges matter. A degree from the others is “actually a dunce cap” according to Peter Thiel.

Absolutely everything happens in only a few cities, which of course have developed completely ludicrous property prices. Nothing happens anywhere else, so if you want a good career you have to at least spend time in one of these.

Markets are winner take all with one or maybe a few companies taking each vertical.

I have asked older people about this, especially the urban elitism of only a few cities matter. Most of them have confirmed what I have observed (I am 45) namely that these trends massively accelerated roughly after the year 2000.

It could be due to the Internet, historically low interest rates redistributing wealth to those that can easily net investment or cheap corporate debt, or some other factor, but I do think it’s real. I also suspect it’s a hidden driver of our political hyper polarization.

The urban elitism seems to have been dented a little by telework and COVID, and we seem to be entering an unbundling phase with social media. Maybe the trend is reversing.
I very much liked Information by a James Gleick, but it’s rather pop
Modern society is just 96 hours away from Canibalism. Maybe another 24 hours if you can get interesting conversation going...
As a development exercise, this is neat, but its extreme focus on software dev makes it just that: an exercise. Slack incorporates all of the extra stuff suc ignores because it's a service; you're paying for someone else to handle the integrations for access control and authz and such.

Homegrown solutions require varying levels of support. Something like Slack is predictable and that makes it attractive, from a business perspective.
I’ve repeatedly noticed that even the most skilled programmers can yield ‘mediocre results’ when there’s an absence of a requirements engineer or product manager. These roles are crucial for translating managerial requests into very clear requirements and/or user stories that define the desired functionality.

Edit: Restructured the comment.

—-

I penned the following thoughts yesterday in a discussion on using AI as a programmer. Despite subsequently deleting my comment, I believe it’s pertinent to repost here due to its relevance to the topic at hand:

My success with AI integration as a programmer heavily depends on the precision and clarity of my prompts. These prompts often mirror detailed requirement documents, specifying what I need the AI to generate.

However, crafting such specific prompts can pose a substantial challenge. For individuals who find it difficult to express their needs succinctly and clearly, the benefits of generative AI might be limited. It’s a tool that necessitates a particular skill set and comprehension to leverage effectively.
If you want to ask me about the wider implications for smaller subsystems then ask me about the Linux kernel. How did it become that system design is the only way to demonstrate this particular skill?