skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wikipedia says that Multics had "about 80 installations". That's probably a big part of why Multics is given short shrift - it was successfully built, but (approximately) nobody cared.

Wikipedia also notes that Unix ran on less expensive hardware than Multics. That mattered - there were many more systems that Unix could be put on.
Social media, not sure. I have wondered why we don't have email operated by the post office.

Also, I wonder why we don't have postal aliases so I can give someone an "address" to which they can send mail regardless of my true location.
> I ended up coding 98% of it

Stop doing that.

If you are trying to get a new team to take over your part of your coding work, you need to let go. Talk them through how you would do it, let them then give it a try... and then accept how they actually do it (as long as it works). When one person does all the work, it ends up being written in just the way that one person understands it and likes it. Which often leads to a lack of acceptance that different devs will accomplish the same task in different ways, and the original coder falls into this habit of "That isn't how I would have coded it, so it must be wrong."

Maybe I'm getting the wrong impression. Maybe you really are brilliant and 100% correct and you have hired nothing but duds. But... the odds are against that.
The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage is one of my favorites.

It talks about how the telegraph brought near instantaneous communication and how that changed the world. He gives specific examples for finance, newspapers and even the law ("Can you approve a contract over the telegraph?")

What I found most interesting:

I read this book in the late 2000s/early 2010s and remember thinking "Wow! This is is EXACTLY what's happening now with newspapers. When was this written?" and seeing that the original copy came out in 1998!
This also depends on the field. I think this is good advice in fields where grad students are primarily there to help with grant-funded research. In those fields, the course and prelim requirements are reasonable because professors need warm bodies doing work. Eg, CS.

It's less good advice in fields where grad student research output doesn't matter as much, and where students do more teaching instead. Those fields tend to make much more aggressive use of weed-out exams to ensure that they have enough young grad students to meet teaching demand but not so many older (>=3yr) grad students that they saturate advising capacity. Mathematics in particular comes to mind.
+1 for The Information. Spectacular book
By lagging indicator I mean traditionally less selective public schools have become extremely selective now.

When I was in elementary school, I assumed I'd get into Cal because everyone did in the 90s and 2000s. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, it's selectivity dropped to the 10-20% range and is dropping further. This is the same at other flagships as well (eg. UCLA, UVA, Mich, etc).

With this drop in acceptance rate, programs also shot up in US News Rankings. Everyone took UChicago's playbook and copied it.

> What do you think the forest is?

Inequality at the K-12 level.

In my age group (20-35) we're already socially stratified largely because we attended the same 200-300 elite HSes which were feeders to the handful of top colleges nationally.

Most Americans won't be able to attend such high schools as they are expensive af - either directly via Tuition if they're private, or indirectly by having houses starting at the million mark for public schools.

The elite of society has become much more diverse racially, but this is very shallow as most Americans

1. Don't attend college
2. Don't attend college track high school programs
3. Don't attend high schools with enough ECs to be competitive
4. Don't attend high schools which provide the level of guidance and counseling needed to apply and get selected at one of those top colleges.

This kind of social stratification already exists in the UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia, and is starting to occur in the US again.
My mother, I love her, but all of her worldview is based off of the news. No social life, no hobbies, no books, no real experience.

It’s amazing, but understandable, how she perceives risk. Cars get in crashes. Flights are always delayed. Big cities are dangerous.

The news has done its job keeping her engaged but she is no better for it
Is it possible to export the data from a subreddit and import it into a new website (like, say, r-programming.com) and put the reddit.com drama in the past?
Yes, and recent examples show it:
- News coverage allowed whole populations to understand a pandemic was happening and what actions were being taken by governments to tackle this issue. News also allowed public debates over policies to be known to citizens.
- News coverage allowed people to follow closely the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war that followed, including its atrocities, which did lead to specific actions in the form of extra support for Ukraine.
- another example given in this discussion was that news allow one to form an understanding of current issues in their country and community and therefore to vote as an enlightened citizen. This is vital in a democracy.
Wouldn't that be just wasting resources more useful that the thing being dumped.
Which is “totally” different than US corporations. The American ones also comply with government requests, supply back doors or capture the traffic at an ISP level.
> The regex-automata 0.2.0 docs did have a giant warning about this

I didn't listen, and it paid off, because a bunch of the knowledge I learned on it is still perfectly applicable to 0.3.0; I already have the same NFA as before. :)

Now my appointment got canceled so I get to read your blog post and play with the new version. Fun!
Because governments that want to exert that kind of control on the population are already totalitarian, which means they already have control over companies within their borders, including social media platforms. The government doesn't need to build it to control it.
Nobody said the passwords weren't hashed
Yeah, that's one of the things I was looking for in this game. A friend of mine had an absolutely bonkers advisor who stopped answering my friend's emails. For a while they basically had to stalk their advisor, who would come in at erratic hours and quickly lock their office door, just ignoring any knocking. It was so wild to me, as my friend was just incredibly nice. My friend only graduated because other faculty sort of clubbed together as unofficial advisors.

I get that if you select only for smarts, you're going to get some odd ducks. But I've heard so many stories from PhD-seeking friends about the level of dysfunction that gets visited upon grad students.
Many municipalities have come up with the idea of developing their own local platforms and fora. Of course that ship had long, long sailed and they soon discovered the mechanics of the network effect.

Also, they didn't have the means and resolve to launch even a small platform. In short: only the trolls were interested.

Now what might have worked, is if at some point a government (or a couple) took over a small, but modestly successful platform (say, Twitter?) claiming that it is important enough as a commons.

Not claiming this is a good idea, but there are precedents with other "public infrastructures" (transport, energy, telcos, banks, harbours, airports, retail). So why not social media, news?
Well, is that notably really possible?

https://www.capital.de/amp/wirtschaft-politik/kann-biogas-ru...
A minimal prototype REPL for the Web, with Console integration
It's far more hopeful than it's been before too. We're asking ourselves what the consequences will be, which we have the time to do. But where do you go with those questions? I think the right answer is don't freak out, but plan what you can.
Depends what you consider to be large files, and admittedly its not a free for all upload, but gov.uk probably fulfils most of those requirements.
Someone can break copy paste in ContentEditable just as easily. All you need to do is preventDefault on the copy or paste event, and then do your own thing poorly.

Basically every rich editor on the web that’s any good overrides copy/paste with custom handling.
Do you use corporate social media?
The borrow checker does catch those issues. But it it does not do whole-program analysis. It analyzes code locally, by looking at signatures of functions being called.

And also being forced to read distant code to understand if given snippet is correct would be a maintainability nightmare.

I've had enough problems dealing with Java exceptions which are allowed to pop up from anywhere and are not visible in the code.
So, I write mission critical software that sits behind narrow interfaces. In my field, security and correctness are basically synonyms. Other people manage large fleets of machines, and there intrusion detection is probably the best you can do. Still other sets of people write frontend software with 10,000's of dependencies, so dependency management is the name of the game. Still others deal with PII and credit card numbers, and in that space compliance matters deeply.

I could list many more sub-disciplines of cybersecurity, but I'm already up to five (and haven't even mentioned cryptography!). None of the skill sets from the five I mentioned really translate well to each other.

Also, what purpose would having a cert for a programming language serve? For things like C++ and JavaScript, there are so many sub-dialects that the cert wouldn't say much about whether you could write inside a particular code base. For things like rust and go, the certificate would need to expire every few years.

Also, it takes an experienced developer a day or two to pick up a new language. Getting a certificate for a language would take longer than that. That lands us where we are right now, where such certifications exist, but they're simultaneously too much trouble to be worth it, and also not worth the paper they're printed on.
It's not really about predicting the future but understanding the context in which you operate so you can plan your own future.

Essentially, if something doesn't impact you immediately or maybe someone wants to do something that might impact you badly initially you still need the context.

For example, Chinese imports are cheap and good but due to things happening there you might end up loosing access to those. You will need news to have a rough idea on how reliable your access to those is, you need news to know who yo would you prefer to support for the policies you need. Without news for larger context, everything you do will be reactionary or ideology based.
People aren't telling you how to live, they're saying that certain current practices are inefficient in a way that causes harm. An extreme comparison would be a murderer-for-hire telling the judge "don't tell me how to live my life, this is a free country!" but that's kinda what that sounds like. You're free to do what you want, yeah... until it harms others.

Individual transportation will always remain an option, but it might be prohibitively expensive for most people to be their main mode of transport when one has to refund the environmental damage it adds.

As for cycling specifically, you and me both as I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36601619 We agree there, but it's not going to be compulsory to cycle...
I have been a rather happy user the last few months but the last couple of weeks it's turned pretty narsty; downloaded my data and turned off my main instance account, and I'm waiting for the schism to happen before I go back in.

I have zero issue with Meta using ActivityPub, cause whatever they try, it makes them at least somewhat permeable in theory. I do have zero intention of interacting with them on any level though.
Arguable IMO it could be argued for civic engagement and discourse and education. That’s the charter as I understand for NPR, I don’t see why a public social network couldn’t fall under that.

Misinformation on social media exists today, I don’t see why we couldn’t argue as a society that public discourse on the network couldn’t be perceived as a way to educate the public.

As far a infrastructure, just limit content type and posting limits (time gate posts on topics, or limit 1 post per day, etc.)

Companies would get public data to be trained since everything would be CC licensed. And a contract to be won for reserved services.
It continues to be a travesty of breach disclosure that companys are legally allowed to claim the best possible outcome without any proof. Only definitive proof of compromise compels them to indicate any problems at all and they still get to downplay it to the minimal proven consequences.

This is totally ass-backwards. There is negative incentive to do any investigation. A investigation can basically only make things worse as you get to assume no harm when you are ignorant.

They should be required to disclose the worst with only a thorough investigation demonstrating a credible absence of compromise allowing a positive statement.

This incentivizes investigation and properly errs on the side of the victim when assessing risks.
I also wanted to mention the "cousins" of:

> "Can you approve a contract over the telegraph?"

- Is a faxed copy of a signed contract legally binding?

- Is an email scan of a signed contract legally binding?
There's probably some presidents somewhere on the world that own telcos and banks, but I assume you meant "precedents".
Because if you have a private company that is tightly controlled and essentially acts as a projection of your state, while pretending to be independent of it, you can trick some people into thinking it's a free market. This applies well beyond social media.
There's a difference between talking about the wider implications of a system and acting like software can be planned top down with any sense of accuracy
But medallions don't actually do that, because all of the extra revenue that drivers get due to the limited supply, and then some, gets paid out as rent for the medallion.
Wow, that client is pretty fast. If I'm being honest, every fediverse client has been slow as balls so this was really surprising. Very cool!
Succinctly summarized at https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...

Blue check promotion moves the dumbest, coldest takes anyone has ever written right to the top of the thread.
Yeah, at the individual level this isn't cut and dry. When I wrote my comment I was talking about aggregate groups of students, apologies if that wasn't clear.
It's not how much news you consume but how you consume it.

If you read news from several sources, then you are less likely to be misguided than someone that reads way more news but from only one source.

For your example about Hillary and Trump, to me, that just affirms that keeping up with news (and history) is super important. The relationship between news and polls is not new. Dewey Defeats Truman [1] was one famous historical example where a newspaper got it very wrong despite using tried and true methods and more recently, FiveThirtyEight was an example when a statistician got it very right for a small period of time [2]. Backed with that knowledge, you are able to read a headline like "Hillary will prevail over Trump" with the right amount of context.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight

I think one could argue that perhaps keeping up with news in order to understand news is too much work but that's an entirely different issue.
I've been in a run-of-the-mill state school and an elite Ivy, and I can tell you that yes, a lot of the students in the latter were born extremely smart. Yes, there are smart people in the former, but the difference in the distributions is not small. IMO
Cash alone doesn't work, you need the parenting, role models, nice local institutions and schools, etc.
A great summary, there is a dramatic mismatch in what the ivies suggest they do, and what they actually do and this has horrible consequences for society.
Because no matter what country you are in, and what the laws are, or what the culture is, there are better more important uses of state resources. No matter how far left or right someone is on the political spectrum this is not a popular idea.

So you want to take tax money to build a social network. And it continues to cost a lot of money to operate all the time? And it doesn't generate profits? And it just creates a big headache for everyone involved? And the headache never goes away unless we shut it down? Only an incompetent and self destructive government would build this.
Internally, there's been a lot of hate towards financing these big spends in the era of layoffs. Lots of rumors say that we were saddled with Rings of Power because Bezos wanted his own Game of Thrones.
It's not in this manual, but I definitely remember the Ariane to have an "Anti Pogo Device" which kind of sounds anti-fun, in a funny way.
The article states "the group provided 100 credential pairs". That indicates one of a couple things; a) lying attacker providing old hacked accounts, b) unsalted or weakly salted credentials vulnerable to rainbow tables or brute force or c) plaintext storage.
What would we see at the speed of light? [video]
I mean it already is to some; some people are pushing for social media to be reclassified as a utility, and some people are banging the drums about their rights being infringed because they can't say what they want on social media, citing free speech.

Twitter is going through that right now; it does not have free speech despite being led by a self-proclaimed free speech absolutionist. Truth Social was supposedly to escape Twitter and co's censorship, but it's one of the least tolerant platforms out there. It goes on.
Are you living an AND life or an OR life?
What’s the use-case? The system RTF editor on macOS is quite serviceable, and the Windows one isn’t too bad either.
The Theological Problem Behind Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04
> I think you're just describing an iterative process by which someone might eventually precisely define what they want.

Not necessarily, you'd have a series of change requests and resulting code - but no requirement that all features delivered were specified precisely.

How does this differ from an agile process?
> So little of the news is actionable, as the article points out. The only remotely actionable news for me is what’s happening in my local community; but the gradual demise of our local newspaper has made that difficult to track.

A hyper-focus on the national news also makes people feel like they're being a good citizen, while they completely ignore the things that actually make them a good citizen. I see it here all the time. People spend hours a week - often hours a day - following news about politicians they've already made their mind up about, or even politicians from other jurisdictions they'll never have a chance to vote for or against. Yet they spend almost no attention on local leaders, and keep voting back in the same group of people with poor track records who ignore constituents.

It's not a simple difference of opinion about these people - I've had numerous conversations with the people around, and the vast majority of people don't know many of their local elected officials, and those they do know the name of they couldn't tell you anything about. Yet they could quickly tell you all the outrageous things a governor in another state did.

Most national news is like junk food, where people feel like they're satiating themselves but they aren't getting any of the news they actually need.
> Vacuous virtue-signaling 'safe' garbage.

It’s noteworthy to mention that what you are describing is just what one party likes and the other does not.
If my Russian friends ignored the news as much as you did, at least some of them would be feeding worms right now. Most left the country when the news made it obvious that a mobilization order is to be declared — it was confirmed a couple of days thereafter.
Even the more static websites built by my government look and feel like garbage. There is no way they could pull off something remotely as complex UX-wise as social media. Unless they hired expensive contractors, in which case people would seriously wonder why their taxes are going into this app which they well may never use.
The top comment there was a pretty good analysis and dropped the bomb at the end.
>Q: What happens when output from LLMs start feeding back into training new LLMs?

Humans do this all the time. For example, fake news spreading and most people believing in it.
How about Minitel [1] as an example of government-built social media?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
> Why is there no government-built social media?

There is, it's called Facebook, Youtube etc. Twitter was part of that until Musk bought it and published the Twitter Files.
You can change display scaling to make GNOME small.
Sarcasm aside, cooperation and control are on entirely different levels.

For example: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/23/china-to-place-government-of...
Why Webhooks Matter
I'm at the precipice of getting rid of most of my streaming services.

I only keep Amazon video around is because it's free. The only show I watch on that is The Boys. I'm waiting for Netflix to ask me to purchase a second account for my sibling who I share my Netflix account with, and when that happens I'll immediately cancel it. There's nothing there I watch anymore. Disney+ has a slew of failed Marvel shows and I cancelled it early on. Hulu, Peacock and the rest of the services have nothing for me.

The only quality content is HBO that I'm willing to pay $15/month for. I also pay for Youtube premium because no matter how much I try to force the issue, my kids watch Youtube the way I watch TV, so I'd rather get rid of all the ads. Everything else, I will pirate without guilt.
Give people a good interface that hides complicated things like federation, is very low barrier and looks nice.

As similar example consider lemmy. Here https://wefwef.app/ is a much, much better starting point for new users than the official page. Immediately shows you stuff, nice interface, no "what do I even click" problem.

Contrast that with https://joinmastodon.org/

- Need to click to another page first.

- Giant list of whatever, what am I supposed to pick, how am I supposed to judge any of ...

- Nope, not going to bother. The end.

Instead give me a page that immediately shows me interesting posts (browsing as guest) and where sign up only requires a username (just pick a server for me; curated, random, I don't care).
Both links work just fine here. You probably over-blocked something somewhere ;)
Hereditary is not the same as genetic. Non-genetic inheritance exists; gene expression can be affected by trauma or want experienced by immediate ancestors. The traits that result from this inheritance can be modified through therapy; the framework for the unmodified trait continues to exist in the organism, barring catastrophic environmental circumstances.
Readability: Google's Temple to Engineering Excellence
All those places seem far off and distant to a lot of people… just “noise”.

In all of those cases those things dismissed as noise were the sounds of millions of peoples lives being torn apart.

But yes far away and distant - oh unless one’s relatives were fleeing their soon to be bombed homes like my Syrian American coworker.

To be able to ignore those events is only for the lucky - but can (for now) doesn’t mean should. Even the lucky should not ignore them. Also I say “for now”, because in most cases the far off events quickly influence local events - many of those are directly effecting American border communities, and also national politics through a nationalistic platform by a party.
"is back" on a site that is going downhill fast. No thanks. I'll follow the new programming magazine on kbin.

https://kbin.social/m/programming