skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wonder how Oracle knows which contacts to email.

It's oracle. They know how to get hold of people. Their business model has involved sending threatening letters/emails to people to try to get them to cough up additional license fees since at least the early 90s. It used to be "let's talk about your oracle license to check you aren't running it on more cores than you told us about", now they have just changed to threatening people about JDK licensing.
On the database side, for some time their tendency to threaten/harass their customers has been so bad that if you're in tech leadership you'll find there is a cottage industry of consultants who cold-call you offering to help you with your oracle license audit[1] just because its so common and unpleasant for businesses to have Oracle audit their license usage trying to squeeze more cash out of you.

[1] Whether or not you have an audit or indeed use oracle products at all.
On the Past and Future of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (2001)
The reason elite roles are elite is because they're focused on directing the activities of other people. Management consultants, executives, finance, entrepreneurs, politicians, to some extent tech - what these all have in common is that they make decisions influencing what problems all the other people in society will solve. By definition, there can only be a limited number of these roles in any complex society, because the roles are structured as the top of a pyramid. If you don't have a large number of people following you, you're not really an elite.

The true purpose of the Ivy League isn't necessarily to train elites to do better at these roles. Everybody sucks at these roles, regardless of how much training you've had. Executives make boneheaded company-destroying and job-destroying decisions all the time, finance people make bad investments, politicians make bad laws. This is because the complexity of understanding and directing thousands to millions of people is more than any one person could conceivably do, regardless of how much training they've had. In fact, one of the reasons liberal democracies have generally done better than communism or fascism or feudalism is because they try to devolve as many of these decisions as possible to non-human systems like markets, elections, and algorithms. But having some selection filter for the people who will occupy these roles, whether it's the Ivy League or imperial China's civil service exam, seems to result in less braindead decisions than having absolutely no filter.

More importantly, the Ivy League also functions as a way to take potential counter-elites and assimilate them into the existing system so that they can take roles that preserve it rather than destroy it. The most dangerous thing for a socioeconomic system is a leader who can convince a majority of people that the existing system needs to be cast down and replaced with a competing one. Ivy League universities work like an escape valve, trying to identify people that may be poor but smart and give them the connections and education (indoctrination?) to believe that they can make themselves less poor within the existing system without having to destroy it.
Should we start a public petition?

EDIT: This is an idea that I’ve recently been advocating for; I just don’t know where to start. We have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces? Offer a contract every few years to be bid by large corporations such as AWS, or Microsoft. Administration by semi-public entities such as universities or NPR. Make it join the Fediverse to enable sharing of content.

What am I missing?

EDIT: User submitted content would be bound by CC licensing.
It is a start. But since both the administration and social media companies (for the most part) appear to favor censorship, it will be difficult to pursue this long-term.

Secondly this news item has been posted to Hacker News at least 5 times in the last few days to, at best, lacklustre response. Perhaps the various items should be merged and censored heavily for content (just joking)8-)).
At least the US has cheap energy. Germany has high taxes, high energy prices and still manages to be dirty while being morally arrogant.
This does seem to be a major concern
That article does not say what you seem to think it says. Heritability and IQ are both fairly complex topics and citing a single article out of context doesn't do the subject justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

That said, your statement does not follow from your argument. The heritability of IQ is unrelated to whether people's potential is wasted by being denied access to a nepotistic college system. The school system is not a meritocracy either.
It's about the same in the US, where being in the trades isn't exactly widely and highly regarded, but it will get you a middle-class lifestyle. The difference is that for the most part it's a lot harder work than an office job with an equivalent pay; you don't get paid if you don't work, you will have to work in 120ºF attics in the middle of the summer, and it will leave a toll on your body after decades.
> The narratives used to characterize that data point vary based on the biases of the news institution, but either way it (more often than not) paints a distorted picture relative to the macro reality.

That's true, but I'd dispute that some kind of objective understanding of "macro reality" through "data" is even possible or practical outside a few narrow areas.
It's not that clear of a correlation actually (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/).
Yes! I've seen first hand how much it helps (is it just me in particular? maybe not everyone needs it?) programming things I can visualize (in a literal sense of seeing, but I think the essence is really being in close contact with intermediate results). So, I just make ways to visualize things :)

A particularly simple and amazing tool for this is p5.js, with an editor that, to me, enables exactly the kind of workflow shown here: editor.p5js.org

Whatever you are going to do, you can draw alongside to help you make sense of it better. I do this on my own mind sometimes, but for example visualizing and small neural networks (which I have been messing around with) can't be done on my imagination alone.

I think the important is just that you have some library that makes drawing easy, and put it alongside your work. Of course, it's extra work to make diagrams of everything. But sometimes they really help. I think it's important to simply have this possibility in mind.

(maybe it should have a name? Visualization-enhanced programming? Print-programming? I think (e.g. jupyter) notebooks strive toward this, although tbh I prefer the p5js environment without a linear format)

It should be up to us to decide if and when this extra work is worthwhile. I think really designing (and discovering) things is what benefits the most from this style (i.e. game design, product design, scientific experimentation). So you need programmers working on a design problem and/or designers working on a programming problem; or you could have them side-by-side collaborating (and not just a designer imagining things, and a programmer following specifications to the letter).

It also requires a kind of artistic taste to make things look good, but of course that's something you can develop.

It's a really enjoyable process to be able to get a feel for what you're doing!

(See here: https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/sLA07wpa_ for some personal experiments in visualizing graphs and sparse neural nets, https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/1Bb5VIHi2 for designing an algorithm to efficiently make a roguelike map)

I think you're saying is that we don't get this for 'free'. There's probably no tool (although maaaybe AI could help?) that just instantly visualizes anything you could do. Instead it's up to us to do it :) (although good graphics libraries and a tool that encourages you to recompile often is almost essential imo!)

And here's the kind of art I could likely never just simply imagine to existence, experimentation is essential! https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/pVFFT_8E5
Caching is also as old as computer science itself, which is my point. It’s not rocket science. We got that. We don’t need caching solution #6362.
New tool exploits Microsoft Teams bug to send malware to users
To play the... angel's prosecutor (?), but how can it be good from engineering standpoint when they're not trying to block users without login, supposedly, but this army of scraping AI firms and botnets?

Who ever scraped a page and doesn't know to try referrer, user-agent and all other 101 tricks in the book?
Why is there no Government-Built Social Media outside of the US?
I tested Optic's AI or not while writing - https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-art-challenges-meaning-in-a-w...

Despite claimed 95% accuracy, I found it had such a high false positive rate that it is unusable.
It immediately broke embedded tweets all over the web, something which was unique to Twitter. This lowers Twitter’s overall value in hopes of reaching some short term sign-up goal.
> As I mentioned else thread, if you do not care about parallelism you can pin your threads and use SCHED_FIFO for scheduling and then you do not need any synchronization.

I don't think it is a universal solution. What if I am interested in parallelism as well, only not for the coroutines that operate on the same data? If my app handles 10k connections, I want them to be handled in parallel, as they do not share anything so making them parallel is easy. What is not easy is running stuff concurrently on shared data - that requires some form of synchronization and async/await with event loops is a very elegant solution.

You say that it can be handled with an SPSC queue and it is only one ack/rel. But then add another type of event that can happen concurrently, e.g. a user request to reconfigure the app. Or an inactivity timeout. I can trivially handle those with adding more branches to the `select!`, and my code still stays easy to follow. With threads dedicated to each type of concurrent action and trying to update state of the app directly I imagine this can get hairy pretty quickly.
I’m china it’s basically govt built, it’s just outsourced
Also you generally want sunglasses to be much wider and taller than prescription glasses, because otherwise you get too much light bleed around the sides. Making large lenses is when the thickness takes off, especially for nearsightedness where the thickness ends up at the edges of the lens.
Part of Pawoo's problem is that it has been defederated and blacklisted a lot because of the early prevalence of lolicon and shotacon content on it: I'm pretty sure Pawoo was originally the reason why Mastodon added the ability to block media proxying to a given instance. Misskey for some reason hasn't really experienced as much backlash despite as far as I know having similarly relaxed content restrictions.

I don't really know exactly what makes Misskey more popular now: I doubt Japanese users are that concerned about the content moderation on Pawoo, though I could be wrong. It may help that Misskey was developed by a Japanese developer and is prevalently Japanese-first.

Misskey does have some neat features, though personally I find the interface to be dizzying and very busy.
No, that is a myth. They are right wing extremists.
I've found myself in the past in a situation where I needed an offline regex debugger (dealing with air-gapped networks, so the folks that needed to use the tool literally couldn't get at any online site, nor would they be permitted to even think of putting what they were working with in to an online one, no matter how it's designed), and it seems almost all of the work has gone in to online tools. The offline tools are scarce and somewhat lacking in comparison to, say, https://regex101.com/.
I find it funny how Aubrey de Grey is so focussed on life extension while making himself look about as ancient as he possibly can...
A lot of online glasses places do two-for-one deals so I just get two of the same frames, one with normal lenses and one with tinted. That way I know the lenses will fit the frame.
> this is going to hollow out twitter

should. I hope it does. Treating users like they are deserves much worse.

> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative

Nope.

If there was, we'd already have seen more attempts with some strong competition.

Twitter has always struggled to make more money. Founding team and CEO are gone. Musk tried all he could to get himself out of buying it. Twitter board was desperate to sell it.

Twitter's power users were happy with 140 chars and a textbox. They got there years ago. They're still there not because of what Twitter has become, but despite of it. Not many, not a growing community and they're not leaving.

What kept it alive en-masse was celebs and politicians. They're seemingly not missing Twitter.

Threads is about Ego. Musk burned $400 billion and Zuck $650 billion on shit ideas. This is them dueling, burning more money just to prove they know how to make popular products. In reality neither has a
a fking clue about what people actually want.

We'll see this burn to ashes after the elections.
For frenchs: https://www.mylloon.fr/blog

I am still a student and I never wrote anything before this blog so it's not very interesting but Im having fun (and everything from the software running the blog to posts are by my hand!)
> But the straight and cis folks I know (to choose one axis of this "culture war") or the wealthy center-right PMC/petit bourgeoisie/owning-class folks I know (to choose another) don't seem to understand much of anything no matter how much Fox/New York Times/ WaPo/ MSNBC they consume.

Oh certainly. There was a survey a while ago (which I can't find) that found that reading UK rightwing press was correlated with being less informed about issues than simply not reading news at all - i.e. readers would underperform random guessing on multiple choice questions.
The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. Weaves fascinating history of personal computing and internet through J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider biography.
Nice, thanks. Though I was going to try using Xen on there, rather than kvm - any experience/thoughts on that?
> An item in your cart was on sale, you bought it immediately and felt much better. +5 hope

Feeling personally attacked.
Ah I didn't know I was supposed to link every single relevant email from the mailing list.
How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
Mercury emissions from industry can be greatly reduced
"a large database containing more than 30 million Microsoft accounts, emails, and passwords."

A database containing passwords? Why would anyone store passwords in a database is beyond my comprehension.
FWIW, the parts of those "elite industries" that STEM majors are hired into are more upper-middle class than you might believe, in terms of their capacity for the accrual of significant wealth/status. I'm not saying they're not well-paid or that they can't buy a house, but it's a cut below anything that might be called "ruling class".

If you study the backgrounds of capital allocators, a disproportionate percentage of the top ones had a combination of privileged backgrounds and technical educations, but the vast majority have privileged backgrounds and no technical educations.
It's probably also about getting people to use the API.

With Twitter's data being public, bots and data analyzers can just scrape the site instead of paying for the now extremely expensive API. Not only does this mean Twitter isn't getting paid, but scraping puts a lot more load on Twitter servers than equivalent API usage.
Unless you're a legacy or a child of a donor or professor. (There are a lot of legacies and children of donors, somewhat fewer children of professors.)
Agree with this. Even if it only opens that first door, that's a pretty darned important door.
> It doesn't need to be actionable to have value though, is it?

Depends what you value. There is no objective value to random information. I don’t have any use for the real-time temperature of ice on Europa, but a scientist studying that moon probably would.

Moment-by-moment troop movements and updates from the Ukraine conflict does not help me decide when I’m going to get groceries this week. Maybe it will affect the price of those groceries, but is there anything I can do about that? I could save up more, sure, but that’s a speculative play that incurs opportunity costs.

Reading my city’s newsletter, on the other hand, tells me about things like bridge replacements that will impact how I drive to the grocery store and planning board meetings that may impact how I use my land.

If you enjoy being informed about world politics, I respect it. It’s not something I derive any enjoyment from, so I focus my consumption on very local news.
It is like twitter doesn't even want you to read and follow along people's tweets anymore, barring access, moving things out of order...

Twitter went from free rss feeds available for every microblog(twitter account) to paywalling access if you'd like to see whats new at a glance on several microblogs at once.

Fediverse's mastadon and tootdeck have no problem with allowing to browse and follow along multiple people's accounts and many fediverse instances have rss feeds as well, they have been doing it right for years.

The new tweetdeck is an inferior experience with even more frontend bloat, the old tweetdeck even worked on old and lightweight browers.

I pretty much haven't visited twitter once since the rate limits, and unless access to tweets change drastically, probably will never come back. While I'm using rssbridges as a stopgap, I'll be migrating to other ways to follow people's work where ever possible. It was nice seeing progress and updates on twitter, and I am hoping more people will move to other methods to post statuses.
Could Google outsmart them by hosting some of the data in EU, but still keeping spying on customers?
> A college or uni degree should carry the same weight wherever you study at

A big issue here is that all degrees with the same title are not equal between universities. If nothing else; as long as MIT is more selective than Indiana University of Pennsylvania, you're going to have a a general average quality of graduate produced.
Yes, it's awful that HTML is now dependent on js... how did we let that happen?? I'm thinking mostly of HTML5 web components, which, unless I missed something, are completely useless without js. All I wanted was a way for HTML to import other HTML. This seems to be the central issue that we've been hacking around for decades with SSI, template languages, and js. It's so basic -- everybody wants a header and a footer and maybe a menu on each page. Should be an HTML feature.
Not one single kind of rolling stock in Singapore's MRT is made in Germany. Why do you just claim random things like that as if it were true?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Singapore_MRT_and_LRT_...
Eh, in China corporations are something like loosely attached branches of government.
The posted link is to another Guardian page:

They took everything’: an Indigenous town rocked by the killings of young people

Link to the "iron method", already posted on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36597526

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-r...
That's an issue which can be solved. Consume more location appropriate news. Social media (ironically, when considering what kind of media is bad for you) can also provide decent local news information.

Maybe even support your local news, if you find it valuable.
As usual the tiresome histrionics around Musks management of something being it’s death knell will be proven wrong and ignored like tears in the rain.
Well here's an easy* win for any new parents reading this: read to your kids. As much as you can. They will start school with a significant leg up!

https://journals.lww.com/jrnldbp/Abstract/2019/06000/When_Ch...

* edit: easy, of course, if you don't work a night job and have the time to read multiple books to your child every day
> Why is there no Government-Built Social Media outside of the US?

Closest thing I know of is this: https://social.network.europa.eu/explore
Show HN: b2bsaaskit.com
I think the government should provide every citizen with their own cloud compute instance.
universal basic compute allowance.
One possibility would be if you had a girlfriend or wife, the new anti-abortion laws would fairly directly impact you as well by limiting your family planning options depending on where you live.
None of the subsections in that essay do much more than “point”; in classic Scott Alexander fashion he makes a lot of noise and gestures at. . . something. . .

* Privilege

> “One obvious answer would be “privilege”. It’s not completely wrong; once the first talented individual makes a family rich and famous, it has a big leg up.”

But this answer isn’t politically viable for him so he glosses over it.

* Genetics

> “The other obvious answer is “genetics!” I think this one is right, but there are some mysteries here that make it less of a slam dunk.”

He spends a lot of time trying to make this one work but of course it has all the well-known problems that all the eugenicists of the past ran into (e.g., assortative mating doesn’t completely explain Ashkenazi Jews).

* Education

> “Overall I’m not sure I can find any commonalities in these families’ educational styles except that they were all pretty weird.”

* Yudkowsky’s “Hero License”

> “. . .which I have no evidence for.”
> And they can do that because of their good reputation, which is mostly based on tradition and perception.

And possibly based somewhat on quality of education
Certain types of news are more like cultural/societal events and stories that are worth following just to have some topic to bring up with other people. Stuff like a submarine implosion, or a 9/11, or an OJ Simpson trial. These are unique once in a lifetime events that give you some social currency.

Repetitive news like mass shootings or political BS is just noise, and quickly loses its novelty overtime. What results is you just gradually feel worse and more cynical over time without learning anything new or interesting.
> I've never really understood the point of comments like this.

As a Dutchman who doesn't enjoy cycling, especially alone (for function rather than leisure), I do see their point. It's just not an alternative for me. I'll put up with it if it's <1km of flat land with safe infrastructure, but beyond that I'm opening up a public transport planner. Also in NL, most trips are >1km and/or carry more freight than fits in a backpack or on the rack (?bagagedrager) (could take the bike in hand and hang your bags from the handlebars, though).

I'm happy to pay a bit extra for Climeworks to take the CO2 out of the air again that was added while building the wind turbine for my electricity-powered method of transportation.

But to each their own. Cycling is also healthy, especially if we'd no longer be surrounded by combustion transportation. I'm all for bicycle infrastructure and promotion.
Sure fine, whatever, but this is only possible because you rely on others to prop you up. Obviously this attitude and behavior wouldn't work at scale.
I think the term "clever" is used to describe unnecessary complexity and indirection, which makes the code harder to debug.

I agree with the notion that simplicity is hard though.
AI weights are not open “source”
Yeah, for me it was confusing to see that many programmers seem to thrive without static typing, and in fact the 6-month Elixir project was an experiment to see if I could do the same :P (to me, Elixir is still the most appealing of dynamically typed languages)