skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Watching these guys twist in the harsh reality that nobody actually wants to hear from them is rather gratifying. "It's not a free speech platform!" Gab is a free speech platform, and truth.social, right? If simple free speech on a platform was all they were after, they would simply be posting there, it seems to me.

So, what could it be, other than free speech, that they are looking for on these sites? Could it be... legitimacy?

We know they want reach of course, but quite a lot of the world has made it clear they prefer to be out of their reach, including a lot of companies that understand who is actually buying their products and services.

Forcing oneself in front of eyeballs, on the old internet we called that spamming and regarded it as the lowest form of bad behavior. Well, other than sharing CSAM, they were definitely the lowest. But the spammers, they're actually people who are probably not into images of child abuse for their own enjoyment, but would think nothing of trafficking in them in order to make money.

True story actually, by the way - I know a guy who used to run warez servers waaaay back, and sometime in the mid-aughts he went to jail because one of his servers had a bunch of the bad kind of nasties on it. I don't know whether he was secretly into that during the brief period that I played warcraft at his place or whether he just got used by some random scumbag, I haven't talked to him since a long time before that story made its way round to me.

These people all achieved their momentary delusion of legitimacy through behavior that they would describe as "clever" or "effective" or some other value-free chessboard assessment whereby they identified that a gameable system was being used as a source of truth, and set to gaming it. Their actions were the catalyst for a lot of people waking up to the reality that we can never trust our communities to capital, because capital will always choose the money over the ethics, every single time.

Welcome, nazis, to The Great Smartening Up.
Savor your coffee; someone probably lost sleep over it
Google is suggesting this should be used in poor countries without enough doctors because they know it is (or essentially will be, after the tidal wave of malpractice suits happens) illegal in the US.
> I doubt bank loans were that much easier for startups in times of low interest

Low interest rates doesn't mean loans are “easier” (this is going to depend on the risk policy of the specific bank, and is mostly unrelated to the interest rate), but it lowered the interest rate you'd pay for every loan no matter who you are (I personally bought a house with a .7% interest fixed mortgage in 2019, I didn't have to personally know Christine Lagarde for that).

> if anything the inflation hurts bootstrappers worse.

Low interest don't drive inflation up (we've had anemic inflation for a decade of low interest), if anything, inflation leads to interest rates hikes.
Grand problems for any decade until there are figured out.

- General artificial intelligence - being able to effectively model how the world works, and search for solutions in that model.

- Energy - nuclear fusion, cheap artificial photosynthesis, cheap solar such that we can have solar on almost every surface facing the sun.

- Molecular assembly - figure out how to custom program DNA from scratch to build what we need. Imagine building more efficient trees where it captures CO2 and sunlight into gasoline, or strong timber directly.

Each of these can go quite wrong if not developed with safety in mind.

I call it the Mind (intelligence), Body (molecular assembly), Energy (putting energy to work) problems.
I could be mistaken, but I think the following are also possible:

(a) While crossing the threshold, head trauma from the bar(s) that support the flexible ceiling of the bridge.

(b) While crossing the threshold, pinned and crushed by that bar. I.e., half of their body is inside the plane, the other half is holding up the bridge via that bar.

(c) While crossing the threshold, a parent carrying a baby. Baby is ripped out of parent's arms, and falls 6-8 feet to the ground. Possibly head first.

All are horrifying possibilities, which I don't believe would be fully remediated by post-incident insurance or maintenance.
> still eventually need to return money to your private market investors

If that’s what you pitched them. Most businesses are private. Most rely on outside funding. Most of them never exit, and are never expected to.
Indefinite Backpack Travel (2023)
Focus: A simple and fast text editor
As a mathematician I'm hypersensitive to people overreaching with theory. It's often the King's clothes. There are indisputable reasons why a musical fifth sounds good, but vision is more organic. Evolution has left us with many layers of color perception, like an out-of-control code base. Sure, anything can be fit to a model if we ignore the parts that don't fit; that's how theory intoxicates.

My father devised the "Bayer filter" for digital photography, and favored green for practical reasons that have stood the test of time. There is some theory that applies here, it's just not the same as harmonics and sound.

I'd love to code up a machine learning project that showed the user many color combinations, responding to feedback. Willem de Kooning for example painted with an extraordinarily original palette. Could we tailor our own color palettes, with an AI assist?
The problem is thinking that 5 or 10 or 20 people can decide what is good for millions of kids. Let parents work with teachers and schools to figure out what works for their kids.

The government should shut down all public funded schools. If some people need financial aid to ensure education, provide that aid directly in the form of money or school vouchers.

Schools will spring up with varied teaching philosophies and approaches. Parents can evaluate the available options and enroll their kids wherever they like.

Eventually the best approaches will win out, and even specialisations might emerge. Maybe everyone actually doesn't need to learn arithmetic. But others do. So they would choose the appropriate school and courses.
It may have been an interesting observation in 1968 but it's "not even wrong" today. IMO there is tons of useless friction in trying /not/ to ship the org chart. I've observed orgs where the software boundaries/APIs line up with organizational ones, and others where they have nothing to do with one another. The latter require years of meetings and proofs of concept before half-shipping products nobody wants. The former just ship software relatively cheaply, and if it's the wrong thing it's cheap enough to change it.

No other industry tries to avoid shipping their org chart. GE's space division does not consult with the oven division before it builds something.
>In one demonstration, the new algorithm efficiently placed 670 objects in just 40 seconds, achieving a packing density of about 36%. It took two hours to arrange 6,596 objects with a packing density of 37.30%. "The densities we're getting, close to 40%, are significantly better than those obtained by traditional algorithms," Matusik says, "and they're also faster."

Faster and better than alternatives sounds good to me.
Virality will happen regardless of your intentions. Your systems need to be designed to handle it.
Recent and related:

Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641 - July 2023 (604 comments)
It's still indicative of VC culture that the CEO calls the company a success after IPO. Rather than, say, after the company is profitable. (I have a couple shares of NET, so I'm optimistic they'll be profitable eventually. But sometimes their path to getting there seems lackadaisical.)
I have a lot of flowers that grow out front of my house. If you pick my tulips, daffodils, roses, or lillies then I'll be mad because they're pretty, short-lived, and for pollinators. I go to great lengths to have blooming flowers almost year round and a great deal of planning goes into that. One flower dying prematurely or going missing isn't a big deal, but if everyone picked a flower then the great deal of pollinators my property attracts would be impacted in some small way each time, and the pollinators play a key role in the micro-ecosystem of my yard. I do my best not to disturb them. If you rip up the bulbs for your own I'll be doubly mad because you're just selfish at that point. Go buy your own bulbs like I did, or better yet foster a yard where bulbs multiply.

On the other hand, nature isn't so delicate. My ground cover has smaller blooms most the year and provide the pollinators with much more abundance and resiliency to what people or animal might do to my "prettier" flowers. It's difference between O(n) impact to O(log n) impact.
I thought ElementaryOS was dead due to infighting between the two cofounders, but it still seems to be going: https://elementary.io/

(I had installed it on one box a few years ago and liked it, but moved back to Ubuntu once I learned about its conflict in the team.)
You're not out of luck. Your testing framework should allow you to hardcode different responses to different requests. Include the time in the response if you need to, it shouldn't be hard.

I've started adding random elements to my mock responses to force other developers to not assert things that aren't relevant to the test.
Sorry, let me clarify. If I bought it, it would be for desktop use. But my first exposure to the product page and the pricing, was via my cell phone.
It seems inevitable in the future I won't have a choice whether my info (however personal) gets sucked up into some corporate database via AI chatbots. Even if I were to refuse to use one personally, I have no control whether the nurse I talk to is just typing what I tell them into a chatbot on their laptop.
Yeah and
1. "Kill all X" is almost nowhere protected legally as speech. That's calls for violence, which falls under either terrorism or hate speech laws.

2. "Following you home" is in best case harassment, worst case assault. Don't legitimise lynch mobs, please.
Why are you meeting VCs? In what context? What else are they supposed to be in that context? It's a sales + finance job. If you're meeting them in a working context, and you're not transactional and don't have a really clear idea of what you're trying to accomplish, it'll be a alienating experience, except in the rare cases where they're going out of their way to be nice to you because you're out of your depth.

I had a lot of animosity towards VCs from several bad experiences (with a company of mine that got funded, and then with another that didn't). But I've come to realize the commonality of those bad experiences was that I was naive about what was going on. I don't go to my bank hoping for camaraderie and sage advice. VC is tricky because of the "sales" layer it adds to the bank. The best parallel (this is probably really offensive to investors but it's more about me than about them) is real estate agents --- who I also had very bad experiences with, until I learned what was actually going on.
Yes, Americans should go back to England to their ancestral Anglo-Saxon homeland, and cede the country they stole from the indigenous people!

Except that the Angles, Jutes and Saxons stole their country from the Romans in the 5th century! So the Americans and English should yield England back to the rightful owners, the Romans, and return back to Anglia, Saxony, and Jutland.

Except the Romans took England from the Britons - and if we can find any of them left, we should cede England back to those truly deserving to rule it, the Britons!

Well, but of course the Britons deposed the true sovereigns of England in the 8th century BC, you know, whoever built Stonehenge. So, let's find them, and restore order to England!

And meanwhile find Koelbjerg Man's relatives and return Anglia and Jutland to them. Identifying the just sovereigns of Roman, Saxon, and North American territory is left as an exercise for the reader.
You’re not wrong about the advertisers but I wouldn’t cède the point they’re trying to refute either. People claim that executives are are purely motivated by money, but that just doesn’t hold up with the advertisers or with Twitter itself. They have their own political agendas, and time and again they are willing to sacrifice short term profit for long term political victories.

Money is power. People who want power want to use it. They’re not just dragons sitting on their hoards.
like 90%
Dark story, bro
Are you experiencing degraded performance when running on battery or is it happening at all times?

You might want to look into BDProcHot throttling.

https://pastebin.com/JB3R2CdM

I returned a HP laptop because of this crap.
> Healthy communities are easier to destroy than create. They need protection.

"Healthy" doesn't seem like the word to use to describe something that requires constant and intentional intervention/manipulation by some external party merely to exist.

At least some relatively high degree of inherent self-sufficiency, resilience, and robustness should be present for something to be considered "healthy".
Sorry to be pedantic, but the categorical imperative is not about reasoning from the consequences of an action if everyone did it. It's about testing whether it's even possible for you to will the maxim of your action as a universal law without contradiction, or to what extent your action respects the rational agency of other humans. You could make the Kant-inspired argument that taking a limited resource for your private enjoyment does deprive others of their agency, but it's not Kantian to say "it's wrong to take the fossils because then there will be no more fossils."
A mathematically correct way to tie your shoes
No, misinformation is objective, and allowing it to propagate lets it fester.
> when really they were apolitical operators trying to make as much money as possible.

Yes. That’s it. From 37signals, Slow Ventures, to the most generous perks. It’s not for you. It’s for them.
> Have you ever run a business before?

Only 30 years. You? Not mean to be as snarky, but this US all or nothing stuff is getting on my nerves just a bit. I came from a simple background, but in a country with free education, so I got a degree in uni, opened a company in high school, all without too much risk. Didn’t need to work myself to death, didn’t have much stress, didn’t need VCs and make more than most here who seem to be dying of stress, lack of proper healthcare, free education etc etc. My clients like I have no funding and that I have enough money yet want to keep working as I like it.
Neat. Although there seem a to be overlap in the goals.

Do they have measurement in the goals over time?
If you go down that road of thinking, you'll end up noticing that those with the most power usually aren't the most rich. Power is power, and it usually involves some butter, but more guns.
personal charisma
It is still a 404.

You can serve a body with a 404, user will see the appropriate message and robot can safely ignore this page until further notice. Search engine will often retry 404 later and slowly reduce crawling if it stays not found.
There's only one group running water to my house. Is there really only one place online where I can speak?
Living a 140-year long and healthy life [pdf]
I don't think the existence VCs are bad, but I do know many people that are taking VC money either shouldn't be or don't know what they are putting themselves into.
That's typical for most products like that but it doesn't solve the problem. The issue is only partly "will I like it" or "will it fit me", for which a free return policy can help (but not fully solve), but a lot of the issue is "why would I want this". If you walk past one in a shop and can give it a go you're much more likely to overcome that than spending £300 on one and having to go through the return process.

Aside, I hear a lot more about free returns from people in the US. In the UK they are seemingly near-universal, but there is significantly less willingness to return outside of specific categories such as clothing. I have a little experience working in a retailer (as a software engineer), and US return rates were far higher than UK/EU return rates, and this was apparently considered typical.
Or even the doctor. They could consult with a chatbot rather than other doctors in refining their own opinion. I think that is more likely in developed countries, where this is more likely going to be a tool to be used by doctors directly, a more efficient way to sift through 10s if thousands if maybe relevant published studies and literature.
The Steam Deck Will Have a Booth at the Bitsummit 2023 in Kyoto (July 14 to 16)
> Statistically, companies that raise venture capital are vastly less likely to succeed than those that are bootstrapped.

Any citation for this? I’m highly skeptical of this claim.
Which do you expect your local shoe store to sell?
If you want to call about 10 lines of trivial code a 'memory allocator', then yup, we're totally going to write our own 'memory allocator' ;)
Your handling of the PHD situation sounds perfect and it seems like we're in agreement.

I want to reiterate you will never be in a situation where everyone is respectful even if it's a professional setting. You also can't control what other people do so there's no point expecting people to give criticism respectfully or trying to teach people how to do so - you can't correct someone's behavior if they don't want to change it.

Every time I catch myself wanting to say "people should act like xyz" I stop myself and think "I will react a different way when someone acts like xyz" instead if I'm not happy with how the situation went. Especially if I've already expressed my feelings and someone has ignored them and still acts in a way I don't like.
The belief that wearing general purpose masks would prevent the spread of COVID 19 was misinformation that festered for quite some time.
You have to be more specific. Do you mean feeding mailing and documents a LLM to train your new model?
Are we not already in WWIII? What is the leading cause of death among military service age-eligible men in the US? Would war increase or decrease that death toll? There is a rational case for war, but not in the Ukraine.
Special?
I'm an American millennial who quit a rewarding career to join a French company
I though the green in the bayer-filter was over-represented because the human eye is more sensitive to green compared to other colours?
All I can say is good luck with all of that. I don't see any company ever doing that.
This one actually gets use. I bumped up against an error in our internal services and it was returning 420's... Not fun to diagnose
Apple tried to bring small phones back and not that many people bought the mini relative to the regular size iPhone. Other than a few attempts by android phone manufacturers the iPhone 13 mini will probably be the best small phone made.
He was originally from Bulgaria and there are Roman ruins there too:

https://davidsbeenhere.com/2017/03/01/top-10-ancient-sites-i...
Cache me if you can: A Look at Common Caching Strategies
I'm advocating it as the content distribution layer, not the social interaction layer. You don't even need all of the metadata, as there are BEP extensions to distribute that as an index [0] or an RSS-style feed [1]. Images are particularly painful, like the previews in Mastodon, because they hammer the origin server rather than looking around at what other peers have. This problem will only get worse as the federation grows in size, both in users and in servers.

I say irony because we had all these scaling problems two decades ago during the peak P2P years, including federation and implicit DDoSing, and BitTorrent emerged as the lasting protocol because it could handle the scaling issues.

I say tragedy because for this to work you do need some openness, which puts people at risk of content companies trolling for you, ISPs dropping you, and is completely antithetical to the control Silicon Valley demands over its users and data.

[0]: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0049.html

[1]: http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html
The only cash flows into the ecosystem have been from ICOs. The SEC is cracking down on such activities.

Besides investment cash flow, I don't think there have been any revenue generating ventures that cater to customers outside the Web3 ecosystem.

The true web3 players will be traditional finance companies upgrading their settlement systems.

I am curious how people will answer your second question.
Great points and perspective, thanks for sharing! Totally agree.

Having grown up in a family that runs a real estate firm, I can say the ratio is about the same - about 1 in 20 real estate agents are decent human beings who desire both to help others and make a living, and the rest are highly self-interested.

What I find interesting is the VC stories along the lines of "X VC really worked with and helped/saved us!". I haven't encountered such stories about any bank.
The Internet (or really the Web) is a common area. You tweet something, I write a blog post and embed your tweet in it, Alice emails my post to her friends, Bob writes a post in response and links back to me, Charlie submits Bob’s post to Hacker News or Reddit, David and Eve discuss in the comments, etc.
Apple absolutely needed to normalise the idea that a £300 black puck was Luxury Fashion. See what happened to Google Glass for when a company fails to make a wearable product fashionable, and we've been wearing expensive glasses for hundreds of years. Watch nerds still shun it today, although Apple has managed to break through as much as they needed to make it a success.
With Windows UAC, when you run a program it opens a pop-up saying "do you want to run this program" and you can click "yes" to continue. With a Mac, if you run an unsigned program it opens a pop-up saying "program cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified" and your options are "Move to Trash" or "Cancel". It doesn't mention anything about letting you open the program anyway. This means that if you want to develop software targeted at anyone who doesn't know to go to the security section in System Preferences when they're not prompted to do so, you have to pony up $100 for a developer license. A lot of open-source projects don't offer Mac builds for this reason, and you have to build from source instead.
Apple Vision Pro comes close, but still lacks in the light-field department.

(Your pupils get lazy from using it because everything is in focus all the time).
For this to be a true comparison, you should look at how many flashlight apps were built.
Your statement and opinion are why Elon Musk owns Twitter now.
> UB exists only on the compiler.

Sure, but UB exists so that compilers can generally do whatever's fastest on that particular architecture.

Your signed add instruction traps? Great, do that. Does one on a different architecture overflow? Fine. Just emit it and it's conformant.
Out of school BAs seem like the the best way to waste significant dev time explaining to people who don’t understand the tech or technical documentation what to do.
I think everyone knew they’d move onto the next scam
All communities have norms that are actively applied implicitly or explicitly. Some through technical constraints. Some through moderation. Some by general community reaction. Just because you’re not aware of them doesn’t mean they’re not there. Healthy communities take work. They’re not just a crowd of people screaming whatever they feel like at one another. (Unless that’s specifically what that community wants.)
It's more like barely tolerable is the enemy of complete crap.
That's absolutely vital on a space colony; on Earth, we're dead from CO2 toxicity well before we can't breathe from insufficient oxygen.
Based on my LinkedIn inbox… plenty of them still around & still hiring.

They just seem to be less about what was original called “web3” and more about applying crypto to… stuff.