skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the early '90s, I was a fresh Computer Science undergraduate student at a state university. Our computer lab was packed with the Sun SPARCstation IPCs, each running SunOS. We had this rudimentary email system that everyone in the department used to communicate. The tech-savvy folks, of course, had started exploring Usenet, but for the majority of us, the e-mail was our digital universe.

One day, my group of friends and I decided to have some fun. We concocted an idea inspired by the famous 'fortune' command that prints out random adages. We wrote a simple shell script that would take a random line from a text file full of humorous and nonsensical messages we'd written, then mail it to a random user in the computer science department. The script was set up as a cron job, scheduled to send one of these messages every hour.

Initially, it was just a harmless prank. People found the messages funny and would often share them in the lab. The source of these messages became the talk of the department, but nobody knew where they were coming from. We took great pleasure in watching our peers and professors speculating about the mysterious sender.

However, things started to get out of hand when the Dean received an especially absurd message that read, "Why do computer scientists confuse Christmas and Halloween? Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!" He found the joke incomprehensible and thought it was some sort of cryptic message or even a potential threat.

The campus IT team was called in to investigate, and a week-long frenzy ensued as they tried to trace the source of the emails. My friends and I watched in trepidation, wondering if we'd be found out and expelled for our seemingly harmless prank.

Finally, after several sleepless nights, we decided to turn ourselves in. We went to the Dean and confessed. After an anxious silence, he started laughing. Apparently, he had been let in on the joke by one of the Computer Science professors and was waiting to see how long it would take for us to come forward. He was good-natured about the prank and found our initiative creative, although he warned us about the unintended consequences of such pranks.

Looking back, it was a fun, memorable prank that gave us a valuable lesson about the ethics of technology use. It's a story I often recount when I'm teaching my own Computer Science students about the importance of ethical conduct in the digital world.
Question about VR, has someone used a good VR headset to kind of cure/reduce mountain vertigo?

I reduced my own with training but one of our son has it pretty hard and if VR sessions (or whatever the name is) could help reduce it, I would be ready to invest.
This is the moment where libertarians go oddly quiet.

Absolute free speech means organized crime, drugs, sex trafficking, racketeering, blackmail, all that.

Did you know, our mind is, broadly speaking, is organized in modules. It's like having dozens of little brains. The prefrontal cortex moderates the impulses of these modules. You may think a woman passing on the street is attractive. The prefrontal cortex suppresses your instinct to go and have sex, immediately.

This is the role of moderation in intelligent beings.

There's no intelligence without moderation. There's no civilisation.

This is why blockchains and decentralized platforms in general, under the control of no one, trusted or untrusted, it's just another name for regression, for chaos. For crime. For reverting to primal instincts.

Doesn't mean Mastodon is doomed, but it certainly can't be just the future of social media in this form.
Google is really failing hard in this regard, and I'm fairly sure it's intentional on their part. Searching "Typescript array" has obvious intent from the user, and an obvious "correct" first result. Google returns the documentation page in the 3rd result, but it's a link to a deprecated version of the page. The rest of the above-the-fold links are websites that contain Google ads.

Duck-Duck-Go returns the up-to-date documentation link 2nd, and the MDN result in 3, with W3Schools in 1. Bing returns actual content on the results page, describing exactly what you need to understand a TS Array.

Google have the incentive to push the poor sites, because they earn revenues from doing so. Bing and DDG don't have that incentive, and return much more relevant and useful links. That doesn't feel like a coincidence.
This isn't trolling, genuine question from someone who joined the internet after Usenet was already gone:

I keep seeing people wanting to build distributed this and distributed that. According to Wikipedia, usenet was already distributed. Why did it die?

Edit: follow-up question, what about freenet? Are they the same thing? Are they different, compatible, implementations of the same protocol? Are they incompatible but share some properties? Etc
I'm a huge contributor to SO, with over 100k rep.

But I stopped contributing seriously maybe 2 years ago. I just got so sick of SO behaving like complete jerks again and again, and lost any desire to keep enriching their shareholders.
I also have a similar account and you inspired me to vote to reopen maybe twenty questions in a row. All of them were perfectly good questions closed for stupid reasons.
Passing through a device is more secure than bare-metal, yes, but I meant it as the Qubes OS project themselves dissuading the notion. And doing so decreases security for the whole system, which is why they advice against it, because you've now given a potential bridge back to the main system. Not that there's been many exploits for that yet, but if such systems were more common, there would be.

Regardless, even with the ease of virtual machines, Qubes OS doesn't really solve problems involved in professional management, nor should it be considered for that given the overhead of the system. It's a neat system, and for general purpose use it's pretty cool, but for stability and work required to update a system, it really doesn't.

Sure, it makes general use-cases pretty easy to update, but those aren't really much of a problem if you've set up a PXE server and have a base image together with default configuration. The issues occur when you're updating servers, which is what I was talking about, because the end-user isn't that important in this context.

Whether you have it running in a hypervisor or bare metal, it all comes back to properly configured backups. Qubes OS doesn't solve this, nor is it meant to. It increases security at the cost of convenience and complexity. Nor does it solve stability in a professional environment, because while it does give you an isolated OS per application or stack of applications, you've now increased your maintenance surface. Servers need to be updated, within a reasonable time frame of ones being provided, and general computing often requires more of that too.

And at the end of the day, while I do like Qubes OS and do like virtual machines, they're not the be all, end all, in regards to security. Exploits exist, and as with all things, the more common they become, the more will be made.

I do still hope for a system like Qubes OS in the future, just not Qubes OS.
I love this kind of stuff, now if Netflix want to make a documentary out of this, that would be amazing!

We had this sort of operation in the UK before WW2 when there were separate companies running trains and even more so pre WW1 when there were 10s/100s of companies running everything from a single short line through to main lines up and down the country.

It was, of course, very inefficient for the reasons that the OP discusses, the need to send a wagon anywhere from anywhere meant 1000s of "trip freights", although these would almost entirely have been made by trains. You also had stopping freight services that collected and set down at each station so you can imagine the shunting/marshalling was very time-intensive but, of course, in the early days, a day or 2 was still faster than most alternatives.

What happened in the 70s in the UK with Speedlink was that they realised the best way to utilise capacity was to try and create fixed freights that travelled good distances at relatively high speeds between a small number of very large yards where it could be broken down into smaller ongoing services or go onto trucks. Of course, this only suited certain customers and would not work for a small business shipping a small volume but it worked well enough that it became the standard pattern by which all freights now run in the UK. I guess the issue in the US is that the distances are so long, you don't want lots of smaller specific trains but a few much larger trains with an enormous mix of destinations.
Somewhat against UNIX culture. There used to be proudness in having very high system uptimes. The modern security arms race has basically killed that.
x.com was a seperate company which merged with Paypal

https://web.archive.org/web/20000619201415/http://www.x.com/...
> personal weaponry

It's really only just the US being an outlier here. There's no other western country where people think it's normal or a fundamental right to carry automatic weaponry.

I therefore cannot see the comparison to encrypted communication. Everyone communicates, increasingly through software. To keep things that once were private private, encryption is a key ingredient.
Didn't watch the video, but I feel that now's a good time to share a slightly relevant anecdote.

I'm Norwegian. A friend of mine who lives in the countryside recently told me that the owner of the only gas station is considering closing the station. It needs expensive maintenance (something involving digging) and the owner is unsure whether future income will pay for it, but also aware that there still are ICE cars in the area and no other gas stations. How difficult will the transition be?
The bash not sh issue is due to ignorance on the part of the answerers not an XY problem. Also shell can"t do everything - you are in a POSIX environment so use POSIX tools. The Unix environment is an environment of putting together many small tools and not just using one so any shell script can call POSIX tools as a minimum. So just making a complex shell script rather than using the tools does need to explain why.

I must admit that I don"t buy in to that philosophy and like using one tool so for scripting I would do all in python, so I would not be answering that question.

Many Linux users think that their way is the only and that means bash as the shell and many others like GNU coreutils, gcc etc. I am an MacOS user and my professional career includes several non Linux Unixes so I know bash is not the only shell - try csh for fun - which is partly why I use python or previously perl as they are the same on all machines
I tried it once, it was some kind of skiing game. When I had a big jump I immediately felt nauseous because I expected to feel like my body is in free fall, but I didn't, so it felt weird
What is the best way to block google? I mean, everything to do with them. On your router and on your phone.
Summary of the blog post "Zenbleed" by Tavis Ormandy:

The blog post discusses the discovery of a vulnerability called "Zenbleed" in certain AMD Zen 2 processors. It revolves around the use of AVX2 and the vzeroupper instruction, which zeroes upper bits in vector registers (YMM) to avoid dependencies and stalls during superscalar execution.

The vulnerability arises from a misprediction involving vzeroupper, which can be exploited with precise scheduling and triggering the XMM Register Merge Optimization, leading to a use-after-free-like situation. This allows attackers to monitor operations using vector registers, potentially leaking sensitive information like encryption keys and passwords.

The author found the bug through fuzzing and developed a new approach called Oracle Serialization to detect CPU execution errors during testing. The vulnerability (CVE-2023-20593) affects various AMD Zen 2 processors, but AMD released a microcode update to address the issue. For systems unable to apply the update, a software workaround exists by setting the DE_CFG[9] "chicken bit."

The post concludes with acknowledgments to individuals who contributed to the discovery and analysis of the Zenbleed vulnerability.
My understanding is that Google has an incentive to send people to content farms because those farms will show Google's ads. Stackoverflow doesn't. So they can increase ad exposure.

Thinking of it, it would be an interesting test to compare the ranking of two similar sites, one with google ads, another with ads from another provider. Might be good evidence for antitrust litigation. But what do you do if they just prefer sites with more ads? Because due to their market position, that benefits them, but it isn't anti-competitive against other ad-pushers.
Back in the 1990s I was at film school at the point they were transitioning from Amigas / Toasters to an Avid suite, so I bought an Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster off them on the slightly-cheap. I got fairly proficient in Lightwave but all I ever used it for was making short 16mm film loops for projecting on huge screens at raves from a bank of Elf projectors nailed to a plank.

Edit: Tangentially related, it's well worth seeking out the film Tim's Vermeer about NewTek founder Tim Jenison trying to recreate Vermeer's style. It's fantastic.
You put to much trust in companies :)
Try sending a probe to Mars making the same assumption
One Operator that can manage multiple types of databases, complete with comprehensive operations management features. How is this achieved?

Most Operators can only manage one type of database, or at most, several CRDs.
I happen to have tried this multiple times. Every now and again I want to erase all trace of me on the internet. HN doesn't allow it. They tell you that you can give a spreadsheet with comment ids and how you want to rephrase things in case you've given TMI about yourself (in order to anonymize). I just don't have the time to go through my entire history to do this. So I attempt to post less, knowing I don't own my comments and I can be tracked

Reddit is actually a lot better in this regard
A hacker conference (organized by the Chaos Computer Club I'd guess, a famous hacking club of many decades),

runs, during the conference (and surely just for fun)

their own "silk road" (a clandestine marketplace, named after the namesake "dark web" online marketplace, where people bought drugs and other illegal services)

on top of a pneumatic tube network - a network of connected physical pipes used to send messages pushing them using air (e.g. some paper note inside a container). Pneumatic tubes were a physical "instant messaging" system used in early 20th century offices and large organizational buildings.

This "for fun" pneumatic tube network is powered via regular vacuum cleaner motors (as opposed to the air pressure being produced by some dedicated motor).

In this network, inside the conference area, people send lots of BS spam messages for fun, and sometimes even vodca shots (inside some container) from one point to another.

People attending the conference can build their own tube capsule (their own message/small item container to be transmitted through the tubes), but they first have to show that they can run through a test track (a smaller test pneumatic pipe line), so that they don't stuck/create issues when they put them into the main network.
Safari doesn't have a Windows or Android port.
There's nothing stopping them from installing Debian on these Chromebooks.
The short answer is yes. The long answer is that most of the VideoToaster software and hardware were specifically designed for the Amiga hardware architecture and therefore did not easily port to other systems. The extension card was Zorro II and the performance critical software was written in 68k assembly. In some cases the assembly code is written in such a way that it depends on cycle exact sync with the video signal. Original source code is on github.com, search for OpenVideoToaster.
So ADHD is a mismatch of people to the current environment/society rather than a neurotype?
You should see the discord server for the C# language. What a mess.
I guess alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die is dead.dead.dead.
Anecdotally Wikipedia is often the top result for me ... with the twist that it's the Google widget, with the side bar and related videos.

Only way below this block (which takes about 120% of my whole screen's height) come the "organic" results, that aren't great, but probably match what Google assumed I wanted to see.
I would personally place a non focusable window on top of that annoying gif.
MIT's 'PhotoGuard' protects your images from malicious AI edits
Does the alternative exist - being uninformed and eager to criticize power? How are we meant to differentiate the two?

I think one way is to note that this post was about being inaccurately charged with a felony - not about cops. The request for stats was not “cop stats” but identity fraud based felony and as a result arrest at routine traffic stop.

If a cop sees you have multiple felonies in another state, it’s quite literally their job to arrest you. Do you suggest they see someone charged with multiple felonies and just say have a good day?

No, the post was about being charged inaccurately due to identity theft. Perhaps you are overly eager to criticize police and became uninformed with reading the comment thread.
> Did it simply come down to the coincide of the system clock being a multiple of the NTSC signal?

Not a coincidence, and there was also an additional hardware feature: the "genlock".

Normally when doing graphics generation your software keeps track of the "vertical blanking interrupt", which tells you when a new frame has started. Normally this is generated internally. The Amiga let you lock the output video generation to an input video signal, so you could draw over a TV signal without having to digitize the incoming signal or use some sort of external chromakey system.
> The reefs will move north. Not to be flip, and say that climate change is not an issue, but here the planet can and will adjust--if not on the timeline us humans (and humans who make our livings off tourism) would like.

I'm not sure about that. The vast majority of coral reef destruction around the world has not been due to climate change but other human activity. Fishing, as well as agriculture, forestry, erosion, cities, dredging and shipping, that cause sediment and nutrient and chemical poisons.
1. It got spammed to death.

2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.

3. It was too problematic for ISPs (or others) to provide ready access to it: spam, harassment, child pornography, and copyright violations all posed massive concerns.

4. There was no viable business model for providing the service.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230603024330/https://old.reddi...>

(I'm author of that piece. It seems to hold up pretty well with insiders' views, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36200045>. That last link is from an earlier discussion on Usenet's demise, of which there are several in HN history: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=usenet>)
imo of course,but usenet had a hard time existing in a post-corporate internet exactly because it was difficult to wall off your users into your niche community, which became big in the early 90s and remains that way now.

AOL/compuserve/prodigy/whatever offered easy to use and understand UXs which drew a large crowd, and their large crowd was in a fairly walled off portion of the internet using foreign protocols and systems -- so they drew in their friends and so on.

same kinda thing fb does, among others, now.

when the crowd/discussion moved elsewhere that was that.

I think usenet saw a bit of a resurgence in popularity due to piracy, but the discussion has never really came back.
Absolutely. Google search results quality has declined and I often find myself prefixing search queries with "site:reddit.com".
It is not about SO at all. This is about chatGPT.
One of the main issues with that form of mortgage is that people didn't realize, for they were not informed, the payment for the entire house was due in full at the end of the run time. It left a lot of people going "Wait, what? I thought I had paid my mortgage for 30 years? what do you mean I need to re-mortgage my house?"
The Amiga is a classic example of "technological tour de force, commercial failure". Did it ever sell well in the US?
It probably means they have tried it for _some_ purpose, but not necessarily the one described in OP's post here. The claim is that this is specifically useful for quantization. It's seems reasonable to assume that this would have initially been tried and potentially discarded for having little or impact on general accuracy. But that's a different issue. I suppose we'll here something definitive in a month or so.
"You know Usenet is almost-dead when there is not even spam in most groups."

"Spammers have decided "it's not profitable to send a few bytes to these open boards anymore" and if you think about it it's kinda sad"

As much as I hate spam, and I hate it a lot, yes, that's pretty damning evidence.

You know a new comms platform has arrived when the spammers, scammers, griefers, and propagandists do.

And you know it's dead when they don't even bother any more.

(afr-l notwithstanding)
> I don't really understand why it's not taking off in the mainstream.

"Non-VR games, books, movies, music already get people deeply immersed without putting their head into a bucket" (Jonathan Blow in a recent stream). To me that pretty much sums it up. Your mileage may vary, but I don't think most people are actually waiting for that type of experience.
Nobody would care about the U2 album today. It would be just another pop up or advertising notice among many others.

Microsoft recommends Edge! Review your choices! 90 days free Apple TV! Upgrade your iCloud to continue backups!

The only one that slightly moved the meter is your documents moving to OneDrive, even that only had an impact because of a data loss bug.
Are attention spans genetic?
Great links! Thank you for this comparison. I am a huge fan of spreading content across platforms as to avoid a monolith. I will be looking in to this Tiktok. And I truly cannot stand the "smash the like" whatever every. single. damn. video.
This is exactly the reason I gave up on SO. It was so disappointing to see the "frist!" answer get votes, even when it was factually incorrect. By the time it took me to think and write a half decent phrase the original answer had been edited dozens of times. The site was also eager to interrupt me every time to tell me that an existing answer had been edited. They did everything possible to allow the system to be gamed and, well... they succeeded.
These Chromebooks are unlockable. Go ahead and keep using them with Linux forever, they are not e-waste. The real planned obsolescence issue is hardware that can't be unlocked, like iPads.
yes I'm sorry, I was wrong, it certainly wasn't a righteous diatribe, it was just an emotional screed about how right you are and how ignorant I am

stay advancing the discussion my friend. keep accusing anyone you disagree with of being ignorant and disingenuous, that's healthy for the debate
“Non moving data” is like “Bug free”, it's a lie
Yes, just bring money and lawyers, and you have it. The same with patents.
If I can find a way to do that I will, and certainly for future submissions. Thanks!