skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$100 euros a year does not get you 50% of your pre-tax salary for a year. That 100 might be what you paid, but that is not anywhere close to what that costs. Do not confuse the cost of something with the price you pay. At 100 per year they should just make it free. I'm not sure what the real cost of unemployment is per year (there are people who's job it is to figure this out - they have more data than me), but it is thousands per year.
I thought Fastmail was Australian? This looks like it's a US-based union. How big is Fastmail's employee presence in the US? Just a handful, or a major chunk of their operations?
That's because he uses "not sure" as weasel words, remove the weasel words and you end up with:

"Is there anything we can do to slow up the franchise community on the other solution? What communication from either McD or Midd can or will go out?"

That already sounds a lot more damning. And this is an executive, so if he's asking questions in an e-mail he's telling you to do something. So anyone working for him will interpret that as:

"We need to do something to slow up the franchise community on the other solution. Send out a communication from McD or Midd."
I've always wondered why completion i/o systems require you to hand them a buffer rather than a buffer pool. Handing them a buffer means that you are keeping a huge amount of memory allocated when you have a huge number of connections.
> The Embrace, Extend, Extinguish argument also falls down at the last point for me: Extinguish. This is a tremendous amount of effort that Meta is undertaking to try and… what? Stop the fediverse from growing? Defeat Mastodon, Meta’s mighty competitor?

Well, if the author had actually cited the people whose arguments they're dismissing, the answer to these questions would be clear.

Here's one.

https://emacs.ch/@ramin_hal9001/111579818136072605

-----

In case of the article being edited after I leave this comment, here's an archive snapshot of what I'm responding to: https://web.archive.org/web/20231215205458/https://anderegg....
I guess one must ask El Reg to write about it. I think that might have been how it got solved a couple years ago when comp.lang.c and others were affected by this [1].

Currently, at least mozilla.support.seamonkey (not a USENET group, but from news.mozilla.org - which was shut down, but whose archived content would certainly be useful) is in that state at Google Groups. And yes, IIRC the only SPAM in recent times in that group had been posted via Google Groups...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/01/google_usenet/
Reminder to Say 'No'
It lets me run up-to-date daemons on my home server, with excellent uptime, on some old-ass version of Debian I never bother to update (don't worry, it's not routable from the public Internet) and without having to touch systemd (or sysv init, or openrc, or whatever), having written nothing but a single short shell script for each service. I could take all my exact same knowledge and scripts (and a backup of the data directories, helpfully and completely documented in those same shell scripts) and spin my whole stack up again on basically any other distro, only having to google what installing Docker looks like for that system.

Different init system? Older/newer packages than I want in the distro's official repos? Some futzing-about with third party repos needed to add to get what I want at a version that's not three years old? No option but downloading a tarball and dicking around with that, on this distro? Package on this distro stores some daemon's config in a different places from the last one, and carves it up differently, so you can't just drop in your old config and have it work? This distro or version puts data for this daemon somewhere different, so now your backup scripts are fucked?

I don't have to care at all. About any of that.

I no longer have to give any shits which distro or version my home server's on (within reason) and anything I learn managing it transfers basically anywhere.

I can turn around and immediately apply nearly 100% of that skillset to any day-job I've had in the last decade or so.
I know a middle school teacher. He said they got a bunch of kids from elementary school that don't know anything.

Especially from poorer families, that have several kids but didn't have enough rooms for pandemic remote schooling.
Many parents use tablets/phones as pacifiers at restaurants / similar venues. If you weren't judging them for using technological pacifier, you'd probably be judging them for bringing a noisy kid into a restaurant.

It's quite possible that the kid rarely gets to use a phone at home where it's acceptable to act like a kid.
I love it. I could totally believe the etymology starts as slick sales persuasion trying to downplay the implementation difficulty of something that's being sold.

And then people also pick it up for non-persuasion, because it also sounds like a catchy name for an engineering approach we already had.

Of course it can still be used for persuasion for awhile, but will grow baggage over time, as efforts linked to the term don't play out that way.
A marvelous specimen. A souvenir and a remnant of the yesteryear of the Internet.

Okay, I overplayed it a bit.

But, honestly, I mean it: it is a great example of what happens when people care about their cause. Words fail me to praise this enough.
Cats Kill a Staggering Number of Species Across the World
Actual title is "4 simple software engineering habits that transformed my productivity"

Using keyboard shortcuts is one of the four. I've been using keyboard shortcuts since I was a child! I can scarcely imagine programming without them. It would be like removing half my fingers or something in terms of detrimental effects.

Could somebody even get to a high level in software engineering skills without them? I'm curious. How would you interact with the terminal? Could you completely avoid it?
Good news, DCS is now viable to play on an Xbox gamepad and cheap head tracker. Some if the best online wingmen I've flown with are using gamepads.
A lot of what makes declarative stuff nice is it comes with an implicit opinionated standard way of doing stuff. Nix tries to be way more general to the point of a whole programming language.

Compare that with Snap packages:
https://snapcraft.io/docs/python-apps

Where everything is closer to true configuration not declarative programming. Apt and PyPi packages in, snap package out, install it like it was an exe or put it in an app store, give it some permissions, done.

They don't introduce any new concepts and there are few intermediate extra steps, it's all more of less pretty common ideas found in any tech workflow.
I am frequently frustrated when I see people doing "studies" of LLMs where they don't put in the prompt engineering work. I came upon an example [1] recently where someone compared GPT-4 to Gemini Pro and Claude 2. The results hardly matter to me because they didn't put in the prompt work: they didn't give the model space to think (demanding it return only true/false), and they didn't give it higher-level instructions about the categorization, only vague instructions and a couple examples.

I think this often happens in order to be "objective" about the evaluation. I can see how it feels like cheating to coax the model to produce the answer you want. But... it's not! An off-handed prompt isn't more objective than a crafted prompt. You just haven't investigated its biases and flaws.

This lazy assessment is common everywhere, of course. It's one of the reasons bias gets into testing so easily: you setup a test and you assume that it is objective because you give everyone the same test with the same rubric. But if the subjects don't understand your terminology, or the proctor doesn't understand the subjects' terminology, it's easy to mistake misunderstanding for something else (intelligence, opinion, whatever you are testing for).

Systems based on communication need feedback loops, and that's just to get to the _starting point_. Prompt engineering is one of those feedback loops.

[1] https://www.vellum.ai/blog/best-at-text-classification-gemin...
I do this. I leave my code in a state where it wont compile. So the next day just hitting build will highlight where i left off - which makes it easy to get started, which makes it easier to move to the next thing.
With a recent project, I was _moderately_ successful by providing a jsonschema to follow for the response. I still had to sanitize the json a bit, but the fixes were minor and the resulting data otherwise fit the schema well.
Does "pay mortgage and feed family" qualify as a terminal goal that is exciting and beneficial?
For me, this only leads to sleepless nights.
Ask HN: I hate exercising. How can I exercise more?
I have tried everything. Weight training, sprints, hiking in nature, pilates, yoga, etc. I have not found anything that I love. And because I don't love it, it doesn't stick.

Therefore, I have to constantly force myself to exercise. I don't like it, but I do it. And it becomes a repetitive off and on pattern (a few months in the gym, a few months off). But believe me, I'm trying...

How can I make it stick? Or how can I be one of those people who loves working out?
I created a site so you can explore Netflix's engagement data
On Tuesday, for the first time, Netflix posted their engagement data for their entire catalog. This data is for H12023 (from January 2023 to June of 2023).

However, they posted the data as a large excel file that you have to download. So, I created a website so you can explore/search the dataset without having to download the file!

I'm a believer in making data accessible and easy to explore, so it's also free. Enjoy. I'll be adding more features over the weekend.
BTW: https://www.bricklink.com/v3/studio/design.page?idModel=1603... or other, similar models there.

Bricklink is perhaps secretly (or perhaps not) owned by LEGO itself so they can have their hand in the pocket of the used / resale market. People will upload full MOCs (My Own Creation) there and you can purchase the sets piece-wise. Usually even more expensive than if you wait and buy a set through LEGO but for stuff like this it's worth it.
Unsurprising. The sota tech in the space is still not there so products at this time are under baked and are going to get found out very quickly. Especially by knowledge workers who know what they're doing.
No link found between phone use and cognition, quality of life, or sleep
I think it's a fair question. The primary reason email has centralized is spam. The fediverse doesn't have any specific answer to this. It explicitly punts in the spec[0].

Personally, I wonder how much value there is in NxN communication where N=8,000,000,000. If your instance only downloaded and showed you content from feeds you explicitly followed, spam would be a much smaller problem. But everyone wants to see responses from everyone else and yell at each other.

Email certainly provides value in being able to cold-contact someone, but I think that could be handled separately, maybe using something like a cost-based anti-spam system[1].

[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#security-spam

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-based_anti-spam_systems
> Box model + flex box + the display modes + "positioning" (stacking contexts) are typically the most confusing parts of CSS, I feel.

That's like 90% of UI. Saying they are the most confusing parts of CSS is basically admitting that CSS is awful to learn and use.
I mean... police can force you to open your door, your safe, or virtually any other container of secrets. The 5th Amendment doesn't give you broad protection to hide things from police when they have a warrant.

A phone is unique thing not because it contains so many secrets, but because you have to give testimony (as opposed to property, like a key) in order to open it, and it's impossible to open by bashing the door down or cutting it open. It's a technological coincidence, not a legal/philosophical doctrine, that makes phones secure against compulsion by law enforcement.
I don't know if it's a bug in Sonoma or Chrome but Chrome and Chrome-based browsers will intermittently throw a ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED error. Usually a simple subsequent refresh will work.

https://superuser.com/questions/1816615/getting-err-network-...

I've seen many solutions that purport to fix it but the fact that they're all different, and that no Sonoma or Chrome updates have fixed it leads me to believe it's proving to be difficult to find.
Google gives Pixel phones privacy-protecting 'repair mode'
I normally write uncommitted comments of what I need to work on next, e.g. a to-do for the next day
that is great (no sarcasm) - but I also don't think it is unusual for a <2 year old to spend almost all time with just one or both of the parents. I think the kids that had already in school that were the most affected.
It really depends. This is just one of the tools that might or might not for you. I think it's more important to know your goal and yourself. In this case, you want to increase your productivity. As long as you can reach your goal, it's good enough.

Personally it doesn't work well for me because I need clean separations from work and be in the prolonged work mode would cause burnout. I have no problem to get started in the next morning with my own routine. It's more important for me to put things down and rest everyday.

On a meta level, experiment with what might work for you and iterate on your own work flow - it's exactly like TDD programming but for yourself
Urban housing is still expensive

Not compared to most countries: https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-..., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...
I dunno - using cdk8s at one place was a miserable experience. Adding runtime evaluation just made everything more complex than it should be.

In that case I preferred to describe infrastructure rather than program it.
I believe you're committing the no-true-scotsman rhetorical fallacy.

Proper firearm practices don't protect you from deliberate self-harm, nor does it protect the other people living in the space from a resident motivated to do them harm. Following proper safe firearm practices protects you and your family from negligent discharge and from someone turning your firearms against you. But it does absolutely nothing to protect you from yourself, nor protect your friends/family from you. You know who doesn't shoot their friends/family/self whilst in the grip of a severe, acute mental health episode? A person who doesn't have easy access to guns.

About 42% of adults in the US live in a household with guns[0]. If your claim is that the statistics [that show living in a household with guns is more dangerous than not] are easily mitigated via good practices, then a HUGE number of people must not be following those practices. Why else would the statistics be so clear on that point? Either a large proportion of people are not following those practices, in which case some other mitigation is necessary, or those practices are not as effective as you claim, in which case some other mitigation is necessary.

I bring this up because my wife and I have discussed at length whether or not to conveniently locate our firearms for self-defense, and concluded that, for now at least, adequately keeping our kids safe from using the guns without supervision basically precludes using the firearm for self-defense (that old "when seconds count..." saw), to the extent that we don't keep our firearms in our home.

0. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts...
OK but why? Is this for fun or profit?
If a country is selling lead-contaminated children's food, they absolutely deserve to be "condescended to".
Because it's never a moral question, it's always a financial one. And the finances shake out quasi-optimally for McDonald's the corporation.
Write it out then, quickly, before you stop. On paper, that is, with a pen/pencil. Write in pseudo-code if it helps get it on paper faster. Stick that to your monitor or under your keyboard, it'll be there the next morning. If you got it right, typing it in will be easy. If, the next day, you see things differently, you will be past the first draft.
That’s paywalled but the abstract is talking about stock market pricing, not the health of the company. Lower equity would make intuitive sense if workers have better compensation, but that doesn’t mean the business is less competitive or likely to survive.
Do you have trouble putting work down if it's unfinished?
Yes. We seem to be going full-speed ahead towards relying on computer systems subject to, essentially, social engineering attacks. It brings a tear of joy to the 2600-reading teenaged cyberpunk still bouncing around somewhere in my psyche.
I really hate gotcha videos like that, but I'm sure it was effective. So will they now move into the skimpy, ill-proportioned bathing suit era? Sexuality will always express itself somehow.
Same. At this point I've resolved I'm never again writing in a language without static typing, unless someone's paying me to. Too much of a headache.
It could if you cut costs and increase your net worth by 20-50% over the next year. Otherwise, no, not very exciting.
Unless emptying your brain helps you forget.
Was going do the same question. And was more curious in the

>When time is critical or access is restricted, selectively extract specific data you need to kick-start your investigation

part. With full-device encryption, was expecting it would've been all or nothing.
It is not necessary for a company to be especially bad for a union to be desirable. Some workers simply like a fair bargaining arrangement and having more say in their workplace.

I don't have any insider knowledge at Fastmail, but the fact that a labor union could get organized and come into being without any drama from the company probably indicates that the upper levels of the company respect their employees enough to not fight its creation. Seems good, imo
> there were also overflowing hospitals in 99.9% of the country

The hysteria over "overflowing hospitals" was mostly due to people not understanding the base rate of hospital occupancy, or how hospitals account for occupancy limits in general.

In reality, utilization of the medical system collapsed because people were scared to go to the hospital for routine medicine. Whether that was net positive or negative depends on how iatrogenic risks interact with the selection effects in play at the time.
I mean anything new that I'm experiencing for the first time is magic because I don't understand how it works. Perl was magic until I learned what the weird syntax meant. I've learned a little about Java over the years and so it seems less magical, but there still seems to be a lot of magic I can't comprehend.

I think the issue is that Nix is "too much new", not too much magic. Because I have familiarity with Nix, I can go to e.g. the PostgreSQL build file [0] and mostly make sense of what's going on, just like any other language I'm familiar with. Now if you give me something like a debian package, I have no idea WTF is going on. If anything goes wrong with a package installation, there isn't much I can do, except try to build outside the package manager. With Nix, I have a few options, from simply overriding the upstream repository to forking the broken module to fix whatever problems I'm having. It's also really nice to be able to be confident that what is in the Nix file is what's in my environment. As the syntax and libraries became more familiar, so did my confidence using Nix. That's pretty much how it works with most things, I think.

[0]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/203ecda835bcf69633df71...
The Rök Runestone
Reminder to iPhone users that five fast presses of the side button will pop up the emergency calling page; it will also lock your phone in a way that requires your passcode to unlock even if you use biometrics.
The BBC article on the subject mentioned somewhere around £100M of legal fees that were incurred in this case, so the damages are just the tip of the iceberg of what the newspaper company is on the hook for.

The UK legal system damage calculation actually requires some justification of the damages sustained by the claimant.
Most tech these days is designed to learn without trying, so I can see where the expectation would come from.

Learn is maybe the wrong word, it's more like "Become familiar", it's such a different experience from trying to learn guitar or drawing or dance or anything in real life that actually requires practice and isn't just mostly the same concepts you already know with different function names
Between all the ai generated nudity, furry stuff, a general onslaught of erect penises, educational twerking, cartoons with subjects of questionable age (tagged with 18+ of course), there was some tasteful nude art to be found.

Impossible for twitch to moderate this though. Guess we're back to regularly scheduled bikini pool, stretching and ASMR streams with onlyfans and pornhub links.
“Stereotyped gender roles begin in childhood. Girls learn they are not equal to boys and cannot resist mistreatment and abuse, and that they should feel shame if they become targets of abuse by men, whether in the home or in public spaces”

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/21/submission-rights-women-...

My own time there was limited but I watched music and dance performances comprised almost entirely of young girls. In contrast, I saw tons of people in military uniform or in training, clearly of widely varying ages, but 100% male. If “gender disparity in education” is as shallow as, do girls and boys both learn algebra, then the answer is probably no. But I observed what looked like complete brainwashing of expected gender roles and your future contribution to society, starting at a very young age.

Regarding fertility rate there, I never trust any specific numbers they publish like the 1.8 mentioned. Literally 1 person there has control over what stats the rest of the world sees, balancing his imagination/vision with what the rest of the world will actually believe.
Sure you can, it's just less efficient so you get less done.
I'm not dying on any hill or refuting anything. The point is the title is fine, could be mildly improved, though isn't outright incorrect, and that this entire conversation has been a waste of all of our time. Haha.

If I'm talking to a person, and then they just start repeating a nonsense sound no matter what I say to them, is it really inaccurate to say communication has stopped, especially when it's immediately followed up with by saying communication has broken down and explained further? No, not really. Certainly isn't wrong enough to have this long, fruitless discussion that I feel embarassed I participated in.
Should murder be a pro-choice thing?

If you, based on your values, see something as tantamount to murder, why would you let people decide if they can take a life or not

You're thinking on this is stuck in your own belief system. Try empathizing

I'm pro-meta-choice fwiw and if that is not clear to you
Yeah, not a fan of Harris' videos at all. He defines journalism...differently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dum0bqWfiGw
Cars are the ones hitting bicycles, I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here about what the statistics show.
I do think there's a power to the readability that makes it more approachable (but which eventually burns you). We were rewriting our AST at Kurtosis last year, and the default choice we were going to go with was of course YAML. But we came across a Github issue from DroneCI (who also started with YAML) that said something like, "we started with YAML, and we learned that you always eventually want to add more complex lotic on top. Go with a Turing-complete language to begin with, else you'll be in the CircleCI trap inventing a language via YAML DSL."

We decided to go with Starlark as the base language for our DSL, and we've had a consistently great experience. Users report that it's very approachable, and the starlark-go library is very pleaeant to deal with.
I imagined there would be more RBG