skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What an odd perspective. Personally, I find hearing about awful people, injustices and atrocities, etc. to be highly de-motivating. I want to save a world less when I plunge deep into a well of knowledge about the people that don't deserve to be saved.

And vice-versa, when I learn about uplifting things — selfless people doing things to help others, people striving to invent new technologies and medicines that keep our world going one more day, preventing us from tipping over into some apocalypse or another — I find myself more motivated to help others as well, because I can imagine that I am helping those good people. And also, I don't have to imagine — those people are on my side! If I have a goal for positive change related to one of these issues, news about progress with those issues tells me that I wouldn't be alone in solving these problems; that there will be people there to work with, people to ally with and collaborate with, people that massively increase the chance of changing the world!

Besides the motivational angle, though: "the world is burning" news is basically information-free. For almost all adults who haven't been living in a cave, such news causes no Bayesian update. Growing up, you learn about a few of the worst atrocities ever committed — the dictators, the serial killers, etc. Once you know these, you can derive the pattern of thinking behind them, an understanding of the base impulses of humanity at its darkest. You don't need constant new examples of the pattern to remind you that it continues to happen. You can assume that it continues to happen. (If you know this and you still feel obsessively compelled to expose yourself to such information — well, there's a name for that.)

Whereas, "good news" is frequently useful news. A new medicine? You or a family member might live longer taking it! Solar panels are cheaper now? Hey, maybe you can afford them yourself now! There's currently a big grassroots push to treat tuberculosis in developing nations? Sounds like something still small enough that a retweet could actually help it happen! And also sounds like you should slightly update in favor of those nations becoming more developed and being a place you should take a vacation to one day!
You want to avoid reloading data all the time, but you can't because of aliasing
I read HN almost everyday and when there isn't much interesting topics (to me) I generally start browsing the same day in past years (e.g. I would be browsing 26th of December 2022 then 2021 and so on).

Once you get few years back most links start breaking due to various reasons (websites being online, deleting the content, changes in url structure etc).

I always thought it was sad, especially when I could see vibrant discussions to topics I care for.
There are also entitlements you still can’t use and a 3 app limit with a free account, at the very least.
The point of life is not to have a job. Although exactly what the point is after that is a religious question and hotly contested. Although uncomfortable in the short term, there is simply no point people doing work that could be profitably automated. There is great benefit to be had from abundance.

So far pretty much all the economic upside has gone to the masses. The wealthy have much higher nominal wealth and no way to use it for themselves that hasn't existed in all of history. In fact, the lack of modern pyramids like what was built in Egypt suggests they're using resources even more consistently for the common good instead of monumental waste (heh).
IIRC it was a relic of their background as a hardware manufacturer — if everyone was off for a week at the same time, they could shut down entire lines, thus saving on the baseline costs of running their manufacturing processes.
1) I enjoy figuring out how HN works over time by noticing certain patterns. Still haven't figured out (please don't spoil) why I can't downvote certain comments in threads where I see both arrows on other comments. HN feels like games in the past - you're given some docs but over time you'd go "ooooh" about something undocumented. Good stuff.

2) voting system works well for just users but HN is infested with corporate voting manipulation. It seems that an entity monitoring eg. brand's name is able to use just a few 501+ karma accounts to bury, or a few more to strongly boost, any post

3) based on what I learned about posts' scores (more than a grain of salt - as I mentioned - I'm still figuring things out) it seems a little out of place that sometimes a few hours-old posts (not as old to qualify for the "second chance" thing) with barely any comments and points are positioned higher on the top page than younger posts with more activity (higher score and more comments). I've noticed it more than once with substack and my assumption is that HN may be boosting YC-backed products
Are there any browser extensions that provide a user tag feature, similar to Reddit Enhancement Suite?

There are so many notable tech people on HN, it would be useful to be able to recognize their posts and comments.
Why would you want that?

In decades of programming in very varied environments I have never compiled any software project otherwise than by using globbing, so that I have never needed to waste time to write the name of any source file in a Makefile.

I have never seen any reason to do otherwise.

For instance, using special compilation flags for a certain source file, different from the others, is something that I consider a mistake. Whichever is the goal, it certainly can be achieved by other means (e.g. pragmas or attributes).

Moreover, the dependencies for any file must always be generated automatically, they must never be written explicitly, which removes the main reason why in bad Makefiles the names of the source files are written individually.
... And what's untrue about it?

I have tasted development on Smalltalk, with Common Lisp on modern tools, and even with Symbolics Genera 8.3/8.5. The kind of environment they provide pretty much by default an environment that at best you're going to have to bring with yourself in case of JS - in case of modern Lisp, it's usually a matter of installing an IDE plugin first though, but commercial stuff comes with IDEs as well.

The best of "built in" support for JS in browsers pales in comparison to what was one mouse click away under Genera. Similarly most desktop/server environments except niche ones (Erlang ones? modern Lisps, Smalltalks). Even the better parts of less capable language tooling is often overlooked (advanced debugger support in things like Visual Studio, etc.)

That paragraph is nowhere near ridiculous to anyone who actually used the tools, even if they agree with the dissenting voice about NT with (D)COM that was written on symbolics lisp user groups ~1995 - because the process described there is also now often disregarded unless one develops exclusively for Windows.
I subscribe to Reasons to be Cheerful [1]. I like it alright.

1. https://reasonstobecheerful.world/
My township recently sold my local sewer line to a private company, after privatizing my water line to the same company. Interestingly, there was a major scandal a few years ago where the private company had allowed grey water to mix with the fresh water running to everybody's tap, and a few people got sick. There seemed to be a major public outcry but the company did not pay a price for the error, and were rewarded with the sewer business. As someone who maintains a SaaS business, this seemed unforgivable to me, the equivalent of my company failing in their one job, to keep the servers online. At the same time, my water bill has just about doubled, and my sewer bill has now gone to be around three times. I now pay 4.5 times what I did at my old residence with public utilities, for the exact same service. Is everybody on the take?
Faceting is a deceptively hard problem to solve because it requires understanding the features of the products within the categories of products within the ecosystem of products a seller is selling, and dividing them up based on how a customer is likely to be thinking about the products. If you're selling clothing, the customer is likely going to mean something different with the word "long" than they would mean if they were searching for foods. Within different categories of clothing the word "long" is going to mean different things.
You don't need them, but they do make things easier for a lot of people. With Android, at least, you can do plenty from the command line if that's your jam.
I was going to ask if you had time to look at Crystal since you are using GO and wrote about not using any scripting language but I guess you dont :)
Consoles ship at a hardware loss, iPhones don't. The business comparison has always been a tough stretch, and the functional comparison of an iPhone to an Xbox/Keurig/dishwasher has always been absurd. Apple's service revenue channel is unprecedented, and so far unchallenged. In cases like Apple Music and the App Store, it is unquestionably at-odds with fair competition. Now, countries like Europe and Japan are using their markets as collateral at the negotiation table. Seems fair to me, given that Apple and Google are comfortable treating their userbases the same way.
Yes, certainly, using better connectors would head off overheating problems. That's not free. Something else that isn't free is extra copper in the wire harnesses from the PSU.

Meanwhile, it's true that point-of-load regulation from 48V directly to 1V will be less efficient (well, maybe; see nimish's link below). But by the same token, regulation in the PSU would be more efficient if it didn't have to go all the way down from 150-300 VDC on the primary side down to 12 at the output.

A good compromise would probably be the geometric mean between a few hundred volts and the voltage at the load with the highest current. Assuming 250 volts on the primary as a compromise between 120/240VAC operation and 1V all the way downstream, that would be about 16 volts. Doesn't seem like a big improvement, but it would be enough to lower the current at the GPU input connector by about 1.8x compared to 12 volts.

Either way, sticking with 12 volts in any new standard is just stupid. 48 has another advantage, which is that automotive is going to (finally) start moving to it over the next few years. There could be a lot of room for parts-sharing between the two industries.
You can and correct Google won’t review it - that’s why Android shows a warning when you enable sideloading about only using APKs from trusted sources (to my recollection).

Those alternative channels typically provide a tiny percentage of active installs compared to Google Play installs, however.
When did Hacker News start applying topcolor to the YC logo? I just noticed it today but am curious if it’s been there for awhile.
Fwiw I meant "made in Europe" (as opposed as models of Europe)
Disappointing response. Don’t make generalizations or confuse explorative questions for broad naïveté.

The issue I take with your approach here is that you’re focused on making the other person feel wrong, on the wrong path and assuming they know nothing (implied: idiot) rather than exploring ideas and solutions to novel problems.

That’s a common pattern in the world (ad hominem), but it doesn’t do much in innovation circles or have much of a place in early stage innovation practice.

I have a fair amount of experience in ag, and ag insurance, but not predator collars.

I’m cool with being downvoted for having an unpopular idea but please be more conscious: not everyone would speak up to your behavior and it’s quite unnecessary. Try to attack what’s wrong with the idea not the person.

You are literally on here telling me that my ideas will never work. It’s a lot cliché and not just a little bit hilarious. Don’t do it. Haha.*

I’m ok being dumb when exploring ideas, and that’s actually ok. Or it should be. At least on HN.
> Notebooks are still a great way to preserve the little details of "what the hell was I thinking?"

Here here. WWIT (what was I thinking) is so valuable. I'm spending much more time now writing notes that provide context in addition to a bare description of what I did. I hate it when I look at old notes, have a million questions, and curse myself for not writing more.

Also, thank you for making the point about the US patent system. I recall somewhere around 1990, where people silently didn't bother to issue notebooks for me to record ideas (i.e. inventions) in favor of electronic disclosure forms.
Wouldn't all these useless build artifacts be outside the .git folders?
My impression was that he was also a consultant, and that BCC was more of a demopiece than a product. His A/B testing framework abingo, for example, used BCC as a concrete application of the tool. It's something you can show to potential clients that they can easily understand, successful enough that it actually got traffic and believable results, and low key enough to let sit on the back burner.

This is typical of consultancies: the "typical" equation is 30 percent of a year is spent working for clients, 30 percent finding new business, and 30 percent skill building. Product building, done cleverly, does both skill building and advertise your consultancy. 37signals did the same thing and we got basecamp as a result.

Anyways, the attention he gets is from writing a lot, responding to comments on HN and having useful quantified insights from an unusual engineering-marketing combo. People pay attention because he is persuasive, not because he is the next Steve Jobs.
My point is that the non-profit on OpenAI's operating model is just a tag. And the reasons for why this is the case is clear to anyone with 5 minutes of time to research about the company's self described "capped-profit" investment structure.
Oracle doesn't sue for fun and Canonical isn't exactly a massively successful company financially speaking. However one day it will want something from Canonical and that is the day the lawyers will come out. Possibly once there's IPO money in it's coffers to go after.
Thank you for compiling this list. I have been using the site since 2007 and had never looked into the classic page (assumed it was an old stylesheet or something similar). Also had no idea about some of those special URLs such as noobcomments.

If a user has 31 Karma, they can also vouch for a [dead] submission/comment. A vouched submission/comment has its rank restored (and potentially improved as the vouch can counteract the effects of flags).

Is this consistent? I recently vouched for something on the New page and it wasn't restored.

One other thing I would like to ask: I currently bookmark about 20 users whose comments I find especially insightful across a wide range of subject matter expertise. Is there another way/better way to do this?
It has had artificial scarcity introduced to provide an incentive to create it. It's certainly an imperfect system in many ways, but it kinda sort does create scarcity that drives revenue which pays programmers to keep working on the software.
Neat device!

I don’t see any obvious answer for this, but how often does it query / refresh the image URL?

I’m thinking of writing some script to just push an updated image to something like https://example.com/dashboard.png every 15 minutes or so.
That's the same thing for Google indeed, they are getting paid by the search ads so they don't care of the quality of what's below those.

As long as the market share is that high, there's no reason to improve anything.
To be honest this is a unique type of moderation I haven't seen elsewhere. The site owner (or head-moderator?) himself publicly engaging with and spending time and effort on a disbehaving commenter puts a different spin on things when you are on the receiving end. I mean this is very effective, for persuading both the commenter and the bystanders witnessing the situation to behave accordingly to the site guidelines.
My group was trying to hire a person. My boss had already talked to him and I was the final interview. As I interviewed this person I began to realize that he was talking about doing things we did not do or had no real plans to do. I realized my boss had been "embellishing" the job. I felt obliged to correct his thinking.

I cannot count how many times I have see this happen. Employers flat out lying about their jobs in order to get an employee. They usually have an issue with hiring because they will not pay the going rate so they try entice engineers saying they have projects that are really interesting. Then when you get in the door - "priorities" mysteriously change.
I'll add more activities, I wanted to collect feedback before spending too much time on it
Another interesting and challenging project: design and implement a file system. I only assume it is interesting and challenging, having not done it myself.
It’s not just the plugins, the editor experience (toolbars, menus, layout) is too kludgy to be useful.
Sometimes a Little Bullshit Is Fine: A Conversation with Charles Simic
https://www.princeton.edu/~minjie/files/jaeil_apec20_paper.p...
People are waaaay ahead of you. The 48V -> 12V -> ~1V is apparently less efficient than a 48V -> 1V even with the really high step down ratio.
Happy to hear it, will do!
> Was it colonialism when all the jewish populations of Arab countries were forced into exile after the partition?

I'm not sure. Just reading it now, it looks like Palestine was cut in half, and half got given to the Jews. Was my reading incorrect? How should I tie that action to colonialism?
As an update, here's that writeup with screenshots and conversation examples in case it helps: https://liza.io/creating-a-writing-assistant-with-chatgpt-pl...
As painful as what you have described may seem, it is the correct path.

Workarounds are fine as long as what you’re working around is documented and the business is aware.

Without at least trying to raise the issue, you are being “that guy”.
People have to die of something. Just make sure you don't expect all-cause death rate to drop to 0. Bodies decay.
Yup. About $20 USD where I grew up, with several archery ranges at public parks. I’d probably spring $20 for a few more niceties.
> There’s your answer - having a monopoly is not problem, abusing it is.

But tying (e.g. of an app store to a platform) is classic monopoly abuse.
My custom built desktop that runs Linux/Windows is going on 24 years old. I don't think 10 year old electronics are anything worth writing home about.

Apple also writes horrible software and breaks perfectly fine APIs with every OS release to eventually force you into hardware upgrades.
> I’m sure this is an oversimplification of a complex ecosystem-wide impact, but my understanding is that the effect is mostly that it forces deer and elk to stay on the move, making it easier for certain types of plants and trees to survive.

After most of the wolves were wiped out we discovered the concept of keystone predators [1] that keep other predators and herbivores in check so that they don't go through catastrophic boom and bust cycles. Part of that is moving them around more but also just plain population control.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species#The_wolf,_Yel...
An air fryer. I was a skeptic, thinking that an air fryer is unlikely to outperform my conventional convection oven in any meaningful way.

When my pressure cooker died, I replaced it with a multi-purpose machine that also included air frying capabilities, and I gave it a try. I was pleased to discover that my prior skepticism was misplaced. It's not perfect for everything, but it heats up fast, and it really shines in a few areas (e.g., making fries, reheating fries/pizza, cooking seasoned chicken, etc).
I wish. I had an issue where I accidentally passed a double literal instead of a float literal and the error was longer than my terminal history (so more than 10k lines) and even when I actually got the full message by piping it into less it didn't point at the correct line. (Clang did though so clangd could spot it)
Google knows that they just have to make it inconvenient enough that 99% of people won’t do it (or really even know it’s an option). So yes, if you squint really hard you can kind of make it look like Google is a good guy here. But if we’re talking about how it actually pans out in reality, Google is no better than Apple.
The author should mention the automatic variables: https://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/make_10.html#SEC94

Specifically, in one of the examples, to list all dependencies as the input to `cc`, you can write `$^` instead of `$(OBJS)`.
Thanks for commenting David! I’m based in CO too and appreciate your insight.
> I don't see the Murdochs on the list though, what's up with that?

Rupert Murdoch was an Australian citizen until 1985, after which he gave it up and acquired American citizenship.
They do the opposite thing: they're extra hands-off with YC-backed things, and quicker to turn off flags on stories critical of YC-backed things.

I don't see much evidence of voting manipulation (and a lot of evidence of HN being hair-trigger about suppressing vote manipulation).
It will refresh within a minute or two of you pushing the updated version.
> To what extent is the US subsidizing the low cost other countries like to brag about?

None whatsoever. It's preposterous to even consider it in a serious manner.
Yea, I mean who even has a 401K?
It may not even be official corporate manipulation. HN is frequented by a lot of industry insiders, and if they see something that doesn't resonate with what they know to be true they'll downvote.
TIL!

Since these pdfs end up in whatever and how old devices, I'd rather not risk it though.
Did archery technology precipitate complexity in the Titicaca Basin?
Huh, surprised by this because the Hue app runs great for me, don’t think I’ve ever seen it lag as a daily user for a couple years. Honestly kind of blown away but how well it (and the Hue platform as a whole) works coming from a company that I don’t usually associate with tech.

Goes to show that experience doesn’t always generalize, and I’m curious what’s different in our cases to cause that (since I’m also using on a iPhone 14 Pro).
yep, lack of disposable income is why poor people practically never buy drugs. See, the money supply is too tight and they cant borrow, they dont earn anything, so they simply can't pay for drugs or alcohol. This is why low-income segment has the lowest substance abuse percentages ever. /s
That much is obvious given that a vanilla phone setup has no trouble with even 90-character lines. Not my business to stop anyone making things hard on themselves, though, so good luck you all!

(do we have anyone who reads HN over a morse clacker?)
Show HN: DIY video magnifier with readout support based on Raspberry Pi
Hi, I've just updated the code and instructions for my homemade video magnifier and hope it's useful for someone out there. It uses a Raspberry Pi and Pi camera to magnify what's under the camera (in predefined scaling steps), supports colour inversion and can also read out text using Tesseract OCR and Pico TTS. The housing is up to you, with examples ranging from simply mounting the device on a lamp or a board up to 3d printed cases.

I started this project years ago for my grandmother who needed a video magnifier due to her macular degeneration, and still come back to it from time to time. The new Raspberry Pi OS and v3 camera needed some extra work, so happy to share this update.

Please let me know if you end up building / using it or have any suggestions.
"Bootleggers and Baptists"[1] suggests it can be both -- Intuit is definitely not lobbying to make it easier. One wonders if Intuit makes donations to Americans for Tax Reform, but probably Nordquist is the more influential of the pair.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists