skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh boy...

Here's a good one: the FAA categorically prevents any pilots from taking any psychiatric medication (minor caveats but the point holds in practice), in particular for depression, anxiety, and ADHD, all of which are extremely common in the airlines. As such, everyone just hides their diagnosis and waits until they snap because the alternative is permanently losing a job they took out hundreds of thousands in loans to get. Others pay out of pocket for treatment under false names so the FAA is currently trying to hunt them down.

Before anyone says the usual stuff about not wanting their pilots on meds, the medications are safe to fly on and much safer than the alternative, the FAA just hasn't updated their psych guidelines since Freud was the standard because any change would open whichever bureaucrat up to being hauled in front of Congress for the next accident regardless of culpability. Additionally the medication standards are also inherited from ICAO so even if we wanted to change, we'd need to convince the likes of China and the Saudis (both major stakeholders) that they can come out from the rock they live under and accept modern psychological science.
> Don’t do that. China built its first AP1000s in 9 years, including waiting approximately half that time for a coolant pump. We take about that long to NEPA a transmission line. The problem is very obviously permitting.

Yeah, because China is what we want to emulate. Of course, if it paints nuclear power in a positive light you gotta do what you gotta do.

> No, you can’t, because they aren’t being built to actually last that long. Nukes are.

Which means you do not understand economics 101, while still trying to justify something that goes against it.

They are built for a certain lifespan because that is what investors find are the optimal between construction cost and payback time. It is trivial to engineer renewable a plant to last 40 or 60 years. The construction cost would of course not double or triple to achieve this.

Thus we aim for 20 years, because that is the current optimum.

> You’re confusing technological progress with the time value of money.

Technological progress, means risk, because your solution might become obsolete and a stranded asset before it pays back the investment.

Technological progress is the time value of money. The same as political progress. Imagine you construct a factory in eastern Ukraine in 2005. What is the risk of Russia invading?

This is why the time value of money is an exponential factor, the longer out you go the larger the profit must be because the risk increases exponentially.
In contrast with Thailand, where a surprising number of their leading movie and TV actors (and actresses... have we fully retired that word yet?) are biracial. My extended family in Bangkok keep complimenting my three half-Thai kids on the bridges of their noses being high enough to keep designer sunglasses up off of their cheek bones. (Edit: at first, I was confused about "big nose" being a compliment. Most Western fashion brands don't account for/have special models for East Asians typically having higher cheek bones and smaller noses, resulting in sunglasses that never quite fit and hover above the nose.)

I think part of it is economic, but I like to think a good part of it is that Thailand has been a meeting ground for centuries. First, it was a meeting place between Chinese and Middle Eastern merchants, and later Europeans when they started to cut out the Middle Eastern middlemen. Still later, Thailand was a neutral buffer state between British (Burma/Myanmar) and French (Vietnam) empires. Neither Britain nor France attempted to take over the buffer state, as it would have caused the other empire to immediately invade. Thailand was never strong enough to have full control over its affairs, but managed to turn that into its niche as a neutral middle ground.
If someone has the evidence, that would be great. Your comments seem so dismissive and determined that it's hard to take them at face value. Do you work in the industry?
A lot of the reason depends upon what you hope to get from the labour and the overall environment that you are working within.

I was working with a 486 around 1995. Compiling your own software was the norm and compiling your own kernel could have significant performance benefits (even if it was just to conserve the limited memory supported by machines of the day, to head off some of the swapping). By the time I learned of Gentoo, that was not really the case: most of the software one could obtain was provided in binary form and compiler optimizations were much less relevant (unless you had a special workload).

The tooling provided is important too. I was using NetBSD for a while. For the most part you just started the compilation process and walked away until it was done. (I imagine Portage is similar.) You didn't get the instant gratification, but it was not time intensive in the sense that you had to attend to the process. That was very much unlike my earlier experiences in compiling software for Linux, stuff that isn't in the repos, since it did have to be attended to.
Good point. I failed to qualify what I meant by freedom of expression, and made a meaningless claim regardless. Despite the US Constitution's relatively broad speech protections (e.g. don't criminalize hate speech, and allow truth as a defense to defamation claims), US governments don't always respect freedom of expression (e.g. KOSA would force social media companies to moderate more aggressively to "protect kids") or respect press freedom (e.g. police pepper spray journalists at protests). Even so, I think Congress wouldn't have bothered to codify fair use if the First Amendment weren't as broad as it is.

I replace the following sentence from my previous comment:

> Most other countries don't have freedom of expression and freedom of the press, so copyright law in a different country usually lacks a unifying exception test like fair use to supplement the specific enumerated exceptions.

with the following:

Copyright law in most countries usually lacks a unifying exception test like fair use to supplement the specific enumerated exceptions in each respective country.

The rest of my previous comment remains the same.
My family uses Apple's keypass for everything password. Is there an easy way to get passwords working like Safari?

I currently do Search Passwords, Search website, Copy password, Paste in Firefox manually.
There is no need for fossil backup. Renewables can scale to 100% and will work fine (and probably cheaper than nuclear) in a post-fossil world.
I use 2 4K monitors, often with one connected to work computer and one connected to personal computer.

When I'm not working I sometimes connect the work computer display to a Chromecast or as a 2nd monitor to personal computer.

Work computer is much shittier than personal computer and doesn't support 2 monitors.
The Silicon Valley billionaires and their plans will soon be extinguished by Reality. American hegemony is quickly dissolving as its capacity to wage war and its currency dominance both circle the drain.

Just as the realities in Ukraine, Israel, and Saudi Arabia have become too big to mask. The complete Western Reality can be circumnarrated until it can’t.
Now that's a take I've never heard before. It'd be interesting to have an opt-in for sharing your medical history with entities, but there is no way in hell I'd be sharing information that is so easily weaponized against me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Couney
Possibly mistaken but from what I understand 2023 was the last year of Strange Loop - I was hoping to attend 2024’s
I'll switch to Firefox when they get proper vertical tabs like Edge's. I know Microsoft Edge has a really bad reputation, but damn it I can't live without its vertical tabs, and I can disable most of the idiotic AI crap. I know there are plugins, but they all feel quite hacky and are simply not as good.
Firefox is the web browser equivalent a dying language. It will be a tragic loss for the culture of the web for Firefox to fade away. But, there are powerful macro forces pushing us to that outcome. "Switch, please," calls to action are a noble but insufficient countermeasure.
No. It should be the default. And I bet it only refers to notifications, not to other applications stealing focus (as in bring themselves to the foreground) from the one you're into because they think they're damn important.
More towards the advanced side I'd recommend Fred Hebert's Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir - https://pragprog.com/titles/fhproper/property-based-testing-...

It's also one of the best resources I've come across on property-based testing and is something I recommend to non-Erlang/Elixir programmers as well.
I've been a Kagi user since the early days, and it is one of my must-haves. It's the only engine I've used that doesn't flood me with SEO trash, allows me to ban Pinterest forever, and has working exclusion operators.
Yeah, I actually switched from Firefox to Safari this month. I didn't know Safari had tab groups, the feature I missed from Chrome when using Firefox. No speed differences and Safari has less of a battery impact so far.

Hard to complain about a browser that still cares about privacy, but with tighter OS integration.
WTF does religion have to do with this? I have no idea what you're trying to say.
Swags: Sampling Windows Adaptively for Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting
does that apply to installations from apt?
> impossible to draw any conclusion from a successful big project abroad

Wait, we can draw conclusions from France building a different reactor (but only its latest ones, which were most expensive) but not from China building an AP1000?
Main purpose for salt was good preservation. That's why it was extremely valuable.
How are the Firefox dev tools these days? I feel like every time I try to switch, the dev tooling has felt subpar compared to Chrome, and I don't like using one browser for regular use and one for development. It's been a couple years since I tried though.
Spacetime Gaussian Feature Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic View Synthesis
While I'm here, does anyone know of a good trustworthy RAT for Windows machines that I can control from my Linux box? I have some relatives for whom I provide technical support. I'd love to just put an EXE on their desktop that would launch a VNC session and connect back to me (since they have the typical NAT + firewall of home users), but I don't want to install a virus on their machines.
> An open source Spotify would immediately pop up that would only charge you enough to cover hosting. What commercial enterprise do you think could compete with that long-term?

What you are describing is a commercial enterprise.
Comparing "typical" vs "ideal" is always going to tip in the direction of the "ideal" case.

There are plenty of companies, SaaS or otherwise, in which a single "whale" customer makes up so much revenue that losing them would instantly make the company unprofitable. Similarly there are plenty of employees who can handle being fired perfectly well, financially speaking.
It does not. Those binaries are signed by your distribution and the same for everyone.
> Much of the 90s experience lives on in FPC/Lazarus, but it did not get much better after that, and few use it. I wish they aligned themselves with a more popular language like Rust or Go for a more cohesive experience

A very core aspect of LCL and how Lazarus works (and VCL/Delphi for that matter) is language features like metaclasses, RTTI, properties, etc which allow the framework to register classes, instantiate them at runtime and inspect the class definitions so that serialization/deserialization and IDE features like the object inspector will work. AFAIK neither Go nor Rust have this.

The only language off the top of my head that has it is C# (which isn't surprising considering both Delphi's dialect of Object Pascal and C# were designed by the same person).

Of course there can be language extensions like C++ Builder did for C++ but they'd need to maintain their own compiler (or fork).

Personally i get the impression that Visual Basic and Delphi's language features were added in tandem with the underlying framework (if not deciding first how the framework and IDE features will look like and then deciding on the language features to support those) whereas modern UI stuff are made with whatever the target language has in place.
Ask HN: What is your new year's resolution for 2024?
More vices? Less vices?

Start something? End something?

Looking forward to hearing what the HN community is resolved to do in 2024 :)
Developer tries to tell a story...

Sounds like OP interviewed the person who uploaded the code, whose system was previously inflitrated (it can still be the NSA). So why say "If the guy who did it wants to come forward, that is his decision. But he did provide me the full story", it doesn't sound like OP interviewed the "guy who did it"...
It is possible (especially if you have access to tritium for boosting), it's just more difficult.

Japan's reactor grade Pu stockpile, ostensibly for a now-cancelled fast reactor program, is likely there as deniable insurance in case the US withdraws the nuclear umbrella.
I think in Google's favor, their service is so utterly dominant[0] as a search engine that when someone asks you to google something they have a high expectation that it will be done on Google. As opposed to someone asking you to hoover up a mess but they don't really form an internal model of which vacuum cleaner you'll use, or asking to "borrow" a kleenex with no concern as to which brand of tissue you give them.

So even though you personally use DDG, surely there are still vastly more searches on Google than on all other search engines combined so there's no immediate danger of dilution.

I do have a question though for people familiar with trademark law. Why can't they just do away with the trademark dilution rule? So what if I want to go "rollerblading" on pair of K2s [1]? Why should Rollerblade be at risk of losing their trademark? Who is being served by this rule? It just seems to incentivize litigious behavior.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share (note that they easily beat all other search engines combined

[1] https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health-products/g46167391/b... (Good Housekeeping has no problem genericizing rollerblade all throughout this article. Perhaps unlike Velcro, Nordica is ok with this?)
A CTO can't have friends in their department?
I am going to pretend I didn’t see this =‘(
I am all for visas post education, to give a chance. But they should be separate from work visas so they can be tweaked separately.
I'd say knowingly trying to claim an attack that did not happen is --not a false flag-- but certainly a govt conspiring to deceive "the people".

Not sure what's worse.

And see the result: how many dead Viets? I recently heard a US TV anchor say "all civilian deaths since WW2" (they meant to say "US civ deaths").

The Iraqi WMDs were a similar hoax to get "involved". I never trust a word 3 letter agencies again: professional lairs with zero accountability.
> There are no such things as “serving spoons” — any spoon is a serving spoon if you serve something with it.

> There are no such things as “desert spoons” — any spoon is a desert spoon if you eat desert with it.

That's not how that works. Eating a dessert is not what makes a dessert spoon what it is. There are multiple criteria which all go into deciding whether a spoon is a desert spoon. For example, dessert spoon cannot be bigger than a table spoon if they are sold as a set.

This isn't true for languages. There's nothing to warrant a title of "scripting" to a language. Nothing that would allow you to discern a "scripting language" from a non-scripting one. This terminology lack internal consistency. You could try to define what that means for you, and that could make the definition valid, but there isn't a shared coherent explanation for how to tell a scripting language from a non-scripting.

> If everyone understands exactly what they mean when they say “scripting language”

Well, here's where you are confused: no, nobody understands what exactly they mean when they say "scripting language". Far from it. It's similar to the situation with fruits and vegetables. Unless you know about the controversy, you might be convinced that you know very well what is a fruit or what is a vegetable, but you will find that not only there isn't a consensus on individual plants, but that there isn't even a consensus on the definition.

So, similarly, if you want to be precise, and you want to use the word "fruit", you need to consider the context in which you are using it and make sure that whoever you are talking to knows what sort of a definition you are using.

But, it's even worse with "scripting languages" because any of the definitions I know are without merit. They don't describe any useful property of a programming language. Knowing that some language is a scripting language doesn't help you understand what can it be used for or what to expect from it etc.

The unfortunate reality is that beyond various aspects of extensions of context-free language group we don't have any useful means for creating of language taxonomy. All we have is a bunch ob b/s often inspired by marketing departments of companies pushing those languages. But we crave taxonomy. It's just the one that we have is worthless...
Being publicly against same sex marriage is a business liability in San Francisco.
It isn't harmful to people collecting rent for those Airbnbs. Or service workers who can demand higher salaries. Or local business that see increased sales. Or the government itself that can collect taxes on all of it.

A large amount of foreign income being spent in a local economy may cause temporary disruptions to the status quo but is overall a good thing. It shouldn't really be a surprise that governments worldwide are encouraging it.
The time I "wasted" with Gentoo in 2005 taught me enough about how Linux works to land me my first real IT job. I will forever be grateful to that distribution.
If it weren’t for the unique to Firefox audio/video sync problem, I would.
> wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along

I was claiming that before the invasion. Because it was. 100% for certain? Of course not. As knowable as anything like that is? Yeah.

That the guys who said a couple years earlier we should take any excuse to get rid of Saddam, who were already lying about a popular war (which I was also against, incidentally, for the practical reason that it was gonna be incredibly expensive, far outstripping any benefit, and wouldn’t result in a stable democracy in Afghanistan as the admin claimed it would—go figure) and funneling money their own direction all over the place, might be lying to get their excuse, and more opportunities to loot on a grand scale… yeah, far and away the most likely explanation, and their thin evidence was mostly laughable (I think I may literally have laughed at parts of Powell’s presentation, which was the point at which I gave up hope they had any real evidence)

For fuck’s absolute sake, a bunch of these chucklefucks running the show were Iran-Contra alums! Just… wild gestures of exasperation

Yes. IT WAS OBVIOUS.

And yeah, next time the same thing will happen. That’s just how we operate. We go to war on pretty weak lies every so often. All Iraq did (for me) was hammer home that that hadn’t changed (for some reason I supposed it had?) and, so, probably won’t. That anyone’s still treating that situation as oh so muddy and hard to read just confirms that. We’ll do it again.
You are right - I am building a mental model along these lines:

a) compounds which induce a chemical reaction inside cells and as a result cause damage. Benzene, PFAS, phtalates, BPA etc are in this category. Size is less relevant but usually these are smaller and more reactive molecules.

b) small particulates, which are still probably much larger than those in group a). Thinking here microplastics, asbestos, PM10. These particulates are not necessarily super reactive with our cells, but they can cause problems through physical accumulation(?). So the question is: does the size of microplastic particles matter? Ie if I get 1K of 100 micron microplastic particles vs. 1K of 1 micron - does that alter my health risk?
It offers more customization than Arch and the like, and it allows you to fix bugs you might find annoying more quickly than maintainers might. This is in addition to some nebulous performance gains from optimizing the builds you compile yourself.

The problem has always been that while you had all this choice, the one choice you didn't have was to just use regular old binary packages for the things you didn't have to customize. This complaint has finally culminated in TFA.
Here you go [1], [2]. It's not completely ready yet - but it's usable. It should be OK if you plan to just modify or reuse parts of it. It currently supports btrfs backend. Plain directory backend and packaging of the tool are not done yet - but shouldn't be too hard. I was keeping it for tomorrow. Meanwhile, you can use asciidoctor to convert the docs if you need to refer it.

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~gokuldas/genpac

[2] https://crates.io/crates/genpac
I guess the term "sandbox" can become overloaded. I'm not thinking of OS processes as sandboxes in this context.

> However, that’s a big “if”, since most of the linux sandbox thingies take multiple seconds to spawn a process, and multiply memory usage by 10-100x.

And this is the thing I'm not willing to accept. Well, I can tolerate excessive memory consumption depending on what I'm doing, but I refuse to entertain long boot times. It's the main reason I avoid Java apps, Flatpacks, and so on.
> ChromeOS is built using Portage, Gentoo's package manager, and Gentoo-based chroots. ChromeOS uses the upstart init system.

Sounds like they are just using parts of it and not Gentoo itself.
Exactly! Same for the --benign-- roman wages in salt story. It will get ignored.
I ran Gentoo for a long time in the early 2000's. I learned nearly everything I know about Linux machines in general from that experience!

What was interesting about the USE flags was learning that a given package even HAD a particular integration with some other library / package. Realizing that the SQLite3 binary doesn't work the same when you don't have readline support linked to it lead me to understand what readline was as a whole. That happened over and over again for a lot of the "invisible" libraries that are always included on every other Linux system.

Absolutely invaluable learning tool at the right time in my life for sure.
I still have my Mom's sewing machine she bought circa 1958; it still works.
Why these homes in the hottest places don't need AC
I know we're not supposed to focus on insignificant things like naming...but I'm so confused about choices like this: Ohm has one definition, so are we to takeaway that this library provides resistance?

Or is it just someone's name?
The fusion reactions in stars are different than the ones to be used in fusion reactors (or used in bombs).
Brave’s internal ads and crypto weirdness are enough for me to be uncomfortable with it.
It was more than a personal view. He paid a lobbying campaign for a policy that is diametrically opposed to Mozilla's organisational views on diversity.

A CEO should stand for the values their organisation represents.
I use PWAs extensively and Firefox decided they won't bother to implement them, so that's going to be a no from me.

Rather than wanting the web platform to be first class, they really want it to languish as a second-class citizen. Really sad, seeing as they also fired devs, and invested in "AI" instead.