skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was so confused when I clicked this link. I saw "NERV" and knew it was related to Evangelion. But then reading the website it seems so real and legit. But then they're using the real NERV logo from Eva, even with the "God is in his heaven, all is right with the world" subtext. Which makes seem like it must be some sort of spoof. But who'd set up something like this, in light of the recent disaster, and even publish real apps.

Man... the cognitive dissonance I went through mentally bouncing back and forth for a few minutes. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that before in my life.

I'm glad all the top comments on HN are about Eva though.
For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people.

Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different.

I don't know about all the individual topics that are mentioned. I'm not an expert of blood cancer and I'm guessing the author isn't either, but ... maybe it's not that simple? The "Preclinical proof-of-concept study" from August 2023 doesn't really sound like "we've solved it, end of story" to me.

"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot, and "I looked at this for a few hours/days and I figured it all out" is classic mistake that people make. Almost everything is conceptually simple. Actually doing it tends to be harder because all those details you didn't account in the high-level overview often do matter.
You are implying the cause of illiteracy is the lack of funds. It is not so - in fact, the very worst schools often spend per pupil the same as the very best ones, or at least very close to it. Throwing money at the problem is not the solution - it would cause the worst schools spend even more and keep churning out ignoramuses. The bad schools are bad not because they can't find money to become good but because the whole system there is broken and it can't be fixed by just giving the same incompetent, ignorant and apathetic people more money to waste.
That’s the same as it costs too much.
Capabilities aren't magic, and i don't really think they make sense during the low level boot process.
The points are a sequence of integer coordinates. The points in the outside contour of the letter are stored in clockwise order, the inner holes in counter clockwise order. There is some kind of marker to indicate where each countiur starts. The points are either on curve or off curve. On curve are touching the visible line, off curve point is a control point of a three-point quadratic Bezier curve. If there are two offcurve points listed one after the other then you create an implied oncurve point halfway between them.
I have some problems with the way modern software is changing, but I don’t think it is QA related, more a race to the bottom with perpetual beginner focused UX.

But as far as the author is referencing QA is there a good measure of quality over time?

My recollection of consumer software started 30 years ago, and it was incredibly unstable. BSOD frequently, my uptime is far far better now. Save frequently, because you will probably lose your document at any moment; I still reflectively ctrl-s even though I can’t remember my last document crash.

It references the image exploit in the article, that’s bad, but I got MS Blaster simply connecting to the network.

No punting people with ping of death anymore.
It's more like the state that's this creature that engulfs everything.

Nation states have been extremely successful. Nearly every square metre of landmass on earth is claimed by one nation state or another.

Capitalism stays out of stuff just fine. Few people organise their family or friendships or their bowling club along capitalist lines.

Even companies themselves are usually structured as quasi-socialist command economies, and the market mostly only is for interaction between companies.
Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
Shareware was a common software business model back in the 1980s and 90s, though it's rare (or not called that) nowadays. Even the legendary DOOM was shareware, with the first few missions for free and the later missions available for a nominal fee (a practice not uncommon for games at the time).

In the 90s i used perhaps half a dozen pieces of shareware with any regularity but only purchased three (in no particular order):

1) TheDraw - an ANSI/ASCII art editor, which i briefly used for creating animated screens for use with dial-up BBSes.

2) 4DOS/4NT was a command.com replacement for DOS/Windows which offered features such as the command-line editing available in all modern shells.

3) DOOM, which my two housemates chipped in to help buy. We played the hell out of it, multi-player on two 486/66's connected with a serial cable.

All of the purchases arrived via snail-mail, with TheDraw and DOOM on floppy disks and 4DOS on a CD. A couple weeks after buying it, one of my housemates took the DOOM disk(s?) to his father's place and ended up infecting it with a virus.

What shareware, if any, did you purchase back in the day (and what did you use it for)?

Edit: there was a 4th: WinRCS was a Windows front-end to the RCS version control system. It didn't get much use but it was my introduction to source code control.
> human beings aren't inherently selfish

Of course they are. I am, you are, everybody is.
Some people aren't afraid of dying even after they lose loved ones. Not everyone lives in fear.
Can we do this with defense budget instead of healthcare? I don’t mind paying taxes for universal healthcare.
Unfortunately makes it harder to know that they're doing anything.

A subtle glow is the best for an indicator light.
Lives on in the form of asmtwo (lightweight, supports 1.3) and asmpro (featureful, needs v37).
People will get immune to it if they aren't already. It's already common to fake screenshots of tweets/etc. Not a real problem unless you want to beleive falsehoods, then you will anayway.
You don't limit powers of doctors to prescribe medicines just because you found an incompetent or corrupt one; you fire that one.

Governments in truly free countries must not act above their own justice, just like judges can't when picked one by one; if a corrupt judge or a corrupt politician are caught they must be fired and prosecuted the same way. Corrupt politicians work against that, and they often pass laws that limit the judicial power as a whole, which would make no difference when dealing with a corrupt judge, but would help them to avoid prosecution.

Invariably, all attempts at justifying those attempts to limit judges powers are from people who either fell for propaganda or is spreading it on purpose.
But that’s what the post was kinda trying to argue, no?
> possibly due to selective abortions

Young Families in HP tend to try to have at most 2 kids. If they get a boy in the first try, they generally won't try for another [0]. I can safely say it's a similar story in Jammu, but I can't speak for Kashmir.

Kerala (where you appear to be from) actually has a worse Sex Ratio than JK [1].

Us Northies (at least DL/PB/HR/HP/JK/CH) have roughly comparable social indicators to Kerala, despite much more social strife.

[0] - https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/low-sex-ratio-at-bi...

[1] - https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1782601
> Subject engineers to licensure

That'd be great. It can also finally define a standard for things like clean code, development cycles and and design patterns. Companies keep claiming to promote these things but it seems to be just a lot of equivocations.
I tried to start an ad campaign on X to measure the CPM's on there for various keywords, and they haven't approved my ad campaign.

You would think a company that is desperately trying to increase ad revenue wouldn't make me wait 2 months to start giving them money.
I learned to navigate primarily using cardinal directions, before handheld GPS was common. When I walk around a new city, I find it easier to look at google maps to figure out the cardinal direction I need to travel, as opposed to remembering a series of turns that are relative to each other.

That’s assuming the sun is out or a compass is available
You can’t even elect people who fix everything. There are industries relying on things not getting fixed, who can lobby.
AC can mean "sinusoidal" or it can more generally mean "any non-constant voltage [or current]." It was clear from the context that the parent meant the latter.
I used a single ~$200 REI backpack for all of high school and college. In high school I either took the bus or rode my bike to school, and college was exclusively walking. I replaced it after college because it was incredibly grubby and overkill now that I'm no longer hauling textbooks around, but I still have it and it's perfectly functional
Google used to have this build into google, directly. It’s near immediate discontinuation made me realize that google was on a downward slope of profit vs quality results.
Maybe I'm talking out of my ass but this seems to be designed for regimented JP primary school life. Rigid central compartment for books. No need to accomodate for lunch boxes or water since you get that at school. Or you clothes/shoes for sports and after school activities.
I mean a lot of us work on open source software in one form or another. I don't think FOSS is communism by any means, but it does seem somewhat adjacent in terms of values.
The US hasn't been invaded since 1942. That's what we have to show for it.
This article focuses on policy recommendations, but that's not the issue in my opinion. It's people who are comfortable with the current system for whatever reason who don't want to find radical new approaches to solving problems that's the issue.

I think Bukele in El Salvador has been a great example of changing this. Decades of murder and mayhem and having the highest murder rate in the world, and the guy makes it the safest country in Latin America in just a few years by calling B.S on the government's entire approach to criminal justice. It's one of the greatest examples of turning a country around in recent memory. We shall see if Melei can do it in Argentina with his approach to radically changing an economy that has been a basket case for decades.

In the Elon Musk biography, the power he has to so effectively build a manufacturing company is he knows enough about all the aspects of the business that he can call B.S on people in any part of the company who aren't performing. It's the ability to go into power structures that are stagnant and tear out the parts that need tearing out.
Compare https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-t...

(And also https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/)

> Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.

> Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops.

> In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!

EDIT to be more topical to the submission:

> So for example, Gurri examines some of the sloganeering where people complain about how eg obesity is the government's fault - surely the government could come up with some plan that cured obesity, and since they haven't done so, that proves they're illegitimate and don't care that obesity is killing millions of Americans. Or homelessness - that's the fault of capitalism, right? Because "we" could just give every homeless person a home, but capitalism prevents "us" from doing that. Or if you're a conservative, how come the government hasn't forced the liberal rot out of schools and made everybody pious and patriotic and family-values-having? Doesn't that mean our lack of strong values is the government's fault? The general formula is (1.) take vast social problem that has troubled humanity for millennia (2.) claim that theoretically The System could solve the problem, but in fact hasn't (3.) interpret that as "The System has caused the problem and it is entirely the system's fault" (4.) be outraged that The System is causing obesity and homelessness and postmodernism and homosexuality and yet some people still support it. How could they do that??!
Somebody's got to grow the food and build the housing.
If you think there was any risk in the Middle East invading the US after September 11th, that is an exceptionally weak position to take. No one is invading the US, it’s either terrorist attacks you can’t defend against due to the asymmetric nature or ICBMs. Making peace with that is emotionally expensive but financially cheap. America has no appetite for emotional fortitude at nation state scale. Cheaper to send economically disadvantaged enlisted to the sandbox on expensive military industrial complex chariots and have a superbowl halftime show in their honor. At least the cannon fodder is wising up if the recruitment crisis is to be believed.
Increasingly, I suspect the real value of type systems is that they force slower, "more correct" development, allowing you to "win the argument" with Management over taking the time to Do Things Right. They put a floor on code quality (albeit, IMHO, a pretty low one - you can also royally fuck up a type system) - preventing the worst excesses of rushed development.
Google deserves all the hate its getting for all the $h!t its doing.
You have a lot of faith in the bureaucrats who are supposed to dream up and enforce those rules.

There are honest and competent civil servants, of course. But they are a precious and limited resource for any society, and should only be expended on the most critical tasks.

I'd rather have those people work on important stuff (say, criminal justice), than arbitrate microwave popcorn buttons.
> extra cars are expensive so you are better off with one that does it all instead of trying to figure out those exceptional trips.

Or the town cars can be designed to take an extra battery that you can easily rent (preferably from a charging station) when needed.
Thank you for pointing me in this direction. the RK3588 seems to have what i need, now i just have to find it in a smaller form factor/just remove the ethernet port and other large connectors from it i guess.
almost zero imagination and effort helped me turn the original link

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/01/01/a-new-year-mes...

into

https://www.economist.com/business/2024/01/01/a-new-year-mes...
Our economic system controls the schedule and actions of essentially every human on the planet. When they get up in the morning. What kpis they have to meet to stay employed or bring food to the table.

It transcends nations through trade treaties and competition, trillion dollar companies have “no choice” but to lay off workers to placate “shareholders” expecting infinite growth.

And we know it is stripping the planet of its resources at a completely unsustainable rate, poisoning our very environment, some times burning the equivalent of entire forests for as simple reasons as “decentralized crypto NFT defi product scam”

Game designers know better than to make a game with a single high score, and even better than to allow players who amass the score to use it to pay for new rules.

Players know better than to continue playing a game that’s entirely and utterly broken for them.

But humans … oh well
I can’t really trust it anymore. If you don’t know what you want with outside information, you’ll be defrauded. Other retailers are not that far off on shipping so it’s only really price that’s letting them keep my custom.
I don’t think it’s fair to mark some parts of the argument “not the real world” when the argument is a whole block. The societal changes being discussed in the article are the main proposed path to a solution, not the particular cancer cure. Yes it involves some changes in the amount of profit some people will make. Yes potentially even destabilizing capitalism somewhat. These kinds of changes might not be comfortable or free of risks, but we have done similar changes in the past. Sometimes without even killing people in the process. The are definitely part of “the real world”.
Mainstream porn may be unrealistic, but that doesn't mean you can't find realistic depictions of sex.
It is adorable when a person who knows a lot about some things decides that he knows everything about all things, all problems are simple to solve, just do this and that, and the reason all problems in the world aren't solved yet is because all other people just stupid and for some stupid reason refuse to do obvious things that are so clear to this person. I guess this is where the different between a lot of knowledge and wisdom shows up.

Also, something I am wondering from the article. If socialized healthcare is the best system ever, and the only problem in curing cancer is the lack of proper incentives which the socialized healthcare provides, why the cancer is not cured yet? We have billions of people living under various fully or partially socialized healthcare systems. Any of them should have all proper incentives to cure cancer. Why China didn't do it yet? Why anybody in Europe didn't do it yet? Why Canada didn't do it yet? I mean I get it, capitalism is bad, profit is bad, profit motives are bad (even though I don't get how curing cancer wouldn't be fabulously profitable beyond anybody's wildest dreams, but let's assume that's the case). But there are a lot of countries which have socialized healthcare systems. What are those people waiting for? Or maybe curing cancer is not about finding proper incentives after all?
So much of "work" is unnecessary product cycles and reinventing the wheel: useless things for society.
Not really. The folks no one knows are the most successfully ‘non-social’, by definition no?

And by definition, the ones with fewer friends also are known by fewer people.
> Nation states have been extremely successful. Nearly every square metre of landmass on earth is claimed by one nation state or another.

Isn't that just because its an abstraction we view the world through? As an abstraction it often doesn't fully work. E.g. is taiwan a nation state? Are the parts of lebanon that have effectively been taken over by hezbolla really part of the state of lebanon if the state isn't fully in control anymore? Is belarus really an independent state or does russia have so much control that it isn't really anymore? The state abstraction makes for neat boxes but the reality on the ground in many places isn't really that clear cut.
Every major operating system has a capability model (eg SELinux or Group Policies). Mobile operating systems have had capabilities from the jump, but still get hacked.

(That being said, capabilities are great, we should use them and they do help. If you're not familiar with this pattern, look it up, it's worth knowing.)
Last one, called SaaS Starter Kit, seems to be linked to the "Next.js 14 SaaS starter kit" site.

It should be free, but says it's $300+.
Who buys those useless microwaves?

Most gadgets I ever bought were far above legally required minimum requirements. Ie those minimum requirements were not a binding constraint. Why would that suddenly change?
Tip for those who are looking at the compression ratios thinking "so what?": look at the run-times. It's a minimum of 3x faster than its contemporaries.
There are homes to where it can be done profitably, homes to where it can't.

It can probably be done profitably to every home, but it's even more profitable to do it to only the easier homes.

Collective action could make a law that only allows companies to lay fiber if they do it to every home.
For governments and infrastructure they don’t need to make a profit they can subsidise. That is somewhat the point of a government. Costs too much is still an objection but “no immediate profit” isn’t.

Whether that is true for fibre, I don’t know it is a complex topic.
The problem is it’s too expensive. Every item is £10 minimum. It’s not just raisins, it’s 5.8kg of raisins. And it’s not actually cheaper than other shops because they’re just selling you premium products in bigger sizes.
Problem is that incentives, especially financial incentives, have so much control over our democracy. Why don't we fix the housing crisis? Because homeowners will vote out politicians who reduce their house value. Same answer for why we don't fix global warming, farming subsidies, carried interest loophole.

For everything wrong like this, there's a small but determined group of people who will defend the status quo, versus a much larger majority who actually do want to fix things but this majority has a political will that is diluted and disorganized and can't be concentrated into political leverage. So in practice the smaller group has the power.
Creative Destruction in Small Business Bankruptcy
The “goalposts” are defined by the Houthis and unless you think they’re careless or have ulterior motives compared to their stated aim of stopping the Israeli genocide of Palestine, then there must be other reasons they have. For one I’ve heard they take action if a ship doesn’t respond to their hails.
I'm using it since... uh, forgot how much time, anyway it works great to filter out the Pinterest junk that invaded Google Images a few years ago.

I just wish there was some similar extension to filter out Ebay sellers from search results based on their shop/user name and/or feedback ratings. Ebay blacklist likely works only on user names, and I'm not sure it is effective when searching as a buyer myself.
Places where the author notes a mismatch between the “correct” word and the word on the paper, I wish they’d presented the morse code difference too. Otherwise, pretty interesting!
FWIW, I have had more luck with Pantsbuild rather than Blaze.

The fact that it does dependency inference has made adoption far easier. I've found the community pretty active on Slack too.

Using it to build Python/Java/Kotlin/Go/Docker; generally pretty happy with it, though the Python support is the best and the Go support is the weakest.
Exceptio probat regulam.