skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are modern Linux distros really that hard to get running on older systems? What'd be the main issues?

I don't really get the complain of TFA: IIUC it's not that Linux, the kernel, doesn't support 15 years+ old hardware but that some software that used to be shipped aren't shipped anymore by default, and so the only way to get these running is to compile them from source, which is not always possible due to missing repositories?

I still have my 386 and 486 somewhere: can't I install, say, a modern Debian on these?

> Most of these versions can no longer be found anywhere on the Internet. If you did not have the foresight to save them, you no longer have access to them. As far as you are concerned, they are gone forever.

Darn... I threw a lot of these away recently (old CDs with early Linux ISOs). Even much older stuff. Are these really gone forever? There has to be some data hoarders keeping them no? I'll be careful if I find older CDs: I may rip them and store them on a BluRay for another 50 years (not kidding).
> It’s not that I think the companies are the problem, it’s the machineries and imperatives of Late Capitalism, which for a while we foolishly thought Internet companies could route around.

Blaming “late capitalism” for google’s institutional problems provides absolutely zero insight. Rapidly growing orgs have turned rotten since ancient times. OP’s other comments on institutional dysfunction are more informative and it made this well worth the read.

Sorry for your loss OP, it sounds like google was once a great place and I hope you find something like it again <3
I have worked with/for dozens of startups. There are thousands (maybe 10s of thousands) of fully remote startups.
> I wrote an article a while ago that was critical of Linux developers who refuse to maintain distributions that run on computers that are more than about 15 years old.

> Some developers said I should just create my own Linux distribution. I would love to. Unfortunately, that is out of the question for a couple of reasons. First, I just don't have the time. I am too busy...

There's a certain lack of self-awareness in this article.

Maybe don't be critical of open-source developers for not supporting your ancient hardware, when you lack the capability to do so yourself?
Well, almost. I use a lot of assertions to check the obvious (value out of range, null pointer, etc.) and test the happy path(s) to prove the code at least works in the cases I can anticipate. I add unit tests for complex algorithms, and to prove a reported bug is what I think it is and that it has been fixed. Otherwise, I think using unit tests to find bugs is mostly busywork.

For even a fairly trivial piece of code, the search space for bugs can be vast or even infinite. Writing unit tests to find bugs within that space is like throwing darts at an infinitely large wall and trying to hit an unknown number of invisible targets. You can only write tests for the potential bugs you anticipate - if you could anticipate a bug, you wouldn't write it, right? You end up with dozens or hundreds of tests that probably never failed, except when you have to change something. Such was my experience when I tried to maintain high code coverage. When I switched to writing assertions and acceptance tests, my rate of bug reports did not change, and I was more agile.
https://ntpsec.org/accomplishments.html is a good read for some fun insight in to what it takes to modernise a 1990s pre-git codebase and build chain.
I read through your website and I don't understand what your service is. You sorta seem like an email host but seem to very intentionally and carefully not advertise as an email host.
Yep very much this. Why on earth would you choose to live somewhere that is a 3 hour commute. DOn't do that to yourself. Move. If your commute is that bad, either you're choosing a stupid place to live, or your town planning is terrible. That's the problem, not working in the office. Everyone should be able to do a few days hybrid comfortably. If you can't, you should have a job in a city closer to you.
Someone's humorous aside is not a meme.
Would that be more suited to a graph database such as Neo4j?
Not sure about your capability but what I see in most of new devs and techs is serious lack of fundamentals. I would start there. Once you tick that box it doesn't really matter what's next. You'll pick it up quickly.
You've precisely described Java! And Go!
Well, a Google existed then, and a Google exists now. Has Google always been the same, so that we can attribute any note of it changing, to "aging and seeing things differently"?

This is a kind of gaslighting ("Google was always the same, your experience of it in a previous state is irrelevant, you see things that never existed because you're older").

Tons of real world changes have happened to Google, the people, the culture, its reach, its products, its business practices, between 1998 and 2024. Things obvious even to people who weren't there - and of course more obvious to people who have been there, but in any case not things that are subjective as to whether they happened, but concrete things, documented in news reports and press releases, shown in the product line, and so on.

And many of the things that changed between 1998 and 2024, changed in the part between 2010 (when TFA's TB was hired) and 2024.

Similar to how Apple was different in 1977, different in 1984, different in 1992, different in 2000, different in 2008, and different in 2024. That's not some personal subjective hallucination, it's a hard fact.

You can say "Google was good/shit then to be that way, and it's equally good/shit now, even though it has changed in several ways".

But you cannot say "Google was always the same, it's just you 'seeing things' if you see it as having changed", because that's absolutely and objectively wrong.
> I still have my 386 and 486 somewhere: can't I install, say, a modern Debian on these?

Unlikely. Note that while Debian has a "i386" distribution, it actually targets at least a Pentium Pro. The 32-bit Intel architecture release ought to be labeled i586, but that ship has sailed.

I'm sure Gentoo would run though.
Did you ever run into a hard limit of statement size?
I really appreciated the story, but personally I wish the Author's note hadn't been there, or at least I wish the author hadn't felt the need to include it (although I don't blame them). They may well be right that the story would get misinterpreted otherwise, but that's not their fault. It's a shame that the political climate is such that they're afraid of being "accused" of having one belief or another.

To me, it was clear that the story was not about taking a stance on the concrete policies discussed, but rather the larger topic of AI alignment and the fact that the results of policies and instructions can be counterintuitive, and thus the "best" policies (along some axis) can be as well.

And personally, I would've preferred if the end left one thinking about that - rather than being "dragged back down" to the topic of the concrete policies - much as I sympathize with the author's situation of course; that must be terrible.
My parents are parents but not child raisers anymore.

I have friends who are child raisers but not biological parents.

The main point is whether you are a primary carer for a child below school age.
A lot of people buy the latest phone as a fashion symbol, not for the technology.

Most people don’t care about incremental improvements
YouTube made $8 billion in ad revenue in Q3 2023, that's more than 10%: https://www.shacknews.com/article/137516/google-googl-q3-202...
I think the point is the term is not so much 'not fully accurate' as 'actively incorrect' and should avoid being repeated as it leads to a false perception of how corporations actually work (or at least, it leads to an inaccurate idea of the origin of their behaviours).
Maybe begins with a "Y" but sounds like axe? How about a "Yak." Also, many of the letters I can see in the photos seem to be of animals.
I like your vibe but basically no one bought bitcoin back in 2010
> One significant problem exists for all of the above Linux ISO's. They only contain the applications that actually come in the ISO files.

Fedora and other larger distributions, especially those of 15 years ago, stand out brightly in my memory as distributions which offered full package management through DVDs and CDs. Fedora and Mandrake distributed something like six CDs back when I was a teenager, all full of RPMs.
Edit: Reading your comments again, it does look like you are a pacifist?

> I think it's ok to take life if it's your own life or help someone to take their own if there are good reasons for it.

I read this as you think it is never OK to take a life in self defence, even if that means that tens of millions will be exterminated?

If so, you can disregard the rest:

> Figting and killing didn't help them in any way.

There are also many examples of much smaller ethnic groups who avoided complete extermination because they had a very competent army.

If you don't resist a neighbor who wants to exterminate your ethnic group, then the outcome is given. If you do resist, you still have a chance.

> The rest of the populace would just become the part of their (WW2 Germany) empire.

No. That is only true for northern and maybe western europe. Eastern europeans were considered vermin by them.

> They were multitude of ethnic groups who survived by getting assimilated into their stronger neighbors.

That can happen. Doesn't mean it's a given. I feel your overall logic reasoning leaves a lot to be desired? Do you strive to make logically sound arguments, or is that not important? If not, I don't think we can take this any further.

There is a sliding scale here. You have everything from pressure to align your country with the bigger neighbor all the way down to 100% extermination.

Germany's plans for the Slavic peoples were complete extermination. There was nothing the slavs could do or say to convince the German leadership to change their mind.

> I'm Polish. How much good do you think killing Germans did for Polish people in 1940?

Maybe you think that Germany didn't plan to exterminate all poles. Ok, let's just pretend that's the case. By advocating that Poland shouldn't have resisted, you're at the same time advocating handing over the 3 million Polish jews to Germany without a fight, knowing what would happen to them. Are you really OK with that?

> Stalin is a different thing. Just because Russians are terrible at everything. I'm still sure they wouldn't manage to keep whole Europe under their shoe for long. And if they did that would mean they seriously stepped up their game, so prosperity of sorts.

Sure, the Russians would have had a hell of a time keeping western europe under control. Stalin's answer to such problems were simply killing enough people until the problem disappeared. Not letting them do their own thing.

During the 1930's, Stalin sent out his underlings with orders to kill a certain quota in given area. The quotas were in the hundreds of thousands.
Or the real "OS/2" -> https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/
Thanks for the tip on ReadWise, that looks interesting!
I feel like there are many definitions of EDM out there. GP probably means electronic music in general - to me EDM is a genre coming out of the US since maybe 2006, heavily influenced by pop, French house and UK dubstep - basically a watered down and more palatable version of underground styles of EU electronic music. But we can ask 10 people and get probably a dozen different definitions.
Try MagicEarth
The only people experiencing offense here seem to be the ones who don't like the term child raiser for some reason.
I've certainly encountered the opposite - folks who probably would have lived healthy productive lives, but were subject to some terrible event during some formative time and negatively impacted by it.
It makes me cringe to think people believe any mention of the past and comparison to the present is automatically some age-induced hallucination, as if reality doesn't exist, changes never happen, and (in this case) 2024 Google isn't a much shittier version of the older Google.
I got an email listing my users, luckily only 4.
What i'm trying to find now is how to run my own report so i can see when those users are 'fixed'.
Anyone able to point me in the right direction?
Thanks
These are game engines. What if I want to run GPGPU code in a cross platform way?
How about Lotus Notes? Or is that just "a road we didn't go down"? I've always felt it had so much promise.
EarthPT: A time series transformer foundation model
Wanted to share the code release of EarthPT, a model that predicts future satellite observations in a zero shot setting! I'm the first author so please shoot any questions you have at me.

EarthPT is a 700 million parameter decoding transformer foundation model trained in an autoregressive self-supervised manner and developed specifically with EO use-cases in mind. EarthPT can accurately predict future satellite observations across the 400-2300 nm range well into the future (we found six months!).

The embeddings learnt by EarthPT hold semantically meaningful information and could be exploited for downstream tasks such as highly granular, dynamic land use classification.

The coolest takeaway for me is that EO data provides us with -- in theory -- quadrillions of training tokens. Therefore, if we assume that EarthPT follows neural scaling laws akin to those derived for Large Language Models (LLMs), there is currently no data-imposed limit to scaling EarthPT and other similar ‘Large Observation Models.’(!)

Code: https://github.com/aspiaspace/EarthPT

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07207
If I believed in conspiracy theories, I'd say that Google encourages the security theater* industry to make you distrust your devices so they can have all your data.

* There are real security vulnerabilities, and there are end-of-the world articles that try to make you believe the whole world is at risk via some complex exploit that requires the attacker to obtain local root some other way.
Rural homes are dirt cheap almost everywhere. Yes, choices are made.
> but they a minority and got unlucky, and then extrapolated their experience to everyone else

Bold of you to assume you're not the minority.
Do "current gen" llms use Markov Chains? I have been wanting to look into trying to understand this stuff but I honestly don't know where to begin.

I guess I should clarify that I prefer being able to purchase textbooks or use free online sources.
Debian at least offers old ISOs: https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/
Oh yes; I thought it was obvious but then I re-read what I wrote and it was not obvious. My point was to show how it's rather normal to have languages mixed up geographically in such a way that can explain why the same language family ends up in central italy and in an island in greece, by observing that it happens also with languages for which we have much more available data.
PNG Is Pronounced as „Ping"
I think they meant that some compounds are unsafe for consumption, and we don't necessarily know which without research.

My recollection is inexact, but there was a story about a person who synthesized a novel theoretical psychedelic, tested it on himself, rapidly developed Parkinson's-like symptoms which deteriorated until his death. I don't know that Shulgin was ever or always the first to try novel syntheses, but I do think allowing known-safes is better that challenging people to put themselves at risk through self-experimentation.
And why would the conviction of "how things should be" should be assumed to be wrong, and the way things are now should be taken as better?

Is 2024 Google better than 2010 Google? How about 2001 Google?
At Youtube or Spotify scale this has nothing to do with engineering hours or project costs. It is for sure a power play message.
Coincidentally I just finished listening to Dan Carlin's two-part "Hardcore History" podcast about the Vikings, Twilight of the Aesir - highly recommended and currently available for free (via podcast apps or https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/).
What were your pronouns, again?
That should be plenty seeing as Google would lock your account before an attacker were ever able to bruteforce an app password, right?
I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position.

Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.
But then there are there are large organizations who decide these things for many people.
I never thought someone as seemingly obtuse as you could exist but you explained why rockstar failed to capitalise further on their market domination
Great story with great punches.

Godspeed all humans and Dave, human life is sacred.
So does Linux[0], except some 486SX variants.

You are going to find way more software for Linux to make your computer practically useful and pretty much all information out there is for Linux, so unless you have a reason to explicitly prefer BSD, it is much better to install Linux than any of the BSDs.

In fact chances are Linux will support your old hardware better than most, if not all, BSDs.

[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
> It's almost certain now that AF2 will win the Nobel Prize ... most exciting breakthrough

Unsure of the merits of this finding myself, but I'd be cautious given just this past week DeepMind was accused of publishing gibberish by Chemists: https://twitter.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/17443839652705816...
> Google Maps probably has MUCH better worldwide coverage. Which means that Apple Maps is useless in large parts of the world.

But that is not a major disadvantage for everyone. It’s a disadvantage in those areas only. Same app version might work great for me, but not for someone else. I wonder if they specifically target improved coverage in areas with most iPhone customers?
Ask HN: Founder Salaries
We are building a MVP SaaS for a B2B client. One founder is technical with a side business, 2nd is layer with a practice and I'm a CTO. We are working part time at the moment, but I'd like to work full time on the product, since client are really eager to integrate it.

What is a fair salary? How equity comes into it?

calculator: https://foundrs.com/
Refs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7610781
https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/26337/what-to-ask-for-on-a-business-partnership/26370#26370
> unpaid labor in the home

Maybe that used to be the case when divorce laws were written, but today I know very few marriages with the wife in a traditional role like that. The modern marriage has the home workload split equally and very often outsourced. Cleaning services, laundry services and food delivery are accessible and affordable while costing much less than the salary of a full time person doing those tasks and in no way worth paying for with half your assets.

So in a divorce it comes down to earning potential vs spending habits. Earning potential for women is generally less than for men due to their preference for lower paying, humanist fields and their spending habits are generally higher.

That is why divorce proceedings are generally more profitable for women than the accrued assets of the single life.

> Most men don’t fight for custody of their children in divorce. When they do they are almost always successful at getting at least joint custody.

That is just not true. Couldn't read the paywalled Opinion article on WaPo but no judge will remove the mom from the kid's life unless there are very good reasons (drugs etc) but they routinely consider monthly payments from men enough. Unproven allegations of abuse from the wife are often enough to remove the dad from the equation.
My definition is that it's electronic music that makes you dance.

For dancing purposes, lyrics as in meaning matter less, so it's about what goes with the flow to make you move.

EDM is about pleasant, energetic vibing, moving and energy.
Wayfair is laying off 13% of its global workforce
Unveiling the Next-Gen LLM to Disrupt Technology Headline Writing
I've never been very successful at writing tag-lines for Hacker News submissions.

So I asked an LLM to help. It came up with the one at the top of this post.

I did this, because I suspected the glut of low-content postings I saw this morning, might be the result of somebody generating them with a tool. Lots of Wikipedia cruft, major news source direct links to shallow topics.

Has that been done already? Is it likely? Desirable?

Here's my conversation in it's entirety.

I'm an avid reader of Hacker News, an online news aggregator that subscribers post interesting technology topics. What would be a great topic headline for Hacker News, that would capture the attention of many readers and result in many upvotes?

ChatGPT

Crafting a compelling headline for Hacker News depends on current trends and interests within the tech community. Here's a suggestion:

"Revolutionizing the Tech Landscape: Unveiling the Next-Gen [Innovative Technology] Set to Disrupt [Industry]"

Replace "[Innovative Technology]" with a cutting-edge technology or concept, and "[Industry]" with the relevant industry that it impacts. This type of headline often grabs attention by promising something groundbreaking and disruptive, which tends to resonate well with Hacker News readers.

Me

Would the topic of AI and LLM be good examples of those substitutions?

ChatGPT

Absolutely! Those are excellent choices for the substitutions. Here's an updated headline:

"Revolutionizing the Tech Landscape: Unveiling the Next-Gen AI Powered by State-of-the-Art Language Models, Set to Disrupt Industries"

This headline combines the buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) and language models (LLM) to pique the interest of Hacker News readers. It suggests a groundbreaking development in AI technology, which is likely to generate curiosity and attract upvotes on the platform.

Me

How about "Revolutionize Hacker News: unveiling the Next-Gen LLM set to disrupt the writing of technology headlines!"

ChatGPT

Your headline has a clever twist by directly addressing the Hacker News audience. It could resonate well with the community's interest in technology and innovation. However, consider making a slight adjustment for clarity:

"Revolutionizing Hacker News: Unveiling the Next-Gen LLM to Disrupt Technology Headline Writing!"

This version maintains the playfulness while ensuring that the main message about the disruptive impact on technology headline writing is clear. It aligns with the platform's focus and may attract attention from Hacker News readers.

Me

Thank you! I'll try it.

ChatGPT

You're welcome! Best of luck with your post on Hacker News. If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask. Happy posting!
LSD is a pretty darn safe compound. And there are a lot of similarly safe compounds with "smoother" psychological effects.

The War on Drugs is a lot bigger hinderance than technology here. And the patent-driven pharmabusiness too.
Please take my offer of compassion. Look up hypnogogia. It can be extreme, but everyone has it to a degree. it's the brain switching gears. It's like swapping out a nintendo cartridge while it's powered on. Try to relax and trust it as a natural phenomenon. Self-help junkies actually use this to make changes :)
Everything is a “No Evil Zone” when money flows freely.
To get more money?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing
>How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

Parent is not talking about Google employees caching on Google stock.

They're talking about acquired company founders, getting the acquisition money from Google and retiring (or having the money to do show) through their "exit", while living Google with shitty startup code, created in "startup mode" with no regard to the future, just to ship, patch it to get enough traction, and exit quickly.