skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Only in software do we accept engineers having the absolute bare minimum knowledge and skill to complete their specific job.

You can require that your frontend engineer absolutely must have good assembly knowledge but you'll pay more for them and fall behind your competitors. You can require that your DBA knows how to centre text with CSS, but you'll pay more for them and fall behind your competitors. You can require that the people managing the data centre understand the internals of the transformer architecture or that the data scientists fine tuning it understand the power requirements and layout of the nodes and how that applies to the specific data centre, you'll just pay more for someone who understands both.

Everyone requires the bare minimum knowledge to accomplish their job that's pretty much the definition of "require" and "minimum", limited by your definition of someones job.

"software" is such a ludicrously broad topic that you may as well bemoan that the person who specifies the complex mix of your concrete doesn't understand how the HVAC system works because it's all "physical stuff".

> but having a generation of developers unable to do anything outside their chosen layer of abstraction is a sad state of affairs.

Whether it's sad depends if they're better in their narrower field, surely. It's great if we can have a system where the genius at mixing concrete to the required specs doesn't need to know the airflow requirements of the highrise because someone else does, compared to requiring a large group of people who all know everything.
Theoretically, they can lock you out by suspending your passport and preventing you from traveling even if you leave the country. Also they can have full access to your bank records given the warrant and you can't make any serious purchases with cash.

Even in an unlikely apocalyptic scenario you have described they won't gain much more power than they already have. I don't see how this makes you a slave by itself. Only if government begins using this as a tool to control you but then, if we hit such a point, they have much more other tools people have to worry about.
If you’re comfortable with band structure, I’d recommend looking into the states that arise in flat band systems e.g. quantum Hall states and spin liquids. Otherwise, you can read some electronic structure books to get a sense of how flat band systems differ from the traditional approach. I recommend John Singleton’s book from the Oxford series.

As an aside, it’s a lot like how people talk about non-Fermi liquids (nFLs). The positive definition of nFL is hard to come by in texts, so when someone talks about nFL behavior, you have to ask them what measurement/model they are studying.
My plan is better: https://snafuhall.com/p/earthwrap.html

We will use paper products to construct the orbiting shield; not only blocking solar radiation bu ablating Space Junk, and stimulating the Economy.
In this case, one of the main issues seems to be that assigning a grade of "unknown/uncertain" wasn't an option, regardless of what issues could have happened during the field work ?

I'm also annoyed at how the Guardian is parroting the "made up" term, which is a terrible misrepresentation of "relying on your memory of the events".

Speaking of decision-helping tools, there has been a French law for some years now : for any administrative use of them, the target citizen can request the algorithm to be explained to them in clear language.

(I already have my popcorn ready for the inevitable clash with the fiscal inspection, which not only tends to operate as if laws didn't apply to them, but also I hear started using neural networks, which have basically no way to conform to this requirement.)
It's a frontend for the OpenAI API. So while IntelliJ might not use your data, OpenAI might.
Stupid idea, I know, but what do you think of

Telephone-pole-as-a-service TPaaS

What are the regulations in place for putting up telephone poles and what are the associated costs?
> Every single PNG, including this one, starts with the same 8 bytes.

This might be common on other platforms as well, but I know that Apple uses a kind of series of tests to determine the type an image is rather than trusting the extension.

As an experiment, change a PNG to have a .JPEG extension on MacOS and double-click. Preview, unsurprisingly, launches — but if you get Info on the image in Preview it indicates it is a PNG. Of course.
Speedqueen washers and dryers are simple and made in the US. Built like tanks. Double the cost of the cheap imports though.
Is this world history? If not you need to make it clear.

Got it on 2nd try.
I love Thunderbird. I really do. But man it sucks that after all these years, still, the interface freezes while its downloading messages.
It may be worth looking at Nix if you haven't already
No mention of Quora founder at OpenAI? https://archive.is/xsK8S

> His position on the [OpenAI] board has also raised eyebrows because Quora has been in increasingly direct competition with OpenAI’s best-known service: ChatGPT ... Shortly after OpenAI launched ChatGPT a year ago, Quora introduced Poe, a platform that allows people to ask questions from various AI chatbots, including ChatGPT.
I still have a iPod. I replaced the battery and the hard drive for a SD card and its still a great way to listen to music over a nice pair of headphones. I plan to make a few more so I have enough for the rest of my life.

Phone + Bluetooth is more convenient but something about the experience of the iPod, perhaps the lack of distraction makes it more visceral.
Umbrel App Framework
Yeah, this is the main problem I have with Quora. You go to a thread to look for answers to a question, then find the platform has merged in a bunch of answers to related questions alongside the ones I'm actually there to read.

For example, I found this random question just now:

https://www.quora.com/How-does-blockchain-technology-work-11

About half the answers there are actually to that question. The rest are to questions that are about the same thing but with different wording:

* 'How does block chain technology work?'
* 'How blockchain technology works?'
* etc

or to related but not quite identical ones:

* 'What is blockchain technology and how does it work?'
* 'What is blockchain technology, could you explain it in an easy way?'
* 'What is a blockchain?'

So you'll see a lot of answers... which may or may not actually be for the question you were interested in. Or which may explain it in a weird way, since the actual question they answered was worded very differently.

At least with StackOverflow you know that the answers are all related to the same question.
> Unfortunately, I don't have a great alternative to offer. The obvious approach is to either let the users handle dependencies (which you can also do with ugit) or write package definitions for every major distribution. And if I were the author, I wouldn't want to do that for a small side project either.

Well... There's nix. Complete packaging system, fully deterministic results, lots of features, huge number of existing packages to draw from, works on your choice of Linux distro as well as Darwin and WSL. All at the tiny cost of a little bit of your sanity and being its own very deep rabbit hole.
What are you responding to?

Cash is anonymous, by and large. That’s a fact, not a fallacy. I’ve never in my life seen any shops track serial numbers of cash transactions, nor associate them with me. I’m skeptical that anyone does it, but I welcome any evidence of this dubious claim that you’d like to provide. Having your face capture by a camera does not track the bills you used, nor the items you purchased. You’re spinning a mostly false tale.

E-money on the other hand tracks everything you buy, what you buy, when you buy, what you paid, where you bought it, and that information is used to construct a valuable profile of your purchasing habits. That profile is used for advertising. But it could also be used to deny insurance claims. Should be illegal, but I knew someone who worked for a credit card company that informed me they were thinking about how to do this legally.

E-money is tracked on everyone for everything by default, and cash does non of this. It’s insanely expensive for the police to try to trace cash, and they can only do it for one criminal at a time. They do not, and cannot, track everyone’s cash.

Spending profiles captured via e-money tracking are captured by private corporations and they are offered for sale. Any criminal cash tracking by police is used solely for capturing criminal and is otherwise not available to anyone else.

> Modern cash is high technology

Again, who’s even arguing? This is a straw man, the context is digital money. There was no debate about how much technology is used for printing bills.

> Cash, in evolving forms is here to stay

So you say? I’m not going to argue or pretend to make predictions, but one thing we know for absolute sure is that there is a downward trend of cash transactions globally.
This was quite a bit more helpful than the paper itself, thanks.
Nope, you can’t the-free-market-will-fix-everything this one. The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations. Wireless is slow and coverage is spotty. Satellite is unreliable, expensive, and has a fixed latency cost that can’t be eliminated.
> they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content

This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good, it was literally making the world a better place.

Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for such a platform. Something to make it resistant to enshittification.
Yes, absolutely - skills move from mainstream to niche, but are still required! For example, a much smaller proportion of the population knows how to farm today than 100 years ago, but it's still important :)

(And sometimes these mainstream, practical, everyday skills stick around in funny ways: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/)
Indeed, that was a dumb statement on my part. Edited.
> How long did we use RCS and CVS and Subversion before modern alternatives like Bitkeeper, Mercurial, Git, et al. entered the scene?

For Subversion, about a year.
How would I use this? Say I just made a bad commit in my terminal. How would I run this container to fix it? The container doesn't have my working directory does it? Or is that the idea, to mount a volume with the working for or something?

In that case, maybe it could be helpful, but to make it convenient, don't I need a script that stays in my main system and invokes the docker run command for me?

So if you do that and just give me a one liner install command to copy paste then I guess this actually makes sense. A small docker container could eliminate a lot of potential gotchas with trying to install dependencies in arbitrary environments.

Except it's a bash script. I guess it would make more sense to get rid of the dependency on fzf or something nonstandard. Then they can just install your bash script.

For cases where you have more dependencies that really can't be eliminated then this would make more sense to me.

Why does it need fzf? Is it intended to run the container interactively?
Pinephone and Librem are the best known. Also Murena (de-Googled Android), Pro 1X, and Volla, and a few more.

See: <https://itsfoss.com/linux-phones/> and <https://linuxstans.com/linux-phone/>

A Pine review was on HN recently. Pretty good Linux system. Not so much as a phone.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39192584>
Nice idea. (Site is broken with firefox+ublock. Seems like dependency on google recaptcha is breaking stuff.)
It can be disabled - I disabled it and many other plugins I dont use to speed up IDE
In its "golden age" (say 2014) Quora was a pleasant place to write answers. But it was often an unpleasant place to ask questions.
The 100% LLM-free WiFi bunny
I would consider myself a very advanced Gradle user. I keep up with experimental/nightly features and best-practices.

I have a love-hate relationship with Gradle. I think it's a better alternative to XML (if you keep it declarative and any kind of stateful logic the hell out of your build scripts).

BUT. Gradle introduces breaking API changes frequently, and they have changed around "best practices" every year or two.

You can easily see this by using "gradle init" to create a new project. It used to be the case that "buildSrc" was the recommended way to do multi-module build logic composition. But it didn't even work with the recommended "libs.versions.toml" file for managing dep versions (you couldn't reference the generated code from within your buildSrc logic).

Sometimes I consider switching to Maven, lol. Have to weigh the effort required to keep up w/ changes against the benefit of using strongly-typed build files.
Correct, I was only highlighting that the news story itself is way late and not really relevant as news. The research around zoning laws and their impact on housing development was known probably 5-10 years ago if not more, the state law changes passed within the past 1-2 years ago, and we are in the middle of the time period of the state enforcing all municipalities to conform or lose zoning privileges and SF nominally claims to have ratified changes to be conformant (the initial plan was rejected by the state and they submitted a revision at the deadline)
"Earth radius (denoted as R🜨 or R_E) ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_radius
Its funny because he also argues that much of the computer science curriculum is worthless advice on programming. Recently dove into parser theory as an example.
We're currently in it.
By the books, Hz is only for regular phenomena. To the extent human activity is a magnifying lens of underlying quantum activity, as is radioactive activity, Bq are better suited.

It is indeed the unit of “activity”, not rate.
Sonic is phasing out their DSL offerings.
At its peak it was considerably better than Y!A. They started with Silicon Valley luminaries (their friends) and that attracted a lot of other well educated users, especially scientists and philosophers. A lot of genuinely great content was generated.

I believe Q&A sites will inevitably degrade as the low-hanging fruit is picked early. ("How do I lose weight?" "Explain relativity" "Is God real?") It can start with great answers, but it quickly becomes repetitious. Y!A probably also had a similar phase, but by the time most people heard about it, it was already famously dumb.

Quora followed a similar path. It actually lasted longer than one might expect, in part because they threw a lot of money at it. But it is now much worse because it's better known and a more visible target to trolls and spammers. Plus it's reputation for paying people, which attracts vast amounts of minimum effort, much of it automated. (And not paying any more, but that doesn't stop people.)
Tangentially related, since the CEO of Quora is on OpenAI's board.

I recently had an interaction w/ OpenAI's community that left a sour taste in my mouth. Asked one question, some smarty guy tried to "XY problem" me, I clarified this is not an "XY problem" and my question is quite clear and specific and eventually one mod was involved, other mods ganged up on me and removed all my posts because "they were violating guidelines". I complained about that sort of abuse, but guess what? The same mods that run the forum run the "forum about the forum" section, lol, so they had their fun again. Left a note there, in case some actual OpenAI employee/investor cares, telling them "this is how StackOverflow died".

I'm sharing this here because if they are taking a page from Quora's playbook, well ... good luck? I'll never bother myself again with the OpenAI community and that's exactly why I stopped being involved with Quora and StackOverflow in the past. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about the forum's demise in a couple months from now.
I’m still surprised that D’Angelo didn’t get as much scrutiny in the OpenAI mess, especially as the only board member still in place. Seems obvious in hindsight that Quora continuing to fail can only be saved by leveraging as training data for the next thing. And OpenAIs ambitions threaten that.
I've long struggled with this. Another HN user pointed out that it could actually be Windows Defender causing the issue. I disabled it for Thunderbird, and things are now running much better. Hopefully this will work for you too!
The lights make some sense in that you may not want to walk to another corner of your house, or up and down stairs to be able to turn them on or off. Similar functions, like smart locks or blinds or ovens also let you have some peace of mind to make sure you’ve got everything in the On/Off state you need it to be in.

Though personally I think we’re barking up the wrong tree by trying to smarten up every appliance. The objective of having remote control/sensing of all your stuff would be better achieved by having a single robot “butler” that can check on state and interface with everything, but the appliances themselves should be simple and easily controllable. As long as there’s a universal communications standard for all devices to be able to communicate with the “butler” the mechanical interfacing could basically be designed in as accessibility features. That way the software and smart capabilities are all in one package that can be upgraded or modified instead of scattered across a bunch of individual things that are expensive to replace or repair.

I’m basically imagining a drone that runs around the house along a rail track on the ceiling and has a little dongle it can plug into devices to control them like Star Wars droids. Bonus points if the method of control is purely mechanical without needing much computing power in the appliance at all.

The reason this will never happen, of course, is obvious. You’ll never get everyone to retrofit their houses for a robo-rail.
Typescript supports JSX out of the box. It was once true you need custom tools for React, but JSX has proven useful enough that support is provided almost anywhere you need it. Also, as someone else mentioned, JSX is really just syntactic sugar around vanilla JS, so supporting it is much easier.
> You have some wiggle room but chunks have a specific order. For example, the image metadata chunk has to appear before the pixel data chunk.

Probably to make streaming easier. If you know the size early, HTML layout can anticipate the data that should eventually follow.
Support for the other two may vary based on hardware, but sound seems to have mostly been solved by pipewire.
> The becquerel, or Bq, is the si unit of (radio)activity. It is also defined as one event per second.

Bq is not defined as "one event per second". One becquerel is defined "as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel
It’s a UX trainwreck
Yeah, the flip side of there being 'less skilled' developers who operate at a higher level of abstraction is that it is easier to train more of them.

In absolute numbers, there are probably more people today who understand the fundamentals of computer hardware then there were 40 years ago, but it's a much smaller percentage of all the computing professionals.
> Your ability to follow simple conversations is far too poor to judge others like this.

It's not about ability to follow "simple" conversations. It's about willingness to chase down numerous seemingly-unrelated references (that you didn't even bother providing links for) in order to discover the missing connections that you could have easily explained up front, without much a priori confidence that tracking down those references would satisfactorily fill in all the gaps.

On a forum with such a broad audience, you have to be more careful about assuming which things "everybody knows", and need to put more effort into fleshing out your arguments and explanations. Otherwise, it's hard for people who don't share your expertise or obsessions to tell when you're eliding important information because it can reasonably go without saying in some narrower community you're used to discussing the topic in, or whether you're presenting an argument that genuinely has serious holes in it. The latter happens often enough in discussions where I have expertise that I'm sure it's common when other subjects are involved.

I'm sure we'd both agree that HN has plenty of people who are not qualified to provide expert opinions on subjects like epidemiology. Whatever qualifications you you may have are not on display here, so users such as myself have to estimate your credibility based only on your comments. That evaulation will necessarily be a snap judgement, because there are too many trolls and misinformed people debating controversial subjects, and because someone who is knowledgeable and right but bad at explaining to people not already in the know isn't worth much more of my time and still isn't what people want to find when they come to HN.
> Seems especially egregious compared to the GM settlement mentioned in the article - at $773 million

Maybe the scale, duration, impact and response were different? As I said in the other comment this story appears to be about Tesla service centers' waste, and the GM issue you mentioned is about manufacturing facilities.

> The United States alleged in bankruptcy filings that Old GM operated an aluminum diecasting plant on the Massena property from 1959 to 2009, and that Old GM disposed of hazardous substances including polycholorinated biphenyls (also known as PCBs) at the property

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/united-states-announces-appro...

That was at just one site over a span of half a century.
I pay a fixed monthly fee for my bank that comes with full access to the interbank payment system. Every business on my country does the same for the other side, and we get unlimited transactions with no marginal cost.

Anyway, as somebody else said, a 3% fee on transactions is just ridiculous. If you get any bit of competition, transaction-value based fees tend to be on the order of 0.5%.
Sure ... but 99 out of 100 users just say "weird" and leave.

And that's "How Quora died".
It's also because demand has been higher than the pool of workers with a CS degree.
I have tried self-hosting. It is very easy to do on a VPS and you get the vendor VPS backup automatically (to which you would presumably add another backup option)

That said, github has features like review, comparison, user management, that obviously you wouldn't have if you just self-hosted.
Exactly, I just wanted to present another anecdote which only worked for me. With the hope that it might inspire someone.
I can understand the move from unmanaged C to Rust for security reasons, but C Sharp to Rust ? Am I missing something here ?
Be what?
API != Network API. Win32 is also an API.
Disabled but not uninstalled. That's what people are asking for.

This is like one of those cheap phones that you can't uninstall Facebook on.
Not only Quora, but many other sites including the various "stackexchange" sites started declining I would say from about 2018, so this is not a phenomenon attributed to llms. IMHO I attribute this to the following: a) The overuse of social media conditioning users to provide short answers, rather than long thoughtful write-ups, b) Most topics have been saturated to the limit c) lack of interest from the new generation d) Bad management and moderation.
I would love to see at minimum a basic "here's how datacenters are designed" even if the only use is to see how "the cloud" just maps those concepts to APIs. You'll imminently understand why AWS networking and EC2 have all the different concepts they have.
Is it dead? It and reddit (and stackoverflow) are the main "human typed" results I still get

(yes I'm aware they're spending some resources on displaying an AI answer at the top).

Of course never really liked quora's forced login thing and how it seems to have removed parts of questions that answers are still referring to and how it mixes answers to different questions in front of the current one