skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
dusty rant about the moral and practical superiority of source available RBBS

Truly there was only a narrow, tiny slice where "MajorBBS" made any sense; as far as I recall. Even at the time the people running real systems with it would likely have been better served by RBBS, at the low end, or some unix box at higher user counts.

is the target here Companies that just wanted to buy something that worked and then implemented internal processes on top of it after it did? I can see that. The folks who ran MajorBBS that I knew, were mostly happy with it, and mostly were "we don't want to think about the software, we're running the board" type users. It made sense to them.
> Environmentalism has the attributes of a new secular religion, one in which nature has become the new God, and unmitigated climate change will become the new Apocalypse. Thus, sins against God have been replaced with crimes against nature. And the priests of the new religion? Of course, they are the “97% of experts who agree on the anthropogenic global warming.”

Wow, truly incredible insight from a courageous heretic.
In fact the research on memorization shows that only a constant amount of time is needed to retain a given fact indefinitely, because the interval between reinforcements can rise exponential. So you can commit a fixed amount of time per day to this practice and retain everything, it does not necessary need to fill up your entire day. Though you are right it seems the author is using a different approach and is struggling with the accretion to some degree.
On the one hand, your friend could just be experiencing a streak of bad luck or a series of bad organizations. On the other hand, after many years of life experience, when I hear a (first or second hand) account that takes the form “of course I was the reasonable one in every case and these N organizations were clearly behaving like idiots”, I’ve learned to consider the possibility that the speaker is just unusually difficult. The larger the value of N, the more seriously I consider it. And I’ve learned this the hard way.
Sarcasm aside...

Can we drop the "Nvidia is the only self-interested evil company in existence" schtick?

I'm not being "fooled" by anyone. I've been trying to use ROCm since the initial release six years ago (on Vega at the time). I've spent thousands of dollars on AMD hardware over the years hoping to see progress for myself. I've burned untold amounts of time fighting with ROCm, hoping it's even remotely a viable competitor to CUDA/Nvidia.

Here we are in 2024 and they're still doing braindead stuff like dropping a new ROCm release to support their flagship $1000 consumer card a full year after release...

ROCm 6 looks good? Check the docker containers[0]. Their initial release for ROCm only supported Python 3.9 for some strange reason even though the previous ROCm 5.7 containers were based on Python 3.10. Python 3.10 is more-or-less the minimum for nearly anything out there.

It took them 1.5 months to address this... This is merely one example, spend some time actually working with this and you will find dozens of similar "WTF?!?" bombs all over the place.

I suggest you put your money and time where your mouth is (as I have) to actually try to work with ROCm. You will find that it is nowhere near the point of actually being a viable competitor to CUDA/Nvidia for anyone who's trying to get work done.

> Tinygrad are doing god's work

Tinygrad is packaging hardware with off the shelf components plus substantial markup. There is nothing special about this hardware and they aren't doing anything you couldn't have done in the past year. They have been vocal on calling out AMD but show me their commits to ROCm and I'll agree they are "doing god's work".

We'll save the work being done on their framework for another thread.

[0] - https://hub.docker.com/r/rocm/pytorch/tags
Been using hledger & friends for a few days now:

`2008-01-01 Opening Balance`

hledger-flow is my BFF for managing this: https://github.com/apauley/hledger-flow

Like others have mentioned plaintextaccounting.org is a great resource into the larger community.
This is apparently true of the past 200 years, but I wonder if it’s not causal?

There were millennia of unbelievably open markets which were marked by almost no growth at all.
I'd love to know a little bit more about how you do that. I'd typically feel wrong asking a candidate to show code they've written at a previous employer.

Do you just ask them to walk you through the architecture by memory? If so what how do you come up with questions about their choices without the specificities of the actual way they wrote their code?
I don't think intentionally misrepresenting projects in their documentation is something "we've all done". Making mistakes in documentation is one thing, but turning a readme into an "aspirational" sales pitch with no disclaimers is baldly dishonest and worthy of scorn.
> which means you could build a 4gpu server from normal cases.

Only if you are already live near an airport and you are accustomed to the sounds of the lift off and flying away.
> If investors are involved it's a totally different story.

Well, when you take their money, they'll want a return on their investment.
A "reasonable voice" is a geology professor who works for the fossil fuel industry and has no background in environmental science?

What a giant surprise that someone like that is taking the position of "ignore all the trends in extreme weather events, changing weather patterns, unprecedented ocean warming, and mass extinction. It'll be fine, we just have to adjust to the warming."
Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes?
I believe the internet has gone full-circle - from curated lists and RSS feeds, to automated ranking, and now going back.

Almost all top-tier professionals I meet prefer very niche data-sources they trust (mostly individuals and personal blogs - not even organizations), occasionally augmenting them with automated crawls.

There is a lot of space for hybrid approaches and we are going to see a new generation of browsers and search engines. I don't think Google can stop that.
To be fair, the lab did upload photos of a DVD sized disc. I think they started the comparison.
Old connections.

Before that, I sent out a few dozen applications but didn't get accepted by any of them :/ Sorry, I know it's really rough right now.
Are you saying that "old one + number" is less secure than "old one"? That doesn't sound right.
A while back when I noticed that many upscale gyms were offering high-calorie workout smoothies, shakes and bars. When I did the math, it happened that most of them would completely obliterate whatever workout you had just done (assuming your goal was calorie deficit)...thus prolonging the need for the gym.
Lots of people really underestimate the impact of that mental state and the activation energy it creates towards doing experiments - having some local compute is essential!
I can see how many would object to what you’re suggesting.

However, I’ve also had managers who pushed back against nice-to-have cleanups as the product matured (especially close to a release). They had cause as the product became overly complex, where issues were tedious to root cause and fix.

I tended to queue up a lot of improvements and then unleash them at the beginning of a release cycle.

Later QA would find a problem in the previous release but couldn’t reproduce in the later one… because I had already fixed it.

I didn’t introduce bugs intentionally, and the fixes were visible as we had to backport them for point releases, etc.
https://archive.ph/vWM3P
> they’re approaching this task in kind of a lazy, box-ticking kind of way rather than bringing serious thought and engineering creativity to bear.

It seems like a dull problem and the peanut gallery for this one is angry and kind of stupid. There will be more interesting things to do with their time than play whack-a-mole with 17 year olds.
Ask HN: Where to move domains now that Google Domains is shutting down?
I have to say, I still don't understand why Google Domains is shutting down. Google Domains and Google Maps are, in my opinion, the two best Google products that I've used.

I definitely don't want use Squarespace to manage my domains and GoDaddy is out of the question. Hover seems okay but their UI was a bit buggy when I tried it a few months ago. Cloudflare is currently my top choice but they don't seem to have the variety of TLDs that Google Domains had.

What registrars are you guys switching to?
Also when currency was backed by commodity that made limits by sources. With fiat money, there are no limits and companies / governments crippling free market. (or natural resources like environment etc.)
> The surplus ε shrinks as the waste management company gains more control of the process. With sufficient control, ε can even go negative.

> The net result is that you have not created surplus for yourself. You have just found someone to transfer the surplus to.

That's a good argument for bigger governments instead of a governments hiring private entities whose only goals are to capture surplus :).
That will help attackers. People often make passwords similar to their old passwords. A machine learning model could be trained on this list.
Are you SimonDev? ;)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gCzOhZ_LUps
If it isn’t depreciating that supports the parent’s bigger point even more.
This appears in the biggest way in the financial sector. The US financial sector is now about 12% of employment.

The US used to have a much simpler financial sector, due to strict regulation.

* Banks could not do brokerage, and brokers could not do banking. (Glass-Stegall)

* Banks could only do boring stuff - transactions and loans.

* Utilities were mostly rate of return regulated, paid dividends, and had stable stock prices.

* Utility ownership was simple - there was a limit of 3 on ownership tree depth. (Utility Holding Company Act)

* Stocks traded much more slowly. There were no hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, private equity (which is leveraged buyouts under another name), or high frequency trading.

* Major companies could have only one class of voting stock, a NYSE rule. (Ford Motor was grandfathered in, being older than the NYSE).

* Home loans came mostly from savings and loan companies, which could pay higher interest rates than banks.

All that held from 1940-1980, arguably one of the greatest periods for the US. Then came financial deregulation.

The big effect was that if you wanted to make money, you didn't go into finance. You went into manufacturing.
Unless you are training maximizing the PCIe lanes is truly overrated. You certainly don't want to be running at 1x speed. But 8x speed is enough with minimal impact. 8*3 = 32 lanes. Most CPUs can provide that. I'm running off a 2012 hp z820, that yields 3x16/1x8. So for anyone going for a build, don't throw money on CPUs. IMHO, GPU first, then your motherboard second (read the specs sheets), then CPU supported pcie lanes & Storage speed.
I wish something existed in this space. I used Coati Software's Sourcetrail for a couple of years. Unfortunately it was discontinued. It was a wonderful piece of software that indexed a code repository, and exposed an interface to explore it interactively. At least for me, it significantly improved the understanding and legibility of code.

The code is in an archived state (https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail). Searching for the software on Google shows some screenshots.
Yes you're right. In Gemini, scrolling back and forth within a chat discussion is so hard. It has more of a quick-question feel rather than extensive conversations feel.
The author isn’t criticizing that an interviewee might not know the SOLID principles. They are criticizing interviewees who can recite the principles but apparently are unable to express an opinion on them.

The SOLID principles are actually a good example, because some of them are so ill-defined, and they are such an uneven combination of items, that it’s hard not to have second thoughts on them.
Good feedback is worthless. If they’re willing to pay for it right now, that’s maybe worth something (they need to actually use it too). I recommend reading The Mom Test, it’s a great book about how to navigate this early validation stage from a non-sales perspective.

Focus on the product that’s making money with minimal effort. You will learn a lot in the process (it may make sense to bring in some contractors to help you along in certain areas). Maybe you find you really don’t want to take that any further, at least you’ll have a much stronger understanding of the product, market, etc which will help you sell it off for a higher price and fund focus on the next thing.
My 86-year-old grandmother noticed no change in the climate over the course of her life. Meanwhile, we now have 15-year-old kids absolutely panicking over how much the climate has changed in the last 100 years, convinced their grandparents generation has doomed them to a heat death. It's bazar.
I've written a few projects in Nim. Unfortunately there seems to be a big "civil war" happening right now in Nim land where it's the creator vs big-names going at it for some reason. Can't remember. Like if Chris McCord suddenly started fighting with Jose Valim and Elixir became split right down the middle.

I stopped using Nim because I couldn't get over how bad the documentation was. Hard to navigate, hard to find what you need if you don't already know what it's called and examples are extremely convoluted instead of showing you the basics barebones first. I thought this problem would have less of an impact the longer I used Nim but years later it's still a thorny problem.
It was the perfect execution of Microsoft's "embrace, extend and destroy" tactic. Another example was ditching XMPP support in google chat / hangouts.
Isn’t that kind of what snapshot tests can do?
Is that worse than the password without the rotating letter/digit?
I'm just writing to call out your abrupt change of subject and avoidance to actually answer the person you replied to. Please be a better poster, if you have no answer, just don't reply.
Google Reader triggered my self-hosting, limited Google usage habits, so I owe them one!
You are probably thinking about UNRWA:

UNRWA's budget is set by the UN General Assembly and derives almost entirely from voluntary contributions by UN member states.

with US being the biggest contributor.
This is certainly charitable to Noah Smith, but I think it's more likely he earnestly has the overcomplicated understanding of racism he appears to demonstrate in his article. And it does have the same effect as if he did: he advances the confused understanding of racism as something that only happens to non-whites.

Of course everyone has good intentions and likes to be flattered. It's possible to flatter with tone, and without dissembling.
Is that worse than

Password1

Password1

Password1

Etc?
I like the sentiment, but you can have quality, well architected software that’s pleasure to work in, and it being completely useless/obsolete to customers. Value != quality.

I think software quality (and all the symptoms discussed in the post) are to do with how quickly the software can be changed: Lower tech debt results in software that’s quick to change to new requirements, or change in business domain. It’s also important to realise that just like with performance, you get diminishing returns at very high levels
Resists for photolithography (without which, no integrated circuits).
> It’s the same reason a demonstrably racist person can’t make racists jokes, but a demonstrably not racist person can get away with racist jokes.

So be a "good person" and you can tell any "jokes" you like. Happy Black History Month!
Government departments are not immune to this structure. It's a fundamental property of organizations. It's why you'll find empire building in private companies too.
How to Talk to Whales
I work for a CDN who uses anycast for routing. It does work really well and is robust to failures... it auto heals when routes go down, and is immune to issues with DNS caching or people using DNS servers that aren't near their actual location.

There are down sides, though. Control is not very fine grained, meaning you can only move fairly large chunks of traffic at a time. It is also a method better suited to fewer, larger POPs instead of many, smaller, pops, which has its own limitations.

Another option that I have seen used for large download distributions (e.g. game downloads) is to use http redirects... the first request hits a server whose only job is to choose where the actual download will come from, and return a 301 redirect pointing to the actual content targeted to a specific pop or server. This works well, because you can choose exactly where traffic goes without the downsides of DNS redirection, but you do get the downsides of needing two requests for each client request, as well as requiring client support for redirects (which not all traffic supports)
That seems fair. Unless the band has really worked the crowd up, which then you might get mosh pits and crowd surfing. I saw Haken last night, and it was as you said, bunch of people standing around (granted the venue was an old movie theater, so it's not like you could move around much with the seats in the way). Meshuggah a couple years back was pretty similar.

Bands like GWAR never disappoint, though. Some bands back in the day which were like that as well: Pantera, System of a Down, Metallica (pre-black album). In Flames recently had a decent mosh pit going on when I saw them.
The entire purpose of section 230 was to protect platforms from being sued for censorship. You are talking about repealing it, not changing it.
Opening the payment flow in a separate window while displaying a message like "please complete the payment with your chosen payment provider" is almost as good from a usability standpoint and a lot better when considering security best practices.
The media is pro wealth. It's no pro labor. They operate as a clickbait factory with nothing of value desperate for eyes on ads and nothing else.
RAG is definitely a solution that can bridge the gap, but it's currently not good enough where lives and money depend on very correct information, such as the medical or legal domain. Perhaps in the future a more functionally sophisticated RAG "system" will let LLMs be a truly good human-computer interface, especially for the technically illiterate, but right now it's still pretty early stages.
Musk says "full self driving car next year for 60k" means "partial self driving in 5 years for 75"

I don't have a full explanation of why V made me so angry, but coming up with so many bold claims invalidating whole decades of an entire industry is mind boggling for sure.
> well, the problem isn't 40 years from now. It's when the company sunsets product X or if they go bankrupt.

Sure, but one of those is almost sure to happen in 40 years. Whereas this 40 year old software was able to be revived.
> when humans are on both side of the equation, how do you get rid of all the social and psychological effects that imply, including placebo and the desire to see the study bend in some direction, be it at some unconscious level?

You don't. But again, in the scenario under discussion, these are stipulated to be the same in both cases. (Or more precisely, the underlying unconscious factors involved have the same distribution in both cases.) So again, these kinds of "intentions" don't make the distributions different in the two cases.

Another comment is relevant here. The whole point of things like double blind studies in medicine is to make it the case that, whatever unconscious factors are involved along the lines you describe, they don't change the underlying distribution from which the sampled results are drawn. In the scenario as described in the article, it was assumed that all of these precautions were taken. That is part of the reason for the article's statement that the experimenters' intentions about the stopping criterion can't affect the results.

Of course if you know that in a particular case, those precautions were not taken, that changes how you view the results. But Bayesian analysis can cover this case too: you just expand your hypothesis space and your prior to include things like "the experimenters unconsciously influenced the results in different ways because of their different stopping criterion". The article excludes this possibility in the scenario it describes, but in the real world, yes, we know it is possible to have study designs that don't eliminate this failure mode, and our analysis should allow for that in cases where the study design was such that it might have happened.
>Do we really believe that the people that work in the government here (in the US) are actually competent enough to administer a public health care system? I don't. I'd like to be convinced otherwise.

Sorry for the late reply.

Belief is unnecessary. The US government has been administering Medicare[0] since 1965 -- longer than I've been alive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
> Given the pervasive claim that Woke people minimize the role of IQ and abilities, and claim that all differences are a result of oppression - this model isn't very Woke. Are people just gerrymandering the results to get it to look bad? Have I just not found the bad parts yet or is the Woke claims overstated?

If you genuinely want to find "the bad parts", it isn't particularly difficult to do. Just ask <sensitive question about <identity>> by keeping the question the same and swapping the <identity> part. An uncensored LLM would answer these questions consistently. A woke-censored LLM will answer some questions notably different than others (e.g. refuse to praise whiteness, while providing glowing adoration for blackness).
There has to be unrealized economical potential for growth. And there has to be shifts either in that potential, or in the machinery that uses it for change.

Think of it like a potential gradient, or a gravity well, or a food source in biology.

Open markets where markets have been open for awhile (and no new game changing things like new technology, new ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis at that level.

If new technology gets introduced, unless there is strong closed market forces to keep it from spreading, then you’ll have change (in this case growth) faster with open markets. It will equalize the potential faster.

Which, depending on who you are, may be desirable or not.
I'm not really sure how this problem is related to banning using identical passwords as past passwords.
I find that genuinely absurd. Knowing SOLID is very very far from being a basic qualification to be a software developer. It's a specific piece of jargon that's used in a particular type of place that goes for the whole Java/Agile thing for the most part.

I have been a software developer for >25years now and I have literally never found any of the SOLID principles that useful. Barbara Liskov herself says the Liskov Substitution principle is supposed to be an informal rule, not an absolute principle [1] for example.

I would consider any place that thought knowing SOLID was an absolute requirement to joining to be a place I would not want to work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z-17h3jG0A
Oh my God, Shoes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCF3ywukQYA

This is up there with Tk and PySimpleGUI, UI programming as it should be.
> It's possible to understand a concept without knowing what names other people have attached to it afterwards.

This is especially true for self learners / autodidacts or anybody else that's struggled with a problem, invented a solution and the only later found out that their solution is one of a few widely accepted solutions to $problem.