skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a nutshell, San Francisco’s ultra-liberal policies fight for the right of doing drugs and potentially dying on the streets, because they believe that actually helping these people would be akin to penalizing them because they are poor or jobless, or would be an infringement to their freedom. Helping them really means detaining them and/or forcing rehab for their benefit and the benefit of the community. Many of them suffer from mental illness, often induced by drug consumption, or that leads to drug consumption, but apparently detaining or forcing treatment is considered to be more cruel than letting them die, and so nobody does nothing with huge negative externalities in the community (besides the actual people involved and their families).

In San Francisco there are open-air drug markets that nobody shuts down, where illegals are selling “death” 24/7. Of course San Francisco is a “Sanctuary City” so they don’t collaborate with immigration services to deport the drug dealers, let alone shut down the drug trade.

Of course keeping to feed their addictions with public money doesn’t actually help them and they eventually die on the sidewalk by over dosing or other drug-related complications. Hundreds of them die every year, it’s really despicable.

San Francisco has a large network of no-profits that exists with the sole purpose of trying to “help” the homeless population by encouraging “clean” use of drugs (they distribute needles and other drug accessories), and they are the recipients of 1B+ of funds every year from city hall [1].

Many of these no-profits are plagued with corruption [2], the Mayor itself and people in her circle have been investigated/arrested [3], but nobody does nothing because they are afraid to lose the ultra-liberal vote. Now that the tide is starting (very slowly) to shift, we are seeing politician’s big talk to clean up the city, so far with poor results and no action.

Of course with more than a billion dollars on the line every year, some people started to wonder if these no-profits really want to solve the problem (they don’t) to keep the money flowing, and the pockets of corruption ongoing.

An interesting book to read is San Fran-Sicko [4] which analyzes this phenomenal in ultra liberal cities. It’s so bad that kids are accidentally ingesting Fentanyl at the park [5].

Even being a moderate democrat acting rationally will earn you the label of “fascist” by the ultra progressives.

Ultimately, this will be remembered as a very dark era in the history of San Francisco and everyone involved has blood on their hands, including the voters and supporters of these ultraliberal policies that lead to death and desperation.

[1] https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

[2] https://sfist.com/2024/02/23/scandal-plagued-sfpd-partner-no...

[3] https://www.ktvu.com/news/former-sf-official-agrees-to-plea-...

[4] San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

[5] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-au...
Expectation: Programming is about finding a way, and I will be able to do that faster.

Reality: You will be able to think of multiple ways or approaches easily, and narrow down the space based on various experience, often ending up with something different and better than you would've done as a junior.
You do, though. Because although there’s a chance of catastrophic failure, the typical case is that the launch goes fine, and then they notice some unexpected degradation of the O-ring after the shuttle comes back. That’s how they were measuring chance of O-ring difficulties; a shuttle had never exploded, but there had been observable signs that things could have gone badly.

In other words, in most mechanical systems, a certain amount of wear and tear is acceptable. It’s only at extremes (way too cold) that it becomes a disaster. Convincing yourself that you’re certain there will be a disaster this time is a level of scientific and engineering confidence that’s hard to fathom.

In that situation I would have done everything possible to alert management that there was a high chance of an issue, but would I have grabbed my daughter and drove to stop the launch because I was 100% certain it would blow? Probably not.
Tumblr is a meme, but it's also one of the few places left where you can view a feed of reverse chronological content exclusively from the people you follow, and that's moderately valuable in of itself.
You offer to sell me shares of your stock for $10 each. I am not your friend. I do not think your offering supports your valuation so I decline. I think your stock might be worth $2 a share, I convince your friend I am right. Your friend sees her investment tanking and agrees to sell her shares to me before they fall any further. Your market cap is now 2 million.

I go to mars and build a shoe factory. I produce and sell shoes for a fraction of a barrel of food. I buy your house for two pairs of shoes. Now you are homeless.
I’m using Rust in embedded systems for this reason - sure C is the ‘native’ language, but the engineers before me couldn’t tame the beast and made barely working software. The HAL provided by STMicro is functional but riddled with side-effects and is incompatible with an RTOS.
In a sense I agree with you, there is definitely stealing involved. At the same time I offer you a different POV.

Imagine you are a parent of a meritorious child, above average student you may say. You know that your child will grow more if he gets access to the books of the nearby library. But you can't get the books because the library is controlled by elites and denying access (or asking higher price) to you because you are a peasant. What will you do to solve the issue minimizing the damage?

If people put to a back in the wall situation thousands pages of moral teachings becomes mute.
It's not as if the latin alphabet has changed significantly over the last century, so there are plenty of handbooks which are long since out of copyright and have been scanned online. After finding one you like, it's just a matter of practising.
Figma uses WASM, so its total size is much bigger: https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-faster/
There is no such universally accepted definition of these terms.

The one you propose is useful and how the literature on expertise defines a journeyman but the word "senior" is highly ambiguous.
Print for others. Cursive for me.

I developed my own writing style. I can write about 60wpm.

Cursive is faster than print at the cost of legibility for those with less than perfect penmanship.
Since Bluesky published their protocol, I’m thinking about how one integrate a BS-compatible microblog into one’s own weblog software, e.g. POSSE.

With ActivityPub I can see that: a form of headless ActivityPub server which provides an Inbox and Outbox, based on the DB. Such you can publish your own posts both on the web and into an outbox. And even better, you get reactions in your inbox, which you could possibly display on your own web pages with enough determination, similar how the Indieweb people do that with WebMentions. After all every Status in Mastodon/Fediverse has an url property.

With AT Protocol I’m a little bit at a loss. You could possibly expose your Backend as a AT-compatible Personal Data Repository, although that would be a lot of work, exposing a Git-like interface.

But I’m still wondering how one would aggregate reactions. It seems it would not be enough just to have a PDS, but also to run an Indexer/Relay, which indexes other peoples PDS. And not just the PDSs of the people you are following, but also the rest of the world – after all a Like or such can come from everyone. When running an Indexer you are pretty soon into Firehose territory. Too much for a single person website.

It really seems there isn’t a way for reactions to swim upstream – the social graph of Bluesky in a way lives in the Indexer/App View world, not on your PDS.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the AT Protocol docs are not very expansive on such points. Neither is Klabnik’s blog. Everyone talking about ATP seems to be excited about the Solid-inspired DIDs and PDS, but never talk about the transmission mechanisms. Whereas I’m sitting here and thinking that an ActivityPub Actor’s Outbox is already a form of PDS – and it has an Inbox. Addressable via the Web and findable via Webfinger.
Now we only need an infinite euro note.

It will be fun paying with it and getting change back.
The estimates are all over the place, but the idea is that resources are finite including space. This is one of the reasons that there is a growing trend of anti immigration even among the left. (Not my opinion since I was an immigrant.)

https://www.issuesofsustainability.org/helpndoc-content/Club...

https://theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-popula...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-ove...
ETA: I jumped to conclusions a bit - I thought the Bob Pony ISO distributions were shadier than they were and misread part of the installation details. See the discussion below about the challenges with hosting these older Windows ISOs.

From the README:

> Is this project legal?

> Yes, this project contains only open-source code and does not distribute any copyrighted material. Neither does it try to circumvent any copyright protection measures. So under all applicable laws, this project would be considered legal.

From install.sh:

if [[ "${VERSION,,}" == "win7x64" ]]; then
DETECTED="win7x64"

VERSION="https://dl.bobpony.com/windows/7/
en_windows_7_enterprise_with_sp1_x64_dvd_u_677651.iso"
fi

Along with other similarly shady links.

Look, IANAL, nor am I hooting and hollering for Microsoft's profits. But that README seems dishonest, any competent user should be suspicious of a "bobpony"-distributed Windows ISO.
I do a bunch of stuff I don’t enjoy because it makes my life better in the long run. For example: laundry, if I don’t do it, then I have to wear dirty clothes and I am sad (and smelly).

So it goes with engineering too. Sometimes (often?) I need to do something that’s not enjoyable in the short term to realize the best long path.
But in cases where the bribe is to expedite an official act—they give the example of getting a driver license issued—why wouldn’t the official just give the smile then shuffle your application to the bottom of the pile?
Most people don’t work at startups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_quota
Agree 100%. Free speech is unfortunately not something all people want nowadays. Sad, but that’s the reality whether we like it or not.
Sorry. Unfortunately that section of my brain is immutable so I am unable to strike it out.
You’re starting from the premise that if it’s possible, everyone does it. Obviously wrong. You can be influenced, and the influence of porn is extreme / deviant behaviour (to counteract the hedonic treadmill).

I’m exhausted writing something so obvious.
Hyper competition and perverse incentives is present in western academia also. The only difference is in the amount, not if it is present or not at all. I don’t get how a bunch of HN readers could fall into the trap of binary thinking.
Check out the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Not quite the same thing, but still worth a look.
This doesn’t make sense - there are literally thousands of academic AI research labs who are severely limited by compute resources. If anything could work better than transformers and require less compute they would be all over that.
When did we begin to believe the “news” in the first place?
I guess the lesson here is that PR damage can be permanent.
The price for cobalt is currently around 30 USD/kg but has been as high as 90 USD/kg: http://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=co&u=k...

I’m not very familiar with the ellconomics of recycling, but I doubt that this process to recover an additional 2% will be cost effective.
Coming soon: I'm compiler. I'm debugger. I'm stackoverflow copy paster. I'm copiloter.
> I'm going off the assumption that you're an average-ish suburban american, so if you're not that, then this doesn't count...

Well, I am not. That is not an "average" person at all, how many people in the world would that be, 5%?

> Cars use fossil fuels to run, and rare metals to be manufactured. These are inherently limited, thereby making our lifestyle unsustainable already

Ok, so we need to step-up recycling and run EVs or CO2-neutral fuels. That's not that far.

> Phones, computers, tablets, etc. etc. use rare metals in production, and last a relatively short period (5 years if you're lucky, at least ime). Also unsustainable.

I believe we're already pretty good at recycling these? It's also not that large amount, maybe 10 phones and 10 computers per person per lifetime?

> A lot of electricity is generated using fossil fuels.

That's not a lifestyle problem, more of technological problem.

It all sounds like a matter of progressing further and expanding on what we're already doing. I imagine the sub-urban lifestyle would be something that needs to change, but it's such a corner case that in the global scale it won't matter that much.
laugh at people who overhyped it with singularity agi and skynet lmao
The insane cost of housing, mostly.
Why science relies too much on mathematics
Actually agreed about FlexGallery, now that I am thinking about it.

As for the rest, they just miss [...]Factory and [...]Controller prefixes, and then they truly would become typical Java classes.
I don't think a few months is enough. Gemini is laughably bad and quite far behind GPT4

I don't see how they can catch up before GPT4.5 or 5.
“SpaceX is possibly withholding broadband internet services in and around Taiwan—possibly in breach of SpaceX’s contractual obligations..”

What is the purpose of an article with such compounded uncertainty?
> It's just reads that the author works/worked at horrible companies.

Hard disagree.

> Boring meetings, working during the weekends, stress and awful legacy tech is not a necessity.

Boring meetings are not a necessity, but meetings are. (Article mentions no "boring" meetings.) If you don't think so, you're not senior enough.

Working on weekends is not a necessity, but when unexpected crap happens the senior engineers will be called upon whether it's a weekend or not.

Stress is not a necessity, but most people feel it out of increased responsibility. This is a personal/subjective thing, but it doesn't reflect that the company is horrible. Quite the opposite -- if you believe your work is meaningless, and feel OK with doing meaningless work, there's actually not much you can stress yourself about. It's only when you believe there's high stakes that stress becomes high.

As for legacy codebases, it doesn't have to be awful (also note "awful" is not mentioned in the article). A senior engineer who has worked on the project/team for a couple years probably had a role in creating it, or at least has the most experience with it, which is why it tends to be the senior engineer who has to debug it. And if you think overhauling systems just because they're almost 10 years old is always a great idea... well you're not senior enough.

To be fair, I suspect in the contemporary scale of "senior" titles, the stuff in the article is more akin to "staff" level roles than "senior" roles (the latter AFAICT basically means you're technically capable of doing things independently, which is what you're alluding to).

The realization that you need to hold meetings to align and share information with the team (and management), that if you don't fix the outage at 2am nobody else could, that you rather fix the issue in the legacy codebase yourself than assign it to junior team members and subject them to endless frustration... is probably beyond the experience of the typical "senior" level dev.
ok - except detailed webs of statistical probabilities only emits things that "look right" .. not at all the idea of General Artificial Intelligence.

secondly, people selling things and people banding together behind one-way mirrors have a lot of incentive to devolve into smoke-and-mirrors.

Predicting is a social grandstand in a way, as well as insight. Lots of ordinary research has insight without grandstanding.. so this is a media item as much as it is real investigation IMHO
> if I had to send my post to every single one of my followers’ repositories, that would be extremely inefficent, [..] an additional kind of service, called a relay, that aggregates information in the network, and exposes it as a firehose to others

Therefore a company with money/resources to build this relay will be in control if/how the firehose presents my content as a content creator/pds owner. This will create the same imbalance of power you find today with Youtube/Twitch/Instagram/etc.

The solution is not to add intermediaries, but to make this dissemination to all of those followers less inefficient.

Designing a whole protocol to cater to the .1% of users that might get into the million followers is another level of premature optimization, in my opinion. For the others, sending requests to 10k followers should be plenty reasonable to do with off the shelf computing without requiring protocol level intermediaries like relays.

AT protocol, in my opinion, caters to the "scale" crowd and in doing that puts all the power in the hands of the few that can do it better. Instead of democratizing social media, which what a federated protocol would imply, it actually maintains the status quo albeit by changing the companies holding the power.
Wouldn't most of the so-called "West" already be in the process of depopulation, based on current birthrates, if not for immigration from other regions?
> please consider using actual threads.

Bad advice in general.

Why would you run separate thread if you only want is to iterate over nodes in a tree (as an example of non flat collection).
"globalist" is frequently (typically?) a dog whistle (especially alongside the word "cabal"), it's worth eliminating from your vocabulary if you want to be taken seriously by people who recognize it, and I feel like your claim wouldn't meaningfully suffer from its lack.
Sorry We Machines Destroyed Your Civilization in Such a Boring Way
Looks like a bogus PR propaganda wikipedia link.
The OpenNIC project [1] maintains an alternative DNS root and supports a few alternative TLDs: .bbs, .chan, .cyb, .dyn, .geek, .gopher, .indy, .libre, .neo, .null, .o, .oss, .oz, .parody, and .pirate.

My personal web page is available at http://pablo.rackham.pirate/ for users of this alternative root =). I don't have a TLS certificate for it thought, because it's not supported by Let's Encrypt (same problem with my .onion address, but it's less of a problem because traffic is e2e encrypted anyway over Tor).

Also, I don't know if there is any conflict with the new TLDs that were introduced by ICANN in 2015. I hope not :).

[1] https://www.opennic.org/
It’s not terrifying because it has been happening since the 1950s. One theory is that as countries industrialize, their males become less fertile over subsequent generations. (This theory accounts for socioeconomic changes like abortion and being too poor to afford children.) It’s not too surprising given chemicals like BPA aka synthetic estrogen is so pervasive that now it’s in clothes and paper receipts. Almost no country is safe except for a few in central Africa

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/25/world-popu...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/ageing-planet-...
There’s no breakthrough until a business plan exists to resell for a profit, otherwise it’s as recyclable as plastic.
Yeah an 8 year old benchmark doesn't mean much, both languages/platforms surely have evolved greatly and I would not surprised that on many meaningful workloads there is some parity.
There's also cgo. Say what you will, but an easy-to-use way to reach into highly performant libraries and existing code was smart from a language design perspective. But yeah, other than that, I agree with you.
If only we could find a child-slavery free way to extract and process the cobalt.
Why would you assume that this is a joke?

C (particularly back when this was written) was a low level language. You could not simply use an external iterator - they didn't exist. And if you try to roll your own, you'll wind up dealing with a lot of complications around resource management in a language which lacks basic memory management.

But the proof is in the pudding. Back then it was common to want to telnet into a Unix machine from Windows. And the only two solutions that worked well enough to consider were installing Cygwin, or installing PuTTY. Cygwin was better if you needed a Unix environment on your Windows machine. Otherwise PuTTY was your answer. As the article comments, PuTTY was written with this technique.

When you've solved a problem that a lot of people had, and your solution is widely acknowledged as the best one out there, people get interested in how you think it should be solved. Which is why this article interested me when I first saw in many years ago on Slashdot.

So absolutely not a joke.
I’m similar. Maintaining code in the long term is where the really interesting challenges lie. Greenfield projects can be refreshing at first, but after a while you realize that all you’re doing is create what will soon become legacy code. The proof is in the pudding, which is the legacy phase.
If your website needs 24hr babysitting, you're doing something wrong.
Pin Save Decentralized Pinterest
Pin Save is a revolutionary decentralized image sharing and content aggregation platform that allows users to control the content and the platform itself. With Pin Save, users can leverage the power of decentralized storage, smart contracts, and creator ownership of intellectual property to protect and monetize their content. Pin Save provides users with secure storage and access to the latest technology, making it the perfect choice for those looking to take control of their content.
I guess the argument is that most AI research is supported by the big tech, and they have heavily invested in the deep learning approach.

If the fundings were funneled to research groups working on alternative approaches, maybe we'd see the same amount of progress in AI only using another approach.
OpenNIC Project: alternative DNS root
1. Egypt isn't actually 'selling' the land like Louisiana was bought. It's selling it the same way someone's house was sold to them, or how McDonald's buys the land their restaurants sit on.

2. Taking Alaska as an example, there was a real risk Russia would be in a war with the UK again. If that happened, Alaska was completely indefensible. SO better get money for it now than lose it later.
AAC and Debian
Traditionally (in the Berkeley code) the timeouts in the stub resolver in libc are 3x longer than the timeouts in the iterative resolver in the recursive server. I don’t think this is specified or that the RFCs even have much to say about timeout periods or retry counts.
This early in the game? No. If LLMs become vastly cheaper and faster then adoption (and model size) will increase in line with that.
I was being a bit of a prick with my comment, I could've written it more clearly. Sorry for that. My point is this: what do you think is likely to happen if the requirement to write these documents is removed?
a) In the absence of an impetus to justify architectural decisions, people cease creating overengineered architectures.
b) People with an inclination to overengineer systems continue to do so, without documenting their reasoning.
If (a) is plausible, maybe the documents are indeed pointless (or worse). I'm arguing that (b) is far more likely, and it's a strictly worse state of affairs than one in which decision records are written.
What is Communism?
I guess if you're a massive recycling facility and working on 30,000+MT of raw batteries as input, the 2% extra could equate to a fair amount, certainly when the spot price is $28,000/MT.

Considering spot prices for cobalt are dropping quickly and are now back to pre-2019 levels... not sure it makes sense to invest heavily in this.
You could always mount an sshfs