skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My position is not that a different or more thorough presentation of the argument would have made no difference (though, personally, I doubt that it would have), it is that Tufte's argument (and the aphorism it launched, "charts killed the Challenger crew") greatly exaggerates the significance this narrow issue and tacitly blames the people who were trying their best to save the day.

In Tufte's version, the meeting in question was the tipping point where it all went wrong, while the reality is that it was the last forlorn chance for NASA to to escape, by the skin of its collective teeth, from an overdue disaster that had been years in the making. As the Rogers Commission revealed, NASA had, in an environment of over-promising and political horse-trading, developed a culture in which deviance was normalized, and it was not ready to handle evidence contrary to the semi-official dogma of shuttle flights being routine and established events.

I'm not in a position to say how Boisjoly felt so sure the launch would end disastrously, but I can make a few guesses. I think it is quite possible that he gradually became aware, and then concerned, that the O-rings did not fare well in cold weather, as the data trickled in one launch at a time. I can imagine that when it became clear, a few days before the launch, that the temperature would be below freezing, his concerns sharpened into near-certainty that things would go wrong. One does not need a theory of what, precisely, was happening to the O-rings to suppose that if below-normal temperatures led to problems, then nothing good could come from an exceptionally low one. Perhaps he was too close to the data; I can also imagine that this seemed so clear to him that he never imagined his managers - who were also engineers - not also seeing it, instead clinging to older estimates of risk. I further imagine that he was completely blindsided by the somewhat rhetorical and sarcastic response, which went something like "are we supposed to wait until July?"

IIRC, Boisjoly anticipated that the joints would fail catastrophically immediately after the boosters were ignited, and for a minute afterwards he experienced profound relief...

Despite this all coming out in the Rodgers Commission report, NASA followed the same normalization of deviance path after it became apparent that ice was damaging the tiles, which is one reason why I doubt that better charts would have stopped the launch.
Enterprise Windows is a cash cow, lock-in is perhaps...forever; long MSFT. (Typing this on one of my three Macs.)
Related:

A peek at Intel's future foundry tech

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465519

Microsoft Will Use Intel to Manufacture Home-Grown Processor

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39456466
I read this.

I read it if only to glean why anyone would do this. I learned nothing of the sort of person who would use Javascript to structure a YAML config.

10 years ago this article would have been "Used PHP for structured YAML config" and there would have been a minor riot of people poking fun at the article writer for attempting such sillyness. (And I say this someone who still made my money on PHP 10 years ago).

We got soft somewhere along the way and stopped calling out silliness.
They survived in the past by having low expectations and knowing hardship was a fact of life. And also that life was unfair to the extreme.
Have we been in decline for 2,500 years?[0]

0. https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a...
I honestly think that Gnome is a big part of this. A lot of people very obviously and loudly like it, but since I've been giving developers the option to use KDE they've been a lot happier with it all.
This is basically an article by a guy angry that the UI for printers changed and predicting the end of the Windows empire based on that.
DHH today on how windows is just as good as Apple now. https://world.hey.com/dhh/vscode-wsl-makes-windows-awesome-f...

(OK he hates Apple so is pushing an alternative but a good POV)
Just ask any criminal attorney or police detective. Normal people can’t get their facts straight even if they all witnessed something memorable first-hand just hours ago.
> Only one religion can be right or none, that must mean,logically speaking all other religions are hallucinations.

There are some mistakes in this sentence.

It is possible (if unlikely) that multiple religions accurately describe some aspects of the world, while being mistaken about others. That is, treating rigorous complete "correctness" as the only useful state a religion could have is very misleading. Newtonian physics and special relativity both fail to predict some observed phenomena, but they're still both useful (and not every religion claims rigorous perfect correctness, even if some do).

Even if some religions can be shown to be wrong, that doesn't automatically mean that they're hallucinations. People can believe things for plausible reasons and be wrong about them.

People can also have reasonable stances like "I cannot prove this is true, and would not try to, but my subjective personal experience of visions of God persuade me it's probably real."

That seems very different to me from an LLM hallucinating a paper from whole cloth out of the blue.
Most google teams don't use git.
You’re taking the article too seriously. It’s more like a satirical what-if sci-fi short story.
And yet, you continue to use software and hardware that trans people have made significant contributions to, including quite likely (at least indirectly) some written by myself.

This is the great tragedy of open source software, isn't it? We keep laboring on things that make people's lives better, including the lives of the people who hate us. Sometimes I ask myself if focusing my career on FOSS always was a mistake.
Accurate as every other week's predicting of Microsoft's
impeding doom from users who don't like Windows in the past 30 years.

- 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft.

- 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft.

....

- 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft.

Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.
Not at a rate that would meet GP world.
College removes vending machines, discovers they were using facial recognition
Except they're two sides of the same coin. The underlying technology (software) is almost all the same. And it is not problem-free, unfortunately.
Always useful to look at the seemingly endless stream of Linux information, the Arch wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ASUS_ROG_Zephyrus_G14_(2022...

Also NixOS has a nixos-hardware repository with configurations for some laptops:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/tree/master/asus/zep...

Reasonably legible if you ever programmed anything
Pretty interesting. No great surprise that we've had these varied neurotypes all along, IMO.

Since one of the biggest advantages of our species is our brains, it makes sense that evolution would produce slightly different types that give different advantages. Given that we're a social species, having a variety of neurotypes in a group would offer all the advantages while the group as a whole offsets the disadvantages like inattention.

Imagine a group of hunters. Someone with ADHD might hyperfocus and be really good at spotting fast prey like rabbits or birds, but may not notice a wolf creeping up on them. The group can compensate for that, and are more successful than without the ADHD tracker.

Just think about the wide variety in our bodies. There's a whole spectrum of physical ability from very small and nimble humans to very big and very strong ones. There's a huge range of different adaptations evolved by different groups. It really just makes sense that we'd see a similar sort of variety in structure and ability of something as complex as a brain.

Humans evolved to fill niches, same as any animal.
You've never heard of Roku? That's pretty impressive honestly. I assumed they were a household name.
Why would I trust the rules made by my own government if I can see that other more productive countries are building things better and faster than us?
Venture catalysts?
Meta Staff Found Instagram Tool Enabled Child Exploitation. They Did It Anyway
Show HN: Pdfmergeapi.com – Create PDF documents from templates and data
Hi!
I've been working with an app for creating PDF templates for use in document creation.
Feel free to try it out :)
A few talented but not unique engineers should be able to make a web browser. Like a window manager. It is a hard task, but in range of a solid community effort.

The fact that the WWW is an important communication network means that it should not be difficult to make a tool that accesses it. It is bad that almost everybody’s access to it is gated by a massive ad company.
Horrible companies are more common than well-executing companies.
We're not changing anything else with businesses? I wouldn't expect those numbers to change very much then. Certainly far less than 2x.
I've posted about why I left Windows, and wont be back, the only device with Windows is my Surface Book 2, and even that I can install Linux on...

I have mentioned it a few times on HN in the past few weeks, but I already hated the telemetry spying, heck, it was creepy that me looking up files on my one computer was on their servers somewhere, so I wiped all that many years ago. Then I realized, their Antivirus tech will send files to "analyze" with zero audit trail as to which files, or anything of the sort. I immediately pulled down POP OS and wiped my drive. You shouldn't be sending my data around willy nilly without an audit trail. What if I'm working on something classified? What if its highly proprietary? This is so unethical on many levels.

The article also mentions some issues I've run into, where their UI is just not working correctly, which led to me uninstalling Windows one time prior as well, I had Windows Home Edition after spending thousands of dollars on a prebuilt machine, I tried to add a new user, it told me to use a different program, so I went to the different program, which then told me to go back to the program that told me to use that specific program. Why not just let me add users instead of horsing me around? I uninstalled Windows on that box, until I wanted to play Starfield, I got enough hours in until I saw that their AV software violates any sense of privacy on a whim with zero audit trail.

Microsoft. You had a really good OS, and you keep making it worse. Please stop making it worse. I'll gladly take on the task at half of whatever you pay the person currently ruining the OS, which is clearly way too much. You peaked at Windows 7 and its been downhill since. I am someone who weirdly enough did not mind Vista or 8, but I will admit that 7 was the peak best version.

Previous comments I've made on the subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39444688

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371870
The leader of the Republican Party, Ronna McDaniel?
misery loves company. consider bringing on a business partner who knows product-market-fit, marketing and sales.

disclaimer: i have never (yet) tried to build a saas business.
Well maybe, but with Windows maybe they shouldn't think about power users but power buyers. And power buyers (i.e. medium to large enterprises) care about security, maintainability, backward compatibility, and supportability and yeah lots of stuff has moved to the cloud but the end user has got to use something to get there.

So, the question is, is this creative destruction or just destruction. Not every change is an innovation even in IT and large vendors have a long history of failing in computing usually because they either got sclerotic or too focused on the organization and promoting the organization and too little focused on the customer.
I see no evidence of this in biology nor in ML. I've read those scale papers. I've worked on scale myself. I'll bet the farm that scale isn't all you need. But I won't be surprised if people say that it is all scale.

If you really think it is all scale, train a 7T ResNet MLP based model for NLP. If scale is all you need, make a LLM without DPO or RLHF. If scale is all you need, make SD3 with a GAN. Or what about a VAE, Normalizing Flow, HMM? Do it with different optimizers. Do it with gradient free methods. Do it with different loss functions.

The bitter lesson wasn't "scale is all you need." That's just a misinterpretation.

Edit: It's fine to disagree. We can compete on the ideas and methods. That's good for our community. So continue down yours, and I'll continue down mine. All I ask is that since your camp is more popular, you don't block those on my side. If you're right, we'll get to AGI soon. If we're right, we still might. But if we're right and you all block us, we'll get another AI winter in between. If we're right and you all don't block us, we can progress without skipping a beat. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket. It isn't good for anyone.
Being able to list different solutions and their tradeoffs is a true mark of seniority.
Thanks, I'm building a website focused on Metroidvanias. I liked the results so I was thinking I may use it to offer some interesting results on the various game pages.
Does anyone know of a watchguide for Twin Peaks?
GNOME2 was the apex of GNOME, fortunately MATE and Cinnamon are keeping its legacy alive.
Every single time I wake up my computer from sleep the Edge browser opens up in full screen. I have as many Edge settings disable as possible, Chrome is my default browser, and there are no keyboard shortcuts that could possibly open it.

It doesn't matter if I press the spacebar, click my mouse, etc. No matter how the PC awakes, Edge launches itself in full view on top of the other apps.

It's blatantly aggravating stuff like this that pisses me off even more than spying telemetry.
There's definitely middle ground that could be negotiated if the will was there. For example, regarding the T (of LGBT), a liberal stance on people presenting how they want, and making it unlawful to discriminate against them for it. But at the same time, protecting single-sex spaces rather than redefining them in terms of "gender identity", and not punishing others for exercising freedom of speech and belief.

So if Bob wants to call himself Brenda, wear a frock and make-up, and take drugs to grow breasts, then that's fine and he shouldn't be fired from his job for doing so. But this doesn't give him access to women's spaces, and if any of his colleagues don't want to refer to him as "she" then they shouldn't be censured for doing so either.

This stance also protects LGB who may want to organize same-sex groups, such as lesbian speed dating or gay men's saunas, without having individuals of the opposite sex imposing themselves for self-identity reasons.
>hey are making some improvements like the GUI and cleaning up other elements that give a more cohesive look. No more mixing Metro UI and Legacy panels like Windows 10

I don't even think this is wholly true. The new / old context menu that for some reason now exists in parallel so you have to do two clicks on every right-click actions still mixes legacy and modern UI, and there's so many redundant mouse control and audio control settings also with entirely different look and feel. It's like you're on three Windows operating systems at the same time.

Baffling to me how a company the size of Microsoft cannot streamline their user interfaces.
I tried changing myself to linux (Fedora) and I still had problems with a Realtek ALC892 for audio, which is a chip from 12 years ago. No solution other than buy a soundcard with a different chip.

Unfortunately, we still be using windows.

Curiously the game were working quite fine as long as I was using x11.
Those things, and the performance. My surface laptop is 3y old, constantly lagging on windows, but as good as new on Linux.
Being your own boss and seeing the beauty of the world are both extremely modern tropes, I'm not saying they're bad in and of themselves but they certainly aren't the be-all and end-all. Lots of tech people become miserable and insufferable trying to follow that dream
Huh?

Is Florida prohibiting its citizens from writing opinions in this? I thought the bill was about an age minimum for using an internet product.
What drives me mad is my lean 2023 windows laptop suddenly making noise because some installer or whatever started. If that was occasional, that'd be okay.
Microsoft has been driving users away for no less than 10 years now and nothing much is changing IMO because Windows is what most people think of as "the computer". Non-technical users think they have no other choice, they shrug the defects off and try to get their job done.

Though the article kind of piqued my interest by claiming that Microsoft "is in panic" -- any proof that they are indeed bleeding users more than what is deemed normal?

I have noticed people around me get recommended Linux Mint and being happy with it but I'd think that's a minority; many offices rely on bespoke local network setups with printers and scanners and people putting files in shared directories and what-not... modernizing that and making it better is no easy feat.

EDIT: Oh, and as other users are saying, Linux desktop is absolutely not going to eat Windows' lunch. There are still too many confusing things there, and "you can hack it and make it your own" appeal to an infinitesimally small audience.
Can't it just be pronounced "sclite", rhyming with (e.g.) "sprite" ?

And when you apply FUSE (or FUSE-T or NFS or WebDAV) to its archive format "sqlar", getting a file system called "sqlarfs", then pronounce it as "sclarfs", rhyming with snarfs/scarfs/barfs.
Must be the Republicans because they have been trying to strangle government for decades by making it look incompetent so they can point to it and say “see, I told you.”
Every week when I SSH into my Ubuntu server I see a "System restart is required" message after installing updates.
One would think that this scar is bad enough that python would address it.

Candidly I think python is going to be forever stunted after the python 2 to python 3 multi year fiasco.
Yeah, Microsoft's got a huge majority of users captive and now they can do as they please, "Oh you don't like this obnoxious new 'feature'? Well what are you going to do about it?", like an abusive partner.

If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness... Too bad Google's product managers are just busy trying to advance their own careers, plus it's not like they respect users...
Oh, you really think this doesn't happen. Where I (in Australia) the conditions you paint were accurate for most of my life. In fact they remain accurate for Australian's attending Australian educational institutions now for the most part.

But about 20 years ago, Australia decided to adopt the US model for education - educational institutions should compete for student dollars, just like your local coffee shops compete for customers. This boiled down to allowing educational institutions to charge students what they wish for educating them and the money the government used to give the educational institutions would go to instead low cost loans, and upfront payments for enrolling students so the they didn't pay full price. It sounds reasonable on the surface, well worth a try.

But it was insane to try it in Australia because it has already been tried in the USA where the result was the student debt fiasco. The end result in the lower levels was exactly the same as in the USA, with educational institutions preying on student naivety giving away laptops in return for signing up to very expensive long term courses. Very few completed the courses, so they didn't get that long term money, but they didn't incur the expense of educating anyone either. They got the bulk of their income by getting the government money for signing up the students. The cost was advertising and the giveaways like the laptop. To your point, when the government attempted to clamp down by paying only for graduating students, they simply graduated them regardless of their grades. The model has since been abandoned, of course.

This predatory approach didn't work in the Uni's. I think Uni students and their parents are in general too smart to fall in a long term debt trap, and rendering Uni Bachelor certificate meaningless scared too many people - business and governments alike. But they could and did, and do play the same game with overseas students. Professors are under immense pressure to graduate them, so they get the degree they paid for. There I've seen first hand Professors (Professors in Education no less), sit down with an international student and re-write their assignments for them so they could pass them. They despised it. But the government had reduced funding of local students to force them to become "lean and mean", so to survive they had no choice.

You don't hear about this a lot because everyone involved on the education side is literally trying to keep their job. Broadcasting the educational institution they work for hands out worthless grades undermines that, so it's a conspiracy of silence.
Why do you want so hard to start a business? Why not spend your precious time, money and effort on something else? If what motivates you is willingness to change the world - you can do so by working for a non-profit organization. If you want to earn money - you can be a regular employee.

> Where do you find the strength to keep going? What keeps you going and energizes you?

It is NOT work. I try to work as little as possible. Being a programmer, it is not so hard to earn a good living while working part-time. I'm an urban activist and a guerilla gardener. I spend a lot of time talking to neighbors in our community garden I started :) I also signed up for a literature and creative writing course at the university (in Poland studying is free, I know that's not the case in the US).

Work doesn't have to be the most important thing in your life.
I've converted a handful of some of the least computer tech heavy people to Linux. This was years ago.

The final few nails of Microsoft's coffin are being nailed as we speak. Not only because they are just fundamentally bad at innovation, but because they also sold out the United States to China. Billy boy is scared, and he should be.
I really don't care about design to be honest but the fact that update after updte they keep changing where you find things and how they work pisses me off so much.

The good thing is that powertoys and WSL2 at the end of the day compensate for me enough.

But get into setting up some bluetooth device and you want to cry if it doesn't work at first shot. You want to find help online? Pretty much all guides speak about the same OS like Windows 10, and yet they are already outdated with everything having been moved away.
Seems like the concern is a purposeful attempt to bias how genetics research is presented to fit an ideological agenda.
He's not angry that it changed, he's angry that the new settings interface doesn't let him fix the issue at all, and while he used to be able to easily access the old interface so he could fix it the old way, MS has now hidden that ability too. If not for some user-hostile magical incantation, printing would have been permanently broken. Who wouldn't be seriously annoyed with this situation? How many non-technical users would have chucked a perfectly good printer because of a poorly executed software change? The Windows control panel UI transition has been a serious boondoggle from the start.