skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A large amount of &nbsp; and spans with letter-spacing or font-kerning can help, but no one’s going to do that (unless you go for an extremely fixed layout or engage JavaScript, which I would consider in poor taste for these purposes).

I concur on the warm fuzzy blanket of DTP software, personally.
We use HTML & CSS to create invoices and some eBooks, one resource I love is print-css.rocks [0] which has a comparison of tools available (for us Weasyprint [1] is good enough) and also several tutorials of how to accomplish tasks.

[0] https://print-css.rocks/

[1]: https://weasyprint.org/
Yeah, coding is the easiest part of the job. And once you hit a certain level of mastery, interacting with an LLM will slow you down.
It was a booming market, why wouldn't they?

I guess it was a possibility, but then it's a prime example of capitalism fixing/exploiting the pay gap.
There’s a very big difference between what the USA does in proxy wars vs direct conflicts.

Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority, and is basically getting shipped leftover or soon-to-be disposed equipment. You have some really good points, but I would be cautious about extrapolating over Ukraine.

As a counter-point, you can look at what happened in Iraq when it was basically a large military power entering the Gulf War (and stealth fighter/bombers were in their infancy).
My Cats Are Under Sanctions? The Tale of a Tech-Savvy Pet Owner
Hey Hacker News community, buckle up for a tale that'll make you question the extent of international sanctions and their unexpected targets – my cats!

So, picture this: I decided to be a responsible pet owner and invest in an automatic feeder for my beloved feline friends. With great excitement, I unboxed the device, eager to set it up and streamline their feeding schedule. Little did I know, I was about to embark on a journey filled with frustration, confusion, and ultimately, laughter.

The automatic feeder came equipped with a sleek mobile application promising ease of use and customization options. "Piece of cake," I thought, firing up the app and ready to dive into the world of pet tech. But alas, after what felt like a million attempts, I couldn't get the darn thing to connect.

I tinkered, troubleshooted, and even resorted to some questionable DIY fixes (cue the duct tape), but to no avail. The app remained stubbornly unresponsive. At this point, I was ready to pull my hair out. Why, oh why, wouldn't it work?

And then, the light bulb moment struck – after some frantic Googling, I stumbled upon the most unexpected revelation: my country was under sanctions, and apparently, so were my cats!

Yes, you heard that right. The mobile application that was supposed to streamline my pet care routine was off-limits to me because of geopolitical shenanigans. I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. Who knew my cats would become unwitting victims of international politics?

As I stared at my furry companions, blissfully unaware of the diplomatic storm raging in the background, I couldn't help but marvel at the interconnectedness of our world – and the sheer randomness of how it affects even the most mundane aspects of our lives.

So, here I am, sharing my tale of tech woes and geopolitical intrigue with you, dear Hackers. Let's raise a toast to the resilience of pet owners everywhere, navigating the choppy waters of modernity, one cat feeder at a time. After all, who knows what other surprises await us in this wild, interconnected world?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some manual feeding to attend to. Until next time, keep hacking – and keep those cat bowls filled, sanctions or no sanctions!
In my experience the less judgement I bring to a situation, the better I will be able to listen. If someone is telling me a story where I feel like they were morally wrong or where “one easy trick” would have solved their problem, it is very hard for me to not want to blurt out advice, admonishment, or shut the conversation down.

The funny thing is that being quickly opinionated is highly valued in tech, so my maladaptive behavior (in part) got me accolades and promotions. I actually think this tendency to have a hot take on everything immediately is a large portion of why engineers rub non-engineers the wrong way
Frickin' love the CHM. My only complaint is they have only a few live specimens. But keeping those old beasts working is a challenge in and of itself.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-summary.txt

Scroll to "Laser printer debacle"
If you watch the video(s) he paid ~$15k for the battery, and had to drive ~900mi to get it from a salvage business.

Here's the first one: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qpPYkqpe-Ms

I don't know if he mentioned how much it cost to get the conversion kit stuff, but looking at the site (evtv.me) makes me think it was several thousand dollars. It looks like 'standard electrical stuff' controlled by an arduino.

He has a propane-fueled generator for when the battery system is offline. He shows it and you can hear it running when he swaps out the old lead-acid battery system.

He's hoping to get 20 years out of the batteries. At several points you see the power draw on the system. At the end of the second video he did some verbal napkin math based on the number of cycles he'd already gone through. This was happening during the winter, his assertion being that winter would be the toughest time of the year.

You should watch the video series.
Like zoning laws?
As you pointed out they don’t provide a link to a well know betting site and they give users the option to hide the odds. What more do you want?

Should Apple maps not allow you to route to a liquor store? Is the ability to do so enabling alcoholics? It is their ecosystem and they are thus enabling a very destructive addiction.
Lawns are a place where I play, or my kids play. Or where I go to just sit and enjoy nature. They are also decoration (flower bed for example) to make my surroundings more pleasant which helps my mental state.

If your lawn is a Veblen good you are doing it wrong.
You will never see this from a single human being.

Probably, within a few months, one (or more, possibly colaborating) LLMs just might.

Always fun to see "the difficult ones," proven.
> "It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human, everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence."

The Nvidia CEO doesn't understand what programming is.
Hey I also use weasyprint to generate invoices! Small world.
Sounds like someone's butt-hurt that other people don't want to be stuck with 1980s technology.
As i understand it, stuff is overpriced, and happy hour "discounts" are the actual normal prices.
> We are committed to providing you with the best possible experience, but please note that the artisanal design and the youth of RISC-V processor architectures do not allow us to guarantee a specific level of service, resulting in an SLA of 0%.
So you want OFCC? Office of Foreign Compute Control?
I agree that InDesign generally is clunky (the same reason it has a lot of typesetting black magic: business model where you make money by satisfying requests of perfectionist designers and their managers). However, in the past, while I was still doing relevant work, I had mild success abstracting some of it out by defining a template and populating it with data imported from JSON.

Now I’m not using ID much, and struggling with generating PDFs from HTML, so I really appreciated the example you gave. Great work!
it's more than semantics though. We humans are emotional creatures, it feels good to get a discount for X and we feel cheated if we get a surcharge for -X. That's what's at root of the Wendy's story, and should be a lesson on PR and corporate communications. Extremists are going to boycott Wendy's for the rest of their lives based on this, and I don't blame them. Even if that doesn't meaningfully affect their bottom line, people are still going to be all "ugh, fuck Wendy's." If they'd avoided all usage of the word surge, and just said they were spending $20 million to modernize their restaurants so they were nicer, we'd instead wouldn't even be talking about this and those that would be would just be debating how and if they could make Wendy's nicer instead of this.
I disagree with the dashboard point, because the only thing that's worse than having little user traction is having no understanding of what user traction you do have. As the conclusion says, you should be focused on learning about your users and your domain - but that's exactly what a good dashboard should be helping you with!
exactly. that sounds like a pretty good description of hell to me. i much prefer highlighting the text, alt/option-left/right to adjust the kerning in real time.

this type of description of using CSS for DTP reminds me of using tables for layout before CSS. it was a bullshit solution waiting for something better. only, in this case, DTP software is already there and better. so why would someone do this to themselves?
tl;dr: negative people tend to miss deadlines
these are pretty cool! thanks!
Can I guess if you're a) in your lower 20s or lower, or b) steadily employed with at least a few months of savings and have never been abjectly poor or injured?
> Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority, and is basically getting shipped leftover or soon-to-be disposed equipment. You have some really good points, but I would be cautious about extrapolating over Ukraine.

The US and Europe is manufacturing artillery shells and other things, and cannot nearly keep up with Ukraine's needs.
Oh for sure. I meant Nazi WW2 soldiers. Good catch!
I wonder if any of the people working in this field write SF that ponders the many thorny ethical knots this involves. There's a paragraph late in the article that makes it clear they are aware of them.
Bring back private offices
The past few weeks ChatGPT's response hangs about 80% of the time for any query I make and I need to refresh the page. Has anyone else had this experience?
"In reality, we are not a ransomware-as-a-service, but professional fraudsters."

And they say there is no honor among thieves
There is nothing like facing other cultures that makes you appreciate your own.

The walking on eggshells, nobody clearly communicating, the complete and total waste of time on etiquette.
You may enjoy the special audio presentation that was included with RDC newsletter #17.

https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/news/news_1...

The above is essentially a comedy sketch intended to demonstrate the different voice synthesizers that were available at the time. Raised Dot wanted to provide listeners with multiple options to receive the newsletter in their preferred voice. Keep in mind, this was all done painstakingly on tape!
Are the majority of applications even developed by "companies"? I'm honestly not sure at all, or even how to go about measuring that. By the numbers, most games on steam are developed by individuals or small teams, even if the bulk of sales are driven by games produced by larger companies. I'd imagine the same is true of app stores, too.
Fair point, I hadn't made the distinction in my mind. Perhaps that resolves my previous qualms.
I don't agree that people on the left hold the notion that Elon and Hitler and comparable.

So this isn't a left vs right problem. It's a moral relativism problem.
> Phlogiston theory, formulated in 1667 - 1703

If that's the best you have, we agree! :)
But stuff spends more time at the regular price and less time at happy hour prices, making the higher price normal and the quotes around discounts the lie.
The executive branch should not be allowed to do an end run around Congress for something this significant. If enacted, this would give foreign hosting companies like Hetzner a huge efficiency advantage over domestic suppliers. (Data center customers aren't presently unknown to law enforcement, because banks will help trace payments. However this could, due to the per-user burden, make it impractical for smaller hosts to offer free tiers, or even to serve small accounts.)
The author's interest in middle-grade books is fascinating. I'd love to read a post of recommendations with accompanying rationale, if only to get ideas for books my daughter might like!
> Healthcare being a right is a nice, feel-good slogan, but does little to address resource scarcity or system inefficiency.

I don't think these are contradictory concepts, nor does this do much to justify the objectively atrocious method we currently use to ration healthcare. Every dime of profit could have gone to healthcare—that's not rationing, that's just unnecessary and easily preventable cruelty.
yeah but not when he gave that interview
Let him cook
No way any regulated industry is going to just trust some AI to write the code.

Imagine trying to get a medical device through FDA approval with firmware written by a bot.
People enjoy their Louis Vuitton handbags, also improving their mental state. So the fact that you enjoy your lawn doesn't make it any less of a luxury good. Not faulting you for having one, we humans like our luxuries. Let's just understand that's what they are. Like BMWs and Rolexes.
> but then based on my personal experience as print media designer the likes of InDesign are full of various special tricks (and language-specific, too)

That seems to concur with an informative article by AtaDistance from 2019 that I read the other day [0]:

> ...

> The result was InDesign 1.0 J which shipped in early 2001. InDesign J was the first, and only, major software application developed outside of Japan that followed the Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) X4051 typesetting and composition specification (the kumihan “bible”) and traditional Japanese print production methods.

> I have covered some basics of Japanese layout before, but a review is helpful for first time readers. I’ll use a mix of my material and McCully’s presentation to explain.

> ...

> Western created DTP layout is graphics-driven and calculated by margins and font baselines. The western baseline typography model and font metrics is how PostScript and OpenType fonts, and all layout engines evolved. Adobe was well acquainted with the shortcomings of their own font technology and InDesign J got around the problems by adding proprietary Kanji virtual body font metrics and Japanese line break algorithms. None of this exists as an open standard that benefits everybody.

> That is fine for InDesign and print production, but web layout and typography via CSS is an entirely different world. There are 3 huge obstacles for good vertical Japanese typography on the web:

> * No font metrics for virtual body/em-box glyph space placement: everything has to be accomplished with baseline metrics

> * No reliable space control

> * No reliable line breaks

[0] https://atadistance.net/2019/04/26/the-state-of-css-japanese...
You've apparently never actually been in a suburb. They typically have random unkempt forests behind each row of houses, and not just a little bit. Like you need a serious walk between houses on different roads, and all of that is a long unbroken piece of nature.

The front of the house near the road has the lawn, but there's a LOT more to suburbs than that.

2 minute walk from where I lived in a suburb was a "forest" as I called it as a child, so large you could get lost. In the suburbs where my relatives live there's more forest with bears, and a there's a creek behind their house.

Yet from the front it's a road with lawns. There's a lot more to suburbs than that road.

Not to mention kids love playing in that road since there's barely any cars. All those car-free threads, about how cars ruin things? Suburban kids already have that: They have barely any cars to contend with.
Here in Brazil we use a system with copper pipes in an insulated "box" to heat water during the day using this energy from the sun. A couple of years ago, in a cold winter day with a minimum of 5 degrees (celsius), just after the sunrise the water froze, broke the pipes and the glass above it. I couldn't understand what happened because the ambient temperature was above freezing point, maybe it was something like this effect?
My understanding is that neurons are simultaneously electrically active and chemically active, and are organized into larger systems that are dynamically plastic.

Somewhere in there there's some efficiencies being achieved that come from being functionally active in ways that it don't make for an easy one to one comparison to transistors.
Better than this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcnr6YiT-g8
Yeah my Rolex helps my mental state. I can read the time with it and it is useful for deep sea diving.
When your business is about selling shovels to gold diggers, there is no way you can admit that there is no gold out there.
This comment is posted on HN, a site that doesn't offer dark mode but has succeeded anyway. I'm curious why you think lack of dark mode is a blocker for early adoption. Anyone who really cares can use browser extensions to create an ad-hoc dark mode, so workarounds exist.
Neurons aren't anything like transistors: they're CPU cores, and each individual neuron in a mammalian cerebral cortex is the equivalent of a deep artificial neural network: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i...

In particular the human brain is an 80-billion core processor with each core running at 300Hz. Its architecture is not so good at FLOPs and other things we typically use computers for, but overall human brains dramatically outperform anything in 2024 except the world's fastest supercomputer.
MeitY approval must for companies to roll out AI, Gen AI models for Indian users
Outlook is a once-great product that has been left to rot by a Microsoft with little lineage to the great company from the 90s and early 00s that created it.

Outlook debuted Cached Exchange Mode in the early 00s, popularizing "offline first" before it was known as that.

Now: The "new" Outlook can't even show folder unread counts correctly, even when fully online. It seems to only load a small subset of messages locally, only populating folders when you scroll past the point it loaded. (In classic Outlook, this was a setting—I understand loading all mail was not enabled by default—but it could be enabled. No longer.) It sometimes gets stuck where it won't show new mail until restarted. (Gmail has this bug too.) It forgets open mail windows when restarted. It forgets expanded folders in the folder pane when restarted (but only sometimes).

Microsoft removed the ability to show the mail/contacts/calendar navigation bar below the folder pane, and forced it to be shown on its own huge vertical bar, almost all of which is wasted space. For good measure, they did this in classic Outlook as well as "new" Outlook. There was massive backlash to this, and Microsoft plowed forward anyway. On Windows there is/was a registry setting to revert this (but intentionally, no user-facing setting). I have not checked on Mac.

To the sibling comment: Outlook for iOS is indeed great, probably only because it was an acquisition. It is not in Microsoft's DNA to build an app like this themselves anymore.

As an admin: Microsoft seems to redo the Office 365 admin interface every 2-3 years. It is an incomprehensible mess. I am also a Google Workspace admin for the past several years, and theirs is far better, and it's more or less stable over the long term.

Office 365 has been hacked by state actors recently.

I still like the Outlook UI and feature set better than Gmail (despite the "new" Outlook being a major regression), so I begrudgingly stay with Outlook/Exchange because I dislike it less than Google Workspace.

Fastmail does not give signs that they are a relevant company—they created JMAP and basically did nothing with it. Why not make a first-class Windows/Mac client, offline first, with powerful organizational features, like the Outlook of yore? Or at least, contribute to adding first class JMAP support to Thunderbird? This is your sole business.
I hope there's at least one chapter on compact data structures!
I don't really see how this is the case, every single nice restaurant also has a bar and bar area, it's not like you have to go to Buffalo Wild Wings or something.
I don't think that's the type of dashboard the article is talking about. I think the article is talking about dashboards IN their product. Like their product is about "help businesses do X" and the dashboard they are talking about is "let businesses using their product look at how much the product has helped them do X".
There's a short book that covers this period of British computing history: Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, by Mar Hicks.

It's more history than sociology, though the title suggests otherwise. There are interesting anecdotes from women who worked from the 1940s-1970s for British intelligence, the General Post Office, and, yes, Dame Steve Shirley.
The black body temperature of the night sky on earth is much warmer than the temperature of the CMB in the universe. You can test this by aiming an IR temperature gun on a clear night.

Relevant stack exchange:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/153839/what-is-t...
that's what I was guessing, but I wasn't sure ... I came in a bit after punch cards :-P
well it’s definitely inspired by pointillism, but they’re doing things like scaling the dots based on depth etc
"~4h of sunlight and 20h of radiation - our more sheltered side gets 0h of sunlight, but the slope and tree cover drastically reduce radiative cooling at night"

I still would always take that 4h of sunlight over 0h and just invest in better insulation. Don't you miss the sun in winter?

But if you don't, well, then it makes sense. North facing sites are usually quite cheaper as well.
Came here to post the exact same comment. It's a fun read, especially since I remember enjoying the occasional bag of smashmallows years ago, but the Theranos comparison is ridiculous. By their definition, any failed startup is no different from Theranos. (If there's any need for clarification: one is a risky endeavor where the parties are properly informed of the risks, the other is fraud.) But yeah, it's BI, so why bother complaining...
How is it different from today?
You'd still have to describe to an LLM what to do, which strikes me as about equivalent complexity to simply writing the code in the first place (which is, after all, a formal description of how a program should behave, even if we perceive it as of a complexity which should not be strictly necessary). The big wins have been simply leveraging LLMs to apply common patterns to multiple codebases (albeit in a buggy and haphazard fashion), but it's still up to humans to compose these patterns into meaningful programs and validate that it's actually functioning as expected or desired. Humans still have far superior understanding of what software is, how it functions, what our intentions are using software, and how to derive good software from bad—we know what a bug is intuitively in a way that LLMs have not been able to demonstrate at all.

However, being able to rewrite a program with formally well-defined behavior (i.e. code) should be in an LLM's capability, but LLMs are a long ways away from demonstrating semantically coherent coding skills, just the ability to regurgitate common patterns (often filled with bugs and/or incoherent semantics).
Also, checking the essential sanity of code and if necessary making it more-sane.

LLMs may indeed end up replacing web-searching interns or bottom-bin outsourcing, with "code a real programmer has to review and probably rewrite".

However there's no reason to believe LLMs will gain a novel new ability to manage that second part just by making them bigger and bigger.
Servers for an API for https://arbitrand.com

Essentially very high security and throughput TRNG servers (with cryptographic signing and the like).
> overall

Meaning at specific tasks, right? Because obviously even the weakest modern computers out perform humans at certain kinds of tasks.