skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have not used sccs nor rcs for version control as such, but I have used them a little.

The BSD archives published by Kirk McKusick include the source repository in sccs, so I have used sccs a little to drill down into nuggets of history there.

In a former job I inherited some sccs repositories which I converted to git. (I believe in preserving history) https://dotat.at/@/2014-11-27-uplift-from-sccs-to-git.html https://dotat.at/@/2016-07-19-uplift-from-sccs-to-git-again.... (sadly the links to the scripts are broken; I wonder if I can get permission to republish them…)

More weirdly we had an ancient and janky terminal-based user interface to allow colleagues to edit configuration files in a controlled manner. It avoided concurrency problems by using rcs under the cover to implement locking.
Vendoring is the right attitude even if it is not the solution. Each company should know exactly its dependancies (ie S-BOM), and if there is a problem, they should look to produce their own patch and release that.

Now this second part is … a little naive, but it’s quite feasible for that to become a middle ground industry. The big distributions are fine but as a thought experiment imagine a group of ISVs focused on say python web services. They can provide an immutable nix-like definition of a simplified stack, keep a treadmill of updates and security patches, probably as binaries.

I think there is unlikely to be a way such “focused distros” will ever give up warranties so perhaps we are not making progress.

However until we live in a global socialist utopia, we need to find some way of making the “raccoon in the dumpster” get paid.
Paperwork is probably similar. Generally reduces productivity for the individual contributors. But reduces the principal agent problem.
Show HN: app for interaction with documents using local LLM (mini Chat With RTX)
Hello HN!

I wanted to share a side project of mine: a fully standalone app that uses a local LLM (specifically Mistral 7B) for document interaction using RAG. It supports a wide variety of document types and is designed to run right after installation. There are still quite a few bugs to iron out and many features I'm excited to add. Considering this is my first time working on such a project, I'm really happy with the progress and am learning a ton!

The project is open source, so I please feel free to check out my work and leave any feedback :)
Deep Aphantasia: a visual brain with minimal influence from priors?
A lot depends on what kind of app you want to build.

For my current side projects I am interested in two kinds of technology.

(1) ML-enhanced apps that involve sorting and classifying content. Here I am drawing everything in the back end and using HTMX to partially update the screen to, for instance, create modal dialog boxes. The point here is that I want to quickly add new UI tasks and it will not be so quick if a front end build process is involved. (Notably in my system you can roll out a new task on the back end without reloading the front end)

My back end is Python which I am souring on. The basic problem is that it does not have threads. So if I have a 1GB ML model and a celery with 32 processes I could waste memory with 32 copies of the model. There are ways of working around all this but if I was just using Java, one copy of the model could be shared by any number of threads. Java doesn’t have the ML libraries though. As it is I think adding another RAM stick will solve my problems but that’s not a good answer for a system with a lot of users.

The general principle here is that the vast majority of React apps are just ordinary form processing apps that could be developed using the methods we used back in 1999 and seem to have either forgot or never learned (if we are young.). You could make the case that DX and UX were better then.

(2) Virtual reality applications using

https://aframe.io/

here there is no back end. With these tools you can make a world that is browsable with an ordinary web browser but put on a VR headset and you are there. This is another counter to the boring React app because it is something you could never do with an frontendless site.
Do you get paid to discuss political beliefs at work, likely via channels provided to you by your employer? In most western countries, it is in fact against the law to misuse the company's resources for private reasons. Unless your employer lets you, which is fine and very common these days, yet not a right nevertheless.
Simple net will solve the problem.
Good work HN, your inability to read and think strikes again!
AI tool converts selfies into GTA VI-style portraits in 30s
I think he meant to post this one in the spirit of inclusion

https://archive.ph/2024.04.02-133335/https://www.nytimes.com...
Replace integers with rationals or reals.
Probably that it was an independent s/w company not beholden to VCs or the politics involved there.
That's individual consumer based which is still part of the problem.

We need to collectively choose to structure education for the benefit of society because we want people to be educated.

It's not about consumer choices or utility functions. That type of thinking has zero place here.
teknium / Nous released Mistral finetunes (Hermes) that are quite great, and even published the datasets used for training.

But for the worldsim I think they are really using Claude (probably Haiku or Sonnet) via openrouter (https://openrouter.ai/).
Just can't leave a good thing alone.
'This' paragraphs are fragile to editing. Ensuring that your text is robust to updates (e.g. insertion of an extra paragraph) is good practice.
Power company can install a mesh or net over lines, to prevent sitting on them, or use another drone to inspect lines and direct a man with a shotgun.
> left and write arms

How do people make this mistake
Linux distributions like Debian (stable) are in principle such vetted dependencies that only receive security updates and are otherwise stable for a number of years. It’s a good model, and would make sense to commercialize more generally. Of course, still no one would want to take liability.
The surprising way philosophy of science can help you become a better data scientist.
I was once caught in a contractual dispute that occurred because the author used passive. The contract basically said 'X will be done' without identifying whether the customer or contractor was expected to do X. Unfortunately this wasn't spotted until the contract was in place.

If you must use passive in situations like these, please at least identify the agent, e.g. "X will be done by Y". Oy just use the shorter, explicit alternative: " X will do Y"
Which Aneroid phone botnets? How many are on my Android phone right now?
I wanna know what library they're using for that CRT terminal, very cool!
I wrote the British Placename Mapper (https://placenames.rtwilson.com/) last weekend, and it got a bit of traction on Twitter here in Britain over the last week.

It lets you search for parts of British place names, and will plot the places that match on an interactive map, so you can search for places that start with 'great' or end with 'burgh' or contain 'sea' (or you can use regexes for more complex stuff). People have found some cool patterns with it.
They were banned from talking about any sort of politics in the internal chats, not outside. That is something It was consider basic work polite behavior until very recently. Ironically, now that many people only can see some topics as "good vs evil", is when it is needed the most.
Is the title intentionally misleading? Rust is well-known for its ownership model as a language and I feel like that's being exploited here in a slightly clickbaity sort of fashion.
It's clear that reality conforms to some operating model, ours may get somewhat close, but it's getting close to something that is real.
All of that is fine but by simply having your IP, Google can continue to profile you in countless ways with data they collect in other ways and it wouldn't be expensive for them at all.
Yes. My bad. I will try to do better in the future. As my Jamaican father-in-law used to say, "Heavy manners."
> The company in question purposely misinterpreted Jesus’s words

That's why I said "was interpreted by his audience". We know what he (allegedly) said and how his audience (allegedly) understood it. What (if anything) he was implying and whether the audience misunderstood him has been the subject of debate for pretty much the entire history of Christianity.
Thanks for the references. I'll check them. I'm extremely biased against the business use of passive voice, to the point of getting so worked up when someone does it with me on mail or slack, that I need go to a quite room and relax for 5 minutes.

The purchase order has been made.

Your virtual machine has been created.

I see this a lot in corporate environments, and it's by low level managers thinking every bit of information they're trusted with is so delicate and confidential, they must go above and beyond to reveal the least possible amount of it. Note, in the examples above, it was the manager themselves doing the action. What's wrong with "I did this", "I did that"? This is LARPing as CIA agents (or whatever), and they like the sound of it (I want you to know I have information I can't share, you little shit!).

"I've just created your virtual machine" peasant

"Your virtual machine has been created" special ops elite force management

Mind you, 99.999% of the time, the concealment of "who did the thing" is totally unnecessary. It's only there to reinforce status.
Just take a page out of a ransom note writers’ book. Maybe literally.
sounds like a dystopian nightmare
WTF does #20 mean? "Occasionally pick random words, sentences, or paragraphs and hit delete. Did it matter?" JF and DHH are among the biggest narcissists I've ever met.
It would be great if they focused on more of a complete picture. Meetings, email, instant messages are all tools in the communication toolbox. Each one has their use.

This policy minimizes or even forgets the human part of communication...
* How do I build trust in my coworkers if the only feedback I get is formal communication and never the nuance of them as people?
* Are a barrage of async essays better than fewer but efficient meetings where everyone takes away value?
* What about the flood of async communication that employees now have to sift through to find the vital parts of their jobs?

We need to remember that fundamentally that we are people and have social drives that guide our lives and work. Strategies should acknowledge and embrace this.

PS. That "automated" social message sounds forced and robotic. I would love to be a fly on the wall and see the actual results from this form of social greasing after 6 months.
Why WASI Preview 2 Makes WebAssembly Production Ready
The complexity involved in targeting distributed, temporal backend systems like the ones being discussed here is sufficiently unreliable and risky that it’s easier and cheaper to just go straight for the people, or simply find another avenue.
Is there a service for this? (Standard developer question).

I found myself writing a book recently, completely left field to my normal technical work. I'm intending on approaching a literary agent but I need it reviewed first and I'm looking for dispassionate, distanced, but informed opinions.
They don't read what they right i guess :=)
To me, these lessons feel very similar to the lessons learned working at a midsized company.

Was there any particular takeaways that are exclusive to working at a FOSS?
Torvalds' git repo only goes back to 2005; is there another one with more history? Because I wouldn't describe 2005 as "long before the introduction of git".
The existence of a non-physical realm.

Once I realize that I believe in the existence of laws of physics, and that these laws of physics can be found nowhere physically in the universe, I realized I believe in non-physical realms.
Outcry after Michigan university announces plan to restrict protest rights
What Happens When the Oxide Server Boots? [video]
It's amusing that most of the child commenters assume that you switched from left to right, while you were (intentionally) neutral about that.
Why do you think they’re using their own weights?
Is it acceptable for you to start a political discussion, for example on anti-china sentiment, in your company’s main channel? Has anything like that happened before in your work?
Yes; the framework itself doesn't really add vulnerability, if you were planning to run containers as root anyway.

However. I used it for a year and moved off it. It starts out as a propeller but becomes an anchor. Just build your setup in Ansible; the increased initial effort pays off quickly the moment you want to do something like run rootless containers.
I don't know if it is just "science journalism" badness or part of the "we promise quantum computing has use" propaganda, but "we used an extra inefficient computer to model a theoretical wormhole" does not support the conclusion "this type of wormhole exists".
I worked at a government contractor and they were deploying a custom Java app on tomcat in windows. Entire team was into manual deployment and I was the DevOps engineer hired to automate. I worked for a year fighting all kinds of pushbacks and ultimately got it done. When I was leaving, the you who was going to run it, said “ansible is too complicated, we don’t need it after you leave.”

And that ladies and gentlemen, is the most useless project I’ve worked on. Hey atleast I got paid I guess.
“I will talk about, what I consider the mission version control system”

i really wonder what this means, i am not aware of anything by that name. I sure hope he follows through with this seemingly quite ambitious series.
>Europe was keeping up with USA just fine until about 15 years ago.

Keeping up how? let's go back 15 years ago: All the top GPUs were American, all the top CPUs were American, all the top SW companies were American, all the successful mobile platforms were American(Nokia was dying), all the top social media platforms were American, all the top PC manufacturers were American(and Chinese), all top semiconductor makers were American(and Asian), all the top financial institutions and VC funds were American(coincidence that money correlates with top tech?). etc

Where was Europe keeping up exactly? Oh yea, we had one Swedish music service whoopdie-doo.

>So the problem can't be one of the reasons you listed

Really? You don't think having the word's reserve money printer that fuels the stronger VC sector in the world that's absent in the EU, doesn't count? Or that Europe has 26 different markets with 26 deferent legal systems and languages and consumer spending habits? You think all those didn't matter when scaling up a start-up across the continent? You really are clueless.

> What changed lately was the onerous amount of regulation being added and a strong left turn in economic policy. Together they brought the unfolding disaster we are witnessing today.

Please tell me exactly which specific EU regulations of the past 15 years are preventing you from scaling a successful EU start-up? Is it the regulations like you say, or is it the lack of VC funding like I said?

>Because they aren't selling you a device. They are selling you access to their platform.

Where? If I go in the shops, I see iPhones for sale, not subscription to the iPhone service.
I honestly don’t get how discussing politics would even allow for work to get done, at least in any company that has international employees. I work with people from California, a conservative part of Florida, the Midwest, India, Pakistan, and a half-dozen other countries. Introducing and encouraging political debate would result in absolute chaos.
Happens every time, that is way we write the "As per our meeting, we've decided that..." emails. Even with those, people still end with different interpetations
Thank you. I was more interested in the “free as in beer” part of the reaction. So it absolutely addresses my question.
They expected some amount of employees to leave(not sure it was 1/3 though). This was during a time when the country was in the midst of some very contentious social issues. I believe the public communique was perhaps to provide precedent for other companies who wanted to make the same move, but were not courageous enough to do so on their own.

I also heard that they offered very generous severance packages(6 months salary), so there may have been other factors contributing to the exodus.
Punishment for crime will happen if the culture wants it to happen.

Even if you cannot morally justify that punishment being meted out by the government, the alternative is always individuals taking justice into their own hands — without the constraints of due process, usually with much more rage and cruelty.
When thinking of Frost's darkness, this poem springs to mind as bleak:

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
it came shortly after employees complained about a list of “funny” names they had internally (which surprise, turned out to be racist)
Yeah, and what's more frustrating is not getting time to work on those bugs. My current place is a little better, but my last place was a joke. We spent time and hired consultants to evaluate our product, logged the a11y bugs, and dove right into our next feature work. Those bugs are probably still there years later, if they haven't aged out.
Yeah it's actually a little terrifying, almost a lack of survival instinct
You've conflated "easy" with "littering". The easiness of littering is an argument for littering, not against easiness.
I am curious how getting rid of Slack at a small company plays out in practice. Do people now just text each other on their personal phones? Or do they send emails to each other many times a day? How does someone ask "Hey, are you still coming to this meeting?"
>It was not enormously expensive. The entire Apollo Program cost about 1/6th as much as the Vietnam War, and that's direct costs only.

you're comparing something to one of the most grossly mismanaged loss-of-value wars the United States was ever involved in such a way as to demonstrate thrift.

the Vietnam war represents one of the largest financial and strategic blunders of US history. Without considering long-term post-war expenses we spent an adjusted trillion dollars on that war and got nearly nothing to show for it except for a lot of abused and tired veterans.
Farmed salmon production leads to an overall loss of essential dietary nutrients
Once believed in god, healing, tongues, etc. Thankfully public schools and secular communities helped me to rethink all that. Now I believe what can be tested and proven. This also led to a big political shift from a moderate conservative to a democratic socialist, though the Republican shift to the party of Trump also helped make that happen.
Bloomberg: India set to receive Russian warships despite sanctions
Such drones are not practical in the war zone, because this introduces dependency on wires and electricity. In our air space it's no helpful. In enemy air space it's vulnerable to enemy action.
> Note that this posts focuses on source control systems, meaning systems meant for storing versions of source code. Other version control systems that focus primarily binary data will not be covered.

I can not overstate what a mistake this is. The fact that Git is effectively incapable of storing binary data is an utterly terrible thing. Our systems, tools, and pipelines are so much more fragile and complicated than they need to be because of this limitation.

My blog post going into further details: https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-...
Guys need your feedback to improve the device more efficient way

You may also visit the site:- Edenband.io
The policy was sparked by employees complaining about horrible behavior, and then rather than deal with the horrible behavior they decided to ban discussions about it.

> Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives began keeping a list of names that they found funny. More than a decade later, current employees were so mortified by the practice that none of them would give me a single example of a name on the list. One invoked the sorts of names Bart Simpson used to use when prank calling Moe the Bartender: Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz, Mike Rotch.

> Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist.

> Discussion about the list and how the company ought to hold itself accountable for creating it led directly to CEO Jason Fried announcing Tuesday that Basecamp would ban employees from holding “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal chat forums. The move, which has sparked widespread discussion in Silicon Valley, follows a similar move from cryptocurrency company Coinbase last year.

As other employees said-

> Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22406673/basecamp-politic...

Trying to act like this was simply a "no politics" rule, when it was actually a "don't criticize the leaders of our company" rule, show they either weren't paying attention to this when it happened or that have an agenda to push.
> So the contributions from collaborative effort is still usable under the same terms in those versions. So what’s this “bait and switch”?

It's undoubtedly bait and switch.

You have a company that portrays itself as the host of a project that relies on community contributions for maintenance, and all of a sudden that host unilaterally forces a licensing change where all users, including those who have been directly and indirectly contributing to maintain the project, are faced with an invoice-or-lawyer threat.

Yes, the source code is still available. Yes, anyone can pick up the last release and run with it. But it isn't business as usual anymore.

It disrupted day-to-day operations of all companies that have been using the software. Managers of all levels had to hold meetings, internal and across organizations. They had to ask lawyers questions and decide what to do and how to act based on their answers. People scrambled to react to this change.

To make matters worse, this change was overtly designed to extort money from it's users. There is no two ways around it. The first step is a sudden change in licensing terms, and expectedly the second step of sending in the lawyers to collect payments under threat of legal action.
DHH recently complained that tech workers don’t have the same work ethic as garbage men, I’m not sure why people listen to him anymore.
This is very helpful, thx.
Interesting - some of them look neat, sure, but they also look fairly cheap. The O2 especially. The construction certainly isn't high quality, they're just stamped coil steel boxes with plastic wrapped around them. Some OEMs still do this, like this Alienware, which is just a squared-off miditower dressed up in a plastic shell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1dlVPzUVo&t=8m10s

Of course in the 90s this would've been quite modern I imagine, considering that the competition was gray painted steel boxes and steel cabinets with a gray powder coat.