skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nah.

Some bits of the 20th century were about improvement.

The 21st has been about spiralling growth and consumption and everything getting worse than before, although sometimes it's briefly shiny.

In software, in hardware, in human life on the planet Earth.

Once you accept this, things make more sense and it's easier to relate to people born into this world and their jaded detachment.

20th century "modern" -- better, improved, refined.

21st century "modern" -- given a coat of paint, looks shiny, but underneath it's the same old junk, just worn out and creaking and failing, but rebranded and sold as NEW.
USDA Report: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/108702/eib-265...

Related:

US Rural Hospital Closures Since 2005 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36302937 - June 2023 (153 comments)

UNC Rural Hospital Closures
- https://www.shepscenter.unc.edu/programs-projects/rural-heal...
Yeah, I think it was that an AES function/instructions and some array clearing were getting reordered unsafely, but only under some very specific distributed modes. We were mostly able to get repo after a couple of days, but it was complicated by having a pretty deep stack and the fact that the corrupting change was being canaried out, not released.
Eggs are so versatile any replacement is bound to be very context specific.

But nutritionally speaking, I don't think we can find anything that compare. It's quite an amazing food.
> Unlike CP/M 2.x, CP/M 3 allows for banked memory and disk data/directory buffers, resulting in a lot more usable memory for applications (Transient Program Area) and faster disk access.

Sounds a lot like what MSX-DOS 2.xx does as compared to its predecessor.

FYI: both versions of MSX-DOS are partially CP/M compatible, such that a # of applications running on it are slightly- or unmodified CP/M programs. Not unimportant given how much quality CP/M software already existed in early '80s.

One oddity resulting from this: some OS calls read or write files in multiples of 128 byte 'records' (regular MSX-DOS calls do handle exact file sizes though). Just guessing: sector size of ancient 8" floppies, or something like that?
Yeah lets make the entire open source ecosystem reliant on Microsoft. No thanks.
She might have really bad social anxiety, ocd and or some other social disorder that's pretty common in your early to mid to even late 20s. I had it and withdrew too until I started talking about it with others my age only to find out they were all crazy / normal too. Thinking your the only one dealing with such and never talking about and or hearing others ur age or close in age deal with it too is the worst thing ...she needs to talk about it and know she is completely normal and many many others her age deal with the same too
I've seen parents with babies in a stroller with their phone strapped to the handle, so the babies can watch YouTube while they go for a walk. They are all going to be completely fucked.
Makes total sense; the rural areas have been manipulated by the shareholder class into selling out most of their quality-of-life-enabling institutions for scrap.

I live in a relatively large Lower Midwestern city. The general attitude of capital and policymakers in the United States after the 1960s became one of confusion about the purpose of the area between the Appalachian Range and Rockies. California was booming, the cities on the East Coast were moving into a service economic model as their factories had been packed up. Why were these people still here? That applies to cities that used to participate in mercantile capitalism (St. Louis is a wonderful example of this) as well as small towns of 150 people. There's a lack of investment that would simply be unacceptable to people in the other parts of the country. Imagine if Amtrak's Northeast Corridor had the reliability of the various Midwestern routes.
What pattern? ..example.com or just *.sub.example.com?
"The Bug" by Ellen Ullman
Why Can't My Mom Email Me?
Hello. I have found the mess of shell scripts. Please don't do this.

I was able to deal with the weird skaffold mess by getting rid of it, and replacing it with argocd. I was able to get rid of jenkins by migrating to github actions. I have yet to replace the magic servers with magic bash scripts. They take just enough effort that i can't spend the time.

Use a tool i can google. If your bash script is really this straight forward and takes you from standard A to standard B, and it's in version control then bash is AMAZING. Please don't shove a rondom script that does a random thing on a random server.
This is one of the most useful documents on the web regarding bzip2 implementation. I wrote a bzip2 encoder in Rust [1] a couple of years ago and it would have been an uphill struggle without Joe Tsai's work.

Like Tsai did for his Go implementation, I used the 'SA-IS' algorithm for computing the Burrows-Wheeler Transform. Unlike the algorithm used in the reference implementation of bzip2, it is linear time, which in practice means it has much better upper-bound performance (though is typically somewhat slower on average).

The problem of suffix array construction, which SA-IS solves (with computation of the BWT being a natural corollary), is a very interesting one in which theoretical and practical advances are still being made. There is a notable implementation of SA-IS by Ilya Grebnov which is spectacularly fast due to usage of techniques like cache prefetching [2]. It's worth a look for anyone interested in really high performance software compression.

[1] https://github.com/jgbyrne/banzai/

[2] https://github.com/IlyaGrebnov/libsais
I’d like to think that there is in fact a trend towards simplicity. But with AI and AI written code, I unfortunately think we may be heading to having even more opaque code.
Humans Forget. AI Assistants Will Remember Everything
Article title is “City-Country Mortality Gap Widens Amid Persistent Holes in Rural Health Care Access”

> The study does not address causes for the increase in mortality rates… differences in health care resources could compromise the accessibility, quality, and affordability of care in rural areas. Hospitals in small and remote communities have long struggled, and continued closures or conversions limit health care services in many places. [perhaps also] persistently higher rates of poverty, disability, and chronic disease in rural areas, compounded by fewer physicians per capita and the closure of hospitals, affect community health.
About a year ago, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board was found to have a "secret sex room".

https://veritenews.org/2023/06/26/payroll-fraud-and-a-secret...
How did one type such a thing back then?
Same here -- one or two sentences along those lines in GPT-4's system prompt makes a _world_ of difference.
The Semantic Web and Why It Failed (2018)
Show HN: ADS-B visualizer
I've created a web app for querying and visualization of ADS-B datasets: https://adsb.exposed/

Source code: https://github.com/ClickHouse/adsb.exposed/

The results significantly exceeded my expectations because the pictures are insanely beautiful, and the data is a treasure trove.

It proves many statements that were not certain:
- it is feasible to generate tiles by aggregation on a pixel level (instead of hexagons or rectangular grid);
- it does not require JPG/PNG tiles - we can transfer raw bitmap data with zstd compression;
- it is possible to do it in real time;
Just spent a fair amount of time figuring out how to make a Mac Mini G4 with Snow Leopard (10.5.8) usable as my home bastion for when I want to access my home systems remotely.

The biggest issues are that Safari and sshd are so old they're basically useless.

- I don't really need a browser on that machine, but for comfort I replaced Safari with the no longer updated but still usable TenFourFox browser. Log into your ppc system and type 'machine' at the prompt. Use the value it shows to choose which version to download from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tenfourfox/files/fpr32.5/

- For sshd replacement I installed Dropbear as I couldn't get openssh to build. To get Dropbear to build I had to:

1. Comment out "LTC_CFLAGS += -Wno-nullability-completeness" in libtomcrypt/makefile_include.mk and libtommath/makefile_include.mk (as the C compiler didn't know that option).

2. In default_options_guard.h after the #ifndef related to DROPBEAR_SVR_PAM_AUTH, add "#define DROPBEAR_SVR_PASSWORD_AUTH 0" and "#define DROPBEAR_SVR_PAM_AUTH 1" (as OS X needs PAM to log in).

3. Build with:
./configure --enable-pam
make PROGRAMS="dropbear dbclient dropbearkey dropbearconvert scp"
sudo make install

4. Start the new Dropbear ssh server on port 2222 as follows:
mkdir /etc/dropbear
/usr/local/sbin/dropbear -F -E -R -p 2222

You can then ssh into the machine as before (ssh -p2222 user@host) and things like port forwarding work fine.

Nice feeling to have a G4 Mini still doing something useful!
I looked at the MLX codebase - certainly pretty tight, although also very poorly commented/documented.

I'm still not sure MLX vs PyTorch is really a fair comparison though since PyTorch is a much more mature framework and of course supports many different backends, as opposed to MLX which is just Metal or CPU.

Comparing these is a bit like comparing the new programming language of the day vs older ones that have accumulated a log of cruft/complexity. The shiny new language will likely look just as crufty after it has accumulated all the additional functionality of the older one.
Someone posted this [1] here recently which I found extremely informative. Unless I've missed something zstd outperforms bzip2 in all cases there?

[1] https://insanity.industries/post/pareto-optimal-compression/
> Within the prime working-age group, cancer and heart disease were the leading natural causes of death

I have a lot of extended family and in-laws who live in rural locations.

The lifestyle differences between what I see in the city and what I see in their rural locations are stark. The norms around diet, exercise, drinking, and smoking are completely different.

Even norms around personal safety and protective gear are completely different. Most of my rural extended family will do things like casually spray pesticides or paint without a mask. I was mocked for pulling out safety glasses and hearing protection for power tools when we worked on a project together once.

The study classifies things like heart disease and cancer as “natural causes” and blames lack of healthcare, but my anecdotal experience is that the lifestyle differences could easily explain the difference in heart disease and probably a significant number of the cancer diagnoses as well.

Even when healthcare is available, many of them don’t trust it. Statins are still a common debate when I visit, with many of the people in mid-life telling me that they don’t work and it’s just a big pharma cash grab conspiracy (even though statins are dirt cheap now). Refusing to take doctor-directed medication is a point of pride for some, though they tend to reverse course in older life when they see their peers start dying young. Many refuse vaccines for themselves and children due to things they heard on podcasts or social media. And mental health? Don’t dare even suggest that one.
Or, you could use NixOS and just declare your systems in some text files, git commit; git push.

You build script becomes:

while true; do

git pull

nixos-rebuild switch

sleep x

done

That's it. You can even do it remotely and push the new desired state to remote machines (and still build on the target machine, no cross compile required).

I've completely removed Ansible as a result and no more python version mismatches, no more hunting endless task yaml syntax, no more "my god ansible is slow" deplyments.
I was as well, but I was under the impression that I was a weirdo. I can't say I ever really grew out of it either. I think the interviewee was a bit older though.
I'm not sure. Googling for "gpu non-determinism" and reading around the results seems to indicate that GPUs are often not deterministic.

I don't know why, but it is easy to imagine a scenario where non-determinism makes sense. For example the computer could say "I am supposed to do this floating point division. Let's see ... my very exact FP-Division unit is pretty hot at the moment. 82°C. Let's pass this calculation to the slightly less exact FP-Division unit then".
Do you have a source for this statement? Doesn't pass the smell test for me...
I think the WiFi jammers aren't for taking out the target's cameras, but random neighborhood Ring cameras and the like.
Ok, changing it then, bit^Wnot felting^Wdeleting (though since much of the time the wing^Wwrong guess isn't even there, but rather it's plurals and verb forms and si^Wso on, I do often need to refocus away from the import^Winput fitting^Wfield, pause, scan, conclude the right word isn't there, then delete anyway, so my muscle memory is to go for the delete key). It's still a suboptimal experience because the keys for the next weird^Wword like punctuation are at the bottom and the wing^Wwrong guesses mean you have to scan the list at the top.

These ^W marks are all organic mistakes that it really shouldn't be making so many of considering the word prevent^W placement[1] and statistics and thousand upon thousands of units^Wunless^Wit's^Winputs.

Maybe it's the never^Wnerve damage in my diggers^Wfingers making me sort^Wsuper clumsy, or being a lefty makes it wise^Wworse sommelier^Wsomehow, but I do remember it being better, far better, in the past. And it never, ever, send^Wseems to learn (I don't have Google services so maybe it needs to phone home to learn?)

It seems possible to add words: you type then^Wthem n^Win and choose then^Wthem from the bar m^W.

But thank you for so kindly telling me I'll^WI'm once-unimaginable^Wimagining[2] it.

[1] take this one for example: "considering the word prevent" isn't grammatical, but "considering the word prevent^Wprevent^Wplacement (argh again! Twice! And prevent^Wplacement want^Wwasn't in the list, it was prevention, preventing and prevents) is.

[2] "once-unimaginable" is one I put in by typing it once as it has little concept of compound Shane^Wadjectives. It seems to completely hallucinate the "once-un" to prioritise a previous manual unit^Winput. But I can't actually swipe to get it again, no matter how carefully I go. I get "once-imagined".
It omits some characters from its output. It also mangles some others through octal escape codes or other such stuff. Depending on flags it will also not handle filenames with spaces or newlines properly. ls output is meant for human consumption, not parsing.
> Classic MacOS for most of its life could not drag windows with their contents in real time

There was shareware you could install which would do it though! Even on a 25 MHz 68030 it was surprisingly usable (more usable than the passive matrix LCD at least) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cQo29SIIgU

It got a bit slower in color on an external display https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peWIysrf7DY
Women Came to Antarctica for Science. Then the Predators Emerged
"Ironically, to be truly competitive, European LLMs will still need to be fluent in English — which remains the language of most of the world’s scientific papers, and just over half of the pages on the world wide web"
> Of course, if you are too blinded by far right ideology or McCarthyism, it can be difficult to notice distortions because you believe in false or distorted informations.

Aren't you blinded by far left ideology? By marxism?
NYT journalism has really gone down hill towards clickbait and controversial takes in lieu of just reporting the news. Gotta stay in business somehow I guess.
Shame on you. SEO has been one component in the Internet's becoming less useful.

Please retire to a life of quiet penitence.
>I just read there's priests flying over flooded places in Russia to pray. How is that going to help anyone?

Did they stop once they realized you were ridiculing them?

I agree that every issue you brought up is a legitimate issue. I just don't think ridicule is the solution.

And I especially don't think ridicule is warranted when we're talking about someone attending a funeral that no one else attended.

>According to you, I'm not allowed to make jokes about such either?

By all means, you are completely free to ridicule them, just as I'm free to call it out as unproductive and sad. I'm not sure why you and the other poster resort to this "are you trying to censor me?" rhetoric.
I think that in the absense of a "god" to tell us, everyone has to come to their own conclusions about where they draw moral lines. For me specifically I think that being able to make plans about the future is a superficially appealing but pretty bad way to decide. For a start there are humans who (because of brain-damage or whatever) lack the ability to make meaningful plans.
Headphone jack is a driver of innovation and early adoption as well. Look at mobile payments for instance, 1st available on 3.5mm. It's a good connector to have.
Well, the article is a bit of a mess.

... so, what exactly makes it ambitious?

The article itself brands AMD as afterthoughts in "GPU" (note: virtually no references to actual graphics, I get it, AI pushes all the investment these days), and then plops down performance graphs that generally show AMD to be better.

It talks about "compromised" gaming as the stated bar in the opening paragraph.

I understand that Intel has shown near-complete managerial incompetence in discrete graphics despite trying every five years or so. So maybe "not totally failing" is "ambitious".

Maybe at some point, GPUs are "good enough", once you can 4k 120FPS enough aa textured triangles, it's more about art design, modelling, etc (something I actually think AI will be really beneficial for)

Alas the tantalizing prospect of real time raytracing seems to be backburnered under the AI hype onslaught.

So maybe the "lesser" iGPU will be a new sweet spot for a couple generations. Maybe having all the high end cards swooped up for LLM training will have the PC gaming market take a breather and work on optimizing for a somewhat stable hardware capability.
the difference is that there isn't 1 billion people in the west -- US (330M) + Europe (500M) still isn't close. lots of space in the US to move to, also.

and the ability to be extremely vocal about it -- which could get you sent to jail or otherwise ruin your life via social credit scores.

point is, the kids in China have it notably rough.
Is there any person who wants to test an old but currently in-development agpl licensed accounting software? Your help would be regarding testing the software, reporting bugs and maybe submit PRs to fix issues

https://gnukhata.org/install/
I find it patronizing that you assume they must have been brainwashed.

For some people, dying more easily is worth it for the sake of freedom. Not the trade you would want to make, but that’s their prerogative.
It'll be worse the closer to the date it comes.
Wire cut is a definite hard alert. More reliable indictor than a jammed WiFi, way less false positive too.
Advertising is one of the main reasons modern social media is experiencing continued enshittification in this era. Noam Chomsky in his "Manufacturing Consent" wrote of three "filters" that determined which content would be presented to viewers, and while he wrote on the mass media in 1988, I believe this framework applies equally to social media in 2024: access to capital; the "advertising license to do business;" and a symbiotic relationship with government, who provides access to authoritative sources of news.

Take X, for example: its access to capital allows it to eclipse most other social media and build network effects that are difficult for other startups to disrupt; after the Musk acquisition, advertisers began withdrawing from the platform; and as the Twitter files have claimed, its collusion with the U.S. government in the promotion/demotion of certain viewpoints.

If you want to see genuine viewpoints, you'd best seek out media that are largely independent of these three "filters" over what messages are permissible on the medium.
It is still pretty relevant, as the .bat file contents can't prevent improper arguments from executing arbitrary code, whereas a #!/bin/sh file invoked with arbitrary arguments will not do any code execution other than what the file itself asks for. And, even still, the #! form will still pass the arguments as separate elements, i.e. a file containing "#!python3" invoked via an execve argv of ["the-file", "arg1 \"foo ^%`'\\", "arg2"] will result in a total invocation of ["python3", "the-file", "arg1 \"foo ^%`'\\", "arg2"] (JSON-formatted here for clarity reasons, there's no backslash-escaping happening anywhere in reality).
Social media has ruined society, indeed, but only because the exploitability was always there to begin with. Just look at everyone in this thread opting for letting their kids cave in to peer pressure and dodging responsibility for their upbringing because "past a certain point" you can't do shit about it, and God forbid they try to develop themselves into a worthwhile adult without using any of those time-sinking, mindless apps, because then they will be "left out". Left out of what? A vile cesspool of shit in which everyone seems to bathe nowadays, at the expense of their potential?

Lack of impulse control, no critical thinking, laziness and general negligence have always been at the root cause of many of societal ailments like this one, and until a large enough group of people chooses to come up with healthier alternatives and sacrificing hedonistic and mindless tendencies, they will keep festering across the globe. In the meantime, I absolutely prefer to be "left out" and interacting solely with similar minded people.
> Why have so many custom ERP software suites or anything else related to the backend if a transformer can do the work?

Because they can't. Transformers are great at probabilistic tasks that traditional computing can't do well, like natural language processing. They're very suboptimal for the tasks that traditional computing is already good at.

The first and most obvious reason is that traditional computing is deterministic and predictable in its behavior. This is great for business systems because errors can be tracked down to specific lines of code that can be demonstrably fixed and regression checked. A transformer doesn't have this property—when something fails you can try tweaking parameters like temperature or fine tuning it longer, but it's hard to prove that the specific bug won't show up again.

The second reason is cost—even saying you can make a reliable transformer-based ERP system, in the long run it won't cost less than the traditional equivalent. The initial training cost can be enormous and you still need highly paid staff to organize that work. Once you have the working system, your business will still need to make changes to the rules over time, so you'll still need to keep some of those staff on hand to make those changes, but you also have to pay for the GPU time to run the application, which will cost much more than the equivalent traditional ERP.

Finally, even if all of that sounds fine, at some point you need to store the data and host a web server of some kind, which means you're going to need to interface with deterministic computation. I guess you could go the tool use route and let the LLM generate its database queries on the fly, but that makes all the reliability problems in the first paragraph much much worse. And if you're going to hire web devs anyway, why not just have them do everything?
Installing ad & annoyance blockers is good. Another approach is to nuke "sticky" elements with a simple bookmarklet. It also removes a bunch of other useless crap from modern websites, like those lame floating headers & footers. I wrote about it here: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...