skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey HN!

I decided to make a solo bootstrapped project that aimed to improve reading comprehension! Feel free to try it out at https://pebble.study

It has embedded questions while you read articles on the web, tagging for spaced repetition quizzes on the website, AI questions while watching youtube videos and a random feature for generating wikipedia articles.
Singular they has been around much more than the "past few years": https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/singular-nonbinary-...

> We will note that they has been in consistent use as a singular pronoun since the late 1300s; that the development of singular they mirrors the development of the singular you from the plural you, yet we don’t complain that singular you is ungrammatical; and that regardless of what detractors say, nearly everyone uses the singular they in casual conversation and often in formal writing.
We just need to build trains.
Off topic, but thank you for having a perfectly modern and beautiful skeuomorphic GUI in Ardour. Tactile buttons with descriptive names instead of vague flat squares with incomprehensible icons; I wish more software offered this kind of interface.
How would you make a bomb out of a tokamak? It is barely stable enough to generate the little heat required to generate energy, any disruption to that will just put out the reaction it wont explode.

Fusion bombs requires fission bombs as a fuse to have enough heat to explode, fusion reactors wont even come close to that.
LLM can you use words only in the following list, to create the longest sentences you can that make sense and read like plausible English sentences?
+1! Even though we have a full-on smart home network, we still use these mechanical timers sometimes since they are totally foolproof.
That's where reflog comes in handy
Apparently this later became ISO 2047 and most of these characters are mapped into Unicode (with the exception of a few which have reasonable substitutes).

I was wishing for something like this recently so I'm genuinely pleased to know this exists.
Yep - and the hardest part about getting the input signs and symptoms data is that patients often don’t know the words to describe what they’re feeling.

LLMs are not going to help if the input data is also garbage, let alone hallucinations.

“Are you dizzy?” - sometimes, I’m not sure… etc
Domino's retreats from Italy having failed to conquer the home of pizza (2022)
Hate to burst your bubble, but with the end of Moores law this seems unlikely to pass.
Italians decided that Domino’s cardboard pizza tasted only slightly better than the cardboard container they sell it in.
This is not a solution, it's a workaround.
One that breaks with ( outdated ) system design doctrines and therefore is likely to spawn more cans of worms and will certainly increase the amount of technical debt at present.
How do people with aphantasia draw/paint/design? I always thought you had to kind of visualize those artistic things in your mind before manifesting them on paper/screen?
Spoiler alert: Software doesn't jump from “uses one core” to “efficiently uses 192 cores” once you remove the first lock.
I'm not sure I agree with that. The unknown length of instructions in x86 does make decoders more power hungry. There's no doubt about that. That is a big problem for power efificency of x86 and the blog doesn't address that at all.

M1 really is a counterexample to all theory that Jim is saying etc. The real proof would be if same results were also reproduced on M1 instead of Zen
> I sometimes wonder why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often

The best piece of code that I worked on was an ETL in pure Ruby. Everything in modules, simply to read, no crazy abstractions, strange things like __main__, abstract clssses or whatever.

Maybe others can chime in, but the main difference that is found in ruby developers is that they really have fun with the language making everything with a higher lever of software craftsmanship that other folks in the data space, e.g. Python of Julia.
So, I guess Kerrygold shouldn't be worried, as food wrapping are not included?
Using the uops directy as the isa would be a bad idea for code density.
In RISC-V land, vendors tend to target standard extensions/profiles, but when they hardware is capable of other operations they often expose those through custom extensions.
I set my language to English (Pirate) a long time ago to similar effect.

The option has been removed since, making me part of an ever shrinking community of essentially random people - not a particularly interesting target for advertisers.
It's also worth noting that the Coreutils `su` is no longer in use by anyone, and that the `su` from the shadow-package absolutely checks for wheel. It's even configurable if you haven't enabled PAM by configuring `SU_WHEEL_ONLY` in your login.defs. And with PAM you configure that via PAM.

Hell, not even GNU distros like GNU Guix, Parabola, nor Trisquel follow RMS' opinions on this anymore.
A big folder hierarchy of bookmarks works just fine for me and I get reference value from them practically every day, so it's not just unnecessary hoarding as the armchair psychologists imply.

The thing that solved bookmark annoyance for me is having them actually synced between all my devices. Having bookmarks trapped on specific devices is very annoying.
Not the GP either I can’t do any of that.

Sound is like images for me. An abstract concept you can reason about later but only experience in the moment.
Quick reminder, in case anyone is tempted, jwz.org detects referers from HN and redirects to an “unpleasant” image.
Meta: I would have appreciated a "jwz:" source in the title. I didn't know he was on there, nor that he still posts about tech.
I was thinking the same thing while reading, but the author does mention them at the end (together with the bee swarm plot or sina plot, which I think is the better version of a violin plot)

https://www.rhoworld.com/i-swarm-you-swarm-we-all-swarm-for-...
I use violin plots but a complication is that the shape depends upon the bandwidth hyperparameter of the kernel density estimator that is used inside. The plot can differ a lot for different bandwidth values.

Selection of the 'proper' bandwidth is a classic bias-variance tradeoff problem.
A real life Lord of the Flies: The story of group of teens stranded on an island
For who does not know, his books used as textbook in South American universities for years during 90s.
Isn't GPT4 non deterministic?

So the same prompt won't necessarily give the same result
I would like to do it more, but it's hard to convince people to not produce absolutely useless commit messages, and trust me I've tried.

Looking through my work project git log, it's a sea of random ticket numbers followed by absolutely nothing helpful or descriptive, usually just the title of the ticket if you're lucky.
Oh it's much worse than that. They only accept member fees paid by SEPA transfers. As in Single Euro Payment Area. Don't live in a country that uses the Euro or is part of the EU? Your money isn't welcome here.

What a dumb policy.
Are these the same companies we hear about because the got hacked because of security holes in their code?
When profiling slow queries/code I often collect the elapsed time of a test where I take 5-10 runs and calculate the mean/average, standard deiviation, min, and max.

As well as using line charts on the average, I've used a box plot (with the edges of the box being the mean +/- 1 standard deviation) to get an idea of whether a given change is significant or not. I.e. if the boxes are close together I will ignore a change I've made, only committing changes that provide a significant jump in performance. The box plot is a useful way of visualizing that.

They can help with seeing highly variable performance (long box) from consistent performance (narrow box).

I can see this in the data (mean, standard deviation) but having it represented visually can help -- especially looking at the data over several iterations, or when looking for patterns from changing a variable (like the number of items in the data being processed).

I've also used linear regression calculations when data has looked linear or quadratic to check/confirm that assumption. -- You can overlay that on top of the data by computing the values for each value of n along side the actual data average and then including the average and calculated values in a line chart.
So the diagram should not be used because of an education problem with some audiences?

Isn't that a bit like banning cars because some people can't drive?

Some diagrams are simply not for mass consumption and this is one, particularly because it is designed to illustrate an interpretation of ranges instead of the direct/linear representation of the raw data.

Of course I'd illustrate this fact as a Venn diagram comparing "box diagram" Vs "people" (intersection those who understand it) but I'm afraid the universal set may be mistaken as "those people who don't have eyes" rather than literally everything else.

Perhaps we should stop using that too, since it's non obvious what the universal set is.

All diagrams have some ambiguity and can be misinterpreted, sometimes it's deliberate (e.g. bar chart vertical axis not starting at 0 or scale not being linear) and that's why there's the saying "There's lies damn, lies, and statistics." That doesn't mean some diagrams are not useful, just that it's not suitable for some audiences who may misinterpret the data.
I'd wager that stalling of GNU OS is as much due to inherent product engineering or design complexities as folks attribute to its principled stand. There are other operating systems like Debian, Mint and Fedora which work pragmatically on your laptops despite having a principled stance.
The squash merge is for the sanity of master/main, whereas rebase is for the sanity of the reviewer. That's how I look at it at least
I have what probably sounds like a niche use case, where most of the boxes I work on don't have access to the Internet.

So for me, "is it installed in the base distribution" is the difference between being able to start immediately no matter which box I'm concerned with, and spending months trying to upstream a new program to be installed with our OS image team.

I took a look around a vanilla Debian 12 box, and didn't see Ruby in there [1]. So, sadly, although I really like the way Ruby looks, I'm going to have to stick with Bash and Python 3 for the hard stuff.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/what-programm...
Ah, I assume this is linking to the Mastodon post advertising the article instead of the actual article due to jwz.org's response to requests with HN in the Referer header?
Just switch to doas already.
While I write most of my scripts in Ruby and enjoy doing so, there is one gripe I have with it: its slow start-up time.
On my machine, running an empty Ruby script takes about 100ms, compared to <10ms for Python, Perl, Lua, Bash.

One can mitigate the problem somewhat using the `--disable-gems` flag, but that's not a good general solution.
just use boxplots with an overlay of the actual data and any confusion goes away
Not OP. I don’t recall any dreams since childhood. If I had not experienced a few myself, I would have a hard time understanding what a dream even is. And my 10 or so dreams only had abstract images. Defo not like a movie or reality where you can “see” things, people, objects. I don’t recall much about them anyway except being slightly mildly freaked out at the time for experiencing something which was not “real”.
These didn't get much use as far as I know (and many computers of the 60s still used 6-bit characters and not anything resembling ASCII), but I think CP437 became the de-facto representation of the low characters for most of the 80s through at least the mid 90s.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Codepage...
I actively waited for 47ish OLEDs to come out and drop in price before upgrading my tv as didn’t want or need anything bigger but definitely wanted OLED.
Hi, author here. This is a good point that's worth addressing.

Technology is not the reason it's a winner-take-most market. It's helpful, but in the long term, many players will have comparable technology.

Utilization is the reason why it's a winner-take-most market. If you have the most popular app with the best drive liquidity, that's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. In turn, it means that your economics are better because your cars are going to be utilized at a higher % of the time. This in turn means that you can charge lower prices, and so forth. (A similar dynamic has been the case for Uber, for example.)
You wrote "50 years ago." 1974 is closer to 1979 than 1966.

1984 is 40 years ago.

Yes, 1950s Finland is different from 1980s US. Blue laws were also stronger in 1950s US.

Edit: Tourist book from 1968, https://archive.org/details/fieldingstravel00fiel/page/427/m... "Shopping hours: Weekdays, 8:30 A.M. TO 5 P.M., plus 6 P.M. on Fridays; Saturdays, 8:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. in winter, with 3 P.M. closings in summer.

A few pages earlier, it says hairdressers are generally open 8AM to 5PM.

It seems like a pretty good nightlife scene. On page 412, "Always go late to savor Helsinki nightlight (except to Espilä which wraps up the evening at 1 A.M.) The gear shifts of merriment seldom mesh into overdrive before 11 P.M. - and from then onward, they're off and racing."

Earlier on the same page it also mentions "Prayer Sundays" - four Sundays of the year where there is no public entertainment between 6pm Saturday and 6pm Sunday.
>In the 1950s tips ran to about 10% of bills. By the 1980s they rose to 15%. In recent years they have hit 20%. Whereas tipping used to be reserved for table service at restaurants, now buying a coffee or a muffin is likely to involve the employee flipping around a tablet screen to the customer to solicit a tip. That can be hard to refuse when the person behind you in line is peering over your shoulder. And these screens typically give three options—of, say, 18%, 20% or 23%—making it difficult to opt for something smaller.

This is perhaps a consequence of student debt nightmare from worthless, over priced college degrees. People waiting tables and serving coffee now are "highly educated" with expectations!
Yeah, while I think Mozilla has made a lot of bad decisions over the years (looking at you, Pocket integration), supporting Netflix was not one of them.

Stubbornly clinging to principles at the expense of the user experience will alienate all but the most hardcore users.
I'll answer but I don't think you want one/it... They're different. That's why. Simple.

One you're giving them information/still seeing ads

The other, they're guessing and you're free from the mind rot. Distance surely hurts their accuracy.

Can't stop them guessing but you can stop being their authoritative source. You've heard the whole, "we're in charge of our response, not the problem", right?
No you shouldn’t stop using box plots. You should use them for when they are appropriate - showing location and spread. And not shape! There’s absolutely no information on modality or distribution presented past quartiles and limits.

They are mostly useful for comparing batches not analysing an individual batch.

The author doesn’t know what they are talking about and is telling people as if they do. If he read any of Tukey’s material he might know. But no name dropping is enough clearly…
Why does a web server have significantly more cold start overhead than whatever is receiving requests and passing them to the handler in the classic lambda case?
Out of interest, how does someone who's worked as these cooks end up frequenting HN?
Ok, but C++ is a compiled language. Even though compilation speed doesn’t need to be that slow, at least you’re getting something out of it.

JS is interpreted and JITed. The whole point of using it is having a very fast feedback loop.

The tradeoff should be: faster at dev, slower at runtime. There’s something fundamentally wrong if that premise is broken.

Actually it’s insane that we need build steps with any noticeable delay during dev time at all.
So basically, small-scale war/death is fine, as long as large-scale war is monopolized by the powerful?
It’s not a direct relationship as far as I know. The point is that maybe the LLMs gave enablement for the people that thinks about software as a “means to an end” and I think it’s completely fine.

I like elegant code, well written and easy to maintain; but for a long time the field of programming started to develop the pristine idea that the programming _was the end_ and not as a way to achieve something.

What’s the post author made was to bring it in a more latent way saying that you could use programming to achieve the same results but you do not need.
This rings more than true, but it reflects market conditions that are not set in stone (otherwise we'd have lots of hundred-year old incumbents, but the evidence is that companies live shorter and shorter lives).

The cost dimension is (ultimately) what indicates whether a domain is ripe for disruption. No matter how cozy an arrangement it will eventually implode if it extracts unjustified rents while alternatives are readily available. Ofcourse cartels can remain untouched longer than you can remain solvent. There is a timing element and luck involved.

Open source can be an important lever in this direction because it is not just "free", it is also more transparent. Ceteris paribus the cost of assurance should be lower. When resistance to chance is primarily due to risk aversion this could be an other element to weigh in. But for this dynamic to kick in there has to be adoption and amortization of costs and that is a catch-22.
Everyone, that is, except for the customers dealing with buggy slow products that will eventually be breached and leak their data. And the good developers who now have to hunt for dumb bugs without clues for where to look because the person who generated the code can’t help either.
What are you going to do when ageism catches up with your technical ability? I made it to retirement at 65 as a technical individual contributor but the last 10 years were a struggle trying to learn a new framework every 2 years. What does your retirement runway look like? A boring job that pays the bills and helps with the runway is not so bad. As others have said live for the kids and or your hobbies.
Is anybody using this?

https://webtag.io/
Google has blocked Reform UK's Ad Accounts just two weeks before the elections
Freedom also means being free to use DRM if you want to.

Nobody is holding a gun to your head to open a Netflix account.
For myself, drawing never required having it visualized in my mind. I knew what I wanted to draw and could put it on paper. However not without difficulty. Using a model, or image to reference certainly helped.

As a simple example. Do you picture the letters you are going to write before writing a note? I don't know the mechanic, but I can write notes without effort.
In the same vein, simple objects like geometric shapes are very easy for me to draw, no visualization needed. I suspect it's the same for most.

However, I did give up on drawing because I recognized I couldn't visualize a scene and place it on paper easily. It felt like I was drawing with poor planning which resulted in lots of mistakes, corrections and ultimately frustration.

However, I'm not sure if I qualify as someone with true aphantasia or not. I can visualize things, but I can't hold them in my mind. I see it briefly, like a flash, but can't hold onto it. I've tried to practice holding an image in my mind without success.
I don’t dream.

When I was a child I remember dreams occurred but they did not contain any vivid representations of anything. Just abstract images. Nothing you could classify as vivid, let alone a representation of reality in any sense.

The whole concept that you can actually “see” something that is not real and happening in the moment is non sensical to me.

Vivid dreams are just mysterious to me as the minds eye.
Box plots make distributions easier to reason about by oversimplifying them. In a similar way, the mean can be very misleading (but we likely won't forbid its use!).

IMO a good takeaway might be to always use a plot that fairly represents the underlying distribution.
This is only true for backticks, which are somewhat intended for non-serious use. If you want exceptions for subprocess failure, `system` does the trick.

There’s really no need for this kind of over-the-top response.
Is the kitchen life as bad as it looks on TV? Like stressful as hell and some ultra aggressive chef chewing you out constantly (and for low pay), or is that just for TV drama?

Also how often are people getting severe injuries (chopping bits off their hand, getting severe burns)?
I fully agree, and also think that
if it's a professional environment pushing to the main branch itself is very questionable for most / code repos. Not only because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for public companies.
Glad to hear this update is coming.
What about sexual fantasies? Can people with aphantasia imagine the other person in any manner? In the article, the writer claims she can’t even imagine her ex-boyfriend.

I can imagine anyone, anywhere, without even closing my eyes. In many situations, I know I shouldn’t do it, but I’ve had this ability since early childhood. It has not made me a sex-craving maniac, though; I’m quite stable.
>box plots always make distributions look bell shaped

I feel like this is where the confusion stems from for the author and everyone else here. Box plots don't make anything bell shaped (they don't change the distribution), they assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape. This is correct in cases where the central limit theorem can be applied (which is almost everywhere) - but when that is not the case, the assumption is wrong and you shouldn't use a box plot anyways, because the values it shows have no real use. There are very real use cases for box plots, but people need to understand the basics of statistics before they can use them.
> easily reach their children when picking up

School busses should be taking care of this; parents should not be acting as kids' personal limo driver.

> or in an emergency (like a shooting).

There exist systems that should be taking care of communicating the status of students in an emergency scenario. Obviously they're not perfect, but having a personal direct line to your child at all times is not a reasonable solution IMO.
Related: "Why GNU su does not support the `wheel' group (2002)", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37175754, 143 comments
I suppose RMS's came up in a very different time when it came to computing, and pre-modern-internet computing had much less an emphasis on security, but his takes on things like this always seem so bizarre to me.
You can describe LSD, or a novel programming paradigm, just as well as you can describe Beethoven's 5th symphony in words.

The amount of lost bits of information makes the explanation totally worthless, even though you technically can explain it. The point is it's a waste of time. You won't understand LSD, Beethoven or Forth until you have tried them.
> secure and efficient

Judging by the fact you generated it with an LLM, the quality of the code, and skimming the videos, I’m highly suspicious of the claim and don’t think you’re basing that assertion on anything defensible.

Adding “make the code secure and efficient” to your prompt doesn’t make it so.

I fear for the future quality of software products. Quality was already going down the drain and LLMs have the ability to accelerate the decline.
I don't read very often because it's just words and therefore not very interesting unless it illicits emotion and / or for learning.
> And since the sshd approach doesn't allow you to restrict root access to only certain commands [...]

The ForcedCommand infrastructure.
And of course I’m super important and always right, never humble.

And at the same time very quick to criticize management because they’re so dumb.