skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The vastly overwhelming body of evidence clearly indicates that today humanity is materially and by nearly all concrete measurements of human well-being better off than at any time in all its long history. This paints a powerful case for humanity also being psychologically and emotionally better off, on average, than at any older time in history since, as should be obvious, dodging starvation, random war, plague and een minor medical problems becoming deadly isn't exactly conducive to being as happy as you could be without these things.

If you want to make a case for the "natural" life of simple pleasures, sure, it could be attractive contrasted against the cacophony of modern digital and other distractions, but here's a basic thing: If you want that kind of life today, within the relative safety net of modern medicine and economic support in a wider sense, you're free to pursue it as intensely as you like, and more safely than you ever could have before.

If on the other hand, you, living in some grimmer, dirtier past, wanted any other sort of life, the choice didn't even really exist unless you were one of an incredibly tiny minority that formed the elites of society. And even among these people, the slightest infection could randomly kill you, losing your eyesight with age was a gradual sentence into blindness, and god help you if you ever were to have any major dental or surgical needs that are today fixable with little fuss.

Whatever you might think of Steven Pinker, the guy's fundamental argument is broadly true even if some specific details might be cherry-picked(and i'd like to see which one's you're referring your suspicion to)

Again though, feel free to list the stuff we've lost. I'd love to see what you refer to and balance it against what we've gained.
Europe doesn't have earthquakes. (Neither does Houston, but the previous comment did mention it as an issue in general.)
> so I recommend to use your imagination

I think (certain important portions of) modern day Human's curiosity/imagination capabilities have atrophied, since we know everything. Or maybe more accurately, they've been concentrated in a narrow, specialized range: knowing everything.
I need opinions about my project AI PHP WordPress
I am developing a plugin that automates the creation of standard Worpdress posts by associating them with an image based on the title of the article, the content of the article is also filled. Free API keys are used for this project. It is not paid.

Automating processes in WordPress, particularly with a plugin that creates posts and associates images using artificial intelligence, is highly advantageous for several reasons. First and foremost, automation saves time and simplifies repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on more strategic aspects of your website or content creation.

By leveraging automation within WordPress, you can ensure consistency in posting schedules, reduce the likelihood of errors, and enhance the overall efficiency of your content creation workflow. With your plugin integrating artificial intelligence to match images with post titles, you can enhance the visual appeal and relevance of your content effortlessly.

please be nice with me...
“Storage” doesn’t exist. The choice is between nuclear, fossil fuels, and frequent blackouts.
Doing software right will require a lot of planning, irrespective of whether that planning occurs up front or as you go. If you plan more up front, that will eliminate a whole lot of guesswork when the time to do the programming comes. You need systems analysts -- generalists who understand the business and work well with people -- to come in and characterize, in detail, how the business currently works in terms of systems and subsystems, and then propose and design new systems, again to a high level of detail. Once that's done, inasmuch as you need software, producing the software is a simple matter of translating the detailed requirements into language for the machine.

Unfortunately, modern methods are basically just institutionalized guesswork: this is what Agile is all about. It's a methodology designed by programmers for programmers, in order to bamboozle management and inflate the programmers' own sense of self-importance. The correct way to design a business's internal systems, including but not limited to its software, appears to have been forgotten, except a pastiche of it lives on as a strawman called "Waterfall" for Agilistas to take down.
The one password and the app that uses it are more secure than most other applications. Lock out is just another term for DDoS if a bad actor knows usernames.

I love proton pass.
Indeed, voice matching to book "by some magic metric" is the way to go.

My comment wasn't entirely clear, it was the "voice matched to author gender" part that prompted a response.

In the great scheme of thing any voice reading aloud is an advance for people that require or like to hear books read out, improvements can come on a per book basis.

The end goal is likely a mix of bespoke readings by gifted voive readers (Fry) and guided "selectable AI voice" readings that can do can do clear and correct pronunciation and pacing with the voice of Jamie Erl Jonas (totally not James Earl Jones), Skarlat Johnson, or that Chipmunk character.
If they take it, theft. If its willingly given, charity.
Besides the obvious disposable income effects (with proportionally smaller working-age populations, total production is reduced; with larger old age populations, a greater proportion of that production is spent on aged care and medical treatments) there are some second-order effects.

South Korea looks set to disappear, effectively. Goodbye an interesting and occasionally beautiful language, culture, literature, and set of artforms. Japan will be in severe decline also, as will the Baltic states and some Eastern and Southern European ones.

The potential for military adventurism goes up, as relative populations sizes change and previously dominant states look more and more feeble. In 1950, the population of Europe was around 550M, and that of Africa around 230M. Now Africa is around 1.5B while Europe is at maybe 750M.

The cultures that still have high birth rates have little regard for the rights of women, as well. A greater proportion of the people alive in 2100 will have less happy lives than is the case today.
If you're worried about spoilers for something, why would you be reading the comments discussing it?
Is the Age of the Resistance Historian Coming to an End?
> houses on your artificial island may be much cheaper than in legacy nations as you can reduce taxes and red tape that add a lot to costs, you can build higher, etc. You can also entice people with lower taxes and better demographics

One convenient thing about a city on an iceberg is how easy it will be to dispose of less-desirable, erm, "demographics". And of course, all that keeps "legacy nations" from being great places is "taxes and red tape". Then again, if that's true, why then not simply shut down major parts of the government, abandon taxes and "cancel" those pesky red tape and laws like building codes? That should do the trick.

The best thing about trying this on land (get out your popcorn) is that it will keep this guy from pumping several cubic kilometers of shredded plastic into the environment that they envision to use for ice re-enforcement and landscaping.

> over a size of a few thousand square kilometers an ice-island can be economically self-sustaining, especially if human capital is carefully chosen

Then again a micro nation atop an iceberg with no taxes and "no laws" has a certain chance of cracking, melting and / or cataclysmically turning over b/c of shifting mass centers, so... for a "transhuman" experiment populated with "carefully chosen human capital" (crypto bors, I guess?) that may turn out to be its true benefit for the advancement of mankind.

*Edit*

> Philanthropists like Elon Musk

Musk would make a great asset to your carefully curated human capital society, being the philanthropist and fascist wacko that he is
They’re likely paying for egress from the databases as well.
Wastes space on the screen (especially if you have to scroll the screen to read it, or if you want to print it out and you want to save paper and ink), might sometimes make it more difficult to understand (in case you do not know what is the significance of the picture), and can use up power and disk space, etc.

However, sometimes it might help if you can specify which ones are merely for decoration and what is what, that you can easily disable them and to avoid downloading them. (Even if a picture is meant to be a significant part of the document because it is what it is about, then you still might not want to download it right away although it would help to display a placeholder (e.g. a hyperlink) in that case.)
You are thinking about it backwards. Humans have a tendency to buy high and sell low. It seems to be a psychological benefit of some sort that holds us back in abstract market scenarios.

By having a fixed percentage portfolio you are forcing yourself to sell high and buy low.

This was also the only basic strategy that mathematically beats the market based on papers I read during undergraduate (there may be others now). Basically, by splitting investments among higher and lower investments that are out of phase you can make sure that you are moving money out of an investment before it falls and into it before it rises.

What I find interesting is that the advantage only works with discrete periods of rebalancing. Instantaneous rebalancing doesn’t provide any advantage. I do not understand why but I saw a paper that showed that being able to take advantage of phase shifts in nearly correlated signals goes to zero as delta t goes to zero.
Doesn’t Gitlab blatantly discriminate in salaries?
Have you been exercising?
There’s more obvious things people already mentioned, but for less obvious examples.

A night sky without light pollution and darker nights from a sleep perspective.

Large families and extended families. Your great grandparents likely had 5+ siblings.

100ppm lower CO2 levels had a meaningful impact on cognitive and physical performance.

Less intrusive advertising such as pumping gas without videos popping up.

Natural sounds and smells in a world without massive pollution.

Edit: It’s easy to say the modern world is better based on metrics which exclude meaningful downsides. Job security doesn’t get tracked the way unemployment rate does.

In 1790 individual members in the House of Representatives represented 39,000 people (though a low percentage of that could actually vote), today it’s closer to 800,000. But nobody is saying your voice is less important every year.
Arguably you could have more free time than ever before and maintain a similar standard of living to historical standards in many places, but that option isn’t popular.

Especially true of software engineers. Take a mediocre paying remote job at a mediocre non-tech firm, work 2 hours a day as the work is easy, and spend the rest on yourself.

But I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.
> It doesn't even pay that well anymore, and AI is just another huge excuse to drop wages by management.

Can you expand on this? I haven’t noticed salaries going down where I’m at (only fewer open positions the last ~1.5 years due to the global economic climate - but I’m sure this is cyclical and will swing back soon enough).
Life Experiences May Shape the Activity of the Brain's Cellular Powerhouses
Anything new with ZeroMQ? It's been around for a long time.
Normalisation, relations,

What does that mean?
Really? These are the things to lament having lost in comparison to all the things that humans have gained?

Today you can still buy simple tools and equipment that are very long lasting, or you can choose modern conveniences. Either way, you actually have that choice, and buying either won't cost you a huge percentage of your wages as was the case in preindustrial times in which any manufactured or produced goods were enormously expensive by tendency.

People in modern times have more time for community and family than at any other point in history. This applies especially if they don't pursue the kind of material hamster wheel that many do. Almost anyone wanting to live at the subsistence levels of preindustrial societies could do so today with far less work than the people at that time endured to achieve the same. I think you're grossly understating how hard and long the work hours just to feed a family and literally keep it from death were prior to (at the most) 200 years ago.

As for your last point, the science on climate change doesn't predict the end of the world at all. Go read the IPCC's own worst case scenarios. They certainly don't predict our extinction. What's more, do you really think people in the 17th century felt any ability to plan 7 generations ahead, or easily avoided living in grimly filthy conditions at a level that was superior to today?
Sure, I'm not saying RPC isn't used today or that it doesn't solce specific problems.

It is a reinvention of an old idea though. There was around 15 years where RPC rotted on the vine until Google brought it back for (mostly) the enterprise scale, and another 6 or 7 years before JavaScript frameworks rediscovered it again for fullstack web applications.
I just don't think quicksort is a good fit for visual programming, (not that I've ever actually implemented quicksort....).

Visual is excellent for things like "At 7PM if the enable switch is on, turn on the sprinkler".

Stuff that's very simple, but you want no chance of it going wrong, and you might want to edit it from a phone.

When you want the least powerful programming model possible, that isn't even turing complete, that's arguably not even programming and just configuration, it's great.
The one-word answer is probably "bureaucracy". Large groups of people just don't tend to make particularly good decisions overall, and a lot of nonsensical choices arise from that.

Ditto for why CR1 and 5-7 are still "reserved" and CR8 came into existence.
I definitely find camera-on meetings have people pay more attention. Whether that is more productive or not depends on your definition of productive.

The the “camera off lets me do other work”-theory that people in this thread adhere to says the meeting itself is unproductive and the less involved participants are the more chance they have of being productive.
> arguably the single biggest differentiating factor from other anglo colonies like aus and NZ.

Not the gigantic, habitable, natural resource filled landmass?!

I know about the Puritans, Quakers, and Cavaliers. I've read Albion's Seed.

Take a look at Scots-Irish demography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans#/media/...

You think that correlates to areas of higher US GDP?
The author of the blog IS Jason Cohen....
These aren’t the same as the Ultra Definition series they mentioned, unfortunately. They lack the dim to warm feature that makes those desirable. RAB is the only manufacturer I’m aware of that makes 3000k dim to warm A19 bulbs for the US market.

The RAB bulbs have a weird stair step warm-then-cool when turning on and off. They also have a huge non-linearity when dimming. That makes the Philips version more desirable, but they’re 2700k.
"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us yet Again
Intel tried that with the 80376 and it did not go well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80376

Neither did the Itanium (Itanic).

Backwards compatibility is the whole reason for choosing x86 over ARM, MIPS, RISC-V, etc. Sadly it seems some people at Intel and AMD don't realise this.
Show HN: CMS and other features built with Laravel and livewire
CMS and other features built with laravel and livewire
A file is a manufactured concept that has served us well for a long while. But I'm not convinced that it's the right abstraction for everything. Files are just binary blobs (even if they're text), with no uniform interface to interact with them other than open/read/write/close. In order to compose processes around files, they have to agree on a certain format (e.g. lines of text for most Unix commands); there's no structure other than what each process assumes it to be.

My idea is that processes should compose in a statically typed manner, where opening a channel for reading gives you a Channel[T] to read entities of type T. Two sub-abstractions of Channel[T] would be Source[T] and Sink[T], where they can be used to read and write to any source/sink (including files) as long as there's a registered (de)serializer for T.
It relies on acid? Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori too, please.

In the long term I expect engineering to outperform evolution in the same way that mathematics allowed humans to establish such a practical lead that we're almost in a different class to animals. It'll be interesting to see how quickly and how lopsided the advantage is over cells if nanorobots take off.
> I notice that's in the past tense.

Yes, but that's because I moved companies. The bank in question still uses Windows.

> I know there are some heavyweight applications out there like video editing and Engineering CAD with finite state analysis that need raw metal performance.

WASM and WebGL etc (or whatever the newest developments are called these days) are there to make working in the browser faster.

Btw, if you have beefy enough servers, it's not the 'weight' of your application that's the problem, but the latency.

> For those that are left - are they going to survive the transition to ARM and RISC-V?

Just recompile, or use the automatic translation of binaries that comes with your OS.
Individual people could in theory have more free time, but at scale our economy is dependent on people working long hours etc. Someone’s got to be awake at 3am for a hospital emergency room to function 24/7. Our convince often directly requires someone to suffer.
“The hard thing is, can you pick fast? Can you pick consistently? Can you pick the right portion size without spilling? And can you pick without making it look like the food was picked by a machine?”

ha I do the same when use chatGPT to author stack overflow questions. Have to make it look like it wasn't picked by a machine.
>NZ is no where near as wealthy as Texas so Houston should be able to afford to do it too.

No country is nearly as wealthy as the USA, but the USA can't afford to build a bullet train or replace decrepit bridges that randomly fall down.
The system which puts so much importance on a single person, has to be changed. Problem isn't how to avoid Trump's re-election. Problem is how to make this kind of threats irrelevant in the future.
This isn’t a solely a problem of modern economics/economists. A family or tribe would have the same problems. A primitive tribal village would struggle to survive with an inverted population pyramid too. It’s the same problem, modern economics and trade just makes the size of the tribe or family bigger.
> South Korea looks set to disappear, effectively. Goodbye an interesting and occasionally beautiful language, culture, literature, and set of artforms. Japan will be in severe decline also.

I do agree that would be a bummer, but if that's the choice of a country's population, then so be it. But even if South Korea or Japan get to the point where they don't have enough people to field a functioning country, it's not like their language and culture will disappear; there are millions of South Koreans and Japanese living outside their respective countries today who keep their language and culture alive.

> The potential for military adventurism goes up, as relative populations sizes change and previously dominant states look more and more feeble.

That doesn't really track for me. What matters is the state of a country's military. Sure, that's not completely divorced from population and population trends, but it's perfectly possible to have a formidable military with a smaller population. E.g., the US has a third-ish the population of China, but China's military is not 3x as powerful as the US's. Similar point for India. Availability of volunteers (or ability to conscript) and sophistication and availability of training and materiel are much more important than raw population numbers. Certainly a declining tax base can make it harder to maintain those things, but I'm not convinced this is such an outsized problem.

> In 1950, the population of Europe was around 550M, and that of Africa around 230M. Now Africa is around 1.5B while Europe is at maybe 750M.

I'm not sure how that supports your point, though. Are there African countries today that would stand a chance of successfully invading Europe? I... don't think so?

> The cultures that still have high birth rates have little regard for the rights of women, as well.

For now. A lot can -- and hopefully will -- change in the next 75 years.
I haven't faced such issue. I think the only issue I faced was when I upgraded to 2.0, they made `--threads:on` the default, so I had to turn it off, but that's about it.
I'm in the retirement age bracket.
My last experience as a consultant led to disgust with valorizing quantity of work as measured by an arbitrary metric susceptible to simple gaming.

That, and prioritizing "new" features over maintenance because the former were booked as CapEx work,
thus amortizable,
while maintenance was booked as OpEx,
combined with companies wanting to minimize CapEx ratio for accounting purposes.

Notice how little of what is measured and managed has anything to do with building working software to satisfy user needs?
The claustrum was already hypothesized to be associated with attention and consciousness. But associating it with wakefulness might be a new idea.
Better link: https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2024/07/berkeley-resea...
Great article. To circle back to the point, some of these visualisations also contain hints to how they could be used for actual programming.

E.g. changing arrow type in the ownership diagram is a good example of a change that is very annoying to do manually in Rust but it's trivial in the diagram.

The challenge is to connect this action to the whole programming workflow, which is currently optimized for text, I'd even say overfitted. Rust especially is famously difficult to process by tools. I think we might need to use a language that is specifically designed to be processed by visual tools to make it all work.
Exploding the Phone
LegacyAI allows vintage Macs to run AI services like ChatGPT
Yeah, in fact, most interfaces - video editing, Airbnb, 3D modeling - are some sort of visual interface. I understand code isn’t resembling a physical object.

But books and paintings were our best approximation of reality, then technology allowed us to make movies and photos. I feel like code being lines of text isn’t the best abstraction. But finding a better one won’t be easy.
Yup, I would say I got 9 in 10 jobs this way.
I'm very much not a Marxist, but I think he is remarkably undervalued for his analysis of capitalism, particularly how specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness, the dissolution of family and social structures etc.

His plans for how to address the shortcomings of capitalism are, um, flawed. But the analysis itself is incredibly insightful.