skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Euphemism is often a way to conceal and obscure truths, but also to lie. They aren't neutral. "Differently abled" asserts something that isn't true. If I have lost my legs, I am not differently abled, I am not now a fish who can swim, I lack the use of my legs which are manner in which human beings move around by nature. We see the same thing in autism circles, where autism is described not as a disorder or deficit, but as "neurodivergence", as if autism were something like hair color or even a special ability to take pride in.

This isn't good for society. I understand that words can accumulate baggage, but that alone doesn't explain euphemism or excuse its use.
The first paragraph of the article struck a chord with me. I listen to a fair amount of sports talk radio and have for most of my life. Even back into the 80s and 90s I remember noticing that these guys on the air seemed to speak the language of betting. Odds, spreads, etc. They would often talk about the games in this context. But, this being before the legal/online/casual betting age we're in now, it always struck me as both sad and out-of-touch. I would think, these sports radio hosts are all such degenerate gamblers, they probably don't realize that most of their listeners are actual sports fans. I would also think, maybe I'm the outlier? Maybe the hosts AND the listeners are all gambling and I'm the only one who doesn't?

But now, the cat is totally out of the bag. And the gateway drug, I think, was online fantasy sports leagues.

Anyway, I enjoyed this article and agree with many of its points, and for an article on Jacobin that's saying a lot coming from a died-in-the-wool centrist like me.
The big problem for me (outside of the annoying betting line during broadcasts) is that it ruins the integrity of the game. How can we be sure it's even a real contest anymore, and that a player(s) aren't throwing the game?

Sure it's a problem old as time, but it feels like today it's a lot easier to get caught up in with the massive amounts of money swinging by.
Ironically I learned programming by playing with microcontrollers, which I got into through learning about electronics. So I had a really true "ground up" learning experience, starting with embedded C (not machine code, I wasn't that hard). I did a number of projects on AVR's and got decent at writing programs.

When moved on to writing PC programs, I struggled so much because everything is so heavily abstracted and languages like python have so much ability embedded in them already. I kinda had to toss a lot of intuition and learn things new.
Normally: no agenda, no need to attend. But since our team is currently small, we have a deliberately agendaless meeting every morning. We talk about anything: somebody's daughter got engage, an upcoming vacation, that gnarly engineering problem that never got resolved yesterday. It's an anti-standup, and it's designed to take the place of those transient "water cooler" convos.

It's incredibly valuable, but sure doesn't scale.
By a similar argument, the Clojure people could be said to be diametrically opposed to human-generated code. Which is also true-ish, but not that meaningful an observation. At some point code needs to be written by someone or something.
If 3 cents is the most you've ever lost by shipping an eBay sale, you're doing great.

Historically on eBay, 'shipping' charges were whatever the seller said they are, and so were very often used to pad profit of the seller. So, all the more reason for eBay fees to be a function of price+shipping.

Today, eBay is often the middleperson for purchasing the shipping service for an order, so eBay knows exactly how much the seller is paying for that. Although eBay could exclude these actual shipping charges from their fee function, I mostly see disincentive for them to do that. (eBay does offer discounts over USPS list price for shipping, though, so that helps.)
Well isn't that the thesis of the article? It's meant to be an explanation of the modern startup economy (HN) for the capital-H Hacker.

> My point is, it is not just about computers. It's about understanding how
the world works. The world is made up of people. As much as machines keep
society running, those machines are programmed by people--people with
managers, spouses, and children; with wants, needs, and dreams. And it is
about using that knowledge to bring about the change you want to see.

> That is what being a hacker is all about.
Worn records can play. The quality wouldn't be as good.
So don't do secure boot at all rather than saying "when one step in the boot chain is compromised that can compromise all later steps"? How is that a better security model?
> Norway distributes the returns from the fund, not the fund money itself.

Is that adjusted for inflation?

To explain, suppose I have a stock that went up 10% last year (and paid no dividends, to keep things simple). If inflation was also 10%, there was no real return from my investment, and nothing should be distributed. If inflation was 2%, my real return was about 8%, and we could distribute that without touching 'the fund money itself'.
I'm not sure if this idea is helpful, but if they can learn to write small PR to fix the problems, to learn the basic skills like using git and writing good comit messages and a little of the language.

But as Joel says in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-don... they must still be very good in their job to keep the management happy.
I'm concerned about the effects of the staggering amounts of gambling money on the sports themselves. It all quickly gets to where you ask yourself if what you are watching is real, or is it professional wrestling?
Is there a name for the phenomena encountered with this particular response?

Specifically, I’m talking about when discussing extremely complex systems, ones that we don’t have full understanding of, there’s this tendency at a certain point of complexity to throw your hands up and say:

“because we can’t understand all of it perfectly then we can’t understand any of it and so just rely on these exceptionally loose grained impossible to define heuristics that have no comparability reference or baseline or anything meaningfully objective”

It’s like completely abandoning the concept of science measurement and just going full in with nothing matters we can’t measure it so do whatever you want.

Is it a failure of communication or is this an actual cognitive pattern that we can define?

It seems like a basic implementation of the all or nothing fallacy
Gambling has a similar addiction profile to cigarettes and other drugs, so why not have the same kind of labels on every bet and app, something like, "FanDuel is legally required to tell you that sports gambling has been shown to cause massive financial losses and is a major cause of divorce."

I am also against specifically state sponsored gambling like the lottery. At least (non casino style day trading) investment in stocks has upside at all.
Is the title here editorialized? I don't see that second part on the page?
You'd be taking on a lot of risk to get there, wouldn't you? You've got the same large initial capital expenditure as a for-profit casino, the same risk of cheats, maintenance, etc., and I suspect the same marketing outlay to keep people coming to your casino vs another.
> Is it? Is an alcoholic's decision to drink, or a heroin addict's decision to shoot up? Is it a person with attention issues' decision to spend unreasonable amounts of money on micro-transaction-powered games?

Yes. Obviously the choices involved are easier or harder for individuals based on their predilections. But at the end of the day, it is still their choice.
Sounds like it’s a freemium so increase ads or add an interstitial ad. Perhaps you could force social logins only. Or the Cloudflare wall may help. You haven’t really defined your problem here but I assume you perceive value is being stolen by their methods.
Show HN: Vetara Agentic
AI assistants and agents have huge potential - I've developed a Python package that helps developers build simple Agentic RAG applications using Vectara (I work there), and using LlamaIndex.

This is in beta and I would love any and all feedback: what other features should be added?
The response to 'science is confusing' should never be 'ignore science'
What a bad analogy. One is an anagram and the other is two phrases with (mostly) the same literal meaning.
I think you are conflating ES6 classes with TypeScript.
If you do text, you only help once. The problem is solved for everyone else, and you leave a trace for people searching for similar problems.

On the other hand, in secret 1:1 calls with no trace, that only help one and only one person, you can appear busy and productive while also helping people in secret, and doing so multiple times for the same or similar problem. You reap the rewards multiple times.

And since people never put any initial effort at all (they just say "hi do you have a minute?" instead of describing their issue), if multiple people have the same problem right now, then you have plausible deniability for your multiple calls because you didn't know that they had the same issue, so that's why all calls were separate instead of solving them all at once.

Don't even mention the fact that others can explain their initial problem with screenshots, or with a Slack recording (literally 2 clicks, and then doing exactly the same as they would do during the first minute of the call anyway), to get quick context and then either solve the problem instantly or jump to a call. Nono, while those things get points for not being searchable, they still leave some useful information in the history (mainly some context and the moment in time when you had that conversation), and we can't risk having that.

Also, if they send the video, Slack might even include a searchable transcription (I don't know if that's a feature yet though), and if that wasn't bad enough, if you end up not knowing the answer, the video can even be shared with others on a shared channel to save time finding the person who knows how to fix the problem.

Hopefully you understand now the problems with async text communication.
The thing I have had to do every winter is drop the carburetor bowl and spray carb cleaner up through the Jets. This means draining the gas into something, which I pre empt by draining it in the spring. Also this year I left the carb bowl off of it. And use the gas in the mower so you can start with fresh gas come winter.
Hash maps that don't hate you (2021)
While well intentioned at first - it would inevitably be weaponized against legitimate journalists from speaking inconvenient and unpopular facts. Better to just teach the public to think critically.
It's clearly a "corporations are holy" kind of argument, where it's implicit that if one breaks down the oligopoly that is oppressing the market and disallowing innovation, the entire economy will go down, since the oligopoly is the entire economy.

But I don't think the OP noticed that.
Buy game on Steam, install, play. Same as on Windows, sometimes even less issues, especially with really old games. And with recent renaissance of demos one can easily try a game compatibility before purchase.
> Just as "magic spells" use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.

This is definitely the case. I've modified NDAs (from our lawyers or other parties') and have written plenty of business contracts and I find some people are uncomfortable with them unless you wrap them in a "whereas" preamble and put some pointless nonsense like "The parties agree that time is of the essence in this agreement". What a pointless waste of time.
I wish we could have another and bump the packet size.

We're at the point where we can have millions of packets per second going through a network interface, and it starts to get very silly.

It's at the point where even a 10G connection requires some thought to actually perform properly. I've managed to get bottlenecked on high end hardware requiring a whole detour into SR-IOV just to get back to decent speeds.
That's not the alternative. The alternative is the death of most sites other than walled gardens like Meta and Amazon that own their own advertising end-to-end. Do you want the internet to be even more Meta controlled?
I would say this is at least partly the purpose. It is sometimes very hard to avoid the conclusion that activists came up with some of these terms in order to mark themselves out as more virtuous, not that the group in question were bothered by it and begged people to stop calling them something.

Like LatinX, that definitely seems like a top-down word, that still hasn't caught on among actual Latinos.
> [...] are they just very inefficient in how they learn?

I'd challenge: inefficient compared to what? For many tasks, the only more capable systems we know of are biological ones that evolved on 4 billion years' worth of data followed by years of constant input from all senses. Gradient descent is incredibly fast and data-efficient by comparison (hence use of mutation + natural selection for machine learning is mostly limtied to tiny toy examples).
I've been wearing a Yeswatch daily since V1. Newest V7 world watch has wireless recharging. Titanium case is light and strong. Not for everyone (it's chunky) but I'm a big fan.
> Like, genuinely, good for you if you, like me, can just control your vices and not succumb to them like many can. Genuinely, I'm happy for you (and me!) but like... what about everyone else? Is having the wrong kind of brain just damn you to spend your entire life being robbed blind because "freedom"?

Yes. I have my own vices, but yes. I do not want to impose religious values on others.
Oh nice! I gave a PechaKucha talk with the same title back in 2019[0]. Love the illustrated examples here.

One thing I touched on in my talk was the idea that code is an art form that expresses the values of the artist by making something new possible in the world. The artist is saying "this should be possible for people to do" and then makes it so. I think that's really cool.

[0] https://www.johnluxford.com/blog/code-as-art/
I don't know, I love the northern flora, too, Rattlesnake master, moline, dogwood, black-eyed susan, blazing star, echinacea (purple coneflower) and so many more.

More importantly, humans need water.
I would posit that it is easier to get caught now than it has ever been. I've heard of more players getting caught and banned in the past few years than I have in the past 20.
I don't think there's especially compelling evidence out there that the world is dying.

People have been saying that forever. Especially during downswings like we've had lately (which is somewhat minor all told).

And then the world doesn't die but they spent a bunch of time dooming instead of staying ready for the inevitable opportunities that come from things turning around.
You can’t overturn that argument with a one dimensional quip about fortified foods not existing. Imagine a diet with less sugar, more whole foods _and_ fortification?
Thanks for bringing up the concrete example of Silicon Valley's chemicals.

Btw, just to be clear: overall both solar power and nuclear are very good technologies in terms of overall harm done per Joule produced. Much, much better than coal or oil. But we shouldn't pretend that the harm per Joule is literally zero; and we should also be honest about what harm there actually is, and not just what sounds plausible or good.
Watches are superior to phones imo. It's way more convenient to simply look at your wrist than it is to dig your phone out of your pocket.
"Predilections" in this context being measurable, structural/chemical differences in their brains, that they can do literally nothing about? Or are you thinking more about life circumstances, also often not their fault, that make them acutely vulnerable to it?
I think the drug war has been such a colossal failure (often doing more harm to many of the people it was ostensibly meant to protect) that trying to make comparisons to drugs doesn't make the argument that you want.

I think sports gambling is clearly less addictive than drugs since underground gambling was never as big an industry as the drug trade, and I think that makes it far easier to deal with like a normal activity with externalities.
I think player's salaries in the big leagues are high enough for players to not ruin their income for the most part. The few players that get caught are banned and punished extremely harshly.
The first thing the "administrator" will need is all the details. If they were printed, the person reporting could at least send a screenshot or similar.
/// – Esolang
New genetic editing technique can modify wild populations with less risk
> Is it? Is an alcoholic's decision to drink, or a heroin addict's decision to shoot up? Is it a person with attention issues' decision to spend unreasonable amounts of money on micro-transaction-powered games?

Of that list, the only one that doesn't have commercials is heroin.
You and the top-level commenter clearly don't have a grasp on the neurology of addiction.

Addiction is a disorder that can't be controlled. The person with the addiction can control it for short periods of time, but it eventually overwhelms them.

If being addicted were a rational choice, we would not be able to addict rats to drugs and behaviors. Are rats making a rational decision? I think not.
Yeah, I dual boot. I think my efi partition is around 100mb. I forget if Arch puts just one backup kernel in there, but I feel like I saw a lot of garbage in there once that I had to clear out. Maybe that's the problem, will investigate, thanks.
Technically neither of those has “the” as part of its official name. Now The Bahamas on the other hand…
This article took less than 10m for me to read. That is really not much time.
How Tanya Smith stole $40M, evaded the FBI and broke out of prison
I don’t agree. It’s obviously not a “real” wake, just something for friends to hang out and show support. And switching careers often means moving to a different city, so it would be nice to say goodbye to friends who won’t be seen for years (or forever).

I’ve been to a couple “deportation parties” for friends who couldn’t get their visas renewed, and it’s sort of the same thing. Mostly lighthearted but a slight somber undertone.
The thing to know about the BeBox is that it's a cost centre. Every single Be fan who purchased a BeBox to "support the cause" drained limited cash and support from Be Inc. The idea is twofold, this demonstrates what to build, if you're making a new workstation you shouldn't care about what works well in Windows (not this) because SMP is the future, and this demonstrates how it's used, with the breakthrough applications that do not exist in 1995 on software like Windows 3.x or (Classic) MacOS.

So if you buy this and it goes in your spare bedroom because it's cool, maybe you run the demo to show a few friends, you've cost Be money and not helped them towards their goals.

What they want is a two man indie startup buys a BeBox and uses it to invent Zoom, or Blender, or at least Portal or something. Something that creates a significant demand from real users for Be's actual product, an operating system, and which is hard to replicate for the existing 1980s-style single CPU operating systems Be wants to compete with.

Ideally for JLG, this product attracts attention from Cupertino. If Be Inc. flops but Apple hire him back as new CEO, that's fine. If they buy Be Inc. and he gets to cash out and prove he was right too that's even better.
Your opinion is very important, but real-life examples would mean a world for me to better understand :)
That's the point isn't it, that it doesn't really help to invent new words, the new word will become a slur if it refers to something people don't want to be. I mean "retard" is of course itself a euphemism.
OP isn’t arguing about volume. Of course there’s more food today, and it probably is thanks to cheap processed foods that we can have so much of it. But in solving scarcity we invented new problems.
A coop. They split the profits with the patrons (minus operating expenses) at the end of the year. (So they can go right back and gamble away their share.)
> Sizing transmission for the absolute yearly peak is not cost effective, so various schemes are used to reduce that peak, including efficiency improvements and demand response.

Nonetheless, voluntary curtailment of demand by consumers (for any objective) must be compensated, right? And generally speaking, demand response curtailment (especially on shorter notice) is compensated at a higher rate than peak energy rates (4x in my area). It shouldn't be the case that one spends more money by participating in a demand response program that not participating, which is what the OP implied.
I knew someone similar. They would just get free templates and sell them as a website to customers, with almost no changes, aside from logos and text. Most had no Javascript or css and looked terrible, even by 2005 standards.

His clients were usually older small business owners that just wanted a web presence. His rate was $5000/site.

Within a few years, business dried up and he had to do something completely different.

He also hosted his own smtp server for clients.It was an old server on his cable modem in a dusty garage. I helped him prevent spoofing/relaying a few times, but he kept tinkering with the settings and it would happen all over again.
> Surely that's not the first time you've heard of run-time type casts?

Indeed – and for good reason, I'm sure. Pedantically, a cast is where the programmer says in a language "just trust me on what type this is, don't bother to check my claim". A runtime type cast doesn't make any sense.

I mean, I'm fine with words evolving and whatnot. I'm not here actually trying to play language police myself. But, as it seems you want to squabble over "duck type", which is then quite humorous when you accept any random definition someone can dream up for "cast": Why not call what Java is doing duck typing?

> I hope you would agree they are essentially the same.

I do agree, just as I said before, that Go's type conversions are essentially the same, except checked at compile time rather than run time. There is no conversion with type assertions, however. It is merely a runtime type check. The type you have is the type you keep.

Now, what is important to remember is that Go's interface is a structural type. And what is a "structural type" checked at run time? That's right: A duck type!

> So TFA could be written in any of those languages

It's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day. Of course you can write something that achieves the same result in just about any language. There is more nuance at play here, though. In the case of Go, it is not "here is another way to achieve the same thing". It literally employs duck typing, as duck typing is normally understood.
The battery situation isn't as odious when you realize you can get third-party batteries compatible with ryobi, milwaukee, etc on Amazon for about 25% of the list price of the first party brand battery.