skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can use them (MBPs) to actually make money. AVPs mostly make money to 2-bit YouTube influencers making videos about it…
I was with ya until the hyperloop example. Hyperloop was pushed for years as a vacuum tube train. Serious prototypes of this were developed. If it had worked out absolutely perfectly, it would still have lacked the throughput to be a good idea, but the prevalence of earthquakes in its target area, the inherent instability of a vacuum tube, the massive intended scale of the system, the economic feasibility of digging a huge tunnel, etc all made it an absolute shitfest of an idea. They then came up with a new idea, which was a one-lane tunnel without a safety walkway, which is utterly useless for passenger transport because it has, at best, the throughput of a two-lane highway. The hyperloop is probably elon’s most embarrassing failure after twitter.
By what the OP describes, these devices could become a limited but perhaps “profound” replacement for flying thousands of kms to have a holiday.

Or to have “power holidays” similar to a Power Nap, where you use an VR/AR device to relive a holiday for 5/10 mins.

Or to have “preview holidays” to experience a destination before booking a flight there.

If travel agents still existed, then they would be a perfect market for these VR devices but travel agents have long gone the way of the dinosaurs.
Good article! When I was first learning to produce some tutorials I knew sound was an important aspect but it was quite a lot to learn. This level of depth was good. I especially struggled with the advice of "just use your ears".

I also heard the advice of "point the microphone at the source, not the source at the microphone", so you kind of speak at a 45 degree past the microphone which definitely helped with pops.

If you ever get around to another one, would love a similar level of guide into a subtle EQ tune to improve sibilance etc.

Great work!
I had been somewhat comfortable with the older `netsh` commands from Windows 7. The PowerShell commands are overall richer for being consistent and composable if you're already comfortable with PS, but it does require a learning investment.

My general sentiment is that I am frustrated with tech companies imposing UIs on users. Some examples:

Duolingo changed its interface to this new "learning path" that took choices away from users.

Garmin updated its Connect app with a new UI that (I subjectively feel) shows less information and forces unnecessary compromises.

Microsoft has been messing with the Control Panel for years. The new UI is missing a lot of settings. I don't agree with the Ars article that you only need the legacy Control Panel for esoteric features: I never figured out how to set a Static IP Address in the new Settings app, which is hardly unusual for servers.

I trust it is possible to set a Static IP in the new UI, but I still feel like these changes are unnecessary and unwelcome.

Anyways, I do hope the PowerShell commands will remain stable for the next 20 years.
> There's no a priori reason why the expected success rate of research projects should be 50% and not, say, 1% or 99%.

Humans are really bad at predicting the future, so I'd argue that the large majority should be between 49% and 51%. A 99% success rate would imply that humans can predict the future, which I think is pretty much the opposite of how science should work.
I'm currently working on a .NET hosting solution where you zip your published .NET app and then drag the zip file onto the site and it's automatically hosted and a unique URL is created. Takes about 3 seconds once the zip file is uploaded.

Kind of like tiiny.host but for .NET... it's almost ready too :)

It was one of those "I wonder if this is possible" type of ideas I had in the shower and would you believe it... it bloody works :)
I agree with you, I don't know of anybody who looked at the price combined with the form factor and concluded it will be a hit.
I was thinking the same thing; the city I'm in isn't even that large (approx 450k pop.) but I could probably go through my list of contacts that live in-town and rattle off at least two-dozen area codes that aren't native to the area (on top of the dozen or so that are), with at least half of those being out-of-province. The slow death of long-distance billing, which also finds itself competing with the likes of FaceTime et. al., coupled with the highly-mobile nature of cell phones, have just made it a hassle to go through the process of changing your phone number for anything other than moving to another country (or a wicked discount).
- see hable one. A few FOSS variants have been tried but failed
- look up “switch boxes”
- look up “eyegaze” hardware

Truth is hardware is actually hard to get absolutely right. Software - now there’s tons of space on this. The problem is identifying the big pinch points. If anyone there wants to help us look at these priorities

- ows. An open wireless switch box https://github.com/AceCentre/OWS/tree/main (largely hardware)
- echo. SwiftUI app. Aiming to provide speech to blind and physically impaired and with no voice. https://github.com/AceCentre/Echo
- facecommander. A fork of googles gameface that was appallingly bug ridden. Use your face gestures to act as keyboard inputs https://github.com/AceCentre/FaceCommander
- dasher. This needs a lot of c++ https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher-MIT/ its the fastest text entry system for head mouse , eyegaze users etc but woefully old

See also openassistive.org makers making change, openaac for other communities
Check out cozo
I thoroughly disagree. Most things I can get to on the ribbon within 1-2 clicks. It's worth the effort to get to grips with the new Word.

I came from the old school, and am still powering along through professional studies and office work as a relative power user.
Next topic: how to surpass the economic religion, because the current mania of making anything tradable and measurable in money units actually IS A FORM OF RELIGION. Of course a useful religion for those who know how to master it, but anyway a religion with serious damaging effect on society and human development.
oh; thanks for trying it - our linkedin api provider is imperfect. If you could try to put in your resume that would be great. I'm happy to get on a call and talk about it but no pressure.
> what was the point of SQL.

IBM's get-it-out-the-door release of partial (if not broken) implementation of Codd's relational-algebra model, which incorporates parts of predicate-logic, set-theory, and more besides. It kicked-off an industrywide multivendor revolution in information storage, processing, and retrieval.

...but thesedays I'm convinced the point of SQL is to have something other programming languages can point-to to deflect any criticisms of being slow or unwilling to adopt new features, being specifically unergonomic, or most of all: being entirely unresponsive to the day-to-day needs of present-day application developers.
Shell.how: Explain Shell Commands
If I recall correctly, you have to press a secret keyboard shortcut (to open command prompt) and run a command to unlock the "no Internet and thus no Microsoft account" version of the Windows 11 setup.
Also, get a copy of Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style" and read it often.
i said SMB because SMB doesn't need cloud. if you have enough users to warrant cloud you're no longer S or M. I was actually going to start to concede that you might be right, maybe i should have said small-time users or something more eloquent; but no, i'll stand behind what i said. Dissuade all SMB and small users as much as possible. then there's 0% chance they get a surprise cloud bill. I solved the problem, yay.

as i mentioned elsewhere i'm intimately familiar with pretty much every intimate detail of "cloud" from hardware, software, network, cooling, and ops (i wouldn't call me a dev. I don't think anyone else would or should, either.) I've bootstrapped cloud services from empty racks twice and repurposed existing hardware for cloud once.

I understand why there's no "cap" available on any cloud services. I mostly have a problem with capitalism, which is ironic, considering this site.
Yes, Xray does more than just making the traffic look like typical web traffic. It also makes the open VPN server port look exactly like a port serving a legitimate third-party site, with the proper TLS certificate and all. Put it on port 443, make it proxy something like samsung.com or whatever else your censors find inoffensive.

This protects the VPN node from being blocked after a port scan, and gives you plausible deniability: "Yes, I have visited this IP. Let's open it. Ah, I just wanted to look at the newest Samsung phone model."
> Give it a few years

you can give it 50 years. with the trash treatment apple gives developers, they won’t ever again release a new successful platform like iphone. They burnt the bridge to get there
AIP is just marketing bullshit IMO. It is an module in Foundry which just allows you to do LLM stuff. Combining it with the ontology is very powerful though.
Custom elements are incredibly powerful. Not only do they have their own tag name for easy selecting from css without having to use a class, but by adding custom attributes (eg size=“large”) you can basically eliminate the need for css classes entirely. Combine that with attr() to put the attribute value anywhere in or around the element with pure css and plenty of interactive components can be built purely with css, no scripting required. You can even use the @media scripting block to add noscript behavior to custom elements from css.

And then you can register a javascript class with customElements.define to add more dynamic behavior, and the sky becomes the limit. Custom elements are like a hidden framework built right into the browser.
Gauging Societal Impacts of Large Language Models
I was under the impression that APE encapsulates the full binaries for different OSes completely. I don't understand enough about it to be able to tell either way though.
No it's because they need to have a growth plan and developing massive new markets is what shareholders have wet dreams about.

Failure is irrelevant. It keeps the share price high while they try other things at the same time.
As if. They are simply going to replace the references to control panel in the docs with arcane PowerShell snippets, because you’re not expected to customize anything anyway
OK, if you live in (Western) Europe, you can go, say, from Netherlands or Sweden to fabulous places like Barcelona or Rome or Istanbul, all very different, picturesque, and not hugely expensive. A flight, if you time it well, could cost less than €100, or even €60..
I'm not a christian, but I wouldn't call this judeo-christian morals, just puritanism and purely an American mindset that is completely alien in other Western (mostly christian!) countries. I also don't associate puritanism with Israel either, so the "judeo" part is another misnomer.
That sounds amazingly fun -- thank you for sharing, and for including si units! Do you have any pictures of the whorls? (I'm imagining something like damask steel)
I'm curious how much time it will take for most FLOSS devs to understand that relaying on third party giant code hosting instead of put back usenet (it's cheap enough) to have visibility and keep the code REALLY distributed and REALLY developed in a distributed workflow...

We have witnessed various GH and co bans for USA orders, often for no reasons (like a Belarus game dev who have nothing to do with foreign gov or intelligence, a USA citizen who have been in Iran for a little time and so on), DMCA and so on. It's astonishing how many develop FLOSS without understanding such basic consideration on depending on third parties opposing the classic "ah, I'm here only for visibility" and than start using PR, CI, ... not even understanding the threat of that and the scale effect.
You're totally right. In fact that's one of the main reasons I gave up on an academic career. My collaborators who still rely on grants are miserable, and with good reason.
I have to disagree honestly. I have access to Foundry and it is way more than analytics. It is rather comparable to Databricks then to BI tools IMO and great for non-technical users.

The "downside" of the product is that you have to invest time into coming up with an ontology of your company, which can be very time-consuming and difficult.
I’m a little split on it. I don’t actually mind their streamlining because of the way I windows. Which is professionally and for video games. I wouldn’t use windows professionally if I had a choice (company policy, and one I get from an ops perspective), but at least every setting is taken care for me. I wouldn’t really use windows for video games either, but the fact that they are removing more and more of the “use windows” part means that my only windows machine is basically just a console at this point with how little I have to interact with it.

I do understand where you’re coming from. Which is the flip side of it, but what I don’t understand is why anyone really wants to use Windows in 2024. I’m not a huge fan of the direction Apple is going with their continuous platform lockin, but the smallest MacBook Air is cheap and works better than anything that runs windows. Similarly Chromebooks are actually just fine, ok maybe not outside the context of windows/macos/chromeos. I chose the Apple lock-in because my families likes iOS, but I would have been fine with Google.

If you like to tinker and own your OS there is still Linux.

Professionally I think Microsoft is doing fine. They have a functional monopoly on enterprise organisations, especially the 99% (citation = made up) which aren’t tech related. So it’s probably a decent enough strategy for them. Hell, I think the primary reason they don’t have a cheap device to compete with MacBook airs and Chromebooks is because they know windows would lose.
I haven't read the article yet but why not make a PHONY target that just runs that build command?

.PHONY all
all:
tsc --build ./tsconfig.json
Honestly, I dislike Musk since the 'submarine to save kids' story, but in Europe, at least outside big cities, Tesla owners aren't associated with Musk, so his politics or likeability aren't a factor on purchase choices. Musk himself wasn't really a factor for 95% of people before anyway, I think only americanized Europeans cared about him.

I just think Tesla can't find footing in the real low-end EV market because of BYD + Renault and associates (that market is small atm so it isn't an issue), never got in the high-end EV market so it has to compete with historic automaker in a market they have a lot of experience in.
Being at the level where you have an account manager should help. Our technical account manager always said if we ever accidentally rack up a bunch of cloud costs we should at always ask if we can get a refund, and as long as its infrequent there's a good chance to get some credits.
Most people would not see any problem in spending 8 hours over two days enjoying an activity by oneself.

I can guarantee that if you watched 5 minutes of Dune or Gravity on your $20 (or $2000) TV and then on an AVP, you would say: “Oh, I see.” I’ve randomly paused in those movies (and Kill Bill, and others) just to marvel at the artistry of the cinematographer. The device provides a unique and, frankly, stunning visual experience, which I think is hard to understand with seeing it oneself.
It's basically the prisoner's dilemma. Everyone knows what would be best if everyone did it, but doing it while others don't has a negative payoff.
I recently worked on an admin project with a group of varying experience and grade, from months to decades using MS Office. It's the first time in years I've had to use 'ribbon' apps.

Not one of the staff used the ribbon directly, they just searched for everything using Word's titlebar search field and picked the option from the results. Every time, unless it was something like embolden that has a keyboard shortcut.

I tried hunting and pecking through the ribbon but it was such a guessing-game, trying to imagine where the UX designer had filed the option, that I eventually relented and started using the search field too.
> Meanwhile: like every public cloud, we provision our own hardware, and we have excess capacity. Your messed-up CI/CD jobs didn’t really cost us anything

This^ Don't feel bad about asking for credits when you accidentally make a costly mistake.
Because then you don't get to break the Android/Apple duopoly
And? How would that help if they have no clue about how that specific system was supposed to work?
I think the problem isn’t size, after all people are happy to put ever larger TVs in their homes.

I think the problem is that VR/AR are such dislocating experiences, so unlike anything else that consumers can’t relate to the technology.

These devices do not follow a technological linage such as TV. First came radio, then cinema and then TVs - each technology gave the consumer a relationship to understand the new technology: TV is like having cinema at home, cinema is like radio with pictures etc

There isn’t this same graduation in technology with VR/AR hence consumers are overwhelmed with this technology and don’t grasp the use cases yet.
I hate the fact that they started calling this AIP. It is just their existing product, which is great, Foundry.
Except Gnome does accept PRs that fix UI gaffes (as long as it fits their design spec) and has also been forked (Cinnamon and MATE)
> anything inside the UK is subject to UK law and no other law

This is true in theory but not in practice. If you’ve been sanctioned by the US then you won’t by able to get a bank account in the UK. Even if you’ve not violated any UK law.

The Americans can give a British bank an ultimatum between dealing in US dollars and dealing with a particular individual. Every bank will always choose the former.

Similarly anything with US assets is subject to the US court system any its interpretation of copyright. Naturally this means US companies need to obey its rules.

But also given the reach of copyright law, so do foreign companies that interact with US ones. Visa, Mastercard, Google, FedEx, and Stripe can’t do business with someone who openly violates US copyright.

So perhaps a local council using self hosted services could use nationalised data but that’s about it.
It looks eerily similar to the problems of businesses that happen when all what the executives care about is the stock price growth in the current quarter.
must admit, i could never see the attraction. but better to read some poetry rather than none.

another american author that seems to have vanished - richard brautigan, of "trout fishing in america" fame.
I remember having to point people to the hamburger menu because they couldn't figure out it was a menu. The other week a girl said it would be nice if my website had a menu. Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!"

The moral of the story is that it is all about conditioning. MS should have left everything the way it was. The money they could have made! I could thoughtlessly click around and do everything on muscle memory.

Change things often enough and no one is comfortable. There are no improvements. A new user might like it, they might even like it more than the old user liked their iteration. Say, 5% better for 3% of the users 0.15% improvement in total vs 15% worse for 97% making it 14.55% worse. The difference is 100X

No we don't like the new Slashdot.
One possible resolution to that paradox is to recognise that money is not linearly proportional to 'value'.
I don't think I have bought an App in the AppStore in years, so the only money they're getting for me was from the device I buy every 5 years or so.
> I’m saying there will be a market.

Perhaps, but how is the price or popularity of MacBook pros particularly related to that?
An important part of hobby projects is the scaling to zero part too. I wager a lot of hobby projects use cloud simply because it's free or almost free (e.g. 2 cents a month), which isn't the case if you rent a VPS.
> what did Elon do that was racist?

Explicitly allow and encourage racists on his social media platform?
You're selecting for people who feel they're priviledged enough to reach out to support and ask for bill forgiveness even when they may've messed up, repeatedly. This does select for something but I'm not 100% sure "people who are doing this work professionally" is that clear-cut, especially once you move past western cultural norms.
Compelling to who? Might be to the managers who get some twisted satisfaction from spying on their employees, but most people aren't gonna want to wear a brick on their face so their manager can make sure you're paying attention or whatever.

I don't turn my camera on in meetings and it's often "broken", some idiotic headset that my manager forces on me is going to be similarly buggy and "broken"...
What about those who peer review papers that are later retracted?
Ahh, I see! This is a common problem with things that are "known" to be true -- often people don't rigourously test them.

This paper [1] has some good data in it:

"The experiments in this study were developed to verify the influence of the grain-flow
orientation on fatigue life and its impact on the anisotropic properties of a mechanical
component. To this end, steel specimens were made, and their fiber was oriented by
machining and hot forging. Subsequently, they were subjected to flexo-rotational fatigue
tests in a piece of specific equipment to determine their fatigue life."

(...)
They then describe three parts: A, properly forged, B, improperly forged, and C, machined.
(...)

"The results showed that specimens of configuration A achieved a much longer fatigue life than configurations B and C, actually doubling it. The results indicated a similar fatigue life behavior between configurations B and C. It is important to emphasize that this similar behavior between these two configurations is valid for this case analyzed (...)"

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/13/2/187
This seems brilliant.
No batteries to fail, etc. No tracking, no databases, simple. True hacker solution.
I assume we can print our own bar code on paper, and using clear tape, attach it to most things.
Some scientific collaborations put thousands of people on every paper, publish around 100 papers a year, and cite at least 10 of their own papers in each one.

To some, that might be "a fraudulent citation ring". To others it's just business as usual.

Of course a lot of academia has caught on to the ruse, but the mitigations are pretty ugly: some funding agencies and universities just stopped counting papers from large experiments as valid scientific contributions.
That all sounds very depressing to me if I’m being honest.
Try The Quest: Everest next.

https://www.thequesteverest.com/
The assertion that Linux needs tinkering to use is absurd. Fedora, for example, works great out of the box. Some people may choose to change a few settings in a GUI but that isn't tinkering in the way that I think that you mean it and it certainly isn't unique to Linux.
You could plausibly be referring to Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows Vista or Windows ME. Making this strange line of argument just seem idiosyncratic and more about your own feelings on "inclusivity" than objective analysis of software quality.
https://xkcd.com/1129/
I think the ergonomics is an underappreciated aspect of adoption and regular usage.

> There’s definitely a point where headsets are going to be comfortable enough you can forget they’re there

I would really like to think so, but I am not at all confident that this is will happen.