skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well that was an interesting chain of events:

I read the first several paragraphs. Since they seem wordy and light on actual meaning, and the post is long, as I often do, I grabbed all the text and headed to ChatGPT/Claude -- in this instance ChatGPT.

"Summarize this in no more than twenty bullet points."

ChatGPT spits out exactly twenty bullet points, including pointless gems like:

- He believes public social media, particularly blogs, played a more vibrant role than traditional media during their heyday
- Rao humorously attributes the blog’s success to the low-interest-rate era, with its cheap hosting and free distribution.

So I switch to Claude and prompt:

"Summarize this into no more than 20 bullet points. Skip unimportant housekeeping bits."

Claude also feels the need to produce exactly 20 bullet points, including exactly the housekeeping bits I pointed it away from like:

- Some content threads (lab tinkering, fiction) will find homes in other media or formats.
- Rao plans to compile book-length volumes from the blog archives.

Now I'm going on too long, so I'll just say it took several more prompts, with examples, to get them to coalesce to:

ChatGPT:

1. Venkatesh Rao is retiring his blog *Ribbonfarm* on November 13, 2024, after 17 years.
2. He views this as the end of the blogosphere era, which played a major role in shaping the internet during the Web 2.0 phase (2000-2020).
3. The decline of blogs is linked to rising interest rates and the shift toward paid distribution models, which replaced the free, open web environment that allowed blogs to thrive.
4. Rao coined the term "cozyweb" to describe the more intimate, private online spaces (like Discord and Substack) that are replacing the public nature of blogs and social media.
5. *Ribbonfarm*'s closure symbolizes the broader cultural shift from the chaotic, public blogosphere to this new era of niche, cozy communities.

Claude:

• After 17 years, Venkatesh Rao is retiring his blog, Ribbonfarm, on November 13, 2024 (his 50th birthday).
• Ribbonfarm's lifespan (2007-2024) coincides with the rise and fall of the blogosphere, Web 2.0, and public social media - a significant chapter in internet and civilizational history partly enabled by low interest rates and cheap venture capital.
• Rao sees the "cozyweb" (a term he coined in 2019) as the successor to public social media, favoring more intimate, subscription-based platforms like Substack.
• In recent years, Rao shifted to writing "blogchains" and avoiding viral content, reflecting broader changes in online writing styles.
• Post-retirement, Rao plans to compile book-length volumes from the blog archives but is uncertain where to share his "random impulses" that found a home on Ribbonfarm.
Same here, but I tried the new 12.5.4.1 yesterday and the difference is night and day. It was near flawless except for some unexplained slowdowns and you don't even need to hold the steering anymore (it detects attention by looking at your face), they clearly are improving rapidly.
I have noticed the style, hadn't thought to attribute it to "sounding youthful". To me it just sounds genuinely from a younger person.

Fixations around "intelligence"/IQ is huge these days, I have found, among young men, not just because of the AI stuff.

And humans in general can still, for now, write and be passionate and maybe have some misplaced enthusiasm on internet forums!
> The earliest sources we have on it, also from the 14th century, are a Bishop calling it an obvious fake, to which a Pope acquiesces.

That’s circumstantial evidence, not scientific. Like I said, I think it’s a forgery, but I don’t need it to be real. The flip side of that coin is I don’t need it to be fake either…so why do non-believers care so much to argue that it is?

What drives that need? What is so important or dangerous about the object that it must be revealed as a fake to the minuscule amount of Christians out there that believe that it’s not?
I self host this and probably the best looking and working file sharing app. Works well for me as the files are ephemeral and the upload is protected by cloudflare access.
Unconnected to the 2012 riddle of the same name.
Yeah, but the Ethernet port is inside the display case and you control it from the display menu.
Windows has always been annoying, but now it seems like nearly every UX element is a trap or broken (both?).

I'm not familiar with Roots. Google suggests it's an iOS app for focus. You use it on Windows?
Are you sure that's acceptable? I do that all the time, but I think the right word for how my wife feels about it is "tolerable," not "acceptable" :-)
Dollar bills are secretly weighted in metric units? Evidence of the Illuminati world government, surely.
Primarily the rules of hooks and what does and does not trigger a render or a unmount. If your project still uses class instead of function components, that's a potential target for refactoring.

> some relevant docs

Read the docs. All of them. React isn't that big.
Thanks. I will read up!
cool whine
Problem I'm having as a developer with LLM documentation is their reliability, or rather lack of it. Every time there is an assertation I end up having to double-confirm it because they tend to be wrong as often as they're right. Reading imaginary hallucinated documentation is just about as useful as zero documentation.

While I could keep doing this for the rest of my life, my employer doesen't really appreciate the extra expense. A technical writer is much, much cheaper than the dozens of developers trying to confirm the docs.
Specially when there was no clear positive upside for him. Reminds me of Vinod Khosla interview with CNBC: https://youtu.be/pidTqyg9Rms
J-Cart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-Cart

Nice hardware piece, some games even supported controller sharing to have 8 players on one console.
I use Windows in work, Linux/Windows for home. But on the Windows at work when I have spare time I develop my experiments-side project.

What I like on Windows is the availability of latest and greatest of open source software. Of course this has nothing to do with M$$$ but only with the hard work of individuals.

With the Windows recall not resolving I will surely replace the Windows system for FreeBSD. But If ReactOS becomes available and even if it is usable (not necesaarily on par with Windows, Networking and USB) I would use it because of the vast amount of software and knowledge.
InTouch: Keep your parent safe, entertained, and engaged
The Anthropic principle and the structure of the physical world
Absolutely. My older boy (3 y/o) definitely has eaten it and doesn’t quite get yet why he shouldn’t. I think the comments saying kids don’t do this or it’s the parent’s fault are from people who don’t have kids!
I guess you haven’t worked in many large companies. I’m currently working for a large American company, and the waste and inefficiencies there beat most Swedish government agencies I’ve ever have had to deal with.
A better example is ‘pv -l’. Seeing cat in a heavily-used pipeline means pv is not available.
Recall is invasive malware and Microsoft will eventually make it non-optional in one way or another. It's like the story of the scorpion (microsoft) and the frog (users). They can't help but screw them over, it just their nature.
Unrelated, "Harvard cancer institute moves to retract six studies, correct 31 others amid data manipulation claims" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39097031
Any additive/subtractive method at that scale for coin faces sounds like a huge waste of time and effort compared to just pressing the design, but also not a coin expert.
I tried to do it seriously a number of times. Perhaps I am doing it wrong, but my productivity drops like a stone.

Writing down your thoughts as you go and maintaining them takes serious time. The romantic notion of writing (and reading) code like a book is appealing, but writing books is hard and arduous, it cannot be underestimated as a craft on its own right, and there is coding to be done.

There is also the question of structuring the literate code. Telling a story of how you are building it or explaining how it works has a very different flow and order to how code is usually structured for good maintainability.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, because I would love to dive into it, but I don’t think there has ever been any major piece of software developed following literate programming (at least as Knuth envisioned it). I also don’t think there is any significant book that contains a sizeable working program embedded in it throughout, that can be compiled and executed as-is.

In practice Knuth was most concerned with embedding short code snippets in his papers and books. Having the whole thing be an actual compilable program was secondary, and it was mostly short academic proof-of-concept prototypes and algorithms.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept, that’s why I have given it multiple serious tries over the years, likely I will again, and why I think I have some insight of what happens when you use it for “real-world” work.
There are many examples.

The Koch brothers, famous "anti-regulatory state" warriors, have fought oversight so hard that their gas pipelines were allowed to be barely intact.

Two teens get into a truck, turn the ignition key - and the air explodes:

https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1996...

Does anyone go to jail? F*K NO.
Assuming I understand the argument flow correctly, I think I disagree. If there is one thing that the past few decades have confirmed quite conclusively, it is that people will trade a lot of control and sense away in the name of convenience. The moment FSD reaches that sweet spot of 'take me home -- I am too drunk to drive' of reliability, I think it would be accepted; maybe even required by law. It does not seem there.
Not sure about this. Most JS frameworks only last a few years before the next shiny is mass adopted. The churn in JS land is insane.

React is definitely one of the long beards though, and thats’s because declarative programming is a win for UIs IMO. So much so it had a massive knock on effect in popularizing this approach (what’s old is new again… and again) across languages and problem sets.
In the books Nemo is obsessed with fighting British colonialism (and broadly all imperialism) due to his family history. Can't say it's something Verne overlooked.
It takes only a slight mind jump to considering Amazon a marketplace platform like Ebay.
It might be that my working memory was temporarily expanded. Research has found its possible to massively increase it by disabling parts of the brain with electronmagnets.

What it seemed like subjectively though is that my thoughts themselves became "longer", imagine planks of wood. You can stack them (slightly offset, like a video timeline with layers), and the wider they are, the more ideas you can stack before it topples over.

I have unfortunately been unable to replicate the experience. There were after-effects for a few weeks where my senses and cognition were markedly enhanced, but this faded after a few weeks.

My main take-away here is "why are we trying to make machines smarter than humans, we should try to make humans smarter"! (I guess Neuralink kinda does that, but it doesn't actually make the human part smarter...)
My school got a lot of computers from the "make poor areas great again" social programme. The teachers had no idea how to use them, and the computers went unused until we got a batch of new ones and the old ones were just recycled.

One teacher put the extra effort to actually use the equipment. The plan failed miserably. The core of the issue was that getting a bunch of teenagers to learn things they don't want to learn requires divine intervention, not a single underqualified teacher on a mission because all the qualified ones have better career options than working themselves to death for what amounts to one and a half minimum wages in a trenchcoat but no government will put serious investment into education because such projects span multiple elections.
I just meant that if they were to take a chance and travel, they could get picked up. It's not much of a deterrent against future interference, but at least it's less of a mockery of the laws to defend democracy.
People often forget corporations don’t go to jail. Murder when you’re not a person ends up with a slap.
This overcomplicates things...

* If you have something like what the article calls a fencing token, you don't need any locks.

* The token doesn't need to be monotonically increasing, just a passive unique value that both the client and storage have.

Let's call it a version token. It could be monotonically increasing, but a generated UUID, which is typically easier, would work too. (Technically, it could even be a hash of all the data in the store, though that's probably not practical.) The logic becomes:

(1) client retrieves the current version token from storage, along with any data it may want to modify. There's no external lock, though the storage needs to retrieve the data and version token atomically, ensuring the token is specifically for the version of the data retrieved.

(2) client sends the version token back along with any changes.

(3) Storage accepts the changes if the current token matches the one passed with the changes and creates a new version token (atomically, but still no external locks).

Now, you can introduce locks for other reasons (hopefully goods ones... they seem to be misused a lot). Just pointing out they are/should be independent of storage integrity in a distributed system.

(I don't even like the term lock, because they are temporary/unguaranteed. Lease or reservation might be a term that better conveys the meaning.)
With LLMs it is now quite easy to generate docs as needed. In fact we built a service to do just that - https://docs.codes/

Here is an example of how it is very useful especially for newer libraries.
Nemo was originally written as a Polish aristocrat. When you consider that, all aspects of his description in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) make sense. By the time Verne wrote The Mysterious Island (1875), his ire had become more directed toward the British rather than the Russian empire, so he changed Nemo to be an Indian prince.
I’m not sure I agree with the entire premise. Maybe it’s true about the cheapest bikes but that’s because bikes used to be considerably more expensive on average.

If you’re willing to pay the same (inflation adjusted) I think the overall quality is considerably better than 30+ years ago.
Release Candidate for Back in Time 1.5.3
Please allow me to announce a new Release Candidate in preparation for the Back In Time release version 1.5.3. Please report back if you use it, even if no issues are found. Details: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime/releases/tag/v1.5.3-r...

Changes:
- Extensive code refactoring.
- Added support for FCron.
- Improved text labels in the graphical interface.
- User manual updated.
- Serbian language now available in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
- New language: Interlingua (Occidental).
- Minimum supported Python version raised to 3.9.
- Removed dependency on libnotify-bin; now using DBus for notifications.

We encourage everyone to test this Release Candidate, as it helps ensure a higher-quality final release. Without testing and feedback, creating an Release Candidate would be pointless. Your input is essential to improving the project!

Thank you very much for support!
Abusing Self-Hosted GitHub Runners at Scale [pdf]
I opened the landing page on Safari on M1 Mac and found out it was using 25% GPU one hour later…
What was the point of this comment? Seems hostile for no reason.
Yep. 1 SEK coin is 7 grams to the dot ;-)
The Year Is 2149
I'm speculating, but I think the big difference is the barrier to downvoting something here is greater.

If you say something controversial over at Reddit there is a substantial chance you get piled on and labelled a troll, unpopular positions cannot be expressed without the risk of no longer being able to participate.

Anything you suspect will generate something other than a bland, mildly positive response is too risky to express.
You need good source material, including docs, to have LLMs generate docs that are accurate, reliable, and safe. LLMs have interesting applications in areas like SDK and API docs, for sure, but can't replace an entire function.
Predictions for the year 2149. Like all works of science fiction it tells you a lot about present day writers (AI! Fear of computers!), but not necessarily much about the future.
Yes, some luxury products are little lore than a brand icon tiled to cover the entirety of a poorly made hand bag. I agree.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the preeminent fabric/leather/composite composing studio in the world with a long history of creating military, sporting, racing, and yes: fashion goods. They have a fully in house production pipeline and complete control over every step of the process, something unique to them across all of the boutiques. They additionally have a long history of creating new and unique patterns for their prices, and are arguably the most knowledgeable folks on the plant when it comes to designing cuts for optimal 3D shape, flexibility, and long term performance.

But don’t just take my word for it, consider what an actual astronaut who has spent 1,200+ hours in space and used suits like this for life support while floating hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface performing critical repairs to Hubble and many other scientific instruments says:

> Prada has considerable experience with various types of composite fabrics and may actually be able to make some real technical contributions to the outer layers of the new space suit

- Jeffery Hoffman, 5 time astronaut and 4 time space walker.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67022619

I’ll take that over 100+ year old ramblings from a time when folks thought artisans hand stitching every garment was the baseline.
I think we will go the other way: A person will write the documentation and the AI will build the system that delivers the described product.
I'm not gen Z, but my experience (parent) of late gen-Zers suggests they don't read books or blogs much.
There is also another possibility. ReactOS becoming usable enough that people migrate there.
Investing back into yourself is generally true, but only under healthy economic conditions. Boeing exists in a really weird place of being "too big to fail" (ie a monopoly) where investing money into personnel and improved processes is actually wasteful towards the shareholders because it isn't necessary to maintain the core business.
Ah, the classic corner desk, the only way to not have your head permanently fixed to left/right side.
How do you install this? Homebrew broke global pip install. Is there a homebrew package or something?
Sabotage evaluations for frontier models
How many miles have you driven since the update yesterday? OP described a half dozen different failure modes in a variety of situations that seem to indicate quite extensive testing before they turned it off. How far did you drive the new version and in what circumstances?
my favourite documentation is minimal running code examples. give me example inputs to get the job done - i.e. not just "inputs: x is a y", but actually create a minimal version of y and show it going into f(x) and coming back out as a genuine object (as opposed to a mock) that I can inspect/prod until I understand what's happening.
Plane: A distributed system for running stateful WebSocket services
I've seen enough wear to prevent them to be calibration material at least.
Global water crisis leaves half of world food production at risk in next 25
The Indian origin was used mostly to explain his dislike for the British.

His story was not uniquely Indian, but it still would have fit only someone from the British colonies, and one who despite that still had access to money that enabled him to get a modern education, which would have been less plausible for the natives in other British colonies.
The workers previously would've faked the signals to pretend to be engaged organically to brown nose the boss. Same lie, now automated to free the worker for better tasks, such as napping or bugfixes.
It can be quicker since you are in the environment already and you are sure that they will activate only when your program is running
> People are long-lived entities with accountability and you can't just create or destroy them at will.

This notion is currently being contested
The Monastic Grades
Even in jellybean analog, almost everything you can do with a 555 timer you can do with a quad comparator. And more. Over a bigger voltage range, too. It’s usually a design smell to see a 555 used for anything in a professional design, even from before the tiny mcu era.

It makes a nifty missing pulse detector, though.
> Reading imaginary hallucinated documentation is just about as useful as zero documentation.

no, it's worse. it's closer to reading outdated documentation that outright lies and gives examples that don't work, and will cause you to waste hours/days learning things that aren't relevant to the api anymore.
The key here is insurers. Because they pick up the bill when things go wrong. As soon as self driving becomes clearly better than humans, they'll be insisting we stop risking their money by driving ourselves whenever that is feasible. And they'll do that with price incentives. They'll happily insure you if you want to drive yourself. But you'll pay a premium. And a discount if you are happy to let the car do the driving.

Eventually, manual driving should come with a lot more scrutiny. Because once it becomes a choice rather than an economic necessity, other people on the road will want to be sure that you are not needlessly endangering them. So, stricter requirements for getting a drivers license with more training and fitness/health requirements. This too will be driven by insurers. They'll want to make sure you are fit to drive.

And of course when manual driving people get into trouble, taking away their driving license is always a possibility. The main argument against doing that right now is that a lot of people depend economically on being able to drive. But if that argument goes away, there's no reason to not be a lot stricter for e.g. driving under influence, or routinely breaking laws for speeding and other traffic violations. Think higher fines and driving license suspensions.
As I come over the top of a crest, there was suddenly a lot of sun glare and the my Model Y violently swerved to the left, fortunately I had just overtaken a car on a two lane, dual carriageway and hadn't moved back to the left hand lane yet.

The driver I had just overtaken, although he wasn't very close anymore slowed right down to get away from me and I didn't blame him.

That manoeuvre in another car likely would have put it on two wheels.

They say FSD crashes less often than a human per mile driven, but I can only use FSD on roads like motorways, so I don't think it's a fair comparison.

I don't trust FSD, I still use it occasionally but never in less than ideal conditions. Typically when doing something like changing the music on a motorway.

It probably is safer than just me driving alone, when it's in good conditions on a straight road with light traffic with an alert driver.
The bigger story is that Russia will need to move its semiconductor fab underground; as she relies on drones to take out tanks.
Weed dealers would commonly use a 1p coin to weigh an 1/8 oz of hash