skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there is something fundamentally different between religious texts and even mostyths and fantasy/sci-fi stories. When the Mesopotamians were listening to the Epic of Gilgamesh, they were reading about the world as they thought it is. When the ancient Jews were listening to stories of Genesis or Moses, they were reading about what they believed the world to be. Even to the extent that they believed certain aspects of those stories to be parables and not an exact description of reality, the main point was to elucidate aspects of what the real world is, or how it should be.

In contrast, when you read The Lord of the Rings, you're reading a pure fantasy, about a world that you're not expected to believe is real in any particular way, and where the reflections on any real world concepts are buried deep in the subtext (unlike, say, a teaching by the Buddha).
The shape of attention has changed.

It's true that now more than ever, niche super creators have found an audience. I think the paradox here is, because of specifically this, not so gifted people have less incentive to create.

30 years ago, there simply was no spreading of media that wasn't so mainstream. So there was no medium for a lot of niches. Without the medium, people felt rewarded in their local community for showing something interesting that had no mainstream analog.

In a sense, the niche creators that were great were more effectively broadcast leaving less audience for worse niche creators. This, over time, meant that less people tried to create and switched to critique.
In the same way it can detour your thoughts to the mainstream and lead you away from a line of thought that might have ended up somewhere else.
Imagine a system monitoring payment transactions. Each transaction stream (e.g., purchase events) could be joined with customer account data (e.g., past purchasing patterns or blacklist flags). Streaming joins enable flagging potentially fraudulent transactions leveraging live context.
He doesn't get it. It is not "those that can write", it will be those that can communicate, really communicate versus those that cannot. It's amazing now how few people can explain themselves, without thinking that act of explaining themselves is somehow a punishment or a lead up to a punishment. Beyond that, how few developers can explain what they do without the use of empty acronyms and a host of gobbledygook that they probably only know as a pile of gobbledygook because they don't work in that stuff, they just use it, tangentially.

But the real issue is people that are not already engaged and knowledgeable about what one another are doing, the key moment when a non-tech needs to discuss a tech need with someone from the tech developer sphere: can they even communicate, and I'm not talking through a salesperson, but actually discuss what one needs and what one provides without resorting to empty jargon? Real communications needs no jargon and does not use jargon, it modifies itself to be understood by the audience, using the audience's terms.

This is critical in the coming decades: learn to communicate, professionally communicate, and I'm not talking about being a media talking head, I'm talking about learning how to speak to anyone anywhere from any stature. It's a critical skill and it is damn well needed now as well as tenfold in our fast approaching future.
Capitalism via *kaput (head) and feudalism via *fehu (cattle) stand in a metonymic relation. PIE speakers have been obsessed with livestock for millennia.
How is that your takeaway? Please quote the sections from his essay that led you to your conclusion.

My takeaway: people that know how to write, that have trained that muscle, are better at thinking in a structured way and articulating their thoughts. The number of people that know how to write is declining, at least in part due to the advent of GenAI. The number of people who know how to write is still non zero and is not limited to only Paul Graham.
Why not set the environment by spawning the proper docker containers rather than having to choose for a specific version of PHP and its dependencies?

And this, of course, applied to as many things as possible.
> That's the thing, though, the compat story is terrible.

It really is. With shared documents you just have to give up. If someone edits them on the web, in Teams, in the actual app or some other way like on iOS, it all goes to hell.

Pages get added or removed, images jump about, fonts change and various other horrors occur.

If you care, you’ll get ground into the earth.
I suspect they were being facetious.
If you want to make the most out of it - probably continue with JS for the backend - throw in TypeScript. You'll also be able to use that knowledge in frontend (and anywhere else really) as a bonus, and it's not going away. IMO your best bet.

Ruby is my favourite but at the same a niche language compared to JS or PHP - I'd check the local market first if you're under pressure to land a job - there are many great offers with competitive salary if you're open for remote work though. Note that by diving into Ruby means a 99% chance of working with Ruby on Rails - it pretty much dominated the ecosystem.

PHP is very popular still, but I don't think it's a solid choice career-wise. A lot of ways to shoot yourself in the foot, the legacy code to deal with, and oversaturated market. Still have PTSD from that.
GIMPS is not typically targeting HPC, it is typically targeting hobbyists who have spare cycles to burn.
the world of greek philosophy is marked by two eras, with the socrates as the inflection point. as far as we know, he wrote nothing. we only know of his ideas from his students, and they are pretty good ideas. socrates sharpened his wits in conversations. plato’s dialogues are a homage to this fact. it appears that productive thinking happens in conversations. unless you’re engaged in a mere manipulation of symbols within some grammar (as happens in mathematics) can it be accepted that solo thinking via writing is a great aid. this is leslie lamport’s domain. it should influence how one understands his statement on thinking and writing. about complex, irregular ideas solo thinking only gets you so far. the sort of solo thinking you do when you write is what has misled paulg to write this incomplete think piece. if he had discussed this idea in a conversation someone would have pointed out to him that socrates, jesus, and muhammad wrote nothing but have left behind some huge edifices of thought.

maybe someone would have even pointed out to him from what activity the peripatetics derived their name. but alas!
I really like the Stylus plugin for that. I think it takes a bit less effort than changing CSS with greasemonkey.
I did the same trip. Highly recommended. On the trip I learned that there is an Amtrak Rail pass, which includes 10 rides. It seems that it often is on sale at the beginning of the year. So if you are interested in such a trip, you may want to look out for that.
No, he made the theory, that too many in NATO believed their own sides fiction. (And orcs for russian soldiers is a literal slang)

As someone who followed all of that quite extensivly, I tend to confirm this. Otherwise that disastrous offensive last year never would have happened at all. As it was quite clear from the beginning, that it was bound to fail - but the imagination that the glorious win of the righteous forces of history is about to happen. So it needed to happen, despite objections from reality seeing people on the ground.

Because the russian minefields and fortifications and russian artillery supperiority turned out to be very real. And they were real before.
Absolutely beautiful. I can see that it is now a World Heritage site:

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1538/
Not for a long time. The WebP encoder has improved a lot since MozJPEG was released. But these days we have Jpegli [1] which beats WebP at higher quality levels.

[1] https://github.com/google/jpegli/
A Brief History Of Time?
Not for the 99.99% of people. Maybe you should raise the bar when defining "it works great".
bigint cannot be replaced by regular number when working with arbitrarily large whole numbers. With regular numbers you will lose precision out of the range [Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER, Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER]. If you try to implement such functionality via JS, it would be even much slower than the bigint native implementation. So, it's great to have such thing natively implemented.
More like plantations for vineyards and eucalypts.
Am I the only one who finds it surreal to see long distance trains in the US? Don’t get me wrong - I know they exist. It’s just that I feel like they never get depicted anywhere in the media. I also don’t think I know a single American who has gone to another US city by train.
If you don't somehow make something useful, or built a thing people actually use, then what was the point of it all? To have fun and then be forgotten?

Though, with AI looming to take this last shred of human dignity too, maybe having a bit of fun along the way isn't such a bad idea.
The way i heard the story, after Adriano Olivetti died politics and politicians finally had the chance to sack and split the pie… and split they did.

Carlo De Benedetti is no random john doe. They basically led the decline of olivetti.

They had no vision for the company , and they actually were antagonists to it: Olivetti was an exceptional company that proved wrong both left and right, but proved particularly wrong the left, and they just couldn’t bear it. They just couldn’t bear the living example that it is possible to run a company in a capitalistic manner while also caring for the human beings and treating them well.

So they dismembered it, little by little.
At least aspects of fiction in fictional lands are much older. Plato's (admittedly very short) mentions of Atlantis in his dialogues are a good candidate.
Yes, Starlark is a relatively sane option, but the benefit of a language like that isn't simply that it's sandboxed, but also that it's not Turing complete because it only allows for primitive recursion and thus is guaranteed to terminate.

If you want a sensible compromise, it's to use something like Cue or Dhall to generate JSON configuration that's actually consumed by the software. There's also Jsonnet, but I've never been a fan.
It is a big step from his humble origins promoting tanning balls machines.
It’s possible, but I don’t think we’re fully agreeing.

To me, a government being able to compel silence from / prohibit disclosure by a private company or person feels much less awful than a government being able to force them to say something false.

Those are not even in the same category of acceptability for me. The second one is pretty much never acceptable; the first one sometimes is, though of course not always.

I think the other commenter was saying that US law allows the government to oblige Apple in the second way, in other words to affirmatively make false statements. I was saying it does not and probably constitutionally cannot. That seems like a clear disagreement to me.

They and I are, however, agreeing that US law allows the government to compel Apple to keep silent about certain things. This includes not disclosing that certain prior statements which may have been true at the time have subsequently become false.
> The total IQ on the planet remains constant even as the number of people increase

IQ, (from “intelligence quotient”), is a number used to express the relative intelligence of a person.

So for the whole population it is constant by definition :)
Some people with ADHD thrive in periods of stress, new study shows
For me Opera died when they abandoned their own rendering engine Presto and moved to Chromium. UI was simplified greatly and many customization options disappeared. Vivaldi is spiritual successor to classic Opera browser, still using Chromium, but has all possible customization options and additional tools, like RSS reader and email client.
You can't get road insurance for them either.
They seem happy to host media for other conferences as well! <3
I also do not agree to this thinking/writing duo. Most of my thoughts are free floating, so to say, and I ( and possibly anyone) can derive/enhance/combine ideas in my head without any writing necessary and even come to a conclusion how to act on that thoughts.

As opposed to the writing at one end, these thoughts are rooted in an experience, an emotion, and this association never dissapears. Add the above act on them, it is like writing.

Maybe the author is referring strictly to communication or to the art of writing.
Mostly private use, I have 2 servers and a laptop configured with this: https://github.com/matrss/nixfiles. The servers host a bunch of different services from Nextcloud to a DoT-to-ODoH proxy and some more.

I've also introduced some light NixOS usage at work (3 hosts, one is an uptime-kuma instance, two are Forgejo Actions runners). For that I had to get some proprietary scanner software to run on it, which I could by just putting the extracted deb package in an emulated FHS environment and setting up a service for it, all declaratively.

Even for interfacing with legacy systems and unusual stacks I don't think you will need the escape hatch. Anything that is buildable on and above the abstraction-level of "ensure a file is present at some path with some content" should be doable declaratively, and that includes setting up an unusual software stack and running it in systemd services to communicate with some other legacy system or whatever.

The escape hatch is there to modify how NixOS itself behaves, and modifying that should only be necessary to extend NixOS' core functionality. A quick search revealed that impermanence (https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence) and in some cases sops-nix (https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix) use it, but those fundamentally extend NixOS with ephemeral root storage support and secrets management, respectively.
I was picking up WCBS in NYC at 5.105 GHz, near the antenna at Empire State. Never could figure it out, their engineers didn’t know why either.
> Accountability is important, especially in large organizations.

Why? So we'll have someone to blame when things inevitably go wrong? In my experience, the people who like to say the buck stops with them are nowhere to be found when that happens.

I much prefer organizations focussed on actually getting things right, instead of worrying about who takes the blame.
Can you elaborate how exactly git is at risk here? These posts never do.
Physics isn’t based on mathematics and logical systems, it’s based on measurements that the mathematics are chosen to fit
Look at the situation now: I don't think 25% of the population can write a single paragraph on some non-banter non-gossip topic that does not appear as if it were written by a 4th grader. Look at the business communications actual people write, it's jargon and very simple directives like "did x happen?" Look at the logical flow of the sentences in technical white papers and wish the authors had more basic writing, basic communications practice, because their sentences do not flow.

We're already in a poverty of quality communicators. All that nonsense with Bitcoin was fast talking nonsense that sounded plausible. This is what happens when real communications breaks down: fraudulent technical products surrounded by a word salad of abused language and people afraid of looking stupid so they never ask for clarifications of the gobbledygook.
I think you have understood "writing" in a very narrow sense. As mentioned in other replies, Stephen Hawking was a very prolific author. He did not write much, but he sure knew how to write.

PG is obviously talking about the mental process of writing, i.e. of organizing a complex network of thoughts in a linear hierarchy that others can grasp, not the physical one.
> Every major city has tours in tunnels and are usually pretty cool

I agree. Edinburgh has some amazing ones under The Royal Mile.

The Paris ones used to be quite extensive but the comments here make me wonder if they have been shortened?

The catacombs in Lima gave me pause. The environment there is very dry and so decomposition is presumably slowed. There was a very distinctive smell.
Any city built and or designed before cars is a nightmare for giant American pickups.

That said do you see those in Boston or NYC a lot?
> People used to take the Bible and other religious texts very seriously, and they believed in their literal truth

I don't disagree. But in a world where even reality was very much a mystery (so you had myths of ancient lost civilizations, cities of gold, etc and so forth), maybe religion, as literal as it was taken, was enough to satisfy the common people with its otherworldly descriptions of places.

My point is that I think it is natural that as the world becomes less mysterious and religion becomes increasingly seen as allegorical, the craving for fictional worlds where not all is known becomes more appealing.

> Maybe Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene? Its connection to our real world is tenuous at best, I'd say.

Maybe the oldes I can think of is the land of Avalon in Athurian legend? Still would have a tenuous connection to the real world.
Political speech probably chases not even the median, but the marginal, voter, so you'll see that US SOTU addresses having been going regularly "Dick and Jane"-wards for the last couple of centuries.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwPnJXXX5Ic
Not really, because there’s no guarantee that it will be available in the future. A script to download the data doesn’t mean I can reliably recreate the data in 5 years, I wouldn’t call that open source. To me, the data itself needs to be published.
You’d probably be surprised how often people have to create config files programmatically. With properly specified formats, you can serialize the configuration, which means nesting and string escapes are taken care of automatically. With half-baked custom formats, you have to resort to string replacement and praying.

Having said that, there’s an official RFC for CSV, and INI files are de-facto specified by Microsoft’s implementation.
Media depictions are a hugely underrated aspect of public transport perception.

In japanese and korean media (my experience is with a ton of anime and k dramas, more in the former than the latter though) trains are very common casual and serious backdrops for a variety of scenes, either within the train, at the station, or just a train passing by on the bridge in the background.

In Hollywood/American TV, it's always cars, with the occasional airport/plane. It riles me up quite unreasonably that shows/movies set in New York fuckin city with 24-7 subway service, and characters are shown trying to catch a cab in Manhattan in the middle of the night to go 20 blocks away. At least Marvelous Mrs. Maisel acknowledged this directly as a class thing for some characters and other characters took the train, but most movies just assume the American viewer cannot relate to someone using the subway.
I can foresee a proliferation of small LLM-wrapper services like these in the near future (and evidently it is already happening). They're going to appear because they seem like they could make money, and that's enough of a motivator.

It's an odd product space to me, as there is a very large overlap between people who can query this API, and people who can query a generic LLM API with "respond only in valid JSON...". Certainly there are some people who would pay for things like this, but the cost of 10 of these little services starts to add up when you could have a generic solution for all with minimal effort.
Very good point. I often use AI to see things from multiple points of view. It is a good tool to check if you have included obvious things in your argumentation. Spell checking is just one of those obvious things.
The difference is that with arithmetic and calculators I am simply playing the rules of a formal game without regard to the semantics of those numerical symbols. I don't care so much what the numbers mean as much as I care that I have executed the rules correctly and arrive at the "right number."

With language however we are attempting to refer to some kind of underlying meaning or reality, and an LLM will not give you the understanding of the things being referred to - only the outward representations themselves. If you are indeed interested in meaningless exchange of symbols a la Searle's Chinese Room then perhaps there is some utility in this; otherwise it's the act of digesting and comprehending meaning, and the internal cognitive processes that go into the production of the written artifact that matter, not just the written artifact itself.
Oh for crying out loud.

"EEE" isn't a magic incantation, it's the name of an actual policy with actual tangible steps that their executives were implementing back when the CEO thought open source was the greatest threat to their business model.

Microsoft contributing to a project doesn't automatically make it EEE. For one thing, EEE was about adopting open standards in proprietary software. Microsoft during EEE didn't publish GPL code like this is.
I follow Paul's argument about the consequences of the churning of low quality output by AI, but I think there's a second order effect that's more concerning. The ability to judge other people's knowledge of a subject area will become exceedingly rare and priceless.

Unlike younger generations, who are growing up surrounded by AI-generated content, many of us older folks have had the experience of engaging directly with people and evaluating their competence. We developed a knack for quickly determining someone's skill level through just a few minutes of face-to-face conversation—a skill that was essential for navigating various life situations.

Now that anyone can use AI to generate seemingly competent text, videos, and more, and as in-person interactions decline, the conditions that once allowed us to gauge competence are fading. I worry that in the future, no one—including AI trained on our outputs—will be adept at making these assessments.

Those of us who take time to carefully compose arguments and revise them, as Paul suggests, will have a better handle on this, so that's a helpful consideration.

I worry strongly about a future like that in Ideocracy[1], where nobody has a clue bout actually judge competence, and instead goes with the best sound bites.

The one path out that I can see, and it's unlikely, is to teach the skill of explicitly tracking history, and reviewing how well someone predicted the future, over time.

The explicit generation and curation of a reputation is part of that priceless nexus that they'll all be seeking in future generations, and yet it'll pale in comparison with the ability to size someone up in a few minutes of interaction.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Could it be argued that a format being patent encumbered was less in focus back then, that "codecs are covered by patents and users of a codec must pay royalties to the patent holders" was just the more or less unquestioned "way things were" back then by groups like ISO? The original JPEG was also patent encumbered after all.

This is not a rhetorical question, I was way too young back then to have been aware of the conversations which were going on regarding JPEG-2000. I see that PNG was developed specifically to be unencumbered, which suggests that at least some groups were focused on it, to your point. But I can't tell if that was a mainstream concern at the time like it is now.
I am 27 years old and in the last decade, I have only sent about 5 physical letters. 3 of those were RSVPs to weddings (and were in the minority of weddings, most using an online RSVP system), where the envelope provided already had postage and a mailing address. I've also learned by now that a google search can often be faster and less confusing than asking my parents how to do something.