skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder...
https://marshallbrain.com/the-case-for-euthanizing-everyone-...
Does anyone remember blogs being called E/N sites at first? Everything/Nothing sites?

Maybe it was only in the group of sites I followed, but I think that name was pretty common.
>> exactly what the people really think (probably what you consider "bad speech")

That is a large, opinionated assumption you are making, but be aware we're not discussing "me" but rather advertisers.

As for "me" I consider "bad speech" to be enabled by "unmoderated free speech", which Elon freely chose to allow on Twitter. So yes, he chose to increase it. "Free speech" is NOT synonymous with truth or facts. I will stay away from people and places that I consider to use "bad speech". Yes, it's subjective, and that's the point.
The downvoting on this is shameful. This is exactly what has happened.

The 90s nerds were fucking malevolent. They’re the ones that built the dystopia we are currently experiencing.

I know, I was one of them and I had a first row seat for a lot of this stuff.
One cause of the mismatch is that tech did not turn out to be "lucrative" for the vast majority of techies.
What is a former q3 champion doing these days? I'm genuinely curious. Since you are on hacker news I assume you do something with software. Any skills that you picked up back then that are useful today?
> If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing, so...

This is a bad argument for piracy. (There are good ones.) Plenty of things that can't be bought and sold without restriction can be stolen.
> But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world?

As the author said:

> Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.

It's not changing the world, but I just do what I can to not contribute to it. And if any alternatives do pop up I do try to support them, sometimes financially.

The internet's outskirts are emptier than ever with this centralization, but I have made the active choice to de-activate pretty much all the mainstream stuff and use extensions to minimize their ability to track me. So knowing this did change my behavior on how I interact with the internet.
Curl -v Google.com
I’m guessing they mask out the edges. Maybe for exposure reasons or something?
I have a relative who commented one time about how in 1960 year the fusion power was only 10 years away.

I'm pretty sure he was talking about sustainable electric grid usable power. He spent some time with a key in an underground silo though...
Welcome green commenter!

I regularly see "posts from dissidents" here on HN, but I do notice that they are all strongly written, well-argued and often contain citations to support their position. Is there an asymmetry in the way karma is awarded to "bubble" and "non-bubble" positions? Probably, but that doesn't mean non-bubble never makes it.

Could it be that karma rewards different things than you believe?
Never suggested that. Nice ageism though.
This was one of the most exhausting aspects of working for a US company, especially as an H1B. Simply: just don't say anything, it wasn't worth it.

I'm from cultures where we bluntly call a spade a spade and pride ourselves on disdain for hierarchy. There's far less fear in raising concerns generally to anyone, but it's quite possibly because of the far better employment laws.
Then where are all the articles bashing them? Only targeting the trendy bait makes them seem insincere, just like the other commenter said.
I think this idea of “for the user” is a symptom of being trapped in a certain worldview. For some people, the only form of productive organization they can imagine is a company, which consists of an insular minority of producers, and a large majority of consumers. In such a structure, how can the minority of producers possibly know, anticipate, and retain concern for the interests of the consumers? They have to cross this huge gap between them and their users to do so. Eventually, the company grows larger and that gap between users and decision makers widens to the point where the company loses favor, and this process is inevitable so long as the structure of “company” is presumed necessary for the making of the product. I think open source communities demonstrate a potential alternative route.
On call shouldn't have 24/7 responsibilities. For example, I'm on call and took a call this morning due to MySQL Server running out of space. Terraform change later, it's no longer out of space and I'm back to my day. I'll take 30 minutes it took me to resolve out of my normal time elsewhere.

If on call balloons your 40 hours to 70 hours, yes, you have an issue. That's not normal and you should consider changing jobs.
Interesting, ~2014-2020 seemed to me already past the best date. I mean that was the time of Cambridge Analytics scandals and rage-baits on Facebook.
R&D expenditure often let's you write off more than 100% of the cost for tax purposes, to encourage it.
> As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology.

I think this is because 10 or 20 years ago, when tech wasn't a particularly prestigious or high-paying career, you got into tech because you really believed in it, and so other people who were in tech also really believed in it - hence the optimism.

Today, most people in tech are in it because it pays well. Not only do they not believe in it - I suspect they begin to dislike it because they feel "forced" into it, as you might when doing anything you don't particularly enjoy for an extremely long amount of time.
Not every applicant, but the ones in the accepted pool, it strikes me as odd there isn't some basic amount of vetting.

Instagram? No (although, wouldn't be surprised)... but doing a gut check with the school admin and looking at public records? Sure.
I've explained it the best i can in the other comment. But you keep making the mistake that this is just a culprit of 'bad thinking' or 'intentional revision of thought' and while i'm not saying those things don't exist, It's not.

Not only are the rationalizations i'm talking about and which some of these papers allude to not intentional, they often happen without your conscious awareness.
That sounds like the correct response if he knows anything about the field: shitty peripherals are an unsolvable problem from top to bottom. The hardware sucks, the software sucks more, there's absolutely nothing you can do to fix it as an end user (unplug it and try again is where "debugging" ends), and the production chain will never improve along the quality axis because the margins are tiny and people are very price sensitive.
I used to download torrents of tv shows less because it was cheap, and more because it was way more convenient than watching them through legal means — I could download them and then watch them when/wherever I wanted.

For me, the content providers have now basically solved for that with streaming services, I find that way more convenient than dealing with torrents.

It’s definitely not cheap, I’m paying for at least five streaming services right now, but it’s fast and easy and for me that’s worth it.
Author here: I know this is a very obscure topic, but hopefully it will be interesting to some. Let me know if there are any questions...
My take while reading OP was that the author simply grew up. When young and idealistic it's easy to believe the utopian marketing. In reality, business is the same as it's always been.

I do think politics has gotten worse in the "post-truth era". And tech certainly enabled that. It's hard to blame anyone in particular, though. One thing we see in the show "Connections" is that it's always hard to predict the consequences of new technology. Even seeing it coming, it's not fair to believe tech workers should have saved us from the rightward swing.
What’s wrong with the other half ?
How do they picture the magnetic field from far away like this? I would have thought that the probe can only sense the local field.
Plutocracy unveiled.
It's clear based on the exchange rate. You absolutely can't trust whatever data they put out there, but you can see based on their behaviour. I mean, they're literally asking North Korea and Iran for help, trading oil and gas directly...

There's no advantage for them to have the Ruble so weak because they absolutely want to import Chinese and Western products, namely technology, to fund their war machine. Even against the Yuan, the value of the Ruble has nearly halved since June 2022. That's not good for a nation that needs to import things...
Saying "piracy supports organized crime" as a scare tactic is a new one to me, and doesn't seem like a very effective campaign. What would be their motivation, shitty ad revenue?
> awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.

I don't think it was a change. Both things existed in parallel, with a little bit of crossover. The startup/VC/megacorp thing just won out, that's all. And nobody ever really doubted that it would, once it was visible.
well, we're not in the best economy to just "make stuff for fun and share free information". One thing we forget is that such a position is a privilege in and of itself. Either for the young who have guardians to provide for them, the well off who don't need to worry about next months' rent, or the obsessive who give everything in their life as their own.

My GitHub is very rusty, but I'm delaying Open source plans until I have a fully time job. It's just not worth it for me otherwise to try and be this FOSS advocate while I can't keep things stable in my own backyard.
The reverse engineering is really secondary to the regulatory regime. The company in this story had already been investigated and fined before anyone had tried to reverse-engineer their app.

It's an offence under GDPR to fail to cooperate with a supervisory authority. There are extensive record-keeping and transparency requirements. Trying to play cat-and-mouse is itself illegal and likely to be legible to the regulator.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-30-gdpr/
I think the GP was talking about tech in a more general sense, not just "companies".
The Saga of the seven suns has beings living in suns. Unsure how far they go with the idea,I'm missing 3 of the 7 books
lets say you are good representative of a general population… how much of a climate change “dent” do you think we made?
I found the part about the possibility of life on neutron stars to be fascinating.
> depends on what kind of academic work you're looking for, right?

It depends on where you are. British universities value teaching more than American ones, which are more focussed on research.
Calculus isn't on the standard SAT or even the Math Subject II tests [0], at least not in the early 2000s.

They taught us calculus because it's a prereq for engineering and physics and that's been important since the space race.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT_Subject_Tests
> plus I made sure my expenses are quite low so I can afford it.

Reaching a point where you have more money than time is surprisingly easy to do without becoming financially stable in any sense. From my experience the key discipline has to be making my own food at home; it sets a baseline for my thinking on consumption.
The Many Faces of the Kingdom of Shu
> To use a dog metaphor, a chainsaw tends to growl before it bites.

I believe the author is mistaken about why chainsaws don't cause more harm than they do. There are multiple of ways in which a chainsaw will kill or destroy, without any warning. Kickback is very quick. A tree falling in the wrong direction comes without warning.

Personally, I suspect there are 2 main reasons why chainsaws don't cause more harm.

A) They've been around for 100 years, and they've been causing fatalities and injuries for 100 years. People have invented ways to reduce the risk. Any chain you can readily buy is a low-kickback chain, and the saw comes with a chain brake. It doesn't completely remove the risk, but it substantially reduces it.

B) They've been around for 100 years, and they've been causing fatalities and injuries for 100 years. People are aware that chainsaws are inherently dangerous. Even someone without any training, and without looking at the safety instructions, understands that one of these will take off a limb without blinking.

What this means for the rest of the metaphor, I'm not sure.
> A nation state can probably buy the building across the street if that's the value of hacking your system.

So make them spend that money.

Or, more likely, convince them to refocus on a cheaper target.
I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments. If enough users here used it, it would reverse these trends and force dissenting opinions to be taken seriously. This is not reddit, where the average greyed out comment is some nazi stuff. Here, most greyed out comments are just feather rustlers doing their duty. We are lucky to have them, else we surround ourselves with sycophants and yes-people.
Bill Gates: Wrong on Communism and IP
I don't consider that very extreme considering the persistent harassment by someone who, as far as I could tell by the mailing list archive and Overstreet's Patreon, was wrong about the subject matter and insisted on it multiple times, with ascending levels of agression each iteration.

Personally, I would take such an insult as a signal to step away from the immediate conversation and maybe rethink it after some time, but this (admittedly very flamewar provoking and somewhat rude) way of pressing the RESET button on a conversation is understandably not tolerated in the same capacity as it might have been in the 1990s. The problem is, we haven't really replaced it with anything that's as efficient.
This almost seems more like an OS than a desktop. (microservices, messaging)

I guess my opinion is biased given my longterm use of "window managers", specifically fluxbox.

Maybe the features of this are more in line with the development environments provided by gnome of KDDE?
It's an American POV because a lot of EU and Asia have safeguards against this stuff. America's been deregulating such things for decades now.

It is indeed an American POV that universal healthcare seems to come and go with the president, something unthinkable for other first world countries.

>The tribalism of picking sides is part of the problem.

Following up on the other response: if you got or know a coalition that can push more ranked choice voting in some states, I'm all ears. That's the only real way to affect this as any reasonable level.
In 2013 Google Reader has been shut down, and Google defederated from XMPP. That has been the beginning of the end of "Web 2.0". Before that we were naively thinking all those APIs were free, and only the old enemy Microsoft wanted proprietary protocols and vendor lock-in.
sounds like your work is invaluable part of your life - absolutely nothing wrong with that. as bumpersticker say “I’d rather be fishing/golfing/boating/…”
Fair.

My guesses would be Oracle, IBM, or Private Equity.
The comment was edited after the down votes started pouring in.
Deep Dive into Pytest Parametrization
How is this different from previous periods in which technology companies harmed people and society as well? (Think coal mines, cars, television, what have you).

I fail to see what is so special about our current day and age, apart from us living in it.
> Human life expectancy literally doubled as we switched from those "less hazardous and more reusable" options to disposable plastics.

Really? And are the two things causally connected in the way you imply? In that period infant mortality was falling which has a dramatic effect on mean life expectancy but is probably not all that greatly affected by disposable plastics.

Also life expectancy in Norway was 72.8 years in 1950-1955. When, if ever, was it only 36.4 years? I'm quite that plastic packaging was rare or non-existent in Norway and the rest of Europe in the early 1950s and life expectancy is certainly not 145.6 years now that it is ubiquitous.
If it’s something involving property damage or another issue requiring reimbursement, I’d recommend seeking legal advice and the lawyers can send whatever correspondence is needful.
Why would it be hard to square the mentality of "pirating art to watch is acceptable" with the mentality of "pirating art to train LLMs on is acceptable"?
So it takes strong writing, good arguments, and citations for a dissident to have any hope of being seen. Since that doesn’t describe every upvoted HN comment, what are you really saying here?
>I've long thought about making a bot which automatically upvotes all downvoted comments.

You'll just get banned.
They are extremely popular in the "niche" of censorship evasion especially in countries like China and Russia. There are many more such protocols as well like OBFS/Shadowsocks/Snowflake/Meek etc.
Nice article! I am about to reach the five-year mark of blogging (https://pncnmnp.github.io/blog.html) - I started during my second year as an undergraduate. Over the years, I've seen that:

* Keeping the blogging stack minimal helps. Using simple tools has helped me focus entirely on the content. For instance, I write everything in Google Docs and then manually convert it to HTML.

* It is beyond okay to feel stuck, especially with technical content. I often have several partially written drafts sitting around. Revisiting these drafts periodically helps me see them with fresh perspectives. Eventually, inspiration strikes, and I end up finishing those half-baked drafts.

* It helps to avoid obsessing over analytics. I have intentionally avoided analytics, and it has kinda allowed me to focus on topics that genuinely interest me, rather than writing solely to please some imaginary audience. It kind of gives me the freedom to explore obscure subjects, even if they appeal to only a small number of my readers.
I chatted with them recently but it’s like a maze finding how to reach an agent.
Let's make it top 1 ))
This is excellent advice. In general, offering feedback in the form of a question is an extremely underutilized way of beginning a productive dialog.

Unfortunately, likely due to surveys, most people are accustomed only offering declarations in lieu of interrogatives.
Because that's the topic here. Blog posts venting against "RTO". The message I responded to claimed that TFA didn't have anything "new", but to me, as far as I know this genre, that point being brought up was new.

So I asked for examples, so if they exist and this isn't actually uncommon in such blog posts and I've just been unlucky, then I might find some interesting blogs to read. The absolute bulk of somewhat popular tech work blogging is done by very boring, very self-centered people, and I've found caring about epidemic disease to be a decent indicator that people might not be in short-form social media.

But a bunch of what looks to me like illiterate cretins got in the way. Maybe they're not, but by now I don't really care either way, and have given up on the potential for blog recommendations.
Well said.

People definitely latch on to the negatives, and that is in itself a big part of the problem of social media type platforms today.

Sure there's misinformation etc, but I'd much rather what we have today - it's not perfect, but it is so much easier to learn topics, so many more resources, and no not everything is free, but a lot of it is, and at least the paid resources exist!

I'm also glad that we do have people raging and seeing the negatives too. We need these people as a way of finding balance, and I'm sure as a system we'll regress to a mean and everything will be ok.
To help with your wonderings, I was a tech optimist who became pessimistic. I enjoy working on and thinking about technology problems, but it's so hard to keep my own creations from going on to become harmful. Perhaps my pessimism began with Jevons paradox. If I got a redo, I'd pick a different field.
Didn't lots of us get six figure salaries?
The two biggest advancements in tech in recent years: Crypto and AI have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable. And arguably have done far more harm than good.

Compare this with advancements before then: Personal Computers, Internet, Smart Phones and they have had overwhelmingly positive impacts for the world.

So I see there being a completely legitimate reason to be negative about tech today but optimistic about its future.
Let's be honest, nobody is saying to rebuild the world from scratch.

The stance for in-house built tools and software is a much more balanced act than that. One that prioritises self-reliance, and foments institutional knowledge while assessing the risks of making that one more thing in-house. It promotes a culture where employees stay, because they know they might be able to create great impact. It also has the potential to cut down the fat of a lot of money being spent on third parties.

Let's be real, most companies have built Empire State Buildings out of cards. Their devs spend most of their time fixing obtuse problems they don't understand, and I'm not talking about programming, but in their build processes and dependency hell.

It's no wonder that the giants of today, who have survived multiple crisis, are the ones who took the risk of listening to those "novice" enthusiastic engineers.

Don't kill the enthusiasm, tame it.
Pretty much. I'm unsure if even American can escape WW3 unscathed though.
Dictator for a day?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-trump-has-said-he...
Live chat exists, it just takes few hops to get to human through chat bot.
Email works, but it only for cases when they ask you to email them photos or something
I don't love the analogy, but I 100% agree that we are putting AI tools into people's hands that they are not yet able to wield safely. I think this is mostly because of how quickly AI has been developed. New technologies can take decades to be absorbed by society. Early on with cars we had no traffic lights, speed limits, or seat belts. And modern freeways were many decades off.

"Early electrical systems were poorly insulated, and fires or electrocutions were common. The creation of standards for wiring, outlets, grounding systems, and circuit breakers took decades to develop." It could be that AI will develop so fast that society never catches up, but I'm sure we'll at least get better over time.
Astonishing. Completely backwards. This article describes how to give feedback to your subordinates, not to your superiors. If your superiors are unable to process no-fluff information, regardless of whether it's feedback or updates, they have no business lording over anyone and will sink whatever function they have oversight of. If you find yourself working under such people, don't bother giving feedback, start polishing your resume.

The reason you fluff up feedback to your subordinates is because lower down the chain they tend to be insecure and don't yet have the experience to distinguish between actionable impartial feedback, and threats to their job security.

The reason you don't fluff feedback, or any information for that matter to your superiors, is described in basically every handbook on highly effective communication in organizations.
Do not give feedback to your boss.

https://www.manager-tools.com/2012/02/do-not-give-feedback-y...
I like fishing/golfing/boating... for a week. Have you tried it for longer?