skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Graham's early essays on, say, the ambitions of cities or hackers and painters, were interesting, original, were grounded in his personal experiences, and were focused in scope.

This latest mush makes extravagant claims about the evolution of society over the course over a 70 year period, seems shocked that news rooms might have style guides, and suggests that recent campus life can somehow be meaningfully be compared to the Cultural Revolution.

It observes many trends, perhaps some accurately, but observes everything superficially.

Pragmatically, what Graham suggests at the end is reasonable--pluralism combined with openness to the ideas of others about morality. I don't know that we needed 6000 words of vague dyspeptic musings to get there.

He has demonstrated the ability to write and think more clearly than this. It is reasonable for someone to observe this and be disappointed.
Sorry I switched to hugo my https://gioorgi.com and it was easier than expected.

Initially, I only followed the ‘drama’ tangentially, also because I have always considered myself a mere "end user" of Wordpress, even if long-time one (I used it for about 20 years).

For me, the fact that Wordpress.com sold a service based on an "extended" version of Wordpress.org was never a particular problem, but I never thought it was illegal to compete directly with it by taking the open source software and offering a simple hosting service.

Anyway I started to consider to switch from Wordpress to a static site hosted with hugo, retaining the comment system and all the URLs in the original form, more or less.

I was surprised because it took very little time (less 1 week of total work) to migrate my articles (1000+) and the comments.

I used open source tools, and I am a "hugo" newbie, so I make some trade off too.

Never less, I suggest all of you to give a try to hugo+isso (isso is a comment system very light).
The Global Collapse of Coupling and Fertility
Does it matter when sugar is already dirt cheap? In bulk it costs 18 cents per pound. Given that a person is unlikely to eat even half a pound of sugar per day, the price is unlikely to be a factor. Even if for some reason corn syrup is free, the budgetary hit is less than a dime per day. I doubt that's going to change anyone's eating habits.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/sugar
I would say the biggest reason might be that PHP doesn't have to worry about the web server aspect. Apache (or another webserver) serves the requests, PHP just returns the page to Apache. This is one of the ways that Apache can serve hundreds of PHP based sites, cause there's no need to spin up another web server and Apache is pretty fast at what it does.
> Benevolent dictators of open source are great for productivity until benevolence gives way to malevolence.

Autocracy is more efficient, with the best leaders.

Democracy is more stable, with the worst leaders.

The suboptimal cases are autocracy with bad leaders or democracy with good leaders.

I think it's also pretty common that autocratic leaders go badly quickly. The same focus and dedication that drove them also makes it unlikely they'll suddenly decide to step away cleanly. Instead, they'll decide that everyone else is wrong, they're the ones that really put in all the work, {insert rationalization here}, and fight change.
Ministers mull allowing private firms to make profit from NHS data in AI push
Medical workers are shielded from outsourcing because the vast majority of people who need medical care aren't going to travel overseas to get it.

The threat of jobs being exported just means that members of the union or association have to embrace innovation like unions do in Germany rather than focus on job retention.
the paper on Arxiv - https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03775

and the dataset - https://huggingface.co/datasets/darpa-scify/withdrarxiv
At Meta? I can't say but I doubt it. At the large company I work at - definitely not.
Even if the process isn't particularly pleasant, the result often is. Unlike with AI, whose output is often bland.

In my experience making music, specially the more experimental kind, is therapeutic for the musician.
I was flabbergasted when a friend introduced me to WP's ideas of "GPLs" and "nulled plugins", which is to say, by the community's description, someone other than the author distributed GPL-licensed WP plugins without charging for them.

Uh, what? Yes, that's how the license those authors chose for their code works. The other people aren't "thieves" for redistributing it.

Other people reading this, check out https://old.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1ghc2o6/gpl_clar... for a representative example of odd discussions on the subject.
You are woefully ignorant here. There are lots of cultural challenges (ex: IME young Indians jump jobs even more frequently than young Americans), the time zone coordination, corporate organization, matching client time zone & culture, etc.
Talent is not an issue.

Even blind statistics are not in your favor.
I think questions about whether a CEO is "good" or not are kind of impossible to answer, because you can't test the answers. All we can observe is the current reality and the decisions they've already made. There is no way to observe the other alternate universes where Zucc didn't buy Instagram, and/or the universes where he bought something else. Did the company do better or worse in those universes? No way to know.

Also, sometimes people say things like "Only [ceo's name] could run [company]. Look at their results!" This is just survivor bias. Who could know whether someone else could or couldn't run Facebook (or Tesla, or whatever)? Who can say with certainty that out of the 8+ billion people on the planet, only one particular guy could run the company, and that particular guy happened to be the guy who indeed ran it? What an improbable coincidence!
Eh. Aquia tried a similar stunt with Drupal (centralize all the tings at the community's expense) and that hasn't exactly been a rousing success. I don't have a great feel for how dependent upon the larger dev community the WordPress ecosystem is so maybe it'll work for them?
Look it up. They are both dirt cheap. We just happen to subsidize one and artificially raise the price of the other.

Now, maybe caloric sweeteners should be much more expensive and maybe that will have a positive impact on society (like incentivize zero-cal sweeteners). But if that's what you're getting at, you shouldn't be arguing for that through a proxy argument about corn vs cane sugar.
Sounds like he doesn't have a high opinion of his midlevel engineers.
thank you. Also, were you aware that 0xcafef00d is not included in the wikipedia article on hexspeak? is 0xCAFEFOOD used as a magic number in any systems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak
Linus Torvalds offers to build guitar effects pedal for kernel developer
The TfL trademarks are all over Apple Maps. The map itself would be covered by copyright, not trademark.

It would seem that nobody bothered to run the notice past a lawyer.
Universities with publication metrics researchers say are too good to be true
Being near the child is important. Our economy was so insane that a new mother/father was not be able to spend the first few years with that child even though we had every means of allowing them to do so (for many workers, not all).

Being there to pickup the kid from school is important.

Getting lunch with your SO is important.

Being in your neighborhood is important.

Those two hours of sleep is important.

What nonsense perks can a company can offer me compared to things like that. I don't even know if you can pay me enough to go without that (If I have the means to get that, that's what I'll do).
Yeah, there really needed to be some voting or other feedback system to encourage consistency over time.

This is a mildly interesting experiment that largely just looks like a failure at the moment.
> undiscerning users will stay no matter what

That's one take.

Another is: ecosystem partners are often surprised what users actually value. We all like to think that our contributions are critical, but the Reddit example shows a huge disconnect between the value 3P partners thought they were delivering and what users actually valued.
From the article:

> Automattic announced that it would restrict its contributions to the open source version of WordPress. The company would now only put in about 45 hours a week total — down from nearly 4,000 a week — so as to match the estimated hourly contributions of WP Engine.

source: https://automattic.com/2025/01/09/aligning-automattics-spons...
When Wordpress first came up, PHP was something anyone with $5 could administer, and Python/Ruby required a lot more money and expertise that put them outside the reach of junior hobbyists.

This was before the days of PaaS solutions like AppEngine.
You'd think there would be more startups in this space given the demand. I understand robotics is hard, but money makes it easier.
A synthesizer is literally an electronic device designed to reproduce the sound of other instruments.
> The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture.

The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.

That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.

I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".
Not these gems but my son and I hunted for and found a couple of 19th century single use pipes and part of a brick with a cool logo a couple of years ago. Go to the Tower Bridge, there are stairs to go to the shore right next to it. Good hunting!
This is fine as long as your users don't mind your site randomly changing all the time.
RIP S3 sleep... Took years to get it to work reliably under Linux, then we had a good decade+ run of it "just working" like this, now back to trying to weed out all the wacky platform quirks and weird hardware/firmware behavior that make the S0ix states be just barely unusable.

Maybe in another five years...
A machine can’t do self expression for you.

Replacing self expression with an LLM is just hollowing yourself out, it’ll be evident to you and everyone else when you’re not behind a screen.
> with far left views that in the recent decade have become the loudest voice basically every online platform.
> the same toxic far left hub that Reddit has become
> shifting away from the far left messaging that has been the default

That entire post has left reality a long time ago. Honestly, this level of resentment can't be healthy.

> angry, myopic, us-vs-them extreme thinking.

You've clearly become what you're (allegedly) so vehemently against.
Still can't believe we all changed our branch names from master to main.
Any interpretation (including interpreting the inputs to the neural net as a "prompt") is "slapped on" in some sense—at some level, it's all just numbers being added, multiplied, and so on.

But I wouldn't call the probabilistic interpretation "after the fact." The entire training procedure that generated the LM weights (the pre-training as well as the RLHF post-training) is formulated based on the understanding that the LM predicts p(x_t | x_1, ..., x_{t-1}). For example, pretraining maximizes the log probability of the training data, and RLHF typically maximizes an objective that combines "expected reward [under the LLM's output probability distribution]" with "KL divergence between the pretraining distribution and the RLHF'd distribution" (a probabilistic quantity).
A lot to unpack in this comment.

1. Wherein do you find the smugness? It does not speak to any person, let alone the first person.

2. What would give the impression that comments on the internet are written for others? Carly Simon once recorded a popular song about this type of falsehood.

3. It remains that SQL isn't relational. That is why it "won", after all. Relations are too complex for the layman to understand. Tables are much more familiar to the people in charge and arguably a better model for most business problems.
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either.

There is nothing that better demonstrates how disconnected your average ivory tower silicon valley elite is than this sentence. You would have to exist in an entirely different reality to believe this is the case.
> you need an open your eyes test

Well that seems unbiased, as I'm sure would the mitigations for the identified problems. /s

> Americans are not healthy and corn syrup is a big factor

I am concerned about Americans' health and I'm not so quick to point my finger at devil-corn. In the 90s we had corn syrup in everything but we didn't experience rapid weight gain until this century. We know that other factors can affect us (see "leaded gasoline" as an example) and we know that we're starting to see lawsuits over things like PFAS. Maybe there was some unexpected side effect like corn syrup plus 64 bit game consoles. And I'm only sorta kidding about that. It could well be a combo of factors.

Getting fat is a global phenomenon, so give me better evidence than unsupported claims that American diets are especially bad, please.
Don't worry, they'll fail upwards like many other executives who leave dumpster fires behind them.

Remember, though, conveniently, according to other executives, there's "only a limited number of people with the skills to be CEOs! So we have to pay them so much!"
The problem is if you stop working as a gig worker you get replaced almost immediately because the barrier to work is incredibly low. The company never even feels a change.
Back in the 1990s, Borland Turbo C permitted this -- it even worked in some DOS memory models, because it depended on the 8088 or 80286 segment registers not being reused. I had to teach a cohort of developers who were migrating from Turbo C to a C89-compliant compiler. In C89 this was "undefined behavior".
It’s hard to define “woke” as anything other than “something someone politically to the left of me does that I don’t like” as that’s how broadly it’s used.

It’s utterly meaningless.
Off the top of my head: differential privacy (which is now being deployed at scale), differential dataflow (Materialize), shared logs (Corfu/Tango, productized by VMWare). I'm sure there's many more that would be easy to google.
To echo the other comments - I'm reasonably confident that the Linux kernel is perfectly capable of handling sleep, the problem is varied hardware support. Consider that every Chromebook and Android device on the planet is running a Linux kernel, and they have no trouble. Likewise, I don't think I've ever had Linux struggle with sleeping on a thinkpad, and the best suspend/resume experience I've ever had was Linux on a random Lenovo laptop a while back.
This is the thing. Most people don't know that in order to keep your brand, you have to continually use it and defend it.

In a similar vein, the lawyers of the popular "hook and loop fasteners" Velcro constantly try and defend their IP so it doesn't become generic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY
And there are clearly side effects [1], and it was already clear before this news that this was being censored. We just have confirmation from the CEO of Facebook now.

[1]: https://dailysceptic.org/2024/12/11/revealed-the-full-hidden...
Saying “we don’t know what he actually thinks” is a defense. You only ever see people use that line when it comes to his politics, but never say, to question whether he actually likes Diablo 4 or AI.

When it comes to things that people find mundane or agreeable, the stuff he posts about all day reflects what he thinks but when he gives fifty million dollars to Stephen Miller[1] in 2022 to fund his Citizens for Sanity ads[2], maybe he’s trolling or it’s drugs or whatever.

> I'm thinking about what led to his success, and how those lessons might apply to me or people I'm supporting.

This is quite literally a defense of his character. If your response to “this guy sucks, here is proof that this guy sucks” is “there is literally nothing bad he could do that justifies thinking about anything other than the positives about him”, that is what defending a person looks like.

1

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4912754-musk-donated-m...

2

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/who-is-behind-citize...
The HN guidelines say not to complain about the formatting or presentation of the article, but often the page design is so insanely terrible that someone can't help but post a complaint about how they couldn't read it because X, or how it didn't work on browser Y, or how the information density was so annoyingly low it wore out their mouse or pointing finger, or...

This isn't one of those posts. Good job to the author. This article is not only nicely written but also a pleasure to read.
Reproducibility and Replicability of Qualitative Research
I think Matt should reach out to Elon Musk to assist him. And I don't mean that in a weird or snarky or "jabbing at Elon/Matt" kind of way. Clearly he is struggling to deal with a competitor and community wanting to impose their will on him, and make him behave like a "good boy" for their benefit (whatever that may be). Unfortunately he doesn't have the kind of "Fuck You" money that Elon has to deal with said interlopers.
Megacorps being naturally risk-averse, and the lion's share of the rest of the capital being held by that banquet room, it's going to take one or a few scrappy startups hitting it big while also committing to WFH/etc to get the banquet to loosen the purse strings a bit and kick off a new wave of investment a la Web 2.0 post-dotcom-crash (which was coincidentally also post-oh-noes-outsourcing-1.0)

That plus a few years of new successes might get the megacorps to start hiring en masse and possibly see the value in WFH again, but it'll take a lot of these stars aligning to produce several new unicorns that can eat a few lunches to get there, which will probably take the rest of the 2020s and possibly part of the 2030s (based on the last time this happened, going from 1999 crash to the 2010/2011 renaissance)

If I was a betting man, I'd guess the first wave of new startups will be unifying a huge dataset of local info with AI into like the AirBNB-of-local-whatever personal concierge sort of thing, like OpenTable on steroids. but I'm frequently wrong, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I still don't know.

Starving the milk cows (push customers into losses) is never a smart strategy for those living on milk cows. Sounds more like inceadibly stupid. Or short sighted parasitic (squeeze all then run with the heist).
Arguably the indie scene is bigger than it’s ever been. I think the issue is more that, like social media, streaming music services like Spotify and YouTube keep everyone in their bubble. Even if you try to break out the algorithm pulls you back in.

Radio was a much different paradigm that had to respond to changing desires or risk losing revenue and going out of business. So it had to react to listener desires with much more finite resources and that led to (I think) larger cultural shifts within music than we see now.
While at the same time our tax dollars are supporting literal Nazis in the Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade
all this WP drama makes me really grateful about deciding to go with a static site generator.

Astro FTW!
RTO is studied and found to be equal to, or less efficient and profitable than, hybrid.

My guess is that RTO mandates act as a lay off.
Ah I see, I thought you were talking about him personally.
this article opens with "since i last wrote about wordpress", with a link to a previous article. the linked article does the same. it goes seven layers deep! what dedication!
That's rather what all of these AI salivators are all about.
I don't think that's what they're saying, they're saying that they don't want to be forced to come back to the office because they don't like it because some percentage of the people there are there just to shoot the shit. That doesn't imply that everyone who comes to the office is there to slack off.
I agree with what you said, but I still think performance and moralizing is the central aspect.

In your hierarchy, I think most people would also agree that an activist blogging about using the world "unhoused" instead of "homeless" is more woke than the one advocating for the wealth tax.

Similarly, someone arguing for wealth tax and transfer on moral grounds is more woke than someone who argues the identical policy saying it will result in long term cost savings.
I would sum my career up as C -> C++ -> Python/Ruby/Python -> Go -> Go/Rust, and would say my experience of Go (reinforced in Rust) was sharp pushback on class-based OO idioms, especially inheritance.
Windows used to work about this well back in the XP days, possibly Windows 7 as well. Plenty of times I hit the "sleep" button that Logitech put right next to the esc key (....) and resumed the system to find everything working as expected.

Not sure if the embedded video is suspend to RAM or disk. Also not sure why there wasn't a PW prompt upon resume, but I'm not a BSD person, just someone who is paranoid about PW prompts.
Very interesting thought. I didn’t know the toupée itself neither the fallacy. Looks like a cousin of the famous survivor bias and both are children of a "observational bias" category. This is only my humble layman guess.

The video was interesting too, I’ll have a look at that channel. Thanks for sharing.
Please make your substantive points without personal attacks.

Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.
Absolutely terrible take.

Creating music that you yourself love -- even music no one else will ever hear -- is a peak human experience that I wish everyone got to experience.

The joy of creation is truly wonderful for its own sake.

Can AI help that creation, just like other "synthetic" techniques for making music (not least - the synthesizer)? Definitely.

But for me at least, the less of me (i.e. other people's samples, stock sound effects, DAW gimmicks) that's in my music, the less rush and joy I get from it. The less it feels "mine". But that's all very subjective.

Which takes me back to why this is such a dismal take. Why wouldn't this dude point to how making music is a creative joy, and AI can help bring that joy to more people by lowering the barrier to entry?
Thanks; none of that came up in a quick web search, so I would not have known.
I find the opposite. People frequently show up to meetings in person unprepared. They are also way less likely to document the discussion - which can now be done with AI transcribing the discussion... which is even more productive. There is way more shooting the shit in person.
I'm not sure what your point is. The argument isn't that corn syrup isn't being subsidized, it's that on a absolute basis the subsidy doesn't matter. If there's only 10 cents worth of sugar in a 2L bottle of coke, switching to sugar is unlikely to change the consumers buying habits.