skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to crunchbase, Automattic has taken just shy of $1B in funding. Yes, that's a B as in billion.

I wonder where those investors are on returns on that investment and the kinds of changes they want to get them.
Seems like it’s sold out now except for a special one at £1,000. Did anyone catch what the original price was?
> This type of policing is another iteration of doublespeak that we were warned about in 1984. Policing the language polices thoughts. It harms communication effectiveness. It makes it harder.

Jesus, it's really not that hard. I work full remote and I just ask people what they prefer. I'm not in office and a lot of people aren't on camera and it's a bad idea to generally assume shit based on their name anyways. If I forget I apologize and we move on.

I have literally never encountered any issues in my long career of working with people because I don't feel a need to fill my head with hot air and make a big deal about it.
In this article, Graham claims the following:

"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."

Bud Light was boycotted because they did a promotion with a minor trans celebrity. What is "woke" about that? It seems to me that what happened here is that Bud Light was punished for heresy, just from a different direction than Graham is choosing to condemn.
Quick, burn Picasso's Las Meninas! Burn iitttt!!! Velazquez would not have approved, I can tell you that!! Of course he wouldn't have approved, everyone can tell.

/s

Seriously, you can't and should not want to stop others from creating derivative works of works that are in the public domain. Sure, some such will be horrible, so you ignore them and hope others do too. But some will be creative in ways you could not have imagined before seeing/hearing/experiencing them.
If you are going to train black doctors, then you need to enrol them in universities. If you don’t want tu use scholarships or quotas, then you must make sure that those black candidates actually do good in high school, otherwise it’s DEI.

If you are giving scholarships or subsidies to black teenagers so they can eventually get into a university, that’s also DEI, so better subsidise their families so they can get a better primary education and upbringing… but that’s also DEI.

So you keep going back and the “solution” is basically to do nothing and keep the status quo.
The weirdest thing that I've run into wrt pronouns is when people object to the use of gender-neutral pronouns as "misgendering" - e.g. a person insists that you must not use "they" to refer to them but rather their preferred gendered pronoun, and if you don't, then that is "erasing their identity".

The argument that's usually made for this is that if someone's referred to as "they" while other people around them are "he" or "she", this makes them feel excluded etc. But if so, then using "they" uniformly would have been acceptable, and yet the same people insist that it is not.
> You'd have load up on ammo like it's a war wagon. And it's likely you'd blow your leg off at some point, yet still somehow die of dysentery.

XKCD says that's what happened in real life.[1] And that was for the people who made it to Oregon.

[1] https://xkcd.com/623/
> I wish there had been a convention that lets the correct version of Node run without me manually having to switch between them.

For what it's worth, I think .tool-versions is slowly starting to creep into this space.

Mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/) and ASDF (https://asdf-vm.com/) both support it.

Big reason I prefer ASDF to nvm/rvm/etc right now is that it just automatically adjusts my versions when I cd into a project directory.
3: Fair enough, but you also have to consider what is wise for him to say and not. You can't just make any shit up and get away with it. He might say certain things and certain other things not to aid his agenda, but I don't think he just makes this stuff up.
At the risk of defending a megacorp: Apple has always been great about supporting their devices for a long time.
Why a weird, distorted take. People who put “LGBTQ Ally” in their signatures aren’t being phony. They have friends or family who are LGBTQ, and being visible is one way to support them. If it’s unprofessional to be an ally to LGBTQ friends and family then it is easy for hateful folks to claim it’s unprofessional to even be LGBTQ. Why does it offend you so much for someone to say “I support my gay friends”?
For real, those people just want to spew their hateful eliminatory rhetoric towards trans people, and asking them not to is somehow creating a left-wing echo chamber. I feel like I'm losing my mind.
> The thing is, most non-Americans dont connect master with slavery at all
Or, he's loose off the vine juice.
The question stands, then! What's your answer?
> I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to 2014
> our users were about three times more likely to upvote something if it outraged them.

I see how upvotes were detected. But outrage?
An AI can easily produce a filler slop story. They struggle much harder with creating something new and interesting. For a CYOA type story for kids that might be reasonable, although they tend to make a hash of the details. There are more problems, like does the AI know when to stop? Can it recognize or generate a bad end or a good end without explicit instruction from the player?

Something like:

Generate a choose your own adventure story about a young boy shipwrecked on an island populated by hostile pirates. A hidden cave holds treasure. There is a jungle on the island. Dangerous jungle creatures inhabit the island and the boy can not fight. Also hidden on the island is a boat. Each story section is around 200 words long and ends with a multiple choice question for the player to select which path they want to pursue next. The story is complete either when the boy dies or finds the boat, after no more than 20 story segments.

I have some doubts the AI will be able to handle all of that and keep it interesting and coherent. This sort of storytelling requires some attention to detail that LLMs usually struggle with.
What Paul Graham misses is the "aggressively performative moralism" that appeared in response to wokeism. For those hungry for attention, it was a very useful enemy. In many ways, the narrative of what it even meant to be "woke" was quickly hijacked and controlled by those opposed to it. Deriding anyone of color in a leadership position as a DEI hire is a good example.
None of this was a call for reason or to return to balance. It was an equally performative stunt to cast anything that event hinted at inclusiveness as evil intent.
I've only read the first paragraph so bear with me but I'm not understanding the reasoning behind "A/B testing drugs is bad because only half of the sample can potentially benefit" when the whole point is to delineate the gots and got-nots ...
> Sonos has a good reputation for building quality speakers, but its latest move has disappointed some buyers. Recently, the company offered a trade-up program, giving legacy customers 30 percent off the latest One, Beam or Port. In exchange, buyers just had to "recycle" their existing products. However, what Sonos meant by "recycle" was to activate a feature called "Recycle Mode" that permanently bricks the speaker. It then becomes impossible for recycling firms to resell it or do anything else but strip it for parts.

> Sonos suggests that after bricking the device in Recycle Mode, users drop it off at a recycling facility or give it to Sonos to do the same.

https://www.engadget.com/2019-12-31-sonos-recycle-mode-expla...
> The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".

The actual meaning of "wokeness" is that it has several different meanings. For instancee, the first could be what you outlined:

1. an "awareness of the existence of social injustice"

And another, equally valid one (that comes about from the reaction to people who embraced the first meaning and proceeded to behave obnoxiously and gain lots of attention) is:

2. the obnoxious and doctrinaire enforcement of the values of the "social justice" subculture on the wider population through bullying tactics (e.g. social media pile ons)

etc.

Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent (usually by the left, as they have more access prestigious institutions, but language is language and no authority can suppress new words and new senses of existing words).
> unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s

Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
Function of rate of change of electric mobility product deployment rate, how fast the hockey stick gets pulled towards vertical for e-bikes, EVs, trucks, busses, etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales

https://www.wri.org/insights/countries-adopting-electric-veh...

https://www.sustainable-bus.com/electric-bus/electric-bus-pu...
Side note, it would be interesting to work somewhere where you had to go up 50/100 floors before you got to your place. Maybe some floors are food and you just live in this building for the day till you go home. I used to work in a 10 story building and remember cramming in that elevator every morning.
This. I've been in a similar situation working as a data scientist for 2.5 years and went back to software engineering a couple of years ago.

I'm not trying to say that data science and analytics are necessarily bad environments; I just came to realize that I had different expectations for my work than my organization.

While the skills of a software engineer — e.g. quickly comprehending technical references, operating APIs, ability to type more than three lines of code straight — are highly valuable for a data analyst to be productive, I had to realize that my organization did not appreciate the craftsmanship of producing code as much as I still do.

Over time, I had to witness my analyses end up on slides or in Excel workbooks, only to be looked at once. They'd done their job and weren't needed anymore. I was effectively "prompt completing" analytic requests from management to understand the organization/business/whatever better — always with the same result for "my work".

Providing an organization with the intelligence to understand their business is for sure not a bad motivation and can be fulfilling. It's just not a good fit if — instead of the analytics — you consider the software you create for the analytics as your work.
I worked at JPM, practically the entire US office was Indians. It was a mess.

It's the largest bank in the world, "too big to fail" and apparently "too big to employ the people who are on the hook for their bailout".
It's a well written piece. Early on, though, this caught my attention:

> As for where political correctness began, if you think about it, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin outside universities and spread to them from this external source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and spread from there to the humanities and social sciences? Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the humanities and social sciences.

He's setting up the assertion "political correctness began in university social science departments." He tries to make it look like the conclusion is an inevitable result of reason, but really it's just an assertion. I dislike this rhetorical technique.

His assertion is probably correct.
200Mbps is barely enough for TV streaming if you are on Comcast (Xfinity). You need 500.

I have tried 300 and had issues once in a while, 500 works fine. That is because with Comcast, you will never get 200Mbps, no matter what the plan, at least were I live.
I straight up told you how to recover it. And the graph you just posted is CPI! (Which, to be clear, even though you won't listen, is nothing remotely to do with PPP analysis) You're confusing inflation with value! I give up.
Windows Phone OS was really slick actually, I used a Lumia with it for a long time. I loved live tiles, very good idea on a phone.

Microsoft's stewardship over their entire smartphone campaign, however, was so miserable, it's kind of impressive.
While we're on the subject: I'm having difficulty squaring this part of his essay with history as I understand it.

> "The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power."

That's both literally incorrect (we shouldn't consider the Black Panthers or the ACLU "student movements") and seems ignorant of the real power those organizations had (their agitation led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act).
The hidden costs are the price increases that ISPs add to customer bills to “make up for it.”

Now, I’m not saying that’s right - I actually agree with your premise - nor am I saying that any ISP truly has a marginal cost of each customer (especially given their engrained habit of oversubscribing their infrastructure) that they need to “make up for.” I’m just clarifying the “hidden costs” that GP seems to be mentioning.

IMO, this would be better handled as an explicit tax that’s passed onto customers of the ISP. If every bill came with a line item adding $0.50 charge for “underprivileged broadband access program,” nobody would complain. Phone bills already include these kinds of line items. And at least this way it would be clearly delineated rather than masked in a future price increase.
Very insightful, didn’t think about Reddit’s incentive to promote low effort garbage over quality content
> I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate

Not only lesbian. Living with a Sri Lankan woman and raising two boys. And living not in Germany, but Switzerland.

Seems to bend herself quite a lot to gain power ...
I don’t even have them on my phone, hah.
Who are these super woke people in power exactly? F500 CEOs? Politicians? Who are you talking about because I don’t see it.
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_Datacenter_Manager_Road...
Why? Some of the greatest bits of culture is advertising. Some not all not most but some.

While Coke commercials didn't create the image of americanized Santa as is often claimed they helped shape it. Wily Wonka and the chocolate factory is widely viewed as a classic despite it being a giant Candy ad
It's magnificently Paul Graham that he wrote some incredibly long essay called "The Origins Of Wokeness" without ever discussing, the origins of wokeness. Whatever you think about the current situation of "wokeness", the fact that pg manages to never once mention the origin of the term, going back to Marcus Garvey and Leadbelly, speaks to pg's monumental intellectual incuriosity.
Graph of CO2 level in the atmosphere doesn't show even a tiny sign of those efforts. Sure, they are all good and commendable, but here we get zero points for the effort. If we reduce emissions a lot, really reduce them across he globe, this will simply mean that we will slow heating speed, not the target temperature. Like turning oven regulator from 3 to 2.5 - oven will still reach maximum temperature. CO2 level is the regulator.
I'm getting 500 errors on what looks some important payload but based on the comments I'm looking forward to checking this out ...
"woke" is believing and wanting to do the right thing before the majority see it as moral and correct

ie. Slavery abolitionists would have been harassed as "woke" if the word had existed then

It's that simple.

People just REALLY don't like being told what they are doing is wrong and that they should be more enlightened and change, change is the real showstopper.

So they've given "woke" a toxic treatment.

The real test is if "woke" costs someone nothing and yet they still refuse.
The semester of my life that I coded everything in Common Lisp I was using vim to do it. Vim didn't make anything harder and some macros I had at the time and some extensions like vim-slime did everything I needed them to do just fine. Emacs has the whole "Emacs is also a Lisp" thing that gives it a lot of prominence as the editor/IDE of choice for most styles of Lisp, but some of that is just marketing.
> By 2060, new dementia cases per year could double to one million because of the growing population of older Americans, a study predicts.

For anybody rightfully assuming this would be due to something else, as the title suggests.
Sonos couples the digital music selection to the sound system, trapping you in an ecosystem that can then brick your devices. The Wiim Pro is a great digital receiver that you can hook up to any sound system. Use Spotify or whatever you want for digital music selection.
I never called any vegans assholes. Personality quirks are not wrong, they actually make life fun.

I guess the thing I’m getting from you is I shouldn’t comment on my own observations because of toupee bias, and I shouldn’t comment on other people’s common observations because they are just memes an not real. Is there an acceptable threshold for situational humor short of a scientific study? If so, what is it?
I have no idea why this was shared on Hacker News (might simply be the Paul Graham connection), but it was one of the best, well-written, and researched articles I've read in years!
Step one is to stop the handwringing over who’s “woke”. Paul is committing every sin he claims the “woke” people are doing by obsessing over what words other people are saying instead of trying to solve actual problems.
Not all bad, then.
Came to share the same link, much better piece than PG's
I'll give my opinion, as someone who used to hold pg in extremely high regard, but who is often surprised at just how thoroughly uninsightful pg's essays seem to me now.

The biggest problem I see with pg, and basically with all of the SV elite, is that I rarely see them question any of their assumptions or conclusions that don't lead them to "everything I've done is right, or at least the original goals of the 'SV ethos' is the best thing for society."

For example, take the concept of meritocracy. I completely agree that I think the "wokeness" of many on the left went way overboard in demonizing meritocratic processes, e.g. getting rid of advanced classes and opportunities for some students in the name of "fairness". At the same time, I rarely if ever see these SV kingpins suggest viable solutions to the fact that in the relatively new "winner take all" tech-led economy, very bad things happen if only a teeny meritocratic elite hoards all the wealth and leaves everyone else in an extremely precarious state. For a counterpoint as to someone who I do find insightful, consider Scott Galloway. He is definitely not someone who I would call woke, but he also understands some of the real problems so often ignored by the "tech utopianists".

In this particular pg essay, there is not much I disagree with, but I didn't really learn anything from it either. I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans." It's similar to how I feel about Zuckerberg's recent pronouncements. When I first heard them, most of them I agreed with and they made sense to me. Then I read the actual new "hateful conduct" guidelines and I almost threw up. I'm actually fine with being able to call gay people like me mentally ill - I'm willing to debate that 9 ways to Sunday. But kindly STFU about "free speech" when only gay and transgender people had a specific carve out to allow for their denigration. Like I have to listen to all this crazy religious bullshit that in a sane world we'd recognize as symptoms of schizophrenia, yet if I said that on FB that would go against their new hateful conduct guidelines.

Frankly, I see pg largely as another uninteresting SV elite: someone very, very smart and who obviously worked very hard, but who was also obviously extremely lucky and now thinks that his thoughts are worth so much more than anyone else.
>a movement thats advocating for equity and trying to dismantle structural oppression.

Well, for years those advocates did so with censorship, gaslighting, destruction of property, threats and calls for violence, etc. They had a hysterical fervor and lack of rationality that did often seem quasi religious. I dont think Paul's understanding is perfect but the parallels to religious puritanism are quite obviously there.
Optimizing libjson, or: beating encoding/JSON by at least 2.5x
Yeah elks love to get drunk on rotten apples. Humans prefer rotten grapes.
Whole article on the word "woke" and no references to Erykah Badu. I don't think he knows what the word means.
Kirby is only source-available, not open source, and requires a paid license for usage. I think that's a deal breaker for a lot of Wordpress users.
I would love to see the prompt / image data sent to GPT-4o!
> If every bill came with a line item adding $0.50 charge for “underprivileged broadband access program,” nobody would complain.

Sure they would.
> If a platform is attempting to operate within the ethos/spirit of free speech, you 'should' be allowed to make such statements on the platform.

Ah, but you aren't allowed to say "Christian men are totally useless" or "Lesbians are so stupid", so it sounds like you should take up the ethos/spirit of free speech with Meta as well.
This is a common refrain I've seen on HN when this topic has come up before, but there's a problem with it. The is a huge difference between (1) "flat organizations can work" and (2) "groups make better decisions than individuals, and this disparity is even larger on complex issues."

If #2 is true shouldn't an organization like Valve run circles around every single competitor it has since they're all dinosaurs with hierarchies and Valve isn't?
We are literally less than a week since Zuck fired all the fact checkers because he said Facebook and Instagram were now all in on “free speech”.
Please stop putting salespeople in charge of highly technical product companies like Sonos. I'm so glad that Tom Conrad is an engineer by training. I hope he can turn this mess around.

The key technical change that broke Sonos was abandoning their reliable UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) system for device discovery in favor of mDNS, while also shifting from direct device communication to a cloud-based API approach. This new architecture made all network traffic encrypted and routed through Sonos cloud servers (even for local operations), adding significant overhead and latency, especially for older Sonos devices with limited processing power. They also switched from native platform-specific UX frameworks to a JavaScript-based interface while moving music service interactions through their cloud instead of direct SMAPI calls, resulting in slower performance and reduced functionality.

For a more extended discussion, see this excellent LinkedIn post from Andy Pennell, a principal engineer at Microsoft with a deep technical understanding of Sonos systems. He created one of the most successful third-party Sonos apps for Windows Phone and worked directly with Sonos on their official Windows Phone 8 app.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-happened-sonos-app-techn...
Scientists Discover Underground Water Vault in Oregon 3x the Size of Lake Mead