skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I have a few very good remote friends which I meet only rarely, but when it's one of the best kind of things.

However most of my "Facebook friends" were shallow faint contacts, where paths may have been close for a while but went apart as each went on with their lives. No more scrolling through which bar they visited, how their kids are doing, or which TV show they were watching didn't take anything from my life, while it encouraged me to reach out more actively to people I really care about, as I didn't "rely" on passive information anymore, assuming to hear about "relevant" events, but became interested in them and shared things which wouldn't make "public" social media.
IMO the article makes some pretty convincing points. The things described by Feynman appear in "Mondo Cane", but there seem to be no other sources. What do you make of that? Fun fact: the Wikipedia article on cargo cults cites the movie for the airport ritual, together with a "better source needed" disclaimer :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Postwar_development...
Spack: A Flexible Package Manager for HPC Software
I think some people have been traumatized by the bitter lesson and now think it’s a fundamental law of nature or something. But application development isn’t just about technology. It isn’t even primarily about technology. It’s about people. Good applications reflect conscious and purposeful design choices based on understanding of the user’s needs. That is where the value-add is.

The best application developers deeply understand the interface design space, the quirks and limitations of the underlying technology, their users’ mental models, and how to bring all of this into alignment to deliver a worthwhile product. I see no evidence that LLMs are on the precipice of acquiring (much less mastering) these capabilities.
This seems similar to people attempting to interpret original intent in constitutional law and on their best guess at the minds of those long dead.

Why be so obsessed with what things meant originally? Why not let things exist without patterning them to the past in grotesque ways that no one is doing? Language evolves, it isn't restricted to its roots.

Who, other than the obsessed, are being harmed by people using this language? Why do you care so much? What is the goal of the crusade to align historical interpretation with present usage? Is it because it is easy to win battles against ghosts?
What? Nah C++ is some template based language. The real object-oriented evolution of C is Objective-C. ;)
The best example of this jumping the shark is “LatinX” which was greeted by howls of laughter and genuine offense by Latin people. Latin. There is already a non-gendered word in English because English is not a gendered language. Spanish is, and trying to make it not is… colonialism? What are you going to do redesign an entire language spoken by hundreds of millions of people? To avoid offending… is anyone actually offended?

This stuff isn’t harmless either. It helps push people toward the far right by making them sound reasonable.
Investigating the popularity of Python build back ends over time (II)
Bugs in Hello World (2022)
>And finally: Ordering. Non-chronological ordering makes no sense, because everything is random (probably not, somehow maximizes engagement for users very different from me, I guess). So I can’t even scroll for the stuff I want to see.

Does https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr not work anymore? It should surface the chronological feed without reels and other recommended slop.
> However, a more likely explanation is the use of "volatile" (which only appears in the working version of the code). Without it, the compiler might even have completely removed the loop?

No, because the loop calls cpu_relax(), which is a compiler barrier. It cannot be optimized away.

And yes, reading via the memory bus is much, much slower than a barrier. It's absolutely likely that reading 4 times from main memory on such an old embedded system takes several hundred cycles.
>Similar problems with runtime version management (need to use nvm for sanity, using built-in OS package managers seems to consistently result in tears).

In practice I find this a nuisance but a small one. I wish there had been a convention that lets the correct version of Node run without me manually having to switch between them.

> More package managers and interactions (corepack, npm, pnpm, yarn, bun).

But they all work on the same package.json and node_modules/ principle, afaik. In funky situations, incompatibilities might emerge, but they are interchangeable for the average user. (Well, I don't know about corepack.)

> Bad package interop (ESM vs CJS vs UMD).

That is a whole separate disaster, which doesn't really impact consuming packages. But it does make packaging them pretty nasty.

> More runtimes (Node, Deno, Bun, Edge).

I don't know what Edge is. Deno is different enough to not really be in the same game. I find it hard to see the existence of Bun as problematic: it has been a bit of a godsend for me, it has an amazing ability to "just work" and punch through Typescript configuration issues that choke TypeScript. And it's fast.

> Then compound this all with the fact that JS doesn't have a comprehensive stdlib so your average project has literally 1000s of dependencies.

I guess I don't have a lot of reference points for this one. The 1000s of dependencies is certainly true though.
Mandatory deposits on all packaging for drinks is an effective solution to pollution. No special technology needed. Does not matter if it is reusable or not - just make the required deposit high enough and people will collect the containers for the money.
Is IRC "social media"? I'm not quitting that.
Thanks, I think it got better in at least one instance of those. But for some reason programming.dev is okay either way. Feels like posts don’t change if I switch between all/local. Why is that?
Every time a new technology comes around, people say society is going down. Socrates famously claimed that writing text down on paper provides only the semblance of wisdom, not true understanding, because it allows for passive consumption of information rather than active engagement with it. For Socrates, true knowledge came from dialogue and internal reflection, not from external, static texts.

It’s ironic that nowadays we put reading books on a pedestal and designate it as the antidote to social media! No one today would argue that reading a book is a poor use of one’s time.
Because the 2CV is mostly replaced by the entire crossover and compact SUV market segment.
> the global optimum would be to abolish private property

The Soviet Union had this I believe, at least with buildings, and it didn't necessarily work out optimally.
As another parent, that sounds like a frightening financial burden :( So, $125k-$250k for each child? Is that the going rate in USA now? for comparison , here in UK its gone up lots but 3 years at university would cost approx £30k in tuition, plus maybe £40k in living costs that could be largely avoided by staying at home and going to college locally. Which can be mostly borrowed, and paid back as an extra 9% in tax on earning above a certain amount after graduation. Even with these figures, my wife and I will still encourage our kids to look hard for decent apprenticeships, consider Open University, possibly work part-time and study part-time, to avoid having such a big debt, especially given cost of housing etc. Kinda wonder whether your figures make it worth going to college at all? 20 years ago I met an American who had 6 figure debt from law school and was doing a job at a law firm that she disliked in order to pay off the huge loan so that after that she could then do what she wanted which would pay much less....
> I've hardly ever run into module incompatibilities

I'm not totally sure what you're referring to, but I've definitely had a number of issues along the lines of:

- I have to use import, not require, because of some constraint of the project I'm working in
- the module I'm importing absolutely needs to be required, not imported

I really don't have any kind of understanding of what the fundamental issues are, just a very painful transition point from the pre-ESM world to post.
The monkeys and the ladder are a valid metaphor for a different scenario. In the cargo-cult case, the ones who started it were copying others without understanding what they were doing and why is was not working. In the monkeys and the ladder case, the monkey did understand the problem and developed a valid solution for it, and then they keep applying it long after the problem had disappeared. So, the cargo-cult metaphor refers to stick to procedures and best practices as if they were religions precepts, while the monkeys-and-ladder metaphor is about maintaining unnecessary technical debt.
Drinking tea is in itself an act of theft - he drank that tea and now no-one else can drink it.
Yes, semantic arguments are weak, but no, the author is not complaining about the term being offensive. Perhaps this is only a subtle difference because they are still suggesting people change their language.

Clarified at the end of the post, i think a valid complaint is that the fictitious pop culture version (from which the technical use was derived) has unfortunately obscured the anthropologically correct version which is far darker and important.

> Finally, the cargo cult metaphor turns decades of harmful colonialism into a humorous anecdote. Feynman's description of cargo cults strips out the moral complexity: US soldiers show up with their cargo and planes, the indigenous residents amusingly misunderstand the situation, and everyone carries on. However, cargo cults really were a response to decades of colonial mistreatment, exploitation, and cultural destruction. Moreover, cargo cults were often harmful: expecting a bounty of cargo, villagers would throw away their money, kill their pigs, and stop tending their crops, resulting in famine. The pop-culture cargo cult erases the decades of colonial oppression, along with the cultural upheaval and deaths from World War II. Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story.

I don't think it's possible to override the pop culture version, language does its own thing, but the author at least managed to inject a bit of important history back into it for many of us here, and that will probably make an interesting talking point as we are reminded of it each time we use it technically.
That's true, although society generally does not applaud sustaining permanent injuries at work as dedication.
Yeah I also realized my wording probably wasn't right.
I meant to say words not known by most of the English speakers which can also not be found in the big dictionaries (to be fair Oxford had it, but Merriam webster didn't).

Especially when there is an established gender neutral pronoun: they
This is what interested me for a long time. The media industry in particular demonstrates very well that DEI content is not only unprofitable; it is net negative to the companies that produce it. The state of the movie industry is such that we have movies that have positive journalist reviews and negative user reviews, yet nobody is watching these movies, and each movie production costs them hundreds of millions. This should have a giant impact on a company that produces such content, yet the company keeps going on producing something that is net negative to it. Obviously, this looks like a push from investors. But why aren't investors interested in seeing more profits?
I think it's only the case that the first book has entered the public domain, not all the others, so technically you are breaking copyright if you use images from later books (as does this article).

Also copyright is not the same as a trademark, and I expect "Tintin", and perhaps the visual image of Tintin, are trademarked.
People in academia know enough computer science to appreciate that everything can be reduced down to unification and function application (+ side effects) and they advocate for expressiveness in the same sense that a manager on a team of people working with an industrial language advocates for simple and readable code (because he wants to streamline the onboarding process, and because he's constantly hiring juniors instead of seniors).

Common patterns in functional languages are considered "too clever" in most workplaces. Because they leave new hires dumbfounded and no one has got the time to explain them how to do their job. It's not that they're too "clever" but rather that the average coworker is too "dumb". But that's not a jab at anyone in particular, it's a consequence of our work culture -- and "clever" and "dumb" are not statements about intelligence, but about experience and team composition.

Basically the incentives are actually opposite to each other. It takes a long time to wrap your head around languages like Haskell because you actually have to know some theory, you can't just wing it. Javascript however...

On one side of the spectrum there's imperative languages and on the other end there's declarative ones. So this dichotomy creates friction and inertia.
just look at the LA FD: what are the chances that 3 top leaders in FD are lesbian women?

Given the fact that the rest of the fire dept are white males, the chances of this happening at random are minuscule. This is the proof that people who have DEI factors are promoted to the top leadership, with the predictable poor outcomes
Thankfully, there are many countries outside the US where this sort of 1984-style language policing is not accepted and we'll continue "clinging" to our "legacy terms", tyvm.

FWIW some of us in the USA will also continue using the original words as they were intended rather than injecting social issues into language and trying to control people with compelled speech. I for one put all the words back when people swap them out by using FoxReplace for Firefox, Word Replacer II for Chrome and nobody even notices unless I happen to quote them. The people trying to control language are quite selective. For example they have chosen not to tamper with "Masters Degree" but they will change master everywhere else.
People care insofar as their lives are made to intersect with it.

Zuckerberg in particular most likely cares and isn't being performative when he speaks out against it. I'm surprised that people are surprised he has. The man likes to larp as a bronze age hunter, killing goats with spears in his backyard. He trains in combat sports and wants to have a celebrity boxing match with Elon Musk. He's the father of half-asian children, who are classified as "negative diversity" by DEI initiatives. The man fits the profile for somebody who hates DEI, but until recently he wasn't speaking out against it. If he, despite his enormous privilege, felt cowed into silence by DEI, that speaks to the strength of the social forces driving the preference falsification.
It's no more pejorative than "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
> Things will be owned by whoever has more pointy sticks :D

That sounds like the feudal or socialist systems. Isn't one of the points of modern democracies that we have the pointy sticks for outside invaders, and a legal system that replaces the system of internal-facing pointy sticks with an economic system and a justice system?
Then you play Hey Jude (wisdom art)
Fixing the system has always worked by a tug-of-war between the status quo and a opposite reaction to it to find a new middle.

I don't know of any other way a social system has been fixed that couldn't be reduced to this approach.
I grew up on Tintin. I learned French, reading him (and Asterix).

I have since, almost entirely forgotten the language :(

My favorite Tintin fan art: https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3270528/random-cool-tinti...
I still think it's important that people understand what actually happens.

FWIW, as a reasonably clever person (a paper I wrote in the course of my PhD got an ACM Hall of Fame award) who regularly got failing grades until I got into high school, I think that story about Einstein, if I heard it, only did me harm. I started putting in effort in high school sort of on accident. I wish someone would have kicked me in the ass much sooner, told me that nobody cares how smart you are if you don't get the job done, and that I'd better figure out how to make things happen or I'd be a wanna-be loser.

OTOH, it's said that people with dyslexia or other neurodivergences which cause them to struggle in school often make good entrepreneurs -- they're used to dealing with failure and used to working around their limitations to get things done.

Details matter.
The Big Problem with Bitwarden Backups [video]
I find this article very unconvincing. The info-dump style reminds me of bad video-essays and stands in contrast to Feynman's speech. He describes the relevant aspects of cargo cults in a couple sentences, and uses it to make an enduring and effective point. His talk was not about cargo cults, it was about science!

Whereas I'm not sure what point this article is supposed to make. I guess the info-dumping is meant to communicate that Feynman's offhand two sentences are not a complete and accurate representation of a diverse religious movement, which I think most people could have figured out themselves.

But if all this info is meant to show that the roots of the movement are more complex than Feynman indicates, I think it does terrible job without mentioning the gift economy aspect. I think this is partly a result of relying on older sources - but then again, study of reciprocity in Melanesian cultures is as old as modern anthropology, so...??

In a nutshell, these cultures relied upon reciprical exchange of gifts to define the social order. When the Japanese and Americans arrived and distributed valuable goods which the natives were completely unable to reciprocate, the entire community lost their collective social status. In order to cope with this, it was rationalized that these goods actually belonged to ancestor spirits and had been somehow co-opted by the Americans. This is the reason 'cargo cults' take diverse forms - they are just a reaction to the sudden appearance of foreign cargo within an existing socio-religious framework.
I adore my Parker Vectors. Design classics and dirt cheap. I lose them more than I break them, but that's OK because I always have several.

I'd love a nice 51 but I'd probably drop it. The Vector writes very nicely at a fraction of the price, and it's not too showy to whip out in public.
> However, the point of all this discussion is that Lisp doesn't provide good enough language servers for modern editors,

They use the "language server" model since a long time, before Microsoft's LSP existed. Thus the need isn't really there, unless one wants to develop with Microsoft products (or similar) and get the needed extensions for Lisp into those Microsoft driven standards. If there were a real need and a real benefit, there would be some better adoption on the Lisp side.
You can stop saying this now, those numbers (of ignorant users) no longer serves the argument. We did our job in informing the majority.
I need to load this one up again and see how it plays. One of my complaints in most of the train and tycoon style games these days is they are too darn easy from a strategy perspective or they require casts amount of micro managing.
Spending more time and effort than other people are willing to do works in a number of fields.
At the risk of hijacking the thread, for a somewhat equivalent on the Jabber/XMPP side of things, there is https://search.jabber.network

https://providers.xmpp.net/ to help find a provider

https://xmpp.org/software/ to help find clients/servers
I think the point is we're not in preschool, nor are we cave(wo)men, so we don't need the penis drawings.
LocalSend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop
I think I understand this perspective somewhat. It's coming from a mindset where it's easier for the author to imagine the end of human civilization than it is to imagine a world without capitalism. They don't really want to keep Tintin from the common folk, but they want to keep it from the hands of greedy capitalists, and they assume that those will always be with us.
I've just tried to make it run something, and I just could not force to include the python code inside ``` ``` quotation marks. It always wants to put word python after three quotes, like this:
```python
.. code..
```
I wonder if that's the result of training.
(I use the LLM output to then run the resulting code)
An old manager of mine once spent the day trying to kill a process that was running at 99% on Windows box.

When I finally got round to see what he was doing I was disappointed to find he was attempting to kill the 'system idle' process.
I, for one, welcome this repost of a very interesting technical article that I had missed, and arguably did not get the audience it deserved 8 months ago.
"couldn't afford to run a server 24/7 from your basement" - it was early days but DSL was a thing, though expensive. But you could get a static IP address (which I still have! though when, not if, I have to change ISPs I'll lose that - another "good old days" thing) and fulltime internet access from your own box was a novelty. That's why I registered a domain (which I still have) and a friend said hey, you can get yourname@yourdomain email address and I can help you set it up! That was around 2002, give or take. I used that until "google apps for your domain" came along and let me port yourname@yourdomain to a Google account.

It was such a novelty that I let friends and family have accounts on the box to host their own web stuff. The Google Maps hack wasn't exactly 20 years ago, possibly 2005-2006; I know that Gmaps (not Google Satellite) was a novelty, and still since "everything in the cloud" wasn't the default yet (as you point out, dialup was still the norm), a friend wanted to stitch together a big map of our area out of Gmaps tiles to use offline.

Facebook: I got on in 2007 and felt late to the game already. Possibly exactly 20 years ago it didn't exist but close enough.

As for online dating, that was just the thing! And here the date is spot on; I was active from 2003 to 2005. It wasn't just geeks any more. There were women. Lots of them. Just like a bit later everyone was on Facebook, at the time pretty much everyone who was single was trying online dating. But the "shareholder value" ensh*ttification was still in the future, and fake profiles weren't a significant factor. It was just lonelyhearts ads on steroids, and it worked. The other couples (20 years and going) that I know it worked for were "almosts" from my own dating that I stayed in touch with, simple as that. I was at a couple of the weddings!
While I don't have a dog in that fight, describing the opponents position as being against Tintin "becom[ing] part of the shared treasure of all mankind" seems rather unfairly dismissive.

I would expect that most of those artists don't mind the journey into public domain. Rather, the are against large corporations hoovering up that treasure and regurgitating it with a profit motive.
Same, always a surprise to see that "book" was even there along with Asterix comics.
What does the legal system have to do with companies deciding whats happening on their platforms?
Do you want to force all companies to treat all content the same if it's not illegal?