skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually a really tough one.

Obviously, FB, twitter, insta, LinkedIn etc. are a toxic cesspool. I've left my accounts there pretty much dormant for 10+ years.

Ideally, I'd have maintained connections and contacts with my own network, using my own media, direct emails / texts, phone calls, in contexts that I controlled. The problem is... I didn't. I basically just buried my head in the sand and withdrew.

I guess the takeaway is to try to use these platforms in a positive way, as a means to an end, and not get sucked in, or to network in some other, better way, rather than withdrawing, because that's not actually a good alternative.
Not sure what that even means. It's our best theory at the moment and helps explain multiple different cosmological phenomena.

There are also hypothesized particles that fit within the Standard Model that researchers are searching for experimentally.

Honestly, these articles are upvoted by people who know very little physics and think that dark matter is somehow a very mysterious idea.
Meh I still use IRC, whatever.
Only in a perfectly efficient market, which is pretty rare in the real world.
IMO Matrix is awfully heavy and impractical, when XMPP works just as well if not better.

I'm administering both Matrix/synapse and XMPP/prosody servers and I wouldn't do the former if it wasn't my job.
It sounded anecdotal because I shared an anecdote. I don’t have a research study on the topic. Still anecdotally, I’d say the same thing about my 3 internships, so I’ll say n = 4. Happy to hear your anecdotal experience or non anecdotal data.
Ask HN: How to Build Pro Bono
I’ve written js python at big tech and would like to build a saas app for a friend whose employer won’t invest in their team’s productivity.

This is a simple scheduling app for a team of 20 to collaborate more effectively.

What’s the right stack to use for something like this? It has to be adopted virally by the team it can’t be sold as an enterprise solution to the formal organization.
I had to look up the name, and then realized (ha!) it's the pen I grew up on, across two countries.

My body is probably full of microplastics from chewing away at them.
> he casually mentioned that Meta is teaming up with Trump to fight EU regulations affecting their platforms.

I really hope EU just bans Meta from operating here.

"There you go Zuck, you don't need to worry about our regulations anymore"

I think we would live just fine around here without their awful products. It would also serve as a cautionary tale to other companies willing to undermine regulations around here.
Are you fully aware of your surrounding when that happens? That trick I mentioned works best for me when this annoying meta-dream of being sleeping/paralyzed in my dream (i.e. dreaming of being somewhere sleeping, usually around people and not being able to wake up to engage with them). I've often wondered if this is a sort of sleep paralysis or not because it doesn't quite fit neither what I read about sleep paralysis nor about false awakening but it's extremely annoying when that happen.
Iron deficiency anemia
> Moreover, your foo() and bar() calls can actually begin to fail in the future when more functionality is added to them. Heck, they might call a user callback that performs arbitrary tasks. Then your code will break too. Whereas with the cleanup block, it'll continue to be correct.

In a language without exceptions, I'm also assuming that a function conveys whether it can fail via it's prototype; in Rust, changing a function from "returns nothing" to "returns a Result" will result in a warning that you're not handling it

> What you're doing is simplifying code by making very strong assumptions on how it looks during initial authorship, and assuming the code will remain static throughout the lifetime of your own code.

But this is where the burden of exceptions is most pronounced; if you code as if everything can fail, there's no "additional" burden, you're paying it all the time. The case you're missing is in the simpler side, where it's possible for something to not fail, and that if that changes, your compiler tells you.

It can even become quite a great boon, because infallibility is transitive; if every operation you do can't fail, you can't fail.
I mean, honestly that's why I'm here? It has that vibe. It has the vibe of a mid-2000's forum dedicated to a specific set of topics that's well moderated. The fact that it runs in the datacenter for a a venture capital firm is... I dunno. I don't feel any bother over it.

I talk shit about VC constantly here and I haven't been banned for it.
Make them include the full post in feed.
20 years ago we were 20 years younger.
Strange journey you’ve gone on here in this thread from adults doing serious thinking about the company mission to admitting you see yourself as a sycophantic servant to your master.

Other non-feudal relationships are possible based on mutual respect and honesty.
Payment before delivery works. Either bill hourly and stop working if they stop paying... or bill by the project with 50% down, 50% at delivery. Or whatever percentages you negotiate.

But handing over a working repo with instructions is actually a decent way to go once you are paid. Otherwise you are on the hook for actually running the thing, too, which is a completely different ballgame.
I agree people are way more agentic than we give them credit for in these situations. We tend to 'petri-dish' ourselves and act like we're just the products of our environments, being swept along when top-down analysing large situations like this when that really isn't the case.

That being said, I can't see any world where there isn't mass ontological shock/hysteria, mass unemployment, and unrest at least for a few years, and I feel like it is definitely the kind of event you take active measures and preparations for beforehand.

And so do I, but like the golden rule of camping you should prepare for the worst and hope for the best!
Covering your eyes does not stop the oncoming train.
> Python based tools where you may want a global install (say ruff) can be installed using uv tool

uv itself is the only Python tool I install globally now, and it's a self-contained binary that doesn't rely on Python. ruff is also self-contained, but I install tools like ruff (and Python itself) into each project's virtual environment using uv. This has nice benefits. For example, automated tests that include linting with ruff do not suddenly fail because the system-wide ruff was updated to a version that changes rules (or different versions are on different machines). Version pinning gets applied to tooling just as it does to packages. I can then upgrade tools when I know it's a good time to deal with potentially breaking changes. And one project doesn't hold back the rest. Once things are working, they work on all machines that use the same project repo.

If I want to use Python based tools outside of projects, I now do little shell scripts. For example, my /usr/local/bin/wormhole looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
uvx \
--quiet \
--prerelease disallow \
--python-preference only-managed \
--from magic-wormhole \
wormhole "$@"
> Taking a humble approach, we may be in the same position when it
comes to things we, from the height of our reason, do not understand
as well.

Isn't that the main point of that cargo-cult metaphor as used today -
a restatement of Arthur C Clarke's technology and magic remark and how
we've let our own magic exceed our reason... that we're no longer at
the "height" of reason at all?
Not OP, but that was one of the primary justifications that Mark Zuckerberg gave in regards to retiring "fact" checkers for community notes.

>"But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S."
But perhaps a competitor would allow you to do that. There is at least a niche of users who would prefer not to have everything go through the company's servers.
> Meanwhile in python complex topics like duck typing, object oriented methods, exceptions, the distinction between iterables and lists, how to use a command line/terminal or how to configure an IDE, and so on must be covered before people can start writing code for the exercises.

No, they dont have to be at all. You might as well suggest you need to learn the JVM before writing a line of Java.
> The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.

The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.
A whole bunch of telecom technologies like WAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol), ISDN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN) and ATM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode). Thankfully too since they were ugly, closed and expensive.
'Immune' might be too strong — we are all humans after all. But it's certainly plausible that the magnitude of the effect varies between disciplines.

As the commenter above observes, physics is (supposed to be) falsifiable, so it should be clear when you have a result and when you don't. In the some of the more 'wooly' disciplines, this is not the case. You can write BS and as long as you're able to argue sufficiently eloquently that your particular strain of BS is valid, you win — in some cases, you needn't even supply data or perform experiments. It is in those fields that I assume the forces of politics/fashion/social pressure are strongest.
I don't think so, though maybe I didn't explain myself correctly. You can link to a relative package wheel I think, but not to a package repo. So if you have a repo, with your main package in ./src, and you vendor or need a package from another subfolder (let's say ./vendored/freetype) , you can't actually do it in a way that won't break the moment you share your package. You can't put ./vendored/freetype in your requirements.txt, it just fails.

That means you either need to use pypi or do an extremely messy hack that involves adding the vendored package as a sub package to your main source, and then do some importlib black magic to make sure that everything uses said package.

https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/6658

https://discuss.python.org/t/what-is-the-correct-interpretat...
It must be lonely fighting your little battle against all the stupid people in the world.
City of Ashes: The Los Angeles Wildfires [audio]
NATO Phonetic Alphabet Converter (Claude Artifact)
Still too rose-tinted, I clearly remember the early internet being a minefield of viruses and malware and pop-ups and savvy teenagers hacking your favorite niche communuty forum cuz you were one security patch behind...
One man is worth 400B and is just now taking the red-pill’ed weirdo initiation and the other is Steve Bannon.

All kidding aside: let the whole “movement” self implode —- I’m here with popcorn and bated breath.
> The default and de facto standard should be something that doesn’t get put on a pedestal but stays out of the way.

This to me is unachievable. Perfection is impossible. On the the way there if the community and developers coalesced around a single tool then maybe we can start heading down the road to perfectionism.
Does anyone else question whether an undergrad is best able to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum?
Clearing an airstrip isn't magical thinking though, you'd need to do that for planes to land. It's just not sufficient, because the planes also need to want to land there. I don't think magical thinking covers that same concept.

It appears that there are some people (like you and the post author) that are constantly confronted with someone screaming "cargo cult", which has to be exhausting. But it's absolutely not the world others live in. In my world, it comes up every now and then (I'd guess every 3-4 months), and I've experienced it multiple times that I mention it and the other person hadn't heard it before but absolutely LOVED the term after an explanation because it describes certain behaviors so well.
Wow, this is an amazing book, nearly 800 pages; counless examples of BCPL applications, by the author of the BCPL language.
My social media presence directly affects my income, as the more I talk about the stuff I'm doing, the more visibility it gets, and the more money I make. Social media visibility (while doing something interesting) is also a good way of getting podcast invites and similar opportunities for even more visibility.

Social media isn't the only means of getting visibility, but it's a very important one.
Not every anti-censorship person is pro Trump. Considering I’m not a U.S. citizen nor do I live in the U.S. and actually fear the outcome of Trump on my family since American politics affects people world wide.
Sounds like a tale from a decade ago, people now use things like pnpm and tsx.
I’m hoping we look back at the social media era with some embarrassment at the amount of time we confused typing in a text box with meaningful communication.
yes, moderation is an issue that doesn't scale. therefore, many technologists ignore it in favor of "oh, fancy serverless architecture". priority should be on building moderation and tools like reply controls (e.g. only mutuals), shared inboxes (for friends to assist cleaning out hate mail), mod appeals and the like. It's a thorny issue that involves /listening/ to community organizers, who go through pains with poorly written software to try to keep a community civil.
Python supports imperative, OO and functional programming paradigms. And to start you can use any text editor, an IDE is not required. In fact you can start working in the REPL right away, in which case you need a terminal and the command “Python”.
How would I tell this to use an api framework it doesn’t know ?
Also expressing concerns about the selection of suitable languages for novice programming is King's College CS Prof Michael Kölling, who explains, "One of the drivers is the perceived usefulness of the language in a real-world context. Students (and their parents) often have opinions which language is 'better' to learn. In forming these opinions, the definition of 'better' can often be vague and driven by limited insight. One strong aspect commonly cited is the perceived usefulness of a language in the 'real world.' If a language is widely used in industry, it is more likely to be seen as a useful language to learn." Kölling's recommendation? "We need a new language for teaching novices at secondary school and introductory university level," Kölling concludes. "This language should be designed explicitly for teaching [...] Maintenance and adaptation of this language should be driven by pedagogical considerations, not by industry needs."

While noble in intent, one suspects Kaplan and Kölling may be on a quixotic quest in a money wins world, outgunned by the demands, resources, and influence of tech giants like Amazon — the top employer of Northeastern MSCS program grads — who pushed back against NSF advice to deemphasize Java in high school CS and dropped $15 million to have tech-backed nonprofit Code.org develop and push a new Java-based, powered-by-AWS CS curriculum into high schools with the support of a consortium of politicians, educators, and tech companies. Echoing Northeastern, an Amazon press release argued the new Java-based curriculum "best prepares students for the next step in their education and careers."

Links at: Should First-Year Programming Students Be Taught With Python and Java? https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/01/05/1853210/shoul...
First thing I thought was hopefully they wont rebuild using same cardboard and wood in a highly fire prone area.
That isn't console. That is X11. I've known people who avoided that and who did not use GUI. Or maybe framebuffer (occasionally!). When I use Linux, I use Wayland. You say i3wm? I say SwayWM. Even if you were insisting on X11, there was QubesOS. And, there was a time when being conservative in Unix-land meant you did not run Linux. Or you sticked to Unix instead of WinNT. It is and always will be two steps forward, one step back. Case in point: Wayland, QubesOS.
Yes but again, this is about stopping to USE them. Deleting your account versus not using your account at all doesn't have any difference of outcome here.
> But OPs point is that people are not willing to give up modern life for these gains.

Because for decades fossil fuel companies used tobacco lobby style tactics to sow doubt about the real cost of that lifestyle.

And yet somehow suing them into oblivion 'won't solve anything'? Suing tobacco companies into oblivion did wonders for us. I think it's worth a try.

> If you win and the legal system shuts down the modern lifestyle, you are going to have people anti the legal system

The modern lifestyle is driving us off a cliff. No one - no one - has argued that suing fossil fuel companies is a one and done complete solution. That's a straw man.
a lot. so many more features!

bigideasdb allows you to have hundreds of thousands of rows of data for not only reviews from G2.

There is a database full of 3000+ validated problems scraped from Reddit Posts/Comments that involve users seeking solutions that can be directly solved with a SaaS application, and they are then analyzed and generated into ideas!

furthermore, you can run your own pipeline to get pain points from Reddit Posts/Comments from your own specified Subreddits and Keywords.

I just added a new feature that allows you to get thousands of success stories scraped from Reddit to find potential market gaps and improvements on already existing products to build a potential product!
Yes, yes, heard it all before. And it’s never matched my lived experience.

Social media does have a powerful use case: keeping in touch with friends and family you don’t see often. It feels trite to watch a video of them with their kid and give it a ‘like’ but I’d miss it if it were gone. Especially if it was still there for everyone else, I’d miss their collective presence more than they’d miss my singular one.

Rather than another scolding post telling everyone to delete social media I’d much rather folks think and talk about how we can make a better social media, preferably divorced from the control of giant corporations.
I'm going to put aside the urge to say to just not do this as corporations don't need free work, and instead answer the question at face value. I see two correct answers:

1) Whatever stack you know best.

2) Whatever stack they already run.

If those match up, it is an easy answer.
Unfortunately sometimes you get to host things not written by you, or which exist for a long time and thus there's a lot of history involved that prevents nice and tidy.

My first production use of kubernetes started out because we put in the entirety of what we had to migrate to new hosting into spreadsheet, with columns for various parts of stack used by the websites, and figured we would go insane trying to pack it up - or we would lose the contract because we would be as expensive as the last company.

Could we package it nicely without docker? Yes, but the effort to package it in docker was smaller than packaging it in a way where it wouldn't conflict on a single host, because the simple script becomes way harder when you need to handle multiple versions of the same package, something that most distro do not support at all (these days I think we could have done it with NixOS, but that's a different kettle of deranged fishes)

And then the complexity of managing the stack was quickly made easier by turning each site into separate artifact (docker container) handled by k8s manifests (especially when it came to dealing with about 1000 domains across those apps).

So, theoretically discipline is enough, practical world is much dirtier though.
Chat models make UI redundant. who will want to learn how to use some apps custom interface when they are used to just asking it to do what they want/need? Chat is the most natural interface for humans. UX will be just trying to steer models to kiss your butt in the right way, eventually, and the bar for this will be low as language interaction problems are going to be obvious even to teen-agers.
Yes — I've heard so, and that informed by decision to stay here.
The nerd emoji and the Clippy like assistants come from Microsoft Bob.

Another interesting product from that era was Microsoft Comic Chat, an IRC client that rendered conversations as a comic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
Agree. Hold onto them, else someone can snatch them up and you may have to clean up the reputational mess later. See this happen to an acquaintance of mine.
> but does not sound inaccurate.

The basic premise of Feynman's interpretation is that cargo cults arose from post-war magical thinking by native Melanesians. TFA observes that (1) cargo cults predate the war, (2) are connected to a broader millenarian phenomena, and (3) don't involve magical thinking about the cargo per se but come from a pre-existing set of religious beliefs (pre-existing spirits/gods that would take cargo from foreigners and dispense it to the locals).

What makes "cargo cult" appealing as a technical is the fact that it's exotic (to the post's point about colonialism), not that the underlying phenomenon is particularly special. Substitute "cargo cult" with "Eucharist" and this becomes clear.
I always wonder was MSN ever actually a thing or did Microsoft pull it / replace it before it reached the market? I know plenty of people who used AOL or CompuServe, but never met anyone who used the original MSN.
The answer is completely subjective, whatever the individual feels is important for them to quit.

>I get what you mean, but for someone with habit of looking for distraction whenever they have nothing to do it won't be a cure, bandaid at best.

This is something society seems to have forgotten to do, and what I've focused on helping my kids remain capable of as they grow older - knowing how to be bored.
Also AFAIK collision and total loss is required to get financing and for leases, so you still pay / there is still an opportunity loss in other forms.

I lease EVs with the federal tax credit and invest what I’d otherwise spend buying cash. You need to look very closely at the numbers for your own situations but it’s been a “better” deal than buying cash the past few cycles.

Sure, you could also just buy a decade-old Honda used, but then you get to drive a used decade-old Honda. It’s like suggesting that camping is cheaper than a hotel or that luxury hotels provide no additional value beyond budget hotels.

On the other hand, used Range Rovers depreciate so drastically that you can buy one less than a decade old for under $10k, just make sure to check insurance and maintenance costs and actually have it inspected before buying. The air suspension in particular is why you see so many “dropped” examples for cheap.
Palisades resident defied evacuation orders and saved his home [video]
cryptographic agility is a recipe for JWT shooting you in the foot. Age or Minisign strike good balances by making the cryptography decision for you.
I talked about how social media terms and service have become a middle man between social etiquette and laws in shaping social behaviour off and online on agora. Using social media feels closer to thinking than speaking sometimes, and anything that infringes on thought is dangerous.
They will do this either way. Fake profiles are created all the time that are copied exactly from a real person's profile. If you have an account, and don't log in and check it every now and then, this will probably happen to you too.
It's not as bad as Common Lisp support which stinks to high heavens of someone not learning the lessons of the Common-Lisp-Controller fiasco