skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've started like six blogs in my life. For each I write between two and five entries, then give up on it. Four of them have been tech-focused.

Part of my giving-up is admittedly just laziness on my end, but a lot of it is that I don't feel like I have enough interesting stuff to say about technology to warrant a whole blog. Most of my opinions on tech tend to be relatively vanilla, or at least "mainstream for the quasi-academic engineer".

I will probably start at least one more in the future, but I feel like I might enjoy it more if I decide to confine it more to personal anecdotes and heartfelt stuff.

As it stands, the closest thing I really have to a blog sharing my personal opinion on tech is my HN feed honestly.
Hi! I am Max. I am a Full-stack Engineer with 13+ years of experience and extensive knowledge in several areas: UI Design, Software Development, Analytics.
Involved in creation of several startups and have previously created my own products and tools. I have a strong mathematical background.

Particularly interested in fintech, crypto, LLMs, AI, complex systems (business & technical). I'm keen on working in a startup but open to discussing any opportunities.

Location: Warsaw, Poland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Hotwire, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Vue, Svelte, Nest, Next, Nuxt, Tailwind, Postgres, Docker, CI/CD (Gitlab & Github), Grafana, etc.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxberdnikau/

Email: maxberdnikau@gmail.com
This might be true of all tech. I don’t want a new tv ever. I want one as dumb and old as possible. No sense letting the fuckers try to catch up to my ad blocking tech.

I fired up my old iPod the other day to get tunes in my shop. Hasn’t been updated in 7 years and still has all the music I like. Doesn’t come with a subscription.
Still has genius playlists. Remember those? they were great. I’m so glad Apple hasn’t thought to or isn’t able to brick it.

The biggest improvement in computer speed for the last decade or so comes from more ram and much as Apple wants you to think so, it ain’t scarce.

A five year old laptop with 16gb ram is totally fine for everything I ever do (32 if I want to splurge!).
I mean unless you want to run windows 11 for some unknown reason. Which, to be perfectly clear, I do not suggest for anyone ever.
Did you know Linux can run security updates in like 45s? Windows wants to download a 6gb patch and spend 45min replacing your entire operating system every month. That alone should be enough to get everyone to nope.
I agree that balance is necessary and nitpickers should be steered away from that behaviour.

I think I'm more concerned with nitpickers which show up in different flavours.

I understand a functional requirement to rewrite a piece of code in a PR. Perhaps you spent the last 8 hours coding up a solution that passes all of the tests but if you use that data structure at scale it wouldn't perform acceptably. That's a rewrite and that sucks but it will be for the better.
Yes the human brain can really be blind when its a priori assumptions turn out to be wrong.
Prairie Telephone
I always feel really bad when I see these two bar charts, because the way women rate men is how I thought everybody rates each other. I find the statistically average woman (and man) explicitly unattractive. I always assumed it was some combination of the modern person's astronomically high exposure to images of beautiful people, as well as, like you say, an actual degradation in people's looks caused by modern health issues.

But apparently I am unusual? And it's not like I need people to be attractive to like them - I'm just talking about sexual attractiveness. Also, I think I'm pretty average-looking on par, below-average nowadays, so I don't think my standards for others are being inflated by my self-perception.
Am vaguely reminded of a fancy apple-style aluminum stand I saw in an ad recently. That one is probably a lot more expensive.

This $6 “fancy” cardboard box from Ikea has been doing the same job for me quite well. Can also discretely hide a power strip and hub inside, keeps dust off too. Just cut a small hole in the back.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/tjena-storage-box-with-lid-blac...
I read this book and took this advice to heart. I don't have a brass bar in the office, but when I'm about to push a button that could cause destructive changes, especially in prod, my hands reflexively fly up into the air while I double-check everything.
It's not evolution - more like language eugenics.
> N period on from now, software engineers who haven't adopted or started exploring software assistants, are frankly not gonna make it. Engineering organizations are right now are split between those who have had that "oh fuck" moment and are leaning into software assistants and those who have not.

Mine was InstructGPT, a few months before the public release of ChatGPT. Everything that followed was an unsurprising extrapolation of what I saw in that moment.

Question is, how far will it continue? That I cannot say. At least a factor of 3 from foreseeable compute improvements… unless a war is started over the manufacture of compute. But also, Koomey's law (energy) is slower than Moore's (unit cost + feature size), and if one presupposes that manufacture of compute is unbounded, then we rapidly hit limits of manufacture of power sources for the compute, and that in turn causes huge economic issues well before there's enough supply to cause mass unemployment… unless there's a lot of huge algorithmic improvements waiting to happen, because that might be enough to skip electricity shortages and go straight to "minimum and cheapest calories to keep human alive are more expensive than the electricity to run the servers that produce economic value equal to the most productive human".

I have no confidence in any forecast past the end of 2028.
Your slippery slope looks more like a slippery uphill.
This is not the experience of the musicians I know, and I am really sad for people who feel that way - developing the skill and your own workflow are a huge part of what makes music enjoyable!
Yes, product led vs sales led growth. But note that even then, as the former grow larger and target more enterprise, they shift to a "contact us" model anyway over time, until yet another competitor comes in, rinse and repeat. Intercom has this model, their pricing used to be very simple and now it's not, because it's tailored to enterprise, and now a lot of upstart competitors exist with that simple pricing.
It’s a caricature. Nobody has those big noses, either.
"We should avoid the term 'cargo culting.'"

"We should avoid criticizing people's speech."

Note that both of these statements are criticisms of people's speech.
oh wow, how much agronomy did you study? photosynthesis is optimal below 35°C and is at 0% already at 50°C
Most of the people in this database were drafted. I think you're angry at the wrong people.
Show HN: The Shape of Music Albums
> Every IT department I know is scrambling to replace their VMWare stack ASAP, including very large ones.

At least some of the big ones seem to just pay up. Probably because they / their MSP / their relationship with their MSP is so dysfunctional that they know migrating is a pipe dream.
It wouldn't even be the first time we've done that.
> Or is this a case of operational costs being ignored in favor of capital costs?

I would lean more towards this.

Because big windows cause solar gain in the summer, and you have huge losses of heat in the winter in more northern climates: even the absolute best windows maybe reach R-8 (U 0.125), while even sucky walls probably get R 20 or better (U 0.05).
That’s exactly my point though - Mullenweg’s impact on Wordpress is toxic both to the community of users, and the community of contributors.
ok, the only thing is that the application is in Spanish, at the time I did not contemplate that it was multilingual, among other things because I made it for me, if you are still interested I will write you and send you a link.
Hi! I am a seasoned Product Leader with 13+ years of expertise across Product Design, UX/UI Design, Software Development, Analytics, and Management. I craft well-thought-out user-centered visually striking digital products, and implement them in code.

I am involved in creation of several startups and have previously created my own products and tools. I have a strong mathematical background.

Completely self-sufficient, and also lead a team that includes all essential roles: Web Software Engineer, Graphic Designer, UX/UI designer, 3D Designer, etc.

If I can be of assistance, please feel free to contact me.

Location: Warsaw, Poland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Des: User Research, User Flow, UX/UI, Web, Holistic, Design System, Wireframes, Email Design, Dashboards, Mobile App Design, 3D, Illustrations, Animations, Figma, FinTech, E-commerce.

Dev: Ruby, Rails, Hotwire, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Vue, Svelte, Nest, Next, Nuxt, Tailwind, Postgres, Docker, CI/CD (Gitlab & Github), Grafana, etc.

Email: maxberdnikau@gmail.com
> How do you find readers

I don't, that's what search engines are for. If people know what keywords to lookup, and are willing to go an extra mile (browse all pages of the Google search) they will eventually find your blog. If you have done a good job, it may land on the first page of search results.

> Where do you share your content?

Random short off-topic ramblings on X. Discussion oriented stuff on Reddit. Personal long-form opinion/perspectives on personal blog & knowledge base.

> why do you keep writing

For myself, I do not owe anyone anything, I don't plan to "build a brand" (or rather I have failed to do that), writing is a form of expression, that's it.

Whenever my gut says, this "thought" needs to get out of your head because you have been wasting a lot of time thinking about it, that's usually my cue to draft a post.
> He's the father of half-asian children, who are classified as "negative diversity" by DEI initiatives.

WTF!? Do you have more information about this "negative diversity" concept?
Tell you what, if the descendants of the alleged victims of this "racism" make it known that they find this usage offensive, I for one will drop it. On the basis of a blog post from, and I'm not sure of any other way to put this, a middle-aged white man however... I'm not so inclined. This feels uncomfortably similar to the "Latinx" debacle, in which people outside of the allegedly affected class took it upon themselves to find something to be offended by, then "fix" something the people themselves didn't think was broken... and certainly didn't want their "fix".

I think that's a good heuristic to apply.
There were not a lot of published games, but I seem to remember there being a handful of flash game derivatives. I played the heck out of Corporation Inc on Armorgames back in the day.
The press conference earlier today implied the government was spending on AI, but this suggests the opposite: they've secured private investment to the tune of £14bn and thousands of UK jobs.

I can't see any mention of direct costs to the UK taxpayer, except for needing to include AI in the NHS and civil services in various vague ways.

There are no details on what laws or regulations they plan to change in exchange for that investment, though guessing from the public questionnaire a few weeks ago, they will likely relax copyright on private artworks so it can be used with AI generation by default. Tax breaks are a given but it’s not clear how much or if it applies to anyone working in the sector.

This all means nothing if the AI bubble pops, forcing those companies to collapse, laying off thousands and wasting everyone's time (and rights).
We've Not Been Trained for This: Life After the Newag DRM Disclosure [video]
The whole train DRM saga has been endlessly entertaining as someone looking in from afar, but I can only imagine the stress this must place on operators trying to keep trains maintained with this dagger dangling over their heads. I wish I could hack a train, thats a once in a lifetime opportunity and would make for an incredible "2 truth and a lie" type story

Also available at https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-been-trained-for-this-...

Previous coverage:

"37C3 - Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrlrbfGZo2k

"O trzech takich, co zhakowali prawdziwy pociąg – a nawet 30 pociągów" https://zaufanatrzeciastrona.pl/post/o-trzech-takich-co-zhak...

Mastodon post by q3k https://social.hackerspace.pl/@q3k/111528162462505087
Food is tricky. The food supply is one of the highest national security concerns IMO. Free market proponents love to go about saying that growing food should be left to countries and regions who do it well (due to climate and infrastructure), but if your country cannot grow enough food to supply it's own citizens' basic calorie needs, you are literally living on borrowed time. If the food supply is cut off for any reason, things go down very-very rapidly and the government has days, if not hours to sort things out before things descend into chaos.

At the same time, governments do not have a good track record of running the food/ags industry. I guess a system where the government heavily subsidizes it and incentivises domestic production, but lets farmers do their thing is probably as good as we can do?
Turbocharge? I can’t access Sora in the UK with my OpenAI subscription.
A secret weapon in agriculture's climate fight: Ants
Saw yesterday a post on Reddit where someone proposes to change "et al" to "and gang" in academia. I think that would fit here much better.
Yes they do, because you will likely pay less than people who go through the sales process and can be convinced to pay much more. Sticker shock is a real thing, it is very difficult to convince someone to pay $10k for example through their credit card if they see that price on a landing page, whereas it is easier to convince them if they can talk to a real human in the process.
> 13,250 jobs

They used AI to write this lol
The right has been pro police since day one. There is no world where the right was going to be in favor of criminal justice or police reform until it started affecting them.

This is so well known that during the protest in 2021, there were “white shields” where White people would stand in front of Black protestors because everyone knows that police would not beat White people because there would be consequences.

https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
Because they did a 2 week Bootcamp in Prompt Engineering and been on 120k+ for the last 2 years.
Financial min/maxing strikes again.

Then again, if something costs more money than it brings in, that thing is probably not long for this world. It's nearly impossible to escape economic restraints.
I find this a bit naive. Girls sleep around because they want to sleep around.
I mean if the choice is between living with Soviet standard of living and burning in a wildfire, the choice sounds obvious.

Note that no one has argued for a planned economy.
I wrote two blog posts about reverse-engineering a Gamecube video game that I'm quite proud of. I put links to those posts on my resume. I don't know whether it made an impact, but they hired me.
Looking at the population of Austin proper is pretty silly here, and similar just looking at Travis. The city proper lost population from 2019-2020 as many cities did during the early pandemic, but grew each year since. The Austin metro area has grown every one of these years.

In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.
It's not taking away, a new point is by definition adding. Just like The Free Movie added to The Bee Movie.
I worked at a place once where the process was "Quit thinking, and have a meeting where everyone speculates about what it might be." "Everyone" included all the nontechnical staff to whom the computer might as well be magic, and all the engineers who were sitting there guessing and as a consequence not at a keyboard looking.

I don't miss working there.
Yes, define "worth it".

If you want thousands of people reading it, probably not. If you just want it there for posterity, I would say yes. In that case maybe see if it is in the wayback machine.

I have moved my site to gemini with a gopher mirror, I find that far easier to maintain and I do not really care who or if anyone sees it :)
Indeed, like I mentioned in another comment, if you saw a $10k pricing model on a landing page, you will be extremely likely to not buy it, but if you went through a human-led sales process, your chances of buying go up astronomically. That is why sales exists and why companies have sales teams.
There are two versions of Ultima 1, the original has BASIC is basic with assembly and there is a remake in pure assembly. You can definitely tell the improvements the asm version brings with the overworld scrolling faster and the first person dungeons redrawing very quickly.

So - I'm guessing game logic of MECC Oregon was in Basic with some assembly routines to re-draw the screen.
BTW original Oregon Trail was also 100% basic and a PITA to read. You're really getting to the edges of what applesoft basic is practically capable of with games like Akalabeth and Oregon
EuRuKo 2024: Mechanical sympathy, or: writing fast ruby programs [video]
Anoncast – Post anonymous using ZK proofs
Anoncast allows users who hold a certain balance of a ERC20 token to prove ownership (without revealing the wallet address) and make posts to farcaster, a decentralized social media site.
But it's also a great negotiating tactic for the buyer not the seller. This seller has been chasing this buyer for however much time, and then at the last second walks away from the deal. I've had the price of a car drop drastically by doing this. I can't imagine a software sales person and its managers not budging and just letting the deal walk away either.
"a good chess player sits on his hands" (NN). It's good advice as it prevents you from playing an impulsive move.
That looks great. Found it in your IParse repo. I'm starting to work through "Write a C Compiler" by Nora Sandler and I think this could be very useful for me. Besides, I'm curious how it puts things in order and lets you mention functions multiple times, using "..." to skip what's already there, etc.
As people repeatedly say in trying to rebut my OP, it's important not to cherry-pick examples. I try to be careful to find the best examples when criticizing. In that spirit, here's a couple of examples from https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html

https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/hwtime.w is the very first, and most easy to justify introducing a language, but it doesn't do much of that. It does your thing of explaining stdio.

A slightly more advanced example https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/hull.w doesn't explain #includes, and doesn't describe the language as far as I can see/recall.

So feel free to share examples where people document the language. But that doesn't feel like a big anti-pattern to me.
This is rad! I’ll throw this in my embedded resources round up [1]

https://hardwareteams.com/docs/embedded/embedded-resources/
It’s not enough to take in more in taxes than they spend in subsidies. If they’re spending that resident’s taxes on paying subsidies, there’s none left for paying for the other public services that the taxes are also supposed to pay for.
I guess people are unaware of the various malicious rootkits that have cropped up?

If you're serious about this stuff binary thinking is a mistake. It's not a question of whether rooting is possible or impossible. It's a question of under what circumstances it can be done, and under whose control.

Also, "conflict" is the wrong word here. It's a question of competing concerns not conflicting ones.

We probably want root access to be under the end-user's control, but in such a way that minimizes the ability of malicious parties to exploit it.

e.g., one way would be to allow anyone to easily install any root they want, but to disallow software from, say, the Apple app store from running on such "rooted" devices. While that gives end-users control and would mostly prevent malicious actors from getting things they want, it's probably not what most user's would want. They probably want to run all their regular software along side the root software.

Another way would be to allowing people to easily install software as root, and allow software from popular app stores to run on it. That gives users max control, but is pretty easy for malicious actors to exploit too. People aren't going to be too happy with this when some coupon clipping app starts emptying people's bank accounts.

These are just examples to give the idea of the range of possibilities. The real answer needs to be a lot more nuanced than this. The point is, pretending there aren't issues doesn't get us anywhere. You might as well have no opinion on this.
Your starting with a general outline of it feels exactly right, to me. I thought Knuth actually did that quite often, as well?

In a sibling post, I describe it as how you would narrate the code to someone. You wouldn't go line-by-line in that. Instead, you would likely start by describing the general structure. Then, you'd start talking about bursts of changes.

It can be difficult to explain, as often times this can be done by talking about the functions that you are adding. In which case, it doesn't look much different from many other environments. Once you get to the non-linear additions of code where you are scattering variables and such through multiple sections, though, it starts to really shine.
Hetzner is by far one of the most popular in EU!
We've literally spent trillions of dollars already to combat and mitigate change. We spend $500B annually just on solar panels. Add in the amounts we've spend on wind turbines, EV's, methane capture, etc, and we're spending over $1T per year combatting climate change.

It's not enough, but this meme that we're not trying is silly.
> Cavis explained that, “Partners also have the flexibility to create specific promotional rates, such as country rates or mobile rates, which are designed to offer discounts, not charge higher prices.”

> The implication is that the expensive rate that San Franciscans see is the “real” price — while Kansas City and Phoenix travelers are getting a discount.

Uber and their 'flash promos' come to mind here.
>She said they presented no proof to back up their claims that the government had pressured social media companies like Twitter and Facebook into restricting their speech. “Unfortunately,” she said, the Fifth Circuit court of appeals “relied on factual findings that are “clearly erroneous.”

Those next two sentences from your article seem to contradict your assertion that it was because it wasn't Facebook that brought the case.
It's possible to have a useful debate about whether California's fire preparedness and response is what it should be. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is some tweet from an account with 25.4 million followers says California has cut specific budgets, but the actual budgets say otherwise. Some tweet from an account with 4.7 million followers says 60 Oregonian fire trucks are held up in Sacramento for emissions testing, but they were already in Los Angeles and never went through emissions testing.
What issue(s) did you have with it?
> the ones who do know don't care because they wouldn't be able to (technical knowledge) or want to root/unlock and utilize the capabilities

This is a good point. Some of that is perhaps self-perpetuating: Why root if there's nothing you can do with root? And why develop stuff you can do with root if there's nobody who can use it? If there weren't so much active suppression of software freedom by manufacturers maybe the situation would change and the benefits of consumers having full control of their devices would be more apparent.