skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, although you'd probably find that in many shops developers have the latitude to use Firefox off their own initiative if they so chose.

I recently finished a 7 year stint at a company where I was CTO. I always made it clear that we needed to be testing functionality in more than just Chrome because, apart from anything else, a good chunk of our users would be on mobile, and many of those on iOS (i.e., using Safari). I used Firefox as my main browser for probably 4 - 5 of those 7 years, and I suggested engineers do the same because it tends to hew closer to web standards than Chrome does (meaning that if it works in Firefox it'll almost certainly work in Chrome, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold). That gradually bled through the development team, with a number of the engineers using Firefox as their main browser. That's really all it needs is a few people using it for their day to day work.

I made the change on principle because I could see the way the wind was blowing and - even then - Google were doing plenty of things I didn't like. I like to think that influenced the team as well but, reality check, they probably did it to avoid me moaning at them about bugs running in Firefox all the time.
> and less connected to the world around them.

Sounds like Americans were literate back then. I also suspect that most were _more_ connected to the world around them. Not the broader world, but the immediate world around them.
While this is an oversimplification, my understanding is that it roughly goes like this;

BMWs are decent. Other European brands' EVs are a bit of a joke. Korean ones are solid. US big manufacturers are somewhere inbetween. The Hyundai Ioniq series is probably the best value for money on average for those who don't want a Tesla or Chinese EV.
I frequently hear people, mostly online, arguing that we should eliminate opportunities for smart children as a means to close the performance gap.
Are other kernels that don't get the 1M hours per year as usable by end users as Linux?
Care does not come from without, but instead from within.

To proclaim "Why does nobody care about anything?" is to neglect an oft quoted axiom:

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.[0]

0 - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/mahatma_gandhi_109075
You know who really cares? The Karen in the HOA who relentlessly hounds the board because one of the units in the complex has the wrong color paint on their door. Be careful what you wish for, or the grass is always greener.
I worked on the FMA back in the early days when it was still run out of the WFMU office.

There's some really killer stuff buried in there alongside some solid netlabel output from the teens. It was very actively curated in the beginning but it quickly became hard to find the good stuff and after a couple years of emphasis on promoting royalty-free music for film it kind of drifted away from its original mantra of "It's not just free music; it's good music".

Honestly kind of bummed with where the project landed, presumably sold for peanuts to a for-profit so they can use it for lead gen.
i thought this was a joke.
My experience has been that it sucks but not as bad as private customer service.

Getting a refund from UHaul was fifteen hours of pulling teeth. DMV was a 45 minute wait.

Worse in Texas where they dont fund it ofc.
I don't think that's particularly accurate for the US. Perhaps some of the Protestant settler communities were very literate, but I'm quite certain literacy would have been far lower by the time the country was actually founded, as slaves were imported and immigration from other communities picked up.
Yes, I tried a similar one called "omniparser" - where the issue was it was missing annotating some UI elements sometimes. Moreover, Gemini and Molmo worked right out of the box without needing any fine tune.
> In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat.

My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.
Its worse than that. There is a logic to society, growth and scaling that involves accumulating obligations. This is like a gravity or a gang hivemind that due to scale inverts the value of bettering to the value of self-preservation of a corrupt society theatre. They dont want improvement but containment i.e. inhibition of creative destruction. What really gets me here is just how much people normalize lying.

When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.
You bring up an important adjacent point. OP believes bikers and non-drivers are substantial stakeholders, but ignores that the tax complainers and drivers may prefer the world that way. And they do hound council.
I agree. The glasses would be useful if they weren't tied so much to Facebook properties. Which also happen to be very buggy. I bought mine last month and will probably return them this week.
Ask HN: What were some of the biggest mistakes you made when you were young?
I'm graduating this May and considering many things that could be huge mistakes (both personally, and career wise). If I'm going to fuck everything up, I'd at least like to do it in a way that hasn't been done before.
Yes, it's our backing database for Morio [1], an open source observability plumbing tool.

We're still building it but we're dogfooding it and run it in production ourselves.

Can't recommend it enough

[1] https://morio.it/
Something like that. They believed it was important that everyone was literate enough to read and understand the Bible themselves, without it being filtered through a historically corrupt Church that engaged in selective representation and interpretation of the Bible for their own manipulative purposes. Basically, they wanted everyone to be able to go to the source to determine what was and wasn’t moral and Christian, instead of relying on assertions by self-interested third parties.

Regardless of if they achieved their religious objectives, that earnest mission to make every human soul capable of reading the Bible for themselves produced the social good of a literate population capable of reading prodigious amounts of non-Bible content.

It is an interesting consequence of how the religious wars in Europe spilled over into in the early Americas.
I would do this. Back mounted drone that carries me down.
Heh, and I thought Roger Arrick using a BMW driver seat as a programmer's chair was cool :-). That looks like a great project and I'm jealous my Dad (or my Mom!) were not that kind of motivated to do a project like that with me.
I wonder if declassified cold war spy plane photos might be usable to extend the records farther back in history? The resolution and coverage should be pretty good.
A well known CEO noted that in a failing organization he was trying to devise a turn around plan for that everyone in the organization invariably blamed... the other teams! Not a one said "our team is responsible for our failure".

The engineers blamed product, the product people blamed sales, etc.

He said he provided this suggestion, "You are of course right (it's the other groups fault, and it might have been so), but what can you do, in your group, as part of a solution we all work towards to help fix this?"

So yeah, it is the other guys fault. But what you can you do to help fix it?
you did a Show HN and it sounds like it didn’t work out. that sucks to hear pal.

it might be worth taking some time to reflect on what your part in that was and what you might do differently next time.
Hard to believe that Jon Krakauer’s _Into Thin Air_ is over 25 years old. If you want a first hand account of how bad luck snowballs on Everest, it’s a good read.
I worked at place in the late 90s where that was true, at least for anything Internet related. We were doing (oh so primitive by today's standards...) Web development and it happened so many times. I'd call downstairs and they'd swear DNS was fine, and then 20 minutes to half an hour later, it would all be mysteriously working again. But only if we called down heh heh.

On an unrelated note, one of the folks down there explained the DNS setup once and it was like something out of a Stephen King novel. They'd even been told by a recognized industry expert (whose name I sadly can't remember any more) that what they needed to do was impossible, but they still did it. Somehow.

They really were great folks, they just had that one quirk but after a while I could just chuckle about it.
And does your blog have RSS or Atom feed? That's usually where it becomes a little tedious.
If the US goes untrustworthy, every non-poor country on earth will have to start a program
I was surprised to read this post. Thank you to share. From Wiki, I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

> By 1875, the U.S. literacy rate was approximately 80 percent.

And:

> By 1900, the situation had improved somewhat, but 44% of black people remained illiterate.

And:

> The gap in illiteracy between white and black adults continued to narrow through the 20th century, and in 1979, the rates were approximately equal.
We have a basic feature phone at home which they take if they're going out just to stay in touch/emergencies etc. They don't have phones unsupervised at all times.
This is very cool! I'm always on the lookout for extensible assemblers. I especially want one that can handle a normalized subset of GNU assembly so that it can be used on the output of LLVM or GCC (using existing assembly languages, but assembling them in non-standard ways or with extensions).
I lost my brother to a glioblastoma. I think it’s a 70 pct mortality at 18 months. Best thing my brother did, against doctors orders, was to have some nice vacations w his kids. Those were such fond memories for the kids.
I am sorry for your friend.
Langar halls are also places of community where you can interact with strangers in your area and build sangat (similar to community). Most people would do sewa (help out) in langar and then eat. Also you cannot waste. People would eat down to last bit rice before handing back plates. The one who is taking Langar, the one who is serving, consider each other as Guru (Waheguru/God) doing both the serving and consumption of food. Washing the plates is the most imp sewa and usually that part of kitchen is always busy (people seek it).
That's Japan.
You're worried about people who have already decided to take the risk. (sherpa safety is seperate point)

Its not like theyre being forced to go climb mount everest.

They could go do bungie jumping or cliff diving, driving fast, etc.
I'd be very concerned if a school relied on a smart phone even for class work.
I have similar thoughts. The base camp trek was high on my list but then I've heard that it has become a rich people's village and I lost interest.

While on this topic, one book I really enjoyed is Into Thin Air [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Thin_Air
Maybe the Will To Have Nice Things is solved by culture not process.

I’ve seen the above too. Imbuing an organisation with the Will To Have Nice Things seems unsolved because, as you say, the value is constantly traded off against more measurable outcomes.

I think the solution has to be building and rewarding a culture of doing the right thing, taking pride in delivering not just to spec but excellence. So when the org plan demands a giant construction barrier near the kids playpark of course the person responsible also commissions a dinosaur mural for it. Not because it’s a KPI or was debated and traded off on the functional spec but as a matter of personal and professional pride.

Interestingly I think the drop in taking pride in your work coincides with the relative anonymity of society in which reputation is no longer tracked through past interactions or word of mouth but is institutionalised in rating systems. This is perhaps related to why a more insular and smaller society in Japan has managed to retain it to a higher degree. Certainly there are elite groups around the world in which everyone knows the other players and so reputation and (from an institutional perspective) over-delivery are still valued, and these groups are the ones that accomplish otherwise unachievable advances. The broader anonymous society that delivers only to spec ends up with leaky abstractions that gradually collapses under its own weight of incompetence once the former culture of Wanting Nice Things degrades to Somebody Else’s Problem.

If true this predicts a
stable rule-of-law-based society or organisation in which the most powerful all know each other and which otherwise is broken into small mostly-stable communities would foster the Will To Have Nice Things more than an anonymous interchangeable mass would.

I can hear patio11 reminding me that this should have been a blog post.
I’m not sure why it is becoming fashionable, but the reality of parents homeschooling children, who are functionally illiterate and never finished high school, is a recipe for disaster.
Sorry, I simply cannot use OpenAI because it's leadership is kissing the ring of Trump.
Alright that's a bit mind blowing. TIL. Thank you. =)
Ironically, we may look with fond memories of the days when an actual human being handled our DMV paperwork.

An AI chatbot with an unblinking stare and frozen smile is likely to be your new DMV virtual assistant!
Good Enough Design
Logitechs high end mice are lovely to use but garbage build quality. That little spring under left button gives out far too easily.

Its possible I click hard and certainly they got above average use but 3 died in 5 or 6 years
> One example of how we’re using this implementation in iOS 18, is the new Live Caller ID Lookup feature, which provides caller ID and spam blocking services. Live Caller ID Lookup uses homomorphic encryption to send an encrypted query to a server that can provide information about a phone number without the server knowing the specific phone number in the request.

Privacy by design is always nice to see.
I used to rank the McDonald's in Toppongi hills Tokyo as having the best employees anywhere after I saw one run from one side of the little shop to the other when the French fry buzzer went off.

However, it got beat out by the McDonald's in Arkadelphia Arkansas, where the employee fast walked as quickly as hen could to take the order to the car waiting in the Drive-Thru, and then also fast walked back. Running of course would have been against OSHA and gotten hen in trouble so hen did the best hen could.
I mean...
This guy must not have kids in school—because to be a teacher, you have to be nothing but a ball of caring because the job sucks the life out of you at every step. No money, half the country thinks you want to turn their kids into trans people and want you to teach their specific brand of a religion and so they defund you at every step. I feel bad for teachers—they really, really care.

This guy must not ever volunteer for anything—In my town we have volunteers who will find houses with dogs chained up and offer to build them a fence for free because they don't like seeing dogs on chains. We have volunteers who work community evenings and do cleanups at schools, parks and graffiti removal for community spaces. My city has hundreds of volunteer fronts, and they always need an extra hand.

This guy must not ever have bought girl scout cookies or got a Christmas tree from the boy scouts, a lot of people volunteer to make sure all that happens and the money goes back to the kids, and nobody there is getting "paid" and they all care.

This guy must never have talked to a fireman or a parks worker, they have crap pay and dangerous job conditions (Park rangers are assaulted at the highest rates for any job). They do it because they care.

This guy must never have been to a museum... actually, I could go on all day about people who care ...

At this point, all I can figure is this guy has his head firmly lodged up his rear-end.
What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one.

You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
llm - Clippit of 202x,
but for the original Pentium was enough.
In Japan this attentive behaviour is often out of fear or boredom. Either way the service is good overall.

I live here. Sometimes the service isnt good and staff behaves like an insentient robot who repeats a script and fucks off.

If you know Japanese and actually talk to them, its obviously the same ape base mech the rest of us are driving.
I believe there is an SNL skit on this topic.
You think it's useless to be able to communicate to someone directly without the use of an intermediary translation device?
Most welcome :)
> However, it is less important now that we have expansion.

Not really sure if that's true. They seem like two different/distinct use cases, though there's probably some small overlap.
> P.S. Huh, it appears that actually is Yuri "Four Stages of Ideological Subversion" Bezmenov in the comments.

That is not the real Yuri Bezmenov which died in 1993 but a fan account:

> Kicking off 2024 by honoring the real Yuri and sharing the reasons why I started this Substack

> Yuri Bezmenov passed away 31 years ago and gave his famous speech about subversion 40 years ago. If he were alive today, he would marvel that everything he predicted in 1984 came true. He tried to warn us. All honor to his name.

https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/yuri-bezmenov-top-quotes...
AI Framework for Building Dockerized RAG AI Agents
Then why the huge disparity between cultural attitudes in the USA vs. Japan? Clearly the Japanese tend to take more pride of ownership, which is OP's point.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No.

It's exactly that. All your government and regulatory capture examples are precisely about bad incentives leading to bad outcomes (including people who cared but stopped caring because these perverse incentives punished them for caring one way or another)

But wait, the author understands this!:

> Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much.

So it's a YES?
It's interesting how people react first when you start acting different, doing little things like picking up garbage you didn't throw on the ground.

Even my kids went: Why are YOU picking this up, you didn't do it?

I just ask: Why not ME?

After some of similar experiences my kids asked to help and they were so excited when a friend of my wife bought them trash tongs to help me.

It's not that I'm proudly making the world a better place by doing something very difficult (like in the movie Pay it forward), but just doing small things that aren't difficult to do. Somehow it feels nice.
Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.
It's not distributed wildly unevenly
This is a skill I would benefit to learn.
Indiana's BMV used to be the Kafkaesque when I went with my mom in the 1970s. She waited in a huge line only to find out it was the wrong line...waited again to find she didn't have a certain document and had go home to get it.

About 20 years ago the would check to see if you had everything right as you came in.

Now it's almost magical how fast friendly and efficient they've become for the few times you actually have to visit. Most transactions are online or via mail.
I imagine so. You need agreement on "nice things" first.

My city constantly fights over this. Is a mural a nice thing or is the tax saving? Heck, is colour printing too much? I've heard people whine about them printing city handouts for council in colour.
The run usually isnt because they care its because theyre scared of senpai and (bucho/shacho) big boss.

If the management is chill they arent gonna run.
The guy who won is a traitor
Homeschooling doesn't scale, this is why it's not a solution for everyone. I can't see a fundamental drawback to it, like there are none in say, private jets: only problem is that neither can be applied to any sizeable minority, let alone not to the majority, of people. But if you can do it, do it.

The need for socialisation and being able to get along with the average had any meaning for as long as we had any hope for the "society" thing. Now it is obvious that there is no society (and it is arguable whether one really ever existed, maybe only for short periods in times of grave crises).
> Nationalists are not motivated by reason.

It's curious how nationalists, who often claim their stance is grounded in objective truths, almost always champion the nation of their birth.
And after the article was unflagged, it became one of the most upvoted topics.