skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(...plus came up with Bayesian spam filtering, plus wrote the book on Lisp macros, plus revolutionized startup investing).

It's only astounding because your assumptions are false. pg is nothing like a pointy-haired boss. What he is is a highly curious and lazy (in the good sense of the word) hacker who is bored by busywork. How you managed to arrive at the inverse image of that is such a feat of pathfinding that I'd be interested in the steps by which you got there.
Very few people were told the nature of the funding.
The law says that US cloud providers are fined if they continued to provide services to Bytedance.

As far as we know, Tiktok is operated on US servers by Oracle. While it might have been possible to find another cloud provider and move all US data there, I can see them not wanting to do that given that there was no point if the app isn't distributed in the US anymore.
Nicely indented easy to read blasphemy is the most dangerous kind!
Something being a free speech violation does not imply it being illegal, free speech exist as a independent concept from the US constitution
As a Brit, when I was raising the seed round for my startup, UK and European VCs would consistently try to haggle you down on price while the American VC's were exclusively focussed on trying to figure out whether this could be a billion dollar business or not (in the end we raised a $5m seed led by Spark, and have done extremely well and raised more since).

The UK lost Deep Mind - which could have been OpenAI!! -- to Google. I think part of the issue is cultural - the level of ambition in the UK is just small compared to the US. Individual founders like Demis or Tom Blomfield may have it but recruiting enough talent with the ambition levels of early Palantir or OpenAI employees is so hard because there are so few. Instead, a lot of extremely smart people in the UK would rather get the 'safe' job at Google, or McKinsey than the 'this will never work but can you imagine how cool it would be if it did' job at a startup.

There are probably political reasons as well. Unfortunately the UK has not been well governed for 20 years or so, and hence economic outcomes as a whole have been abysmal.
Clocktower is not meant to be a solvable game. In fact, solvability is a big problem in One Night. The most boring games of Clocktower are those where you can coldly logic everything out because there is No Other Way for things to have happened.

Clocktower is the ultimate iteration of a social deception game. It’s about the lying. It’s about the storytelling; not just by the storyteller but by the players themselves who have to create the alternative narratives and convince their friends of those narratives.

Clocktower is so good because it forces people to work together, and assume unreliable narrators regardless of intent. It gives individuals unique and powerful abilities, giving a lot of agency on the game regardless of whether they are dead or not. And because of all of this, it’s not the few but the many that achieve a success for their team.

I am utterly fascinated by this game and, more than that, thanks to its format, it yields a huge framework for experimentation by scriptwriters and storytellers. I have stopped playing any other kind of social deduction game - none can even hold a candle to Blood on the Clocktower.
Ad services, once it was monopolized by Google and Facebook really warped the value of the software engineering profession over other areas.

Software is incredibly valuable, but there are other technology areas that are much harder and equally as valuable (if not more so when augmented with good software).

A lot of software engineers who only know the last 20 years have inflated egos as results.

How many technology experts suddenly became public health experts overnight when COVID-19 hit? And how many of these same people continue to parrot the same bullshit after over 1 million American deaths?
me, Canadian, open tiktok for the first time in months and the 2nd reel is Canada vs US war & how China will help Canada. No way you can convince me this isn't a propaganda machine.
Socialism isn't the solution, it's the problem. People deserve to be paid for work and the better the work that they do, the more they deserve to be paid, even though that can be much more than the average person earns.
Maybe you're looking at the "Discover" tab and not the default one which is called "Following".

One scenario where chronology is confusing is when a reply to an earlier tweet takes its chronological place in the timeline but also includes the earlier tweet for context.
The title was changed, it used to be "Trump's executive order..." something.
OP is a YIMBY for the record.

Returning by right development to the UK is very possibly the single largest policy measure that might enable a way forward, not because it's so intimately tied to the financialization of the economy, but because it's such an enormous capital concentration that its limitations overshadow a lot of other issues.

It may be hard to see it from where we're standing, but the current housing situation is one extreme of a catastrophic ongoing crisis.
He's only accountable to Congress (SCOTUS also affirmed that) and good fucking luck ever getting the required votes to remove him from office. He can do whatever he wants with impunity.
It's skilled, but skilled wages are low in the UK.
I don't think the UK is allergic to industry, it just got worse and worse at manufacturing relative to other countries after WW2.

Just look at the UK's automobile industry... terrible quality.. terrible reliability, particularly in electrical components until the whole thing collapsed.
Some 4D chess there, not sure who is playing whom at this point
I noticed some surprising load times on Codeberg’s Forgejo instance. For example:

- The first page of releases (out of only 63 releases total) takes 3–5.5 seconds to load: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/releases

- The issues page is faster at ~1.5 seconds, but still a bit slow: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues

- The commits page for the main branch (22k commits) is much slower, taking over 11 seconds: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/commits/branch/forgejo

These load times were surprising to me given the relatively small amount of data being loaded (just the first page of results)... It feels like there could be an inefficient query at play here? The HTML responses aren’t huge (~400kB), and my ping to Codeberg (~125ms, US<-->Berlin?) shouldn’t be a major factor when just loading a single HTML document without factoring in other resources. I also have gigabit internet, and while there could be bottlenecks between here and Europe, they surely wouldn’t be responsible for slowing things down to this degree.

For comparison, I’ve run Gitea on a local server, and it’s been lightning fast, even with larger datasets. For example, on a test with the Linux kernel repo (1.3M commits), Gitea rendered the first page of commits in under 500ms. That’s a stark contrast to the 11 seconds it took on Codeberg’s Forgejo instance for just 22k commits.

I wonder if this slowness is more of a Codeberg hosting issue or something inherent to Forgejo, but I haven't tried Forgejo locally.
> Sure, paper is white, but it's not glowing white

It‘s your fault if you set your display to glowing. My displays, depending on the model, have their brightness setting between zero and thirty.
That's kinda what I was thinking too. There is a privacy loss for sure, but the average consumer also gained things for that loss.

Maybe Amazon in 2000 wasn't so icky but there was also no free same day shipping. Apple II could be repaired without "special tools" but those machines were huge, heavy, mostly empty space, and gap and glass alignment was way worse. I wish I could say something smart about Windows 95 but I've worked hard to erase it from my memory, so I can't. :)

Electronics things, just in general, did a lot less in the past. With that comes good and bad.

Privacy is a trade-off and right now the general public doesn't place a high value on privacy so they're happy to trade it away for anything. Honestly I understand it. I'm convinced I'm going to get bombarded with marketing nonsense regardless so I might as well get something for it.
And private spending is something like 200%. GDP is a measure of added value, not total spending/revenue.
> No need to go that far ..

Seems relative .. I literally grew up on Aboriginal land in the Kimberley and attended school with multi lingual kids that had non English speaking parents.

Most are still not writing in their own language.

What is "Far" for you is neighbours from school and locals of the town I now live in.

Certainly these are closer in space and time than Slavs from a few hundred years past.
There's a big difference between quarantining people who you know have a dangerous disease for a few weeks until they're better, and quarantining the entire country for years because you're not sure who has a dangerous disease.
At this point eval results presented by AI companies are a joke and should not be trusted
So if the works they're stealing aren't worth anything, why do they need it so badly?
The context was the CIA, which used to have such guidelines.
Affordable high density housing used to comprise about half of all housing built in the UK. Then almost all constuction of it was halted.

The private sector never built any of it. NIMBYs didnt stop this construction. Ideologues whinging about the % of GDP spent by the public sector did.

NIMBYs are just a side effect of the world neoliberals created.
Making things harder is not separable from making things impossible.
Because it's not the content but rather the company behind it. The exact same .apk would be allowed if ByteDance divested.
I think the same way we can talk about monkeys or squirrels. It's a family tree of related ideas. But there's no official checklist of features it has to have.

To give an example for comparison, a lot of people want to say socialism is about workers controlling the means of production. But that doesn't come close to covering all of the things that were called socialism that existed before someone proposed that definition.

With communism it's similar but at least I'm not aware of any one jingle that people are pushing as the one true definition.

But there are definitely lots of people who want to say they understand Marx better than everyone else and the Soviet Union doesn't count as communist because of x. China doesn't count as communist because of y. Etc etc. it's a way to preserve an identity as a communist without having to admit there are any downsides.

For what it's worth I'd argue that capitalism is even less well defined and I've heard it used to describe every economic system that's ever existed including all communist countries.
CIA's Chatbot Stands in for World Leaders
> but what’s the solution?

I strongly suspect it's a variant on capitalism that:

1. Recognises that some industries (utilities, healthcare, etc) are not well suited to market provision and are state funded. i.e. the sort social provisions that many of the nordic countries have.

2. Recognises that extreme wealth inequalities invalidate the key principle that capitalist economics is premised on (that the market value of a good or service closely approximates it's societal value) and therefore imposes much stronger progressive taxes on very high earners to effective cap how much wealth a single individual can control.

> early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)

High tax rates (90% in some cases) and all
I wouldn't be surprised if the freedom of speech nonsense is an influence campaign by the PLA.

It is just such a ridiculous argument but if you repeat nonsense enough times, people start repeating it back as if it is real.

We never had to deal with this before because the WW2 generation was obviously not stupid enough to let the KGB publish children's books and Saturday morning cartoons inside the US and have a KGB influence campaign that says to ban the books/cartoons would be a free speech issue.

Obviously a non-starter. What you see with Tiktok is how completely infiltrated and corrupted things are in the US in 2025.

The unrestricted war from China started a long time ago and the IMO the US has already lost.

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
― Sun Tzu
> EH?

I feel like that would also make a good response from the text parser in an old-school interactive fiction game.

Slightly related, but I remember some older variants of BASIC using "?" to represent the PRINT statement - though I think it was less about memory and more just to save time for the programmer typing in the REPL.
> Also, you seem to have taken issue with the phrase “random humans” because you’re confused at what’s being done here. It is random humans. Non experts.

I'm largely aligned with your interpretation of "random humans", with a clarification below. The experts I was referencing are the ones you identified:

> Experts are asking for the help of non experts.

The call to action by the archivists (experts), IMHO, has the intent to engage people with interest in the topic. So not really random from a mathematical definition, but perhaps better thought of as "unknown interested parties."

Granted, this is my unsubstantiated opinion.
yarvin thinks democracy is “done” because it’s inefficient, controlled by elites, and fails to deliver real results. he argues that politicians aren’t accountable and power is more symbolic than effective. he believes a strong, centralized leader (like a monarch or CEO) could better address societal issues than the current democratic system. basically, he sees democracy as broken and unable to solve modern problems.

our democracy is definitely broken in many problematic ways, but the entirety of history has shown that centralizing power to a single person or group of people has disastrous outcomes. inefficiency is the trade-off we make for meaningful representation.

the lack of representation and accountability would be addressed really well with a few changes, like campaign finance reform, ranked choice voting, and a greater overall society-level class consciousness. i think if more people realized that the class struggle is responsible for most of their problems instead of whatever the boogeyman of the day is, they would vote much more aligned to their own self interest.

until then we'll have billionaires buying the entirety of corporate news to manipulate and distort the main avenue of information, and spend billions on elections and advertising to inject as much misleading us-vs-them propaganda as possible, and have a two-party system that refuses to get anything done unless it's to their own selfish benefit
It's because the UK is so good at financial services.

It's fairly easy to deploy capital in the UK in mainland Europe, the US, India, China, ASEAN, and Middle East, which means there isn't much of an incentive to deploy it within the UK in industries that the UK cannot compete directly in.

For example, Dyson has almost entirely shifted operations to ASEAN (Phillipines and Malaysia primarily).

And AugustaWestland/Leonardo, Rolls Royce, AstraZeneca, GSK, BT Group, JLR, and BAE have largely shifted operations to the US and India.

The UK could make it harder to offshore, but then that also destroys the UK's entire financial and services industry, because most of the capital in the UK exists because it's a connector for global markets and would leave if that is ended.

They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
laziness is a virtue of a good programmer.

why demand many char when few char do trick?

also

> Why would anyone [...] encode a duration as a numeric value without unit in a human readable configuration

If I'm only implementing support for a single unit, why would you expect or want to provide a unit? What's the behavior when you provide a unit instead of a number?

> but not doing that extra work is lazy

no, because while I'm not implementing unit parsing for a feature I wouldn't use, instead I'm spending that time implementing a better, faster diff algorithm. Or implementing a new protocol with better security, or sleeping. It's not lazy to do something important instead of something irrelevant. And given we're talking about git, which is already very impressive software, provided for free by volunteers, I'm going to default to assuming they're not just lazy.
https://archive.ph/9KxkJ
i mean that's old law. theres a new law in town and it was a 9-0 ruling too.
> the US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is not 100 percent beholden to the US gov

You have it backwards. The US gov is concerned that an app installed on half of all US cell phones is controlled by a company that is 100 percent beholden to the Chinese gov.
There's currently no evidence pointing towards Oracle shutting down cloud service to them though. TikTok appears to have just preemptively shut down the app before they were obligated to, complete with dramatic messages telling users what to blame and who to thank.
You can still game a test set without training on it, that’s why you usually have a validation set and a test set that you ideally seldom use. Routinely running an evaluation on the test set can get the humans in the loop to overfit the data
To be fair, self-promotion is a good kind of propaganda to broadcast. It inspires healthy competition.

If tomorrow China becomes a global beacon of high-quality and affordable healthcare, maybe US will actually feel some pressure to fix its issues.
It’s fine for small projects. I clear mine daily, and it’s the sole place I do any communication management.
Using such restraints on foreign trade to censor publications is a very transparent end run around 1A.

It is a big sign that we live in a police state that the courts are willing to be politicized to the point that they are willing to ignore this obvious trampling upon the human rights of both the app publisher and the app’s users.

Also, iOS users can go buy a tablet or phone that can sideload. Also, tiktok.com is a thing that works on everything.
It obviously irrelevant whether the law was bipartisan or not, and the Supreme Court never "affirmed" the law--it denied a preliminary injunction.

As to upholding laws passed by Congress--just two days ago, Biden did his last round of student debt forgiveness, bringing the total up to $188 billion.

I’m not trying to “both sides” this. I’m just saying that the standard you’ve articulated for how promptly the president needs to act on a law like this isn't the standard we apply in practice. The government tries to reach deals like this in lieu of enforcement actions all the time.
But perhaps this was 5 years too late. A burn much sooner would’ve been much safer regardless
This is probably the worst argument for banning tiktok. You can choose to delete the app. You can choose to not look at your phone.

I use the app "minimalist phone" as well as screen time restrictions. You can do the same.
Can somehow explain to me how they can simply not respect copyright and get away with it? Also is this a uniquely open-ai problem, or also true of the other llm makers?
> I sometimes wonder how much of how Agile implementations look is a consequence of simplistic tooling. When your team's work planner is fundamentally unable to represent the basic idea that tasks can depend on other tasks

In the agile world it's accepted that a task that today looks like it depends on another task may not have that dependency next week.
Planning involves scheduling what the stakeholders prioritize now that can be done,
and whatever lands in the "we can't do that until we do other thing" doesn't even get scheduled.
i would love to see Bluesky add RSS to user feeds the same way Mastodon does by just adding /rss to the end of the url.

it really is rad to add my most read users to the feed.
I run a wordle spinoff, xordle, which involves two wordle puzzles on one board. This means you can guess a word and get all 5 letters green, but it isn't either of the target words. When you do this it just says "Huh?" on the right. People love that bit.
I'll grant you outside, because the power of the sun is immense, but they're definitely bright enough to use in any well-lit indoor environment. Do you mean if the lights are behind your head instead of overhead? That's either bad lighting or bad ergonomics, and I'm sorry if you must suffer through that. That sucks.

An ergonomic screen arrangement, with the display placed such that you're not looking downward at it, should make it basically impossible for an overhead indoor light to interfere with your view.

> If E-ink or similar technology manages to get a bit better refresh rates, it's going to change building architecture in the entire industrialized world.

Fingers crossed. I remember yearning for the breakout of transflective displays that never happened.
I understand the nuances just fine. Nowhere have I said that China is innocent here. Does this ban alone make the US as authoritarian as China? Of course not.

But I also understand that an outright ban of a social media platform is an authoritarian practice, and a bad sign for the future of this country. It is an easy way out, but at the cost of introducing a mechanism by which more censorship can take place.

To me, this ban indicates that the US is willing to ban any platform that does not cave into its demands for content “moderation” (if you will) - just like China has been doing for a while now.

We are not “better” than them anymore, and the sooner we realize this, the better of a chance we have of reversing this process.
Thats only because those corporations are owned by Americans. Foreign corporations do not have first amendment rights.
> somehow my matrix room continued to run without me hosting it, and without an admin running it

Surprise, this is probably the primary architectural feature of Matrix. This is precisely what it's designed to do.
> How many Nintendo Entertainment System games sustained themselves with in-app purchases and microtransactions? What more did the console ask of you after you bought a cartridge? Maybe to buy another one later if it was fun?

True, but unlike the Apple II, the NES was not an open system. The NES had hardware DRM, which allowed Nintendo to control what games were published for the system and to charge licensing fees (much as Nintendo, or Apple, do today). Nintendo also tried (unsuccessfully) to shut down Game Genie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES
In this case, it is this simple.

AIPAC wanted this.

They threaten congressmen who buck them with being primaried. They reward compliance with money. This is not behavior we see routinely from other special interests.
If antitrust laws did not exist then making them would need a constitutional amendment
Can't exactly ask coworkers for an ugly crying hug in the middle of a workday and then just act like nothing happened like you can with a best friend :(

I'll also admit it: I'm lonely and the magic of life seems to have disappeared since this over-the-top loneliness began around 2020. I too want a life full of loving people.

Also, fantastic work on that website. That's good stuff.
Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I’m a SWE. Even here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don’t get me wrong, you can make enough to be “comfortable”. But anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid handsomely to be in tech and are “Product Designers”. Even then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute their product. Admittedly, it’s really hard to do hardware in this economy when one country has 60% of the global manufacturing output and can copy your design, make it cheaper, and make it better. Ironically, the biggest dividing line that makes a hardware product better is good software.
Yeah, as a 12 yr old, I would've reacted completely calmly to Counterstrike being banned, or ICQ being banned, or MySpace being banned, or, worst of all, my access to lingerie models from clothing catalogues being destroyed...