skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds interesting, I'll have to look into that. I'll say that the shared TV was better in one respect: it was right-side-up for more than just one person!
You dismissed the criticism of your argument without comment and then repeated yourself. Thats very disingenuous and a sign of a weak argument.
Windows laptops are genuinely atrocious.

I don’t think that’s really an x86 vs ARM things. That’s a red herring.
The IT industry has gotten highly specialised over time. The NAND-to-Tetris style education helps create computer scientists who know their stuff from ground up. But tech companies are constantly on the lookout for vocational pragmatists (like "Python Engineer" or "Java Engineer") who could quickly replace another like them. I think that's why the high level language first approach has gotten so popular.
Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety
I've heard of a startup that claims to be able to achieve a near-0% false positive rate: https://www.pangram.com/our-model/how-it-works

They appear to basically RLHF a model on a bunch of examples of human/AI output on the same prompt. Not sure how well it works, but I'm guessing Mozilla is doing something similar here.
Glamorous Toolkit: A Moldable Development Environment
Seems interesting. Also there should be mention that this works for English text only somewhere. Non-English text is not supported. Also If I open the extension and try non-English text, then the "x" button for that page won't close the extension sidebar.

edit: It is even worse, if I'm visiting non-English page then the extension sidebar will be loaded and you cannot close it. You can't control this behavior. This is not a problem with English pages.
I found your comment quite agressive, and a bit out of place.
I, for one, do have trouble getting others to read my handwriting (on boards mostly, on paper it's ok). I'm left-handed, and the system of traditional writing education you seem to value so much has left people like me unattended for most of recent history.

And it is not the kind of mentality that transpires from your comment that would have helped anything change as --thankfully-- it did.
It’s called “experience”. HN skews young white and male, and if there’s one thing young white male coders are NOT is “humble.” Any decades plus veteran of the industry who has hired new college grads knows a lot more than you seem to.
At what point do we have to wonder when Musk does an active takeover of the United States?

If he is able to unilaterally and arbitrarily rewrite all the code for the treasury, and our nuclear weapons, should we be worried about some kind of active coup, to install himself as emperor?

It's possible that I'm just being paranoid, it's likely just immense greed from Musk, but I have no fucking clue why anyone feels like Elon needs access to our nuclear weapons.
If someone is removing a fence, and you don't know why, don't stop them.
I wouldn't say they're big in Thailand. Especially compared to the ever present 7/11.
Single-stepping is moderately complicated. I'm even less impressed with modern editors that can't keep up with typing. My first computer could do that. It had a 2MHz 6502.
In my experience it would not be typical to use a wedge to represent a cross product. Typically a wedge is used to refer to the outer/exterior product, which in three dimensions would correspond to a bivector as opposed to the vector you get from a cross product.
I definitely wouldn't have used "<<" in an "ad" for C++ :)

(I must say that I was happy to see/read that article, though)
If I only spoke Arabic or Russian or Chinese, could I write words in my language on those ancient developer tools? Or would I be limited to ASCII characters?

If I were blind, could the computer read the interface out to me as I navigated around? If I had motor issues, could I use an assistive device to move my cursor?

I'm not saying this excuses everything, but it's easy to point at complexity and say "look how much better things used to be". But a lot of today's complexity is for things that are crucial to some subset of users.
I did have parents passionate about this stuff, but they also sent me off exploring on my own. So experientially this was a post in memory of past times unstructured self guided exploration.

The huge risk of course is misunderstanding. Every autodidact gets hit by that. So the didactic panels are necessary, the pathways, but the sheer amount of tidying up and simplifying is (badly) stunning: they took shitloads of materials off display, to contextualise what's left better (in their eyes)

Contrast with the BM. Last visit: "do you want to hold a real Celtic bronze axehead" from an archeologist on the floor. (Detectorists probably helped motivate them to socialise the stacks of finds which arent holotypes) They're bloody heavy, amazing things. Beautifully crafted Lovely chap, spoke about the casting techniques, preserving the binding in surrounding soil when removing, all kinds of stuff. I think the BM and Sir John Soanes house have kept the spirit alive, the Science Museum hasn't.
Weirdly, it had good Linux support before launch and then it somehow went away.
Blow routinely trashes software he’s never had to write.

Single user software that is the sole focused application when it is running. It saves nothing of importance and doesn’t alter any system to any appreciable degree.

You know what’s more impressive than The Witness? Any web browser. It has to deal with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector. A web browser can run VS Code. It can run Doom. It can be made to run The Witness.

Blow does not remotely acknowledge the complexity needed to make modern software. He treats his incredibly small domain as the pinnacle of the craft.
Its hilarious city folks think rural power is subsidized.

I recently extended a line about 1000 feet. For this, I paid $13000 -- primary transmission, poles, anchors, electricians, transformers, all at full rates. And it was a required donation, as in the power coop owns everything and it goes on public easement on to the next guy when they extend from mine. When they finished, I worked myself silly digging secondary transmission to where I was used on the property.

It is the other way around, rural people shoulder the costs of massive mileage of the grid extension that aid intercity networking. The costs are privatized but the benefits are socialized.
I got my JetKVM in... I have used SuperMicro IPMI, HP IMPI, Tiny Pilot, and old school physical KVM's back in the Windows 95 days. For the price, this works amazingly well. I'm pleasantly surprised. Especially comparing it to the Tiny Pilot which is quite bulky and has lots of cables to hook up to work.

They did a wonderful job on this.
You know that their desktop processors are minor variants of their mobile processors as are their operating systems? In fact, they ship the same processors in their iPads and Macs.

And it’s not just about disks it’s about memory.
I tried to replicate this on my 64 bit machine, so

nasm -f elf64 tiny.s && ld -s tiny.o

; tiny.asm
BITS 64
GLOBAL _start
SECTION .text
_start:
mov eax, 1
mov ebx, 42
int 0x80

and this lands me at 4320 bytes!
Why is there such a stark difference?
Unrivaled could teach the NBA how to win back its fans
This book doing the rounds again reminds me of the ever relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/610/ Everyone likes to think of themselves as special somehow, so authors of fiction write stories to play up to that.
For us slow kids in the back what does this mean, “[…] such that the nine 9-digit numbers formed by the rows of the grid has the highest-possible GCD over any such grid”?
I've had the same thing happen with a drawing app.. I've an older android tablet that has a sketch app. It works great..
I got a new high powered tablet, because the battery on the old one wouldn't keep a charge.. New one has a sketch app that lags.. draw line... wait. draw line... wait. It's unusable..
It has a newer processor, and more memory, but I can't draw.
There are a couple of things that I believe are simple, effective yet difficult to do as engineers.

1. Don't open one's mouth when one is not sure about the topic;

2. Don't say anything without some good proof;

3. Be precise and keep it short.

Personally, I haven't managed to achieve any of them.
Or just downvote me because you’re wrong.
What are you talking about?

The BBC doesn’t get any USAID funding. The BBC News website is supported by UK television license payers, and for non-UK folks it has banner ads which help pay for hosting and other costs.

There's a separate non-profit, BBC Media Action (formerly the BBC World Service Trust) with a completely different remit to the BBC that receives some USAID funding, but is mainly funded by the UK government.
Are things you disagree with bad by definition or assumption? Or because you were told… because unless you have a front row seat, everything you know is because someone else already parsed that info for you.
> Bjarne has been criticized for accepting too many (questionable) things

He even writes that way in his own article... The quote from the last section of the introduction was hilarious, and actually made me laugh a little bit for almost those exact reasons.

BS, Comm ACM > "I would have preferred to use the logically minimal vector{m} but the standards committee decided that requiring from_range would be a help to many."
If I'm just travelling, airports are liberating; it's the beginning of a journey, long or short. If I'm indulging in my hobby; it's the start of an adventure, flying a light aircraft.
Also maybe a random cigarette butt once in a while.
Because of what?
Ah, then I suppose you'd be aware of my own forays into 64-bit ELFs (https://tmpout.sh/3/22.html)! I really should get around to publishing my writeup of the 73-byte minimum on Linux. (At least, it's 73 bytes for x86-64, since '\177E' at the start of the file jumps to byte 71, but it may be different under AArch64.) I have a nearly-complete draft, but I got caught on some oddities around the vDSO mapping which may or may not have changed across kernel versions, especially since the time I wrote it. Perhaps I should just jettison that section entirely and get the article out, since it's not like any of the x86 vDSOs have useful gadgets anyway.
That’s awfully close to an iota though.
I'm cool with using the word Deepfake for text. Generated text should generally be referred to in the derogatory, considering it very rarely adds anything of value.
No, text is not fake in the same vein. The whole point of deepfakes is that they're images of real people in situations they were not in. Unless you're actively claiming that some victim wrote the text, it's not similar.
Cool. Now you’ve just undone 70 years of rural electrification in the United States.

Optimizing for factors other than universal service is completely valid, but I’m guessing each of those municipal power systems pre-dated rural electrification and thereby get to somewhat free ride on the system more than anyone would reasonably allow Walnut Creek to do in the year 2025.
The real problem is that we have a broken, anti-performance culture. We have allowed "premature optimizaiton is the root of all evil" to morph into "optimization is the root of all evil. That single quote has done untold damage to the software industry. We don't need to pass laws to force all programmers worldwide to do anything. Fixing our culture will be enough. In my view, that's what Casey is trying to do.
Twenty Lessons on Tyranny
Show HN: Joyspace AI Captions – low cost GPU powered parallel video rendering
I have been looking for tools that render modern and fancy captions as seen on viral videos instantly. However, most tools have limitations around how much video they can process.

Then, after trying a few I realized that most of them took too long to process videos and podcasts.

We've built a high-performance captioning system with a custom GPU-powered rendering engine for parallel video processing and transcription to address this problem.

You can transcribe any video or podcast within minutes. The transcription editor works like Google Docs and you can adjust everything about Captions. The editor ensures frame-precise caption synchronization.

Some of the technical details:
- Custom NVIDIA GPU implementation for parallel processing
- Real-time transcription and rendering pipeline for smooth performance
- Support for 4K video processing
- 18 language models with 99.9% accuracy. We will launch 100+ languages very son.
- Multi-format support (.mp4, .mkv, .mov, .mp3, .wav, .m4a and many other standard formats)
- Custom rendering engine built from scratch for high-speed processing
- B-Roll included and 4K output is supported for all plans.

Our system processes video rendering and transcription in parallel, achieving speeds significantly faster than traditional CPU-based solutions and most of other tools using GPUs.

The editor allows word-level timing adjustments while maintaining perfect sync with video frames.

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3GHU1_KBR4

Try it out for free: https://captions.joyspace.ai

We’d love to see what you think on our Joyspace AI Captions. Let us know if you have any feedback.
So you're cool with using just any words to describe just anything, so long as the vibe is right. Great. I'm sure that'll help a lot with everybody's understanding of the world.
You're still assuming that free markets will find the global optimum, which is equivalent to asserting P=NP and shrouding it in no true Scotsman.
> If you are a licensed professional and your profession doesn't own the board, what often ends up happening is competing professions under the board sabotage each other.

From The System of Professions:

> By focusing on parallels in organizational development, students of the professions lost sight of a fundamental fact of professional life—interprofessional competition. Control of knowledge and its application means dominating outsiders who attack that control. Control without competition is trivial. Study of organizational forms can indeed show how certain occupations control their knowledge and its application. But it cannot tell why those forms emerge when they do or why they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. Only the study of competition can accomplish that.
Very happy this is happening. There's a ridiculous amount of incredibly valuable data, scientific documents, etc. "out there" that are at risk.

I haven't had much time to look at this yet and see what all is there, but whether currently included or not, a couple of things I really hope get archived are the contents of the DTIC (Defense Technical Information Center) document repository (lots of really interesting older scientific publications) and the NASA TRS (Technical Report Server).

I'm working on my own archive of at least some portion of the DTIC stuff just to be on the safe side. So far everything I've tried to access is still there, but who knows how long that will last.
The whole point is to get it automated. A checklist in a note app is not on the path to automation.
Mozilla continues to do anything and everything but work on the damned browser.
Sad: CLI search and replace - Space Age seD
Ill-considered abstractions, yes. There are a lot of abstractions that you can tell are the first draft or attempt but because of tech's "religion of speed"—and being drunk on hubris—end up shipping (vs being one of several iterations).

Then, if those abstractions are part of a popular project, other people copy them due to mimetics (under the watery banner of "best practices").

Rinse and repeat for ~10-20 years and you have a gigantic mess on your hands. Even worse, in a hyper-social society (ironically, because of the technology), social consensus (for sake of not being found out as an "impostor") around these not-quite-there solutions just propagates them.

FWIW, I love that Jonathan Blow talk and come back to it at least once per year. He doesn't say anything controversial, but deep down, I think a lot of developers know that they're not shipping their best (or guiding younger generations properly), so they get upset or feel called out.

We've just reached a state of culture in which chasing novelty has become commonplace (or in some cases, celebrated). Well-considered solutions used to be a cultural standard whereas now, anything that's new (whether or not its actually good) has become the standard.

We can navel gaze and nitpick the details of Blow's argument all we want, but the evidence is front and center—everywhere. And yes, over a long enough horizon, that can lead to civilizational collapse (and when you consider the amount of broken stuff in the world, arguably, already is).
Access permissions are orthogonal to having a file system. In fact, mobile apps still use the local file system, they just hide it from the user. And password files should still be encrypted with a master key, e.g. application-private secure enclave key where available.
Studying engineering in an academic setting is an ordinary way to develop an engineering discipline.

Reading about engineering is not practicing engineering…sure it might be part of an engineer’s practice once they are practicing. But it is not solving real or pretend engineering problems.

Sure there is also learning engineering on the job from experienced engineers. But again, that’s not a book.

To frame it another way, engineering practice is about doing things correctly to solve the problem. Not in the way that benefits yourself. That’s why people can trust engineers.

Reading a book is not the way the problem of becoming an engineer is solved. Good luck.
Economic efficiency gains from specific power pricing are vastly undermined by the huge positive externalities of having electricity.

Solar panel and battery investments reduce your demand for power from the grid, and in many rate cases will reduce your energy bill, but they _won’t_ reduce the costs of maintaining the distribution grid assets connecting you to the grid that need to exist even if you only use them 0.1% of the time. People with solar panels are the worst offenders as they can end up paying nothing, or perhaps even net receive money, despite still requiring investment from the utility.

Accurate pricing of power is very very difficult. Whose energy should cost more? The 10k residents with 5 miles of overhead lines being undergrounded this year? Or the 1k with 15 miles of overhead lines that won’t be under grounded for 5 years? Are you prepared to impose a $50M capital investment cost solely on the consumers that use it? Uh oh. Turns out customers oppose an huge hike in their energy bills and are demanding you DONT underground their lines. Are you going to charge consumers extra because a car ran into a pole that’s specifically on their feeder? The risks of something like a forest fire affect everyone, even if it’s on a line that serves just one person.

This stuff is very complicated. The elephant in the room is that under grounding distribution networks in places like California is simply far too expensive for the kind of budgets they have.
What’s wrong with TotalSpaces?
It would be interesting to know percentage of market
Good products can reach those who really need it. If this works successfully, I can say it does make the world a better place.
Maybe tight is harmful.

The code is unclear because it has single-letter variables instead of names, exacerbated by being in Greek, which mathematicians reached for because they were using single-letter variables, and ran out of them, and weren't bold or imaginative enough to break from convention. Then they used up the best of the Greek letters too and moved on to things like Gothic. This is stupid.
> If I only spoke Arabic or Russian or Chinese, could I write words in my language on those ancient developer tools?

For relevant cases, YES!

NT4 was fully Unicode and supported multiple languages simultaneously, including in the dev tools. Windows and all associated Microsoft software (including VS) has had surprisingly good support for this even back in the late 1990s, possibly earlier. I remember seeing in 2001 an Active Directory domain with mixed English, German, and Japanese identifiers for security groups, OU names, user names, file shares, etc... Similarly, back in 2002 I saw a Windows codebase written by Europeans that used at least two non-English languages for comments.

Note that programming languages in general were ASCII only for "reasons", but the GUI designers had good i18n support. Even the command-line error messages were translated!

Linux on the other hand was far behind on this front until very recently, again, for "reasons". You may be thinking back to your experience of Linux limitations, but other operating systems and platforms of the era were Unicode, including MacOS and Solaris.

None of this matters. UTF8 is not the reason the GUI is slow. Even the UCS16 encoding used by Windows is just 2x as slow, and only for the text, not any other aspect such as filling pixels, manipulating some GUI object model, or responding synchronously vs asynchronously.

Look at it this way: for a screen full of text, ASCII vs Unicode is a difference of 10 KB vs 20 KB in the volume of data stored. The fonts are bigger, sure, but each character takes the same amount of data to render irrespective of "where" in a larger font the glyph comes from!

> If I were blind, could the computer read the interface out to me as I navigated around?

Text-to-speech is an unrelated issue that has no bearing on debugger single-stepping speed. Windows had accessibility APIs since forever, including voice, it was just bad for reasons to do with hardware computing limitations, not a lack of abstractions.

> If I had motor issues, could I use an assistive device to move my cursor?

That's hardware.

> But a lot of today's complexity is for things that are crucial to some subset of users.

And almost all of it was there, you just may not have been aware of it because you were not disabled and did things in English.

Don't confuse a "lack of hardware capacity" or a "lack of developer budget" with the impact that overusing abstractions has caused.

These things were not a question of insufficient abstractions, but insufficient RAM capacity. A modern Unicode library is very similar to a 20-year-old one, except the lookup tables are bigger. The fonts alone are tens of megabytes, far more than the disk capacity of my first four computers... combined.

Today I have a 4.6 Ghz 8-core laptop with 64 GB of memory and I have wait for every app to open. All of them. For minutes sometimes. MINUTES!

None of this has anything to do with accessibility or multi-lingual text rendering.
The Cake That Is Intelligence and Who Gets to Bake It
Split twins does the opposite: separated twins IQ-test outcomes track the SES of the families they go to. But "twin studies" is science at the level of "The Bell Curve", which is 30 years old.

At this point, you kind of have to want IQ to be genetically determined (in any meaningful amount) to believe it is.
Also talked about C64's, like they lived through it. That brings them into their 50's. I got the feeling they've been at it a long time.
This is a great point, I think the only other thing I would add is that if you happen to have a passion in a certain hobby, try to find technical work around it (if possible). For example you like running, look into sport tech, or if you like biology, look into biotech companies.
in situations where you want or need to look into "uninterruptible power backup" at even a reasonably small scale (e.g. a large apartment building or a hospital), given the cost and durability of a diesel generator, once you've bought and installed one, turns out you might as well run it. Varying economic and regulatory conditions can make it more or less viable, but it's in the range of feasible.
Yes, this is a lost battle. Ask for a specific way of writing to defeat most existing system. Gain access to the review system to defeat them entirely.
A great book that goes deeper into the sand industry is The Material World by Ed Conway. Highly recommended!