skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm quite a fan of that piece as well. I don't think I agree with it exactly as stated, the claim feels like it can be usefully weakened - but it's crisp, so I like it the same way I like Nietzsche.
> a note about how "OpLock" means the same as "opportunistic lock"

This one is a bit silly, I admit, but consider this one:

> Note: Your application should not perform any file system operations on the file between [calling CreateFile2] and [requesting an oplock]. Doing so may cause deadlocks.
You just don’t want to trust them, but you should now. That was 7 years ago.
that sounds like you installed edge not chrome...
Off topic perhaps, but what annoys me about Goodreads is that the rating system just doesn't work. Everything seems to be 4-5 stars.

You're relying on a whole mix of people, from tweens to teens to old goats, who may, or likely don't, have similar tastes.

A pointless exercise imo. Similar to going to reddit for reviews. It's not what you really want.
No, you're the one in denial. Just have a look at the decade old book "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" to see the flaw in your assumptions.

It details many Concrete examples of exactly how the companies are manipulating everything about food for profit.

Kessler, further FDA head has written about this topic extensively as well.
> Where do you see larger revenues going besides to shareholders

The state takes a much larger share of your salary than the shareholders do, so no you are wrong here. Most money do not go to shareholders, it goes to the state taxes to fund programs and worker salaries, increasing those is a good thing.
Mucins aren't enzymes (as far as we know!), and the gut mucins are a bit different from those found on the endothelium, largely because they have different functions. The gut (and generally mucous epithelial) mucus is there for (amongst other things) clearing and maintaining a microbiome. Endothelial glycocalyx probably has some other mucin proteins, but also likely lots of mucin-like proteins, and the set of functions of these are much less clear.
GPT-4.5 feels like OpenAI's way of discovering just how much we'll pay for diminishing returns.

The leap from GPT-4o to 4.5 isn't a leap—it's an expensive tiptoe toward incremental improvements, priced like a luxury item without the luxury payoff.

With pricing at 15x GPT-4o, they're practically daring us not to use it. Given this, I wouldn't be surprised if GPT-4.5 quietly disappears from the API once OpenAI finishes squeezing insights (and cash) out of this experiment.
Ah, interesting, apologies for the accidental goodreads slander. I moved on to storygraph a while ago and haven't looked back.
> I think many of the factors which can make public sector entities less efficient - e.g. harder to get rid of underperforming employees, fewer institutional rewards for reducing unnecessary expenditures - apply broadly across countries

It's much easier to remove a Federal Employee in the US compared to Germany. The "give 3 documents" rule makes it easy to not have to deal with lengthy arbitration. At worst, it's comparable to private sector hiring/firing rules in Germany.

Furthemore, hiring practices for federal jobs are much more decentralized in the US compared to Germany.

And finally, the entire corpora of statutes, legislation, and administrative policies in the US is significantly different from that in Germany, such that any surface level similarities are basically convergent evolution.
There are effective approaches to curbing fraud waste and abuse and ineffective or even damaging approaches. Which do you believe the current administration is engaged in?
The RP2040 can output 24 bit (or technically 32-bit), 48kHz stereo audio over I2S. Combine that with a DAC like the PCM1502 (which has plenty of dev boards) and you've got yourself a high quality audio setup.

I have a Rust crate for outputting I2S data, or retrieving it from something like a mic or ADC. You can hook it up to DMA and make your audio go brrrr

https://github.com/bschwind/rp2040-i2s
Private companies are funded by willing participants and have economic incentives to be efficient. The incentives for your electric company and other government programs for efficiency are not nearly so clear. It seems reasonable to favor efficiency wherever possible.
Reading every thread related to something DOGE is doing reveals the same pattern.
Commenters instantly seem to reach two conclusions (or bring them to the table from preconceived notions):

1- Republican = bad, evil
2- You cannot/should not touch anything in government

I won't get into the first because it is objectively stupid. This is just as stupid as people on the right concluding "Democrat = bad, evil". Both polar opposites need to stop being bigoted and use their brains. Living in their respective glass houses they throw stones and shit all over half the country, painting them as evil, stupid, incompetent, etc.

This simply isn't true.

On the second point. Well, that's an unreasonable position. It say that government is perfect as it is and none of the hundreds of organizations that comprise it and millions of people who run it should ever be expected to do better. Ever. Again, utterly unreasonable.

Government should be obligated to go through an audit every N years. You cannot just keep throwing money at it and growing it. That does not solve problems in the private sector and it sure as hell does not in government.

I have worked with and sold product to various government groups. From White Sands Missile Test Range to city local entities. Anyone posting comments without having had experience engaging with government entities has no idea what they are talking about. None.

I have seen contracts awarded to companies charging double the street price because the person making the decision is so incompetent that they went with the company they thought would cover their ass. These are lazy and expensive decisions made by people who are not qualified to do the job and should not have that job. In other words, they would not have been hired to do that job in the private sector in a million years.

The US has serious problems. We need a restructuring of priorities and how we do things or it will be hell in a decade or two. The reason we have to be so assertive today is that this work should have started 25 years ago. It did not. And so the problem is now an order of magnitude greater.

This week I spent five days cleaning our area drains. I should have done this ever five years or so. I did not. I have not touched them in 25 years. That's why it took five days. The accumulated crap in those pipes was amazing to see. Solid sticky mud, roots, tennis balls, rocks, lego pieces, garbage bags, etc. This required renting a powerful machine to just rip through stuff as well as a powerful 5000 PSI pressure washer with a 100 ft snake and a nozzle to shred everything in its path.

In other words, when you don't keep an eye on things for a long time, the solution tends to be far more "violent" than the case of having kept thing in order with regular checkups (this applies to your health as well).
Read "Left Beyond Quest", it's very relevant.
I'd like to ask if there is a bookmark sync function and plugin sync function in any of these alternatives.

It does seem to me that Mozilla corporation management has become corrupted, and will only get worse; so I'd like to move off Mozilla Firefox and onto something else.

But I really like that when I wipe a machine and install a new OS, first I install the Bitwarden plugin, then that lets me log in to the Mozilla account, and then that syncs down all my plugins and bookmarks into Firefox. I really like my Temporary Containers plugin in Firefox, for example, in addition to uBlock Origin. But all of them, really: the GNU Terry Pratchet plugin is fun.

The Mozilla Firefox solution does also work both on Linux and Windows.

If there is some other form of sync for plugins and bookmarks, then I'd leap at Librewolf or Waterfox or Icecat. But I am unaware of a sync solution that would work.

Anyone have something they like? I can self-host if that is an option.
They should have called it "ChatGPT Enterprise".
That's not how govt contract works.

Repeat providers will win almost all contracts because they know how to navigate the "red tapes" and they know the inner people.

Competition? lol...
I agree with the first part of your statement but disagree quite strongly with the idea that the government created them. Monopolies and oligopolies are the natural product of unchecked capitalism. Without government activily enforcing antitrust and breaking up monopolies you naturally end up with companies having a stranglehold on their sector.
> If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.

I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.

Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues.

With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes.

The populace chose the pit full of spikes.
applying algorithmic strategy concepts to growth strategy is an interesting idea. I wonder what other domains this could be useful for
I noticed that I can no longer that a screenshot on my Samsung phone of Netflix. I used it to advertise a show to my friends. "You gotta watch this..." It’s just them shooting themselves in the foot.
Is there a concise comparison between other tools?

Specifically looking to see where this differs from chezmoi.
Doesn't need to be long-term viable. Forks like LibreWolf are sufficient to fill the gap until true alternatives like Ladybird are ready.
for me it is the opposite - i actually prefer older UI.

Less optimized for farming my attention and ads, more optimized for me discovering things, and not being shoehorned into choices.
I truly appreciate your viewpoint, but we are in strange times and we need a place to have a rational discussion about them. There are very few places on the Internet where this can occur that aren't completely polarized already. Since this current political situation impacts so many Hacker News topics, including science, research funding, employment, job postings, economy, startup culture, in my view it is worthy of a few posts.
Do note that Thunderbird can afford to keep a relatively tiny team (compared to Firefox) because it stands on the shoulder of giants (Firefox) for its UI and HTML renderer. That Thunderbird is able to cover its expenses with donations really doesn't prove that Firefox will also be able to do so, but that doesn't excuse Mozilla from not even trying.

> failed side project after failed side project

Rust and MDN have been huge successes. Their mobile OS is still alive and kicking, although other people are making money from that now. They also put in a ton of resources into decreasing FF memory footprint as part of the failed mobile OS effort, which benefits all of us.
Is there a way to import your Goodreads library after profile creation? I skipped it because I couldn't get it to download on mobile, but will probably only use the site if I can import it later when I'm at my desk.
which just proves that we shouldn't have any welfare if it supported that hack! /s
> If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival.

So the whole thing is kinda weird, because the new terms of use _do not_ give Mozilla any ability to monetize your data. All they do is state that if you give the browser some data the browser can use that data to follow your instructions.

For example, I am using Firefox right now as I type this message in. Firefox will save what I type in my profile so that if my power goes out (or Firefox crashes, which is rare these days but wasn’t always) then it can recover this text when it restarts. It’s always done this but apparently Mozilla’s lawyers now think that this requires an explicit mention in the terms of use. I disagree, frankly, and I think the lawyers who forced this issue are milking it.
Where did he mention voluntary charity in his tweet?
I would be much more interested in a Goodreads alternative that focuses on articles/substacks/newsletters etc.

There isn't a good way of sorting through all the stuff out there and I feel like I am missing a bunch of content worth reading as a result.

Out of curiosity how did you initially populate your site?
> When implemented well

Here's the important part. Regulatory capture and monopolies don't want or need things to be implemented well, because that leads to alternative options.
> One alternative recommended by the present article, Brave, is dabbling in ads as well

It blocks ads by default. It also doesn’t indicate it would sell my data. So, I’m using Brave or anything that doesn’t sell my data until Ladybird is available.
There really isn’t another option. They aren’t going to get those government jobs back, so they might as well go private. Otherwise, they’ll just be unemployed and have to find work doing some other thing somewhere. Short of becoming President and reinstating this stuff what else is he supposed to do?
They have the Markov property that the next state depends only on the current state (context window plus the weights of the model) do they not? Any stochastic process which possesses that property is a Markov process/chain I believe.
I found the UI of story graph unusable, like among the worst I had ever seen. I remember having to google how to see books I've already read. Using hardcover.app now, whose only issue is that the performance is really bad
They never did and they don't claim to be conservative, in fact they reject it explicitly.
Because a million things can be replaced. An electricity company can use private contractors (either individual or with lots of small regional companies) for maintenance, build, diagnosing, private power plants, ... and these can fail and be replaced independently, even if the power company as a whole cannot.
Gotcha thank you for the response
We’ve had it all along: small businesses and city/county governments.

What we’re missing is a willingness/ability to break up overreaching corporations and states. We used to be better about it - see 19th-century Europe, especially France - but fighting back obviously has costs.

Centralized power isn’t great at supporting human life, but it’s very good at dominating human life. So large corporations and states have been bedfellows and dominated us for the last century or so by greatly elevating the cost of actually fighting back against their united power.
Your competition is not Goodreads, but https://joinbookwyrm.com/
StoryGraph has made it pretty clear they don’t want to be more social—you have to go into your settings and explicitly turn on friends and followers.

They also de-emphasize reviews, hiding them under a button. There are no likes or comments on reviews, and they don’t have shelves like Goodreads.

But to me, a big part of Goodreads is the community, library organization, and reviews, so I want to emphasize those on Kaguya.

Also, I just think our design is much better.
They spent a lot of time and effort building a mobile OS for some reason. I'm sure that didn't help.
> I don’t think anyone who “likes” this solution thinks “it’s a great solution”

It's not a solution.

If we're talking about the current administration, there's no way in hell they're going to contract with a consultancy made up of gov't employees they just fired. If they do hire consultants they'll be ones who are loyal to Musk.

If we're talking about a future administration that wants to show intent to repair the damage done to gov't workers and services, why in the world would that admin start by privatizing 18F?
I mean the easy libertarian response to this would be I imagine them saying "well, she was force to pay into it, she would have a right to partake of it" and they're not wrong.

"Gotcha" hypocrisy arguments about personal behaviour I don't think are great taken from either left nor right.
I'll be a late adopter, go ahead without me :)
No offense, but you're completely missing why Goodreads is still relevant.

People aren't sticking around for shiny features or slick UI—they stay because Goodreads has a critical mass of users and reviews.

The value isn't in half-stars or fancy shelves; it's in the network effects. Unless you have a way to bring over millions of active reviewers (and their reviews), you're just building another pretty ghost town.
> Because, now, what trust or guarantee do we have our data and processes could not be taken hostage or offline or used against us by an adversary?

Don't be too happy to support euro political initiatives - for example when it comes to the security and privacy of your (european) data. It hasn't been pretty. And out of the pack, it's Apple that has been resisting the trend - and probably has the better offer for non-technical users.
It's really been a joy using Firefox from source with gentoo for so many years. Every so often I'm reminded by a friend about all the crap Mozilla does with new Firefox versions on the Windows side, especially apparently when it comes to messing with the UI whereas mine just stays the same and looks much like I had it back when Firefox 3 was the new thing. I'll trust the gentoo maintainers to keep at it. I also think a big canary on the actual impact/difficulty of disabling for privacy-invading and related things would be for the tor project to give up and switch to a chromium-derived base for their browser bundle.

But Mozilla has long since lost any goodwill from me. I use Firefox because there's no alternative for what I want from a user agent. If I could configure or find extensions to make some Chromium-derived thing look and behave the same way, I'd just switch already. (Minimum: adblocking at least as good as ubo, NoScript, RSS feeds, and the big one, close feature parity to TreeStyleTabs or Sidebery. The full scope of everything else I'd really want on top is too much for here.)
It is exceedingly rare to make over 200k in govt. Most heads of agencies and other high level roles are GS-15 which tops out around 195k

What you USED to get in exchange for less salary was stability as government jobs were viewed as less vulnerable to economic cycles and uncertainty. Now that value prop is gone
The problem is that source control is optimally a visual activity: the source control tree is a diagram, and the operations one does to it are diagrammatic.

Text-command-first approaches lead to inferior and hard to understand APIs which are, at best, papered over with a GUI. Managing the source of the project should be a series of trivial visual operations.
Hmm interesting; I wonder what a sort of weighted rating might look like, where the more similar another user is to you, the more weight their rating/review gets. That way everyone sees a custom rating, that's more akin to "what you're likely to rate this after reading it".
A dated UI is fine by me, but at no point did the current placement of the search field make any sense for the average user. It is de-emphasised, hidden almost below the fold, as if searching for reviews of a particular title wasn't the thing most visitors come there for.

Of course there are plenty of monetisation and engagement reasons for that UI item to be awkwardly placed…

Kaguya seems a little better here, but it too starts with a huge 'MAKE AN ACCOUNT OR FUCK OFF' message in mid screen, with the search field in the navigation bar on top. If you want become the Goodreads alternative, start with realising that a lot of people just want to see if the reviews are any good before committing to creating an account and contributing in turn.
That's a really good idea. The only trouble would be keeping the astroturfers away, it's much easier for articles - a company I used to work for would send out company-wide requests to upvote their articles on HN.

But if someone could make this work in a way that it's like a "if you liked this you might like" version of HN/lobste.rs it could be really useful.
I think there's a lot of people who still remember Fauci telling Rand Paul "I am the science!" during his congressional testimony where he denied there was any gain of function research being funded by the NIH.

Edit: there was also a legal moratorium on GoF funding from 2014-2017, though I don't know when EcoHealth was funding Wuhan. I'm assuming it was during the moratorium, based on some hazy memories, but I wouldn't put money on it either way.
End Edit:

He served as the head of NIAID (NIH institute of allergies and infectious diseases) from 1984 to 2022.

To play devil's advocate, the culture in place that allowed such poor oversight (per my previous links) and hubris can't be fixed by adding some new policies. It can only be removed by rebuilding the department under people who were not a part of the original culture.

What we're seeing now is part one of that without knowing what part two is. There might not even be a part two, though I personally think it'll be somewhere in-between what it used to be and the doom prophets who say this administration is the end of the US government.
> Federal government employees cannot make more than the VP ($235,100). So if you know a role that pays more than that it pays less in the federal government. (There is some hand wavey-ness around locale pay and stuff but we're not talking 2x)

Medical specialists (certain types thereof) and surgeons employed by the federal government (VA, DOD, etc) commonly earn $3xx,xxx or even $4xx,xxx - which is less than they’d get in the private sector - I’m pretty sure some of the more highly paid ones are getting at least double the VP’s salary (but not all the non-salary perks the VP gets, like a 33 room mansion)

VA base salaries max out at $400K, but I believe you can get much higher into the 400s, even into the 500s potentially, with market pay / allowances / etc - https://www.va.gov/OHRM/Pay/2024/PhysicianDentist/PayTables....
Brave disables or removes a number of Chromium features:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
Your statements do not align with the reality of Firefox’s own words. They are trading/selling your data and they updated their ToS to reflect that.

“ In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar”

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...

This has been discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
> Having 25 developers trying to manage a CSS stylesheet together

As opposed to 25 developers trying to manage a React component together? I don't think that's feasible either.
They aren't packed with conservatives. They are packed with Republicans.
Time for a hard fork. Or is it better to double down on the upcoming alternatives like Servo and Ladybug? None of them seem close to being ready though.