skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course it is too western. Today, I think a lot of that is language and culture though, rather than discrimination. If you aren’t of some particular background it can be very hard to understand them accurately. The language is only one part of it but not enough to truly understand things from another culture, which the article touches on - you have to live in that culture. Since English language and American culture is dominant, other philosophies are marginalized.

The part I’m not sure of is “for its own good”. What does that mean? I think the modern field of philosophy is limited and maybe even sometimes childishly simplistic because of this issue, but it’s not as risk of dying probably.
Ugh. So much of that waste comes for not developing state capacity and instead farming everything out to the private sector.
You're overestimating the average competence of engineers. Besides, this is one of those situations where ideology easily trumps reason.
Just get rid of it all together. I want my device to sound dry and factual like the ship computer in Star Trek, not emotional and... moist... like the lovechild of a Youtuber and a SV startup bro.
Had DOGE been more than 2 brain cells fighting for 3rd place, they would have spun out 18F as an independent organization. They could have taken inspiration from how the British government did something similar with the Behavioural Insights Team.

The US government could have even secured favorable rates for a period of time so it could continue to benefit from the 18F expertise.
At the time of early Linux, BSD was still a UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group project, though the CSRG would disband after 4.4BSD was released sometime in 1994-1995. BSD had a user base even in the days when using BSD required an AT&T Unix license. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an effort to replace the AT&T bits with open source bits. This reached a breakthrough in 1991 when all that was remaining was six kernel files, which 386BSD was able to fill in that gap. 1991 was the year Linux 0.01 was released.

Unfortunately, BSD’s growth was stunted due to the lawsuit between AT&T (USL) and BSDi, where there were allegations over the open source code:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_In....

By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had already captured the attention of those wanting a FOSS Unix-like operating system. However, it’s quite remarkable how FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD found niches in the 1990s and are still around today. They may lack Linux’s market share, and admittedly they don’t have the same levels of driver and application support as Linux, but they are excellent operating systems that serve their niches well.
Rating is a mess. Still I think people are used to express their opinions on a 0-10 scale, and they will appreciate if they can just keep doing that.
This article hits close to home for me! Coincidentally, I also started making apps in high school using REALbasic, before moving on to my first "real" language Perl, and am also working on launching a new app now [1].

On the article's point of "don't underdevelop," for launch I ended up trying to follow the SLC philosophy [2], a cousin of MVP. I managed to stick to the "S" with mixed success :-).

My own two cents for anyone out there thinking of trying your own thing: it's discouraging sometimes to read the flood of comments about survivorship bias, the need for luck or connections, the doom-y statistics about the percentage of companies that fail. Are these viewpoints based in fact? Yes, probably. Should you take the leap and try your own thing anyway? Also yes.

Reflect and decide ahead of time what your definition of success is for your venture. Money, satisfaction, adventure, idealism, hope: all are equally valid definitions of success, and just because someone may have a different definition does not invalidate your own. Work out your budget to see what you can realistically spend and for how long. Then go to work!

We are fortunate as software engineers that our field allows so much creative expression from just our brains and keyboards. Software can be almost a living thing, "pure thought-stuff, infinitely malleable" [3]. If your circumstances allow, it certainly deserves your attention, and the fact that sometimes it can produce economic value is a side effect, IMHO.

[1] - App for technical and engineering diagrams: https://app.vexlio.com/

[2] - Simple, Lovable, Complete: https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/

[3] - Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, can't remember which essay.
Yep. Watched a few videos, was overall impressed. Subscribed. A week later blocked the channel because the value of the videos was less than the annoyance of seeing the thumbnails and titles in my feed. No great loss.
Nice, can you share the browser version when it's ready?
Not necessarily. The government will have several providers to choose from, which will have to compete in price. If the prices are still inflated, we are talking government corruption, which is yet another reason to make the government smaller, not bigger.
> I don't know why these sites don't lean into the social angle and weight reviews by social-graph distance.

Goodreads does that though. Reviews from friends and people you follow are shown first
>"it doesn't matter" != "code is correct"

Fair. Despite the lengthy argument, I don't think our stances are all that drastically different. I am not saying that you shouldn't write tests. Just that the mental model comes first and that the tests are informed by it (in an ideal world the test are an automatically executable specification of your mental model).

Still I don't understand why you insist that "there exists an automated test for it" has to be the definition of whether something matters.

> But if you write webapps or games or ...

In which case it might just be fine to YOLO it without tests.

People have been delivering valuable software without automated tests for decades. Checkout the code of the linux kernel from circa 2005 and see how many tests there are.
Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused.

Mozilla survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly and almost totally dependent on Google --- one of (if not "the") world's biggest privacy invaders.

And I seriously doubt they have forgotten where almost all their money comes from.
The Ayn Rand types deserve to be reminded that she spent her final years on welfare.
More than 50% voted for not-Trump
Ah just what we need: a billionaire to throw money around at secondary symptoms. No thank you, just lobby for higher taxes and give cash injections to the bottom of the economy, please.
> Civic duty

I remember when this was considered essential to being an American Citizen. We had classes on this in K-12.

Sometime in the last decade or so, it's become synonymous with "communist."

Which is pretty rich, considering what's going on, these days.

Both Abe Lincoln and Joe McCarthy are doing 3200 RPM, right now. That's pretty crazy.
Germany has issues as well becuase it's been a de facto austerity state since 2009 due to their debt break, but the American administrative structure is very different from Germany's, so it's an unfair comparison in either direction.

The only countries remotely similar to the US might be Canada and Australia.
My simplified guide with 30+ slides to help web publishers and creators understand the basics of crawling, rendering, indexing and conversion rate optimization (CRO)...
As part of cost-cutting efforts, the U.S. government outsourced military logistics and supply chain management to private contractors like KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary).
Instead of the military running the system at cost, private companies added profit margins, and the price of everyday goods—including soda—increased significantly.

KBR and other contractors billed the government enormous sums for logistics and operations, including running dining facilities, supply chains, and retail operations.
Reports showed waste, overcharging, and inefficiencies, with some contractors billing the U.S. military $45 for a six-pack of soda in extreme cases due to inflated supply chain costs.
I'm a neuroscientist. Here's the surprising truth about TikTok 'brain rot'
> Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda

I (and many others) have worked for, contracted for, interacted with, and/or closely observed government for decades. The only “reflexive” thing here is your argument that people who disagree with the you are the victims of propaganda.

You can certainly quibble with the details on how to deliver government efficiency (and I highly encourage people to sincerely scrutinize any efforts to do so - it should produce better results), but there are good and valid reality-based reasons that the “DOGE” mission has broad support.
Please don't write new code in nonsafe languages.
You’re right in that government is a monopoly in most cases.
The DOGE engineers are Musk sycophants, and Musk is tearing apart the government so he and other oligarchs can profit off the unmet needs.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/business/elon-musk-faa-air-tr...
I would argue that companies like Plantir show that it's actually quite viable to be in the private sector while simultaneously serving the public sector. Granted Plantir is primarily military and law enforcement but I would say the overall model could work well for other parts of the govt.
> If there is no alternative to supporting Mozilla, how do we keep them accountable? If they know that they're the only hope for a cross-platform browser that isn't developed by Google, then they know that any outrage is a bluff that can't have teeth because they're indispensable.

Except they're not indispensable. They're now the fourth place browser in terms of market share on a good day, and dwindling. They need all the good will they can get, and this sort of discussion amongst their most hardcore audience is exactly what keeps them accountable.
Yes, it's my project - thanks for the feedback! Tracking down the source material has been a real challenge since it's so scattered and often offline, but I'm hoping it makes things easier for anyone wanting to dive deep into the primary sources behind Land's main thesis.
Fair, but not on the same “something else” so Trump still had the majority share.

I guess I’m more surprised by the low voter turnout. If you voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all, you are partly responsible for the mess being created lol.

Choosing not to pick a side is a choice in itself - not the absence of choice.
The problem is the complexity of the web itself, and that complexity was to some extent created and amplified by Firefox. IDK if there is any escape other than to treat the existing web as a modern day AOL that sensible users ignore in favor of a clean niche alternative. Sort of like GNU/Linux users in the ocean of Windows.
I’m not moving goalposts, that’s what DOGE is attacking. It’s 100% part of efficiency. And it’s absolutely happening. DOGE is addressing “fraud, waste, and abuse”.
How is having a particular option unfortunate compared to not having that option?
There's no denying that there's bloat, but going in with a chainsaw is not a conducive or efficient way to reduce bloat in an organization.

If you want to use the "private sector lense" (which I do not think is valid for a govenenent bureaucracy), there's a reason why when I've participated in M&A events, we would spend a year doing due diligence and understanding the organizational and financial structure before initiating an event.

By haphazardly doing these kinds of initiatives without even understanding regulations and laws means any potential savings will be burnt in litigation and cleaning up messes.
Exactly the same reaction. I realized these kind of people don’t actually care about technology. They’re not engineers. They don’t love the industry or the impressive human achievement. They see tech as a vehicle to power. It’s all a power game.
This seems less a reaction and more the design of causing as much damage as possible.

I imagine this consulting will cost the taxpayers at least twice as much and be insulted by their contract from any consequences….
Exploring multi-cluster fault tolerance with k8gb – CNCF
Am I understanding that this project is limited to play 8kHz samples wave-files, ie only up to 4kHz real world? Is that even tape-quality?

Not to talk down anyone’s hobby project, but that kinda limits the appeal for most other people I would think?
I'm curious about the origin of the name. Kaguya-hime no monogatari? Kaguya-sama?
my most uncomfortable salvia experience definitely felt like my whole body was being unzipped and folded back in on itself
It's funny to me to see this kind of thing labelled as "communist" considering that classical Marxist theory itself actually has a very cynical (and determinist) view of the state and does not in fact see the state as performing this "civic" role at all. Old school dogmatic Marxists see the state as nothing more than the coordinating arm of capitalism, or a "relief valve" for it, and Lenin spoke openly about its complete destruction in State And Revolution. It's as equally cynical about government as the libertarian position is.

So, no, it's not "communist" to advocate a functioning civil sector.
Yeah, we don't have comics and graphic novels currently. I wanted to keep it simple for launch.
I guess I should clarify my stance: I think that 18f going private is a good thing _given_ they are being dissolved. I of course would prefer if they stayed inside the govt but if it's between continuing to exist as private entity vs not existing at all, I'll take the former.
> HTML/CSS was on most job descriptions I saw.

Those are going to be on nearly every FE job description you see. I think OP's point is that they are not necessary to land a job despite their automatic inclusion in the job description.

(Speaking anecdotally, the companies I have worked for either don't have any CSS masters to sufficiently test for mastery or don't include those experts in the interviewing process. Or, more commonly, we are so desperate for framework devs that any amount of CSS knowledge is considered good enough.)
Deep Groundwater Might Be a Sustainable Solution to the Water Crisis
Arguably 2005 was a high water mark for UIs. That was when people were still focused on "human interface design" and hadn't adopted the A/B "revealed preference" nonsense.
I disagree that trying to curb “fraud waste and abuse” is an outfight foolish endeavor, no.
The British Navy Resisted a Decent Lightning Rod for Decades
I wonder if I'm in the minority in not caring about Firefox's privacy subtleties, as long as I get good extension support. I just want a different browser vendor than my ad and video vendor (Google).
To assume only altruistic intentions from Cuban, yes I would say it's a very good thing to support the people doing actually great work in the government.

My point is just that Cuban is supporting the problem that Musk is creating, albeit without putting himself entirely in a position where he could receive the ire of the public.

And just to reiterate, 18f has done great work, and if this is the only way for them to continue for the time being I guess so be it. I just don't agree with the chain of events that led here.
Emacs supports browsing with WebKit: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Em...

This is distinct from its own Emacs Web Wowser, which is a more primitive browser (but quite good for quite a lot!).
It's not that you can just install LibreWolf and forget about it forever. If everyone does this, Mozilla won't be able to monetize your data and they will fight back for their survival.

Someone needs to fund the actual browser development.. it's possible to avoid your data being used, but it only works because data of others is monetized.
Privatization isn't about eliminating human flaws but accountability and incentives. Private corporations face real consequences if they're inefficient: customers leave, profits drop, and they eventually fail. Government agencies, funded by taxpayers without alternatives, rarely face such direct pressures.
I think the best would be if billionaires would stay the f** out of meddling with governing countries.
Equating government-funded research programs (completely optional) to water provision isn’t remotely coherent. Pipes in the ground are a natural monopoly.
There are still some people (even in this thread) pretending it is not deliberately sabotaging the government in favor of billionaires.
This is exactly what Trump and Musk would want, privatization of what should be (and were) government services.

No one — and I mean no one — should profit from the provision of what should be core government services, like tax filing or health care.
I second that. The best documentary I've ever seen about Linux and GNU.
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone embrace cyberpunk aesthetics while misunderstanding its ethos, I'd have enough money to buy my favorite social network and run it into the ground.
Longer term, I think our best hope is the Servo project, and I would encourage anyone who is able to support Servo development.
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.

I think something Germany and the US have in common, compared to many other countries, is less blatant corruption in government, due to strong laws against it.
I view it as a positive. It's easy to find things and obvious which parts are interactive.
I'd argue the difference between private companies and government is that in government that spending is public.

Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to grandstand by reducing your budget.

Waste a few million on a Salesforce implementation that never works, never does what it promised and never gains adoption and is finally quietly abandoned? Doesn't even make the Shareholder meeting and the exec in question gets even more influence for his ability to lead large projects.
It’s possible to have both kids and side projects, just involve them. I used to hang around my dad’s shed doing random stuff when he would do his woodworking side projects, and sometimes he would show me cool things and let me cut wood. It probably helps though if you have the “right” kind of kid for this stuff.
Some of them have very limited, anthropocentric visions of a world where they live as gods, empowered by godlike technology.

The more insightful ones see the end goal as one where humanity has been obliterated, with the successor expanding through the light cone, devouring all in its path. The (unspoken) rallying cry: "They will replace us." Naturally, this isn't a good popular slogan, so they ride along and let useful idiots do their thing.
More likely guess, given a refresh fixed it: there was a slight delay with the CT log and it hadn't started returning the precertificate yet.
Yes, like:

- Leaving my smartphone in the car in case I must MFA for work or have for safety... I’d love to use a flip phone or minimal smartphone that only had camera, FaceTime, maps and an authenticator; I could just delete apps, but I don’t want to be able to install anything that wastes my life.

- If others are watching streaming video, could go somewhere else to read.

But, I may not have adequate willpower, and I struggle to read.
** WAKE UP FOLKS! ** THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US.

If you're in the US, it's time to start asking yourself what you are going to want to be able to say to your kids or grandkids when they ask what you did about it when the constitutional republic was falling.
How about a complete economic collapse and great depression? They are FAFO on many critical pillars of our system, including biopharmaceuticals and research, heavy tariffs with major trading partners (you cannot instantly undo the last 50 years of globalization without a complete collapse, because the ecosystems simply do not exist anymore), the Federal Reserve (you cannot wish inflation away, you can only apply a brake that takes 18 months to have an impact), and oh so many other things. We are seeing a monkey pull the tablecloth out from under a fully set table of china and silver for 24. Apparently the majority were so deluded by propaganda that they wanted them to burn it all down. Buckle up everybody, get a go bag ready and find a safe place to keep your money.
I think most n/x rating systems are extremely weak and the level of detail is irrelevant. Averaging leads to a soup where nearly everything that isn't objectively awful falls in 60-80% rating. There's no signal to determine if it's good or just mediocre based on the rating alone. Goodreads and IMDB have been utterly useless to me.

Rotten Tomatoes' system has a lot of positives and I see a ton of signal in Rotten Tomatoes scores. It only works with a critical mass of people rating a given piece and I don't think anyone could get that critical mass for books aside from Goodreads.

I had an idea of a rating system where people would have to create a ranked list of the movies/books. Their rating for a given piece would be based on where it is in their list, linearly. Then ratings would be relative to other content. I think this would be much harder to get off the ground than a Rotten Tomatoes system.
Indeed. The chainsaw approach will only produce an even less effective civil service, and one in constant crisis.

If you want to actually improve governance (and we really should because it is in fact often quite dysfunctional), you don't come in with the notion that it is intrinsically rotten to the core and the very idea of governance is flawed by nature.

You start by motivating people to improve. Which you don't do by accusing them of graft, corruption and incompetence.

It's all very disingenuous.
The last mile might be monopolized, but you are oversimplifying it. When implemented well, there are markets for generation, transmission, distribution, and retail, implying alternatives and resiliency. Every system has bottlenecks. This does not mean they are all equally resilient. To give a familiar example, your having one brain does not negate the benefit of having limbs in pairs.
Yeah there is a repl, it is called maestro studio and opens a local web page you can inspect app elements and execute commands
If you want to do a similar audio player I can recommend the DY-SV5W module family, this is essentially a micro-SD playback chip with a headphone amp and a 5W (mono) amplifier, the whole thing can be powered from 5V/USB. Really great for art projects where you just need a single track to play/loop on the press of a button and can't be bothered to program.

It has thre DIP switches that set the mode, you can use them to set the playback modes, one of which is serial control, meaning you can easily beef this up using a microcontroller.
> I don't think it's fair to say they haven't continue driving innovation since 2010

I don't know about "driving" but that's the norm for Apple. Certainly pitched in - and from that point of view, it's not fair to only count successes. So Vision Pro of course belongs to the list: Apple was not the only company working on something in that general direction but a ton of work went into it. Same for the car effort: just because we are not seeing it doesn't mean it wasn't done and the lessons learned by a massive pile of engineers. And this continues with a pile of software feature efforts (payment?) and fights for users' rights (encryption?). With its share of unfortunate directions (CSAM?).

Just because a project is not hardware and a smashing success doesn't mean it didn't get done.