skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sort of thinking is exactly why Big Tech shifted from being left Democratic in Obama's time to being center-right Republican in Trump 2024 election.
Demonizing ads comparing it to Heroin and tools of authoritarian regime is a MASSIVE hipérbole. Go to look at heroin addicts. Go to look at people that click on a personalized ad with cookies that knows they want to buy a new fridge. They are very far apart.
It's like claiming the electricity company holds you slave. Go look at what slavery was.
The simple truth is that Big Tech is incredibly powerful because they earned it. They made incredible technology that helped humanity moving forward. Yes there is a great power imbalance now. Yes it would be better if that power was less concentrated. But it also wrong to demonize Big Tech, to paint them as evil Machiavelli's dealing drugs. What we need is a new generation of Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple. Yes Steve Jobs in order to build Apple in his own time painted IBM as evil, but it was done in an ad (paradoxically) and it wasn't the whole government passing laws against IBM just to reduce it's power. I'm European and GDPR in Europe was in my opinion a very bad move. I don't think third party cookies are that bad. And people that think that they are bad they usually don't know how they work. Companies shouldn't directly export your plaintext data to others. Third part cookies didn't do that.
So stop painting ads like heroine. Once you destroy Google you will have destroyed also the income that allowed Google to give us free (g)mail, free maps, chromium and then node, Android and a ton of other products I'm not remembering right now.
Not OP, but it's good to turn them off for sessions of focus. They can, almost always, wait.
I know, imagine what would have happened to society if people unwinded after a long day of work in their own home with weed, or if they drank coffee every morning. /s
It's remarkable that you put all that thought into coming up with holes in my one-line argument, and no thought into steelmanning it.

Since we're coming up with hypothetical laws and loopholes, here is a simple addendum to my original argument:

- Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR.

There. That avoids penalizing most of the personal advertising scenarios you mentioned. Since laws are never a couple of sentences long, I'm sure with more thought we'd be able to find a good balance that prevents abuse, but not legitimate use cases for informing people about a product or service.

Again, the goal is not to get into philosophical discussions about what constitutes advertising, and banning commercial speech, or whatever constitutional right exists. The goal is to prevent companies from abusing people's personal data, profiling them, selling their profiles on dark markets, allowing mass psychological manipulation that is threating our democratic processes, and in general, from corrupting every communication channel in existence. Surely there are ways of accomplishing this without endless discussions about semantics and free speech.

But, as I've said in other threads, this is all wishful thinking. There is zero chance that the people in power who achieved it by these means will suddenly decide to regulate themselves and kill their golden goose. Nothing short of an actual revolution will bring this system down.

> And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists.

Agreed. In the olden days before digital ads, product catalogs worked well. Companies would buy ad space in specific print media, and consumers interested in buying a product would consult the catalog for the type of product they're looking for. Making ads pull rather than push solves this awareness problem proponents of advertising deem so important. The reason they prefer the push approach is because it's many times more profitable for all involved parties. The only victims in this system are the people outside of it. The current system is making a consumer of everyone every time they interact with any content, when the reality is that people are only consumers when they're actively looking to buy something. Most of the time we just want to consume the content we're interested in, without being sold anything. It's the wrong approach, with harmful results, and the only reason we stuck with it is because it's making someone else very rich. It's absolute insanity.
> The best way to learn about new products is through influencers/reviewers/experts in their field. I'd even say its superior, which is why advertising companies ~sponsor~ bribe influencers to promote their products.

In the same sentence, you give a possible solution and the reason why it wouldn't work.

Ban ads and companies are going to pay more and more for sponsored content to the point you can't differentiate what is legit from what is not.
> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.

The main difference between advertising and propaganda is that advertising usually is obvious and loud, and in many countries is required to be declared: people need to know they're watching an ad. You have specific placements for ads that are clearly defined: tv breaks, outdoors, even banners. It's true that there are active efforts to blurr those lines, but still.

The problem of propaganda is that it's mainly being done covertly, no one is saying they're speaking on behalf of someone or of an ideology.

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.

While this concept sounds good, it doesn't seem to work in the real world. For example, could shops have billboards on their property? What about businesses that didn't have prime locations? How would people know they existed? How would small businesses compete with big retailers?

One of the things the internet brought, for better and worse, was to lower the barrier of entry—you wouldn't need to be a massive brand that could afford to have its product placed on TV Shows or even to have sales teams selling door to door.
But unlike in other countries that replaces a tip.

My view was that previously large groups might not tip especially if splitting the bill but ones and twos would tip.
> It means you can’t say something like “the numbers are only higher because more adults are living together”, as that is already being adjusted for. In theory.

I think it muddies the waters because it's possible that the numbers are higher because people are choosing to have fewer children (which may be driven by affordability), or more people are living in HMOs. It makes it much harder to argue about cause and effect. Are these equivalised incomes rising because people are having fewer children, because there are more people living in HMOs - or are more people doing these things because of a crisis of affordability?

> but the constant refrain of “living standards are collapsing” and “no one can afford a house” just doesn’t match the data IMO.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

The price of housing in England has doubled relative to the median income since 2000.
Lead is only in avgas used by piston engines. Approximately zero firefighting aircraft use piston engines at this point - turbine power and reliability are so good that most firefighting aircraft that started with piston engines have been retrofitted (e.g. Calfire's Turbo Trackers).
This is super amazing. I also go the "Failed to ..." etc error messages initially ( waited about 3-4 mins that time). Just checked once more after about 1 hour and it did generate the whole documentation.

Fairly readable and doesn't seem wrong ( havent gone in depth yet)

https://gitsummarize.com/daptin/daptin
All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused.

And why? Because the designers need to prove that they so something?
One type of restaurant that would be a great import into the U.S: The "comida corrida" places of where I live in Mexico. Basically, they're tiny, family-run sit-down joints with simple setup (sometimes being run right in the lower floor of someone's home or in their garage, repurposed with a kitchen addition) and simple but essentially home cooked and balanced fare. For the equivalent of 3 to 7 dollars, you get a starter, main course and desert for lunch (in some cases they also serve breakfast) The food isn't fancy, but it's freshly made and filling.
Surprise is also based on convention.
What could be surprising to you might be just a stroll in the park for others.
In Japan people would be surprised to see others wearing shoes in a house while it's perfectly normal for people of other countries.
Reading the manual is something to prevent surprises and only takes one sentence to explain. I'd go for that any day of the week!

> ... a well designed system wouldn’t do this. ...

A well designed system would be able to explain their decisions and document that somewhere. Perhaps in the manual.
The UK has great consumer protection laws.

I didn’t realise this until I lived abroad (Colombia, USA). It’s something we should be proud of and I wish other countries would emulate
I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust.

While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.

While I would advise to use Rust for some security critical scenarios, there are many others where it is still getting there, and there are other requirements to take into account other than affine types.
> anyone antagonistic toward advertising has considered this fact.

and yet, the apparent disregard for the interests of those currently benefiting from advertising is dismissed as mere trifles, not worthy of compensation.

Policy suggestions should not be so one sided. I would always use the veil of ignorance, and ensure that any policy suggestion go through this retorical device.
I'm trying to brainstorm an answer. My best guess is that SSH is obsoleted by disposable instances. You can spin up a new instance for every version of your configuration, transition to it, and dispose of the original (or set it aside or whatever). That way, you could probably have a reasonably complete tech career and only ever use ssh as an implementation detail of git.
In EDN[1], which is to Clojure as JSON is to JS, commas are whitespace (as it is in Clojure itself).

1: https://github.com/edn-format/edn
> Coming from this direction, the addition of commas feels like an evil plan to have more syntax errors, with no obvious benefit

It helps to learn your history before you criticise something and claim it is useless.

JSON is the way it is mainly because it is just JavaScript and that meant that every browser in the world already supported it before JSON was even invented. It is THE reason why it is as popular as it is.
> It's interesting that there are no reasoning models yet

This may be merely a naming distinction, leaving the name open for a future release based on their recent research such as coconut[1]. They did RL post-training, and when fed logic problems it appears to do significant amounts of step-by-step thinking[2]. It seems it just doesn't wrap it in <thinking> tags.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06769 "Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space"
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12lAM-xPvu8 (skip through this - it's recorded in real time)
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.

We would no longer be tricked into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't make us happy.

But because GDP is what it is, we will have a recession. Quite a big one, because a lot of the economy is reliant on selling people stuff they could do without. Perhaps people would be happier once things settle down, but we have locked ourselves into measuring things that are easy to measure, and so we're all going to think it was a failed experiment.
> What if i'm handing it to a friend/spouse to play to beat my time?

then that works better with his suggestion for a timer rather than a countdown

you could retain a challenge aspect by showing average time to solve (or your result compared to others; “You did better than 94% of people!” etc)
I think it depends where you are. When I worked in Boston, going to somewhere like Chinatown was common. No one I knew would have gone to a chain restaurant for lunch.
I just want to say that I absolutely love these articles. Reading these kinds of investigations is like brain candy to me. I don't know why, but in my head, this falls into the same genre as a Sherlock Holmes novel.
I think he is equating stern copyright notices to somebody making a strong statement about what annoys them. As if to say “so what”, and the boom in “unapproved” 88x31 pics demonstrates this
Someone wants to pull up the ladder?
Could be.. let's say you deploy a version of a model that was trained by some bad actors to give some wrong output, you won't have a method to verify it without the hashing technique.
The article is suggesting that they'd rather not have ads than not have guns? Because ads are tools of manipulation? WTF do they think guns are for?!

Let's face it, it is incredibly simple to entirely avoid ads everywhere online. Vivaldi or Brave will block all ads (Brave even does it in YouTube) so just install those in 2 taps and you're set.

Many online communities and first party sites are free because they are paid for/motivated by ad income though

Sure there are many sites that don't have ads and are done truly as a passion project by the owner(s) but many rely on the income to pay for bandwidth and hosting etc, or even staff costs. Would Reddit et al exist without any source of income?

People say "I'd pay to use foo without ads!" Yet when those options are available, and when it comes to putting your money where your mouth is, turns out that actually most people don't want to pay to access foo without ads (think YouTube, think Facebook etc that have ad free tiers that hardly anyone pays for). People just block the ads and keep using it for free and so the site gets neither ad revenue nor subscription revenue.
Claude Code + Vim (+ occasional JetBrains IDE usage) is working phenomenally for me
anyone actually use comma-first syntax? It lets you easily move lines around, too:

{"foo": "bar"
,"baz": "hehe"
,"yes": "aligned"
,"better": "this way"}
> How do you even define advertising?

You don't define "advertising". You look for things that advertisers do and see if they can be made illegal or unprofitable.

Formula 1 cars used to have displays for tobacco products. At one point, the law in Europe started saying "you can not do that", so tobacco advertisements disappeared.
Here in Berlin fast food chains are for the tourists. You pay way too much for crappy food. If you know where to go, you can sit down for a proper meal and pay far less.

There are about 40 Mc Donald's restaurants in Berlin. About 1 per 100K citizens. There are a few other chains operating of course but they are similarly small. There are 4000 kebab restaurants in Berlin. And loads of pizza, pasta, currywurst, sushi, etc. restaurants too. Probably close to 10K restaurants or so. The vast majority of which are not franchises. It's great.

Germany just seems to have a lot of rules that prevent franchising from being very lucrative. Whatever it is, I love it. I'm from the Netherlands. That's more like the US. Restaurants are expensive. Sitting down for a quick, affordable lunch is not much of a thing. It's either cheap fast food or self-catering in the super market/bakery. With all the health consequences as well. Obesity is on the rise and it's a poverty correlated thing. Food poverty means lots of fast food.
Yes but what is it - they are just elements - no description of what they are.
I found this article at a time where I had the opportunity to accept two job offers, so I had nothing to lose by pushing for more salary. The negotiation went well and got a substantial increase in the final offer on company A. On the other hand, company B dropped their offer. So watch out, if company B had been my only option I would have lost my opportunity.

I was clear from the beginning that I had another offer at hand, to use as leverage.
>..you are very serious about monetizing it

Ads aside, I'm curious to know what you think would be a good monetizing strategy for this kind of games (simple, online): subscriptions, sponsorship, donations..?
Readability matters and humans like that. Otherwise XML would have won.

https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
You understand go doesn't have exceptions right?
I wish I could unread that.
And iOS programming makes you fill dictionaries with alternating k,v,k,v,nil
I've made a big stink about this last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42133181

They've updated the documentation on /etc/ssh/sshd_config
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cloud-init/+bug/20...
The Freeze-Frame stories are officially called the Sunflower series. While different, they have the same alien creepiness that Watts is so good at, the extreme time frame (millions of years) makes it all the more chilling.

It's a novel plus one prequel short story ("Hotshot"), two sequels ("The Island" and "Giants"), and two short fragments. All the shorts can be found on his web site, I believe.

I also really enjoyed Echopraxia, the sequel to Blindsight. I think some people thought it was too different from what they expected; it doesn't pick up Siri Keaton's story, but tells a vaguely concurrent one. There's a Portia connection there too, by the way.

Consider Phlebas is one of my favourite Banks novels, but I know many people dislike it. If this is your first Banks book, don't write off Banks completely. Finishing Phlebas is a great stepping stone to read Look to Windward, which I personally think is Banks' best Culture novel.

What's Transference? The Ian Patterson book?
> just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.

This is absolutely untrue. Living organisms _must_ deal with damaged DNA all the time or they wouldn’t be able to live for very long. There are many ways our environment can cause DNA damage, and radiation is definitely one of them. At low levels of radiation our own self–repair mechanisms easily fix the damage and no harm is actually done. This is especially good since we live in a constant bath of radiation all the time. We cannot escape it so it’s a good thing we don’t need to.

What isn’t good is that because of politics and fear most government regulations do not recognize this. Flawed safety regulations like this cost us a huge amount of money every year, both directly in the form of higher costs and indirectly in the form of lost opportunities.
Full Stack Starter: build an image gallery from scratch without frameworks
Also, real ppm for this kind of thing is supposed to be by weight, so that would ideally be pounds per million-pounds.

IOW if they dumped a million pounds all over the place, and there was 1 ppm of trace lead content, then there was one full pound of unwanted lead scattered across the same acreage as the 900,000+ pounds of active ingredient.

However, ppm for environmental laboratories conventionally means milligrams per liter since that's a close equivalent to weight ppm, but realistically only for water samples. So for test material having a density different than water, some correction is needed which can often be neglected, but the real number is usually within the same order of magnitude.
Having implemented DDA code a bunch of times, I find it easiest to think about it in lazy functional terms: it's like a takeWhile on a merge (or union) of infinite ordered streams of ray t-values.

In other words, decompose the problem into one of finding where the ray crosses the X grid lines and the Y grid lines, and the mental image is:

+-------+-------+-------+ | | | | -------------------------
| | | ^ | | | | ^ | ^
| | | / | | | | / | /
| | | / | | | | / | /
+-------+-------+-*-----+ | | | / | ------------------*------
| | |/ | | | |/ | /
| | * | | | * | /
| | /| | | | /| | /
+-------+-----*-+-------+ = | | / | | U --------------*----------
| | / | | | | / | | /
| | / | | | | / | | /
| | / | | | | / | | /
+-------+-*-----+-------+ | | / | | ----------*--------------
| |/ | | | |/ | | /
| * | | | * | | /
| o| | | | o| | | o
+-------+-------+-------+ | | | | -------------------------

Now, if our ray has origin o, and direction d, the position of any point along the ray for a t-value is:

x' = o.x + t * d.x
y' = o.y + t * d.y.

Where's the first grid intersection in X? Assuming d.x is positive, it'll be at ceil(o.x). So solve for t:

ceil(o.x) = x' = o.x + t * d.x
t = (ceil(o.x) - o.x) / d.x.

Then, since the grid lines are spaced 1 unit apart, every subsequent intersection will be 1/d.x further along in t. In other words, the ray t-values of all the grid crossing in X are stream generated by a simple linear function:

((ceil(o.x) - o.x)/d.x) + step * 1/d.x.

And exactly the same thing applies in Y for the Y grid crossings.

So let's say that we have a ray with origin (0.8, 0.2) and a direction of (0.5, 0.25). Then we get:

X-crossings = [0.4, 2.4, 4.4, 6.4, 8.4, 10.4, ...]
Y-crossings = [3.2, 7.2, 11.2, 15.2, ...]

Then we merge those two infinite ordered streams:

[0.4, 2.4, 3.2, 4.4, 6.4, 7.2, 8.4, 10.4, 11.2, ...]
X X Y X X Y X X Y ...

and those are the t-values where we walk from one cell to another. Keeping track of which value came from which stream tells us whether the step is in X or in Y (it's always one or the other - a DDA never takes a diagonal step). Continue lazily generating and merging the stream this way until you run into something, run out of bounds, or just decide you've gone far enough to stop.

Obviously, there's some fiddliness when the direction has negative components or worse, zero, but it's not to hard to work out the adjustments for those cases. Likewise, you also want to be very careful about handling the case where the ray origin is exactly on a cell boundary. But again, focusing on just one dimension at a time helps when reasoning all that out.

Generalizing the concept to a DDA in 3D on a voxel grid isn't much harder, either: now you find the stream of Z-crossings as well and do a 3-way merge.

(If you ever want to vectorize grid traversal across multiple rays, there are some tricks to that in a 2006 SIGGRAPH paper that I worked on: https://www.sci.utah.edu/~wald/Publications/2006/CGT/grid.pd...)
Eventually we might also need non-US driven programming languages and OSes, that are needed to power such non-US based services.
As long as a substantial number of christians consider Israel a divine-ordained country, there will not be any repercussions for any crime they commit.

The Bible contains literal instructions for genocide, and many Christians bemoan anci nt Israel for not following those instructions to the letter.
Just feedback from me: I enjoyed it and found it non frustrating to use. Not sure if I would create an account for it though.
This is really good. Thanks for mentioning it.
I saw this in a linked article :

> some Rust code will explicitly check its Result types, while other Rust code sprinkles '?' around and accepts that if the program sails off the happy path, it simply dies.

This is blatantly false. Rust's '?' operator bubbles the error up the callstack, transforming it along the way (generally wrapping it in another error type) but it doesn't "simply dies" at all.