skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it can be best summed up in Craig Ferguson's joke he made when chatting with Robin Williams that he liked to go to London and do to the English what they had been doing to his people (the Scots) for hundreds of years.

Much was made of the double rainbow that appeared when the queen died, and I say that was God saying, "Things are going to be better now, now that that evil bitch is dead."

Maybe if the royals weren't spending their world rapings on 13 pomeranians (or whatever), there'd be more money for the poors.

I do like Harry, though, he's got enough of his awesome Mum in him to counteract his father's evil.

And now King Donald is decimating America. Such is the way of kings, my friends.
Do antibiotic-resistant bacteria respect borders?
Trickle Up Economics.

Sucked the life out of the middle and lower classes. A progressively weakening economy.

Then Brexit delivered the KO punch.

It's not difficult.

You're welcome.
This. The problem with looking at trade deficits is that they are comparative trade phallus envy that somehow "demand" regulatory "action" when others don't buy enough of our stuff. How dare them! These deeply-unpopular actions alienating allies certainly won't motivate them to purchase more but than can and will convince them to purchase a lot less. Losing customers abroad who don't want American stuff and losing customers at home who can't buy stuff from elsewhere or stuff from home since prices shot up and they were laid off. Nothing good will come of any of this because the leader is, no doubt, using breaking things for personal gain and to weasel their way into staying in power indefinitely by creating protests and/or war to justify it.
For what it's worth Gumroad left VC land several years ago.

https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting
No it doesn’t. It reinforces that copyright is the law. If you don’t violate someone’s copyright, you don’t need a lawyer.
Bro what are you even talking about? ControlNet has been able to produce consistent assets for years.

How exactly do you think video models work? Frame to frame coherency has been possible for a long time now. A sprite sheet?! Are you joking me. Literally churning them out with AI since 2023.
Me too. They're addicted to cable news that gives endless praise with animations of waving flags.

It's clearly just non-stop propaganda.

The lying some people do to sell a couple ads...
Hal Abelson, casually enraging functional programing CS people around the world.
The issue with variables and loops that OP described is worse with React, since you create closure inside the render function for event handlers, and if that closure captures any state variables (rather than a getter function for example), then you'll end up referencing stale state. React relies on linters to protect against this, but that only goes so far and the API design makes it easy to screw up, so you have to be on your toes.

Edit: To be clear, this is specifically a React hooks problem, not the old React with classes.
Or did not approve of either option. No way to tell. Same result.
In the cities I have been to this is not my experience, at least in South America and the Nordics. The wear and tear of lots of people means you need to design things differently in well visisted areas, but there a square meter sees more people in a day than you get in a year in small villages.
How do you verify it or connect it with other papers if it gives you a summary instead of linking to the paper itself?
Links:

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/browserstate

GitHub: https://github.com/browserstate-org/browserstate

Feel free to ask questions or share your feedback!
Not quite immediately post-45. That was when the modern welfare state was being put together. Winning a war was the peak of state capacity. Things were still going OK around 63 and the "white heat of technology" speech (why can I not easily find a full transcript of this?). Wheels came off in the inflation era leading to the "winter of discontent", followed by a massive and explicit backlash against socialism and in favor of individual profit. Thatcherism. North Sea oil solved the money problems, but papered over the more structural problems. Blairism managed a second financial services boom, but then .. 2008. And we've never recovered.
> IT contractors, engineers, healthcare professionals

You're not disagreeing with me, other than that I don't consider those "working class" occupations. In general in the UK those are quite often middle to upper middle class.

> tradespeople

Still do run small limited companies AFAICT. Certainly the ones I used to interact with. Mostly because they have multiple clients and are a lot harder to point at and say "that's not a real business!"
Regardless of what anyone thinks of the website, it's likely that the only way the code exists is that ream of paper. While Bill Gates could easily have bought an OCR reader to make a text file of it with the loose change in his couch, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to just scan it in and provide that scan.
Failure Studies: Why Schools Should Teach How Things Fall Apart
I don't think that's how it's meant to be read, if you consider it in the context of the original quote, it's about good and empathetic minds going to waste because of the demands of society. We put so much social and economic capital into tech that it's better to push five lines of code for Facebook than be a doctor, which are the "good minds going to waste".
Probably an over-representation in the training data really so it's causing overfitting. Because using training data in amounts right from the Internet it's going to be opinionated on human culture (Bart Simpson is popular so there are lots of images of him, Ori is less well known so there are fewer images). Ideally it should be training 1:1 for everything but that would involve _so_ much work pruning the training data to have a roughly equal effect between categories.
Maybe the tool knows nothing.
But it allows me to learn niche things often much faster than via a web browser. So it has to value for me.

I think there’s lot of dangers and problems with it and frankly I’d probably be happier if it was never invented. But even then I can still see the value it has
Except our superior ability to collaborate is arguably our strongest asset.
Agree - but don't think there is a "best mind(s)". We're creatures of repetition and thus specialization, and so our minds can get really good at very specific things, but ultimately we're all dumb apes trying to survive as best we can.
Do they have SPLIT and JOIN also? I have long wished for those in Excel
A lot of the testimonial photos for this show the AI literally deciphering the text Nutrition Information label.

Any other interpretive situation based solely on a camera has so many inherent flaws as to render this almost useless.
To make matters worse, there's also litte evidence that the increases in spending on SEND provision have led to better outcomes.

I can't help feeling like this is a vicious cycle - the lack of community facilities is causing greater isolation, causing a rise in health needs and so on.
Venjent slaps, and this is his best track (imo).

His door genre deserves recognition too.
Small children typically ignore race, but there does seem to be (at the very least) a cultural tendency towards racism as people move into adulthood. There is a good book about it called "Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" https://www.amazon.com/Black-Kids-Sitting-Together-Cafeteria...

People's characters need to be formed, I would at least argue, to overcome a normal tendency to be uncomfortable with difference.
NeetoRecord
I wish this were a joke, but I’ve actually worked on a production application designed like this.

They use a single table with columns named PK1, PK2, PK3, PK4, and so on, dumping all kinds of data into it. users, orders, addresses, and even blob data. For example, PK1 might be the user ID if the row is a user entry, or PK2 could be the address ID if it’s an address object. And if PK1 happens to contain a #, that might mean it’s a user profile object because apparently that’s how they chose to distinguish it.

As more entities were added, the table just kept morphing into this unstructured, unreadable mess.

There’s absolutely no good reason for this kind of design. It’s just a lack of understanding of how NoSQL systems are meant to be used. The team was told to “utilize NoSQL solutions,” and this is the chaos they produced.

I wish I could unsee it, but the damage is already done. It still gives me nightmares.
alfalfa is water-intensive. This export is straight up resource theft.
Moreover, it was kind of a standard for any scripting language at that time. In other words, this was generally expected behavior. (E.g., compare AWK, Perl, etc.)
If not Minecraft, there's other games that scratch the "manipulate your environment and build something" itch. Space Engineers, Satisfactory, Populous from back in the day, uuh. There's a long list.

Actually, before Minecraft, Notch worked on a game called Wurm Online, which was a tedious and buggy MMO but which allowed you and your friends to manipulate the sandbox world, dig holes, flatten the environment, build roads, etc. With teamwork, they could do some really interesting things. But like I said, it was pretty tedious and slow.
The post 1970s financialization of everything [1] is probably behind most of Britains decline. The UK was just an early adopter [2].

Embracing that nonsense (including rampant neoliberalism) has really rotted the backbone out of our society.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-GDP-sha...
There's a throwaway quote about the school Gates was attending spending a few thousand dollars a year on a terminal and computer time.

The inflation factor is around 5X, so that's maybe $15k to $20k in modern money.

There were very few schools in the world with a five figure budget for computer experiments for a handful of pupils in the early 1970s.
I run an IT consultancy and often work in both commercial buildings and private residences across the UK. When it comes to the latter—trust me, the elites (and even the upper-middle class) still have an extraordinary amount of money.

What’s changed is that no one cares about the public sphere anymore. You wouldn’t believe the contrast between Britain’s crumbling high streets and the lavish interiors of some of these homes. I’ve seen marble floors, $10K TVs, $100K kitchens, $150K bathrooms. Home offices decked out with $50K worth of gear. Wine cellars, indoor spas, private gyms—you name it.

Even on the commercial side, it’s wild. It’s not uncommon to walk into a privately-owned or government-owned building and be greeted by a $5 million art piece in the lobby. Then you start looking around and adding up the costs—“they probably spent $10K just on that fancy trim around the doorframe.” Or you notice a particularly heavy door, Google it, and realize it costs $15K per door. Then you start counting the doors—there are thousands. The rabbit hole goes deep, and the amount of wealth becomes staggering. It’s just hidden in plain sight.

But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity.

So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
The current administration was also cited during elections as not being part of Project 2025 and not going to follow it.

Actions speak louder than words. We will see how it plays out I suppose.
OpenAI's Viral Privacy Trick
Danes: Feel free to give this bug report an upvote.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256032425
Series of such "improvements" could be fame and fortune in your team/group/vertical. In such places, the guy who toots the loudest wins the most.
No, actually his plan for Brexit was the most coherent, and Truss/Kwarteng were on the right track but executed appallingly badly.

If you go for Brexit the "hard way" as the country did then your way forward to compensate and to create growth is to find new competitive advantages and there are not many options apart from going low tax low regulations.

This never happened. Truss/Kwarteng made a bad and short-lived attempt and that was it.

I am not saying Brexit was a good idea but this is one of those massive changes of course that require "going big or going home" instead of trying to keep things as they were when that's impossible, and slowly fail (it does not mean that it would necessarily succeed but at least you're going for it).
>{x} is not very profitable

This sums up most of the problems with the late stage capitalism system we are forced to live in.
But the concentrations of training data because of human culture/popularity of characters/objects means that if I go and give a random person the same description of a character that the AI got and ask "who am I talking about, what do they look like?" there's a very high likelihood that they'll answer "Indiana Jones".
> Game theory? Never heard of it! I did watch A Beutiful Mind. Great film, wonderful film. I watched the first 20 minutes. You know, I thought it was about me. It could've been. Maybe it was. But I stopped watching. It was too boring.

- Trump
I remember when the USA government spaceweather websites and FTP sites went away in the early 2010s. It was terrible. They replaced them with the current javascript monstrosities and hid the raw directories. It made automating mirroring of space weather resources much harder.
Source on his backstory being made up?
I have been paying my local laundromat to do mu laundry for over a decade now, it’s probably cheaper than youre imagining and sooo worth it.
This is exactly how I feel and I can't want to start sharing this with people.

You can leave the country and not tell anyone the field you are in and inevitably the topic will come up.

Insufferable.
UK citizens have ALWAYS been "less satisfied than ever with the NHS". It's a service - no one likes services. But it still goes on looking after us, pretty well.
There is some truth to it, but it also isn’t exactly accurate. #2 isn’t true for me in its generality. Some new things were exciting and revolutionary, but by no means all. Regarding #3, some new things still excite me today, and many more could excite me, but nobody is making them. Even #1 isn’t accurate. What’s true is that “excitability” goes down over time the more one is aware of the flaws and trade-offs.
It’s totally superficial rage porn. Solutions offered include “a total rethink” and “an integrated strategy”. Brilliant…
> It's very difficult to decide which module to put an individual function in

It's difficult because it is a core part of software engineering; part of the fundamental value that software developers are being paid for. Just like a major part of a journalist's job is to first understand a story and then lay it out clearly in text for their readers, a major part of a software developer's job is to first understand their domain and then organize it clearly in code for other software developers (including themselves). So the act of deciding which modules different functions go in is the act of software development. Therefore, these people:

> Quite often coders optimise for searchability, so like there will be a constants file, a dataclasses file, a "reader"s file, a "writer"s file etc etc.

Those people are shirking their duty. I disdain those people. Some of us software developers actually take our jobs seriously.
There aren't that many (11) levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_of_the_People%27...

Functionally, the US mostly works the same way - people start in small local roles and move to county, state, and national levels over time. It's just not enforced as a hard rule, just a practical thing.
What's wrong? Full breakdown here if you're interested

https://birchlermuesli.substack.com/p/copy-garys-badeconomic...
Can you explain this logic a bit more because it genuinely confuses me, but I hear it articulated so often that I feel I must be missing something. I find it helpful to walk through the logic:

For example, it is frequently framed that there are only two (real) candidates, not voting or voting for a third party is the same thing as voting for <person I don't like>. The <person I don't like> is always Trump if you're talking to someone more on the left, and is Hilary/Biden/Kamala if talking to someone on the right, but the logic is the same (a contradiction should already be starting to be apparent). Both people are using the same logic to make the same claim, but they obviously can't both be correct.

It seems to me that the choice isn't actually binary. At least, if you insist that it is, then you must also conclude that a person actually gets two votes, because consider the following scenario:

Imagine that both major candidates (Candidate A and Candidate B) each deadlock and get 10 votes per, and a third party Candidate C gets 1 vote. I also have a vote, with the following possible outcomes:

1. I vote for Candidate A. This brings the total to A: 11, B: 10, C: 1

2. I vote for Candidate B. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 11, C: 1

If it were a binary, there wouldn't be any more possible outcomes. Yet,

3. I vote for Candidate C. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 2

4. I abstain from voting. This brings the total to A: 10, B: 10, C: 1

All four of those outcomes are mathematically different, which doesn't seem possible if it's actually just a binary choice. If the outcome is different when I vote for Candidate B vs voting for Candidate C or not voting at all, then it seems self-evident that they are not the same thing. If I vote for A or B then they win, but if I vote C or not at all then there's a deadlock and a runoff. Clearly those are not the same thing.
Yup it's called overfitting. But I don't suppose you'd appreciate a neutral model either.
> comfortable, house paid off retiree with a part time job, mostly living off accumulated wealth and prestige.

That's the median voter.

Or at least the picture of the median voter all the parties are chasing. Which is very bad news for the working population, because policy gets heavily influenced by clueless retirees.
I thought it was good. It evoked a lot of mental images and feelings for me and was thought provoking. I enjoy these types of experiences, and its increasingly rare as I don't engage with literature much anymore. Therefore for me it had utility.
Both JS and PHP are rather footgun-rich languages; have you tried Python, Java, Kotlin, or C#?
I ran into the same thing recently. Did you end up seeing a boiler plate template site filled with Lorem Ipsum?

I believe there were certain DNS resolvers that seemed to have been incorrectly resolving. Whether that was intentional or not I didn't have time to look into.
> If they'd just stuck with what worked instead of chasing the shiny glimmer of modern web dev they wouldn't be in this exact situation.

I'm going to think about that sentence for the rest of the day.
I meant 10-15 years as in "when they are 16-20 years old and actually start to understand how fucked we are".

> Realistically if this is a problem it's my adult grandkids at most or great-grandkids who it would begin to impact.

It's already impacting us. We are measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening faster than the one of the dinosaurs.

The way it's going, GenZ (probably millenials) are more likely to die from this than from age. After having lived in global war times. Anyone in their thirties or less being anxious about their retirement are missing the bigger problem they will be facing at that age.
Speech now streaming from brains in real-time
What is the downside of the scenario where only the rich can afford to own houses or land? After all historically, the rich owned the land and just allowed the poor to live there.
Yup. That one.

Managed to get on Question Time because he's very good at telling people what they want to hear.
Yes, people grow old, but I don’t think there’s a rational fear people will ever live forever. However, there are diseases and conditions that are age-related that if solved would improve people’s quality of life, especially the last decade or two of their lives.
The knee-jerk reactions of the incompetent sycophants further hemorrhaging actual talent.

It's further indication that Donald Trump has descended into dementia plain and simple.
https://x.com/shl/status/1908146557708362188

Probably not entirely, but straight from the author.
I prefer cURL as well, but according to official sources it is curl. :D Not sure how it is pronounced though, I pronounce it as "see-url" and/or "see-U-R-L". It might be pronounced as "curl" though.
These high costs are attractive to investors in those fields though. The question is, WHY is there still a lack of investment despite those attractive high returns?
Wikipedia calls it "China–United States trade war"... would this be thought to be inaccurate?
Cyberattacks by AI agents are coming
I doubt Britain's problems will ever really be solved. We only seem interested in making them worse. I blame the media, mostly. They're not interested in telling people the truth as much as getting Nigel Farage on every other week to argue about immigration. The issue with news is that you can only really report on new stuff, whereas the problems we face are chronic and old. My faith is our political system is utterly crushed, and I suspect the same is true for many other people. The ground is ripe for fascism.
An aspect of these self-improvement thought experiments that I’m willing to tentatively believe.. but want more resolution on, is the exact work involved in “improvement”.

Eg today there’s billions of dollars being spent just to create and label more data, which is a global act of recruiting, training, organization, etc.

When we imagine these models self improving, are we imagining them “just” inventing better math, or conducting global-scale multi-company coordination operations? I can believe AI is capable of the latter, but that’s an awful lot of extra friction.
An island of penguins ended up on Trump tariff list
Yeah, I could triple the "read this to learn more" links and it'd still not cover all of it.

"The entire history of the Republican Party since Goldwater, our bad system of elections, the entire history of postwar 'think tanks', the McLuhan-sense 'message' of TV and especially the Internet, and a slow-motion more-successful knock-off of the Business Plot" covers a lot of ground.
The same Accuweather whose previous CEO (and founder's brother) was Donald Trump's nominee to run NOAA in the last administration?

Color me shocked that, under the last administration and when it looked like the Trump campaign had a good chance of self-destructing, they wrote a milquetoast "we don't support this at all ;-)" press release about his agenda.
They shouldn't be surprised. Stuff like this is exactly what they said they were going to do and ~70 million voted for it and ~90 million weren't compelled enough to vote for the other viable choice or choices
I definitely agree there were some individuals who made money from the imperial project, but it wasn't rational at the level of the British state/monarch.

> Like with every colonial power...

Some colonial powers may have genuinely increased the wealth of the imperial state. The Spanish and Mongol empires stand out in my mind here, although I don't have a precise source of accounting.
Thanks for the links, that adds a lot of important context.
I was going to ask, is there anything like it where you can build a physical computer out of discrete parts? but you answered that in the last remark.

I would love a physical / homebuilt computer of sorts though. Ideally with clicking switches or lights and the like.
A growing trade deficit with China not respecting "intellectual property" and other such things?