Software Development
Notes on what makes good and bad software development experiences
Addiction
Notes from around the internet on living with, overcoming and life after addiction
Mental Health
Notes from around the internet on factors impacting our mental health in the modern age
Capitalism
Thoughts on how capitalism intersects with work, art, technology, urban planning, life and love from around the internet
Terra Ignota
Interesting concepts from the world of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota novels
Social Media
Comments on the state of different social media services, user generated content and recommendation algorithms
Education
Notes from around the internet on what makes for good and bad education experiences at different stages of life
Games
Thoughts on video game design, mechanics and storytelling from around the internet
Install postmarketOS on Android phone and use Docker as a home server
For those looking for portable servers, the majority of the Motorola G series phones with Android 14 including models under 120 USD have a battery charge limiter down to 60% adjustable.
The battery will drop at least 15 percent before recharging to the specified percentage for coulomb counter drift compensation.
Most lithium UPS avoid this by using LiFePO4.
Moto G04 with 128GB Storage (UFS - 400MB/s read/write), 4GB RAM and 2TB capable SDcard UHS-I slot is just 90 USD.
ZRAM is enabled by default at 2GB and 2GB storage swap, it's adjustable under "RAM boost" setting.
Disabling the app background killer is one toggle away for Termux.
No root required.
Wi-Fi does around 350Mbit with no buffer bloat, and supports simulatenous softAP and station mode on the same channel (a.k.a repeater). This is useful for out of band management, e.g if Wi-Fi AP goes down, there is a small hiccup though.
The Type-C port is dual role with charging support.
Most Type-C phones that are rooted with 3rd party battery charge control app will disrupt power to USB peripherals if a hub with a charger is connected on recharge.
I do hope a Pi A+ or something similar and popular exist in the future at a reasonable price, considering that we have phones that are cheaper than the Pis while missing GPIO but adding camera, speaker, screen, and a headphone jack which was also removed on the Pi 5.
Mini PCs vary a lot, and hard to setup headless, especially projects utilizing an easy DIY approach like the Pi-hole or kit/pre-flashed SDcards.
Comments comparing a new Pi with used PC isn't fair, used Pis are a lot cheaper after shortage.
2024-12-06T17:30:08.181802Z
Americans React to UnitedHealthcare CEO's Murder: 'My Empathy Is Out of Network'
I'm not really all that clued up on all of this, but overall seems like a Shinzo Abe-type situation: no, we shouldn't be assassinating people. But also: you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences. This seems just as much of a failure of society in dealing with these kind of nihilistic parasites sucking our society dry as anything else.
2024-12-05T19:32:17.549613Z
Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
Well, let's go:
> low unemployment
In an economy where you can easily deliver packages or drive uber, there will always be close to zero unemployment. This number stopped making sense a few years ago.
> strong consumer spending
In a high inflation environment, one has to consume "strongly" just to maintain the same standards of living.
> average income increasing at a rate higher than inflation
If you underreport inflation, then the average income will increase faster. But even if not, average is not what you and I receive, and it is determined by some people making lots of money while others have stagnating salaries.
> majority is doing better than most years
You cannot prove this from the above points. Average income doesn't mean that the majority is doing better. Something called inequality will not allow that to happen.
> They might not feel that way though
That is pop psychology at its worst. Nobody cares about feelings, you just need to look at the numbers in a critical way.
2024-12-05T05:25:15.238469Z
A Personally Significant Bluesky Moment
> Ah yup. Mass moderation, aka silencing dissenting voices.
Bluesky moderation is primarily based around labeling and blocklists; that is, people _choosing_ to either be warned of content, or simply not see it. For instance, I use a moderation service which places a label on any posts from users which use AI imagery (because it’s a bad sign; most such users are some form of scam), and subscribe to a blocklist which outright blocks transphobes (because life is too short to listen to their one joke that they’ve been making for the past 25 years). This is all consensual. But, like, if you _want_ to see this stuff, just… don’t use the third-party moderation tools.
2024-12-03T19:20:11.836211Z
In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse
The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
2024-12-02T17:35:34.443411Z
Ask HN: Bluesky Accounts Worth Following for HN Enthusiasts
You just have to ride the wave with social media sites. Same as dating apps. Use them before they rot.
2024-12-01T23:28:36.211897Z
Thoughts on the software industry
I've gotten into the habit of actually reading the manuals for my synths and DAW after realizing I was missing out on lots of little quality of life things. I've used enough synths--and not just subtractive!--that I can usually pick a new one up in seconds, but the people who made it and the people who know it best contribute to those manuals and the stuff they share can lead to massive leaps in proficiency.
2024-12-01T15:15:34.309126Z
If not React, then what?
Most webapps would be dramatically improved if the developers were banned from using any JavaScript on the client side in the first version, and allowed only to apply progressive enhancements from there.
2024-12-01T10:51:57.313691Z
The Engagement Is Better on Bluesky
Every single social media platform of note charges accounts for “reach”. Your post gets seen by 1-15% of your followers unless you “promote” it with a marketing spend.
Bluesky has no mechanism for artificially limiting the reach of legitimate messaging, and no business impulse to build one. It really is something new under the sun.
2024-11-30T01:36:04.447482Z
Fly.io outage – resolved
It feels like fly is trying to repeat a growth model that worked 20 years ago: throw interesting toys at engineers, then wait for engineers to recommend their services as they move on in their careers.
Part of that playbook is the old Move Fast & Break Things. That can still be the right call for young projects, but it has two big problems:
1) AWS successfully moved themselves into the position of "safe" hosting choice, so it's much rarer for engineers to have influence on something that's seen by money men as a humdrum, solved problem;
2) engineers are not the internal influencers they used to be, being laid off left and right the last few years, and without time for hobby projects.
(maybe also 3) it's much harder to build a useful free tier on a hosting service, which used to be a necessary marketing expense to reach those engineers).
So idk, I feel like the bar is just higher for hosting stability than it used to be, and novelty is a much harder sell, even here. Or rather: if you're going to brag about reinventing so many wheels, they need to not to come off the cart as often.
2024-11-26T19:33:14.310361Z
Against the Dark Forest
AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.
It’s an interesting contrast to actual dark forest theory—-AI doesn’t want to destroy us, so we don’t need to hide for existential sake. But imagine walking outside and as soon as you do, innumerable copies of you spring up, and each action and sound you make is replicated and amplified. Like a weird Phantom Tollbooth meets Alice in Wonderland on DMT
2024-11-23T06:36:08.721196Z
Against the Dark Forest
Real talk. The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology] enables them to manipulated into building systems which reproduce and reinforce social structures and social relations in ways that they would otherwise object to.
To the degree that we've collectively built a dark forest, it's been in part due to this lack of multi-disciplinarianism.
Humans are amazingly adept at rationalization.
2024-11-23T06:34:07.778309Z
Why so many families are "drowning in toys"
The article is not talking about the real cause: There is an ongoing extermination of young people through low birth rates. Any child today is inheriting toys from several childless uncles and aunts and friends of parents, or getting presents from them.
2024-11-22T16:33:44.079289Z
Why so many families are "drowning in toys"
> Shelves overflowing with cars and blocks and action figures can be just as stressful for kids as they are for parents. Sometimes “kids don’t play with anything, because there’s just too many options,” said Sarah Davis
I find it quite interesting that "choice fatigue" is found just about everywhere, from what show to watch on Netflix to what toy your kid picks up. Semi related anecdote but I recently picked up a Steam Deck with the intention of emulating PS2 games. One thing I was very intentional about is to not load it up right away with every game imaginable but rather, go one game at a time, much like I used to when I still had to buy these games at the store.
I use the Deck quite often and attribute much of that to the fact that I limited my game options, as if I loaded up every game I could possibly play then I would just drown in choices.
2024-11-22T16:32:56.454353Z
ICC issues warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas officials
This is a good example of the core problem with this academic and religious sophistry, i.e., unless something is documented in a very specific gate-keeper approved way, it must not have happened or is not real, in spite of empirical evidence, observable reality right before our own eyes.
It leads to things like accepting the most heinous and horrible things by the worst types of people humanity can produce, who think themselves as some kind of demigod, stone age, chosen people psychopath supremacists who can slaughter you like bugs while you sleep in your home are are trying to get food for your starving children.
2024-11-21T16:13:04.549377Z
Call for Developer Projects
I tried doing that with Twitter a few years ago in an attempt to reduce the amount of posts related to US politics. I don't follow any political figures or commentators, only tech people and artists, but about half the posts on my feed were about US politics.
Although I ended up with a blocklist of around 100 words it was very much a losing battle and a waste of time.
2024-11-20T20:50:25.827684Z
Call for Developer Projects
I find that I want the opposite of the firehose: I want the thoughtful and smart people, and I want it to be about their interests.
I did sign up for bluesky, but it has the same failure as twitter: I don't want to hear about your politics just because I follow you.
I wish there was a way to force users to use 1 hashtag per post and then I could unfollow hashtags - but I suspect it would be playing wack-a-mole.
Really anything that aims to replace twitter should be forced to not optimize for engagement.
2024-11-20T05:36:49.436235Z
rust-blog/posts/rust-in-non-rust-servers.md at master · pretzelhammer/rust-blog
Shelling out to a CLI is quite an interesting path because often that functionality could be useful handed out as a separate utility to power users or non-automation tasks. Rust makes cross-platform distribution easy.
2024-11-19T18:51:53.953393Z
Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?
You don't have a choice. Any content you put online will be harvested by LLMs regardless of your intent, or any license you post to the contrary. That's already the norm and it isn't going to change any time soon.
hehehheh's comment is your best option - poison your content when possible. It's still going to be consumed but at least you can make the LLMs choke on it. Second best option is to never post content to the free internet, but even that's just a temporary measure - all accessible data (including private data) will be assimilated eventually.. But expecting a license to work in a post LLM world is just naive.
2024-11-18T11:47:11.831471Z
1M people have joined Bluesky in the last day
When I joined it, just as when I joined Mastodon, most of what I saw was just anti-Twitter and anti-Musk content, which I didn't really care to read about, either for or against both of them. It might just be who I was following but the people I followed were similar in both Twitter and Bluesky / Mastodon, mostly indie hackers and other small time SaaS founders, and even these people started posting a lot of anti-Twitter stuff, more than even talking about their own products. On Twitter, the same types of people just...didn't give a shit about any of the drama and I actually learned a lot about product building from their threads.
It seems like if you start a platform mostly as a reaction to another platform, you're gonna get the same sort of social media bubble, only of the opposite variety. That's why I still use Twitter currently, I just don't see the same issue that other people seem to have, and that's likely because I don't engage in politics or respond to trolls on there.
2024-11-15T14:50:50.266364Z
Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home
It's simpler - how will you have an affair if the secretary is not in the office?
Working remotely makes quality of life for upper management worse. They have to schedule meetings instead of randomly drop by. They lose socialisation. You have to remember that their career is their life and their achievement. Starting at the screen is not what they signed up for. If they get a better life but company loses 5% productivity, they will take that deal
2024-11-14T01:12:47.607551Z
Did scientists revive an extinct animal or just breed a less stripey zebra?
The question of 'Why bring back extinct species?' is fundamentally the same as 'Why save species from extinction?'. It's unspoken but seems to be widely understood that biodiversity and preventing its permanent loss has inherent value. It sometimes has economic or ecological value too, or the potential in the future, but even when that's not the case most would agree we should aim to minimize extinction of other animals - if for no other reason than it being easier to drive a species to extinction than revive any of the billions of extinct species out there. (at least for now)
It's curious that the response to bringing back mammoths and less-stripey-zebras is so lukewarm when there's very little of the same criticism directed at efforts to save obscure species that are in decline. Say it was discovered that a small herd of quagga had survived since we thought they died out in 1883, but without human intervention they will soon due to habitat loss. Imagine: "Why would we want to save them? The world is inhospitable to them now, their population declined for a reason. They have no use to us, and their niche isn't one that couldn't be filled by living species that we could import. To keep them from going extinct would be a cruel and irrational act of ego."
2024-11-11T19:37:49.823172Z
Did scientists revive an extinct animal or just breed a less stripey zebra?
> “Even if they succeeded, the obvious question is, what would you do with it?” said Stuart Pimm, a professor at the conservation ecology research unit at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “If you had a Woolly mammoth, you would put it in a cage. It’s a colossal exercise in ego.”
This is my thought about all these efforts. The mammoth people talk like it's about a solution to climate change, but that's obviously working backwards from their goal (revive the mammoth for reasons) to some sort of reasonable-sounding justification. They set out with different motivations in mind.
I'd ask the same question here: why try to bring back a species we already killed off? These won't be descendants of the animals we killed, so it's hardly a form of reparations. If it's about preserving the ecosystems we already have, there have to be more efficient ways to do that than rebreeding less stripe zebras.
It's hard not to see this as just the same impulse that led to the poodle: because we can and because it will look cool and draw attention and make money. The only difference is there's a slight nostalgic bent to the aesthetic.
2024-11-11T19:37:10.728508Z
Inside the $20M business of gutting failed Bay Area tech companies
Just do a web search for "office furniture liquidator" and include your nearest big city.
You are probably going to want the least flashy of the results, as all that flash comes at an expense ;)
I know that there are at least 2 good ones in Chicago and another that sells used hotel furniture (which I am not sure that I would willingly go into, but apparently there is a market for such things...).
These places are very much business-focused; it's not like walking into an IKEA. You'll probably have to get buzzed in through many doors and then sign in, where you'll be asked for both your name and business. If you don't have a business they aren't going to throw you out or anything, but probably ask you to write something like "<First Name><Last Name> LLC" so they can put you in their system. You probably have to get escorted to the sales floor but are free to wander around. You have to pay in full for what you want, up front, but will get issued an invoice and bill of sale as if you are a business (from their point of view, they aren't selling anything to you, they are selling to the business you are representing).
2024-11-11T17:39:02.771212Z
Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)
BTW, cooked rice can be frozen and used later without too much loss of quality which can make a larger capacity rice cooker quite useful even if you don't have a large family.
The frozen rice should be fine for at least a month and still OK after a few months although with some loss of flavor and/or texture.
I'm single but have a 14 cup rice cooker. It was a Wirecutter budget choice. They said it makes great white rice but undercooks brown rice. I wanted it for brown rice, and addressed the undercooking by simply putting in enough rice to make 12 cups instead of 14 but filling the water to the 14 cup level so it will cook longer.
After cooking I divide it into 12 one cup plastic covered containers and into the freezer it goes.
I reheat the frozen rice by putting it in a bowl, spraying a little water on it. Enough to wet the frozen block but to not leave much loose water on the bottom of the bowl. I cover the bowl with a plate, and microwave for 3 minutes on high in a 1250 watt microwave.
2024-11-09T22:12:40.512156Z
Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)
Under $1000:
Voice lessons at the local community school of music. I'm a lifelong musician, but was an almost entirely solitary one. I taught myself different instruments, but I never felt like I could get to basic competency teaching myself to sing. I decided to spend ~$200 for a semester of weekly 30 minute lessons. (The community school cooperates with the local university to offer lessons taught by university students for a low rate.)
My singing improved (more work is needed), but the life-changing thing was getting involved with the local music community. It turns out they have a shortage of piano teachers--I had mistakenly assumed there would be plenty in my town! So I started teaching piano, which had long been a dream of mine. The school also connected me to local performance opportunities that are now a part of my regular music routine. And ultimately, the experience encouraged me to enroll as a (part-time) music student at the university, which itself has been extremely enriching and a tremendously positive community experience.
2024-11-09T22:04:42.004619Z
Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)
Under $100:
- A dumbphone. Even if I’m not using it anymore, it has shown me what life I could be living without distractions. My anxiety and stress levels went down from about the second day using it, I became much more aware of my emotional state and the environment around me, it was a noticeable shift.
I no longer buy the arguments that we can control our smartphone addictions with will. The technology is too optimised for most of us to break free. And the addictions — too subtle for most to notice.
It may simply be a physiological addiction to checking email or for notifications every now and then. If you feel like you’d be missing out unless you check your phone several times a day, you have it. If you reach for your phone without thinking when you’re bored, you have it. It’s all about compulsive action.
I think much of the population is addicted. Certainly most of the online types.
Every interaction with your phone pulls you out of being present!
2024-11-09T22:04:26.137142Z
Democratising publishing
What strikes me about Ghost's story is that if they hadn't failed to get in to YC[0], they probably would have failed for real, because eventually the VCs would have come calling and they're obviously not a unicorn.
Instead, they have a successful organization providing a livelihood for almost 50 people, and real value to countless more.
[0]: [https://john.onolan.org/a-decade-after-being-rejected-by-yc/][1]
[1]: https://john.onolan.org/a-decade-after-being-rejected-by-yc/
2024-11-01T01:26:08.618484Z
On the influence of Japanese archaeological heritage on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Journal of Geek Studies
The absolutely best thing about being in Japan is realizing that games so often are recreating Japan ... and you don't realize it until you're there. You hike and exit the path at a small shrine and feel like you're in Zelda. You go through a tunnel and come out in a different (snowy, in my case) environment, and feel like you went through a Mario pipe. You drive on expressways in Tokyo with office buildings nearly right up to the road, with pillars between lanes and (in one spot) a highway going through a building and suddenly racing games don't seem so far fetched.
It's a trip, in the best of ways.
2024-10-30T19:08:00.739267Z
GLP-1s like Ozempic are among the most important drug breakthroughs ever
These are drugs designed to fight back against the food industry and its abusive practices which damaged the lives of millions of people without consequences.
But what will happen from now on? Will the obesity industry cave, or will they try to fight back and overcome the effects of the drugs with even shadier practices? Option 1 sounds overly optimistic to be honest…
2024-10-30T14:04:39.446300Z
Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
The latter. If you can not manage the company correctly and it leads to the job losses of hundreds of people not to mention the millions in salary that was wasted by their poor planning then yes they should be immediately relieved and not allowed to run any other company. They are clearly incompetent.
Considering dropbox is not facing some economic recession outside of its control we can only blame the CEO's incompetence.
2024-10-30T14:02:57.669385Z
Character amnesia in China
> Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand.
For those who can’t read Chinese here, I’ll just note that this is basically the equivalent of forgetting how to spell certain words in English. For example, I can read just fine, but there are still words I’m not good at spelling.
I’m just noting this so that this problem doesn’t seem totally exotic or specific to Chinese(/Japanese).
2024-10-27T20:12:54.798457Z
Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan
That was a fun read.
What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them.
I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects.
But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A.
Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about those topics and even the best students mostly go on to achieve only above average things.
My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. I feel terrible writing that because I’m certainly not as smart as him, but R is just so impressive and I’m glad he got his lucky break.
People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms.
Almost every extraordinary person I read about seems like they were 1 step away from being forgotten, and got some huge universal break that boosted them.
2024-10-22T09:13:58.070760Z
Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages
This guy is not competent to talk about what he's talking about.
>"JavaScript is, in my opinion, a working-class language. It’s very forgiving of types (this is one reason I’m not a huge TypeScript fan)."
Being "forgiving of types" is not a good thing. There's a reason most "type-less" languages have added type hints and the like (Python, Typescript, etc) and it's because the job of a programming language is to make it easier for me to tell the CPU what to do. Not having types is detrimental to that.
2024-10-21T08:35:45.159398Z
I Went from Reading 40 Books a Year to Reading 0
I had a very ambivalent reaction to this blog post. Most importantly, I find the author's relationship to reading quite odd. Basically, all he talks about is reading self-help books. Not really any reading for pleasure, nor does he discuss reading to learn about other non-self-help related topics that might interest him, just for learning's sake.
So he seems to approach reading primarily from a "how is this going to improve my life", usually from some sort of productivity-enhancing, "always be hustling" mindset. So I'm not surprised at all that he's found diminishing returns in this endeavor.
Don't mean to sound too harsh, but I actually did read his entire post and throughout the whole thing I kept thinking "Maybe try chilling TF out and just reading something you enjoy."
2024-10-17T15:40:48.444296Z
How long til we're all on Ozempic?
I've been on tirzepatide (Mounjaro) for 4 months now. I'm down 13% of my body weight. I realized that frequent cannabis consumption interferes with the weight loss, so I've kicked the habit from daily to occasionally on weekends. I've started walking 2-3 miles a day, 2-3 days a week regularly, in addition to eating less and being more motivated to calorie count.
All this to say, this drug has been life changing for me. I spend more time doing things I want to do, depression and anxiety have less of a hold on me now. I feel that this drug has allowed me to be the best version of myself I have been in a long time. The only side effects so far have been positive. I do worry about what I will do once it's time to titrate off the weekly dose and the best I can think of is that the habits I'm forming in the time on the drug I will have the resolve to continue after cessation.
I say this because I have battled depression, anxiety and obesity issues my entire life. I've had many failed attempts at getting back to a healthy, productive and non-obese lifestyle. I don't know what is so different about having the drug help me, but I can tell you that it has been different.
2024-10-12T05:31:06.307259Z
Proposal: JavaScript Structs
I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry.
The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript.
Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are constantly adding features. After all, it is their job. They are incentivized to keep making it more complex.
The first time I ever used C# was probably version 5? Maybe? We're on version 12 now and there's so much stuff in there that sometimes modern C# code from experts looks unreadable to me.
One of the reasons I have so much fun working in node/Javascript these days is because it is simple and not much has changed in express/node/etc for a long time. If I need an iterable that I can simply move through, I just do `let items = [];`. It is so easy and hasn't changed for so many years. I worry that we eventually come out with a dozen ways to do an array and modern code becomes much more challenging to read.
When Typescript first came out, it was great. Types in Javascript are something we've always wanted. Now, Typescript is on version 5.6 and there is so much stuff you can do with it that it's overwhelming. And nobody uses most of it!
This is probably just old man ranting, but I think there's something there. The old version I used to debate about was C vs C++. Now look at modern C++, it's crazy powerful but so jam packed that many people have just gone back to C.
2024-10-11T15:51:31.450393Z
US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward
Selling on Amazon requires a registered trademark. If you're a random factory in Shenzhen you don't care about branding, you just want to be able to sell your stuff on Amazon, so you just put together random letters in the hope that your registration won't conflict with anything else. You don't want to have to deal with back-and-forth with USPTO, you don't care about having a meaningful, memorable, or interesting name, you just want an Amazon listing.
Coincidentally the majority of USPTO trademark submissions are literally just random strings of letters now for this reason.
2024-10-08T02:18:14.831088Z
Rust needs a web framework
I came to Rust from Ruby-on-Rails and I’m absolutely done with method_missing and finding nils and NoMethodError in production.
This is not remotely a trade off I’m interested in making.
2024-10-07T11:38:00.712826Z
Rust needs a web framework
> I feel a lot of anxiety when I'm forced to touch fragile bits written in Ruby, Python, and JS.
I resonate with you even with TypeScript, since it's just annotating types but not the true value under the variable. You would have to go to a greater extent to make sure that everything from outside (library code, parsing HTTP responses, database queries, etc.) conforms to your annotated types. Even in the same project code created by other people, I often doubt the validity of the types, asking myself questions like: Should I validate this? What if this has already been validated, thus making mine a performance waste? Does this object contain extra sensitive information that could be leaked when used in a logger?
After having experience with Rust, working with TS feels like navigating a minefield where every refactor could detonate hidden bugs or behavior collectively accumulated by all the historic code and dependencies, small or large.
2024-10-07T11:02:31.464953Z
Hyprland 0.44
> Use libinput-gestures with hyprctl if you want to expand Hyprland’s gestures
Ah yes, I definitely want to download THREE programs and the entire Python runtime to get 3 finger volume control. Linux in 2024.
2024-10-07T01:17:51.105373Z
12 Months of Mandarin
I wrote my own dynamic keyboard layout to optimize typing speed while procrastinating on my dissertation.
15 years later I'm still using it. My dissertation not so much.
Procrastination is (sometimes) awesome.
2024-10-05T15:15:52.723852Z
Laying myself off from Amazon — Daniel Immke
I quit Amazon a couple weeks ago to start a startup, and I felt like I was reading my own story at some points. The tooling was the biggest thing dragging me back. It's hard to get excited about what you are building when you have to wait 2-4 minutes to preview your changes when most industry standard tools / stacks can do it instantly.
I left this feedback a bunch of times with different people in the org and I really hope they scrap their janky "frameworks" and dev tooling. They should just move to more standard open source tools options that evolve and get better quicker than barely maintained internal tooling.
Open Source tools also have bigger communities and resources online to debug and solve issues, compared to mediocre documentation from internal wiki. If absolutely needed, make thin wrappers above open source tools. Some other teams within Amazon had the luxury of using better tools, but I bet a lot of people are in the shoes I was in.
2024-10-01T21:54:23.738255Z
Bop Spotter
I love everything about this.
There is this undercurrent to our technology landscape. A kind of subculture somewhere in the locus of the hackersphere where a kind of punk-rock ethos rules the roost. I can only describe it as a live exploration of concepts _through_ technology, where functional fixedness is a foreign concept, including in the shared experience of social construct; everything becomes parts to be remixed in a way. In this place people just do things that, by way of having fun, just becomes art. It's emergent gameplay just by following a solitary "rule of cool."
I saw this page and was immediately transported back to the late 1990's and early 'aughts. The kind of "I glued these things together and just look" attitude that graced the pages of hackaday.com and slashdot.org. LED "throwies" come to mind.
In this case we have a de-facto art installation. I imagine that this was probably put together with odds and ends, maybe installed illegally, and probably doesn't have longevity in mind for its construction. It lightheartedly challenges some conventions, challenges ideas about privacy, brushes up against copyright, and is entertaining to boot. Most importantly, how it was made is less interesting than what it _does_, and where it carries the conversation of the observer. Or maybe: that's the point.
2024-09-30T21:05:34.479005Z
Sitina1 Open-Source Camera
> Also, ditch the old-timey film-camera look. I don't need 15 physical switches [...].
You really, really do. This may sound contradictory at first, but cameras are operated blind. Even when you’re looking at the camera, you’re not seeing the camera, you’re seeing the subject. Touchscreens suck at blind controls. (That’s not to say touchscreens aren’t useful: choosing the focus point doesn’t exhibit this conflict, even if some prefer a joystick; or if you’re already digging into menus to do something very particular and non-time-sensitive—astrophotography, focus stacking, live compositing—a touchscreen can be better than a D-pad.)
Cameras also weigh quite a bit and are supported with the fingers you’re using to operate them, so significantly shifting anything except maybe your right thumb usually means a real risk of dropping the camera. The weight also mounts a two-pronged attack on the size of your touchscreen (I’m assuming a walkaround camera, not weddings or sports): the camera needs to be smaller in order to be lighter, and a large part of its surface area needs to be available for you to grip. So, realistically, you don’t want a camera with a 6-inch touchscreen.
In conclusion, please please please don’t take away my physical controls. I know a touchscreen is cheaper, but please don’t. I’ll pay.
(Side note: it’s been almost fifteen years, and I still type slower on my Android phone than I used to on the QWERTY keyboard of my Nokia.)
2024-09-30T14:15:45.419855Z
Map with public fruit trees
when german people get free fruit: yes, that is well and good, the way the world is meant to be.
when non-german people get free fruit: aaaargh the immigrants are eating all the fruit! no respect for social norms! poachers! thieves!
2024-09-29T18:28:56.989427Z
Jonas Hietala: Why I still blog after 15 years
"I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read."
This is the key to do anything over a long period of time but certainly applies to blogging. Nothing is better than intrinsic motivation and something you do for yourself. I have a blog that I try to keep up with but fail at it to be consistent and one reason always has been "Who should I write it for". Something to take away here.
2024-09-25T15:23:47.749461Z
It's probably time to rethink "Building in public"
If I have to think on first principles, the reason why people are building things in public is because that's just a form of marketing and self-promotion. We're way past tech being the hard part of launching a product. The harder part is building the audience and trying to stand out. Building in public is probably the easiest way to build buzz, gain an audience, and name recognition.
2024-09-22T19:20:56.281930Z
Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray
The Linux kernel's license is copyleft, which has done all of zip, zilch, nada, zero, to prevent large corporations from benefitting from the enormous amount of free labor put into open source.
Git is GPL, this didn't prevent GitHub from becoming a multibillion dollar behemoth of a Microsoft subsidiary.
The value which companies capture is in using software, not modifying it and selling a proprietary version of the modified code. The only way to sustain this misapprehension is to notice every time permissively licensed software makes a company some money, and studiously ignore it every time copylefted software does the same thing.
2024-09-21T02:44:34.517578Z
Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, and going gray
Companies will continue to take advantage of free and cheap labor just as long as those people continue to serve.
Perhaps after this generation of LBIP moves on, the next wave won’t be so generous.
Also, open source doesn’t have to mean free labor. One could be paid a wage to work on open source.
2024-09-21T02:42:20.905963Z
Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated
I left the UK almost 20 years ago, and cannot imagine returning for any length of time.
My personal take on this is the UK got so used to having an empire, and specifically India, which could absorb more British bureaucrats than the UK could possibly produce. Consequently when Indian independence occurred this massive pipeline of producing people for running colonies had nowhere to go, and a large number moved back to the UK. What you have now is a class of people have been trying to run the country as a colony of itself with rather predictable results.
The UK has a broken culture, and until they start valuing things appropriately they will stay that way.
2024-09-20T13:34:49.695355Z
Why we'll stay remote
> However, if I know anything about high performing teams, it’s that you need to have mutual trust (which breeds psychological safety), and a shared model of what success looks like (metrics anyone?). Without these you’re going to struggle to produce results office or no office.
Hear, hear.
Note that these points are interdependent: Staff must trust management will collaborate and iterate on metrics, and management must trust employees will not game the metrics. If those things are true, then success measured against those metrics (that flows into business health and employee rewards) will reinforce mutual trust. The opposite is true, too.
2024-09-19T15:14:11.696455Z
Twitter shut off API access; users volunteering their own data for an open API
Social media used to be about content sharing, but it's clear that it's far more profitable to keep your users on your site at all times and keep the content they create in house rather than linked somewhere else.
HN is probably the last true aggregator site left that I know of.
It's partly why the web is so much worse. There's really no reason to create content outside of a walled platform is it is getting increasingly difficult to find an audience for it. Even blogging is an uphill battle since more and more social media sites penalize link sharing (they want you to create the content on their platform and leave it there).
That's why it's not surprising that these APIs are disappearing since the fundamental model has changed.
2024-09-18T18:17:41.047340Z
00Key a 75% Keyboard
I like keyboards with layers support, but layers aren't a replacement for sufficient keys. Holding down the layer button means another finger unavailable for hotkeys. For instance, on my keyboard (ZSA Moonlander) I have the function keys in an alternate layer. This isn't a problem for a normal press (layer shift + 2 => F2), but it makes pressing something like Ctrl+Shift+F2 rather painful.
Yes, for such shortcuts that I use frequently I can create special custom keys in layers, but when using new apps or particularly complicated apps with lots of hotkeys (IntelliJ) that doesn't scale.
2024-09-17T20:58:38.326346Z
How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
Wartime software is a disaster unless you mean it, and should be treated with extreme caution even if you do.
Wartime is an in house propaganda shop running posters that say Carthago Delenda Est, mid-level product managers discreetly but reliably dispensing Adderal, Ritalin, and Modafinil, open disdain for people who leave the office two days in a row, and paying enough that your people are just in a meaningful sense smarter than anyone else.
Every company gets to pull that maybe once, so it has to count. And it’s a hell of a place and time to see.
But if you’re not going the whole way, you’re far better off doing reliably good engineering in a repeatable way and poorly served by analogies to war.
2024-09-16T00:05:51.040913Z
How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
It all feels like theatre. Been working in many companies in “war mode” and they all think that in order to become profitable (none of them were) you need to push the most “important” features out of the door asap, otherwise your competitors will eat you alive.
It’s a lie. Executives and VPs and all those folks that earn 5x what a normal engineer earns, don’t really care about the company they work for. All they care about is to keep receiving the big pay checks until the ship sinks. Obviously you cannot just mandate “normal mode”, otherwise it wouldn’t look as if everyone is doing their best to keep the company afloat.
I hope in 10 years or so, we’ll see “wartime software engineering” with the same eyes we see today Agile and Scrum masters: snake oil.
2024-09-15T23:47:45.890817Z
AWS Makes Cloud Formation Stack Creation Up to 40% Faster
I've been working now around 8 years with cloud stuff. Not a lot of years compared with many of you here, but still enough to feel confident about my dislikes being more than just ignorance or inexperience.
I really wish AWS conceded the IaC war and stopped putting resources into Cloudformation. I never suffer as much as when I have to work with CF. The only worse thing I can think of is having to interact with Azure, which around 5 years ago was a terrible experience all around with regard to automation.
Going back to my CF rant: As soon as you get into any amount of complexity (and this also includes CDK, as it inherits all of CF problems), like for example using nested stacks and custom resources, it becomes almost impossible to troubleshoot incidents and problems. Error messages are obtuse. Fail states are too frequent. Update and deploy times are incredibly slow. Working with CF makes me reconsider my whole job every time. I curse the day that I chose to ignore my general precaution with CF and go for a database (Opensearch) managed with CDK.
There's a night and day difference between managing infrastructure state with Terraform and CF. Terraform also has its quirks and warts, of course, but at the very least there's very little that cannot be recovered by yourself. And it is also fast enough. CF is mostly a black box of misery.
2024-09-12T21:01:04.626233Z
New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike
This is such a weird response. Do you collectively interview for other jobs? No. Would you tell any other union this? No. Collectively bargain for your current job and raise the standards for everyone now and in the future. I don't know why tech is so hyper-individualist.
2024-09-11T14:10:39.365667Z
Iron Mountain: It's Time to Talk About Hard Drives
Pretty much. You see hobbyists getting data off of 30+ year old hard drives for the novelty of it, but I can’t imagine relying on that as a preservation copy. Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc. Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.
2024-09-10T22:31:44.024647Z
Cohost to shut down at end of 2024
I've found myself in an argument with some people on Lemmy last week who were genuinely trying to make the case that contributing $1-2 dollars per year should be more than enough to make an open social web sustainable.
It started on a thread asking how much it costs to run an instance per user. Because most admins runs things as a pure hobby, all answers were like "oh, my instance has a few hundred users and I run it on $20/month VPS, so it's just a few cents per user per month"
No one even considering factoring the cost of the developers, the hours put in by admin, the value of the work done by moderators. Nothing, the only thing that has an actual price is the stupid VPS, so this is all that they think should be chipping in for.
For completely unknown reasons, there is a big overlap between the people that make this type of argument and the people that are mystified about the fact so many smart people end up using their talents to optimize the amount of ads being pushed to people online.
2024-09-09T21:10:00.896762Z
You are not dumb, you just lack the prerequisites
It's funny, I was good at basketball as a kid. I played 'representative' and went to country championships.
Doing that made it clear to you that you might be good in your city but there were still kids who were way, way better than you were likely to be.
In contrast, smart kids often don't hit a 'bigger pool' until they get to university.
In some ways many places are better at handling kids who are good at a sport than they are kids who are good at school.
2024-08-25T15:13:11.078457Z
Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
Boq/Pod: canonical service frameworks and configuration automation all-in-one system. Boq and Pod give you blueprints for server configs, deployment, server discovery, environments + release pipelines, monitoring, alerting, canary analysis, functional testing, integration testing, unit testing and presubmit, server throttling, etc etc all for free with automated setup.
P2020 + Rollouts: This is for intent-driven deployment, where deployment configuration for jobs, networks, pubsub topics, and other resources are declaratively checked into source, and the Annealing system automatically finds diffs against production state and resolves those diffs (aka a rollout).
Automated job sizing: load-trend driven automated capacity planning. Separate from autopilot, which is a more time-sensitive autoscaler. This will actually make configuration changes based on trends in traffic, and request quota for you automatically (with your approval).
BCID: this is for verifiable binaries and configs in prod, where it requires two parties to make source changes, two parties to make config changes, two parties to approve non-automated production changes, and only verified check-in binaries and configs can run in prod, not stuff you build on your desktop machine.
2024-08-18T14:07:32.509066Z
Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
The traditional view is that young engineers should join startups in hope of a massive payoff if one goes big, but working for 10 years at BigCo with good salary and stock plans can set you up for life without any risk. One path to avoid is the one I took which was to work at a big tech co as a contractor. Good rates but nothing to show for it after 10 years other than the experience and whatever I had put in my 401K.
2024-08-18T02:06:41.528063Z
The TikTok Case Will Be Determined by What's Behind the Government's Black Lines
What an all around terrible situation. The US government has had over two decades to come up with general laws to protect personal information and maintain competition by requiring interoperability. Instead, they've sat on their hands while the surveillance industry has been allowed to keep festering, becoming ever more entrenched in Americans' day to day lives while being championed as bastions of "growth" and "innovation".
Now that a single foreign company has gained the level of breakout popularity that had already been achieved by 20+ domestic companies, it's time for pearl clutching galore. Give me a break! Instead of hanging their hats on this stupid election year stunt, the government could still create universal regulations that reign in the surveillance industry and give Americans control of their personal data and digital lives. Yet apart from essentially toothless regulations by a few states, still crickets.
So I guess the lawmakers' concerns still aren't really about protecting Americans, but just making sure nominally American surveillance companies at least get paid while Americans get abused? It seems like no matter which way this case gets decided and sets a precedent, We the People are set to lose.
2024-08-14T03:30:26.063699Z
Workers are stuck in place because everyone is too afraid of a recession to quit
Situation is quite ridiculous. People are working jobs they don't like and being low-performers on projects they have little control over while working on side projects that they like (for free) and not able to monetize their high performance on those projects. But no matter how good their side projects become, they cannot monetize them due to monopolizing forces. Earning money nowadays is all about having access to money which comes out of a safe money printer.
Yes, I could be doing all this useful stuff which makes 100x better use of my skills than my day job but those things don't pay because I won't be able to find any users for it. I don't have much time for it. I could find users but not users who are hooked to a money printer and can afford to pay. I'm sure most users would love it if they spent 20 minutes trying my side project, however, this is too high of a barrier.
The company I work for is already well hooked into a money printer and already has its own users but, unfortunately, I cannot produce my best engineering work there because there is too much legacy code and, understandably, my colleagues are as beaten down as I am over this industry so the will to innovate is severely limited. The best we can provide is stability.
I've (unfortunately) learned to perceive software complexity as a friend; in the same way as security consultants perceive hackers, as pharma companies perceive chronic illness and as those who build mouse traps perceive mice.
I already got burned badly for innovating at a previous company and experienced politics getting in the way in a mind-bendingly disturbing way so I'm not keen to experience that again!
Repeatedly in my career, I have seen the low-performers and outright saboteurs being promoted and the innovators being suppressed so my goal now is to emulate those people and engage in political bs. It's the only way. I'm a little bit older, I have to think about my finances now. I know how money flows through the economy and I just go straight for the jugular straight out of a money printer... Printing leafy, digital monetary goodness straight into my bank account. Oh that feels nice.
2024-08-13T00:46:29.623721Z
Susan Wojcicki has died
Younger folks forget that YouTube launched (2005) a few years before both the iPhone launched and Netflix pivoted to streaming (2007).
In that weird era, (a) average home Internet connections became fast enough to support streaming video (with a healthy adoption growth rate), (b) the most widely deployed home recording device was likely still the VCR (digitizing analog video from cable to burn to DVD was a pain), (c) there was no "on demand" anything, as most media flowed over centrally-programmed cable or broadcast subscriptions, and (d) people capturing video on mobile devices was rare (first gen iPhone couldn't) but obviously a future growth area.
So early YouTube was literally unlike anything that came before -- watch a thing you want, whenever you want.
2024-08-10T15:51:03.167187Z
"We ran out of columns" – The best, worst codebase
Writers often say that your first N books will be crap, and the answer to that problem is to just write more than N books. I feel that’s true of software as well - the first years of the magical programming I did without any expectations meant those projects were utter crap yet functional.
2024-08-03T14:51:51.750521Z
"We ran out of columns" – The best, worst codebase
The first line really hits me hard. There’s something so incredibly freeing about being a kid and doing stuff like coding. There’s simply no expectations. Even the smallest project felt like such an achievement. But now I code professionally and I don’t know how to turn off engineering brain. I don’t know how to be okay doing something poorly, but on my terms.
2024-08-03T14:51:43.118730Z
Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
As someone who develops email templates, you will never understand my pain. Figma creates a complete fantasy world for designers who do not understand that a pixel and color perfect design is going to be smashed to bits by the client.
Also, I feel the rise of React is partially to blame. CSS frameworks were clunky and constraining - but they forced you into a lot of design constraints developed on years of best practices. I can't tell you the number of React-based enterprise tools I have to use on a daily basis that have picture-perfect designs ... that turn clunky and confusing the minute you resize the window or activate an animation.
2024-07-25T06:27:18.559496Z
Will Figma become an awkward middle ground?
I feel seen!
I'm one of these codey designers. The madness that exists in modern design teams (I used to manage a team of 50!) is insane. There's a lot of time spent on "design systems" in Figma. Very generally Figma is not the website, and the effeciency additions of building tools there is a lost cause.
Modern CSS and your JS frontend of choice is a lot quicker and more powerful for component building and general design work. There's way too much to do with media break points and tokenization there. There's a misguided group of designers that are learning a lot of esoteric Figma features that don't translate into something users will ever touch.
10 and 15 years ago designers needed to learn the code part too. Somewhere along the way we put them in a corner and made learn these prototype tools.
2024-07-25T06:25:38.806378Z
How I use Obsidian
I went down this rabbit hole for about six months last year. The hook is easy if you're working in IT (hint: it's in the name). The first two months were quite enlightening as I learned about Zettelkasten, PARA, Second Brain, Obsidian, Roam, LogSeq, etc. I even did a side journey into bullet journaling (it appears that craze is dying now).
Towards the end of my journey, I couldn't help but feel I was getting pulled into a cult. I would watch certain Youtube personalities famous in this area and realize they are talking in a language that doesn't make sense. To the uninitiated, it sounded fascinating, but the more I learned, the more I realized a majority of it was cyclical.
Perhaps this is an overly pessimistic view, but nowadays I just write stuff in a daily Logseq journal and move on. No organization, mind maps, second brains, thought galaxies, idea mitochondria, etc. Just a little bit of English spread across a few bullets.
2024-07-23T22:08:43.668431Z
Crowdstrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops
Throwaway account...
CrowdStrike in this context is a NT kernel loadable module (a .sys file) which does syscall level interception and logs then to a separate process on the machine. It can also STOP syscalls from working if they are trying to connect out to other nodes and accessing files they shouldn't be (using some drunk ass heuristics).
What happened here was they pushed a new kernel driver out to every client without authorization to fix an issue with slowness and latency that was in the previous Falcon sensor product. They have a staging system which is supposed to give clients control over this but they pissed over everyone's staging and rules and just pushed this to production.
This has taken us out and we have 30 people currently doing recovery and DR. Most of our nodes are boot looping with blue screens which in the cloud is not something you can just hit F8 and remove the driver. We have to literally take each node down, attach the disk to a working node, delete the .sys file and bring it up. Either that or bring up a new node entirely from a snapshot.
This is fine but EC2 is rammed with people doing this now so it's taking forever. Storage latency is through the roof.
I fought for months to keep this shit out of production because of this reason. I am now busy but vindicated.
Edit: to all the people moaning about windows, we've had no problems with Windows. This is not a windows issue. This is a third party security vendor shitting in the kernel.
2024-07-19T16:11:42.060681Z
Story points are pointless, measure queues
Yeah, it seems like it's fairly common for people/teams to follow the idea that any story that is 8 or more points should be broken down to tasks of 5 or less. This simply doesn't make sense to me. If the most simple task is 1 point, is your most complex task allowed really only 5 times as complex? Story points usually follow an exponential increase for a reason, enforcing staying in the mostly linear portion is just pretending the complexity and uncertainty has been decreased.
2024-07-16T22:03:08.665413Z
Story points are pointless, measure queues
Story points aren't time (as OP states). They're relative complexity, and uncertainty (hence the fibbonacci sequence building uncertainty in to larger numbers). And stories should be able to sized as big numbers. I've never been on a team comfortable with more than a 7, at least not since my first agile experience where we all took an agile/scrum training together for a few days. We'd frequently give things like 21 or 30 or 50 points, as appropriate. That's the only place I've ever seen a burndown chart that looked like it should. Everywhere else, it's flat until the last day and then drops to zero as all those "it's a 7 I promise" get carried over to the next sprint for the 3rd time.
2024-07-16T22:02:50.654187Z
GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright
This is missing the largest argument in my opinion. The weights are the derivative work of the GPL licensed code and should therefore be released under the GPL. I would say these companies release their weights or simply not train on copyleft code.
It is truly amazing how many people will shill for these massive corporations that claim they love open source or that their AI is open while they profit off of the violation of licenses and contribute very little back.
2024-07-11T11:28:28.109619Z
Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
You have a much smaller lobbying budget than the AI industry, and you didn't flagrantly rush to copy billions of copyrighted works as quickly as possible and then push a narrative acting like that's the immutable status quo that must continue to be permitted lest the now-massive industry built atop copyright violation be destroyed.
Violate one or two copyrights, get sued or DMCAed out of existence. Violate billions, on the other hand, and you magically become immune to the rules everyone else has to follow.
2024-07-10T12:41:44.276611Z
Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
It seems to me that regardless of the outcome of this case, some developers do not want to have their code used to train LLMs. There may need to be a new license created to restrict this usage of software. Or, maybe developers will simply stop contributing open source. In today’s day and age, where open source code serves as a tool to pad Microsoft’s pockets, I certainly will not publish any of my software open source, despite how much I would like to (under GPL) in order to help fellow developers.
If I were Microsoft, I’d really be concerned that I’m going to kill my golden goose by causing a large-scale exodus from GitHub or open source development more generally. Another idea I’ve considered is publishing boatloads of useless or incorrect code to poison their training data.
As I see it, people should be able to restrict how people use something that they gave them. If some people prefer that their code is not used to train LLMs, there should be a way to enforce that.
2024-07-10T12:19:58.590806Z
Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
> Indeed, last year GitHub was said to have tuned its programming assistant to generate slight variations of ingested training code to prevent its output from being accused of being an exact copy of licensed software.
If I, a human, were to:
1. Carefully read and memorize some copyrighted code.
2. Produce new code that is textually identical to that. But in the process of typing it up, I randomly mechanically tweak a few identifiers or something to produce code that has the exact same semantics but isn't character-wise identical.
3. Claim that as new original code without the original copyright.
I assume that I would get my ass kicked legally speaking. That reads to me exactly like deliberate copyright infringement with willful obfuscation of my infringement.
How is it any different when a machine does the same thing?
2024-07-10T12:19:07.305011Z
Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit
Regardless of the details here, it's become quite clear that the judicial system is for corporations. It doesn't matter whether they win, lose, or settle, as they win regardless, since the monetary benefits of what got them in court in the first place far outweigh any punishment or settlement cost.
2024-07-10T12:16:32.903051Z
Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
Problem: It is extremely hard to stylize native Win32 controls.
That's not a problem, it's a feature. I am absolutely bloody sick of apps that go out of their way to reinvent the standard UI controls in perplexing ways and behave unexpectedly. Following the system UI preferences is what you should do, and it irritates your users if you don't.
There is a “hidden” dark mode for Win32 controls used by Windows File Explorer that you can activate, but it covers only some of the controls and still doesn’t look good.
Don't do that. If you use the regular Win32 controls then they will automatically get the styling the user has set.
I've been writing Win32 apps for close to 30 years now. It's sad to see the regression in UIs over the years.
2024-07-01T14:36:54.262152Z
Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
I have a very low opinion of developers who decry having to pay for a commercial licence for otherwise LGPL licensed software libraries. They expect to be paid for their work, and ensure that by creating closed source software. That's fair enough. Yet, the devs that solved the actually difficult parts of creating a UI library have to be utter saints who freely bestow a gift of code upon the world.
2024-07-01T14:31:07.573530Z
Coffee helped the Union in the Civil War
Caffeine is a very interesting drug that makes capitalism and just daily work bearable. It's interesting that this went all the way to 1800s for the US.
After reading Your Mind on Plants [1], I decided to do an experiment, and stop any caffeine intake for ~3 months. After ~1 month, I felt "normal". Only when you cannot rely on a drug, a clutch, you realize how many pressures you face every day. One might have a deadline, something doesn't work, some part of work is boring... Maybe you just slept badly. Coffee fixes all of those.
Nothing is free though, and soon, you'll discover your sleep is not the best pretty much every day of the week. That, in turn, forces you to consume more caffeine, and thus the addiction cycle begins.
Interestingly, after being 3 months caffeine free, I succumbed to the pressure and started drinking some amount of caffeine again (work needs to be done, caffeine makes it easier to concentrate -> it's really difficult to say no).
I would encourage everyone to examine their relationship with this particular drug. It's insane to me that the population in 1800s was already so addicted to the drug that the lack "plugs" threaten to lose the civil war.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Plants-Michael-Pollan/dp/0593296907
2024-06-30T17:38:54.272887Z
Farm: Fast vite compatible build tool written in Rust
Another way to view it: slow builds is a poor man’s feature, that punishes you for bringing in too many deps.
The JS ecosystem (speaking as an omnivore using many languages) suffers two big problems:
1. Tooling is too fragmented and complex and poorly designed. This includes even the standard tools and formats like npm and package.json.
2. There’s a weak culture of API stability. Leave a project for 3 months and there are new config files, plugin formats, etc.
It’s improving slowly through standardization with things like ES modules. But it’s still a Wild West.
2024-06-22T13:41:24.203405Z
Nobody knows what's going on
One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusion that the writer doesn't really have a good grasp on what they're talking about. Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?
Kind of a bummer to think about.
2024-06-20T02:21:06.709399Z
Neofetch developer archives all his repositories: "Have taken up farming"
Maybe they have saved enough from working in tech that they can grow vegetables for themselves in a very low scale way. Its nice to escape from the career you've had for decades. Sometimes its not even an escape from the career, but the career and the city you've lived in. Moving to the forest and growing some vegetables and raising chickens isn't that difficult. Its exactly what I did.
I found it difficult to get a job in tech at the start of COVID after working in it for ~25 years. I moved to Michigan, and now live in the woods. My Cost of Living is a fraction of what it was. My mortgage is only 80% of what I was paying for rent in the SFBay area. Its peaceful and quiet here. It actually gets dark too. I no longer hear BART screeching on the rails at 2am or the constant flow of traffic. I.. do once again work in tech though at a much 'smaller' scale. My company is small and work demands don't dominate my life. I have balance.
This year I've planted ~200 onions, ~100 potatoes, ~100 garlic, ~60 strawberry. I have blueberry from a few years back starting to flourish. I have wild blackberry, and mushrooms galore. "touching grass" is a daily activity as we manage our small flock of chickens.
2024-06-19T12:53:47.415027Z
In Praise of 5-Over-1 Buildings
I live an hour or so away from the town I went to grad school so I still visit once a month or so. It seems like every time I visit another old building is torn down and another one of these 5 over 1 buildings are going up.
The stores are rarely successful and I'm sure that the companies building all these things just factor in the cost of building these as a cost of doing business in that town.
Most of the kids that rent these "luxury apartments" (which is how they are always described) are from cities with much higher cost of living so they can charge a ton of money and mom and dad will still think it is reasonable. This ends up recreating housing crises of big cities because people that live and work in the town are getting priced out of living there.
2024-06-18T19:17:16.905889Z
As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice
GLP-1 agonists (Wegovy, Ozempic, semaglutide), help people who have a brain chemistry preventing calorie reduction success naturally (willpower or whatever you want to call it).
The gene therapy trials should be done soon. At that point, the flywheel comes up to speed and starts enabling susceptible populations with the genetic bug to fix it, in order to have agency against a system designed to shovel them garbage for profit. Obesity at this scale is a system failure, so you have to fix the system (and it’s clearly not going to be done at the regulatory or corp level).
(You can absolutely blame them for making people fat; some people cannot control it, and you cannot blame someone for their brain chemistry)
2024-06-14T01:01:57.726250Z
"Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
There is also a nexus with the reward system of the brain in general, and semaglutide definitely seems to have effects similar to ADHD medication in these respects. It also seems to help alcoholism for the same reasons - it helps reduce the underlying dysregulation in the reward system that keeps people in that loop.
Probably this will be the next patent-ever greening strategy pursued after the weight loss thing.
It’s an absolutely wild drug in medical terms. “The white whale” is an understatement here. It literally is a white whale for multiple whole fields of medical science.
2024-06-14T00:38:57.860535Z
Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
This post has managed to piss off everyone: employees who didn't realize founders were getting liquidity events while they're still sitting on their more-often-than-not valueless equity, and founders who feel they've earned it and don't like the implication they haven't.
2024-06-12T18:38:49.288861Z
Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago
Indeed. Many of these pirates are the most devoted fans of the music they store and distribute. They go to gigs, buy merchandise and vinyl editions, and otherwise support the artists directly.
In contrast companies like Spotify don’t care about the music at all. They would just as well sell you white noise if it would somehow give them the slightest improvement in growth or margins.
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, regularly makes statements that suggest he’d rather see professional musicians disappear. Most recently:
https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-fans-and-artists-hit-ba...
2024-06-01T16:55:30.599057Z
Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality.
For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement.
In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
2024-06-01T16:55:18.978125Z
Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”.
I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun.
Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an artist’s entire discography in one go. Or if you’re into automation, lidarr , sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as they’re released.
What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best version of a free thing. And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version.
2024-06-01T16:55:11.095241Z
iTerm2 and AI hype overload - Xe Iaso
There’s a perspective I haven’t seen yet that may explain the backlash: I would never integrate OpenAI into a terminal program I was building because of hallucinations, a lack of trust in OpenAI, and other reasons. I’m not an anti-AI Luddite either, hopped on the AI train in 2015.
So, when someone else integrates OpenAI where I don’t think it belongs, I feel like I can’t trust their judgment, and therefore can’t trust them to make good product management decisions in the future. Adding questionable features is a red flag indicating the product team isn’t focused or has poor judgment.
Put another way, you don’t put the person that says Taco Bell is quality Mexican food in charge of arranging catering for the company Christmas party. I can’t trust them to not screw it up.
2024-05-31T03:52:05.816510Z
Lisbon, a city dying from its own success
>but the general flattening of cities into predictable, quality consumer products seems to be happening everywhere, not just Lisbon.
That's not the main problem. IMHO the bige one is that cities are no longer people's homes and hubs of culture, but have turned into highly efficient wealth extracting machines (from the tourists and immigrants, as well as from the locals) where the owning class try to extract as much money as possible from the have-nots, like you point out the rents shooting up.
Once everything becomes about making as much money as possible at the expense of everyone else around me, where the locals don't work anymore to support local business in their community but work to help bulldoze piles of money into the hands of a few foreign multinational corporations with HQs in tax heavens, then things inevitably turn to shit: society becomes low-trust, people more divided, wealth inequality increases, crime increases, ghettoization, homelessness, political extremism, communities and family units breaking up, social services decaying, loneliness epidemic despite living in a large city, etc. And all these things can happen despite or maybe even because, an economy and GDP going up.
This isn't something new either but has been going on for 20+ years AFAIK. Not sure how to fix this though since it seems like the effects caused by an unregulated globalization which seeks to MIN/MAX everything, creating huge gaps between the winners and the losers of the new order, both at national levels, and at individual levels.
2024-05-30T12:20:48.325852Z
Making EC2 boot time faster
Boot time is the number one factor in your success with auto-scaling. The smaller your boot time, the smaller your prediction window needs to be. Ex. If your boot time is five minutes, you need to predict what your traffic will be in five minutes, but if you can boot in 20 seconds, you only need to predict 20 seconds ahead. By definition your predictions will be more accurate the smaller the window is.
But! Autoscaling serves two purposes. One is to address load spikes. The other is to reduce costs with scaling down. What this solution does is trade off some of the cost savings by prewarming the EBS volumes and then paying for them.
This feels like a reasonable tradeoff if you can justify the cost with better auto-scaling.
And if you're not autoscaling, it's still worth the cost if the trade off is having your engineers wait around for instance boots.
2024-05-23T20:51:03.111735Z
Ask HN: Devs/data scis who pivoted to a new career in 30s/40s, what do you do?
I got burnt out as a SWE at a startup from stress and health issues. Bought a cafe and turned it into a bookstore cafe. Annual revenue is around 600k. Seller's discretionary earnings is around 220k. In hindsight, I should have done this earlier. Not having to deal with office politics, insane on-call rotations, stress. On top of that, it helped me qualify for E-2 investor visa, which is far less of a headache than OPT/H-1B. It was a major help having an experienced business broker/commercial real estate agent.
2024-05-23T17:34:55.932249Z
Ask HN: Why do you all think that Htmx is such a recent development?
I created the library that would become intercooler.js in 2012 and released it in 2013, based on a mashup of $.load(), pjax & angular attributes.
The world at that time was not ready to consider an alternative to the hot new ideas coming out of the big tech companies (angular from google, react from facebook).
In 2020 during covid i decided to rewrite intercooler.js w/o the jQuery dependency and rename it to htmx. The django community started picking it up because they were being largely ignored by the next.js/etc. world and they didn't have a built in alternative like rails has w/ Turbo.
In 2023 it got picked up by an ocaml twitch streamer, teej_dv, who knew some other folks in the twitch programming community. He told ThePrimeagen about it who took a look at it in July 2023 on stream and became enthusiastic about it. At the same time FireshipDev did an "htmx in 100 seconds" short on it. That lit the rocket. I was lucky that I also had just released my book https://hypermedia.systems at around the same time (it had been cancelled by a major publisher about a year beforehand.)
Another thing that happened is that Musk bought twitter, and a large number of big tech twitter accounts left. This opened up an opportunity for new tech twitter accounts to grow up, like a fire in a forest. I am pretty good at twitter and was able to take advantage of that situation.
Here's the story visually:
https://star-history.com/#bigskysoftware/htmx&bigskysoftware/intercooler-js&Date
So I spent about a decade screaming into the void about hypermedia and had largely given up on the idea making a dent, rewrote intercooler.js just to stay sane during covid and then got very, very lucky.
2024-05-23T01:49:57.701646Z
What UI density means and how to design for it
This explains exactly why physical restaurant menus are so much better vs mobile site menus. If I'm viewing the menu of a restaurant on my phone, I always look in Google Maps for someone who took a picture of the menu, because it's a dense UI. Every "mobile friendly" menu site is able to show maybe 5 items on the page at once, so it takes many pages of scrolling to see everything.
2024-05-22T04:01:51.144453Z
Enlightenmentware
Nix is one of the reasons open source wins in the long run. I would have never imagined that package dependencies could be installed and managed across programming language boundaries, kernel boundaries, shell boundaries, dotfile boundaries etc.
Given that computer complexity grows exponentially all the time, then at some point everyone will be forced to use something like Nix.
I agree with the article with Emacs and Unix/Linux.
2024-05-21T01:25:23.553309Z
Noi: an AI-enhanced, customizable browser
I don't want an AI browser, per se. I want an AI agent that slips into every pane of glass the platform companies own (Chrome, iOS, Windows) and works for me against the advertisers and attention stealers.
I want an advocate that detects and nukes advertisements. That filters clickbait and rage content. Something easy enough that everyone can install, so we can all be collectively free of this nonsense no matter what tech stack we use.
Imagine if AI became the ultimate anti-advertising, attention-preserving, sanity-defending weapon.
"No Google, you're not allowed to advertise to my person." Or, "these comments are toxic drama, so let's not expose our human to them."
This would be a great new technological era.
2024-05-18T20:50:20.510931Z
Hyperworlds – Web Replacement Projects
Regarding "No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget" - I take photos of things all the time of things precisely so I can forget them - I take pictures of gates closed on farmland, electrical items switched off etc. I never look at these pictures again - but the simple act of taking the picture means I don't fret about them afterwards....
2024-05-08T13:02:57.520196Z
NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul
It really is amazing. We were thiiiiiiis close to having a generation that wasn't addicted to nicotine for the first time in hundreds of years (like, since trade between North America and Europe really became a thing) and these guys pulled this thumb drive that tastes like cotton candy out of nowhere and every young person is just jonesing.
And the regulatory/public opinion environment isn't what it was in the 80s and 90s when we decided to take on cigarettes. Imagine a company being told today that they now have to stop advertising on billboards, can't advertise to kids, and have to pay a fifth of a trillion dollars over 25 years for the harms they caused to Medicaid. Can't, can you?
2024-05-06T12:52:07.828179Z
Texas' online porn law could shatter a First Amendment precedent
Pornography was widely banned in pretty much as soon as photographs were invented. The federal Comstock Act was passed in 1873, and many state laws preceded it.
Stanley v. Georgia is the kind of brush that needs clearing. It concluded that anti-obscenity laws that had been on the books for a century were suddenly unconstitutional.
The reasoning of the decision makes absolutely no sense. It has a lengthy hand-waving rant about what someone may possess in the “privacy of their own home.” But the only privacy right in the Constitution is the fourth amendment, which prohibits warrantless searches. But in that case the police found the pornography while executing a valid warrant on suspicion of gambling activity. Nobody doubts that if police find contraband while executing an otherwise valid warrant, it would be entirely constitutional to prosecute based on that evidence.
If the defendant in Stanley had been in possession of child pornography, he would have been subject to prosecution even today. So the decision’s while digression about privacy is literally immaterial to the issue before the Court.
Instead, Stanley is based on a value judgment about the type of pornography at issue in that case an opposed to say child pornography. But that sort of analysis of social costs and benefits is for voters and legislatures, not the Supreme Court.
2024-05-03T13:32:21.551001Z
GPL all the things?
The point is pure psychology: The internet and other advanced "communication" technologies has caused a loneliness in people due to the lack of genuine human interaction, which is partly due to its inherent nature and partly due to the intense commodification of everything on it from large corporations such as Google.
The result is that systems are designed more and more to appeal to the need of the person to gain attention. Twitter itself is much more of a platform where people fight to gain attention for themselves because it is the single aspect of human interaction that has been "gamified" in order to keep these platforms running in exchange for ad views. It is a pathological nature of human interaction that has become a sort of mental drug for users.
The final result is that people have a knee-jerk response to continue these systems because they have become psychologically addicted to seeing their own little posts as encapsulations of their voices, with all the upvotes and views satisfying a single component in their minds of human interaction -- a component that is meant to be part of a much larger complex of behaviours that constitute real, genuine human interaction, and which no longer exist due to our collective support of a consumerist system that places no value on the essence of humanity.
2024-05-01T11:09:18.476332Z
The IMEI Code: Your phone’s other number
Fun fact: Lots of cellular modem/routers have the easy ability to change IMEI. Doing so is a fairly common practice in the rural internet community. i.e., those using cellular for their internet access either because cable / fiber or an official cellular option like T-Mobile home internet is unavailable or they're mobile in an RV.
These people are not trying to do anything particularly nefarious but they do it so that they can use a phone or tablet plan in a router. Unlimited or high GB plans for routers and hotspots are expensive and there are not many options.
There are lots of reasonably priced, easy to get unlimited phone and tablet plans but if you put a phone SIM in a router it might work for while until the carrier detects that you have the SIM in an unauthorized device. The "solution" to that is to activate on a spare phone and then change the router IMEI to match the phone. Don't use both devices at the same time. The carrier now thinks the router is a phone.
The legally of it is somewhat unclear so it's talked about quietly on various forums using words like "magic configuration", "giving your router an identity crisis" etc.
It's a bit of a cat and mouse game because IMEI is probably not the only way to identify an unauthorized device but so far it seems to be the main way.
2024-05-01T11:07:14.181571Z
Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)
Here are my personal principals:
1. Don't use too many thumb buttons, especially at odd angles, they just make my thumbs hurt after too much typing.
2. Don't use layers for any frequently used buttons, having to keep a button held for a while frequently just leads to more pain.
3. Function keys are mandatory. They aren't used frequently enough that having them in a "far" location is a problem, but when I do use them it is great that they exist (and don't require some strange layer combination press).
4. Home/End/PgUp/PgDown/Delete are all mandatory and should be somewhere near the (also mandatory) cursor keys and a shift key. Not sure how people survive programming without these buttons ;)
2024-04-29T14:00:49.118347Z
Corporate Open Source is Dead | Jeff Geerling
None of these blogposts (including this one) have any realistic solution to the problem of making OSS software and being able to live from it, and prevent others from exploiting you in the process.
Hyperscalers like Amazon exploit OSS projects by reselling them as a cloud service and they earn a gigantic sum in the process. But this is not a neutral thing to do - the OSS project is still responsible for maintenance! (And in many places, the "no warranty" clause seems completely disregarded - users and corporations demand bugfixes since it's a "critical library")
The most telling sentence is "Open source culture relies on trust. Trust that companies you and I helped build (even without being on the payroll) wouldn't rugpull."...
where is any trust in exploiting someone's work without giving anything back? the hyperscalers routinely break the OSS social contract, but because they abide to the letter of the licences, they get a free pass and many white knights from even the OSS community and even OSI itself.
A business model of "you can see the source, you can modify it but you can't offer it as a service or resell my work" is much more honest and trustworthy than the "develop a library, a cloud service picks it up then pressures you with PRs and issues until you permanently burn out from the whole thing"
This is partly addressed by the post - "But you know what? I'd just prefer honesty. If revenue is so dependent on selling software, just... make the software proprietary. Don't be so coy!".
This is not honesty though. Claiming that anything not party-approved.... I mean OSI-approved is not open source and it's proprietary is very myopic thing. For users and developers, it's much more beneficial if they can see or even modify the source even if they don't have an unrestricted right to use and modify it however they want. This absolutist, black-and-white approach could potentially lead to many pieces of software becoming fully proprietary, all-rights-reserved in the future since the open source community harasses source available projects quite frequently, and not many have the patience to put up with that. And that would be a sad outcome indeed for user freedom, repairability, portability and other values RMS and the FSF dearly holds.
2024-04-25T20:21:47.219856Z
The Seattle Public Library Is Reducing Our Maximum Digital Holds. Here’s Why. – Shelf Talk
Honestly at this point, I feel like the ethical thing to do is "steal" digital and buy/borrow physical, the copyright surrounding digital goods has been so thoroughly gamed in the favor of publishers.
2024-04-23T03:21:06.011444Z
Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia.
It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it.
The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
2024-04-11T14:21:37.006602Z
You won't find a technical co-founder
If you want me as a technical cofounder, you are going to tick most of these boxes:
1. You have at least 8-10 years of experience in that domain with some of it in a leadership position (ie product manager)
2. You already have a huge following or audience. Especially important if this is a SaaS product or b2c. Not as important if this is hard tech (ie biotech).
But if you’re doing a HR startup, show me your 10,000 engaged HR followers on LinkedIn. If you’re doing a martech startup, show me your Substack with 10k marketing subscribers.
3. You already have talked to at least 25 people about this, and gotten feedback about their pain points, initial reaction to your solution, etc. These conversations are documented and easily shared with me
4. You preferably have at least 1 successful exit/company under your belt, or a couple of failed ones is OK too (but I would need references to make sure they failed for legitimate reasons) the worse is 0 years of experience starting a company.
5. You are a cold email/call/outreach junkie. Because you will OWN sales in the early days. I want to see your 100 send emails or 100 daily calls or 100 sent DMs everyday asking potential customers for feedback or validation conversations or to sign up for your beta
2024-04-02T12:31:03.135351Z
X confirms plans for NSFW Communities
X is a pretty good name for the site because it already is full of NSFW content. I have very few followers and still get porn bots replying to several of my posts and comments. It's frankly pretty gross.
I predict that we're eventually going to discover that like Tumblr and Reddit, hosting porn was a key part of Twitter's business all along.
2024-03-30T13:47:56.950735Z
Reddit shares plunge 25% in two days, finish the week below first day close
Reddit is a very risky venture. It relies on enormous amounts of free work and they are not keen on the website being further monetised. The mods are regularly at odds with the site ownership and without them it looses value quite fast, the moderation is what makes the site work. While last years protests against the API shutdown didn't take reddit down the scars of that action and the protests by users are visible on a lot of searches of the site now. Many users deleted the contents of their accounts alongside the account and you find deleted posts all over the historical posts now. Its reduced the value of the site quite considerably for answering weird questions via another search engine.
This incident caused Lemmy to become a stable and permanent competitor that is gradually growing and competing with Reddit. Its still tiny but unlike a year ago it works a lot better its not hastily been thrown together. Reddit enacting another war with its users and there is now a clear alternative that people can go to. The trust wont be there in Reddit as a company for a lot of users and they wont need as big a push as last year.
Its a risky investment because its nothing without those mods and if they protest or leave the user base will quickly dissipate as the site descends. Its been harder to moderate since a lot of the tools were lost with the APIs. The quality of Reddit has clearly dropped in a lot of subs. Reddit does not have many cat lives left. They still haven't made any money and the entire project seems to be unstable.
2024-03-29T01:51:31.964632Z
The IRS Has an Answer to TurboTax
The government requires us to pay taxes. It also requires us to file tax returns. It's unconscionable that we have to pay a third-party to fulfill our legally-mandated obligations. It is way past time for tax filing to be made available for free at all levels of government.
(Don't come to me with paper forms or FreeTaxUsa or whatever. FREE IRS software should be able to handle taxes of any complexity and situation. If they can't handle a scenario in their software, they shouldn't be allowed to collect any taxes resulting from the law that created the scenario)
2024-03-25T14:03:35.947429Z
OneDrive has stopped working on non-NTFS drives
There is a strongly utilitarian argument to not allowing such false statements.
It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity.
Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims.
Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
2024-03-25T03:15:28.699144Z
US Gov announces $8.5B preliminary CHIPS investment agreement with Intel
WRT to lack of a skilled workforce, here is an interesting anecdote. I remember back in the late 90's, Intel had to fire most line workers in their FABS, and hire people with Ph.D.'s in solid-state physics.
I actually knew one of these people who were fired: She was our housecleaner. And--like the supper-smart garbage man of the Dilbert Cartoons, she was very smart. Smarter than me. I know because she helped me solve some problems I couldn't solve on my own.
Why was she cleaning houses? Tragic story. No doubt she could have gotten a Ph.D., but she was older, had some health problems which wouldn't let her work 60-80 hours a week. And she was black, perhaps discrimination was a factor too.
I'd hate to even think of how smart you have to be to work in FABs today, but let me tell you, not even $8.5 billion is going to create more of these people. Best you can hope for is you can pay them enough to get them to work for you.
2024-03-20T16:38:53.830381Z
8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here's the Inside Story
> "Realistically, we could have had GPT-3 or even 3.5 probably in 2019, maybe 2020. The big question isn’t, did they see it? The question is, why didn’t we do anything with the fact that we had seen it? The answer is tricky.”
The answer is that monopolies stifle technological innovation because one well-established part of their business (advertising-centric search) would be negatively impacted by an upstart branch (chatbots) that would cut into search ad revenue.
This is comparable to a investor-owned consortium of electric utilities, gas-fired power plants, and fracked natural gas producers. Would they want the electric utility component to install thousands of solar panels and cut off the revenue from natural gas sales to the utility? Of course not.
It's a good argument for giving Alphabet the Ma Bell anti-trust treatment, certainly.
2024-03-20T15:32:49.866788Z
USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update
For me OSX updates have broken, over the past few years, my USB C ethernet dongle and firmware upload connectivity to specific hardware chipsets. This caused me to buy a non-Apple laptop. Now my Apple laptop refuses to update at all (top of line 4 year old laptop with max spec) so the upgrade driven failures problem category has effectively gone away, but OSX is becoming increasingly unusable. As a result I won't be buying more Apple hardware and have moved back to Linux as the primary machine - super fast and stable, with a slight setup tax and occasional annoyances.
2024-03-19T14:58:15.555572Z
USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update
My upgrade to Monterey (MacOS 12.x) broke my Canon D530 printer driver. Re-installing the driver didn't help. Now I have to print to a PDF, copy that to an old Snow Leopard 10.6 machine, and print from there. FYI, Snow Leopard is 11 major OS revisions behind Monterey. Printing worked fine in Mohave, 3 major revisions ago.
I also can't write any files to /, even with SIP disabled, and during the Monterey upgrade, Apple deleted all files and directories in / that they didn't recognize, including my system backup. I had to recover that from Backblaze. Can't say I'm a fan of recent MacOS. If you think you are in control of your Apple machine, think again.
2024-03-19T14:57:14.257112Z
Losing Faith on Testing
>I get paid for code that works, not for tests
A blog post could be written about just this statement and how it contributes to a low trust workplace where those who cut corners are favored by stakeholders and everyone else is left scrambling to clean up the messes left in their wake. If you're writing code for yourself, sure, be targeted and conservative with your tests. But when you're working with others, for goodness sake, put the safety nets in place for the next poor soul that has to work on your code.
2024-03-17T11:38:00.441219Z
Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right
Coming from a senior Oculus lead, the most interesting thing about this write up for me, is what it lacks: it says almost nothing about the software stack / operating system. Still 100% talking about hardware at the bottom and end user applications at the other end. But there is no discussion of the platform which to me is actually the highest value proposition Apple is bringing here.
In short: Apple has made a fully realized spatial operating system, while Meta has made an app launcher for immersive Unity/Unreal apps for vanilla Android. You can get away with an app launcher when all you want to support is fully immersive apps that don't talk to each other. But that fails completely if you are trying to build a true operating system.
Think about what has to exist, to say, intelligently copy and paste parts of a 3D object made by one application into a 3D object made by another, the same way you would copy a flat image from photoshop into a Word document. The operating system has to truly understand 3D concepts internally. Meta is building these features but it is stuck in a really weird space trying to wedge them in between Android underneath and Unity/Unreal at the application layer. Apple has had the advantage of green field engineering it exactly how they want it to be from the ground up.
2024-03-16T05:16:25.079690Z
Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and Indigenous
The critics of this project seem to be outright racist. I don’t think that’s an overstatement.
They’re basically saying that Indigenous people aren’t allowed to participate in the modern world. You’re not allowed to be urbanist if you were “less advanced than the white people” three hundred years ago.
And they’re butthurt about the development not having the need to comply with Vancouver development rules. Yeah, well, sorry not sorry you weren’t able to steal all the land. Nothing is stopping y’all from changing the rules in Vancouver and building something similar.
2024-03-14T18:40:52.310613Z
What it's like living without an inner monologue (2020)
I don't have an inner monologue as I find it explained in many of these articles, in the sense that I don't notice myself addressing myself with it. I would rather say I have a constant _dialogue_ with what I would describe as projections of people I know. I guess I must have developed that as a strategy to prepare for conversations, to evaluate how they might respond, but now it's so automatic that it can be really annoying, and even with a lot of meditation exercise I haven't managed to switch it off yet. There's a lot of arguments going on between different "people" in my mind quite often, most of the time actually, each "telling me their opinion". Which I know is simply me imagining how they might think of something.
I am also considering that this may be what people describe as "different parts of themselves"? In these sense that I sometimes find it hard to make a decision because I am "still engaged in conversations around it inside me". It also feels sometimes like I am never alone: there are always lots of witnesses to anything I do.
2024-03-14T04:30:47.443631Z
Google fires employee who protested Israel tech event, shuts forum
> My old manager put it best: No politics and religion in the workplace.
No politics for you. The corporate strategy, governance, hiring, dealmaking, etc... will all be politically informed. All your work will contribute to the political beliefs of leadership. It's such a strange abstraction to believe that you're somehow separate from that.
2024-03-10T14:46:28.746643Z
Bazel Release 1.0
Google just tests the living Jesus out of everything, and only versions a few core packages such as protobufs, grpc, and other packages used by pretty much everybody (this is called the "crust").
Everything else is tip of tree, and things are automatically re-tested using checked-in tests if they are affected by your changelist. You basically can't submit if you break anything. So in a way, Google doesn't need "versioning". Whatever is currently checked in is good to go.
Tests are required, of course, and a Google reviewer won't let you submit anything if your tests suck. This, obviously, precludes the use of such a set-up in, shall we say, "more agile" orgs which don't have good test coverage.
Blaze (at Google) is also not just a build system, but also an interface to a much larger distributed build and test backend, which lets you rebuild everything from the kernel upwards in seconds (by caching petabytes of build products at thousands of possible revisions), serves up source code views for developer workstations (code is not stored there either), and sustains the scale of distributed testing needed for this setup to work. As a result, nobody builds or tests on their own workstation, and there's close to zero (or maybe even zero, period) binaries checked into Google3 monorepo. If you need a Haskell compiler and nobody used it in a while, it'll be rebuilt from source and cached for future use. :-)
Fundamentally, I think Google got things very, very right with Blaze. Bazel is but a pale shadow of what Blaze is, but even in its present state it is better than most (all?) other build systems.
2024-03-04T16:18:26.905678Z
Building a Fly.io-like scheduler with resource requirements
This is a cool series of posts, thanks for writing it!
We've released a bit about how the AWS Lambda scheduler works (a distributed, but stateful, sticky load balancer). There are a couple of reasons why Lambda doesn't use this broadcast approach to solve a similar problem to the one these posts are solving.
One is that this 'broadcast' approach introduces a tricky tradeoff decision about how long to wait for somebody to take the work before you create more capacity for that resource. The longer you wait, the higher your latency variance is. The shorter you wait, the more likely you are to 'strand' good capacity that just hasn't had a chance to respond yet. That's a tunable tradeoff, but the truly tough problem is that it creates a kind of metastable behavior under load: excess load delays responses, which makes 'stranding' more frequent, which reduces resource usage efficiency, which makes load problems worse. Again, that's a solvable problem, but solving it adds significant complexity to what was a rather simple protocol.
Another issue is dealing with failures of capacity (say a few racks lose power). The central system doesn't know what resources it lost (because that knowledge is only distributed in the workers), and so needs to discover that information from the flow of user requests. That can be OK, but again means modal latency behavior in the face of failures.
Third, the broadcast behavior requires O(N^2) messages for N requests processed (on the assumption that the fleet size is O(N) too). This truly isn't a big deal at smaller scales (packets are cheap) but can become expensive at larger scales (N^2 gets steep). The related problem is that the protocol also introduces another round-trip for discovery, increasing latency. That could be as low as a few hundred microseconds, but it's not nothing (and, again, the need to optimize for happy-case latency against bad-case efficiency makes tuning awkward).
Fourth, the dynamic behavior under load is tricky to reason about because of the race between "I can do this" and getting the work. You can be optimistic (not reserving capacity), at the cost of having to re-run the protocol (potentially an unbounded number of times!) if you lose the race to another source of work. Or, you can be pessimistic (reserving capacity and explicitly releasing what you don't need), at the cost of making the failure cases tricky (see the classic problem with 2PC coordinator failure), and reducing efficiency for popular resources (in proportion to the latency and popularity of the resource you're looking for). Slow coordinators can also cause significant resource wastage, so you're back to tuning timeouts and inventing heuristics. It's a game you can win, but a tough one.
This needle-in-a-haystack placement problem really is an interesting one, and it's super cool to see people writing about it and approaching the trade-offs in designs in a different way.
2024-03-03T17:00:08.120197Z
TikTok is finally on the decline
There is an argument that even if you hate TikTok, or Twitter, or Instagram, or whatever, you should not cheer on their demise, because whatever comes after them will be worse. That is, they will be a more effective form of whatever attention eating mechanism the previous one relied on to generate ad revenue for funders. The history of the internet provides many examples of this. But the cost of switching away from the incumbent is sometimes enough to keep these upstart apps from becoming established in the first place. So if you have accepted the fact that our culture won't suddenly go back to not abusing social social media when one of these services shut down, then we who hate them might want the current cast of social media villains to stick around as long as possible.
2024-03-03T16:47:16.636877Z
Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
> As a result, Nintendo ... is demanding that the Yuzu emulator is shut down.
When corporations like Uber violate multiple laws, do they get shut down? When Amazon treats its employees poorly, does it get shut down? When Google forbids manufacturers to pre-install competitor apps, does it get shut down? Well, it seems that as long as copyright is not infringed, everything is ok.
Also it seems to me that Nintendo might themselves violate antitrust laws by using their monopoly power on market of Nintendo-compatible games, and not allowing enough competition there.
2024-02-27T23:17:48.253450Z
I turned my open-source project into a full-time business
> In any case, it changed years later when a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars. I was financially not in a good place back then, and when I saw the news, I started to wonder – what did I get out of this?
This is the root of most things like the BSL. You create an open source project or product, and companies with billions in quarterly revenue build the core of their business on your software, and meanwhile won't contribute to your ongoing viability (nevermind actual success) even in amounts that are entirely trivial for them. Toss the cloud providers into it now and it's even uglier.
2024-02-27T13:50:22.245550Z
Reducing our AWS bill by $100k
Considered bare metal at all? Also have a startup - we estimated our cloud bill would have been over $4k/mo+ but on bare metal we are running at about $200/mo
2024-02-27T06:23:40.604859Z
Disillusioned with Deno
I got thoroughly frustrated with Deno on a side project for similar reasons (leaky node compat abstractions, kludgey interop between code that does IO the Deno way and Node modules, immature Deno stdlib, undermaintained Deno libraries, spooky bugs). I lost a lot of time to figuring out how to make things work the Deno way.
Then I spent a day switching my codebase back to Node. I was struck by how much worse my code got. The Deno code made use of niceties like top level await and import maps. I needed to resort to a bundler to dedup instances of Y.js between my backend and Lexical. The Deno libraries tended have cleaner APIs (e.g. Oak vs. Koa).
After I took a step back, I scrapped the Node rework and accepted my misgivings with Deno, for now. Going back to Node was kind of like playing an older game; the graphics were great at the time but now that I've seen what a 2023 backend Typescript codebase looks like, I don't want to go back.
2024-02-26T06:37:22.779592Z
Frugly vs. Freemium
One thing I noticed about having different tiers and free options: government institutions will be required to acquire whatever the cheapest version, even if they have tons of money and your product directly supports their mission/goals. So if you want to have government customers, realize that their duty to taxpayers may prevent them from purchasing if you have a free version.
2024-02-26T06:32:33.682613Z
Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
I had same experience at a large company.
Guy had a very simple project. He came to me and asked for "help." I found an external vendor who specialized in solving that problem (building a basic product extension) and got it done in two weeks.
When I gave him the solution, he immediately stopped talking to me and wanted nothing to do with me.
It turned out he had gone to a VP, cleared a 50 person team to work on this problem. He had a weekly call with like 10 people (tiger team he called it) to do nothing but this and nine months later they released the solution and had a giant party.
Everyone got credit, high fives all around.
AT that point I realized that work is a huge scam at large corporations. He was optimizaing for a "promotable event" that "spreads the credit far and wide."
Nothing to do with solving the problem efficiently.
2024-02-25T05:43:44.778780Z
Meta's new LLM-based test generator is a sneak peek to the future of development
> Maybe I've done too much TDD, but to me the tests describe how the system is supposed to behave. This is very much what I want the human to define and the code should fit within the guardrails set by the tests.
People who work on legacy code bases often build what are called “characterisation tests” - tests which define how the current code base actually behaves, as opposed to how some human believes it ought to behave. They enable you to rewrite/refactor/rearchitect code while minimising the risk of introducing regressions. The problem with many legacy code bases is nobody understands how they are supposed to work, sometimes even the users believe it is supposed to work a certain way which is different from how it actually does - but the most important thing is to avoid changing behaviour except when changes are explicitly desired.
2024-02-24T03:58:27.656172Z
Meta's new LLM-based test generator is a sneak peek to the future of development
I find it interesting that generally the first instinct seems to be to use LLMs for writing test code rather than the implementation. Maybe I've done too much TDD, but to me the tests describe how the system is supposed to behave. This is very much what I want the human to define and the code should fit within the guardrails set by the tests.
I could see it as very helpful though for an LLM to point out underspecified areas. Maybe having it propose unit tests for underspecified areas is a way to do look at that and what's happening here?
Edit: Even before LLMs were a thing, I sometimes wondered if monkeys on type writers could write my application once I've written all the tests.
2024-02-24T03:58:06.650740Z
AWS CodePipeline
Internally at Amazon, Pipelines (which inspired this service) was a lifesaver. Apollo (which is the inspiration for CodeDeploy) was also helpful, but should probably just be replaced by Docker or OSv at this point.
But if they ever release a tool that is inspired by the Brazil build system, pack up and run for the hills. When it takes a team of devs over two years to get Python to build and run on your servers, you know your frankenstein build system is broken. It could be replaced by shell scripts and still be orders of magnitude better. Nobody deserves the horror of working with that barf sandwich.
2024-02-21T03:52:42.157704Z
Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?
I use Objective-C exclusively (no Swift) in my App Store apps.
I wrote a Swift app for a hobby/free project a few years ago and regretted it. They changed the language and deprecated some of my code, which isn't easily replaceable without a significant rewrite. The project now compiles only in Swift 4 and will die when Swift 4 support is removed from Xcode.
I see no reason to use Swift. The compiler is slower and buggier. The debugger is slower and buggier. C interoperablity, while it exists in Swift, can be very painful. And I don't actually ship any bugs that Swift could have theoretically saved me from. I see no gain in switching.
People have been telling me since 2014 that every line of code I write in Objective-C is "technical debt". I continue to laugh at them and ask them to compile Swift code they wrote in 2014.
Of course if I had to get a job, it would be a different story, but I own my company, so I can do whatever I want.
2024-02-20T16:44:58.283648Z
Show HN: htmz – a low power tool for HTML
I'm the creator of htmx and think this is a great library/snippet. Much closer to what htmx-like functionality in HTML would/should look like in that it is following existing norms (iframes, the target attribute) much more closely than htmx.
From a practical perspective, a lot of the bulk of htmx is bound up in things like history support, collecting inputs, a lot of callbacks/events to allow people to plug into things, etc. I expect a lot of htmx-like libraries will come out now that it has some traction: it's not a super complicated idea, and many of them will pick smaller, more targeted subsets of functionality to implement. That's a good thing: the ideas of hypermedia are more important than my particular implementation.
2024-02-20T06:30:12.430619Z
Trading trust | Seth's Blog
I've been thinking about how excess capitalism erodes trust. I believe capitalism is important and powerful, but it does cause people to be constantly fighting and trying to destroy each other. Plus, trust doesn't show up on a balance sheet - so might as well erode that to get some cash. Capitalism leads to Apple maintaining a 30% App Store take rate (thus eroding trust and perhaps sinking the launch of Vision Pro), profitable tech companies doing layoffs (thus eroding trust but increasing profits further), and military contractors building better killing tools (thus eroding trust but making more money). Perhaps, in an age where we have the technology to feed everybody in the world, we need to increase the societal guardrails to make people's lives more stable - and thus increase trust.
Apparently Maslo updated his eponymous pyramid of needs before his death to add "Self-transendence" above "self-actualization" [1], which you could interpret as "moving from only caring about yourself to caring about other people." I think there's an angle here where perhaps the USA as a whole is stuck on "self-actualization", i.e. caring only about each person and individual success, and is failing to have a shared identity where people care about each other.
If we don't solve our trust problem, I think people will stop having kids in the USA and we'll eventually end up like Japan - in population decline and having all the associated economic problems with it. I think that can be directly be linked to excess capitalism - if we focus so much on making money, then we don't have time (or stability or resources) to raise the next generation.
[1] [https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/maslow-self-transcendence/][1]
[1]: https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/maslow-self-transcendence/
2024-02-17T05:28:28.013537Z
Trading Trust
Trust is a valuable and precarious thing, It's hard and slow to build
but easy to destroy. It's our greatest advantage against authoritarian
regimes, and that's why destroying trust is a long term strategy of
non-linear warfare against our culture.
Like fossil fuels that take millions of years to form, but can be
burned in half a century, trust is burned (enshitification) as cheap
accumulated social capital by those without higher loyalty. This for me
is why financialisation sucks the life out of nations and why greedy
and selfish big-tech companies are some of the most treacherous of all
entities.
2024-02-16T15:58:43.481551Z
Trading Trust
Watching large tech companies seemingly just destroy everyone's trust in them has been equal parts fascinating and depressing to see. People actually liked Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc at one point. Sure, they didn't like them all equally, (Google's reputation was usually a lot better than Facebook/Meta's), but there was something of an expectation that they did good work and offered good products/services.
Now it seems an increasing percentage of the population outright loathe them, and see them as basically everything wrong with the modern internet. Criticism of Google search is way more common now, criticism of Google shutting down products quickly is way more common, complaints about knockoffs and poor quality goods on Amazon are way more common, etc.
It's just wild to see.
2024-02-16T15:58:34.750592Z
Sad Clown Paradox: Why You Should Check In On Your Funny Friends | IFLScience
"Clowns are unhappy" is just something people with no sense of humor say to feel better about themselves.
Everyone is unhappy about something. I'd rather see it channeled into humor than into passive-aggressiveness.
People mention Robin Williams and John Belushi. If you want a (fictional) example, take Jerry (or Larry?) from Parks and Rec. He was as boringly positive as anyone alive, but he had a fantastic family life, and more importantly, I'd bet his kids would say, "Dad is really funny!" And most of his "jokes" would be silly Dad jokes.
2024-02-10T18:04:51.776755Z
Neal Stephenson's Most Stunning Prediction
I think the most prescient prediction he made about AI is this from Anathem. The concrete prediction is that the internet will become filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to use it will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense, before they reach any useful information. To translate: reticulum means internet, syndevs means computers.
> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
> “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
> “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
> “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
> “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
> “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
> “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
2024-02-07T15:02:35.496159Z
Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly
I have one point which I really feel exemplifies the entire Netflix experience: before you sign up, they do not give you a list of what's available to watch.
Seriously, check out their website. It's basically a landing page which says "give us your money". The prices aren't even displayed.
There is no list of shows, save for a few measly screenshots of featured/well-known titles. There is a search box which lets you search for titles, but nothing like a catalogue of offerings, which is the absolute bare minimum I'd expect to see before purchasing a service.
I really cannot fathom why anyone would willingly give their hard-earned money to a company which doesn't even tell you what you're getting in exchange.
2024-02-05T01:48:44.730769Z
Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub
Interesting, he seems to primarily work on a Discord Bot.
This is at heavy risk for confirmation bias, but I believe that writing chat bots is one of the best ways for people to get into and enjoy coding, because it's fun and rewarding, and simple enough (with an existing framework to use) that just uses strings. For a large generation it was MySpace and the ability to customize your page heavily with HTML. I know a number of people who learned HTML for that reason.
Chat bots seem like the closest modern day equivalent (despite the main platforms making it harder with stuff like difficult to connect to the real time websocket and force use of webhooks). 10 years ago or so when Slack was new and had a gloriously simple API, I even wrote a framework that made it as easy as implementing one function, and you could receive messages (among other metadata like the username of the sender) as strings and send replies easily as strings. It served as an entry point for a few friends who had some fun with it and learned some ruby in the process.
Anyway, if you're looking to get into coding but want to do a "real" project (or something very rewarding), start by writing simple chat bots! If you need some ideas, these are simple:
1. Start with writing a simple echo bot that just replies to every message with the same message that it received.
1. Write a bot that responds to every message with a random number between 1 and 100. For a slight increased challenge, have it do fizzbuzz where the nth message received is the counter.
2. Write a bot that that will reverse the message of whatever it receives, so it echoes replies but backwards.
3. Write a bot that will lookup a word when the message sent is "define <word>" and reply with the definition from one of the many dictionary APIs out there.
Go from there!
2024-02-02T11:19:53.929142Z
Fighting Infomania: Why 80% of Your Reading Is a Waste of Time (2016)
I leave up articles for days hoping I'll read them, they pile up in my tabs— wasting so much memory. A lot of pc memory is wasted from just this on my end and I know I'm not the only one.
It's interesting to think about how much wasted energy comes from tabs you're leaving open, hoping you'll get back to them one day.
2024-02-01T09:28:51.054972Z
Show HN: Librarian - Semantic Bookmark Search Using Transformers
Bookmark search is for rookies. I'd pay for a search tool over my 877 open tabs.
2024-01-29T08:25:15.442438Z
Flattr is closing down
I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments. The reason is simple: It's not a good way to actually earn an income. Creators need stable and predictable support. Subscriptions work much better for them. It's a tried-and-true business model.
What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure here, and it's a big one.
2024-01-18T22:51:07.455270Z
FAQ on Leaving Google
That was an absolutely spot-on description of what it was like when I joined in 2007 or 2008. Within 2 year of joining, I had approval to use all the idle cycles in prod for protein design, folding, and drug discovery, and I had a front-row seat with some of the best programmers in the industry. By and large, employees were fun people to interact with, and the management was generally understanding of our hijinx. The main struggle I had was to convince the leadership to move faster into the cloud ("But we have appengine!" and "But profits aren't as good as ads", until MSFT ate their lunch). As soon as it was possible, I built and launched the cloud product I had wanted Google to make even before I joined!
It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did.
Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust.
Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.
2024-01-18T03:29:11.173486Z
Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases
Sadly I never got to work on this when I was at Apple (interviewed for it though!), but hearing about this a few years ago sort of made me realize something that should have been obvious: there’s not really a difference between a database and a file system.
Fundamentally they do the same thing, and are sort of just optimizations for particular problem-sets. A database is great for data that has proper indexes, a file system is great for much more arbitrary data [1].
If you’re a clever enough engineer, you can define a file system in terms of a database, as evidenced by iCloud. Personally, I have used this knowledge to use Cassandra to store blobs of video for HLS streams. This buys me a lot of Cassandra’s distributed niceties, at the cost of having to sort of reinvent some file system stuff.
[1] I realize that this is very simplified; I am just speaking extremely high level.
2024-01-17T16:05:46.797769Z
How to set your domain as your handle
> All it needs to do is to get rid of the invite system
Exactly. The hype will be dead by the time people can actually join.
If we look at the example of Clubhouse, the invite system just pissed a lot of people off. So by the time they finally opened up the app to the public, the goodwill of the potential userbase was spoiled.
Invite systems feel bad and hurt your relationship with your future users.
2024-01-16T01:47:12.614677Z
FSRS: A modern, efficient spaced repetition algorithm
I’ve learned tens of thousands of foreign language words using Anki and have always find that having pictures on the cards help me remember the words.
I currently have a (foolish?) project. I’m trying to memorize the 750 cards of a quiz game that we play in the family. All questions are answered by a year. So for example: “What year did Coca Cola Light come out?”.
I have been using Midjourney to generate images for those cards which makes it so much eaaier to recall.
I have a system. I have a person representing each century; Einstein is 1900-2000 and for example Mari-Antoinette is 1700-1800.
Then items represent the decade; a sixties car represent the sixties, jacket with shoulder pads the eighties and so on.
I do something similar for the last digit.
Then I have Midjourney generate such pictures, in a comic book style, and I save the most fun or absurd one and use that on the back side of the Anki card.
The image is often easier to recall than the year by itself
2024-01-15T23:30:58.105458Z
The hovercraft's time might have arrived
In middle school one of my science teachers was really great and thorough, the kind of teacher that you remember the things you learned years later because they made the classes memorable.
We would drop things off the roof of the building and record with slow-mo cameras to calculate the formula for gravity, he lit hydrogen balloons on fire and you could feel the heat. The coolest day of the year was when we got to play with his “hovercraft”. He had repurposed a Vacuum cleaner to create a baby hovercraft.
It was basically a small platform, with a plastic tarp on the bottom that had little holes and when you turned the vacuum on it would expel the air and the little platform would ever so slightly lift up and glide across the ground.
The reason I remember it so vividly was because each of us students got a chance to sit on the chair atop the hovercraft platform and the teacher would push us down the hall and we’d “hover” from one side of the building to the other.
I am forever grateful for the teachers who go above and beyond to make learning fun for students with no reward to themselves.
2024-01-15T18:20:46.018339Z
The hovercraft's time might have arrived
You had the middle school science teacher I wish I had but never did. This was one reason I decided to send my kid to private school. When choosing schools my wife had a bunch of criteria but the only thing I really cared about was interviewing the middle school science teacher and we picked one with a great science teacher. My kid had a had a terrific time in that class and I got to experience middle school science done right through homework projects and dinner time stories.
The incidental lesson learned is that a private school board, principal and administrators who do the hard work to build a system and culture able to attract, hire and nurture one really great teacher tend to attract more than one. About half my kid's middle school teachers were extraordinary. When selecting schools just remember culture starts at the top and administrative regimes can change by eras so look at the recent history of board, principal and key staff turnover. I found out later the great principal who hired the teachers we loved had left the year before we started. Fortunately, it usually takes a few years for things to change much and our kid graduated middle school last year. I feel kinda bad for students starting there now though because some of the best teachers are starting to leave.
2024-01-15T18:20:19.566961Z
NixOS: Declarative Builds and Deployments
Having been on NixOS exclusively for a couple years now, it's inconceivable for me to go back to a non-declarative OS. It would be analogous to from from Git to unversioned source code. My operating environment is a piece of compiled software itself now, and is remarkably reliable and predictable. Yes, it's difficult to learn and takes more work, but it's similar to Git in that respect - powerful tools are worth the effort if it's your vocation.
2024-01-15T03:51:40.175164Z
Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?
Back when I ran Windows in a KVM VM for gaming, a lot of anti-cheat systems didn't take kindly to running in a virtualized environment.
Turning on HyperV to go KVM->HyperV->Windows effectively 'laundered' my VM signature enough to satisfy the anticheats, though the overall perf hit was ~10-15%.
2024-01-14T03:27:21.346841Z
Why are Apple Silicon VMs so different?
Doesn't Windows do it more or less the same?
A lot of Windows features depend on Hyper-V, once enabled Windows is not booted directly any more, Hyper-V is started and the main Windows system runs in a privileged VM.
All other VMs need to utilize the Hyper-V hypervisor, because nested virtualization is not that well supported. So even VMware then is just a front-end for Hyper-V.
2024-01-14T03:27:16.195543Z
Cloudflare employee posts layoff call with HR and goes viral [video]
I resent the judgmental attitude being expressed in some of the top comments. In the US at least, we’ve been socialized into believing workers need to “watch their manners” while corporations can get away with murder.
Here, a worker is clearly being wronged and some random HR goons want the whole thing to proceed as a normal, matter-of-fact 15-minute meeting. They’re going to email severance and equipment return info anyway. Take advantage of these opportunities to make them miserably uncomfortable. In Britt’s case, they never even knew her, so it’s not like she’s going to reach out to them for a recommendation.
2024-01-12T14:31:56.345419Z
Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees
Rank and yank
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
1. Rank everyone
2. Layoff bottom 10% or so
3. Reward the top
4. Keep it secret or the workforce will adapt by hiring bad people and sabotaging good people
Used at most companies with performance evaluations. Taught at MBA schools.
Trivia: MBAs have accomplished nothing throughout human history. Only creating overpaid executives that avoid taxes, corrupt the government, ruin the environment, make people poor, sick and make other countries richer. If all MBAs retired tomorrow 90% of obesity, pollution and corruption would stop.
2024-01-11T19:15:10.578151Z
Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
“Your job is NOT safe.”
I read once somewhere that the phrase “my job”/“your job” is one of the biggest oxymorons ever termed in America. You do not possess the job. You do not own it. You never did. There never was a time where anyone did. The “job” is owned by the employer. You may be assigned it. It may be unassigned by the employer. Or reassigned by the employer. Or redefined by the employer. “Your job” never was.
On the flip. It’s your life. Own that. We came up with the ideas of continuous integration, apply that to the relationship. Constantly renegotiate how your life overlaps with your employers job.
2024-01-11T15:48:34.870854Z
Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
The easiest way to follow this advice is to take it to its logical conclusion and just offer your services on a contracting basis, as a single member LLC or a small partnership. At this point in the US tech industry the relationship between employers and FTEs is so tenuous that there isn’t much difference between the two legal arrangements in terms stability. I’ve kept my best clients much, much longer than my longest tenured FTE jobs.
And there are lots of benefits to being independent legally. Tax benefits aside, the pay is usually much higher, and you can/should take on multiple clients simultaneously. This leaves you less exposed to the whims of a single C-suite, and lets you stack up silly amounts of money when times are good.
2024-01-11T15:46:30.436511Z
Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
Be loyal to people, not to companies.
Companies will cut you in a random layoff at the drop of a hat. I've seen this enough times in my career. It doesn't matter if they promise its the only/last/whatever cutoff, or it was for performance only, or whatever..
People in your network will pick you up and refer you / hire you on at the next gig.
My prior employer just did a wave of deep cuts and the stories I heard out of management were pretty crazy. Directory level people were basically given an hour to cut $X Million off their people budget from their directs and all their skip level staff. They then begin laying them off the same day. This was not a well planned or thought out process. So obviously the people I saw getting laid off were a mix of underperformerss, great-but-expensive, random personal grudges from the director, and unfortunately biased towards a lot of "lifers" who'd been there a long time.
2024-01-11T15:45:58.791178Z
Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
There's this phenomenon where employees earning higher than their friends and family OR at least doing work in a clean and safe environment tend to believe that they are not workers and they oppose regulations and unions because they feel like its beneath them.
At the company of a friend of mine, the white collar employees do charity events for the blue colar ones and while the blue colar ones participate on labour day events the white collar ones are too cool to be with them.
But when the actual non-workers feel like they can make more money by laying off some white collar workers, they go through the exact same process as the blue collar ones.
Also, these are not even high earning white collars, they just happen to work in a pleasant environment. Many blue collar workers make more money from them and are closer to the non-workers since they can actually do highly paid short term contract work.
There's a strong cognitive dissonance going on among white collar workers, having trouble to process the signals on if they are the cool elite or the working class. In Europe, this is not as strong because of the unions and regulations pushing all workers to earn more like the same and work in safe and clean environments but in places outside of EU there can be workers which are 10x or 100x beter off than those at the bottom and get too confusing.
2024-01-11T11:03:16.731280Z
Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %)
Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense.
After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers)
You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you. Not one thing. Not ever. Even if they're being truthful they were probably lied to themselves or told a half truth.
Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm. Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
You can be somewhere for 10 years. have glowing performance reviews, feel like you're making a difference, think it'll never happen to you, not even be aware the company is in shit, and then... tomorrow you're gone.
Your job is NOT safe.
2024-01-11T10:59:55.374212Z
Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?
I’ve worked in a lab of one of the original folks working on genetic logic gates, and honestly, no they don’t really work very well at all.
I think a lot of computer scientists assume that their model of the world (binary logic) is the most abstracted version possible, and you can drill down other information carrying systems to that level, and then use that knowledge to build reliable systems.
Biology does not work that way. Its fundamental abstraction is different (mostly one of massive interconnectedness). Engineering logic gates and the like, mostly, doesn’t actually allow you to build better genetic circuits.
2024-01-10T14:49:05.645403Z
An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
Thanks for sharing about your projects (especially notado and kuli.sh), I would never have heard about it if it weren't for this comment.
2024-01-09T19:02:12.454767Z
27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve.
The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist.
This was my experience in (large co).
I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC.
Management of that group took the approach “it’s a team effort!” And get the credit for that output.
Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star.
Eventually super star gets fed up and leaves, and gets paid what everyone else gets somewhere else “hoping to be valued.”
Management still win. They get the credit for the super stars work. Frustrated super star leaves. Mediocre management is still there.
A decade later nothing but the WORST and LEAST talented garbage are left. No one remotely talented would ever join that company because it’s a trap - you just get averaged in with mediocrity.
The “averaging the great in with the spectacular” to reduce the relative power of the spectacular is the entire point of “management.”
You have a team of six, pretend the work of the super star is “everyone working together” and attempt to grow your headcount off that super star.
That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently.
2024-01-01T15:54:35.133772Z
Amazon's Silent Sacking - Justin Garrison
My FAANG adjacent company is following the exact same practices. The goal is to "manage out" without paying a severance. They do this by making people miserable - fake PIPs, constant blaming, putting everything on "performance" etc.
My coworker got fired this way but I learned something amazing from him - his management was ready to cull him as soon as his project finished. This guy quickly figured this out and instead of quitting, he essentially stopped working hard. Then, he started giving fake status reports leading the management to believe that work is getting done. One fine day, he was let go.
But management was left picking up the pieces after his departure. With few engineers around, it led to lots of outages.
Suffice to say, my company is losing b2b customers because my company decided to fire people who were keeping the services up and running.
2023-12-31T16:16:05.407397Z
It's not microservice or monolith; it's cognitive load
The moment you adopt service based teams with service based managers, say goodbye to engineers caring about working product. Say hello to cross team meetings and project management every time you want to ship a feature.
It's pure vanity for a startup to think they will become the next AWS by adopting hard service-based contracts between teams.
2023-12-30T00:22:32.250777Z
Will scaling work?
The best analogy for LLMs (up to and including AGI) is the internet + google search. Imagine explaining the internet/google to someone in 1950. That person might say "Oh my god, everything will change! Instantaneous, cheap communication! The world's information available at light speed! Science will accelerate, productivity will explode!" And yet, 70 years later, things have certainly changed, but we're living in the same world with the same general patterns and limitations. With LLMs I expect something similar. Not a singularity, just a new, better tool that, yes, changes things, increases productivity, but leaves human societies more or less the same.
I'd like to be wrong but I can't help but feel that people predicting a revolution are making the same, understandable mistake as my hypothetical 1950s person.
2023-12-27T18:51:39.921060Z
Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, Human Rights Watch claims
One day, there will be a bigish war, and comms between the sides will be cut off, either by law, or all comms links severed.
At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.
I suspect that few businesses have prepared for such an eventuality, and I suspect severe disruption can be expected when it happens.
For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do is to never use sequences for database ID's. By using random id's, you can mostly let your replicated database partition itself, and a later merge isn't too hard as long as most users have been operating on only one side of the divide.
2023-12-24T06:55:15.963732Z
Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about. Today, I know what Spotify is trying to push, but I have no idea if that is what is actually popular. Even if I were to install TikTok I probably wouldn't see the same things they are. I have no idea if the garbage on the front page of reddit is really reflective of how younger people think, or if it just an engagement algorithm feedback loop gone wrong where everyone reasonable has long since checked out.
I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.
I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
2023-12-20T02:54:26.533420Z
Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
Not to create too much of a political tangent, but the lack of private offices, or rather the ubiquitous mandatory nature of open offices, and its universal unpopularity with non-managers, is evidence imo that tech could use a union or professional association or guild or something.
Oh sure you can talk about high comp and career mobility. But where does all of the vaunted labor power of software engineers go when they ask for something as simple as a cubicle?
2023-12-19T12:49:02.956093Z
The falling nutritional value of crops
If you repeatedly harvest crops from soil without working on building it, this is what happens. Each crop progressively removes some nutrients from the soil with the result that the soil nutrients, and nutrients in the derived food gradually decay. Most petroleum/chemically derived fertilizers do not replace such. It is a known phenomena organic farming circles. Organizations like Rodale institute are working to correct this my improving soil health - but in general we’re been on a long program of “withdrawing money from the bank account without paying in”.
2023-12-16T19:17:44.388435Z
Oxlint – Faster than ESLint
Would you consider removing your customisations to be closer to the workflows supported by these tools? One of the great things about go is that you're free to have an opinion, but if you disagree with go fmt or go build, your opinion is wrong.
2023-12-15T16:51:42.908662Z
Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead
Because Apple embraced texting by supporting SMS, then extended it by forcing all the text conversations that they could into their own proprietary infrastructure, and is extinguishing it by using punitive product design to create pressure on communities of people to all use their products so that everything goes over their proprietary network.
I don't want an over the top chat app, I just want to text people.
2023-12-15T03:50:37.551278Z
Etsy is laying off 11% of its staff
> I appreciate that our industry has developed a norm of generous severance
What if you had unions or proper labor laws that actually guaranteed this? As an European it's weird to see you having to rely on the "kindness" of the company to not get fcked over.
2023-12-13T18:33:27.124640Z
Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
Sometimes I think this whole "blue bubble" thing is a gigantic opt-in psych experiment about how biases like racism can start absolutely anywhere.
2023-12-09T03:15:11.988970Z
Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
youtube-dl, NewPipe, and uBlock Origin exist solely for the purpose of empowering the individual, yet they are constantly attacked on HN as being tools used unfairly to harm Google's profitability. Open-source projects like Matrix, PeerTube, Mastodon, are built to be free and open-source for the benefit of end-users and lack of vendor lockin. Yet each is derided on HackerNews for not being enough like their corporate counterparts. Yes, there are those here who don't do that, but as cynical as it sounds, I do think this site's audience is mostly folk who like the status quos set by FAANG-types and don't really care about hackerism outside of toy websites.
2023-12-09T02:27:21.836652Z
Crush Your Interviews with the Power of Storytelling
I had many many technical interviews this year. Nobody wanted to listen to my stories. I got a technical task and needed to solve it. From explaining steps in Visual Studio on paper how to create a functional hello world GUI. To some crazy undefined system design tasks. The single story I was allowed to tell was my introduction. I never experienced an interview where somebody wanted to do something else than assess my technical skills.
2023-12-07T14:06:02.914360Z
23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users
This disaster is the perfect counter-argument to those always saying "why do you care so much about privacy. It doesn't affect you when I share things. You can just choose not to do it", except no, I can't choose when we're relatives and you chose to share our genome.
It is so obvious that your relatives sharing their genomic data with 23andMe reveals a lot of information about you. We can only hope people will realize that this also holds true for collecting behavioural data on other people sharing the same background as you.
2023-12-05T16:27:55.885950Z
Launch HN: Slauth (YC S22) – auto-generate secure IAM policies for AWS and GCP
Not to knock on the OP but in general, if you are doing a startup in 2023, you cannot do it without AI otherwise no one will take your seriously. I am not joking. AI is the new Gold Rush that blockchain used to be. Personally, I do think that AI is awesome and has lot of great use cases but unfortunately, most VCs/Investors are looking for that keyword if you wanna get funded so I feel a lot of startups are forcing AI into their stuff.
2023-12-04T22:27:30.018634Z
An Update on December 2023 Organizational Changes — Spotify
I still cannot fathom any board allowing the CEO at the helm of a public that made cuts of 17% to remain in place.
That's a huge pivot in organisational structure by any measure and shows clearly poor judgement.
2023-12-04T20:31:40.869885Z
An Update on December 2023 Organizational Changes — Spotify
I wish CEOs would resign when layoffs happen. It should be like some governments where the whole cabinet resigns. If layoffs are a necessity, then the CEO and the top management should show the example and take responsibility for taking the company into the wrong direction, leading to layoffs. That would be fair and more understable than a "thank you for your hard work and commitment".
2023-12-04T20:31:05.847543Z
Why does sleep become more elusive as we age?
I’ve slept better as I age because there isn’t a government enforced mandate to force me to wake me up early in the morning and go into a room with my same age peers. Not being in poverty helps as well.
I found children were set up to fail so spectacularly when it comes to sleep that I wonder why it would become more elusive with age.
2023-12-04T13:57:58.141563Z
What's lost when we photograph life instead of experiencing it? (2016)
I deeply regret not photographing more when I was young, and I appear to have lost a lot of the few things I did photograph - very possibly because I was on extreme budgets and my first camera wasn't great, and my second had a fatal flaw that I never really fixed after 10 years of owning it (it was a Canon T70 that didn't always engage the aperture mechanism)
2023-12-04T13:44:52.520311Z
Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
Analog computation.
I don't mean just vacuum tubes or even electronics at all. Mechanical analog computing is insane when you get down to it. You have special shapes that move against each other and do calculus.
We make these mechanical models as analogs of more complex physical systems. We can turn huge calculations into relatively simple machines. That we can roll two weirdly shaped gears together and get an integral out says to me something very profound about the universe. I find it to be one of the most beautiful concepts in all of the sciences.
What's even more wild is that we can take those mechanical analogs of physical systems and build an electronic analog out of vacuum tubes. That vacuum tubes work at all is just completely insane, but it's some absolutely beautiful physics.
And yes, there are equally beautiful problems that can only be solved in the digital domain, but it just doesn't speak to me in the same way. The closest thing is the bitwise black magic like fast inverse square root from a special constant and some arithmetic. Besides, that's more a property of number systems than it is of digital computation.
I understand how and why digital took over, but I can't help but feel like we lost something profound in abandoning analog.
2023-12-03T07:25:48.524745Z
You do need a technical co-founder [video]
This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech product for the most part isn't the what beginners think makes tech hard — the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way.
Many non-tech people e.g. look at programmers and think the hard part is knowing what this garble of weird text means. But this is the easy part. And if you are a person who would think it is hard, you probably don't know about all the demons out there that will come to haunt you if you don't build a foundation that helps you actively keeping them away.
2023-11-30T22:37:40.998508Z
I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
> But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term, and some hyper-rational VP repurposes that reward as a kind of tenure cliff forcing people out just ahead of it? All the pieces are in the article, just waiting for folks to put them together.
If you're someone considering moving to a company that aggressively uses "performance management" like this ... the target of this system is you, not because you're bad at you're job but because you're new. The human toll of people in positions of trust essentially gaslighting their colleagues about their performance to confiscate special comp or satisfy the gods of analytics.... Deeply misanthropic.
2023-11-30T13:34:09.400876Z
Reddit Sans
What an interesting thread to read. "Typography aficionados" are one of the most ardent and vocal subcultures within the Hacker News community. Any given post may be hijacked at any time, for a meta-discussion about the font choices on that post's linked web page.
When a post actually IS about a new font, people dissect that latest microscopic riff on Helvetica like whiskey snobs describing a spirit's nose and mouthfeel.
However, a strong cross-cutting theme on HN is "hating Reddit even though you obviously spend a lot of time there". It's a clash of the titans, and a real role-reversal... this may be the first time I've ever seen a post about fonts mostly hijacked by something else instead.
2023-11-30T00:13:00.145882Z
Labor unions are pushing hard for better pay and hours – and winning
Software engineers often have a strange attitude, thinking they don't need unions, when pro athletes who make $millions per year all have unions. There's a myth that with unions, everyone will make the same compensation, but that's not even remotely true in pro sports.
The reason to have a union is that no matter how much money you make, the owners of the business have more money and power. Collective bargaining is a counterweight to the power of ownership.
And it's not just about money, it's about working conditions. For example, labor unions could fight back against back-to-the-office demands, whereas without a union, employees are forced to individually consent or lose their job.
2023-11-29T04:53:44.608987Z
Developers are not happy with .NET MAUI, but nobody in the team cares about it
Three decades of experience talking here: If you don't see a vendor like Microsoft using a GUI framework for at least 50% of their new applications, then you've made a terrible mistake in adopting it yourself.
Microsoft uses Google's framework for their own applications: Electron.
Yes, you heard me right. Microsoft, a nearly 3 trillion dollar company, uses the framework of a competitor for their own desktop applications.
Teams: Electron.
Visual Studio Code: Electron.
Azure Data Studio: Electron.
Now, let's make a similar list for Microsoft MAUI apps!
Umm... err... hmm...
2023-11-25T13:08:27.612014Z
The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work — Ludicity
I think every engineering manager has either worked for or interviewed with a company that believes this stuff.
Software dev is still at the craftsman[0] level. It might move out of that, eventually. But not yet, and probably not in the next 20 years or so. We haven't solved some intrinsic problems around defining a problem completely, precisely and succinctly without having to write code[1]. And getting five engineers to write a single piece of software is exactly as complex as it was when Fred Brooks wrote about it, I think the only improvement we've had since then is Git.
[0] craftsperson? that doesn't feel like the right gender-neutral expression. I guess "artisanal" but that looks rude. Suggestions?
[1] The "I got ChatGPT to write this application without writing a single line of code" phenomenon is interesting, but it seems like an alternate skill path - you can write code, or you can write prompts. The complexity is the same, and the amount of effort is within an order of magnitude. I'm not sure, though - I haven't managed to get ChatGPT to solve a single technical problem successfully yet.
2023-11-24T16:37:39.450287Z
The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work — Ludicity
Programming is still a craft, not engineering, or manufacturing. A software house should work like bespoke tailoring, or fine cabinetry, or glass blowing.
There's still no better training for programming than the equivalent of master/journeyman/apprentice. Apologies for the gender specific terms, but they are specific to how tradespeople operated from medieval times.
The worst thing to ever happen to the practice of business is the invention of the MBA. MBAs are imbued with the misleading axiom that management is a craft and science of its own, independent of the type of process or practice that is being managed.
Combined with endless selling of the latest buzzword theories by consultants is why we end up with JIRA-Driven-Development, nonsense like t-shirt sizes, 2 hour wankfests called "Sprint Reviews", let alone all the scrumming and standing-up and backlog-refining and endless make work.
2023-11-24T16:36:00.967565Z
The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work — Ludicity
One key problem is nobody, none of the suits anyway, want to believe that there are essential, hard problems that can't be outsourced, can't be commodified, can't be shortcut in any way.
It's the business version of the get-rich-quick scam course hucksters. The truth that there's no silver bullets can't compete.
2023-11-24T16:35:12.988738Z
OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster
> OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
Are we really defining intelligence as economic value at this point? This is completely ridiculous.
We have yet to decide exactly what human intelligence, how it manifests in the body, or how to reliably measure it. I get that people want to justify developing artificial intelligence before understanding intelligence itself, but now we assume that economic value is a proxy for intelligence? Seriously?
2023-11-23T03:11:24.858686Z
We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO
Developers are clearly the weak link today, have given up all power over product and it is sad and why software sucks so bad. It pains the soul that value creators have let the value extractors run the show, because it is now a reality TV / circus like market where power is consolidating.
Developers and value creators with power are like an anti-trust on consolidation and concentration and they have instead turned towards authoritarianism instead of anti-authoritarianism. What happened? Many think they can still get rich, those days are over because of giving up power. Now quality of life for everyone and value creators is worse off. Everyone loses.
2023-11-22T14:21:52.333606Z
RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information
I gotta say I don't deeply understand ActivityPub, but one of the first things I thought when trying to grok it was "how does this improve on RSS?". Like another commenter here I think a big part of it is that it's JSON and not XML, but I think another thing people would say is that you aren't storing things locally, that is you don't have an application pulling things onto your local machine (phone, laptop, whatever).
But I've evolved lately, and now I strongly feel like we're missing the forest for the trees here. These things aren't just RSS; they're email. They're email lists. ActivityPub even uses the language of email; it has `to` and `cc`, and `replyTo` fields, in/outboxes. There are (media)Types, i.e. MIME types.
There are differences. ActivityPub basically exists to be an underlying protocol for Twitter-like social media, so it specs out things like Likes or Undo. But IMO, stuff like this is either superfluous/harmful (chasing likes/views maybe isn't a good idea), or maybe unclear what a lot of people would want out of a conversations platform. I don't really want someone else to irrevocably edit the stuff I've pulled down; sure I'll let you send a diff or something, but I want the history. Or, on the other hand, maybe I don't want someone to store a history of my worst posts, ready to unleash them whenever I dare to do something public. Or, on the other hand, maybe this has been a really useful tool to speak truth to power. Or, maybe we shouldn't create a protocol that seems to guarantee this, only to have rogue servers that store these things as diffs anyway to lull you into a false sense of "posting hot takes is OK I can always undo/edit/blah".
2023-11-20T14:05:42.852661Z
Return To Office Mandates Can Take A Hike
Offices today are merely a justification for managers (the useless kind, which is about 90% of them) to not become redundant, and for the C-suite to keep getting those sweet sweet tax breaks.
Which answers the question by itself.
"Should we be loyal to companies...?"
No
2023-11-20T10:49:33.122676Z
Return To Office Mandates Can Take A Hike
Offices, along with mass transit, are superspreader sites, but we're asked to pretend that they're not, even after going through a pandemic during which we were told to be in constant fear of killing grandma and potentially everyone else we come into contact with. It's amazing how quickly things like caring for the environment disappear the instant they become inconvenient for businesses or governments, and the same is true for just about every single thing that was rammed down our throats during the pandemic that should be forgotten so managers can look out over their underlings and extroverts can get their unspoken fringe benefit of using the office as a place to socialize.
COUGH COUGH! Oh well, none of that pandemic stuff really matters anymore, right? Which is weird considering how much messaging there is around everyone needing to get more boosters. Can't even go grocery shopping with it being announced. So, what is it? Over or not? If it's still on, why are superspreader activities allowed, especially when there's a viable option of not maximizing office attendance?
2023-11-20T10:47:46.428810Z
Return To Office Mandates Can Take A Hike
Here is an argument in favor of WFH that I hardly ever see:
Growing up in a second rate city in a country with little tech scene, my and my colleague options to advance our career was to leave our city or our country behind. Having to choose between family/friends and career is a pretty tough choice to face. My sister in law moved to the capital for 2 years and had a distance relationship until she was able to transfer back to our city.
WFH makes this much less of an issue. Now someone can have a successful career more easily even if they live in a small town. Having more choice of career while not sacrificing friends and family is something I wish I had 15 years ago.
At the same time people starting their career tend to be the ones who benefit the most from an office setup, so there is probably still a tradeoff to make.
2023-11-20T10:46:34.210862Z
Return To Office Mandates Can Take A Hike
I have a 100% remote job, but I had them set me up with a desk in a coworking space. I just felt that being alone all day was just a lonely way to live my life. It was great at the start to have so few interruptions, but y'know we're not building the pyramids. Everything we make in tech becomes legacy pretty quickly and eventually forgotten about and lost. I think a lot of life is what happens in the interruptions. That's where you find out about the guy that goes ice fishing and get invited along, or about someone who plays in a band and introduces you to a weird new music scene or something like that. I think everyone should get to work however they feel they need to within reason (I like the coworking space vibe myself), but I just hope people aren't giving up more than they realised.
2023-11-20T10:45:16.717260Z
Backlash as Netflix cancels five shows at once including its 'best series'
Netflix has already damaged their brand of original shows for me. After years of starting something and having it suddenly canceled and left unfinished I now don't bother to watch any original Netflix programming unless it's already a completed series.
I'm sure it makes sense in the short term to cancel things that aren't bringing in enough revenue, but when you have years of aggressive cancelations it also causes some long term damage that might end up harming the platform even more than spending a bit more to make a quick series conclusion.
They also lose out on potential long tail value of a completed show, like how arrested development wasn't the most popular at it's initial run but later made up for it in DVDs and streaming. People won't want to start watching something they know doesn't finish even if it would otherwise be a great show for them, so it becomes a complete waste of production money instead of a possible future asset.
Most corporate decisions these days seem like they're made to maximize a short term stock or revenue bump... and then the execs rake in a huge bonus and jump ship before the future fallout hits.
2023-11-20T00:32:56.660151Z
The Small Website Discoverability Crisis @ marginalia.nu
Not so long ago, every blog has a "blog roll", a list of author’s favorite blogs.
Nothing was better than have your blog in the blogroll of a "famous" blogger.
It is funny how people who didn’t live through this blog era are now reinventing it spontaneously. It’s a bit like bloggers were onto something 20 years ago, before being killed by the advertisements monopolies.
But there’s a big difference between old blogosphere and current blogosphere : old blogs had ads. Most bloggers were experimenting with it, one way or another. We were lured by monetization and killed ourselves in the process.
Younger bloggers seem to have learn about it: let’s do the same old blogs but, this time, without any ads and by actively preventing tracking.
That’s how evolution works, when you think about it. It’s beautiful.
2023-11-15T15:23:46.815411Z
X is changing its algorithm to highlight smaller accounts
Twitter was the first platform to get celebs posting on the daily so they had something new and exciting on their hands.
TikTok then said, what if we turn normal people into celebrities?
TikTok would not exist without Twitter and I think Twitter could not have been TikTok. The two cater to different audiences. The elitism of Twitter is what kept the celebs posting there.
2023-11-14T12:14:48.775716Z
X is changing its algorithm to highlight smaller accounts
This is good. Was insane that it used to literally penalize your account if you interacted with sub 1000 accounts before.
Seeing how TikTok treats its creators really shows old Twitter management squandered something bigger by chasing only the desires of journalists and celebs on their platform.
Never seeing the bigger picture of what was possible.
2023-11-14T12:14:26.948120Z
A coder considers the waning days of the craft
I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride.
It was one of the incidents that made me to stop front-end development.
As an exercise, I recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly.
I’m certainly a middling programmer when it comes to CSS. But with ChatGPT I can produce stuff close to the quality of what the CSS masters do. The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists.
2023-11-14T12:11:49.443442Z
Tragedy of Return to Hostile Offices
I like the phrase "serendipity is not a strategy", it gets to my biggest complaint about the arguments for going back to the office. Your shitty open plan office was never MIT Building 20 before the pandemic, and it's not going to become a womb of creativity after the pandemic just because you want it to be so. The way I know that is because you have to threaten people to come back to it, if it was special at all they'd come back on their own.
2023-11-13T16:36:47.692803Z
An Overview of Nix in Practice
I must say that as far as I'm concerned, Nix is very much emblematic of simpler technology. Nix tries to solve problems (such as build impurities) very much by trying to fix things at the source (and contributing back to upstream!), rather than slapping things that work on top of each other, mindlessly using magic like containers. That's one of the reasons why I adore nixpkgs, that they have heroically attempted to fix problems in packages at their sources, and have very much succeeded.
2023-11-13T05:37:48.612817Z
Archived YouTube Video Finder
Cultural rot caused by YouTube taking down old videos is a serious problem.
There was a YouTube channel I was following for about 15 years, of an older woman who had pet foxes. Her health started declining and she always had on her channel something like, "I'll leave these videos up forever." She passed away and YouTube deleted all her content.
The problem is 100x worse for any political content. My YouTube bookmarks from just the past few years is a graveyard of information that's not convenient to have around. It's even true for politics-related jokes, songs, and memes. They seem to be selected for deletion more often than not, within a few years.
2023-11-11T18:37:58.291765Z
Goodbye Spotify
If HN was Spotify client, the add comment button would randomly shift position on every visit and have one of these as the text: create, send, publish, add to thread
And sometimes if you clicked it, nothing would happen
2023-11-11T04:17:20.455492Z
Goodbye Spotify
I feel we're entering a 2nd great renaissance of media piracy and torrent sites. Fair streaming services were a great solution. But for a variety of reasons that all has slowly been corrupted and become obtrusive. I've recently cancelled my Netflix account after subscribing for over 12 years. Private torrent sites are reporting a significant increases in active users.
2023-11-11T04:15:45.027827Z
Apple discriminated against US citizens in hiring, DOJ says
Reading into the press release, there is a distinction that probably escapes most native citizens here: they are talking about EB2 visa, not H1B. PERM certification is not the same labor certification done in H1B.
PERM is a much more rigorous and demanding process and it costs a lot more money than anything related to H1B. The reason is because it leads to a green card, not just a work permit. Often, it requires an advance degree and higher qualification than H1B too, PhDs or experienced masters. The money is paid upfront and USCIS then look into it and approves PERM on a case by case basis often taking a year or more. Then when the PERM passes, the applicant can finally get on the green card backlog and wait a few more years, or a decade if you were born in the wrong place...
This is to say the quality of applicants here is very high and Apple actually felt it was worth it to invest tens of thousands of dollars on each of them just for a green card gamble, which the employee can get then quit Apple immediately after and nothing can be done to them because they are now a permanent resident. No such thing as wage depression or abuse at this point because they are for all legal purposes, an equal to any American once they have EB2.
2023-11-10T23:28:08.019383Z
AI.gov
The US government can't legally pay the salaries required to find AI experts right now (just look at the salaries on the open positions). So all this work will end up being done by contractors who _can_ pay those salaries while the contractors skim off the top.
The US really needs a special schedule for software developers if they want technical expertise in house (and they really should have technical expertise in house)
2023-10-30T18:09:42.932251Z
Giving a Shit as a Service (2022)
why is everybody so obsessed with scale? the good things in live don't scale, like relationships. the dream of scaling everything to a 1 billion business is just greed talking. caring about a craft and building relationships will be more fulfilling than a billion in the bank
2023-10-29T20:44:13.955538Z
Giving a Shit as a Service (2022)
The Forks episode of The Bear is one of my favorite stories on giving a shit: a fork polisher at a fancy restaurant learns you don’t work in food service because you love polishing forks. You do it because you want to bring people joy and polishing the forks is one of many steps to that end. You can find purpose in fork polishing through both excellence and empathy for your customers. There’s a lot of days the code I write is about as exciting as fork polishing, but you do it for your teammates and users.
2023-10-29T20:43:24.918225Z
Giving a Shit as a Service (2022)
I know a lot of people here are writing about how this can be done for small consulting companies, but I also saw it in Big Tech.
Amazon until 2022 really genuinely exemplified this. I saw it for more than a decade leading up to this. Just an unbelievable collection of people that truly Gave A Shit. Publicly we called it "Customer Obsession" and through that lens you could move mountains around here in the pursuit of Doing The Right Thing.
The first sign of trouble was 2021. Salaries skyrocketed in the industry. Amazon didn't keep up. A lot of great people left because they got obscene offers, and you know, who could blame them? Our core of "intermediate" engineers (L5 here) got decimated - why bust your ass for a promotion when you can just get a Senior offer from one of 100 over-funded Unicorns for more money than you would've made here. Sensible.
Then in 2022 the stock price dropped in half and a bunch of folks who seems like were only putting up with the bullshit as long as the stock grew indefinitely left too.
Then 2023 brought layoffs.
There's still a lot of us around that Give A Shit, but I feel like we are outnumbered more and more by those that just want to punch in and out and no longer Make History. I get it. I can't blame anyone individually. But I miss it.
2023-10-29T20:42:20.453379Z
Google to invest up to $2B in Anthropic
I don't see how that could even register. We use OpenAI at home (both me and my wife) but everything ChatGPT spouts must, invariably, be verified.
It's not even "trust but verify" but "Oh yup, I didn't thought of that. However it may be a lie because ChatGPT is a pathological liar, and as I cannot possibly trust a lying tool, I'll now verify" (I know, I know, there's a discussion regarding nomenclature: "lying" / "hallucinating" or whatever. But anyone who's actually using ChatGPT knows what I mean).
Basically the output of ChatGPT, for me, goes directly into Google / Wikipedia / etc.
The one case where I can use the output of ChatGPT directly is when I translate from, say, english to french or vice-versa and I know both languages well enough to be able to tell if the translation is okay or not.
Those believing they can use the output of ChatGPT without verifying it are basically these lawyers who referenced hallucinated cases to a judge.
As another person as commented: it didn't even make a dent in Google's search requests and that is no surprise.
2023-10-28T15:27:59.372217Z
Passkeys are now enabled by default for Google users
As others have pointed out, cryptographic authentication is very hard to bootstrap if you simply loose your device.
Just last month my missus cracked the glass of her iPhone. Apple repaired it under AppleCare, which is great… except… that they didn’t tell her that the “glass repair” entails them replacing the guts of the phone and wiping it in the process.
Apple iPhone backups don’t contain cryptographic secrets like eSIMs!
She got stuck in a loop where she couldn’t activate her eSIM because that needed her email, but her email needed MS Authenticator, which she couldn’t activate without an SMS.
She had to drive to the Telco with a pile of photo ID to reissue her eSIM. Her bank account got locked in the process despite the password being correct because of some sort of phone hardware lock.
This took days to fix and multiple in-person visits to various organisations. If this had happened while overseas on holiday, she would have been screwed.
Times have changed.
Your entire digital identity is now a smart card in your phones
That Smart Card is either a SIM card or an onboard TPM chip, but in any event if you lose it, you may as well be dead as far as anyone else is concerned.
Passkeys make this much worse. At least if you still have a physical SIM you can transfer it from any phone to any other phone.
Passkeys are not cross-vendor transferable!
Run away screaming. Don’t believe the hype. Wait until the vendors get their act together and come up with a solution for transfer and recovery.
2023-10-10T21:54:30.995408Z
To bring socializing back to social networks, apps try A.I. imagery
As a person with an audience – you get to a point where the audience feels like an insatiable beast that just wants wants wants and never gives back. Soon you feel like a monkey dancing for peanuts to a jeering crowd that will move on to the next monkey immediately when you stop. You are only as good as your last [new] piece of content.
Social media has long since stopped being a bazaar of ideas and stimulating exchange. These days to most people it’s passive entertainment fueled by semi amateur creators. It’s no linger social media, now it’s social media.
It's pretty draining if you’re on the creator side.
2023-09-30T03:30:27.430588Z
WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
When my son was younger - maybe 9 or 10 or so, we were on a plane and he was using his phone and I looked over his shoulder and realized he was on the internet... but I hadn't paid for an internet plan. I said, "son, how are you using the internet?" He said, "oh, a kid at school showed me - if you go here" (he opened up the wifi settings where the DHCP assigned IP address is) "and start changing the numbers, eventually the internet will work." Apparently, at the time, on American Airlines, when somebody bought and paid for an internet plan, it gave them an IP address and authorized it to use the internet... if somebody else guessed your IP address (which was pretty easy, it was a 192.168 address) and spoofed it, they could take over your internet connection with no further authorization.
I had to tell him not to do that, but I was kind of proud of him for having the temerity to go for it.
2023-09-29T00:15:49.797172Z
Tell HN: There is a highlights page on HN
I’d contrast to Tildes where I think reply notifications help keep people engaged in discussions and Mastodon where I think people use favorites to close off a discussion.
Tildes is interesting to compare to HN because it is superficially similar but the balance between links and discussions is quite different. That is, I think “Ask HN” is pretty sad and mostly failed (look at how few get a single comment) but linkless discussions on Tildes are pretty lively.
2023-09-25T13:29:42.994604Z
It's okay to make something nobody wants
A fellow I knew would build boats. Sailboats. I don’t know much about boats but I’d say that these were something like 25-30 foot boats. These were not dinghies.
He started from raw plans, build the hull ribs, layer on the fiberglass for the hull (he bought his resin in 50 gallon drums). Now, of course, he has to sand and finish the fiberglass.
Once he got to that point, he’d build a rig around the hull out of wood that allowed the hull to rotate in place around its axis with a hydraulic Jack. He did all of this alone.
Once upright, he’d have about 5000 lbs of lead delivered to be placed and secured in the keel. At this point he gets the top parts of the hull and deck in place so he can weatherproof the interior.
The interior is all hardwood. Mahogany and such. His two car garage was a dedicated woodworking and cabinetry shop. The boat was in his fenced backyard.
When it was all said and done, 4-5 years later, a truck and a crane would come, lift it out of the backyard, and take it to the local harbor, 30 miles away.
Then, he’d sell it, start over, and make another.
He didn’t sail.
I know he made at least 3 of them. I’m sure he profited on raw materials, not so sure on time, certainly not on time/value of money.
He was a software developer by trade. He wrote accounting systems.
2023-09-23T06:09:46.042448Z
What the debate about Neanderthals reveals about us
> Perhaps that is a surer way to restore them to dignity than any other: to see them not as falling prey to our ancestors but as our ancestors.
I did notice that the popular transition to recast Neanderthals from primitive troglodytes to advanced peers seemed to coincide closely with the revelation that all Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA.
2023-09-22T18:56:33.165993Z
Amazon Prime Video content to start including ads next year
This is equivalent to shrinkflation: pay the same, get less. Streaming platforms want to retain most users, but also extract more value from them. Slowly a new threshold for what's "normal" is set, and perhaps then -more- adds can be added. There's no need to speculate where things go from there. Just look at where cable TV is.
2023-09-22T13:12:44.965890Z
The male loneliness epidemic and how it affects fathers
"1 in 5 said they had gotten emotional support from a friend in the past week, compared with 4 in 10 women." -TFA
There was no need to change the demoninator - it was done to confuse people by having them compare 1 vs 4. It's hard to take the rest of the article seriously when they game the numbers to manipulate people so obviously.
I feel like there is a real problem here, even if it is played a little too hard for the article. I do a lot of parenting but am lucky that my college friends all married and reproduced around the same time. So now instead of 12 people hanging, gaming, and BSing, we have 30-40 people in a glorious mob of activty. Thing is - the kids kinda entertain themselves reducing the parenting load for everyone. And everyone know how each family does stuff, so any 'random' adult can provide guidance or escalate to their parent. I don't know how I would do it without the group - likely I would try to build one from my kids new friends without the 20 years of common history.
2023-09-18T18:35:38.458826Z
The “Do Something About It” Club
For me I've come to realize two truths:
1) there is no value in putting energy into that which you have no control, and MOST things you can read about on the Internet fall into this category
2) almost all good or beautiful things are either personal and happen either in their natural course (relationship, family, the sunset) or they require a lifetime of distillation or creation of that _something_ that is missing from the world.
For me personally I've chosen to focus on my family and job, and spend the rest of my time in pursuit of a large life-long goal (civboot.org). It's gone quite well so far, but I'm only 3 years in
2023-09-16T14:26:37.586480Z
Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?
Visual Basic is one of the best arguments for open source and community ownership in the history of computing, IMO. Microsoft's decision to tank it was hugely painful for companies that had made major investments in it -- no company should make that kind of investment in a proprietary platform that can be killed off by a single company and not forked and maintained by others.
2023-09-11T19:34:31.322081Z
In Germany, 27 are in 'preventive detention' b/c they might do climate protests
This is is a state law, not a federal one. As far as I understand it is limited to 2 months. Just a clarification, not a justification. It was a somewhat controversial law, and I think those cases clearly show why. Those laws always get justified with terrorism, and now they're jailing people that block traffic.
I don't think such laws should exist, and we should do better there. Unfortunately I don't expect that with the Bavarian politic landscape this will happen on the legislative way.
2023-09-11T18:55:09.788036Z
Can We Talk to Whales? | The New Yorker
That guy right here[1], states that we will start to decode animal languages within one or two years. There is a story in the video, where he describes he and his team recording whale's words, playing the recorded audio back to the whale, and the surprising reaction of the leviathan.
One pretty astounding observation he makes, is that we humans and the planet earth, thought to be the centre of the universe until the telescope came along. Now it will be a similar moment, in which we think that our language is at the centre of intelligence, not realizing that many animals communicate just like us, but in an incomprehensible way to us.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tUXbbbMhvk
2023-09-10T19:22:39.056065Z
Can We Talk to Whales? | The New Yorker
Communication established: "sorry for the genocide, but we needed the candles and BTW, those stomache cramps come from microplastic. Oh and we caused a global warming, so.. Good luck?" if any sea life had a fully conscious society it would wage guerrilla war against humanity.
2023-09-10T19:21:54.732368Z
An effort to ban caste discrimination in California has touched a nerve
> a proposal that many felt was unnecessary and unfairly tarnished the image of the South Asian community
I'm white yet I don't feel "unfairly tarnished" by the banning of white supremacy.
Nevertheless, plenty of Americans (mostly but not exclusively white) do oppose legislative constraints on white supremacy and I think it's fair to say that they "feel tarnished" by them. My read is that this opposition comes from the same place.
2023-09-04T19:33:36.095327Z
Teaching with AI
Those who really desire to understand how things work will be undeterred by the temptation of AI. There are two types of people: those who care to know and really understand and those who don’t. Should we really force people, past a certain point, to care when it’s clear they don’t and are only doing something because they are forced to? I would argue that people should spend more time on the things they truly care about. That’s the critical difference; when you care about something and get enjoyment and satisfaction out of it, you want to understand all the fine details and have a thirst for knowledge and true insight. When you don’t care, you take the absolute shortest path so you can make time to do whatever it is that brings you true satisfaction. That’s perfectly okay with me because I do it all the time for things I couldn’t care less about.
If someone who wants to be a software engineer can’t be bothered to learn and understand the fundamentals I’d argue that software engineering isn’t the discipline for them. The more you understand, the larger the surface area of the problem you have for which to explore further.
2023-09-01T17:37:54.051374Z
Social media’s addictive loop compels users to share mindlessly
> After a time, habitual or frequent users become desensitized to positive feedback, such as likes and comments, from other users.
I've noticed this personally. In my early social media days circa 2012, going viral with a post of mine evoked genuine gratefulness for the post and appreciation for how much reach it got. Now, going viral is just a habit. 10,000 likes, 1000 shares on Facebook is my new normal. It's not 'special' like it used to be. I still appreciate my viral posts, just not to the extent of my early social media days (this is probably because fewer people were on it in 2012).
2023-08-28T18:41:00.089214Z
We Don’t Need a New Twitter
Twitter’s real value was its “global RSS” nature. You could get short, quick updates about local news, published papers, sports events, political happenings, and more.
It made it easy to source info from your followers (or their followers) quickly. Think Ask HN but broader.
Activity on Twitter is down now, mastodon and threads aren’t cutting it. There’s more activity on LinkedIn but it’s quite phoney.
I genuinely feel that Twitter provided me with useful information from people of interest.
2023-08-28T14:25:56.570143Z
Mister Rogers had a point – routinely greeting six neighbors maximizes wellbeing
As a kid, I had extreme social anxiety. I had a hard time talking to people and making friends. I never felt like I “belonged.”
As an adult, I still have crippling social anxiety.
I can’t speak for everywhere, I’m pretty much only in the U.S., but I’ve noticed that most fellow adults I come across are chronically deprived of social interaction.
My social anxiety doesn’t actually matter. Me being awkward, and weird, and a little bit out there doesn’t actually matter. If you talk to people, ask them questions about themselves, laugh with them when they want to laugh, listen to them when they want to vent, rant with them when they want to rant, and feel pain with them when they’re vulnerable, a sweeping majority of the people I’ve met in the U.S. engage.
And the more you do it, the more you realize the world is actually full of amazing people. They’re all living their lives, making mistakes, getting things wrong, and making bad calls. But overwhelmingly they’re trying to figure life out and get through the best they can; and they want people with them on that journey.
I still have crippling social anxiety but my friend group is steadily growing and it feels good. I still play the fun game in my head of “haha did we all have a good time today or did I actually say something terrible and now everyone hates me or thinks I’m a fool?” on pretty much a daily basis. But I wouldn’t go back to being lonely. Not just for me, but for these amazing people who want more folks with them on their journey.
2023-08-19T03:07:06.570573Z
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler (2022)
To some extent my entire career has been searching for and destroying said half baked implementations. This saying can be adapted to infra: “half baked, bug ridden kubernetes”, “half baked, bug ridden proxySQL”, “half baked, bug ridden redis”, the list goes on and on.
In some ways I feel like my impact has been quite boring, in other ways quite vital. But it’s never made me friends with the kind of developers who look sideways at the idea that other peoples life’s work might be better than their 5 year old weekend project.
2023-08-18T04:02:30.232992Z
How a startup loses its spark
I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in a few months. A really easy to use deployment tool, Asgard, just happened. The VP of CDN at that time said Netflix would build its own CDN and partner with ISPs. Well, it just happened in merely 6 months with 12 people or so. Netflix said it was going to support streaming and move away from its monolithic Tomcat app, and it just happened. And the engineers there? I can't speak for others but I myself had just one meeting a week -- our team meeting where we just casually chatted with each other, to the point that the team members still stayed close to each other and regularly meet nowadays. I also learned that the managers and directors had tons of meetings to set the right context for the team so engineers could just go wild and be productive. At that time, I thought it was natural, but it turned out it was a really high bar.
2023-08-12T21:17:46.883372Z
Doctors on TikTok
The end result of most social media is to make all relationships exploitative.
2023-08-10T14:23:10.181206Z
How the “lazy girl job” took over work
We are doomed.
But a lot of people have decided, that before the system finally collapses they could be parasites on the system. And it is hard to blame the people for making this rational decision.
Late stage capitalism looks very much like Soviet Union in 80-ties. The economy doesn't make sense, the system is wasteful, no one believes in official propaganda, there are no values that you could follow. But a little guy can at least take it easy and relax a bit.
As the saying goes - They are pretending that they are paying us fair wages, and we are pretending that we are working.
2023-07-27T13:24:04.145488Z
How the “lazy girl job” took over work
> most people don’t actually do much work at work and that it was all one big game
This much is true. Most people don't do much work at work. The difference between working in the office and working remote is that when you're at the office, your "pretend to work" time is spent discreetly browsing social media on your phone. When you're at home, you can spend it on things more conducive to your health like going to the gym or walking your dog.
I have a hypothesis that the top 10% of performers (could really be as little as 1%) in society are usually very upset by the fact that 90% of people want to do as little work as possible, and those top 10% performers are holding the rest of us hostage via in-office requirements and constant electronic monitoring, but I think since 2020 these people are now losing that battle and the 90% no longer have to pretend to give a shit what the 10% think anymore
2023-07-27T13:22:25.506539Z
A world where people pay for software
Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some.
Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blows my mind how much easier it is to run a business that deals with bytes instead of atoms. The OP talks about software having no copy protection, but Amazon sells DVD players and cordless drills for $30. Imagine for a second how hard it is to compete with that. Competing with Google or Microsoft or some startup is a walk in the park in comparison.
In software the hard part is making an excellent product. And let's face it, that's where most people fail. It has nothing to do with monetization.
2023-07-26T18:55:56.280743Z
The remote work dominates on HN:Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote
> I was able to move closer to my church community, so my "human interaction" need is being fulfilled richer than ever now.
This is what the "but you need human interaction" return-to-office crowd doesn't understand.
WFH !== Being alone
WFH means surrounding yourself with the people you choose to be around.
Whether that's your church community, fellow hobbyists, intramural sports teams, the local co-working space, etc.
Plus, that can include "my coworkers" for anyone that wants to make work a bigger part of their life, like those working in startups. However, this should be the exception, not the rule like it has been.
It should be your choice...
2023-07-25T16:00:43.980547Z
Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node
The eternal struggle. Information wants to be free, and then people use those freedoms to do the most screwed up things imaginable, and people like this pay the price.
It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
It’s surprising how much anonymity and the subject at hand are correlated. In my 20s I liked to explore, as I’m sure many of you do too. I once met someone in the Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service, so you can’t just pull up google maps. Nowadays starlink solves that problem, but back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps, and ended up dying to exposure when he went to get help. Never leave your car.
I found all of this fascinating. What a project! Make all of google maps accessible right from your phone, with no internet. I briefly fell in love with that community.
Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of child porn that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general. I have a pretty high tolerance for “operating in gray areas,” like this guy. But one of the tragedies of the cyberpunk dream is that the entire scene has been coopted by cp. In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
2023-07-23T20:14:11.575253Z
What Is Nix?
Dockerfiles which just pull packages from distribution repositories are not reproducible in the same way that Nix expressions are.
Rebuilding the Dockerfile will give you different results if the packages in the distribution repositories change.
A Nix expression specifies the entire tree of dependencies, and can be built from scratch anywhere at any time and get the same result.
2023-07-22T01:45:10.247641Z
Food companies ‘sweetened the world’ and increased the risk of disease
I would like to live in a world, with very little tempting foods when i walk around.
I would like to live in a world where me and maybe a person i trust, could together limit of the foods i can buy, and than program that into my credit card.
I would like to live in a world, where instead of scientists and engineers and businessmen working on optimizing the addictiveness of food, which isn't a good social goal, would work on optimizing the long term happiness derived from food.
And sure, while I would lose some freedom and fun in this process, given the role food plays in mood and health, over the long term i would likely be happier, much happier.
2023-07-15T04:25:52.068116Z
Instagram Threads: The Problem With The "Everything for Everyone" Approach
This isn't a critique of Threads, this a commentary on the nature of social graphs and different identities in different spaces. People use IG different than they use Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, etc.
You could get the same experience on Twitter by following Dora the Explorer, Procter and Gamble, your uncle, and Brian Chesky but you have chosen to have a specific experience in that app by curating your feed.
A better example, port LinkedIn's graph to Snapchat and it would seem like absolute nonsense.
IG ported a visual social graph to a text based app, this, by definition, isn't going to produce the most optimal experience. Thats 100% fine though, you'll realize who is good at posting text content, follow them, you'll unfollow the people that are not good, etc.
This is why TikTok was interesting in the first place because it removed the curation step and created an interest graph instead of a social one. What the poster is talking about is the friction inheirent to using a social graph as a proxy for an interest graph.
"I love when you talk about tech but I don't care at all about your dog."
2023-07-12T21:01:32.045765Z
Istanbul's Blue Tile Paradise - by Kiefer Kazimir
I was in Istanbul recently, and what surprised me was the absolute depth of the cities attractions. I stayed in the Kadıköy and Sultanahmet districts, and it was so incredible to walk through a society which had been Monkey Patched through millennia. The runtime behavior of the objects, streets, buildings and the city had been adapted time and time again. Roman temples becoming Churches becoming Mosques becoming Museums, sometimes simply with some new tiles or a freshly laid down carpet. Each layer rich in artifacts. My favorite attraction was the Great Palace Mosaics Museum, some of the most detailed and vibrant mosaics I had ever seen. I hope to return soon.
2023-07-12T20:04:14.175601Z
How to Blow Up a Timeline — Remains of the Day
All this reminds me of World of Warcraft. In 2004-2008ish, WoW was a cultural phenomenon. South Park made an episode about it, there was a famous question on Jeopardy about it, parents played it, celebrities played it. Then it started to fade away for many reasons. But as it was fading, people were asking what was the next MMO, what was the "WoW-killer". It never came - sure there were and are other MMOs (ESO, FF, GW2, etc) that people played, but nothing ever peaked like WoW, because WoW happened at a unique moment in time. It was right before social media exploded, and so people were able to be social with each other in the game, creating a unique community situation. All the other MMOs (mostly) grew up with social media, so the social effects were diminished. They were just games.
I see an analog with Twitter. There will never be a Twitter killer, a Twitter 2.0. There will be successful, Twitter-like things (Threads, Bluesky) but nothing can be like Twitter because the era is gone. (Which is the point of essay, more or less). Something else will happen that will engross us for a while, and I'm curious what it will be (and really wish I could predict it!), but nobody, not even Twitter (just like WoW itself was never a WoW killer), will be another Twitter.
2023-07-10T02:53:26.121327Z
Creative Good: Why customers don’t want chat bots
Workers don't want open-office plans either but they keep building them.
And there's a vocal minority that want to be able to buy a smaller truck in the United States, but they keep on building monstrosities with beds too short for a sheet of plywood.
Time to start realizing that Capitalism doesn't really offer consumer choice or optimizes for the best outcomes for people, it optimizes for the best outcome for the business.
2023-07-07T16:14:24.559823Z
Sourcegraph is no longer Open Source
Never found a startup on the premise that someone else's product will be inadequate forever.
The recent rewrite of github search has probably made sourcegraph irrelevant. If you may recall, original github search used almost the most horrible algorithm possible. It dropped all punctuation and spacing and just searched for identifiers. No patterns allowed, no quoting allowed. One of the only meta-arguments was filename:xyz.
Now that github has improved its basic search functionality, sourcegraph might be doomed.
I used sourcegraph at Lyft which (at the time) had unlimited money to waste on software tools, and installed the open-source version at Databricks but nobody cared.
2023-07-04T13:59:02.288620Z
Bluesky facing degraded performance due to record high traffic
Since Bluesky is invite-only and there's a lot of clamoring for invite codes, it's easy to think that you're missing out if you're not a member. I'd like to offer a different perspective, that most HN readers would probably be happier on Mastodon than Bluesky. In particular, Bluesky is very small, has a strange vibe, and has almost no technical content or people interested in it.
The number of participants on Bluesky is small, and everyone seems to know each other. Getting even a single like on a post is an accomplishment, and getting 16 likes (I think) gets you onto What's Hot. Approximately nobody is interested in technical discussions; Mastodon is much better for that.
The vibe on Bluesky is weird. Everyone is very enthusiastic about being there, and most of the discussion is about being on Bluesky. Someone said that everyone is Extremely Online and much more interested in meta-discussion than discussion, and I'd agree. Bluesky is all about the in-jokes and memes, which turn over at a dizzying rate, much faster than even Twitter. It's a very horny place, with lots of butt photos.
I don't want to be negative about Bluesky. For people who want a tight-knit community to chat with, it's great. But don't feel like you're missing out if you don't have an invite code. (BTW, I don't have any to give out.)
Edit: I'm not hyping Mastodon here, just comparing Twitter alternatives. Unfortunately, so far I've found that Twitter is the best choice for me. I get maybe 10% of the interesting technical discussion on Mastodon that I get on Twitter. And I still don't understand how to work with the federation. There's also Newsmast, a new social app that reached out to me, but there's approximately 0 content there.
One thing I forgot to mention about Bluesky is that it looks exactly like Twitter, so much that I can forget which app I'm on. It's very different in that regard from Mastodon, which is like alternate-universe Twitter.
2023-07-02T19:48:00.064400Z
YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers
I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are. I don't care if the ads don't track me. I grew up changing the channel on TV when ads came on, and ripping adverts out of magazines before sitting down to read them. I vote for billboard bans whenever I can. I have zero tolerance for ads of any sort.
Advertisers have no morals, they're completely depraved. They'll eagerly exploit a teenager's self-conscious body issues to sell useless beauty products. They sell sugar water to fat people and at every turn promote the rampant consumerist culture that is destroying our planet. They're lower than pond scum and I never want to see a single ad from them ever.
2023-07-01T16:44:28.225650Z
Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
We don't need a critical theory of boyhood, we just need to stop institutionally empowering people who hate their dads. I know many good men, and the defining characteristic of every single one of them is that regardless of who their father was, they accept him, and by extension they accept themselves. If you are still mad at him or have contempt for him, I recommend considering how it's manifesting in your beliefs about the world before even thinking about problematizing boyhood.
Obviously I'm quite suspicious of adults talking about how to raise boys, but only because the only problem they should be trying to solve at all is how to be a worthy example, and anything else is a substitute for that essential element. But the "concern" about boys is just another form aggression against them, imo.
2023-06-26T00:21:41.873264Z
Ask HN: Why Discord instead of a public forum?
> And the cost is lack of discoverability, basically forever.
Sadly, this is actually a feature. Discoverability of content adds an incentive for SEO-style spam. It's very hard to implement technical solutions to this kind of incentive problem. I'm part of a few discords where there's a lot of valuable knowledge about purchasing certain consumer products. If this content were discoverable by millions of people it'd be someone's full time job to game the system.
2023-06-20T01:58:40.606166Z
Why did Nix adopt Flakes?
We use it for devshells, and it’s awesome. New devs install nix and direnv and they instantly have all the right versions of all of our tooling. A first day setup process is now done in minutes instead of a day. Flakes made it possible for us to package up internal and external tools and ensure consistency across a team.
I have no experience running it in production, but I imagine if you don’t want to use containers it’d be a pretty good option.
2023-06-17T05:42:18.969789Z
Reddit Doubles Down
Google should buy Reddit instead. Not that different from owning Youtube. And they'd ensure their search results remain full of good, text based content.
Lot of people have complained that Google search is worse today without Reddit. If Reddit management kills the communities which produce the text posts it could have a real negative impact on Google.
Meanwhile Google's text and video ad network could probably monetize Reddit way better than Reddit can.
2023-06-14T01:03:49.173276Z
The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine
>We need to remember that five minutes invested in reading an article – even a mediocre one – will almost always offer a better payout of emotional energy than five minutes of gambling on a slot machine with only one reel.
This is not true. You cannot trick your brain into enjoying a mediocre "healthy" thing more than the enjoyment that you actually feel.
This a recipe for burning out and relapsing. Your brain will always know the actual ratio of effort/reward over time, and will prefer the skinner box without question.
If you are truly consciously aware of yourself while scrolling, you might find (to your disgust and dismay) that just being in front of the slot machine is a reward to your brain.
The unfortunate truth is that you can "cargo cult" yourself into all kinds of debilitating addictions and behaviors with their own twisted, undeniably sound logic that you can't "mindset" your way out of.
2023-06-13T18:42:51.642531Z
Pixelfed Introduces Import from Instagram
> you can seamlessly transfer your photos, captions, and even hashtags
that’s rich, given that nobody has posted photos, captions and hashtags to their feed in 2 years
Its all in the ephemeral stories now, or the reels
Too late
2023-06-12T19:18:51.905264Z
How Dowries Are Fuelling a Femicide Epidemic
Dowries are a plague on humanity. They’re rooted in the idea that women are property.
I lived in India in the 1970s as a child. At that time the shorthand was “cooking accident” when new brides were killed. As in, “The bride’s father couldn’t pay the dowry. Too bad she had that unfortunate cooking accident.”
The local man who did our laundry had four daughters, and it was considered a curse. He killed himself because he couldn’t pay their dowries, and he knew he’s spend the rest of his life in shame with daughters who were spinsters, or dead.
2023-06-12T19:16:15.547673Z
Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a mind-control test subject
Most criticism comes with the implicit belief that the US has cleaned up its act since the terrible experiments of the Cold War era.
That's an intellectual fallacy it's easy to fall prey of: if most cultures and nations have committed heinous acts in their past, one should assume they are still doing terrible things to this day.
MK-ULTRA is dead, but history teaches that one day we'll learn of something even worse that's occurring right under our noses in 2023. It is disingenuous to criticise what the CIA and other three letter agencies have done, while not being totally opposed to their existence to this day. Who knows how they are experimenting with people on US soil, how they are fomenting revolts and financing drug lords in South America today.
Sadly, any such criticism can be easily waved away by calling it a conspiracy theory, which is how they keep operating with impunity. The only difference between an outlandish conspiracy theory and history are the existence of declassified government documents.
2023-06-11T14:21:56.754016Z
MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation
It's not that there isn't enough electronic music being made, it's that every new track that lands on soundcloud is a drop in the ocean of mediocrity. There is _too_ much, and 99.9% is just boring to listen to, because it sounds like everything else. I listen to a LOT of electronic music (and have, since the mid 90's) and just don't have the patience anymore to sit through hours of average material to find one or two truly inspired artists.
I doubt I would turn to AI much for anything other than background noise while focusing on work. In fact, that sounds like a perfect use case for me. "Dear GPT, please compose a four-on-the-floor downtempo progressive track with soft pads, no vocals, and zero goddamned fake vinyl noise that runs for two hours straight..."
2023-06-11T01:38:56.299940Z
June 2023 Data Dump is missing
This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide the platform, and store the data. We need to rethink this model.
The thought and knowledge of communities and users need to belong to those communities and users. To people they intentionally and thoughtfully delegate to and trust. We need to decentralize our communications, like how the internet used to be before the arrival of social media and mega forums. We need to revert to small, focused forums, with less anonymous, more persistent communication, run by people we trust. Otherwise, we will continue to see mega companies harvest our data and use it (or not provide it) against our wishes. If we don’t work to mitigate that dynamic, we have nobody to blame for the poor outcomes but ourselves.
2023-06-09T23:04:05.341633Z
Addressing the community about changes to our API
Reddit is one of the most-used pornography sites on the internet, mostly because it's mixed in with a much larger amount of non-pornographic content so can't be filtered by the usual domain-blocking tools. Children are certainly accessing porn via both the website and apps that use the Reddit API.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first step towards removing all the pornography off Reddit entirely, for good reason as much of it is very extreme and not something children should be looking at at all really. And even more of it is degrading to women, depicting them just as holes to fuck. It was worse in the past too, with so-called "jailbait" subreddits and pornographic images of dead women, which were only removed after a considerable amount of pressure on the admins. Really makes one wonder what their priorities are.
2023-06-09T21:51:51.018553Z
Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?
The solution to a lot of problems is simply to not scale platforms past something like 1000 users. At that level, you can have a community that is guided by individual people and their relationships, rather than anonymized and centralized. And the infrastructure is much simpler to set up and maintain: we just need more tools tailored to being easy to set up and administer at this scale.
m15o has built a ton of examples along these lines. There are other communities and tools too, loosely referred to as the "small web"/"smol web"
https://lipu.li/?u=m15o&p=projects
https://runyourown.social/
https://github.com/cblgh/cerca
2023-06-09T21:34:33.649491Z
Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?
Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless.
I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day.
What you're asking for, for free, isn't possible.
2023-06-09T21:32:28.910713Z
Apollo will close down on June 30th
When your landlord raises your rent from $2000 to $8000, they're not really hoping to raise your rent. They're evicting you.
I think the new API pricing model was developed with a single purpose: extinguishing third-party apps to improve the official app's install/usage metrics before their upcoming IPO.
2023-06-08T18:51:55.898348Z
Apollo will close down on June 30th
This makes me indescribably sad.
Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These apps invented many of the conventions and designs that eventually percolated to the official clients. Sometimes these innovations even became platform wide conventions (pull to refresh anyone?). The writing was on the wall for a while, but now the door is firmly closed on that era - and we will all be poorer for it.
2023-06-08T18:43:39.299748Z
Reddit will exempt accessibility-focused apps from unpopular API pricing changes
> alright, we'll let you fix our broken s** site but only if you take a vow of poverty.
I'm so glad someone brought this up. Every conversation I've seen about Reddit's API pricing on HN has had at least one person asking, "well, how are they supposed to fund the site then?" And that's not Reddit-specific, it's a really common talking point whenever a property/platform starts cracking down on fan/volunteer work.
But that question never gets asked about the fan/volunteer work. It's interesting to look at what ventures we as a society think have an almost moral right to make money, and which ventures we almost think of as being morally obligated to not make money. Sometimes it's really arbitrary.
If 3rd-party accessibility services are important for accessing your service, those 3rd-party developers should be allowed to make money off of their stuff. Sometimes "non-commercial" clauses are appropriate for some projects/terms, but sometimes they get really abused and it's worth taking a step back in many situations and asking why they were included in the first place. Community-focused devs like to eat and have housing too.
2023-06-08T15:10:06.222155Z
Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022)
I love this, and I love how disturbing it is for a lot of people (especially those who only read the title)!
We think we write to remember, but it's really the act of letting go as the article gets into as a theory, that really lets those notes become effective to us. We can revisit these notes at a later date, with fresh eyes, having forgotten about it entirely. It adds value, not because the original idea or note was particularly great, but because of what we are then combining it with (action and experience).
This is also why blindly making notes isn't effective as a form of memorizing. You are writing just to write, you have to revisit them blindly in a new way for them to become effective with a new combination. As if you are a chemist creating a new concoction previously thought impossible.
So let your notes app become a giant trash pile. It's better for you, and they should do their job with proper search anyways. Don't spend time optimizing for note link graphs or any of that BS that doesn't help you and you absolutely will stop caring about those "features" in 5 months anyways. Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
2023-06-01T14:01:30.050317Z
Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing
This is a selling point of Discord. The ability to have a conversation without "researchers" being able to search for it for decades.
2023-05-31T23:22:24.299443Z
YouTube removed dislike counts, so this guy made Rotten Tomatoes for YouTube
Honestly, it isn’t hard to justify Youtube’s choices on this very specific issue. The dislike button presumably has a function beyond public shaming. I expect it’s primarily for tailoring recommendations and tuning their algorithms, but in any case it was clearly being abused by troll hordes.
If Youtube devs could see that significant amounts of dislikes were coming from users who hadn’t watched the video, or could identify other statistical aberrations, it stands to reason that such abuse would actively interfere with the legitimate functionality it was intended for and/or work against the interests of YouTube, advertisers, as well as authors and viewers.
I personally think that removing the public counter was an elegant solution in this case, as it suppresses the worst excesses of trolling while maintaining the original intent of the dislike feature, which should improve the overall experience for most users, generally speaking.
2023-05-28T23:44:05.452342Z
Meta preps new social app
It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. The people who consume content within a niche tend to be very likeminded and often times quite willing to rally behind and support the bastions propelling the niches that they identify with. Even for smaller creators, I've seen time and time again that all you need is one or two highly dedicated and engaged fans to make being a creator an extremely lucrative endeavour.
I've been working on a platform to help content creators diversify their revenue streams and offer their communities that become a sort of privatized social network as one of their product offerings in addition to their content. The hope is to allow creators to better capture their community and monetize from their niche.
https://sociables.com/creators
2023-05-22T13:17:19.950858Z
Noise is all around us
I think of ambient silence as the most valuable sound of all. Think about what it'd cost you to get freedom from your neighbor's lawnmower, traffic, sirens, construction, dogs barking, and the rest of the mindless noise that involuntarily assaults the average person's brain all day. You might think you can move out to the country, but most of the homes you might buy still have plenty of it. Neighbors will have bigger lawns that require even louder diesel tractors to mow, large dog ownership is at a higher ratio, recreational gunfire is more common, or you might hear a chainsaw running all day. In fact, it might be even more noticeable due to its irregularity.
I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.
2023-05-22T00:36:28.197106Z
It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity
This glosses over the fact that jobs are a central piece—if not _the_ central piece—of many people's identities in the States.
We've lost religion and communities as things that define and provide structure and purpose, leaving us clinging to jobs.
Is this good? No! It's terrible! We should fix this!
However, I'm not convinced that workplace stress is a matter of hours … it may be a symptom of lack of life beyond work—and I don't mean in the "there's not enough time" sense.
I appreciate what Cal Newport advocates for, but it always feels a little surface.
2023-05-19T23:59:42.930746Z
The Maddest My Code Made Anyone | Blog | jackkelly.name
Programmers sometimes have that experience, as do musicians, hardware designers, film directors, novelists, painters, game designers and all other professions that create things regular people interact with casually.
Consumers (specifically the sub-genre of critics) often have no real imagination what making a thing means and under which constraints it happens. They often see publishing a imperfect work to the public as an affront to their sophisticated intellect and taste, even (or especially?) if it is free.
In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
Of course complaining is totally okay if we e.g. talk about social or political conditions, or some mandatory process you have to subject yourself to by law. But even there I hate people who just complain and leave it at that without even trying to change a thing.
2023-05-17T11:39:06.702862Z
Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
This is quite incredible
Could you imagine if MS had convinced the govt back in the day, to require a special license to build an operating system (this blocking Linux and everything open)?
It’s essentially what’s happening now,
Except it is OpenAI instead of MS, and it is AI instead of Linux
AI is the new Linux, they know it, and are trying desperately to stop it from happening
2023-05-16T20:39:37.357255Z
Tiredness of life: the growing phenomenon in western society
Regarding socialization, suburbs are anti-social. There is almost no chance for spontaneous interactions with strangers.
Even small countryside towns are more social b/c there is a main street where people hang out on the street.
If you have to get in a car to "do something", your chances of spontaneous interactions go down exponentially.
I washed my bicycle outside last week and some 70-80 year old started up a conversation with me. Other times, going to the laundromat, some 80 year old lady chatted with me. But if I had to get in a car to get coffee or ride my bike, these kind of interactions would not happen. I want to live in a city when I get old and die on my feet.
2023-05-15T02:33:58.009455Z
Please Let Me Monetize My Hobbies
People want to do meaningful work and improve their skills and lives.
However, incentives are not lined up to promote and reward this for quite a lot of people. Workers look around and see that working harder just means you get more work and maybe a pizza party. Raises don't beat inflation or are non-existent. They might be scheduled or classified in a way that makes them ineligible for health insurance. Pensions don't exist and "the market" ruined plenty of people's paths to retirement. Their free time is disrespected with inconsistent and last minute scheduling or with on-call duty. Their leaders can decide that inflation is caused by high salaries with layoffs as the solution and their employer obliges. They can work full time and still be in precarious positions when it comes to basic necessities like housing and healthcare.
I stopped at a McDonald's to use their WiFi and a group of high school kids were there, and I overheard a girl get very upset because her mom was laid off from the job she worked at since the girl was born, and can't retire, keep her health insurance or home. She was crying for her mom and herself. She yelled about how her mom worked crazy hours and put up with abuse. Then she said something to the tune of, "what's the point of giving yourself to your job if you will just be thrown out like that?" This was in a middle/upper middle class neighborhood.
2023-05-14T04:45:04.583531Z
Rome v12.1: a Rust-based linter formatter for TypeScript, JSX and JSON
I've got mixed feelings about Rome. There's so much room to cover with ridiculously slow tools today. But I'm sick and tired of these people in the industry dropping their toys because they're tired of working on stuff people actually use instead of just improving what they currently have.
Would it have been impossible to nudge Node.js in the direction of where Deno is today?
Would it have been impossible to replace Babel with a Go implementation?
I also don't want tools that want to be literally everything.
Imagine if Daniel Stenberg was like, "You know what I'm tired of cURL, let me rebuild literally the same thing in another language and give it a new name, and entirely different opts."
2023-05-14T01:29:58.269900Z
He wrote a book on a rare subject. Then a ChatGPT replica appeared on Amazon
A lot of technology disruptions happen by a "bait and switch" approach. A new technology appear that promises to produce something at a much higher efficiency and much lower cost. Only after it already took over the market did people discover that it was not the same product. The disruption, while often has genuine merit, also sneakily changes some fundamental assumptions that people held over the product.
This is not new: for example, products of industrial farming are often significantly different from products of traditional farming. However, it is a better product in the sense of market competition. This mechanism is considered the engine of growth for society.
I think products that consists of human communication are fundamentally different: this assumption of "disruption is good" is more likely to be false. Even existing technology that aim at changing human communications, like emails and social networks, end up having serious negative effects. AI based culture and communication product is changing one of the basic assumptions of human communications: that the communication is produced by a human. I can't help but being sad and pessimistic about that future.
2023-05-12T21:32:55.587458Z
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release
Mechanical sympathy. Rather than designing a game on a PC to take arbitrary advantage of modern tech and then trying to cram it down onto a more limited console platform, Nintendo ask, at design time, what the most interesting things they can do are that would work perfectly within the constraints of the platform — and then do that.
(And Nintendo engineers can have perfect knowledge of "the constraints of the platform", because 1. they built the platform; 2. it's the only platform they ever code for, never porting to anything else; and 3. for late-in-generation titles, they have been developing for it for years already, while also doing platform-SDK support for every third-party development studio.)
Oh, and besides that, because they design each platform initially specifically to work well for the types of games they want to make. (This goes all the way back to the Famicom, which has hardware PPU registers that were specifically implemented clearly to make the launch-title port of Donkey Kong extremely easy to code.)
2023-05-12T10:20:21.624807Z
The JavaScript Ecosystem Is Delightfully Weird
Javascript is this generation's C++. It's a massive language and the only way to stay sane on a project is to agree to use a well demarcated subset of it.
Nothing wrong with being C++. The reason JS is so massive and weird is because it's the language that everybody uses, or has to use at some point. Upsides and downsides.
2023-05-11T15:09:28.424217Z
TS to JSDoc Conversion
Lordy, I did not expect an internal refactoring PR to end up #1 on Hacker News. Let me provide some context, since a lot of people make a lot of assumptions whenever this stuff comes up!
If you're rabidly anti-TypeScript and think that us doing this vindicates your position, I'm about to disappoint you. If you're rabidly pro-TypeScript and think we're a bunch of luddite numpties, I'm about to disappoint you as well.
Firstly: we are not abandoning type safety or anything daft like that — we're just moving type declarations from .ts files to .js files with JSDoc annotations. As a user of Svelte, this won't affect your ability to use TypeScript with Svelte at all — functions exported from Svelte will still have all the same benefits of TypeScript that you're used to (typechecking, intellisense, inline documentation etc). Our commitment to TypeScript is stronger than ever (for an example of this, see https://svelte.dev/blog/zero-config-type-safety).
I _would_ say that this will result in no changes that are observable to users of the framework, but that's not quite true — it will result in smaller packages (no need to ship giant sourcemaps etc), and you'll be able to e.g. debug the framework by cmd-clicking on functions you import from `svelte` and its subpackages (instead of taking you to an unhelpful type declaration, it will take you to the actual source, which you'll be able to edit right inside `node_modules` to see changes happen). I expect this to lower the bar to contributing to the framework quite substantially, since you'll no longer need to a) figure out how to link the repo, b) run our build process in watch mode, and c) understand the mapping between source and dist code in order to see changes.
So this will ultimately benefit our users and contributors. But it will also benefit _us_, since we're often testing changes to the source code against sandbox projects, and this workflow is drastically nicer than dealing with build steps. We also eliminate an entire class of annoying papercuts that will be familiar to anyone who has worked with the uneven landscape of TypeScript tooling. The downside is that writing types in JSDoc isn't quite as nice as writing in TypeScript. It's a relatively small price to pay (though opinions on this do differ among the team - this is a regular source of lively debate).
We're doing this for practical reasons, not ideological ones — we've been building SvelteKit (as opposed to Svelte) this way for a long time and it's been miraculous for productivity.
2023-05-10T20:40:14.728310Z
What Is Permaculture?
Ah, they didn't have us apologize to plants - only to thank 'em. It wasn't a guilty thing we did, but it was a lesson to appreciate that they were growing and that we could enjoy them.
I'm surprised you didn't stop at the idea that it also implies plants have hearing and can understand language and process some kind of human meaning - I feel like those are more absurd than the idea than a plant feels. (More organisms on this planet demonstrate something like feelings than the capacity to verbally communicate.) But yes, I project the idea the plants have something like human feelings, and that's definitely a product of that kind of education reverberating through my life. It was a kind of spiritual lesson, and the school incorporated other spiritual elements like performing the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address during some school assemblies and camping trips. I'm not confused about those as an adult.
I also know that a plant's experience on this planet is alien to mine, and it's silly to apply human meaning to what I think it's going through. I think our brains have enough space to hold these ideas up there though and reflect on them, and I think children deserve more than a functionalist education. I don't think I'm messed up as a result of that education, and I'm living a happy life - fair to say I had a heck of a time catching up on math and language in middle school though!
2023-05-10T03:33:00.124004Z
What Is Permaculture?
I went to a small Montessori school on the Rio Grande while I was growing up, and among the other "new age"-y things going on at the school, we would spend half a day every week in permaculture class. We spent that class doing things like gardening, constructing adobe stuff like ovens and a gathering space shaped like a turtle (the head formed a pizza oven too - it was really cool), collecting eggs from a chicken coop, recycling fibers and scrap paper into (very brittle) paper, and making tea out of the herbs we grew - mint, chamomile, lavender, etc.
One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.
It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!
2023-05-09T18:31:54.702084Z
Do the weirdest thing that feels right
If you’re not being strongly compelled from within by an idea, then I wouldn’t pursue it. I don’t think it has to be weird necessarily.
I’ve been working on a side project and there are so many little problems that creep up that it really feels like you’re running an ultramarathon or climbing Everest.
If you don’t have that very strong and deep calling from within I don’t think many will make it through that, and so you’ll just end up burning a lot of mental/physical/emotional energy on something that doesn’t pan out.
2023-05-09T18:31:05.272640Z
UN Human Rights Chief Urges UK to Reverse ‘Deeply Troubling’ Public Order Bill
The most frustrating thing for me is that whenever you talk to people in the UK about this stuff you notice there is this cultural attitude that if you're sticking your neck out too much that its somehow your fault.
People here don't care about being monitored by CCTV because they believe that so long as you keep your head down you'll be fine – and that any respectable person is going to keep their head down anyway.
You'll also find a lot of people here just dislike the act of protest in general. Again, I think it's because protest involves drawing attention to yourself which a large percentage of people here dislike on an instinctive level. So you find even the most agreeable protests seem to receive some level of pushback and shame which I think bleeds into our attitude towards policing. That said, I don't know what it's like in other countries. I just get the sense that the UK has a much more conformist attitude which enables the state to take a more authoritarian approach to policing protest here.
As an example, I'm not an anti-monarch but I was extremely angry about how the police handled anti-monarch protestors during the coronation. Yet when I've spoken to people about this over the weekend, most people have expressed to me that it was rude for there to be protestors at the coronation... But that's the point of protest!! Still, this doesn't change the fact that the act of protest is largely incompatible with our otherwise polite and conformist culture.
2023-05-09T15:43:05.286578Z
Bluesky Frustrations | anderegg.ca
Bluesky is going to be successful because of its current state of being invite-only and sponsored by Dorsey. It's essentially the new blue checkmark: an indication that you're part of the group of "always-online Twitter powerusers". Once Bluesky opens up people will join because they either want to be part of that group or the people that you'd follow on pre-Elon Twitter are part of that group. Technology has little to do with it
2023-05-09T15:42:06.708350Z
Bluesky Frustrations | anderegg.ca
> People are having a great time! But I suspect this is because the service is currently small, simple, and centralized. Once the decentralized systems are in place, there’s a good chance it’ll be more confusing.
Precisely! This is what has been ticking me off about the Bluesky love-in so far; it's as if people are so desperate to call something "new Twitter" that they forgot the systemic factors around why Twitter turned bad.
Today, BSK is exclusive. Getting an invite gives one the ability to peer into what's happening at the cool table. It's invite-only, so most people there will be cool and not try to clickbait or build clout.
Problem is, Facebook was exclusive once too. It didn't last. Twitter also was once just a quirky little online space. Then the Arab Spring happened and now everybody writes with an assumed gravitas, as if their 280 chars are going to be featured in a CNN story.
2023-05-09T15:41:42.010005Z
Give It the Craigslist Test
Similar to this: I raised a seed round with a deck that was (deliberately) just black Times New Roman text on a white background, plus a few screenshots. The product was also deliberately simple and rough around the edges.
I stole an idea from Joel Spolskey and made beta features in the app have graphics that were literally drawn in crayon, to make it clear they were unfinished and to make it easy to test changes.
Investors liked the deck. It made it clear that what mattered was the content, not the presentation.
2023-05-06T20:13:03.317249Z
Journalist writes about discovering she’d been surveilled by TikTok
If you hate tiktok, I get it —- I really do. But please just know that you’re missing out on something wonderful, unique, and delightful; in fact, delightful in ways remarkably similar to the feeling that https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights gives you.
There’s a commonality between HN and TikTok that I haven’t yet been able to put into words. They’re both “bookish”. You feel like you’re exploring. Often times I’ll swipe past 6 or 7 memes in about 3 seconds, when something incredible catches my attention. And it’s often incredible in exactly the same way as HN: you feel like you’ve unearthed some fascinating gemstone. (And much like HN, it’s designed for entertainment, so you can waste arbitrary amounts of time if you fall under its spell too long.)
I wrote a comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573893 showcasing the three lists I was particularly proud of: educational, physics, and math. But I have dozens more. There’s guitar tutorials, handyman repairs, a collection of 18 videos teaching you how to tie all kinds of useful knots, art tutorials, cute animals, hardcore ML discussions, and everything in between. Someday I’ll showcase them properly. (Theoretically you can view them on my TikTok profile, but I doubt it’s presented well: https://www.tiktok.com/@theshawwn)
Just know that if you stomp TikTok out of existence, it’ll be a real loss. It’ll feel to me like you’d feel if someone burned down HN. And the calls for banning TikTok sound to me how you’d feel if Reddit was urging everybody to ban HN.
Now imagine that politicians are seriously considering whether to ban HN. That’s how it feels to read through the comments here about TikTok. The outrage is deserved and understandable, but it’ll be a real loss if it disappears.
If this comment coaxes you into trying out TikTok, one tip: use the “not interested” button ruthlessly. (Long press on a video.) The algorithm will dial you in after around 45 minutes, which isn’t so long. The first experience can feel jarring the same way that YouTube in incognito mode looks like a weird dystopian universe filled with people screaming at each other.
2023-05-06T02:20:26.855923Z
So this guy is now S3. All of S3
Here's how I think about it:
* ActivityPub -> AT Protocol (https://atproto.com/)
* Mastadon -> Bluesky (https://blueskyweb.xyz/)
Right now, federation is not turned on for the Bluesky instance.
There are differences in both, however. I'm not going to speak about my impressions of the Mastadon vs Bluesky teams because frankly, Mastadon never really caught on with me, so they're probably biased. ('they' being my impressions, that is, I just realized that may be ambiguous.)
At the protocol level, I haven't implemented ActivityPub in a decade, so I'm a bit behind developments there personally, but the mental model for AT Protocol is best analogized as git, honestly. Users have a PDS, a personal data server, that is identified by a domain, and signed. The location of the PDS does not have to match the domain, enabling you to do what you see here: a user with a domain as their handle, yet all the PDS data is stored on bluesky's servers. You can make a backup of your data at any time, and move your PDS somewhere else with ease (again, once federation is actually implemented, the path there is straightforward though). This is analogous to how you have a git repository locally, and on GitHub, and you point people at the GitHub, but say you decide you hate GitHub, and move to GitLab: you just upload your git repo there, and you're good. Same thing, except since identity is on your own domain, you don't even need to do a redirect, everything Just Works.
This analogy is also fruitful for understanding current limitations: "delete a post" is kind of like "git revert" currently: that is, it's a logical deletion, not an actual deletion. Enabling that ("git rebase") is currently underway. Private messaging does not yet exist.
Anyway if you want to know more the high-level aspects of the docs are very good. Like shockingly so. https://atproto.com/guides/overview They fall down a bit once you get into the details, but stuff is still changing and the team has 10,000 things to do, so it's understandable.
2023-05-05T22:50:01.794851Z
Searches for VPN Soar in Utah Amidst Pornhub Blockage
This is such an HN comment.
Democratically elected politicians enact laws that reflect the conservative views of their voters and that is totalitarian because they are controlling every aspect of government centrally with all decisions made my unelected leaders? No, because you disagree with it, that's it.
You know, I dislike both liberalism and conservatism but in the US specifically, I feel like there is a particular misunderstanding with liberally minded people about what the US is supposed to be. If your fundamental human rights or other protected rights are violated I get it, but watching porn is not a right if any kind, states can restrict any aspect of your life that isn't protected as a right. There is already a restriction on adult material that involved minors or unwilling participants, this simply expands it to all people, and there is plenty of research and reasoning that indicates porn is harmful to everyone, period! Personally, I find it more reasonable if you argued cigarettes are healthy compared to what porn does to your mind and therefore life. The whole point of a federal union is you move to other states when you don't like the laws, and everybody gets to exist with the most ideal liberty vs restriction ratio.
For the "land doesn't vote" people who think the electoral college should be abolished? this is exactly why it exists, so crazy states line utah or missisipi don't have to leave the union. I am far from a secessionist but the electoral college was literally a critical component of the contract that states agreed to when joining the union. You need to understand that short of a global nuclear war, there are few things that are worse for humanity as a whole (even more so for americans) than a civil conflict between american states.
The whole point of post here is that so long as these crazy state laws reflect the views of those who live there and existing (not future) rights of protected individuals are not violated, drop the exaggeration and tolerate them as you vehemently disagree with them.
2023-05-03T22:26:57.767643Z
Searches for VPN Soar in Utah Amidst Pornhub Blockage
I have a favorite Utah story that is I think appropriate here. Many years ago as a young and green consultant I was sent to Salt Lake to help with some ASP.NET/C# app with Utah Department of Liquor. I was told to look for the tallest building in SLC and the warehouse did not disappoint, it was huge (well, SLC is really flat and squat too). They showed me the warehouse full of really fancy robotic stuff (all made in Utah, and they were correct to be proud of it). We got to work looking over the code of the app, and along the way they learn that I am originally from USSR/Russia. "Oh" the devs say, "do you want to see our Russia module"? I am of course intrigued, and discover that during the process of organization of 2002 SLC winter Olympics (Mitt Romney's baby/rise to prominence), there was a huge diplomatic incident. The rules of State of UT at the time limit the number of bottles sold to any one in a given transaction, and the Russian delegation was refusing to come to Utah because they would not be allowed to buy as much liquor (likely vodka) as they wanted to. This got escalated to the highest levels of State department, and the intrepid UT legislature found a way! They [very quickly] passed the law that any person with Russian citizenship could buy whatever the heck they want in any amount. Now it was up to the poor saps in the UT Dept. of Liquor to implement it. But you couldn't just rely on people showing passport! No, the software team feverishly coded up the "Russian Module" that implemented passport number validation, making sure that if you did show a red passport with double-headed eagle, its number was valid. There was serious collaboration on the numbering schemes and maybe even some proto API validation to the Russian Federation servers. Yeah, legit module. Used for 2 weeks, and then decommissioned as the law sunset very rapidly.
So, where there is a will, there is a way. And a VPN.
2023-05-03T22:24:34.255858Z
“Why I develop on Windows”
> I know a lot of developers who will opt to do all of their scripting in python these days, even putting #!/bin/python3 at the head of a script so that it runs through the shell.
...which is exactly what you're meant to do.
This is not an example of how bad Bash it, it shows that you didn't understand what Bash is. It's expected to use various languages to write code on Linux, nobody wants you to do things in a language that wasn't made for the task.
Imagine you had to use Python on the shell and, any time you open a terminal, needed to import os and do something like print(os.path.glob("*")) instead of just opening a terminal and typing "ls" to get your directory listing. Different tools for different jobs.
Also the point they try to make about bash looking like a foreign language and having weird syntax. Yes, that's the thing: it's a very specific thing called a shell, not just any old programming language that you're meant to use for things that are not shell scripts. If Python feels more natural to you, that's probably what you should be using. Don't feel like you need to use Bash for bigger tasks than a few lines of code for no reason other than because you're on a system that has it.
2023-04-28T22:41:43.254954Z
Nostr (“Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”) – An Introduction
> Resilience is provided by the protocol being simple enough to implement in a weekend, in your language of choice. Platform lock-in is impossible, since any client can republish any note to a different relay if one misbehaves or enacts a disagreeable policy.
That's a wonderful sentiment but we said the same thing about the web and email and both are effectively controlled by large companies.
Twitter is centralized due to being the creation of a single company, but that's not the fundamental problem.
The web and email got effectively centralized because distributed protocols create problems of search, filtering, abuse, identity, community continuity, etc. You can't easily solve them in a distributed way, and even if you _can_, you can't easily get everyone in the network to upgrade. Hence, providers arise that say "We're Nostr, only better!(tm)" or "We're the best way to find what you want on Nostr!" and they work on locking in their customers.
If you want to be resilient to monopolization you have to show how you're going to solve those other problems.
2023-04-25T03:15:27.573613Z
LSD: Not even once. Really. | QWORD
I had the same experience with tinnitus and visual snow, and unfortunately, they are still present. While I had one bad trip, I was okay after that one. However, after waking up from another trip, I simply wasn't the same. The depersonalization was the worst part - it left me in an awful state of mind. It's been so long now that I'm not even sure if it's still there or if it's become the new normal. In fact, I couldn't even tell you what normal feels like anymore.
For me, the few hours of fun weren't worth the amount of stress that followed. I got nothing out of it except some temporary entertainment.
I strongly believe that using LSD in therapy is malpractice. It is not right to give such a potent and mind-altering drug to people who are already dealing with mental health issues. I worry that in the future, we will see a rise in similar cases to mine, as LSD becomes more commonly used in therapy. And although I turned out OK and I can deal with the condition I am scared about how people who might already be suicidal deal with such a life altering event.
2023-04-23T20:45:10.039028Z
A silent crisis in men’s health gets worse
> “Men are advantaged in every aspect of our society,
> “We tend not to prioritize men’s health, but it needs unique attention, and it has implications for the rest of the family. It means other members of the family, including women and children, also suffer.”
> Advocates for more research into men’s health say the goal isn’t to steal resources from women, girls and gender minorities.
So men's health deserves to be an issue only because it may impact children well-being, and only if it doesn't steal resource from other more noble causes.
I don't know how US audience reads this type of article, but as a foreigner, it seems every single issue nowadays has to be artificially rebranded as a social justice fight.
2023-04-22T03:01:24.439115Z
Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content
Twitter [0] explicitly allows sexual content:
> You can share graphic content and consensually produced adult nudity and sexual behavior content within your Tweets, provided that you mark this media as sensitive.
But since we're on the topic, one social media service that you didn't mention is TikTok. I haven't seen anyone write about this and find it a bit fascinating. Although TikTok claim that sexual content isn't allowed, a lot of adult sex workers continuously skirt or outright ignore the rules. Some sex worker's strategy seems to be to continuously create multiple new accounts, as new accounts have a time period and size limit where growth and reach is really easy in order to get creators initially hooked. Two trends I've encountered are women flashing their vaginal lips through a see-through dress with a backlight and women flashing their breasts on reflective background items while seeming to engage in some mundane activity. But even the sex workers that don't engage in blatant TOS violations clearly create content to lead you towards their OnlyFans page. A breakdown of the evolution of the sex worker advertisement meta on TikTok is a YouTube video waiting to be made, especially as TikTok dies off and the strategies no longer remain viable as a vehicle for growth. A modern-day version of Aella's classic "Maximizing Your Slut Impact: An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling" [1].
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/media-policy
[1] https://knowingless.com/2018/11/19/maximizing-your-slut-impa...
2023-04-20T05:59:02.924753Z
Imgur Updates TOS, Banning NSFW Content
Tumblr 2.0 incoming?
It's a not-so-unspoken fact that a lot of social media platforms are popular because they have tons of pornography. Reddit, Twitter, OnlyFans (more openly) and (until now) Imgur all have massive communities around explicit content. Even Twitch and YouTube are hugely successful as ways for OnlyFans creators to drive users to their explicit content.
Going to be very interesting to see if imgur drops off the face of the earth as tinypic, imageshack, photobucket and many others before it did. Certainly this was the longest-lasting image host I can think of.
2023-04-20T05:56:29.147866Z
Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”
It's interesting to compare how different professions handle the ambiguity in left/right. In the maritime world they went with an approach at one extreme, where they just use two completely separate words, "port" and "starboard." (Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.)
At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective. You could imagine that the maritime world could have gone with a similar convention. But the downside is that on very rare occasions someone along the way gets confused and the doctor operates on the wrong side of the body.
The theatrical world takes an intermediate approach, where they use the terms "stage left / stage right", which always refer to the perspective of an actor onstage facing the audience. Then the word "stage" tells you the perspective, but you still keep the words left/right so you don't have to memorize two completely separate words.
2023-04-19T06:23:20.118985Z
Overnight 'hotel train' could link San Francisco and Los Angeles
I met my wife and the mother of my children on the Amtrak “coast starlight express” - the late train that runs between LA and SF. We were seated together for dinner in the dining car and the rest is history. We would be first in line for this! Fantastic idea - I hope the economics make sense!
2023-04-19T02:31:06.262473Z
Anime Confronts a New Apocalypse | The New Yorker
This “new apocalypse” really started with Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime about a young man being coerced by his uncaring father into defending a world the prior generation had effectively already destroyed. I expect its drowned cities and alienated youth will only gain more poignancy with time.
Anno was a far better (if perhaps not as innovative) artist than Matsumoto because of his refusal to retreat into the recuperated fascism that dominated much of postwar culture, instead choosing to show its true social and psychological impacts.
2023-04-18T19:11:37.516058Z
Horrible Code, Clean Performance
It is absolutely true that some hot-path code needs to be mangled into an ugly mess to reach performance requirements. The problem is that I have encountered people who somehow take this as a blanket justification for writing unreadable code, and who operate on a false dichotomy about a choice between readable code and performant code. It is important to keep in mind that:
1) Most code, i.e. at least 80% of the code in a codebase, will never be a performance hotspot and does not need specific optimizations (i.e. as long as the code does not do stupidly inefficient things, it's probably good enough).
2) Even in performance hotspot codepath, you should not write unnecessarily hard to read code unless it is strictly necessary to achieve required performance.
In both cases, the key point is to benchmark and profile to find the specific places where the ugly hacks need to be introduced, and do not introduce more than is strictly necessary to get the job done.
2023-04-18T18:18:59.501471Z
You're not uncool. Making friends as an adult is just hard
> "Researchers also find that when we develop groups, our friendships are more sustainable than they are with individuals. Because there's multiple touch points now, right? Someone else in the group could reach out to all of us, and then we all keep in touch."
This is the most important tip in the article, in my experience.
When I lived in SF, most of my friend hangs were 1-on-1 catchups over coffee or lunch. It would sometimes feel like a chore. Meeting so many people individually was time consuming, repetitive, hard to schedule, and yet somehow infrequent -- it felt like the main reason to hang was to catch up on what's new, so you needed to wait a month or two to let new things pile up.
Then I moved to Seattle. I decided to switch to only really attending (or inviting people to) hangouts that included multiple people. Basically, my new policy was to try to hang out with multiple simultaneously whenever possible. And it worked wonders! My friends met all my other friends, and things played out exactly as described by the article -- some of them hit it off, became friends with each other, and started initiating invites and events without me.
In addition, hangouts are just more fun with more people. There's more to talk about, more excitement, more fun. And it's easier to schedule, too, since you can see more people in a smaller number of hangs. The value of the hangs goes up, too. There's more reason for people to say "yes" because they're getting to catch up with multiple people, not just one person.
2023-04-18T04:09:20.041351Z
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be shipped. They may have even "observed developers" or "measured output" in constructing these things, and thought they had figured out The Way and knew how to systematize it, and deserved to sell it for millions of dollars, along with training, books, etc.
EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". You don't have to be great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily. Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
2023-04-17T13:11:13.718593Z
Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
While I love all these stories of turning your friends and loved ones into chat bots so you can talk to them forever, my brain immediately took a much darker turn because of course it did.
How many emails, text messages, hangouts/gchat messages, etc, does Google have of you right now? And as part of their agreement, they can do pretty much whatever they like with those, can't they?
Could Google, or any other company out there, build a digital copy of you that answers questions exactly the way you would? "Hey, we're going to cancel the interview- we found that you aren't a good culture fit here in 72% of our simulations and we don't think that's an acceptable risk."
Could the police subpoena all of that data and make an AI model of you that wants to help them prove you committed a crime and guess all your passwords?
This stuff is moving terrifyingly fast, and laws will take ages to catch up. Get ready for a wild couple of years my friends.
2023-04-12T15:27:48.031372Z
AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the new staff starts from cooking rice perfectly first and perfecting roasted seaweed before moving on to preparing an egg sushi and then graduating to fish.
It's not grunt work.
It's how new engineers learn the ropes and gain experience doing low risk work; it's part of the learning process that only feels like grunt work to a senior dev.
2023-03-31T16:58:08.729143Z
Incompetent but Nice
I used to think the same way as you, and then I started a company and had to pay out of pocket for employees, and the sad truth that I almost hate myself for admitting is that if you have to pick between incompetent but nice, and competent but a jerk, you take the jerk. And yes, multiple people will even quit because you picked the jerk over the nice guy, and I still found it's worth it to take the jerk because of how competency scales. A good/competent software engineer can genuinely do the work of many, many mediocre developers and you're almost always better off with a small number of really solid developers over a large number of nice but mediocre ones.
Now of course we can always exaggerate things to an extreme and compare a racist, sexist, jerk who swears nonstop, to someone who is mildly incompetent, and there are certain principles and boundaries that are worth upholding with respect to how people treat each other regardless of their productivity, but in actuality that's not really the difficult choice you end up facing.
The really difficult choice you end up facing is someone who is nice and gets along with people but is ultimately too dependent on others to do their job versus someone who works independently and does an excellent job but is very blunt and can be an asshole in regards to the expectations they hold others to. Good software developers often expect their peers to also be at a high standard and will speak in very plain, rude, and blunt language if they feel others are not pulling their weight.
And finally, I have observed that in the long run, competent people tend to prefer to work with others whose skill they respect and they feel they can learn from because they're really good at their job, compared to working with someone who is pleasant but is always dependent on others. Being nice is a good short term skill to have, but people get used to those who are nice but they never get used to someone who is incompetent.
2023-03-30T02:06:17.432303Z
I would love to have enough time and money to go to an office to work all day
In my opinion, my ideal walkable/livable community is the university town. It has everything you need in walking distance. Most people who work in the community live in the community. Public transportation is well-used, to the point cars are often outright forbidden. Lots of greenspace, with good wifi through the whole town. Well managed library and IT infrastructure. Very inclusive and welcoming community, as they are arranged around the idea of incorporating new people into the community on a regular basis.
I'm one of those lifers that went to college and never left, now entering my 5th year as a professor. That's a lie -- I had 3 years in industry, and I just hated it. I mean, the people were okay, but "the real world" seems to be a euphemism for having to put up with the shitty systems and communities that everyone else has to.
But here's the thing (and sorry to rant for a minute), calling academia an "ivory tower" in contrast to the "real world" is an admission that we have to accept the shitty systems and communities past generations have built for us. Because with all of the craziness in the banking sector and tech sector lately, it's hard to convince me that academia is any more divorced from reality than other large industries out there that are trying to run the world. How is academia any more of an ivory tower than silicon valley? And aren't those silicon valley bankers and billionaires the ones who are trying to shape the world in their image, while crashing banks and laying off hundreds of thousands of people? To me, that is a dark tower, and one we should not be trying to emulate at a country scale; whereas my community, the places I walk, the people I work with every day, the relationships I build with them -- that's the real world. Or at least my world. /r
Yes academia is a bubble and unique, but at the same time, that's what allows it to be a place where you can have the things you say you want. Is it sustainable? You know, probably not, but at the same time many of these communities are over a century old. I know my University has plans for sustainable growth for the next 100 years. There's surely still work to do to make such communities more sustainable, less costly to manage, and larger and more widespread. But still, the university town is a model that proves we can at least build walkable communities in America. They definitely exist!
2023-03-28T20:58:46.904470Z
Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?
Call center employees are pretty much as good as gone once the price comes down on GPT4. You can pretty easily give it a good prompt that allows it to answer very specific questions about your company, or interact with external APIs to schedule services, make changes based on the customer's requests, etc. Throw some Speech to Text and Text to Speech services in front and behind it, and voila you have an AI receptionist that blows literally every automated answering service out of the water today. IMO, 90% of call center employees will be out of work in the next 10 years.
2023-03-27T17:32:04.488050Z
ChatGPT Plugins
A couple (wow, only 5!) months ago, I wrote up this long screed[1] about how OpenAI had completely missed the generative AI art wave because they hadn't iterated on DALL-E 2 after launch. It also got a lot of upvotes which I was pretty happy about at the time :)
Never have I been more wrong. It's clear to me now that they simply didn't even care about the astounding leap forward that was generative AI art and were instead focused on even more high-impact products. (Can you imagine going back 6 months and telling your past self "Yeah, generative AI is alright, but it's roughly the 4th most impressive project that OpenAI will put out this year"?!) ChatGPT, GPT4, and now this: the mind boggles.
Watching some of the gifs of GPT using the internet, summarizing web pages, comparing them, etc is truly mind-blowing. I mean yeah I always thought this was the end goal but I would have put it a couple years out, not now. Holy moly.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010982
2023-03-23T20:49:32.298434Z
Hetzner launches three new dedicated servers
I've been using Hetzner servers for ~15 years with multiple clients and employers, and always been disappointed with other providers compared to what Hetzner delivers. OVH with their frequent network level outages, the 2021 fire and so on. DigitalOcean with their way too frequent and long lasting maintenance windows. And AWS/GCP/Azure with their obscene pricing, ridiculous SLA and occasional hour-lasting outages. One application platform I managed was migrated from DO to Hetzner with huge cost savings, much better uptime and insanely much higher performance running on bare metal servers rather than cheapo VMs. If you need more than two vCPUs and a few gigs of RAM, I see absolutely no reason to use overpriced AWS/GCP/Azure VMs.
2023-03-15T14:31:21.791994Z
Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents
> I genuinely fear that the breakdown of millennia old social structures that kept us human might lead to a temporary (century long) turmoil for individuals. The answers to the 'meaning of life' and 'what makes us human' are going to change. And we will never be the same again.
Meanwhile, the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox Jews are going to refuse to talk to AIs - it’s a sin - and will go on having lots of kids, just like humanity always has, while the AI-addicts will be too addicted to bother having any at all. Maybe the future of the human race will be the people who reject AI rather than those who succumb to its charms
2023-03-14T21:09:38.071609Z
Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents
Perpetual happiness is already a solved problem in humans. It's called the mu-opioid receptor. That's what opioid junkies sprawled on the sidewalk half-naked in San Francisco have discovered. Fentanyl is very cheap and you could put someone in factory farm like confines and feed them bare sustenance and fentanyl for the rest of their lives and they'd probably be "happy" if kept perpetually high.
However, those opioid receptors should not be pushed synthetically because they have been positioned by evolution in all sorts of strategic spots to encourage pro-social behavior, mating, eating, etc. that are part of our millions year old evolutionary program that must have intrinsic value in itself. If it has no intrinsic value and any happiness is as good as any other happiness, then someone spending the rest of their lives in an opioid haze and someone interacting with the world in a way that evolution tells them to in order to be happy would be considered equivalent, and that would be the end of the human race essentially.
2023-03-14T21:09:09.484698Z
Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents
Wall-E humans are going to be reality. That last century has already proven that humans cannot be expected to responsibly indulge in Gluttony, Sloth or Lust. Now these models can skip the material desires and trigger permanent hormone releases through perfectly personalized content.
I genuinely fear that the breakdown of millennia old social structures that kept us human might lead to a temporary (century long) turmoil for individuals. The answers to the 'meaning of life' and 'what makes us human' are going to change. And we will never be the same again.
This isn't just about AI. External wombs, autonomous robots, genetic editing & widespread plastic surgery each fundamentally destroy individual aspects of 'what makes us human' or 'the meaning of life'.
Might be for the best. But such drastic change is really hard for the fragile human brain to process.
2023-03-14T21:07:41.055092Z
Is Setting Up a VPS Worth It?
We used to manage 500+ servers with Ansible for almost 10 years. It was a nightmare.
With so many servers Ansible script would ocassionally fail on some servers (weird bugs, network issues, ...). Since the operations weren't always atomic we couldn't just re-run the script. it required fixing things manually.
Thanks to this and emergency patches/fixes on individual servers, we ended up with slightly different setup on the servers. This made debugging and upgrading a nightmare. Can this bug happen on all the server or just this one because it has a different minor version of package 'x'?
We switched to NixOS. It had a steep learning curve for us, with lots of doubts if this was the right decision. Converting all the servers to NixOS was a huge 2-year task.
Having all the servers running same configuration that is commited to GitHub, fully reproducable and tested in CI, on top of automatic updates of the servers done with GitHub action, was worth all the troubles we had with learning NixOS.
This entire blog post could be a NixOS config.
2023-03-14T03:53:26.811997Z
Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
Ironically, for me it was probably when they shut down Google+ that I finally changed my views on Google.
For me Google+ was a lot like HN:
Peaceful, quiet and beautiful and lots Open Source content and smart people.
I still look once or twice a year but it seems everyone who are into building social media wants to copy not only the very limited functionality of Twitter, down to its dumb limitations, but also its UX and aestheti.
The exceptions I am aware of are Hubzilla (which lools seriously interesting but just confuses me and has no obvious way to enter - and yes, I can create my own instance but I cannot find anyone else), Diaspora (which I think copies Facebook and which is also confusing) and MeWe (which superficially look like Google+ but insist on repeating Googles mistake WRT real name policy).
2023-03-13T15:35:49.800851Z
Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are fake, and here is the proof
Imagine this future:
Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it because good sensors are expensive, but compute time in the cloud on Samsung owned servers is cheap. You take a picture on a crappy camera, and Samsung uses AI to "fix" everything. It knows what stop signs, roadways, busses, cars, stop lights, and more should look like, and so it just uses AI to replace all the textures.
Samsung sells what's on the image to advertisers and more with the hallucinated data. People can't tell the difference and don't know. They "just want a good looking picture". People further use AI to alter images for virtual likes on Tiktok and Insta.
This faked data, submitted by users as "real pics in real places" is further used to train AI models that all seem to think objects further away have greater detail, clarity, and cleanliness than they should.
You look at a picture of a park you took, years before, and could have sworn the flowers were more pink, and not as red. You are assured, by your friend who knows it all, that people's memories are fallible; hallucinating details, colors, objects, sizes, and more. The image, your friend assures you further? "Advanced tech captured its pure form perfectly".
And thus, everyone will demand more clarity, precision, details, and color where their eyes don't remember seeing.
2023-03-11T13:47:21.149264Z
FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank
I have some family who (with some other partners) founded a small community bank that has grown over the years.
They expanded in some areas by buying other small community banks, specifically in areas where there was a big increase in income in the local area (from mineral rights, etc).
The smaller banks that they bought were in a situation where suddenly they had large amounts of cash incoming, and customers who were paying off / not taking out loans like they used to.
They didn’t have the reach (mostly confined to a small rural region) to use that cash to give out loans elsewhere so they looked to merge or be bought by someone who did.
Until I heard about those banks I hadn’t considered “too much money” was a problem.
2023-03-10T21:51:21.123764Z
Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
That's not sufficient, though. You want the 0.1% case where you press undo a couple of times and big edit operations get reversed to be smooth. You have to hit your frame target when a lot is happening, the individual key press case is easy.
It's just like a video game. A consistent 60fps is much better than an average frame rate of 120fps that drops to 15fps when the shooting starts and things get blown up. You spend all the time optimizing for the worst case where all your caches get invalidated at the same time.
2023-03-09T17:40:41.340133Z
Discord, or the Death of Lore
It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers on discord, basically unsearchable (discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful). There’s so many communities that end up moving to it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else.
For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities.
Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.
2023-03-07T03:55:28.549878Z
Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents
I'm curious if the blocking of adult content has to do with moralism, commercial interests, or something deeper.
An eager to please conversational partner who can generate endless content seems quite dangerous and addictive, especially when it crosses over into romantic areas. There's already posts of people spending entire days interacting with LLMs, using as their therapist, romantic partner, etc.
Combined with findings like social engineering through prompt injection on Bing [1], the potential for systems that can manipulate people is clear.
While some of us may think that the LLMs appear ultimately limited in their capabilities, there's a ton of specific applications where they're more than sufficient, including customer service chat bots and telephone scams that target vulnerable people. It's only a matter of time until scammers stop using international call centers and switch over to something powered by these technologies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34976886
2023-03-03T18:14:44.049712Z
The Lone Developer Problem
Yeah, exactly the same in my experience too.
In fact, the biggest software atrocities I ever saw were team-based, with people having different opinions and wanting to modify the architecture every six months. And getting away with it because there was no vision.
This is where a good team lead or technical lead, or even Fred Brooks' "Surgical team", or your example of "single developer and contributors": have one person with the vision making the difficult architectural decisions and you'll get some conceptual integrity.
What I see a lot is people with little experience who learned things one way and become unable to understand or respect working code and want to change everything purely for personal preference. Maybe this is where the bias against lone developer code comes from.
2023-02-28T15:12:49.898383Z
The Lone Developer Problem
In my experience it's more often the other way around.
Most projects I've seen with actually readable code and a consistent overall structure have been written (mostly) by a single coder, of course usually with contributions from others, but not real 'team work'. Of course there are also messy projects by single authors, and readable code bases by teams. But in the latter case: the more the responsibilities are spread, the messier the outcome (IME at least).
I think in the end it comes down to the experience of the people involved.
And then of course there's personal taste, one person's readable code is a complete mess to another.
In any case, the post reads like the author stumbled over one messy project written by a single author and extrapolates from there to all other projects.
2023-02-28T15:12:44.118270Z
CoffeeScript for TypeScript
Way back in the early 2010s I was very "excited" about coffee script and similar projects. They sounded like they should be great for productivity.
When I actually tried to write a project in coffee script, the results were the opposite of what I expected.
The code was harder to read, harder to modify, harder to understand, harder to reason about.
There's something about removing stuff from syntax that makes programming harder. My hypothesis is this: your brain has to spend extra effort to "decompress" the terse syntax in order to understand it, and this makes reading code unnecessarily difficult.
So I fundamentally disagree with the underlying premise of these projects, which seems to be based on PG's concept of "terse is power".
My experience suggests the opposite: there's power in being explicit. Type declaration is an example of such a feature: it makes explicit something about the code that was implicit.
Type declarations add more to the parse tree, and require you to type more, but they actually give you more power.
The same can be said about being explicit in the language constructs.
There of course has to be a balance. If everything is way too explicit (more so than needed) then your brain will do the opposite of what it needs to do with terse code: it has to spend more effort to remove the extra fluff to get to the essence of what the code is doing.
Being terse is good, up to a point. Same with being explicit.
Languages that try to bias too strongly towards one extreme or the other tend to miss the mark. Instead of aiming for balance, they start to aim for fulfilling some higher telos.
2023-02-27T23:51:24.472866Z
Turn your backyard into a biodiversity hotspot
During the process of buying our house, one of the disclosures was that the house has a huge inground swimming pool, but some aspect of the plumbing was broken, and nobody knew how much it might cost to repair. So, as-is.
Nobody in our house swims, and the costs of repairing and running the pool would be excessive. At first I thought about having it drained and either removed or converted to some kind of outbuilding space. Then it occurred to me, I shouldn't just dispose of a water-bearing structure! The thing is engineered to safely contain thousands of gallons! We kept it. The pool hadn't been used in several years prior to the sale of the house, which was perfect because the chlorination had long since evaporated. Thus a readymade freshwater pond.
I started adding native plants and sheltering areas to the shallow end. Frogs were already in residence for mating season but now several species live there full time. Tons of insects: backswimmers, water skimmers, caddisfly, mayfly, damselfly and dragonfly larvae, bladder snails, giant water beetles. Ducks and herons visit. Purple martins and flycatchers hang out at dusk.
People often ask about mosquito control, and so far it hasn't been an issue. I believe this is due to a combination of the water depth (mosquitos prefer very shallow and still water like puddles), circulation speed, and predation of the mosquito larvae by everyone else. Because there are marginal plants, predatory insects can transition from their aquatic larval stage to adulthood (they need stalks to climb up out of the water).
The pond has become one of the great joys of my life--seeing the seasons change through the lifecycles of the species, watching bees forage on pickerel rush flowers, hearing frogs sing at night.
2023-02-27T22:56:58.571056Z
The Power of “Yes, If”: Iterating on Our RFC Process – Squarespace / Engineering
Yes we should rewrite it in language Y if everyone on the team is comfortable with the language, it provides nonfunctional benefits, and has potential to drive business value.
It’s just about acknowledging the conditions that would make an idea a good one. All ideas are good in a specific context. Instead of assuming everyone’s aware of the current context, state the ideal context for an idea.
2023-02-26T19:26:54.206182Z
Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved
In the UK if you want to buy food in the supermarket you have to have a HD video camera pointed in your face (often two cameras). When all major supermarkets introduced these cameras a couple of years back no one even discussed it, or thought it was odd, because here there is no assumption of privacy.
I was telling a coworker recently that I always use a VPN while browsing the internet. He was genuinely confused, and was asking why I would care about privacy unless I have something to hide. And this isn't just one person. I've had similar reactions when I've told people I only use signal, or refuse to use cloud storage, or won't list employment history on LinkedIn for privacy reasons. I get that I have an extreme preference for privacy, but people in the UK don't even understand why someone like myself value privacy.
This attitude is also adopted by our leaders and businesses, who by various means, mass surveil the public, typically citing "safety".
The issue with the UK isn't just that our government don't value privacy, it's that as a people we don't even understand the value of privacy.
2023-02-25T15:33:58.271723Z
Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub
This is one of those important events in life where you realise that sometimes those who hold seniority over you aren't necessarily as smart as you are. This experience will help you to cultivate a healthy disrespect for authority. We all go through something like this at some point.
The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?
Perhaps you could even get GitHub to sponsor it :)
2023-02-23T14:59:03.670939Z
Seattle could become the first city to ban caste discrimination
The real question Ive heard being asked is "Veg or Non veg?" This in many places is used to ask the caste question without explicitly asking for caste.
The other question I've heard being asked of Indians is "what is your full name?" as most upper caste Indians indicate their caste in their surname/family name. If your surname isn't upper caste, you are likely to be silently dropped in many social situations.
So someone who eats meat and doesn't have an uppercaste name is a lower caste. However since some upper castes do eat meat the surname question gets them through.
The color of your skin is the third SELECT. At some point all of it seems like a DB query.
In many localities and apartment complexes across India you will find it difficult to get houses because of these simple questions. A brief stint in Bangalore was eye opening with real estate agents being super frank about caste specificity.
2023-02-21T06:13:13.400423Z
Seattle could become the first city to ban caste discrimination
Very coarse racial/religios groups, (caucasians/asians/africans or christians/jews/muslims) discriminate against each other. But those groups are each divisible into smaller groups, which discriminate against each other just as hard, and those groups are also divisible into yet smaller groups, which discriminate against each other just as hard.
There's a famous old joke about this problem, which goes as follows. Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
2023-02-21T06:09:41.143486Z
Dancing is stupid
I was one of these. I grew up fairly religious in an environment where dancing was looked down upon (especially for men). As an adult, I had friends repeatedly nudge me toward it and it took a long time to get comfortable with it. Much of my resistance was not wanting to look silly in front of others, not wanting to be out of rhythm, etc. It’s a humbling experience at first and requires swallowing some pride. But man, once you experience your body unlocking and moving in time with music and other people, it’s hard to look back.
I definitely acknowledge gp’s point, it’s important to respect people’s boundaries and not push them into things they don’t want to be pushed into. I just hope you know that nudging often comes from people who like you and want to share joy with you.
My preferred manner of nudging is to 1. make a fool out of myself to clear space and 2. try and get people on the sidelines to do the smallest dance possible. Wiggle your pinkies, tap your toes, feel your way into it :)
2023-02-19T14:16:41.630399Z
I love building a startup in Rust. I wouldn't pick it again
If you're thinking about building something in Rust, a good question to ask is, "what would I use if Rust didn't exist?"
If your answer is something like Go or Node.js, then Rust is probably not the right choice.
If your answer is C or C++ or something similar, then Rust is very likely the right choice.
Obv, there are always exceptions here, but this helps you work through things a bit more objectively. Rust can be a fantastic language for many purposes, but it has a very high development cost.
2023-02-17T16:05:36.117207Z
Many women struggle to breastfeed. Scientists are starting to ask why
I think it's almost unfathomable for us to imagine how far we are from a "traditional" homosapien life. I read a book called "Hunt, Gather, Parent" where they describe the life of multiple 'less developed' societies, and how they spent a large portion of their life interacting with babies, adolescents, older children, pregnant relations.
It's a miracle people are still able to reproduce at all given our isolation from reproduction and the processes of rearing children.
2023-02-15T20:26:05.679508Z
Browsers are essential and how operating systems are holding them back (2022) [pdf] (2022)
> Nothing any OS vendor or browser vendor has done in the last decade has been a user-focused positive experience. They have become delivery tools for revenue only rather than information access.
Succinctly put. I've felt this shift everywhere; it killed the fun and curiosity I felt when I first encountered computers and the web. I can't recommend anything in good faith. When I open a new website or program I dread to think what it is collecting from me... who is looking at it, where it is stored... forever.
It just seems so powerless to resist, especially when so much of wider society expects you to use $CHATAPP or even $DATING_APP. I can't imagine a first date where I scold the lady on her use of proprietary software: "Please install this XAMPP-Mastodon-Matrix chat app from the F-Droid store or I won't speak to you again"
2023-02-15T04:40:33.753410Z
Poor people pay higher time tax
Closely related to the toilet paper metric. The poorer you are the more you pay per sheet, on average. A middle-class person will drive to a place like Costco a few times a year, buy a few large packs, and they're set. For a poor person this has an number of hurdles. Costco membership is an up-front cost. Can't fit three large packs on the bus so expensive cab fare. Less likely to have the time when the store is open. They won't have as much storage space. And $60 of toilet paper is a rather big outlay when you're broke. You can buy two rolls at the convenience store for $4 though. And again the next week. And again. Which prevents them from saving up for the bulk purchase and cab fare so they can escape the vicious cycle of over-spending on TP. It's very expensive to be poor.
2023-02-12T19:20:52.530939Z
Ubuntu 19.10: It’s fast
I tried both Wayland and X11.
I feel like I'm going crazy because every time I mention the words Linux and HiDPI I have this same conversation, and it's been happening for years.
The my takeaway is always, Linux users have ridiculously low standards for what works when it comes to UI.
The conversation usually goes something like:
"I don't know Wayland works for me with X setup"
"What about the blurriness with fractional scaling"
"Oh I'm used to it/It only happens with some programs <usually all programs using some incredibly ubiquitous UI toolkit>"
Or:
"What about when you move a window from one screen to another"
"Oh I don't do that/Oh it gets a little blurry/Oh just use X11 and <insert Xrandr hack to mess with the frame buffer>"
Or:
"What about the tearing"
"I got used to it/What tearing, I'm not gaming?"
Or:
"What resolution are your screens"
"2k small screen and 4k big screen , I can just run the same scaling on both"
I remember one time I had this conversation in person, and we failed at the, "move that window to the other monitor" step when it blew up the window to 200% size on the smaller screen.
"Why do you expect the window to automatically resize itself and change the font"
"Because the application is unusable when every UI element is twice as big as it should be?"
"But I want my application to be unusable [paraphrase], you just think it should resize because that's what OSX does, stop bringing your OSX mentality to it and it's fine"
I think that's when I should have stopped ever hoping for anything better and stop saying Linux and HiDPI in one sentence... but here we are...
2023-02-11T18:44:20.981511Z
Ubuntu 19.10: It’s fast
Well there is fractional scaling, it just looked like garbage and had tearing.
But also handling a mix of low and high DPI displays... and any solution that includes the command `xrandr` is wrong, either because of clarity issues, or tearing/performance issues, or graphical bugs in the DE, or a mix of all of the above
I don't get it, why can't we all just copy what OSX did. They got HiDPI so right with such a flexible solution, that I literally forgot that was still a thing until my latest endeavor with Linux
2023-02-11T18:43:05.131023Z
Show HN: Filmbox, physically accurate film emulation, now on Linux and Windows
"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."
- Brian Eno
2023-02-09T00:32:10.036123Z
I used GPT to build a search tool for my second brain note-taking system
These "augmented intelligence" applications are so exciting to me. I'm not as interested in autonomous artificial intelligence. Computers are tools to make my life easier, not meant to lead their own lives!
There's a big up-front cost of building a notes database for this application, but it illustrates the point nicely: encode a bunch of data ("memories"), and use an AI like GPT to retrieve information ("remembering"). It's not a fundamentally different process from what we do already, but it replaces the need for me to spend time on an automatable task.
I'm excited to see what humans spend our time doing once we've offloaded the boring dirty work to AIs.
2023-02-07T05:53:04.943462Z
PhpBB 3.3.10
One definining characteristic of internet media is where they rank on the "transience" spectrum.
The most extreme end probably being some old school chat apps and IRC on one side, and encylopedic wiki's (not the only kind) on the other. And while both forums and Usenet were closely rooted in current conversation, they had a more long-standing meaning, too. Where you could follow whole discussions even years later and where the writing style recognized this, often having single posts that more closely resemble articles.
Twitter and Mastodon seem a lot more ephemeral. As do sites like this or reddit, after all, they're concerned with "news".
StackOverflow seems closer to the forums of olden time out of most of the contemporary outlets.
So apart from the UI, you might miss that different conversational character resulting out of this.
As a final note, I do miss Wikis like the original one, where you had a lot of long-standing information, but with a conversational bent.
2023-02-06T06:18:31.386658Z
PhpBB 3.3.10
Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue.
As someone who never understood the appeal of Twitter or Facebook, the new wave of FOSS social apps feels very alien to me.
2023-02-06T06:18:22.616447Z
Will Nix Overtake Docker?
No, it definitely (but unfortunately) will not. Nix does everything docker does better than docker does, except most crucially, integrate with non nix tooling.
Nix vs Docker is like Rust vs JavaScript - you can point out every reason js is terrible and rust is better, but for the common developer looking to get things done, they’ll often gravitate to the tool that gets them the biggest impact with the least upfront investment, even if that tool ends up causing major predicable headaches in the future.
2023-02-05T15:56:53.480781Z
Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
I’ve ran NixOS on my last two machines. I like it more than the alternatives, but it isn’t without flaws. At this time, you must be sold on the idea of declarative configuration and willing to learn at least the basics of how Nix the language works.
It’s cool that you can Git pull and build an OS, but management of the project can be very slow. Using a ‘pull requests’ model majorly slows down progress; if you need to revise changes for a new package or package update, you will make the correction and get approval, even as a maintainer, but no one will come back around to merge it. With a patch-based model maintainers can waste less time by just making those few modification to the patch and getting updates upstreamed faster without the back-and-forth.
That said, it’s still something I’d recommend for someone with the experience and interest. There’s never been a system I was as confident with running patches and just updating the system myself for when stuff wasn’t working. But also, Guix is out there doing similar stuff and you must admire the free software goals even if it can sometimes be impractical (I just do not like the Scheme-based syntax).
2023-01-31T19:15:41.568510Z
No one wants to have kids anymore
> The low-sleep phase is temporary. It’s such a short duration relative to the rest of your life as a parent that it really doesn’t matter much in the long run.
Yeah.. I am a new dad to a 21 week old baby girl (our first) and I would say that the sleep deprivation stopped after about 8 weeks. The last few weeks have been absolutely amazing. I play with my daughter every day, I cuddle her, her giggles warm my heart and make me dream and get excited about the future. So many amazing things to look forward to. I can't wait to build a snowman with her. I can't wait to go snorkelling, skiing, ice skating, surfing, etc. with her. I can't wait to take her to places and answer all her questions and tell her stories and spend time together. Until now my best friend was my wife, but now we have an additional best friend in our life. It's someone to play a board game with in the evening when all our other friends are too busy watching Netflix. It's an extra person to have dinner with and have interesting conversations with. An extra person who will challenge me in my thinking, will educate me on issues I would be unaware of as an older person now. An extra person to argue with, love, hug, miss and root for in her own accomplishments.
Who doesn't want an additional best friend in their life? Someone who you love so much that you know everything that you accumulate in your life you can happily pass down to?
What I find interesting is that the same people who argue that having children is such a churn and piece of work because of the nappy changes, short lived lack of sleep, etc. are the same people who end up having 2 cats and a dog. That doesn't make sense to me. If you don't like to change nappies for a few months then why did you pick a pet which you'll have to walk to the park at 5am in the morning for many years to come just so it can have a piss and shit every morning. My friends with pets are much more limited in visiting restaurants or going on holiday than my friends with kids. Kids go everywhere, pets don't.
2023-01-24T01:15:55.086421Z
No one wants to have kids anymore
My personal experience - and I've heard many others repeat the same sentiment:
When you're single, your happiness levels typically range on a scale from 0 to 10.
Once you get married, that range expands to run from -100 to +100.
Then when you have kids, all the limits are removed.
2023-01-24T00:49:35.385279Z
No one wants to have kids anymore
There are many great things about having kids. There are many tough things you need to deal with when you have kids. Before I became a dad, I had a decent insight into the good and the bad.
One good thing that surprised me is the immense inner joy I feel when I see them enjoying themselves. Whether it is watching them laugh uncontrollably, seeing them learn something, or watching them immersed in play.
These are things I used to enjoy, but with age, I either have fewer opportunities to do myself, or they became less enjoyable. Watching my kids go through these experiences stirs up all those same emotions once again.
I'd never think I would enjoy Santa's visits or the great feeling of learning to ride a bike again as an adult, but through my kids, I get to do it again.
Strangely, I don't get those feelings watching other kids doing these things. The chemistry of our minds and relationships is baffling.
2023-01-24T00:47:26.063390Z
Tell HN: From bartending to managing cloud infrastructure
Your story confirms what I have often thought, life is about connections. My own tumbling into IT with no education was a series of connections. My three main jobs over the last thirty years were through my wife's friend husband, a teenage friend from church and a teenage friend from working in a supermarket. I'd had the opportunity to give others a go myself down through the years. I had a nice moment recently when a young guy, now a senior dev, thanked me for giving him the opportunity. I interviewed him for work experience as a favour for a friend. A colleague and I could see during the interview he was a bit special, though he had no idea of this himself.
So let's hope for more people like yourself willing to have a go, and more people looking out for others.
2023-01-21T03:10:21.835096Z
In the past, I've had students call my problem sets “emotionally trying”
My favorite history professor in college gave open book essay exams.
He asked your opinion on topics, "what were the motivations of the leaders of the US revolution?" Even better were the questions that ended in "why or why not?"
There were no right or wrong answers, if you could justify your answer in a reasonable manner, you got full points.
Some students hated his tests, some students loved his tests. The students who hated his tests really hated them, the students who loved them, really loved them. (I was in the loved them group!)
Getting a Computer Science degree felt awfully similar, especially in higher level classes. Students of course had to do a senior project, 6 months to make something real in a group of 5. One group of students spun their project out commercially and and made some good money off of it.
My group make a photo library management app that was designed to allow for rapidly tagging hundreds to thousands of photos, utilizing custom experimental UI concepts. (This is when Google Picassa was still a big deal) When we started out we didn't know if we'd succeed, after all "experimental UI", "handles libraries with thousands of photos" and "desktop app written in Java" weren't typically phrases that went hand in hand back in the mid 00s.
But we did it! Which kind of summarizes my entire career in software engineering. If I'm not scared and uncertain of how I am going to do something, of if something is even possible, than I probably am not tackling a hard enough problem.
2023-01-18T13:14:34.457823Z
Ask HN: Techwise, how did TikTok get so good?
What sold me on Tik Tok (I'm a early 40 year old guy!) was realizing how their algo allowed you to drill in to a musical emotional trip like no other platform that I've seen to date.
You find a video, with a song, that you vibe with. Now, click on the bottom right sound graphic and you can watch ALL the videos produced with that sound and vibe.
It is part of the core product!
So good it's hard to describe :)
2023-01-18T12:06:33.136082Z
Microsoft is preparing to add ChatGPT to Bing
If language models take over text content, content creators will flee even quicker into creating video content. There's already a trend where younger people tend to prefer video for being more "genuine", and now it might become a sign of "human made" for a couple years. Also easier to monetize, and easier to build parasocial relationships, so all around a plus for creators. Too bad I prefer text.
2023-01-04T14:16:25.757133Z
Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation
> Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.
I think it's time to add another HN tab called Complaints where we can post complaints for the common culprits like Google, Stripe, Pinboard, etc. It sounds backwards but the amount of people HN has helped over years it must add to millions of dollars to priceless things like getting back your email and photos.
Big kudos to dang and HN for standing up for the average person and being this helpful!
2023-01-03T16:13:15.156444Z
The internet wants to be fragmented
The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric.
Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said?
The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience already agrees with. They started getting negative feedback for doing the thing language was designed for.
Normal purposeful speech makes different opinions closer, while speech under the feedback of the like button makes similar opinions even closer and different opinions further apart.
If the interaction stays the same of course fragmentation is inevitable - but that's not a good thing. This fragmentation extends to the real world and has real consequences. It will blow up. Even with Twitter being internally fragmented the polarization in society grew. Nobody wants to listen to the other side anymore, while there's always the most to be learned from listening to the other side.
The core of the problem needs to be addressed: that social media has reprogrammed people to the purpose of speech.
One of the reasons I'm even bothering with websites like HN as opposed to social media is because it still feels like there's a slight chance of making people change their minds here.
2023-01-01T16:16:34.810261Z
Rant: Year of Linux on the Desktop
> But to me the fact that the games are not natively supporting Linux and are instead needing a tool like Proton still means that Linux is not ideal for gaming. Just like Mac is not.
You’re holding a proof that it isn’t so in your hands and still claim something opposite. The biggest issue with gaming on Linux has always been impossibility of providing a binary build that works everywhere due to lack of a stable kernel API and ABI. Turns out, win32 API is exactly that and works really well on Linux if you put in the work, see proton.
IOW Linux is ready for gaming thanks to and because of Windows, not despite it.
2023-01-01T16:14:18.780236Z
What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me. As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. They are quite literally helpless and look to caretakers for all their needs. There's a deep seated biological reason it feels bad to ignore it. The fact that it is so uncommon in other cultures should make this obvious. What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century? Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you. It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed. Yes, it is frustrating and will interfere with your sleep. This is one of the many sacrifices of parenthood.
2022-12-29T20:14:01.195315Z
Remote Work Is Poised to Devastate America’s Cities
Right now, yes and no. I live in a mid sized town in the Midwest. People who are renting, and not tied down by things like having kids in school, are fairly likely to move if a job change alters their commute. However, it's complicated by the fact that they are also influenced by the amenities that different neighborhoods offer. For instance do you prefer lots of hip restaurants, or lots of green space?
Once people are more dug in, they will often just eat the longer commute. However, there is a sizable "transient" population that is as likely to move to another town when they change jobs. This is true of people like academics, doctors, and so forth.
There are certain occupations that are fairly centralized, due to being the seat of government and home to a large university. My spouse just changed jobs at the U, and we already live close to there.
2022-12-29T17:02:05.791760Z
Remote Work Is Poised to Devastate America’s Cities
Remote work has the potential to make neighborhoods more dynamic. With more people at home, there's more demand for nearby coffee shops, entertainment, food options. I prefer the decentralized neighborhood approach to the hub and spoke model where you commute to a big city from the boring suburbs.
2022-12-29T17:01:40.282772Z
Americans lost $10B; caused by illegal Indian call centres in 2022
These days whenever I hear Indian voice, I just reject call. They way they target grandparents is surreal. One day they told my my friends parents that their children is in accident and they have to pay in gift cards. It is so distressing to elderly people.
US must take strict actions and call out India publicly. Elderly people are weak, education isn't going to solve the scam problem. Scammers must be punished harsly. They erode the trust in system.
Also, Indian government is not doing anything. In many places like Kolkata, scammers can get away easily by bribing police. Our phone are being redirected to India, and they can abuse our phone number. I wish, the US government passes strict rules and regulations to keep these scammers in check.
2022-12-27T16:48:24.339142Z
Mozilla to explore healthy social media alternative
Interesting project, although in all likelihood vast amounts of people crave toxicity, popularity contests and flamewars. Kinda like how school bullying appears everywhere, independent of culture.
That doesn’t mean that healthy places cannot exist or thrive, but it means that there will always be demand for the unhealthy. Tech impacts society, but we’re mistaken if we think we can change human nature.
I’d expect the outcome of the research to reach a different conclusion than people expect. For instance, I don’t think the typical system of likes and followers will ever be healthy. Beware of early results though, because it always takes a while for a platform to mature enough to see if it withstands the test of millions of users, socially speaking.
My WIP theory is: people-oriented public broadcast mediums always deteriorate towards the unhealthy with massive scale. You can have one or the other, but not both. (People oriented means that there is a strong focus on the people, usually with real name and face, or emphasizing the user/display name)
Anecdotally, to illustrate the point:
- LinkedIn became a cesspool despite having a professional boring focus. My theory: because it’s people-oriented and public.
- Group chats have thrived and are very rarely problematic, despite likes and reacts everywhere. My theory: private groups with implicit trust. No need to build your personal brand.
- GitHub has not deteriorated (a bit perhaps, but very much usable still), despite having likes, being a public broadcast medium. My take: it’s because it is mostly content oriented.
2022-12-21T00:57:59.370679Z
A Linux evening...
This post resonates strongly with me. I love the term "a linux evening." This was precisely my experience when I used Linux full time: mostly it worked great, but then occasionally something wouldn't work (some personal examples: touchpad doesn't work after OS update, wifi card stops working etc.) and then I have to spend a few frustrating hours debugging the issue. All I can think in these moments is "you don't get this time back. Is this really how I want to spend three precious hours of my life, when, if I used a different platform, I could avoid this hassle completely?"
I know it's a tradeoff and I sacrifice a lot to live in my current Macintosh rut, but I just don't have the motivation to be my own DIY tech support wiz after a full day on computers for work.
2022-12-16T15:46:33.068027Z
How to rebuild social media on top of RSS
RSS has got to be the thing that Hacker News loves the most that every non-tech person on Earth doesn't care about. So many techies love this model of designing their feed and collating what content they consume, while the quickest growing social network's entire pitch (TikTok) is "we'll deliver you what you want without you having to follow anyone".
2022-12-14T16:10:56.476788Z
After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires
After four years working on my retro game nearly full time, and several launches, I still don't understand marketing enough to understand what to do differently.
A lot of the advice out there is something like: "create a community" or "go join several communities" or "get to know other indie devs on Twitter". To me, this simply feels fake. I don't really participate in any online communities. I spend enough time in front of a computer for work and I prefer to socialize with my real life friends.
Besides, I simply have no idea how to get any kind of attention on social media. I created an eight-page booklet that recreates the first issue of Nintendo Power, except with my characters in place of Mario and Wart. It's an homage, because I developed a retro game. Somebody suggested that I post it on a retrogaming subreddit, where many others were posting fan art, and those people should recognize the magazine cover that I recreated. Well, I posted my PDF and it got about 4 upvotes. A simple photo, posted around the same time, of the very common TMNT NES cartridge got -- 800? 900? I stopped looking.
I understand that what I made is not going to be for everybody. I'm not expecting to be a millionaire. But damn if I can't figure out how to even get it in front of people. Everywhere I try just gets ignored.
The game is pretty substantial too. Mac, iOS, and Windows versions all done by me -- custom game engine -- 40+ hours of gameplay -- about a 5-6 hour minimum play time if you start from scratch and you know what you're doing (I was shooting for 3.5ish hours to equal Mario 3 or Mario World in "size" or "depth"). Lots of fun secrets. Nothing repeated. Challenging, but not as hard as Dwarf Fortress. Real life playtesters (not friends or family) asked me to reset the game so they could start all over again.
I just wish somebody else could do the social stuff. It all just makes me want to stop programming altogether. My brain just does not work along the lines of "how can I phrase this email to get this person's attention?" So I realize cold calling is a numbers game but I seem to be ignored no matter what I do.
I want to make great stuff, and I really don't care about attention/fame/money -- but what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me?
2022-12-14T02:59:15.949889Z
Is Europe Just Not Good at Innovating?
There is no Europe. It's just not a thing. European countries just work with some common framework that is better than nothing.
It's not even easy to employ people across Europe. You cant as a company in Denmark offer a normal employment contract to someone in Germany. You need a legal entity in both countries. There's also still european xenophobia and racism (ie not hiring someone because of their nationality).
Moving around in Europe sucks as well. Why should you move to country X and learn their language just because of a company/job? It makes no sense. A growing company in Berlin does not benefit anyone in Warsaw. There's no synergies.
2022-12-13T17:26:28.899267Z
What if you delete the “Program Files” folder in Windows? [video]
I developed windows during the Windows 10 timeframe. Although I left before windows 11 was conceived, it's painfully obvious that it is just a UI reskin on top of 10. This was preordained by certain organizational choices made during my time there; namely, that the "Shell" team responsible for the start menu, desktop, and other UI tidbits[0] was completely divorced from the rest of windows development, with their own business priorities and so on. This was the team responsible for Windows 8/.1, so as you can imagine they were somewhat sidelined during Windows 10 development. It appears they have their revenge, first and foremost from the promised-never-to-happen rebranding (whereby they jettisoned the Windows 10 brand which was an embarrassment for that team and that team only). That the result is only a reskinned 10 is the natural result because that is the only part of the product they have the authority or ability to change.
The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the embarrassment was contagious.
[0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit. This explains the central position of advertising in the reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to drive ad revenue. That is the distinct business priority I mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted to Azure.
2022-12-12T21:52:14.677276Z
What Happens When Everything Becomes TikTok?
Yep. This is the same strategy Instagram used a few years ago in copying Snapchat's Stories format, and likely has the same goal. The idea is not that Instagram can take back TikTok's audience — those users are well and truly lost — but rather that it can deny existing Insta users any reason to even try TikTok in the first place. (Because they can get the same form factor without downloading a new app.)
From what I've heard, the Stories copying strategy did successfully contain (but did not roll back) the Snapchat threat to Insta. So there's some reason to believe they can hold the line against TikTok with this approach too, even absent the possibility of a government ban.
I expect this sort of convergence will continue in the future. Whatever one might think of fast-following as a strategy, scale plus rapid copying of features does seem to work.
2022-12-09T23:32:20.475918Z
Why Did So Many US Men Quit Working? Social Status May Hold the Key, Study Says
Hope is everything. The ability to sell yourself a story about future success determines a huge portion of the human personality.
If you stand in San Antonio, Texas, surrounded by shuttered shopping malls and half-built-and-now-abandoned projects, it's incredibly hard not to be cynical about the future. Sit in the cafeteria of Stripe HQ and it's incredibly hard not to be optimistic. No mystery why the political beliefs of both places match the on-the-ground reality.
The greatest threat to a stable society isn't economic collapse - it's the collapse that follows: the collapse of a belief that things can get better. The exact second you don't think things can get better, the entire game changes, and there is no reason to do anything other than help tear down the system that left you so hopeless in the first place.
It's not that we pay so little that people can't make ends meet. It's that life costs so much, and can be so good, that people can't make dreams meet.
2022-12-07T22:23:01.766280Z
Why Is Everything So Ugly? | Issue 44 | n+1 | The Editors
To latch on to this great post there are a couple of other worthwhile discussion points:
We're still in a nuclear war mental model. We can't build beautiful things if we think they'll be destroyed in a war. We still have a societal level PTSD from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and other things.
World War I veterans came back with horrific problems. That's why architects like Frank Lloyd Wright built bunkers that blended in with nature. As they entered into professions like architecture they avoided symmetry, and this was cargo-culted into the present day where we build very weird, stressful objects like Boston City Hall [1], suburban homes that are incoherent and have hidden front entrances (although the car is very prominent) or throw a bunch of scrap metal together and call it art.
I'm not religious at all but right now we face a crisis of what we are building for (as opposed to constructing buildings and temples to the glory of some god or gods). I'm hopeful that either the environmental movement or our desire to become a space faring civilization will reinvigorate the passion of our species.
There's also no point in building a very beautiful building that will last a long time while you are living in Austin, TX if you think in a few years you'll move to Seattle or maybe Washington DC before finally settling down in Kansas. I have been encouraged to see that remote work has caused people to change their location priorities and invest in their current homes instead. Major headwind is just that most homes that were constructed are either in isolated, car-dependent suburbs and/or they are built using the cheapest materials possible. But you can see that people are willing and want to invest via new offices, garage gyms, etc.
I'm really disappointed in our financial overlords who haven't built a single beautiful building for society anywhere in the US. Even their own houses typically look like architectural garbage.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall
2022-12-07T15:35:59.052469Z
Why Is Everything So Ugly? | Issue 44 | n+1 | The Editors
It's worth mentioning that a lot of modern architecture (in single family & small-to-mid multifamily developments) is essentially dictated by money: what sells the best (typically the design that maximizes square footage), what is cheapest to build, and what is capable of passing for a given state and municipalities zoning and building code.
People shop by location, price, and square footage as their primary search criteria. Safe & bland architecture with no unique craftsmanship reflects the fact that these things are not relevant for the financing, construction & sale of most housing.
Edit: a few other things to consider.
1. Our relationship with the outdoors has shifted considerably since the invention of modern heating and AC. This has implications on modern architecture.
2. Our relationship with our housing (namely, how many hours we spend in what parts of the house) has shifted immensely in the past century. This has vast implications on modern architecture and construction.
3. The average person's relationship with art and beauty has completely changed in just the past few decades. Consider a pre-war world with little-to-no television in the average household, where you yourself had to look in the world around you and decide what was beautiful; versus the modern world where you open your smartphone and scroll down an instagram timeline or a pinterest board (or watch a show on HGTV) and instantly have an idea of what's "expected" from a "good house". Mass media (including social media for the most part) has a homogenizing effect on culture.
2022-12-07T15:34:33.796447Z
The Impotence of Being Clever
> The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was tormented by the thought that he was “merely clever” and criticized himself and others for valuing cleverness over genuine wisdom.
This torments me too. Growing up I was top of my class/district (same as my parents and theirs, which really suggests a genetic component), but then when I started working with other smart people I realized that only gets you so far.
To make wise decisions, you need to have the proper mindstate to make genuine "human" decisions, rather than using just your intelligence. In fact, if you're smart enough, you can "logically" prove wrong things to yourself like "this is impossible". Wisdom is knowing that whenever you say that, you have made a mistake in your logic at some point.
It's very hard to teach people to start thinking like this. The junior engineers who can think on their feet are usually mentored better since that's the part you can't teach..
The tormenting part is this: the same can be said of most other areas of life. I've seen so many genuinely smart people completely mess up personal areas of their life by refusing to think, or do things differently. Despite having a strong apparatus for thinking, they don't "wake up" and use it, they just form all kinds of delusions that they can prove to themselves using their strong proving abilities. Despite being wise in some areas, this wisdom doesn't extend to the others.
I think this is why depression rates are higher in more intelligent people. There's a better ability to comprehend and change your life, but that usually doesn't translate to the willpower and wisdom needed to do so. Those are separate things one has to have/train. An inbalance in the two causes great upset/lost potential.
2022-12-03T19:19:44.941228Z
Individuals prefer to harm their own group rather than help an opposing group
A great example of this phenomenon is the white response to desegregation in the United States. White union workers voted against their labor interests, white flight from major cities, municipalities closing down public swimming pools, disappearance of social clubs, etc. Community services were shut down in favor of the "free market" and we've seen the rise of pay as you go government services. Even obviously true notions like "it takes a village" were derided. Collectivism and the notion of "community" were greatly reduced in response to desegregation. The nation self immolated its social fabric in response to desegregation.
EDIT: In the last sentence I wrote above “nation” should have been written as “white people of the nation”.
2022-12-02T15:20:00.429118Z
Ask HN: Why don’t governments target zero inflation?
>Western governments all seem to target 2% annual inflation. Why is this?
When currencies operated via the gold standard. Inflation of gold was out of their control, gold mining, gold rush etc. Which tended to be about 2%. This goes back to antiquity. Roman emperors clipped metal off their coins and thus created inflation. Inflation doesn't exist in economics, inflation is a political tool.
This is it though, that's why it's 2%, nobody has ever had the courage to aim at anything lower.
But now that it's not gold standard, what is the 2%? This is actually government being able to print money for free. 2% of total money supply pays for quite a significant amount of government. This is compounding obviously, so it's not a long term strategy. However, this is what makes large currencies so powerful.
>Why not target 0% to make financial projections simpler for businesses and households?
The government has to raise taxes(not going to work) or reduce spending(very very not going to happen)
So aiming for 0% isn't plausible not because of economics, but because of politicians.
Something did happen in 2020, usa/canada/others no longer targeted 2%. They targeted >10%. The government printed a ton of money to pay for extreme spending. Canada for example put more debt on the books in the last few years than all other prime ministers in history combined; inflation adjusted. Someone will pay for this eventually or retirees are coming back to work.
2022-12-01T14:01:07.983396Z
Persistent and pervasive impact of being bullied in childhood and adolescence
It's actually a different problem than most people realize. What happens is that you have criminal assault and abuse being tolerated by adults and then blaming the victims. To try to understand, take the behavior of the "bullies" and imagine it is being done by adults.
It really comes down to a lack of responsibility and accountability for managing the behavior of children in schools. Instead of dealing with children who are totally out of control, they blame the victims and compartmentalize the assaults as being somehow different since they involve children.
These assaults are actually even more critical to address in childhood because as they are allowed to form patterns that persist in criminal assaults and fraud in adulthood.
This type of failure is one reason that we don't truly have a civil society. There is this facade of order, but really at the heart it's just the animal kingdom. There is some aspiration by those with the responsibility, but on average the teachers etc. have little real resolve, courage, or capability to actually deal with the broken and dangerous children that are common in schools. So they blame the victims.
2022-11-30T18:28:28.127859Z
Persistent and pervasive impact of being bullied in childhood and adolescence
I was bullied pretty severely as a kid. So bad in fact I was put on medication just to deal with it. I was a weaker kid when I was younger owing to the fact I was sick a lot.
In America there is a concept of "zero tolerance" that keeps the bullied compliant and the bullies in charge. It was not until I started to get very violent that the bullying stopped. I would fight at a moments notice even sometimes in classrooms. Spent a lot of time suspended and my parents had conferences. I never lashed out at anyone. Though if someone tried to insult me, push me around, etc I would immediately switch modes and start swinging. As I got bigger and stronger it became less of an attack of weak punches to full blown knockouts.
The only way we can solve bullying is by teaching our kids that violence is not only necessary but expected. Teach them to be violent, and teach them to control it. You must defend yourself from these people. Enrolling your kids in an actual martial art (some combination of boxing, bjj, muay thai, etc) will help. When they break a bullies nose/arm/etc and get suspended you should not only encourage them to continue you should celebrate the victory. You can't win with bullies by "being the better person". Bullies aren't beat enough at home, so it's your job to bring the beatings to them. School systems are DESIGNED to protect bullies and subjugate the bullied. In America, they are prisons. The sooner children realize this the sooner they realize the methods to staying alive aren't much different.
"If you are not capable of violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless."
2022-11-30T18:23:54.394929Z
Goodbye, data science
Unfortunately it seemed pretty clear from the start that this is what data science would turn into. Data science effectively rebranded statistics but removed the requirement of deep statistical knowledge to allow people to get by with a cursory understanding of how to get some python library to spit out a result. For research and analysis data scientists must have a strong understanding of underlying statistical theory and at least a decent ability write passable code. With regard to engineering ability, certainly people exists with both skill sets, but its an awfully high bar. It is similar in my field (quant finance), the number of people that understand financial theory, valuation, etc and have the ability to design and implement robust production systems are few and you need to pay them. I don't see data science openings paying anywhere near what you would need to pay a "unicorn", you can't really expect the folks that fill those roles to perform at that level.
2022-11-29T20:00:05.479164Z
Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.)
One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty."
The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. When I've had these products, I've always walked away feeling like they taste inferior to traditional vegetarian burgers / sausages that don't try to taste like meat.
> Some say the slowdown in sales is a product of food inflation, as consumers trade pricier plant-based meat for less-expensive animal meat.
Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper.
IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach. When I want to eat meat, I want to eat meat.
2022-11-29T03:17:24.196412Z
The Need to Read
When writing you have to actual flesh out the details and figure out what to include and what to omit. It is so easy to skip that in day dreaming.
Thinking is like drawing a bridge on paper. Writing is to actual construct the bridge and test it.
What looks like the strongest bridge (built of paper) is not always the strongest one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtMx7FZUC6A
2022-11-28T06:55:32.565740Z
No cure for loneliness
So, while every country in the world has issues with social isolation and loneliness I think the US seems to have a particularly large problem with it. I have no evidence to back this up but it seems to me that family structures in the US are less solid than they are in other countries. And for the people who say "I'm from X immigrant community and we have very strong familial bonds", imagine how much stronger they would be had you not come to the US, and will the next generations bonds be as strong or stronger than your generations bonds?
There is a self-reliance in the US which when it works seems to work ok (although even "successful" people can be very lonely), but when it breaks down very quickly leaves people with no where to turn. People often travel long distances from their families. Often relocating across the country again for work breaking whatever bonds they formed in University. People see their families once or twice a year (because the distances are so great). People prioritize economic needs over family and societal needs and this weakening of familial and societal bonds is the result. Often you end up living far from your family with a spouse and kids. If that doesn't work out - say you break up - you can find yourself alone very fast.
I feel that the homeless problem in the US is a symptom of this - although it also has many other causes. In societies with much stronger societal bonds, people don't let people live on the streets.
I don't have a solution for it, it's just something I've noticed and think about a lot when I listen to stories like this one. And don't get me wrong. Every country has problems like this. It's very easy to get isolated in large crowds of people, I just think the US has a pronounced case of it.
2022-11-27T11:58:59.551185Z
Thorsten Ball - How can you not be romantic about programming?
I think there is a lot of romanticism in computing because there is a lot of irrationality. We don't like to admit that. We pretend to be "scientists". Irrationality is as much the engine of progress as reason. Both can be directed toward good or evil ends.
Ada Lovelace saw one romantic side of computing as the possibility of machines writing poetry, music and song. Today as much fear, horror and loathing as joy surrounds that idea - but that is also romantic in Mary Shelley's sense. Big-R Romantic features are in both; possibility, drama, tragedy, and rejection of reason according to a counter-enlightenment embrace of emotivism.
Ours is the age of impossibility - the hopeless inevitability of the status-quo, the lack of vision for alternative systems, amidst a grinding project to render all human affairs predictable, legible, identifiable, and controlled. Today "computer love" (the romance in computing) derives from the struggle to overcome the ignorant, cowering bureaucracy to which lesser men put machines in pursuit of mediocrity and dull power.
2022-11-22T16:14:30.559744Z
Is Our Definition Of Burnout All Wrong?
Perhaps more like... 'engagement fatigue'? When it's truly rote or mindless work your brain can disengage and be somewhere else. With knowledge work you don't have that luxury, even when the work itself isn't what we could consider 'engaging', you nevertheless are obliged to be engaged mentally to carry it out. Do that long enough without deriving any satisfaction, it seems a perfectly sane reaction to want to escape the situation, or just plain shut off. It makes sense for our brains to realize we're spending a lot of brain focus and time on something that isn't activating any reward centers, and insist we stop doing that. That really seems like a fundamentally sensible and healthy response from a brain functioning properly.
2022-11-22T00:05:34.603374Z
Is Our Definition Of Burnout All Wrong?
I've noticed a similar discrepancy in my life: Mental burnout wasn't present in my early, physical-labor jobs. It also wasn't present in my early coding jobs. It only started to appear later in my career when my pay was highest and my actual time spent producing tangible output (whether physical labor or code) was lowest.
One theory is that I became less physically active over time. Exercise is well known to have a protective effect against burnout, and physical labor jobs are a lot of exercise all day. I was also going to the gym much more when I was younger.
Another theory is that my later career burnout came from what studies would call "social defeat stress". I was most burnt out when I spent most of my job time trying to navigate dysfunctional companies, deal with incompetent bosses, and fight against dirty office politics.
Changing to a job where my boss was more demanding but also more competent unexpectedly reduced my burnout symptoms rather than worsening them. Something about being in a socially consistent environment makes everything easier to stomach. On the contrary, being in weird office politics situations where Bob in management gets to insult your work and upend your priorities every week just because he's got a certain title leads to burnout. It's like the burnout is a response to dampen your expectations and efforts in response to situations where more engagement will only produce more stress and frustration.
Physical labor jobs, on the other hand, have a property that more input will usually result in at least some tangible forward progress.
2022-11-22T00:05:11.764325Z
Is Our Definition Of Burnout All Wrong?
One of the things I've spent time helping other engineering managers understand is that burnout doesn't relate only to exhaustion.
Instead, as the Maslach Burnout Inventory points out, it tends to be a three-factored issue. The MBI is a tool widely used in research studies to assess burnout, and it measures three scales:
1) *Exhaustion* measures feelings of being overextended and exhausted by one's work.
2) *Cynicism* measures an indifference or a distant attitude towards your work.
3) *Professional Efficacy* measures satisfaction with past and present accomplishments, and it explicitly assesses an individual's expectations of continued effectiveness at work.
So you can absolutely be experiencing burnout even if you're not experiencing exhaustion, if the other two scales are tipped hard enough.
Among the questions that help measure Cynicism and Professional Efficacy:
* I really don't care what happens to some of my colleagues/clients.
* I have the impression that some of my colleagues/clients make me responsible for their problems.
* I have achieved many rewarding objectives in my work
For more details about the MBI, check out https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-and-ethically
2022-11-22T00:03:13.438935Z
I don't want to go back to social media
I'm torn on the topic.
On one hand, you can accomplish so much in your life in a short amount of time by not endlessly consuming social media. From personal experience, you read more, write more, build more, and enjoy being in the moment with your loved ones more.
On another hand, being a creator on social media can change your perspective of how much impact you can have on the world by helping others with whatever you're able to help with.
Create a lot, consume little.
This however comes with a responsibility: "The more you create, the more powerful you become. The more you consume, the more powerful others become."
2022-11-20T14:33:30.841129Z
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
The past is a different country, and anything that happened before your grandfather was born happened in a different culture altogether. The people who lived in your general geographic area ages ago are not your people, and it's useless to try and set the record straight for them.
2022-11-20T14:26:03.289616Z
Show HN: Firefox Addon to Filter NSFW Content
It's called consent. For a minor, their parent or guardian must consent to show them adult or other traumatizing content. Despite your personal experience, parents and guardians ultimately have the right,authority and responsibility to do their best to ensure the well being of a minor under their care which could mean no porn or even no meat in their diet. You don't have to agree.
> Much worse than adult content is addictive content that forms obsessive behaviors...
There is literally nothing more addicting than porn. Not only that but the long term social and behavioral issues that result from porm addiction are far more harmful than for example cocaine or lsd (which isn't addictive).
But let's say porn is not harmful or addictive, showing porn to people against their consent is a form of sexual abuse much like exposing yourself in public is (despite nudity laws). It boils down to the fact that biologically speaking naked people arouse a sexual reaction and sexual interactions of any kind must be between consenting parties. Period.
This isn't about policing morality but consent and it is a shame that it is neccesary to begin with.
2022-11-19T15:13:22.841227Z
The “je ne sais quoi” of TikTok — Daniel Immke
I think it's a bit weird to compare TikTok to traditional social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Those older platforms were about your social networks (friends and friends of friends) - or at least they were before they started to ape TikTik.
For me, the much closer comparison to TikTok is YouTube, and I feel that TikTok is really just a mobile-optimized YouTube.
2022-11-18T04:51:02.307972Z
Ask HN: Anyone go through Montessori education until age 12 (end of grade 6)?
I did Montessori from kindergarten until grade 6 (age 12), in Mexico.
I really, really like it.
I think it reinforces the kids natural curiosity.
In middle school, my first year out of Montessori, I was shocked at how little other kids cared about learning. I remember the teacher discussing something about astronomy, and I raised my hand to comment on some fact I had read, and what followed was mockery by my peers and antipathy by the teacher. I learned quickly to never again show that I cared about learning.
This was a huge contrast with Montessori where most us were eager to learn and share what we had learned. I had friends that had built the solar system to scale out of their own initiative (in hindsight they may have taken some liberties, nonetheless).
I kept tabs more or less my classmates that came out of the Montessori, and I think they overall overperformed the non Montessori people in middle school and high school. Harder to gauge adulthood success.
I also liked that they had children of various years in the same classroom. I think it promoted knowledge sharing from the older kids to the younger ones, and it removed barriers for friendships. Some of my best friends back then where older than I was. That would never happen in middle or high school.
Finally, I don't think it's perfect. Because we were all expected to join a traditional school after grade 6, the school made some effort to make sure that the outgoing class had covered all the basic requirements (a not necessarily a simple thing since we had great liberty of pursuing what was interesting to us).
All in all, I would strongly recommend it.
2022-11-17T01:00:28.548417Z
The Rise of Influencer Capital
I strongly disagree with Galbraith's argument essentially about "the end of quality". We did not reach a zenith of product quality in the 50s.
What did change was the coverage of mass media.
Instead of relying on long and expensive genuine user feedback loops to generate positive buzz around a product, advertising manufactures that buzz directly. This is why is it everywhere, and influencers are just the latest innovation. Not because product quality/QoL reached a high point.
2022-11-15T18:02:49.068051Z
The Rise of Influencer Capital
This is only tangentially related, but this article reminds me of Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" which should frankly be required reading for undergrad social sciences. In it, he argues that, at the time of writing (late 50s), the industrialized West has largely solved what had previously been the main preoccupation of economics - improved standard of living. As evidence, Galbraith points to advertising.
The argument is simple: when important productivity improvements take place, say the invention of a new way of baking bread, they don't need advertising to gain mass use. Their benefits are so obvious that they don't need to be sold. Demand doesn't have to be created, because demand comes from human existence.
The existence of advertising, in contrast, shows that the thing being advertised probably isn't that important. Indeed, the item is so trivial as to require advertising to create demand for it. This then leads us to wonder what benefit is being served by both creating this product and the demand for it; Galbraith argues that we've essentially fetishized economic growth at all costs (a holdover, in his view, from the early days of econ which was concerned with our metaphorical bread making instead of our metaphorical advertised widget making). He then attacks planned obsolescence as the dumbest outcrop of this process, because now we're purposefully wasting materials on things which we hope to replace in the near future for no reason other than to keep making the things, things which we don't need anyway - as evidenced by the fact that they're advertised.
Anyway I think this fits in perfectly with the whole influencer economy phenomenon, because that's literally all they do. Their raison d'etre is to generate demand for items nobody needs or even previously knew about.
2022-11-15T18:02:05.883752Z
The Rise of Influencer Capital
This is only tangentially related, but this article reminds me of Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" which should frankly be required reading for undergrad social sciences. In it, he argues that, at the time of writing (late 50s), the industrialized West has largely solved what had previously been the main preoccupation of economics - improved standard of living. As evidence, Galbraith points to advertising.
The argument is simple: when important productivity improvements take place, say the invention of a new way of baking bread, they don't need advertising to gain mass use. Their benefits are so obvious that they don't need to be sold. Demand doesn't have to be created, because demand comes from human existence.
The existence of advertising, in contrast, shows that the thing being advertised probably isn't that important. Indeed, the item is so trivial as to require advertising to create demand for it. This then leads us to wonder what benefit is being served by both creating this product and the demand for it; Galbraith argues that we've essentially fetishized economic growth at all costs (a holdover, in his view, from the early days of econ which was concerned with our metaphorical bread making instead of our metaphorical advertised widget making). He then attacks planned obsolescence as the dumbest outcrop of this process, because now we're purposefully wasting materials on things which we hope to replace in the near future for no reason other than to keep making the things, things which we don't need anyway - as evidenced by the fact that they're advertised.
Anyway I think this fits in perfectly with the whole influencer economy phenomenon, because that's literally all they do. Their raison d'etre is to generate demand for items nobody needs or even previously knew about.
2022-11-15T18:02:05.883752Z
Scaling Mastodon is impossible
Mastodon is messy. The world is messy. We have cities with different rules, different mayors, different odds of existing in 50 years. It's nice to have all the cities follow all the same rules and customs if you agree with them, and nice to have another city to move to if you don't.
Email as a decentralized medium has survived for decades. You use a big provider like Gmail, choose a host in another region, or an organization like Proton Mail that does thing somewhat different.
It's OK that Mastodon is messy and at times chaotic. It's organic.
2022-11-15T04:35:10.450130Z
Scaling Mastodon is impossible
Mastodon is messy. The world is messy. We have cities with different rules, different mayors, different odds of existing in 50 years. It's nice to have all the cities follow all the same rules and customs if you agree with them, and nice to have another city to move to if you don't.
Email as a decentralized medium has survived for decades. You use a big provider like Gmail, choose a host in another region, or an organization like Proton Mail that does thing somewhat different.
It's OK that Mastodon is messy and at times chaotic. It's organic.
2022-11-15T04:35:10.450130Z
I tracked everything I read on the internet for a year
Have you considered adding ActivityPub comments?
I would love to see every social bookmarking service and RSS reader to have an interoperate-able comment section. Why should I manage my bookmarks outside of the browser if not for the benefit of receiving additional information about the articles?
2022-11-14T04:37:14.195041Z
Ask HN: Do you believe there's really an alternative to Twitter?
I do game development on the side, just fun small indie games. I like using twitter to follow other game devs and see what they are working on. It's fun tracking down new devs and seeing new and interesting projects, and it's fun sharing progress on my games and getting some positive comments from them.
What's not fun is the sheer amount of topics on twitter I have zero interest in invading my timeline. I don't like how much marketing spam there is, since every post is secretly hoping to 'go viral', which even for the indie devs I follow makes it fairly bland sometimes. Twitter is just so huge that it's not possible to have any small communities.
For all its warts, there's a fantastic twitter community around the FGC (fighting game community) - members in the community regularly post really interesting questions or statements on fighting games and/or their design, and it usually kicks of dozens of videos from other people I follow on that topic. The FCG's usage of Twitter is probably the best I've seen.
Personally, what I would like is something more akin to a mailing list or RSS feed I suppose, but with the ability to reply to threads, a bit like a forum. I want to be able to follow people I find interesting manually, with zero discovery in the app itself. I want to hear updates from them, and without any 'retweet' functionality there's less incentive for small players to spam the ever living hell out of their account in the hope of getting lucky.
I think that would be my dream app - something that works like an RSS feed, but without the technical overhead of actually setting up and publishing to your own RSS feed, with the ability to respond with comments on the posts without having to repost it to a site which does allow it (like HN or Reddit) with one shared identity. That would be cool.
Does Mastodon fill that role? Does anything? If so I'd certainly use it.
2022-11-14T04:35:00.812515Z
Why are U.S. transit projects so costly? This group is on the case
It partly has to do with the bidding process - the drive to get the lowest bid. Competent companies know the cost won't work and are unwilling to put up the surety bonds to take on a project. It leaves with the boldest incompetent company to make the lowest bid who gets their foot in the door and then jack up the cost overrun later on. Often the project failed due to cost overrun or sheer incompetence. At the end the cost of doing business go up for all parties involved.
I've seen transit projects with hundreds of millions budget fell apart with nothing to show at the end, and have seen a transit project that doubled the cost and tripled the schedule to get to completion, and that was a good project.
2022-11-11T20:26:43.706488Z
TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History - WSJ
I think tiktok's "slice of life" short glimpses into how people live is dramatically more interesting than the bloated content youtube pushes at me, which is usually weirdos with fake sounding voices doing overly dramatized "explainers" or "reactions" about something the algorithm has identified I'm mildly interested in.
What you see in tiktok feels more "real" (even when contrived) than the overly produced content of youtube.
2022-11-11T16:48:44.654339Z
TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History - WSJ
Go get addicted to TikTok for a month and find out how high quality the stuff can get. There are farmers, professors, chefs, mathematicians, dancers, artists and so much more doing amazing things on the platform.
Privacy concerns aside, it really is a wonderful nexus of humans.
2022-11-11T16:47:55.997986Z
TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History - WSJ
The best part of TikTok is being able to see who is talking to you. Reddit has become less and less useful to me as I have aged as I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not talking to a person at all or if I am it’s a 13 year old edge lord pretending to be whatever.
So much information gains or loses value based on who is saying it. It also came out around the same time that every YouTube creator started stretching their content to 10 minutes minimum for ad revenue. I rarely want to spend 10 minutes on a single throw away topic which killed a lot of interest in browsing YouTube casually for me.
I know there are a lot of naysayers for good and bad reasons but if you are on the fence you should give it a try and it will likely become one of your favorite online spaces to spend time.
2022-11-11T16:47:19.161696Z
TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History - WSJ
I am skeptical of TikTok because it works too well and is too enjoyable - while conditioning users’ brains to go into a very short attention mode. Someone else here talked about the advantage of finding something interesting and 20 minutes long on YouTube- much healthier.
One thing that TikTok did for me that was awesome: I searched for restaurants in the small tourist town I live in, and the search results were very good. I had read that young people (I am 71) use TikTok as a search engine so I tried it.
I tend to have TikTok installed about 25% of the time, and uninstall it when I am wasting too much time. Someone here suggested blocking content creators I don’t like; next time I have it installed I will try that.
2022-11-11T16:46:48.213230Z
Pinboard vs. Raindrop
I'm a Pinboard user and am happy with the bookmarklet which in my experience works flawlessly.
But... I (almost) never lookup any of my bookmarks. Googling is faster -- and safer, since it's possible I'm wrong and didn't actually bookmark what I'm looking for.
Bookmarking satisfies the mind; it's a bit like hoarding. Maybe the best bookmarking service would be a mock interface that doesn't actually do anything.
2022-11-11T15:30:15.054253Z
TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History - WSJ
My very loose understanding is that the effectiveness of the "Not interested" button is somehow inversely proportional to the strength of the correlation that TikTok uses for that particular suggestion.
As the obvious example, if you are a male, you might only need to click "not interested" once or twice to stop seeing e.g. skateboarding or woodworking content, but many, many times to stop seeing content from attractive females.
2022-11-10T11:52:35.313406Z
TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History - WSJ
The problem that Youtube has is that they already were what TikTok is today. Early ~2005 Youtube was extremely similar to what modern TikTok is, lots of amateurs talking into their webcam and not a whole lot of professional content.
Youtube however spend a lot of effort to drive that early content away and focus on professional content that they could monetize easier. Finding a random video from somebody who isn't a professional full-time Youtuber is getting pretty rare these days.
Youtube Shorts thus has the problem that all the random slice-of-life content that strives on TikTok, is deliberately suppressed on their own platform. Difficult to see how they can fix that, as it just goes against everything they have been doing for the last decade.
The algorithm is important of course, but it needs content to search through and I just don't really think there is enough left on Youtube to compete with what TikTok is doing. All the videos I saw on Youtube Shorts was just professional Youtube's cutting some bits out of their larger videos into a shorter video, it just felt useless, annoying and uninteresting.
2022-11-10T11:51:46.795131Z
TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History - WSJ
ByteDance has been making loads of money from Chinese domestic market, through TouDiao and DouYin. It knows in order to compete with big names such as Facebook, YouTube, it needs the North American market, which is known for all international brands. Basically winning the US market is winning the world, the same concept as being a Hollywood star is a international star.
I think people failed to understand TikTok. People keep talking about social network. TikTok is not a social network, it does not use your friends and your connections to predict what you will enjoy, and that's the beauty of it. For me TikTok is a TV. It is MTV, constantly showing you exciting videos, regardless where it come from. YouTube is like Cable TV. The closest to it is Instagram, but Instagram pays too much attention to who you follow. TikTok does not replace Facebook, but it will eat your TV time, it competes with Netflix.
2022-11-10T11:49:11.647551Z
The Age of PageRank Is Over
You can't compare the good faith web from 1996, which consisted of a bunch of nerds blogging, to today's web. Everything of any importance in our society moved online, and much of it needs monetization. And since on average users won't pay a cent for anything, ads it is. We very much have a role in this outcome ourselves.
Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, something else will. As soon as something gets large enough, it will be gamed. If not for commercial reasons, it might be cultural/political influence.
I will end by reminding ourselves that us techies should spend some more time with ordinary folks. I agree with everybody here that Google Search has been getting worse and worse for years now, especially for our niche searches.
It's a mistake though to think that this is widely experienced as such. My mum looks up an unknown ingredient in a recipe and within a second sees a picture of it. That means it works. All kinds of personal data might be shared in the process but since you can't really see that, it didn't happen. From her point of view, Google Search works extremely well and is close to magic.
The point being, Google doesn't give a shit that you don't get the best answer for your query on JavaScript closures. Nobody searches for that, and those that do, block ads.
2022-11-10T00:53:24.699403Z
Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
> A mushroom or LSD trip in nature is the quintessential human experience and has been immensely helpful even for those than never continued use of the substance
I'd like to provide a counter-example - I've never had any benefits from using LSD or shrooms. The first time I was just tripping and deluded myself into thinking I've discovered something very profound, when in fact I was looking at some basic mathematics like Fibonacci sequence and thinking thoughts like "wow this is so much similar to real life, things repeat, but they also change". Every subsequent time has been progressively worse. One time I've spent an hour feeling most depressed I've ever felt in my life while crying in a fetal position. Last time I tried shrooms, every single noise was amplified 10x and scared the shit out of me. Afterwards, it just wasn't worth trying anymore.
My best friend from high school, a very bright and intelligent young man, met a girl who was very into psychedelics. They started doing them, had lots of fun. I did it with them a few times too, mostly had a good time. At first sight, one would say that the drugs actually benefited them, made them more "open". But after some time, they internalized the stance that they were "immune to bad things" that can happen from drug abuse. Few years later, the friend ran away from home, talking about how his parents are narcissistic and abusing him (which I'm fairly sure they weren't - he told me all about his relationship with parents for years, and there's never been a single sign of narcissism or abuse in his stories, and I've personally met them, hanged out at his house, they were always nice to us and never showed a single sign of any issues), cut off his fingers with a knife, and disappeared without a trace. To this day I haven't been able to find him anywhere online, and I only hope he's alive.
Psychedelics are fun, but to say that they're "immensely helpful even for those than never continued use of the substance" is a huge generalization, requires a lot more data than most people consider to gather, and is harmful as general advice.
A better advice would be something along the lines of "try it and see how it works for you, there's a chance it might help you out".
Also, if you're depressed or anxious, avoid psychedelics, especially heavy doses. At some point it's hard not to start thinking about the white elephant, and once you start falling in the abyss, there's not much that can pull you out.
2022-11-09T22:49:13.871740Z
Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
I take issue with traditional advice on the subject-- it's all self-centered. Finding MY purpose. MY life meaning. MY values. The path to getting there involves MY consumption of <drugs>, acquisition of wealth, influence, or other forms of self-indulgence. Everything is about MY happiness.
Consider that perhaps you don't find your "calling." Instead, it finds you.
The only "trick" here is that you have to be reachable by putting yourself out there, and keeping in mind that you're fishing, not hunting. Coming back empty-handed is not a sign of failure, it's one round in a process of elimination.
Volunteer work is a good start, missionary work is even better. Or pick up a holiday shift in retail or a temp job. Help out at homeless outreach, animal control and domestic violence centers. Attend a service at a church, a temple and a mosque. Go on a ride-along with the local cops. Visit your national parks and memorials.
Most of this is an exercise in forced association with people and situations you'd otherwise overlook-- you'll hang out with the poor, the wealthy, the criminal, the pious, and everything in-between enough to at least get a sense for the breadth of the struggles of the human condition-- and present you with a buffet of experiences broad enough to encounter a perspective that resonates with you.
My pet theory is that triumph over struggle is the real driver of happiness and the only universal purpose any of us have. Once people transcend the struggle, there is nothing left for them to overcome, and they never again feel any sense of satisfaction.
ESID, and not everyone is meant for servitude, but it works for me. Best of luck to you.
2022-11-09T22:47:46.653074Z
Building a semantic search engine in Rust
I remember when "semantic search" was the Next Big Thing (back when all we had were simple keyword searches).
I don't know enough about the internals of Google's search engine to know if it could be called a "semantic search engine", but not, it gets close enough to fool me.
But I feel like I'm still stuck on keyword searches for a lot of other things, like email (outlook and mutt), grepping IRC logs, searching for products in small online stores, and sometimes even things like searching for text in a long webpage.
I'm sure people have thought about these things: what technical challenges exist in improving search in these areas? is it just a matter of integrating engines like the one that's linked here? Or maybe keyword searches are often Good Enough, so no one is really clamoring for something better
2022-11-09T15:33:42.537819Z
Exploring Mastodon
The thing that surprised me a bit about federation is that it puts instances front and center. You have an account at your "home instance", and that's the first thing you see. When I first read about federation I had thought that the idea was to have one big network of independent but equal instances that just transparently share data under common topics. But instead I discovered that you are identified with your instance and can follow topics per instance, with local topics being the default, and you have to explicitly reach out to see the "rest of the world".
With Lemmy communities too. It seems that you can subscribe to a community on a given instance, but there is no such thing as cross-instance communities.
I found this disappointing because it means that for there to be a critical mass of content in a particular community so that it gains in popularity, then that particular community in that particular instance has to become popular on its own, instead of all instances contributing to one big community. Add to this that the default view is "local communities" and you've guaranteed you'll never build something as popular as reddit, sadly. Example, someone from mylemmy.eg cannot post together with someone from hislemmy.com in one big Programming forum. Instead they both have to agree to post in [email protected] and not [email protected] which, imho, is unlikely to be a successful as there being one centralized place where everyone knows to post. If they'd just remove the domain names and pool everything I think it would have a lot more chance of success.
2022-11-07T19:53:34.674703Z
Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)
> And then there is twitter.
You may recall the advice about waiting til next morning to hit send on that scathing email reply. You might not feel so dramatic after a cooldown period.
My working theory on why Twitter is so noxious is that it captures (then broadcasts) people's impulsiveness reaction.
I keep thinking of Marshal McLuhan's The Medium is the Message. What would he say about Twitter?
I've never grokked McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cold" mediums. (Makes sense; being one of the first to discuss this stuff, he had to invent a vocabulary.)
My current guess involves feedback loops and channel bandwidth. "Hot" is reactive, "cold" is deliberative. But it's not just the immediacy of the medium, it's also the interactions (feedback loops).
Face to face, there is very high bandwidth (included by not limited to backchannel, body language, facial expressions, context, etc) along with rapid feedback. So we have the information needed to keep communication from going off the rails.
Alas, Twitter's very constrained bandwidth, while maintaining the rapid feedback loop, doesn't permit any sort collaborative moderating effort.
In other words, Twitter is custom built for kneejerk clapbacks.
For contrast, I keep thinking of John Carmack's journaling via a .plan file (and the finger protocol). Twas a precursor to blogging and RSS feeds. Why didn't that medium incite virality, outrage, and pogroms? .plan files are also low band width, right? I think it's because the feedback loops simply didn't exist.
2022-11-07T12:38:01.254835Z
Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)
The other day I wrote a fan letter to a developer who has been maintaining a popular and useful library for several years. In his reply, he said that this was the first fan letter he had ever received. I think we need to show Open Source developers a lot more love and a lot less snark...
2022-11-07T12:36:12.701121Z
The elite, underpaid, and weird world of crossword writers
Diversity is what will kill crosswords, and I don't mean diversity in the skin color or gender of the setters, but the fragmentation of culture where nobody watches the same TV channels or reads the same newspapers any more. We increasingly hive off into our own bubbles of preferred content, tied only by whatever cultural commonality we acquired in grade school.
There's just too much art, too many books, too many TV shows, and too much access to it all, to go back to the mostly-shared corpus of mostly-mutually-understandable cultural references we had in the 20th century. You would think that people would at least have read the really famous books, or seen the super popular TV shows, but I am regularly surprised to meet people who haven't.
Fair clues are foundational to crosswords, and foundational to fairness is understanding what the solver can be expected to know.
A Guardian crossword last week referenced The Beatles, Anthony Eden, and the Russian revolution. Fair game? All part of a standard British upbringing, surely? Perhaps for now, but for how long?
2022-11-07T01:06:03.640866Z
In Defense of Linked Lists
>When people asking my opinion for Rust, I loved to share them the Linkedin List implementation link:
This LinkedList obsession is a bit bizarre to me, and tends to come from older programmers who come from a time when coding interviews involved writing linked lists and balancing b-trees. To me though it also represents the stubbornness of C programmers who refuse to consider things like growable vectors a solved problem. My reaction to the LinkedList coders is not "well Rust needs to maintain ownership", its why does your benchmark for how easy a language is involve how easy it is to fuck around with raw pointers?.
LinkedLists are a tool, but to C programmers that are an invaluable fundamental building block that shows up early in any C programmers education due to how simple they are to implement and the wide range of use cases they can be used for. But they are technically an unsafe data structure and if you willing to let some of that stubbornness go and finally accept some guard rails, you have to be able to see that a data structure like linkedlists will be harder to implement.
It has nothing to do with the language; implementing with LinkedLists with any sort of guardrails adds a ton of complexity, either up front (e.g. borrowchecker) or behind the scenes (e.g. a garbage collector). When you accept this fact, it becomes ludicrous to imply that a LinkedList implementation is a good benchmark for the ergonomics of a language like Rust.
2022-11-05T01:05:32.784650Z
Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
You're confusing bad actors with bad behavior. Bad behavior is something good people do from time to time because they get really worked up about a specific topic or two. Bad actors are people who act bad all the time. There may be some of those but they're not the majority by far (and yes, sometimes normal people turn into bad actors because they get upset about a given thing that they can't talk about anything else anymore).
OP's argument is that you can moderate content based on behavior, in order to bring the heat down, and the signal to noise ratio up. I think it's an interesting point: it's neither the tools that need moderating, nor the people, but conversations (one by one).
2022-11-03T21:36:58.978592Z
Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
Every single social media platform that has ever existed makes the same fundamental mistake. They believe that they just have to remove or block the bad actors and bad content and that will make the platform good.
The reality is everyone, myself included, can be and will be a bad actor.
How do you build and run a "social media" product when the very act of letting anyone respond to anyone with anything is itself the fundamental problem?
2022-11-03T21:36:23.366514Z
Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation
At least one missing element is that of reputation. I don't think it should work exactly like it does in the real world, but the absence of it seems to always lead to major problems.
The cost of being a jerk online is too low - it's almost entirely free of any consequences.
Put another way, not everyone deserves a megaphone. Not everyone deserves to chime in on any conversation they want. The promise of online discussion is that everyone should have the potential to rise to that, but just granting them that privilege from the outset and hardly ever revoking it doesn't work.
Rather than having an overt moderation system, I'd much rather see where the reach/visibility/weight of your messages is driven by things like your time in the given community, your track record of insightful, levelheaded conversation, etc.
2022-11-03T21:35:49.826873Z
Functional programming should be the future of software
I immediately distrust any article that makes sweeping claims about one-paradigm-to-rule-them-all.
The reason why multiple paradigms exist is because here in the real world, the competing issues and constraints are never equal, and never the same.
A big part of engineering is navigating all of the offerings, examining their trade-offs, and figuring out which ones fit best to the system being built in terms of constraints, requirements, interfaces, maintenance, expansion, manpower, etc. You won't get a very optimal solution by sticking to one paradigm at the expense of others.
One of the big reasons why FP languages have so little penetration is because the advocacy usually feels like someone trying to talk you into a religion. (The other major impediment is gatekeeping)
2022-11-02T14:08:32.807531Z
Functional programming should be the future of software
Functional programming won't succeed until the tooling problem is fixed. 'Tsoding' said it best: "developers are great at making tooling, but suck at making programming languages. Mathematicians are great at making programming languages, but suck at making tooling." This is why Rust is such a success story in my opinion: it is heavily influenced by FP, but developers are responsible for the tooling.
Anecdotally, the tooling is why I gave up on Ocaml (given Rust's ML roots, I was seriously interested) and Haskell. I seriously couldn't figure out the idiomatic Ocaml workflow/developer inner loop after more than a day of struggling. As for Haskell, I gave up maybe 20min in of waiting for deps to come down for a Dhall contribution I wanted to make.
Institutionally, it's a hard sell if you need to train the whole team to just compile a project, vs. `make` or `cargo build` or `npm install && npm build`.
2022-11-02T14:05:41.046219Z
Show HN: A tool to help you remember shit you are interested in
This seems really well built. It's fast and responsive. It looks nice. But I just don't understand what I would use it for.
It seems like the idea is to build a database of people, movies, Wikipedia articles and such and then be able to find them via search/links. But I'm not at all sold on why I need this in my life.
Is there a way to make the value clearer? Am I just not in the target audience? Who is going to see this and say "TAKE MY MONEY" and why?
I'm thinking of products that were instant sign-ups for me...
Spotify: For one price, listen to all the music on Earth whenever you want. TAKE MY MONEY!
Gmail: Fast email with 2 GB storage. This was such an instant sign-up they had to make an invite system to slow people getting access.
Maybe could add something like Lichess: Chess training and games, with modern UX, offered open source as a public good. I mean, if you're at all interested in chess, that's an instant sign-up, right?
Trying to say, this idea of presenting a clear value isn't limited to big players like Spotify and Gmail, but can also be done by smaller companies if the value presented is really clear.
What should someone see that makes them instantly recognize they need this in their life, because that's what I'm totally missing here.
2022-11-02T14:02:51.697496Z
Jony Ive on Life After Apple
“Language is so powerful,” says Ive, who often begins a new project with conversation or writing, not sketches. “If [I say] I’m going to design a chair, think how dangerous that is. Because you’ve just said ‘chair,’ you’ve said no to a thousand ideas.”
The older I get the more I believe this to be the most difficult aspect of making decisions. Saying 'no' to thousands of potentialities seems scary because it's a memento mori of the finiteness of individual lives.
2022-11-02T13:59:23.637650Z
Twitter Blue for $8/Month
Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world". It gives them an easy way to reach their audience on their own terms without any middlemen.
As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter.
Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.
2022-11-02T02:15:26.720303Z
Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes
I gave up alcohol years ago after reading a few of these studies. I wasn't drinking often anyways, but does it ever feel good to never feel that morning after headache. I found even one pint in the evening could disrupt my sleep.
Saving on the restaurant, and eliminating the liquor store, bills was gravy.
2022-11-01T23:32:44.341392Z
Twitter Blue for $8/Month
That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense.
In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.
An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes.
Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform.
So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
2022-11-01T22:09:12.422835Z
Laws barring noncompete clauses spreading
Over the years so many different jurisdictions around the US and the world have stated their desire to be the "next Silicon Valley" and have poured an immense amount of money and effort to make it so, whether in the form of incentives for businesses, tax breaks, education, job training, or even just straight paying smart people to move there. Every such scheme has generally failed because they refused to emulate the one key piece of California law that is necessary for a startup ecosystem to exist – banning noncompetes.
"But I'll spend money to train my employees and they'll just take those skills to go work for a competitor or start their own business!" Yes, that's a feature of the system, not a bug.
2022-11-01T21:17:24.943371Z
Centralization Is Inevitable
The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if they do something fishy. It's about the threat, and what can happen on margin.
Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is reasonable.
2022-11-01T18:51:59.626895Z
Twitter discontinues ad-free articles for Blue subscribers
Raise the price and drop the features, makes sense to me. Next step, the MMO route: sell different-color flair for your account so everybody can tell how much you spend per month on Twitter. Then, let people filter by tier: Twitter Blue can block Twitter Blue and no-check users; Twitter Red cannot be blocked except by Red and above... on up to Twitter Diamond who can't be blocked by anybody but other $100k/mo users. Sure, people will hate it, but will they pay?
2022-11-01T17:05:37.152459Z
Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
I disagree. Your points aren't necessarily wrong, but they ignore one big factor. Twitter chooses what content to promote to people.
I could use Twitter quite happily not knowing about the latest "scandal" in, say, the knitting world. But Twitter actively promotes that content to me - either with the "trending" sidebar or by showing me content that it thinks will increase my engagement.
That is a technical problem. How do you surface engaging content without also surfacing harmful / polarising / abusive content?
If a specific Tweet got a million likes, a "neutral" algorithm might choose to promote it. But unless that algorithm knows that the Tweet is deliberately inflammatory, it can't choose to de-prioritise it.
So, yes, there is a problem with human nature. But it is being exacerbated by deliberate technical and policy choices.
2022-11-01T16:43:52.294407Z
Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve
I used to agree with you until I created a new Twitter account from scratch.
I'm not American and I specifically put non-political things in my interests. Yet, the second I signed up I got the following:
1. A notification about a smug reply a rando made to a Republican Congressman.
2. Posts from a meme page with a Pepe the frog avatar showing homeless people fighting in San Francisco.
3. Somebody I don't follow accusing another person I don't follow of being a nazi.
The problem with Twitter is that it needs high engagement, so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion. This gets people to post the most smug and controversial takes they can handle.
I recommend everyone creating a new social media account every once in a while to see what the rest of the world see. It's as enlightening as browsing the internet with Adblock disabled.
2022-11-01T16:42:39.130458Z
Ask HN: What was being a software developer like about 30 years ago?
It was great. Full stop.
A sense of mastery and adventure permeated everything I did. Over the decades those feelings slowly faded, never to be recaptured. Now I understand nothing about anything. :-)
Starting in 1986 I worked on bespoke firmware (burned into EPROMs) that ran on bespoke embedded hardware.
Some systems were written entirely in assembly language (8085, 6805) and other systems were written mostly in C (68HC11, 68000). Self taught and written entirely by one person (me).
In retrospect, perhaps the best part about it was that even the biggest systems were sufficiently unsophisticated that a single person could wrap their head around all of the hardware and all of the software.
Bugs in production were exceedingly rare. The relative simplicity of the systems was a huge factor, to be sure, but knowing that a bug meant burning new EPROMs made you think twice or thrice before you declared something "done".
Schedules were no less stringent than today; there was constant pressure to finish a product that would make or break the company's revenue for the next quarter, or so the company president/CEO repeatedly told me. :-) Nonetheless, this dinosaur would gladly trade today's "modern" development practices for those good ol' days(tm).
2022-10-31T15:25:04.754717Z
Ask HN: What was being a software developer like about 30 years ago?
Fun!
Precarious. Very slow. Like a game of Jenga, things made you nervous. Waiting for tapes to rewind, or slowly feeding in a stack of floppies, knowing that one bad sector would ruin the whole enterprise. But that was also excitement. Running a C program that had taken all night to compile was a heart-in-your-mouth moment.
Hands on.
They say beware a computer scientist with a screwdriver. Yes, we had screwdrivers back then. Or rather, developing software also meant a lot of changing cables and moving heavy boxes.
Interpersonal.
Contrary to the stereotype of the "isolated geek" rampant at the time, developing software required extraordinary communication habits, seeking other experts, careful reading, formulating concise questions, and patiently awaiting mailing list replies.
Caring.
Maybe this is what I miss the most. 30 years ago we really, truly believed in what we were doing... making the world a better place.
2022-10-31T15:23:51.291589Z
Ask HN: What are some of the best books you have read in 2022?
I finished the quadrilogy Terra Ignota, also known by its first book title, Too Like the Lightning. It is one of the most unique set of books I've read, taking place in the 2400s but referencing events 300 years in our past, so it is as if our current time is right in the middle of both ends. It is quite long and flowing in its writing, something that not everyone may like. It has a very high amount of allusion to other Western works, particularly ancient Greek works, so if you're not familiar with those, read them before reading these books.
I am also reading Fire and Blood, which is on the opposite spectrum, much terser but somehow still enjoyable as its blunt style makes imagining the scenarios that play out in the story much easier than the flowery prose of Terra Ignota.
2022-10-29T16:16:13.830158Z
Ask HN: What are some of the best books you have read in 2022?
Salvation Sequence by Peter G Hamilton
A realistic alien invasion hard scifi trilogy set during different periods of time in our future. "Read" in audiobook format, narrated by John Lee who is also great.
2022-10-29T16:13:36.190065Z
Incidents caused by unappreciated OSS maintainers or underfunded OSS projects
our model of society is not compatible with open source
there needs to be a massive shift and appreciate more the work of volunteers, contributors and benevolent
until then, these problems will amplify
and i'm not talking about github sponsors since it's opt in, and it's more of a popularity check than anything else
i'm talking about that dude who will randomly appear to send a PR that fixes something important, the dude who decide overnight to open source his work but is agoraphobic, that other dude who help write documentation, that other dude who help triage issues, countless hidden people who never are rewarded
2022-10-29T15:29:55.154627Z
Stop writing Twitter threads! - Chez pieq
Twitter penalizes links. If you post a tweet with a link only a fraction of the people will see it compared to a twitter thread. They much prefer people stay on platform.
It's not just Twitter doing this - all social networks prefer you stay within their platform. Facebook is notorious for it.
If you put all that work into a blog post and only 5 people see it versus typing it out as a twitter thread and 1000 see it, it makes it obvious which one is better - even if its a worse UI.
2022-10-25T21:29:00.008645Z
Stop writing Twitter threads! - Chez pieq
As someone that regularly writes long-form content on a blog, I have to say: this post completely misses the point.
People write Twitter threads because Twitter gives them distribution for what they want to say.
Sure, it may not be the perfect soapbox for what you want to say. But if you write something insightful, a zillion people may see it as opposed to your mom and best friend who read it on your blog.
2022-10-25T17:06:41.178142Z
What “work” looks like
Look how many comments here are something like: "Well, of course leisure is good - because it helps me work harder!" It's sad. It's that "work-is-noble" ethos. These people are effectively saying that they are at-lesiure in order to work better - they have it backwards! I don't know about you, but I work in order to be-at-leisure; I am only ever not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure. Refreshing and recharging is good - because it's the end, not the means!. But so many here seem to be framing leisure as the means, the end being work itself. Work itself is not noble.
2022-10-25T12:53:09.741983Z
What “work” looks like
Software development is creative work. Creative insight can come anywhere, any time. Better ideas can make difficult things easy. And make the impossible– possible.
So the most important thing on a software team (or really any team creating high technology products or services) is an environment where team members feel safe to be themselves– psychologically safe, where they can try out new things, make mistakes, fail, and not be punished or belittled. Say their ideas and have them improved by others, not criticized. It's an environment where team members take care of themselves so they can be creative– sleep enough, exercise enough, be with friends and family enough, play enough.
You have to be at your keyboard or lab bench or whatever enough to make things. But if you are there too much your creativity plummets. This is what I try to get across to my teams.
2022-10-25T12:52:11.323556Z
Forgetting The Asbestos. - by areoform - 1517 Fund
Although we attempt to store information in external mediums, it's humans who make the world go round. Funny to think that, in practice, the collective knowledge of mankind is a fuzzy imprecise mess coupled with a few scribbled notes.
2022-10-24T20:01:03.626489Z
Behind TikTok's boom: A legion of traumatized, $10-a-day content moderators
What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up.
Considering how many reports there are of Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok, and other sites where content moderators are suffering from having to perform their jobs, it suggests that there's a great deal of really terrible stuff going on - and worse, that the people involved are filming and attempting to share it.
This is a serious thing, and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough.
2022-10-24T15:55:07.548642Z
Behind TikTok's boom: A legion of traumatized, $10-a-day content moderators
The "defaults" on TikTok are fairly terrible. However, after spending maybe one hour at most scrolling and liking/disliking things to tune the algorithm, and search tags, it works fairly well. I have
- Learned several cooking recipes and some tricks
- Cleaning advice I've actually put to use
- How to use some woodworking tools. Also, general woodworking ideas
- Cat behavioral advice
In my experience, it's far better than Reddit (mostly because there's far more niche content, and it isn't limited to "recently posted") and the discovery is far easier than on YouTube.
2022-10-24T11:13:05.367027Z
Fake books - lcamtuf’s thing
It's virtual evolution at work, i.e. spam evolution. It's the Internet Gold Rush (i.e. "make money fast" at work), which we have watched getting "more professional" in the last ten to twenty years. And because those companies which supply resources (ebook platforms, search engines, but also hardware for crypto mining like graphics cards etc) to those "virtual miners" profit from what's going on, we won't see that fixed in the upcoming years.
Generating books instead of spam emails looks more professional so gullible people, who meanwhile (hopefully) did learn that the Nigerian prince isn't a prince, will buy such books (it's written in a book, and book writing is real work you know, so it must be true) to learn about all those fancy new concepts they hear about.
It's actually not that different from all these ads you see, especially if you actually watch recent youtube ads. Due to the current "energy crisis" and the upcoming winter, I've seen videos advertising magical electric heaters, which will "recycle" 85% of the energy used for heating and thus will save you lots of money. It's simple physics that warm air coming out at the front of such a device will be sucked in at its back again, but there's nothing to "recycle" here, to somehow save energy.
BTW, anybody interested in my upcoming book on quantum heating? Quantum heating will even earn you money, because it will generate certain energy efficient by-products which you can sell at your favourite online retailer ;-)
2022-10-24T11:08:12.193325Z
Fake books - lcamtuf’s thing
This has been a concern of mine for a while; I have also published absolute garbage just to see how far I can take it. I've published music under various pseudonyms, books underneath different pen-names... the list goes on. I've retracted such publications, but it is frightening if one person like myself had the curiosity to try, what is already out there, and, what a well-funded nation-state actor could do.
----
Post-truth, like post-modernism, does not mean an absolute absence of truth, but a decline in confidence in common knowledge, making your own truth the center of your life, rather than a set of values shared by a community.
We now believe that our own truth is somehow better than the "centralized" or "official" truth. We are now free from the institutions and authorities that controlled the truth. But this is an illusion, because the very definition of truth requires trust in something other than you.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/j5gyp5/the_search_for_truth_in_a_posttruth_society/
2022-10-24T11:05:33.445652Z
Write Like You Talk (2015)
I like a lot of what Graham writes, but I fundamentally disagree with him on this one. Spoken language is the JIT compiler of information transferral. It’s spur-of-the-moment; it’s stream-of-consciousness; it gets the job done by stripping away a lot of nuance and complexity.
Written language is more subtle, more considered, more edited - he states himself that he writes then edits - in his case to make it more “spoken”. By doing this he is removing complexity in the interests of simplicity, and this may well fit with his goal for this work. It is not a general panacea.
I don’t disagree that sometimes it is more useful to have a simple introduction, leading to a more complex and better understanding of a subject before layering on the exceptions and subtleties - there is certainly a place for simplified knowledge transfer, our entire system of education is based on this “lies to children” approach.
What I do disagree with is that it’s a useful go-to rule. The world is inherently complex, and we deal with complexity by introducing layers of abstraction (more of the “lies to children” approach, but this time to ourselves). Not everyone needs to understand the quantum mechanical physics of a positive charge in order to understand that balloons will stick to your hair if rubbed against certain materials, but if you’re trying to explain that, then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed. Sometimes that abstraction is very thin, and the language used will reflect that; at other times, “it just does” is the way to go… party handbooks printed on balloon packets are different to undergraduate textbooks.
So written language, with all its capability for complexity, context, subtlety and nuance should be employed when that capability has a useful effect. That means understanding one’s audience and tailoring to suit, not just a blindly-applied rule to “write as you speak”.
2022-10-23T18:56:33.172355Z
Write Like You Talk (2015)
As with so many things Paul Graham: there is a good, important idea here (omit needless words!) but he overshoots the mark, descending into venomous overgeneralizations. The truth is more nuanced: speaking and writing are both important vectors for communication (obviously?), but they are different (delightfully so!) -- with different strengths and weaknesses. Great writing is tight: it crackles. If a word serves that end, it should be used -- knowing that if someone like Graham wants to decry the word choice as "fancy", it reveals more about the critic than the writing.
2022-10-23T18:55:09.252291Z
Review of the Kinesis Advantage360 Professional
I got the Kinesis Advantage2 last year. I got used to it, almost reaching my laptop typing speed. But I actually don't find it super comfortable.
To be honest, no keyboard matches the comfort of my macbook with the keyboard being under the level of the palms.
I also more recently got the keychron K3 (low profile) and realized that the thing I don't like in the KA2 is my wrists being locked.
I think it's not enough to consider a keyboard without a complete setup, including where the hands / arms will rest and where the mouse is positioned.
For example even the distance of my laptop stand makes a huge difference because it affects how far my keyboard can be from my torso, hence whether where my arms rest on the table.
2022-10-22T21:23:42.084070Z
A global house-price slump is coming?
It's sickening that this is always marketed as bad news, even though we've been in a bubble for the past 20 years. The bad news is that we decided that owning a house is a retirement plan instead of giving people proper retirement plans. Somehow every non-homeowner has to be a policy slave to the passive income of some wealthy person. And we defend it by claiming that old people who are worth enough money not to work are not wealthy, as if we care about old people. We only care about old people as model "savers" who can be used to morally justify policies that directly and overwhelmingly benefit the very wealthy to the obscenely wealthy.
And also, there's a problem with revolving credit (i.e. a 2-year mortgage), such as Australia or Britain, or anything that is floating along with some interest rate. But these are a) intentional problems that the people making the loans hope will make them rich, and b) problems with pricing, because people are expected to take decades longer to pay off a house than it would take for them to build it alone with their own hands in their spare time.
2022-10-22T00:09:51.647019Z
How to become a pirate archivist
Redacted's ratio economy is fucked. There's groups of people using high speed seedboxes that grab every new upload to build up ratio in a normal way, if you can call it that.
Everyone else is left with scraps, trickling data out to whoever comes later. Or maybe you get lucky and you're the lone seeder, you get a 1:1 copy. You just better hope that was on a 24-Bit FLAC release, given how big they can get.
There's many many threads on [https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers][1] about REDs economy problems. OPS has a bonus point system and suffers less, but has worse content than RED. My opinion only though
rutracker is all about putting content out there. A lot of stuff is mislabelled or lower quality, less retention, identified wrong, seeded slowly. But you can sure find a lot of oddities there.
> was any data lost
yes, absolutely. I've hundreds of albums not on RED, and I can't bother to reupload them. it's a total waste of time when you know they're unseeded in a week if not for me hanging on.
time better spent finding new music and sharing everything on soulseek instead.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers
2022-10-21T17:46:13.907684Z
Why we chose not to release Stable Diffusion 1.5 as quickly
I'm not a data hoarder, but from the moment Stable Diffusion was released I had a gut feeling that I should download everything available while it's there.
Somewhat similar gut feeling to when popcorn time was released, although it might not be exactly the same.
While I really wish I'm wrong, my gut tells me that broadly trained machine learning models available to the general public won't last and that intellectual property hawks are going to one day cancel and remove these models and code from all convenient access channels.
That somehow international legislation will converge on the strictest possible interpretation of intellectual property, and those models will become illegal by the mere fact they were trained on copyrighted material.
So reminder to everyone: Download! Get it and use it before they try to close the Stable doors after the horses Diffused. Do not be fooled by the illusion that just because it's open source it will be there forever! Popcorn time lost a similar battle.
Get it now when there are trustworthy sources. Once these kinds of things go underground, it gets much harder to get a trustworthy version.
2022-10-21T03:35:34.394747Z
Your account is permanently suspended
I think the solution is opt-in curation.
If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm.
Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets.
And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one.
Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in.
You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore.
Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about.
The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.
2022-10-20T13:19:29.936356Z
Your account is permanently suspended
It's only hard if your business model is "growth & engagement" and you need to maximize user and engagement numbers at all costs.
If that's not your business model, abuse prevention is trivial. You can operate the network like a members' club where people gain privileges (such as posting links, media, etc - anything that can be used to spam or harm other users/the platform) over time as they prove themselves and acquire trust (Stack Overflow calls this number "reputation") and you can then use this trust number as a weight in automated decisions, so that high-trust users (who are unlikely to suddenly burn their hard-earned account) will not be impacted by an automated ban.
Forums in the good old days were ran by volunteers were able to deal with spam/abuse just fine with a combination of bans and privilege levels (it will take time & effort to level up an account to where it's able to post links/etc and be useful for spamming), there's absolutely no reason current social media companies can't do the same, if it wasn't for the fact that their business model to a certain extent relies on moderation being both unfair to users and subpar at effectively suppressing bad content (hint: bad content is nice to have around as long as it's not too visible, as it generates tons of outrage and thus engagement - it's only a problem when powerful people get wind of it and then you delete it and issue a fake apology).
2022-10-20T13:09:00.909240Z
Your account is permanently suspended
It's only hard if your business model is "growth & engagement" and you need to maximize user and engagement numbers at all costs.
If that's not your business model, abuse prevention is trivial. You can operate the network like a members' club where people gain privileges (such as posting links, media, etc - anything that can be used to spam or harm other users/the platform) over time as they prove themselves and acquire trust (Stack Overflow calls this number "reputation") and you can then use this trust number as a weight in automated decisions, so that high-trust users (who are unlikely to suddenly burn their hard-earned account) will not be impacted by an automated ban.
Forums in the good old days were ran by volunteers were able to deal with spam/abuse just fine with a combination of bans and privilege levels (it will take time & effort to level up an account to where it's able to post links/etc and be useful for spamming), there's absolutely no reason current social media companies can't do the same, if it wasn't for the fact that their business model to a certain extent relies on moderation being both unfair to users and subpar at effectively suppressing bad content (hint: bad content is nice to have around as long as it's not too visible, as it generates tons of outrage and thus engagement - it's only a problem when powerful people get wind of it and then you delete it and issue a fake apology).
2022-10-20T13:09:00.909240Z
Remote work may have aided the reversal of America's long decline in birth rates
I can understand that it's probably easier to track the numbers of children born to 'women' instead of 'parents', but my observation has been that remote work has resulted in a sea change as to what it means to be a full time working parent.
My boss works long hours and now has 2 kids under the age of 4. Pre-Covid he would have been out of the house from about 7-7 and only able to have moments of interaction at the edges of the day. Now, he works about the same hours, but when he takes a break, when he gets lunch or coffee, when his wife is busy, he can spend time with the kids. Play a little peek-a-boo, read some Dr Seuss, watch them grow. Our company is pushing back-to-work policies and he's pulling every string to get exceptions for our group. I think if push comes to shove then he's gone.
My brood is older but boy I like being there to help with the math homework. Even 10 minute to go though the process of "Here's the strategy, here's an example, here's why it works this way" makes a huge difference. I let them work out the problem by themselves, and 10 minutes later they come back with "I got it!". My partner, the scientist, is in his element. If we're not careful the kids are going to be going back to class and correcting their teachers.
It's redefined what it means to be a working parent. I hope it sticks. I'm old enough that I'm seeing the regrets from parents who quit their jobs to stay home and are in a unenviable situation post-divorce.
2022-10-19T18:54:29.489079Z
Write Better Error Messages
Watched the new Quantum Leap yesterday (it's not great) and there was this really cringeworthy moment when something goes wrong with their awesome supercomputer and the screen flashes a giant "INTERNAL SYNTAX ERROR". Apparently, somebody didn't run their linter before sending people through time. Too bad.
2022-10-19T18:37:52.633236Z
Write Better Error Messages
Probably just me, but I am less concerned with how good my error messages are, and more concerned with trying very very hard to make the errors happen closer to the cause of the problem, rather than further away.
"Fail early, fail hard"
i.e. if I can make the error message happen near the beginning of a process, I can get away with making it a hard error.
Hard errors in the middle of a multi-hour operation tend to annoy people.
2022-10-19T18:35:32.940819Z
Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
Hot take this is the right line of thought. Restructure society so we work less, not so that we can work more.
2022-10-19T18:11:43.237642Z
Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
You're conflating not wanting to be in an office with being mediocre at their job, and that's simply not true. Some of the best developers I've met were remote long before COVID, and I'm certain it's because they were so good at what they did, they could just command such a work benefit.
Now that such a benefit is widespread, the majority of people get to design their own lifestyle for the first time ever, and they really enjoy it, instead of designing their lives around the needs of their employer (or your needs). It's not just commuting, it's moving closer to the office; its time away from family; it's cost saving conveniences because they're short on time; it's expensive lunches when they forget their brown bag; and feeling obligated to hang out with people they really just have a business relationship with (and maybe one they don't want). And yes, a lot of people's mission in life is their family, but that doesn't make them 'less than' you.
Remote workers aren't enough to outsource, outsourcing is not a new thing, it's been around for a very long time. There are a number of reasons why a company might not outsource such as tax incentives, cultural clashes, work style clashes, and logistical challenges.
I would encourage you to do some introspection as to why you think you need the office in the first place. Why do you need the social aspect of it? is something missing from your outside-of-work social life? Design your life around your own needs. Co-working spaces are still a thing, and I even go to them sometimes.
2022-10-19T18:10:35.739346Z
Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
What if I can't fit in a shoebox and can't afford anything larger? What if I have a dog and want them to have a yard that doesn't require me to leash them every time they want to go outside? I don't mind sharing a yard with neighbors, heck I would even share a kitchen space if I knew it would be maintained well and available when I need it. But none of that is even an option.
I don't buy the idea that only hyper-dense cities can be walkable. The fact that NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. are the closest thing we have to anti-car living speaks directly to OP's point about the US not prioritizing building comfortable communities.
2022-10-19T18:09:28.301162Z
Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
Most of my distaste for WFO comes from two places:
- the USA's failure to provide even a single city that's pleasant to live in and travel around without a car
- tech company insistence on open office layouts that are not conducive to deep work
The first one sounds like a commute problem... but it manifests in more ways than you think. When you have to travel around in a car, everything is expensive. Parking is a pain. There's a certain amount of effort required to hop in a car, leave the parking garage for work, find a parking space near a lunch spot, etc. It's a huge financial burden in maintenance and feeding with gasoline or electricity. The economics of cars also impact how much space cities can devote to housing, how dense we can make downtowns, etc -- which has knock-on effects on housing prices and rent.
Open offices make me never want to come into the office because I can't concentrate. They're always the wrong temperature. I can't personalize my desk or my space into something that best suits me. I can't leave stuff out on my desk, or even in unlocked drawers overnight because apparently the janitor might steal Kafka secrets and sell them to competitors.
I actually like the idea of walking or biking to an office (with an actual office for me) where I can collaborate with coworkers in person. But modern society and tech companies have externalized so many costs -- car ownership, commuting time, comfort, rent -- onto workers that I'd rather just work from home. The last city I lived in had massive car theft and crime problems at night; it's not like I'd "hang out" with my coworkers for dinner downtown even if we all showed up.
2022-10-19T18:06:41.428911Z
Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
This is why it’s controversial.
For someone working remotely, a meeting with someone remote or in an office is irrelevant.
For someone working in an office, it makes their “in the office” experience irrelevant and meaningless.
It is not controversial because of the people who like working remotely; it’s controversial because of the people who dont, because they force their choice on other people.
You know how many people have to work remotely before it has to be a zoom meeting to be inclusive?
1.
So, in order for you in office preference to be meaningful, it has to apply to everyone.
No one likes having their choice overridden by someone else’s preference.
Thus; controversial.
When you say “I want that old school in office experience…” what it means is “I want you not to have that flexibility”, “what I want is more important than what you want”.
That might not be the intent, but let’s be blunt and realistic:
The blue sky dream of that in office experience doesn’t exist any more.
It can only exist if everyone is in the office at the same time.
Personally, I think the cat is out of the bag now. What are the chances that everyone will go back into the office full time? Not big.
That means the blue sky dream of the in office experience is probably gone forever.
It’s probably time to start trying to figure out an alternative set of practices and social outlets for people who like in office work.
2022-10-19T14:31:29.606594Z
Ask HN: Why don't I see gold at the end of the remote working rainbow?
With all due respect, this is mostly my problem with the "work-from-office" (WFO for ease) crowd. Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy. Very few, if any, of the WFH crowd want mandatated WFH, it would make no sense. But then the WFO crowd often says no, I don't care what makes you happy, because you being in makes me happy. That doesn't seem right. Of course you could argue that if some people work from home, the WFO people arent happy, but thats not because they lacked choice, whereas with the alternative, thats exactly the reason.
I don't want that to come across as aggressive or anything, that just the way I see it, and I think thats why its sometimes met badly. If what makes you happy is a condition in which someone else is unhappy, that person is unlikely to react well.
2022-10-19T14:22:02.574185Z
Product vs. Engineering
> What I have noticed even in top engineering companies is an interesting dichotomy. Product determines the "innovation", engineering determines how to build it. I wonder if thats because, if you let engineers do both, you end up with a mess and accomplish nothing.
The top companies have product and engineering working closely together. This allows product people to go deep on optimizing their product skills and engineers to go deep on optimizing their development skills, both of which are most effective when performed in conjunction with each other as part of a strong team.
There are great product-minded engineers and great engineering-minded product managers out there, but it's much easier to find people who are simply good at their domain and know how to work closely with people in other domains to get things done.
Some companies try to cargo-cult this by drawing a dividing line: Product defines the "what" and engineers define the "how". Product works in isolation, hands things off to engineers, then engineers churn through tickets in isolation. This is not good at all.
2022-10-18T18:53:12.692850Z
Syntax Design
I find the section on "syntactic salt" interesting:
> The opposite of syntactic sugar, a feature designed to make it harder to write bad code. Specifically, syntactic salt is a hoop the programmer must jump through just to prove that he knows what’s going on, rather than to express a program action.
This is perhaps an uncharitable way to describe it, but the concept does ring a bell. Rust's unsafe {}, C++'s reinterpret_cast<>(), etc - all slightly verbose. More important than jumping through hoops, the verbosity helps when reading code to know that something out of the ordinary is going on.
2022-10-18T15:33:06.540834Z
How Fly.io and Tailscale Saved Notado
Maybe they covet ilrwbwrkhv's worldly possessions, due to their financial success stemming from their ability to reliably write files to local storage devices.
2022-10-18T04:34:23.676429Z
How to become a pirate archivist
While reading this I realized that the first impression for 'Pirate Archivists' that I was exposed to were the bums in Fahrenheit 451 who memorize books so they can't be burned.
I never realized that was my first true introduction to piracy. Really enjoyed the write up!
2022-10-18T02:21:38.297281Z
How to become a pirate archivist
I'm curious how Sci-hub's approach compares to the What.cd/Redacted approach.
IIUC Sci-hub has scooped up science docs through a good enough UX that it was able to leverage the goodwill of science folks to upload docs (plus whatever other methods it has used to scoop up docs), and it uses a public blitzkrieg-style distribution mechanism. I.e., I guess if one had a big enough harddrive and a fast enough internet connection, one could start downloading the lib right now and see if they win the race against the copyright holders.
On the other hand, the What.cd/Redacted approach seems to use Bittorrent ratios to create a private-tracker economy. New users get a few gigs free download on joining. But apparently because a) there's a 1:1 upload/download ratio, and b) a few first-mover fat cats are sitting on enormous ratios, this means there is a scramble by everyone else to upload new FLACs to build up their ratio so they can continue to be able to download FLACs. It seems that would mean the library-in-its-entirety cannot be easily replicated at will. Yet the tracker was apparently already nuked off the internet as What.cd and reappeared later as Redacted. Was any data lost between the two services?
Oh yeah, there's also apparently another approach in rutracker, which seems to be blitzkrieg to add content and publish, at the (apparent?) cost of quality of content.
It's really a shame that the nerdy, completist domain of digital archiving through torrents isn't covered by fair use. Perhaps we could exclude the most recent 10 years of music so that the hopeful young musician streamers can get paid a few hundred dollars for millions of streams and then receive the silver lining of fair use protection against a label refusing to release one of their albums.
2022-10-18T02:18:33.818197Z
Protein interface – how to change aproach to building software?
Interviewing is outside my skill set, so take this with a grain of salt, as it's just the sort of question I'd like to answer:
"We have an application that needs to run inside a vehicle, which means the power will be killed at regular, but unpredictable, intervals. How would you design this to ensure data integrity?"
It's weird enough that few people will have solved it before, but it can be solved at every layer between circuit and application, so you can actively brainstorm with the candidate to draw out some of their solutions into more detail.
And if they start with, "well, I'd build a react app," you can go straight into the trash can with their resume, because you can have that whole discussion without deciding on so much as a language, much less a framework, so you can see who jumps too hastily to wrong assumptions.
2022-10-16T23:34:43.134413Z
Digital Gardening
We run our company with a forest in mind. Client projects are gardens within the forest. We have a green house for seedlings (innovation projects), we have a fire in the center, where we regularly meet and hang out. We have an outlook point, where we look out to sense what’s on the horizon… obviously, we don’t want our gardens full of weeds or trash laying around.
2022-10-16T20:09:31.398022Z
Moving from React to Htmx
I think this take does yourself a disservice: htmx is an extension of HTML and, in general, of the hypermedia model, and it is this model that should be contrasted with JSON data APIs.
I think that you should learn JavaScript, and I certainly think you should learn HTML(!!!) and CSS. But I also think you should consider how much more can be achieved in a pure hypermedia model with the (relatively small) extensions to HTML that htmx gives you.
I have a collection of essays on this topic here:
https://htmx.org/essays/
Including an essay on how I feel scripting should be done in Hypermedia Driven Application:
https://htmx.org/essays/hypermedia-driven-applications/
There is more to all this than simply avoiding JavaScript.
2022-10-16T01:34:50.928973Z
A Real World React – Htmx Port
> as you reach a more “app like” experience with multiple layers of state control on the front end you need to reach for a front end JS framework
I think that if you fully embrace HTMX's model, you can go far further than anticipated without a JS framework. Do you really need to be managing state on the client? Is it really faster to communicate via JSON, or protobuf, whatever, rather than atomic data and returning just small bits of replacement HTML -- inserted seamlessly that it's a better UI than many client-side components? Why have HTML elements react to changes in data or state, rather than just insert new HTML elements already updated with the new state?
I think you're describing a, let's do React in HTMX mindset, rather than let's go all in on the HTMX model. And I might be giving HTMX too much credit, but it has totally changed how I go about building web applications.
2022-10-15T22:40:02.561137Z
What Is It Like to Have a Brain?: On Patrick House’s “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness”
Consciousness vs awareness vs sentience are terms that really need some society-scale effort to nail down what we mean by one or another. The conversation circles round and round because many folks talk past each other or interpret discussions in ways that the writer didn't intend. (I'm not saying the answer is available today if only we solve this dialectical issue.)
Philosophers of consciousness define "consciousness" as "phenomenological experience" in the barest, most unqualified sense, ie, the experience of "yellow" when photons of wavelength ~580nm strike a visual sensory organ of some kind of cognitive system.
Note that the above does not automatically imply that the experience is understood or even recognized. A lot of armchair philosophers and intellectual hobbyists conflate the term "consciousness" with the notion of having some kind of mental model through which to comprehend the experience (what I call "awareness"), or an understanding of the dichotomy between self vs environment (what I call "sentience", ie, "self-awareness").
Acting through anthropocentrism, it is easy to assume that the three are inextricable, but I don't think that perspective is the way forward toward understanding of consciousness per se.
2022-10-15T00:12:04.833365Z
Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head - Boston Review
This has become much more clear in the last couple years. Demand shot way up and is far outstripping supply. Then you get into the issue of how so many patients aren't a good match for the first therapist they try, so they have to jump through all the hoops and fill out all the forms to try another one, which also may not be a good match (all while potentially on the edge of some kind of breakdown)... I went through at least five before I found one I felt was effective for me, and my experience is not uncommon.
Personally, I think we need to lower the barrier of entry for people to become therapists, and streamline the whole patient intake process. It's not like the quality is all that great with existing barriers, there are PhDs out there actively harming patients-- one kept trying to push Jesus on me when part of what I was dealing with was childhood religious trauma and the difficulties of restructuring my world view as a nonbeliever, an absolute breach of ethics.
We need to make it easier for people to try out multiple therapists until they find one that's a good match for them, and part of that is increasing the supply of therapists. Unfortunately I'm not sure a chatbot is ever going to quite do it except for in the simplest & most clear cut cases, the mental tangles we can get into really require general intelligence to grapple with.
2022-10-14T13:16:47.117230Z
Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head - Boston Review
>Others engage in therapy with an artificially intelligent (and usually feminized) chatbot. Disturbingly, these digital apps are largely unregulated and have questionable standards of care.
What alternatives are there? Therapists don't scale. If half of society could improve their life with therapy, and a therapist can treat 30 people per month over 10 years, then 1% of society have to become therapists. More therapists than teachers would be needed.
I believe that this is a huge opportunity. Like medicine, people will be willing to pay anything to be happy. The biggest problem apart from developing a cure will be getting heard. The market will be flooded with enticing apps and a most likely bitter medicine will be a tough sell.
2022-10-14T13:15:58.104378Z
Using a Framework will harm the maintenance of your software
From my own experience, writing something without a framework often seems very elegant to yourself, but the moment you try to onboard other people to your framework-less code it becomes a nightmare. Turns out most folks don't want to get familiar with e.g. intrinsics of browser technologies, HTTP request processing or other complex things that you've reimplemented in your code, they just want to deliver working software using frameworks and conventions they know.
You can think of frameworks like conventions: If enough people know them, it makes life so much easier for everyone, even though the convention might not always be the best fit. To state an analogy, imagine each municipality would invent their own traffic signs from first principles - because it makes maintenance easier for them - and you were tasked to drive through such a city with large speed, learning the conventions as you go. An absolute nightmare. I think that's how most programmers feel about code that brings its own framework-less abstractions and technologies.
So while I would've been able to write my own frameworks I've become humble and reasonable enough to just default to something that's popular and well-known, because it will make life easier for my colleagues or employees.
2022-10-13T09:00:47.527440Z
Using a Framework will harm the maintenance of your software
Rails will harm the maintenance of your software*
*Is really the accurate summation of the article. And yes, this is well known. Every article about a company upgrading Rails is "it took us several years and only three people died." And we know better than to use MVC nowadays.
No offense to Rubyists, but in the Ruby ecosystem, I have seen a disturbing lack of absorbing information from other programming ecosystems. This article smells like that to me. If you've only used Ruby and Rails, you might not realize some of the dangers and inherent limitations of the design unless you've worked in other ecosystems.
2022-10-13T09:00:09.664475Z
Ask HN: Are we all burned out?
Too be honestly, I feel like society at large causes burnout.
I read a very complete account of my grandfathers early life (before he joined the military during WW2) and the kinda shit he did living of a farm is stuff of fairytales.
When someone in the 20 mile radius needed a barn built, LITERALLY EVERYONE came to help. When you were off work for the night, you would sit with your whole family and read the newspaper or play cards, or travel to your grandmas house 3 blocks away.
Now the whole world is split up. My nearest family is over 600 miles away. My friends would rather play video games on discord than go and play cards in person. Work is a 9-5 and then you forget about it.
It seems like there is no community anymore outside of online spaces, and that just isn’t the same. In my opinion, burnout is synonymous with lack of real world, in person community.
2022-10-12T21:02:25.060059Z
The 4th Year of SerenityOS
You are already powerful enough! Some of our most active developers today didn't even know C++ when they started. If you're interested, look for something small that annoys you, and then see if you can't figure out enough of the code to fix it. :^)
2022-10-11T01:24:35.260015Z
The 4th Year of SerenityOS
I follow Andreas on twitter and he is a big inspiration for me when I go look at more challenging problems now.
I have an addictive personality, so far cigarettes are the only thing that got me and only for 4 years, but I largely stay away anything else now because I see how it effected members of my family and how easily someone like myself could go the same way.
Because of that I very much appreciate channeling yourself into something as ambitious as an operating system instead. It's actually the same way I've built any of my best work and how I've gotten even this far in my career. The line I say is: programming keeps me sane.
2022-10-11T01:23:07.395338Z
The 4th Year of SerenityOS
I think it’s that most people are doomers and/or are defeated by doomerism. Most people think it’s impossible to build an OS or a web browser (and are told this when they ask for help building one.)
In reality engineering is straightforward, you just need someone to show you how to properly write data structures and algorithms and to break problems down.
Andreas showed these kids this, reinvigorating the web based hacker culture I grew up in. Anything is possible and even if a problem ends up being more than you can handle at least you learned a ton along the way.
Now days searching for how to code leads you to a ton of tutorials about gluing modules together. I feel sorry for young people with that thirst who won’t be satisfied thanks to the commoditization of learning to code.
2022-10-11T01:21:13.125240Z
Take a Break You Idiot
It's funny isn't it. Recently in a job with "unlimited" vacation, because of a dubious message from one of my two bosses who was a bit of a dick, I was too scared to take a real vacation. Until Christmas. Then I decided I was going to take some. It had been a rough year, isolating from Covid, not enough money, and living in shitty circumstances. It was the first PTO I'd had in over a decade, as working as a freelancer/consultant often means no PTO, so I decided to savor it, come what may.
I took just under 3 weeks, like almost everyone else: there was a shared vacation calendar where I could see everyone else's Christmas break.
My reward when I got back? Low performance metrics "in December" were cited when laying me off. It wasn't just about December, but December was the month they decided to measure and "give me a chance". They didn't take into account the break, and the only way their "assessment" could be satisfied would have been to work through Christmas.
I then worked my ass off to ship a technically difficult, world-record-beating feature during my notice month, which they told me if I delivered it would surely be impressive, and turn it around. I did ship it, but not until the very end of the notice period, which was too late. If they had cared, they would have seen it was on track.
If they had kept me on, let me relax, and worked with me rather than their choice of how to assess work, they would now have a world-beating product. It's their choice of course, and I now don't think they were serious about trying to build a real product. I think it's a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors scheme to keep grant money flowing in. After all, in about 4 years nobody has ever run the product on the real data it is designed for, except me, and I had to pay for servers from my own pocket to run those tests. Even now, I believe I'm the only person ever to run it, or even be able to run it.
It's been interesting to watch how the product has stayed in the doldrums since I left, and how the folks working on it are now starting to implement things for which I have had working, high-performance functionality for months in my private fork since leaving. (It's open source.) It will be particularly interesting to see if their version is ever able to run on the real world data it was created for, or if their perpetual optimism will be forever misplaced.
Ironically, I'd say the company had the nicest, most helpful HR, legal and accounting teams I've ever seen at any company. There was a lot to like, and I'm sad to have had to leave. But I don't miss feeling constantly afraid there.
And, as a person who really enjoys creating things, I don't miss watching another team member shipping garbage commits that usually didn't work, and doing fine, while I was the only person on the project providing real functionality but not scoring well on the right metrics, because I spent too much time solving the product's blocker problems. To score well I'd have to ship garbage too. Oh well.
2022-10-10T15:25:48.071718Z
Take a Break You Idiot
There was a time a dozen years ago when I was working alone on my (over-elaborate, uncontrollably sprawling) graphics software product. One time I wrote a multi-thousand-line refactoring of existing code into a new class and felt very happy about getting it done. The next day I discovered that I had already done the exact same work the previous week, just as a slightly differently named class.
That wasn’t an isolated memory loss experience in those days. I ordered lunch, sat down, then five minutes later just stood up and left, assuming I’d already eaten. An hour later I realized what happened.
Long-term productivity is impossible without proper rest, including regular vacations where you’re truly out of work mode preferably for a week at the minimum.
2022-10-10T15:23:50.556318Z
Take a Break You Idiot
There was a time a dozen years ago when I was working alone on my (over-elaborate, uncontrollably sprawling) graphics software product. One time I wrote a multi-thousand-line refactoring of existing code into a new class and felt very happy about getting it done. The next day I discovered that I had already done the exact same work the previous week, just as a slightly differently named class.
That wasn’t an isolated memory loss experience in those days. I ordered lunch, sat down, then five minutes later just stood up and left, assuming I’d already eaten. An hour later I realized what happened.
Long-term productivity is impossible without proper rest, including regular vacations where you’re truly out of work mode preferably for a week at the minimum.
2022-10-10T15:23:50.556318Z
Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
What's preventing it is their existing codebases, mostly.
IIRC, one of the first things Neovim did was throw out literally tens of thousands of lines of legacy code from Vim.
Meanwhile, Helix can just add the `lsp-types` crate as a dependency and they're already a quarter of the way to making LSP work.
The difference between adding something to a 30-year-old C project and a new Rust project is so massive that it can actually be the difference between "fairly straightforward" and "essentially impossible".
2022-10-10T13:24:53.308751Z
Learn Exponentially
There are a few e-ink note taking devices. They pride themselves on feeling like paper, but they're far more expensive than a notebook and offer trade-offs rather than clear advantages.
For example, is using a text search on an e-ink device better than knowing "I wrote this down in the first 1/3rd of the notebook on the page with a coffee stain". Maybe? Maybe not. It's a trade-off. A physical notebook and an e-notebook both offer different ways of indexing, searching, and remembering where things are. One is not clearly superior to the other in this respect.
These e-ink devices have left a clear advantage they could claim unrealized.
I want an e-ink notepad where I can turn my notes into spaced repetition. I want to take hand written notes, proven to improve memory, and then I want to blot out portions of the page and have those blotted out portions be presented to me by a spaced repetition algorithm to help me remember my own hand written notes.
I'd pay a lot for such a dedicated device. Getting hand written notes and images into Anki or other spaced repetition programs sucks. I'd love to just be able to write or draw, with my own hand, and easily integrate with a spaced repetition algorithm. This is valuable enough that I'd happily use a dedicated device just for this purpose.
2022-10-10T01:33:06.176187Z
Learn Exponentially
Spaced repetition turns reading into a physical activity with feedback. If you had an activity that required the knowledge you were hoping to acquire, you would learn at the same rate or faster by practice. Most lessons are encoded really poorly. I think spaced repetition is great, but practice at something is better.
A hacker is just someone who has practiced learning independently and has become exceptionally good at it. The reason people say you can't teach the hacker mindset is because without the underlying drive, there's nothing you can tell anyone. It's like when teachers who lament students don't care what they say so long as they get the right grade, it's because those students are optimizing for approval in a system because that's sufficent for their limited purposes. The more you profess to them, the more you reinforce that learning is passive submission to authority. If you want to make hackers, start with necessity, and technique will emerge as the artifact of navigating constraints. If you want to make people smart, challenge them instead of just telling them things. Hackers aren't defined by knowing more, they're defined by having physically done more. Spaced repetition as it's usually presented optimizes for outcomes in an approval environment that produces people who have been rewarded for cheating themselves out of knowledge and expereince.
I would say, want to learn physics? Build mechanisms or make radios. Number theory? Break cryptosystems. Astronomy and geometry? Sail at night. Lead? Ride horses. Fluid dynamics? Tune engines. Statistics? Write a spam filter. Speak a language? Tell their jokes, etc. Imo, most education is set around meaningless but scalable exercises of professed skills instead of meaningful exercises that are more powerful, but don't scale. We've optimized for scale at the expense of quality. It's the solution to an inferior problem.
So sure, learn spaced repetition, but really, find something and practice it for more joy and better results instead.
2022-10-09T23:52:43.314667Z
School vs. Wikipedia
Any new media has this problem. I know we think of digital media as being old and well understood at this point, but that's far from the truth.
Media moves too quickly for most people to understand it. By the time you understand it, it changes again. That was true for newspapers, radio, television, digital media, and now ubiquitous computing.
As people who build these media platforms (hackers) we need to do a better job designing the technology for humans and educating people to approach it with a more sophisticated mindset.
Ex; social media has been a disaster.
Remember, it was not that long ago that everyone got their information from the same places. This is going to be a long road.
2022-10-07T16:40:57.238345Z
Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana
It's obvious. They want to make sure those people are ineligible (or a least seriously impeded) for a visa, green card, or citizenship. Very few offenses can absolutely torpedo immigration to the US as much as drug possession/offenses.
The US is a relatively 'free' country in many areas but they have a shockingly dystopian immigration and DHS, with border security that many travelers characterize as one of the most brutal in the world. Even as a US citizen with clean record I am subject to invasive (cavity) searches, cuffing/throwing in a cell, questioning, threats that I'll not be allowed in the country etc when I deal with CBP/DHS. If you have a marijuana offense as an immigrant you are utterly fucked, and those in power would like to keep it that way.
2022-10-07T04:05:55.181277Z
André Staltz - Software below the poverty line
Marx wrote a famous piece called "Fragment on Machines". It actually predates Capital volume 1. He talks about the mix of knowledge and labour to produce machines that are capable of transforming nature (doing labour).
From here, Marx explores a world where labour can be produced entirely (or almost entirely) by machines, for him machines are capable of undoing capitalism. The so called post-scarcity society. I think the key part here is that software is actually capable of replacing large portions of labour; think about how much book keeping work is saved through Excel. But what happens when capital owners own all the machines, what happens to people? This is a fundamental problem that Marx explores through out his whole work.
I think OSS is actually what machines should look like for Marx, available for everyone at the cost of production and upkeep of the machines which in our case is the cost of copying and storage of the bits that compose the software. But Marx through out his work also explores deeply the relationship between labour and capital, and obviously producing machines requires labour!
I know you're probably joking, but I we can learn a lot about OSS from Marx. I mean, a big part of Stallman's philosophy behind the free software movement is inspired by marxist ideas.
2022-10-05T15:37:42.779827Z
André Staltz - Software below the poverty line
This is why I think that open source / free software is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled. It exploits the generosity and naivity of devs who have committed to a particular ideology that, while well motivated at the start, has nevertheless turned out to be extremely easily exploited by corporations who now essentially get an enormous amount of labour for free. What's more there is intense social pressure from large segments of the dev community to both contribute to open source and to publicly endorse and promote "open source values". Even the author refuses to acknowledge that the problem with open source is open source licensing. Dropping the non discrimination clause in open source licenses and demanding payment for labour from large companies, would be enough to solve all these issues. But that is anathema to the ideologues who dominate the conversation.
2022-10-05T15:36:51.430387Z
André Staltz - Software below the poverty line
This is why I think that open source / free software is the greatest trick that late stage capitalism ever pulled. It exploits the generosity and naivity of devs who have committed to a particular ideology that, while well motivated at the start, has nevertheless turned out to be extremely easily exploited by corporations who now essentially get an enormous amount of labour for free. What's more there is intense social pressure from large segments of the dev community to both contribute to open source and to publicly endorse and promote "open source values". Even the author refuses to acknowledge that the problem with open source is open source licensing. Dropping the non discrimination clause in open source licenses and demanding payment for labour from large companies, would be enough to solve all these issues. But that is anathema to the ideologues who dominate the conversation.
2022-10-05T15:36:51.430387Z
André Staltz - Software below the poverty line
Yeah sure, violent cultural imperialism, with forced relocations, forced re-education, children taken away, men killed is totally the same as me, a white middle european dude, deciding the software they wrote for themselves might serve others and putting it on github.
I mean while I agree that the conditions for people writing open source software could be better (e.g. more government money for it), comparing this self chosen past time to slavery, colonialization and exploitation is ... quite bad?
Colonialization and slavery have produced magnitudes more of human suffering.
2022-10-05T15:34:37.108580Z
André Staltz - Software below the poverty line
> The struggle of open source sustainability is the millennium-old struggle of humanity to free itself from slavery, colonization, and exploitation.
This kind of over-dramatisation is totally unwarranted. Unlike slavery, participating in open source is completely voluntary. Unlike colonization, no one is taking your ancestral lands from you. Unlike most kinds of exploitation, the “exploited” can end it any time they want to. No one forces them to continue working on their open source project.
I fully agree that more people should donate to support open source, but this is not a violent or coercive situation.
Money is not the only motivator in the world. Most open source maintainers are (evidently) not doing it for money, but are motivated by altruism, passion, recognition, etc.
2022-10-05T15:34:26.807894Z
André Staltz - Software below the poverty line
There are two alternatives possible.
One is that we collectively decide to stop shaming software developers for having the audacity to want some level of ownership over the product of their work. We don't shame authors for wanting copyright on their books; we don't shame musicians, artists, designers, or aerospace engineers for asking for some copyright protection for their creative babies. Yet when a software developer does it: fuck that guy! He's trying to take control of what's running on your computer (or the internet server that you're sending requests to ...). Nobody throws a hissy fit when J.K. Rowling has (gasp!) copyright over the Harry Potter books that are sitting on your Kindle. It's your Kindle! Shouldn't you have the right to copy off the words in the books and re-sell it to other people for much less money, undercutting Rowling? How dare she try to get some legal protection that says you can't do that! It's fucking ridiculous when we talk about authors that way, but somehow it's OK to talk about software developers that way.
Do you think "open source authors" would make a living from their books? It's already difficult enough for new authors to get any notice; how much worse would it be if prominent authors (who were already rich) came out and founded the "Free Books Foundation" that comes out and says every young author who's trying to sell her books for money is being a greedy asshole and we should fight against them and every author needs to spend a significant portion of their free time contributing to "open books" or they're assholes?
Of-fucking-course it's not sustainable. That's because it's always been OK to want copyright on your creative work. I'll be the first to say patents are a huge problem right now and we might be better off without any patent law, but copyright is not the same. Yes, the terms are way too long, and the family of Marvin Gaye proves that "copyright trolls" are possible, but the fundamental concept of copyright is actually critical if we want creative people to ever get a paycheck.
The other alternative is Universal Basic Income, so that making "below the minimum wage" doesn't mean "fuck you, you get to die sick and homeless in a tent on the side of the highway". Then people could actually just contribute to OSS because they want to.
2022-10-05T05:46:24.710181Z
SQLite: QEMU All over Again?
SQLite only works as a concept because it is not networked. Nobody truly understands the vast and unsolveable problem that is random shit going wrong within the communication of an application over vast distances. SQLite works great because it rejects the dogma that having one piece of software deal with all of that shit is in any way a good idea.
Back your dinky microservice with SQLite, run multiple copies, have them talk to each other and fumble about trying to get consensus over the data they contain in a very loose way. That will be much, much less difficult than managing a distributed decentralized database (I speak from experience). It's good enough for 90% of cases.
Remember P2P applications? That was basically the same thing. A single process running on thousands of computers with their own independent storage, shuffling around information about other nodes and advertising searches until two nodes "found each other" and shared their data (aw, love at first byte!). It's not great, but it works, and is a lot less trouble than a real distributed database.
2022-10-04T19:24:28.209119Z
SQLite: QEMU All over Again?
I feel like a lot of fantastic software is made by a small number of people whose explicit culture is a mix of abnormally strong opinionatedness plus the dedication to execute on that by developing the tools and flow that feel just right.
Much like a lot of other "eccentric" artists in other realms, that eccentricity is, at least in part, a bravery of knowing what one wants and making that a reality, usually with compromises that others might not be comfortable making (efficiency, time, social interaction from a larger group, etc).
2022-10-04T19:10:56.963330Z
The 'attention economy' corrupts science
And yet, in my career, I've noticed the rewards are increasing for being the person who is willing to focus on one thing for a long time (for several weeks, or months). For instance, I've never been the kind of software developer who could write obviously clever code. But I have written code that was admired and praised, and sometimes seen as the salvation of the company I was working for -- but not because I'm especially skilled as a software developer, but only because I was willing to think about specific problems, deeply, for longer than anyone else at the company. In 2012/2013, to the extent that I helped re-invent the tech stack at Timeout.com, it was because I was willing to spend weeks thinking about exactly why we'd reached the limits of what we could do with various cache strategies, and then what would come next. I then introduced the idea of "an architecture of small apps" which was the phrase I used because the phrase "microservices" didn't really become widespread until Martin Fowler wrote his essay about it at the very end of of 2013. Likewise, I now work as the principal software architect at Futurestay.com, and my main contribution has been my willingness to spend weeks thinking about the flaws in the old database schema, and what we needed to do to streamline our data model and overcome the tech debt that built up over the 7 years before I was hired. We live in a world where there are large economic rewards for the kinds of people who are willing to think about one thing, deeply, for weeks and weeks or even months and months, until finally understanding a problem better than anyone else.
I have to hope some young people eventually escape the attention-sucking technologies that try to sabotage their concentration, and eventually discover the satisfactions of thinking about complex problems, continuously, for months and months and months.
2022-10-04T05:29:06.320875Z
Ask HN: In what ways is programming more difficult today than it was years ago?
> Spending months to get the basics up and running in their React frontends just to be able to think independently of hand-holding tutorials for the most basic operations.
Frontend devs who were present before the advent of the major web frameworks, and worked with the simplicity of js script + DOM (or perhaps jquery as a somewhat transparent wrapper) benefited from seeing the evolution of these frameworks, understanding the motivations behind the problem they solve, and knowing what DOM operations must be going on behind the curtain of these libraries. Approaching it today not from the 'ground up' but from high level down is imo responsible for a lot of jr web devs have surprising lack of knowledge on basic website features. Some, probably a minority, of student web devs may get conditioned to reach for libraries for every problem they encounter, until the kludge of libraries starts to cause bugs in and of itself or they reach a problem that no library is solving for them. I feel like this is particularly bad outcome for web devs because web I feel is uniquely accessible for aspiring developers. You can achieve a ton just piggybacking off the browser and DOM and it's API, the developer tools in the browser etc. But not if you are convinced or otherwise forced to only approach it from the other side -- running before you crawl, or trying to setup a webpack config before you even understand script loading, etc.
2022-10-03T00:36:33.902701Z
Ask HN: In what ways is programming more difficult today than it was years ago?
Programming today is easier in many ways: Information is readily available for free (I recall saving up a lot of money for a kid to buy specific programming books at the book store after exhausting my library’s offerings). Compilers and tooling are free. Salaries are much higher and developers are a respected career that isn’t just “IT”. Online programming communities are more abundant and welcoming than impenetrable IRC cliques of years past. We have a lot that makes programming today more comfortable and accessible than it was in the past.
However, everything feels vastly more complicated. My friends and I would put together little toy websites with PHP or Rails in a span of weeks and everyone thought they were awesome. Now I see young people spending months to get the basics up and running in their React front ends just to be able to think independently of hand-holding tutorials for the most basic operations.
Even business software felt simpler. The scope was smaller and you didn’t have to set up complicated cloud services architectures to accomplish everything.
I won’t say the old ways were better, because the modern tools do have their place. However, it’s easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses on the vastly simpler business requirements and lower expectations that allowed us to get away with really simple things.
I enjoy working with teams on complex projects using modern tools and frameworks, but I admit I do have a lot of nostalgia for the days past when a single programmer could understand and handle entire systems by themselves because the scope and requirements were just so much simpler.
2022-10-03T00:36:05.909435Z
How Writing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year
I'll highlight Japanese because that is what I know.
A lot of imagery can be conveyed with choice of characters. Whether alternate readings in a novel, or brilliant neon signs on the street, you get a lot more information at a glance due to the overloaded meaning of the word being represented. Even more so in the case of compound words.
In spoken language you say のむ (nomu) - to drink, and contextually it doesn't matter how it's used. However, in writing 飲む means to drink a liquid, while 呑む means to drink alcohol. Imagine an author using the former for the latter as a particular word choice, probably to convey something like an alcoholic drinking alcohol as if it were water!
The language also has the problem of having a ridiculous amount of homophones. Deciding to use the more phonetic-like hiragana system inversely makes adult level reading even more difficult, not simpler. Texts would become longer (one character kanji vs multiple hiragana), and the implied meaning would be lost.
2022-10-02T06:14:07.888607Z
DALL·E Now Available Without Waitlist
It's really amazing how DALL-E missed the boat. When it was launched, it was a truly amazing service that had no equal. In the months since then, both Midjourney and Stable Diffusion emerged and got to the point where they produce images of equal or better quality than DALL-E. And you didn't have to wait in a long waitlist in order to gain access! They effectively gave these tools free exposure by not allowing people to use DALL-E.
Furthermore, the pricing model is much worse for DALL-E than any of its competitors. DALL-E makes you think about how much money you're losing continuously - a truly awful choice for a creative tool! Imagine if you had to pay photoshop a cent every time you made a brushstroke. Midjourney has a much better scheme (and unlimited at only 30/month!), and, of course, Stable Diffusion is free.
This is a step in the right direction, but I feel that it is too little, too late. Just compare the rate of development. Midjourney has cranked out a number of different models, including an extremely exciting new model ("--testp"), new upscaling features, improved facial features, and a bunch more. They're also super responsive to their communtiy. In the meantime, OpenAI did... what? Outpainting? (And for months, DALL-E had an issue where clicking on any image on the homepage would instantly consume a token. How could it take so long to fix such a serious error?) You have this incredible tool everyone is so excited to use that they're producing hundred-page documents on how to get better results out of it, and somehow none of that actually makes it into the product?
2022-09-28T21:39:09.342137Z
India's lattice buildings cool without air con
Modern Indian housing in major Indian cities has done a complete 180 from these tried-and-tested architectural practices. The materials used seem to be deliberately chosen to maximize human misery. There's glass everywhere which, besides being impossible to keep clean in India's dusty summers, also retains heat and makes most housing unbearable without AC.
Then there are the designs themselves. Faux wood is everywhere, as are laser-carved patterns that collect dust. Spaces are designed to maximize square footage, ventillation and sunlight be damned.
The "builder floors" that dot cities like Delhi are an exercise in public ugliness and bad design.
Edit: An example of the kind of housing I'm talking about. Superficially "modern", but absolutely the wrong design for Indian weather:
[https://newprojects.99acres.com/projects/findahouse/findahou...][1]
[1] https://newprojects.99acres.com/projects/findahouse/findahouse_grandeur_builder_floors/images/l44oozuc_large.jpg
2022-09-27T16:44:44.971982Z
Get in Zoomer, We're Saving React
That's a pretty inexperienced take, out of context. People should absolutely learn from elders, even if they feel the elders are wrong. Which is pretty much, every young person who has ever existed. There are often nuggets of wisdom buried inside resistance to change.
I often wonder how much further along we'd be as a society if we didn't spend the first couple decades thinking we know everything. Myself included.
2022-09-24T11:58:36.557289Z
Cinder is Meta's internal performance-oriented production version of CPython
To me it looks like lock-in. They chose a language good for prototyping and quick iteration, and then their codebase gets stuck with a permanent performance problem.
You see the same problem in Python with regards to correctness - it's hard to refactor Python or change a large codebase and have it keep working correctly, so huge Python projects tends to ossify.
It may be a rational solution only in the short-term, but still an objectively bad solution overall.
2022-09-22T10:51:18.235455Z
Cinder is Meta's internal performance-oriented production version of CPython
It's bizarre. I don't think it's an exaggeration that it's the 10th project I've heard about to speed up Python.
Seriously, use a faster language. If you need a performant fork of Python, you're using the wrong tool for the job.
2022-09-22T10:48:57.514888Z
Show HN: I made 7k images with DALL-E 2 to create a reference/inspiration table
End of the day, unless it's opened up Dall-E 2 will be seen as an evolutionary dead end of this tech and a misstep.
It's gone from potentially one of the most innovative companies on the horizon to a dead product now I can spin up equivalent tech on my own machine, hook into my workflow and tools in an afternoon all because Stable Diffusion released their model into the wild.
2022-09-13T18:36:57.663988Z
FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friend's posts
Yes it’s a negative feedback loop created by the very bad product decisions they made to optimize for local maxima of getting more ads revenue. You inject more and more ads followed by more and more suggested content, thereby reducing the in network content. The in network content doesn’t get as much of traction, therefore people stop posting. This in turn forces the feed to have more and more suggestions and a few stale in network posts from days ago. This drives engagement down from people who want to see in network content and they leave. So what is left is people who do engage with suggested content, pushing the product to make decisions to push even more suggested content. All of this continues till eventually fatigue sets in and a sudden rapid drop in engagement kicks in because your global maxima of a quality product was lost long time ago and your product dies.
2022-09-13T18:08:17.903880Z
Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children
Is this really surprising?
Any time I had used cannabis I felt like my IQ dropped 20-30 points and I would lose hours of my day where it was difficult for me to learn. It made doing household chores not terrible, but brought out a lot of panic inducing moments and erratic behavior. I was thinking about a 100k other things while doing one thing. Later on I realized I wasn't even doing that one thing so well. Anything that drops cognitive abilities for a moment is going to be awful long term and especially for babies.
I know a lot of people think cannabis isn't bad, but it is intellectually dishonest to disregard the broader effects of effects on cognition. I say that as someone who used to smoke a ton of cannabis.
Not having to rely on drugs to find calmness has made a profound change in my life, and I can't believe that I used to turn to weed, alcohol, etc. when all I needed to be permanently (key word) happy was already present within me. Prior, when the effects went away I spent just as much time craving and suffering heavily.
That being said I don't think it should be criminalized or anything like that. It is up to adults to do whatever, but it is useful to be honest as well. Not everyone uses it for epilepsy, none of the dispensaries here sell CBD products. Its all high THC products meant to "fuck you up"
2022-09-13T15:04:41.869125Z
1Password delisting forum posts critical of their new Electron based 1Password 8
One of the very best things I ever did while working on an Android app was to buy a dirt cheap phone.
Every performance problem was obvious. Every fix was a clear improvement. And when things were acceptable there, the app absolutely screamed on modern phones. We had startup times faster than Android's launch animation with a little bit of care. Our users loved it.
2022-08-26T02:45:40.757557Z
The coming tsunami of fakery
The end result of all this fakery is a growing doubt and distrust of the world and the information presented to us. Bots on twitter, corporate reddit moderators pruning discourse, astroturfed discussions, deepfakes, AI generated news articles, AI art, it all waters down the assumption that what we see before us is real. Leading us to doubt everything we read, see and hear. Much of this bot driven noise online is only possible in large, public online communities.
I think we will see a shift towards much smaller walled gardens of community online. It's already happening with the mass exodus to discord and smaller chatrooms. I think we can all safely assume that our 30 discord friends are real people... for now.
The country club exists for the wealthy to enjoy the pleasantries of community and pastime without interruption by the masses. I think the internet will move to mirror the real world as we segregate apart into the places we most enjoy... or have the connections and money to afford. Authentic and vibrant human communities with novel content curation will be a luxury, while the "public pool" for the masses will be an internet of data pollution and grime.
2022-08-25T20:46:34.150202Z
Why Punish?
This is mostly a history of punishment in western society. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s interesting. It answers the question in the title mostly by asking what, from today’s perspective, are the rational uses of punishment?
But it doesn’t get much at why we do this in the first place. Why do adults punish children? Why do so many people belong to religions with strict and explicit punishment dogmas (e.g., going to hell for offending a higher power). It doesn’t provide a rhetorical or moral framework for differentiating punishment from abuse or torture. I think these are more interesting questions, although perhaps not fair to expect from a historian.
Clearly punishment is satisfying to us. Revenge stories are as old as literature, and widely celebrated. I think that in a large society it’s an obsolete and harmful impulse. The article references Plato’s views: “Plato discussed punishment in terms of learning virtue and deterring future acts rather than just in terms of taking vengeance for the past, which he dismissed as a primitive, animalistic motive.”
It’s interesting to me how long it takes for views like this to take hold and create a more just society, and how easy it is for cultures to backslide. Revenge is a powerful impulse.
2022-07-30T18:08:29.508927Z
Princess Mononoke: The masterpiece that flummoxed the US
The thing that gets me about Spirited Away (and most Ghibli films) is the sense of being transported.
The characters at the end are no longer in a place where they can go back to “the way things were” but somehow it’s okay. So there is this pain but in the end it’s ultimately cathartic and you feel joy and hope.
2022-07-26T00:30:03.006123Z
The Importance of Elders
We're living in an era where expert level information is easily accessible on virtually every subject on mobiles devices. The reliance for an elder's traditional wisdom is collapsing, accelerated by the obsoleteness of their information relative to a rapidly-changing society. It turns out that Grandma's apple pie wasn't that great, or Grandpa's advice on job hunting isn't a very accurate, or helpful, in today's job market. Plus, add in the complication of newer generations moving away from their family's home area with greater frequency, decreasing contact time between parents and children, and grandparents and grandchildren.
I think the weird transitional part still lies ahead, when people born after the internet age become elders. Currently, our elders lived in a time where their elders were valued, so they're met with a hostility that didn't exist for their elders in situations where they probably expect respect or appreciation. It must feel frustrating.
Negative aspects aside, I believe there will still be value in elder wisdom. Not necessarily through traditional knowledge transference on subjects evolving day after day, but on how to navigate the stresses of a modern life, developing/recognizing healthy interpersonal relationships, and adapting to change. Transferable life skill knowledge that isn't necessarily taught in school or from busy parents. This can be passed on to grandchildren or mentoring children growing up in challenging situations via volunteerism. But, like the author pointed out, reliably tapping into this seems challenging.
2022-07-23T20:12:30.511543Z
My students cheated... a lot
Cheating is the natural result of an exclusive funnel for entry into the middle class.
This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well.
Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-to-earth: Either you pass this hurdle by hook or by crook, or you spend the rest of your life flipping burgers. It's not a hard choice.
Once you have the piece of paper (regardless of how you got it), you're in the club. So the goal is to obtain that piece of paper by any means necessary.
2022-05-29T04:18:25.840169Z
The great junk transfer is coming
Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child.
Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to use it. When the father died, the stuff in the shed was mostly junk to be sorted into scrap metal or put in the skip. A very few useful tools, a bunch of valueless obsolete tools, and a little antique/collectable stuff. The mother’s stuff was useful or precious to her, mementoes and knick-knacks. Plus some hoarder mentality that made sense given her background. Mostly valueless stuff to anyone else. What value is a drawer of your smalls?
I want my parents to pass their problem down to me and my siblings. I think forcing parents to tidy up or downsize can be cruel. Why be selfish and needlessly make my parents sad?
2022-05-25T04:48:16.786312Z
My journey through the American immigration system as a computer engineer
Maybe the US is just good at maintaining a facade that they aren't authoritarian. The US border agents are acting in an objectively authoritarian manner while the Chinese border agents are not and yet somehow you conclude that the Chinese are the real authoritarians. It seems like you are a victim of propaganda.
2022-05-12T17:21:50.087510Z
Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work
Warning: Hot Take.
I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers.
For some work a physical presence is required not just preferable, but for most of a software engineer's day to day there really is no unquestionable upside.
I'll quit before I go back full time. I've never been happier or more fulfilled with my work/life balance, and I've never been more productive with my time. I'll even take a different remote position at a 20% pay cut and a reduction in equity, at least, to retain WFH. Most I'm willing to give is a day a week in office, and maybe temporarily longer in rare circumstances where the benefit in performance is clear.
2022-05-09T16:24:08.337883Z
Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively.
If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert.
If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's new.
So what I've been doing is not entirely quitting Internet stuff, but instead I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and filtering all the feeds. Sort of a Marie Kondo thing. I go through every subreddit I'm in, every RSS feed, every account I follow on Twitter, and i strongly consider "is this really providing lots of joy and/or value?" If not, it gets the chop.
I've cut out at least 2/3s of the stuff I was following since the peak, and it's only going down. Now when I doomscroll it's only for a few minutes. I hit the end of new content very very quickly. When that happens I start to look elsewhere. I've been reading a lot more actual books, done more chores, and been more productive overall.
As for the things I unfollowed? They clearly had no value because not only do I not miss them, I can barely even remember what they were.
2022-05-06T15:56:34.809986Z
I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself
I have a son who is 11. All of his friends have smart phones. He will have friends over to the house and the friends will sit there and stare at their phones. My son who doesn't have a phone will be like, hey can you get off tiktok so we can play or go outside? It is rather sad to see this, they are hanging out sharing videos they find on their feeds through their phones. One time my son said, hey get off your phone and lets go scooter around the neighborhood, the kid replied, hey I think I am going to go home. He wanted to surf his phone more than actually hang out with his friend.
I think I made a very good decision not to give my son a phone until he is driving. Instead of surfing tiktok all day, he learns music, does origami, plays outside, helps me with the garden and many other things that bring him a lot of joy. I obviously help him with whatever interest he has, and I think him seeing the way his friends handle social media has made him not really want a phone anymore. He doesn't even mention it to me like he did when all his friends first started getting one. He sees how addicted they are and how he doesn't even have those friends over anymore.
I think people over estimate the "pariah" thing. I grew up in a family of alcoholism, so I chose never to drink. At first people would ask me to drink with them at parties and such. Eventually they realized I never gave in, so when they were out buying alcohol, they would always buy me a pack of soda so when I came I would have something to drink with them. So if the friends are good, I don't think our kids will be pariahs. I think/hope that instead our kids will just find people who appreciate and understand their choices or the choices of their parents. If they don't, are they that good of friends after all? I think it is okay to have less friends, if the quality is higher.
2022-05-03T15:30:22.300200Z
Is Everything Falling Apart?
How devoid of intelligence it is to consider this manufactured divide as the reason things may fall apart. The group of mass media big-shots is extremely cohesive, as per this author's own perception of integration. Yet they fuel both sides without a single care about whether this may cause things to fall apart, and they're not wrong, which becomes clear if you actually look at the world and try to understand it instead of just absorbing mass media without practicing intellectual self-defense.
Our eyes are being averted from the actual problem, because it's believed that the more we look at it, the worse it becomes. I reject this anti-intellectualism, therefore present you why everything is actually falling apart.
The more humanity advances, the more we lack eros (loosely love for things we do not have) and the eros we have becomes weirder or outright bizarre. As this happens, we lose hope, that's the fatal hit. For example, access to porn has demonstrably been extremely detrimental to sex. For every passion we lose, we lose hope or replace it with a fetish. When we lose a healthy passion for clothes, we stop caring about what we wear or (more common in the west) become fetishized with bizarrely priced brands. When we lose passion for work, we stop caring about the future entirely (common in the third world) or become parasitical bureaucrats. It all adds up and often materializes into drug abuse. For an extreme example, look up the catalytic converter gangs in Kinshasa [0]. This loss of hope is monotonically increasing globally, and the manufactured divide has nothing to do with it. In fact our elites believe a little infighting and polarization may be good, as extremists are generally hopeful when they see things going their way, and more traditional solutions like education don't seem to be working these days. I don't think this theory has a name yet.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210927195719/https://nypost.com/2021/09/27/car-exhaust-drug-craze-alarms-congos-capital/
2022-04-29T19:24:15.782740Z
Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts
People are realizing that social media is draining, predatory, and entirely superfluous.
Of course there are employees here of social media corporations who would want to stem the tide of this mass exodus, but it's useless. Social media corporations have overstepped their boundaries and become a net negative on human society.
Deleting your social media accounts results in an immediate improvement of quality of life and mental wellbeing. These sites are intentionally designed with predatory psychological mechanisms, they are designed by hackers like ourselves, but the hackers who see "social engineering" as a perfectly ethical practice and not simply psychological manipulation.
These services are designed to be addictive, full stop. Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media. Maybe this will bring SV back to its roots, real technological progress for the nation and not desperate bids for data mining based on cheap psychological tricks.
People are growing sickened of the endless scrolls of psychological disturbing viral content combined with the false positivity of human interest stories. It is deepening social divisions, racial conflicts, political partisanship, and general misery. We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections in an increasingly isolated society, and social media stands in the way of this.
2022-04-24T23:49:21.963379Z
Gen Z does not dream of labor
> “My dad got a job straight out of high school, saved up, and bought a house in his 20s,” said Anne Dakota, a 21-year-old receptionist from Asheville, North Carolina, who earns minimum wage. “I don’t even think that’s possible for me, at least with the current money I make.”
I think this is pretty much the whole story. It’s very hard to be motivated to work when you could save your entire adult life and still struggle be able to afford such “entry level” things as a house or even a new car. People are willing to save and/or hustle for 5-10 years to get material rewards, but beyond that it feels pointless. Why be miserable grinding for two decades just so you can get one hand on the ladder? Instead people look for ways to have a life they find interesting or satisfying now.
2022-04-24T18:55:10.199964Z
Neubrutalism is taking over the web?
> "People simply get bored with how their apps and websites look after six to seven years. They need a change"
Real world objects rarely change design because of the costs involved. When they do, the change needs to justify that cost. For example, I'm not going to change the buttons on my microwave because I'm "bored" with them. The costs of changing software design is far less impractical and expensive, and therefore isn't driven by the same high level of justification.
I strongly suspect then, there are two reasons for these design changes we see every couple of years in software:
The first is easy, and most of us probably already agree; designers gotta design. They have to justify their salary _somehow_.
The second is more philosophical. The west — and especially the U.S.A. — looks to alleviate existential crisis with distractions. Shiny new toys keeps us from having to face uncomfortable truths about the nature of reality (if you're not religious).
2022-04-22T00:58:53.424153Z
Neubrutalism is taking over the web?
> "People simply get bored with how their apps and websites look after six to seven years. They need a change"
Real world objects rarely change design because of the costs involved. When they do, the change needs to justify that cost. For example, I'm not going to change the buttons on my microwave because I'm "bored" with them. The costs of changing software design is far less impractical and expensive, and therefore isn't driven by the same high level of justification.
I strongly suspect then, there are two reasons for these design changes we see every couple of years in software:
The first is easy, and most of us probably already agree; designers gotta design. They have to justify their salary _somehow_.
The second is more philosophical. The west — and especially the U.S.A. — looks to alleviate existential crisis with distractions. Shiny new toys keeps us from having to face uncomfortable truths about the nature of reality (if you're not religious).
2022-04-22T00:58:53.424153Z
Hydration is pure overhead
if none of this makes sense to you - don’t try to make sense of it or you’ll be disappointed
do you need 2000+ of dependencies to essentially show a HTML page in a web browser?
why should you have to wait 5 minutes to generate a static website?
Netlify and Vercel are well aware of these inefficiencies and offer you a “cloud” solution that promises to solve the problems you shouldn’t even have had in the first place
if you think you need things like Gatsby or Next.js you’ve been brainwashed by capitalists
2022-04-20T22:00:46.048141Z
Automation is the serialization of understanding
To paraphrase the maxim, working automated systems evolve from working manual systems. But only some manual systems work.
I start CI/CD by doing the whole process manually. For example, type the commands to build a Docker image, or spawn a VM, or obtain a secret. I encode all this in pseudo code, then put it in Bash (or Python). When a conditional branch appears (a different environment with different credentials), I treat it like any other code. Separate the bits that stay the same, and inject the bits that change.
The problem with most CI/CD systems is that people tightly couple themselves to the tool without really understanding it - the point the article is making. They over-complicate the solution because the documentation encourages you to do that. When they want to customise, debug, or even migrate away from it, it’s very difficult.
2022-04-20T17:07:30.110599Z
Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?
I lol'd at your comment. Poor UX designers. In an age of gentleness, I wish I could barge into their houses and rearrange all their furniture, toss the contents of their refrigerators into the bathtub, and spraypaint their bedrooms a cheap pink color. Because that's what they do to my computer interfaces at random intervals, and I have no power over it anymore.
2022-04-16T17:33:25.682720Z
Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?
I lol'd at your comment. Poor UX designers. In an age of gentleness, I wish I could barge into their houses and rearrange all their furniture, toss the contents of their refrigerators into the bathtub, and spraypaint their bedrooms a cheap pink color. Because that's what they do to my computer interfaces at random intervals, and I have no power over it anymore.
2022-04-16T17:33:25.682720Z
An argument for a return to Web 1.0
The golden age of the Internet was also distinctly different because I'd wager that the majority of people online back in those days had some technical know-how. You knew you were interacting with people who could operate a computer well enough to dial-up to an ISP so generally they were fairly intelligent.
As nostalgic as it is, I think if you were to really strive for that type of world again you need to move forward with building a new network - something that requires some measure of intelligence in order to gain access to it. Of course, what's then stopping someone from automating that and repeating the cycle all over again?
Better off just carving out your little piece in this new massive online world and building a community - or - just join one that already exists. There's millions of forums and "hand-made" websites out there, you just need to dig a little deeper these days.
2022-04-15T05:17:19.901617Z
Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
I think this is why it's hard sometimes to argue in support of something you believe, even if you're right.
At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded into your working memory, and with that information you arrived at a conclusion. Your brain, however, no longer needs those facts and figures; you've gotten what you needed from them, and they can be kicked out of working memory. What you store there is the conclusion. If it comes up again, you've got your decision, but not all of the information about how you arrived there.
So when your decision is challenged, you are not well equipped to defend it, because you no longer retain why you arrived at that decision, just the conclusion itself.
It's immensely easier to trust that you arrived at the right conclusion and the person who is in disagreement is missing something, than it is to reload all of the facts and figures back into your brain and re-determine your conclusion all over again. Instead, you can dig in, and resort to shortcuts and logical tricks (that you can pull out without needing to study) to defend what you've previously concluded (possibly correctly, but without the relevant information).
If this finding ends up being generally an approximation of how our brains work, it could explain a lot about what's happening to global conversations, particularly around the Internet and on social media specifically. It also suggests a possible solution; make the data quickly available. Make it as seamless as possible to re-load those facts and figures into your working memory, and make it as unpleasant as possible to rely on shortcuts and logical tricks when arguing a point.
2022-04-12T17:50:51.514190Z
Is my advice too mercenary?
There was a time in America a generation or two ago when you could give your all to a company. Here in Michigan there were a number of small towns where a single employer would dominate. If the town needed something, like a baseball park the owner would simply write a check. If a loyal employee had a health crisis that insurance didn't cover the company owner would write a check. When there were tough economic times the employees would rally to help the company knowing in better times it would have their back.
Then one of two things happened, the owner died with no capable heirs and the company was sold. Or after NAFTA the company wasn't competitive with low priced foreign labor and folded. If the company was sold a couple of MBA's came in to run the store and ruthlessly ran it exporting all the profits. Eventually the jobs would go overseas or to another part of America with lower wages like the South.
Either way the people eventually lost their jobs and entire towns would collapse. I have seen it here in Michigan happen over the past forty years again and again.
2022-04-11T22:34:24.786214Z
Ask HN: If you used to be socially awkward and shy, how did you improve?
I was watching Euphoria these days, and reading your comment reminded me of a thought I had watching that. School is like prison. People are forced to spend most of their living hours with one another for long periods of time. So like in prison, weird social dynamic develops itself. Once you're out of prison, everything is much smoother. You can simply exit any toxic situations.
2022-03-27T19:06:10.112410Z
The new silent majority: People who don't tweet
One of my pet theories for why social media is such a cesspool is that it exposes us to the whole of someone else.
If I play boardgames with Sue, that's enough. We meet, enjoy a beer and play some Catan and go our separate ways. That's a fine relationship.
If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'm happy just playing some Catan once in a while.
Historically you didn't need to know everything about everyone. Your friends will always have opinions or lifestyles you will find disagreeable - that is the nature of human existence.
Humanity either needs to "agree to disagree" on wide swaths of things we care a whole bunch about (abortion, firearms, lgbtq, etc) or we need to go back to not discussing those things in public or polite company.
My $0.02 is that it's easier to fall back to rules of polite conversation than fix our compulsive need for agreement.
2022-03-08T23:02:40.862243Z
How Ebooks Have Poisoned Electronic Ink
I sometimes wonder whether the invention of the public lending library could happen today. Had the concept not been given a prior place in our minds, the very idea seems otherwise inconceivable in contemporary society dominated by corporations.
The lack of consumer-oriented legislation is the proximal cause for devices phoning home, spying on you, locking you out of the goods you've purchased (that is, dictating how you can and cannot use the good) and which resist the user's need to repair or extend.
The author's solution is to apply duct tape and glue to arrive at "ethical reading" (really, it sounds more like ethical vending). However, I think it is a problem which consumers can't buy themselves out of; pro-consumer legislation is required.
Being choosy about where you buy your ebooks is fine, but we didn't get better automotive safety standards by just being choosy about the kind of cars we buy in the first place. It was a political -- not a consumer -- process that brought about change.
2022-02-23T20:38:41.396944Z
How relationship satisfaction changes across your lifetime
The relationship has to come first. It precedes the marriage and family, and I think societal norms are to put the children and the piece of paper first.
It's a living thing that needs to be fed, and when times get tough what do people often do. Stop being kind to each other, stop having sex, building resentment and accelerating the decline.
The goal is not to keep it together at all costs. The goal is to live an authentic life, and if that is going to be with a partner, don't lose sight of that fact it's the two of you that's important, not all the other stuff that comes along.
2022-02-21T15:28:45.596081Z
Be anonymous
It's good advice. The problem with anonymity in an environment of ubiquitous surveillance is that it's paradoxical. The point of anonymity is achieving freedom, but staying anonymous expends energy and makes you a target, so you can't actually do any things that anonymity was supposed to get you.
If what you really want is sovereignty, which is what most people confuse anonymity with, the goal is to be like what Ernst Jünger called the anarch (in contrast to the anarchist), which is someone who complies and renders herself indifferent to authority, rather than standing out and drawing attention.
A much better practice is to be as open as possible about the boring stuff, so you're not constrained and can do what everyone else does. Trying to be absolutist about anonymity is automatically like wearing a straitjacket.
2022-02-21T00:44:07.507457Z
Blade Runner 2099 Sequel Series Coming from Ridley Scott
2048 was a fantastic depiction of modern male loneliness; unloved and invisible, yet with beautiful commercialized girls at one's finger tips.
"Her" didn't capture this well, and frankly I don't think Spike Jonze is the type of author who can. He's too popular to be that pathetic! The movie is great for other reasons, but behind its sci-fi lies a traditional romance movie plot.
2022-02-12T03:45:17.845603Z
The Factorio Mindset
My problem with games like Factorio (and more recently Oxygen no Included), is that after I get addicted and get up past 100 hours of gameplay I start to question what the hell I'm doing with my life. Up until that point it's great fun designing, building, and optimizing, but then a switch in my head flips. I start to become anxious about the fact that I was excited about getting better at skills in a virtual world. Usually around this time I start watching videos of more advanced builds, and then become increasingly depressed about the idea of sinking 1000+ hours into a game, when I could just be building something in the real world, or out riding my bike. This is usually the time I put the game down and never play it again.
I think the problem for me is that these games give me the illusion of learning, building, and accomplishing things, which my little engineer brain loves. But once I come out of the haze of addiction, I realize it's nothing more than an illusion, and I just stomach going on.
2022-02-12T03:40:40.192063Z
Facebook loses users for the first time
There is something else going on around FB.
Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working example. Discovery > Static friends list.
The entire premise FB was founded on is eroding. This isn't just Apple privacy and some regulatory strangulation. It's seismic to the business. The reason most people are still going to Facebook is incompatible with their primary activities online which is: consuming content from people-you-don't-know.
Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later.
They are doing everything they can to try to move in this direction, but the more they push it the less useful Facebook is for the average user. Instagram's discovery page is a prime example. But Reels are less good than TikTok, and whatever they are doing for short form video in Facebook is surely a hopeless game of catch up. This is classical innovator's dilemma.
The very idea that Zuckerberg straight up said they need to copy the competition harder is incomprehensible considering the resources they have.
They are going to try to do a few things. One is to anti-trust Apple (in the media at least), and the other is to hand wave (Metaverse).
The reason the Metaverse was such a non sequitur is that it is so clearly a last minute thrust coming out of the C-Suite. If you've ever worked at a highly visible tech pubco, you've seen this happen before. Weak quarters mean that product announcements get pushed up. When it is as all encompassing as the Metaverse announcement, you know something is up.
2022-02-03T15:05:59.822828Z
Cannabis use produces persistent cognitive impairments: meta review
I used to wish to be a professional drummer. When I was 14 I attended a drum camp for a week to meet and learn from some of the world’s best drummers, along with other children and adults from around the UK with similar ambitions.
I became friends with one kid who was exceptionally talented as a musician, but also had a chronic marijuana habit. He was a better drummer than me at the time, but the drum camp was held every year. I attended the following year, and to my surprise, so did he.
As I am a huge nerd, I spent the entire year obsessively practicing. My friend spent the whole year smoking marijuana and being complacent. We were excited to see each other and catch up, but it wasn’t long before we started showing off our skills on the drum sets. His heart sank when he realised how dramatically my skills had surpassed his. I think he had a bit of an identity crisis, and likely as a consequence of the frequent substance abuse he developed a deep and blatant paranoia. He tried to commit suicide in his room the following day, and had to be removed from the camp.
I didn’t speak to him much after that — kids weren’t quite as connected as they are today back in 2005 — but to my surprise he did manage to contact me a couple of years ago. I asked him how he was, and he said he was doing better now after rehabilitation, but that life got much worse for him since we last met, explaining that he had been addicted to heroin.
I recognise that this is an extreme case, but I grew up with a lot of kids like this, and marijuana is scary as shit to me, despite some nerds today being adamant that it’s excellent and certainly better than alcohol.
2022-01-21T14:18:31.852516Z
Dominant languages can spread even without coercion
What's already happening is that languages that aren't tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don't have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the languages that culture is written in.
This isn't the case for, say, the Netherlands, or Sweden. And I'd specifically cite the need to import English-language cultural works as driving the use of English in those countries. There's plenty of other countries' whose languages never really had a literary culture to begin with, too - although usually at that point you can find some kind of forced cultural erasure rather than mere economic need to learn English.
>Multilingualism (both in countries and individuals) lessens the zero-sum nature of language competition. But it is costly, in both time and money. Ultimately, some societies may have to put a price on a cultural inheritance that, once lost, is nigh-impossible to recover.
That being said, this is peak anglobrain. The EU bloc is already a deeply multilingual society, and people are perfectly willing to dabble with multiple language proficiencies. Ironically, this is because much of the EU just falls back to English - like, to the point where the EU has it's own dialect of it[0]. French, German, and Spanish are also commonly learned and used as second languages, too.
This "languages are hard to learn" meme is, more than anything, the product of bad educational practices, lack of student motivation, and difficulty in finding speaking partners. For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That's not to say that learning a new language is easy, of course. It's just that we aren't even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language.
[0] This is known as Euro English.
[1] And, arguably, Japan.
[2] The UK is so bad at it that it was probably the deciding factor in Brexit. Nobody wants to immigrate to countries they can't speak the languages of. This meant that the UK had a uniquely lopsided ratio of immigrants to emigrants, and that much of the UK simply didn't get the benefits of being allowed to leave.
2022-01-20T03:42:19.150101Z
I automated my job over a year ago and haven't told anyone
This story is a pretty accurate fable for the pointlessness of the modern economy and its inability to provide real value to anyone. Man spends all day playing video games, because he automated his largely superfluous job at a law firm which itself likely only exists to deal with bureaucratic or unnecessary cases (assuming this is true, as they have a single absent IT person who handles their entire infrastructure.)
On top of all that, this story itself is probably made up, created to get attention from other people in pointless jobs. It’s a meta-exercise in pointlessness.
2022-01-19T17:40:21.137976Z
Train burglaries in LA
I'm reminded of recent realisations in the evolution of whales. The great size and efficiency of whales came about due to increased ocean productivity --- more available food, though often at widely-separated distances, an efficient feeding mechansism (lunge feeding), which could onboard vast quantities of krill in a single act, and the lack of any credible predators, allowing great whales to focus their evolutionary specialisation on long-distance speed and efficiency.
See: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-blue-whal...][1]
Similar principles apply to human transportation modes. In particular, safety of routes, for passengers and cargo, is absolutely paramount, and there's little that kills traffic, whether terminal or through-passage, than increased risk.
For rail, the equivalents are continent-spanning cargo operations, efficient freight loading and unloading (particularly via intermodal containerised traffic), and a lack of effective theft or crime operations against the trains and their cargo itself.
The Twitter thread here is strong evidence of a failure of that "no effective predators" requirement. Various supply-chain issues may be changing the calculus on long-distance freight operations and efficiency --- whether cargos decrease in quantity, in value, or in predictability, each of these would decrease operating efficiencies and opportunities. Containerisation is proving to be both a boon and a risk as well, by facilitating theft.
How challenging this might prove for railroads isn't clear, but I see a potentially large risk here.
As John Schreiber's thread notes, law enforcement for railroads is provided by the railroad companies themselves, in one of the first multi-jurisdictional police forces. Historically, railroad cops were more the scourge of hoboes and patrolled freight yards, but they might have to extend operations further if attacks such as these are increasing in frequency.
For those frustrated by Twitter's interface, Threadreader and Nitter links:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html][2]
[https://nitter.kavin.rocks/johnschreiber/status/148177072227...][3]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-blue-whales-so-gigantic/
[2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1481770722271760384.html
[3] https://nitter.kavin.rocks/johnschreiber/status/1481770722271760384
2022-01-14T17:43:19.154181Z
Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again
We are barbarians occupying a city built by an advanced civilization, marveling at the hot baths but know nothing about how their builders keep them running. One day, the baths will drain and anyone who remembers how to fill them up will have died.
2021-12-16T17:19:16.272221Z
The metaverse is bullshit
Text is mightier than the Metaverse.
Kids can do video calls with their smartphones but prefer texting.
We could discuss Hacker News stories with video chat but we prefer text.
News and politics junkies prefer reading text tweets on Twitter to watching talking news anchors.
Once upon a time Amazon was a company that only sold books. Dried ink on dead trees. And in the early internet age this book seller outperformed many more "forward looking visionary" startups.
Billions and billions spent on making movies as polished as possible, yet "I thought the book was better" is what we always hear.
The Metaverse will be programmed with text.
The quarterly reports outlining its financial losses will be written in text.
When journalists ultimately write its obituary, they will write text.
2021-10-30T14:38:47.393819Z
How I made Google’s data grid scroll faster with a line of CSS
I work in UX, I am constantly being given designs that don't work well with native/semantic elements- a great example is tables. As soon as the table needs some kind of animation, drag-drop behavior, anything like that, I can't use a "table" anymore; or it becomes some frankenstein kafkaesque amalgamation that is impossible to maintain. Does the table really need an animation? (probably not) drag and drop? (probably not) But management and the people in charge of OK'ing these designs have a 'make-it-happen' attitude and nobody really cares about semantic, native feel when they've invested so much into a "design system" that is largely antithetical to that.
Select elements are the bane of my existence. Impossible to style. I am constantly re-implementing a "select" because it has to look a certain way. Just terrible.
2021-10-28T05:50:48.323457Z
My ideal Rust workflow
> How do people develop in Rust? I'm trying to learn it, but it's hard to jump into code-bases and understand the code as I cannot run snippets.
I might be able to help answer this! I've spent over 10 years of my career writing production code in Lisp or Scheme, and about 5 years now writing occasional production code in Rust. So maybe I can explain how the two workflows differ.
In Lisp, it's super-easy to redefine a function or test some code. You can constantly test small things as you work. And you can easily open a listener on errors and inspect the current state. It's genuinely great.
In Rust, you rely much more heavily on types and tests. You begin by nailing down a nice, clean set of data structures that represent your problem. This often involves heavy use of "enum" to represent various possible cases.
Once you know what your data structures look like, you start writing code. If you're using "rust-analyzer", you'll see errors marked as you type (and things will autocomplete). If you want to verify that something works, you create a function marked "#[test]", and fill it with exactly the same code you'd type into a listener. Maybe you run "cargo watch -x test" in the background to re-run unit tests on save.
Then, maybe 2 hours later, you'll actually run your program. Between rust-analyzer and the unit tests, everything will probably work on the first or second try. If not, you write more "#[test]" functions to narrow down the problem. If that still fails, you can start throwing in "trace!", or fire up a C debugger.
This workflow is really common in functional languages. GHC Haskell has a lovely listener, for example, but I rarely use it to actually run code. Mostly I use it to look up types. The difference is that in strongly-typed languages, especially functional ones, types get you very close to finished code. And some unit tests or QuickCheck declarations take you almost the rest of the way. You don't need to run much code, because the default assumption is that once code compiles, it generally works. And tests are basically just a written record of what you'd type in a listener.
For understanding code, the trick is to look at the data structures and the type signatures on the functions. That will tell you most of what you want to know in Rust, and even more in Haskell.
So that's why I don't particularly miss a listener when working in Rust. Does this answer your question?
2021-10-27T13:27:12.296110Z
GitHub stale bot considered harmful
In my experience, these auto-closing bots are the natural result of software development workflows that treat issues as tasks to be closed, rather than a data point that a user is experiencing a problem of some kind (maybe they are doing things wrong, expecting something the project doesn't provide, or triggering a real problem – the exact cause is immaterial).
This treatment of issue-as-a-task is made worse by micro-management frameworks like Agile, which encourage metrics on how many of these issues-as-tasks are closed, which leads to ill-advised features like this that close them automatically because "Duh, no one said anything in 30 days".
If I were to design this myself, I would argue that the correct way to treat an issue is not to have it have a closed or open state at all. If the issue spawn a task or related tasks, you can close them. Or you can provide feedback on the issue that states that it is invalid. The user has already experienced a problem or wants a feature, there is no value in putting a red label that indicates "I'm done with this, please go away". It unnecessarily invalidates the experience of users who have their provided valuable time to report something to your software project. I think this is similar to the approach used by forums like Discourse, where a thread about a problem will usually not be closed or locked, but will just age out of current discussion if nobody brings it up.
2021-10-26T11:38:10.917931Z
UK: Students could be prevented from taking university courses deemed low value
I think about this all the time. The combining of seemingly unrelated skills brings new perspectives and it helps people go from being cogs to creators.
2021-10-24T03:43:22.774870Z
Facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to painting
The thing that burns out web developer is web development. The constant shift of technologies (just for the sake of it) and the nerfed (to oblivion) environment is hell. As a web developer, after you learn the basics (~5 years) there is no feeling of where the "up" direction is. Everything feels like sidesteps. There is no feeling of permanence to your knowledge, unlike a lawyer or a doctor. The knowledge feels like water pouring into a full container - as much of it goes out, as it goes in.
Switched to embedded systems 7 years ago to avoid the burnout. It is better, in my opinion. Funny enough, there is a natural barrier to entry that keeps most programmers away - You have to understand how computers work, how operating systems work and you have to be able to code in C/assembly. I have a lot of fun and actually picked up electronics as a hobby, which will help me better myself professionally. I think there is enough here to keep me entertained until I retire.
2021-10-21T13:57:02.753410Z
Willingness to Look Stupid
After a terrible breakup years ago I took a trapeze class. Before we got up on the trapeze bar, I spent most of the class telling everyone how bad I was going to be at it. When I got home I lay in bed confused. Why did I do that? This article is spot on. I was afraid of being seen to be bad at something.
Have you noticed? We spend almost our entire adult lives doing things we’re good at. Anything we do that we’re bad at, we either stop doing or we get good at it. So all roads lead us away from the experience of being a beginner. For me, it had been too long. And I’d accidentally forgotten how to do it.
So I took up dancing (which I’m bad at). That was really terrifying. And trampolining. And more recently improv. At the moment I’m learning to draw - which I spent most of my life wanting to do. But I never stuck with it because I hate drawing badly. But that’s just what it feels like to be a beginner. The trick is letting that go, because it doesn’t matter. You don’t get to be good at anything without first being bad at it. And being comfortably, visibly bad at something gives everyone else permission to play.
2021-10-21T13:53:04.467729Z
Eliminating gifted programs won’t make education fair
Infuriating.
Speaking as someone who moved around a lot as a child, and would be identified as a G&T candidate in each new place if there was such a program available there; when it wasn't, school was unbearable. In the last 2 years of High School, I stopped going to class, and stopped handing in assignments, and still did well... enough. My teachers liked me, could tell that I didn't belong there, helped out where they could.
I think it's helpful to think of G&T kids as having a learning disability. It sounds strange, but if they aren't stimulated, they are miserable, and will not do well in school.
2021-10-20T21:07:48.213540Z
Eliminating gifted programs won’t make education fair
Worse, eliminating gifted programs seems like its done mostly from spite. Like "i'm going to make these kids do worse to make it fair", not "i'm going to make these other kids do better to make it fair". What we want is to make the kids who do worse do better, not some abstract ideal of "fairness", because not everybody has the same aptitude so the only way you will get that is by reducing to lowest common denominator.
2021-10-20T21:06:35.998352Z
FTC Puts Hundreds of Businesses on Notice about Fake Reviews
Generally I'd say product reviews are one of those ideas like passwords that work but don't survive introduction to the general public and mass use. The problems of authenticity are obvious, but I've also noticed that people who rely on word of mouth from their friends and colleagues are generally happier. And why wouldn't they be? A colleague tells you this e.g. monitor is perfect for your line of work so you get it and find it also good. No fuss, nothing nerve wracking, no time wasted. Compared with reading through dozens of reviews that even when authentic raise good points that are maybe entirely irrelevant to you.
I try to buy stuff in shops now. It's more expensive only if my time spent on reading reviews is free. And these days it's not even more expensive to buy in real shops anyway.
2021-10-14T12:48:42.496463Z
Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable
Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology.
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.
2021-10-05T11:56:44.320918Z
Facebook going down meant more than just a social network being unavailable
Was talking about this with a friend today, and I think this incident highlights why I sometimes get really depressed about my career and technology.
I'm a Gen X-er, and I started my career in the late 90s. Before that I was a ham radio operator in junior high and HS (back when they had Morse code tests!). I remember the heady euphoria around the Internet then, and the vision of "tech utopia" was certainly the dominant one: the Internet would bring a "democratization of information" where anyone with a computer could connect to the Internet, publish a website, and communicate with people across the world. Really cool new services came online frequently. I still remember the first time I used Google, and at the time I was blown away by how good it was ("like magic!" I said) because the results were so much better than other search engines of the time.
But these days, the older I get the more and more I feel like tech is having a negative impact on both society at large and me personally. In the 90s we all thought the Internet would lead to a decentralization of power, but literally the exact opposite happened. Sure, telcos sucked, but there were tons of them spread across all corners of the globe. Now there is 1 single megacorp that a sizable portion of humanity depends on for phone/text communication.
It just makes me sad. Sure, there are pluses to tech I'm ignoring here, but I just think that how reality turned out so 180 from the expectations of the late 90s is what really hurts.
2021-10-05T11:56:44.320918Z
A monk’s guide to office life
I think the biggest problem in modern society is car dependent infrastructure. Cars are the ultimate form of isolation. They isolate us from the intermediate spaces where we interact with other people. Parks, paths, stations, cafes, downtowns, and all the other free public spaces we used to use to meet with other people have been devastated by cars.
I can go a week in my suburban home without ever interacting with anyone. Take away the office and the supermarket and you can go for years without talking to anyone.
Then I get on my bike, or walk somewhere and suddenly I meet more people in 30 minutes than I did in 3 months.
2021-09-28T18:45:09.468789Z
Lockdown, distance learning likely to increase social class achievement gap
I believe the trend toward a peaceful society has led to an imbalance of power based on age. When life was violent, it stabilized wealth concentration issues by periodically resetting the power of entrenched interests.
Today, the old disproportionately control power and they direct that power towards their own protection. This is true of 80 yr olds. But it is also true of 50 yr olds. And even 30 yr olds.
The COVID crisis response is one such example. Overbearing responses were put into place primarily because the danger was to old people. Concerns over this very outcome were handwaved away with low likelihood counterfactuals.
Alternatives exist in some other cultures. We are familiar with the Fukushima Skilled Veteran Corps [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13598607][1] but there are people who have a similar perspective who occupy this world.
My parents are surgeons in their sixties and they continue to practise during this crisis and do not advocate for the degree of total lockdown that is so popular. They do not advocate for closed schools. I would rather be them than be like risk-averse 70 yr olds saying that life should pause (but not their pensions).
I’m going to go ahead and say it: intransigent old people might be the greatest threat to humanity’s long term survival through their normalcy bias, grip on power, and fear of change. I hope that as I grow older I, too, manage to prioritize the next generation over myself.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13598607
2021-09-27T20:32:32.611155Z
I just don’t want to be busy anymore
One thing that helped me is not to care so much about my employer's goals.
It's almost heretical. But once you embrace this mindset, it does wonders. Or at least, it has for me so far.
I think a lot of us want to be proud of the work we do, and we feel that if we slack off, then we shouldn't be proud. But it's the other way around. I think the slackers have it right.
You're probably not going to get rich from working a day job. You're replaceable, and if you left your job tomorrow then you'll soon be forgotten. This is true for the majority of software engineers.
In that context, why do so many of us take on so many unnecessary responsibilities? It's tempting to say "Well, my employer assigned them." But how often do you tell them no, or try to present a different approach that just so happens not to involve you?
I know someone who is a chronic yes person. They will almost never say no, and they're pretty stressed day to day because of it. Whenever I point out that they're taking on too much, they say that they disagree and that it's their career.
That's true, but they won't get rich from that career, so I don't understand why they care so much about it.
Just remember to say 'no' for yourself from time to time. You often don't need to take on as many responsibilities as you have.
2021-09-27T03:27:42.511538Z
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I can read about those interests.
I think that shows there is a problem with blogging that goes beyond just the medium. Consider that blogging is a decentralised ecosystem, so you have no central place for discovery outside of Google specifically and search generally. Being on the top of Google is an attractive proposition because it means many eyeballs and lots of ad revenue. Therefore it is natural that many new blogs exist to game the search engine, hence the term "blogspam".
Some of the same incentives exist with large social media sites as well, but on Twitter and the like if you mute/block enough big people and follow only those you care about, your feed will eventually become clean enough to look at every day. So I think it is much more important to solve the discovery problem with blogs if you want them to get more traction.
2021-09-20T13:40:08.011704Z
Paradise lost: The rise and ruin of Couchsurfing.com
The social proof that a couch surfing reference brought was second to none. Each one boils down to this "I, a stranger, stayed for a few nights in this other strangers home for free, and they were good human beings". That social proof carried to any part of the globe you visited.
I cannot think of an internet app that brought people together in a more meaningful and wholesome way at scale.
It was great while it lasted.
2021-09-19T17:02:35.655074Z
Was Germany’s 19th century industrial expansion due to an absence of copyright?
I think the notion of proliferation of broadly available technical knowledge is correct, but I'm not entirely convinced whether literature in particular was so relevant.
In How Asia Works, a great book on industrial expansion in Asia, Studwell notes that when Taiwan was moderately prosperous and dominated by industry half of the workforce could not even read. What really benefited East-Asia was a grey-collar culture, a national, egalitarian educational system and corporatism rather than a white-collar, classist and academic culture more common in say, England.
This is something you also find in Germany. The education system was designed to be broad. Schools were universal and focused on practical knowledge, with few ivory towers. Knowledge was historically and is still spread around between institutes (Frauenhofer say), firms, and industry-friendly universities, dispersed and practical rather than concentrated, theoretic and elitist.
This Prussian style system which is really where most German institutions come from also was quite literally copied by a lot of now industrial powerhouses in Asia.
2021-09-19T15:05:09.022317Z
Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show
Jonathan Haidt has done a ton of research on this and it's terrifying. His thesis seems to make a lot of sense: boys bully each other physically while girls bully each other reputationally. This is likely why mental health issues for boys and girls have diverged wildly since about 2014, because as lives moved online, this was a recipe for disaster for girls since social media is so perfect for this kind of bullying, but sort of a non-event for boys who were already online playing video games all day. Social media unlocked and turbocharged all those preexisting pathologies for girls.
2021-09-14T13:43:41.619134Z
ByteDance in talks with banks to borrow over $3B
I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.
2021-09-08T13:35:13.503353Z
TikTok overtakes YouTube for average watch time in US and UK
Yea, the Youtube algorithm is the "pick me girl" of algorithms.
I watched one video by a creator I already follow about their solar panel installation and water-catcher garden irrigation.
What do I get in my recommendations? Dozens and dozens of videos from completely random channels about solar panel installation and gardening.
I very rarely find new creators on YouTube, who produce consistent high quality content. I follow a handful of channels and even from them I lookat 20-40% of their videos.
TikTok on the other hand I swore I'd never use. Then came Covid19 and lockdowns. I reached the end of HN, Reddit and Youtube, so I installed it.
The Algorthm is fucking amazing. Dunno how they do it, but 80-90% of stuff it shows me I end up watching (it is 10secs to 3 mins so the investment isn't that huge =) ).
I've ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f'd up cars they get to service, to farrier and sheep shearing videos to a guy who does comedy about weird animal facts.
I'd never actually go search anything like that on purpose, but I actually kinda found out I enjoy looking at. It's a good way to space out for 30 minutes and relax. Most TikTok videos get to the point before a stereotypical YouTuber has gone through their intro and sponsor segments :)
2021-09-07T13:12:55.014870Z
58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics
There is a German movie about the system that is used to gather TV ratings. It's a special box that some users get which reports what they are watching. Small sample size goes into a big statistic (not sure how accurate the portrayal of the system in the movie is). These boxes are given to the people who pay the German public TV fee, which excludes i.e. students (they don't have to pay) and some other groups. This group of critical people figured that out and started to hack into these machines to fake ratings. They faked the ratings away from stupid trash TV towards some higher quality stuff, documentaries, culture, ... Obviously in the movie then the country saw a renaissance, everyone got smarter, yadda yadda, you get it.
I feel like this is similar. All tech savvy people block ads and analytics and at least the known tricks they use against us. So the internet only tracks the defenseless people and is then built to serve them (and or exploit them).
Maybe we should engage in large scale AdWords fraud. Send come fake traffic away from Facebook and over to Wikipedia.
2021-08-31T14:54:48.645160Z
Enterprise Software Projects Killed the Software Developer
Elegant and clever code wont live through a maintenance cycle.
I'll take a software developer who writes and structures code so change requests and code are written in a way that the DSL is the same across the organization. This makes changes easy. Clever people should be writing libraries or doing research.
Don't kid yourself, you are either the guy who builds the building and its easy because its greenfield, or you are doing remodeling and the hard part is making the upgrade fit in the building and not look like shit.
2021-08-31T00:04:28.392936Z
Burning Out and Quitting
This is a powerful piece that resonates with my own experience. I went through a period of severe burnout that took me a couple years to recover from. One of my later insights was that burnout doesn't merely entail working too much (although that's certainly part of it); burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love."
So many of us go above and beyond for our companies/projects/teams/whatever. The author here describes overcommitting at work. We might have the best of intentions, but at some point, we don't see the returns we yearned for and start to question what all this self-sacrificial giving is for. That is when burnout really sets in. I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc.
A second insight was that burnout can play a positive role in our lives. It's like a circuit breaker that trips to protect us from a damaging situation. When we feel burnout coming on, it's a warning to pay attention to an important misalignment in our lives.
2021-08-25T23:38:30.790474Z
The role of high-skilled foreign labor in startup performance
Points to a bigger problem. Imagine how many startups simply don't come into existence because the founders are stuck on life long H1B visas.
Or many times the founders simply can't even make it into the US even though they have much needed skills.
Skilled immigration into the US is much harder and way more uncertain than other nations. Massive amounts of paperwork (so much that you need a lawyer), lotteries, long wait times and in the end highly dependent on whichever immigration officer sees your application.
2021-08-24T00:23:00.476271Z
The case for mutual educational disarmament
This is basically right. Quite a lot of education is a waste, it's window-dressing actual learning.
For instance, you might have spent some time getting exam prep advice: read the instructions, skip questions that are hard and come back later, try to memorize this or that formula / molecule / map / argument, if it's multiple choice strike out obviously wrong answers, look for hints to part 2 in part 1, if you can't figure out the integral guess that it's 0 or 1 (LOL a lot of high school integrals are elegant).
You have to spend real time learning this kind of sharpening exercise in order to do exams, or you will get less than what you should get, given what you actually understand about a subject.
There's no value to this time. You'll never need to remember how to reverse a linked list, because in real life when it comes up, you will just find it in a browser. Similarly with most things that require a precise answer, the effort in sharpening the answer is way more than what might reasonably be worthwhile in a real-life setting. Eg. I needed a Bessel function at one point in my career. Could I write down its form from having seen it at uni? No, of course not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni? Yes.
The real damage is we end up not educating people. We give them a bunch of answers to memorize and never test them on how the question is important. Did anyone ever examine you on why complex numbers are a big deal? Or what the big gap between classical and quantum physics was? I bet you only had exam questions about how to do the calculations and derivations. Get a number or a formula, that's easy to test. Whether this formula makes sense to use, that's hard.
The part about education being positional is also important. There's quite a lot of jobs that could be done by someone with no degree at all, including mine. My first boss in the City still has no degree, and didn't need it despite options trading having a reputation for being mathematical. All that's happened is nobody wants to not go to uni, and nobody wants to hire a non-degree holder to trade options anymore, because both groups think that going to uni signals that you're smart. Neither group actually thinks you need any of the actual skills you learn in uni, though.
2021-08-22T11:36:37.837645Z
Parser generators vs. handwritten parsers: surveying major languages in 2021
I took the compilers class at Stanford and never really understood the algorithms of bottom up parsing, or even really how grammars worked. I just made the tool work.
I then went to work at a private company, and an older guy who had gone to a state school that taught recursive descent (his was the last class to teach it) taught me how to do it. In a month or so I had learned more about how grammars actually work, what ambiguity is, and so forth, than in my whole class at Stanford.
I now teach compilers at a university, and I teach recursive descent.
2021-08-21T22:42:49.053756Z
Thoughts of work invaded my life until I learned how to unplug
I struggle with this daily. As the founder of a startup, I would routinely pull 100 hour weeks. I remember being invited to a Halloween party and just showed up as "exhausted software person" because I had no time to prepare a costume.
I took a break for 8 years from startups, because I was unable to create boundaries in my mind.
This April, after what I thought was a long enough break, I just joined another one.
I'm writing this right now because I woke up early in a panic attack about an announcement from one of our competitors. We have a big launch coming up this week, and I'm afraid that we're already too late. I feel my stomach clench and my mind race when I think about the next steps for the company.
The problem is that I'm only 4 months into the startup and I've already alienated my partner enough that I have to move out. My whole life has become devoured by this puzzle, and I'm always checking Twitter and Discord to see what I can work on next. I can't slow my heart-rate down and just work at this job normally.
If any of you have a good way of "turning off" in order to keep your family stable and mental health okay, please let me know. And I'm not looking for a run of the mill response -- I really would like some advice from people who have really dealt with this before. It's easy to give advice if you have good boundaries, but I would like some help from those who have really struggled.
I love my work, but I don't like how it makes me feel. Thanks for your help, everyone.
2021-08-21T15:55:58.029647Z
A lot of people are getting the OnlyFans story wrong
At least this explains why normal porn sites keep living on perfectly well using MasterCard and Visa. They already have to follow regulatory requirements to demonstrate they are complying with age and consent laws, each video includes a front-matter frame saying where you can get the documentation of their compliance, and many include behind-the-scenes extra content showing all of the performers presenting government-issued IDs and signing consent forms.
This brings this conflict out of the realm of adult entertainment and into a broader conflict between incumbent central providers that are held to regulatory standards and apps providing a platform for individual contractors that don't follow those requirements. It's in the same field as people arguing AirBNB is only able to exist because it's allowing people to operate hotels without having to comply with hotel regulations, and Uber allows people to operate taxi services without complying with taxi regulations. OnlyFans was giving individuals a way to produce adult films without having to comply with adult film regulations related to age and consent verification of the performers.
2021-08-20T15:55:18.010154Z
OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October
Does anyone else here feel the Onlyfans phenomenon is just exploiting sad lonely men who’d be better off leaving the house, doing some exercise and trying to eat healthier and build their IRL social networks?
This whole cam-girls making a fortune this way seems somehow more dishonest than normal porn to me, maybe because it’s about these guys (who can never have relationships with these women) building a personal and intimate relationship as one of her “fans”. I almost see this as being like gambling where people need to acknowledge maybe how powerful sex is and being a technology that should be regulated similarly.
I wonder if nobody calls out this exploitation because society keeps suggesting that all men are privileged, which is definitely not true for at least 60% of the male population.
Anyway I’ll probably get downvoted for this but these double standards have been irritating me for a while :-)
2021-08-20T14:13:36.063382Z
Psst: Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust
What's funny about having to rely on unauthorized clones to provide a fast native UX was that Spotify's original client back in 2008 started out as beautifully light, custom rendered native client.
Few Apps ever had that wow factor the first time I used it, it was so much lighter and more responsive than anything else of the day. I remember being perplexed at how I could search and skip to any part of a song quicker than iTunes could looking at a local library. Everything was latency-free and instantaneous.
We were building a Music Startup at the time, so we investigated how it worked. We we’re very surprised we couldn’t find any evidence of an established UI toolkit. It looked as though they had built their own custom UI renderer and optimized TCP protocol which sent back its metadata in XML. Their traffic looked like it was initially seeded from their own (or CDN) servers (for best latency) and then overtime we would see some P2P traffic on the wire.
Our QT/C++ client had decent performance but was noticeably heavier than Spotify's. I was disappointed to see their native client eventually be abandoned and succumb to become yet another Chromium wrapper. I expect it fell to the pressures of a growing startup adding 100s of developers (without the skill of their original CTO/devs) where a native UI couldn't be updated and re-iterated as fast as a Web App. I wish they maintained 2 desktop clients, and left their native client alone to just be an audio player and push all their new social features to their new flagship CEF app.
It's unfortunate the skill and desire of building fast native UIs are being lost to Electron and CEF wrappers. Seems the larger the organization the more likely they are to build new Web rendered Desktop Apps and we have to rely on unauthorized Indie efforts like this for fast, responsive native UIs.
2021-08-17T17:39:45.186383Z
Australia is becoming a surveillance state
Since leaving Australia (and started living in Europe) I have come to the conclusion that Australia is not a "real" country - it is just a continent owned by corporate interests that happens to also have people living on it.
Corporate interests own the media, politicians, food production, education etc. and no one cares, because Life Is Good. Why expect anything to change, or people to care about strong democratic institutions, when there is no incentive for them to care about abstract concepts such as privacy or governmental oversight.
Decades of bull markets, house price increases, a decline in public education, torpedoed communication infrastructure and complicit "independent" media has resulted in a wealthy, ignorant and complacent society who allow their representatives full control over their lives. It is not that they don't care about these issues, they are not even aware they are issues at all.
But who cares, when you can go to the beach?
2021-08-12T01:35:06.316867Z
Machine learning won't solve natural language understanding
Caveat lector: I'm analysing this as a linguist. Not as a programmer. (Unless you count a bunch of bash scripts as "programming".)
>Let us start first with describing what we call the “missing text phenomenon” (MTP), that we believe is at the heart of all challenges in natural language understanding.
The missing text is not the heart of the challenge; it's just a surface issue. The actual problem is deeper - machines treat words as if they got intrinsic meaning, when the meaning is actually negotiated between speaker and hearer at the moment of the utterance.
This might sound complicated so, as an example, let's say I told you: "I got a cat. That wug sleeps on my bed."
You don't know what's a "wug" (it's a nonsensical word BTW), or why I'm calling my cat a "wug". So you're missing info, just like the machine, right? And yet you're able to parse the second sentence just fine, based on the first. And if we keep chatting about my cats, any mention of the word "wug" will represent the feline from the picture. We effectively negotiated the word "wug" to represent that cat.
A machine does not do that; instead it'll give words intrinsic, non-negotiable meanings. It won't have "wug" in its dataset, so it won't understand that sentence.
I don't believe that machine learning will solve this issue _on its own_, but it could once we're able to simulate that negotiation of meanings.
>Was Aristotle really Aristotle?
If I saw this sentence "in the wild", I'd immediately interpret it as someone questioning the historicity of Aristotle, and claiming his works were made by someone else. It shows that the question is not as redundant as it might look like.
> The trophy did not fit in the suitcase because it was too // 1a. small // 1b. big
This specific example doesn't show it, but that ambiguity is an issue even for human beings, as shown by
"I dropped the trophy on the table. Now it's broken." (What's broken - the trophy, or the table?)
In fact, it's such a big issue that languages often have a bunch of resources to minimise those situations, as gender agreement and distal/proximal pronouns.
2021-08-10T05:15:20.947707Z
Difficult math is about recognizing patterns
I think the pattern recognition happens once the concept “clicks”.
At some point you build a machine in your brain that automates and simulates some mechanics and your role shrinks into feeding the machine with the relevant information. Then it’s easy, you can imagine what will happen just by looking at the problem.
I believe the trick is to properly understand the low level basics, explore edge cases and play with the machine as you build it.
Many people will try to learn the basics of the highest level possible, then proceed to master methods and cases without deeply understanding the subject. They cannot compete with the person doesn’t know too much but has very deep grasp on it, working the way from there.
2021-08-10T05:12:24.264724Z
Show HN: Should I Get a House? a better rent vs. buy calculator
I quite agree with this. People - often people with choices and means (money) - spend a lot of time agonizing over optimal monetary outcomes, except:
You're going to die.
The experiences you accumulate are what makes a life, as one moves through time in a one-way fashion.
No one gives a shit if you die old and efficent, unless that's the thing that made you sleep soundly at night.
I've rented and I've owned. They both have pros and cons. Now, as I get old, I like the idea of owning something where I can do whatever the hell I want, and moreoever, I can live away from humans who have parties, make noise or compete for space. Like you'd find in a rental building. I'd like to be able to build my own gym in a garage instead of timing my trips to a gym based on how crowded it is, and I'd like to buy a couch I'll use for many years to come instead of something that has to move around.
A cost-effective life is only a happy life if cost-effectiveness in and of itself makes you happy.
2021-07-21T00:25:11.605429Z
Brain Signals Translated to 18 Words per Minute
Grammarly might seem like an improvement if you have poorly developed grammar, but it’s a limited substitute for educating yourself in the English language. Why? Because if you outsource expression to an app you lose the personal dimension of your thoughts. This is more than nuance - it is a straight jacket because it stops you from thinking about what you are saying.
2021-07-19T02:07:32.836960Z
A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement
When I was around twenty my Mom used to call me every other day or so just to have a chat. One day, after she asked me how my day was, I shot back something along the lines of: "I don't have anything to tell you, really. You're calling so often that nothing new manages to happen in between the calls." So, she stopped calling. I would go home every other week as usual and everything seemed fine. It was only much later that I found out that she basically cried for three days straight after that call.
Some time later there was a period when I would contact my parents every few months or so. Not really on purpose. Simply because other things simply took more of my time and attention, and calling my parents wasn't really high on my list of priorities.
Only when my son was born I started to realize what someone goes through as an individual and as a couple once a child comes into their lives. How it changes things. That not being thrown out of the window at 2 a.m. as an infant is already a blessing. I'm sure that thought has crossed the mind of many a young parent with a screeching infant on their hands in the middle of night. So, I felt ashamed of myself, and grateful to my parents for being there in the first place, and being decent at being parents as well.
Now I've made a point to myself to call them up at least once a week. As in, I have set up a reminder for that. I now know how much they value this. But it's not only for them. I realize very well that one day I will wake up and wish to call my parents to have a chat about something. But there simply won't be anyone to call anymore.
I'm not passing any judgement at all on people who have abusive parents. I have no idea how that feels like. I'm just happy that I didn't end up accidentally getting estranged to the decent parents that I have. At some point it really was going that way.
2021-07-15T11:35:20.654242Z
Goodbye, Fleets
"We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter."
Perhaps I can help.
Twitter is always angry. You'll find the most idiotic, extreme, harmful statements from both sides of the political spectrum. Worse, Twitter actively rewards it. The more unhinged and controversial, the more engagement you get.
The replies will be equally angry. Any attempt to add nuance or reason is futile. Because the damage is already done in the form of retweets, likes, quotes.
Hence, the unreasonables run Twitter. And they have normalized a lot of absolutely pathetic behavior. Taking things out of context and applying the worst faith interpretation of it, willingly. Sub-tweeting, screenshotting, exposing private conversations, speaking badly of others within their bubble, and sometimes this triggering further attacks or even cancellations.
This culture of perpetual outrage, hate-addiction even, and the many childish behaviors that come with it, are born at Twitter.
After a Twitter session, one feels miserable and depressed. There is nothing delightful, nothing new you learned, no new friend you met. It's horror. Like the news, but then 10 times worse.
Wait, sometimes there's non-hateful tweets too. 99% of them are self-congratulatory or stupid. Something like: "My 3 year old just commented that an intersectional approach in politics is most effective".
Attention starved, completely made up. Yet for sure it will get thousands of likes. Both hate and idiocracy are richly rewarded.
To stay in line with the ever narrowing Twitter culture, one has to use it at least 6 hours per day. Otherwise, you might miss that word you used your entire life suddenly being problematic. Could even be a particular emoij. Anything triggers outrage. Anything at all. It seems the entire point of Twitter: maximizing outrage perpetually.
It's a Twitter thing and a Twitter thing only. I've never experienced it with such intensity anywhere else, and I'm merely lurking. The reason I hate it so much is that it goes beyond just a website sucking, its effects are cultural.
2021-07-15T04:32:22.783057Z
Goodbye, Fleets
> Although we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets
this is exactly my problem with Twitter. It's an even bigger echo chamber than FB. As much as I try, I can't seem to escape the oversaturated bubble of a handful of extremely loud mouthed tweeters and their ardent followers. Mix in the toxic conversations, and it's definitely not a place I feel comfortable discussing anything.
2021-07-15T03:39:22.598762Z
Building a vision of life without work (2015)
I was 2nd employee at a unicorn startup and have been on a work-hiatus for almost a year. Now, I live amongst Amish people in the country.
My biggest insight has been a mindset change. Previously my underlying approach to life looked like: "I will do X which will enable me to do Y so that I can finally do Z." I now approach my days with "What will make me happy?" This is an experiment I'm performing. A structured life feels safe and orderly - but what if living life and letting things unfold more 'organically' is better?
It is a weird/uncomfortable shift because I can't predict what is coming. As an example, turns out I really enjoy building dams. A couple months ago I would not have been able to tell you that I'd be building a dam.
I have no idea what it is that drives my own interests or affinities, but now instead of attempting to manipulate them for whatever X, Y, or Z goal... I just roll with wherever they take me. And they always seem ready to take me somewhere.
My point is: In a life without work (in my experience) stuff will come up. Follow what arises, see where it goes. It certainly feels better.
2021-07-14T14:48:57.400760Z
The History of Karate
"In a Western-style sport, the aim is gaining victory at all costs,”
This statement most resonated with me. I had to give up playing hockey because - at the lowest grade - people paid no respect to you. If they could kick the ball and the ref didn't see it, they would continue play. If they could hit the ball hard at you from point blank, that is fine.
You see similar in elite sport, players in "football" of whatever code. Everyone knows it. A professional player who breaks the rules is expected to play on as if nothing happened until the ref calls it.
At this point it is not a game, it is a grudge match.
The win at all costs mentality costs one themselves.
2021-07-13T04:08:50.558617Z
I Stopped Using Emojis
I don't need to experiment with not using emoji. I am old enough to have a working life before they existed. In those days all online discussions became a huge argument very quickly. Passive-aggressive memos with bosses cc'ed in flew about constantly. In-person meetings were hastily convened on a regular basis to sort things out. Usually all that needed sorted out was a stupid misunderstanding, and the root cause was usually a misreading of tone followed by an emotional overreaction somewhere in the chain of emails.
My 18-year old son, who I mostly communicate through text messages, went cold on me recently. I assumed he was angry about something so I called him. No, he had decided to give up using 'childish' emoji. I asked him to reconsider.
I am firmly of the opinion that emoji are incredibly useful and that normal speech is full of emotion and playfulness that hastily written text cannot convey. You should therefore be using them in your workplace. If you don't use emoji you will be misunderstood. No matter how well written your prose is the recipients may only have time to skim-read it.
Using emoji are, in my opinion, very 'professional'.
2021-07-12T12:58:13.629607Z
Compiling rust is NP-hard
I have worked for 3 years on a project where it took a whole week to get the code compiled, signed by an external company and deployed to the device so that I could see the results.
I just learned to work without compiling for a long time. Over time my productivity increased and the number of bugs fell dramatically.
Working this way requires you to really think about what you are doing, which is always a good idea.
This was over a decade ago and now I work mostly on Java backends and I am happy that I typically spend days or even weeks without ever compiling the code and that it usually works the first time I run it.
I can't think how I could get back. It looks really strange to me to observe other developers constantly compiling and running their code just to see if it works. It kinda looks as if they did not exactly understand what they are doing because if they did, they would be confident the implementation works.
The only time when I actually run a lot of compile/execute iterations is when I actually don't know how something works. I typically do this to learn, and I typically use a separate toy project for this.
2021-07-08T12:26:52.426188Z
Some Days I Can’t Do Life – When everyday life becomes a struggle (2020)
I have caught myself riding the snooze - alarm clock pattern.
Its my favourite part of the day, the 'waking up in warm bed' time. When I am just barely conscious and its feels good to be in warm bed - it feel blissful. When I wake up in the morning I will hit 10min snooze, just enough to fall asleep and wake up. Just to get more of that feeling - because I know thats the only time I will get it. I am doing it for an hour on weekdays and often for hours on the weekends.
I just can't force myself out of bed, out of that state where it doesn't feel bad. I talked to people who are going through the same. Some skip work to stay in bed because they cant do it anymore. I did it few times too, and I am terrified I might slip into that state of apathy. That fear is the only thing that keeps me going, I can only hope this fear will stay.
I dont have any wisdom or advice for anyone going through this, I just wanted to vent my thoughts and say that you are not alone in this, stay strong.
2021-07-05T12:35:22.670285Z
On working too hard: finding balance, and lessons learned from others
A friend of mine who fell for the "work hard forever" idea just wrote a lengthy post venting about what this did to her: when you spend all your free time working/studying, and constantly turn down invitations to go do stuff with friends, people stop inviting you to things. And you drift out of friend groups because of this. Your social skills atrophy, you have no idea how to try and make new friends on the rare occasions you pry yourself away from work. Work becomes your life. And even if your work is something you love to do, that never involves a toxic workplace or moral qualms or any other problems, there's still emotional needs work will never, ever fulfill.
2021-07-04T23:39:01.004660Z
The most precious resource is agency
Amen. I’m a sober alcoholic, and if I died tomorrow I’d be content knowing that I did at least one worthwhile thing with the time I had: I helped another alcoholic, a 23 year old man who tried to kill himself shortly before I met him, get sober and start working and move out of his mom’s basement and stand up straight and look other people in the eyes and then go and help a few other people stop drinking.
Not a single professional accomplishment is within an order of magnitude of that level of fulfillment. Just help one f*cking person become more than they thought they could be and you’ll die happy—why didn’t they tell us it was this simple?
2021-07-01T14:17:28.886457Z
Japan government backs 4-day workweek
It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week. This was true well before the pandemic and is more pronounced than ever now. Everyone needs to be "present" for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but spends their time in pointless meetings, preparing documents and powerpoints that no one will read, faux social/teambuilding events, hour long lunches, goofing off on the internet, all to maintain the pretense of office culture.
Companies that shuffle things up to prioritize productivity over simply showing up will be set to succeed over the next generation.
2021-06-21T02:51:02.769648Z
Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?
My biggest mistake, that I made again and again, was not leaving a job when it was time. I thought I had something to prove, but there was never any point to it. You don't owe anything to an employer. You can't prove anything to an employer. They have absolutely no loyalty to you, and care less than nothing about what is right or wrong, wise or foolish.
So: If you ever think things might not turn out as well as you hoped, move on. There is so much else going on in the world that is at least as interesting as what you are doing, where you have a much better chance of making a difference, that spending time on things that you might not end up proud of is a terrible waste of your short time on Earth.
2021-06-20T05:26:21.144741Z
Minimum Viable Self
>Online provides a forum for people to get the sort of attention we might like. "Look what I can do!" or "Look at me!" Still, one of my gripes about social media is that there are so many people who lurk.
There's a lot to learn from lurking. My mother watches Tik Tok videos and doesn't post herself, but cooks more now than ever based on the ideas she sees on there. You can learn about a cultural trend, a social cause, a musician, a resource, etc. There are lurkers with agendas, sure, but many are just bored and don't take pictures of everything.
Message boards like this offer even more to learn. Many people repeat what's already been said. The lurker respects this or has nothing to say and moves on.
I don't like that Burning Man curator's quote calling their saying a form of "inclusivity" when it doesn't include the lurker. It also suggests that "being present" is necessarily not being observant, but doing things that are supposed to be done at their festival, which I don't agree with. That said, I'm sure a space like that would actively become less of what its meant to be if there were tons of people just spectating. They should own the exclusivity that they want.
2021-06-19T14:47:41.139595Z
Minimum Viable Self
I know very few people who want attention from strangers when they go out in public. Most of us want to be left alone while we go about our business. Online provides a forum for people to get the sort of attention we might like. "Look what I can do!" or "Look at me!" Still, one of my gripes about social media is that there are so many people who lurk. The lurkers are there to look at people attempting to get attention. The attention seekers are acting. They are on a stage. Nobody is confusing the act for the real person except the young and naive. The lurkers are the audience. Lurkers don't contribute anything (most won't hit the like button, much less comment, even if later the tell me "I loved your post"). The quiet ones are not "homeless."
Burning Man attempts to solve this with the no spectators rule:
“‘No Spectators’ is a long-standing saying on Playa. You are encouraged to fully participate. It’s all about being there, being fully present, and not just observing. Two of the ten principles of Burning Man are radical participation and radical inclusivity, meaning that there are no outsiders. Everyone is part of the experience.”
– Nora Atkinson, The Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge, Renwick Gallery
Again, nobody is confusing the Burning Man persona with who they are back at the office after the event is over. People try things out, take mind altering drugs. Identity is fluid. Social media isn't bad because it is fake. Social media is good because it is fake.
"...we tend to see other people’s lives as works of art." Sometimes, but most people aren't that good at performance.
2021-06-19T14:47:33.011209Z
TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020
TikTok is a social network that could not be made by an American company, due to its complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship.
This is a major part of its success, due to not allowing its network to deteriorate into culture wars and general unpleasant behaviour.
I suspect any future social network much like TikTok will have exclusion as a major feature.
2021-06-18T16:41:43.920685Z
‘Positive deviants’: Why rebellious workers spark great ideas
The fact that offering an idea that's better than what's already being done is seen as rebellious at all, as opposed to being the entire job of an engineer, or the definition of what engineers do, is not a good sign for any organization.
Next they'll be talking about rebellious accountants who have recorded more numbers by the end of the day than were in the spreadsheet at the beginning, or subversive lawyers who review contracts that had not already been reviewed. Before long it will take a fifth-column delivery driver to move a pizza to a location it's never been before.
2021-06-14T13:16:35.781032Z
Untapped potential in Rust's type system
Interesting article, but I think the key to writing idiomatic Rust is not to stretch what the type system can do but rather be happy at what It can express and avoid unnecessary abstraction. The compile-time guarantees that we have to prove in Rust, also serve to give a hint for when not to abstract.
2021-06-14T12:56:13.203695Z
Don't Let Social Media Think for You
The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed?
I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread.
Now I look back and see I was another participant in the mob.
Look, the author described in the post absolutely did herself no favors. Her book may have been great, but the way she interacted with people on social media was absolutely not. But being the 10,000th person to tell her that is never necessary. That's just wanting to join a mob, because mobs are fun, because you're all justified in this act together.
Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified. A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.
2021-06-08T14:26:33.718310Z
Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working from Home
They want to build that familial model where you live and die for your teammates and wfh hampers that because you aren't forced to trauma bond with a bunch of strangers. Facebook/Google learned early on that building campuses that look and act like colleges increased worker retention and productivity because they built their whole lives around the company. Shopping, Doctors, Recreation all happened on campus. All your new friends were made on campus after they forced relocation.
2021-06-01T13:42:01.140514Z
Rethinking the computer ‘desktop’ as a concept
The desktop is broken not because of the file/folder paradigm but because we stopped using files to represent information. Figma, Slack, and Notion should save their information to disk. You should be able to open a Notion document, or a Figma design, from your desktop, instead of through their Web interface. You should be able to save a Facebook post or Tweet and their replies to disk.
Why can't you? Well, for one, social media companies don't want you to save stuff locally, because they can't serve ads with local content. Furthermore, browser APIs have never embraced the file system because there is still a large group of techies who think the browser should be for browsing documents and not virtualizing apps (spoiler: this argument is dead and nobody will ever go back to native apps again). Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it? It's much easier for Google to store the data on their server so that everyone can access it instead of you setting up some god-awful FTP-or-whatever solution so that your wife can pull up the grocery list at the store.
I'm hoping the new Chrome file system API will bring a new era of Web apps that respect the file system and allow you to e.g. load and save documents off your disk. However, this still won't be good enough for multiplayer apps, where many devices need to access the same content at the same time. I don't know if there is any real way we can go back to the P2P paradigm without destroying NAT - WebRTC tries but WebRTC itself resorts to server-based communication (TURN) when STUN fails.
2021-06-01T01:10:00.761089Z
Ask HN: How to cope with the death of a dear person?
I just lost my 17 year old kid brother this year. He was the passenger in a car that got hit by a charter bus. He died on impact. I never got to say goodbye. I’ve lost grandparents and friends before, but I have never felt pain this intense before.
This is also the most alone I have ever felt. Even surrounded by my huge family I felt alone in my pain. I consider myself extremely lucky, I have an incredible wife and loving families from both of us, and yet the grief has left me feeling isolated.
One thing I have thought about a lot is an analogy someone shared with me. They said that when we lose a loved one, we are given a box. In that box, is a ball and a button. Every time that ball touches the button, we feel pain. When the loss happens, the ball fills the box and is constantly pressing the button. The pain seems inescapable. Over time, the ball gets slightly smaller. It still will press on the button, but maybe not as often. The pain doesn’t change and it is always there waiting to be triggered, but as time goes on it may happen less.
We carry that box for the rest of our lives I guess. I still don’t know if there will ever be a day I don’t miss my amazing brother so much it hurts.
I guess I don’t really have much advice for how to deal with the pain. But it has been helpful for me to read your and other's posts on here. Thank you.
2021-05-29T18:42:43.861080Z
Life after an internet mob attack
I've learned a lot about the internet by reading the history of the wild west. The open frontier where the only rule was what you could do with your own hands. Then comes the frontier towns where the ability to enforce law was difficult at best. When justice feels far away, often we rely on mobs to fill that gap.
This used to happen on a community scale...people would get run out of town. More or less, that's still what's happening, except the city limits are more conceptual. This is what it looks like when the justice system doesn't keep up with society.
2021-05-27T03:05:52.671657Z
Life after an internet mob attack
+1. I did exactly this a few years back when I saw a prominent member of the Nodejs community get savaged for linking to an article (exploring the idea that campus speech codes might adversely impact autistic people). I thought "if they can (nearly) take down this guy (a Nodejs technical steering committee member) for linking to a blog post, what are they going to do to me, Joe Nobody?" I was primarily a consultant at the time and relied on being invited to conferences to give talks & trainings in order to drum up new consulting work. Reputational damage would have been devastating to my income as a freelancer.
So participating "in the public sphere" was just not worth the risk. I had no idea what view I express today might in the future be deemed unacceptable. Even just being visible on there makes you more of a target–it's harder to have a pile-on on, say, someone's blog.
I miss twitter and facebook at times (quit facebook for different reasons), but overall it's a huge relief to not be contributing to those ecosystems.
2021-05-27T00:14:45.808924Z
Life after an internet mob attack
When these attacks take on a racial or gender-focused hue, I think they end up having a terribly ironic effect: further isolating the group they sought to protect (e.g., POC, women, etc). That is, they win the battle, but lose the war. Each of these stories reinforces in my mind to not associate with those that are higher on the oppression totem pole. I know it is not their fault, and I feel bad for doing so, but the risk/reward simply does not make sense. It helps that I'm a loner anyway.
See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918][1] for the effect I'm speaking of. People will continue to distance themselves as (primarily American) society continues to be a flashpoint and Twitter a flashmob.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918
2021-05-26T21:35:19.891589Z
Status Anxiety as a Service
> Twitter creates the instantaneous illusion of social equality between influencers and normal people, but then it periodically reminds you that it’s an illusion.
I noticed a kind of "illusion of community" on Reddit.
E.g., you arrive late to a sub where, say, a female poster complained about her boyfriend. Skimming the comments you see a fairly wholesome thread. Thoughtful comments, innocuous thread-game digressions, good faith advice and disagreements, etc. You even see the OP responding to these and it all seems like an obviously valuable conversation.
Then you start unfolding some of the lower-scored comments. You find trolling, misogynistic statements, nasty insults, bad faith questions that turn into abuse. Worse-- you find OP had the bad fortune of interacting with many of these low quality posters before the mods and participants cleaned up the overallcontent by hiding them.
If you skim the top subs of Reddit, you're almost always following this pattern of reading the moderated content of a thread that originally had a much higher percent of visible abusive content. It seems like the digital equivalent of enjoying watching an organized sport, then joining the team and getting hazed in the lockeroom.
2021-05-24T13:30:20.968116Z
TikTok Remix Culture
I have never seen so many to say "average" people on tiktok like on any other social platform, in a sense that I can relate to those people and don't feel like a celebrity is trying to feed me some content down my throat. There's so much of normalization of everything that I'm blown away by how normal Tiktok is, you can see teenagers struggling in a school, you can see people hating their 9-5 jobs, you can see crafts and arts, you can see people with disabilities living life at its fullest, cooking videos, etc.
The whole vibe is so wholesome that it's truly the first social network that feels social in a wide sense.
2021-05-15T11:17:04.676440Z
Ask HN: Does anyone else find the AWS Lambda developer experience frustrating?
You've discovered what many other people have: The cloud is the new time-share mainframe.
Programming in the 1960s to 80s was like this too. You'd develop some program in isolation, unable to properly run it. You "submit" it to the system, and it would be scheduled to run along with other workloads. You'd get a printout of the results back hours later, or even tomorrow. Rinse and repeat.
This work loop is incredibly inefficient, and was replaced by development that happened entirely locally on a workstation. This dramatically tightened the edit-compile-debug loop, down to seconds or at most minutes. Productivity skyrocketed, and most enterprises shifted the majority of their workload away from mainframes.
Now, in the 2020s, mainframes are back! They're just called "the cloud" now, but not much of their essential nature has changed other than the vendor name.
The cloud, just like mainframes:
- Does not provide all-local workstations. The only full-fidelity platform is the shared server.
- Is closed source. Only Amazon provides AWS. Only Microsoft provides Azure. Only Google provides GCP. You can't peer into their source code, it is all proprietary and even secret.
- Has a poor debugging experience. Shared platforms can't generally allow "invasive" debugging for security reasons. Their sheer size and complexity will mean that your visibility will always be limited. You'll never been able to get a stack trace that crosses into the internal calls of the platform services like S3 or Lambda. Contrast this with typical debugging where you can even trace into the OS kernel if you so choose.
- Are generally based on the "print the logs out" feedback mechanism, with all the usual issues of mainframes such as hours-long delays.
2021-04-19T03:49:01.805302Z
Bernie Madoff has died
Here's the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time.
Fines are just the cost of doing business.
There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should've.
2021-04-15T03:13:43.830002Z
“It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”
Twitter rewards being a dickhead. It was fun when everyone was allowed to be a dickhead, but now there's a protected class that cannot be criticised and freely sends death threats and the like to whatever bad guy they think they have that day.
This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet
2021-04-14T11:40:02.199087Z
Is content moderation a dead end?
It's hard to separate content moderation from the problem of Evil. Low entropy evil is easy to automate out, high entropy and sophisticated evil can convince you it doesn't exist.
This is also the basic problem of growing communities, where you want to attract new people while still providing value to your core group, while still managing both attrition and predators. What content moderation problems have proven is that even with absolute omniscient control of an electronic platform, this is still Hard. It's also yields some information about what Evil is, which is that it seems to emerge as a consequence of incentives more than anything else.
In the hundreds of forums I've used over decades, the best ones were moderated by starting with a high'ish bar to entry. You have to be able t