HN user
If you want to work through SICP, you can use MIT Scheme, but another option is to use Racket or DrRacket, with this add-on package: https://docs.racket-lang.org/sicp-manual/
If you want a non-corporate alternative to Goodreads, there's a Fediverse one, BookWyrm: https://bookwyrm.social/
(I don't know how many people are using BookWyrm, but Goodreads itself seems half-abandoned. Maybe most of the publisher attention is on TikTok influencing now?)
OfficeCLI is the first and best Office suite purpose-built for AI agents to read, edit, and automate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Free, open-source, single binary, no Office installation required.
1. Calling Microsoft Office simply "Office" without qualification treats it like a trademark, rather than a generic term that was in use for this class of product before MS appropriated it.
2. If you're going to treat it like a trademark, don't violate it in the same sentence.
The US should just find a way to quietly share literature access with the Russians, rather than letting piracy be promoted and facilitated for US consumers as freedom-fighter "archiving".
Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.
We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.
What was the root cause of that? (Company consciously prioritized other things than those logistics optimizations? Individual incentives lead to management behavior that was against company's intent? Bad hiring and retention practices for upper management or whomever was informing them?)
Slop that wasted my time. Flagged.
What's at 12,000 meters deep? What are they afraid of?
One of the better-written ones I've seen. Am sending it around to some professors.
Unrealistic.
There's no way a contemporary tech founder would offer 5% of the company to an engineer that late in the game. It would be 0.5%, and it would be ISOs at worthless pricing.
Also, for all the founder's Leadership contribution that warranted owning more than half the company, apparently they didn't know that those VCs could pressure/pay all their other companies to buy ovens. And then you simply ride that growth signal to a successful exit. Building and sustaining a viable business is a problem for seasoned professional managers, not brilliant innovators.
I thought the Guardian might decide not to show a photo of a corpse of someone probably with living friends and close relatives.
Nope, they do it too, like the Daily Mail, but with a big yellow GUI control to reveal it, like a weird macabre vintage "multimedia".
Use the slider below to show a picture of the body of the climber known as Green Boots where it lies on Mount Everest. Some readers may find the image distressing
Just because the photo has been shown before doesn't mean it needs to be shown now, especially now that it's been identified, in in this context.
Is this a place Sony could differentiate from other platforms?
Contractually require (and technologically support) that the servers are kept running for n years after the last sale, for example?
This is a weird marketing strategy. They must feel free to do as they please since they know consumers are trapped.
I've been on PlayStation family since PS2, and used to think I was married to it, with my game library and my player character stuff/gear/creations in various games.
But the platform no longer lets me play many of those games, anyway, whether due to console gen or server shutdowns. And nobody cares about my PlayStation gamer score or trophies. So there's little tying me to the platform for the next game I buy.
Sony, please don't make me move to "Linux" gaming, via Valve/GOG/Epic (since I don't want to endorse Microsoft hegemony over the low-level gaming "standard"). PlayStation should be a beloved brand and platform that can be trusted to keep games working -- not one that throws away history, nostalgia, and community. You already impose rules on publishers, so this is within your power.
Related: Project Aces, I was fairly highly ranked in a couple of the Ace Combat installments, but when you shut down the servers, you took away what I'd invested in. I reluctantly bought AC7, but found I didn't have the heart to invest in it, just to have it taken away again, and I won't be buying AC8 nor anything else in the franchise.
IKEA CORRAS FTW. https://www.neilvandyke.org/machine-learning/super-in-ikea-c...
That might be responding too narrowly to this objection.
Then there's the question of singling out some subset of Debian users based on their country, for different behavior they presumably don't want and that is against their individual interests (see the other comment, about displaying a flag getting you beaten).
The solution is to treat everyone fairly and honestly, and to set an example for how people can get along. Imagine Debian is an international space station: the astronauts will help each other, not bicker and backstab. There are other venues for conflicts.
I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and the desire to demonstrate or speak out, but I don't see how this instance is very effective, and doing it has a significant cost to the integrity of Debian, as this argument says:
Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG ""turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue"". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:
> I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.
Regarding "old beliefs", a distinction I'd like to make...
My anecdotal impression is that early Internet overall was, on average, more enlightened and amiable than Internet today.
Our earlier experience: Nobody knows you're a dog, people are excited about the possibilities, people are open to meeting others around the world, people see others sharing just to share, people haven't been conditioned to intolerant extremism by a couple decades of propaganda, etc.
Today we'll meet intolerance and meanness in many places, and we might want to call that "old beliefs" in that they are outmoded, and want to think that the latest generation will be smarter and OK. But it's certainly not just older people being hostile. And some groups of older people (e.g., much of early Internet) already did it better in many ways, before society backslided. When kids are trying to repair society, they can find allies in older people too.
A lot of the group was great, but some friends I invited to the challenge had a bad time in the irc with transphobes and we all dropped out.
That sucks, and the channel or network should do something about it.
IRC is how I was friends with many trans people, before we knew the word trans.
It makes sense: it was much easier to pass online. So you could just hang out and talk about programming or whatever, and no one cared what plumbing you were born with.
Of course, there were always some people being antisocial on IRC, and that's why there were channel ops, war scripts, and IRCops.
I think I recall one or two occasions when someone attacked a channel I was on, and then later came back and reconciled. There should be more of the learning to play nice with others, but less toxic to start with.
I'm saddened and concerned by these allegations of a deficit of integrity.
I was very fortunate to attend Brown University for grad school, and consider it a great place.
Why would many people who were also fortunate to attend there not honor that opportunity?
The police where I live are generally good, and I imagine that's the case many places. Treating police as the enemy, or a punching bag, is unfair and counterproductive.
(I can't speak to any places that might have a lot of corruption or ill intent.)
Places that aren't too corrupt, you'd be better off encouraging a partnership among citizens, police, lawmakers, and other officials. Which is how it's supposed to be. Everyone in the government has their respective duties, and they operate within a framework that's ultimately decided by the people.
If, for example, police propose certain surveillance, to help keep everyone safe, within their scope, then sometimes someone with different or larger scope might need to say, yes, but there's also these other considerations. Eventually a decision is made by the public or their elected representatives, and everyone nods with respect, and aligns, and continues their respective duties within the frameworks.
This could be a starting point for consulting a different human expert for a second opinion (e.g., specific questions to ask about), but I wouldn't put much trust in Claude alone on this.
IME, on an almost daily basis, claude.ai and Claude Code are confidently wrong about something, and use polished language to assert nonsense.[*]
If it's doing that on something easy, like factual knowledge available in text on the Internet, or programming code that can be inspected easily and follows well-known rules, and I can tell, because I understand those things... then there's no way I'm going to assume that Claude doesn't also BS when it comes to someone else's field. Especially not a field that requires some of the smartest people to go a decade of training, just to get started in the field.
[*] And if I confront Claude with its mistakes, eventually it apologizes, and acts as if it's learned something, again mimicking word patterns it's heard real people use and mean, without meaning any of it. I wonder whether the AI user experience would be better, if LLM-ish interfaces weren't implicitly created in the image of fake-it-till-you-make-it overconfident performative sociopathic techbros.
Yeah, and if you're early, like a few-person startup, you hopefully have someone who can do ops things as needed.
When I was the one-person eng and ops departments for a few-person seed-stage startup, which already had a major customer in critical production... even when we bought SaaSes (e.g., GitLab), I still needed to spend significant time on the recurring manual steps of backup processes for everywhere we put data we couldn't afford to lose, even after I'd spent time to automate everything that was worthwhile to automate.
For my last side-startup, I just self-hosted Forgejo myself (Git, Issues & Boards, Wiki), and it's less work than when I was doing the same with paid GitLab SaaS.
It depends on the case-by-case circumstances, but sometimes self-hosting an open source package, on your laptop, random PC in the corner, or your existing AWS account, takes less of your valuable time than a paid SaaS does.
Codeberg runs open source Forgejo, and you could on-prem that too (for no license cost), if it suits your needs.
GitLab is more powerful in some ways, but early startups might want to look at Forgejo first.
The article's theory is similar:
But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because: [...] c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.
Different people need different messages around this.
For years, I read many online newspapers a day, as well as journalism trade publications. I also did a little low-key activism, during an earlier tech industry gold rush, when caring was less fashionable.
Today, I read almost zero news, and have set up filters on social media to block most references to the awful.
I have a pretty good idea about some very bad dynamics going on, but I can't do anything about them.
Were I to dwell on the very bad news, throughout each day, I wouldn't be able to do any small bits of good. Such as by contributing to a non-evil startup. Or trying to get sufficient resources that I can afford to share more.
Some people need to be told to take a step back, before they're destroyed by empathy and futile problem-solving. Other people need to be told to care more, or to be less self-centered. Other people need to be told not to be so incredibly awful, that they are ruining everything for everyone else.
I decided I'm in the first group, and hope to shift into an overly-comfortable second group, then fine-tune to somewhere between the two.
KeePassXC might do what someone needs, and I really appreciate the work of its developers, but when advocating KeePassXC, I should also acknowledge that the "UX" is rough in parts:
1. It has lots of features and complexity, but doesn't always convey affordances for common use cases to the user.
2. Some of the UI design feels very incrementally developed (naturally), and the implementation a bit quirky in parts.
(For one of many examples, when I had to do something involving adding TOTP secrets, once I found where to add them, I had to be careful in which sequence I clicked things, or it would just discard the secret I already put in the right place. If I hadn't been watching carefully, I might not have noticed immediately that it did this, and not been able to restore the secret before it was lost.)
Of course, in an ideal world, one would like to do a great holistic rethinking of the UI design (while preserving the data model), but that's a ton of work.
When advocating it to a "technical" person (who is not scared of, say, a legacy IDE), I would say it might do everything they need. When advocating to an ordinary user, I would look at their use cases, and see what they are going to see, and how confusing or quirky that might be for them.
I intended for the entire sentence to be in terms of the thinking of top leadership.
And to gloss over how that improvement would actually happen. (Not knowing what they've currently done and want to do, but for example, guessing: probably in partnership with vendors, consultants, etc., iterative and experimental process and tools improvements, and involving a variety of approaches and refinements.)
Pre-AI version: Oops, you laid off the higher-salaried people without having them train their replacements, so bring them back, long enough to do that.
Now, that training[*] will be for both AI models and lower-salaried hires.
Perhaps a second mistake by those who thought they didn't need their most experienced people: Now they think they just need to train the AI better, and then new-grad "AI native" hires will be the most cost-effective way to operate/oversee the AI and do whatever it can't.
[*] edit: originally typed "replacement" when I meant to type "training"
That sounds like a brilliant idea.
I wonder whether they already thought of that, and are exempting from monitoring the roles most likely to generate "smoking gun" evidence.
[...] you get a degree of viciousness, competitiveness, and steel-eyed execution
I think there's a lot of truth to that. (Aside: Many manage without the viciousness part. It's not their fault their parents lined them up with an internship and a research paper co-author in high school, and they're not jerks about it.)
Though the current generation of students didn't invent hyper-competitive. Before software engineering jobs (and startups) were high-income and high-status, you'd see that mentality among many people on track for Wall Street, for example.
Another example: Before CS was a go-to for the hyper-competitive, a mentor of mine actually switched from pre-med to CS, at an Ivy, because a percentage of pre-med students were outright sabotaging other students, and it turned him off of the field.
that a lot of older Americans just aren't used to.
Though, there have been -- and hopefully will remain to be -- people doing it for the love of the field, who are not impressed.
Other than the genuine people being crowded out of admissions slots and fratbro interviews by Wall Street types...
If a Palo Alto helicopter-parented overachiever McDojo black belt tries to pick a fight... with a humble rope-belted person in Asia, who's studied martial arts for the love of it... the latter will chuckle good-naturedly, and help the Californian up off the ground.