MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quicklime | 2025-06-24 03:11:05+00:00
From the article:

> SOC 2 is a security and compliance framework created by the AICPA

How is it that a group of accountants (the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) was able to create a security framework for software, and position themselves as the sole gatekeeper who decides which auditors are allowed to certify SaaS vendors?

I’m surprised that companies would look to accountants, rather than people from the tech industry, to tell them whether a vendor has good IT security practices.

Yet the whole tech industry seems to be on board with this, even Google, Microsoft, etc. How did this come to be?
by stephen_g | 2025-06-24 03:11:53+00:00
Also time to market - I have a friend who worked for Alcatel Lucent and they would use FPGAs while Nokia would use ASICs, they saw it as a big advantage since if there was a problem in part of the ASIC, or if you needed new features that were outside the original scope, the time and cost to respin was massive over fixing problems or implementing new standards in the FPGA bitstream!

Eventually Nokia ended up buying Alcatel Lucent and not too long after he left, not sure what their current strategy is.
by bitwize | 2025-06-24 03:12:52+00:00
It turns out that you can induce pluripotency with all four Yamanaka factors, but there's a significant risk of the pluripotent cells turning into cancer.

But by using only three of the four factors, you can still induce pluripotency, but with much lower cancer risk.

I think that cloning individual organs is much more promising than cloning entire bodies and then harvesting. Much less work, you don't have an entire body you need to either upkeep or dispose of.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-24 03:13:45+00:00
> Mainstream companies have tried offering the headphone jack in some phones and every single time, those phone have undersold their jackless competitors.

What, when?

I hope you don't mean when the flagship phone has no headphone jack, and a mid tier phone does. It's not the choice between the headphone jack and 3% more battery making the decision in that situation.
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-24 03:13:56+00:00
That’s not how BNPL works in its modern form with the third party companies. You pay late fees if you pay late. If you have a 3 month plan, they divide the payment into three equal installments and you pay it off.

The parent poster is confusing BNPL with cobranded cards like Room 2 Go credit cards that have special promotions with “0% for x months”. It’s a regular credit card where the minimum payment won’t guarantee that you pay the original amount off in “x” months, but you only have to pay 2% of the balance. These have always shown up on your credit report.

They are “deferred interest” plans where if you don’t pay the balance off in $x months it will charge you back interest.
by RangerScience | 2025-06-24 03:14:12+00:00
I think your question is well-asked, and I lament any work environments that have led you to think asking a question like this would be A Problem(tm).

IMO - there’s a lot of things that queues are an excellent answer to. Potentially including performance.

But - queues (generally and among other things) solve the problem of “this will take some time AND the user doesn’t need an immediate response.”

If that’s not your problem, then using queues might not be the solution. If it’s something that’s taking too long and the user DOES need a response, then (as you say) optimizing is what you should try, not queues. Or some product redesign so the user either doesn’t need an immediate response. Or finding a way to split up the part producing an immediate response and the part that takes awhile.

For example: validating uploaded bulk data is in the right “shape”, and then enqueuing the full validation and insertion.

Also really really avoid jobs that enqueue jobs. Sometimes they’re necessary (spacing out some operation on chunks of a group; or a job that ONLY spawns other jobs) but mostly they’re a route to spaghetti.
by paxys | 2025-06-24 03:14:52+00:00
People would go watch original movies in theaters every weekend when tickets were $6 a pop. Now a night at the movies for a family can run into the hundreds of dollars. The cost of a disappointing showing is simply too high. The audience will only pay for Fast & Furious part 27 and Toy Story 16, and so that's what we are stuck with.
by lmm | 2025-06-24 03:16:22+00:00
> You can swap out uv for any other project management tool or build frontend and change nothing needs to change about the development environment.

> This is the entire purpose of the standards.

That seems to amount to saying that the purpose of the standards is to prevent progress and ensure that the mistakes of early Python project management tools are preserved forever. (Which would explain some things about the last ~25 years of Python project management I guess). The parts of uv that follow standards aren't the parts that people are excited about.
by II2II | 2025-06-24 03:16:42+00:00
While it's true that none of that prevents computers from replacing typewriters, it becomes more difficult to convince people that computers are better than typewriters.

Put another way, I grew up with those 8-bit machines. I preferred using those 8-bit machines for writing since it was easier to edit documents, which was important because I was young and learning to type (along with learning spelling, grammar, etc.). Using a typewriter wouldn't so much be an exercise in frustration as it would be one of mental anguish. On top of that, I wouldn't have the expectation of screen text mapping reasonably well to the printed page.

On the other hand, people who had experience with typewriters (or even 80-column terminals) would have that expectation. And they would be bumping into that mismatch whenever they were dealing with indenting or centering or lists or any number of other layout options. They would also be more accustomed to the writing/editing process with a typewriter, so they would be less inclined to view it as problematic. The flip side is that they would be unaccustomed to the writing/editing process on a computer, so they would be more inclined to view those quirks as problematic. On top of that, the process of using a word processor would be completely different from using a typewriter. Think of over-typing: (fake) bold, underlining, and so on. It is less labor intensive to do on a computer, but the average secretary would have trouble seeing that when they have to navigate the then cryptic user interfaces of software.

Proving that something is possible probably wasn't the issue here. Proving that something is better, which isn't hard to do even considering the primitive word processing software for the Apple II of that era, isn't the issue here. Dealing with the expectations of people is.
by stephen_g | 2025-06-24 03:17:00+00:00
I mean, it's not like people producing products with those parts actually pay that for production though, except for some really tiny volume ones (such as some defence projects).

Companies make products based around FPGAs and can sell the whole thing for less than you could buy just the single FPGA part for on a place like Digi-key. It's just part of the FPGA companies' business models. In volume the price will be far smaller.
by blharr | 2025-06-24 03:18:47+00:00
For the first interview that you get an offer, what exactly do you tell them to keep them from moving on to someone else?

Most don't extend employment offers out for months in my experience, or at least they really try to get you to agree off the bat. I imagine someone job searching is getting an interview once a week or so. Several times, I've had delays of weeks to months after just submitting an application to get the interview. So how do you just have multiple offers to juggle at any one time?
by caseysoftware | 2025-06-24 03:20:33+00:00
Admittedly, I'd never heard of the CSB until this article but their mission - from their "About Us" page - seems important:

"The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating chemical incidents to determine the cause or probable cause."

Out of curiosity, I looked up the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in 2023 and can't find their investigation on their site in either the active or completed investigation sections. Looking elsewhere, I'm only finding FEMA's concerns about cancer clusters, nothing from the CSB. Can anyone else find it?
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-06-24 03:21:24+00:00
Good point! I should have been the first to point out that battery tech has different rules in Norway. That a wealthy population half that of New Jersey is a good sample. And that any push for EVs in there reflect only realities of the product’s durability and nothing else like marketing or a shallow veneer of concern for “the environment” while they literally survive on oil. I can believe I didn’t think to use “the highest adaptation of EVs” as good metric.

>I have an EV in Minnesota and it's great.

Today. I’m sure it is. That “big hit” you take in the winter, will only ever get worse. Eh, but maybe I’m wrong! Maybe I should change jobs.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-06-24 03:22:25+00:00
Yes, doesn’t quite help current owners though does it?

They will be good. They aren’t now. The entire market is cooling before it turns in to backlash.

>I'd be assuming the car manufacturing industry in the USA is fucked

Ha, well, I guess the most comforting thing I can tell you is that it’s OK you don’t know anything about how cars are actually made. It took Tesla a decade of building them and they still haven’t entire figured it out. No, automotive industry isn’t going anywhere. It’s got its own ups and downs and quirks, but overall we’ll be selling cars in 2050 no question.
by maxglute | 2025-06-24 03:22:27+00:00
1. PRC urbanization still has long way to go, rate slowed to ~0.8-1% per year, that's still 10-14 million per year. Current urbanization is ~65%, goal is 70% by 2030s, but "urbanized" by east asian standards like SKR, JP is ~90%. So still looking at 200-300m to urbanize (factoring in population decline to 1300m) by 2050s. Depends on hukou reforms and rural policies, a lot of rural old don't want to move, but if they want to age with modern amenities/services, they will probably have to.

Current excess PRC square footage in housing inventory is enough for 100-150m people. About 10 years of urbanization headroom. This is without accounting for replacing deprecated housing stock. Reality of speculation and (mis)allocation of "ghost" developments is messy, but over next 25 years, PRC is still ~100m short on urban housing, they just also have a very wasteful 100-150m decade long housing runway that needs to be unwound in mean time.

2. It's product of PRC land finance system, local govs revenue cash cow is to raise money by developing land / RE. System got gamed/speculated to hell. 3RL finally starved process, shock left a lot of financing drama on existing projects. System slowly figuring out how to restart/finish, remember a lot of these are presales... people are waiting on their units. But the TLDR is PRC / CCP haven't figured out politically palatable way of introducing property taxes which would go a long way to replace inefficient/speculative land finance model.
by jez | 2025-06-24 03:22:42+00:00
This is cool, I learned about `:cb` today (populate quickfix from current buffer)

I find that if I’m already piping into a buffer, I just leave it as a buffer. Vim’s gf and gf keybindings let me jump to the filename under the cursor, and it being a buffer makes it easier for me to edit (reorganize, group, further filter, etc).

I do think people undervalue the quickfix buffer though!
by tptacek | 2025-06-24 03:23:29+00:00
It's an audit standard about security. It's not a security standard. It defines a small number of extremely broad goals, like "you do risk management" and "you have access control mechanisms", which might be IT tools or might be a tabletop RPG.

You're irritated that people keep describing it at a security standard, which is understandable, but it isn't. AICPA auditors run SOC2 audits because SOC2 is an audit; it's about reconciling paperwork and evidence, about digesting policies and then checking that you actually do anything in those policies.

If you want to know about a firm's actual security program, you'll need to ask deeper questions than SOC2 can answer.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-24 03:23:35+00:00
Not a real answer, but I think a local LLM is going to be the way to go. I've been playing with them for some time now — and, yeah, they're still not there with the save context, hardware requirements needed for a really good model... But I suspect like anything else in tech, a year or two from now a decent local LLM will not be such a stretch.

I can't wait actually. It's less about privacy to me than to being offline.
by marc_abonce | 2025-06-24 03:26:23+00:00
> A Collection of Unusual Pedantry [...] ACoUP

Tangential comment but only after reading your post I realised that acoup is an acronym for the blog's full name. All this time I thought it was "a coup" (like a coup d'état) and that "A Collection of Unusual Pedantry" was the blog's tagline.
by mikem170 | 2025-06-24 03:26:44+00:00
Reagan cut regulation, and manufacturing still left, quick as ever.

I assume that is due to larger trends. Population growth has slowed considerably and there's more competition than ever. Worldwide fertility rates have dropped from 4.7 to 2.3 in the last 75 years, and in that time the U.S. share of world GDP dropped from about 50% to 25%.

My two cents: We may be already be in uncharted economic territory with regards to shrinking workforces, retirees, pollution, etc. How much of our economy is dependent on growth? We may find out. Places like Japan, Korea and Europe are leading the way. Ponzi schemes won't work forever. The world is getting smaller and older. And evening out. There's less room for arbitrage. Innovation is coming from all directions. Technology can still increase productivity. But it could also put masses of people out of work, leaving not enough demand for the latest and greatest. That, and a pie that is no longer growing, could cause a lot of social friction.
by ryukoposting | 2025-06-24 03:27:41+00:00
There's a guy I see at my local coffee shop who uses a word processor. Based on what I found on eBay, I think it might be an AlphaSmart. If so, it would have run him about $75. I thought about getting a similar device, as I also write a lot, but settled on a $90 used laptop instead.

Not seeing the case for spending $175 and only getting half a word processor. If portability was the goal, an external keyboard goes against that. If the goal was better ergonomics, the screen wouldn't be the size and shape of a table tent. So... why?
by kamaal | 2025-06-24 03:28:19+00:00
>>It's possible to give feedback without burning bridges.

Unless you are a coach, and your job is to give feedback. I would advice a) Don't give a feedback ever. b) If you are in a situation and had to give feedback, always say something positive.

Very few people are genuinely interested in improving and largely use feedback as a mechanism to see how people judge their work, and here a negative feedback is simply used to mark up people as enemies.

There are people who are exceptions to this, but this really is the rule.
by rapjr9 | 2025-06-24 03:28:35+00:00
Some grad students are finding a third path, remain a grad student. The pay is poor, but sometimes the work is interesting enough. After 8-10 years you've made enough contacts and gotten enough job interest that you have choices for doing something else. If you invent something truly new and useful that can lead to an income as well. It is quite obvious that getting a PhD is not a sustainable path to working as a professor once the number of PhD's exceeds the retirement rate of the profs.
by watersb | 2025-06-24 03:29:07+00:00
Could be a satellite that moved into the frame during green.

There was a livestream presentation and press conference up on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/live/Zv22_Amsreo?si=zQLeGfJokZoCPkji

At time 1:38:19 - one hour 38 minutes 19 seconds - into the livestream presentation, there's a slide that shows RGB streaks of fast-moving objects that were removed for the final image.

Those streaks are apparently asteroids.

Perhaps it is indeed a glitch or cosmic ray event.

(Is there a better URL for the slide deck?)
by ehnto | 2025-06-24 03:29:15+00:00
I understand that to be one of the differences in approach to zoning, zones and buildings are considered on a spectrum of "impact". A high impact building like an industrial plant shouldn't be too close to low impact buildings like a single dwelling. But because it's a spectrum you get a natural mix of low, medium, and high impact buildings. A large residential complex might be considered medium impact and so can go next to a shopping complex that is also medium to high impact etc.

I would imagine that a great deal of Tokyo's megalopolis fits nicely in the medium impact zone, allowing housing, small scale manufacturing and commerce to mingle in an organic way.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-06-24 03:29:26+00:00
You do not get a battery replaced anytime you want. If you think this is how it works, I suggest you read the fine print about normal wear and tear on “consumable parts”.

I’m sure some mfg was selling 10 year warranties on this gen 1.5 of EVs, and they will take a hit. Believe it or not though, the MBAs that pushed to market to bad fit consumers, yea, they know what they’re doing.
by somenameforme | 2025-06-24 03:29:37+00:00
That again requires assuming your own conclusion. Once again I have no way of knowing you are conscious. In order for any of this to not be nonsense I have to make a large number of assumptions including that you are conscious, that it is a physical process, that is an emergent process, and so on.

I am unwilling to accept any of the required assumptions because they are essentially based on faith.
by nickm12 | 2025-06-24 03:31:20+00:00
Being a Python superset and being fast are fundamentally in tension. It would be possible, maybe, to have a Python superset where you get the highest performance as long as you avoided the dynamic features of Python. However, I suspect it would make the user base grumpy to have a hidden performance cliff that suddenly showed up when you used dynamic features (or depended on code that did the same).
by maxdamantus | 2025-06-24 03:31:20+00:00
> Too expensive to scale, so you switch to ASIC ?

I think it's not so much about too expensive, but once you've got the resources it will always be better to switch to an ASIC.

Not a hardware engineer, but it seems obvious to me that any circuitry implemented using an FPGA will be physically bigger with more "wiring" (more resistance, more energy, more heat) than the equivalent ASIC, and accordingly the tolerances will need to be larger so clock speeds will be lower.

Basically, at scale an ASIC will always win out over an FPGA, unless your application is basically "give the user an FPGA" (but this is begging the question—unless your users are hardware engineers this can't be a goal).
by bigtunacan | 2025-06-24 03:31:38+00:00
We have 100s of queues processing millions of jobs in sidekiq queues at any given time.

These are data and compute heavy workloads that take anywhere from minutes to hours for a request to be completed, but the UI takes this into account.

Users submit a request and then continue onto whatever is the next thing they intend to do and then they can subscribe to various async notification channels.

It’s not the right choice for everything, but it’s the right choice for something’s.
by wenc | 2025-06-24 03:32:09+00:00
There are a bunch of distraction-free writing devices, from the BYOK to the Freewrite. They range for $100 - $500.

List here: https://kadavy.net/distraction-free-writing-devices/

To me, YAGNI.

Let me suggest two cheaper alternatives (battletested by me):

1. Fountain pen and a nice notebook with nice paper (Mnemosyne, or Rhodia)

2. A foldable Bluetooth butterfly keyboard ($43 on Amazon) paired to an old tablet (I have an old iPad Air 2) with Wifi turned off and no apps except a writing app. Google Docs works in offline mode! (this is what I use in cafes when I’m traveling). I recommend a Samsers keyboard. This is what I have:

https://a.co/d/3kIJZsv

I love good typography and I just can’t with these distraction free devices. The iPad Air 2 has a retina screen that displays beautiful typography.

Forget e-ink devices — they might sound like a good idea at first, but their refresh rate is slow enough to be annoying.

If you don’t need portability, an old DOS PC running Wordstar or WordPerfect is also distraction free. I used to write long articles for my school newsletter using nothing but Wordstar.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-24 03:33:09+00:00
See also: the exosphere. Helium and Hydrogen in Earth's atmosphere float up above the others and form a layer which hangs out around 1000 °C. Despite the high temperature, you'd probably get hypothermia if you stayed too long in the shade at that altitude (supposing the low pressure didn't get you first).

Temperature, it would seem, is an idea that would only have developed at the bottom of a gravity well.
by lmm | 2025-06-24 03:34:14+00:00
> That's the first I've heard of it. Everyone else is saying it covers everyone in the USA, including the courts who ruled that kicking people out for blogging was unconstitutional and ordering the release of the people the US government had arrested

People care about constitutional rights when it suits their politics, but unreasonable searches at the border have been standard for decades, under multiple administrations from both parties.

> Please, imagine it is your own head that is the target of, in your own words, "the goon squad to crack heads".

> What's happening today in the USA can happen anywhere, including where you live.

As an immigrant I don't have any rights, I can't even vote. Like it or not, that's part of the tradeoff.

But being realistic, I feel a lot safer, in part because Japan has quite strict immigration enforcement. It doesn't (yet, touch wood) have the US' dramatic polarisation and two-party split; rather there is a strong social consensus and a strong rule of law. And having seen how much crime and antisocial behaviour many of my fellow immigrants are responsible for, I'd far rather have that than the alternative. Yes, I don't want to be on the end of the riot squad getting sent in. But I think the best way to avoid that is to not get to the state of affairs where it makes sense to send in the riot squad.
by alexjplant | 2025-06-24 03:34:25+00:00
When I worked someplace undergoing a SOC2 audit I had to periodically jump into calls with our auditor and security architect to answer all sorts of highly-specific questions about how we deployed our software and the infrastructure that it ran on. At one point, for instance, the auditor told me that they needed me to demonstrate that our servers were all configured to synchronize their clocks to an NTP server. Kubernetes was a foreign concept to them and pointing to GKE docs wasn't sufficient - if memory serves I had to MacGyver some evidence together by hacking a worker node to be able to get a terminal on it and demonstrate that, yes, Google's managed VMs indeed run chronyd.

This seems to be the opposite of

> It's not a security standard. It defines a small number of extremely broad goals

Is this because of the specific auditors we were using? Are some more sympathetic than others to contemporary engineering practices?
by codeful | 2025-06-24 03:35:33+00:00
A good article; it resonated with my current situation.

I'd like to share an insight from a workplace where I've been for 10 years and have had 6 different managers and various teams.

When you start working with a new manager or team, hold back on excessive commitment and trust until the first serious crisis arises within the team or department. This usually happens within a few months. It's in serious situations that people's true capabilities are revealed when they're needed most.