skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey everyone, my name is Tom, and I'm excited to be launching Diahook on HN!

Diahook makes it easy for developers to send webhooks. Developers make one API call and we take care of deliverability, retries, and offer a great developer experience for their users. Essentially, we make it possible for everyone to offer a Stripe-like webhooks experience.

At my previous company, our users were constantly asking us for webhooks, both for consuming in their own services and for integrations with no-code solutions like Zapier. However, we kept on deferring building them because we weren't willing to commit the engineering time, resources and ongoing maintenance required of a webhook delivery system.

There are a variety of challenges when it comes to sending webhooks. For example customer endpoints fail or hang much more often than you would think, so you need to implement retries, but also make sure that such failures don't slow down or block your send queue or the rest of your system. Additionally, because of how webhooks work, anyone can send fake webhooks to your customers, so you need to make sure to cryptographically sign the payload, and make it easy for your users to verify it. You also want to avoid overloading your users' endpoints, so you want to automatically rate-limit webhook sending, as well as disabling failing ones, and notifying your users when you do.

I love webhooks, and I think everyone should be offering them! Our goal with Diahook is to make it faster for developers to add webhooks to their service, take care of the above challenges (and more), relieve them of having to worry about maintenance and scaling, and offer their users a UI for inspecting, debugging and replaying of past webhooks out of the box.

I'd love to hear about your experience building (or using) webhooks systems. What's a must have? Any war stories to share? Got any questions? Suggestions? Please let me know!

Docs: https://www.diahook.com/docs/

API viewer (and OpenAPI specs): https://api.diahook.com/docs/
Sites that use the prefers-color-scheme media query honor the OS setting on iOS, but it obviously doesn't work on sites that haven't implemented it - Dark reader[0] takes a invert-colors approach and makes it a little easier on the eyes.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
Pyramid schemes, MLMs, and even Ponzi schemes are very popular in developing countries. Strangely, participants seem to pile in despite knowing up front that they’re joining a scam.

I think people have recognized that MLMs, pyramid schemes, and Ponzi schemes are lucrative for early adopters and those at the top. Instead of avoiding the scheme altogether, they’re racing to cash in early before it collapses. It’s a gamble that they’ll be on the right side of the trade before it runs out of steam. The power of “but what if it works...”

Some of the more blatant Ponzi schemes operate in the open for years in developing countries. There can even be public outrage when governments try to intervene because so much of the population is invested in these schemes in one way or another. A good example is MMM global: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMM_Global
It's not the trading that's a pyramid scheme, it's the multi-level selling of "training" on how to trade.
I think we're talking past each other. I'm not referring to a percentage of time being consumed by meetings and such; I'm referring to how frequently I'm asked to multitask because several urgent projects are going on at once. New priorities are added unpredictability, and sometimes I'm asked to clear all other work off my plate to fight some fire.

Of course that's a sign of trouble, but it's natural for the stage this company is at. (Note: different company than the one that did the lognormal study I mentioned a few posts ago, and a different role for myself, much more directly exposed to customer issues).

In an environment like that, calendar estimates are completely nonsense because the priority list itself is volatile on the timescale of the estimate. But work estimates can still be stable; I can still accurately report that I have eight hours of work left on issue A, and when I provide that estimate along with work estimates on issues B and C which are also assigned as "top" priorities, management can use that to decide whether I'll finish issue this week or not.

If you're sufficiently informed to know what your priorities will be on the timescale of an estimate, you can make reliable calendar estimates.
as if a spaceship launching anywhere would change anything
I had never heard of bog oak before, but this material is absolutely stunning. I really wish there was more appreciation of proper heirloom-quality furniture and things in general. I think it's part of making living more ecological, and it's a form of generational wealth. Unfortunately we live in an era of cheapest possible items, and disposal of things when they go out of style. Something like this never goes out of style.
Macabre Mystery of a British Family’s Skull-Topped Spoons
I went to check[0] who was the maintainer for uutils-coreutils on Nixpkgs, and realized it was me! Thanks for the reminder, will push a PR update.

[0] https://repology.org/project/uutils-coreutils/versions
Bit of an unbalanced article.

Whenever politicians, especially "controversial" ones say or do something, news articles happily provide "context" in the form of other things they've said or done that might anchor your perception of this latest thing.

Here, the anchoring wrt Timnit Gebru goes so far as:

Dr Gebru, whose firing led to an international wave of criticism of Google and widespread support from her colleagues

So, only criticism of her firing then?

Yet I recall a post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386

Google doesn't consider that they fired her; She posted an ultimatum and they accepted it as a resignation.

It's also not clear if 'encouraged to make use of "therapy resources"' is the same as medical leave, which is what the article purports to be about.
I don't recall getting a discount for self-checkout.
Counter argument, don't deploy your code on other people's hosts.
"Even when they don’t get a result they expect, they might find it lovely anyways and just go with it."

That happens to me in game design, too ... and other areas of computer art, or just UI.

But yeah, not what you can do while implementing buisness logic.
I think the key is how much the "expected" recipes can be stretched while the food can still be called <whatever> i.e. how many additives & preservatives you can mix in and still call it a sausage.
wow... really ?
Follow and Reply Received are the only two social features I would like to see officially implemented.
Does this mean we will no longer have pedants going around telling everyone to say "GEE-EN-YOU-SLASH-Linux" ?
Sure, on the front PASSENGER seat and not permanently. Screwing around with software control etc. of airbags and other security features is (I hope) very much illegal and a reason for taking away the operating license of that particular car.
This is exactly right.

A team that crams agile sprints with tons of "tickets", makes features that aren't fully thought out (necessitating more "tickets" to fix them), and has steady influx of general bugs cropping up is perceived to work super hard. People like to see noses to the grindstone and people stressed out.

The team that works carefully and deliberately, does things well the first time, and seems to be moving at a relaxed pace is perceived to be lazy and inefficient. People are offended by this. This hit me hard the first time I was a project lead -- the customer was delighted, the product was steady and reliable, but my staff were super uncomfortable and insecure -- because the project was successful and they did their job well and like professionals, they realized that they weren't super busy. And when they aren't super busy it means they may be on the chopping block - it was terribly depressing. No amount of reassurance that, well, this is what life is like when you're good at what you do really settled anyone.

So, consciously or not, we fill our time with "work theater". We work really hard to write new code that then requires more work to get right and to fix, and with a backlog of work, it looks like we're working really hard. Being always a little behind, we then make the case for more funding, more staff, more resources, etc etc etc... And the cycle continues.
Schiele was a really talented guy. If you aren't familiar with his name and work, you might know of him via The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Boy With Apple painting, which is stolen by Gustave H. and Zero, is replaced by a pseudo-Schiele painting. The whole film is filled with references to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and World War 1, even though it mostly presents itself as taking place before World War 2.

http://museumofperipheralart.blogspot.com/2014/07/boy-with-a...
ahm yep! I can't stop making the same mistake unfortunately, I have attributed this to the similarities with the worrying about my payload that I experience about the same sending 6 figures of hardware to a stranger as I have felt when I encountered clients using the mta service for contractual correspondence ...
From the same article:

Is there anything I can look for on the label that will lead me to a healthy sausage?

Implying sausages are not blanket "unhealthy", i.e #NotAllSausages
Quicksort is popular, and Quicksort bad inputs can happen in highly plausible specific cases (e.g. almost sorted input vs. pivot on first array element) and can be easily engineered whenever an attacker controls a large input to be sorted and can guess what sorting algorithm is being used. Probability of bad performance is only low on implausibly random input instances.
Thanks a lot, I just took a dive into it.

Edit: I really like the art, but not the format of the show.
Supermarkets, sure, but plenty of small businesses require one of the so-called contactless payment methods these days — a trend that started pre-corona. This means either a debit card or a smartphone with a virtual debit card on it. It is a point of concern that this excludes people without a bank account, but as this doesn't impact essential services it is tolerated. I don't think we have a law that mandates cash, but of course supermarkets would face criticism if they closed the last cash register (there is always one that accepts both kinds of payment).

These payment terminals and the Dutch debit cards are by now all suitable for this type of contactless payment: you either lay the card on top of the terminal or hover it there, or hold it near the side (depending on the model); it can be done completely without terminal and card touching, and of course only the card carrier touches the card (i.e., you don't hand it over as is sometimes done with credit cards).

Credit cards are rarely used for payments in shops here, and are often frowned upon by merchants (and often refused). It's all debit cards (either as a physical card or virtual in a smartphone) and some cash — although covid may well proof to put cash that much closer to the grave.
The stuff that makes this a pyramid scheme is all the stuff around the trading.

> influencers usually make their money by selling private courses

> are paid by brokers each time one of their followers opens an account

It doesn't matter what the product is when operating a pyramid scheme, so long as the rubes buy the idea that it could make money. The scam has nothing to do with Forex trading.
Wittgenstein’s Money
> Has it crossed my mind that I can replace my salary gambling? Yes

It also depends on what you mean by gambling.

Can you replace your salary playing poker? Maybe.

Can you replace your salary playing slots? No.
> these were popular in Eastern Europe

Aside from Albania & the 1997 unrest, where else had these issues?
Show HN: Finally Launched on Product Hunt (Social Media Management Solution)
I've always seen it like trying to measure the length of a coastline or any other fractal curve. The more you zoom in any particular task or part of the curve keeps revealing details previously unseen.
We must have been reading vastly different articles

> Business has been good. “I make over $30,000 annually from forex trading now,” he revealed — a tempting figure in a country where public servants are paid some $177 a month. His earnings come mostly from his own trading, with student fees making up a small part.

Speaking from experience (I'm from Kenya), I've seen people make big bucks from Forex trading. A friend of mine makes enough money to pay for his rent (~$200 PM), furnish the house with not-so-cheap furniture and maintain his excessive lifestyle.

There may be a 'pyramid scheme' aspect to it, but it's not as rampant as you make it seem.
Is it really more efficient (faster, lower effort, etc), or are you just busy (as opposed to idle)?
Disabled people work for fun in grunt, manual labour, positions?

Seems hard to believe.
This is one of the worst ideas I've ever read on this site. But I'm glad you wrote it, as this is the epitome of a sentiment I've many times seen lurking.

- Standard libraries always go bad over time as idioms change and they don't have a policy for breaking changes

- Services do not compose as easily as libraries. Composition is key to code reuse.

I understand most off the industry deals with terrible libraries, and many of you long for simpler times, but the proliferation of complexity will occur with or without the NPMs of the world, as the industry grows and functions in a economy that doesn't care about externalities, including endemic stupid extra complexity.
There are no subtleties. The post contains a specific example in Google Meet, which is used by "the general public" and not by anyone "already trained to see this pattern in all other software". It's confusing for a lot of people.

Have you ever watched a "normal" person try to complete a task on a computer? They routinely click the wrong mouse buttons (or double/single click when they should single/double click), close windows, press in the wrong places in the GUI, and generally fumble around until they get the task done. But they don't get exasperated, because they have been conditioned to expect that computers are confusing, and they persist on with their work. And that's why "normal" people think that computers are mysterious complicated beasts.

Because the UX sucks. Everywhere.
GPL is the antithesis of freedom.
"Metadata" works all the time. SMTP is chock full of metadata. HTTP is chock full of metadata.

Doctorow appears to be talking about a very specific kind of metadata: industry standard XML, in situations where people aren't actually exchanging data. The kind of thing that was pushed by the Semantic Web project, which failed pretty badly.

I was involved in Semantic Web, and I've got my own reasons why I thought it failed. Some of them align with Doctorow's reasoning; others don't. It sure didn't help that Semantic Web was neither semantic nor web; bad naming doesn't have to be a problem but it invited difficulty in agreeing on what they were talking about.

And some of it was that Big Data happened along just when they were supposed to be getting going. In theory Semantic Web stuff should have obviated a lot of the data cleaning that goes into Big Data, and made a lot more information available, but Big Data gave sexier results than Semantic Web, and people just didn't want to work on the latter. Why grind out standards when the neurons can just, ya know, figure it out, kinda sorta maybe?

The fact is that data standards work all the time. "Metadata" as Doctorow means it is just one narrow way of defining standards, and that too exists all over the place. Any time people need to exchange data, they set up a standard. It's boring and frustrating and people hate it, and the results are usually bad, but when people need to, it works.

What Semantic Web hoped for was that people would just voluntarily come up with standards and throw their data out there in hopes that somebody else would use it, and that their competitors would use the same standard. Doctorow was right that that was hard, for all kinds of reasons, and rarely actually happens -- especially not with the mechanisms that XML supplies, even supplemented with RDF and OWL.

But in a lot of ways, this essay comes down to Standards Are Hard. Which is true and non-controversial.
Hmmm, seems closely related to the Spanish porron [1]. Closely related geographically as well.

The porron is supposed to be for communal drinking without touching lips to a shared vessel. Although as far as I've been able to tell is used as much for drunk people to get wine all over their shirts.

The port sippers seem to me personally to be... a little more childish? Clearly it's just my cultural associations, but I feel like drinking through a straw is like drinking from a sippy cup.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porron
Communism doesn't work.
Ikea has made millennials think furniture is disposable.
If you're going through all that effort, then why bothering with hardening Chrome? Why wouldn't you start with Firefox, which doesn't require unGoogling to be considered secure?
One thing to keep in mind is that ASL, for example, is the first language of many people and it is a totally different from the English language.
Can we just skip this step and go directly to auto-dispensing kibble bowls?
Interesting, is there a laymen explanation of why this might help?
Capturing Reality is now part of Epic Games
In the case of coreutils, there is really no issue with presence or absence of GPL. cp is just cp and nobody is going to hang a proprietary extension off the side.
> In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W

Right — Control-W should always¹ be ‘erase word’. Windows/IBM really mucked things up by stealing Control for GUI operations (among other things like conflating Tab with Next-Field because they're the same thing on punch cards).

¹ Okay, ‘end of transmission block’ is also acceptable.
These are the steps, not the communication channels. Look at any agile team and all parties should be represented in 1 meeting.
I used Sibelius for years and am happy to have switched to Dorico.
IBM is to develop German vaccination certificate
Upvotes and downvotes are two sides to the same coin of passion! I'm used to my stricter "it's your job" comments getting downvotes. I always assume because they come off as hyper-conservative, bootstraps type language.

In this case, I think it's funny because the same mentality results in a more kumbaya attitude in the workplace (it's not my job to pick my coworkers. Whatever their faults, it is my job to succeed anyway). It's the type of thing I'd expect to be a bit of a upvote magnet...but I suppose hating on crappy coworkers trumps warmfuzzies in the HN crowd.
Cruz pushed the topic three times, on the third (after being told the case was closed the 2nd time) they told him to go on leave.
I wonder how Bitcoin compares to this.
The GPL guarantees very specific freedoms for users by limiting and regulating what developers can and have to do.
What is the simplest self-compiling subset of C?
See https://github.com/certik/bcompiler/issues/1#issuecomment-793896926
> I can tell that my main disadvantage is the constant, crippling imposter syndrome.

IMO, that may in fact be an advantage. The biggest pitfall generalists face is Dunning-Krueger. They rush into a new field, think they know everything, and get burned by their overconfidence. Generalists can be very powerful, but only if they understand the boundaries of the unknown unknowns.

That requires a high level of epistemic humility, which often feels like imposter syndrome from the inside.
Nvidia and VMware Deliver AI-Ready Enterprise Platform
Isn't WaPo owned by Amazon's ex-ceo Jeff Bezos, I'd be concerned about a conflict of interest with regard to its reporting on the matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#The_Washington_Post
My interpretation here is that this makes a ton more sense within an organization vs externally facing. The other comments regarding saas are on point. But the way you build your saas should - imo - take this approach whenever possible.
More likely because both are Africans...The commentor is ignorant, we don't need to paint him as racist too lol...
Internet Explorer is evil (1996)
The Rust implementation that we are discussing is MIT licensed and as far as I know not part of GNU.

I do not believe that "Coreutils" is trademarked by GNU.

There are other projects that use the name "Coreutils" that are not part of GNU:

https://github.com/DiegoMagdaleno/BSDCoreUtils
Never mind, I misunderstood the question.

[Even if the game is fair and the house has no edge you may run out of chips before getting ahead. There is no certain way to win in a fair game. If you were certain to win and the opponent certain to lose it wouldn't be fair!]
An application I touched a few weeks ago has a DB column named 'type' with values 1,2,3. So on to the source code we go:

enum RecordType {TypeOne(1),TypeTwo(2),TypeThree(3); RecordType(int dbValue) ...}

As it happens, I know an end user of this particular beast, so I show her some record IDs of each type and ask in what way they differ. She looks a few seconds, then says: 'This is clearly a type one record, the next is a type two, and here you have a type three'. After a little back an forth, it turns out even our internal course for new personnel talks about 'records' with different rules to follow for 'type one/two/three'. The end users have no other word to describe these entities than 'records' each with its own numbered type, and think about it as completely natural. The application is based on an older COBOL application, and the terminology just stuck around.

Clearly, the application is well-written: The enum uses the terminology used by the business. Another of my flabbers just got ghasted.
Even agile teams need someone who analyses the solution. If there is nobody who specifies the solution, you get what OP describes.

Agile does not exclude different roles, on the contrary.
Yes, there is a different amount for out of network yearly max, but it’s still less than $10k. It applies to anything.

I’ve had several surgeries, one was over $100k just for the surgery (a broken arm that was healing wrong and had to be reset, all the tendons were turn off from the bone) and insurance paid without any questions.

A stated many times it is not my preferred system, but as a software engineer you and your family will be taken care of and healthcare is not a worry.
Is SaaS really the only viable (or "unicorn") business model?

Do people not sell software licenses anymore? (In theory nothing prevents you from making your license require recurring payment as well)
I don't think it should be open source.

But it's very expensive to integrate it and it's Ogone all over again ( most expensive option = the Belgian one) ~3€ / user/year for the most complete option for ( what is basically) a login verification.
> Just look at the cross intersection they use as an example, typical of the US. The ROAD is the death trap there. People are crossing each other at high speed, this is the BUG, and should be fixed.

> The proper solution is putting there a roundabout, and you will have instantly less fatal accidents.

People are only "crossing each other at high speed" in these simulations because the scenario involves someone running a red light:

> Here, for example, you can see on the bottom of the screen that the simulated Waymo Driver avoids a reconstructed version of a real-life fatal crash by obeying the speed limit—and not running a red light, as the initiator did in real life [emphasis mine]...

I don't think "roundabout all the things" is the answer to every traffic and road safety problem. This looks like an intersection between two 3/4 lane roads, and you'd need monster roundabout for it that seems like it would be confusing and/or slow. Also, a road can "have instantly less fatal accidents" by being closed or turned it into a traffic jam. IMHO, the road engineers need to balance accident avoidance, throughput, and user-friendliness.