skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found a practical example of this last week.

For years (literally!) I've been on the lookout for an efficient Javascript blur algorithm. I've attempted to code them myself following various online tutorials, or lift the code from others who seemed to have better insights into various algorithmic approaches than me. Because I struggle with complex mathematical concepts, I've tended to steer clear of code that looks nothing like Javascript.

Then last week I discovered a blisteringly fast gaussian blur algorithm in a GitHub repository[1] which translated work done by some very clever Intel developers[2] into Javascript. I copy-pasted the code on blind trust into my library code, then tweaked more in hope than knowledge to get it to bed in and play nicely[3] ... and it works! 40px radius gaussian blurs over 800x800px images at 60fps (in a 2D canvas - no webgl gets hurt by this algorithm).

I consider myself a well-versed JS coder, yet I've stared at this code until my eyes water: none of it makes sense to me. All I know is that it works by magic, and that makes me happy!

[1] - https://github.com/nodeca/glur/blob/master/index.js

[2] - https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/iir-gaussian-blur-... - page redirects if you're not logged in

[3] - my tweaked code - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/docs/source/factory/filterEn...
Once it's up on Github and out there, you don't really have any control. It's not like we were keen to put big barriers on the 'try it out' side. I didn't have some mad keen quest to be able to communicate to management "hey, someone from A----- or H----- downloaded our library". That's not that interesting. A lot of people kick the tires.

What I did kinda want to know is if a major Intel customer put our library into production. Sometimes we figured this out by detective work - e.g. one of our staff had a bunch of custom standing google searches hooked up to an RSS feed that would often find big vendors handing out paraphrased versions of our documentation to explain which regex patterns were supported.
> If there's a famine or a meat shortage, wouldn't people turn to other foods on their own?

Encouraging weekly fish-eating habits is also a mechanism to ensure that you have a healthy national fish industry, that you can dial up as soon as you need it.

This is something that modern [especially European] nations seem to have institutionally neglected or forgotten.

By importing all necessities and instead focusing on exporting services, you put your nation and people at risk from any such crisis.
> I’d argue it’s the philosophy of owners of low-wage businesses.

I fail to understand why any business should pay more than market rate for anything. I get that you want the market rate to be higher, but I have yet to ever have encountered a business that completely disregards market rate and just blows their wad on the first employee they hire.
"The responsibility of creating the plan for this bill is given to Jack Mallers, CEO of bitcoin investment and payments company Zap."

Great to see the synergy between the modern blockchain economy and traditional "bribe El Presidente to let you loot the country" practices.
This is addressed in the article:

>Second, everyone needs to be using unique passwords. You don’t have to use a password manager to do that, whatever system works for you is fine. If you want to use a notebook in a desk drawer, that’s totally acceptable.
intersting, i actually hadnt heard of branch coverage before, but that looks promissing
Oh this brings memories of my Windows 98 tweaks and linear gradients in title bars. I'm afraid that's the peak of customizability and it's only going downhill in each operating system version.
Yep, nothing new. It’s abstractions all the way down :)
Add to the pattern:

* Write to high profile companies that use your OSS work asking them to contribute.
* Get a very polite and convoluted "no" in response.
Jeff Bezos owns the 2nd largest newspaper in the country, and now a major movie studio. I would say he qualifies.
I have an alternative theory, called the "anti-singularity". It posits that there is a point in technological development where both future development AND maintenance of key technological tools will become impossible, and from that point on we will be doomed to use ever-crumbling and worsening systems.

For evidence, see almost any computer-based tool, my favourite examples being Windows, Android, and DNS.
Looking at https://gitignore.io - there is plenty of empty space and nothing, even subtle and small like "I would appreciate donations" with link/button.

I also see nothing in https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io and GitHub sponsoring seems to be not enabled.

(just mentioning in case you would make it more clear that you would be happy about donations)
If a competitor figures out how to build a tractor that is as good as the ones from John Deere then they probably can compete with John Deere directly--as in, "on their terms" with a locked down tractor that makes them more margin--rather than bother to sell unlocked tractors. The same issue happens with cell phones: users want control over their phones, but they also want good phones with good screens and good cameras. There are, in fact, phones you can buy that give you complete control, but they are the companies that have shit products and so are trying to use this as a differentiator to draw in a new market. If you are able to compete with the iPhone--like Samsung can, but almost no other manufacturer can (sometimes Google manages to pull it off with first party phones, but very few people buy those, so they are clearly missing something)--then you build a device as equally locked down as the iPhone and compete with it "on Apple's terms" as there is a nearly bottomless well of money that you can extract from users if you are willing to screw them and force them to participate in your closed ecosystem.

Essentially, you can't just look at the one product in isolation and think "this should exist from a competitor", as if anyone could easily make a company to go out and do it... you instead have to consider the ecosystem of companies and the numerous barriers to entry (such as patents and limited supply lines and the enormous R&D costs) and what the incentives in the market are, and it turns out that, if your product is one where the competition is already scarce--Apple + Samsung make up 80% of the mobile phone market, with the rest likely targeting people who don't have enough money to pay for high-end phones; there is a similar thing going on with tractors, with five companies controlling >70% of the market, and AFAIK mostly now selling locked down machines--you can't just expect to magically find a competitor pop up that is going to fill this particular interest. If you manage to circumnavigate all of the hurdles to build a phone that works as well as an Apple or a Samsung device, you are almost certainly going to join the oligopoly and lock your device down also, as the incentives are just too poor otherwise. The only fix for this is regulation and, to the extent to which regulation actually already exists here, legal precedent.
The US has lost (or not definitively won) every war since WW2, none of which were on home field.
Can you give a few examples? I’m not using computers that long and don’t know in which way modern software is so frustrating.
If course they do. It's called a dual currency deposit. Suffice it to say that a bank would never accept these, but they can easily convince customers to do it since the published interest is much higher than a regular deposit.
Ditching Windows and AWS, diving into Linux and Hetzner
The US is special because it has active startup investors in both SV and Boston/NY, and angels with extreme risk tolerance (Conway, Woz.)

Canada is no worse and no better than any non-US country - meaning terrible. (With the exception of the Skype/Estonia connection.) Some Western European countries have rigid pension contribution requirements that make non-family-staffed startups impossible.

In many parts of the world, it's all about personal/school/family connections with inherited wealth (India, China, Korea, SE Asia, etc.)

Here's some examples of what works in Canada:

- ActiveState was funded by Microsoft to improve Open Source tools for Windows

- Canada has an entire national ecosystem around aerospace that is govt. funded (Bristol, Bombardier, etc.) The govt. scientists partner/adjunct with local universities, so you can approach them on campus.

- Ottawa once had a telco industry, now replaced with Shopify HQ execs. So reach out to them.

- But it's friends and family/mortgage your house/credit cards for funding otherwise. Any Canadian banker will suggest a heloc, and won't loan money without equal collateral.
No, you just have impostor syndrome.

As I've said before, most SV startup prototypes were written by one or two 10x programmers - without seed funding, it's a necessity. I've met several, so it's real.

Youtube was mostly written by 4 people (there's a foto online of the original core team.)

WhatsApp was originally written mostly at Red Rock Coffee on Castro St. in MV, so that's only a handful of people:

https://twitter.com/redrockcoffee/status/791762563755233280?...

Instagram (13 employees) was a very small team when bought by FB, so that's a pretty good example. FB itself operated out of a rental house initially.

https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-first-13-employees...

MiniVend, PoF and X-Plane are other single-author examples.
How do I transition from Civil Engineer to Programmer?
I've always liked programming but I stopped doing it after college in the UK.

I know the basics of programming but have never taken it seriously. I like the logic to it. I know from my day job, not all projects go smoothly, and it's time and people management which leads to successful project, but programming is still something I would like to do.

I've been a Civil Engineer for the past 6 years now, but I somehow cannot see myself being a Civil Engineer for the rest of my life.

How would I transition to becoming a programmer, it's something I've always wanted to do.

Has anyone made any similar career changes in their 30s?
That’s the point - the choice of a normal distribution is misleading. It doesn’t model market behaviour on any time scale.

Backtesting is more likely to be meaningful. Am I missing something here?
Right. Another reason not to confine ourselves to C++98.

While the abstract machine is not allowed to reorder volatile writes, the compiler is NOT obliged to emit instructions forcing the actual hardware not to reorder writes. Thus, regular cache behavior can turn your carefully ordered sequence of volatile writes into a bunch of local cache operations followed by a single writeback bus transaction.

If you are coding to a microcontroller, its cache hardware might be simple enough that this can't happen. Or, you might be able (and need!) to initialize a memory controller, at startup, to give a chosen memory address range simpler write semantics, e.g. "write-through".

But atomics are the cleanest way to express things at the source level.
OP (and others in this thread) might not want to reveal their IP address or their Wikipedia username.
Come to think of it, they probably didn't.
But a quick online search seems to show that the 70s was around when the world understood Vitamin D a lot more, so could be.
Looks great!

How do you sandbox custom js code. Can we choose if it runs on the front-end or server-side?

Most of the low-code opensource builders seems to run it on a sandbox in the frontend using realms..but this is not great if a screen needs to perform calculations that affect financial data like a mini POS, tax calc etc
There’s an interesting trend I’ve seen where a lot of folks who were previously super health conscious, put on weight when they are in a relationship they enjoy.

Anyone have a study or article of this phenomenon?
The US, at least, has not been a free market for a long time.

What we have is some form of (heavily financialized) crony statism, where a bunch of well connected monopolies milk consumers shamelessly (health "care", higher education, etc).
one-off changes don't make for a revenue stream, you'll find that people are prepared to ask for features a lot more often than they'd pay for them

also, tenuous conditions are inherent to that model - typically you have a couple people paying a few dollars and asking for the moon every other day, and you already said "yes"

doing that sort of thing solo is certainly not for everybody, the overlap of people good at producing software and good at customer management + PR is extremely slim
DeepMind scientists: Reinforcement learning is enough for general AI
Oh ok. Maybe there’s some confusion over the meaning of “emerged” then. I interpret “emerged” as “when the leading edge first becomes detectable coming out”.
Not really sure why this was originally flagged (or this is possibly a dupe of the original post which was flagged?), but even though the comments that I've seen so far are giving it a negative spin I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.

This ranges from everything like online shopping (I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later), to the people who are used in low-wage countries to make those trainers at a price I feel is 'affordable'.

I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.
I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support.

I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project. Maybe that'd even help to get into contact with your users and the companies building solutions on top of your product. Maybe it's just me, but I often feel blind to how and where your project is being used.

EDIT: Typo.
Gradients and convex analysis pop up in optimization. My understanding is controls uses analysis as well (at least for understanding theory).
Oh, that scenario, retreating corporate sponsor would probably not have retreated if only usage was more visible, that must have been very frustrating. Almost seems as if the odd occasional visibility boost from some heavy bug or exploit could have saved it. Were Oscar Wilde and PT Barnum secretly open source visionaries?
As greybeard, I see the golden age of FOSS like disco/hippie days, eventually the majority that was against the man ended up working at wall street like jobs during the 80's and early 90s.

Same will happen when everyone that actually made BSD and GNU happen is no longer around, it will be business as usual.
> The US witnessed something similar under Trump.

FWIW, this was nothing but a media circus. Trump largely continued immigration practices that existed under Obama and indeed Trump deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama did in his first term, but under Obama everything was great and then under Trump they were “concentration camps” and kids were in cages and being separated from their family and America is a white supremacist hellscape and etc.

This doesn’t mean that the Us didn’t deserve its immigration-policy reckoning; only that Trump didn’t do anything to cause it except offend the media.

(for the rabid partisans out there, this one particular defense of Trump doesn’t imply that I’m a Trump supporter or that he doesn’t deserve criticism for other things, etc)
Or civilization (RTS? pshah).
Fair enough - my complaint is a bit too compressed. The point here is that my experience at Intel led me to realize that corporate OSS users will take your library in secret and not even tell you - much less publicly acknowledge it, much less contribute or help support it. Obviously I'm not expecting to be paid extra while at Intel because folks are using a library.

It's just rather discouraging from the perspective of working on anything else OSS as an independent developer - unless it's a pure passion project. Given that the stuff I'm interested in often tends to wind up being hauled into high-performance infrastructure that's kind of important to bigcos, it's a bit depressing.

The whole multiple contributors thing is a great theory and works for some high-gloss, high-profile projects. There's a huge tail of OSS where the expertise just isn't there and most companies just want to free ride.
New York Times Tech Workers Are Fed Up with the New York Times' Union-Busting
I wonder how much of this is premediated vs people getting addicted to credit or having a drop in income and naturally reaching their limit before going bust?

The white paper suggests it's "primarily a first-party fraud scheme".

The ideal customer for a credit card company is allowed to stay just within their limits and just able to make minimum payments, never repaying the capital. It seems natural that will inevitably result in some customers being pushed too far.
People don't get to just buy a different brand of government though, unlike tractors.
I don’t know, the yachts that have their own yachts look kind of cool. Oh, wait, Bezos is building one for half a bil. Never mind.
The effectiveness of a liability waiver is heavily dependent on the state it is being litigated in, as well as the precise wording of the contract and opinions of the people in the courts.

https://recmanagement.com/feature_print.php?fid=200611GC03

> FYI making one or both entities "governmental" doesn't do anything to change this.

I do not know what this means, but my point is that if one of the parties in the dispute is politically disliked, then they may not get a fair shake.

In the context of this discussion, I can see “not having to deal with risks of liability waivers” as a supporting reason for why a company would want to lock down their devices or prevent people from tinkering with them. Then they can simply tell anyone coming after them that their product was clearly not meant to be tampered with and so tampering with it removed them from any liability.
Johnny Depp would basically qualify under that definition.
Agreed. They should have put that bit front and center and not buried at the bottom somewhere, besides it totally invalidates their claim.
FTA :

4. How to indulge a senior manager who wants to talk about technical stuff that they don’t really understand, without rolling your eyes or making them feel stupid

Skill learned : be able to not pay attention to a senior manager who wants to talk about technical stuff that they don’t really understand AND tells you that technical stuff is easy compared to management.
In the 1990s, the perl and python communities both had to cope with an endless stream of novice confusion. One grew community norms which included recreational disparagement. The other, in part in reaction, was explicit and firm: if you can't be polite and professional just now, your contribution to the community can wait. The contrast between the two cultures was very dramatic.
Show HN: Duskee.app – Create a podcast from any web content
"Just say no." -Nancy Reagan
So... I think your right. Underlying a lot of trends eroding user/owner rights are practical benefits. This as true for ipods as it is for for tractors.

My grandfather had an old Massey, and several others for parts. It's easy to idealize this from afar (I do), but young farmers often don't want it.

That said, the individual preference and the systemic trend are two different things. The right to repair, is also the right to have a 3rd party repair. Competition, choice. At some point along the trend, it's about more than that. There comes a point where "who actually owns this farm" starts to be a question. JD might exercise the same power over farmers that Apple exercises over app developers. A my way or the highway world.
Note that fish day applied mostly to "commercial" kitchens:

> This prompted Mikoyan to issue an order on the “introduction of a fish day at public catering establishments.” It didn't have to be Thursday, but from that moment on, factory and other canteens began to serve fish one day a week

(emphasis mine)
Paradoxical, isn't it?
// “I’m a dog person, not a cat person,” and other such bizarreness. Why are people seemingly so drawn to identifying themselves as anything at all?

This is a powerful concept. When I studied yogic philosophy, the teacher pointed out how our language biases us towards identification.

"I am hungry" in English reads like a statement of identity, whereas "j'ai faim" in French for example means "I HAVE a hunger". The hunger exists but it doesn't define my identity.

This identification is a lie. If you stop drinking coffee and start drinking tea, you are still 100% you, plus you have evolved (whatever information caused you to switch your preference must be new to you)

This gets into self limitation very quickly. "I AM bad at public speaking" means you don't try. "I don't HAVE public speaking skills" leaves room for choice to improve.

There are a few things that are core values to who you really are. Those are important. Your choice of beverage isn't.
Creating ossia score add-ons
The bug was inserted by the exploiters, it wasn't present in the code to begin with.
Was mask-wearing pointless, after all? Fauci must answer
He’s getting older.
Selling real-time interactive 3D real estate models seems like a "virtual shops" to me, no?
> They do not want to pay anymore than they have to for anything.

Farmers are also being squeezed by their customers - prices for farm produce have been steadily falling for over a century, see e.g. [0].

JD's commercial model requires both capital outlay in purchasing equipment, and committing to a maintenance contract that the farmer can't influence. So the farmer loses control of maintenance costs whilst also under pricing pressure for their produce.

I can't speak to your experience obviously, but farming for many is a (very) low margin business.

[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
that's why telemetry is imporant

If I were doing serious OSS I'd really hard consider adding just something like a once-a-week ping just to be aware of users count

ofc with an ability to disable it
Redundancy for NASA funded projects makes sense, and it's how we regained the ability to launch human crewed rockets from US soil: Boeing wanted to be the sole contract, and has bungled their launch projects, and it was due to NASA also contracting SpaceX that we've had any successful launches. When SpaceX was recently awarded a sole contract, plenty of people — including here on HN — howled that NASA was letting SpaceX turn into a monopolist like Boeing tried to become. NASA has historically chosen multiple providers for redundancy, and the SpaceX sole contract was a unique departure due to NASA lacking sufficient funding. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/16/nasa-lu...

The Intercept isn't exactly known for... neutral... reporting.
> They were basically wage-slaves.

Most people are wage slaves, they biggest difference between them is the quality and quantity of beads and trinkets they receive to sweeten the misery.
World War III will be in space?