skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again

I work at a tech company, and I’ll offer my take on why this didn’t happen.

Some growth oriented organizations incentivize product people to keep iterating and “improving” a product. Then, product people are on the hook to show some kind of measurable improvement in some metric. Otherwise, they miss out on promotions, or worst case, they get pushed out.

What I’ve seen happen is some elegant, simple UX that no one ever complained about suddenly morphs into a convoluted, busy mess of its former self. But hey, as long as some A/B test shows an increase in click through rate or total engagement time - great! Mission accomplished!

The root cause is these teams and product people don’t really obsess with the product or the customer experience. They’re incentivized towards optimizing some metric - which at face value appears like optimizing it would provide a better product. But it turns out that’s not the case.

These people all get promoted, pat themselves on the back, and move on. Slowly, the engineering teams realize that these business requirements and stringent launch dates led to a convoluted architecture. We can no longer move quickly or truly innovate. It honestly turns into death by a thousand cuts, where the second and third order effects of the incentive structure ultimately results in a not so great experience. It actually becomes increasingly expensive to fix the past mistakes… the reason could be compatibility or versioning issues, a mess of dependencies and services that no one really understands, or even just a general fear of breaking things and not having clarity on how to get back on track.

It might be that team A has the right senior leadership, but they rely on team or org B to fix issues or update some code. But that other team or org has their own product people, with their own priorities. They couldn’t care less.

What’s worse is that no one is really willing to call out these issues, at least not on the record. Sometimes it’s disengagement and other times it’s fear of coming off as a negative person. Because the immense complexity is too difficult to solve by one person alone, and they honestly don’t have a solution that people would really get behind.

Slowly the engineers burn out or feel disengaged. The great engineering talent ends up leaving. You end up with the career people or the disengaged people who are coasting by. At the end of the day, the customer suffers. We stopped obsessing with the customer experience. It’s turned overwhelmingly into cross team or cross org politics, salesmanship, and often times people focusing on the wrong problems (inventing solutions to problems that don’t even exist) while the obvious thing is right in front of them.

Okay I’ll stop my rant now.
Authorship is the metric that scientists get paid for, so of course it has been thoroughly corrupted.

Fake papers and plagiarism are the most blatant form of corruption. They tend to come from certain, let's say, large countries with less developed scientific cultures. Those countries need to put an end to it, because the rest of us keep having to work harder to suppress the racist impressions that we're bound to form of colleagues who look and sound like the cheats.

In more traditional scientific countries, the corruption is more subtle. Today, many groups publish every paper with half a dozen authors, and no indication of what each of them contributed. This enables the professors who run those groups to manipulate authorship more or less as they please, and have total control over who gets to have a career in science. It turns out that absolute power corrupts senior scientists as absolutely as it does other people.

No doubt there are more clever ways to game the system, that I haven't noticed. As long as million dollar grants and first-world citizenship keep being doled out for something as contrived as scientific paper authorship, corruption is inevitable.
Likely! It worked against SEGA, in the Sega v. Accolade case. Unlicensed Accolade (and later, SEGA Dreamcast homebrew games) displayed a Sega copyright logo because they were (believed to be) needed to run arbitrary executables.
> Android developers wanted to rewrite everything in Kotlin.

Probably because Google says Kotlin is the way. You can't use Compose, Google's reboot of the View system, from Java. Why did google create Compose? To eliminate a decade of cruft and problems for one, so congrats ... now your developers are stuck with it.
> they’re not knowingly transferring CSAM, because the system is designed only to notify them when a certain “threshold” of suspect images has been crossed

And when they’re notified, Apple manually checks (a modified but legible version of) the images.
Inspired by today's [0], this is a list of legal threats delivered to Google over the domain "localhost".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28106479 ("Anti-Piracy Firm Asks Google to Block 127.0.0.1")
Yet they don't even offer a top level menu item for podcasts, you have to dig though "My library", which is infuriating.
How to Be Good When the World Is Evil?
> And NCMEC should not be acting like detection is a trade secret.

It feels to me like they want to hide their detection algorithms so people don't find out how bad they are.
From where I sit as a dev, it's less "I want shiny new tech on my resume" and more "we need to refactor / simplify everything for ease of maintainability".

It's a hard problem. Sometimes it's unnecessary but sometimes the tech debt is real. It's not uncommon to have one blessed path for doing most things but hey, here's this edge case that doesn't fit our mental model and is a pain to test and bloats our bundle and we keep getting paged for it and the engineers who built it left the company and didn't leave any documentation or tests, so let's just kill that feature.

And now users are pissed and don't understand, because from their perspective, they think the cost of leaving the feature alone is zero. But the truth is the cost of keeping it is quite high and there just isn't enough usage to justify engineering effort to reduce ongoing maintenance costs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210808233609/https://www.hacke...
(I can't seem to access archive.is, so archive.org)
These are definitely not dumb questions!

Liquidity management is one of the most complicated aspects of the Lightning Network, and certainly one of the most counter-intuitive.

The basic primitive that makes up the Lightning Network is a "channel". A channel is between two nodes, has a fixed capacity, is opened by making a on-chain Bitcoin transaction, and is closed by making an on-chain Bitcoin transaction.

While the channel is open, the two parties to the channel can make payments between themselves, but do not have to publish a Bitcoin transaction for each one of these payments. They only have to publish a Bitcoin transaction when they want to close the channel, which nets-out the intermediate transactions made since it was opened.

As a concrete example, let's say Alice and Bob open a channel, with Alice contributing 1 BTC when the channel is opened, and Bob contributing 0 BTC. Initially, their balances on the channel are:

Alice: 1 BTC
Bob: 0 BTC

In this state, Alice can send a 0.1 BTC payment to bob, and the channel balances will be:

Alice: 0.9 BTC
Bob: 0.1 BTC

Alice and Bob can send each other money, but only up to the amount that they have in the channel. So at this point, Alice can send Bob up to 0.9 BTC, and Bob can send Alice up to 0.1 BTC.

However, at the very beginning, when Bob's balance was 0 BTC, he could not have sent money to Alice. Due to a lack of inbound liquidity, which is, quite simply, money on the other side of a channel, which can be sent to you.

This is an aspect of the Lightning Network that is very different from other payment systems, and from on-chain Bitcoin payments. You must arrange to have sufficient inbound liquidity to receive payments.

You ask a good question: What if I just want to assume that the customer is good for the money and queue it up myself for settlement once I have the liquidity to spare?

Let's imagine that we were in the initial state, Alice had 1 BTC in the channel, Bob 0 BTC, and Alice let Bob make a payment to her of 1 BTC. The new balance would be:

Alice: 2 BTC
Bob: -1 BTC

However! When a Lightning Network channel is closed, you divide up the funds from the funding transaction between the parties to the channel. The channel was funded with an on-chain Bitcoin transaction of 1 BTC, so there would be no way to pay out Alice 2 BTC from that initial transaction. Since both parties to a payment channel can close the channel at any time, Alice would be trusting Bob to keep the channel open until he no longer had a negative balance, and avoiding the need for trust is the whole purpose of the Lightning Network in the first place, otherwise we could just trade unenforceable IOUs back and forth.
In my career, I've had the pleasure of watching a few developers go from enthusiastic newbies to great developers. I'd describe them as self-taught, but none of them developed the whole field of computer science by themselves. They got there by reading other people's code, by writing bad code and getting shown a better way, by reading books and articles and taking a few early CS classes. Of course, I know a few great developers who are older than me. They never made such mistakes or needed such help that I saw. But they were novices once, and they learned from others who came before them.
I don't see how I'm missing the central thesis of [3]. If a strategy X develops for eliminating a virus Y, Y will undergo positive selection to escape targeting by X. X can be whatever target scheme our immune systems first fixate on, or a narrow targeting emergency vaccine. It really doesn't matter. The researchers focus on the defense mechanism kickstarted by the vaccine, because their point is we cannot be complacent. Point well taken, to be sure, but no one was being complacent anyway (I've seen a fair number of presentations on vaccine design at this point, and no one is touting anything as the silver bullet). Where I'm living, other mechanisms for managing the infection have not disappeared just because vaccination is now in play. The emergency vaccine is first and foremost, a way to generate herd immunity quickly. It will need to be supplemented with other strategies, both in the short term, and in the long term. The researchers have done valuable work in helping us better quantify the timespan over which we can expect escape, and thus allow us to better estimate the time by which we'll need the next wave of solutions in play. THE RESEARCHERS DO NOT ARGUE THAT THE EMERGENCY VACCINE IS USELESS.

I said it the first time, and I'll repeat it again: that a more comprehensive vaccine design will need to supplement the emergency vaccine was a given from day 1. For that same reason, design of "upgrades" to the vaccination program began a long time ago. The papers you're citing are collecting data which help such designs. None of them advocated that the emergency vaccination is useless.

> You are incorrect - the current spike protein focused mRNA based vaccines do not guarantee sterilizing immunity - that means you can be vaccinated yet still get infected and transmit the virus to others. Please cite your sources if you're going to make such claims.

Do you realize that the extent to which vaccinations stop transmission is on a continuum? It is not "on", or "off" in exact terms. The current COVID-19 vaccines immunize to an extent that the re-transmission rate is negligible. A leaky vaccine (the kind studied in the paper) barely makes a dent to the transmission rate, and if it does, only mildly. COVID-19 vaccinations are far from leaky, even if they are not 100% water-tight.

I'm not sure why you're using that paper either, to be honest. There are better ones, but they don't suit your point as well, probably? Here's one that directly talks about COVID-19, and openly acknowledges the risk that exists due to the ACTUAL leakiness of the COVID-19 vaccine, but also shows why this does not prevent herd immunity from emerging, and why it in fact poses a greater risk to those who choose to stubbornly remain unvaccinated, or (and more seriously) those who lack the resources to be vaccinated:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.01.20241836v...

I'm not going to continue on this conversation, as I went through your other posts, and I have a fair grasp on what your position is. Continuing on trying to talk to you would be extremely stupid on my part. Have fun doing whatever it is you want to, and good luck.
It's no small feat to maintain compatibility with other product and reverse engineer changes as they happen. Good luck with that.

How many people does AWS have people working on their version of elasticsearch? and on the client libraries in various languages?

From previous discussions on HN, I was under the impression that the answer is very little if any.

My bet is that AWS will keep the service as it is now and never makes patches or upgrades. That's how they operate services usually. And it's not that bad to be fair, the product is good enough as it is.
AWS is pretty well known for rolling out half baked products with understaffed teams especially when it's a re-hosting of an open source product. EKS was a mess for a long time and had a tiny team behind it from what I hear.
If an organisation provides a service transparently, such as Akamai, Level3, DNS root servers etc. then they're plumbing and they should shift packets unless you or your systems are trying to break their plumbing.

If they run a service that you patronise as an end user then they can do what they want because if you don't like their terms of service you can go elsewhere.

Don't like f*c*book's terms or behaviour? Leave. YouTube keeps mistreating you? Leave. AWS repeatedly asks you to stop your users breaking the terms you agreed to? Leave.

I don't care if you can't get the clout or customers you want on Vimeo or Mastodon. I don't care if you don't think there is no viable alternative. You obey the contract you agreed to or you get kicked off. Organisations are not obliged to agree with you or serve you.

Lumping Internet-based organisations into "Big Tech" is a misnomer and I find it is frequently a sign that someone's about to go on a rant about something they either don't understand or are purposefully being obstinate about.
It's long been fairly normal for formal paper writers (of any age, in any discipline) to try to 'jazz up' their lingo to make it sound more erudite/learned. (Apart from specific collegial shorthand like 'lacustrian' or 'normalization'.) Readability suffers, meaning is softened, euphemisms fluorish, mistakes are made.

'Colossal information' in place of 'Big data' ... wow - so wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdZyZu81UMw
Colleges and universities reap what they sow. When you saddle students with ruinous debt to attend, I'm not surprised they expect to have a say in how the place is run, including what language constructs they prefer. If college was freely provided, then if they didn't like it they could always be shown the door and told to go to a college that was more to their liking. Now you have professors groveling to students because student have the power.
No, it’s because commercial speech is less protected by the 1st amendment than other kinds.
Done. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-clients-of-o...
I'll call bullshit to that:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/dev...

Does elastic have something like it?
For anyone else like me that wasn't sure what ATA stood for, this is not the ATA hardware attachment interface. ATA here is Allen Telescope Array: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Telescope_Array
9:00 into their first broadcast:

"The music will continue nonstop"
Thanks! Haven’t listened to Skinny Puppy or Front 242 discography, only their major hits, will dive into them. Appreciated!
This. There is no better alternative music service, but just yesterday I reinstalled Antennapod for podcasts. Spotify did a great job getting me hooked on some podcast shows, but the UI changed (need more taps and travel from the lowest to the highest button on my phone screen every time I want to use it) and features broke (e.g. it needs internet to list downloaded podcasts such that I can press play on one of them). After half a year of waiting for them to patch this worst of bugs I've given up and moved away. But yeah not everyone is going to remember using a different and open source podcast app years ago and can easily move back, most people will just stick with it. GDPR's automatic data transfer clause could really be put to better use.

For music I can't simply install an open source alternative. That I make a backup of the apk before hitting update says enough I think.
I think the example of the railroad is biased by the exact same phenomenon. From 1900, In the next 10 years you would see the mass production of automobiles and the invention of the airplane. Basically it’s the story of disruption told from the perspective of the disrupted technology.

In the 1920’s standard oil subsidiaries were still an effective monopoly for petroleum in the us market. Therefore a reasonable proxy for the future profitability of the entire industry in that market assuming that their ruthless anticompetitive behavior allowed them retain their market dominance. Additionally they were profiting off the same disruption in transportation that you are citing, which as we are both acknowledging was massive.

The book Titan is awesome context for this. Wonderful read.

Unlike the technology such as railroads, natural resource commodities and vertically integrated supply chains tend to not be disrupted as easily (very unfortunate for us).

I’m not saying that it couldn’t have gone wrong, but clearly an asymmetrical risk reward at 3-5 PE. So in general you are right, but I think if you find a company that has a great business model, is a monopoly, and is disrupting a massive market, at reasonable price, you have a recipe for outlier returns.
And it is ridiculous that it doesn't happen in software, because software is one of the most mailable things on the planet. In the 90s you could make your desktop look like a hot dog stand with a few mouse clicks. Or, you know, choose more tasteful colors and fonts. Nowadays we need bespoke "dark modes" just to have 2 choices. Our industry is pathetic.
Do you know for sure that postgres doesn't perform as well as elasticsearch if you don't use the relational capabilities of postgres?

Instinctively I believe what you're saying, just wondering if you know for sure.
>liking in-browser ads

>"""hacker""" news in $current_year
I think it's mostly for OCR'ing high-resolution scans of printed media. I scanned and OCR'd a several hundred page printed book (my grandfather's memoirs) with great results. The text needed very little processing. But I had to manually transcribe all of the image captions, because they were scans of photocopies of photocopies of typewriter labels stuck to photos by hand, and thus very poor quality, and Tesseract produced complete gibberish.
There is only one functional somatic syndrome
> I don’t think “the open source community” was dismayed about either of these actions.

I do. A major piece of software suddenly stopped being open source.
Once you start using Joplin for a longer period, you start noticing bad UX issues.

Encrypted sync is causing many people issues with multiple keys being generated after adding a mobile sync target. There is no easy way to remove superfluous keys from Joplin, once they have been created and synced across clients.

The cli UX is weird and doesn't follow Unix best practices.
The main developer made some weird design choices and some important features haven't been implemented for years now.
No, the tool that reports to NCMEC is on Apple employee workstations (or a private server). The stuff running in the iPhone essentially just flags things as possibly-CSAM, after which someone at Apple verifies it.

Now, I suppose you could DDoS Apple's verification process.

Either way, though, it's not like anyone who would do either of these things would win any points in the court of popular opinion. I can see the headlines now: "Hackers Disable Apple's CSAM Reporting Tools; Legitimate CSAM Reports Get Lost".
I think you need both intrinsic talent / motivation and external guidance.

Like with research, nobody can take arithmetic and single-handedly discover calculus, number theory, and higher concepts. You're not going to discover good software development paradigms without reading about some of them. You especially can't write anything useful without using high-level libraries and working with others.

At the same time, I think intrinsic motivation significantly helps learning these concepts. To some random person, learning about "one function one purpose" could be like learning random historical dates to me. "Why can't I just copy / paste the code? Why do I need good function names?" These people would have to discipline themselves and power through learning this stuff. But to me, I didn't have to discipline myself, because for some reason I was genuinely interested in writing "clean" code and making my development more efficient. This gave me an advantage. And there are people who love writing code more than I do, so when I get tired and brain fog after a couple hours they keep writing.
You are putting the cart before the Solomon. He is saying they would have built on WASM+WASI in the way that Docker is built on cgroups.

Java is not a target for C++ code compiled via Clang/LLVM. Wasm is.

Expert advice done cheap.
I've been a FOSS dev for 25 years and I remember when everyone else I worked with were avid linux/freeBSD users because 'we didn't trust the big end of town'.. over the years I've watched the vast majority of devs move to apple devices for all sorts of 'just works', 'shinier' reasons that just boil down to 'convenience is more important than privacy'.

Perhaps this is just the benefit of longevity but from my POV it was engineer early adoption and advocacy that made Apple, Google Search etc what they are, and it will be engineer early adoption and advocacy that dethrones these problematic companies from controlling the ecosystem..

Back 20 years ago, before the community filled with $_$ dollars-struck startup founders, software was built by people who wanted to use it.. rather than sell it. There are still some people doing this now, Look at Matrix network for instance.

What will it take for a grass-roots software industry to start building privacy-first apps and systems that don't suck, based on decentralised, distributed principles? We have the skills to build highly polished alternatives to these things, but it takes a determination to step away from convenience for a period of time for the sake of privacy.

How bad does it have to get before the dev community realise this? or are we in a frog boiling slowly scenario and it's hopeless?
Would probably be better off putting the batteries and capacitors in a backpack than on the gun itself.
Cool, many unknown bands, thanks for also pointing to albums in particular! Will start with Rabies by Uncle Al
This has been going on for at least 10+ years. I would occasionally chat with a couple guys at OmniCorpDetroit in Eastern Market that managed a neighborhood network. This was back in 2010-2011 and if I remember correctly they were using CloudTrax / Open Mesh flashed devices.