skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LaTeX has a number of issues:

- Compilation feels almost non-deterministic at times. You should not have to recompile your document 2 or 3 times to get the final behavior, yet that's pretty standard practice. References / bibliographies don't work the first time through, and often you compile the bibliography separately, which is just crazy to me.

- Compilation errors are really non-helpful. In programming, if I omit one side of a bracket or parentheses somewhere, I'll almost certainly get an error with a reference to the line number right at or below the issue. GOOD LUCK finding a missing bracket in a LaTeX document based on the error messages when compilation fails.

- Lots of pretty simple behavior that really should be standardized and built in requires additional packages. The real problem comes when combining multiple packages... It's like how medications interact. It's almost hopelessly intractable to try and predict how multiple packages will interact with each other, so the way you do a simple thing in one document may change in another document depending on the combination of packages.

- >What you describe as "a complex hack of internals" is usually in practice a 30 second visit to Stack Exchange and a cut and paste.

I'm with the person you were replying to on this. There's a lot of really hacky stuff to get a result that really should have been built in. Like, a built in quote or excerpt for example, should just be a standard style like: /begin{quote} Quote \end{quote}. But instead you have to do it as a \parbox[center]{hope-you-guessed-a-good-width-mm}{Quote}.

- It's a small thing, but the way you do quotes is pretty silly. Not a fan of `` '' instead of "". If that's really how I have to do it without including additioanl packages, why not at least have a built-in like: \lquote and \rquote ?

I am normally a person that is deeply opposed to language updates, unnecessary feature updates, new frameworks, etc. But in the case of LaTeX, it's one of the most obvious examples I can think of where it's desperately needed.
Nordstrom (my wife works there) does something similar where folks who work in corporate have to work a shift on the retail floor. Generally it seems like a wise policy imo.

I’m a little baffled by the comments about how delivering food is somehow “beneath” an engineer. It isn’t, and sometimes seeing how the things you build are used by employees can expose unknown unknowns that need fixing for both customer and employee.
> What’s to stop that from happening?

Fear. Specifically, fear that I would walk away from that kind of income forever and that I could become destitute in the future (I have a weird relationship with money, having grown up rather poor).
$15 per month is a little nuts - I don't know anyone who pays for Youtube Premium - Though they piloted Youtube lite overseas for $5 per month but it's seems unlikely they will bring it to the states - If they do roll it out, I will subscribe
...or change the developer fee from $99/year to $1 per year per active installation.
There is only really one issue, and that's the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 level and the potential impacts it will have on our ability to maintain a functioning society. The fact that you're focused on a bunch of telegenic activists and police defunding (which appears to not be actually happening, anywhere) illustrates how successfully we've been distracted from matters that affect our own survival.
Shh, the contract doesn't apply when the milkshake machine is "down", don't let him find out!
I made it this far:

> But, we can imagine the scandalized fanboys wailing in the distance...

Oh, piss off. If you've got a sound argument, you can do it without the ad-hominem attacks on strawmen.
Overall I think ideas and programs like this are good for the company long-term; building user empathy is obviously important. It feels kind of odd to be explicitly forcing everyone into it though.

This sounds like it would be concerning for individuals on a work status (TN, H-1b, etc) who are explicitly not supposed to perform work outside of their job or specialization. There's some grey area here for sure, but this seems pretty clearly outside the scope of authorized work.

An engineer helping with a support ticket once in a while, sure, I think it's a reasonable expectation, but I can't see how explicitly putting this as a job responsibility isn't going to muddy the waters for some people.
it'd be nice if you could create loops at least then run them in parallel... like maybe have a record button under each blob then when you push the big play it combines them...
Ask HN: What problem set would you develop for kids programming in C?
What problem set would you give to kids(aged 8-16) who are learning programming in C. The skill levels of kids vary from beginner to intermediate.
Agree with this 100%. It’s fine to say “this type of work is beneath me.” It’s not fine to say “this type of work is beneath me” and then expect to continue working at a company whose values say otherwise.
It's rather impressive that you have the mental fortitude to get meaningful stuff done in your spare time after working in a fast-food kitchen all day. More than I suspect most have, myself included.

Even as a young adult, the heavy labor and stress I took on from working those types of jobs would leave me so exhausted that I could barely even drive home, let alone belt out code. I'm not saying it's impossible -- throw enough money out there and you'll find the people... but that hardly makes it praise-worthy or justifiable from a compatibility perspective.
For unreasonable downvoters let me explain that windows interface is not only aesthetically disgusting it is absolutely uncomfortable and not logically consistent therefore should be avoided as much as possible in my opinion. Familiarity is not everything.

When you deal with software you kind of communicating with the imaginary one who build it. So when I am forced to use windows even for a moment I have the constant annoying impression that I am dealing with some one crazy who can through things in random places without logic or with logic that is changing from one part to another randomly. I simply can't stand it and I know there are other people who can't stand it too.

And please do not think I am saying it without knowing how perfectly and logically windows is organized. I worked with it and programmed it for 10 years. It was a perfect school called "How not to do things".
For personal use I have multiple computers and several iOS devices. Years ago I ran servers on my computers - SSH typically did the job. Then I could log in remotely and also use scp to move files back and forth, and there were nice GUIs that would help - KDE had kioslaves which allowed Konqueror to list remote files over SSH.

A big advantage to this was that I did not need to keep track of physical media.

These days though, I use a few cloud services such as Backblaze and iCloud and Fastmail. All other personal use is straight sneakernet with USB flash drives. A big reason is paranoia over security. The Internet is much more hostile now so I don't want the headache of securing ports that are open to the Internet. I don't even feel safe having servers running in my own home network: the home is now filled with connected devices that I have no control over, so I assume they're compromised and hostile. The easiest way to move data around is just to plug in a drive.

I've even moved backups to sneakernet. I used to use an NAS for Mac Time Machine, but now I just use USB flash drives. However this was less due to security and more because Time Machine over network was just too slow to be reliable. (I still use Backblaze as well though.)

Keeping the flash drives secure cross-platform was tough until I discovered flash drives with built-in encryption and little keypads. Make the filesystem FAT and it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

So none of my computers run an ssh server anymore. This seems a step backward to me but I just don't want to deal with the security.
It's a false division - physical v digital. Prime customers get free delivery (physical) + video.

AWS is a genuinely different business, the rest of it is all bundled together. So, they have digital loss leaders. And they may not have many physical loss leaders, but the ongoing argument that they have all these lines which are profitable just doesn't mean anything when customers don't want an online shop for X specific thing. They want an "everything store".
The point is to not actually have to pay their social security or benefits.
Well not anytime soon, sure. But never ever and it's physically impossible? There is plenty of solar power around that could be used to power a smelter. Maybe someone will devise a new kind of ion-engine that runs on asteroid dust instead of exotic gases...
I'm able to use arm containers for my work and it doesn't seem any slower than what I'd expect from native performance on my M1.
The most important part of this book is the thoughtful explanation and deep dive into psychedelics. Sure you might come away with "I should try this", but it explains how and why these drugs (*medicines) should be used, especially the potential downsides and adverse effects.
Goddamn AWS seems to be down again 4th time this month alone
Eh... regardless of how it's generally used, I think "leech" implies a parasite that is actively harming a host. Generally users who don't contribute aren't directly _benefitting_ the author, but they generally aren't harming the author either.
That its difficult to do today, you need to manage your own private key infrastructure. So it becomes reserved for a few important things, like a digital ID.

What if it were easy and dirt cheap to make a provable claim about anything, in seconds, with a fraction of the infrastructure cost?

Like "I am signed into this application". Or "I have received a covid vaccine", or "i authorized this payment". Theres probably a lot more, my background is in identity so those are the ones I know.

Yes you can do those today but they all carry significant cost, and as a result there are significant moats around established players.

Just like Letterman asking "why do I need such information, have you heard of magazines?". Its true, magazines can do that. Just like PKI can do all those things.
Show HN: Robo Holiday – create holiday themed AI art using natural language
If I could do food deliveries at a relaxed pace while getting paid a software engineer salary I'd sign up in a heartbeat. (Career prospects notwithstanding)
> The underlying media pointed to by the NFT is not restricted, it's infinitely reproducible and thus valueless

It is protected by copyright or other IP law, and not valueless.

I would say that the incentive is that they can access a market of digital products without fear of being sued by the rights-owner. The value of the NFT approach is that it can all be codified and automated so that a) as a creator I can get paid for my content without having to negotiate contracts with every distribution channel b) distribution channels get access to every piece of content.

Not saying that NFT's will work in the end, but that's my understanding of it.

In simple terms, though, it's just codifying the license terms, so that at least has some value as digital media grows and content creation becomes decentralized.
It's not clear that the regular delivery people are gruntled either.
YouTube Killed Trusted Flagging
You got downvoted, but there is a very strong correlation between retirement and death. Some people may be well prepared psychologically for independence, but many are not. My plan is to keep working, but to hone my work to make it valuable to me personally. Lots of positive things people can do are also reasonably profitable. Immersion in the corporate rat race is not an inevitable result of being productive.
This list is very random. You can’t lump in musical notation from the year “1033” and call it programming.

They need to pick a theme at least, to make this useful.
i would, got a link?
Hey Thomas, very cool project! Fellow Dane here :-) I actually attempted to build the same thing for fun some years ago, but I must admit I failed to implement the counter factual algorithm correctly and gave up. (I'm a little embarressed to admit that I remember finding a very nice tutorial and even source code for it, but still not grokking it). If youre like me, you probably just really wanted to improve odds vs your friends at the local pub ;-) Anyways, keep up the good work Jens
Only people that understand the importance of processes have for an organization will understand this.

Most people think they are too good to be doing that.
> [...] who are explicitly not supposed to perform work outside of their job [...]

Surely these visa programs account for things like health and safety training, other upskilling and so on? If DoorDash obligates its employees to do this under the claim that it helps them perform their day jobs, then I fail to see how the visa could come into question.
Are you and I reading the same comment? PragmaticPulp talked about measuring people by their true deliverables — not on whether they act like cogs or "give it their all".
Arguably less then minimum wage
That article has the same ad like a dozen times in a row, and also what is clearly JavaScript leaking out around them. Cool visual but what a sloppy site.
Same. I don't understand how people arrive at these emotions about mining asteroid belts.
Haha, if it were truly like giving up smoking, the gaps between commits would stay the same. :)
I managed a project that built a ambitious (for an internal project) collaboration portal integrating two enterprise applications and customizing one of them for UI and Business Process requirements.

My job was project management and functional validation.

But I dabbled in UI design and coding as a hobby. I flexed a bit.

I impressed the stakeholders with a good UI mockup. Tech team said that level of UI customization is impossible. I delivered a working prototype of customized site on the same platform. They had to accept the requirements, grudgingly I imagine.

I had a small team to do testing. I went aggressive and did a lot of testing myself. Tech team delivered a lot but did not have top notch tech people who were invested. They did stuff like security by obscurity and I called them out. I logged dozens and dozens of bugs. Resulted in extended timelines.

I thought I was ensuring a robust product that everyone would be proud of at launch. Tech team probably hated me. Product was finally ready for UAT.

Client team had a reorg and leadership change. This project was no longer a pet showcase project for new leadership. It was put on back burner and then shelved. Never launched.

Didn't make any friends.

Lesson: Avoid big-bangs. Launch MVP and iterate. Make friends. You don't have to be a Rockstar - aim for normal success.
that happens every day, in all restaurants.
Thank you. I just cannot understand what had happened.
Tiktok actually shows you content you'd like to see. So in that sense it's "addictive." It shows me weird local commercials, retro computing stuff, and clips from old industrial films.

'Reels' is a lot worse. It shows you generic stuff that's slightly personalized by things you "liked" over a decade ago. No reason to use it.
Happy Holidays all! Thankful for HN and the community!
Fair point. In my defense, people say you should pick the tech-stack you're most familiar with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29626371 Perhaps I'm misusing the word architecture - I guess I really mean tech-stack.

I'm most familiar with F#, so I went with that and Blazor initially (to avoid learning JS). PostGres feels fairly uncontroversial. Perhaps I magpied from there to event sourcing - I still find it surprising that an indexdb-eventsourcing-wrapper doesn't exist. I considered ReScript given my F# background (the two share a similar philosophy/syntax).

Now though, I'm trying to "pick the best tool for the job" instead of "use what you know". AFAIK if you want offline syncing, the best tool for the job is CouchDb/PouchDb. If you want to avoid the VDom, Svelte or SolidJS are the most popular options.

Please let me know if I'm mistaken - perhaps I'm too lost in my own head.
HN is 15 years old. It isn't fragile and its position isn't precarious.
Most people have no idea that email is not secure.
My favorite analogy used for psychedelics is a "microscope for the mind". In other words they aren't a panacea.
What a reactive, defensive attitude.

Just try applying everything you wrote to the topic of being vegetarian. Vegetarians are indeed arguing against meat-eating, and you could talk about how you are just some pig farmer selling meat on the side, and the vegetarians are saying "F You!"

And then there's the practical problems with whether animal products are identified in various food products…

And people get super defensive about that stuff too. But this desire to reject the FSF or the vegetarians and call them extremists and hypocrites amounts to an emotional refusal to engage fairly with any of the actual issues or even what the people are actually saying or doing.
> ... from what I've been reading is that Apple may allow alternate payment providers but still demand the fee.

I'd like to see how Apple does this - Apple will have to track payments through alternative systems it has no control over, and then try to claim their 30% Apple tax from the developers for transactions it claims has happened. They'll have to include even more intrusive spying tech into ios to do this. I don't see how they'll do this without upsetting both the users and the developers.
Do you really believe that they are trying to instill camaraderie and mutual respect among their white collar and abused contractor workers, or are they more likely to be have a shortage of delivery contractors and are looking to implement this as a some sort of stopgap or PR piece?

I have worked places where myself and fellow office workers have regularly pitched in for things like inventory in the warehouse, but then again the companies I have worked at have not been notoriously abusive with regards to labor and compensation. Coming from a blue collar family and having worked crap jobs prior to college, I never look down on any labor, rather the companies who take advantage. I do look at exploitative companies implementing suspect policies with a cynical perspective. If you don't believe that the gig economy is a shift towards destroying worker's rights and solidarity (how many tech workers are really pro labor? Vs how many anti-union rugged individualists), I'm sorry.
https://www.noradsanta.org/
National Survey Finds 60% of Internet Users Don’t Trust Instagram
I think it's great that you do this, but I agree with the parent that it's rare.
After working in retail and seeing the kind of people who are actual DoorDash/UberEats drivers day in and day out… I refuse to use it or any of its competitors. Not only are they frustrating as customers because a good 75% of them don’t even bother looking for the items, instead shoving their phone in your face and saying “where’s this stuff at”, but it was also quite clear, going by a variety of metrics, that most of the drivers were… not the most model of citizens, let’s just put it that way. While here and there you had the occasional “girl/guy next door trying to provide for her/his family” type person, generally speaking these types do not make up the majority.
Isn't this the risk with all totalitarian, overly centralized systems?
This is extremely easy to defend from an H1B perspective for an engineer. It just obviously comes under testing the platform that you build, delivering high quality products and building strong relationships with the rest of your team towards that end.

It is also the reason why this program seems to exist in the first place, so it all looks like good faith.
One of my favorite sci-fi books. I had a lot of fun thinking about how I would implement the localizers. I don't have the relevant background so I later found out that my ideas, some of which I put into a blog post[0], were rather naïve.

Anyway, great timing to see this posted over the Christmas break. I wanted to reread The Witcher, but this has revived my desire to read more of Vernor Vinge. Recommendations welcome.

[0]: https://manyagents.ai/posts/001_swarm
Anyone know why they used UTF-16 for the message type, instead of UTF-8?

Also, I'm skeptical that two peers can exchange keys without a third party, without being susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. But maybe the paper linked in the article proves that it's possible?

https://dominictarr.github.io/secret-handshake-paper/shs.pdf

When I was playing with p2p 20 years ago, I found that NAT traversal was far harder than the messaging protocol (I just copied a few commands from IRC at the time). So hard in fact, that I failed to solve it after 2 years of effort. I realized later that NAT is part of a cluster of problems with networking, the main one being that TCP should have been a layer above UDP (not beside it) and that connectedness was never really a good concept (it should have used identifiers like this instead of IP addresses so the stream survives changing LAN/Wi-Fi/mobile networks). Unfortunately, the article doesn't talk about UDP much other than for broadcasting peer identifiers on the LAN. So I'm not sure how much use this would have in the real world for stuff like game networking, much less state transfer with something like a software transactional memory (STM). I wonder if anyone's made an STM that runs on a readonly transaction log like this, kind of like CouchDB, RethinkDB or Firebase maybe? But I digress.

And I might have used the empty string "" to represent a null hash.. wait I misread that, they use actual null to represent the null pointer in the linked list of message hash addresses, which is great!

Could this be used to build a web of trust? Or is it meant to be more transient, like maybe people broadcast on throwaway identities? Could we drop PGP into this?

Maybe this is more like an RSS feed than something realtime like WebRTC?

Other than that, this seems like a pretty decent protocol, these are just some thoughts/concerns that stood out for me.
Yet the expanse is still really good.
It sounds like the Russians are doing just fine. The expectation that they would create an equivalent or superior processor to established technologies is kind of humorous.
Right, to say they have no purpose at all is rather disingenuous, or belies a rather extreme view towards COVID. And as far as the virtue-signaling goes, there is plenty of that from all sides.

The one good point I thought he made was the creation of the ‘COVIDeaucracy’, which like any established bureauacracy can bias towards self-preservation vs. its original purpose.
Folks, you're on fire :+1:
autoconf is nix-only in practice, macro-based, verbose and has a significant legacy burden. I have suffered plenty of pain from trying to build the few projects that still use it. In such cases it's often been faster to write own build scripts for some other newer buildsystem.

CMake and Meson I've used across tens of different projects, there's solid online documentation, significant usage, a good underlying language and I already have my toolchain files ready. Using autoconf instead of something more common and modern is likely to turn off people contributing or using your project as they'll be unfamiliar with it and are going to have more trouble solving issues on their own.
GP never suggested that the selection was based on the cars they drive - what gave you that impression?

My own reading is that gp uses the cars are evidence of past financial success
I see what you did there.

Nothing wrong with solving those problems, but when your business model IS the problem, there's not much the front line can do. Actually if they want to uncover some creative solutions, they should make everybody be the CEO once a month, instead of the most powerless position in the company.

Surely they've heard of the so-called Great Resignation. I think this is just a sly way of doing a layoff.