skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: I'm tired of the one-time purchase model
Every day I hear people complain about subscriptions to apps, that they want a one-time purchase and a lifetime license.

I also thought that's the way to go but man.. it's so exhausting.

Basically, the only way I can keep earning money is by selling to more and more people, and bringing more people increases the customer support work by a lot more than the money I'm making.

I'm creating Lunar, an app for controlling displays through DDC.

Since Lunar's XDR Brightness feature (https://lunar.fyi/changelog#5.5.1) came out, I'm doing customer support full time, answering to emails about:

Lunar brightens my HDR pictures!!

(it does not, people don't understand how EDR works on macOS and that it always did that even without Lunar)

Discord messages about:

my monitor is black!! I can't turn it on

(people that never touched the monitor physical buttons)

...and Twitter DMs on:

my license no longer works, why did you disable it?

(people that don't see the huge red text that appears on an upgrade released outside their free-update period of the license and want free updates forever)

FAQ's don't work, the license model is explained in detail for nothing because no one has time to read that, and I'm sure the most debated comments on this will be attacks on the confusing license model I chose because why can't I do what Parallels or Bartender does?

I'm not converting Lunar to a subscription model.

But I'll seriously reconsider before doing anything similar to Lunar for the next app. There's only so many hours in a day, and I got tired of wasting it on answering emails.
Do you also feel that you are on the wrong side of history? Not on the side of the active evil, but on the side of the passive spectator?
>I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, compensation, benefits and overall career trajectories of people who work with top bosses at office is better than those working from remote.

The way people find new jobs today is already largely digital. Networking events still exist as a once-every-so-often opportunity. The majority of recruiters and employers are still looking at personal projects, all which are accessible from a distance. Realistically there is very little reason the majority of people are affected by this when it comes to new jobs.

The majority of people don't grow well staying at the same job. This immediately lessens the impact of removing physical connections as a means to get better compensation. We've seen dozens of articles regarding this. As an added benefit, I wouldn't be surprised remote workers would have an easier time job hopping too.

I see many reasons the above would unfold, but even without WFH things have been trending against company loyalty and dedication being a great way to further oneself in most of the west.
Just google "von der Leyen McKinsey"
GSoC'2022: LibreCAD 3 Automatic Releases
Where do you live? Even when I lived in East London I never felt a threat of real violence including travelling worldwide.

I felt more likely to be beaten up as a teenager wearing heavy metal or grunge look from other packs of roaming teens (small town UK).

Wishing you more peace in the future!
I'm happy to share! When I find time I'll write it up on https://polyra.com :)
The "I mean" is added to give an informal tone instead of a "Here is a correction since you are incorrect" tone. Obviously it wasn't enough.

> And I don't believe that this kind of obsession with being technically correct will lead to great social outcomes.

There is no such obsession. It's a joke, meant in jest. I'm confirming that parent is correct, and that I'm just being nitpicky for the sake of giving the title a meaning even if it's incorrect.

Granted, in real-life social situations, it's easier to spot when people are joking, in comparison to online text-only comments. Especially when the place where you leave the comment is particularly famous for being dry.
Citation needed.

Having worked with various homeless charities over the years this comment is not just wrong, it's insultingly wrong.

Homelessness is a real problem[0] with various manifestations.

The whole welfare cheat problem is statistically insignificant[1] compared to real problems that cause homelessness like domestic violence.

This attitude that they're faking it and sending money to Romania is just not helpful.

Note: I apologize for the Australian links but most of my experience comes from Australia

[0]: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/homelessn...
[1]: https://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi421
To say it with the words of my first boss that stuck with me:

"Love it, change it or leave it. No amount of complaining will ever do anything else than paint you as a naysayer."

Was a hard pill to swallow, but my own experience proved me again and again he was spot on.
Sorry to play the man and not the ball, and please don't take this as
as personal ad-hominem, but what you are doing is rationalised
catastrophising [1]

Your fallacy is: Because all things are X and some X are bad, all X
are equally bad.

Your game is: Whatever you think of as a humane activity, I can find a
reason why it's destroying the planet so you may as well not bother -
just continue destroying the planet as you are.

Fact is, everything you do will kill you. Every step you take wears
out your body. Every bite of food and breath of oxygen takes you
further down the road to death.

What will you do, stay in bed frozen in fear?

There are a billion things to do in life that have less environmental
impact than flying around the world to go a jet-ski racing and tyre
burning party. Reading a good book [2] :) on a beach would hurt less.

respects

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing

[2] https://digitalvegan.net
Here's a fun article about hacking online poker, in part by taking advantage of a time-based seed:

https://www.developer.com/guides/how-we-learned-to-cheat-at-...

"The system clock seed gave us an idea that reduced the number of possible shuffles even further. By synchronizing our program with the system clock on the server generating the pseudo-random number, we are able to reduce the number of possible combinations down to a number on the order of 200,000 possibilities. After that move, the system is ours, since searching through this tiny set of shuffles is trivial and can be done on a PC in real time."
You needed to learn to hallucinate them. Imagine them in AR from the get-go.
I have many computers and hundreds of threads, and not afraid to acquire 3090 cards. However GPT-3 seems elusive, and I can't find out what it takes to run it myself.
I didn't know about this company before, but a cursory search suggests they were only based in Germany, not used by the German government. Title is misleading, especially as it is not the original title of the article, and Germany has in fact prosecuted them.

That said, good riddance. We desperately need accountability for malware coming from state actors.
Looking at the comments and article, I almost feel like a freak for actually not minding going back to the office.

My commute to the office is about a 10 mins walk - maybe that’s the difference with many others here. Either way, I like the separation between work and home. I also believe that online meetings and chat are not a great substitute for actually talking to people, especially when you are building something together.
Sounds like it is time for you to take your two year vacation.
It's a complicated topic.

When Britain took over Hong Kong, it was a small town with maybe a couple thousand inhabitants. The vast majority of Hong Kong people are immigrants (or their descendants). They knew what they were getting when they voluntarily entered British territory.

In a sense this situation fits the Hobbes narrative perfectly -- British subjects in Hong Kong voluntarily chose to live with the government and accept the social contract in order to escape the harshness of the situation in China, which at many times in the past century was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

And as thus despite the various faults with British rule, in general it did rule with the people's consent as people continued immigrating from mainland China. It doesn't really necessarily speak to good governance on the part of the Brits than the self-selection of pro-British people.

Of course the other reasons in this thread are valid as well. It's a complicated topic.
New Smartphone App to Gather Evidence of Speeding
I had believed that "nuclear construction is expensive, nuclear operation is cheap" got decades, and I spent a few months of pandemic downtime trying to figure out why that isn't true.

I didn't find all that much to go on. Aside from a French Court of Audit report in 2012, this information seems to be mostly non-public? Anyway, it looks like the answer is staffing and maintenance. It seems to be common for nuclear power plants to employ 500 to 1000 people. Fessenheim in France employed 700 people at the time of its closure, plus an additional 600 to 2000 during maintenance (per Wikipedia).

Meanwhile, nuclear seems to be very technically complicated with a bunch of weird Advanced Physics-y shit that can go wrong. Like, water pipes exploding because the nuclear radiation caused water molecules to split up by radiolysis and a design flaw allowed the hydrogen to collect somewhere. Or borated water eating through steel.

And now that I type this, it occurs to me that you can't just turn off the plant for safe maintenance work -- inside the dome is always going to be irradiated and probably require hazmat suits.

And, as you alluded to, nuclear plants use the steam based thermodynamic cycle but run cold because they have to maintain water in a liquid state while absorbing heat from the reactor. The power achievable from the Carnot cycle depends on the magnitude of the temperature difference: nuclear plants run at 300° C, coal plants about 570° C, and CCGT at 1000° C up to 1500° C.

https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEPR/DP687.pdf
I think that GNU/Linux is a valuable distinction due to the significance of libc. Alpine keeps uncovering how applications rely on GNU-isms and there seems to be no end to those issues. libc, however anemic, makes a huge difference it seems. Maybe it should be "glibc/Linux" rather than "GNU/Linux"?

However from the Linux desktop end user's point of view, whether a system is glibc-based, or musl-based is less directly significant than whether it is Gnome or KDE-based; alternatively, whether it's systemd or OpenRC or runit-based. So if GNU wants some clout for glibc, then in fairness the name starts to sound more like "GNU/systemd/KDE/Linux" at which point it sounds ridiculous. And for all those components the famous "I'd like to interject for a moment" makes equal sense as for GNU.

I frequently work with busybox-based systems and they're not nearly as different from GNU/Linux as KDE is different from Gnome.
Autotools helps you nothing when it comes to dependencies. It will just fail, maybe with a useful error message, maybe not. INSTALL file might give you vague hints on what you might need, often imprecise, outdated or incorrect. It's all just manual human work from there. That's a huge problem for Free Software as it ensures that nobody bothers to build their own software, largely removing the one big benefit Free Software should actually have.

GuixSD is working on fixing that, but that's a relatively recent development and at the moment at least it's missing anything equivalent to Nix flakes, forcing you to essentially fork the whole OS when you want to change anything and making you heavily depend on a central authority again.

We are still years away from a point where you can just build Free Software yourself across all the platforms that are supported by it. Even Guix and Nix will bail out the moment you try to target Windows or Android, if they support it at all (Nix supports Windows a little via cross-compiling, but few packages will build successfully).
Pharmacogenetic testing shows 89% improvement for treatment-resistant depression
Mango Pi teases SD sized Raspberry Pi alternative
the laundry list of things he doesn't like to use computers for were all things that all the forefathers of computing also didn't use computers for

like me I don't think this guy really dislikes computers, but modern information systems and their role in society

which is fine, because it is getting cumbersome now, especially with how smartphones have become so ubiquitous that they're practically a required tool to live a normal human life
Python does have a special optimization: when the iterable in a comprehension has len() defined, then Python preallocates the list. The comprehension is faster than manual preallocation+filling because the indexing happens in C instead of in Python.
I think WFH could be a blessing when you have a family. I still like WFH to a certain extent because I get more focused and more productive. But it has one major drawback: for solo people, like me, living alone, far from friends and family, it's very hard to not feel lonely. And to fill the loneliness gap, I tend to work more, casually burning out myself and then ending up depressed and feeling overworked.

I am still trying to build a social network on this new city, but it's a very hard process and a very long one. For now, going to office, makes me feel less lonely and I get some interactions and also do some activities with co-workers.
I don't deny this. But I'm perfectly capable to appreciate their work while at the same time holding a deep aversion against their pathetic need to constantly be applauded by the masses, so much that it borders on martyrs syndrome. The constant whining like a spoiled toddler when the applause they receive isn't enough (and it never ever is). There are hundreds of brats in Tech with a fragile inflated ego and a massive twitter following. I absolutely feel sorry for them because they'll never be able to see themselves for what they are.

It doesn't matter their cause, their background or their political leaning, it always turns out that if they stay around long enough they are all exposed for their manipulative personalities, their psychotic need to be constantly onstage and idolized.
I think to reply to what you said about why a vendor should be treated specially compared to Gnome/Linux Mozilla/Linux or KDE/Linux is that (and I don't really say that this is correct), you can see and credit Mozilla/KDE/Gnome as something that the users see and interact with and are aware of their contribution, but maybe the GNU userland and especially the glibc is so implied that maybe it's fair to make sure that people are aware of the contributions of GNU in the userland by having it in the name?

And I think it's kinda fair, there is work that is very important and vital to the system or at least has been, that has received free efforts, that maybe being so buried down in the system might never be noticed, that maybe it's fair to have it in the name?
It's the same here as in your partner's place. Even the proportions.
This is government work: hiring practices are bad by design and "firing practices" unexistant.
No one is ever fired. This means that the place is perennially understaffed in practice and depends fully on the goodwill, personal/professional ethics and patience of those that will do the work.
But since they can't fire and we all have to live together somehow, management likes to keep the illusion that everyone is the same. So sometimes they will design promotion schemes or bonuses that favor slackers over the guys doing the job, or punish everyone equally for the sins of a few.

It's a pretty kafkian environment, but it's sort of a golden cage too: Pay is good, benefits great, stability rock solid. I'm used to a freedom of agency and independence that I'm afraid would go over badly in a normal place. So I stay.
The point is that big pharma was pouring money into research of these chemicals to use them for treatment in therapy.

The cases of abuse that ultimately led to the stigmatization where blown up because that narrative served the view that the general public had of these substances anyway.

The same rhetoric people use today: "encryption should be forbidden because paedophilia|money laundering|<insert whatever upsets your target demographic most>"

> Not a huge factor really because schedule 1 DEA permits are available. I know a few academics with them.

What good is an permit if you don't have anyone to fund your research? And how do you get research funded for something that can't be brought to market because ... Schedule 1?
You'd think so, but that code is far into nasal demon territory. Both because the default byte representation of an enum isn't stable, and because an out-of-bounds enum value (wherever it comes from) is always UB.
Verizon blames ‘bad actors’ for the spam text you got from your own number
Does it say anywhere in the GNU licenses that any operating system or kernel created by the GNU tools must be called GNU/*?

To my knowledge no, thus GNU activist has no case here. You are free to use the GNU tools, in accordance to their license, and name your project whatever but not infringing on other trademarks.
I would guess that the ANE has some very specialised hardware (E.g. INT8 or FP16 only), and there’s isn’t a huge amount of it. So many nets either don’t fit completely, or aren’t using the right types of operation to match the ANE. Either can’t run on the ANE, or only have a subset of layers that can run on the ANE.

So when running a neural net iOS / macOS needs to make a decision about where to run each net. Even if a net has layers in it that are a perfect match for the ANE, there’s still a trade off from having move the workload back and forth between a CPU core and the ANE (although the unified memory should eliminate a big chunk of this cost).

It might be that in the general case it’s not worth the latency hit from using mixed processors when running net that isn’t 100% ANE compatible, or could just be that Apple haven’t got round to implementing the logic needed to gracefully spilt workloads across the ANE and a CPU core. Which would make sense, because they’ve got the time and expertise to ensure all their nets fit within the ANE. Something that’s difficult for 3rd party devs to do, because they don’t have access to detailed ANE docs.
Speak for yourself. We still have LAN parties. Plenty of times its online and thats ok. But we regularly gather up our computers on wheels and drag them everywhere. Sixteen to twenty xboxes is quite a sight.

If anything its gotten larger. Plenty of us bring kids with their own computers.

We all have dedicated server hardware. Monthly get-togethers at least. Mostly Factorio and similar but also quake/doom and quite a few others. We can still link back home for files and add more server space. We've now got the skills and hardware to do things we previously couldn't.

Why should we only remember the good ol days when we can live them right now? As for the music, the best stuff has just been written. Why limit yourself, anyway? We have a catalog of way more than fifty years!
In that range, just returning x would be way better. Maybe even perfect actually - if x is less than 10^-16, then the error of x^3/6 is less than the machine precision for x.
The whole promise of UBI is that only those who like to work would do it, and people wouldn't do menial jobs because they could simply not do them - and thus the price must rise. Then, because the prices have risen, either UBI must be larger or it's no longer working as promised. That causes inflation, and again UBI must be larger.
I’m sorry, your motherboard had a socket for a claw hammer?
> I didn't understand the algorithm completely (for example, whether you post your vote anonymously or under your name, and where is the private key for the public key you mentioned).

It's best to illustrate it with the ElGamal cryptosystem. Let's say that system officials have set up keypair `sk`, `pk = g^sk` and let everyone know `g, pk`. To submit a vote, the voter selects an option corresponding to a message `m` and encrypts it with a freely chosen randomization factor `r` and obtains a tuple `(g^r, m*pk^r)`. He signs this encryption under their name and sends it to the bulletin board.

The last bit is whether to allow everyone to see that you have or have not voted so whether the fact that you have participated in the elections. There seems to be the consensus in the literature that the signature should be concealed from the public and be allowed to verify only for independent auditors.

> Let's say bulletin board software replaces the vote with 20% probability. You post your vote for candidate A and see that it didn't appear on the board (because the board replaced it with vote for candidate B, but you don't know about it). How can you prove that you tried to vote for A and not for B? The records show that you have voted, and as voting is anonymous it is impossible to know how you voted.

One way to preserve the integrity of the bulletin board is that upon receiving a `vote <- ((g^r, m*pk^r), sig)`, the bulletin board issues a signature on the `vote` and returns it to the voter for the latter to assert for the vote to not be changed. Even when the signature is not present on the bulletin board, the voter can check the presence of `(g^r, m*pk^r)` as the randomization factor makes it unique for each voter.

> Of course, there are other ways to meddle with such election. For example, you see that the turnout is 99%. How can you verify this number? The government refuses to publish a list of voters because GDPR doesn't allow that. And even if the country publishes this list how you can verify that the list doesn't contain fictious voters?

The fictitious voters are indeed a thing if we can't trust the independent auditors of the bulletin board. Personally, I would never support an internet voting system where the result of the elections would lay on the integrity of a few trusted auditors who have special access to do so. Thus I would greatly prefer for the voter lists (the signatures) to be public in spite of losing participation anonymity.
I dunno. Most people I know are 1099 / contract workers, and a lot of them get paid cash off the books. The government might have a rough idea of what they make, but it definitely doesn't know down to the penny. I keep very good books, but I have foreign bank accounts, crypto trades, subcontractors I paid over Paypal, people who paid me over Paypal, and there's no one system I'm aware of that could figure out what I actually owe in taxes. It still costs me about $800 a year through an accountant to file my taxes. (Luckily, you can write it off).

Until or unless everything is centralized and cash ceases to exist, I don't know how they'd really do it. In South Korea do waiters live on tips? Because in the US, almost all money made in the restaurant service industry comes from unrecorded cash tips; the actual wages are extremely low. The restaurant will attempt to estimate their workers tips and cover the taxes out of the fixed wages, but... this doesn't even get into all the other cash industries like stripping or moonlighting as a dominatrix. The US's tax attitude seems to be: You're on your honor, and most of the time we won't catch you, but not even Jesus can help if we do.
I don't know about Ruby, but one example I can think of where a language made the instability explicit is that early on in the language Go changed the behavior of the select statement:

> If one or more of the communications can proceed, a single one that can proceed is chosen via a uniform pseudo-random selection.

https://go.dev/ref/spec#Select_statements

In an early implementation it would pick in lexical order, IIRC (and the specification did not mention how a communication should be picked). Not only could this lead to bugs, apparently some people were relying on it and they didn't want that.
I mean i already never got a raise or career path and already knew job hopping was the only way up, as it has been for the past decade.

And never got a manager trying to change that. We are in a mercenary industry and the faster we accept that the better for us all.