skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Visual Basic 6 allowed almost anyone to automate things, and get on with their lives. The amount of labor saved by it could be staggering.
That was my point. The gp was taking about processing thoughts
>while the share of electricity from coal has has actually gone slightly down

But the electricity generation in general has gone up since then. While total coal has gone down, gas has gone up, and therefore the total amount of electricity generated from fossil fuel sources has only changed slightly. It's clear on this chart[0]. So actual progress in reducing fossil fuel dependency in the last 20 years has been small (the chart is not properly labeled for this, but it looks like something around 50TWh less than in 2002) -- and that's not even counting non-electric heating.

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you were complaining. I was just curious where else you feel the value lies in that software, if freedom isn't it?
No, I'm talking about 1 million a month so that's on me for using it incorrectly then. Apologies.
Maybe a sort of conglomerate, where each new 'startup' is part of an existing company. Would that avoid some of the bureacracy?
I strongly and emphatically disagree. You frame it like we invented these AIs. Did we write the algorithms that actually run when it’s producing its output? Of course not, we can’t understand them let alone write them. We just sift around until we find them. So obviously the situations lends its self to surprises. Every other year we get surprised by things that all the “experts” said was 50 years off or impossible, have you forgotten already?
Just boils down to not optimising until you need to. Start with a 3 tier web app (unless your requirements lead you to another solution), then start with read replicas, load balancing, sharding, redis/RabbitMQ etc
So you are working in monochrome? Even after you have applied the Bayer filter you still need 24 bits per pixel do you not?
Ok, so here's a general notice to the techbros of the world: Most people, when you say "X is true" believe that you are saying that X is true. Not that you are saying X will be true in the future, not that X might be true at some point in time, and certainly not that you are asserting that X is physically possible.

Anyone remember the argument that rather than waiting to recharge an electric car's battery, you can just drop the battery, bolt a new one in place, and be on your way? Yes, that is physically possible. Yes, it might be a way to do things sometime in the future. But no, it is not possible now, no one is building out the infrastructure required, and as far as I know no vehicle manufacturer is designing their vehicles such that the battery can be easily and quickly replaced. The possibility that something may be done in the future is not a solution to a current problem.

This may be news to you, but most people who might exchange a iris scan for $20 in currency that you cannot access now, and may never be able to access, would consider that to be fraud. You have lied to them.

But that's just the start of the craziness here.

"The documents indicate that the true value of Worldcoin’s continent-spanning field test lies in its distinctive Orbs. Rather than just facilitating the company’s utopian promises, the Orb appears to be at the core of Worldcoin’s ambitions to dominate the emerging business of anonymous digital authentication: in other words, proving that an online avatar is a real person without revealing who they are. [...] Worldcoin says that once its systems are perfected, it will anonymize and delete users’ biometric data, thereby guaranteeing their privacy. But the company still has not committed to a timeline, even though it has captured and stored almost a half million iris scans to train its algorithms."

Yes, they're simply lying about the reason they are collecting data.

"Blania strongly pushed back on the suggestion that Worldcoin’s purpose was to harvest the world’s eyeballs in return for a cryptocurrency that may turn out to be worthless. That notion “is just very wrong. I don’t even know where to start, like this is just very wrong,” he said."

Yeah, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and spends its time quacking, it's probably a duck. Theranos!
Trap or integrated win-win?

We use one of these "aggressively simple" architectures too. At this point, I would quit my job instantaneously if I had to even look at k8s or whatever the cool kids are using these days.
I think especially for small teams starting out, complex architecture can be a huge trap.

Our architecture is extremely simple and boring - it would probably be more-or-less recognizable to someone from 2010 - a single Rails MVC app, 95+% server-rendered HTML, really only a smattering of Javascript (some past devs did some stuff with Redshift for certain data that was a bad call - we're in the process of ripping that out and going back to good old Postgres)

Our users seem to like it though, and talk about how easy it is to get set up. Looking at the site, the interactions aren't all that different from what we would build if we were using a SPA. But we're just 2 developers at the moment, and we can move faster than much larger teams just because there's less stuff to contend with.
This is such a HN take. 99% of the people, even the ones who copy embed links, don't even know what js is. This is a problem for everyone, not just literally you and I.
> is a reduction in the standard of living of many

> requires the power of the individual to be reduced

> empower central authorities

> our new rationed, austere society

> a recipe for catastrophic war

> our only solution is technological

That's, like, six unfounded predictions presented as truth with zero supporting evidence.

> those who wish to use climate change as a Trojan horse to enact their social whims

And, of course, one baseless accusation.
Neeva's similarity search is very useful. It takes a page and creates a query from it (oversimplified, actually a document based k-nearest-neighbors) then executes the query. This feature used to be in Google but they removed it, not used enough I guess. Neeva has very limited ways to use this.

Here's wishing for this in all search!
Apologies I understand more clearly that it is rewriting/overwriting the blockquote now. But that is the javascript hiding the blockquote, it's not "gone". It's still in the html, still visible to scanners and bots (and those with no javascript and perhaps also screenreaders for the a11y folks). Javascript/CSS hides alllll kinds of stuff on the web alllll the time to make pages look/format a certain way.

They're not entirely right, but they're not wrong either. You're running their javascript to power the embed, and so they gave the response "respecting user's deletion".
The vast, vast, vast majority of organizations don't need micro services, don't need half of the products they bought and now have to integrate into their stack, and are simply looking to shave their yak to meet the bullet list of "best practices" for year 202X. Service oriented architectures and micro services solve a particular problem for companies that are operating on a massive scale and can invest (read waste money) on teams devoted to tooling. What most companies should do is build a monolith that makes money, but hire good software engineers that can write packages/modules whatever with high levels of cohesion and loose coupling, so that one day when you become the next Google, it will be less of a pain to break it into services. But in the end it really doesn't matter if it's painful anyway, because you'll have the money to hire an army of people to do it while the original engineers take their stock and head off to early retirement.
Having the option to exercise your freedoms (or, say, contract someone to do so, or band together with other users to do this) is an important protection for you as a user, even if you will not directly exercise it yourself. It can for example inform the relationship the original vendor has with you, and how they treat you.

"But I'm never going to patch it anyway" is a bit like "Privacy? But I have no secrets", which implies you will never have secrets and don't want to have the option to, even if external factors not under your control change.

By the same token, just the mere existence of free alternatives does a lot to keep developers of non-free software honest in some cases, even if they don't gain competitive market share.

OTOH, ironically the existence of free software has also let the developers of non-free software off the hook in important ways. For example, if you look at any large proprietary software maker, you will often find that their most skilled engineers are the ones with experience developing free software - because they have additional years of high-density experience that companies fail to provide an equivalent environment for (low incentives to mentor, more extreme specialization, etc.). So proprietary development shops have had to be far less sustainable wrt/ training and recruiting because the community has picked up the slack. Which I'm not sure is a good thing - healthy teaching relationships and learning opportunities for experts on the one hand, business models and competitive salary on the other, rather than both in one spot.
What Is Quantum Computing
Ask HN: How are you supposed to use LeetCode?
This is all pretty new to me. Been at the same place for over a decade, but figured working on my chops would be good. So I made an account, picked a "medium" exercise at random, and started working on it.

It probably took me 2 full hours, and I only got it with a brute force approach and a butt-load of optimization to make it efficient later.

So, anyway, then I go to the discussion tab, and that's where everyone is chatting about this really cool, elegant, O(n) solution. But it's the kind of thing you would see in a CS textbook, not just come up with on your own. And I didn't see any proofs, so I still don't know that it _really_ works. But I do see lots of examples of exactly how to implement it.

My question is; what's the point then? Are you supposed to not look at the discussion and beat your head against the wall trying to best Donal Knuth, or do you look at the discussion and then just copy it all over with your brain totally turned off? I don't get it.

Oh, here it is, in case anyone is wondering:

https://leetcode.com/problems/container-with-most-water/
The best reason to use Emacs is that it’s fun. Would you learn the guitar because it’s “good for you” to learn it or because you enjoy playing music? I think the only sustainable motivation is the latter. If learning Emacs is simply a chore with an abstract promise of “productivity” as a reward you’re not missing out on anything.
I could be wrong (I never really got into gaming as GMA950+Linux was an exceptionally bad combo for it) but I thought source was exclusively DirectX back then.
Never had a reason to use them, but I do recall that Edmund Optics has some C-mount units with liquid lenses in their catalog. The driver modules will allow control over USB or I2C.
The following is strictly related to my thoughts on getting software developed and distributed (i.e., funding / incentive models for building an maintaining the software).

My personal views -- it really depends on what the software is for. In the case of foundational software (OS, libraries, utilities) then Free software has some major advantages that outweigh the disadvantages. The disadvantages of Free software come from the lack of paying customers that fund development. But in the above use case many of the primary users are also developers, who have an incentive for contributing back improvements. (In the case of OS an Libraries, I consider the primary users to be developers, as end-users use software that runs on top of this foundation, even though users also use the OS, they typically primarily use it to execute other applications).

For the next layer above, you have applications software. If the app is aimed towards businesses, then the funding model of businesses licensing the software from a vendor with a pool of developers seems to have positive returns, that outweigh the potential contributions that can come up from making the code follow the four Software Freedoms. Same may apply if the app is aimed at non-technical users. For apps aimed at technical users, many of these can fall under the previous category of foundational software.

The next category is entertainment related software. This I consider almost equivalent to books, a movie, or music. Most of the value is in the creative side, vs the technical side. Therefore Software Freedom applied to a game brings not much more value than the same type of Freedom applied to a blockbuster movie.
> Does this mean the smallest /bin/true is actually an empty file?

That was exactly the implementation of /bin/true in Unix v7: <https://github.com/v7unix/v7unix/blob/master/v7/bin/true>
~ after 1 year: $600, 3 years: $192,000, 5 years: $780,000
> Are we building a bad future for software by not fighting for something like the Free Software movement?

Yes.
looks cool.
Do weatherproofed wind turbines consume electricity? A common complaint around here is that they need to keep the blades heated to avoid frost and ice buildup, even when the wind is not blowing (we do have a lot of still days in winter).

In bad conditions, if that is still the case, having wind turbines connected to the grid might be worse than having none.
Sorry, but why was that a type of "asshole comment"? I don't get it. The poster has valid concerns with the data and the validity of the tweet (as do I). The tweet also seems to be deleted.
Show HN: I built a tool to aggregate your investments and follow other investors
Hi HN!

Over the past year, we’ve been building Wealthly (https://wealthly.com), a tool to help you aggregate all your investments, and a community of investors who are sharing their portfolios and knowledge.

I started working on this idea because I had two personal frustrations:

1. I had a few different brokerage accounts, some retirement accounts, and a little crypto all in different places. It was hard to get a glance of everything I had. I tried all the products in the market, and they all had various issues (poor data quality, constant disconnect, didn’t support options, etc)
2. I learned a great deal about investing from other people online, but I always wanted to see where people actually put their money. I needed the transparency because it gave me a sense of comfort and trust

We’ve slowly built up a small group of users who have connected close to $18M of live assets. We’re hoping that the HN community will find a tool and a community like this useful!

I think whenever a product like this shows up, the number one thing people get most concerned with is always security and are you scraping brokerages for data. Unfortunately we don’t have a magic bullet around this issue in the US. We use the brokerages’ official OAuth APIs whenever we can, and resort to scraping when we’re forced to with no other solutions.

To address the security and privacy concerns people have, we are also thinking about open sourcing our connectors, and creating a desktop app where all your data is stored locally instead of in the cloud.

We haven’t opened up sign ups yet, but you can join with this invite link: https://join.wealth.ly/4WFYJ3.

Would love to hear any feedback!

This is my personal portfolio: https://wealth.ly/@sunny
Of course it's their prerogative, we can still talk about how they've limited some good options.

I think your analogy is poor, because this is a tool for makers. The engineers aren't the makers.

I think a more apt analogy is if John Deere made a universal harvester that you could use for any crop, but they decided they didn't like soybeans so you are forbidden to use it for that. In that case, yes I would complain, and I would expect everyone else to, as well.
Free Software is not about price.
Do you work in the factory at night, bally0241?
Intel suspends all operations in Russia “effective immediately”
Why can't parents travel, date new people, have ridiculously cool hobbies, read, and talk to random people on the street?

As far as conversation topics go, my friends and I rarely spend more than a few minutes here and there discussing our kids. We all have much more interesting things to talk about and kids don't really come up.

I guess you're extrapolating too much based on your own personal experience.

I won't argue that there are no parents who bore you, but fundamentally that isn't due to being a parent.
Difficulty in cryptography is boolean. Is there an attack which has fewer steps than the brute force constant? If no? you’re good. If Yes? add more rounds, etc.
Merci Alain!
I call this "Resume Driven Development"
Thanks for this. I did not know about Geof Darrow.
This looks very impressive!
For pfsense you'd really do a lot better with a small x86-64 system (mini-itx motherboard) that has four or more gigabit ethernet ports with Intel chipset onboard, attached to PCI-E 3.0 bus. In a small mini-itx case it would definitely be a lot bigger than a raspberry pi but also a great deal more capable.

Depending on your needs you can also get systems that have several 10GbE SFP+ cages on-motherboard.
Speech2Face: Learning the Face Behind a Voice(2019)
I was being tongue in cheek about people who religiously follow that "single entry and single exit to any function" rule and then get wrapped around the axle when a function needs to make several discrete sanity checks at the start before doing work.
Those other tools you work with can become more advanced to in order to keep up with the improvements your IDE offers. You want to inline a diagram to your code? That image should show up both in your editor and in the diff.
I'm a drop in the sea, but I "believe" in free software
Well you still end up with less sensor surface area with 4x as many pixels on the same substrate because there’s a gap around each cell and the micro lenses are smaller. So you can aggregate them but you’re still getting less light.

There’s a happy medium somewhere on density vs performance. I think the iPhone 13 pro seems to have it about right for “reasonable compromise”
My body is still fine. What I did not do: hard sports. Or any sports at all :-)
Conversations with a Killer
I find that with a lot of posts recently. I consider myself a smart, switched-on person and yet I'll read an entire article and not understand a word of it.
Classifying sex work as immoral (or at best, amoral) is not the same as classifying slavery as moral, so I would find a better example for "moral failings"
I must be missing something, because I don't see how a link farm doesn't have the exact same problem.

In the case of symlinked directories we have:

- the binary lives in /usr/bin/python3
- /bin is a symlink to /usr/bin
- /bin/python3 therefore refers to /usr/bin/python3

We can use either /usr/bin/python3 or /bin/python3.

In the case of a link farm we have:

- the binary lives in /usr/bin/python3
- /bin/python3 is a symlink to /usr/bin/python3

Again we can use either /usr/bin/python3 or /bin/python3.

As far as I can see, both methods allow insufficiently careful developers to hardcode the wrong paths. What am I missing?
"Why does everyone devolve into the same 'X entity is nefarious and they are trying to build a database to sell' or for x machine learning."

Because "building a database of biometric information in a nefarious manner" is exactly what they are doing.

"How do you prove identity of a wallet and ensure that this is my only one? Say i want to do an airdrop but only to real people? This technology solves the identity problem in a secure way. It's just a hash of my retina data, proves this is my wallet and is based on unique retina data. Also with ZK Snarks, they don't know anything about that bio data."

They are on the right path to build a database of biometric data. All the rest of this is handwaving and dreams.
I object to being called weird. It's quite a logical position to hold, many modern philosophers hold a panpsychist or similar view.
Surely the headline should be "Berkeley beats Stanford"?
It looks to me like the faucet sprays water sideways toward the bowl, which is genius, because then you aren’t bumping up against it when you’re washing your hands!
Please write it! I'd love to read one.
> Almost every single streaming show from Hulu themselves without exceptions is ad-free

Thats almost ad-free not ad-free.
I agree that being private company is a bad defense for a moral attack, because it 1) it is morally irrelevant, and 2) it goes both ways, allowing freedom to censor or not censor.

My point is rather that most people don't even bother making a coherent criticism. "This is bad and I think they should update their policy" is a vastly more constructive position than "this is bad"
Sierra Flashback with Ken and Roberta Williams [video]
Tax is predictable and consistent, at least.
https://binnyva.com

Few other sites as well - but all linked from this site.
The article doesn't care to mention what RFP even means. So I'll be the guy in the comments asking: "WTF does RFP stand for?"
Ha, most companies have no clue about how to even get started writing an RfP and are more than happy having a friendly vendor do it for them. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but a little bias is almost impossible to avoid.
How much is your time worth? US TV has 16 minutes of advertisements per hour, while UK has 7, not counting the BBC channels, which do not have any.
I'm trying to understand your point, because I think I agree with you, but it's covered in so much hyperbole and invective I'm having a hard time getting there. Can you scale it back a little and explain to me what you mean? Something like: AI is going to replace jobs at such scale that our current job-based economic system will collapse?
NATO countries don't act in coordination. With respect to Iraq:

> On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the UN to present evidence that Iraq was hiding unconventional weapons. However, Powell's presentation included information based on the claims of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who later admitted that his claims had been false. Powell also presented evidence alleging Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda. As a follow-up to Powell's presentation, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Japan, and Spain proposed a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, but NATO members like Canada, France, and Germany, together with Russia, strongly urged continued diplomacy. Facing a losing vote as well as a likely veto from France and Russia, the US, the UK, Poland, Spain, Denmark, Italy, Japan, and Australia eventually withdrew their resolution.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War

> It's not anyone's responsibility to lob you a specific case that you can try to shoot down on its specific details, and refusing to (proactively!?) do so does not indicate a bad faith argument come on.

I think that depends on why you show up in forums. If your goal is to learn and grow by sharing experiences backed by data then I think it's important to be specific. If you just show up to "make your voice heard" or make grifting comments, then yeah it doesn't matter that much.
It's an owner enabled option. The car owner requests to Turo that they would like Turo to hold a X$ deposit in lieu of accident coverage. I believe the X$ pays for the driver's / Turo's insurance deductible in the event you crash it and refuse to run it through your insurance. I've rented about 10 cars on Turo over the years including when it was called RelayRides and I've been asked to do it once, but it was for an older Porsche.

Also, if you want to see that deposit, go to any car rental place in america and offer to pay with debit card or cash and see what they'll hassle you with. Hertz requires requires a credit card. Enterprise requires proof of a returning flight. Dollar requires a credit check.