skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't agree more. I've been saying for years that we should have some professionalism added to the industry.

It doesn't mean that everyone who writes code must be licensed. But to determine if software is fit for purpose you must be. Liability is important and software doesn't have to threaten life and limb to benefit from it. Many engineering professions also protect property and business interests (along with life and limb).

What I hope such a system would provide is a means to prevent companies from cutting corners for the sake of profits and give engineers the right to say what is fit for purpose. Too many breaches that have cost economies too much money happen because IT is incentivized to release now and fix it later. Then hundreds of thousands of peoples' financial details are leaked or their pensions disappear. And the current system of liabilities don't protect the end users or dissuade the software industry from continuing on this destructive course.

We also don't account for externalities well. Consider how many years PoW crypto mining has been going on, growing, and forcing new coal plants to open to keep up with demand. People in rich countries don't care because it's not happening in their backyard and it is promising to make some of them rich. That happened because we have no social safeguards against bad technology harming the environment/society/etc. You can write a software service that exists to use up as much energy as possible and you will never face any consequences for the damage caused.

We barely slap people on the wrist for organized crime let alone corporate crime, negligence, etc.

We're not talking about your high school web project here. We don't have to prevent people from learning and building things on their own. I just think we need to prevent companies from rolling the dice with our future and let the folks who know what they're doing run the show.
"Dying in committee" means that the bill did not go to the entire California Senate for a vote, but that a majority of the committee to which the bill was assigned were unable to support the bill to move it onto the floor. It looks like the article links to the site that tracks bill status, but it appears that site does not record how a committee voted.
Some of the past discussions:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24525999 63 points, Sept 2020, 12 comments

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124480 329 points, Feb 2019, 52 comments

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834791 1372 points, Dec 2013, 171 comments

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296634 275 points, Aug 2013, 82 comments
If you have FireTV, then I'd be happy to use voice to do searches to show on it (the same way you can tell Alex to "show me comedy movies" or "search for X on Youtube" and have it show up on a FireTV device), but yeah, I can't imagine I'll ever use it to order something. Reordering something I've ordered before maybe, as long as I can be sure it will actually re-order the exact same thing.
Plenty of John Deer loving farmers would disagree with you.
In many cases it doesn’t matter even if the word is in English. When choosing an audiobook, I’ve had to make some leaps in phonetics to get Alexa to understand certain words in the title.
SWVL plans to lay off 32% of its team two months after going public [By SPAC]
> There are zero operating systems that can stand for a year without patching in the face of contact with the internet.

Similarly, there are also zero buildings, bridges, aircraft, etc. that can realistically withstand attacks of humans despite being built by engineers who have taken on the liability. A sufficiently powerful bomb will win every time. It seems a bit strange to want to hold software to a higher standard here.
Last week's archaeological news: Lost cities, ancient turds, and Hadrian's Wall
> Knobs in the car and on appliances.

I want knobs in my car, but I specially want no GPS tracking, no connection to the internet. My not-that-old dead-dinosaur-powered car doesn't have it, but I'd like to switch to an electric car in the next few years and I'm fearing it.

Will anyone build an electric but dumb car? I know some of the earlier electrics were dumb (in this desirable sense) but they also had significat compromises. Will it be possible to buy a privacy-respecting, good, new-ish electric car in a few years? It looks unlikely...

(I'm honestly asking, someone here will know way more than me about this)
I don't want to quote Elon Musk as a matter of preference but I'll do so anyway:

"If they[people] have, um, implicit, um, assumption that the economy is zero-sum, then the only way for one person to get ahead is by taking from one another".

The context is that the economy is ever expanding, values are being created, and future is bright, but my thought is it characterizes the market today precisely if it had not been for the context.

ref: https://youtu.be/XP5k3ZzPf_0?t=1579
I have seen such companies fail as they struggle to hire and it becomes more difficult to adapt quickly to more spry competition. If they are in a market without spry competition then it works fine. For instance, for internal applications where there is a top-down forbiddance of experimentation with new things. But even for internal apps, if experimentation is not forbidden, a forward-looking team might start effectively using (and hiring for) newer technologies and eventually get all the budget.
I have a dishwasher and washing machine from Siemens (nowadays the same as Bosch, just different branding). European models around 400€ each. Eco mode washes perfectly fine on both of them, that's what I always use. Takes over three hours but that's not an issue for me.
None that can reliably factor numbers bigger than 21.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records#...
Got screwed by Heroku Review Apps? We've got an alternative
You don't need a vacation to not write code for a few days
How does this happen? Why does a simple mechanical feature need firmware?
EIA says the average retail price was 18¢ in California in 2020, and though not all of California is PG&E territory, that is a data point.
Sure(1)

1/ Definition of "real", "quantum" and "computer" may vary.

More seriously I don't think there's a real bar to what constitutes a "real" quantum computer, so it's in the eye of the beholder at this point I think.

As far as I know from publicly available info, there's nothing resembling a practically usable quantum computer yet (as in, a computer that would outperform a conventional one at some practical task).
They're a bit pricey but the gear from Intec would be perfect for this: https://intech.studio
Both - libraries written in Clojure and wrapped versions of Java libraries.

And because Java interop is pretty good, you can use Java libraries directly from Clojure as well.

I have written REST servers, data stream processing pipelines, hadoop jobs, react-based frontends, mobile apps, etc. in Clojure.
The "Foegen effect", written by Fögen, and:

Author contributions

Conceptualization: Zacharias Fögen.

Data curation: Zacharias Fögen.

Formal analysis: Zacharias Fögen.

Funding acquisition: Zacharias Fögen.

Investigation: Zacharias Fögen.

Methodology: Zacharias Fögen.

Project administration: Zacharias Fögen.

Resources: Zacharias Fögen.

Software: Zacharias Fögen.

Supervision: Zacharias Fögen.

Validation: Zacharias Fögen.

Visualization: Zacharias Fögen.

Writing – original draft: Zacharias Fögen.

Writing – review & editing: Zacharias Fögen.

Does not inspire confidence in the quality of this research.
The devil is often in the details, and working out the details can easily be engineered to kill a bill.
I've been semi in the market for my first car, and fully touch interfaces are a hard deabreaker for me, as are subscription services. I don't want to have to look away from the road to change the volume or turn the Radio off, and I don't get why so many cars force you to these days.
However Google does it to avoid anticompetitive lawsuit,and not for helping snoop on users for Google
Subway does franchisee damage control after John Oliver segment: memos
Of course it could, it's a networked computer with storage. I'm guessing there's a 0% chance it's not running a webserver.
> I am amused that folks seem to think we could eradicate so many widespread diseases with just masks.

Sorry, who "seems to think this?". I haven't seen this claim, or anything like it, anywhere.

The point many were making was that the overwhelmingly successful suppression of all these other diseases was clear proof that "masks work" to suppress disease, and by extension that we should wear them to effect the suppression of a much more dangerous pandemic. So when there's a largely uncontrolled pandemic happening, you should wear a mask.

Now, general immunity seems to have reached a point where the pandemic is at least reasonably controlled without mitigation strategies. Covid of mid-2022 is now a worrisome endemic disease, comparable to (but yet rather more dangerous than) the worst flu seasons we've seen in the past century (since 1918).

So... we can take our masks off now (most of us, admitting that some people have different levels of risk tolerance, etc...). The calculus changes because the facts on the ground have changed.

None of that is an argument that you shouldn't have worn a mask in late 2020. You absolutely should have, and it remains horrifying to me that so many of us didn't.
Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike on Fightcade.

App loads instantly unlike most modern games, and if you're in the US, you can quickly find a match. You can challenge anyone in chat room to a quick first-to-3 or first-to-5 which will take 5-10 minutes. It's a great adrenaline rush that totally takes my mind off coding b/c it's so fast paced and PvP. Then back to work.

Easy to get into for beginners, but the mechanics are incredibly deep and people have been mapping the engine out for 20 years, so there is so much to learn if you choose to.
You can do notifications without polling in the background.

Even Facebook Messenger doesn't require the "run in the background" permission, and yet all sorts of cheapest Chinese bidder IoT and Appliance garbage apps check for it and refuse to run if you don't grant it - such as the app for Thinkware dashcams.
> Relying on proxies like "innovation tokens" feels to me like a mistake because it is, fundamentally, trying to replace strategic thinking with a points system.

No, it’s making it clear that there’s a scarcity you have to manage that is non-obvious: too many novel tech choices and you end up getting burned by the sum of all their risks leading to perpetual problems. If you have engineers literally allocating themselves a fixed number of tokens they don’t understand the talk.
There's nothing wrong with the size of the grant, in the US a hundred dollar bill is a nice bag of groceries, this is one to five of them for showing off something cool which someone was already working on.

Something like this which had a clear path from a few groceries to full sponsorship at a comfortable salary could really take off, I think.

As is, it's in a sort of uncanny valley where you'd probably attract more high-quality work in total if the prize was "get on a list of cool new stuff" instead of money. It's easy for the friction involved in accepting money to exceed the value of a hundred bucks, which might prove a bit of a market for lemons.

Or it might not, it's a worthy experiment.

Props to the sponsors for doing this, I look forward to seeing what comes of it!
I recently got professionally qualified as a software engineer with a capital E. I'm still the same regular programmer I ever was! Not sure a piece of paper really solves anything.
Well, the Keeling Curve (the record of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere since the late 1950s) shows pretty steady accumulation, though it's not quite a linear line, it's slightly exponential.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

If you compare that to the global temperature data presented in the same kind of graph, there's this relatively flat period from the 1950s through the 1970s, before the steady climb begins:

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

CO2 is best understood as having its most potent effect at about ~12 km up in the atmosphere, this is where under pre-industrial conditions there was a large 'escape window' for infrared radiation (due to colder temps and lower pressures). That warming in turn drives water vapor feedback at lower levels in the atmosphere, with the water vapor accounting for 2/3 or so of the actual radiative trapping and the CO2 accounting for about 1/3 (then there's methane, a compounding factor but IIRC it's about 1/20th overall).

If we take the Milankovitch cycle of glacial ages into account, the world without fossil CO2 should have been steadily sliding into another ice age (with the warm peak about 10K years ago). So the flattening out period represents perhaps the end of that trend (driven by orbital parameters, and associated feedbacks w/ ice sheets and CO2).

Now the CO2, thanks to steady increase, is the dominant factor controlling global temperature trends, and the global temperature is basically just tracking the global atmospheric CO2, with a lag time of at least several decades (I think it's more like 100 years for the global temperature to catch up with the global atmospheric CO2, but that's a matter of debate).

Conclusion: even if we take dramatic action to curb fossil fuel use (which is a good idea), we're going to be stuck with a steadily rising global temperature for at least 100 years before leveling off (and this ignores issues like permafrost outgassing of additional CO2 and methane destabilization in shallow marine sediments). Hence humans are going to have to plan for adaptation to these new climatic conditions. The point has been well tipped, and we're in for it.
What if I’m not an established team, but just some bozo with interest in security research and hacking stuff?
The committees are generally permanent, not instantiated per bill, and the senators on the committee doesn't change often (the majority party does get to have a majority membership in all the committees) but yeah, committee membership can be really powerful and gets used as a reward/threat by party leadership.
> leading to the same hackery voted in again and again.

Or being replaced by an isomorphic sock puppet.
What part of the authentication material isn’t optimized for production and what adjustments would you recommend?
No-cloud step counter app that doesnt sell my data?
Dear fellow hackers, I'm walking a lot so I decided to give pedometer a shot. But after looking at Play Store I became paralyzed by options that seems shady as usual. So I was wondering if there is any no-BS step counter app for Android. I.e. no cloud, no ads, no personal data collection and sell, preferably opensource, maybe with optional gps-logger+map. I think this disqualifies samsung app, google fit app and a few others as well. No idea which. Also, I have no trust in online review articles since I consider them either payed or not focusing on privacy at all.

Thanks a lot in advance!
> it appears that site does not record how a committee voted

Do you know if that information will be public record in any way? If not, this seems like an awful lot of power in very few, non-accountable hands...
Yeah I know about that issue and will try to fix it.

It's not that simple though and I cannot make the background one solid color, because there are very bright coin logos too and ones with different gray levels. I also don't want to remove the glass effect of all tiles.
Shadow could work but might be too performance intensive to do in real time as the images can be somewhat large (in their original pixel size). Will need to test that.
I might need to analyze the brightness of the images in code and then pick a solid background color if they are too dark.

By the way, I released an update today that among other things has an easier difficulty setting on the home screen, in case you find the default one too hard.

Edit: Just released a quick & dirty fix until I find a more permanent solution: Tile background color now becomes solid when a tile is selected. Some logos like the 2 dark ones today are better visible then but it won't work for all logos.
I should clarify that I still use jQuery in most apps, specifically for its namespaced, off-DOM event model. (I've got my own vanilla version that deals in abortcontrollers but jQuery is handy enough for other things that I end up using it anyway).

So with native events, I don't bother to write enums but I do namespace them and listen for them through the JQ event chain. With custom events I write the enums and listen for them through JQ on the component instance, without having to listen on window or make the component extend EventTarget.

tl;dr I only use custom or namespaced events and never run anything between components/controllers through the DOM's native event chain.
There is only a water shortage if you insist on irrigation by flooding fields in vast inland desert
I really like Scaleway, and have been using them for a few years now.

I just wish they would upgrade/change their UX ! It looks like a bumblegum-birthday-party for a 12 year old !

Otherwise than the crappy UI, their service are really good from what I have experienced in the last few years.
Low-Cost Gel Harvests Drinking Water from Dry Desert Air
> Can someone elaborate specifically on how
Great analysis, and I agree that renewable + storage is the right thing to compare against nuclear. I think the area where nuclear has the biggest potential to shine is competing with very long duration storage—e.g. month long underperformance of wind + solar up to seasonal differences in demand/renewable output. Battery self discharge is around 1% a day, so it could be totally impossible to use it to cover seasonal differences.

I’ve looked a little at hydrogen [0]. It’s got similar self discharge issues that batteries have (i.e. leaks or cooling energy costs). It’s also currently around 1-2 times as expensive as batteries per kWh cycle, and the technology isn’t getting cheaper as fast as batteries.

Plenty of opportunities left for the world to bet on the wrong technology. Leaving aside all the price variability and learning rates, there’s also the issue of how these technologies will perform hour to hour as renewable supply and demand changes (and more end uses like transportation switch away from fossil fuels). A truly hellish optimization problem.

[0] https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/Final%20...
That's an interesting approach, using hardware to correct for design flaws in software. I'd posit that it would be far better to use automatic reference counting and copy-on-modify, to better handle data that is shared in a multi-threaded environment.

Free Pascal uses such a system to manage strings, to good effect. You never have to deal with allocating, nor deallocating strings that can be a gigabyte in size. You can freely pass them by value or reference between functions and procedures and threads.
Something I didn't know before writing this week's issue: Ancient turd fossils are called "coprolites"
I'm sure they won't like it b/c it doesn't fit many bikes. But sometimes you don't want it to - less chance of scratched bikes.
> In this condition, it could burn my house down

You’re pre-heating your oven, so it’s empty. There are no realistic circumstances where an empty oven could burn your house down simply by being on at a preset temperature.
The majority consensus among climate scientists is that's is getting warmer due to human emissions and the error bars on "how much warmer" are not big enough to justify continuing business as usual. But even if you believe that we don't have the data for accurate predictions, that is not an excuse not to be concerned. Quite on the contrary, it could be much worse than what the IPCC reports.
PyLucid: Lucid Interpreter Written in Python
AI-generated music video with VQGAN
Well, in non-competitive "markets" like government services, your failure will just manifest itself in different ways. You will still fall behind more agile organizations, but instead of your company going bankrupt, citizens will increasingly view the government as inept, loose trust, etc. A terrible enough digital infrastructure will eventually become a drag on your GDP and lower your standard of living relative to other places.

What's funny about your quotes is that Kubernetes is now 8 years old, very mature, very capable, widely-used, well-understood, with lots of tooling and wide-spread know-how. It is "boring".
Refresher: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the stock is already at $1. a little late
In my experience, lobbyists are essentially individual people hired by an organization to do extensive, cited research on the topic, and develop "well written and formatted" proposals for/against, as well as dedicate time to delivering the proposals and arguments in person. They call the legislators, they schedule meetings with them, they go through whatever bureaucracy of a given office to get in contact with the legislator, and present their information directly in ways that make the legislator "understand" the position better. There might be financial contributions and vague promises of future opportunities, but those tend to come from a different angle via the same organization.

On the other hand, the regular people complain about the topic in pubs and coffee shops and online and at the dinner table, and might fill out a petition or a pre-made letter. They might even send a personalized email or physical letter (too often poorly worded and badly formatted with no evidentiary backing), or leave voice mails with a staffer. They won't do this very often, but feel that they have strength in numbers. Spoiler: receiving the same misspelled email from 5000 people doesn't make the legislator (or their staff) think "oh wow a lot of people are really upset by this", it just to spam/trash cans.

Financial contribution ("bribes") and fancy dinners or gifts are usually the boogeyman when it comes to blaming lobbyists, but those are tangential and not as common as most people think. The biggest factor for a successful lobbyist is the research, presentation, and persistence.
A scientist working on this topic should obviously not disregard anything like that. They should know how to interpret and filter such events.

I was speaking as and for random people on a technology internet forum where "$person got a vaccine on date ABC. $person got diagnosed with diabetes on data XYZ." has absolutely no merit discussing as causation or mental trigger that there might very well be "serious side effects" as stated by OP. I am sure many people died within minutes of receiving their shot because of simple statistics.

Also you went to paint a extreme example without any need. Please don't do that. No one died instantly, that's a huge over-exaggeration of what the linked paper is about. If you want to speak with analogies, maybe "1 person who bought this item also bought that item" versus "people who bought this item also bought that item" might be more suitable.
The fix is to have laws that recognize that data is extremely valuable personal property, that stealing it is a criminal act and that the predatory "buying" of it (such as offering a $ service in exchange for $$$$$$ worth of data) should be highly regulated.

Maybe amend and strengthen the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act and then make it Federal instead of just some states?

Of course this kind of lawmaking has gone out of fashion and was only around for a couple decades so I'm not holding my breath.
I am using this setup for a while now and would like to tell everyone about an advantage in contrast to the 'resident key': You can push a single, identical key to two YubiKeys, making it easier to recover.

Resident keys are (partially?) created on the hardware token and thus can't be replicated. The GPG keys can be pushed to a couple of YubiKeys before you delete them forever (or keep a paper backup somewhere safe).