skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 'm sure if you look closer you'll find that those workers do have some capital bound in the business ...

Like what? You'll have to forgive me but I'm not very sophisticated when it comes to economics.

> ... that is earning at best a modest return

So what? Rainbow Grocery isn't an investment vehicle, it's just people coming together to make a grocery store. That's my point: not everything has to be an investment. We can have grocery stores w/o ROI, that charge reasonable prices and pay a living wage.

> Once somebody earns somewhat more than their subsistence wage, they want to invest it into something that brings a return.

Sure! That's the beauty of the capitalist system (I'm pro-capitalist FWIW, I just don't think it is necessarily the best economic modality for every business. The way I put it is, "Capitalism as a tool, an economic API, not an ideology.")

> That won't be these worker-owned businesses.

Exactly!

> And the market capacity for such companies seems to be quite small.

Again, so what? These kinds of businesses generally are not trying to aggressively expand (although some do, like REI, the outdoor equipment stores.)

Just to reiterate, it sounded to me like you were saying that without ROI we wouldn't have grocery stores, and I just wanted to point out that we can have grocery stores with good prices and good wages and no investors or appreciable ROI.
There are laws about advertising something as a remedy for a medical condition.
What’s frustrating is Visual Studio already has advantages over VS Code: the WinForms designers, XAML designers for WPF and WinUI.

Microsoft don’t need to turn the VS Code C# plugin proprietary, to give Visual Studio an edge.
Price is a signalling protocol for resource allocation.

Perhaps the underlying resource has been degraded or is no longer useful in some sense, in which case real wealth has been lost. Otherwise it might just mean the signalling has changed (e.g. control of resources has shifted).
Samsung accused of altering TV behavior to look better in benchmarks
College hackers in Kenya are converting stolen money to Bitcoin
Do you think everyone who ever died should have a claim over the land they're buried in for the rest of all time? That seems obviously not workable.
Increasing wealth disparity
Full electricity generation at Olkiluoto 3 delayed yet again
Linkedin should randomly send people made-up requests. They could collect statistics on the gullibility or neediness of the person and sell it!
Ok look, i have that TV that run's Linux, they even send me a "CD" with all the source-code of linux/gnu of it, BUT there is that highly proprietary module loaded into the kernel, firmware and so on, so patching my TV is as easy as re-engineering a whole closed-source system.

In theory the idea is great, in reality it makes nearly no difference.
correct. and to continue the reasoning, we experience this as bureaucratic inefficiency because the inspectors / regulators / etc are chronically underfunded relative to the growing number of users requiring their service. and that's for two related reasons: the bureaucracy is a lagging response as you and others note, and our government has gotten woefully incapable of forward thinking (because of multi-decade sabotage).
There is still an option to report whether you’ve met, so they may be using that info somehow.
It's called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. You are in the extend phase.
I read it this way as well. That said, sometimes boring work needs to be done too. Who does it in this framework?
Good news: it looks like the server-side crawler code that the browser extension sends content to is open source too: https://github.com/mwmbl/crawler-server
>People get involved in city government because it benefits them. It may be a stepping stone in a career in bigger government. Maybe they are looking for stable income, cheap benefits, and solid pension. Or cushy job they can't get fired from. Or its social status; they enjoy having power over people's lives, they enjoy having their opinions matter and being perceived as a person of importance. Lots of different motivations. The corporation's motivations are their motivations. Its purpose is their purpose.

You listed many reasons, and built a long argument on the implications of these reasons. Perhaps this was an oversight but it’s worth mentioning that civic engagement for its own sake is a fairly natural instinct and is arguably more important than any of the other aforementioned factors.
Work on whatever you're interested in or motivated to do.

It doesn't matter if one idea could be the next big thing if you aren't motivated to complete it and make it well. You'll execute better on the ideas you are interested in.
Er, they've been in business for a half century, not a whole one! D'oh!
First ultra-fast photonic computing processor using polarization
IKEA in a vacuum has many many flaws.

As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures.

It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs.

When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1]

I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that.

So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies)

[0] how the table turned, quality wise…

[1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.
I was wondering why I had a sudden bit of traffic coming from HN this morning... for anybody interested in the dog treat business I answered some questions about in the original thread (https://coopersdogtreats.com/), I did about 150k in revenue last year and roughly broke even on that. This year I expect to do a bit better and turn a bit of a profit.

That said, I've got manufacturing and fulfillment mostly outsourced, so my day-to-day is really marketing emails, managing FB ad spend and sending product to the warehouse when I run low on inventory. Given that, it's looking like this is going to get relegated back to a side project while I find myself a real job.

While I'd obviously prefer to be making a boatload of cash, it has been really enjoyable so far, and I have learned a ton. The most painful thing has been Apple's privacy changes - before those, I was running FB ads that were effective enough to be immediately profitable from customers' first purchases. Now the cost of acquiring a customer is greater than the profit I make on the first purchase but less than the lifetime profit I make from a customer, so I can still do it profitably but it requires investing cash up front.
You reveal more than you probably intend.
See that's a somewhat bad example because it's a small implementation detail. A different SIM enclosure that's double-sided is put in the phone and it's suddenly a chinese dual-SIM.

Imagine the pain of selling accessories for two types of iPhones, USB-C and Lighting. The engineering that needs to accomodate two ports. The amount of people turning to the grey market to get a USB-C iPhone.

I'd be shocked if Apple ever releases two models. My bet is the first iPhone that falls under the European mandate will have no ports.
> containers aren't a mechanism to increase compute granularity

Yes they are. Instead of thinking in terms of a whole running operating system with dozens of services, now you are thinking in terms of individual (micro?)services that are relatively isolated from each other. We stuff a lot more containers per box than we used to stuff VMs per box.

But it's true containers (of the namespace/cgroup/seccomp variety) have failed to be a sufficiently secure isolation mechanism to use them for multi-tenant scenarios, so instead we mostly pack containers from the same owner together.

I'd sort of argue that Firecracker and gVisor are actually container engines that happen to use CPU features meant for hardware VMs for additional security hardening. The granularity of compute that you put in them is more container-ish than traditional VM-ish.
Can't you (semi-) anonymously receive money via Paypal?
Author here. You're absolutely right. I enjoy writing, it's fun, but once I start thinking that someone might read it, I get anxious and clam up. That's why I love to journal with pen and paper: I don't have to worry about someone reading it. I don't even read it myself.

The thing that has always sucked joy out of the process is that the initial draft never look as good as someone else's finished text. Which is the wrong comparison on so many levels.

I like to compare it to phtography. A photographer doesn't take just one perfect image and moves on. For each published image, a thousand might be rejected in the editing process.
The high-level OS will be more like Plan 9 than Unix, but appreciably distinct from either.
2022 Cloud Report
Then how about someone else starting a company that tests apples. Demand for “clean” apples would result in demand for independent testing companies to certify that the apples are good. Without the seal, consumers would choose competitors that have tested their apples. The testing company has an incentive to be accurate because if one of their certified apple producers gets people sick, then that certification becomes useless and thus causing the company to lose all their business.

This isn’t that hard.

And besides, what’s the incentive for a government agency to care about apple safety? Tons of examples over the years when regulators approved dubious things (a long list of pharmaceuticals that turned out to be deadly for instance.) Rather than being shut down, those regulators get even bigger budgets. And the myth that the bureaucracy is accountable to the people needs to stop. Ever been to the DMV? Despite being universally hated for inefficiency, that place is still inefficient. How is the DMV accountable to anyone?
Not super frequently but it happens. The classic one is when moving apartments (register apartment, update ID card, update car registration, potentially get a new local parking permit). I also got the timing for my ID card and passport synced so I can do them in one visit.

In the last year I moved twice and will likely move once more in the next 12 months (temporary places, looking to buy something) so I’m a bit more appreciative right now.
Learn Svelte: An interactive tutorial using WebContainers
Can do - part of the treatment is more or less about relating to the traumatic event(s) in a healthier way.

It stemmed from seeing comments here about a book called 'The Body Keeps the Score' reading the book and subsequently self identifying as suffering from trauma.

So I sought out an EMDR qualified psychologist in the city and started seeing them. It's been just over a year now.

Benefits so far have included an increase in self esteem and of quality in my relationships with my partner and my child, a promotion at work(due to increase in ability to be present without zoning out due to anxiety) - along with increased social awareness.

Am basically now less inclined to withdraw and hide from life.

The mind melter is how absent I've been for basically my whole life - and not for lack of trying either. It would be terrifying - all those years - basically a lifetime lost, but I am so glad to have some semblance of a life now. I didn't think it was possible TBH.
LaMDA self-aware? (excellent commentary)
There was also "Operation Socialist" [1] where the UK's GCHQ with the aid of the NSA hacked Belgacom, via phishing linkedin emails. Darknet Diaries also had an episode on it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Socialist
I disagree and maybe I'm not 'fun', but to me there's a lot of garbage in this README. Scrolling through the plaintext document with lists of badges, manually managed table of contents, photos of contributors, miscellaneous HTML, you can see that there's so much content that isn't helping you understand the project—things that should be I a homepage or separate dedicated file. I can't read this without rendering it. The music while somewhat interesting, I don't think has a place in this document—especially linking out a proprietary music streaming platform.
Return Oriented Programming for hacking [pdf]
They're running a sale right now, through June 30, but it doesn't look like G of G is eligible: https://link.springer.com/shop/springer/yellow-sale/en-eu/
That's interesting. What sort of examples do you have of software leading to large scale wealth disparity increases?

I would venture the primary cause of the increase in wealth disparity from the 1970s to today is the outsourcing of labor overseas paired with financial engineering.
Note, Sciter does not embed a browser engine but reimplements the DOM/CSS/JS (via QuickJS) logic in C++ which means many familiar web patterns will work, many will not, and many might behave differently. Unlike Electron, Sciter will not be the best option to wrap an existing web app and expect it to work as a desktop app.

Partial compatibility tables are at https://sciter.com/developers/for-web-programmers/
> I think it's more like hundreds than handfuls.

Could you be a bit more explicit here? I'd be curious how these entities coordinate themselves, since I don't have hundreds of cookies set by any website, so there must be few networks to correlate this data (FB, Google, some IAB groups, who else?). Going after those networks would seem like the obvious next step then.

Thanks for the link. It seems like an honorable direction, but it's a bit nebulous on how browsers would be incentivized to implement with good intentions.
Fair point, and thanks :)

The way I think of it is more of taking advantage of an arbitrage (~20% discount on season tickets to face value). Instead of selling all the tickets to earn ~$2k each year, we kept and used the tickets to our benefit.
Is a precious metals crisis looming?
I funded life over the pandemic selling bots for MMO's. Made way more than I expected. Enough it became a full time job for a while. Died down a little after people started returning to work after Covid.

But still makes a decent passive income.
No I must admit that is even lower than I thought they were capable of , yet somehow doesn't surprise me.
> It feels like a conversation that is hard for others to participate in

My dad has Parkinson's and I can relate. My take is: people feel bad for you but society doesn't have canned responses like we do for more common situations like the death of a loved one. This makes people uncomfortable since they don't know what's an appropriate reaction.

Please don't get discouraged though, I didn't even know this existed! The amount of people that will benefit from you bringing this up is >0.

My dad's not interested anymore in computers (more about the cognitive overload than the hand tremors) but this would've helped enormously during the early stages.
I think the GP is referring to shareholders’ right to sue if they believe that a company’s executive/leadership is operating against the interest of the company (and therefore the shareholders.) But that’s a pretty high standard, one that isn’t coextensive with boosting the share price by any means necessary.
I think any species that wanted to send a signal just use probes which last a long time around candidate stars. Eventually, one will get lucky and report back after which if your civilization is still around you can make a decision on a response. Most likely, we'll not be able to detect stray ET signals for a long time until we get serious and make some radio observatories in space for that effort.
I probably know who you are referring to, but I don't feel it would be appropriate to discuss a specific identifiable individual in a public forum, no matter how innocuous that discussion might be! My fault for bring it up.

Cassandra was super easy to shoot yourself in the foot with, and it remains quite easy. You mention a few foot guns that have gotten better, a few that remain but that will get better, and a few that are sort of inherent to distributed databases.

Anti-compaction for instance should now not be a huge issue if you're running regular incremental repairs, and I hope even the few remaining caveats will be alleviated soon. Bootstrap is something you mention that is also going to get much easier for users this coming year, so that unsophisticated users can manage their cluster membership safely.

Application-misconfigured consistency levels is a really obvious one that isn't strictly Cassandra's fault but for which much better help could be given to the user, and I expect some major improvements here in the next year or two, so that users can configure tables with consistency properties that the database guarantees (to some extent, the user will always be able to screw it up by providing the wrong consistency identifier, but at least the scope is reduced to accidental misconfiguration rather than misunderstanding). This is something we're considering as part of the introduction of general purpose transactions later this year.

Poor data models and partition keys are things the database can offer less help with, though I anticipate much better support for ordered partitioning in future, that would help poorly-selected partition keys, as clustering keys can be used for partitioning there too.

Regarding the choice of language, Java has upsides and downsides. GC spirals are something we have control over at the end of the day, and we continue to do better at (as does the JVM), but guaranteeing no segfaults (and not worrying about the ABA problem) is a big benefit we get in return. I wish we had more control over things like memory placement and execution, but these things may be coming to the JVM to some extent (Loom I expect to benefit Cassandra hugely, and value types later), but equally distributed systems problems often give you enough things to worry about.

The visibility you have into a Java process is fantastic, however, and we are starting to make use of the ease with which you can modify the code Java runs for system validation, using byte weaving to permit us to simulate clusters as they are run, with adversarial event orderings, to ensure those notoriously hard distributed systems problems are correctly solved.

If you do want to speak privately, about anything Cassandra related, the lowercase part of my username (i.e. without the _ prefix) at apache.org reaches me.
Astronomers discover a multiplanet system nearby
> Of course fixing that is a sisyphean task for a single-developer project like Sciter.

Every new feature also adds complexity and size, so it goes exactly against one of the main advantages of the project
I wish I could dig it up in the way back machine, but there was a period in the early aughts where Microsoft employees blogged religiously (on orders from corporate).

Anyway, a group of them discussed lobbying the US government to charge Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond for securities fraud, alleging that people promoting open source software were actually engaged in a pump-and-dump scheme for companies like VA Linux (a dot com company that crashed and burned)

To me this perfectly encapsulates Microsoft’s attitude of that era. It’s all there right in a bunch of early aughts blogs.
You can certainly do it. But then the problem being solved is "keys are bad". Typically in startup lore you want a product to be 10x better than the existing solution to gain mainstream adoption. I have a hard time picturing smart locks to your doors on the blockchain as being 10x better than keys.
i think the author swapped out his custom scripting engine for https://bellard.org/quickjs/ a year or two back.

(he also hangs out on HN)
> On Linux it's not quite as nice since you have to move the libsciter.so to the appropriate folder.

Incorrect. Linux doesn't care where you load a .so from. You could load it by using a path, or you could add a path to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH env var. You could even add it to your compiled binary's RPATH. All methods support relative paths. The latter requires a binary, but the first two work with nearly all scripting languages.
But we already know that tanks are vulnerable to relatively cheap small vehicles, so this is not a comparative disadvantage.

Also consider that tanks are dispatched in small groups; they need to be able to defend themselves. But a swarm of buggies could have weapons optimized to defend each other -- a shotgun is pretty effective against small suicide drones, and nothing defends against a laser-guided bomb anyway.
I would eat at restaurants way less if hand-washing was left up to a restaurant’s discretion. I can’t be alone in this. And I wouldn’t be alone once we saw the rise in salads containing ass-to-hand-to-food-transmitted noroviruses.

But let’s say restaurant-goers power through the higher rate of stomach bugs, because the food is so worth it. There are a lot of jobs that are harder to do when you’re at home shitting[0] or, with some probability, dead.

So, you have to pay the price somewhere: the business pays (fee or lower demand), the government pays (eat the cost or deal with angry citizens or angry businesses), or the consumer pays (health or foregoing restaurants) etc.

But, ofc these folx rarely discuss many of the relevant trade-offs. Unless you were born yesterday, it’s obvious what they’re up to.

[0]: An assumption on my part. As a coder I’d be fine :)
my pond has no fish
You don't need to be permitted to install an app on your laptop or phone (despite big tech's wishes), neither should you need it to install a new kitchen in your house. In a reasonable world, if the contractor is licensed (as you state), that should be all you need for insurance and selling the house. If the work isn't safe, you go after the contractor, maybe with a lawyer. Government shouldn't intervene in each individual job.
I remember reading about this project a long time ago, congrats!

If you don’t mind me asking, what do you find hard to talk about?
It seems tautological that lowering the entry barrier would encourage more variety and lower cost.

Why limit the possibilities to just the US? Why not look at street food in Thailand or Singapore? Isn't it unlikely that the current status quo is the ideal balance between safety and exploration?
VED (Vault Exploit Defense): open-source implementation
I think it's actually not that pedantic.

"Memory bandwidth" is being used in marketing materials today, so it's a little useful to understand what it means. (The author of this article confuses it with memory transfer, probably others do as well.)
being open is not about not paying but using it however you like, not constrained to VisualGarbage XYZ or Windows 15-xtra ultra edition
Try African hair braiding. In many states simply to braid hair requires a 1000 hour cosmetology license. To braid fucking hair. Never once in my life heard of anyone dying or even getting sick because of a bad hair braider.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/02/05/time-to-loosen-hair-...
As much as I dislike "human noise pollution" myself, these things read like the authors have never been in the woods themselves. I've been in heavy industry factories and on construction sites that were quieter than the deep woods during cicada season. The normal noises of a subtropical forest are more varied and not as intense, usually, as "city noise" but its far from the quiet, peaceful and idyllic tranquility that is commonly assumed.