skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Snowden's revelations didn't have much effect outside of tech circles

This is not true. There were lasting changes in public perceptions around the surveillance of Americans [1]. And bulk collection under the Patriot Act was repealed [2]. That is far from complete, but it's also far from nothing.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/04/how-america...

[2] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-prais...
I have a clear bias for B2B and enterprise stuff because it has been good to me, so:

- Is this a real problem? How big of a problem is it? Is there urgency or an impetus (regulation, policy, competitive landscape, foreign policy)? How do I know that? Is this valuable and profitable? For example, one organization tried to avoid one event where each occurrence could result in human loss, damage to a $9bn piece of infrastructure, about $100MM in loss, six to eight weeks of non-productive time, likely fines, PR hassle, and definitely destabilizing markets with huge ripples. They were motivated to solve that problem. Another company was losing around $480MM/year due to a phenomenon and improving that was a win. Very rarely, you'll have an organization that tells you "We want this done, period. Money is not a problem. We're paying a vendor X. Instructions came from way up high to replace that vendor and own the IP. We're willing to pay you 10x if you accept being paid in Y currency". That's the type of urgency that is extremely rare but very real, and a lot is on the line. Again, rare.

- Do I have distribution down? Can I find and reach the relevant people? Do I have a lever to get my product into their hands? Can I leverage something to distribute my product?

- Is this a market I want to be in? Is this a market I could solve another problem for if/when I find out I was wrong and amortize contacts/knowledge/information I have accumulated? Can I have a lot of conversations with people in that sector?

- Have I talked with people who I assume have that problem?

- Is this something they actually are paying to solve? Will solving it for them save them money or make them money? What are the consequences of not solving that problem? Does it touch any critical part in their value chain? What are they doing to solve it right now? Am I talking with someone with purchasing power? (for example, if you're talking with an engineer at some organization who starts talking about the procurement process, you may want to take that with a grain of salt, because they may be talking about the way they prefer purchasing software as an individual, it may not be the actual process at their organization. You may ask probing questions about the procurement process at their organization, and it often shows that they didn't know what they were talking about because they're not involved in that process).

- What's the complexity of the sales process? (it's a spectrum. It is great whenever you can reduce the complexity of the sales process with engineering because you bring down the slider on the high-low touch spectrum without necessarily touching the price, but it gives you the latitude to touch the price at a point. Not that you'd want to do that by default, but just in case, it's good to have the option. Simplifies hiring and training sales people at some point).

- How fast/expensive is it to falsify my hypotheses?

- Can I be profitable first?

- Do I have to keep building features to keep up with other products?
AMC Goes Ape (Moneystuff)
Not only did I add a headphone jack to mine, but I added 5 more of them! This is awesome.
Ask HN: Reverse engineering whirpool.net.au into a F/OSS web app
Whirlpool (AKA WP), is a very popular tech 'forum' in Australia / Nz.

For an overview of it's arch, see here:
https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/wp_architecture

And these 2 links lead off to just about anything else related to the service:
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au
https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki

For those unfamiliar, there's a tonne of great enduser features (inc. a very powerful userscript called wp+).

I'd love to rebuild it all into a modern FOSS web app, one that uses just html/css/js etc, instead of java.

With it's own unique UX/UI, but one that still hints-at or feels, a lot like WP.

Interested in folks thoughts on how best to approach this.
Personally, I think it's sarcasm.

I found it totally fascinating myself. And now that I've read it I see the effects everywhere (musically).
AKA "self-inflicted robotification"?

Yeah, I think the willingness of humans to reduce themselves to a stereotype -- politically, professionally, or socially -- in order to advance themselves (or to just fit in) is a much greater danger to civilization than an all-powerful AI rising up and turning all us humans into powerless minions of a robot overlord.

Stuart Russell started to make this point in his recent book "Human Compatible", I think, but never quite got there. A lovely intro to the state of modern AI, to my eye the book fell short of actually prescribing HOW we might shape AI to be a positive force for humankind, rather than let it grow mindlessly into a problem child shaped only by obvious stereotypes and stratifications.

Hopefully it can learn from its parent what NOT to do...
I put the front camera in the middle of the screen for the whole eye contact thing.
Yes and with the added benefit of having to explain that control to your rotating bunch of compliance people every single year.

I'm not criticizing the methodology as much as the useless performative nature of compliance work.
Hehe, you one upped me for sure :)

We are joking around of course, but sometimes interesting innovation comes from weird ponderings.

I have an experimental cloud phone that has no CPU and uses an FPGA to directly transfer data from a VM in the cloud to the screen. It works, even on 4G but better on 5G. Also, I have been experimenting with transparent OLED.

My dream would be a device completely cloud based, and hence, unlimited processing and storage. The back of the transparent display would be optical sensors and it would use computational imaging in the cloud, no lenses needed. The audio who knows, MEMS I suppose.

I think the technology exists; would anyone want such a thing? Who knows, we have seen things like that in sci-fi movies of course.
PD is great, what other language is working towards a 30 year backward compatibility!
You talk like part of the problem.
I remember when the price of onions went from well under a dollar for a single large onion to about a dollar or more for a large one when there was an enormous amount of flooding in india around 2019-2020, ruining their crops. Apparently the onion is a huge staple out there compared to the Americas and so they needed to source onions from pretty much everywhere else.

It sounds like a trivial price increase maybe to some people in more affluent countries but some in Latin America, it was a pretty challenging price increase.

My personal groceries bill is about 25$usd per week, meat vegetables and a bit of cereal goods. Used to be less within a decade ago, but hey what can you do - North America I was paying closer to 100
That $35 SBC is running a CPU that costs a comparatively lower amount to produce than an M1. Putting 20 billion transistors on a single die reliably at 5nm is extremely more costly than a billion or so at 28nm (the BCM2711).

If you want Broadcom to release a CPU that's on par with the M1, half of your Pi's circuit board will be just the CPU die's BGA pins.

Intel's (and others') price gouging and market segmentation does not in any way imply that it's possible to manufacture an i7/i9/R7/R9/M1 at $20 a piece.
Your comment makes little sense to me on many levels, but I strongly object to your assertion that "people have chosen by a HUGE MARGIN to join these systems". Oracle can not have possibly amassed consent from 5 billion individuals to mine data on them. People have certainly not opted-in for this kind of surveillance in exchange for "product diversity" or "lower prices." These objectionable consumer surveillance databases are being amassed and maintained regardless of whether they actually benefit the people in them or not.
I don’t understand why vegans try to mimic things. I have no problem eating vegetables and mushrooms but I would never eat bacon made of mushrooms. The devil deals in deception.
There's a charity, ALLFED, that I donate too that investigates techniques for keeping as many people alive as possible if we can't have agriculture for a few years due to supervolcano or comet strike or nuclear winter. One of the promising approaches is to turn our now dead forests into calories via fungus. So it's good to see people investigating the wood chip to fungus route at an industrial scale.
As historically established global centralized methods begin to fail with greater and greater impact institutions and individuals with the will and means to decentralize those methods will continue to accelerate. We live in a redefining time and many are greatly motivated to prevent that change while others still are planning to adapt and even fewer have already made such changes. Our modern lives are highly built around energy and if one fails to see the coming decentralizing movement around this and more then opportunities are certain to be missed.
I'm sorry you were disappointed, what word is it? we're going to have a look.

https://tuxdex.com
(Anonymous Search Engine)
> When Apple made tracking opt-in, pretty much everyone refused. I think that's a clear indicator that the overwhelming majority do want privacy, and if they're actually given a choice, most will probably take it.

I've seen this or equivalent statements a lot in discussion related to privacy, tracking, and the ios ecosystem. However, I don't think the results show what you're saying they do. All I see is that people accept the default behaviour of their devices. Unfortunately, there's no mobile ecosystem where you can easily opt out of tracking to compare to.
>correct language, proofreading, and concern for detail have been held to be racist, supremacist, or at least arrogant

surely you jest
Google research AI image noise reduction is out of this world
For what it's worth, I have never once regretted making a bold color choice in my home. I've been using bright orange as a the primary accent color in my kitchen for about fifteen years across four homes and still love it.

Life is too short for fucking beige. Build a space that reflects what you love and if what you love changes, so be it, change your space then. But there's no reason to shortchange yourself now in subservience to a future self you may never become.
There is a path though, you can marry someone who is from any other country but India (even if they are not going for a EB-2/EB-3, have a green card, or are a US citizen). You can cross charge your employment green card to your spouse, some of my Indian colleagues have done this, it’s super rare because of cultural expectations though.
Frankly, at the end of the day, this is better for Humanity as a whole.

People are coming to the US, learning about technologies, and bringing those back to other countries with plenty of people willing to use them. In the longer term, this will result in more, better technology, all over the world.

There will be more net good than if all such technology were concentrated in the US, though the US will have less domestic benefit than it would have otherwise.
Looks to be a Firefox thing. I just tested in both Chrome and Safari and the download link was there. Not in Firefox tho
Ok, I'll byte. Let's take a hypothetically example that might just happen.

Imagine a company has a Wikipedia hosted by a 3rd party. I interpret E2EE as: after I submit a post, it is encrypted, and the servicing company can't look at the unencrypted data, my coworkers can decrypt the posts.

It is simple to ask "how would you support linking to posts" - but "how would you support searching for posts"?

Would you maintain a key-value lookup list? Would you handle semantic search? Are there E2EE algorithms that facilitate enhanced searching?
Yeah it's sad, I agree. Their breakfast is lovely, and it was one of the few places to get something like this, most places serve more Spanish style stuff like a sandwich with a potato omelet in between. In fact McDonald's even had their own version of this one too. But they also did the usual ones.
Twitter CEO says damning claims about Twitter bots and security lapses are false
Please speak for yourself.
The self-service prices for Mac weren't available yesterday, so all that we could discuss was their iPhone program. Apple doesn't publicly list repair prices for laptops, so it is hard to say exactly what you'll pay. I look forward to people doing more in-depth research and figuring out exactly how things balance out with the Mac self-service program, but the iPhone program did not live up to even the most basic expectations.

I'm also not seeing where you got that "$500-600" number "upthread", which presumably refers to the rest of this HN discussion, since I don't see any numbers like that. It could make the prices somewhat more reasonable than they were for iPhone, but I definitely haven't had time to do the research myself, and I don't appreciate how Apple hides the OOW repair cost for laptops, which makes this analysis harder.
Wheredle.xyz now runs on user submissions
Writing petitions is not that great of a sacrifice and strong proof of moral character...
Blockchain asks the question: what if you couldn't regulate the banks through democracy?

Which would imply that people love banks and want them to be even more powerful.
Nuclear power is great. If you have a few billions to invest and a few decades time to wait.
What are the implications of more moisture/clouds/rain?
It's not like it's random people every time though. There tend to be regulars in certain discussions and interest groups. Just like forums and chat rooms (on which I've definitely made connections with "randoms" due to discussing shared interests online and having a persistent identity there.
Well risk is about likelihood vs impact, and work interactions are shaped by risk.

It’s a low likelihood but high impact event to be shot by your board game buddy.

It’s a med or high likelihood and high impact event that your career will suffer bc of a misstep in a social sphere at work, or imo more accurately it’s a medium/high likelihood and high impact reward that by navigating work socialization correctly and as anything but a normal social interaction, you’ll do well.

Both result in high impact/high likelihood results for my family.

So why take the risk/lose out on the reward just so I can have work friends who are truly friends?

Fwiw, there is legit academic research on the work social dynamic being about anything except normal friendships. The Organization Man is one example of academic research, the other is https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... which is a bit more pop-psychology that still rings true vs experiences.
Show HN: Open Source Canva Clone
I am creating an open-source canva clone. Demo here: https://react-editor-core.vercel.app/
> 2 years?

Let's assume that Apple is 2 years ahead now, and that their rate of innovation is 20% higher than any competitor. The answer is therefore that the competitors will never catch up. This is why I am long APPL.
India is entirely dependent on the monsoon for fresh water. When combined with a warming climate, this is a disaster waiting to happen. I am 100% confident that we will live to see the days when food scarcity returns to India. Mind you, indian soils are some of the most fertile in the world so this really is an alarming scenario.

India's past issues with food scarcity were due to a combination of mismanagement and theft. Partly the british empire and partly the lack of skills in India. Widespread crop failures haven't been a thing for a while now.
Multiple EU countries have mass surveillance programs and spy on their own citizens. One of my links described the French mass surveillance program in detail.
If they wanted to have success they'd be trying their best to play rock in a stadium, not settle for working in your company :D
Here we find ourselves again, still without any answer about which patents and what the actual issue is. If you're attempting to initiate a thread about 'communication style' then I'll respectfully wait until we get some concrete answers to the original patent question. Thank you.
I have no idea. I assume it's a bit of a "dog catches car" situation.
Right? It's baffling.

I still don't understand why developers use Microsoft tools. At all.

About the only valid use case I can think of is creating Windows native apps and _maybe_ testing on IE/Edge.

Otherwise, why? Just why would you wade in the shit when there's a lovely clean pool right over there?
> Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library

Above is the headline from the crawlee.dev website.
I use a similar setup, I need CUDA for work. But machine learning on a fast CUDA-capable GPU on a laptop is brutal battery and heat-wise. So, I just SSH into a Ryzen tower with a fast GPU for machine learning. (The MacBook with its AMX matrix multiplication units and Metal Performance Shaders is fast enough for short test runs.)

You can also put a much faster CPU and GPU in a workstation than a laptop, if you have enough headroom for 105W TDP CPU and 350W TDP GPU.
The Spanish town that was mistakenly abandoned
> They began as the embedded storage layer for some bigger thing.

I immediately thought of Kafka's streaming query stuff when I read the headline (ksqlDB). I'm not sure if that's the origin story of RocksDB, but it's the storage engine underlying that streaming query tooling in Kafka's ecosystem.
Yes, exactly. When you sit right next to your business users and listen to their day-to-day activities or phone calls, it is priceless "ambient information". However, if you sit next to completely unrelated, but noisy team, it is hell! The trick is floor layout. The best companies in my experience obsess about floor layout to get relevant teams close!
This kind of content is better suited for LinkedIn.

I'm not a machine. I need rest and recreation to function properly. I sometimes get sick or sleep poorly. I sometimes get bursts of inspiration. There's no telling what condition I'll be working with on a given day.

But perhaps you're right. Perhaps I'm casting my vote against being some sigma grindset, 4 AM cold showers, audiobooks at 3X speed kind of guy. The other guy seems more chill.
Even the sodium in bacon isn't necessarily unhealthy. The issues with sodium causing hypertension and metabolic disorders are due to complex interactions involving genetics as well as intake of water, fructose, and other nutrients. So we can't say that "sodium = bad", or even that people should limit themselves to a particular maximum level of sodium intake (within reason).

https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson2/
Doesn't this depend?

- When iterating an array, you're supposed to use "size_t", because it's the only type that's guaranteed to contain the maximum size of an array.

- When storing the difference between two pointers, you're supposed to use "ptrdiff_t" because it's the only type that's guaranteed to contain the signed difference between two related pointers.

- When storing numbers, prefer unsigned to signed because signed overflow is UB.
Unless you are building a database, these embedded KV store libraries are less likely to be the best solution the job. If you are considering them for an app that isn't a database, you should also take a long, hard look at SQLite first.

What's also interesting is the trend of newer distributed "database systems" like Vitess[0] or SpiceDB[1] that forego embedded KV stores and instead reuse existing SQL databases as their "embedded database". Vitess leverages MySQL and SpiceDB leverages MySQL, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, or Spanner. Systems built this way get to leverage many high-level features from existing databases systems such that they can focus on innovating in even higher-level functionality. In the case of Vitess, it's scaling, distributing, and schema management of MySQL. In the case of SpiceDB, it's building a database specifically optimized for querying access control data in a way that can coordinate with causality across multiple services.

[0]: https://github.com/vitessio/vitess

[1]: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb
I interviewed at Oracle sometime ago, and the product was basically tracking where your eye ball was focusing.. pretty crazy times we live in.
I put the power button at the top so that I don't accidentally take a screenshot when I want to change the volume. Somebody please give me a design job at Apple.

I still don't understand why Apple moved the power button to the side opposite the volume buttons.
That's more of a respect for your coworkers thing than a remote vs. office thing though?

Headphones on meant leave me alone in every shop I've been to. I also, personally, rarely have extended periods of just coding. The value I add is almost exclusively helping other people work through problems at this stage in my career. "Distractions" are "the job" for many of us.
I think there's two things here

1. It absolutely helped "lower" prices because you never pay anything for the services that are built around ad-networks from the start, specifically social media. Do you think 1.39 billion people would pay $8 a month to use tik-tok (12BN rev/1.39B users)? No chance. The entire conceit of the consumer venture landscape since 2012 is: "How do you build a community on the back of VC money which forms the data source for your ad-network?"

2. There are certainly companies now that get the benefit from the data without "passing the savings on to consumers" but they are saving money in their costs.
It hasn't really played out that way.

With GPT-3, that bias is pretty explicit, and not hard to manage. I also don't treat advice as necessarily /good/ advice. A good way to think about it is ideation.

A good example is to ask how to communicate something. I sometimes miscommunicate what I'm thinking, and it often takes a lot of effort to figure out how to say something. With different prompts, GPT-3 will give different ways to say something, and I can pick one which works well and meets what I want to say. Let's say you promised someone something, and need to change plans, and you don't want them to think you're blowing them off. GPT-3 will often give me good ways to communicate something like that.

Or another example is: "I am struggling with ____. What are good strategies I can use to ____."

GPT-3 will often come up with things which I wouldn't have come up with myself, or ones which would have taken me a lot of time. Just as often, it will give a useless, generic list of suggestions. At the end of the day, though, it provides helpful ideas often enough to be valuable.

GPT-3 definitely doesn't (and shouldn't) act as an arbiter in a conflict, but even in conflicts, there's often a solution which works for both sides. My major problem is that I tend to think slowly, and come up with those solutions too late. GPT-3 thinks a lot faster than I do, and having those ideas before they're moot is sometimes helpful.

As a footnote, human therapists tend to reinforce biases too. They only have one side of the story. I've seen people really damaged in the way you describe. In one case, both the person and the therapist were living in a (plausible-sounding) fantasy world.