skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has been obvious since the 2017 report by Homeland Security about the Russian disinformation campaign:[1]

> Bots are computer algorithms designed to execute specific online tasks autonomously and repetitively. They simulate the behavior of human beings in social networks, interacting with other users and sharing information and messages. Millions of bots spread information on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. According to a 2017 estimate, there were 23 million bots on Twitter (around 8.5% of all Twitter accounts), 140 million bots on Facebook (up to 5.5% of all Facebook accounts) and approximately 27 million bots on Instagram (8.2% of all Instagram accounts). These three platforms alone contained 190 million bots—more than half the number of people who live in the entire United States.

I've been wondering (and posting on HN about it) this exact topic for years. All those bots are pretending to be online users and all of them doing everything possible to circumvent detection, including consuming ads.

I would bet that most big advertisers have contractual rebates and reimbursements covering the fake ads - there's no way they'd stand for this sort of graft filling Google and Facebooks bank accounts while they paid millions for ads to fake users.

It's the smaller advertisers that get really shafted. Some small franchise or website buying a few thousand ads only to get little in the way of return on their investment. They have no way to detect the false impressions and rely on the various ad networks to detect bots, of which they have zero incentive to do.

I'm amazed it's taken this long for any news to come out about this, and even more amazed Congress and law enforcement haven't been involved yet. Again, look at the numbers above - this is a huge number of fake users and that only covers the disinformation efforts. Imagine the various networks out there that are focused purely on generating ad revenue and nothing else.

1. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ia/ia_c...
Related to his vegetarian lifestyle?
Aside from being an amazing story, my other takes are the following:

C / C++ are truly powerful and efficient languages for execution. Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? This is the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). C++ is a workhorse, warts and all.

Game development is just so different from all other types of development, but I feel like if you can game dev at this level you can develop just about any type of interactive application, but maybe I'm wrong?

The golden age of MMOs has long passed, hasn't it?
What is history? (2020)
> For years, Apple has been running ads for hundreds of third-party apps across social media and other platforms so that users would download apps from its store and not from developers’ websites

Errr, what? AFAIK Apple has never run ads for 3rd party apps outside of its own App Store , and what’s this no sets out downloading apps from a developer’s website? They all come from the App Store (note, the article is specifically talking about mobile app advertising at this point).
ElementaryOS and stick to flatpak for apps where possible works really well.
From the article:

> And while Uber has enjoyed the Covid-precipitated boom in food delivery over the past few years, Lyft remains largely a rideshare company.
It's my opinion that if ChromeOS can suit a user's needs, then so can desktop Linux with a browser.

Plasma is actually well polished and reliable, much to my surprise as someone who never really cared for KDE.
Apple has ads everywhere, including Apple News and Stocks, and I imagine iMovie, Pages and Keynote soon enough.
I was originally skeptical when we implemented it because for safety reasons I wanted it to be painfully obvious when I was switching contexts.

It's definitely grown on me, but I frequently emphasize to my teammates that I'd much rather they specify their AWS_PROFILE for each command they run, instead of exporting it into their environment. Especially using Windows and setx seems like an open invitation for disaster.
Dynamic memcpy()-based overflow detection coming to Linux 6.1
> So in fact your policy is that we should ensure Russia loses in Ukraine, up to and including a direct nuclear exchange

My take is that ensuring Russia loses decreases the risk of nuclear exchange. I don't know why you keep throwing in "up to nuclear exchange" in your argument as if it's somehow guaranteed. Russia has already threatened to use nukes. Where exactly is the line between them threatening and using that we shouldn't cross?

You presumptuously act as if know exactly where the fine line is. But lines are blurry. Maybe we're already past the point of no return. Maybe we've been there for the last 10 years.

> Utterly ridiculous. This is unequivocally MAD territory

Same has been said about Crimea annexation. And about eastern Ukraine annexation. And about current invasion. And yet it happens, and people like you are finding their ways to rationalize it.

I don't know if you realize it, but you are constantly echoing Russian propaganda.
Chai, Assistance Games, and Fully-Updated Deference
The "how good is university" is based on some arbitrary metric, which does not tell anything to the student, but works on foreign students see
PolyMatter The Chinese Student Crisis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQWlnTyOSig

It has even lower value for Europeans, because even if some university in Paris would be THE BEST in the world, it still will have only a national character. For example some guy from Poland is not going to study there, simply because when you are 20 years old, then you can barely speak English on A2, but at that case, to actually understand and learn, you would need to speak French on B2 (of course, we can find rare exceptions).

So in the end you are choosing your school from less than dozen national universities (could be less or more, depends on size of your country) and then you will decide by their program - Do you want to study agriculture university with a program on genetical engineering of plants? Do you want to study technical university with a program of computer science? etc.

All those universities are national (public), there are also some private universities, but you will go in those if you are mandated to have diploma (i.e. some governmental positions). The problem with private universities is that non-governmental employers are not taking them seriously and they will look at you as on somebody who accidentally bought his diploma with his newspapers.
Is it possible that the lead time for surge reaction is too high to actually react to sufficient surges and it's all demand management?
Can you provide a review of their product? Is it any good? What do you actually get out of it?
>People getting into science, not for the search for truth

I got into science in order to discover truth and develop new things.

Left after less than a year, got a job as a SWE then eventually started my own business selling used video games of all things.

Have never met a group of people less interested in the truth, or a system that goes to such extreme effort to actively inhibit discovery, than what I experienced in academia.

A friend who works for a private non-profit "researching" cures for cancer has reached the same conclusion there too.

Getting money from rich old people/the government takes precedence over science and it's just sad.
This is such a fascinating story, I was literally thinking about this a few months ago when Equinox randomly contacted me. Also identify as an (ex)founder with ADHD. Would love to hear from you and hear about this journey if you're interested in connecting. jason @ jasonshen
Yeah - as someone that has run production search clusters before on technologies like Elastic / open search, deep pagination is rarely used and an extremely annoying edge case that takes your cluster memory to zero.

I found it best to optimize for whatever is a reasonable but useful for users while also preventing any really seriously resource intensive but low value queries (mostly bots / folks trying to mess with your site) to some number that will work with your server main node memory limits.
Fun with Gaming on Linux
I appreciate him sharing his experiences, and I've only known about it because he blogged about it.

It rings true to some of my friend and is potentially very useful to people in the same situation. Brain chemistry doesn't care about rich or poor, and unprivileged here in the US could be extremely privileged in other parts of the world. Engaging in a race to the bottom is of no use to anyone and solves nothing.
I provided a variety of solutions. That one was to hedge against the mental gymnastics I predicted you'd perform at the prospect of a child crossing a road.

If you want to know how it's actually done, go visit a school in finland or netherlands.
Supply and demand only work in the short term as an explanation why something costs the amount it does _right now_. Once enough time has passed for the markets to adjust then there is something fundamental that causes them to be stuck at a given level.

Software development is applied autism. There aren't many people on the spectrum and the ones of us lucky enough to be interested in computers (instead of say model trains) are making out like bandits because there's no one else who could do our jobs.

OP already covered why there's such a high demand for us. When you have a limited supply and unlimited demand wages increase. Or to put it another way: there are no other professions that can make 10 million for their employers in an afternoon by thinking really hard.
Ask HN: Books on Early Space Discoveries?
I'm looking for a book that covers early discoveries about our solar system and space. I'm most interested in Galileo, but want something broader than just covering his discoveries and theories. Any suggestions?
As the article mentioned system-wide adblockers are banned from Android from the 1st November.
Well, this had to happen at some point. Rust-for-Kernel isn’t just a second language. It’s another culture. A culture that is in clash with kernel community. This project should be halted right now, instead of wasting thousands of man-hours only to be stopped later. There is no way these two cultures would go along for long.
There are also: GNU Social (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social) and Friendica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica) both open source and based on OStatus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus).
> People getting into science, not for the search for truth, but in search of respectability, green card, money, or whatever else.

I doubt that. It's much easier to get all of those things elsewhere (ok, maybe not the green card, but the fact that this is not a US-only problem also discards this).

If it is an issue of systemic corruption, people are getting corrupted after they walk in, not before.
OTOH the article does not mention The Amazing Fishcam, which may predate the FogCam. The Amazing Fishcam was available at the URL about:fishcam in Netscape.

https://sites.google.com/a/montulli.org/about-fishcam/Home/h...
> That also means that unless you build a project on two identical hosts then it is unlikely you will get the same SBOMs.

I don't understand why the author thinks this is such an insurmountable issue.

Reproducible builds are possible with a little care: large parts of Debian are built reproducible. There are tools from https://reproducible-builds.org/

Bazel and similar build systems support reproducible builds, and thus identical SBOMs.
Ultima Online is the only MMO that felt like a true virtual world and not just a grindy RPG game played with a lot of people. It occurred at a unique time in history that is unlikely to be replicated again. You could build the same game but players have largely moved on from this style of MMO. A shame.
Location: Phoenix, AZ, USA
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, .Net, Node.js, Deno, Rust, Go
Resume/CV: https://github.com/tracker1/resume
Email: hn (at) tracker1.dev

Staff/Principal/Architect/Senior Developer/Engineer with two and a half decades of experience in all aspects of web based applications and application backends.
>When you're underwater on your mortgage, you're trapped. You might be able to afford the monthly payments but you can't sell because you don't have the spare cash to pay off the mortgage.

You can short sell if the lender is willing. Caveat being they will gift you the difference which can count as income and is taxed. There was an Obama era program during the last housing bubble burst that provided tax relief as well as incentives to the lenders to allow the short sale. Not sure if it’s still active, but it helped a lot of folks avoid foreclosures.
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergemasse/

Montreal, Canada

No relocation

Preferably remote but can do hybrid

3 to 4 days per week

Android, Java, SQL, expert systems

A few world-first in my career
> There's a quote along the lines of "an intellectual is someone who has discovered something more interesting than sex".

There also exists the humorous definition of asexuality as "an asexual person is someone who prefers cake over sex":

> https://www.bonappetit.com/story/cake-dessert-asexual-symbol...
At the point more than 50% of results are not reproduced and/or reproducible — is science really science?
It appears to be still around?

https://uo.com/

EDIT: looks like it changed hands a number of times, very unlikely its as good as it once was, I imagine
so how much does an $avgDev make?
I don't know about that I'd say we're doing pretty good on the MMO scene. FF XIV really revitalized the space, but WoW is still chugging along, ESO, Star Wars, New World, Guild Wars, EVE, MMO Lite Destiny 2, etc. Basically there are a lot of MMOs with really stable populations where doing activities isn't cumbersome and you can play whatever aesthetic (fantasy, space, etc) you'd like.

It's certainly different from the age of MMO's like Ultima though and the sense of community is vastly different than it was back then by virtue of how mainstream they are now and because of all the different tools and such people use to build those communities now.

So if not golden, I'd say still pretty strong silver.

To your other points though I completely agree.
The figure is echoed by the USDA. [1]

The report I linked in the original post includes a breakdown of exactly where food is wasted on pages 14 to 30. [2]

There's a pie chart on page 10 which includes a breakdown by kind of food too, as a percentage of waste by weight.

- Dairy: 19.1%

- Vegetables: 19%

- Fruit: 13.9%

- Grain: 13.9%

- Added sugars and sweeteners: 12.6%

- Meat, fish and poultry: 11.5%

- Fats and oils: 7.5%

- Eggs: 2.1%

- Tree nuts and peanuts: 0.4%

[1] https://www.usda.gov/peoples-garden/food-access-food-waste/f...

[2] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-2017-report....
It seems DDG has recently started ignoring entire keywords in a 3 or 4 word search phrase without informing the user a keyword has been excluded.

Something like "2015 camry leaking exhaust" could return nothing but "2015 camry exhaust" results until "leaking" is put in quotes (not a working example). Google search ignoring keywords was the straw that broke the camel's back - is DDG following suit?
We will have to agree to disagree. I predict that if the left becomes more aggressive they will win more elections. No one is going to vote for wimpy liberals, whose hearts no longer beat
MARWOOD: Even a stopped clock gives the right time, twice a day.
I just don't think you can provide an accurate view by working a job like this for six weeks and leaving right as it starts getting bad. I also think it is fair to dismiss anyone with millions in the bank who reports about their stints in a warehouse as an alternative take.

I'm not offended by the piece because I don't actually think the author is trying to give a critical take about manual labour. It didn't sound like he thought critically about the experience at all besides feeling good about himself. Instead this piece reads more like somebody recommending a trip to Bali.
I like this. it's more clear design in UI.
Good point. Thanks! Code is good but needs lower adaptive entropy (nobody wants to write a sha256 by hand).
Finally, Hacker News gets closer to Slashdot. Now all we need is abstracts for stories, and the karma system that lets people communicate what their vote means.
Plasma really impressed me, as well. I went back to Linux expecting jank and to have to tinker a lot, and was pleasantly surprised when Plasma proved those expectations wrong.
Hardware exists without software. What is software without hardware? Probably just math.
Hi capableweb Thanks for your work on improving Stable Diffusion
I don't know? Does it? Why do you write like this?

Also, tourism is good? Getting new perspectives is good? Do you not do it? Is there anything wrong when you do it?
A game development pair working on a kind of similar MMO for the last 10 years. "Haven and Hearth" has all the house building, player killing, crafting, and trading. No pre-made safe zones, though, and it resets every year or two.

I think all of these small, independent efforts fall under the radar without the advertising of more expensive games. I don't know if UO was well-advertised at the time, but it was certainly the only option at launch!
Since you're saying you are in the Denver area, you should follow Colorado state law and actually post the compensation details on your listing/website.
What process should I follow if I want to stream a normal webcam to the web using my own webserver? I would like to just query the webcam and post it on the site without outside streaming like youtube or twitch.
> But: don’t think that you are one of them and able to advocate as a representative

I don't see how the author did that. He advocated a change of mindset by dialing to an extremely different situation to solve his own issues/or other people with the same issues, not that the situation is great or perfect.

I don't see where he advocated for it. For what it's worth, his effort in the warehouse is already more than 99% of more privileged folks who has never needed to do that. I fail to see why this is being criticized.

The comments criticizing him as patronizing is in turn incredibly patronizing of the warehouse workers themselves, the irony.
It kind of is, there's a lot of demand now from console gamers to disable cross play with PC due to the abundance of cheaters. This was pretty evident in the Modern Warfare 2 beta.
I'd add a favorable context to the routine. Being around people that appreciate your ideas / goals makes it a lot easier to maintain than on your own, or worse, surrounded by negative people.
As a former employee, I think this is exactly what happened. A handful of people made out big while keeping up appearances. The closer you get to the executive-level, the faster the turnover rate. I've never seen that before in ~10 companies I've worked with. The internal game is maintaining confidence to subordinates while quietly selling your stake. The external game is also all about maintaining confidence, using "adjusted EBITDA". But the GAAP numbers don't lie.
>As a man, online dating is already a miserable experience.

Based on what I've heard from women, it's bad for them too. Easy to find a root, but hard to find someone to introduce to mum and dad.

IRL dating is worse. Apparently in the post-#metoo era men just stopped talking to women in general.
This is a song by Jerobeam Fenderson, played through an oscilloscope in X-Y display.
My problem with this is that my thoughts are too jumbled and non linear. I can start writing and my mind will jump to something else tangentially relevant and then do that several more times before I realize and struggle to recall where I originally was
> Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022?

Yes.
Try "Coming of Age in the Milky Way"
It's a Ship of Theseus argument. What is a "webcam"? The camera itself? Its location? The software running on the host computer? The web page it is streaming to?

You can replace each of the pieces slowly over time, but in the viewer's eye it is still the same.
Fair. I run into a handful of recurring glitches too. I just usually find them to be mild nuisances and not show-stoppers, and the rest works well enough that I'm still far, far happier with it overall than the mainstream alternatives.
Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. The technical term "sharding" literally comes from the intro video in the game where they explain why there are multiple copies of the same world.
Yes but QR relies on camera which often isn't available on desktop. A common use case would be sign in on desktop, check email on phone. The code needs to be brought back to the desktop.
Does LTSC still lag behind other Windows releases? I remember trying to get WSL 2 working on it but it turned out that the LTSC release didn't support it yet.
This comment shows such a lack of understanding of how most of the world lives. OP could be working to support aging parents or be a single parent or live in a place where the ability to access social services are dependent on where you were born (as in China). They could also just not make enough money to afford to move and be stuck in a cycle where most of what they make is spent on maintaining life essentials.

Technically they could quit it all and walk off and become homeless, but is that realistic? This idea of endless choice, especially that without any potentially dangerous consequences, it's reserved for a small number of people.
I'm not sure, other than "I can do that too" kind of things... I would probably lean towards Deno, Cloudflare's worker runtime and wasmer all before this.
It feels so weird to me that the WSJ is writing about a post-pandemic scenario when 500 people are still dying everyday from Covid in its country.
Where’s the Christopher Lun plug? Great explanations by him on how to do LQR.
The sexuality part is interesting to me, because gross biomechanics aside, it's one intense merging with someone else emotions. I'd be very happy to find places or people to discuss the neuropsy or neurobiology of this.
State of the Jamstack 2022
Software engineer built 'cloud pet' to mourn childhood dog
I've spent the last few years working on a soft realtime control system for doing system measurement, and it frustrates me to no end how little knowledge of controls there is in the SRE space. I regularly encounter teams who want to build a system that does a little bit sometimes, and a lot other times, and they need to build a way to make that happen, and I'm like "hey are you familiar with controls?" and I get nothing (or, worse, "that's too hard to understand").

Having working fundamentals in the space can be a huge competitive differentiator. Everyone working in tech should have that.
I’m not an Apple dev, but their app store is around 60% of global market share for apps and I don’t fault people for choosing food on the table over platform ideology. I’m also not interested in this zero empathy game of “you should have known better” when the power imbalance is this severe. I lay the fault at the feet of Apple, where it belongs.

Tangentially, I think the tech community needs to be prepared to examine its assumptions about how much control large companies should have over their platforms as they start to resemble utilities. We can’t keep pretending that a duopoly represents real market choice.