skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure there are counter-examples, but Amazon generally do have quite good customer service. When I've had a problem with a delivery I've been amazed to be able to contact a human quite quickly and have them investigate. Just being able to talk to a human is startling compared to certain other tech behemoths.
See for example the criticism of Ellen's friendship with George W Bush.

Though interestingly the Obamas and Clintons don't get the same criticism for that, apart from occasionally being held up to suggest the centre left wing of the democrats isn't that different from the old bush-era republicans
Maybe don't take medical advice from an Economics e-zine.
But NH3 is deadly. Household NH3 is 99% water and then you dilute it 16:1 to use, and still need windows open.

CH4 is environmentally unfriendly, but you don't need nearly as much safety gear to work with it.
Humans Are Not All That
I don't know if anyone disagrees with the following definition:

Consciousness is the perception of self, which is the result of an information model on self built by the brain from a) the external experiences of the entity, b) the internal experiences of the entity.

Personally I find the above definition 'good enough' for all purposes. Are there any disagreements on the above?
Myths About In-Person Work, Dispelled
It should mean that, but apparently doesn't mean that. Hence getting riled up.
Isn't suspended a negative word too? Maybe banned is too vague in that it could mean you had access now you don't OR you were never allowed access in the first place.

What I'm saying is "permanently suspended" isn't sugar coating what happened
Having to ask your colleague is an extra cost - for common tasks (like the example of parsing of command line arguments used in the parent comment) you should be using the exact same code as your colleagues unless there is a good reason to make an exception (which there rarely is), so you should be able to read and maintain others' code just as yours because it's written in the same way as you would, making the same style of calls to the exact same functions. And furthermore, the third party libraries (at least for Python) are so standard that a new hire would have used the exact same library if they ever had to do the same task - for most things there's going to be just a few reasonable ways (and often just a single idiomatic one) to do that thing in the language, which sometimes used a built-in library and sometimes uses a popular third-party library.

If your company has a dozen tools which need the same functionality, "rolling your own" for each codebase (or worse, copy/pasting it without being able to update them from a single place) is obviously not a good solution - the choice is between making and using an internally maintained library, or using an open source one.
"Assaulted!" God damn British politics is crazy!

The need to put a UFC octagon in Parliament.
So ... ready for Rishi?
> Why would they ...

Mozilla.
Same here, I find CoPilot super useful for boilerplate, repeated variable definitions, similar functions, etc. I've quite literally never had it spit out more than 3-4 lines of code and it's always been trivial code. That's where it shines. On their own the suggestions are "trivial"/"simple"/"obvious" but like you said, it adds up and makes me smile every time I don't have to type out something basic, that alone is worth $10/mo.
It pains me to think that we gave up on RSS for this.
Researchers discover new monster black hole 'practically in our back yard'
Intel Core I9-13900K Review: Hot and Hungry
We need to figure out a different system of politics, where the elected officials aren't paid for their position, and accepting money from non-publicly-visible donations is illegal. I don't know how to accomplish that, but there needs to not be monetary incentive for politicians to be politicians. It's a huge responsibility, not a job. Ever since politicians could become "career" politicians, government has been worse for it.
Laravel's Safety Mechanisms
Question - if a business permanently suspends a user, will the user ever be able to come back to the account? (of course, theoretically no).

Then, why not just delete the account, why only suspend? What benefit is it to the suspended user, more importantly to the business?
I'm the one who gave this talk, and I can assure you there is no such thing in our code. htmx just enables us to fire some JS events and react to them by triggering AJAX calls then replacing some <div> with some HTML fragment. No state management, just a hook system.
1) I really like that in the UK system if the leader is crazy the party can just kick them to the curb rather than basically having to support them even when they do terrible things.

2) The US system of open primaries where anybody can vote that we adopted in the 70s seems like a mistake in retrospect and there's a good reason no other country does things this way. The UK Conservative party's system, adopted in the 2010, of allowing people who pay party fees to vote in primaries seems like an even worse idea in terms of candidate selection though it does have the advantage of raising money for the party.
If the article is accurate, then Australia has 0% starving during post-nuclear famine (see the map at the bottom), versus 98%+ for most of North America and Europe, so yes, the odds are very much better here.
We're really bad at code reuse.
No, no, it clearly must be a WWII relic. That’s clearly why they would arrest these people. The guy on HN that has private knowledge about the indictment said you could find the same ones on ebay for $5k.

/s
> Copilot may be perfectly fine as it is, BUT you may not be allowed to distribute (or even use internally) code it generates for you.

This will just encourage stolen (and now closed source) code.
Ah, I misunderstood and phrased it badly.

My point was that when quantum mechanics first was proposed early last century, I can’t imagine anyone would have even considered LEDs as a thing even in their wildest dreams, yet it was obvious once further progress occurred, and was key in understanding and developing them past the initial ‘that’s odd….’ stages.

We don’t know yet if something similar will come out of QCD (understandable and usable ‘high temperature’ superconductors? Quark matter computers? Super high strength materiel derived from some kind of degenerate matter?) but it definitely seems less likely by the day.

It does at least have falsifiable predictions, so it’s about a billion miles ahead of string theory!

It’s also possible we’ll need another 50 years of engineering or a world war (I hope not) to dig deep enough into areas to discover another, simpler, way to think about it that is more useful.
You could design a OS with abstractions built around latency, instead of physical machines. It would still allow you to find and use resources according to their constraints of use, but wouldn't force you to keep track on which exact machine they are located.
Stratechery interviews?
This shit hurts their reputation more than anything.
Nukes are also WWII era technology, yet you would face some very critical questions if you tried to build one in your back yard. So are rocket engines and jet engines for that matter.

This type of jig grinder is absolutely not comparable to the things you can find on Ebay, let alone for 5k.
I suppose I was being pendatic (sorry) but more over your comment than theirs. If that's what they meant then your original reply could've just been "oh I think they meant not a proprietary license" rather than explaining what open source means to someone that already understands it.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/european-nationals-and-en... specifically mentions a high-resolution jig.

I wouldn't be surprised if in some cases just the tooling bits are around $5000, leaving aside the whole machine. For high-resolution machining, e.g. for lens fabrication, there's a whole science to drill bits, where special processes allow for achieving up to sub-nanometer surface roughness in parts. If they're making holes in hard metals they might be using titanium, diamond, or carbide drill bits that have crazy physical properties and cost a pretty penny.

In some sense CNC machining is also a WWII era technology, but CNC machines from that era couldn't touch what modern-day machines can do and the repeatable precision with which they can do them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY

While on the subject, this really is a fascinating field and it rules the world more than people might think. Consider that TSMC's core machines are made by ASML. Among the most important and specialized-IP parts in ASML machines are the huge lens which are made by Zeiss. Zeiss makes the lens with some next level machining equipment from companies around Heidelberg and Karlsruhe area. High-resolution machining isn't super known to the general public but it is so fascinating once you get to see the things they can pull off.
but that's not what the original comment mentioning "incestuous" was talking about. The original was talking about academic trees, for which "incestuous" would indicate a tree with loops (i.e. multiple paths between two points)
So, this all falls under the category heading of "this private company's product or service is now too important to have it denied for arbitrary or unclear reasons". This is, in fact, not a new problem; we even have a word for this kind of good or service: "utility".

There was a time when phone service, electricity, etc. was just an ordinary private company that you contracted with, who could do whatever private companies can do. Eventually, we placed these kinds of companies in a special category, distinct from ordinary private companies, where they were subject to special rules (in those cases where they were not taken over by the government outright).

Eventually, we will turn social media companies which are as large as Twitter under the "utility" category, and access to them will be subject to a process with all the bureaucratic checks and balances. It won't be perfect, but it will be less bad, on balance.

Also, like almost all utilities, its profit margin will be tightly regulated, and often it will run at a (taxpayer-subsidised) loss.
Show HN: Record voice memo, receive transcription in email
AI will enhance middle management and make things easier, but people problems are complex in a way that AI is a loooooong way off from understanding.

Once they figure that out, it's time for us to kickback, relax, and enjoy the ensuing utopia and/or apocalypse.

AI is far more likely to replace upper management and executive levels, especially in large corporations, since those roles are a lot more 'by the numbers' and act on probabilities rather than specific, nuanced, and complex instances.
Ask HN: Are cloud certifications worth it?
I'm not very fan of the cloud, I prefer a DIY approach to software. But it seems that evey job ad now requires some AWS, GCP, or Azure experience.
Italy certainly did [1]. In fact Italian politics became much worse since the proportional system was weakened.

[1] yes governments were weak and were replaced often, but that's a feature, not a problem.
I use AntennaPod[1] these days, but Pocket Casts was one of the few Android apps I actually ever purchased. It was that good and simply the best podcast app at the time. Glad to see it open sourced.

[1] https://antennapod.org/
I hit annoyances when using sqlite when dealing with some corner-cases. I wanted to implement a lock and share some small amount of data (who did what when) between two different linux users on the same machine.

I figured "sqlite is better than fopen, let's use that!", but between directory permissions, all the WAL files, probably the sqlite3 python lib and Diskcache (https://pypi.org/project/diskcache/) not helping things, it was a real pain, where regularly under different race conditions, we would get permission denied errors. I managed to paper it over with retries on each side, but I still wonder if there was a missing option or setting I should have used.
Similar situations occur on aws, cloudflare, gmail, etc.
Ukraine’s true detectives: the investigators closing in on Russian war criminals
The issue is that it'll send the UK up the chart and among the higher rates in Europe at a time when the economy is not going well and when the country needs to sell itself while outside of the EU and single market.

Btw, the US's the federal rate is 21% (which is also about the European average) but I suppose states may add their own on top.
>> Some of the types of electronic components obtained through the criminal scheme have been found in Russian weapons platforms seized on the battlefield in Ukraine. As alleged, in 2019, Orekhov travelled to the United States to source parts used in the Russian-made Sukhoi fighter aircraft and the American-made F-22 Raptor stealth fighter aircraft.

> "...to violate U.S. export laws and regulations and smuggle a jig grinder that was manufactured in Connecticut to Russia." -- Emphasis mine

Unless the world is far more bizarre than I ever imagined, I don't think a jig grinder is a "part used in" a fighter aircraft or the kind of thing that you'd find in "weapons platforms seized on the battlefield".

Specifically I was asking about the "electronic components" common to both the "Russian-made Sukhoi fighter aircraft and the American-made F-22 Raptor stealth fighter aircraft." I'm guessing they will either turn out to be very interesting or extraordinarily mundane.
This always seemed to me like pure theater.

Have there ever been any serious consequences to anything anyone ever said during the Prime Minister's Questions?

Or are they (like every other politician the world over) just putting on a good show for the folks back home?
Life was pretty vapid in a deeper sense until I had children so I have to disagree with you. It is a challenge but is the only challenge that I have experienced in my life that truly feels worthwhile.
Corruption. You don't get rich by drawing your salary as a politician, you get rich by being corrupt.
Inequalities for inequality: Gini coefficient lower bounds
I have spent very little time (maybe a couple months in my whole life) in the UK, but when I go it definitely feels to me like Britons feel a much keener sense of the Commons there than we do here in the US.

It's not just you. It's how what you do affects other people. This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US.
For all parliament's faults, it's still largely populated by well educated, intelligent individuals who are skilled orators and debaters. Even some of the most awful parliamentarians would easily talk circles around me in any kind of debate.

For anyone not aware, a large number of our politicians come from a background at public schools such as Eton, and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Institutions such as these place great significance on rhetoric and adversarial debate as a method of reaching consensus. Stephen Fry's address to Oxford is worth watching, where he discusses Oscar Wilde's quote about the Oxford manner being the ability to play gracefully with ideas.

One huge downside of this system is that our politicians are widely considered out of touch and unrepresentative. The role of public schools and Oxford PPE degrees in our political system is an area of active debate within society right now.

If you are ever interested in contemporary British politics, the podcast "The Rest Is Politics" is a great place to start.
300W Intel Core I9-13900K CPU Review and Benchmarks [video]
Its usually not so much "a range of wheels optimized for specific roles" and more "one size fits all."

You want a wheel that fits your cart. You have a lathe. Why make do with a wheel someone else made, standardized, and sells to fit a wide range of carts when you can make the perfect wheel for _your_ cart?

Most of the functionality in libraries use standard algorithms anyway. I doubt anyone thinks its a good idea to write your own cryptography or markdown processor, but why do you need a library to left pad a string with zeroes?

if statements and flags take time to process. You only have one way you need to do something. Do you want to take that much more compute just checking flags that will never change so you can get the library function to do what you always want it to do?
OpenBSD 7.2
I'm not sure if you meant it the way I read it but "people" could also be users. The bigger the service the bigger the audience.

Also, who was banned from twitter because of their politics?
I went on a deep dive on mechanical accuracy based on a post here on HN of the book authored by Wayne Moore, the founder of that company. Really fascinating to dig into how everything starts from extremely flat reference planes, and how that accuracy can get transferred to other geometries to build high accuracy cnc machines.

https://ia800104.us.archive.org/20/items/FoundationsOfMechan...
I'm a little out of the loop, and not that familiar with UK politics.

What policies do you think we're on point and representative of good conservatism?
Consider the humble ball point pen and the difficulty of making it in China.

Finally, China manufactures a ballpoint pen all by itself - https://wapo.st/3ySmwlG

And when you get into it...

> The tip of a ballpoint pen is what makes it a ballpoint pen. At the tip, a freely rotating ball is held in a small socket which connects it to an ink reservoir that allows the pen to write or draw lines. Manufacturing a ballpoint pen tip that can write comfortably for a long period of time requires high-precision machinery and precisely thin steel, but for years China was unable to match those crafted by foreign companies.

It isn't unreasonable to believe that there are other, more specialized tools, that have similar difficulties in manufacturing without the proper equipment and expertise. Some of them are just not common enough to dedicate significant resources to try to build inhouse.

(and after pulling that up, I see that a recent cousin comment in another thread brings the same article and point)
I mean, if nothing else it makes me feel better that people aren't really getting better at scams, I'm just aware of them because I'm alive today instead of back then.
The author believes Mullvad is sincere about security. I don't believe that's true for other VPN providers.
This an iOS wrapper for OpenAI Whisper library.

You can use the lock screen widget to start recording - allowing you to quickly capture what's on your mind.

This comment was the inspiration behind this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32928118

Pricing is currently somewhat high, until I figure out how much it costs to run Whisper on cloud GPUs. I'll adjust the pricing accordingly, and perhaps switch to per-minute model.
I used to find the argument that "if I can see you, I can photograph you" a lot more compelling. But now that a photograph is not a piece of paper, but rather both an image and its metadata, and trivially able to be, for instance, reverse image searched, leading to yet more metadata, etc, etc, I'm far less inclined to support it.

I'm coming to a view that there's a lot of difference between being seen (like, with eyes) and being photographed. It's certainly a shame that photography as an artform might be collateral damage here, but it doesn't change the situation that a photograph of me, in public, is now a gateway to a lot more than just an image.
Why would a decentralized system not run into these problems?
From a tweet later in the thread:

https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229

> For the record, this is a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world. So on one hand, I get it.

I think everyone can agree that Twitter's bot detection could be a bit more diligent, but what Ben describes seems like exactly the kind of thing an automated system should detect and ban without prejudice:

- A day old account

- A brand new account tweeting at a rate as fast as 1 per minute

- every tweet has a outbound URL

- while Twitter allows you to register automated bots [0] that use the developer's API, the StratecheryINT account apparently sent its tweets using the standard "Twitter Web App" -- e.g. likely an automated script using Selenium. If Ben had gone the approved bot route, I wonder if the account would've been sanctioned. As it is, faking web submissions probably triggers Twitter's auto detection even worse.

> Crypto spamming with Elon Musk's avatar? Not a bot! Stratechery Interviews? NO TWEET FOR YOU

As someone who's been an occasional reply guy to Elon over the years, I can say that the spambot filtering has gotten much better. Even when I send out a loaded tweet (i.e. mentioning "hacked wallet opensea NFT where can i buy the tshirt"), very few bots will show up, as opposed to dozens within the first 15 seconds.

I humbly submit that Ben hasn't looked in closely at what he thinks is bot activity. A lot of crypto spam tweets are either hacked legitimate accounts, or if relatively new, sent via iPhone/Android. Also a lot of spammy activity is actually real people -- a lot of humans don't take twitter seriously, or thoughtfully. Either way, all of this is much less obvious to filter out than how Ben describes StratecheryINT was operated.

edit: You can play the spam detection game yourself. Do a search "to:elonmusk url:https://\" and sort by latest [1]

For example, this @hameedforreal [2] account is almost definitely a crypto spammer, and likely was never a "real" person. But you can see that the account at least tweets from "Twitter for iPhone" (don't know if there's a way to fake that other than operating an actual iPhone).

If it's from an authentic single iphone (as opposed to a selenium script via distributed AWS), what would the very obvious and scalable heuristics be for auto-banning this account on tweet activity alone? The fact that so many of the tweets are replies with the exact same content? Well, there are a lot of real people who have burst activity like that -- think of fundraisers and activism. Avoiding false positives over millions of possible "bots" is very hard.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/twitter-officially-launche...

[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=to%3Aelonmusk%20url%3Ahttps%3A%...

[2] https://twitter.com/hameedforreal\
I don’t think you’re familiar with this use of Twitter. Since accounts can’t easily be partially followed by certain keywords or hashtags, creators will create additional accounts as notification channels for some of their content that their audience can choose to follow. It’s not spam because the delivery is wanted by those following the account. These channels don’t try to engage accounts that are uninterested in them.

Is that useful account hard to disambiguate from a spam account? Yes, but that’s Twitter’s job here.

Look at email. People get tons of notification-only email that are little more than links. Email providers simply have to figure out how to block spam without blocking legitimate email, and they largely have. Social has the same obligation.
OSS licenses are generally called "permissive", "weak copyright", "weak copyleft" and "strong copyleft" (in case of GPL family) depending on the context and nature of the license implied.

"Strict/Strong Copyright" makes sense.
"The Gini coefficient is often used in economics to measure inequalities in wealth. Now suppose the data is divided into r disjoint groups. We would like to estimate the Gini coefficient of the entire group from Gini coefficients of each subgroup."
Well I did vote and I did read all 55 pitches from the candidates. They only recently made the voting compulsory so that's going to make things interesting for all the people out there who don't do any reading and want to avoid the fine.
paging cstross
British boomers are all there already.
Show HN: Send Number to Phone Website
The USSR was by definition a second world country.

Third world countries in the in the 1960 had life expectancy on the order of 35 years. The USSR twice that at 67. Colonialism was not a picnic for the people colonialised.