skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What’s Up with Service Disruptions?
It seems to me that the big story in the economy is that services of all kinds are sporadically disrupted.

For instance the bus I am taking in the morning has been canceled because the bus company has insufficient mechanics. My doctor sends me a letter in October saying I should schedule a check-up in November but when I call the front desk they are booked until February. Pharmacies used to be open on the weekend but now they are not. The price of services at the hair salon keeps going up, stylists are leaving left and right, some of them make you book more than a month in advance.

I was at Dunkin Donuts the other day and the line of cars was stretched around the building. I went inside and got a coffee and a donut in a few minutes because they had everything ready. It was pretty obvious they used a Kanban system where people are sending signals upstream to maintain inventory. The manager is screaming “I need hash browns” the whole time I am there. I can just imagine there is one person in the drive-through line who ordered hash browns and everybody who wants a coffee and donut and could have been served quickly spent 20+ minutes waiting for hash browns.

At any given time there are some restaurants operating efficiently, certain problems fixed with band-aids. My morning bus will come back but I think the problem is roaming from place to place so there will be some other service screwed up somewhere else.

Compared to inflation I don’t hear a lot about this problem. When I do hear something the main theme is a labor shortage, maybe there are still ‘supply chain’ issues with parts and other inputs.

What I see from a process science perspective is queues that are way too long. People will defend the long queues to their death (“there is no alternative”) but long queues don’t increase the throughout a system can handle, they just cause customers and employees to explode and just increase the time frame in which another thing can go wrong like the customer not showing, the employee scheduled to do the service quit, etc. Most people think the long queues are a symptom of the disruptions, but I think the queues themselves are a cause of disruptions.

I’m concerned about how it can be managed economically. One way to think about it is that demand outruns supply and that is why we have inflation, so raising interest rates will slow down the economy, people will have less money to get haircuts, donuts, etc. and eventually the long queues will collapse.

The other is that businesses need to add supply, pay people better, train people, invest in process and technology so they can do more with less people, etc. in that case, trying to restrain the economy will prevent all of these adaptations from taking place. Prices will go up because all these things cost money, but it may be a one-time phenomenon instead of something that drags on for decades.

I’m afraid inflation fighting might perpetuate the ‘service chain’ crisis and paradoxically keep inflation high.

Any thoughts? How are service disruptions affecting you?
There are workloads where shell scripts are the so-called right tool for a job. All too often I see people writing scripts in "proper" languages and calling os.system() on every other line. Shell scripts are good for gluing programs together. It's fine to use them for that.
I am quite certain that this was done by administrators who aren't part of and don't understand MIT culture and are just implementing what was done in the previous place they worked.
I'm somewhat afraid to google for sources from a work machine, but the factoid that renaissance artists (amongst others) used prostitutes as models was circulated by lecturers in my art history classes. Could still be popular speculation.
All right, then take an example. Recently in a town I'm near, a young man kidnapped his girlfriend's adoptive parents with her knowledge, attempted to rob them, took them to a nature preserve and shot them dead. He had a long history of theft and assault and was proud of his crime.

The state elected to give him a life sentence. (That's just exile except now someone has to take care of him the entire time.)

From your point of view, what are the other options here?
A year or so back I got back into UT99, and was pleasantly surprised that on ~2021 era hardware PRECACHING flashes for a couple miliseconds or so :D
No person or AI needs to actually understand how an AGI actually works, they just need observable behaviours indicative of intelligence. That's what we already do with image recognition, language translation tasks, and more.

Once we move to more general forms of intelligence, like math and other forms of problem solving, then you apply more general tests.

For instance, if we had an Einstein AI v1.0 that could infer General Relativity using X0 bits of information in time T0, and Einstein AI v2.0 managed to infer GR using X1 << X0 bits of information and/or could infer it in time T1 << T0, then v2.0 is clearly superior to v1.0.

I agree that sometimes the parameters for such tests aren't always clear at first, but this has always been the case in science, which is we we iterate and progressively refine our tests as we learn. Any true AGI must be capable of such abductive and inductive reasoning to qualify as a general intelligence.
I’m shocked by how many websites can’t handle a few requests a second
Or you could use a $10 adapter or if rumors are to be believed, next year a standard USB C headphone.
Ad blocking is under attack (2017)
It took me the trauma of 2020 to reconsider my own assumptions about the dynamics of these things.

It's one thing to see newspapers in 1776 and another thing entirely beyond human predictive ability to understand how decades and centuries can lead to inequality levels and power feedback loops with private media ownership.

I don't think I'm smarter, I think this is similar to code in that no matter how talented is the programmer, sometimes you just have to run it to see. It's not about anyone's superiority or foresight, it's about reality surprising even the smartest.

And I'd rather have a mediocre programmer able to dynamically debug than the most of talented programmer on earth writing static untested code.

I'm not on the side of censorship at all. I think free communication of ideas is good.

I'm just not sure if the
1776 revolution could have happened at all after decades of mind numbing propaganda by the British, after they would call their ideas populism daily and train people to associate it with it negatively. After the entire population was immunized against revolutionary ideas as fake news, conspiracy theories, terrorism, danger to pubic safety, misogyny, offensive. These things didn't happen back then. If the British had control over the newspapers and constantly spread propaganda that the cause was lost, how many would volunteer?
The Farce of Nissan(Connect) of North America
Russia Uses Facial Recognition to Hunt Down Draft Evaders
Don't shit where you eat? Instead, shit where you work?

Makes sense ;)
The biggest issue in my mind is the potential for the election deniers to gain real power. If elections no longer work as intended, I don’t think anybody can predict what the outcome will be.
Not going to install fish on all of my servers just so i can run your scripts, sorry. They already have bash pre-installed, though.

> If I want to run some POSIX-compatible script then I just use `bash scripts.sh`

Shouldn't you be using a shebang?
> "That is literally in the law."

No, the law does the opposite. It effectively requires the use of pop-ups to "gain consent", it doesn't ban them. At least, that's how it's been interpreted in practice.

> "And also. GDPR isn't just about browsers or cookies. It's about data in general. Which includes all other situations, including offline interactions, gaming, and communication with governments."

Absolutely. In general the GDPR is a good thing. But it needs a rework to fix the cookie consent situation.
I'm almost positive my home server (which is a lower end, but newer desktop) costs more than $2 a month.

I don't think Nextcloud's photos app would run well on something like a Raspberry Pi either, considering when I tried my photo collection in it, it would consume enough RAM to crash the 8GB VM it was in and give up.

While I have time and knowledge to troubleshoot, realize most don't and $2 is less than an XL coffee.
Congratulations! I think this is actually the first time I've seen a use for Cucumber. Obviously, it would have been better if you didn't have to do this but I've spent enough time as a consultant to know when to just work around the customers.
I think this comment points to an even deeper insight: shell is a crappy programming language but with amazing extensibility.

I would argue that once you pull in jq, you're no longer writing in "shell", you're writing in jq, which is a separate and different language. But that's precisely the point! Look at how effortless it is to (literally) shell out to a slew of other languages from shell.

The power of shell isn't in the scripting language itself, it's in how fluidly it lets you embed snippets of tr, sed, awk, jq, and whatever else you need.

And, critically, these languages callable from shell were not all there when shell was designed. The extension interface of spawning processes and communicating with arguments and pipes is just that powerful. That's where shell shines.
Totally agreed.

The constitution should be hard to amend, its purpose is to give stability. That you disagree with parts of it is one thing, but remember that if it's easy to amend, there's no guaranteed it will be in a way you like.
>> Since it is centralized, Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it.

Yes, this. It might be "fighting for privacy" now, but they can change their mind at any point. With new management, eventual profit seeking, government coercion, etc, this could change with a simple app update. It is more likely to me that it remains private because it isn't particularly successful. I find a lot of people have it but rarely use it.

It also isn't clear to me what is in it for donors such as EM. It is much easier to trust a system with correctly designed incentive structures.
Rather than slowly disintegrate Meta have bet the farm on this. I think it's a mistake but I have been around long enough to allow I might be wrong. Sadly I don't think throwing money at it like this will make it a success.
Saying slave owners rights were being protected is not exactly a rousing endorsement about the constitution protecting the rights of the minority.
Yeah it's funny how much I disagree with the OP. My dad always ends up buying me duplicates of what I have whether it's coffee or cooking. Then you have to do the dance to make sure the one they bought you is the one you use when they come over for dinner.
I had one before they introduced the subscription. Pretty much soured me on the device. The software was still kludgy, and it was clear the direction they were going wasn’t a direction I wanted to go in. Pity, because the hardware was pretty good. But moving things to and from the device sucked.
Waymo and Cruise are still operating.

The market can remain irrational as long as its backers remain solvent.

Getting Alphabet to admit that Waymo was a ridiculously expensive failure will take a lot.
Or not. Depends on how the herd moves. Ask Ms. Truss.
The wording is ambiguous, but the BNF later in the spec [1] agrees with your interpretation. Valid version numbers are three numbers separated by dots, followed by either a minus and dot-separated pre-release versions; or a plus and dot-separated build identifiers.

1: https://semver.org/#backusnaur-form-grammar-for-valid-semver...
A notepad doesn't sync to the cloud.
I would say this favour renewable in some way. Spurring over investment in terms of government subsidies and taxes on fossil fuel because the uptick in renewables is not fast enough.
Got it, interesting...well we agree, there are dangerous things out there if someone wants u...broken bottle getting out if the car..come on. Univ of Fairbanks had a gun room fornus to keep our rifles locked up while at college. Different strokes but notbody saying safety isn't paramount. I want firearms safety courses in public school. avaiable anytime anywhere
Archive.org link to get around the paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20221026024940/https://www.theat...

Article is about Cotopaxi, FYI.
There was also Saudia Arabia, where several timezones were being used: https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/196902/dinner.at.when....
Sub-femtosecond display lag too! :-)
Interactive Map of Every Article Ever Featured on the Twelve Mile Circle Blog
Well, you just let me know, so I won't be getting you a box of chocolates. Paradoxically, a lot of people could be like that, but they appear to be outliers because they never say it out loud.

What kind of gifts would you prefer?
I don’t get it. Is there anything new announced? Because this is a 2 year old device, that judging from the comments a lot of us have.

Am I missing something, or is this a PSA to remind people that the RM2 exists?
> I think the rigidity of the Constitution is probably it's greatest strength

It's not just the Constitution, it's the entirety of the American system, which seems designed to use "checks and balances" as veritable roadblocks to slow everything down.

I agree that - in theory - it's great and very smart, because if the government was indeed designed around truths that are self-evident (i.e. inherently "true" and immutable) than everything should settle at the mean of those truths.

The problem is that when the country was being formed, incredible compromises to those self-evident truths were made left, right and center. So we ended up with a country that claimed that all men are created equal but did not actually adhere to this.

Further, the Constitution & Bill of Rights is full of things not related to these core truths. They tend, often, to be functions of their time. Those are the things that should be open for change, and the core truths should be canonized and unbreakable.
I switched from being a physicist to being a software developer after the crash.

Software still looked like a much better business where I would actually be wanted and it was clear at the time that the fundamentals were good it was just the finance that was temporarily screwed up.
From Pitless Cherries to Softer Kale, Using CRISPR to Make Better Produce
For something really important, I binding contract might not be enough.

IIRC there was a U.S. bankruptcy ruling where supposedly never-sharable info was sold off.

Maybe having the relevant technical data (keys, source code, etc.) held in escrow by a trustworthy party would work?
text.npr.org has about a tweet's worth of CSS and works just as well without it.
Even then, there's about 200 workdays in the year. There are probably scenarios where I'd rather have 2 days of Carmack than a year of a newbie, but they are rare and specialized.
yea, just google reloading kit. People want to reuse the expensive part of a bullet for whatever reason. Brass is $$ and having a company like federal fill to your specific requrements can get expensive!
Convince me to up my game in awk!

I only use it to select the n'th word in a csv-like line. Anything more than that, I need to search stackoverflow for the invocation.

Don't you find its syntax cumbersome?
US citizens do indeed have a constitution that confers lots of rights.

My contention is simply that these rights are legal fictions and political footballs, and should not be in-scope for a constitution. They shouldn't be baked-in; they should be simple legislation.

I mainly don't believe in these "rights". I think people should be treated fairly and equitably; and I think that should be a matter of law. But constitution is about meta-law - how laws are made, not what their effect is.
> 8. '[' and '[[' are both bash builtins.

'[' is a builtin, '[[' is a keyword. Can use bash's builtin 'type' to check.
Not really, because many Mac apps can't even work with mandatory App Store sandboxing, so the apps would simply cease to exist rather than moving to the App Store.
Couldn’t one just do PGP over WhatsApp, over Telegram or whatever? Instead of sending a plaintext message you’d send the PGP message but using existing infrastructure. Then there’d only be metadata to harvest but content should definitely be secure.
Ask HN: How to protect yourself from QRishing attacks?
Today a friend told me about a phishing attempt he almost got caught in, he got an email with a link and qr along with the message, "if the domain doesn't work, please scan the QR code", of course this domain wasn't even registered, so he took his phone and scanned it, reaching the phishing site.

This attack is so dangerous that it bypasses all security and email scanners on the server and tells us to scan the QR code with the address to the hacker's site, and most browsers on the phone even hide the URL.

Now the question arises, how to protect against this? Add a QR code scanner to the mail servers?
I love chess and play it every day but it's not an addiction I think would help a toddler. Would pick animal crossing first!
Hu Jintao being escorted out looked tame compared to being on the receiving end of a dramatic, "You're fired!" from the former favorite U.S. President when he hosted Apprentice on television. Who are Trump's enemies?
.50 sabot is a great 'amything' avaiable setup I think. really lkke the cva .50 for value
Growth of Plasmonic Nanoparticles for Aging Cask-Matured Whisky
I went back to school, finished my degree, got my masters in mathematics, and then went back to being a (much better paid) developer working on much more interesting things.
How exactly do conditions like this work in practice?

I can go ahead and write a ToS or even a contract that says "if you don't give me a blue M&M on Saturday 29 October 2022, you owe me $1M". I can get a client to sign it, perhaps it's part of my conditions as a freelancer.

I can't realistically see any court enforcing that.

As far as I can tell PayPal can only get away with this nonsense because they hold your money anyway. It's exactly the sort of reason people are fighting against cashless/custodial financial systems.
> "Reject is the default!"

I wish that was true.

> "If you, for example, blocked every consent dialog from appearing, no website would have legal grounds to track you (except for legitime purposes yada-yada)."

Sounds good to me!
Fantastic. Do you ensure 100% uptime? If yes, can this be used to delegate and run validator nodes in Proof of stake networks?
I have tablets (colour display, android/iOS) and a Kindle.

As far as reading is concerned there is no comparison, the kindle wins on nearly every metric.

I just wish they would offer a kindle with a 10" display.

I will probably get the kindle scribe once it has been out for a bit, has good reviews and a software update.
I value rest more than ammo or the internet my friend
"Use set -o errexit"

Only if it doesn't matter that the script fails non-gracefully. Some scripts are better to either have explicit error handling code, or simply never fail. In particular, scripts you source into your shell should not use set options to change the shell's default behavior.

"Prefer to use set -o nounset."

ALWAYS use this option. You can test for a variable that might not be set with "${FOO:-}". There is no real downside.

"Use set -o pipefail."

Waste of time. You will spend so much time debugging your app from random pipe failures that actually didn't matter. Dont use this option; just check the output of the pipe for sane values.

"Use [[ ]] for conditions"

No!!! Only use that for bashisms where there's no POSIX alternative and try to avoid them wherever possible. YAGNI!

"Use cd "$(dirname "$0")""

Use either "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" or grab a POSIX readfile-f implementation.

"Use shellcheck."

This should have been Best Practice #1. You will learn more about scripting from shellcheck than 10 years worth of blog posts. Always use shellcheck. Always.

Also, don't use set -o nounset when set -u will do. Always avoid doing something "fancy" with a Bashism if there's a simpler POSIX way. The whole point of scripts is for them to be dead simple.
I read that as Titians, and thought: now we're really mixing our artists. Caravaggio was the Michelangelo and both were Titians, and Titian was the Leonardo, and...
Love my rm2, use it for hours every day. But their stylus is overpriced and fragile. LAMY All-Star is a way better choice, 100% compatible, and has a programmable multifn button (hold to access eraser tool, doubletap to undo).
Shell and SQL make you 10x productive over any alternative.
Nothing even comes close. I've seen people scrambling for 1 hours to write some data munging, then spend another 1 hour to run it through a thread pool to utilize those cores , while somebody comfortable is shell writes a parallelized one liner, rips through GBs of data, and delivers the answer in 15 minutes.

What Python is to Java, Shell is to Python. It speeds you up several times. I started using inline 'python -c' more often than the python repl now as it stores the command in shell history and it is then one fzf search away.

While neither Shell or SQL are perfect, there have been many ideas to improve them and for sure people can't wait for something new like oil shell to get production ready, getting the shell quoting hell right, or somebody fixing up SQL, bringing old ideas from Datalog and QUEL into it, fixing the goddamn NULL joins, etc.

But honestly, nothing else even comes close to this 10x productivity increase over the next best alternative. No, Thank you, I will not rewrite my 10 lines of sh into python to explode it into 50 lines of shuffling clunky objects around. I'll instead go and reread that man page how to write an if expression in bash again.
> I am not saying Facebook should stop growing. It should just not keep dumping money in these unproven projects,

On the Apple side, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad, and the watch were all unproven projects.

On the Microsoft side, giving up immediate revenue from selling Office for $600 - seat into a subscription service for $69-$99 a year had to be a short term revenue hit. Not to mention XBox which loss billions before becoming successful and Azure.

Meta doesn’t have a choice. I really hate the Facebook product. Not because of the privacy angle, it commits the worse sin of any product - it just sucks now. Most of the post I see aren’t even from people let alone brands and websites I chose to follow.
agree, I'm 30 min south of worcesterrrrr
It sounds like you’re being sarcastic But I’ve heard this advice a lot actually, especially for small businesses
I'm not. Plenty of people expect their traffic to be "a few friends", not "a few hundred thousand strangers", and they still use the first host that showed up in Google sixteen years ago.

Those hosts cater to people who expect a few friends' worth of traffic, and have little incentive to optimize for the Hacker News Hug that is honestly unlikely to happen.

Can you find an affordable host that could scale to big traffic? Sure. But that takes time to research, and they payoff might not be there for most people.
Supporting black people, community, and businesses is racist ?
I credit Quake Live / OpenArena for teaching me anger management.