skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice. One side project I'm thinking of is to build a simplified msdos environment for the Raspberry, with basic shell commands like cd, dir, md, etc and a set of basic programs inside the same environment to do productivity/office things, with some basic internet tools (email, wikipedia..) but also with a pico8 like game creation tool..

Like an msdos without the unrelevant parts (system files, configuration,..) with a good enough/interesting set of apps tailored for 5-10yo children

In my mind the idea makes sense at least :_D
> will be long and redundant

They made a highly redundant traceback display much more pleasant a couple years ago, writing "the same thing 1,998 more times ..." or something like that.
Perhaps it could, and I was careful not to do that.
I've travelled a lot in the US and many parts feel like a developing country. The tent cities and begging and vehicle-dwelling and so on appear worse each time I go over. But people either don't vote or vote against their own interests. Maybe one risk of framing things as a societal issue mean that people are less likely to take individual action in voting or changing jobs (if possible)? Voter apathy in the US is quite remarkable, given the constant media furore.

I'm in small business so I'm offering no comment on larger companies, but often here, I think an employee paid $x is expected to produce $3x as an old rule of thumb to cover overheads, taxes, etc. And I have sympathy for the brutal world of small business ownership: if an employee detests that $15/hr, go freelance at $40/hr and wear the downsides that come with it. Almost every business owner has taken a risk at some point to work unpaid or underpaid while getting off the ground, has covered wages during slow periods, etc. It's not always glamorous. An idea I find intriguing is in government or enterprise providing small businesses with as much boilerplate/scaffolding as possible to minimise the impact of wage theft or rostering struggles or anything else in that painful interface between the employer and employee. Without it, an employee is at the mercy of the foibles of the smalltime employer.
The denial rate for H1B visas dropped from 24% to 4%. This precipitous drop in denial rates was almost immediately followed by some of the largest layoffs in tech history. My belief is that the BigCos are using layoffs to constructively abuse the H1B visa program (and, more importantly, abuse terrified H1B workers).

I'm fairly involved in politics and try to contribute in large enough ways to at least be a known entity to campaign managers. If you're the same, now is the time to continue your civic engagement. I'm fairly confident DoL will be watching BigTech labor practices like a hawk, looking for both intentional domestic labor displacement and also abuse of H1B workers. I will not be surprised if Amazon is at the center of intense executive and legislative scrutiny for the next two years as a result of massive H1B allocations immediately followed by massive layoffs.

If you are an H1B worker being asked to work excessive hours or take on new responsibilities, reach out to DoL (NOT USCIS). If you are a manager/director privy to conversations about labor force reduction and H1B status is mentioned, reach out to DoL. Better to be the whistle blower than mentioned by name in a deposition.
> the anger over what happened yesterday is overblown

Much of the anger is about Ticketmaster’s terrible website, which made it impossible for fans to reliably buy tickets even when they spent the whole day hitting refresh. There can be no excuse for that.
There's a reason he tried to get out of this deal. He's going to lose billions of dollars on this, the only question at this point is how many billions.
Just yesterday I met a former coworker who is all-in on crypto and promised to connect me to all the hottest Rust jobs and most rockstar founders in SF. (Not joking.)
Well HN is run by plutocrats. Who pay a lot of money to run the site. I’d rather have HN with this obvious bias than no HN at all.
Would you please expand on that? Like what?
But for ebooks there is no such thing as second hand.
Yeah, that was when he was useful enough to outweigh his jackassery.

And hey, maybe if he kills twitter, he'll still be doing humanity a service.
Berkeley Bowl used to regularly sell them—not sure if they still do.
> It can't be inconsistent. You've got one copy of the data in memory, everything uses that, everything sees the same thing.

Wrong. For instance, state can be stored in locals. Two threads accessing the same structure, one reading and one writing, the reader loads some state into locals and the writer then invalidates that state in the middle of the reader's computation, and the reader proceeds to computing a result mixing old state and new state thus leading to inconsistency. This ABA problem is well known and it just can't happen if the structure is immutable. And this doesn't even go into cache coherency issues.

I frankly don't think you appreciate the number of hazards just making data structures immutable actually addresses, and given you don't seem aware of the hazards implicit to mutable data structures, I suppose that's not surprising.

> What kind of programs would you write that would benefit from this

Pretty much every single program that accesses a relational database benefits from this. There are a few of those around n in case you didn't know. Perhaps you've heard of multiversion concurrency control?
I'd encourage you to read the source he cites in that blog post - it's clearly very, very different from what Musk is doing.
My impression of the intent of the statement was "disable mining altogether" not "turn off the existing physical mining rigs until someone turns one back on"
Presumably they'd try to sell it at some rate wouldn't depeg Tether, and the reason to do so is to preserve cash for the creditors in case Tether depegs for some other reason.
I am from India and live here. I usually find it offensive the way HN becomes racist, subtly and directly, when topics around this subcontinent, especially India, come up. This is anything but that.

I think people are unnecessarily being much more considerate and respectful than this company and its people (including the British PM’s father-in-law) deserve.

Infosys and anything or anybody related to it are worst of the worst.
whoa, the macroexpander (me) must have a bug. Added to the list now. Thanks!
We'll always have the early web as long as we don't let browsers go completely HTTPS only (HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 w/TLS required) and demand support for HTTP/1.1 (HTTP+TLS optional). These days modern websites have an unmaintained lifetime approximately equal to the duration between changes in ACME versions supported by LetsEncrypt. They're transient. But old websites without continually renewing certs and made of HTML and files can last forever... if our browsers lets us communicate with them.
You’ve diagnosed failure after a month? How many puts have you bought at what price? This is the perfect moment to cement your reputation as a stock market expert.
These version numbers fail to stick because business people with no understanding of the technology keep trying to make it about the content. Going back 15 years ago people tried the term “Web 3.0” first as the semantic web and then some advertising nonsense. Last year it was about some cryptocurrency stupidity.

It’s not about the content. It’s about the experience. Web 2.0 were sites making use of XHR (asynchronous HTTP requests) to send/receive content without refreshing the page. Back in the 2000s this was a massive improvement because the experience was better over slow connections and there weren’t giant frameworks to dick it up. You actually had to know what you were doing and the experience was massively improved.

In that spirit “Web 3.0” will likely be a socket and event driven experience. Now the bottleneck isn’t the transmission but slow applications from poorly trained developers. When the application and the transmission are both fast a web application can perform faster than desktop applications doing everything in 50ms or less in response to user interactions. You aren’t going to achieve that with the overhead of HTTP round trips.
I think right now emotions are flying high, so people are going to make grand statements (and of course the press, which now hates Musk, is very gung-ho to publish anything.) I'm sure some systems will fail, but as to if the general public will really notice much of it, I have doubts. I could be wrong, but I've seen employees make similar claims after being fired or leaving and generally most everything working out. Interviewing or getting information from people fired up after an event like that are generally not reliable, in my experience.
Imagine being a 20-year old in Germany and Netherlands and finding the cheapest house you can own goes for 500k. Your salary peaks at 80k after 10 years of work, half of it goes to taxes and 1/3 of that is lost on rent you are forced to pay. Your only option is a 30+ year mortgage that will send you to a rat race with no options to leave, especially when you get married. Or you spend 5 years in Dubai, working remotely for 100k+, return back home and buy a property. Then you work only as much as you need. What would be your choice?
That's some pretty palpable survivorship bias
Spending with urgency when you are in the twilight of your life makes it so that the claim on other people labor is very weak, because the person spending has essentially no time to waste to haggle or complain about poor service
My favourite too, a really great apple, but only eaten plain for me.
One concept of mighty was that your server could be upgraded faster than you could upgrade your personal computer.
Facebook could if they stopped the metaverse cash bonfire.
Elon appears to be ham-handedly binary searching for that answer. The problem is that if you go too low, things catch fire and there is nary a soul to put them out.

A more reasonable, emotionally mature individual would've taken time to develop the appropriate metrics to determine which employees were necessary, and which weren't, vs starting with the galacticly stupid approach of keeping the programmers which have written the most code in the past N days, and then following that up by giving generally well-off, easily re-employable, capable engineers an ultimatum, with a three month severance chaser. Who do you suppose is most likely to click that "yes" button? People who are not as easily re-employable.

I wouldn't be surprised if twitter has less than 10% of their best engineers left, with the remaining engineers being the lowest performers. And now those 10%'s lives are all the more difficult, meaning the majority will likely be showing themselves the door in the near future.

Pure, unmitigated, incompetence on Elon's part.
Uh you’re not well informed about Musk and PR staff
At the end of the day all that really matters is the comp package.
A new type of chess engine
That would be XPS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification
There are B-school case studies kicking off already I'm sure.
Circa 25 years ago I was newly wed and my wife happened to be watching over my shoulder as I looked up something online. I started typing "fr" and "freshmeat.net" came up as a possible completion.

She was, to put it mildly, immediately suspicious of my browsing habits.
There is an episode of the Silicon Valley series where the team tries to increase their VC funding by becoming increasingly toxic and abusive with the VCs they meet, and they end up signing with the biggest offer they got, after one of them literally puts his genitals on the table during negotiation.

Turns out this was hitting very close to the truth. That show was great to show how much a clown world SV can be.
A broken clock is also right two times a day.
...and everyone is going to use their newfangled home computers to organize recipes and do biorythym charts.

Even in a charitable interpretation of history-- ignoring that Bitcoin wouldn't scale to micropayment levels-- any early interest in micropayments was quickly overwhelmed by speculation and illegal trade.

I think Dogecoin tips on Reddit circa 2014 are about as close as we ever got to viable crypto micropayments, and ISTR it was done off-chain by putting a balance in a bot.
Twitter isn’t on the stock market anymore...
Employees started using it when the first proper rounds of layoffs were happening

https://twitter.com/ruchowdh/status/1588694932872925184

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/business/layoffs-meta-twi...
So how does this compare to Twitter, I wonder?

I can't think of any real pros to Twitter. Did they create any great new open-source technologies?
If a layoff isn't an attempt [1] to get rid of under-performing talent or dump under-performing business divisions, then I've always felt that across the board pay adjustments are a much more ethical approach.

I'd be much more inclined to stay at a company that lowered my pay 20% than a company that laid off my coworkers. Not letting people go shows empathy, and uniform pay decreases align everyone's interests in getting back to a good state.

I could see why some might jump ship from a poorly performing company during ordinary economic times, but during this down tech cycle, the grass isn't necessarily greener. Going elsewhere might be difficult or put your head back on the chopping block.

[1] Or as some might view it, an opportunity.
I understand being tough but why cause the needless turmoil. There's a theory of management that advocates breaking it all down and then rebuilding it from the bottom but this is a very extreme application.
Ford CEO: 40% Less Labor to Build Electric Vehicles
I can't name many more types of apples than "Fuji", "McIntosh", "Rome", "Red Delicious", "Gala", "Granny Smith", and "Honeycrisp", but I feel like Honeycrisp apples are too perfect - too sweet, too crisp, but somehow not as apple-y as other varieties.

If you only have one Honeycrisp after years of eating Fujis and Galas it will hit you like a ton of bricks with how good it is compared to what you've been eating. You might even wonder why you would bother to get anything else. But it's soo saccharine, so uniformly "good" that it gets old fast IMO. Hard to explain, but sometimes I'd rather have something that tastes more like a good old fashioned apple and less like apple juice in apple form.
Well, whenever we talk about hacking we get a massive influx of pro-DRM and corporate defense comments so "hacking" existing things without consent of the corporate owner hasn't been popular here in years now :)
It does seem like that would be a good opportunity to weed out some of the insecure aspects of the format.

Unfortunately in practice it would mean that everyone would have to support both PDF and PDF2.
And that technique doesn't scale to something the size of Area 51.
Yes, they are suckers. This sort of principal-agent problem is exactly why defined benefit pension plans ought to be phased out and replaced by defined contribution plans.
As the hate for him has grown over the years, he loudly jumped to the right to latch on to the fervent cult worship rich people have over the right wing masses. That's why elites cry cancel culture every time they face minor consequences for their actions. It always gets some positive press and boot licking.
> Are you saying registrars are equivalent to CAs now and they can revoke domains just like they could reclaim them before?

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. Could you rephrase it or expand on it? Specifically, I don't understand what "before" is in regards to -- before what?

> Right now, I trust TLDs to tell me the NS of the domain so I can query its IP against that NS, I don't trust them to validate that the true owner of the site currently controls the domain.

But you trust registrars for that, right? And registrars basically send that information to the TLD and coordinate with the TLD so that they point the NS record to whatever the owner of the domain wants.

Either way, yes, both your registrar and your TLD have the same technical ability to attack and perform a man-in-the-middle against your entire domain, either in the current WebPKI system or a DANE-based PKI system. So that is not a problem with DANE any more than it's a problem with the WebPKI system.

Of course, what is possible to do technically and what is legal can be entirely different matters. But it is technically possible, and usually illegal in most circumstances (except under judicial order or as a result of law enforcement I suppose), to do these kinds of attacks with both DANE and WebPKI.

> So under DANE, who else if not TLDs does one ultimately trust to attest to that claim? Honestly asking, I don't know enough about DANE.

Which claim, who is the owner of the site? It would be the same as it is now. As far as I understand, registrars do that and then coordinate with whoever manages the TLD.

In fact, that's what I've been saying, the criticism against DANE is equally valid with WebPKI, because the domain system would be the same. Except WebPKI is more fragile and has a lot more weak links in its chain.

tptacek says you can't revoke keys in a DANE system. Yes, you can, you can revoke them yourself! You don't need to wait for browser vendors to revoke an entire CA, potentially affecting thousands or millions of other websites. And they may actually decide not to revoke the CA, even if they issued rogue certificates, for several reasons.

What browsers can't do in DANE is revoke the TLD's keys (but the TLDs can do it themselves if they were attacked). But of course, it makes no sense to revoke the TLD's keys if they are the attacker.

Because if a TLD hijacks your domain (and they already do that today, whenever law enforcement and judges require them to do it), then neither DANE nor WebPKI can do squat about it.
One of the reasons I quit my last job (senior manager in an investment bank) is because of the pressure I was under to hire female technologists to make their diversity stats look better.

The pipeline was 90% male, reflecting the choices that women make in school and university.

We attempt to “correct” this imbalance at the hiring stage, and to do so at this late stage, we simply have to throw meritocracy in the bin.

Horribly damaging in so many ways. Diversity quotas are patronising to female technologists. Quotas only serve to increase their sense of imposter syndrome, when women find out the bar was deliberately lowered for them.

It is also damaging in the long term because it actually -creates- prejudice against women.

Just awful all round.

The DEI phenomenon is self-serving and divisive. Yet it has become a cottage industry right in the heart of our institutions. It needs to be robustly challenged and rejected.
That's a cute writeup, but the author overlooked some important bits of history.

For example, the original use of APL (before it was called APL and before anyone had implemented it as a programming language -- the reason Iverson joined IBM) was to specify the IBM 370 machine architecture.

In other words, it was being used to document how the CPU worked. And it was impressively successful there, distilling a large body of documentation into 2 pages.

This reduction in cognitive load, describing machine structure, is what made it popular back then. And this is what motivated the effort to implement it as a programming language.

(Also, if I understand correctly, there's also a relatively short and direct step from APL to the initial implementation of SQL.)
This doesn't feel like an expensive site to host/develop, but the moderation costs might be up there.
All Twitter Offices Closed as Hundreds of Employees Resign
The golden age of VC was curiously correlated with a decade of free money and runaway equity prices. Like buying a plane ticket and thinking you're a bird.
Turn showdead in and tell me this website is a “free speech absolutist zone”.

I mean, subjectively most of those accounts deserve to be dead, but don’t pretend this is something it isn’t.
Normally the penality on Twitter links is such that a good number of upvotes can still rescue it; now, it seems that penality has changed and there's a very strong penalty, which I strongly disagree with given the industry impact of what's been happening at Twitter.

It's on the front page now, after 100 upvotes.
I truly hope all the top tier engineers who kept it going leave and it all goes bankrupt and Elon can have his tarnished brand lol. There are multiple other avenues on social media for the same functions as Twitter, maybe a little less conducive but they will do the job.
Didn't Elon demand everyone back to the office?
> It's a weakness of functional programming, not the language.

I would strongly object this.

Have you seen ZIO?

https://zio.dev/
I generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817

I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.
> hold its value reliably

It can and that's what it exactly does by keeping its value outside the reach of external influences such as military forces and economic decisions by a handful of people but only governed by its own mathematical law.

It's just that people don't understand the nature of crypto but only see it as a new risk asset class which is disappointing after its 13 years of existence and it's the only reason it's going up and down massively by people not having the fundamental belief of what it's actually about.
I do know that many on HN are critical of twitter, but since the start of the war with Ukraine, twitter was an essential way to get fresh news/analysis of the situation. Therefore it's a pity that twitter is going down. And I do think it is happening.
Easier to tame the workforce if kept under threat for longer time. Want to work from home? You may be chopped. Want better working conditions? You may be chopped. That complaint about your manager? You’re at it.
I think it's not too late to create a modern open-source alternative to PDF.
I find it unacceptable that something that has become so widely used doesn't have proper free tools for editing.
Society shouldn't be limited by income if they want (have?) to use PDFs, or else suffer from a bad experience.
The other bigger problem with PDF is that a lot of the times it's used for something for which it wasn't made to be used for. Anything that is expected to be consumed on both mobile and desktop devices should never use PDFs. Government forms should not use PDFs with hacky embedded scripts either.
Why are people so okay with this particular brand of vigilantism when they're not okay with it in general (e.g., self-help evictions)?
Maybe you have features that can be built somewhere like aws where you have already sold it to a customer and you just don't have the devs. And you know you're going to cut from a part of the company where there is no expectation that the features from the devs will increase revenue. Tuning up the Alexa weather app isn't likely to get more customers but and aws database offering that some other fortune 500 is asking for might be revenue positive a couple months after release.

There more to it than the total cost of devs it matters what people are working on and if the products will produce revenue.