skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's more of an attitude of "over-reliance on automation is bad, because that's how you end up dropping a perfectly good plane into the ocean when the automation turns off."

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/blind-to-the-problem-the...

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...
It's really not that easy a problem to solve and sometimes the suboptimal solution seems better than the alternative (which would be to hire nobody until we find a good senior developer).

Despite the fears of over-abundance of programmers driving down wages being around at least since I've started working, there is a shortage of good senior programmers. A lot of companies (many non-tech) need programmers these days, most programmers are not that great, most work is not that exciting but it still needs to get done. So it's also often not even about the cost of programmers but about their availability (for the price you can pay).

Let's say you're running the internal software department at ACME Insurance and Customer Care Services in your average big-but-not-major Western European or North American city. You need programmers to develop and maintain your creaky Java Enterprise Edition + Oracle DB internal system that has been appropriately handling your insurance and customer care services needs for the last 18 years.

At this point centuries of developer-years have been spent on this system and it's crucial for €/$ millions or revenue yearly that your company depends on. You can't offer the kind of compensation, prestige or interesting projects that the local FAANG development offices can offer to easily recruit great senior developers. What do you do?
For the poor, bail is punishing and harmful. The difference between that and formal "punishment" after trial is academic.
With open source projects there aren't any managers, and yet good quality software gets produced. I'm interested to know people's thoughts on that? Perhaps in open source projects the 'maintainer' roles are analogous to being a manager? On the other hand I've been a manager of a software team in a company, and I'm also a maintainer of a couple of open source projects, and I'd say that the two roles are very different. Does it mean that we don't actually need managers? Really I don't don't know the answer and I'm raising the question to see what other people think.
Edge security isn't really a thing.

Like sure, you could ship a router, firewall, IPS, WAF, et all. But if you're not stopping outbound, controlling clients ability to talk to each other, and blocking things like UPNP, then you're still basically on an untrusted network.

Your options are basically make the network unuseable or mark it untrusted.

At that point you might as well just force all traffic through a VPN.
In Poland Christmas is 25th and 26th, but all the main celebration happen on eveningn of 24th. The remaining two days are more for rest and hanging out with your extended family.
Linus Torvalds has settled that whole discussion for the Linux kernel.

Thankfully his opinion about C++ is meaningless outside Linux world.

Windows started to adopt C++ on the kernel since Vista, you can make use of Windows Implementation Library, a C++ template library for kernel, drivers and userspace code. Just gotta to love that VC++ /kernel flag.

macOS with its NeXTSTEP heritage, changed from having Objective-C drivers on kernel space to C++ drivers in kernel space.

Then if you bother to broaden your horizons beyond FOSS UNIX clones, there are enough OSes already shipping C++ on the kernel.
What about the most classic carol of all, Cyndi Lauper's Christmas Conga?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7E2lcx23JA
If that kind of weather would hit Europe right now I'm pretty sure we'd be in dire straits.
But, you have to admit that if ChatGPT had a process whereby it'd internally list the sites most likely relevant to your question (essentially Google the keywords) then included those sites as context it'd likely ace your question?

Basically, if Google owned ChatGPT the result would be very different.
Another long-time lurker here and I agree, it's amazing that there seem to be experts on any topic here taking the time to write thoughtful posts. And it's not just about technical discussions. Even when it comes to personal topics there always is a helpful and positive atmosphere.
Merry Christmas HN!
Show HN: I built a free Chrome extension that writes entire emails using ChatGPT
Mariah Manson "All I Want for Christmas is the Beautiful People:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1X3d2zWx94
Curious to hear what 1Password is doing wrong?
This year was fantastic. Finally got a social life and a job in the aerospace industry. Merry Christmas!
This is actually a nice demonstration of the effects of AI bias.
Errr, Alonzo Church solved it first, Turing followed .. and both of their independent methods were heavily based upon similar earlier work by Kurt Gödel, with Church also incorporating ideas from Stephen Kleene.

There is no doubt that Turing was bright, very bright indeed, but next you'll be claiming he cracked the Enigma Code or something.
> the people who work at boeing are obviously not idiots

well... knowing what we know of MCAS, and their whole approach to user interaction ... that bar is very shaky.

anyway, the answer seems to be that the button has a clear feedback in the form of physical thrust set-point indicators. basically the pilot (if I remember the post correctly, the first officer) should have noticed that despite pressing the button the set-point indicators did not move.
Signals designed for slower trains were unsafe with faster trains and bad maintenance unless the separation between trains was massively increased and speed limits were aggressively enforced.

Bureaucracy was slow to recognize this causing accidents. Then in an overreaction to accidents they added slowdowns and increased separation, without doing a whole overhaul of the system. Then maintenance issues on speedometers and speed signals forced trains well below speed limits to prevent accidental triggering of speed signals. Also trigger spreed signals that were known to be defective was blamed harshly on operators.
Where does one get this hub app? What about browsers? Most social media apps could very easily be used via mobile web browsers. If I had a company, I would not block Ticktok but would judge those who put that shit on a company device.
Merry Christmas, HN! I’m grateful for this amazing forum and its brilliant contributors.
How much of that increase in safety is attributable to automation specifically rather than other causes? It seems perfectly plausible that automation could be causing problems even while overall safety is increasing.
I kind of can’t tell if this is a spoof? The first point is literally “decentralise ALL the things!”. Ok great.

Next… decentralised Postgres, what does that even mean? Like if we have a decentralised system that is a database, where do I write data? How do I know where to read data? Do you have redundancy? If so what’s the cost? Are you literally just hosting multiple Postgres’s with duplicate data behind some load balancer? Do you need multiple load balancers? What’s your consistency model?

It’s just very unclear to me what this person is asking for?

Just stick with mongodb, it’s webscale…
In the UK too, Christmas Day (25th & St Stephen's Day/Boxing Day (26th) are the bank holidays.

I think the name 'boxing' even comes from tipping servants & tradesmen - giving them 'boxes' of whatever. But that might be a myth...
Both capital owners and workers are paid according to the prices set by the free market for their input. Most of the generated wealth however is captured by the society (ie we each derive more value from the stuff we buy than the cost we pay for it) and by the government - taxes on work, consumption and profit are usually much larger than other costs in a company operation.

Capital tends to concentrate, indeed - but that is also a good thing as it allows bigger enterprises. However the cost to build a new business has been steadily decreasing over the year together with the cost of capital while its availability has been increasing. Today's most productive people can easily open their own practices and set their price on their own contracts. The "rent" they pay is hugely outweighs by their future profits.

If you want to rail agains something, rail against the fact that financial education and investing is not more widespread so people do not understand that they can participate and invest in capital markets from very low amounts of money. Capitalism is powerful and empowering but requires work and education.
Similarly, we have amazingly powerful and reliable computer hardware, but continue to have software that is extremely slow and buggy and hard to use.

I theorize that since software is so invisible/intangible, these complexities are not understood by many.
I am however convinced by the "less cars, not self driving cars" argument.

Urban redesign, reclaiming back some of the on average 1/3 of city surface area dedicated to cars / roads, more reliable public surface transport (I mean are we seriously asking "can we increase the likelihood of a subway crash in order to increase capacity" instead of asking "why don't we have hundreds or thousands more buses on the roads"?

There is a whole polemic Inshoukd be writing about how societies use stickingmplaster solutions over actual solutions - from Iran 1956 to 6th gen aircraft, meat eating, brexit,

it's a long polemic
> We pushed hard for a true digital format like html with a printable format, but the powers that be want a 1:1 replica for Search Warrants and Judges Orders.

Is there a reason you can't have both? Presumably you have structured data at some point, before it's laid out on the page and saved as PDF. Why not just save that alongside the PDFs? You could also serialize it and include it in a PDF metadata field, so it can be extracted from the files even if the database is lost.
I suspect people use secure notes to store crypto keys.
Or the $8 one.
Some wonderful music from Bach, his Weihnachtsoratorium (2.5 hours):
https://open.spotify.com/album/48eINR6FEINQEvDTrbig9X
I'm trying to parse this, but the best I can do is "controlling poor people requires violence."
Every time I have to deal with meson based projects, it needs incredible amount of hacks to build a project if you want to build it in slightly customized way or for bit more different platform. Meson is too smart and often tells you "no you can't do that", which can't be overridden without patching the meson's python code itself.

I also find it bit sad, we need python to build something in the first place.
Of those 15 locations 9 of them are in Canada.

> Alas there doesn't seem to be any in Asia

Abu Dhabi — a place with pre-clearance which I've been talking about — is in Asia :)

However, if you intend to travel to Eastern part of Asia (Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan etc) going via Abu Dhabi is inefficient; from LAX it's 15 hours to AUH, and then 10 hours to NRT. Direct LAX to NRT is just around 12 hours.
What is the Wikipedia Foundation? Is it some kind of scam impersonating the Wikimedia Foundation?
I'm afraid to say 'push [or usually bring] it forwards in time' also typically means 'earlier', not later!

We say 'push it back' to mean make something later. I suppose it all makes some sort of sense if you picture the future as a queue of things facing you - you can bring elements forward (nearer) or push them back (further).
You are forgiven for ruining the year of every football fan in .au ;)
You highlight what the law say, and it is for sure interesting for me, as I'm not American and so ot familiar with US laws. But what I'm saying is that all laws are written for a reason. E.g. there are laws that say you can't kill another person because the vast majority of people agree that this is a thing that shouldn't be done. So what I'm saying here is that in this discussion we should also consider which was the reason behind the law, not just the technicalities of how the law is written.
Fear and rational avoidance are not the same thing. I drive thousands of miles without straying over the white lines because I know it is sensible, not because I am so fearful of them that I require constant medication. You don't need to live in fear to take right action. This is something you might learn in counselling for your fear.
There’s no convenient or not definition. But we have to agree on one before we start discussing if we can fix it. If we define poverty as defining bellow median, we won’t ever get rid of it.

Mental health as in mental health issues making people make decisions where they end up on the streets. Many homeless people were living normal lives when their mental health deteriorated.
The second one is good. Any chance it saw it anywhere in the internet?
Same thing for me with sudden spam emails. But the receive address did not have the customization for me to track it, instead my first name. Not sure if lastpass related but maybe.

BTW one client of mine runs a heavy security operation and they use KeePass.
OP here.

This isn't quite my space, but from what I recall there's a couple wrinkles with transparent proxying. It's overall a good idea, but has some edge cases:

- Authentication can go sideways in weird ways. A 407 from what looks like the correct site can cause odd things. IIRC there isn't great support from vendors for authenticating transparent proxies, too. Sure, you could auth off the machine instead (X device is on the network, therefore it's allowed), but what about shared machines... Proxy auth as user is better, because it allows requests to be tracked to a user ID and login session, not just a device.

- Client getting load balanced between proxies during a session can trigger reauth (because auth sessions not shared between proxies), this can confuse a client.

- HTTPS sites can get weird.

- Routing in very large private environments can complicate default routing to the public internet. Although this can be handled by doing transparent auth + optional manual config.
I really like this approach - in some respects I think managers should be serving their subordinates. I've just recently become a manager of a data team, having previously been a data person myself. I find myself with very little time to do anything technical, and envy my team members when I see them doing technical work.

Do you have any advice for a technical person newly turned manager? Anything you wish someone had told you when you started as a manager / leader?
Malware can easily just pick up and use the system proxy settings. Hell, on Windows it just has to use WinHTTP and it'll use the system's paths to the internet.
> The whole concept of "discovering" which compiler you have, what your linker is, and then using a DSL to generate a script that triggers shell commands is more than a little bonkers if you stand back and look at it objectively.

This concept is still the only way to go if you port your application on a different platform and OSes. In the past, we had way more unix variations with varying compile vendors and funky CPU architectures. Even today, good luck with making your app compile seemingly across BSDs, various Linux distros (modern and old ones), and Windows.

I'll assume JBlow is doing all his development on and for Windows, so IMHO, using anything over simple "make" will be overkill - you already know the platform, you cook the binaries and you already know where your application will be run. What saddens me is the "modern" attitude in development: "if you don't have meson X or cmake Y, fu* off, you don't have to compile my program" vs. was done in the past: "I'll be happy you compile my program on your platform and configure script will make sure to adapt it. But drop me config.log if something happens. You don't need anything except a shell."
That looks awesome. I recently built a free chrome extension that uses ChatGPT to write emails. Do you think that could be a good candidate for the Email writing section?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34115573
I don't think ai companies have any benefit making you run ai on your device rather than as a service.

The future of ai, for many reasons, belong to the cloud.
Happy holidays for the non-religious / atheists of you out there!
Sure, I can write a script to do that.

The script can examine the dependencies, see if any of them changed and then rebuild only if needed.

It's like Greenspun's tenth law[1]:

> Any sufficiently complicated build script contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of make.

But then, what do I need Meson for?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
Humility is underrated.
There was enough concern for privacy that browsers were set up to warn for each and every cookie by default, and prompt the user before running any JavaScript on the page.
Works for me. I love Bach!
Show HN: Semantic Search in Podcasts Transcriptions
I built a podcast search engine that performs a semantic search within thousands of podcasts transcriptions.

Technologies used are: OpenAI Whisper for transcriptions, BERT embeddings and FAISS as a vector database
It should be possible to install meson via pip --user. Even though I prefer system-wide installations, I believe this weakens your argument for user defined functions in your situation.
> I'm hesitant to take on technical work lest I block someone else.

Not the person that you replied to, but I would suggest doing code reviews as a non-approver, taking non-critical path tasks (documentation can always be improved) and writing examples/tests if appropriate for your system.
I am a self taught JavaScript developer who has been writing JavaScript full time for corporate employment since 2008. I do not have a CS degree.

In my experience this decision comes down to two factors: competence versus conformance. If you want to hire somebody good you will look for someone self taught who does this for a hobby on various side projects. Being good at this meant a solid understanding of how web technologies work with a solid foundation in both theory and practice and none of that was taught by universities. Specific examples include: lexical scope, tree model navigation, accessibility, functional programming, asynchronous programming, and so forth. Early on I learned a lot about these concepts reading unrelated books about XML. I didn’t any of these skills coming out of my university educated Java developer peers, which for those guys life was limited to OOP and SQL only.

If the goal is to put a body in a seat as rapidly as possible then you will look for somebody with a CS degree and remove competency as a factor as much as possible, which typically means double and triple down on large frameworks and third party tools. The goal is to ship features, not solve problems. I don’t want to be a nothing script kiddy, so as a JavaScript developer I am less employable.
Tell HN: Thank you all, from a former noob
hi everyone,

i studied philosophy, literature, and law in school and never really got a handle on computers, despite my interest

but a little over a year ago i heard about hackernews

i think it was the calm design of the site that made me become a regular; within no time, i had strong opinions on systemd & sysvinit, on functional & object-oriented programming, on emacs & vim (actually i still don't yet have a handle on emacs but i'm working on it...)

the first thing ya'll inspired me to do was to set up a matrix instance on a vps to replace whatsapp for my circle of friends. it was hard, for me, at first, to set up, but i quickly got addicted to the feeling of ownership that came with being the admin. that alone i would say is worth a huge thank you, but you've inspired me to do even more:

- switched to MX Linux as my daily driver

- started learning emacs and trying to do as much as possible within emacs

- built a server from spare parts and configured debian from scratch

- replaced netflix with jellyfin

- hosted my urbit and made it accessible via any web browser

- set up a minio backend for my urbit

- replaced spotify with navidrome

- hosted a pigallery2 (for my friend who is a photographer)

- created for myself a pseudo-unified computing environment using syncthing

- everything proxied with caddy

just today i set up miniflux and https://github.com/vasanthv/talk

i look forward to hearing about new projects that i can deploy to improve my friends' lives; i hear about them here

but it's not even just what you've encouraged me to do: once i had my server working i became consumed by the idea that i could do it all myself, so i started to try to self-host email. you all helped encourage me to give up that nightmare and just pay a real company to do it for me

this points at maybe what i'm most thankful for: i have a much deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the technology stack i interact with at any given time. even if i'm not "in control", at least knowing how i'm not in control gives a sense of security

more than that, i'm able to impress my nephew, a supposed computer genius, by simply regurgitating the latest talking points from HN. maybe this is the most valuable benefit i've derived so far....

one of the other things i've done is to self-host a ghost installation for the benefit of my friends, john and borka. they basically live like monks for the benefit of the preservation of the amazon rainforest. with HN's help, i have been able to set them up with a website:

https://RioMomon.rhizoma.zone

sometimes at this time of year people look for something to which to donate. the nice thing about rio momon is that all of the money goes directly towards the mission (web hosting & web dev costs, for example, are borne by me -- and i am able to do it easily, because HN taught me)

thank you!
We have an employee whose surname is Null (2010)
It looks great, really! My first thought is that it would make a very handy solargraph diagnostic reporter, so I think I'll whip that up in the next few days.
> I'm really curious as to why Apple has been unable to reproduce their leap in CPUs in the GPU space.

GPUs are highly parallelized and specialized systems. The workloads are already being optimized for the GPU, rather than having a CPU which is being optimized to deal with more arbitrary workloads (with things like branch prediction, superscalar architecture, etc).

So you could say, without creating new instructions to represent the workflow better, there is a fixed amount of digital logic needed to perform the given work, and that translates to a fixed amount of power draw needed on a particular fabrication process.

So Apple could throw more transistors at the problem (with a memory bus that can support the extra need), but the same amount of work still would take the same amount of power and generate the same amount of heat. It is usually far easier and more efficient to create dedicated logic for particular common problems, such as certain ML operations or toward hardware video encoding/decoding.

> It's not exactly surprising when Nvidia parts handily beat the M1/M2, but when both Qualcomm and Mediatek have better GPU performance _and_ efficiency [0]

Benchmarks are highly subjective, so I'd wait for more reviews (preferably by people with more established reputations, and perhaps a website). Reviewers who might try to determine _why_ one platform is doing better than another.

GPU benchmarks are even more so, because again the workloads are targeted toward the GPU, while the GPU is also optimized for handling particular workloads. This means that benchmarks can be apple-to-oranges comparisons - even before you find out that a given benchmark was optimized differently for different platforms.

There is also of course the reality that some vendors will optimize their code for the benchmarks specifically, going as far as to overclock the chip or to skip requested instructions when a particular benchmark is detected.
If you think there's no value to present money flows, I'd love to take $1MM from you. I'll pay it back later, so there's literally no cost to you, right?

Opportunity costs, or any other "virtual" cost, are still meaningful figures.