skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What's a build vs. buy decision that you got wrong?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34163624#34163970 2 days ago

Fairly similar to your "build vs. free" question, including auth
Because German society is very different from American society due to historical factors. The modern German state and people must grapple with their country's role in WW2 and the Holocaust. They have chosen to limit free speech for the sake of preventing future catastrophes, and that seems quite sensible to me. America's history isn't pristine by a long shot, but we don't have a legacy comparable to the Germans to grapple with. Without a clear and compelling reason for limiting speech, myself and most Americans favor free speech. Attempting to restrict speech without a clear and compelling reason (and I believe that such reasons do not currently exist in America) would be tyranny.
One of the best things I've done is locked my phone in my office and only model reading around them. Funny enough, they pick up their books and try to read (mostly looking at pictures cause they're young).

Modeling good habits is really important.
He isn't exactly a luminary when it comes to making well thought out decisions or appropriately evaluating risk. I don't think the fact that this seems like a dumb
decision is a strong argument that he didn't do it.
It does not say that they consulted their lawyer "before and after". They say:

"...yes, we do have a lawyer and we are currently following the advice of our lawyer in everything we are doing. We can challenge the contract but legal fees could run over $30,000 and take years."

Which kind of sounds like they might have hired a lawyer after the fact in an attempt to 'fix' the situation.
There are definitely industries that have mostly moved abroad, especially in manufacturing, but I doubt you would find any foreign-made cough syrup at your corner drugstore.
Well, I'm talking more about the fundamentals, like implementing an OS or database from the ground up, which most people don't necessarily learn, rather than using the latest library.
I really struggle with this because I'm a C++/Java dev who is 4/10 with Python. I dont understand why anyone would choose a single threaded language but its just everywhere I can't avoid it.
> C has enough actual fans that I bet it never really goes away, but it won’t be useable in professional contexts after a while other than for maintenance, because people outside tech will start to call bullshit on the EULA liability shield.

That's an extraordinary claim indeed; if people outside tech were going to call bullshit on EULAs as a liability shield, they would've done so in the last 50 years of software sales.

Reliability or the lack thereof has never been an impediment to some piece of software getting popular, but to me, you appear to believe that people want more reliability from software than they have been getting thus far.

Your belief is at odds with reality.
The comment the GP comment was responding to was about genocide. I'm certain you didn't know that already, or you wouldn't have posted the parent comment.
Typically, hate speech wasn't afforded the same reach 60 years ago that it may have now. You have to remember that all these idealistic views happened in the context of a very harsh monopoly on mass media and a much tighter control of which opinions would be platformed on there (can you imagine a communist being allowed to speak during the cold war, other suppression of speech in that area aside?)
I had one but I much prefer the Economist, also because for some reason I can read it for free without subscribing from my home network.
The more I reread this the less it makes sense.

> each time she expresses an interest I add a python tuple

Did you get into computers by intentionally expressing an interest and then having tidbits fed to you by someone? Or did you discover it organically through full access to libraries and the internet and video games and magazines? When she expresses an interest in something you aren't familiar with, will you let her explore it herself or will everything be filtered through you?

> By 9 I expect her to have mastered a computer by typing, including sending emails to mom and dad etc.

You think she'll be better at typing than kids that are constantly texting and Googling Roblox mods and arguing in YouTube comments?

> retarded monkeys

This has been addressed enough in other comments. But just to give you an example, I was raised without cable TV because my parents didn't have it. But they didn't call my friends retarded, and they didn't care if I watched some with friends or relatives. As a result, I still didn't watch much TV, but I didn't feel guilty when I did and I didn't feel like I had to hide anything from my parents.

I turned out great, and my friends who had a TV in their own bedroom with 1000 channels also turned out great. Access or lack of access to TV has had no discernible impact on anyone I know.
By my reading of the story, upfront payment wouldn't have changed the number of payments.

And forget about daily. It's very reasonable to want monthly pay, and should not be a burden at all. And monthly pay would need at most a month of float, on average probably less. That's not where the real payment issues are.
There will be patterns of inflow into the different ETFs based on paycheck schedules that would get arbitraged away via day trading.
Lup has such detailed and well-thought-out posts.

I used his guides when developing for the PineTime and everything worked perfectly. I would have been completely lost without his information.

Thank you Lup!
> TBH, familiarizing oneself with several subfields of a single field is still not very polymath-y though. Of course, all fields are just much bigger than they were in the 15th or 18th century, so this is more difficult if you want to be actually useful, but IMO being a real polymath still entails being knowledgeable of various disjoint subjects. Like poetry, marine biology, and systems programming.

Agreed, which is why I tried to limit it to CS only. If I were to do it for many subjects, that'd be impossible.
This is the profit model for civil forfeiture, repeatedly supported by courts: the US government is allowed to seize any assets that they want if they claim it has been involved in illegal activities. They don’t charge the person they’re stealing from so the person can’t defend the claims and prevent the seizure - instead they have to prove their innocence to get their own money back. But that’s expensive, and if the stolen money is less than the recovery costs (which the government has stated are not recoverable) there’s no reason to try.
but I doubt that they would target 120 stores...
Sort of the opposite of what you want, but Gary Marcus says we need to cross a few hurdles first:

http://rebooting.ai/
If the answers include hallucinations of basic facts, there is likely something seriously wrong with the Chinese room's thinking somewhere.
It's not very difficult if Apple wants to bother.

Several possible criteria:

A) OSS which Apple uses internally - e.g. I'd be very surprised if there's no usage of curl out there.

(and / or)

B) Very popular projects.

(and / or)

C) Projects where Apple has a strategic interest in being able to run on M1. e.g. certain developer tooling.
It changes my scroll behaviour and I hate that. I instantly close sites that do that.

Edit: I use brave and removed every smoothing from my scrolling.
Show HN: Backup Scheduler
Cheap and dirty solution to backup a specific folder on macOS to S3. I use this to backup my Calibre library.
I hope those cut-proof rounded corners won't require more than 2 gigs of VRAM?
Oh, who am I lying to... I don't care, I'm on KDE :D (and Win7 in dual-boot)
Can you claim to be democratic with a two party system, first past the post, gerrymandering, vote suppression...

The US really isn't the model country for democratic participation.
Something something high quality, ethically-sourced coffee?

(I don’t actually know the details of those descriptions. Playing devils advocate it sounded to me like they were trying to run a very ethical, environmentally friendly, health-focused business from the start, which is expensive as far as I can tell in the US, so maybe those prices made sense.)
I am a little like that. When growing up we had very little allowed TV time (admittedly this was common in the 80s, due to limited selection) and I get distracted by TVs very easily. Compared to friends who grew up with TVs running constantly in the house and who have no problem having a conversation with a TV in the background, I can't help to watch the TV. I therefore hate most modern pubs, which have TVs running everywhere and try to always sit so not to have a TV in my fov (which is often difficult).
It is a bit facetious to say that all analysts are engineers, or that it is "easy" for any analyst to become an engineer.

There is overlap, but they are not identical skillsets.

Analysts are certainly developers, but engineering involves more of a sense of scalability, analysis can do this, but it is generally more granular.
I have experienced a few rogue taxi drivers in some countries too, and they can take advantage of more vulnerable people. Most countries have laws and rules for being a registered taxi driver. The drivers are obviously not anonymous as they have license plates. They can be reported to authorities and taxi companies more easily with an app. As a rider, I do not see why it is so important to identify myself and tell all these platforms where I am going which is why I still prefer taxis.
> That's a lot of words for a language you don't like and don't want to use.

I agree, I'm glad the author wrote up such thoughtful constructive criticism. They clearly care about software development and want everyone to improve. :)
This was very fun to learn, thanks for posting
AWS bills in seconds in some cases but still invoices monthly.
I call BS on this company:

>> Yet, across our nation, this cornerstone of our free society is under serious threat. Far too many of us fear sharing our views or challenging those that seem to dominate. Nearly 6-in-10 Americans believe our nation’s democracy is threatened because people are afraid to voice their opinions.

They "fear" voicing opinions because of society's backlash, which IMO, is the true regulator of "free" speech. There is no "free" speech except in one's own head. Anything said, can, and will, have impact with others, as is the nature of communication and society. OTOH, it is government that cannot silence the people, by law. Society can silence others through protest... which itself is protected free speech.
The list of crimes he’s been indicted for is public. It does not include computer crimes.
How are they possibly not the victims after the distributor orders a vast quantity of product, goes MIA for months, and then proceeds to go "whoops, just kidding, here's your stale product back"?
Viruses will mutate. And we don’t understand them well enough, so one method to study them is gain of function research - you modify the virus and then you have a lab version you can design against. The risk is you risk releasing a new virus entirely unnecessarily, the benefit is you can study how to combat viruses that don’t yet exist. Imagine the counter example of covid. What if a covid type virus mutates in the wild but we already have a great vaccine sitting on ice ready to go.
I don’t think it is quite normal to start out with orders that make you $60000 profit.
In my country 120 days is pretty common for Metro or Tesco.
Hm, this is not exactly how I went about it. I didn't actually have a problem I needed to solve, I just followed the topics due to an innate curiosity, so I'm not sure that Rooney's definition fits mine.
This would be great, but you still need the oversight and accountability that the apps provide. That needs to be offloaded to either you (you pay and trust your courier) or the restaurant (they charge you for their trusted couriers).

It makes more sense to me for the restaurant to validate their own team of couriers, so what you really need is a company that builds a widget which allows restaurants to cheaply host a grubhub/doordash equivalent on their own. They just need some super low-code no friction solution because restaurants can be pretty tech averse. You would need to really figure out what the killer features of grubhub/doordash are and how to put those in the hands of the restaurant, I imagine the 20+% cut that grubhub takes would make it an easy sell.
The space shuttle killed 14 people because it was a poorly-built, designed-by-committee piece of garbage.
Wait until you learn about shrink rules, used in patternmaking!

Cast metal shrinks when it cools and solidifies. To make patternmaking tolerable, shrink rules are scaled up by the shrinkage allowance so that 5" in the pattern doesn't have to be scaled by the patternmaker to some random measurement. Unfortunately, the shrink allowance varies among metals...

A steel framing square also has some completely cursed scales. I'm not a carpenter, and I won't even pretend to know why anyone needs inches graduated into 10ths or 12ths.
Easier ways to accomplish this:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=10....
i don't understand why you're being downvoted, that's exactly what it is for. android users can use do not disturb as well.
So if they are all unpaid volunteer maintainers, what’s happening with that $2 million? It’s still a lot of money!
You can’t have a perfect language. Go is good enough for what is good at. Plus advanced IDE will help make the experience even better
I am a big Bitcoin guy. But I cringe everytime someone yell 'blockchain' as if that somehow equals to decentralization automatically

BitTorrent is almost as decentralized as it gets. It has no blockchain.

I don't have all the answers. But my guess is the crux in decentralizing ride sharing is reputation portability. Probably need a DID and a way to accumulate attestations, ideally directly from riders, in a fashion that the driver owns it, cannot be censored but also cannot be faked. Once that part is in place the rest is just commodity app type of deal.
It's become a huge selling point for me that I can walk into a store and talk to a human about a problem I am having with a product. Lately, this has meant that the Walmart online store gets more of my business than Amazon for items that aren't available at brick-and-mortar stores in my area. Because Walmart will take back items bought at the store and resolve problems right then and there.

Amazon has started selling items that aren't returnable and I wish I could opt out of it. I got a laptop/phone bracket that was made with some crappy, brittle plastic, but Amazon didn't accept returns on that item. If Walmart sold ebooks, I don't think I'd use Amazon anymore. After dealing with expired food and medicine through Subscribe and Save, Amazon delivery just throwing things on the ground and damaging them, and unreturnable items like the phone accessory, I am done with them for physical items.

Getting through to Amazon customer service is a huge pain in the butt, especially now that the customer service flow is self-help -> text chat -> telephone chatbot -> foreign call center. With Walmart, I just drive a half block away, go to customer service, wait in line for five minutes, and boom, it's done. It's a breath of fresh air honestly.
A thought after reading these many great responses:

We keep hearing how programs like ChatGPT are going to "rule the earth" or whatever, that they are smart. They are not. They are only "stochastic parrots" -- they repeat what they were taught, albeit in an elegant and sometimes accurate fashion.

What's missing?

What's missing is apparent in many of the replies here: embodiment. That which we get for being humans doing thinking. To me, that means something like "in the moment" - you have these flash ideas, sometimes while driving, sometimes in the shower or on long walks (read: wherever it's borderline impossible to record the ideas) or even in that fog just before being fully awake (hint: when you realize you're onto something an not fully awake - you can train yourself for that - do not open your eyes until you have fully rehearsed the idea), the very process of changing thoughts in order to get the new idea recorded changes the moment; the moment of invention is gone, even if some broad sketch of the idea remains. The embodiment of that idea is gone.

Bots will need zillions more transistors to come even close to that capability.

The process of letting your subconscious solve problems has been explained by David Gelertner in his book _The Must In The Machine_ as a process where the conscious mind, and its censors (logic circuits), are somehow inactivated, which allows the subconscious to play. Wires connect and some kind of aha! moment occurs.
Cuba is a poor, small country. They can't buy very significant quantities of jeans or phones.

(11.3M people, per capita GDP $9,500 or so.)
ChatGPT can (sort of) play Tic-Tac-Toe
Cache multiple and choose the one that fits the expected data distribution based on the inputs.
(Not to be insensitive either; sarcasm trigger warning) My theory is that it's been mostly replaced in media by the mass-murder/suicide. It's instant, stateless, does not warrant looking for clues and can be blamed on whatever suits the current agenda. Who has time for a killing spree lasting for weeks nowadays?
Having worked customer support as one of my first jobs, I have a feeling a lot of people use it just to have an emotional punching bag to take out their frustration on others, or as a buffer for unpopular corporate policies which customers don't like.

Corporation adds a policy that's unpopular with customers? No worries, customer support is there to take the anger and complaints
> Can you really claim to be democratic when you have wholesale determined that only approved speech can be uttered? How does democracy work when some can speak and others cannot?

Democracy works best when unhelpful fringes cannot speak. Antisemites for instance contribute nothing of substance to any democracy. Same goes for people insisting on abusing fellow humans based on their sexual orientation or skin colour. How, exactly is democracy hurt by not letting them speak publicly? Their opinions are invalid, not based on any reason (so reasoning with them is pointless), and thus their voice is suppressed, and that's actually a good thing for all those that would otherwise have to suffer harassment and abuse.
Actually I do. Their passion doesn’t entitle them to anything, and their sacrifices pale in comparison to those made by people who do hard labor for a living.

IP laws don’t protect small creators anyway, most of whom will fail regardless. They protect the big conglomerates from multitudes of potential creators who might otherwise find education and success outside of the established institutions.
That’s not what the law says, though. It criminalizes speech that incites hatred or calls for violence.
Maybe both?
There is difference between "not targeted" and "failed to blow up". 80% to 90% percent of missiles that russia shoots are intercepted, at which point you don't know what was their final destination. I guess more high value targets (like highest voltage transformers) have better air defense perimeter.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kardashian-filter/...
What do you mean? I'm not quite sure what you are looking for, but would love to learn more.
Didn't. Or didn't just on pizza box. See https://www.calmdownben.com/p/romanian-cops-did-not-find-and...
Not really. This is attempt to refute that NYT article that was posted 5 times.
Totally agreed. My parents were always weirdly mean about my friends and often, their appearances. All it ever achieved was discouraging me from telling them anything at all about my friends and never bringing them around the house because I didn't trust them to be kind to the people I cared about.
yeah, i see your point. I think I fall into the trap of believing what some random piece of papers says always reflects reality. I worked for a large smallbiz ( independent pharmacy chain ) early in my career and it was like pulling teeth to get insurance companies to reimburse/pay on time and correctly despite what the contract said. We had about a dozen people who's only job was to watch them like a hawk and stay engaged with their AP department and nurture a relationship.
Agree, and the inverse problem is also prevalent, as we all know: someone without experience looks at a system, declares it to be shit while ignoring all the edge cases and design constraints that went into it, and insists they can do better by starting from scratch.
>> How does even harmful speech (e.g. your examples) prevent your freedom of expression?

Fear, threat of property and physical harm.
So “Ok, you have check signing authority? Cool. Send me a $1,000 down payment.” The answer would have been “Er, no I can’t actually do that.”
Disruption is a lower cost than the cost of executing the destructor by the mutator.
GameBoy Graphics Part 2: Tile Maps [video]
I can blow through 50 searches in 3-4 days, easy.
> 2020-2021 covid lockdowns lead to a big surge in buying of computer hardware, and therefore a big drop now given that modern computers last a lot longer and everyone is equipped

In other words, the slowdown?
Yes, my first battery failure had the battery swell up so much that the touch pad didn't work anymore.
The "math" is wrong.

You've described cash flow, not profit.

You still have a profit of $60k. That you choose to reinvest that profit in acquiring additional inventory does not affect the profit calculation on the inventory already sold.
And that 3 year old son went on to become one of the greatest scientists of this generation, Astro Teller, or also known as the director of Google X.
I know it's not for everyone, but I love all the exotic synthetic financial products that can be built on top of crypto.

Why should exotic synthetic financial products only be the realm of Wall Street?
Don't forget a law system that allows judges to basically legislate retrospectively because everything is vague and based on interpretations that can and do change - look at Roe v Wade for instance. Coupled with a deification of their Founding Fathers and Constitution and you have a recipe for a massive legal mess nobody can touch.
I've wondered this also. I could understand the initial reluctance for western powers to supply such weapons. But the complexion of the war, it seems to me, has changed considerably with most Russian long range weapon fire now directed at civilian targets. This Russian tactic must constitute a war crime and so I feel the case for supporting the defence against these weapons is much stronger.
I was lucky to learn this a decade ago when I was an intern; except it came from the electrical engineering side of the department (a department who produced products that were seen as the gold standard for that part of the medical device industry)

Manager (who was a world class electrical engineer): "why did you reuse this?"

Friend (who was also an intern): "I assumed ${staffEngineer} knew what they were doing and it would be fine to just place it in this design"

Manager: "never assume that anyone knows what they're doing here or at any other organization."
TLDR they had a miscommunication about the units. They thought they were getting 6,000 bags of coffee, but it was 6,000 cases with 6 bags each.

In school, every class that involves numbers always stresses the importance of units. This is a good real-life example of how important units are, but easy to stumble on.
Little bit of a nit on the title if the author is reading this. Go is called Go, not Golang.

https://go.dev/doc/faq#go_or_golang