skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A clear description of what the product actually does with no metaphors, humor attempts, introducing animal bunnies or "Laser Optical Vertex" and "Segregated Cloud Optimizer", or unnecessary synergizing-360-transformation bullshit. I try not to be dumb in my life, but sometimes I'll read a landing page on something in my domain and I, for the life of me, can't figure out what it does. Just call things by what they do.

Clear copywriting and messaging that will resonate with people having the problem. I've had so many conversations with prospective customers and users and it is helpful to get the messaging clear, because when you start talking and describing problems they just had to deal with that morning and their eyes open wide open and burst out laughing and cover their heads or they tell you "Oh my! Yeah, it's horrible!", you know you're onto something. You then shave off anything that's superfluous to get to that reaction faster.

Shaving off syllabes, as comedians like to say or "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." to quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

I can ignore most things if I understand what the product does. If it's something useful and valuable, I don't care if the site is designed with basic HTML/CSS. I don't care. I can make the effort to try and sign-in, get on the list, track down people behind it and emailing them to figure things out, I'll do what it takes.
I for one thoroughly appreciate how fresh it is for a software project to adopt the Rule of St. Benedict as their code of ethics.
I've written plenty systems that would be fine with a valid, consistent but maybe slightly older state (for example when the db describes both work to be done and work results, or the db otherwise implicitly records where to resume work). On the other hand there are obvious examples where this is unacceptable, say recording the transactions of a cash register.
Where do you see they only ported four screens? In the dashboard screenshot it clearly shows "RN Screen Count: 139/572", so they've ported 139 screens, right? The "four" figure you're referring to is the root navigation screens of the app which get a lot more traffic, hence why they prioritized those to uncover issues.
That's not what GP was critizising tough.
I tend to agree for the current product that Apple is releasing. IMO this technology starts to get interesting for books once folks can generate audiobooks for titles that do not have an audiobook (and likely never will due to publisher disinterest). When I first got into audiobooks I wanted to go back and listen to one of my favorite books and it wasn't available :/. I also see certain audiobooks described as "unlistenable" because of something the reader does.
Herman Cain's Twitter account was still tweeting COVID denialism after he died of COVID.
I read the original post as questioning an assumption (the article assumes ev cars) and proposing a different assumption (ev bikes). The parent you replied to questioned the new assumption (most people won't feel that they can get by with ev bikes).

His experience in the UK seems like it would be relevant to most people in the US, and I assume Canada and Australia also. You can't sell this to people on just your terms, you have speak to them on their terms, too.

I agree with what you said that the problem needs to be attacked on multiple fronts (public transport, mining, zoning, doubling grid capacity, current subsidies and special interest groups, etc).

I assume we'll get there, but it's going to take a while, likely more than a couple decades to start making a good dent in countries with a lot of car-dependency.
> But don’t forget what their job is, and it’s not to protect your interests, so make sure you have someone at the table who is.

Like a union.
>They're the kind of people who are your friends until suddenly they aren't

Happened to me once, I got on the wrong side of some politics and had the awkward termination meeting.

I was civil and cheerful throughout except where I had to be firm and fight my corner: “Pleasure to meet you! Sorry it was under these circumstances, I wish you the best time here!” and I could feel the barely concealed rage emanating from them.

Being in a single party recording jurisdiction was the card up my sleeve, and when I let that slip (after the termination) they looked ready to blow a gasket.

I learned valuable lessons that day about HR, mental health, and how webs can get spun that tangle up idealistic engineers… needless to say, I keep my head down and try to stay out of / avoid starting fights that I don’t stand a chance of winning.
I think we're all pretty familiar with the arguments against non-competes. Does anybody have a compelling argument for them, as practiced in 2023 in the US?

While we're at it, does anybody have a compelling justification for allowing non-poach agreements, too?

From my perspective, they both seem like a non-durable benefit to $current_employer at the expense of a compounding opportunity cost to the greater economy (insofar as it hinders an efficient execution of the labor-employer matching process).

Curious if anybody has an interesting argument for why this is OK. The only thing that comes to mind is "trade secrets" arguments, but don't we have separate laws for that?
No, cars plus planes are much more convenient for travel than bikes and trains.

That is definitely not to say that there is no place for bikes and trains. US certainly needs more of both.

But please stop pretending that a family of 4 can go anywhere on bikes in the weather. Or even going to the beach with all gear in perfect weather. Just not going to happen.
Asus brings glasses free 3D to OLED laptops
Now that's what I'm talking about. Very cool, thank you.
Non-competes do not protect an organization against IP theft or trade sceret dissemination. Those are protected by NDAs, confidentiality agreements, copyrights, patents, etc.

If you see someone making a claim that it's to protect company secrets, that is misinformation used to justify NCs. Please inform them otherwise.

Non-competes limit where your staff can go to. Without proper compensation for the time period in which they apply for, they're a very one sided (and in some cases illegal [NCs are legal in IL unless they assert an economic hardship]) way to prevent employees leaving. The claims for them is "training cost is expensive and it's to limit staff from training at one company and leaving" (which as we know.. companies generally don't do training in house)
https://archive.ph/ZaFdA
Oil ain't a picnic either, so what's the answer?
What is Substack?
Manias, panics and crashes - nothing new under the sun.

But actually no, in the age of 24/7 viral digital titilation, manias have been upgraded to hysterias.

Once the dust of this cycle settles the tangible "tech" advances booked will actually quite meager and people will not believe how many got so excited about so little.

Entire theses and books will be written about how general STEM illiteracy and FOMO coupled with unprecedented liquidity create fertile soil for all sorts of bizarre collective phenomena.
In the original paper they claim to have factored a 48-bit number with an implementation of their algorithm. Did they use some kind of trick?
It's a common technique to invent personalities to describe things you don't want to put in plain writing. Literal reading of the Bible, and similar books, won't reveal much.
In 2020, Southwest took over 7 billion from the government in payroll support money and was prohibited from paying dividends, buying back shares or raising executive compensation for more than two years. [0]

In 2022, Southwest announces 5.6 billion in stock buy backs [1] and in early December reinstates dividends [2].

This means that Southwest has been sitting on 6 billion for 2 years just waiting for the clock to strike midnight and expire the moratorium on buybacks, dividends and executive compensation

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/now/southwest-airlines-received-over-7...

[1] https://www.southwestairlinesinvestorrelations.com/~/media/F...

[2] https://www.southwestairlinesinvestorrelations.com/news-and-...
I am.

And I do recognize that it's just that - a lottery. We could fail and I end up unemployed with nothing. Or a funding round could dilute my stock options to worthlessness.
same here. We had an 8088 with AdLib, which only had FM synthesis. We stepped up to a Pentium 75Mhz with SoundBlaster AWE32 and 16-bit 44.1kHz audio. And CD-ROM drive! Those were amazing times. Shortly after that the internet hit mainstream and MP3s became a thing, and the world changed forever.
Show HN: I used udp2raw for WireGuard, since my cloud provider blocked UDP
You should check out JetBrains MPS. It's very similar to what you're asking for. They have what they call a projectional editor, which edits the structure of the program directly and you can thus cast code into different views like tables.

https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/
You don't need a one-off application for every streaming service, those are there in case you want to use them without phone at all. Bluetooth audio is a thing, and you can stream whatever audio you want from your phone to your car audio using that.
"The transaction knows where it is because it knows where it isn't..."
I'm not defending peer review; I never enjoyed it when I published. It certainly never made my papers any better.

Newton and others all published and then discussed the details in person, a lot of the peer review was "off-paper" and "post-publication".

Also, the vast majority of scientific breakthroughs, by count, occurred after peer review- mainly due to the unbelievable pace of breakthroughs due to technological advancement.
Pet projects by any department that aren't in the interests of the company should be discouraged.

Especially by HR, because unlike an engineering pet project that may waste some time, pet projects by HR can significantly impact the quality of life of every employee at the company, cause people not to join the company or quit the company, and so on.

Dysfunctional HR (which is almost all HR) is just about as bad as having a thieving dishonest CFO or a clueless visionless CEO, in terms of its impact on company prospects.

In comparison, a designer who does their work ever so slightly better than is actually going to have business value, or an engineer who puts 10% of their time into some project that they incorrectly think will help the company, or who chooses the 2nd best tool instead of the 1st best tool because the 2nd best one will look better on their resume, these are all much less significant to the company or to their coworkers.
>Jerod Santo: ...if I want this to be a varchar 40 and you let me put anything in there, then why did I declare it to be a varchar 40 in the first place? You know what I’m saying?

>Richard Hipp: Yeah, exactly. If you say it’s a varchar 40 and you an integer there, it will change it into text. Or if you have a comment that’s declared integer and you try to put text in it, it looks like an integer and it can be converted without loss. It will convert and store it as an integer. But if you try and put a blob into a short int or something, there’s no way to convert that, so it just stores the original and it gives flexibility there.

Am I the only one annoyed by this? Having a var datatype that acts this way is useful, but not being able to trust other datatypes to enforce type constraints is not ideal. Or if you don't actually have a varchar 40 type, and you just have something that's text-like without other more specific constraints, then call it 'text'.

Or allow strongly typed types along with var-type types. Or have a config to choose how types behave. Like, mssql differs from ANSI for NULL handling, but you can specify USE ANSI NULLS.
Because employees are not at the same level as managers/HR. The latter have power over the formers. You like it or not, when horrible people happens to have power, well that's the worst combination possible.

Employees cannot fire managers nor HR (it's in theory possible, but in practices it almost never happens). HR and managers can fire employees (this happens every week).

Employees do not know how much money managers or HR make. Managers and HR know how much money employees make.

Employees have to ask managers and HR for sick leave/vacation. Managers and HR do not have to ask employees for sick leave/vacation.

And a long etc.
I tried it for my (incomplete) compiler project[0], and the results are quite funny:

> This program prints a large string of text to the console. It does this by using a String variable called myLongString, which is initialized with a long string of text. The program begins with the line "program LargeString {" and ends with the line "}". Inside the program, there is a comment that reads "Now let's try a comment". This comment is not necessary for the program to work, but it helps to explain what the program does. The program then uses the write() function, which is a function that prints a given string to the console, to print the large string of text.

It seems as though its looking at the sample code files used for testing rather than the actual compiler codebase.

[0] - https://github.com/JLCarveth/zpl-compiler
Show HN: Live startup leaderboards (a la Hot or Not)
We built this using investor tools. I really wanted to know which startups to work for. Are we on the right track?

PS - there's a paywall but if you want to explore more, just DM me your email and I'll give you free access in our db!
There is a very fixed pie for uranium and lithium and neodymium and ecological damage.

Your hummer could be a thousand ebikes. Your 0.6kg of silver in 50kW of solar and 1t of concrete and 200g of neodymium in 20kW of wind could be refrigeration and basic services for 30 people.

Your 200kg of uranium could be two less children in kakadu or niger with leukemia and 10 acres less usable grazing land.
If businesses think their employees are so valuable that blocking them from working for a competitor is necessary... then how about just giving them incentives to stay? I don't know, maybe a huge bonus, or above-average salary adjustments against the competitor, etc? Or fix the toxic work environment so that they'll actually want to stay?

Otherwise too bad, the business created unfavorable conditions for their employees, so workers should have every right to leave and work for anyone else, including competitors. Either employees are that valuable or they're not, can't have your cake and eat it too, Mr. Big Boss.
HR is human beings like everyone else in the company. Having friends in HR is definitely a benefit. Same as having friends anywhere else in the org. Ultimately they will tend to protect themselves as will everyone else. When the bottom line dictates something bad has to happen, they likely don't have the juice to stop it. Same goes for everyone outside HR.
It's not cynicism. It's realism. The post acknowledges HR can be helpful.
No it does not. Ruby has first-class procs. They are not the same thing. It's a fundamental flaw of the language. It's in the Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_function

"The identifier of a regular "function" in Ruby (which is really a method) cannot be used as a value or passed. It must first be retrieved into a Method or Proc object to be used as first-class data. The syntax for calling such a function object differs from calling regular methods."

Why do people like you insist on talking about things you don't actually know about?
HR going rogue with political nonsense (I can only imagine some libertarian HR telling everyone 'deal with it yourselves!' lol) is not the fault of that HR, it's the fault of incompetent executives. The issue is never one individual, it's a broken system letting a single individual negatively influence it.
The FTC has a congressional mandate (otherwise it wouldn’t exist), the only argument is whether this falls within the mandate they’ve been given.

The FTC claims non competes undermine competition, which is within their mandate, and honestly not that tough of an argument to make.
The cynicism does seem like a race to the bottom.

It’s to the point that discussions are derailed by it with folks who feign knowledge about a topic just offer cynicism. Anything that’s doesn’t work right the empty response is a conspiracy of “oh that’s by design” as if people would otherwise always have things working…

It’s endless online.
What made it scary? The recruiting and onboarding teams in HR have been some of the most helpful folks I've worked with a manager.
>>What I have seen as a senior tech executive and old person is that young people entering the workforce after around 2015-6 often rely on HR to be a neutral arbiter in workplace conflicts, analogous to parental chaperones or university administrators.

Yep - seen it many times when employees (usually younger) say things like "I'm telling HR" or "I'm reporting you to HR", as if it's the same as "I'm telling Mom", and expecting HR to swoop in and rule in their favor on some workplace dispute - thats not there job, never was, never will be.

While you (the complaining employee) are doing that, the back-channel communication to the manager is telling them how they should probably document 'whatever' in writing so that when you eventually get terminated they have a contemporaneous record of all your bad behavior to use against you.

HR is not your friend, they are not supposed to be.
HR is your business partner. You can be friends, as long as you are able to keep business separate from friendship. And stopping yourself, when the friendship exposes too much that influences the business.

I think business follows some very clear rules, compared to friendship. It’s always about money. The decision is always in the direction that is the cheapest and brings the most profit. Friendship can help there, if some options are equally priced, then the friend may be chosen, because of the friendship.

I think employees have a very powerful position, once they realize that. Replacing someone can cost up to 6 monthly salaries (fees for headhunters, trainings, …). If you find out where the tipping point is, you can negotiate better. It’s also important to highlight your employers benefits if you want something.

In corporations then currency is quite often not just money, but influence and power. A lot of managers decide based on what will give them more power. If you play along, they may give you much more money/benefits.
I think you can afford a lawyer as a staff engineer, especially for an issue that directly affects your compensation.
> For example, if you're being harassed, it's very often in the company's interest to stop that happening.

Unless of course, the harraser is a top performer, or VIP in their market. Remeber all that fun with Susan Fowler, an engineer at Uber that went public with her harrasment?

Or the ever infamous https://archive.ph/dUJNs

In those cases, like you said, HR protected the interests of the Company, which was in preserving these high performers. And the people who should have been protected, were screwed over.
Interesting idea but backend is returning 500. Presumably killed by HN.
AHK is great from what I've seen. It's AutoIt that's the problem. AHK was originally a fork of the FOSS version of AutoIt, before AutoIt went closed and proprietary.

A lot of the toxicity on the AutoIt forum seems to come from the grossly overinflated egos of few core participants (some of which appear to be employees in some capacity). Reading through the forum, you can easily get the impression these people believe AutoIt is better than sliced bread or something... and anyone needing to ask a question is simply dumb.

It's rotten to the core. People should use AHK whenever possible.
Show HN: ML Q&A – Get answers to questions about ML frameworks
Both of them are listed.

PetaSales is my first one (dead, I had a lot to learn).

NudgePad is the second one (acquired by Microsoft in 2014).
Interest rates are actually the predominant driver of demand for a currency!
A few years ago I read an article in a business magazine, Forbes or Inc., that surveyed CEOs and found over half of them fear their company's HR department. It seems HR has evolved to be independent of many company's management structure and answerable only to itself.
Ask HN: How to Write More Efficiently
Happy new year HN!

I write a blog[1]. I have many ideas for posts. I enjoy the process of writing, no matter how much time it takes.

But the moment I stop writing, and start editing, I feel like the entire process takes forever. English is not my native language, and so I have to re-read the entire post multiple times, sometimes on two consecutive days, to let my eyes, and brain rest. And even though I'm able to catch some errors, and I use an online grammar checker-I still miss many silly mistakes like "is"/"in", "then"/"than", etc.

And this process of editing, re-reading, editing again, etc-drives me crazy. I know that I can pay an editor/proofreader to do that work for me, but I don't write professionally, and not yet ready to commit for a human editor.

I was wondering, maybe the writers among you have some tips on have I can write and edit more efficiently?

Thanks!

[1] https://www.yieldcode.blog/
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> If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking). You may grant further rights if you adopt a license. If you are uploading Content you did not create or own, you are responsible for ensuring that the Content you upload is licensed under terms that grant these permissions to other GitHub Users.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
There was definitely a lot more junk (mislabeled or fake content, viruses, keyloggers, ...) shared on those networks. Even the Kazaa client itself was riddled with dubious adware.
Also legit content was of much poorer quality overall.

Today even public trackers are pretty clean. Cryptominers are trivially caught by Windows Defender. Effective ransomware campaigns are targeted at entities that can pay millions, not random individuals.
The lawsuits were because Amazon just did it, without any author/publisher buy in. They just said "you can convert this ebook using our TTS with the kindle" and the publishers did *not* like that. IMO that is how this should work, any text anywhere should be convertible to auido.