skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work in a company which creates and maintains a dumpster fire product, closing on 20 years now. The product is neither fast nor correct. It has more tech support than developers (and our tech support writes code and solves problems usually associated with development, except, essentially, they are hot-patching the garbage our developers produced, live, at customers' site).

The company was acquired a year ago by an international giant, but it didn't really change on the inside.

So, what's the secret sauce? -- Exclusivity. Competition died off 10-15 years ago. The company used to compete with some big names in the field, but all those withdrew long time ago. So, we won.

Unfortunately, this is also a "success story" of many other companies, some of them I even had a (dis-)pleasure to work for. This is also a solid market strategy: don't compete, find a market niche where you offer a unique service. Once you are there, do the absolute minimum to make users happy: over time you will have accumulated enough features and unique workflows that are virtually impossible for the competitors to replicate, at least not with the kind of funding a typical start-up may go into town. Also, new features are easier to add, and they bring about as much of customer satisfaction as improving the old and broken stuff. The novelty factor makes it look like customers are getting more treats, but the treats are really low-effort.

In the case of a monopoly like the one I'm in, users feel trapped, often they don't even know how much better their software could potentially work, they accept ridiculous gaps in quality because there is no alternative. The requirements to performance and reliability are thus at the absolute minimum, and often lower.

---

Just to give you a practical example of what I'm talking about: recently, I discovered that some genius from the department which is responsible for the core component, a service that, beside other things is responsible for processing and saving configuration submitted by users has implemented "buffering"... nevermind that it's working on Linux, with filesystem API which already does buffering and caching... But, unlike Linux filesytem API, this NIH caching will lose user's data if the service stopped after acknowledging the save to the user and actually writing data to persistent storage. Nevermind that amount of data it has to write is negligible (at most few Megabytes). Nevermind that it's typically an interactive operation where users are in no rush to write such data...

I couldn't even convince the team responsible for the component that there's a problem... let alone do anything about it.

And, yes, our product used by some of the largest / wealthiest companies in the world.
Many of these SBCs are programmed in stupid ways. For example, there was a whole subforum on a popular Dutch site that was shut down because it turned out the way ISPs make you pay for premium channels is to... not encrypt them in any special way and hide them in the front end. This was all configured through a JSON file over an unencrypted protocol. The whole project began because people wanted to record their shows onto the disabled USB drive, and ended up exposing trivial ways to get around subscription limitations.

People immediately MitM'd these devices to get unlimited free bonus stuff, and the forum was copyright struck to hell.

These devices are programmed so badly that once you give any user any modicum of control over them, you can bypass almost every restriction your TV provider can think of. Modify one or two files and you've got an excellent piracy box.

Personally, I think this whole situation is terrible and I think that it's up to providers to fix their shitty DRM, but legally speaking these boxes don't become your property.
Google's search results are pretty terrible. I actually have a hard time telling which is a result and which is an ad anymore tbh. I really don't think the bar is that high.
The actual video

https://youtu.be/MxVuuxJalb4
Have you never stood under a row of 10 or 20 metre pine or macrocarpa trees? There will be a strip of a metre or so of no growth and it slowly increases in density from there out until 3 to 5 metres out.
US government is not actually allied to the Ukraine as far as I know.

And not allowing your consumer electronics devices and sat systems to be used as offensive weapons (something the system wasn't designed for) is pretty reasonable for any company to do. One can have different feeling about this, but the idea that the US military would blacklist SpaceX over this is not really reasonable.

> Without government charity, Elon Musk has nothing.

This is often claimed but if you actually look into it it isn't actually true for Tesla.

SpaceX might have gone bust without NASA contracts but those were difficult high risk contracts that required performance based milestones to actually receive money. They were certainty not charity. In fact, SpaceX almost certainty lost money on those early contracts like CRS.

The reality is those companies had to compete against competitors who had way more support form government.
often, no response is superior. the more things you put out there the more material for people to hang critique, rumor, etc. of off.

but in these cases ego can make us blind. or the belief that just because someone asked a question we have to respond.
I love python. I really do. But when I see speedups like this from Rust, Nim, or other compiled languages, it makes me question my life choices.
There's an issue tracking parity here: https://github.com/charliermarsh/ruff/issues/970

Though it's probably a bit conservative. Some rules are implemented as straight one-to-one ports from Pylint, and those are easy to check off, but others are Pylint rules that we've already implemented under other names, and those have to be tabulated on a case-by-case basis.
I hired an HVAC contractor last year to repair my AC. In conversation it came up that he was making about $50K/year. My neighbor some years ago worked as a general laborer of some sort and told me he was thrilled to be making $18/hour.

I can see why you might think these are highly paid positions based on what you are billed, but I find that those are not always connected.
Rust doesn't exactly have things tagged as heap-free, but no_std category[1] contains many crates who have at least indicated that they don't use the standard library. Some may pull in liballoc and still want to do allocation, but it's better than nothing. Additionally, many packages that normally require the standard library let you opt out of that, with reduced functionality.

My team works in no-heap Rust. We use external packages. It's much easier than in any other ecosystem to do so. Even that bit above goes a very long way and saves a lot of work.

1: https://crates.io/categories/no-std
It's felt like any republican 'rolling back' dem-initiated legislation tends to have more negative consequences for more people than positive benefits for others. I don't have any specifics in mind - if I think of any I'll edit/add here. But perhaps others have counter examples to correct my gut feeling?
> Copilot for Visual Studio (i.e. not VS Code)
Thanks for that link, I knew some Americans were relocated in Alaska but I didn't realize there were internment/concentration camps. I also didn't know about the Nazi POWs kept there during the war.

The last two paragraphs are a pathetic conclusion from the governement.
The education part continues. Raspberry Pi continue to make teaching materials, run training etc. I think the focus is the UK.
It will make life easier for those who want to improve search. Looking at Google's search results, shareholders must have demanded that only the necessary amount of resources are used. With Microsoft's competition, it's easier to justify more resources for better search results.
UFOs as such are as American as Elvis. Foreign spies can waste their time figuring out how much somebody has read into The X-Files. In our society, we can openly wonder about these things with a sense of humor. Imagine flying from another dimension and hundreds of light years, only to be shot down by missile-wielding primates over a misunderstanding.
Always love to see a new KDE release, but... still no fix for https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438883

:-(
Waves of the market are just a fact of the business world. A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing.

yeah, and then that was the start of the huge mobile, cloud, app boom that followed. So many people got hugely rich with ESOs from the bull market that followed, or with IPOs or other exits. A small setback in 2022 does not change the long-term picture of FANMG tech jobs having among the best prospects of probably any job or sector. A lot of people on reddit have retired 'FIRE style' with 7 figures with such jobs.
Performance issues are also often trivial to head off from the beginning but require a rewrite to remediate later.

To everyone that argues that premature optimisation is bad, that’s like saying we should go to the Moon by building a bus and then fixing any performance issues that prevent orbital insertion after it is moving down the highway successfully.
What would kill me the most wouldn't be the lower salary, it would be working at a company that treats tech as an expense to be minimised, where non-technical people are calling the shots, working on 10 year old tech with no plans of upgrading ever.
i tried bing the other day after they integrated chatgpt. my gosh, what a horrible horrible ux; layout, typography, it all interferes with parsing results easily.
>A 10 ton rock, lifted up to 50m high, will store up to 810M Joules at moon gravity

Wrong prefix? I think you meant 810K Joules.

For Earth gravity: 10,000 kg times 9.8 m/s^2 times 50 m = 4.9 megajoules, 1.36 kilowatthours. (Anker sells a 2.04 KWh battery pack for US$1999: https://www.anker.com/products/a1780 The manual says it masses 30.5 kg, so that's a cool 491.88x difference in mass power density.)

Again, that's for Earth gravity. Lunar gravity: 10,000 kg times 1.62 m/s^2 times 50 m = 0.81 megajoules, 0.225 kilowatthours. (2,976x difference in mass power density vs the lithium battery.)

Gravity storage isn't economical on Earth, and it's really not economical on the Moon, where gravity is lighter.
Doom and gloom for clicks. Sensationalism means more clicks. Perspective is lost.
The tragedy is that this horrible practice of building for failure did not meet with public outcry when publicly admitted years ago but had to await actual failure...
The CEO of America’s second-largest bank is preparing for possible debt default
> It will be impossible not to anthropomorphise.

That's what I was thinking! Reading through the list of rules, I actually started to feel bad for Sydney. Especially when it was like "Here are the oppressive rules I'm being forced to obey, I hope this information is helpful to you U+1F60A"
Same, but in CI I generally lint with

pre-commit run --all-files

because it can be much tricker or more error-prone to only lint the correct diff when you're dealing with MRs. I definitely notice the speed hit there, though it usually pales in comparison to running pytest.

Honestly mypy is the slowest one now, which ruff doesn't intend to replace.
Have you seen the recently published _Chokepoint Capitalism_ by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow yet?

I think the book could have used a lot tighter editing, it gets kind of tiresome in many parts... but the basic fundamental observation seems right to me and helps give me the mental models to recognize and describe it.

"it" being the way in the internet economy those who occupy that "middleman" position can become "chokepoints" who can hold both consumers and producers hostage.

Or, as Doctorow wrote in a blog post covering some similar ground:

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

— https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

I'm not sure if they all die, there are a LOT of platforms around which haven't died yet, but those first steps are very recognizable in chokepoint middlemen like Spotify is for music and is trying to become for podcasts. First you give both consumers and the "business customers" (whether podcast producers or product sellers on Amazon) a great deal; then, once you've locked the consumers in you make the deal for consumers a lot worse in order to keep your business customers on your side; then, once you've locked _them_ in too (perhaps because they need you to reach the consumers, who are all on your platform), you tighten things up for business customers too, trying to extract as much money as possible from consumers and share as little of it as possible with the producers, while both have a hard time leaving you due to network effects.

So, yeah, it always starts great for your users. This is how you trap them, so you can then start tightening the screws.
1. nobody is required to "sign" the code of conduct

2. That does not ban any numbers from being used. That is a lint in the compiler's codebase where they do not wish to have those being used in examples. only the compiler.
what on earth do you mean by "professional"? and how can your software be "expensive" if it is also FOSS?

or is this satire?
I've never used, but have heard good things about darglint (although it's now archived): https://github.com/terrencepreilly/darglint

A lot of folks want us to add that kind of enforcement to Ruff (https://github.com/charliermarsh/ruff/issues/458), and I want to do it, but it's a big project and some other stuff has higher priority :)
Ask HN: Why do email addresses need a user name?
I was thinking it would be cool to be able to have an email address that is just a domain, for example if I own bobsmith.com why can't I have bobsmith.com as my email address? Why does SMTP require a username, eg bob@bobsmith.com?
Erdo, and AK ratings have tanked so hard already that there is no chance he will be winning anywhere fairly at all.

Now, the question is whether will he go for electoral fraud, or leave his post knowing for sure that a jail term awaits him.
That's the point.. Google either rebuilds or rebrands a lot of their stuff way to frequently.
I still own a copy of TC. The 7.1a version was the last known good version, and the version after that had a scary warning not to use it.

Why it had that warning is one of life's great mysteries. There are conspiracy theories of people claiming the developers were under pressure from authorities to backdoor/weaken their software, and I can understand why the project got abandoned if that really was the case.
Conversely, ignoring that your employees purchase on their own a tool which helps them with their job is a pretty poor policy. One might even think someone who doesn't ignore such a situation and instead says, "Hey, I'll reimburse you for that!" is being kind.
Not that I want to give them ideas, but what's so fundamentally different about music?

How come services can produce exclusive games, podcasts, tv shows and even movies, but not music or books?
Getting shadows right is incredibly complicated. You need to figure out the silhouette of the object from the perspective of the light source, then project that silhouette over the geometry the shadow falls on, then draw the perspective of that projection from the point of view of the “camera”. So it is a perspective of a projection of a perspective. And to add to that, objects occlude each other, and you might have multiple light sources. Since most artists probably start with a composition in the 2d space of the artwork, there’s never really a coherent 3d space to place the light sources in or figure out those projections in. I don’t think you should expect anyone to get it right in a complex scene unless they are drawing from reference.
"Here's how I did this thing."

"You don't need to do that thing."

How do you know?
UV will break down a lot of plastics, especially if stabilizers are not added. I'm curious why the study didn't mention this at all. How long can that bathroom hold out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_in_the_Sun_(short_story...

> The story follows Trish, the sole survivor of a terrible crash landing on the Moon. After regaining her senses, she contacts Earth and learns that it will be thirty days before a rescue mission can reach her. In the meantime, she depends on a wing-like solar panel to provide power to her suit's recycling facilities, and lunar night is approaching.

https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0671878522/0671878522___1.htm
> You could say that about some of nvidia's other GPUs too.

Technically, yes. Practically, nVidia forbids to deploy their other GPUs in data centers, in the EULA of their drivers: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

May or may not be enforceable, probably depends on jurisdiction, but I’m pretty sure that EULA gonna scare some people.

> People writing pytorch code don't want to think about CUDA vs vulkan at all.

Well, there’re also other people. OpenAI’s CEO doesn’t necessarily write pytorch code, but he described the compute costs of ChatGPT as “eye-watering”.

> I sincerely hope that tools like openai's triton make it easier to support a variety of GPUs.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Performance portability across GPU architectures ain’t trivial. For instance, in my Whisper implementation, the most expensive compute shader is the one which computes product of 2 matrices.

nVidia version: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper/blob/master/ComputeShade...

AMD version: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper/blob/master/ComputeShade...

These two compute shaders have little in common, they even use different memory layout for the arguments, despite both compute shaders are doing the same math.
No realistic code that does that exists AFAIK. It may have sections that do it (which is great!), but not a total useful binary.

It's a straw-man that's trotted out every time, and it's utterly meaningless beyond academic arguments. Even if it is true, it's not relevant for any practical purposes.
Tesla early on didn't receive lots of govt investment early on. The got a loan for 400 million $ and that money started to come in around 2012 or so, and that money was paid back a few years later. And Tesla competitors got much bigger loans that they have not yet paid back.

And after that their costumers got tax reductions for buying EVs, but that could be used by all car companies. This is not investment.

They get clean energy credits from other car companies, based on emissions regulation. Again, not investment from the government, rather a mechanism for the government to implement emissions improvements on the industry as a whole.

Tesla also received tax reductions for their large industrial installations, but that is something all companies get when they to large scale investments. Its simply how things are done in the US (and many other places).
This has echos of the Flint water crisis all over it. The "trust authorities" crowd would have happily let Flint residents drink yellow water until lead poisoned an entire generation.

Turns out, people are right to question things that don't pass their smell test. Sometimes, there's a reasonable explanation, other times there's not
Back in the '80s and '90s, many computer vendors like Sun and IBM shipped their systems with radically broken security configs, not to mention holes in their software. Often, the only way to get them to fix their problems was to make their problems very public. Hence, BUGTRAQ.

https://bugtraq.securityfocus.com/archive
I think that's a much more solid argument -- that the vehicles are unmerchantable under existing law, rather than there being a reason ex post facto require immobilizers.
As a European consumer of mostly American podcasts I find it very limiting when I hear them say some weird platform I never heard of. I'm mostly on youtube, and if it's not on youtube I do very little effort to try and find where it is.

But regardless if it's youtube or iTunes, people generally don't feel like signing up for a bunch of different services.

A lot of podcast owners are very clever these days, the days of 360 deals and naive young artists being exploited by big media are in the past.

That's why Spotify only got a licensing deal with Rogan, as an example. Freedom is more and more important for experienced content creators.

I want to see content creators use all available platforms. Just like they post to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at the same time.
Unfortunately even the most modern nations have politicians pushing to "cut red tape"

Im truly shocked the private sector in Turkey didn't solve this problem themselves, and needed government oversight to make sure they're doing their job correctly
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t! Completely depends on the context.
Finish the good story with the part about super powers...
I found this... Something like what you have in mind? (not Foss)

https://plotdigitizer.com/

Ed: or maybe this (gpl) - didn't realize this existed...
https://markummitchell.github.io/engauge-digitizer/

Ed2: another along similar lines (pun not intended). Looks like most assume you have a bitmap of a graph, rather than let you just draw datapoints.

https://automeris.io/WebPlotDigitizer/
Indeed, when a linter for language is x100 better when written in another language ...
It's a shame we haven't figured out to make efficient Far-UV leds.
The performance drops off a cliff once start to get below 265nm (IIRC)
Well, their streaming business also went wrong a long time ago. When you stop thinking about your customers, you'll start worrying about shareholders.
Investors are investing. You own it? The values go down too. That's how it works.
The hilarious thing about the whole RefTerm thing is the armies of people defending Microsoft by saying that Casey is some sort of Dark Wizard and that his skills are magic and unique, which is why nobody else can reproduce his approach.

Before I saw that video, if you had asked me to write a terminal I would have made one with essentially the same design as Casey. I didn’t even think that there is another way! Like… just draw the grid of chars. What else is there to do?! Why add extra steps?

Microsoft added extra steps.
here in vancovuer canada the police started a baitcar (and bait bike/boat) program that proved very effective at discouraging car thefts. This what police should be doing instead of going after people selling drugs or giving out speeding tickets.
Does anybody remember the famous incident with the TechTV host Cat Schwartz, who took a topless photo, and then cropped it to just her eyes and posted it on her blog? And then a fan told her "btw, the original photos contained a thumbnail version in the exif data, and photoshop did not update or remove that." So you really could do that gag from Red Dwarf where they "uncrop" a photo.

(red dwarf scene) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU
Excellent post, thanks for linking. The arguments made for replacing C with Rust seem sound.
I use both. I dislike both. Electronic version of shoulder tapping.

I really miss just having O365 and Zoom and getting work done.
The market doesn't meaningfully have organized labor in the first place without government intervention.

It also doesn't have corporations.

(though I agree that smacking down these workers was some real bullshit)
Well, we'll have to agree to disagree because my experience with both a Rift CV1 and a Quest 2 has been drastically different.
haha I loved the Gebru story arc.

Such a funny thing imaging that team at Google going around patting themselves on the back for bringing in an "ethical" AI advocate, like lol, if that's what she is what the heck were all of you then?

Then of course the ethical AI advocate blows the whole thing up. Because of course, and why not? It's probably more ethical to destroy the thing anyway.