skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i can't speak for the Taiwanese link, but my recollection was that China's rise in wealth (and investment and support from the US) only really took off in the 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ask HN: Is Firefox  really privacy friendly?
I am perplexed by Mozilla's mindbending word games about privacy of the Firefox browser. They claim that

"Your privacy comes first
As the internet grows and changes, Firefox continues to focus on your right to privacy — we call it the Personal Data Promise: Take less. Keep it safe. No secrets. Your data, your web activity, your life online is protected with Firefox."

"At Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet."

While this is all good they have a lot of telemetry going on in the background.

"Interaction data: Firefox sends data about your interactions with Firefox to us (such as number of open tabs and windows; number of webpages visited; number and type of installed Firefox Add-ons; and session length) and Firefox features offered by Mozilla or our partners (such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals)."

Please see the rest here.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

How can we really call this a private browser or even privacy-friendly browser while they are constantly hogging user data.
Yep and teaching about it honestly in schools. Borrowing from how they teach about the event in Vietnam and also about how we teach about the events in Germany in WW2.
BNF needs to be understood in context. It's not sufficient or complete for all things because its reductionist to the class of problems its a good fit for.

It works as ABNF in IETF contexts. It works in ASN.1. Therefore it works for SNMP mibs. It can define to the bit level PDUs "on the wire".

It can also in some sense notate the semantics if you intuit above the syntax of the choices of one, any, many as to WHY you are proferred the alternates and what they mean. The problem is that most of the logic about WHY is encoded in comments, or out of scope. It only denotes the forms.

The intersection of BNF and UNIX man page commandline arguments remains probably its most visible context. cat [ -v ]

I learned some variants BNF/EBNF in 1979 to learn DEC-10 instruction set semantics. Pascal, Wirth had written diagrams which morally encoded the same information but in a visual form. It irked me that there was no connect/uplift from (E)BNF into the lex part of lex/yacc functionality on the compiler course. We dived into lexical analysis without discussing a restricted grammer for representation of things which syntax we'd all been taught. I guess its what you know times who you learn it from times what relevance it has.

There is some venn diagram collision in my mind with BNF variants and regex. Perhaps the inevitability of [ and { representative forms, with | for alternates.

I don't write DSL so I don't play in this space but I use BNF almost unconsciously every day, especially if its a 'read that IETF draft' day.
This piece goes from talking about meta layoffs to an indictment of remote work surprisingly quick.

I love remote work, because I grew up in a small city with no companies operating in my industry and when covid hit I was able to go full remote, move back home, and be around my friends and family while contributing to my company and to my local economy.

The biggest thing that has helped my dev team thrive and be able to onboard new members is mob programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming). We have our own take on exactly how we do it, but the gist is that all our software engineers are in a video conference with each other as much as possible and focus on a single task.

We're starting to add new members in timezones that are 5+ hours offset from the rest of the team and that integration is proving to be hard. If anyone has advice on building TZ-distributed teams I would love to hear advice!
How hard could it be to just post a list of what's available via the service?
His poignant take on weekly remote work is being wrestled to the ground stick me the most:

> To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture, and I suspect is important especially to larger orgs because it helps to even out performance. High caliber, experienced employees probably get just as much done at home at the office, or maybe more, but junior employees with less direction struggle more, and WFH provides the ultimate cover for less motivated people (which in a larger company will always be a percentage of the total) that might otherwise be held more accountable in-person.

It's not just about the heavy hitters, it's about the team as a whole. In person work, though a logistical headache and social annoyance, drives team cohesion.
The other deep irony is that many tech companies ruined the office by forcing open office designs. It was no secret that employees found them difficult places to be productive. And now they wonder why nobody wants to go there.
Well I'll be first to admit that my thing against trucks is a bit of knee jerk. To me they are big, loud, scary and expensive. I'm uncomfortable being around roads full of trucks, especially biking. Yet I know that a Mazda Miata will kill be just as well. And I can see the utility in a lot of situations. I've looked at them for camping in wilderness of western US too, I'll be honest, but realized that I would not be able to stretch out in any of them and quickly passed. Yet at the same time I just moved to a little city that identifies hard (to an unhealthy degree imho) with cowboy and military culture and it seems most vehicles are trucks. I honestly think this contributes to this city being universally looked down upon and ridiculed. Although the symbolism of the truck in this context is probably tightly enmashed with the real physical properties.

Utility depends on context. Emotions matter. Urbanism consists of emotional responses. Camping in wilderness is different.
Going to be fun when examples like this start showing up in CTO Magazine (tm)...
So at $685 (1/3 of Manhattan and 1/2-1/3 of SF) there are also units that are somewhat smaller. Just like in Europe. Sounds pretty darn affordable. Meanwhile in SF if you can’t afford the units that are larger by regulation you can live 2h outside of town. The whole point is folks can live in the metro, and live well. And despite that prices haven’t changed in nominal terms in 30 years -
meaning slightly cheaper each year. Not everyone can afford the home of their dreams right now but it shouldn’t be between that and homelessness or a 2h commute.
Neato. Do not have an immediate use case for this, but definitely something I will consider for the future.
But if that's not true, how is that a leak? Anyone could have invented that lie.
Hey everyone! I’m the original Reddit poster and one of the creators of this agent. We essentially give the agent a full cloud sandboxed environment as it’s playground (it’s Firecracker).

We’re working on this agent as a part of a bigger project. This has been one of the most interesting development experiences I’ve ever had.
We also learned a new way of interactions with the model.

For example giving it an ability to ask human for guidance when it isn’t sure what to do next - https://twitter.com/mlejva/status/1637175051828043777?s=20

Or letting the model tell you what tools it thinks it needs - https://twitter.com/mlejva/status/1636721807129493511?s=46

Happy to answer questions
out of curiosity, what issues did you see?

20 to one seems kinda low in my experience. At my last deskjob it about 30-50 to 1 and it felt like a good balance. My team and I (~5 people) met with the manager once a week for a couple of hours. Id estimate they had 2-3 meetings a day with other teams. Project direction and blockers were dicussed and adjusted. It felt optimal, enough to get guidance, but they were too busy to micromanage and get in the way. Non-high-level nitty gritty day to day issues were just resolved within the team throughout the week
Leading Policies of Ethnomethodology
Oh my god, I've been looking for this song for about a decade!

I had faint memories of an electronic song with footsteps in it. Listened to it about 20 times on repeat at a friend's house probably 30 years ago, but I remembered those lyrics immediately while reading your comment.

Thanks so much!
Re-reading your comment with a different lens, the minimum number of natural persons required to fork Bitcoin to a larger supply is actually 1.

That said, it would be a fork, responsible for producing its own hash power, and would not be recognized as Bitcoin since it wouldn’t be following the Bitcoin protocol.

If you wanted to modify the Bitcoin protocol to support a larger supply, see my previous comment.
Another correlation, very unusual and interesting, is that past infection with Toxoplasmosis (a parasite that grows in cat poop) increases the chances of becoming an entrepreneur by a factor of 1.27 to 2

https://hbr.org/2022/07/a-common-parasite-can-make-people-mo...

> they discovered that those infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii were, on average, 29% more likely than others to have founded a start-up, 27% more likely to have founded multiple ventures, and more than twice as likely to have founded their businesses alone

Along with an increased risk of death via car accidents, having contracted Toxoplasmosis seems to precipitate risk seeking behaviors, similar to its intended evolutionary prerogative: the infection makes rats sexually aroused by the smell of cat urine, so they seek the smell, where cats are more likely to be around, are eaten by cats, and the cycle continues.
It started as cherry picked but as you come up with better solutions and handling unexpected situations it becomes magically good at building things
I got my current job from a cold contact from a recruiter and I've interviewed for other jobs in the past that I found through LinkedIn. I also have a good place to message former colleagues. All in all pretty useful.
> it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture

Can someone who agrees explain how these points are obvious, to me, a person who's worked part- or full-time remotely for more than 10 years and has no concept of either of these things?
Can you expand on this a bit? A search on the internet provides plenty of examples of this, even a search in the dictionary[1]. Along with movies[2], books[3], and typical news reporting hack/hacking/hackers has been used to indicate malicious intent.

You can debate crackers vs. hackers and that its the intent that differentiates them but its a moot point based on that very thin veil of separation. Similar to the title security researcher or pentester you only can believe whats presented publicly by that person, group or organization and you can never validate that they haven't sold access or exploits to anyone else.

I would say your generalized term would be better understood as a security audit, pentest or bug bounty which would appear to represent a non-malicious intent to gain "successful unauthorized computer system access" as defined by the contract.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hack
[2] https://cybersecurityventures.com/movies-about-cybersecurity...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espiona...
> I didn't say it was anything to do with being "Morally weak".

My apologies, I did not mean to imply that you did. Merely that this is the usual response I hear from those supporting the PRC position.

> Lockdowns ended when vaccines began, China never got that option, because its population didn't take up any of the vaccines to a high enough percentage. Also, there was never enough mRNA vaccines available to supply the whole world + china, until recently (maybe still not even now).

So, why did the PRC population not vaccinate? Could the government not mandate vaccines? If so, why not? Could it not better educate the population? Was the path via Sinovac the only option? Fosun International in Shanghai [1] had a license to produce
Comirnaty as early as 2020 [2] for example. These are just a few decisions that could have been made differently and yet were not.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosun_International

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID%...

I am not claiming to have answers here as for there being a better path through this chaos. However, I do want a healthy debate about the decisions and outcomes; I simply am not buying how you (and Beijing) are largely portraying the decisions as inevitable.

> It 100% was as binary as I present it. Italy, UK, Canada, US, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea... the list goes on: They all did lockdowns to some degree to slow spread, and help their hospitals. It had nothing to do with culture or politics... except in the US.

I strongly disagree. While I am not a scientist in this area, I am very familiar with the great differences between say the UK, Japanese, and Swedish responses for the people on the ground. Debating excess deaths, efficiency, economic impact etc. is something that I will leave for better scientists to iron out over the years to come, but it is inarguable that the responses (and outcomes) were far more nuanced than you describe them. This – to me – is enough to solidify my position that the whole “There was no other option”, which is commonplace for governments worldwide, is a load of hogwash in this case as much as it has always been.
This makes me think of Futurama. There are still traffic jams, but now they’re in the sky!
I used AltStore for a while, but it’s kind of a mess. The project is not super well maintained, it’s buggy, it doesn’t recognize paid developer certificates if your paid account is linked to a business, it requires a Mail.app plugin to run, etc.

There is a community developed fork now called sidestore, which seems to work much better in my limited experience trying it out.

It still requires a bit of setup and you have to set up a VPN client on your device in order to install an app, but it seems more reliable to me.

https://sidestore.io/

I’m hopeful that Apple will allow sideloading apps directly in iOS 17 to comply with new EU regulations, but I guess we will see.
Aidea: a chatgpt query builder that you feed a snapshot of your online discourse, the surrounding contexts and it tries to find things like hypocrisy/ class/culture blindness, in how you communicate.. or think.
Because college nowadays are optimized for grades. It is a natural decision to eventually focus on grade only in a zero-sum environment like colleges.

Also, it is a very good example of Goodhart's Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
> The first is that it still takes the same number of people to perform a Beethoven symphony, but 4 kids with electric guitars and barely any training can now perform music to a packed concert hall or dance floor.

Economics feeds into this. I happen to like (among other things) "big band" music, which flourished in the 30s through the end of WWII. The reason was that wages were depressed (it was The Depression, after all) so it was cheap to hire a big band (and it was a way to spread the money around and keep your friends employed). The war ended, the depression ended, and jobs were plentiful (plus some new technology wsa developed) and that was the end of the Big Band Sound.

Symphonies evolved in a time of patronage and low wages. They are absurd today -- real money losers. I'm glad people still try, but I feel like my experience must be subsidized.

I am compulsively unable to attend a concert without estimating the amount the band is paid and dividing it by the players. The economics rarely make direct sense.
The one big winner and many losers of UBS’s Credit Suisse rescue
US wanted to bring nukes to bases in Japan, but Japan's nuclear policy denies bringing nukes (in officially. it wasn't denied under the hood).
In a prior life I was an archaeologist and would visit these amazing structures, built by literal dozens of people working together making steady progress over time. It was gratifying to see that incremental progress reflected in the excavations as well. Even if you were doing something as slow as cleaning a cobblestone walls/paths with a brush, over a couple weeks a few people could clean a surprisingly large fortress.

I don't feel the same about some of my years in tech. There are periods where I can't remember doing much of anything that could be called progress, even though I know that I was "meeting with stakeholders" and other ostensibly important things. There's this diffusion of responsibility that occurs in large orgs where everyone is micromanaging some infinitesimal slice of the mission while communication overhead and "following the process" consumes unimaginable amounts of time.

It's hard to not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and desire some kind of self-governed organizational anarchy, but I'm not sure where I think that line is best drawn.
In office culture will die once the emotions abate and the CFO presents to the board a .02 EPS boost by closing all offices. Given the boards fiduciary duty it won’t even be a debate. The “culture” hand wave is ludicrous - a for profit public company isn’t about building culture, it’s about increasing earnings per share. The whole “we need to be in office for the kids” strikes me as absurd as well - we’ve got a 16 year queue of kids that went to school online for two years and grow up with FaceTime, zoom, slack, discord, and all the tools to get it done as common in their life as the pay phone was in ours.

On the middle management purge, I am glad to see it. I went into management at the time that was the only way to increase your leverage as an engineer. Over time it’s become a simpering pile of drivel and I am actively looking to switch back to IC roles. I’m sick to death of the professional manager culture in tech these days - it’s literally filled with people that just don’t like computers that much - likely got into it because their parents thought it was a good career and they realized after a few years they weren’t into it and switched to management. It’s been steered towards managers holding the nominal power but none of the ability to understand their decisions, so they a) don’t make them, b) when cornered make bad decisions. It’s sickening and I literally can’t stand my career as it stands. I’m not even allowed to commit code any more, and even if I were, I’m too busy going to bs offsites to talk about decisioning shift left strategies and how to make inhuman hotel seating open floor plan offices fun enough that people want ti come into their chicken coops to be milked.
> To me, although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture

I feel the opposite though I'm an n=1 and don't have any data beyond myself. My company went full WFH during the pandemic and committed to it. Ever since we've become much more meeting heavy (I also have pretty senior IC title sadly.) Why?

Along with going WFH we began hiring from other timezones in earnest. Low cost of living areas are cheaper to hire from. Previously we were really careful about hiring teams in a given timezone together, everyone on the team used to be within +- 1 hour of each other. Now lunch times, day start, and day end times weren't in sync anymore. Before standup was at 1100, now meetings started appearing at 1000, 0900, eventually 0800. After all 0800 in UTC-8 was actually 1100 in UTC-5. My 1200 lunch is overwritten all the time by folks in UTC-6 for whom it's actually 1400.

Before you'd see people run to the bathroom or express annoyance finding meeting rooms, but now going from meeting to meeting is just a click of a button. What used to be a hallway conversation or an extra 10 minutes of hanging outside a conference room to hash out a few details becomes another 30 min time slot they book on my calendar along with everyone else.
Did you build up a financial cushion before you started for the second time?
Here’s a thought experiment for you.

Would this “gambling” bank be insolvent this week now the Bank Term Funding Program is in place?

You may be surprised by the answer.
How is a team that is meeting their manager consisting only of 5 people if the manager has 30-50 people reporting into them? I wasn't sure if it was a typo or where you actually advocating for a manager to have 30-50 direct reports?
When we got married, we didn't tell anybody. We had already been living like we were married for years, so it was just a tax thing.

A year or so later, my wife decided she wanted to have a party and make a big deal about it--the primary driver for this decision was that she noticed that her female co-workers weren't treating her like a professional, and she suspected it was because they didn't see her as really married.

I didn't press the issue, we had a party, it was great. But apparently, women treat unmarried women differently in professional contexts.

Also, men do. Also, the IRS does. Also, parents do. Do nurses without a family end up working different hours? There are a lot of factors.

I'm just saying that it's really difficult to sort out whether being married helped these women because it's so great, or whether not being married harmed the other ones because they were treated poorly in ways we don't understand.
Ask HN: Where are the QR codes to swap contact info?
Does anyone know of an app trying to solve this problem:

You want to give your phone number to someone you just met. The humans have to exchange the digits by talking or typing. One phone should display a QR the other phone scans and the phone number gets inserted into contacts just like that.

i.e. the QR should have all the info of a VCard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard

I've googled around and found stuff like:

https://flexibits.com/cardhop

https://www.scanbizcards.com/

but it should be much easier. In iOS the wallet app should have several vCards of your self. You want to give someone your main cell number + name + email that's one wallet item. You want to give someone just your google voice number + name and no email that's another.

And built into iOS and Android should be if the camera scans these it knows to auto insert into contacts. We use QR's for everything else! Why are we still printing business cards to be scanned or giving out a 10 digit number by speaking?
My contention is that if their metrics had actual bottom-line in mind they would have been more transparent about it.

For example, do you measure if a project is completed on time and the amount of bugs/regressions from it or do you measure how efficient contributors were by looking at loc, how much they are available,etc... because if things are getting done on time and with good quality but A lot if "unproductivity" then you have a metric problem not a productivity problem.
> The paper contains inflammatory and libelous language with no legal backing.

I don't think that copying an artistic style is stealing legally or morally (I think the moral issue is "passing off"). But I think the reaction ("libelous language") is way over the top.
> although I’d certainly concede that WFH pares down meeting culture and certainly has benefits in logistics, it’s always been fairly obvious that in-person collaboration is more effective, produces a much stronger culture

When I read this, I translate it to:

"We don't know how to collaborate remotely efficiently, so we don't try anything different and say 'office work is better' "

Yes there's a value to meeting in-person. But don't say the process doesn't work when you don't know how to use the available tools to collaborate
As far as I can tell, the wind affects the probability of a ban on these systems.