skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the ongoing "slowly breaking old reddit" and the move to SPA and mobile app, the data for comments and posts will be via OAuth API access rather than a server rendered html page.
It would be interesting if this reintroduced "10% time" with strict wording about not working on R&D in your 90% time. Just to simplify the labor involved in calculating it.
Show HN: Build and run automations in the browser with natural language
It's Artem, Co-Founder of Bardeen here. We launched Magic Box today and I wanted to share it with you.

It takes automation descriptions in English and turns them into in-browser playbooks that can either be launched via shortcut or triggered by an external event (such as an email arriving).

I think it's pretty cool and it's ready for anyone to try it out (no waitlist!). We currently have about 30 productivity apps integrated. Please give it a shot and let us know what you think.

Here is a Twitter thread if you're not in the mood for Youtube
https://twitter.com/bardeenai/status/1648355825537421314

Here is Bardeen installation link
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bardeen-automate-m...
yes pun intended
I still smile sometimes at the pop-ups. I mean, you can try and store a cookie. I'm still gonna automatically delete it in a few minutes.

This never needed a legal solution in this form. Browsers should just not accept cookies, unless the user explicitly wants something stored on their device. That might have been better to legislate. Software on a user's device should not store or enable tracking by remote services, without disclaimer.
> nowadays, it's cool to say this new toy is faster than the rest because it is written in Rust without providing further details?

It's usually true, too.
In the dfm(the UI declaration file) the positions of elements are always absolute with relation to the forms top left point, they are just recalculated on the fly when a change in the form causes them to resize. Using alignment is great but it doesn't solve the problem. Not really that big of an issue in the big picture, just makes diffing forms annoying.
I can consume HN content, turn around and use it to derive value. That value spills onto others in various forms or maybe I keep all the value for myself (can't think of how I would horde value without sharing because I would need to offer something to others to receive value myself).

Nonetheless, markets don't operate efficiently when people horde shit.
Yes, let's make research taxable but leave advertising as a deductible expense.

What could go wrong?
> I am still not seeing anything here explaining the actual illegality here.

The illegality is Apple assigning sales where the goods were not in Cupertino at the time of the transaction to Cupertino for sales tax purposes, to take maximize advantage of sales tax kickbacks offered by Cupertino, despite state law which says the location for sales tax is the location where the goods physically were at the time of the transaction.

> If anything it looks like the State is just now getting around to realizing that they foolishly left money on the table and now they want it.

The state gets the same share no matter where in the state the transaction is assigned for sales tax purposes. The entities losing out are other localities, not the State.
A small note on "least connections" load balancing. The article says:

Because the load balancer sits between the server and the user, it can accurately keep track of how many outstanding requests each server has.

and this is the common case. But there are some cases, such as when serving audio/video streams (looking at you, porn :) where the server will send its response straight to the user, not back through the load balancer. So, the load balancer doesn't know how busy the server is, unless that information is communicated separately, through some other channel. One variation is "least sessions", where the number of active sessions rather than connections is used, and as mentioned, that info is stored separately from the "main" connection, and available on the load balancer for its decision-making.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAmZ3bz8AA&t=681s
And they couldn't provide a better quality JPEG...
How about supporting microsoft with ad dollars being OPT-IN not OPT-OUT.
That might had make sense 200 years ago when Fed government was small. Nowadays it is a slow death sentence to the country.
You can't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how much of a dickhead an author is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
It’s sad that Microsoft does understand that the best windows is minimal, without bloat, trahware and ads.
Time to update your MVP books and release a 2nd Edition, ladies and germs.
I suspect the law is not intended to be logically consistent.
The big, overlooked thing here seems to be that the vast majority of software developers are employed as consultants. Here on HN, you're used to thinking in terms of startups creating products, doing real R&D: creating a product that is speculating that someone will buy it over the next X years. But that's just not how most people who do "computer programming" are employed. Most of us are working to build some stupid CRUD app that would be basically turnkey if it weren't for the fact that consulting is so cut-throat that it can't keep any talented senior developers around. To call what consultoware developers do "R&D" would be like calling a subcontractor who does construction for suburban housing developments an "architecture firm". There's, like, some tangential relation, if you really squint hard, but in reality, there are none of the necessary creativity, or the risks creative work implies, at play.
Additional insight for this, from my perspective as support ops for protesters in Portland.

Bad actors from eastern Oregon, a heavily red and still pretty racist part of the state, would come into otherwise peaceful protests and cause property damage so police would be able to use greater force. It's a very effective way to get a protest re-labeled as a riot.

Remember, Oregon banned black people as a way of dealing with the Civil War. [1]. Portland is a liberal island in a sea of of red, hence why it's become such a friction point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws
I've worked at far more companies with miles of product idea backlog we never get to than ones with nothing for engineering to do.

Now product will be able to use an LLM to come up with feature proposals and design docs even faster! :o

So: are you working at a company where engineering is a cost center or a revenue center? The latter wants to get more done at the same cost much more than it wants to just cut spend.
I actually cursed Maturin a few years ago, as it refused to compile on OpenBSD and hence broke some lib I planned to use.

Python is becoming a bit too reliant on Rust. Rust is good but, in term of portability, is just not as mature as C. If your lib relies on Rust, please please please test it on something beyond Linux and Mac.
If your codebase is as large as cpython's, I think the benefits are clear. But most projects aren't actually this big right? Flake8 runs less than a second on even my biggest projects. Is linting such a bottleneck in people's workflows? Why bother shaving a couple seconds off a linter when your test suite and Dockerfiles take minutes to complete?

I don't really see why I should care about ruff.
Video is from 2018, title should be updated.
Gift link for paywall bypass: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-open...
Fedora 38 Released
Many landfills these days will capture the methane and sell it, at least in the developed world. So it can displace new methane entering the biosphere from wells.
Adding support to a tool for a different is that is developed for winapi is really not a thing. If it was written for GTK or Qt or electron then it is possible. But I would guess you should just best write a new app instead?
It's not homogenization of culture as much as we are all actually humans, with mostly the same wants and needs and troubles, so of course our media will reflect that.

We are really similar in reality, both across the physical world and across time.
Vending Machine is getting adapted?! Awesome.

...yet, I think you're right about the parallel world escapism.
> A state audit is always going to be heavily biased toward state interests

The state gets the same share no matter where in the state the transaction is assigned.

> Laws aren't black and white

Some are quite black and white, some are less so.
What other bad things does this prevent from happening? I can't think of anything, unless you think double-taxing income is good.
I had a manager who would write the most hideous, impossible-to-debug code imaginable and always have some sort of microbenchmark as some kind of justification. At the time I was young enough in my career to just think he was wiser than I was, but upon reflection (and remembering some of the stuff he did involving FFI-ing C into Haskell all the time), I realized that he just didn't he didn't like people criticizing his code, though the first hint should have been when he refused to answer my questions about actual performance profiling of our codebase.
Typing (or pasting) a command into a terminal will always be more reproduceable than anything GUI.
Such a bad name though. Try telling hour friends about kagi. They'll type "kaggy". Maybe it'll be popular in Japan?
This is awesome, curious what is your DSL look like and what is the accuracy of LLM translating into your DSL?
New auto-tax filing system could help low income families
I hadn't been following it but now understand why my company got weird about time tracking day one of this FY.

I thought it was some weird M&A or bean counter power move but I guess it's taxes.
That's not an April fools joke...

April fools is about getting you to believe something happened when it didn't...
GPT Craft: Update
Dear Users,

I just wanted to give a quick update on the service. I've made some improvements that I think you'll really like:

Guests and users can now try out the app without an API Key. Of course, you can still use an API Key if you prefer.

You can now set up the settings, like the model, temperature, and max tokens. This can be applied to all prompts or to each one individually.

I've also made a bunch of minor fixes and improvements to improve the overall experience.

Thanks for checking it out, and let me know if you have any questions or feedback!

https://ibb.co/vLgVsTp
They got rid of HailCorporate? I'm only a casual Reddit reader so I thought that I had missed some ban drama but it's still there:

https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/
If you keep posting flamebait to HN we are going to have to ban you. We've warned you about this at least once already!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well, yeah because you're a normal person who pays tax by the book and don't look at tax optimization schemes all your waking hours. Classing devs as R&D was morally wrong anyway due to the 100% tax credit.
Although I think a better approach could have been an immediate credit in the same year, but a reduced amount.
>>That could mean scrapping the project because it's unpopular, but could also mean narrowing the focus to the smaller population that really does want what you're selling.

... or, keep improving the product to the point where most people actually find it useful, which is obviously an option for Microsoft, with cash reserves to fund centuries of development. Find out what the downsides are, and fix them, or offer actually compelling benefits.

Heck, I'm very hard-set against it, but I just heard about Apple starting to offer savings accts with 4.5% interest. If MS started paying that much, with trustworthy security and no upper limit, I might sign up (i.e., if you pay me enough, I might also accept your other parts of the offer).

It must be damn valuable for MS to have us have accounts, and if so, they could actually afford to provide better returns than banks, because the return to MS would be [banking profit] + [network profit].
> I think the average engineer spends less than 20% of their time on "true" R&D

Based on all of the items in #2, the average software engineer spends close to 0% of their time on R&D - with rare exceptions for those working on cutting edge tech, in research roles or maybe super senior engineers figuring out how to solve complex technical problems

The rest of us just write code and sit in meetings
> As an example of a numerical value, GPT-2 achieves 1 bit per character (=token) on a Wikipedia data set

https://towardsdatascience.com/perplexity-of-language-models...

(I have not checked this claim, it's just what I found from googling "best large-language model character-perplexity 2023".)

A token in a LLM is generally more than one character, so I would guess that the entropy is a bit lower than that. Shannon estimated it at 0.6-1.3 bits/character in 1950 (https://mattmahoney.net/dc/entropy1.html)
Star Trek's DS9 episodes featuring Sanctuary Districts were set in 2024, and Star Trek's WWIII started around 2026. We're kinda on track.
I'm sorry, but you're definitely misattributing this. The rocket in question was launched from Vandenburg SFB in California. It was not close enough to you by the time it reached Alaska to have knocked anything off a shelf.
Sense of purpose need not have anything to do with money or status.
The planets all orbit in approximately the same plane, the ecliptic. So it’s fine to say that they rotate around the Sun—except that, really, they orbit in (approximate) ellipses with the Sun at one focus. But these ellipses are pretty circular (low eccentricity), so, again, we can say that we’re orbiting around the Sun without hurting anyone.
One Step forward and two steps back.
hold your hand... if you have a hand to begin with. Most beginner users won't be able to follow most things in the Arch wiki.
It's not nearly that bad. You start heading too far east and bend back. After your two hours you are exactly on the right direction but have gone a bit farther than you needed to and are 26 degrees off course. I've never encountered any large, featureless terrain; rarely am I moving in a direction that's not either with the nature of the terrain or nearly directly across the terrain--it's easier to go a bit farther while minimizing the terrain fighting.
The only time you get those notifications is generally when you install a new os version and they want to tell you about a new feature. That feature might be 'hey we launched apple news that you can pay for'. The only other time is when you are close to your apple cloud limit it will tell you that you can subscribe to more space.
I love that it's just 12 files, straight to the point, no unnecessary boilerplates
Does more money make us happier?
Same. I've tried DBeaver (its UI is an abomination) and TablePlus (some of the UI is better but e.g hiding the database search where they do - why?) and TablePlus is the one I'm sticking with, but I still miss SQLYog. Especially the permissions editor for database users.
Possible subtitle: Or How Apple Got It Right Once Again
I’m fairly sure I’ve been a member for all 25 years now. I’ll really miss the service. Streaming just isn’t a great option for my rural home.
Can you imagine being in the Windows product design meeting and someone says:

“No means NO! The user did not activate their account and we should respect that not harass them!”

Would never happen.
> 0% tax credit for salaries

I don't think that's what's being discussed here. The question is whether salaries are (completely) expensed immediately (reducing profits) or whether they are (partly) capitalised (which will reduce profits later but not now).
It looks like a pretty clean example from what I can recall.

WinMain builds the window and starts the message pump. The pump is implement starting at line 425. It's basically a while loop that reads the next message on the stack, translates it, then sends it to the object it belongs to.

It's the precursor to today's modern event-driven designs. Basically, this is now done for you by the runtime.

The bulk of the action happens in the created window's "wndproc", cbMainWindow (Line 455 - 2897).

There's a giant switch statement, with each handled message being a separate case. There's also a WM_COMMAND message, which is essentially a message holding another message inside.

This is probably the best book on Win32 API programming out there.

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Windows%C2%AE-Fifth-Devel...
NaturalSpeech2: LDMs are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers
Use ChatGPT! It's night and day for Win32 dev in my experience, and the code it produces is really good.

One thing to note before going into Win32: You're going to have a pixelated, upscaled ui if you don't take care of high dpi support yourself, and that involves patching system controls. So prepare yourself for lots of dpi-work if that's a concern. (One thing I've been experimenting with is superclassing the system controls and "overwriting" the original by registering a superclass of eg. the edit control as simply "edit". This makes other system controls, like the combobox, use your dpi scaled/custom version).
A bunch of prominent independently produced and maintained 'secure' communications networks marketed to black markets were intercepted by global law enforcement networks, shutdown, and many criminal cases were made off the back of those takedown operations.
Yeah now that I read that it's missing context. My bad.
It does seem like that adds two round trips (SET ROLE, RESET ROLE) to each database interaction, though.
Yeah. I had a feeling of dread when I saw the "Changes to your Tailscale plan" email subject, but then was positively surprised by many of the changes. For smaller companies, getting the first three users for free will also be nice.

Previously almost all features were available [0] on all plans, though with certain restrictions that made sense (and some that didn't). I was hitting those limits and wanted to get approval for us to purchase the Team plan.

But now I see that features have been stripped out of the "new" Team plan — and was also frustrated that I couldn't find any information on this. I guess overall the pricing structure makes sense for them, but it's frustrating to not have this clearer in their article.

I suppose I can live without things like Funnel and SSH, and don't need Okta etc., but paying the new ACL tax for Starter to Premium (a $12 jump per user) is more painful.

Overall a positive, but with rough edges which unfortunately hurt me. But perhaps there'll be some tweaks in future, and perhaps again the opportunity to pay for individual feature upgrades.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230417141600/https://tailscale...
My movie fantasy is to create canals into the Sahara, and use solar-powered water desalination plants to irrigate and re-forest the desert.
I agree with all of that. That was my main point in general. Separate out individual behaviors from what a person "is".

>But “bad guy” is also common shorthand for “guy who exhibits bad behaviour”. For some that distinction might even be splitting hairs.

This is where the disagreement really comes from. It's a very common posting style on Reddit/Twitter/social & political HN threads.

I just don't like it.
Yeah there's a salt used
The founders added a bunch of checks and balances but not the filibuster.
The fillibuster was more of a gentlemanly agreement until the 1970s and it wasn't until the Obama era that it was regularly used on almost every single vote.
To answer your question with a question if I may -- when did productivity increase in software ever result in headcount reduction? The competition also will have similar productivity gain.
That is the closest I've come up with; write BDD style tests in YAML that can be interpreted in multiple languages.

It just feels like this should be a solved problem beyond BDD...
As some one who took a welding class.. no it isn’t. It’s production.
wow a not [dead] comment, what did you do dan?
"New product" is a distinction without a difference. Literally all software development efforts are in the interest of "new products" depending on your definition of "new product."
As one of HN's resident climate doomerism skeptics, here is what's what:

1. Climate change is genuinely real. Some of it is probably human caused. That isn't likely to be a problem though as the climate has always changed, including in relatively recent history; i.e. it's not the case that the climate is stable if not for fossil fuels, and the evidence that this change is serious is of garbage quality. It's not serious and could easily go into reverse in the coming years even without any changes in human behavior. Additionally the assumption that change will continue in one direction forever is wrong, as is the assumption of exponential feedback loops.

2. Sea levels are genuinely rising. However they are rising very slowly, by tiny amounts, and this rise is so small it can be easily be offset by other factors like the land rising. This is why the Pacific islands have been growing over time instead of sinking, as we were assured for decades was a 100% dead cert outcome of climate change.

The key theme here is that whilst underlying changes may be real, the size, extent, confidence and expected duration are all exaggerated to the level that the conclusions become merely fashionable doomerism. And deep down people know it, hence why all the most vocal doomers act like they don't believe it: Al Gore buys ocean front property, climatologists fly around the world to international conferences at a greater rate than many other fields, the Pacific islanders build tourist resorts on the beaches, Greta Thunberg takes a boat across the Atlantic but the crew takes flights, etc.
You broke the site guidelines with this comment and unfortunately have been breaking them in other places too recently (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35600201).

Could you please stop this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly, and we've already had to warn you about this more than once before - in fact it has been a problem for many years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27498333 (June 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27498325 (June 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718800 (July 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17529091 (July 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15958523 (Dec 2017)
I don't believe you've proven the point you're attempting to make.

Tesla is a rather famous example of a car manufacturer that doesn't have a dealership model. Do you imagine that GM or Toyota is somehow less interested in how their cars are either liked or disliked by their target audiences than Tesla is? That seems pretty hard to imagine.
Several features of or accidents-resulting-from the US constitution amount to that. With the added "fun" that they also create a system in which fixing any of them is unlikely, from within the system.

There's a reason even we don't tend to push a US-style system on fledgling democracies, when setting them up. It's got well-known, grave, fundamental, and avoidable flaws.
Some places in the US define what a city is, but it can be very small - Fourth class: Cities with 9,999 or fewer residents.

It has more to do with what services the city provides vs the size (cities provide trash pickup, etc).
Super amazing UX. Build automations in seconds :)
It's also worth noting that places like Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland are sunken public spaces, which, while helpful in diffusing sound and making a nice common area, also means the tear gas will linger longer. [1]

[1] https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g52024-d126568...
It takes a substantial amount of time to condense and process CO2 from the air into droplets of synthetic fuel. It would be an unnecessarily slow dripping mechanism.