skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised by this perspective, I think in particular because it is hard to pick and choose availability.

First, like many people, I work in a company that spans multiple time zones. At least 16 hours of the day are in someone on the eng team's working hours. Plenty of places _do_ practically speaking need to use version control 24/7 when you factor in both global teams and out of hours incidents, which at a large enough scale become routine.

Second, when something fails, it doesn't _usually_ come back up of its own accord. It comes back up because someone fixes it. So you're either pulling people in out of hours to fix problems in these tools, or you're fixing them during work hours, which means that you have an outage when people are working! And if you work in an even slightly global team, oops, it might be both – it's in working hours for the people affected, but out of working hours for the people that maintain and can fix this system!

Third, because operating these systems tends not to be someone's full time job, even trivial issues like "the disk is full from log entries because it got mistakenly set to be in debug mode" can wind up taking a surprisingly long time to diagnose and fix.

What am I missing that makes it practical for a system to have 20% downtime, but only when people are not working?
I am happy that so many people get to experience the feeling me and other software engineers feel when we write code. OpenAI democratize some of this feeling and now people that never knew how to code can experience the rush of creating something new using code.

In a world where a lot of AI Researchers that develop these amazing models are slowed down by their lack of "normal" engineering skills I think it's very apparent that software engineering goes well beyond writing a snippet of code.

Like the internet, stackoverflow, forums and other advances in technology that opened new doors and opportunity and democratized the industry - this is another one, a big one! the smart ones will use this push as an entry point to the software development world rather than looking for an oracle function for software development (which does not exist yet)
That’s right, collectivists never want to reside in collectivist countries, they insist on converting capitalist countries so that they can leech off of wealth and businesses that wouldn’t otherwise exist under their own system. If Cuba is so great, put your money where your mouth is and live there. I have always and will continue to always have absolutely zero issue when communists steal from each other, all I ask is that others be left out of it.
And then your site would not be indexed by any search engine. Good luck with that.
Was it really tens of thousands? Looks like 1password 7 standalone was $50, not sure what it used to be when the standalone license was the only option.
Ask HN: What if browsers included common JavaScript packages?
Like it or not, the cat's out of the bag on JavaScript. Lots of the websites we use every day rely on a small number of JavaScript libraries. How many different times do you think your computer and phone have had to download the entirety of React, Vue and jQuery? I've had this idea in my head for a while that browsers should have these libraries included, allowing developers to just import them without the user having to download anything but the actual application code.

`import React from "@browserIncludedReact/v16.9";`

It might feel weird to build this into the browser, but unless you browse with JS turned off, you are downloading these libraries several times a day, if not hundreds. Non-tech people usually leave js on, so the savings, while small for each person, could end up being huge on a macro scale. Curious what people's thoughts are?

Curious what people's thoughts would be?
Your strange reply to me in another thread was flagged and removed immediately -- not by me, btw.

Pray tell why you think I am "a garbage person"?

We seem to agree on energy policy (and I just upvoted one of your comments), so maybe you are also "a garbage person" ;)
Mexico may be behind on remote work but they have the big advantage of being the prime location for manufacturing. Both US and Chinese companies are moving manufacturing to Mexico.
Colleges are run like corporations and this is the cost of doing business. Fines are just a minor inconvenience.
> It’s not opt-in, it’s the default.

I meant Screen Time which lets you disable in-app purchases for children, not authentification which just requires you to enter your password for validation against accidental purchases. That was a mistake from my part.

> What people do with their money is none of your business.

Sure it isn't but what exactly is it that makes the App Store especially protective of users then in comparison to the competition? Play Store also gives the same controls and the same premise of guarding users from malware - which does still slip through, don't get me wrong, but so does it on the App Store - without having to block sideloading. Apple is fine with psychological mechanics designed to get particularly children to dump money into a game over and over as long as the developers paid their cut to them - which as you mentioned is fine in the context of individual responsibility, but it really does not scream "protective" to me. At that point why not give me freedom to install apps from wherever I'd like?

> The reason Epic got fined was because people whose credit cards were saved and charged didn’t consent to the purchases and Epic refused to refund even when their virtual currency wasn’t used, or they locked out the accounts entirely when the transactions were charged back.

Yes and never have I defended that. I am very glad they got zapped for that. I am simply against the idea that any corporation is a trustworthy guardian angel which only has the customers' best interests in mind. Any of the tech giants are more than happy to employ anti-competitive and customer-unfriendly tactics in the name of profit and siding with either one because of favoritism or holding a grudge against the one instead of on a rational case-by-case basis is just silly.
Hope for Mexico they dont follow the unhumane worker rights of the states. Basically europe has the same principles as in Mexico and people in Europe have good lifes.
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!”
― Richard Branson
I'm not denying your experience, but I have almost zero problems with the Gmail spam filter. Never false negatives and almost never false positives. I wonder why different users have different experiences with this?
In my experience “large distributed systems” don’t tend to be idling for 20% of the time? I think often such systems have some dependencies 24h a day. Even if it’s much lower in a 20% window you risk leaving clients out in the cold in that window, similarly to the post you linked, no?
> Thanks! Completely overlooked that they talked about ‘description’, not ‘descriptor’ in several places.

The classic "close reading" that man pages require...
I run a gitea instance on a moderate SBC backed by a NAS over iSCSI.

The SBC runs updates weekly, rebooting as needed as per zypper ps. It takes about 2 minutes for a reboot cycle, and reboots about 50% of the time. During this, the service is hard down.

The NAS selfupdates roughly monthly, and it takes about an hour. The service is stopped during this time.

This gives me a "perfect hardware" uptime of about 99.8.

I've had a single hardware failure in the last year, but it had the service down for 3 days waiting on shipping for a part, which gives an empirical hardware of 99.17.

I've not had any major maintenance on this setup in the last few years, though I expect to replace the NAS's drives in stages over the next few weeks. However, for a best-case, I'll give it 100.

My internet has not gone out in 2.5 years, so I am going to give it an optimistic 100.

My power, however, has been out for a total of 30 hours, of which, 28 hours outlasted my UPS. Based on syslog from NUT calling shutdown, until the first timestamp on reboot, therefore I have a Grid+UPS power availability of 99.68

If we compose all these, we have a total uptime of 98.65 of total services, which is far less reliable for basic operations (git cli interactions) than any of Git(Lab|Hub), Bitbucket, SourceHut.

This only covers all services down cases, my single-system setup doesn't often partially fail, and isn't engineered to hide maintenance (and doing so would be far out of scope and budget). Large services tend to fail partially, as they are composed of many individual systems with varied duties, and the system is often designed to fallback to basic function in the event of failure.

Not to even mention the question of capacity, which my 4c 8t of amd64 comes nowhere close to the CDN-ish power of the major SaaS's in this space.
- Streaming algorithms [1]

- Eventual consistency [2]

- Refinement types [3], [4]

[1] https://www2.cs.uh.edu/~ceick/6340/Streams.pdf

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[3] https://ranjitjhala.github.io/static/trust_but_verify.pdf

[4] https://ranjitjhala.github.io/static/refinement_types_for_ty...
ML-Derived Facial Characteristics and Financial Analyst Performance
Unless not lying / over sharing is bad for your shareholders. Lawyers could argue that publicizing non-material bad news about your service health makes your stock price drop.
My packages at work are about 1.5k lines. Precompilation is about 10-15 seconds. After precomp, about 1-2 seconds to load with "import" or "using". The longest I've seen on precomp have been DifferentialEquations.jl. I've not used it in a while, though I have plans to for personal (non-work related) projects.

My packages have 5-10 dependencies in them, I tend to keep my packages/tooling streamlined, and I performance optimize them (everything from loading time, through data structure/algorithm implementation) quite thoroughly.

Other users at my firm are adopting Julia as well. It isn't displacing python, though that is a possible future. Its similar enough that many grasp it right away. Its fast enough that its a viable alternative to Python + C++.

This said, Julia is not a silver bullet[1], though it is an excellent programming language. It has been able to do all of the same tasks as my python code. Faster (often multiple orders of magnitude) working with 10s to 100s of GB of data, in parallel.

Its a better solution for my workflow, and an increasing number of others. If its not to your liking, that's fine. No need to try to push it down with, from my vantage point, what seems like specious claims (very long precompilation times close to an hour, or so). If you have such actual examples, please post them. I'd love to see them. Chances are we could optimize this fairly easily.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/silver%20bullet
Waste heat is a problem in urban areas

https://climatemodeling.science.energy.gov/research-highligh...

but not so much a global problem. That paper is off base in so many ways, for instance a tiny concentration of CO2 really can hold back a lot of infrared because light is a wave and not a particle so it's not like this tiny photon has to make a direct hit on a CO2 molecule.
Fusion is not just another way to power our lightbulbs it's a completely different kind of energy.

Two unique properties of energy density like Fusion.

1. The ability to hit 10% of the speed of light in space
2. The ability to create fundamental elements like gold, silver etc.

Another good example of the fact that there are no scarcity of resources only scarcity of knowledge. Resources are created not found.

Edit: Why am I being downvoted?
On mobile (iOS Safari) the navigation is often broken and swiping back goes to the wrong page. This usually happens between the readme and any file in the files browser, especially if I go back before the current page has completely loaded. I suspect there is a race condition with JavaScript hijacking the history API and not updating it quickly enough so that if you navigate back before the history has been made consistent, you end up on the wrong page.
>A serious amateur could shoot the same film body for a decade,

The oldest camera I have still in working condition is a mid-1950s vintage Speed Graphic.
It’s often more expensive to convert offices than it would be to knock the building down and start from scratch.
Abusing vector search for texts, maps, and chess
It is disappointing philosophically but I would imagine how the game theory of this works out strategically if really trying to play an optimal strategy is "always cheat".

There just such asymmetry between the risks vs payouts.

Sadly, I imagine your professor was simply wrong. Most likely even for you there is something you could cheat/lie about that would be practically undetectable and give a huge payout for almost no risk.

This is also why a level of a self delusion is an advantage in our system too. Then you get the benefits of cheating/lies without even knowing it or having to intentionally cheat/lie.

"Cheating ultimately cheats oneself" sounds right but just isn't reality.
More like I'm arguing that if they use their BG detection for catching adblockers as well, then that part _might_ be attacked with a greater force than before - and if broken, might hurt them more than adblockers did. Of course it's just pure speculation.

Back to the technical argument, I was refering to the fact that a DB read to check if an ad should be served (done on the player page) as well as the DB write to check if the video was downloaded earlier (on the CDN, we have signatures there and expiry date passed as a parameter) might be infeasible from the architectural/performance point of view, but I gotta admit I actually don't have any relevant knowledge here so I'm just speculating because this seems interesting.
Or, is it just another version of Fake it Till You Make it.

Lot of programmers that can pass the interview questions might not survive a large organization, and vice versa, they can't pass but would be good at surviving.

Generally the larger the organization, the less 'individual performance'/'merit' is a factor, and it becomes more about being 'personable'. Technical skills decline in importance.

Of course, there is inertia. Some of these big organizations, that have lost the ability to 'create' highly complex applications, are riding on their size and inertia and tend towards eventual collapse. Not an iron rule, I've been surprised that it is Microsoft that seems to be able to re-invent and keep high tech skills focused on actual tech.
It's not particularly new, but recently I've been involved a lot with solving large combinatorial optimization problems

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_optimization

Algos to solve those both exact methods and heuristics are super useful in real world applications, and very underappreciated by the HN crowd IMO.
I know there are lots of people who do it, but I can't wrap my head about why any normal person pays for drinks and food at the cinema. It might not be the biggest ripoff I can think of, but it's probably the most blatant one. The markups are huge, for items everyone knows the cost of.
Somehow I've not yet heard of FAGMAN. Very humorous, just like the idea that they hold everyone to the same bar!

But to speak seriously for a moment, some will do it with exceptional candidates. Probably not FAANG, the attitude and level of competition is different there.
Unexpected Kant, and relevant. Nice!

"Would you go to a surgeon who cheated their way through medical school?"
The only thing stopping me doing that is the observation that these people don't seem to be very happy. Which makes sense, they have to live their life being that person.

Play the politics to get the things you need, by all means. But if life is a jungle then you're better off with a machete and your own skills (which can never be taken away from you) than a heavy bag of looted gold and a head full of fantasies about why you rightly own it.
90% of the muscle labour a human invests in driving a car is wasted, being converted into heat rather than useful mechanical work. As such, we consider it unlikely that efficiency gains from improved combustion can meaningfully improve on the gasoline efficiency crisis.
Could this be done with a vector database?
> to advance authoritarian agenda

> make journalism harder

Quite the opposite, as far as I can see.
I don't think a three-year support period is the argument you are making it out to be.

As a side-note, you've used your comment to remember some Apple devices from 13 years ago and compared them to an Android device bought in 2020.
anyone that wants to ship a mobile app?
What all are you using as your primary interface for ChatGPT et al LLMs? I've had some success with OpenAI's default UI but mostly I've been trying out various community Neovim plugins.

I feel strongly that I want an in-IDE pair-programming assistant, but so far I've had at least one or more blocking issues with many of the currently available open source options.

NeoAI is great - for example - I've had it working well on multiple machines before - but today after a Neovim / Astronvim update I'm getting errors about my quotas (which are fine) back from the plugin - and I don't really have time to debug that because I need to get some work done :/
Interviews are indeed broken and largely pointless. For so many reasons, interviews often have no real relationship to the work or skills required. It's no surprise that interview cheaters can still be successful at roles. Of course it's also possible that they aren't really accomplishing much at work due to any other number of company failures.

I refuse to do rounds of interviews any more. I will have the initial recruiter call and then one solo or team online call to talk, but no tests and no projects. I've burned far too many hours on this in the past; and when I get the role, I walk in and find they actually need about 1/10th of my skills and mental capacity.

Put the candidate on a 1-month trial contract. If that goes well, then extend the contract or convert it to employment.
Just add a lock ;)
Narrative over Numbers
Google has 50x more people working in security than fastmail has total employees.
for example? I don't see how it would be useful at all
It's not like the administrators will have to take personal responsibility if they break some labor laws along the way...
My dream is that we all adopt tools for detecting when docs have become stale. That risk is one of the big reasons for not writing extensive docs in the first place, so the whole dynamic could change.
GPT-4 got me through porting a near SoTA image segmenter to the browser and building a prototype UX that uses the webcam to grab decals from the real world in a few hours that prob would have taken me at least 5x longer.
I agree with you and support your decision. I won't expose my kids to this stuff either. The possibility of harm absolutely exists. Gambling addiction is a recognized medical diagnosis: ICD-10 F63.0. More recently, video game addiction was accepted as a diagnosis as well:

https://www.who.int/standards/classifications/frequently-ask...

Adults are vulnerable to this, there's no reason to believe children aren't. It's often difficult to spot the signs, designers disguise them very well behind pretty visuals and indirection. Their livelihoods depend on it.

I'll post here what I know from my own experience just in case it helps anyone:

If you see a timer anywhere, it's a red flag. A common form of timer are the rate limiting resources found in many games, especially freemium ones. There'll be some kind of resource that gets used up as you play and it refreshes periodically. For example, there's games where playing costs "energy" which you get for free every day. These are periodic rewards which create a schedule for players, forming habits. There might be a literal timer counting down to the refresh right there on the user interface. You can pay to reset the timer, of course.

Timers include even seemingly innocent stuff like "this building will take X hours to complete". The mere existence of explicit timers betrays the fact there's no actual game in there and they're just simulating the work as an abstract task that takes some arbitrary amount time to complete. Extremely common in mobile games which don't have good controls or much room for complexity. The strategy is to rate limit player progression and let players pay to skip ahead. In multiplayer games, this implies the game is actually a spending competition in disguise: whoever spends the most money on the game progresses faster, gets ahead and wins.

Timers also take the form of "daily tasks". You get rewarded if you login every day and maintain some baseline activity. This is straight up designed to form habits, the whole point is to get players logging in 7 days a week. You can even find this in non-game apps. Duolingo for example has this obnoxious design. Streaks, daily tasks, monthly badges, you name it.

In more traditional games, the timers are more indirect. Progression in pretty much every RPG is a function of time. You can calculate values such as experience per hour, levels and skills per hour. There's a timer hidden in there. More benign since it's not literally designed to hijack people's brains for profit but it's still addictive. "Grinding" just means doing meaningless tasks over and over until some reward is obtained. There are people out there who spend truly pathological amounts of time doing this.

Gambling is also prevalent in video games. Lootboxes, gachas, collectibles, card games. Anything involving the chance to gain something. Plenty of documentation on the addictiveness of gambling and its effects on the brain.
I'm gonna have to go with scarface on this one. While your statements could very well be true, it is dangerous to make cultural generalizations without the data to back it.
Or anywhere in Canada where the hockey teams don’t have to perform well but demand still well exceeds supply.
If AI is using training data from your site, presumably it got that data by crawling it. So either it's already respecting robots.txt, in which case ai.txt would be redundant, or it's ignoring it, in which case there's no reason to expect it would respect ai.txt any more than it did robots.txt.
Yikes. The AWS status page is a joke -- it's even a joke internally at AWS. There used to be (might still be?) an extension which just replaces all the icons on the AWS status page with one level worse than actually reported.
Flip: AI-designed card game built for Google I/O
Some context - Helion was funded by YC early and more recent rounds were led by Sam Altman personally

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-series-e/?guccounte...
If there’s one thing LLMs are pretty good at it’s summarizing content. Shouldn’t your website just have an “About” page with this information that humans can read too?
I wish I had known this back in the day.
It's a composition vs. inheritance problem.

I postulate that robots need at least a single manipulator in the physical realm: Mechanical arm assembling car doors = robot. CNC machine that follows a path = robot. Mechs with chicken legs = robot. Brain in a vat = not a robot... but can be embedded in a robot.
We have a budget process. If they fail to pass a budget, we get a government shutdown. Shutdowns are already extreme, but at least they are well understood and incremental. A 1 day shutdown is not too bad. A 1 year shutdown is untenable. Why do they need more leverage?
A distributed consensus mechanism provides byzantine fault tolerance - which is helpful even with trusted actors, as this event demonstrates.