skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There may be some truth to that, and they did get the Conservatives to run a referendum on changing the electoral system from "First Past The Post" to "Alternative Vote". In some ways, getting that referendum should have been an incredible win worth sacrificing some short term policies. Unfortunately the campaign for the change was a disaster, and the misinformation and fear mongering about the change pushed the country to vote it down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...
A key interesting point that highlights how increased efficiency creates choking points and fragility:

>Shay Assad: We have nowhere else to go. For many of these weapons that are being sent over to Ukraine right now, there's only one supplier. And the companies know it.

>It wasn't always like this. The roots of the problem can be traced to 1993, when the Pentagon, looking to cut costs, urged defense companies to merge. Fifty one major contractors consolidated to five giants.
South Korea Consults on Draft Decree to Personal Information Protection Act
Among other things, infringing cross-border data transfers are considered also in South Korea.
If you apply principle of least privilege to developers then ideally you should have a whitelist of every software package that they need to use. What happens then when a productive developer, instead of developing from scratch, searches for a solution to some problem and discovers that there is already a module that may solve it? Do they go to some central committe to get approval to add it to the whitelist? What are their criteria? How long will it take them to approve it?

Suppose it takes a couple of days. Then the developer tries the module. Discovers immediately that the module doesn't solve the problem. That's two days wasted for nothing.

Suppose some module that has dependencies on a huge list of other modules. How long will it take now?

I'm not saying polp isn't valid. But is it practical?
Show HN: Visualizations of Open Source Repositories
This is what our donations are paying for? I'll be thinking twice before donating again.
Religious organization of crowds:

"The faithful are gathered together at appointed places and times, and through performances which are always the same, they are transported into a mild state of crowd feeling sufficient to impress itself on them without becoming dangerous, and to which they grow accustomed. Their feeling of unity is dispensed to them in doses and the continuance of the church depends on the rightness of the dosage."
p. 25
The federal "poverty line" definition is notoriously arbitrary and based on a model of household expenses that hasn't been valid for at least a generation. It's almost completely useless for anything except punitively restricting access to aid.

> Also interesting that the issues here would still be categorized as caused by poverty rather than the pandemic and our pandemic response.

This is what they're doing. "The pandemic" is a human social and political phenomenon. So is poverty. There's not going to be a clear line between the two either broadly or in many specific cases. Someone who caught covid at work knowing they were immunocompromised but needed the money, did they die of pandemic or poverty? Someone who died of preventable covid complications but couldn't access adequate healthcare because of money?

Approaching it as "pandemic, mediated by poverty" is a useful lens and people are also studying it that way. But "poverty, mediated by pandemic" is also useful and in a different way and that's what this one went with.
I would note that at least browsers are multi-platform. This seems to be aimed more at making it harder to browse the web on certain devices, regardless of the software you run on them.

I would also say that JS is not the (only) problem making browsers complex and large. CSS is also extraordinarily complex, and together with everything going into the DOM makes for a large chunk of browser complexity. Of course, JS adds another layer on top, but it's not like a no-JS web browser that can still render any modern page without JS is a simple project.
Vscode was always going to attract such issues. On my system, the app does not have access to the home directory and everything is done on a remote container that I locally ssh into (thanks to flatpak's bubblewrap and docker). As a result everything is cleaner and vscode is isolated from the host.

Access to local folders on the host (though rare) is approved on a needs basis.
Since this was written Rails has become much better about this kind of thing.

I think Arel and some of the other work that really helped was happening more than 10 years ago now (how time flies!) but it was a non-trivial upgrade so a lot of production sites didn't switch over for a few more years.
That is a good point, but parallelism degrades to concurrency when you run out of CPU cores.
How can this foundation be held accountable?
The playground was the inspiration for the post. I always wanted to be able to fiddle with malloc implementations and see how they work in this way.

Admittedly the playground is hard to understand at first, and a touch janky in places. But the workloads are taken from for-real malloc/free traces on programs!
Got this working locally - badly needs GPU support (have a 3090 so come on!) there is some workaround but expect it will come pretty soon. This video was a useful walkthough esp on using different model and upping the CPU threads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3F5riM5BNE
Yeah same day might be a bit excessive, come to think of it. Probably give it a week or so to set up a get together. Like a "living funeral" or something.
Show HN: Launch StableStudio local inference in one commmand
Happy to announce integration between imaginAIry and StableStudio. This is the easiest way to try out StableStudio with local image generation.

A local instance can be launched simply with
`pip install imaginairy --upgrade && aimg server`

As a reminder StableStudio is the new open-source version of DreamStudio from stability.ai. https://github.com/Stability-AI/StableStudio
By the double "B" I assume that you mean James and not World Wide? In my opinion, both qualify.
(not a rebuttal on your comment, just a continuation of the conversation)

I found it an interesting criticism, and from what we know about the project I don't think I agree with the author.

In the space of what database to use, there are really few differences between Postgres and Postgres' peers, that "using what's available" is a perfectly sound reasoning to use Postgresql over, say, MySQL. I think around that time MongoDB was a possible alternative as well, however it was experimental and often mocked. Postgres and Mysql are pretty much feature parity, even in 2011, except for very niche use cases, which this project did not sound like it would have.

Factoring in that Heroku's PG UI is great, and to use an alternative would mean to have to set things up yourself (in 2011 the Heroku marketplace was not yet as expansive iirc), or at least have another account at another SaaS company with dubious maturity, the decision to use PG seemed to have been given the correct amount of critical thinking ("will it be able to support all that we need? most likely yes").

The author may also not have been aware that for RoR applications the code is pretty DB-agnostic, an unawareness he hints at in other parts of the story as well. Meaning that in the span of the year that they're working on rebuilding the site in RoR, if they discover a use case that another DB would be extremely helpful with, they could relatively easily switch over to this other DB without having to rewrite all of the code. At most it'd take rewriting of some migrations for FK's and possibly some (hopefully few) custom SQL queries. Remember that they had a one-time-switch-over when the site was done being built, so during this year of development time, the database did not accrue live user data that would have made such a change more difficult.
Same for us, with two things to add:

1. Make "living documentation" part of your culture, so that the new hire feels empowered to extend and improve the documentation as they are using it to come up to speed.

2. Have proper production access controls, so that the new hire can be comfortable poking around without being afraid they can break something.
To be more accurate, the EU is requiring all storage and processing to be in a country which doesn't violate EU privacy laws. That's reasonable and flexible.
It makes more sense that the extension would check the configured telemetry enablement state and use that. Perhaps provide an extension-specific override, but certainly don’t default to anything besides the global value.

This is what happens if you use the first party telemetry module msft provides, but obviously not if you’re just sending random http requests.
Right. But I meant other than sleep.

When we sleep or get knocked out, we are aware that we've been unconscious for a period of time. But there could be other cases where we effectively lose consciousness for shorter periods of time - seconds perhaps - and the brain produces illusion of continuity, in the same way we get blind during saccades and the brain masks it out from our awareness by synthesizing data and screwing with the clock.
For reading, I'd recommend everything from Will Larson ( https://lethain.com ).

As for attitude and behaviours for making the jump, it's a combination of actively looking for opportunities (that's the easy part), and positioning yourself as someone who is an obvious choice for such a position, which is basically when you consistently have an attitude and reputation of total ownership, supporting others, never complaining or taking it easy and instead always thinking and delivering at a wider scope, being the person people come to for making a decision on what and how to do, rather than a person who is being told what and how to do.

Some people do all of that naturally. Lucky them. Others don't, and it's a journey to adjust. You don't need to be a "natural", but if you aren't you need to learn to behave like one before you can credibly go into a leadership position.
Bit off topic, but how on earth did Meta gross 116 billion USD ? lol

Of course we all find tech valuable, but that is absolutely stupid money for what I get out of their services, which is almost nothing hence I've not opened FB for weeks and I open Instagram for 2-3 minutes every day and turn it off, lately maybe every other day.

Even with more engaged users it's hard to believe it's worth that much money. Is the advertising really this effective ? Insane.
Foldit
I don't know how AU and NZ compare but NZ has 40% more UV than similar latitudes in North America.

https://niwa.co.nz/sites/default/files/import/attachments/Li...
> Maybe it could work if some of the tech giants sponsored it

its not about them sponsoring it, that frames it wrong. They news to use it, they have security budgets in the tens of millions, they will already be doing some auditing of their own. A vendor can provide that service to the wider market.
> Where is my 21st-century SR-71?

Flying during night time only from Groom Lake, most likely.
Last I checked the US government taxed US corporations based on profits. One would assume that if US corporations are making less profit due to fines, then they’re also paying less taxes to the U.S. government.
> do you want EU to adopt the same approach and ban TikTok along with Meta and the rest?

if only...
I'd say VSCode is a bit different in who it's aimed at. Only because it doesn't work for a consumer product doesn't mean this wouldn't work for VSCode.

Also it might be good to be more specific. E.g. don't ask for all permissions at once, instead if the app starts talking to telemetry.endpoint.com it has to ask for these specific permissions at that point.

Then the user can see, hey this is requesting access to this particular server, that seems fishy, let's not proceed.
i think the worse part of all this is that it won't be a real ban. you will immediately see the news apparatus telling stories about how teenagers get long prison sentences for downloading tiktok illegally. Real people will be punished for the theatrics of global politics.
cauliflower99 shares similar ideas too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36029345
I was referring to salaries on the big picture financial reports. It could mean more people.
That's more precise but also requires much more information. Recently I ran through that with a few different scenarios and most of them did come out really close to half of median. I can see why they would go with that number for simplicity and to reduce dependence on specific data and avoid accounting for reporting error in the data.
Last things I heard from these are idenity and green politics respectively so I wouldn't count on them to represent FOSS or computing freedom in general.
I've been working with Apple since 1986. I very much have enjoyed their ecosystem, and probably like them, for many of the same reasons that a lot of geeks hate them.

It's worked out OK, for me.

My first exposure to Apple personnel, were the MacHack conferences, of the late 1980s. Back then, Apple was still pretty "scruffy." Some of the T-shirts that showed up at MacHack are now silk-shirts at Apple.

Over the years, because of the companies that I've worked at, we have had pretty close relationships with Apple, and I have enjoyed interacting with many of their staff. I actually had a fairly decent window into their culture.

A few years ago, I finally left my last company (after almost 27 years), and started looking for work. During that time, I was contacted by Apple, and did a couple of interviews. They were probably the only company that I would have relocated for, in my fifties.

It didn't work out. As it turned out, and, quite surprisingly, I didn't mind that it fell through. The interviews made me aware that the culture was nothing like what I expected, and, I suspect, taking the job would have probably been a very bad move for me. I'm sure that the money would have been great, but I don't think I would have found the environment to my liking.

I'm one of those folks that isn't particularly interested in bucketloads of money. I really enjoy writing software as a craft. I'm quite aware that many folks, hereabouts, despise people like me, and that's sad. I feel as if a bit of the "soul" of software has been leached out.

But, at the same time, some very cool stuff has been accomplished (often, motivated by all that money), and I look forward to the future.
Indeed we are. Escpecially since we are now starting to get serious about using that big fusion reactor that just floats in the sky every day.
There are generally two ways to go about to enable plugins in whatever you're building:

- Clear API boundaries that defines what you can do or not, with each API surface being obsessively guarded in terms of what it lets through. Usually leads to secure extensions but hard (if not impossible) to do things the API authors didn't foresee as it's locked down hard. Figma plugins use this approach.

- Give extensions raw access to the host platform, to do whatever they want. This is what VSCode and many others do, which comes with a lot of issues regarding security, but plugin authors can essentially do whatever they want.

The first approach requires a lot of careful consideration, development time and maintenance, while leading also to a somewhat locked down environment. It's more secure, but also limits the usefulness of some extensions.

Microsoft, in their usual lazy fashion, chose the latter approach, probably because it makes the most money sense. Why spend a lot of development time (and money) when you can do it faster and for less money? Some security holes won't lose you a ton of money, but spending N developers building a proper plugin API will for sure cost you a ton of money.
Sure, it's good to compensate employees well. I replied in a sister comment that it's not inherently bad for the salaries to be high at Wikimedia, but it does seem a little frustrating to see a 1.5x annual salary severance for quitting a job when it's donation money being used to fund that severance.

If it were, I don't know, three months severance, that would still be very generous, and I don't think most people would be very upset. We've all seen a ton of banners vaguely implying that Wikimedia is strapped for cash and needs your help, but they have enough to spend an extra six hundred grand for someone quitting?
The time for careful consideration was maybe 20 or 40 years ago. Now we've blown past all emission targets, and it's too late for articles how passengers of the Titanic would be inconvenienced by a change of course.

Sorry a well in your desert property is drying up, but if we fuck up ocean currents there will be a lot more ruined properties and disrupted habitats. If heatwaves and wildfires continue to increase, there will be a lot more dust and devalued land.
> Hm, the section on using CI rather than pull requests seems odd. PRs can be part of CI. You can set up your pipeline to build and test the result of a PR; that is, you are testing each change as if you had pushed it to the project's mainline, but there's no potential for you to break the mainline branch in a way that hinders your team.

That doesn't actually stop you from breaking mainline though, just make it significantly less likely.

Say you are developing a class Foo, and I'm adding new code that uses Foo. You decide to refactor Foo to Bar. We won't get a conflict because I'm adding new code and not touching the Foo class.

In that case we both have pull requests that build fine but that once merged, won't compile. Running pipelines on each PR reduces the breakage but it can't eliminate it, unless you only allow one PR to build then merge at a time.
I don't think Schrems II mentioned the CLOUD ACT.
The point is that people can treat you differently based on their perception of you, mediated by apparent ethnicity. Your way of thinking doesn't factor in.
I only learned about the ranked query approach last week thanks to ChatGTP. Helped me solve a hairy query that rolled up activity events grouped by time periods. Before that I was struggling with distinct (and it was slow).

I’ve avoided ChatGTP until recently and at least for SQL refactoring, it’s great. The interesting part is the ranked example ChatCTP gave me was almost identical to the one in this post. I wonder if they’re (ChatGTP) is training up on technical blog posts.
What do you mean? I couldn't find what you're describing in the app.
Vector Semantics
100% this. It seems so obvious. If edge case escalation is uneconomical, price it so it's not.

I once lost a Google account because of their "the password is not enough, we'll randomly decide what is" policy. It's very unpleasant to get to that "make another account" page, and realise it's all gone.

I'd have happily paid money to go through identity verification and so on to get it back. Its sad they're just leaving this money on the table, hurting both themselves and their customers.
What concerns me more is Wikimedia Foundation was apparently until recently led by someone now on the payroll of Atlantic Council and U.S. Department of State. Must have done wonders to neutrality at Wikipedia.
They mean to say patriarchy and white supremacy. The fight is against the system. I don't know why so many people don't use better terminology that doesn't exclude allies.
I agree with those points, both on the positive and negative side.
Do you have some examples of vague or misleading names?
Yeah agreed. They will simply continue to violate the GDPR. If the last years global revenue was 116 Billion USD, the fine should be at least 200 Billion. Otherwise companies just will see the fine as cost of doing business.
They should be written as a % of profit from the area generating the fine
I don't think iCloud is a great example, because there's a definite value add in having your files synced between multiple devices and your computer. A better example might be Siri, which does basically nothing without an internet connection.
Ask HN: Where can I chat with technical people?
Where do techies chat?

I know there's eatonphil's discord and r/programminglanguages discord. Is there a HN chat or technical chat room that is very technical?

Regards
> android tried this initially with the permissions system. But literally every app requested every permission and it became completely useless.

Google could have fixed this by allowing the user to give the app mock permissions instead, e.g. empty or randomly-generated storage, fake camera device, randomly-generated contact list, etc. Third-party solutions that allow this have been around for about a decade, but they do not have the reach that Google does.
I'm Yevgeniy Gavrilenko, currently working at Phoenix Project. As an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialist, my profession involves optimizing websites and online content to increase visibility and rankings on search engine results pages. I am dedicated to helping businesses achieve their online goals by maximizing their online presence and search engine rankings.
I often work in a resource constrained environment where my program size is measured in two-digit kilobytes, RAM is measured in the single-digit kilobytes, and it can’t exceed some current measured in mA/h. When I am simply sending a UDP packet, I didn’t need nor can I afford the footprint that these libraries have.
I look at it from another perspective. Nvidia well have experience with QC programming techniques when the QC hardware actually becomes available. Just as Ada Lovelace is recognized as being the first computer programmer, before the actual computer machines were available.
I must've been around 12 myself. This game has been a part of my life since before puberty.

I ascribe part of my deep love for history to this game.
I don't know of good solutions. I'm deep in the "ban on regulate" camp, but I don't know what those bans or regulations should be. Honestly, I'm less concerned about Chinese and Russian agents than simple, capitalist free market forces.

Web sites which grab eyeballs grab dollars. There is no connection to truth, integrity, or honesty there. Right now, even with humans and Facebook-grade algorithms, that's leading to polarizing hatred. Things will get worse once LLM-style algorithms start generating content to optimize engagement.

We need individual free speech, but I'm much less sold on corporate free speech (or speech from algorithms optimized to a capitalist markets).
This implies that Meta doesn't make money outside of EU by exfiltrating EU users' data.

If Meta made zero money in EU whilst still offering a service to EU users, and still exfiltrating their data, should the fine be zero?
I suspect the major cloud providers will also each offer their own “enterprise friendly” LLM services (Azure already offers a version of OpenAI’s API). If they have the right data guarantees, that’ll probably be sufficient for companies that are already using their IaaS offerings.
uhm, it sends your hostname, detailed OS information, and by default, your publicly routable ip address (on the packet). That's pretty malicious.

I don't think the title was deceptive.
This right here. Not just Wind/Solar either. We have a community that was built right next to a coal fire power plant that's been there since the 70s (the neighborhood was built in 2005) and people are trying to work to get that power plant shut down because they don't like it's smokestacks and how much it lowers their land values. If we were to shut down that plant, we'd drop 1/3rd of the power generation in our area. If that plant were to actually shut down they'd lose their collective crap because of blackouts.

So basically their argument is "We want that power plant gone but we don't want to feel the effects of that power plant being gone. FIX IT NOW!!1!!11one!!11". Maybe they shouldn't have moved right next to a freakin power plant?