skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is behind the recent wave of Terms of Service changes?
I have had prompts from several apps, the New York Times, Zoom, and Samsung all modifying their terms of service.

Samsung said it was something about arbitration, but there are so many happening so close together, I have to wonder if some new law or lawsuit has set a precedent they're modifying for.
> I believe this system will only support the easiest of tax forms, the type any idiot can fill out.

Which is fine. That would be a huge win.
>Wouldn't opinion pieces be the first to go?

No because people are interested in the opinions of influencers.
>Then why do people worry about UI dark patterns and pay-to-win games?

people worry about a lot of stuff. Some inconsequential to the grand scheme of things.

>You're free to burn your life savings after all

You are indeed free to. I don't recommend it, but I'm not your moral guardian nor therapist.

> Either Apple is complicit or game companies are totally justified and deserve praise for figuring out how to squeeze billions of dollars from regular people. Both cannot be true.

I don't see why not. Apple can allow for it and game companies can reap the rewards.

I'm not even sure what the argument is at this point. I just wanted to point out that the ability to buy and spend thousands on a single video game isn't related to privacy concerns/settings. Unless your password was hacked and someone else did it, what connection is there?
About a year ago, I got audited by the IRS. It was 100% my fault; I had sold a good chunk of stock in 2020 and but forgot to report the capital gains on my tax form (a tax form that was, evidently, automatically approved by the fed in about ten minutes!).

So last year I got a bill in the mail for $8,000; $7,000 for the actual taxes I owed, and a $1,000 fine. I was able to call and get the fine lowered (thanks to advice I received in HN actually!) and I wasn't "angry" with anyone but myself. I did owe the money, I didn't blame the IRS for wanting it.

But it did kind of make me wonder something: if the government was able to find out that I screwed up on my taxes, then why am I doing anything? Clearly they have all the data and information necessary to determine how much I actually owed, and clearly they were able to spot my mistake, so why make me pay $60 for TurboTax at all? Why not just send me a bill or refund every year?

This is a step in the right direction.
> There is, and it’s been stated in simple terms multiple times in these comments

Yet not in yours. What makes "these comments" a better source on what these laws are for than the laws themselves?

The laws are explicitly about stopping people from filming police. They don't make it illegal to obstruct the police.
Laws preventing obstruction of police already exited before these new laws. Police already had, and continue to have, the power to order people to move back or disperse due to concerns over officer or public safety.

These new laws don't change those existing laws. All these new laws do is criminalize filming police.
Show HN: ChatCareer – A Resume Editing App Powered by ChatGPT
Hello HN Community,

We're introducing ChatCareer https://chatcareer.org, a new tool designed to assist with resume editing, leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT.

Our idea is simple. Users can have a conversation about their experiences and our app generates bullet points for their resumes. These points are saved to your personal database and can be used and refined for future applications. This way, as you apply to more jobs, your bank of bullet points evolves and becomes more refined, which should, in turn, improve the quality of your resumes.

Currently, we're offering this service for free, in the hopes that it could make a difference in how job seekers approach the application process.

To make the process interactive and to improve our services, we're inviting users for interviews. Participants will be given a VIP Role on our Discord server (https://discord.gg/6MxQWHqxD5) and a chance to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card. Additionally, we're providing free career consulting services until you find your job.

We appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or questions you may have. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Thank you and best of luck with your job search.
... https://www.thebalancemoney.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-de...
As much as I’m fond of my collection of Matroska files with SSA/ASS subtitle tracks, I don’t think those are appropriate for the Web, what with all the font issues; and SRT is a nightmare of encodings. But apparently there’s a WebM-blessed way[1] of embedding WebVTT ( = SRT + UTF-8 − decimal commas) now? Which is of course different[2] from the more recent Matroska.org-blessed way[3], sigh.

[1] https://www.webmproject.org/docs/container/#webvtt-guideline...

[2] https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/5641

[3] https://matroska.org/technical/codec_specs.html#s_textwebvtt
Zelle is already owned by a consortium of banks. Even if FedNow were to make Zelle obsolete, it wouldn't do anything to harm the banks, so they ultimately wouldn't care.

Meanwhile, Venmo is owned by PayPal, who deserves to become obsolete, so we should all be cheering this on.
Hell. Heck. Shit. That piece is really scary. I did NOT expect that. Remote attestation really is coming. What will happen to Linux? My beloved NixOS? New OSes, Theseus OS? What is the solution? Don't nation states see that this will give American companies too much power, even more than now, too much to really significantly matter?

I see no solution beyond the deglobalization of the entire tech stack (down to the very OSes) and multiple sources of trust in the form of multiple nation states. Maybe my government will make an official Linux distro and make it mandatory, so we can escape this coming shit.
The subfloors I've seen for old houses in Boston are also laid perpendicular to the joists, though diagonal does seem like it would make more sense.
Cloudflare is cheap + free egress
In terms of human history, easily eavesdroppable communication is relatively new, mass eavesdroppable communication even more. I’d like to believe we’re reverting back to the mean - similar privacy to in person conversation but now over long distant.
In previous test by Cloudinary BPG were surprising better than AV1 and JPEG XL in some / many categories. Which lead me to believe VVC in BPG would have done even better.
Zelle may still allow for you to send money to a non-Zelle account - as a dark pattern, they'll hold that cash for the recipient and give them an opportunity to sign up and receive it. This was a big pressure point for smaller banks and CUs to sign up.
> So, not really that useful for a small startup wanting to make a product out of it.

I mean, 50k puts it out of “a couple people starting something in their garage”, but it doesn’t really lock out much beyond that. That’s pretty close to the franchise fee for opening a McDonald’s.

Yes, it could be more equitable, but if that’s the only barrier to access, it’s… pretty open for even quite small businesses.
> "Every time Software is used to fix a [Electrical/Mechanical] problem, a Gremlin is born".

Just did one of those this morning. Hmmm.
I kinda want a Juicero now, but only as an object d'Art. It was a garbage product.
Ice core from secret US Army base reveals historical Greenland ice-sheet melting
Ok, I’ll let the homebrew maintainers that you don’t fund and never will that they just need to launch expensive, labour and time intensive opt-in studies of user behavior modeled after totally comparable clinical trials to understand how the system you’re utilizing for free is used in the real world!

Thanks, this has been super useful. I’m sure the maintainers will be relived.
ChatGPT isn’t the limiting factor here, a good way to expose the toggles is. I recently tried to expose our company CRM to employees by means of a Teams bot they could ask for stuff in natural language (like „send an invite link to newlead@example.org“ or „how many MAUs did customer Foo have in June“), but while I almost got there, communicating an ever-growing set of actionable commands (with an arbitrary number of arguments) to the model was more complex than I thought.
The financial sector is the clear winner in who makes worse user-facing software though. I've interacted with a whole variety of US government services from federal to city and they're on average better than the garbage I have to use for back end management related to bills and various investments. Consumer tax software is downright user-hostile.
What a great experiment. Math looked a bit daunting at first (pixel 22,34) glance but it really wasn't bad. Took me about 4 minutes in total to do the math.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants a chill afternoon challenge. And the best part is seeing the final image come together.
Another nail in the crypto's coffin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controve...

How is something that has a wikipedia page censored in any way?
>well The writing wasn’t very good anyway, it was all a regurgitation of the same thing over and over anyways

well, yes. you clearly understand the problem, but stating it dismissively doesn't refute it.

paying people to do minimal rewrites of press releases or wire service articles is not productive work. at all. people would be better served by reading the original source.

a job that requires no skill and provides no benefit isn't really a job, it's just a selectively-applied welfare program, disproportionately provided to the people with the best connections. putting a stop to those sorts of "jobs" is not a bad thing.
What is produced in the past 30 years? Lots of stuff. For example the LIGO project produced sufficient evidence to conclude that gravity waves exist and we can measure them, as well as identifying sources of such waves. No real application is anticipated- but it's damned nice to know that the prediction was borne out by reality.

CRISPR- an extraordinary tool for genetic manipulation. Could potentially have a huge impact in medical treatments; has already revolutionized experimental research.

AlphaFold demonstrated that protein structure prediction with experimental-level accuracy is possible. This could also have huge implications in medical research and treatments.

Probably, we don't see advancements occurring in real time because we learn about things that happened over decades or centuries, but collapse them to short intervals.
Weird naming choice -- isn't fury.io the package repository host?
I would assume that sender+recipient for the 2FA is stable, so your graylist software should learn that as a good sender. Don't graylist every single email from a good sender!
Andotrope/Gehn's Imager [video]
I'm not disputing that many of them file a return. I'm saying that they wouldn't possibly be paying for this system, which is paid for by federal taxes.
It's double the work if you skim the instructions too fast and pick your own empty pixel and compute it, only to find that you need to be assigned one!
This is not what was intended. Just read the 1995 announcement - straight from the horse’s mouth. It was clear that Netscape had big plans for this. JS had its limitations, sure, but it could talk to Java on the client - which certainly did have network access. And famously, Microsoft felt so threatened by this new “platform” that they feared it would make Windows redundant. The late 90s was a wild ride.

> JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers. While Java is used by programmers to create new objects and applets, JavaScript is designed for use by HTML page authors and enterprise application developers to dynamically script the behavior of objects running on either the client or the server. JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications.
This is not something revolutionary, multiple countries already have instant payment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment. This is just a technical improvement on existing systems. Regarding your questions the FED is simply providing a facility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_house_(finance)) that willing participants (the list of early adopters is in the article) can use.
Very important article. Software engineering also has a lot of fat-tailed distributions that can masquerade as normal distributions. Our intuition tends to assume normal distributions to one degree or another and we must learn when to disregard it.

One example that is both very important to software engineers and will hit close to home is effort estimations. It is a super fat-tailed distribution. The problem is that a lot of tools managers will use to try to make schedules implicitly assume that errors will essentially be Gaussian. I can draw this fancy Gantt chart because OK, sure, task 26 may be a couple of days late, but maybe task 24 will be a couple of days early. As we all know from real life, tasks are effectively never early, and it's completely expected that at least one task from any non-trivial project will be budgeted for 2 weeks in the early planning stage but actually take 4 months. Managers are driven batty by this because intuitively this feels like a 7 or 8 sigma event... but in real life, it isn't, it's so predictable that I just predicted it in your project, sight unseen, even though I know nothing about your project other than the fact it is "nontrivial".

But there's a ton of places in software engineering, especially at any kind of scale, you must learn to discard Gaussian assumptions and deal with fatter tailed distributions. I get a lot of mileage out of the ideas in this essay. It's hard to give a really concrete guide to how to do that, but it's a very valuable skill if you can figure out how to learn it.
The other lever is quality of life at work.

The relevant measure is the ratio of pay to quality of life at work, not just pay.
Those who don’t think it matters already have a choice of great products. We try to build a better alternative to those who think it does. We also think it’s our job to make the ux great, to make sn analogy we think a healthy and tasty food is a better value proposition which for a network is very important.
The built in morality is actually built in propaganda
Oh man I've needed this for a while to the point where I was about to build it my self so thanks! It would be great though if it also listed the tagged nixpkgs version in addition to the hash if applicable.
Gehn’s Holographic Imager/ Andotrope
> This would be equivalent to saying that "Freedom" is defined by the US Constitution or the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms.

The idea of freedom existed before both documents. The idea of Open Source was proposed in 1998 [0], and the OSI was created to define it in the same year [1]. This is not at all equivalent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative
Well, to be fair, the alternative is to simply leave China entirely. Considering how much malware and spyware the average Chinese phone has... Better a compromised iPhone than some of those things.
> Self-documenting code is perfectly capable of expressing the "why" in addition to the "what".

I don't think anymore that's true, at least in a number of areas.

In another life, I've worked on concurrent data structures in java and/or lock-free java code I'd at this point call too arcane to ever write. The code ended up looking deceptively simple and it was the correct, minimal set of code to write. I don't see any way to express the correctness reasoning for these parts of code in code.

And now I'm dealing with configuration management. Code managing applications and systems. Some of these applications just resist any obvious or intuitive approach, and some others exhibit destructive or catastrophic behavior if approached with an intuitive approach. Again, how to do this in code? The working code is the smallest, most robust set of code I can setup to work around the madness. But why this is the least horrible way to approach this, I cannot express that in code. I can express this in comments.
So is this gonna kill apps like CashApp and Venmo ?
This shows poll results, namely the bit in the news paper they used for the headline, but not the actual question American's were asked that ended with "..amount spent for this purpose or not?" which is just as important as the data.
I think TIFF has some unique features that makes it more prone to certain security issues[1] compared to other formats, such as storing absolute file offsets instead of relative offsets. So I am not sure TIFF is a good container format, but many camera raws are TIFF-based for some reason.[2]

[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=libtiff

[2] https://exiftool.org/#supported (search for "TIFF-based")
- Do you have plans to support other connectors, specifically OneDrive?
- Do you have a demo somewhere? From the website and screenshots, it's not clear the functionalities you offer. A few min long screencast would help.
- How do you differ youself from Quivr? Seems like another open source alternative and has some nice feature.
Thanks for this. I will try to use this and see how well it works for my use case.
> Well the purpose of public policy is to serve the will and preferences of the people, so I’d suggest we should rely on our democratic processes to have the final say on all matters of public policy.

Policy in the U.S is decided through democracy. But that begs the question, how should voters decide how to vote? Unless your belief is that vibes are valid, then it should be science.

> This is complete nonsense...

And it seems like that is your position. If you think there is widespread systemic error in science, I got bad news for you about vibes.

> This is also nonsense. Public discussions on science are extensively gatekept to only allowing the views of “the experts” and people who agree with “the experts”. A non-expert challenging the claims made by an expert is misinformation, and should be fact-checked and flagged with a disclaimer, or removed from the discussion entirely.

Have you considered that people get fact checked because they say some wild things without good evidence? Do you not care that people can just make things up?
They ask for the worksheet to check that you're not cheating. They don't check the pixel values. I think much of the charm of the image is seeing the errors.

By the way, there's more going on in the shader algorithm than you might expect. Here's an explanation of the worksheet:

u, v are coordinates relative to the center of the image
h is radius from center, squared
Section B generates the ball:
B3-8 generates the reflected color on the ball.
B9-11 applies the diffuse illumination to the ball.
B12 adds the illumination highlight.
Section C creates the ground:
C5 puts a shadow directly under the ball.
C13 is the cast shadow of the ball.
Section D creates the sky with a simple gradient
Section E converts the image from two-color to three-color
One thing I don't get: how does a government think they can ban encryption? criminals can always encrypt their communication if they want to. How could they even be detected?
The article went from "selling personal data to AI companies" to "selling results in the API search with a longer summary than Google which might be a violation of fair use policy", and yet you still don't want to back down.
I have Zero Knowledge about this topic
Yes. Preferences and ethics are not consistent among all living humans. Alignment is going to have to produce a single internally-consistent artefact, which will inevitably alienate some portion of humanity. There are people online who very keenly want to exterminate all Jews, their views are unlikely to be expressed in a consensus AI. One measure of alignment would be how many people are alienated: if a billion people hate your AI it's probably not well aligned, a mere ten million would be better. But it's never going to be zero.

I am not sure "a lot of books have been written about it" is a knockdown argument against alignment. We are, after all, writing a mind from scratch here. We can directly encode values into it. Books are powerful, but history would look very different if reading a book completely rewrote a human brain.
Which is an even worse look for TSMC. They could easily do it, since they already do for other states, but they want to pay bottom dollar so much that they would rather retain that card (a relatively minor one for an employer) in their hand than play it.
> 30 film IMAX screens in the world

That seems low, I'm pretty sure there are at least 3 or 4 in my city alone - and it's not even a capital.
Time Lapse of Ants Invading a Document Scanner [video]
I think this is a "we call you" situation, so if the kid is on the bubble they ask for the bribe. It doesn't work the other way if the kid is unqualified. No more Kushners...
In a similar vein, F1 racing has an enormous amount of engineering effort put into it in the name of winning a race and those efforts can have positive impacts outside of F1.

It does sadden me that these days their designs are much more restricted, as I enjoyed the wacky ideas we would occasionally see when the rules were less restrictive.
Corporations are rarely made to do anything, unless some court judgement forces them. More likely, corporations die because they couldn't adapt and survive.

Any legacy web entity is at risk of disappearing sooner than later, because most actual web trafic (that isn't bot made) is driven by people born after the web was created, who couldn't care less about why and how the web came to be. They are running with it and breaking it (as well as other things) as they see fit.

Google et al. is already that irrelevant, old, rotting and decrepit thing from ancient history. Unless Alphabet can pull some new trick without killing it first. Thanks for the ride. That's the message here.
Oh, right. I did skip stating an important step in the plan [so, upvoted]. I would do away with the withholding scheme (perhaps creating a parallel savings mechanism) and force income earners to write a check/do an ACH for their taxes.

Under that system, I'm totally fine if people get a $1K refund after writing a check for $15K in taxes withheld. That would still demonstrate the linkage sufficiently to inform their voting choices.
The point is that the bulk of the cost is already duplicated. When was the last time Turbotax's UI had a major revamp? The conservative narrative is, "Intuit and H&R do this so IRS doesn't have to. Isn't it nice that you don't have to pay more for your tax prep software because the private sector is so efficient?"

No, we pay Intuit (or H&R or an actual accountant), and the federal government also spends money so the IRS can develop essentially the same functional code to check tax returns that the third party is preparing according to the same rules.

In 2006 during the primaries, one of Obama's operatives floated $2 Bn as the cost of tax prep. Not all of that would be avoided by an IRS "free" e-filing app, but even if e-filing apps only represent 25%, it wouldn't take that long at $500 million per year to pay for the development of an app and refactoring IRS's existing code to be used in the app, even if it turns into a horribly inefficient project. How many billions can IRS spend on a turbotax killer without producing a turbotax killer?
T + 1 millisecond seems impossible. Light can only travel a couple of hundred miles in a millisecond.
Compare the source code at https://todomvc.com/ to see what various frameworks bring to the table. VanillaJS is generally much more code.
Surely that’s just the nature of IPFS, right?