skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck?

I think Western society has been undergoing a transition between two different class systems. (Marxists would surely connect this with the economic transitions from feudalism to mercantilism to early capitalism to late capitalism.)

In the mediaeval class system, class was determined by social status which was predominantly inherited, and money alone was not enough to move from the bottom to the top. A person born poor might acquire great wealth, but they would still be locked out of the nobility/aristocracy, unless the monarch deigned to ennoble them. An impoverished baron socially outranked the far wealthier merchant who was born into poverty and worked/lucked their way out of it.

In the late capitalist class system–all that really matters is your net worth. Everything else is secondary. Who cares who your parents were or where you come from once you have a billion dollars to your name – and if a billionaire is excluded socially, it is very likely due to something about their individual behaviour (see e.g Kanye–although I suppose he's an ex-billionaire now), rather than their family background in itself.

The transition between the two systems has been ongoing; it still hasn't completely finished, but we've moved a lot closer to the late capitalist system, and a lot further away from the mediaeval system, than we were 50 or 100 years ago. I don't think the transition proceeds at the same rate in every country either – I think the UK retains more of the old class system than most other places (although even in the UK it is a lot weaker than it used to be); it also arguably retains some strength in the northeastern US, although not to the same extent as the UK.
Son of Anton remix did this year's back
> there are something less than a couple dozen in-person locations nationwide

About ⅔ of Canadians live within 2hrs drive of a Canadian Border Services office. This drops to about 56% of all Canadians if you limit it to a one-hour drive.

And there are a recorded 1,200 such manned offices across Canada. Not all of them handle self-clearing, mind you, as some are special-purpose offices that are not accessible to the public at large. But the vast majority do.

These CBS offices can be found at any border crossing, international airport, and harbour that has regularly-scheduled dockings of international ships, even cargo ships. There are 117 land border offices, 43 airport offices, and 393 marine offices in Canada alone.
Ask HN: What is a blog post that changed your life for the better?
I think the horse metaphor is more meant to relate to the majority of jobs.

People won't ascribe extra meaning to the average middle manager's slight alteration to a PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet.

The car changed the way we view horses. But it also diminished horse populations to a fraction of what they were.
If you use a robots.txt file to put your site's archives off limits to Google, does Google obey that? Your own search box can still search them.
Queen Rock legend Brian May launches astrophotography competition
There is very thin line, alas. And it goes to same old "were you really happy to use taxi before uber". In 2 countries where I did live and in many where I used just them, I wasn't happy.

Taxis were as unreliable and untrusworthy and they could be - unpredictable prices, you never know if it will actually come even if company accepted your request, shady city navigation when pay by meter etc.

So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers. But that ability seems like quickly and universally degrades to "we own you and your schedule" attitude by ubers of the world
Ask HN: Someone copied my Chrome extension, is there anything I can do?
Someone copied my extension, changed the name, then released it on the chrome webstore. My code is open source, so I get that they are allowed to do whatever they want with it, but it seems unfair that they can take the code and make their own extension with no changes. Actually, they do have some changes: they collect user data and webpage content. The person also claims to be "ex-FANG", which just makes it worse.

I only recently wrote the extension and it doesn't have that many users, but it is one of my first projects and it's a project that I am proud of. I'm sad to see it so blatantly copied like this. Is there anything I can do or is this just the reality of open source?
2020: California residents voted to classify gig workers as contractors.

2023: Appeals court upheld the decision.

If you don’t like this voting process, then propose an alternative.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/business/prop-22-upheld-c...
i would imagine the idiomatic clojure to do this is to convert the `p` into a bean using `clojure.core/bean`

but if it is a java record class, then there's currently no standard library way, since it's not a bean (getter/setter naming of properties). You'd have to write custom code for it, which sucks.
Yep, here’s an example of what a report looks like: https://tosnotify.com/reports/example
I've got some incredibly worthless stuff that I'd take $100 for.
Why do you need it in China?
The example you've provided of making it difficult to return an item (and thus also difficult to claim a refund) is growing, and it's something that I have also seen on Amazon.

As for Ebay I refer to it as the "place your grandparents go to get scammed" because there are simply too many gaps in their processes that allow scams to flourish and Ebay's customer service are only permitted to accept very specific types of evidence. This inflexibility allows scammers to thrive there.

I personally swore off Ebay after dealing with another type of scam that was operating in the UK. Whereby Ebay recognised unregistered mail tracking labels as if they were a fully tracked courier service. Scammers in the UK caught onto this error, providing a scam which goes roughly like this:

1. You buy expensive item on Ebay from scammer (usually a hacked account).

2. The scammer acquires Royal Mail tracking labels. (It's possible to pre-purchase them as Royal Mail aren't going to record the delivery address, unlike a fully tracked service where each label is associated with an address and parcel specs.)

3. The scammer assembles a basic parcel and addresses it to an address that is near the victim, but not exactly the victim's address. Typically the address will be a nearby convenience store as they will sign everything that comes in.

3. The scammer applies one of their Royal Mail tracking labels and drops off the parcel in a post box.

4. The tracking label's barcode is automatically scanned as it passes through sorting centres, however the address on the package is never recorded by Royal Mail; the tracking is effectively solely for the label.

5. The parcel is delivered to the false, but nearby address. The Royal Mail system receives a signature, a GPS imprint and a time of delivery - but crucially again the address is not recorded by Royal Mail.

At this stage you can see how the scam comes about. All a scammer needs to do is send anything to a nearby address and Ebay will deny refund requests because the scammer has a tracking history from Royal Mail.

However to be fair to Royal Mail, their website for this product clearly stated that it was not a fully tracked service, a nod to the shortcomings of the approach. I believe the product has now also been discontinued, instead now a photo of the delivery is taken - which would provide useful evidence to stop this kind of fraud.
> In the late 80s lots of people were doing these OOP -> C things, often literally using the C preprocessor. The C++ compilers were still early (and most of them effectively preprocessors)

IIRC, some early C++ implementations were described (by their implementors) as C++ => C preprocessors.
A knowledgable friend recently told me the wafer price is, you get what you get. This was in reference to a recent Apple story that TSMC was giving Apple a discount for bad dies, or something like that, on the 3nm node. I have no references.
Postgres already had cachet before Oracle bought MySql, but it was seen more as a small scale oracle replacement for people who were serious about data integrity or for lower volume OLTP work in the web sphere. The MySql acquisition coincided with performance gains by Postgres that made it more applicable to web scale OLTP workloads, and JSONB support was really the nail in the coffin.
For most folks autovacuum "Just Works", transparently and in the background. For people with large volumes of UPSERTs or similar workloads with lots of activity against existing rows, it may be necessary to tune autovacuum - usually to be more aggressive than the defaults. Aside from figuring out that this is a thing that can be done and then doing it (or paying someone to figure this out for you), there really isn't much operational burden involved.

I have seen cases where it made sense to run regularly scheduled vacuums outside of just leaving it all to autovacuum, but in my experience this is rare - when I see someone worrying about vacuums it's usually the case that they should just change an autovacuum knob and then forget about it.
> [Ubers] are as unreliable and untrusworthy and they could be - unpredictable prices, you never know if it will actually come even if company accepted your request etc.

Seriously, the number of times I've seen cancellations because the Uber didn't want to go in that direction or that neighborhood... or had unreal surge pricing applied, etc.

And that's today, so I doubt the Seattle change will make much of a difference. Many (not necessarily most. I don't have that data) drivers game the system in its current state.
I've tried leveraging several self-hosting solutions like TrueCharts(A app catalog fop TrueNAS SCALE) or Unraid both of which can use the ZFS.

Neither application has a built-in mechanism for backing up your application data that is anywhere near user-friendly.

TrueCharts does not have the GUI backup mechanism besides to protect user data per application. One application that becomes corrupt? Good luck, you have to restore all applications to a single point in time if you used with their commandline tool.

Unraid does not have any sort of backup mechanism relies on a community for setting up backups.

ZFS replication is not enough special care must be given for applications to be in their correct state to prevent data corruption.
>my only coworker is my spouse and best friend

TBH that's the part that scares me. I feel this is yet another avenue of socialization that is closing down in modern young adult life. People kept saying that the best place post college to meet friends is at work, and now some industries are going the direction where work may not even have coworkers in your area.

So where now if you don't drink? Hope to hit it off in some meetup with a person who shows up once? Community service simply so you aren't stuck in the house 24/7?
This is Washington state, not California.
I wouldn’t go quite that far. Generally speaking aerospace margins are there for two reasons:

- To try to compensate for the worst-case situations

- To try to compensate for the unknown-unknowns

If you made a Mars rover that experienced a worst-case re-entry burn, got blown off-course during landing by larger-than-ever-measured surface winds, had your solar panel etched by dust in said surface winds, and completed 89 of the 90 day mission, you should still very much feel like you’ve succeeded AND you’ve provided incredibly valuable input data for the next iteration. We then refine our mental model of the Martian atmospheric conditions and revise the worst-case scenario specs for next time.
This is a great example of the harms of AI.

Google presumably used AI to rank pages (it hasn’t been just PageRank for a while).

The AI has noticed people don’t engage with older content, so it deranks older content. It also deranks websites with lots of older content.

So websites pull their older content , which is an important form of historical memory.

Even if the AI isn’t actually doing this, people assume it is.

Because AIs aren’t rules based, we have to guess what it’s doing.

And we guess it’s deranking old sites.
MF Doom ("probably your favorite rapper's favorite rapper") put out some of his best work in the 2000's and 2010's. It's still 90's style hip hop. Go give it a chance.

Mindboggling demonstrating of the sort of phonological rhyming described in the article, but also with an impeccable sense of rhythm in terms of where to place the rhyme.

"No herb in the record bin / Called before a random search for curbside checkin' in."

https://youtu.be/oTPXz6yc2HY?t=34
We are rapidly moving millions of LOC onto Java 21 at $work so that we can take advantage of virtual threads. It's been relatively straightforward as we were already on Java 11 in most places (and on 13, 17 in other projects). The project is like the definition of "entreprise".

The move from 8 to 11 was way harder than upgrading from 11 to anything else. In general Java compatibility between versions is very good.
You can't really run them on a laptop or most consumer hardware though?
Unfortunately the repro test cases tend to be urgent production issues.

If the language was able to reliably check types, surely they would express that as an actual language feature. If the language creators don't trust their type system enough to call it a type system (and regard any uncaught error as a bug) then why should any mere user do so?
I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't sue literally everyone for ripping off the MacPaint interface. I know they had the more general Look-and-feel lawsuit against MicroSoft, but they didn't seem to capitalize on Bill's great UI innovations.
Skeptical-o-meter just went over 9000.
I'd say the difference is that game AI (chess AI here) is competitive. Its goal is to defeat an opponent in a zero-sum game, it has no other use, except maybe indirectly if techniques developed while making the engine have applications elsewhere.

ChatGPT is different. It can be used to compete against humans in a game, for example by writing an essay for you and try for the best score. Grading is a form of competition. And sure enough, it is "unsporting" to use ChatGPT.

But not all writing is a competition. In fact most of it isn't. For example let's say you are using ChatGPT to translate text, one of the things it is good at. You are not trying to compete against a human translator in a translation competition. You are just trying to understand some text, and you probably don't have the time and money to hire a professional translator, and the alternative would have been to just not do anything with the original text. You didn't beat a human, you did something you couldn't do before, a net positive outcome (or maybe net negative if the translation is misleading, but certainly not zero sum).

Same thing if, say, you are getting help from ChatGPT writing technical documentation in decent English, because you are a tech guy and not a good English writer. Same thing here, you can't afford a professional writer and editor, you are not trying to write a best-seller book, so without ChatGPT, you would have just written the documentation using your poor English, which may have harmed the comprehension of the people reading it. Again, a net positive.

There is AI vs human competition, and some people may rightfully or not think their job is going to be replaced by a machine, but it is only a small part of the story. Think about what (good and bad) things simply can't exist without ChatGPT in the absolute sense rather than "who is better".

Chess engines will make you play better chess, but what's the point? In the end, there is a winner and a loser, and no matter how high the level is, it will always be the case, you can't have two winners. That's what we have some arbitrary rules like "no engines" when people play against each other, because the absolute level of chess playing means nothing, the only thing that matters is what happens between the two players, it is zero sum.
Nothing in the comment mentions domestic mail, just email
I understand that it may be viewed as unpleasant, but ultimately if you install a proxy on your end that the server does not like (say an ad-blocker), I don't think it would be fair for the server to say its suffering a MITM attack. Likewise, even if the client is not happy with the third party the server is requesting, it still doesn't make sense to call it a MITM, IMO.
> This is Washington state.

And Seattle is only a city.

California is regarded as the most “liberal” state.

If gig workers “lost” in California, they will likely “lose” Washington state as well.
I’m very curious if exit bans are typically targeted towards Chinese nationals, dual-nationals, or foreigners.
Yes because Uber didn’t have to actually compete with taxis. They offered a nicer service at a cheap cost and both of these things were an illusion. The price was subsidized and the drivers weren’t required (at the time) to meet any of the regulations that apply to drivers or third party passengers (for good reasons.)

So they replaced one crappy service with another that has a better UX. All other benefits seem to have vanished when forced to actually make money and we’ve seen a ton of rationale for the existing regulations in the process. Similar to Airbnb
That is a much safer way to go for most use cases. Well actually, most use cases don't need edge compute at all, but for those that do, this setup is indeed common, and fine for most apps:

- Say we do edge compute in San Francisco, Montreal, London and Singapore

- Set up a PG master in one place (like San Francisco), and read replicas in every place (San Francisco, Montreal, London and Singapore)

- Have your app query the read replica when possible, only going to the master for writes

In rare cases, maybe any network latency is not OK, you really need an embedded DB for ultimate read performance - then this is pretty interesting. But a backend server truly needing an embedded DB is certainly a rare case. I would imagine this approach would come with some very major downsides, like having to replicate the entire DB to each app instance, as well as the inherent complexity/sketchiness of this setup, when you generally want your DB layer to be rock solid.

This is probably upvoted so high on HN because it's pretty cool/wild, and HN loves SQLite, vs. it being something many ppl should use.
AutoCAD is another great example of an application with a domain specific programming language that has provided an absolutely absurd amount of value over time.
You can get a lot more out of LLMs by asking them to spend more tokens thinking it out. It's a tool, and that's just a technique to get more out of it.
>> Blocking off the day makes sense because you want get work done.

I'm sure there are cases there it doesnt matter, but I was mentioning cases where teams need to work with each other and are paid to work with each other. I specifically mentioned Production Support. How can production support meetings "wait until they are back at the office?" From my standpoint, it doesnt matter where they are (home or office) but if they have no connectivity and cannot jump into troubleshooting meetings during business hours, i'm not sure how this works for numerous situations.

Through my career, i've been on the hot-seat as live applications have gone down. Imagine a DB is down or a pipeline is broken, and my DBA co-worker says "sure, lets take it up on Monday when I'm back". Note, I have no admin rights to the DB.

I had a k8s cluster run out of disk space. I had no admin rights to fix this. If the k8s admin decided he could take the meeting a day or days later, it would be a total disaster.
> In my view, there’s a social contract around OSS and its sustainability. My wording of this social contract is essentially:

> You get to expect things of an OSS project to the extent that you contribute to that OSS project or are willing to help. Everything else should be gratitude or grace.

I do think there is another inherent part of this contract, which is that if you put something out there as "Hey I made this cool thing, you can use it for free if you think it's useful" and that thing becomes a production dependency for folks via automatic package managers (npm, nuget, etc.), that you avoid changing the terms of that deal in a way that affects people automatically.

I think it's totally cool if a dev wants to make a new major version with different licensing terms, or a new major version that is a big breaking change, or step away from a project altogether and let it break with future platform updates. They have no obligation to keep supporting and updating the thing they put out there. But to update that thing in a minor automatic point release and change the terms of the deal seems not cool.

In this case the change is also a security concern, adding a closed-source, obfuscated dll that executes local commands and makes network connections, without obtaining any new consent from users to do these things.
It has to build the same stuff as the product because the examples are interactive. So being able to use your existing build config without doing anything special is great.
When I was in college, I used to work Uber as a side gig. One day, while working, my account was blocked, and I would couldn't pick up any more passengers. I was 2 hours away from home. Apparently, one of the customers had filed a complaint about a missing item (gloves or some bs like that), it was not in my car. My account was blocked until the case was "reviewed". So I had to drive back 2 hours without picking up any passengers. (The passenger later found the item in their bag)
I think we're in the worst of both worlds currently. Our online identities are already critically important, yet we're still bound to the physicial address for critical things like banks, employment screening, etc. that refuse to move away from physicial residency check mostly by inertia (I see laws not getting updated as part of that inertia)
Everything that makes it harder for companies to get rid of gig workers also eventually makes it harder for gig workers to enroll
Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope
...unless it was a third party seller
... or hazardous to ship
... or shipped via a third party delivery group
etc etc etc.

Amazon told me walk about and contact different people around my neighborhood when UPS dropped a refrigerator off at the wrong house.

(let's nevermind that I use a wheelchair in an area with zero accessibility; blindly knocking on doors is dangerous.)

It took weeks of coercion from both myself and the manufacturer before Amazon lifted a finger; meanwhile the manufacturer themselves sent me out a unit for the sake of providing some kind of justice.

During the same period Amazon shipped me a quart of boat varnish that I had ordered. It arrived smashed in half with the entire contents spilled out of the cardboard box, obviously ran over or some such, presumably leaving its' contents all over the delivery vehicle. When confronted with pictures of the event they said "Oh , our apologies, but we offer no refund or guarantees on chemical/industrial purchases or deliveries that require hazardous shipments."

Lesson learned : don't buy Amazon.
The advisory they give is the help you are getting from them. It's not like they can send the FBI Hostage Rescue Team or Delta Force to China anyway, even if they wanted to. They might try to get you out in special situations, for example if a friendly country had terrorists taking hostages confined to a small area or if a small and/or weak country tried something and there was no or only a weak travel advisory before the incident, but even then I would not count on it.