skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that companies want to maximise profits doesn't prove the point you think it does.

Nobody is arguing that there's an exact matching of value to the company between 1 user giving OpenAI permission to use their chat history for future training and 1 user paying $20/month. But based on your simplistic view, no company would ever offer a free tier because it's not directly maximising revenue.

It's very obvious that getting lots of real-world examples of users using ChatGPT is beneficial for multiple reasons - from using in future training runs (or fine tuning), to analysing what users what to use LLMs for, to analysing what areas ChatGPT is currently performing well or badly in, etc.

So it's not about blankly and entirely "offsetting costs", it's about the fact that both money into their bank account and this sort of data into their databases are both beneficial to the long-term profitability of the company even though only one of them is direct and instant revenue.

Before ChatGPT was released for the world to use, OpenAI were even paying people (both employees and not) to have lots of conversations with it for them to analyse. The exact same logic that justified that justifies allowing some users to pay some or all of the fee for the service in data permissions rather than money.

I'm speaking from experience making these sorts of business decisions, and to a company like OpenAI this is just basic common sense.
Searching for the ‘People’s Spelling Alphabet’
This is totally good. But I do wonder how much these points apply to a native app generated from a website using the tool in the link. I get the feeling it will still be very SaaSy (a la Slack's "native app").
It’s probably a lot easier if you’re a corp with name recognition, but the regular folks who post online about it have said no luck so far.
Verified Inc.
Microsoft's Foundational C# Certification with FreeCodeCamp
American Bar Association Task Force on the Law and AI
Rust memchr adds aarch64 SIMD with impressive speedups
Improbable is basically a joke in the games industry.

I’m not exactly an expert in them or anything, but the last time I looked at them at all (admittedly many years ago) the whole concept of what they do seemed both very expensive and mostly useless for real games.
I’m trying to use the Community Chat app, send button doesn’t work. I’ll try later, seems interesting.
[0] moonlog

just launched the alpha version.

We're a user feedback collection tool for saas and startup teams.

Proper v1 expected in about 30 days.

[0]: https://moonlog.co
I think the more consistent counterfactual scenario without mass hydrocarbon extraction would be to consider that population would not have grown to the current level (instead of imagining the current population and a sudden disappearance of hydrocarbons).
The vast majority of its "out-sized usage" is because it grows the fruits and vegetables for the rest of the nation. 75% or more of CA water use is for agriculture (also true of the other southwestern states). Per-capita use in cities and towns has been declining (in some cases, by huge amounts), and in general southwestern-resident humans use far less water than their upper-midwestern or east coast cousins.
Running 200 servers will force you to automate everything and also handle (relatively) rare edge cases, meaning added complexity, huge up front dev costs, and a continuous dev effort just to stay afloat. Work has to be balanced in a clever way, making tradeoffs that you otherwise wouldn't need to make. The mental model shifts from individual servers to a whole ecosystem that shows emergent behavior (= things break in a totally new way).

Maybe some of that also applies to 4 servers, but to a way lesser extent.
Huh, I did it yesterday and I clicked the 'here' link in the email and it took me to a page that said I was now opted out. I didn't have to do anything additional.
It’s due to what is effectively a network file system. You have the same issue with nfs, 9pfs, parallels prl_fs, etc. It has to stat every file in the repo and that gets expensive on ang RPC protocol. Even local ones apparently.

This is made worse because git uses the os-specific file statistics including inode number to track file changes. These change over most such file systems types which triggers it to rebuild the entire file cache every time you switch OS running git commands. Which if you have shell integration is constantly.

I share my git repos between MacOS and a Linux volume and it hurts on any repo with 100s of thousands of files or more. Ceph, Linux kernel, etc.
Do I have to build something comparable to be able to comment on the performance issues I have witnessed? I don't think so.

Do I have to accept all those excuses, which like those pictures of ships never run low in this company, to comment on the performance? I don't think so.

They promise a lot. They don't deliver. They break things which were already working and I'm still waiting. Those are clear signs of terrible Project Management and I think, I don't have to know all those cool insiders-excuses to be able to comment on this failure.

So please. Spare me your epigrams. They won't change anything about the facts.
Should We Switch to ARM?
The New York Times is basically become a publication of fear
Yeah, it's also a better mobile app (at least in terms of not wasting screen real estate) than Apple Books on iOS. However some percentage of books I try to upload just give me an error and the app and web app rarely get any love.
sounds like a feature not a bug. Poor onboarding is a cultural problem in my experience, not really a technology one.

When you get junior (or even non junior) developers onboarded in a new language, you have a unique opportunity to break them of bad habits and expand horizons.

Yes, there is a cost to it as it extends in the short term the time it takes to get developers ramped up, however the long tail payoff is huge
In Canada there is the National Film Board that funds Canadian creators using tax money. It is a stunning record of authentic Canadian experiences and operates exactly how you wish the BBC would operate: all the old content is available to the public, you can watch it all for free (you can even walk in to the NFB building and watch content in it’s original medium), and you can even pay a minimal cost to download high quality versions for personal use.

It’s a shining example of public media done right and I wish more countries had film boards like it.
As someone who glimpsed inside for a little bit during the first days - it's a curse of having too many resources, or too few pressure points. They were well funded from the beginning (read their founding history) and got a lot of additional money throughout the way (well, including but not limited to SoftBank) - so they were free to explore their vision, and gosh did they take their time to do it. They had good ideas coupled with a great engineering team, but the problems they were trying to solve did not exist in the real world - or at the very least - the problems were not important enough that game companies wanted to throw money at it. 1M concurrent online players looks good on paper - but who really cares to play such a game? Or who wants to pay exuberant prices for it when you can have the same amount of fun through sharded servers. So, although their vision materialized to an extent (they had the means to do it), and they had the foresight to know they had to support the engine with enough tooling and partnerships and what not and they built that as well, they were not able to make money out of it. If they set out to set problems that really existed in the world (gaming or otherwise) they could have been profitable by now. Instead, they panicked, restructured and pivoted into the latest hype(s) - they still have the means to go on, but with that culture and "baggage" (they are not nimble like a startup anymore) I give them less than 10% chance to turn a profit ever.
Show HN: When Will I Run Out Of Money? (weekend project)
Hi everyone, I’ve been on Hacker News for a good number of years, but this is my first “Show HN”.

I changed jobs recently. Tax is weird in Europe (and maybe other places as well?) in that different amounts go out at different times and repeat at various intervals. I needed to make sure I had enough cashflow to make all upcoming payments, I didn't want any surprises.

So I created a little tool for my own purposes, then had fun putting a small HTML frontend on it as I thought it might be useful for someone else. I'm a backend developer in my day job, as you can probably tell from the design :)

There are other tools out there that do a similar thing, but they normally require you to upload the relevant data to other people's servers, which I wasn't comfortable with for financial data. Also I didn't fancy paying anyone for a service as small as this.

I'm posting it here in the hope that it's useful to someone. And to gather feedback, let me know what you think.
This is a consequence of poor desktop APIs: Windows / Mac installer APIs are awful; and Windows / Mac have no good "common denominator" API so everyone is stuck with HTML / CSS / Javascript. HTML / CSS / Javascript work great for documents, but are horrible abstractions for the kind of things UIs need to do.

Personally, I think we need to figure out a better cross-platform UI API. I'm still surprised that almost 30 years into the Windows / Mac duopoly that we haven't figured out yet.
All of these reasons boil down to "if it ain't broke" and "that's what we're used to".

Switching VCS for a project of this size is always complicated and OpenBSD devs are famously "old school" and conservative with their software choices.

I used to use CVS before switching to SVN and later DCVS like Mercurial and Git. The claim that "it is unlikely that any alternative versioning system would improve the developer's productivity or quality" is absolutely laughable IMO.

This is especially true nowadays where CVS support in modern tooling, if it even exists, is usually legacy and poorly maintained.
> Where / How are you finding Pinterest links?

Google, I google anything and they show up (ESPECIALLY IMAGES). Blacklist one domain in search? Don't worry they've got 200 other ones.

I ended up doing a wildcard blacklist with uBlacklist
To clarify: we host the initial download of the app on our CDN so we would most likely block the initial download of the app. It seems pretty reasonable to me that if a customer doesn't pay for a sub then they can no longer offer it as a download to their customers.
Sky...
There's a Discord group I frequent that has a competitive 6-letter Wordle variant bot where you are all working on the same one at the same time, but you get one guess every 15 minutes and get points for getting new yellow or green letters revealed. And if no one solves it in an hour it resets with a new one. There's also a leaderboard for who has the most points.

I find that one pretty addicting, in trying to make the best guesses or solve it out from under the other people playing. Since you only get one guess every 15 minutes, you have to make it count.

That being said, I haven't played it as much recently, but I usually place a guess whenever I visit their chat.
Maybe I've seen too many movies, but I'd be worried about retaliation if I were her. But then again maybe $300 million is chump change to Booz.
"The art of simplicity" and "Dev toys" and "Microsoft most valuable professional"
After Microsoft changed its strategy from FUD smear campaigns to EEE corporate assimilation, Linux interoperability has become significantly better. My colleagues all have Ubuntu terminals on their WSLs, and it all seems to work pretty great.

I don't know why Microsoft technology triggers me so much.

I have been a big fan of C#, VSCode, LSP, GitHub Actions.

I'm sure it's an instinctive reaction to their aesthetic.

Microsoft are the Vogons of HHGTTG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon
Since there are really many companies and people using AWS, the effect would be noticeable if everyone managed such a decrease. Calling it "an even less significant rounding error" borders on bad faith.
Friendly plug for HCT -- it's a color space I built to enable Material You, it weds the lightness measure mentioned here to the latest and greatest color science space --- LAB/LCH is from 1976!

It makes design more intuitive, they only need to know that a 40 difference in 'T' ensures that WCAG standards for buttons are met, and a difference of 50 meets the standards for text.
Why should I not want my own country to be sovereign?

And why should I not want NATO to stop attacking Venezuela?
you just need to sell the vision well enough. The so-called investors are not buying for financial gain, but for that vision.

It's a pretty cool vision, but it's just unlikely to succeed in my eyes, and that's why i didn't buy in.
If lex/yacc style parsing works for you, then great. However, I suspect most people are going to get more mileage out of just hand writing a recursive descent parser and moving on with their lives.

The benefit of recursive descent is that they're easy to write and modify and understand. You don't need any new paradigms, just write code like you typically do. If something goes wrong, your standard debugging skills will serve you well.

There's also a lot of other relatively easy parsing technologies out there. For example, you can also consider monadic parsing, parser combinators, PEG libraries.

I spent a year trying to figure out which parser technique worked best for me, and I'm glad I didn't just stick with my starting point of lex/yacc. So again, if this guide allows parsing to just work for you, then great stick with it. But if you find yourself encountering a lot of problems, then it might be worth it to look around because other options exist and work just fine.
The explanation all makes sense. But the key line of “we all know cvs” is effectively exclusionary to all the other developers in the world who don’t use cvs. At some point they will need new talent which will be harder to get.
If and that's a very, very, very big if, the current open GC are really leading to to much pauses. Then you can go to Azul and buy a better VM and GC, further improving the performance compared to BEAM.
Self hosted Wallabag is the way https://wallabag.org/
Whenever I tried "eating healthy" without calorie counting, I didn't lose weight. 6 weeks on keto to lose 200g was demoralizing.

Then I did calorie counting with MyFitnessPal and ate at a 500 cal deficit, and I lost weight. It works. But I pretty much had to stop eating out because I couldn't know the numbers on restaurant meals. I was basically eating raw food half the time, just to make it easier to calculate.

I'm surprised there's no government initiative to help people do calorie counting. Open up-to-date database, force restaurants to feed it nutritional info, etc.
The general rule used to be that west of the 100th meridian, you cannot do commercial agriculture without irrigation (because not enough falls from the sky over the arable land). That boundary has now shifted east a bit, and is closer to the 98th meridian at this point. It's a "rule" that applies to all areas west of that line, with the exception of the zone west of the Cascades in OR and WA.
IMHO they also focus on their own content too much. Every time I look for a movie, even from 80s or 90s so not exactly the latest blockbuster, it is simply not there while it is on Amazon Prime Video.
We exports huge amounts of grain. The groundwater we're depleting isn't for our own use, it's to feed other countries.

I don't see why this requires a federal solution. Those states own/control their own water. If they want to use it all up, that's their problem. It's all going to get used up eventually.
I agree with the geocentristic mindset being a product of limited vision.

What is verifiable? A well written paper on some particles being smashed together has to be taken on some level of faith unless I have the means and methods to reproduce the event. I do not have the means so I just believe it.
Getting to Know Doug Powell
In this episode we talked with Doug Powell, renowned designer, about driving value to society through design, creating solutions that are relevant to thousands, and adapting to big changes in work. We also dove deep into how he scaled IBM's design area to create solutions for thousands of users.
OK.

For those interested in reality:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate-change/causes-o...

Covers the contribution of these natural variations to climate change.

> Natural climate cycles can change the temperature of Earth, but the changes we are seeing are happening at a scale and speed that natural cycles cannot explain. These cycles affect the global temperature for years, or sometimes just months, not the 100 years that we have observed. Meanwhile, longer-term changes like Milankovitch cycles and solar irradiance take thousands and thousands of years.
What is the threat that this mitigates?
Climate change === mass migration.

Right now all the people out west think that is something that applies to people in third world countries. In the US it's going to be an attempted migration of the west's middle class to other regions.

At first they will have buyers for their homes to fund the migration...until they don't. Before that there will be a frenzy of wasteful government spending to try to preserve the regions and way of life. It will not work.

Climate change is the reason we keep digging up civilizations that "just disappeared without a trace."
https://status.openai.com/

I suppose a bit.
Communist China is responsible for nearly 2/3rds of CO2 emissions since 2000. In the US it's been going down for the past decade.

You also have to keep in mind the American entrepreneurial culture or DNA which has born fruit unlike any other system, and is even responsible for the very platform we're using right now. That's all about this idea that any individual can change the world.
Short URLs suffer from link rot too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot
Python factorial on big integer is natively as fast as a good C++ implementation of factorial. So clearly the interpreter supports using fast underlying implementations of things

Any idea why python str.find is 100x-1000x slower? Seems like something the interpreter should also hand to an underlying implementation, which could not be that slow.
Private Access Tokens, also not great
CR Rao just passed last week at age 102
It's sort of way outrun it's initial premise: it's lightness channel is inverted compared to every other color space, and it's L has nothing to do with LCH or LAB. It's success brought more intellectual poverty, unfortunately. The initial blog post needs a laundry list of corrections, it goes off the rails when it starts making claims about accuracy based on gradients using CAM16 UCS.
I've gotten 100x improvement with no code change by just adding an index in the database table. An inexperienced developer might have blamed the database and insisted on moving to NoSQL because of "web scale". If they got the chance to rewrite it, they could have pointed to the performance increase as a proof that they were right.
A similar case is also described in Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
by Matt Parker, which I'd recommend.

However, in that case it was profitable to buy _all_ lottery numbers. Which is a massive logistic operation.
That is much less horrible than your wording made it sound - so if a customer is hosting the download on their own website, you are not trying to stop that in any way, correct?
I always recommend this book, "Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK" as an introduction to how SPARK can be used for high-integrity, safe programs for mission-critical applications. SPARK has a legacy of large, high-integrity applications over the past two decades. This puts it ahead of Rust in real-world usage for such applications. SPARK2014 the latest, is a formally verified PL along with verification tools/ecosystem made for these type of uses.

I am trying to write show control software in SPARK2014 at the moment. Show control are critical since it is used to power lifts and stage machinery as well as performer flying systems where safety and high-integrity software is critical. I like Rust, but I feel it is not quite there yet especially in terms of the number of real-world systems in this niche. I also find SPARK2014 easier to write and read. I have been programming since 1978, and although I gravitate towards terse, functional languages like Haskell, APL/BQN/J, I experience a lot of friction whenever I dive back into Rust. SPARK2014 is very verbose and Pascal-like, but this is tedium vs. confusion or confidence in what I am writing. I know AdaCore is working with Ferrous Systems to bring Rust more up to the features of Ada/SPARK2014, but for now I needed to make a pragmatic choice based on real-world usage and ease of use and understanding.
Apple doesn't really have a choice except to offer long support.

Android should offer long support windows, & the hope is there we will someday see this growing significantly (Project Treble & others).

But, Android devices let you install your own OS (if you can get an unlock, caveat #1). The device might not be supported by the manufacturer, but it's still possible to support the device. Which by virtue of being Linux needs to have sources available. Caveat #2, it's often a terrible vendorized kernel that will be incredibly difficult to use (but again Project Treble is trying to tilt the needle here). There's huge caveats, but at the same time, there's also a lot of quite old devices out there that can run quite modern OSes, without the manufacturers help. Which is something no iPhone iPad or iTv can do, and there's seemingly nothing on the horizon with promise to unbind these devices from Apple.
>>> the long tail payoff is huge

In what terms, exactly?
It isn’t a crash, BGP terminates the session and retries because it considers the connection to be malformed. So, “be liberal in what you accept” certainly does apply.
> Therefore, you might want to consider a free personal version that's crippled in a mildly annoying way: For example, no installer, don't sign the app, and have an easily-ignorable nag. (Therefore creating a situation where if I tried to distribute one of these applications for a commercial product it looks unprofessional.)

We basically do this. You can download ToDesktop Builder and create an app for free on your computer. You just can't sign it and distribute it to your customers.

This is a good point though. We will make it more clear on our landing page.
For the record, I submitted this as “Announcing Biome,” which is the title of the post (as is hn custom) and the link does point to that page.

(Hacker News automatically transforms titles that fit certain patterns, and apparently “Announcing X” is one of them.)
Incomplete TLS Certificate Chains and How to Fix Them
Also the big elephant in the room is most people are hardly active. Your body is designed to forage for miles a day. Who even bothers simulating that? We walk to the fridge and from grocery store to parked car at most. Its so much easier to maintain good health if you are active.
The prevalence of sugar in so many foods can't help.

Personally I avoid "sugary" food and drinks like the plague. I also don't snack and do regular exercise and sometimes don't eat dinner. I'm at a healthy weight in my 40s.
How many adults that are obese have a healthy relationship with food and do regular exercise / fast? Obese children I have sympathy for, I'm uncertain how I feel about obese adults. I don't know if their metabolism is ultra slow, or they are just not taking care of themselves. Its complicated...
I'm sufficiently paranoid that I don't connect multi-terabyte photo storage to the cloud
OnlineOrNot (launched Feb 2021) - https://onlineornot.com

it's an uptime monitoring and status page service for websites, web apps, and APIs (and cron jobs/heartbeat monitoring soon) that I've built roughly two hours a time before my work day starts.