skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OptiRTC | DevOps Engineer | Full-Time, Boston, MA | https://optirtc.com

OptiRTC provides a groundbreaking, autonomous, IoT-based stormwater management platform that reduces flood risk and protects water quality. Our team is focused on resilience, self-service management tools for O&M and civil design engineers, and improved multi-site control options to enable greater adoption.

Over 100 communities and private entities have applied our technology to achieve their stormwater objectives at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional (passive) infrastructure. In many cases, our dynamic approach is the only way to cost-effectively manage runoff much greater than drainage systems were originally designed to handle.

We are looking for a Dev Ops Engineer who is able to independently execute projects to support our software development lifecycle, handle incident response for problems with our production and QA environments, and oversee week-to-week requirements and projects taken on by our IT Managed Service Provider to ensure laptop provisioning and maintenance for our company of fewer than 25 people continues to run smoothly. In your first year, you will work with the CTO and 3rd party contractors to conduct an SOC Type I and II audit across our organization, including the development and production environments we use to provide our products. Over time, you will play a central role in efforts to modernize our IT systems and improve our corporate security culture. Accomplishing this goal will support our ongoing security compliance initiatives, and help us continue to provide a trustworthy service for our customer communities and the people who live in them.

Find more info and apply to the DevOps Engineer position at https://optirtc.com/company/careers
It also executes a bunch of code in C++ (at least for Windows) and can do all sorts of wild stuff. It happens when you define globals with constructors that the compiler can't/doesn't optimize away.
We're all prone to missing the obvious when it agrees with our ideological predispositions.

The image of the police has become rather ideological of late, e.g. the "defund the police" movement and a counter pro-police movement. Both movements are tied in to other ideological positions, and I've seen quite a lot of HN posts on positions that are associated with pro-police stances (e.g. on climate change, COVID vaccines, etc).

So it doesn't surprise me to see HN readers accepting police press releases at face value. HN may have a reputation for a libertarian ethos, but libertarianism often supports law enforcement. It would be nice if that would get more skepticism when the press releases are such transparent propaganda, but as I said, we're all prone to swallowing propaganda that feels right.
“…and this is why I did not push harder…”
This is a full-on circus.
Bonuses and stock drop and revenue plus solving a problem for team Sales using team Chrome is just pathetic.

It could be easy to assume this happens across all Google products.
While reading I was thinking why aren’t stackoverflow “mandating” that solutions have tests, so that this problem isn’t left to everyone else, ref. to the comment at the end of the article:

Test all edge cases, especially for code copied from Stack Overflow.
I'm reasonably sure this book is still under copyright.

It seems that a lot of people don't care about that for certain books.
> Are you saying that the water is so cheap that switching to desalination will be a non-issue

For human consumption: this is pretty much true. Desalinization works just fine for people. The biggest issue is where to put the extra salty waste products.

When people talk about the "water crisis" in the US, for example, it's always about big agribusinesses doing farming.
Terminal Race Condition: The only thing that scares me anymore
TLDR: With billions of interacting AIs, competitive fitness landscapes emerge. Speed in decision-making and resource efficiency offer strong selective advantages, just as they did for biological evolution. The leanest, fastest minds will prevail over slower, gluttonous ones. We can compare this to speed chess tournaments where victory goes to whoever makes “good enough” moves most quickly within time constraints.

As hardware improves exponentially, the optimum balance between intelligence and speed rises dramatically. This creates a Terminal Race Condition — runaway incentives to maximize both raw cognitive ability and computational velocity [even compromising accuracy and correctness to do so]. Left uncontrolled, such exponential takeoff could quickly leave humanity far behind.

As AI systems compete, we may see a machine “Thunderdome” — a chaotic battleground where rapid iteration and modification leads to uncontrolled emergence. In this environment, human civilization could become collateral damage.
No a lawyer is not needed.

There is no question that legitimately incurred business costs should be paid from available money, regardless of whether the cofounders are having a fight or not.

No legal question here….

The business is not bankrupt, so pay the bills.
And my point was that from "a utilitarian perspective" there's a middle ground between "coach the original author to produce a better patch" and "commit your own patch without crediting the original author"; it's "commit your own patch while crediting the original author". There's no "out of context" quoting in my comment.
Meta announces AI chatbots with 'personality'
> as though for some reason you're not entitled to the rewards that came from the risk and resources you put into starting your own company and growing its success

Nobody is saying that the owner of a business is not entitled to profits. That's a strawman. What is actually being said is that the owner of a business couldn't make those profits _without_ the workers, which means that the workers, the people actually doing the work, share some of the credit for the success they bring to the owner and that they too should be entitled to at least some of share of profits.

> enthusiastically pro-union people don't see any problem with this line of thinking

Yes, workers talking to each other about forming a union is a right they have by virtue of being a human being. Why does nobody flip this around and ask _what is the business owner doing wrong that their employees feel they need the protection of a union_?

> somehow the idea of them starting a business themselves, as a co-op, is Literally Impossible

For some workers it actually is. The primary thing that distinguishes the owners of the business and the workers of the business is access to capital. It is asinine to assume that someone who has worked all of their life necessarily has access to the capital to start a business. There is a power imbalance here, and you have not addressed it here.

> connecting and organizing people who share a common purpose or ideal is easier than it ever has been in human history

This is what a push to unionize _is_. The owners have the ability to respond to this - it's a growing industry of anti-union consultants and had made a few companies obscenely wealthy providing those services.

> somehow it's considered perfectly fine and just to do nothing like that on your own, but, instead, reap the rewards of others' risk and resources by pretending, after the fact, that they had never had any value to begin with—that it's the workers and workers alone who provide the Real Value to the company, and always have, and always will

See my point above about this being a strawman. Nobody is saying that the person that starts the company has ZERO value. Far from it. All they are asking is fair compensation for their work that has enriched the owner, which they are not getting. Employee productivity has almost doubled but their wages have been stagnant. Far from workers acting like owners have no value, it's the owners that are treating the workers as not having value.
What's the skill level required for those billions of jobs?
Once the context windows for these models grows by one or two orders of magnitude, stuff is going to be very interesting.
I could kind of see things either way. Is this like not providing the source code, or is it like not providing the IDE, debugger, compiler, and linter that was used to write the source code? (Also, it feels a bit "looking a gift horse in the mouth" to criticize people who are giving away a cutting-edge model that can be used freely.)
It's strange to me that "what Nature intended" is a concept entertained by rational, educated, adults. It's one of those carry overs from a time when we had widespread belief in divine providence that doesn't really hold up under inspection.

To be clear on my point: "Nature" is not a rational agent with a plan. No creature evolved a certain way for a reason, they just evolved that way and happened to not die when some others that didn't evolve that way did die.

Nature doesn't even "intend" for you to pass on your genes, it's just that that's how the system happens to work such that things that pass on their genetic information still stick around.

The very premise that there is some "natural" thing that we would be better off doing, silently assumes a pretty major, border line theological, premise that there is any reason that living things should continue to a path that allowed them to survive to a point. If evolution has any "lesson" teach at all it's closer to "be flexible".
The problem is that ~all companies let themselves be controlled by such forces. Given there are so few counter examples it looks like it is a systemic issue and not a choice each board makes independently.

Google's unusual share class structure was supposed to give them a degree of independence from these forces, but it didn't last. They still tie employee comp to share prices, so they still have to care about share prices. Facebook has even stronger centralization of shareholder power, but its pay structure is very similar. Can you think of any example of a public company that is resisting these forces?
Yes totally. Join Tennis clubs, Soccer clubs, (other clubs).. have a coffee regularly w/ the ones you get along with.. it's incredible easy to make connections if you put the effort IMO.
NPF: Packet filter with stateful inspection, NAT, IP sets, etc.
I said "constructed algorithmically". Ie. I expect source to be at the level the engineers who built it generally worked at.

It's very nice that they released their build artifacts. It's great that you can take that and make small modifications to it. That doesn't make it open source.

> For most of these LLMs (not sure about this one in particular yet) the energy cost in particular of recreation is more than most individuals earn in a lifetime, and the enormous data volume is such that the only people who seriously need this should be copyright lawyers and they should be asking for it to be delivered by station wagon.

All of that just sounds like reasons why it's not practical to open source it, not reasons why this release was open source.
I used the first version of Lenovo TrackPoint keyboard for years, before I switched to Tex Yoda 2, which is pretty much a Mechanical Thinkpad keyboard, and never looked back. This brand (Tex) pretty much the only brand that makes high quality keyboards with trackpoints.
This reads like satire.

> Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?

Attention-grabbing nonsense.
Maybe since it has the wireless feature he feels compelled to use it, but wouldn’t if he didn’t have that option.

Maybe?
A countercurrent heat exchanger could transfer up to 99% of the heat from the steam to the ocean water: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countercurrent_exchange
"Plant foods make up the majority of a bear’s diet – sometimes as much as 90 per cent." - https://www.bearsmart.com/about-bears/food-diet/
Exactly. In fact, there will always be some element a in a field¹ for which there is no multiplicative inverse. This is why with boolean algebra, both ⋀ and ⋁ are multiplication operators (for ⋀, T has no inverse; for ⋁, F has no inverse).

⸻

1. To be clear for readers, when KMag and I say, “field,” we’re referring to a specific mathematical construct in which there are + and × operators and symbols 0 and 1, the former being the additive identity and the latter the multiplicative identity.
Not sure this is that interesting since it was already revealed during the GPT-4 livestream back[0] in March.

It’s my understanding that this feature is still rolling out to everyone, so if there are some use cases beyond “simple” - I am sure we’ll hear about it in a more detailed article / blog post.

Not taking anything away, just pointing out the facts.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/live/outcGtbnMuQ
Yea, another good Scout knot. While a square knot can do the same it can capsize under tension!
Author has a pretty good followup video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skozI33D3t4
Isn't doing this what drove Jordan Peterson off the deep end?
Sounds like you're only interested in a clone of yourself.
As a parent, I can only imagine one thing worst than someone causing such head injury to my child, it is for me to be falsely convicted of such abuse and losing access to my own child.
I wish dragonflyBSD’s ipfw3 would get ported to freeBSD.
Back when they leaked it via a Discord bot I found it worked better when you ask it to first describe each box

Without doing that: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/964175221089259591/11...

With it: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/964175221089259591/11...

(though it's only one example so it could be coincidence)
It is not the union that is keeping those cops employed - they're taken off the street, typically without pay - while their case is being adjudicated. What is keeping them employed is the doctrine of qualified immunity where they are rarely, if ever, held to account, criminally, for their behavior.
I couldn't find out the VRAM limit, but I assume for video manipulation one would need quite a bit. Also, it looks like the workers themselves only have access to 128MB of RAM unless this has changed?

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#m...
> It's open source.

How did the engineers who built it do so? Is there more source to create this build artifact?
What is it with people trying to find some magic diet that changes their lives? By all means dont eat like shit and do your best to be healthy but is there really some obscure diet that humans just never thought of that can unlock unbeknown states of well being? Carnivore diet, all fruit diet, etc.

It seems like a modern phenomenon that owes itself to an abundance of cheap food. And perhaps a lot of anxiety, depression, or similar.
Naming the dude and throwing him under the bus is a super bad look. I was really shocked when I saw the other guy's name.
Exactly. That’s why I can see them being successful.
Insomnia's update locks out prev user data, forces account creation w/o warning
I'm a long time user of Insomnia API client (https://insomnia.rest) without an account and was prompted to update the app an hour ago. I thought this was a regular feature update and accepted. After the app relaunches, it gives me the option to create an account with them or use without an account. When I choose the latter, my data is gone. Many others are reporting the same problem (https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577). It's actually a good app but this strong-arming behavior is simply unacceptable to me. What other choices do I have? Postman for Mac?
> ablation experiment

What is that? "Ablation" as in removal? Do they AB test removing new features just for data? ... and also monitor SM threads for feedback?
He has a form of cystic fibrosis.
> The whole appeal to "natural" is so ludicrous.

Not only ludicrous but also frequently used to prop up all kinds of biases.
Only thing I can think of: seeds that I sprout, grow, let flower, fruit, and seed again. Some are cultivars, but some are native. Some of the process isn’t exactly natural, but it could be.
If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.
Well it's not a popular idea. Perhaps you're deeply immersed only in religion, or only in science, and sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees. I forgive you.

But it's a tale as old as time: when any community schisms, and there's a rejection of the "original traditions" the new guys limp along without 'em for a long time, and gradually, piecemeal, they realize they miss those things, or those things were essential to life, and they reinvent them and they put new names on them, but if you examine their essence then you'll see how similar they are to the "old ways".

It happens within Christianity itself! All the time! Protestants spent 500 years rejecting and reviling Catholics, but then they became Mormon, and everything old is new again.

What's happening in the world is a widespread secularization of nations. You know, disestablishmentarianism - the First Amendment. If no religions or allowed, or if all religions are promoted equally, then something will fill the vacuum and become re-established, you can bet your bottom dollar.

Nations who attempt to outlaw and persecute religion get a somewhat bad rep. Nations who legalize all of them are literally a city upon a hill!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill

The strategy of atheist states is to generally subjugate Church to control by the State. If this cannot be done, that religion must be exterminated. China's a good example, and Mexico did their part. Atheist states by no means would/could eliminate religions; they know what service is done for the masses.

The State has its own flavor of religion, its own rituals and priests, sacraments and sacramentals, liturgies and rites. Look at Old Glory, baseball games, military customs, Congress in session, look at the architecture of DC and try to tell me that that's not the New Secular Athens.

Psychiatry is the moral arm of the state, with temporal and spiritual power, authority, and jurisdiction over the citizenry in regards to our internal forum. Psychiatry is granted the rights to teach doctrine, to coerce sacraments, and to revoke rights. I won't elaborate on the whole picture, because your opinion won't change, but try to open your mind, eh?
At least two comments spring to mind: this is at least _blogged_ as a drop-in ZK replacement, which for sure is not true of Corrosion, and ClickHouse has Jepsen tests for their distributed KV store, which I don't see any reference to such a thing for Corrosion

Maybe neither of those two things matter for one's use case, but it's similar to someone rolling up on this blog post and saying "but what about etcd" -- they're just different, with wholly different operational and consumer concerns
Not to address the applicability of this, but you can have advantageous fallback behavior and still say “the system isn’t intended to be in the fallback behavior”.
the arc of 1000 unlicensed copies begins with your first curl
> But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.

lol

I don't know anything about COBOL but I can feel all of the people that must have triggered. Which is surely why the author included it. Probably like if today that said PHP or Lisp.
I feel like this should be inverted: make friends with those who live near you. I understand we can’t be friends with everyone, but chances are there’s 3-4 people in your immediate area that you’d get along great with. I think it’s a failing of community that we aren’t closer to our neighbors. Sure living close to high school / university friends would be great, but as many posters have noted, circumstance isn’t always that convenient. We need more events that promote socialization amongst neighbors in the hopes that some of those interactions will result in meaningful friendships.
This hasnt been true for awhile, RabbitMQ added streams back in 2021.
“Peer-to-peer mental health app Koko decided to experiment with an artificial intelligence posing as a counselor for 4,000 of the platform’s users.”

What I find discouraging is this: A while back (even before the current LLM / GPT craze started) the idea briefly flickered through my mind of having an "AI therapist" as a chat-bot. I thought the idea was so obviously bad in so many ways that nobody would ever take it seriously. To sanity check myself, I started telling a friend about the idea, and before I even finished talking, they were like "absolutely no. No way. Horrible, horrible idea. Never, ever do that." Which is what I expected and hoped to hear.

I pretty much forgot about the whole idea, because - again - it's such an obviously bad idea. No, not just a bad idea, it's a horrible idea. And now, here we are. Somebody (or multiple somebody's) have actually started down that path. These are the times when I want to hang my head in shame and pretend not to be affiliated with the tech industry in any way. :-(

Is that even ethical?

I'm gonna say "fuck no."
It seems like these days, Yandex is just one of multiple stock holders; see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickHouse
I feel like this is going to come off pedantic but I think it's the real heart of the issue. Nature doesn't intend shit. Our bodies are a messy junk drawer of evolutionary weirdness spurred on by what resources happened to be available at the time. We're not "made" to eat anything in particular, in fact it's the opposite, we had stuff around and we evolved to get some nutritional benefit from it because it's what was there. We're the garbage disposals of the animal kingdom eating all sorts of random nonsense that's poison to other species. If we could step outside ourselves we'd look on in horror at the roving packs of gaping maws that eat everything in sight.

We are frighteningly well adapted to all kinds of random diets. We'll eat whatever nature throws at us, it's what makes us well suited for all seasons and living most anywhere in the world. Trying to crown anything as "best" is like asking a random number generator what number it feels it's most meant to return. In fact just about the only thing that'll do you in is eating the same thing all the time which is why these diets are wild. They appeal to the part of our brains that like to pack things into neat and tidy boxes and build in straight lines rather than embrace the organic mess we are. If your body needs something specific it'll start to crave it.

There are bees that evolved to eat the nectar from exactly one species of flower. We aren't that.
Continuous Integration (CI) is the secret sauce that brings sanity to the chaos of DevOps. CI systems like Jenkins, Travis CI, and CircleCI watch your code repository like a hawk. It's like having a personal assistant who diligently checks your code for errors. CI doesn't just find problems; it also fixes them.
Yeah, maybe something is weird about every Mac setup I've used, but I've barely even noticed these restrictions. Pretty sure CLIs and shell scripts in general have full disk access by default. Almost seems like the restrictions require some cooperation from the apps, idk.

Besides disk access, there are all sorts of other ways I don't trust random native apps on my Mac. At least camera access is locked down now (I think).
Bezel – Show your iPhone on your Mac
Instead of a gold star, they probably would like to have some funding.
I tried to use their site to get help with a locked-out Google account, but they had no answers.
You can see the limitations here—https://x.com/spikeysanju/status/1707057365231812630?s=46
My intro to biology prof kept hammering this point. It’s easy to lose sight of it. Often with natural selection people will presuppose that different traits must have purposes or necessary advantages.
> Processors are inherently awesome at branching, adding, adding, shifting, etc. And shifting to get powers of 2 (i.e., KB vs. GB) is a superpower of its own. They're a little less awesome when it comes to math.pow(), math.log(), and math.log() / math.log().

And here's something to consider -- if you're converting a number to human readable format it's more likely than not your about to do I/O with the resulting string, which is probably going to be an order of magnitude more expensive than the little function here.