skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good question. I suppose it's to penalise those who can't work under pressure to a very tight schedule and reward those who are prepared to risk brain-damage with performance enhancing drugs for the sake of recognition.
I wouldn't be surprised if overhead turned out 1/3 of that figure.
Anyone know much does it become worth it to build your own? They spend around $3-4m on storage and bandwidth
gotcha, thank you for the education. I wasn't aware that could happen, definitely weird.
Keeping a phone number secret is "security by obscurity" and therefore the whole point of this article is rather moot.
FB only wanted whatsapp to preempt a potential competitor. They are happy to give the service for free (at a loss)

There is no room for monetization because of FB. In other words, you can't compete with a monopoly, even if you are in a different business. They simply take all
> So you don't think that dogs can be bred for specific traits?

I made no such claim. You are attacking a straw man.

The rest of your post is simply repeating that you disagree with me. Ok, noted. I'm not going to bother arguing about your factual claims any more since you clearly live on a different planet than I do so we don't have any useful common ground for discussion.
I'm Learning Rust
I'm playing on desktop. I tried to play in Firefox's private mode, but the emulator didn't load. I don't know if this is intended or a bug, but just thought I'd let you know.
> far cheaper IT labor outside

This is a product that solves some of the harder problems of engineering, and has a staff of 50. Cheaper isn’t going to get you the best. If you had a staff of 1000, you could make that argument. Besides that’s not a lot of money to begin with. 340k is a senior engineer salary and I am sure the people running the company are far more capable than senior engineers.

> drop those features

That’s a valid argument, but 1.7M for that 20PB of bandwidth is not a lot of money. Dropping or making the features paid, defeats the purpose. If you’re trying to be the privacy first app that competes with WhatsApp and others, this would make it harder to be a viable alternative.

> sms registration fees

Education is a harder problem to solve, but offloading some of the costs to users may make sense here.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice Ever Shared on First Round Review
> Would this be solved by just providing APIs? Scraping is a pain and people only do it when there's no API.

Many sites intentionally make scraping as painful as possible because they don't want anyone scraping them.
Depends n your definition of dangerous objects. For example, sheets?
So ... hire staff to manage that complexity?
Love Signal over Telegram, Wickr, etc.
Yep, the whole point of Signal for me was the SMS component. I put up with the old-fashioned UI for that reason. Now it just looks and acts like a Telegram clone.
No, you’re losing client logs when your logging service crashes. Your logging service should probably not be logging through calls to itself.
Hey! I worked on this and it's great to see it being shared. Check out the blog post explaining more about the project https://predibase.com/blog/lorax-the-open-source-framework-f...
Hello! I'd like to tell the Y Combinator community about Triplay's new travel planner. We offer travelers an optimal route and this feature allows travelers to see many more sights than before!
There's something related to this that I want to explore: Limits of rationality and human experience.

Rationalists break things down with logical tools to a point where they can get an answer - they zoom in to specific problems. This is good and useful. The problem comes when we zoom back out again, and try to generify the specific solution. The specific solution works in a certain context, but we haven't proven that it works in other contexts.

Then someone makes an authoritative statement about psychology or sociology or politics that makes sense in their context, but it ignores the human experience and history.

Everybody is made of their own details.
Would be interesting to know exec salaries, the latest nonprofit disclosure I could find was from 2019
Anecdotal evidence of macro trends aside, it isn't clear to me what value Joe Coffee provides. It seems like they are a SaaS reseller for a particular vertical (coffee shops), and have some amount of custom software. My local, Barrett's Coffee in Austin (they are excellent, btw), seems to use Shopify on their website, and I suspect that the iPad-like PoS system in the shop is backed by the same inventory and sales management system. I don't really see the value in using a middle-man that's specific to coffee when it seems like a reasonably smart owner plus a general sales platform should do the trick.
Google resumes transition to Manifest V3 for Chrome extensions
Sounds like C++11 onwards. I plan to include all of those features of course.
DouGNUt
lol gotta love HN
Legitimate scrapers adhere to the websites terms of service, for starters.
I am imagining a donate page in the app that incorporates this willingness to be public about the costs.

It offers a way to configure a recurring donation for whatever amount and whatever schedule you want. $100/year for instance, but as you slide the slider or enter a number, it shows you if that number leaves Signal in deficit, covered, or surplus, if all other users who are currently paying anything paid this much.

Instead of just trying to suggest an amount with no explaination of what it means, is $5 still leaving them starving? is $5 5x more generous than needed? You still get to use it for free. But if you are of a mind to be one of the ones chipping in to keep it alive, you see exactly what is the right amount.

When 10k people are paying for 10m other people, that "covered" amount may be pretty high, apparently 5x what the average donater is currently paying. (article says it's 20% of total)

But with that little bit of non-repulsive non-abusive game theory, just honest information but presented in an immediate way, a lot of those other 10m users would start to chip in, and the covered amount would come down. Some users will say, well, I can swallow 5x what I was paying, and others can just leave their donation level in the red. But I think a lot more people would go from 0 to a few bucks if they could see exactly what it means and know that it wasn't a waste.

Maybe the donate function could even have a setting track the current covered value automatically so that your bill automatically comes down as other people start adding to the pool.

Also have it display the 3% or more transaction fee overhead going to the debit card and other payment processors, to show right there graphically how much you're wasting by paying a small amount monthly vs a large amount yearly. Everyone always hides that but I say show it prominently.
Vectorized Interpreters: The MRT for PL [pdf]
> During a raucous meeting attended by many fracking opponents, the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission OK’d several parcels for fracking by outside entities — all of them owned by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Ohio Department of Transportation — that include state parks and designated wildlife areas.

I read that as that the entities involved here _also_ own by "state parks and designated wildlife areas". Is that actually where the drilling is supposed to happen?
I'm getting results that roughly match your findings

It's weird, we tend to think of the OpenAI people as programming gods now, but the kr api seems pretty obviously botched at the moment (since I can run use third party tools that use gpt4 with another embedding database, along with the same data, and get much better results)
Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.
700k to drag your feet on implementing usernames for a full decade, seems cushy.
Perhaps they should consider a rebrand to "ClosedCaptions"?
Signal already has a very hard time competing against the network effects of WhatsApp and Telegram and getting people on the app, a fee would only increase that. But making it n$/year but with the option for an account withiot a phone number like other people are suggesting sounds nice, peace
Is it really great to see new players in the field of GenAI hosting. I am just not quite sure whether this will break the dominance and popularity of OpenAI.
There are easier ways. Powerful spyware targetting politicians is now available for sale. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57910355

There are already a number of scandals in europe
those users probably have a far lower impact on Signal's operating costs because they're only sending the occasional message instead of using it as a broadcast platform.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
They don’t seem embarrassed by it either, right? I think a big part of the boomer issue is that they associate walking with being poor
What's expensive isn't (just) the technical infrastructure, it's termination/interconnection fees charged by the destination mobile networks.
I have enjoyed using windowbuilder and formdev when I need a desktop gui
>Thirty-three states including California and New York are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people's mental health and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that cause children to be addicted to its platforms.

Incase anyone wants to look at an actual document which I didn't see linked in the article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b68f2951-2a4b-4822-...
What did WhatsApp win? I've never used it, so I'm not sure what anyone uses it for.
It’s not the core of the application, but it can be the core of the business.

For companies that sell API access logs in one form or another are how bills are reconciled and usage metered.
Would you actually want Signal to be cheaping out on the developers that are maintaining the cryptography software that protects millions of people?

Someone with that level of expertise is going to be expensive.
Please cite one example of an area where the drinking water has been rendered undrinkable by fracking.
In this case we don’t need to speculate at all. Signal is open source. Back when I was at Twilio we even did some at-scale experiments with running Signal. The intensive parts have absolutely nothing to do with Java because the server logic is relatively simple. The hard parts of Signal are the database storage/retrieval and the encryption.
> $19 million for 50 staff. That's $338k/head on average.

How did you compute this? 19/5 is 3.8
I think that's the gp's point.

Given the choice between SMS and a service that provides the same functionality is free, superior in most ways, borderless, etc. the choice to use whatsapp is obvious.
Looks great!

Just one note: there is a very faint shimmer of a white line on the left and right edges of this image which thus becomes more visible when wrapping around a model

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/1a35eff2061fe218236f872f9...
It’s Complicated (tm), a hybrid of the two. Text content across multiple CRDT enabled blocks may be connected in a single logical CRDT, but the segment visible in any given block is stored in that block object, which maintains our permission system invariants. We’ll still support moving blocks to different pages, so one page may have a few different CRDTs visually interleaved.

All the edge cases are very interesting, like what happens if I use backspace to join a block of CRDT B into block of CRDT A.

API consumers are unaffected. Likely we’ll support API updates of text as best-effort diff-match-patch of the text on our side applied as CRDT ops.
> I can almost certainly say that the number of bad or creepy uses for an automated email to phone number generating tool massively outweighs the good reasons for having one

Meanwhile, I can almost certainly say that the number of ways to bury your head in the sand instead of simply facing an uncomfortable problem massively outweighs the good reasons for doing so anyway.

A person who is in need of money and lacking in empathy will not fail to use any technique available and it is thus good to know the defenses of that or at least be aware of it.

"Creepy" arguments (appeals to shame or disgust) are fallacies.

Security researcher types are well aware of the good-actor motivations behind white-hat-hackerdom. Is it wrong that I can buy a book on lockpicking? Would I be seen by some as a bad parent if I taught it to my kid when he expressed curiosity about it?
At some point I’m hoping AI can help with hardening by coming up with potentially novel security holes.
But if your service has downtime because the logs could not be written, that seems strictly inferior. As someone else wrote upthread, you only want guaranteed delivery for logs if they're required under a strict audit regime and the cost of noncompliance is higher than the cost of a service outage.
Do the tax payers get any money for these negative externalities?

Or is this just going to be a handout to whichever private company has the right connections with the right politicians?

Is this mainly going to benefit those politicians and private companies?

This isn't going to materially reduce gas prices for the average Ohio person to matter at all.

State parks are a huge amenity...
Gotcha. I'll do that the next time I bump into them
That was for sending SMS via Signal, not for verifiyng users via sms and they did remove that.

https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/

edit: wording, forgot the word remove
If only someone would release a universal protocol that the app's native messaging apps could utilize to eliminate the need for these 3rd party messaging apps. Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.
This sounds like a lot of justification for "do your own research," and, in my case, I don't prescribe to that--at all.

Hey, by all means, you go ahead and use whatever tools you have available to you to make determinations about your and your family's well-being, but I'm going to trust the opinions of those who work with and treat these sorts of issues day in and day out for decades and avoid the opinions of those I do not deem to have appropriate credibility.
Pensions aren't a thing in the U.S. anymore, especially not for tech. And when a U.S. company says "staffing costs" that does not include licenses, offices, etc. It's strictly salary and benefits.

According to Signal's 990, it's paying multiple employees over $700k. That's above-market for corporate compensation, and it's way above market for non-profit compensation, to the point where it could be considered private inurement.
I'd be happy to pay $1/year for signal, and I'd pay $2/year if it were decoupled from my phone number.
Yes, let’s tie every user of this privacy-focused messaging platform to a credit card number.
A Flow:

> Service A => User: Please Enter Your Phone Number and Email

> Service A => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us

> Clearinghouse => User (SMS): Please respond with the Email you used at signup to confirm you want an account with Service A

Later...

> Service B => User: Please Enter Your phone number and Email

> Service B => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us

> Clearinghouse => User (Email): Please verify you want an account with Service B

Not saying it's great (providing email twice is annoying), but it's something.
I never expected a first world country to pay that little. I live in New Zealand. Your colleagues are earning less than our minimum wage.

So apparently first world is not the same as "high income". In that case I would buy something from Taiwan.
> why bother?

If the output is good enough, saves me time from having to write all the HTML by hand. Big time saver if a tool like this could deliver good-enough code that just requires some refinement.

Less of a time saver if it just outputs <div> soup.
Seriously, people will adore it if they're in the know. Make sure you get it exactly right, tho ;)

https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ph_unit_0279...
Just charge $10 to create an account without a phone number and accept Bitcoin. Most people can avoid the $10 by providing a phone number, privacy-conscious people only have to pay $10, it generates revenue, and the $10 puts the spammers out of business because they don't pay $10 once, they pay $10 every time they get banned, which happens multiple times a day.

You could even automate the bans by banning anyone who gets blocked by more than two people they sent messages to, which anybody can avoid by not sending messages to people who would block them, and if it happens to someone innocent, it's still only another $10 to reactivate your account.
But that's not salary, that's the total cost per employee. So if you factor in ~40% cost for healthcare, pension, perks, and various taxes, then the average salary is closer to $240,000 which will still a bit high, is probably less than market for the average engineer working at the company.
More hope for cost going down on AI applications in the near future.
Children didn’t completely rebuild America around their laziness. Boomers control most wealth, the govt, and every major city planning department. This is their choice and their fault.
To be fair, the Dutch government basically banned the use of any kind of intelligence a long time ago.
Nice.

I do something similar with low cost instances. I use Go and I get a great bang for my buck (performance to dx to costs).

In my case I also leverage the cheap access to gobs of SSD or nvme. I use super cheap VMs for the app servers and they come with 10-20gb disk. I use this as KV embedded cache. For a few bucks a month I’m able to pump out 7-10k rps at load (synthetic but still).

I have a low end pg instance that’s able to pump out 2k tps (synthetic) so with the little bit of caching I’m able to save some costs and also offer good performance. All under $100 a month.

I hope when my business does take off I will have a good base to expand that I can get far without spending tons of money on inefficient compute.
Even Instagram allows you to search your contacts. If they have their number set in their profiles, it'll find a match
the conundrum is that OpenAI is lowering the barrier to entry for this stuff so much, the option for most people unfortunately is between using these black box tools or not doing the thing at all
"You have been doing this for an eternity, you are grumpy, you scream at juniors, you have a grey beard and your existence depends on this."
Podcast Ruined by a Software Engineer [audio]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont...

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/study-links-fracki...

https://www.consumerreports.org/water-contamination/how-frac...

https://www.propublica.org/series/fracking
IIRC, employees cost the business ~150% of their salary. That means we're looking at more like a $220k/yr salary on average. For a bay area company, that seems completely reasonable.
Signal does the same thing. Or maybe it used to but they changed it. I have a bunch of notifications of "so and so is on Signal" from when I joined years ago.

Can't say I've ever gotten any psycho responses from it though.
Funny, because that's the reason I can't use Signal - I don't have a phone number.
Sounds like a great case to get the fuck away from SMS and phone numbers.

But hey, they still want your whole address book, and announce you're on signal to everyone else on signal.

The whole "secure" thing is a joke. Its all linked to your identity via your phone#.
You're absolutely right, locking is a hard problem. Especially when you get into the edge cases of clients not disconnecting cleanly.

If you've ever used one of those awful early-2000s Microsoft word collaboration systems where you have to check-out the doc, and remember to check it back in, and no one can use it until you've checked it back in... it's awful!

I'm not directly in this team, but one of the teams at my company have been working on this problem. They call it "Spaces", and one of the features solves this component locking problem.

https://ably.com/examples/component-locking
Buy 50 invite codes for $5
A lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support.

Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others.

Signal offers essentially nothing to me.
Their competitors are free. Charging $2 would make Signal a non-alternative for many of their users, and due to how the network effect works, it would greatly reduce the utility for everybody willing to pay as well.

And that's all without even considering the significant overhead of collecting low-value payments internationally.
There's apparently even "green bubble bullying"[1] of kids who have Android devices and thus have their messages appear different. In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share - it's awful and they deserve a lot more negative PR for it.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
I know it's unpopular to say this on here but Signal will never be popular as long as they don't add basic features that all other messaging apps have.

- If you lose your phone or it no longer boots, all your messages are irretrievably lost. There's no way to create backups on iOS. Why the hell can't I enable iCloud backups? I know it breaks privacy in some ways but let me choose the trade off. Put a giant warning if you have to.

- The desktop app is awful and requires signing in again all the time. See the Telegram Desktop app for how to do it better. In my opinion it should be the gold standard for desktop messaging apps

- Desktop app keeps losing message history

As long as Signal treats all messages as if they're so important that even super spies should not be able to read them, and as a result, goofing usability in a way that standard features don't work, I 100% understand that the majority of people won't use it.
Oh, it gets worse.

One of our biases is towards conservation of mental energy. If we can, we choose the easiest path. Which means that we actively prefer experts who are smart, well-informed, and certain of their beliefs. Because we can then be comfortable handing our thinking over to them. Why bother questioning the expert when we'd surely agree if we just knew enough? And then confirmation bias keeps us from ever questioning their results.

The result, as https://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/d... documents, is that our most popular and highest paid pundits have those characteristics. But those experts are ALSO the ones who are worst at making predictions about the world. As I pointed out in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TMgfapzbt5qp4Hszf/doubt-cert..., we should really be concluding "likely has cognitive bias" instead of "the expert says it, so case closed".

The documented result is that we wind up trusting the experts that we should trust least!
> I donate to signal, and use it frequently. But I would much prefer for the app to simply charge users rather than beg for donations.

Hard disagree. If you charge, the number of people who will use it shrinks by several magnitudes, and then you lose your network effect, you lose the ability to get your less technically inclined friends to install it.
You cannot simultaneously believe that qualia evolved while also asserting that qualia has nothing to do with behaviour.

In any case, the behaviour I'm referring to is clearly a proxy for complex change. A rock does not undergo complex changes, so unless you're a panpsychist, it's a pretty straightforward deduction that a rock doesn't have internal life.

> but it's no reason to assume an internal life.

I'm not asserting they have an internal life, the person I responded to was saying they have no internal life and I said they cannot rigorously justify such a claim.