skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humanity can have just 2 modes of operation (3th one is fake path). 1) is to consume less and less, so we end up like living in tents in dark with population 10B and more.. 2) Smart-manage population growth and cut bullshit jobs, so we end up with 200M-300M people living good live.

The choise is yours. I personally would go with (2) option, but its just me.

Before anyone hit the downvote button, think about it in math. You only have limited amount of resources and energy. How you distribute it, is up to you.
Check the WaybackMachine - might be enough for you to pull some things out of.
Ask HN: Why is TikTok Web trying to access computer sensors?
Trying to use Tiktok Web with a new, human account, Javascript is on, cookies rejected. I don't have Tiktok mobile or desktop app installed.

I've noticed that "Follow" button doesn't work at all from Tiktok Web. It seems like it worked but upon refreshing the page or looking at your Profile to see followed accounts, it comes back empty.

Plus, on a browser isn't it weird to request "access to sensors"?

Why is this happening?
Saw some discussion about the Transputer on here and thought people might find this talk by Professor David May at the University of Bristol last year interesting
I wrote and open sourced a program to print guitar tablature in postscript (so it ran on our apple laserwriter instead of on a pc; as a phd student in the early 90s our computers were severely underpowered, but also I wanted to make it portable from Suns to Macs to Win 3.1). It could also process a lot of ascii tablature and turn it into nicer copy - this was what I wanted it for as I was trying to print out tab from OLGA using less paper, and when you scale down ascii tab it just leaves blank space to the side. (I got a mail from someone in New Zealand to say he used this code to publish a book of 5-string banjo music, as it was the only thing he could find that handled different numbers of strings)

Anyway, fast forward a year and I interviewed for a programming job with British Telecom. This project came up in conversation and the interviewer got super interested, and I landed the job. Then it turned out that almost everyone this boss hired was a musician of some kind-including a keyboard player for a chart-topping band (he's back touring with them now), a bass player, a professional saxophonist career changer, a singer in a band... he ran a weekly jam session after hours. So I really think it was the guitar playing that got me hired.

And no, it didn't relate to the job, at all. My phd involved parallel programming on transputers in C, and as it happened, the guy they sat me next to on my first day also had a phd involving C programming on parallel machines. And they got us to write Visual Basic for the next 6 months.
You're welcome! It's honestly a great feeling just to have other devs use your work.
And to factor in some of the other commentary--they could build this in a weekend (and continue to operate it for relative pennies) on-prem.
I'll see if I can find the links, it's been a while since I last saw them, but there was a very active GitHub issue on the main Mastodon repo back in 2017 or 2018 related to search. It came down to concerns over content that is considered acceptable in some cultures and child pornography in others.
A friend there says the labels - the producer side - are very demanding to work with. That could be draining resources.
> Not Apple

They're definitely moving in that direction https://searchads.apple.com/

> Microsoft

It's not a huge part of their revenue but they definitely make a sizeable amount of money from ads
Mass firings like these are not normal.

In countries with functional labor laws, it's straight-up illegal unless you're basically going through bankruptcy. Mass firings should only happen if either 1) there's a very significant economic crisis going on, or 2) the company is doing so poorly its immediate future is uncertain.

The Silicon Valley style mass-hiring followed by mass-firing style of management is indicative of poor management. In a well-run company this should never happen, as the same could be achieved by simply reducing the hiring rate and letting natural attrition take care of the rest.
Nuclear energy generation and nuclear weapons have very little to do with each other. You can do one, without doing the other.

> I wonder how the majority of folk rationalise their viewpoint surrounding this situation without being seen as massively hypocritical?

It would be useful if you could point out what exactly are you feeling is hypocritical?
I would recommend creating learning courses on linkedin, udemy, etc.. that's where people go to learn new stuff, if you are not present on those planforms Might As Well be a Dead language
That's a little reductive don't you think.
Glad to see Celso still hacking
I used to click "Print" (macOS) and save to file in (ironically for this article) PDF... does it work for you?
> Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn’t easy.

You won't get any argument from me on that one, but it's worth remembering that it's also hard to find people who are able to run systems in the cloud cost effectively.
Why AI is in a position to kill all publishers?
MS made $12B in 2023 from advertising: https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora...
What's lost when we photograph life instead of experiencing it? (2016)
Page 1, the R&D, sales and marketing, and general and administrative expenses are probably almost all payroll expenses. And they are basically equal to or exceeding gross profit, which means payroll is a huge expense.

https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2023/q3...
From top of head I really enjoy:

MAPMAKING PROCESS, THE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lMu7GVVMZ4

mechanism computer of fire control computer (a classic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug

Physical science documentary series whose exact title I can't recall.

It has been a while. To find more, my method is to do the occasional PeriscopeFilm binge (on youtube that digitizes a lot of old media, with great descriptions), always find find something interesting I haven't watched. If style, delivery really good, there's usually something in description to point to more. Like "U.S. NAVY TRAINING FILM", which usually returns playlists, and videos in same era often share quality. The technical ones generally don't disappoint.

Another one is The Best Film Archives with good military training playlists.

Tangent for others: the one I wish to remember, is a deleted/banned channel, one of the original US archival footage channel, with I think 1000s of videos, that got wiped many years ago right when youtube started drm crackdown. It had a companion website with obsessive amount of detail and tags to find the perfect video. And from what I recall, it didn't feel like a business like periscopefilm, but a passion project. It was an incredible amount of work to have been wiped out.
I wrote this as I had been seeing too many articles either dismiss PQC as being something theoretical that we don't need, or go so far into the details that they're not accessible unless you already have a deep understanding of cryptography. There didn't seem to be much that bridged the knowledge gap between understanding the basics of quantum computing and the specifics of some of the post-quantum algorithms.

Hopefully it's of interest here and at the right level for non-cryptographers.
That would maybe explain 500-1000 people.
I don't think one of you has to be wrong for another one to be right. Should Spotify have focused on its core competency early in its life? Sure. But at some point in the long years since, Spotify should have 100% looked at their cloud bills and built a way out of that lock-in.
BuiltWithRuby: An inspiration resource showcasing Ruby on Rails projects
At an average yearly cost of $125000 per employee they could either cut 1600 employees or not fund some random podcaster.
It's actually non-trivial to run an efficient cost center department that actually supports other departments properly. The incentive structures are just horribly difficult to align. Cloud's selling point is that you won't have to spend 6 months filling out forms to get a single out of date VM (yes, that happened to me).
TikTok found all of those people very quickly, they famously don't use a public cloud provider. Infra isn't magic.
Fediverse has a wrong model of news aggregation - this has been talked here many times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549218 My take is that it conflates what is civil and what is on topic.
Besides, hard links don't have a canonical target, they are all equally correct names for the file. So even if the script author wanted to support the same technique for hard links there is no reasonable way to do it.
Microsoft is also actively trying to grow their ad revenue.
There are large forces that affect our lives that are beyond our control which cause us anxiety. We can deal with this in different ways; religion, government, or employers are all authorities who we may believe can help us through times of need (our healthcare, for some of us our literal ability to continue living, is tied up in our employment, at least in the US). It’s only natural that we run into problems when our bulwark against the uncertainties of the world is taken away. And then tie up the prestige of working for FAANG and the identity that comes with it, to learn that perhaps you weren’t so special; you were just caught up in a ZIRP phenomenon - it can be hard for an individual to take.
A single engineer is 400k in total costs, and they hired thousands for initiatives that didn’t pan out. Thinking cloud costs come anywhere close to being a factor here is nonsense and not supported by anything in the article.

You extrapolated that costs meant cloud costs vs. them overhiring during the pandemic and investing in things like podcasts, which haven’t had the expected returns. You did this in an attempt to tie this back to some injustice that happened to you in a comment section far far away, which you’ve edited the post to remove now, thankfully.
Spotify does awesome music recommendation - there are no human curation involved like with Apple Music afaik - you probably need a whole bunch of people for this.

They do much more than merely streaming mp3's and they working on a video product as well - there is some content creation as well i.e agents , sales , marketing and producers.

You can probably can compare them to Netflix (12,800).
I think that's a good take, it's easy to look in hindsight and say that they made wrong choices but we wouldn't even be having the conversation had they not been at least somewhat successful.

The question becomes then: 9,500 employee's and none among them know how (or wanted) to regain enough costs to save 17% of the company from losing their job just before Christmas?

Certain features (spotify wrapped for example) would definitely be a lot harder with more traditional hosting. But the bulk of Spotify's workload are not significantly hampered by moving slower on infrastructure and recuperating significant costs.

It's just very easy to keep piling infra costs on top of infra costs and not thinking about it, especially if it feels disconnected from company financials for most developers and they do not see a line between spending and jobs.
I would quibble with your use of the word "easily", but I consider it amazing that a language with such a complex runtime manages to expose an embeddable interface at all. Julia is an incredible language.
OpenAI, under CEO Sam Altman's recent reinstatement, has been identified in a letter of intent to invest $51 million in AI chips developed by Rain AI, a startup where Altman also holds a personal investment stake.

Rain AI, situated near OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters, specializes in developing neuromorphic processing units (NPUs) that simulate human brain features. The company aims to revolutionize the AI chip market, offering substantial computing power and energy efficiency surpassing current GPU standards.
Without any direct evidence (although it's an idea I picked up from attending various immunology lectures), it seems like aging/death is at least partially linked to immunity.

Our ancient ancestors had to make a tradeoff in order to combat the extremely high mutation rate of their microbes, by increasing their own rate of genomic diversity (through sex, and through adaptive immunity) including in the receptors which detect microbes.

Sexual reproduction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_reproduction

V(D)J recombination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination

Evidence of G.O.D.’s Miracle: Unearthing a RAG Transposon
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286741...

However, nothing is free, and with the ability to generate this extreme genetic diversity comes a higher risk of making mistakes including un-programmed DNA breaks, etc.. All these little mistakes add up as aging, and sometimes cancer, when the repair pathways are not able to keep up with the damage.

Also, by having an adaptive immune system you're constantly breeding tougher and tougher microbes, which could be considered harmful.

The acquired immune system: a vantage from beneath https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15539148/
I would personally use a Db to manage application state and Kafka to manage the eventing part. That is in line with my experience of using Kafka mainly in a microservice or integration environment to pass different events between interested systems (topics).
My point was more that if you’re trying to decide which method is better for remembering something (handwriting vs. digital), the introduction of a spaced repetition system (either software like Anki or a Leitner box for handwritten notes) will outcompete either one that is used alone.

In other words, if your goal is to go fast: a bicycle will outcompete a tricycle. But adding a motor to either will be an order of magnitude better. At least that’s what I think; and so I wish the study had included this.
Yea I understand that, but whats the point of that strategy if users don't want to even subscribe to podcasts in the app because how bad the UI is. It's like they've never used a podcast app before.
Imagine if the same strategy were applied to biological warfare. Novel viruses tailored to be symptomatic and cause harm to just one specific world leader. If the technology exists, it could be the most formidable assassination tool available; a self-delivering, non-nuclear ace-in-the-hole for winning a war.
https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMR...

For those against clicking:

00:00:00 - 00:15:00

The author of the video argues that Spotify will ultimately fail due to the high cost of membership, the fact that streaming services pay independent musicians less than traditional music platforms, and the company's neglect of its only asset - its artists.

00:00:00 The author of the video argues that Spotify will ultimately fail because of the high cost of membership and the fact that streaming services pay independent musicians less than traditional music platforms.

00:05:00 The author of the video makes the case that Spotify will eventually fail because of its business model, which relies on rapid growth and unsustainable levels of value in the music industry. He argues that if Spotify's independent musicians were paid more fairly, the platform would be unable to survive.

00:10:00 The author of the video argues that Spotify will eventually fail due to the company's neglect of its only asset - its artists. The author believes that this neglect will lead to the eventual collapse of the streaming music industry as a whole. However, he also believes that this collapse will be hastened by the fact that for-profit companies are required to eventually pay their investors as little as possible.

00:15:00 The author of this video argues that streaming services like Spotify will ultimately fail because they rely on artificial scarcity (i.e. the notion that there are not enough songs available to listen to on the platform). They suggest that instead of using streaming services, musicians should focus on releasing their music on their own platforms, such as Bandcamp or their own website.
Back in 1994 I was a sophomore in college. In our C++ class I asked the professor how GUI programs were written and she suggested the Motif toolkit for Unix / X11. I checked out a book on Motif from the library and I had to type in about 2 pages of code just to pop up a single dialog box that said "Hello World"
It also took about 5 minutes to compile on a DECstation 5000 with 32MB RAM.

An older student in the computer lab saw my Motif book and asked what I was doing. I told him and he suggested I use Tcl/Tk. I asked "What is that?" So he pointed me to some documentation on this brand new thing called the World Wide Web.

I spent the entire weekend reading everything I could about Tcl/Tk and had little GUI programs that were wrapper around lots of command line tools with radio buttons and stuff to select options. Then I started drawing circles and rectangles and stuff.

I was also learning HTML and had my own web page mainly to links that I liked but also maintained the FAQ for a popular childhood cartoon that I loved. I had taken the plain ASCII text FAQ and written a Tcl script to format sections into HTML with different header fonts, table of contents, etc.

A few months later I was starting to apply to summer internships. One of them mentioned Tcl as a scripting language for web server development. I put Tcl/Tk and HTML on my resume and got an interview.

The company didn't like Perl for CGI-BIN programming and preferred Tcl. I told them I had my own web page and you could also access the code I had written from my web page. During the interview they actually went to my web site, downloaded the code, and started looking at it.

I was a computer engineering major so most of my classes were on electrical circuits, digital logic, assembly programming, and they didn't ask me anything about that.

All of stuff I learned that wasn't directly related to my classes like Tcl, HTML, and playing around with Linux for fun is what got me the job.

Now 28 years later I'm designing integrated circuits / semiconductors and still write Tcl all the time because it is the integrated scripting language for most of the chip design software. It's not my favorite language but it's weird how this language that was kind of obscure in 1994 helped me get my first job and I'm still using it now.
Thanks! It was a pretty big change but I’m glad I did it. Knowing how to code opened so many doors!
For one, you can use your compute resources much more elasticly. You can create and delete VMs on demand and don't need to drive to the colo to reimage.
> So assuming that probably most people subscribe to YouTube Premium, why Spotify as well?

Because I don't listen to "educational content, product reviews, how to guides" all the time?

I listen to music, and at its core Spotify is still a music streaming service. And between discover weekly, dj, curated playlists, my own playlists and user-created playlists there are significantly more ways to find the music you want, and not the bullshit non-working search that Youtube has.
Because space is one of the most common characters in many languages, and people want to write stuff with spaces.

> Most users wouldn't notice, and shell scripts authors would be much happier!

They would, because people want to use spaces, and they wouldn't, because there's a bunch of characters you need to quote for (in POSIX sh/bash).

The solution is to realize it's not 1986 and evolve shell scripting beyond that. Fish and zsh have done that. Probably others as well. It's not even that hard and doesn't even need to woefully break compatibility.

Oh, and even if you did somehow convince the Unix world to outlaw spaces and other special shell characters by some super-human feat of charisma, you still haven't really solved anything because there's no way in hell you're going to convince the Windows or macOS people to do that, so you're still going to end up in trouble when your spouse or grandma or boss gives you their USB drive, or sends you files (which you can conveniently no longer store), or whatnot.

Might as well argue for the moon to be painted green. It's just not going to happen.
Ask HN: Would a Universal SaaS Experimentation Platform Benefit Your Team?
Hello HN community,

I’m developing a SaaS platform aimed at streamlining the process of structuring, brainstorming, tracking, and analyzing business experiments across various departments - be it in marketing, sales, product development, or even AI. Unlike domain-specific tools, this platform will be adaptable for a wide range of industries and functions.

Key features include:

• Collaborative brainstorming tools similar to Trello.

• Agile-style prioritization of experiments.

• Tracking experiments with customizable metrics.

• Integrating outcomes into business processes as best practices.

I’m seeking insights from the HN community:

1. Do you see a need for such a platform in your current workflow?

2. What features are most critical for you in an experimentation platform?

3. Have you faced challenges with current domain-specific tools that this platform could solve?

Any feedback or experiences shared would be greatly appreciated and instrumental in shaping the development of this tool.
I'm not 100% convinced it's all that negligible, but in general I agree with your sentiment. Inefficient software updates are a pet peeve of mine. If I download 5GB of software patches I'd expect to see major differences after applying the patch, but most of the time these days it's barely noticeable changes, yet the patches are still huge.

Just look at the iOS 17 OTA packages for iPhone 14 Pro.

- 16.6.1 -> 17.0: 3.3GB - fair enough, new major version

- 17.0 -> 17.0.1: 452MB - security updates and bugfixes

- 17.0.1 -> 17.0.2: 384MB - security updates and bugfixes

- 17.0.2 -> 17.0.3: 450MB - security updates and bugfixes

- 17.0.3 -> 17.1: 1.35GB - this one is interesting, an update from 17.0.2 to 17.1 is actually about 150MB smaller than from the latest version which uses the same upgrade package as 17.0 GM

- 17.1 -> 17.1.1: 395MB - security updates and bugfixes

- 17.1.1 -> 17.1.2: 414MB - security updates and bugfixes

In total, I've downloaded about 3.44GB of updates for my iPhone since the iOS 17 upgrade in September, and have received WiFi AirDrop support, some security fixes, and better Home app Matter support. Security fixes are in general just a few lines of changed code, and should result in minimal changes to a binary, so if you just diff the new binary with the old one it should come out pretty minimal, yet the patches are several hundred megabytes.

Someone in a different thread suggested Apple were doing partial binary patching, but I don't see it.
Fyi, linked in the post is the statement in the fdroid GitLab org, https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/447. This provides a bit more context. It also contains a reply from Hans regarding this statement.
It’s usually easy to extract individual strings from a PDF, normally single lines, but it can be quite hard to understand how those form into longer paragraphs, especially if the page has multiple columns and inline figures.

It’s also easy to create a PDF that it is hard to extract text from, not through an deliberate attempt to enforce copy protection but often simply from attempts to compress the size of the file as you may not want to store the entirety of a font in a document.

I’ve been on both ends of this, generating documents and consuming them, and I think we probably created something that allowed for much easier text extraction, but it’s far too late now.
How to bring the startup culture of Silicon Valley to China
That, and people often forget that - even if we stay on the engineering side of things - Spotify has tools and apps for artists, creators, and advertisers that most users never see.