skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Does the North help enforce slavery in the split country scenario?

No, why would they? In fact being free of any legal obligation to enforce the fugitive slave laws (and the provision in the Constitution that they were based on) was one of the main arguments made by abolitionists who advocated for the North seceding from the Union.

> Does the confederacy happily let slaves escape across the border to freedom?

Considering that even with the fugitive slave laws in place, a large number of slaves escaped and were never returned, it would certainly seem like many more of them could have escaped if the North and South were separate countries. Of course the Confederates, or at least the slaveowning ones, wouldn't have been happy about it, but what would they do about it? Declare war on the North?

> You are also sort of writing off the intrinsic value of freeing 4 million people sooner than later.

Sooner than what? If we are going to talk about counterfactuals, how about this one: abolitionists in 1831 have not yet dialed up their rhetoric, and the bill that was in the Virginia state legislature in that year to establish gradual emancipation of the slaves passes (in our actual world, the bill failed because copies of William Lloyd Garrison's famous pamphlet arrived, calling the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" and advocating for Northern violence to free the slaves, and once the Virginia legislators read it, all support for the bill evaporated). Other Southern states gradually follow Virginia's lead. Result: by 1865, all of the slaves are freed without costing a single life or requiring a single shot to be fired.

We could also consider another counterfactual: what if the US had done what Britain did, and freed the slaves by buying their freedom from the slaveowners? Britain did that in 1838.
What if we did both
Don't forget the lengthened form charizard [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charizard
They have 9500 employees. Just salaries alone at a very conservative (for american standards) 75000$ average make up 700 million dollars a year, excluding healthcare and other expenses. Payroll is definitely a huge cost.
Congruence closure 1980 paper implemented in Python
django is good

just one thing

fix .select_related('child__attribute') / .values('child__attribute')

currently it removes from result set rows where 'attribute' is NULL, unlike what typical LEFT JOINs imply
Nine serious relationships in 27 years, but no marriage? I bet you live in one of those heathen countries where sex before marriage is legal, don't you? If you weren't allowed to have sex before marriage, would you still be unmarried after 27 years of relationships? Sweden, where Spotify is headquartered, is 8,600 kilometers from the San Francisco VC-backed tech scene, and is just as culturally removed from it as well.
The Genocide of the Bamileke
Death of a (Really Good) Salesman
I struggle with this. I work with devs who think that a function with 3 side effects is fine, and suggestions that it would be more maintainable if it did one thing (and even more offensive, that the function name should be a clue to what the function does) are often met with hostility. In the end they're angry and resistant and I'm frustrated. Sometimes I just approve it, write a technical debt ticket, and move on.
The Spanish also had many accounts of Mayan child sacrifice. These accounts were often dismissed by historians on suspicion of prejudice. We've more recently found archaeological evidence of the Mayan practice on a massive scale.

Sometimes dismissing evidence because of perceived bias is simply incorrect.
Style wars are the kind of thing that should just be automated away with a source control hook that reformats all submissions.
Gerrit is a poor man's Critique and it's not nearly as slick to use in practice.
Generally agree, but at some companies/teams the ratio of 'nitpicky subjective feedback' to 'you have a bug here feedback' is like 95:5 while at others it's 5:95. The latter function much better.
>This is just how normal, healthy business goes

17% layoffs is healthy? No thanks
Show HN: Reference-free evaluation of LLM-powered chatbots
Hey HN!

This an interactive demo with a *somewhat* helpful AI assistant. The goal is to demonstrate a good way to reference-free evaluate interactions between humans and AI assistants. Reference-free means that you do not provide a correct answer to a query. The used metric in this context is the goal success ratio, which measures how many queries a user needs to send to reach their goal.

In the near future, there will be a guide on how to reference-free evaluate any LLM app (chat, RAG, summarization, etc.).

Try it out and please share any feedback!
expect I don't feel many programs are working in PDF natively except for Adobe products. It's always just an export target, or you "print to PDF"

So to me it kinda looks like the format is lacking

I also don't know much about it, but I assume it's not easy to generate programmatically. While for instance generating an SVG diagram/image is generally pretty trivial
And what's old is new again, both Android and (newly) iPhone have live voicemail screening features!
All Things Open 2024
My partner works at a major U in the US. Top 200ish.

They are solely focused on revenue. Teacher pay rarely raised, but that new upgrade for the stadium at a cool $120m, seems like a great idea.

FFS, her dept went past the paper budget for one semester, about 5 years ago.
The resolution? Do without paper until the next semester.

That's what students insane tuition prices bought them. Apathy over education.
How much NIMBY resistance would something like this get in the USA?
I actually had an external integration beak because someone's last name contained "null". The integration failed with an invalid JSON error. After debugging the payload with one of their developers, we narrowed it down to one record. Apparently, they had a hardcoded rule where they replaced null with "" and it caused two double quotes on the property :|. I had to filter out this one record for a couple weeks until they received all of the approvals to push their fix to prod...
My point still stands. They chose the path of trying to get market share from incumbents in the podcast and audiobook market rather than trying to innovate in their core music business and that has cost them in multiple ways.
“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"
> If somebody wants mentorship I'll add my thoughts in a comment along with my approval.

This is always the approach I take. Especially for junior engineers. Stay out of the way, let them merge code with as little friction and discouragement as possible. Anything that I would have implemented or approached differently I try to elaborate on. Even go so far as to write some (most or all) of the code in a comment or in a remote branch to share. I will still ship the code but let the submitter digest my thoughts.
My experience with the AI recommendations was mostly positive as an L4 doing Java
In some sense it's not right to claim python is used in those cases. The core libraries are all written in one of the 4 languages GP listed. Python is just the glue, or high level algorithm.
Your argument is founded on naivete.

Of course doing something halfway would not accomplish much.
Barely, and only after their previous layoffs this year.
License plates can be fun

https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha...
> Or a security vulnerability has forced a breaking change.

Theoretically, I suppose?

Do you have a historic example in mind?

I've been running Debian "stable" in its various incarnations on servers for over a decade, and I can't remember any time any service on any installation I've run had such an issue. But my memory is pretty bad, so I might have missed one. (Or even a dozen!) But I have `unattented-upgrades` installed on all my live servers right now, and don't lose a wink of sleep over it.
wow, seems like a great solution. what does it look like from the shore?
Rather, Wayland was still a hobby project during ChromeOS' development and X11 always has been ridiculous security-wise. Also the decision allowed them to tightly tie Chrome into the graphics stack (compressed textures, color-space handling, hw plane accelerated compositing etc.), this has become viable on Wayland only recently.
MRs are bad place to align things at scale.
The Netherlands has joined the chat

Seriously, though, a lot of big cities are or were ports, have centres near the coast, and are constrained from growing further inland by geological features or transport time. Extending those cities out to sea, by reclamation or on floats, is at least superficially appealing.
I'm sure there would be negative effects, but at least things would move forward quickly. This is the worst system except for all the others.
In case you're interested, Firefox Relay uses that stack and is open source: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/
I think that people get really upset about layoffs like they're an example of poor planning, but in reality it's all a calculated risk.

Laying off employees isn't a very negative thing from the perspective of the corporation. Very few costs are associated with laying off employees. A few months of salary, but that's it. It's an at-will arrangement.

I learned in a business class that, mathematically, most companies acutally take too few risks. It's not hard to understand why when you start doing some the math: if you invest $1 million into 10 projects 9/10 of those projects fail but the one successful project makes $10 million, then your investment broke even. But our brains see a 90% failure rate and want to be more conservative with our investments. Let's say, alternatively, we invest in 5 projects to be more conservative with our money, but because we didn't take enough moonshots we never found a project that paid off, so now we lost $5 million instead of breaking even. This hypothetical thought experiment is why many companies should be over-hiring and taking risks.

If you make a mistake, so what? You lay off the workers and you immediately stop paying for that cost, and you might even have something to show for taking the risk.

Also, yes, it takes more people to build something than to maintain it. Employees don't like to hear it, but hiring employees that you deliberately plan to lay off in a few years is a completely valid strategy.

If we want this to change then we need to have our governments have better layoff protections in place, like mandatory severance or notice periods. The WARN Act does this but only for large employers making large cuts.
Another good dependable source of demoscene events is https://www.demoparty.net/

You can be pretty sure that every demoparty will be listed there, as well as many demoscene adjacent events.
Free market means businesses decide the regulations placed on the public, for private gain
The US has one of the highest median household incomes in the world. Please, tell me about the terrible consequences.

Now, tell me more about the fantastic results of

- North Korea

- Soviet Union

- Chinese Communist Party

- Venezuela

- Argentina

- Cuba

- India (under socialism)
I don't think the burden of the changing API surface was place on the callers of that API. With core library developers updating their callsites, it meant that people calling into early versions of React, never had to deal with upgrading the react version in their package. As a caller of these libraries, it was much nicer to have the React team take care of upgrades where possible rather than having to deal with it myself.

Furthermore, there were tons of changes that could happen across the board at facebook that didn't happen at google due to owners files. Lots of people were empowered to make broad changes to the entire codebase which in aggregate made the codebase better. Coming from Facebook, all the systems around owners and readability represented a huge amount of time to be able to make changes that should have been easy. It also left the codebase with many warts that would have been relatively quick to fix locally but a pain to land.

Facebook went in the other direction - there were better and better tools for making broad updates
Interesting, didn't know that was a background intention
Intrinsic value changes over time and will eventually go to zero for any object.

That doesn't mean it was always zero, not unlike the concept of depreciation.
Isn't Developer DX mostly a way to get developers locked into your platform? I have avoided Next.js for this reason, it seems like just a way to funnel developers towards Vercel. DX is largely a service specific problem since its coupled to the service you are deploying to.
We did something similar with cinnamon and Ceylon/Sri Lanka. Also moved to the Caribbean.

Though now there are two plants we call cinnamon, and I think the new world mostly produces the other one, which is why Ceylon Cinnamon is a ‘thing’ now.

Pepper was similarly more valuable than gold, but I don’t recall the sordid history on that one.
Wow. I mean, you're joking right? No? Wow.

That furthers my belief that Jenkins is the quintissential mediocre open source project that only hangs on to life because it's free (and maybe just becasuse it's free as in beer).

If I ran a department and I was given an unlmited CI budget forever I can't see what would compel me to use Jenkins.
My take: In the real world code deals with 8-bit byte values all the time. So an 8-bit CPU is sort of the minimum "practical" world architecture for getting things done. So it's interesting from that POV.

Also because of the above, 16/32/64-bit ISAs have to support dealing with bytes, so they end up either including instructions to explicitly deal with them, or constantly having to mask the upper bits of values/registers.

Unfortunately 8-bit CPUs were also almost always tied with 16-bit address buses. Back then when memory was super costly, this was fine. But later on, it became their biggest limitation and all sorts of awkward paging/segmenting stuff was caked on top in order to make them work with memory sizes greater than 64k.

I sometimes wonder how things would have gone if we'd settled on having "bytes" be 12-bits (like the PDP-8) or something instead, with the first gen of address buses being 24 bits. That would have made the first generation of home computers have a lot more longevity.

Hell, I believe the PDP-11 only had 16-bit registers, imagine if we'd just started our journey that way.
Any non Google alternatives out there?
One approach to this problem that’s been fruitful in Nix ecosystem is ~packaging scripts and baking in absolute paths at build time. (Generally by rewriting references in the script to absolute paths or generating wrappers to set PATH or BASE or DIR or whatnot.)
For some insane reason, one of the stores we use that you can order online and pickup at the store, when you try to print the page with the barcode, the barcode does not print. We end up having to take a screenshot and print that. It's just utterly baffling, especially for this specific use case.
Well, to go off-topic with you, the idea that Go "ignores decades of language theory" is just an opinion that you hold. A factual statement would be to say that the Go designers omitted a great many features other languages have included.

The idea that they did so out of ignorance is ridiculous, given the background of the Go design team. They made considered decisions about what to include in Go.

A fixed-gear bicycle is not "ignoring" decades of bicycle design theory.

Creating a programming language is an engineering task not a theoretical task. Which means there are major trade-offs to be made. And they chose their trade-offs. The wild success of Go should at least make you consider whether or not they're better at making these trade-offs than you, and most language designers, are.

Maybe they were wrong about some choices, which is why Go is still evolving, but they were self-evidently mostly correct.
> What's the current miss-rate on them?

Depends how good your code is :)
Adapters and Config: Multi-Database Support in Harlequin
The Harlequin v1.0 release made it to the Front Page -- I'm back to announce v1.5, which adds support for other databases (and addresses the biggest feedback I got on HN).
This shouldn't be surprising at all.
Harvard and other American universities have taken "donations" from foreign countries for years to hire the "correct" professors to push agendas (and raise the next generation of leaders), just look at the amount money flowing from Qatar for example.

Why taking bribes from tech giants is any different?

Veritas indeed.
What makes you say that Facebook's codebase is an order of magnitude smaller?
Honestly large 10-13 inch e-Ink tablets already work well for this as long as you're opening a PDF that stays put. Much like a physical book that doesn't move.

Live web pages suck because they pop up annoyances every 5 seconds that you have to deal with while your hands are messy, and the scrolling jumps around against your will.
From skimming this article's abstract[1] emissions went down 8-17% in April 2020. It doesn't say how much the GDP went down by. Lots of people lost jobs in April. But only 6 months later we had the tightest labor market in decades, so swings and roundabouts.

It isn't a binary choice between stopping all economic activity and 100% renewables and nuclear. There is a range of choices and priorities.

For instance, what would we really lose by eliminating private jets, super yachts, and cruise ships tomorrow?

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10281825/
You missed a step here.

1. my credit card expired

2. I've started getting warning emails about data being cleared, and giving me a few weeks to fix this (because my provider does want me to keep paying.. it's their business after all)

3. I put in a new credit card and it all works again

Compare it to: you came back home and your data is gone. Or you power up your PC after power outage, and the disk fails. Or even worse, you are sitting in front of your computer, and the cryptolocker/ransomware window pops up.

(And one of those is much more likely to happen than others. I don't think I've ever heard stories about cloud data deleted for non-payment, but I've had plenty of first-hand experiences with disk failures and send-hand stories about ransomware)
That's true of a lot of things. You really can't allow a system to police itself. Once you allow that, you've essentially given them carte blanche to run a fiefdom.
The only way to redirect an economy like you describe is with central planning which is absolutely not the American Way (tm).
How was the effort to migrate from DRF to Django-Ninja? I saw Django-Ninja mentioned in another post and am thinking of switching one of my projects over from DRF. After skimming their documentation, it looks very pleasant and simple and perfect for my use case.
> Without laws, you have anarchy. Laws create the institutions necessary to have an economy capable of creating wealth.

Without laws you don't have anarchy, you just have rule of strongest. Anarchy can have laws but no authority that enforces them.
Any of those I imagine, perhaps all. When things reach boiling point pressure has to be released somehow. And as it stands things are under quite some pressure as of recently.
Yeah could Lake Mead benefit from this?
The problem is that all hosting is done by companies trying to make a profit.
When you say host it yourself, likely you mean - Build your own website. A few issues with this line of thinking

- Web hosting companies are attacked for hosting controversial speech all the time (AWS stopped hosting Parler when they were put on blast)
- The infrastructure required for hosting large controversial websites can also be made unavailable to controversial sites (e.g CloudFlare dropping KiwiFarms citing its 'hateful user base')
- Not to mention some platforms/people are literally de-banked, which apparently is a thing, and forced to use crypto for all expenses and revenue

Americans value freedom of speech, these are American companies. At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance with American values. I don't know the numbers but I would imagine it's a very small amount of America that isn't pro free speech.
Wars are won on logistics, absoluteoy. And guess who is responsible for that? Hint, it isn't Corporal Smith.
Hot take: it's a life skill to look at a company beyond the salary they offer you and get at least a basic sense of whether they are over staffed, well managed, offering a valuable service, and not in a dying industry - or at least be sure your role there is doing something high value to the critical service provided. Too many employees IME are just too comfortable with ignorance about their employer outside of their team and the other teams they work with directly.
Is shaving seconds-per-package import a feasible way to get the startup time fast enough for script-type workflows? Before long you end up importing 10 packages and it will be too slow even if each package is 1s. I appreciate that the devs seem to want to do it "the right way" but that seems have taken quite a while.

Wouldn't something like slow interpreter option for "glue code" be feasible? Most code doesn't need to be fast, and waiting for the "hot functions" to compile on change wouldn't be too bad. And you could still AOT for maximum speed when needed. This is essentially how Javascript JITs manage to start up so fast.

Another fine "hack" for many cases would be to keep the Julia process running (like a daemon) but making sure the state is clean when a script is run on it.

Something like PackageCompiler is workable, at least for the short term. Long compiles are OK if they don't have to be done all the time. I indeed manage to get < 1s TTFP with DynamicalSystems with it (last time I tried a while ago I didn't manage). The UX for creating sysimages could be nicer, but doesn't seem anything that a quick script can't fix. Maybe I'll give Julia another go in my next analysis.

From what I gather there's now a new approach for caching the compilation results. I really hope it will succeed, but I'm a bit jaded from the many "Julia 1.x fixes the TTFX" news.
We don't know that. No one has demonstrated it. It's very likely that at larger scales, for a given amount of compute you cannot train a traditional RNN to be as a good as a transformer.
It is a merge block in some code bases. You need to know the code the person said they were going to commit is the code they actually commit. Especially when there is financial incentive and state actors that want code inserted.

In my project we used to be allowed to approve with nits but recently they changed it that the code needs a re-review for almost any edits. The system has some criteria for which it will allow minor edits but it's strict enough that I've rarely seen it pass an edit. I assume there must have been some incident that triggered this.
Your hatred is steaming out of your ears like if you were a cartoon character. Relax, some random poster on the internet is not to blame for your suffering. And just because they have a different opinion on something meaningless, doesn't mean they're an ass, "privileged", or ignorantly living in a "filter bubble".
Browser, WebOS, Android clients. They all seem pretty great to me.

Android client has issue talking to a port other than 8920. There's multiple people debating on github if it is a bug or not.
Electronic payment is just a part of the improvements ushered in by Uber, there's also calling to location and driver reviews. Those are important too.