skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Isn't possible to do some repairs to make it safe again

This ends up being a complex question that's unique to every building, and needs to take into account the architecture, the soil (reinforced concrete is used in footers/pilings) and a ton of other factors.

But what makes it extra scary? In most countries there is always a company that will tell you "Yes, it can be done, and for less than the cost of replacing the building". Even in the USA this happens and then we have deadly condo building collapses.

I say "most countries" because I hope that there's some country where they have tight enough regulations to prevent it. Like maybe Norway or Luxembourg or something.
This is AWESOME. Gonne check it out tonight.
Indeed. But as engineers it’s insane to think of having a testing environment that includes a uranium enrichment plant
How does it mean more biometrics? Many governments already issue plastic ID cards; it's possible to embed a smart card chip in these and use the ID as a secure remote authentication method with almost any smartphone.

Such an infrastructure needs to be neither centralized nor government-run: If you prefer state/local governments to be in charge of ID, or even private notary-like entities, you totally can.
It's true that data is often written out in a logical order, but like you say, that's only because the program that created it was designed that way. I've definitely seen PDF files where tabular data is almost in a logical order but every now and then cells have been jumbled around.

But what I've definitely seen is documents where the characters are deliberately jumbled up and a custom font so that visually everything looks fine. I know this, because there was one specific case where I wanted to extract about 5000 words in a vocabulary list and it was hard to decipher. They'd used several such fonts in the single document as well, so there wasn't a one-to-one mapping of the text encryption. They'd also put a watermark under the list, so you also couldn't easily do OCR of the final screen image either.
SEEKING WORK | Location: Latam (US timezones) | Remote

Fractional CTO / staff augmentation. I cofounded a startup in 2015 and helped grow it through successful acquisition in 2022. I founded a fractional CTO consulting company in early '23, and have engaged successfully with multiple clients over the past 8 months. Seeking very early startups who need tech leadership assistance on a fractional basis. Can also provide highly qualified devs on a fixed price.

rf@4rc.io / http://4rc.io
Understanding graph theory will seriously enhance your engineering skills
I still cannot fathom any board allowing the CEO at the helm of a public that made cuts of 17% to remain in place.

That's a huge pivot in organisational structure by any measure and shows clearly poor judgement.
There's a gigantic graveyard littered with dozens of abanoned Python JITs, Psyco is hardly unique. The community has not at all gone down the PyPy route, nobody uses PyPy either, even if it's technically not abandoned.

There's little reason to think these new JITs will fare any better.
This is not outside the realm of one sprint.
I definitely don't think "impossible" seems like the right word. I do buy that it might be frustratingly slow to the point of not being worthwhile.

I do wonder if Pluto.jl might solve a lot of these issues for you though. I haven't really used it much, but it seems like it works with just plain .jl files, so you can non-jankily version them (unlike .ipynb), and extract libraries and refactor in all the normal ways.

My frustrations trying to do normal-software-development-principles with julia are actually more about the convention the community has around structuring files and modules, which just hasn't clicked for me at all and is a frequent source of confusion. (The testing framework / layout / something about it also hasn't clicked for me yet either, and I wonder if it just isn't great and that's why people don't seem to write many tests...)

But there's also just so much great stuff about the language that I'm not even really mad about any of this :)
More details are available, but were hidden by one of the remaining project members. They're still available on archive.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231117190207/https://gitlab.co...

Issue 448 is said to be relevant as well, and similarly hidden, but isn't available on archive.

The fact that a remaining project member seems to be actively hiding otherwise public discussion which would keep us more informed, seems to itself be noteworthy ("Because I felt like it" was the reason given). Indeed, that action seems to be an example of the unilateral and arbitrary exercise of power with which the former contributors are raising concerns.

One wonders if a precedent can be set for getting an HN story of potential wrongdoing buried by hiding or destroying reports or evidence of it.
Yeah but it's not owned by Spotify, at least the most popular music isn't. I mean: they want you to listen to things they own, not things they license.
Related -- There are many good learning resources, but surprisingly no good quizzes.

I put together a quiz on LLM basics for absolute beginners. I made this for an "Intro to LLMs" class I taught for non-CS folks. The questions are all multiple-choice or true/false. They contain plausible-sounding but wrong options, so these will trip up those who don't yet have a solid understanding.

It may be useful for those just starting to learn about LLMs, to test their understanding. It is a google form, but emails are not collected.

https://forms.gle/W3Ls1E18vuH4HFKa8
65C02 is under $2 on AliExpress.
A well written and absolutely gripping & interesting tale, also discussed here at the time (including by the blog author) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1174912 and re-posted many times without as much ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ).

Particularly striking was how concurrent innovations like copper tools, steam boats, and milk pasteurization derailed only partially developed scurvy theory. One wonders if this story partly inspired Woody Allen's joke in _Sleeper_ about steak being found to be good for you.[1] { Probably more the constant thrashing about of recommendations that has infected nutrition science since forever, though. }

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yCeFmn_e2c
i m talking about societal trust
I was responding to your comment with a rhetorical device. Your quote is entirely uninteresting because of course police will claim that increased drug use and increased $BAD_THING are linked, and please can they have more funding. There's no evidence behind your quote, and you shouldn't have brought it up in the first place.
you've been reading too much propaganda, get off Reddit once in a while it'll do you some good ;)
Sample of 1 but yeah we have a plug in hybrid and and waterproof socket in the storm porch, the car charges in a few hours. No desire to spend nearly 1k to charge a bit quicker
not op

appreciate the comment

this exchange is what i show young people to demonstrate why you should never work for such companies (not signaling out yours specifically)

human want to be human

(tho a buddy of mine worked there with great benefits & $)
You should not use "white" but the initial color_of_tp()
The top comment now link archived issues with more context.
We now know that at least 2/3 of the board had resigned.

I don't know what more do you want ?
As you said we won't solve anything but with such important issues I want to be informed and not hidden and flagged.

Especially since the current plan for the mentionned Hans is to continue business as usual with no change ...
Now take that thought and apply it to someone proposing to put a permanent Rogan-ad on the home screen. One of the first things that is going to come up is "but how can users remove it?" At the level of thought you're talking about here, someone somewhere already made the conscious decision to not make it removable.
Thoughts and Comments on Demographic Aging and Shrinking
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/blameful
Was this written by a LLM? If not, it's baffling. I kept thinking it was so broad it had to be satirical, but it didn't seem to land. Then I got to the list of characteristics, and it's incomprehensible. I hope no human would make #1 and #7 in the list both "Learning". But maybe it's someone being paid by the word!
This is such a bizarre idea. Thanks to this thread, I learnt that the entire Portuguese drug program now costs something like 16€ million. The results for that is - top 10 country in safety in the world - pretty average results in drug usage in the population.

For 16! Million! That's a preposterous result.
While the piece starts funnily enough, has a solid point abut "holodecks", it ends up ranting about all things regulatory.
So what exactly are these guys building? For a product that’s supposedly 1.0 it sure lacks even the most basic of examples. I also think the title should reflect the product name because it’s clickbait as it is right now.
Nile – Tenant Virtualization in Postgres
> But that leaves large and important areas that GPTs are entirely unfit for: Real-time problem solving in dynamic environments, understanding and reacting to current events or spatial reasoning and coordination in the physical world.

It is important to recognize the limitations of these deep neural networks and especially GPTs which both have been hyped to the point where most see it as the solution to everything; since many deep-learning supporters continue to compare it to the human brain, despite the severely limited explainability in these models to the point where not even researchers know what it is doing.

It's one of the reasons why there's very low trust in deep neural networks in general. Humans can be held to account for their actions but with almost all these neural network systems cannot be held to account when something goes wrong and accept the output as the answer whilst 'it is thinking' or 'reasoning'.

> The mechanism behind real world complex systems requires both simple rulesets and a communicative fabric that allows for real time feedback loops. For flocks of starlings this can be as easy as keeping eye contact with the next bird. For Termites, it is pheromone trails. For societies, it is language, reputation and status. For capital markets, it is money. And for the internet, its the physical wiring and network architecture that makes it all possible.

As long as this solution provides transparency and explainable results rather than giving an answer from a black box system then I'm looking forward to this approach.
I wonder if they laid off 17% of management and leadership as well. probably not, but they should
The guide to the cost of living in Berlin
Like I said, it doesn’t need to appeal to everyone to succeed, just a critical mass. Binding Rust to C++ isn’t easy, but the value proposition is strong enough that Firefox and Chromium (early days) projects use Rust in their massive C++ codebases.

But who knows how well a language that prioritises interop with C++ will fare? I guess we’ll find out Carbon 1.0 shows up in 2025. Similarly Zig with its fantastic C interop.
Ruby 3.3 resolves the Range#size bug for rational endpoints
Ruby 3.3 fixes a bug in Range#size when dealing with Rational endpoints, ensuring accurate element counting. Checkout my blog to learn more about it
The short history of cryptocurrency has repeated the reason why all those decades of securities and banking laws/regulations exist.

The collapse in trust of governments is due to lobbyist bribing politicians. And corrupt politicians. And media controlled by a few billionaires who benefit from that distrust.
This speech seems to be largely future-oriented, about hopes and dreams for using AI in high-trust ways. Yes, we rely on trust for a lot of things, but here are some ways we don't:

Current consumer-oriented AI (LLM's and image generators) act as untrustworthy hint generators and unreliable creative tools that sometimes can generate acceptable results under human supervision. Failure rates are high enough that users should be able to see for themselves that little trust can be placed in them, if they actually use them.

We can play at talking to characters in video games while knowing they're not real, and the same can be true for AI characters. Entertainment is big.

Frustrating as they can be, tools that often fail us can still be quite useful, as long as the error rate isn't too high. Search engines still work as long as you can find what you're looking for with a bit of effort, perhaps by revising your query.

We can think of shopping as a search that often has a high failure rate. Maybe you have to try a lot of shoes to find ones that fit? Often, we rely on generous return policies. That's a form of trust, too, but it's a rather limited amount. Things don't have to work reliably when there are reasonable ways to recover from failures.

Often we rely on things until they break, and then we fix or replace them. It's not good that cell phones have very limited lifespans, but it seems to be acceptable, given how much we get out of using them.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's about time governments started signalling to employers that this sort of behaviour will not go unpunished. After all, it's the state that will have to pick up the tab for the rampant over-hiring in the form of social security and healthcare.
Yes, but most scam calls aren't impersonations either.

I bet if you tallied it up, there's many more people being tricked into taking on bullshit contracts with legitimate companies[0] and losing much more money in total, than there are victims of actual impersonation scams. I firmly believe both schemes are morally equivalent, and that one of them is still considered legal only means we should push firmly for a change in laws.

Even the impersonation angle isn't clear-cut. When a telco calls me with their newest scam, it's always via a third-party call centre they outsource this job to. Where I live, it's also historically has been a major source of contact and personal information for scammers - always a "disgruntled employee" leaving and "covertly" taking the customer database with them.

--

[0] - Telcos are my go-to examples here, they're notorious for borderline fraud. For example, just under a year ago, a billion-dollar telecommunications corporation named after a color, one of three major telcos in my country, tried to scam my own grandmother hard, after my grandfather passed away, and almost succeeded. More generally, after many years of near-misses and one or two mistakes, most people in my family learned to never talk to phone companies cold-calling with offers.
Bear in mind that for most (all?) advanced economies the state runs about 40-50%, so top down is working fine for about half of the economy.
A school nurse probably doesn't have SMS capabilities on their school phone, and might not be willing to share their private number (I certainly wouldn't in that position).

I rarely leave voicemails, but I will when it's urgent.
I think this is a symptom of existing too much in the virtual world rather than the physical world. When we spend so much time in that world consuming content, there's a natural tendency to want to be part of it, to want to contribute to that world. The easiest way to create content is to take photographs.
understandable, FWIW since I have numbers on these things from working in multiple companies it might be nice to map out where those extras actually go for other readers:

$500/mo for seat licensing (for developers) this includes: Git hosting/Copilot/Office Suit/IDE's/Figma/Slack etc;

$500-$1500/mo for office space (depends a lot, in my company a seat costs me $500/mo and I'm in the middle of the city- larger companies may pay even less but lets assume a very high cost since it's a tech company).

$50/m for preventative healthcare (friskvard in sweden; this is actually higher than the maximum tax-free value)

$100/m for non-preventative health insurance (IE; private healthcare)

$120~/m amortised cost of laptops (assuming $4000 macbook over 3 years and a screen amortised over 5)

5% monthly salary for pension, so, that varies a lot.

But it roughly aligns with your $30k p.a
I find their algorithms for recommendation (song and artist “radios”) far inferior to 2000’s Pandora, so at least in that area I agree with GP that throwing 1000 times the resources at the problem doesn’t seem to be doing anything…
Motorola's 68HC11 then. But these are microcontrollers, not microprocessors (although the distinction seems a little nitpicky).
As someone who has fought a long time against holes in POSIX sh (cf https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/scripts README with links to the Austin group Mantis), let me list my biggest pet peeves (including this one):

* mktemp -d (mktemp itself is available via POSIX m4; the noclobber solution mentioned is moot, since FIFOs break it https://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1364), very much needed and available on GNU, *BSD and MacOS.

* local or typeset: I think only ksh88/93 doesn't have it without using the non-standard "function" keyword, a runtime check with potential alias creation is my only "solution" (https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/scripts/tree/b21de0bfb0a9534469089...)

* realpath/readlink -f/-e: as said by some, realpath is getting standardized in the next POSIX; can be emulated via a cumbersome function (https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/scripts/tree/b21de0bfb0a9534469089...) but since you either put that massive block in your script or need realpath to reliably source it from another file...

* All the "newline in paths" mess: I gave up, just too many blind spots.
A bit off topic but possible name clash/confusion with https://www.sleuth.io/
In Hurricane-Prone Florida, Builders Are Still Making New Homes Out of Wood
Depends on how their PBX is set up, but often those lines—even if they have separate incoming numbers—will all have the same outgoing number.
I'm guessing there's a lot of work at Spotify that goes into anti-copying efforts, for one thing. If the API and clients behave the same way for an extended period, it gets too easy to have spotify downloaders that work reliably for a larger audience. (I realize these things exist and work, but it remains enough of a moving target to keep it from pissing off Spotify's label/music publishing partners too much.)

There's also maintenance for all their platforms, which expands a bit every year. When I first started using Spotify smart speakers weren't a thing yet, and the number of OSes and streaming devices have only increased since. They have to maintain updates for various releases of macOS, Windows, iOS, iPadOS, Roku, etc. No doubt they encounter plenty of bugs that need addressing on those platforms...

They also have to have people negotiating rights for all the regions / countries they do business in, deal with fraud, and all that nonsense.

And they have to keep up social and advertising to compete with all the other streaming music and podcasting platforms. They have editorial needs - maintaining the artist pages and all the incoming new music, building playlists, etc.

Assuming Spotify offers this info in the appropriate languages by country, that's probably not an insubstantial number of people to ensure that you have pages for each artist translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and on and on. Spotify is available in a lot of countries, if they actually offer the interface and content in half of the primary languages for those countries it's going to be a lot of work. (I doubt they attempt to translate lyrics across the board, that would be an extremely heavy lift...)

That's not to say that Spotify doesn't have some unnecessary staff, but there's probably a lot of behind-the-scenes work aside from accounting and such that people don't think about.
What does your comment add to this conversation?
Freedom of the Net 2023
"Global internet freedom declined for the 13th consecutive year."

"Attacks on free expression grew more common around the world."

"Generative artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to supercharge online disinformation campaigns."

"AI has allowed governments to enhance and refine their online censorship."

"To protect internet freedom, democracy’s supporters must adapt the lessons learned from past internet governance challenges and apply them to AI."
But someone did, maybe refresh the comments ...
True, my hope is people interpret the question in a more universal, symbolic way.
> What do you think the employees do?

Product stand-up, agile stand-up, team fika, cross-team fika, town hall, team activity, tribe activity, one-on-one, backlog grooming, team retro, incident post-mortem, ping pong, live music.

If you do scrape together a few minutes to get part of the codebase into your head (despite the open-floor-plan chatter), you've got no way to trigger that bug you think you saw.

But persevere anyway and diagnose it. Oh it looks like it's happening in someone else's microservice. File a JIRA? Bring it up at the next meeting? Try a different fix anyway. Happy with the fix? Wait in pull-request limbo until it's sorted. Release it straight into prod? You could bring down prod... Maybe you didn't really see that bug after all. Coffee time!
Human explainability/interpretability is terrible -- it takes years to understand a person well enough to model their actions well in novel situations, and there's tons of literature that backs up that people consistently invent bullshit explanations when asked why they did things. Humans can only be held to account by telling them to change, which we can do with neural networks too.
Ask HN: How often do you switch jobs?
I have been working at the same company for the last 8 years. It’s pretty much my first job out of college. It’s very comfortable and I mostly stay in my comfort zone all the time. I’m starting to worry that by staying at this company I’m not not growing as quickly as people who switch companies every 2-3 years.
For what it's worth, as someone who shares a sense that "scientific" programmers have a tendency to over-use notebooks and REPLs, I find your perspective on it to be too extreme in the other direction! It's perfectly possible to incorporate interactive tools into a good software development process.
I greatly appreciate when people reframe old ideas in a new light. It's not only helpful to the conversation, but an effective way to communicate with people who have entrenched ideas and need help getting out of a rut. Perhaps the discomfort you're feeling is from being challenged.
Yeah, I turn on Reader mode in Safari for every sub stack site I wander in to.

I wonder why popups are some kind of web design go-to these days? Don't they get feedback from users that we hate these annoying things?
Unlikely this could ever be done. We share too much of the same firmware for something like to be possible. The average human genome has about 4-5 M single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) - rate in the order of 1 SNP / 1000 bases. The rate is much lower in functionally important parts of the genome because those tend to be under evolutionary constraint / conservation.
I don’t use Discord much, but it seems like a terrible way to “stay in the loop.” Am I wrong that you would need to either 1) receive a lot of notifications from irrelevant conversations, 2) spend some time making fine-grained choices about which discussions to receive notifications from, or 3) turn off notifications and instead remember to occasionally manually check up on what’s going on?

It seems like a great tool for active communities but when I just want to be notified that I can get tickets to an upcoming event, I’d really like to be able to sign up for that, not for a whole chat server.
Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million and he's not brought in nearly that amount for them.

Did they retrench the people who made that decision?
Did they retrench the management who approved that contract?

Spotify employees should be pushing for some degree of corporate and fiscal responsibility given they are retrenching, but they still gave Joe the bag.
Always remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.