skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've argued before that the Apple/Google Tax forces a chilling effect on innovation: there are business models and concepts that simply cannot survive with the spectre of a 30% hit to their _gross revenue_ hanging over them. And while you could argue that makes them bad businesses, I think it's far too rich to simply be forced to accept a _thirty percent_ cost of doing business as baked in, top-line-revenue-leeching overhead.

Plain and simple, this is pure rent-seeking. The idea that the app stores should inherently incorporate some form of gatekeeping makes some degree of sense on the surface, even though the far more restrictive nature of iOS means that you simply do not control the device you purchase from Apple in any meaningful way. But the value-extraction level of 30% is just prima facie absurd.

We've been conditioned into paying silent, embedded taxes like merchant fees essentially throughout our economy, but even the Mastercard and Visa cabals have the good sense to temper their greed and merely skim 3% off the top. The app stores taking a 30% swing right out of the gate was always a bold decision. I'd love to see the internal Apple emails when that was initially being discussed.

It's hard to identify what would be a "fair" price point that wouldn't arouse the ire of, well, everyone, but there are some instructive examples, including some of the "sweetheart" deals Google struck with big players like Netflix--a 10% rate that Netflix rejected anyway.

In any event, the egregious anticompetitiveness isn't in the app stores charging usurious in-app purchase rates. It's in the behavior that they would reject your app if you offered an alternative payment method, or even offered a lower price elsewhere that wasn't at parity with the app store pricing. THAT is pure anticompetitive greed, and they deserve to burn for it. Yes, even accounting for the creation of the market itself and the management and maintenance of all that entails, and all of the other arguments. But this chilling effect is real and we're being hurt by it in ways we don't even really know, and that's a real shame.

I'm curious what the fallout will be on Apple now that there is some legal precedent going the other way against Google, even though there are differences as the article cites. (And Apple has relaxed some of their prohibitions towards alternative payments. But you still cannot offer a purely non-IAP payment option openly in your app, and that still feels criminal to me.
> Moreover, no one has succeeded in hatching living matter from non living matter and we must honestly say we do not know how this process came about or the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur (despite much speculation

Just want to comment on this point. The research in this field is pretty esoteric. It doesn't really benefit us to understand how this process came about (ie, there is little practical gain here, no medical advancements or otherwise), and moreover it requires a simulation which can estimate behavior over hundreds of millions of years. The usefulness of cracking the early earth/life creation part of our history is really not immediately clear, and thus research is limited.

That said, the Miller-Urey experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment) showed animo acids organizing over conditions similar to early earth, and a follow up experiment dubbed Planet Simulator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Simulator) was extended to show the organization of protocells as part of this early earth environment.

It seems only a matter of time before science can connect the dots along the rest of the hundreds of millions of years regarding this process to show the line between chemical young earth evolving to be biological.

As an aside, why do you think it is "important to remember" that we haven't found life or that we don't fully understand the process by which biology evolved from chemistry? Why exactly is it "important to remember" such things?
I don't have a good scrollwheel, not easy to browse the site. :(
fished them out :)
The vast majority of people use computers to Get Stuff Done(tm), they couldn't care less what's driving their computers. If Windows wasn't enabling them to Get Stuff Done(tm) they would be using some other operating system; and to some degree they are, I'm seeing more MacOS where they used to be Windows these days.

Let's not forget the vast majority of people compute on iOS or Android now too, not Windows.

The reason Linux (sans Android) continues to be a meme in the consumer space is not because Windows has aggressive marketing behind it.
Because layoffs provide profitability, rough as it is.

However! What Hasbro is doing to WOTC is tremendously short term thinking. You do not prune the organizations that are providing all of your liquidity in a time of crisis for fear of pruning the wrong branch and diminishing the growth by sending a message to key people that it’s time to go, which is always possible and arguably likely when you cut.

I believe that Hasbro shareholders should insist on making WOTC’s management team responsible for the whole company, as they have time and again been the backbone of profitability, progressive projects that actually ship and make actual money and have been doing a lot of good decision making in recent years.

Yes I’m aware of the CEO’s criticisms around short term decision making, but he’s always had to answer to the parent company and they are very corporate and MBA-logic oriented.

Now on to the answer to your question, here is the math they look at:

https://www.business.com/finance/big-tech-earnings-and-layof...

From the article:

Key Takeaways

Amazon had $2.8 million in earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – or EBITDA) for every staff member they laid off in January.

Meta had $3.9 million in earnings for each of the 11,000 staff members they laid off in November. In response to Meta’s cost-cutting strategy, its stock price increased by 19 percent.

Tech giant Microsoft had an EBITDA of $98.8 billion in 2022. This means they earned $9.8 million for each person they laid off in January 2023.

Other companies’ layoffs weren’t as difficult to understand: WeWork ended 2022 with an EBITDA of -$824 million, and Spotify ended its fiscal year with an EBITDA of -$290 million.
Yeah I didn't think it had, but I've not done too much with Core/5+ yet. I want to use it but I end up just using Typescript/Node by default. I do need to get into the habit of investigating using CLR when a bit more performance or lower latency is required, instead of jumping past it to systems level with C++/Rust/Go.
>most fossil fuels formed between the evolution of trees and fungi that could breakdown lignin

This is only true for coal, not for oil (which is formed mostly from sea plankton biomass that is mixed into sediment layers).
I am a fan of Chimera Linux and both Alpine and Void also use MUSL. But there is no denying that Glibc is the de facto standard on Linux Desktops and many desktop applications assume it.

To me, that is a bad thing and we agree that diversity should be possible.

We do not agree that “most Linux installs are going to be using Bionic”. Android uses the Linux kernel but it is not what people mean when they say “Linux”. The applications running on Android and the ones running on your Linux desktop are separate universes.
One of the key stories for ev adoption though is that you can charge overnight at lower electric rates to save on gas, so we still need a clean baseload power supply for overnight.
> When enough people come to think of something as money, it becomes money

There are many more requirements than that for an artefact to become money

Bitcoin misses out on most
They’re not being malicious, people just like misrepresenting what that data represents because hur hur look at the dumb green hippies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38668665
I'm unaware of any http router that does this out-of-the-box. It would have to be something custom.
Nah: Etherium
It needs to be generic while also being as simple as possible. So you're building the module for a specific situation but leave it as open as possible for other situations without explicitly optimizing for them.
> How do you argue that?

Because the solutions of the Einstein Field Equation that describe black holes are vacuum solutions. "Vacuum" means "no matter or energy".

> let’s say a star has a mass just below the limit of making it a black hole.

There is no lower limit to the mass of a black hole.

There are maximum mass limits for white dwarfs and neutron stars, and stars more massive than those limits (after they have undergone supernova explosions and probably shed a large portion of their original mass) will collapse to black holes.

As for what happens to the matter in the original object that collapses to a black hole, it reaches the singularity at the center of the hole and is destroyed. But anyone falling into the hole after the collapse will never encounter that collapsing matter; all they will see is vacuum.
The DFT/FFR is actually very much useful and transformative to computer science. It is, along with Karatsuba's algorithm, the basis for a lot of the triumphs of computer science. Want to do polynomial interpolation? FFT. Want to do convolutions on large-ish images? FFT. Want to compress audio/images/video? FFT, or FFT-ish. Want to break RSA on a quantum computer? FFT also (well, QFT).

Any algorithms class that left over the Fourier transform is, in my opinion, a small tragedy.

That said, I personally think that integration is less straightforward than the Fourier transforms. It's the first task you're given that requires creativity, as there is no practical algorithm for it (sometimes, there isn't even really a way to do it). If you try to approach the Fourier transform as a piece of linear algebra, seeing it as an orthonormal transformation to periodic vectors/functions, it's a lot more intuitive.
the most important use of my phone is to play audio. to the point that i almost considered getting a pinephone so that i could run something else besides android and get a better FOSS audio player (and a keyboard). but i decided against it because it was just a bit to expensive for what it offers.

now if only i could find a decent FOSS audio player for android. it is critical that the player interface orders files by directory structure and displays the filename because a lot of audiobooks and audio drama series or podcasts use the series title in all files and don't have a file specific title (and those that do mess it up by not having episode or chapter numbering. this often makes the individual chapters/episodes indistinguishable from each other. unfortunately most available audio players assume that the title is enough to pick a file, but that really only works for songs, not audio books, audio drama or podcasts.

sorry for the rant.
I agree that we are limited to "speculating" due to n=1. However, personally my sense is that simple life is more likely to be ubiquitous than not. This is informed by the fact that currently there is no evidence that conditions on early Earth were particularly unique in comparison to first principles modelling of rocky planet atmospheres**. This coupled with the relative speed with which simple life emerged points to it being a relatively probably event, though we can't be certain. I expect that with missions such as PLATO and the upcoming HWOs we'll have a better sense of the conditions on mature Earth like planets in the habitable zone. Though studying a large sample of early Earth's shortly after formation may be out of our reach for a while yet, depending on which particularly mission gets chosen.

**Not my sub-field. Extremely complex models. Much is still unknown.
if you and the other person see the same emojis, this call is secure.

sincerely,

the man in the middle

ps confirming this out of band will not add to your security
Expecting any project to take off is likely end up in disappointment regardless of what kind of project it is, because most projects out there don't take off. By and large you have to do these kind of things because you find it useful for yourself and/or fun, but not because you want it to take off.

I also think it's fine for projects to target a specific more hobby-esque audience. Not every project has to be for everyone.
I wonder if that's a situation where you could use a smartphone to mimic a keyboard (over USB or USB-to-PS2 or whatever), using it to "paste" content that way.
In event sourced systems, you project the event stream into read models, of which there can be many (relational, time series, etc.) If you're familiar with functional programming, it is essentially a fold operation over the stream of events into a single state.

Having worked with event sourced systems in the past, there are benefits in having a persisted explicit event history, but there is much added complexity (how do those read models actually get generated? how do you version the model? do you have snapshots of your read models?). In my experience, the additional complexity was not worth it for most contexts in which the pattern was applied...
Is it possible to have a bank account or electric bill for a fraction of a crown?

In the distant past when I still named computers, I'd always make sure to have a zloty and a kopek somewhere in the zoo; typically they'd be NIS servers or recursive DNS servers or other similarly important task trivially serviced by an antiquated server I had fondness for and wanted an excuse to not retire. "You can't turn off those SLCs; they're the NIS servers for the statistics department..."
Hmm this has my gears turning

These days there's an abundance of public APIs that serve up various public information. What if you took a bunch of those, wrapped them up in a single typed SDK in TS or Python (using their existing SDKs if they exist), under a consistent devex, and just made it really easy to playfully string together different datasets
I've said repeatedly "of sound mind and body and living in America". I see no reason to change that.
Pretty fascinating. I wouldn't really call it a laptop so much as a super thin desktop (SFF) with a built in display. I mean, who wants to route their Ethernet cable across their lap? At the same time I'm happy it has a dedicated Ethernet port. Now we just need to wait a few years for this level of hardware to shrink into something that fits in a backpack...
That's a frustrating response, because you must surely understand as a whole what they are saying.

Artifacts that would have been used by these civilizations, whatever those may have been.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyEWLhOfLgQ

This youtube video addresses the situation pretty well - I found it very interesting the talk about the earths crust basically recycling.
One problem is sales tax. With a percentage calculation after a sale, uneven totals are the rule. It would be better if retail prices all included tax, rounded already.
> As clearly eating less meat is making live lot worse

I have no idea why anyone would think this. I've been vegetarian for as long as I've had a say in my diet without any problem. Food in general is necessary, but any specific diet is only rarely mandatory.

(OTOH, if your entire experience has been vegan "cheese" then I sympathise, that has been a travesty every time I've tried it).
Fun times.

I think one of the interesting takeaways here should be that they have a 48 - 50nm "device pitch" which is to say the transistors are small in the XY plane there are pitch widths much larger than "5nm" or "3nm" (people familiar with chip production realize this but too often people who don't have a very deep understanding of chip production are mislead into thinking you can put down transistors 5nm apart from each other)

So from a density perspective, a perhaps 30 - 40% gain in overall number of transistors in the same space.

Looking at the Intel inverter design, it looks like if they were willing to double the depth they could come up with a really compact DRAM cell. A chiplet with 8 GB of ECC DDR memory on it would be a useful thing both for their processors and their high end FPGA architectures.
You call these factors "circumstantial evidence", but they are only circumstantial evidence if our ideas about what allows/causes/etc life are correct, which we have not validated at all.

If we can't promote abiogenesis in a lab our understanding is clearly limited, which is itself surprising. How many other processes in nature have we observed and not been able to replicate ourselves (or at least make progress towards replicating)?
It’s very difficult to implement, and requires training the network to use it.

I worked at DeepMind on projects that used MCTS. Even with access to the AlphaZero source code, it was very difficult to write an other implementation that got the same results as the original.
Reversion to the mean is a phenomenon resulting from random sampling. In island gigantism/dwarfism, the distribution of the population changes due to various causes. So not really the same at all, as far as I can see.
Except a huge amount of it is alloys. You’d have to reprocess it to extract out the raw materials which is much harder than mining ore and requires a lot more tech. Like things may be bronze plated but you’re not going to find a whole lot of bronze in 1 spot.
The math is the evidence. The math is not in your naysaying favor.
SQS is weird in that you can get the same message in Japan and Germany at the exact same time and "race" to process the message. It's annoying af. I do not recommend SQS unless you are at some kind of scale (in company/team size, not revenue) where you can deal with it properly.
"Fix" is a strong word. I was of the opinion that both Google and Apple have limited background services heaps of the years for the purpose of saving user battery life. Why should this one be an exception?
A fun thought experiment would be to consider how the market would respond if the app store fee was, say, 50%... 60%... 90%?

Obviously there's a breaking point, and we see plenty of companies (like, obviously, Epic) buck at the 30% threshold, but you better believe Apple modeled the hell out of this and landed at 30% as "the most we can get away with while keeping a straight face."

Great for Apple shareholders, horrible for innovation, startups, and novel business models that can't survive a 30% cleaving of their top-line revenue.
With continued solar adoption, "off-peak" will shift from "overnight" to "midday", at least if the utilities are properly passing along their costs. I think it might already have in California - I saw someone in r/electricvehicles saying that they get a cheaper rate for daytime charging. The idea that overnight has the cheapest electricity rates is an artifact of the fossil-fuel-dominated electric grid economics, and (physically speaking) there's no reason for it to hold true with renewables.
if you believe 90s movies you should be able to speak for less than 60 seconds before it's detected
Unlogged (YC S22) is hiring to automate regression testing
My co-founder and I have gone through the stress of black friday deployments, and we have developed a solution for replaying production traffic locally to guarantee zero regressions. We're on the lookout for a seasoned backend engineer to join our team in our Bangalore office.

If you're driven by the idea of achieving regression-free, speedy deployments, we'd love for you to consider joining our team.

Your Role:

- Craft, and develop backend applications leveraging Java and its diverse frameworks.

- Engage with other developers to deeply understand their daily requirements – a practice our founders also adhere to.

- Build a fast, error-free log scanning pipeline.

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- Deploy and manage cloud-based services on platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure.

- Identify and rectify software performance issues.

- Contribute to code reviews to uphold code quality and adhere to best practices.

- Actively propose enhancements in processes and engage in technical dialogues.

What We Need from You:

- 4-8 years of direct experience in Java development and its various frameworks.

- Solid understanding and enthusiasm for Java programming and JVM-related technologies.

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- Experience with at least one major cloud service provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

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To apply, please forward your resume and GitHub repository links to ssl [at] unlogged [dot] io.
The simple answer is the controversial answer. Life needs something to spark it from nothing to something. That's more evidence of a demiurge than anything else.
In the cloud, these chips will compete head to head with GPUs. If they are able to pull off a 10x price/performance win without excessive porting work… it’ll take off in a heartbeat.
> Chimera is a general-purpose OS born from unhappiness with the state of Linux distributions.

https://xkcd.com/927/

It seems to have a nice build system. But I am not sure this solves any issue any other distribution has. And with the amount of opinionated choices this distribution has I imagine there are few who it fits. I think for many, Void would be a better choice.

They do defend/document their choices well. Though I don't know why they'd support that many architectures, I think they might regret that.

Anyway I wish this team the best of luck. Who knows, maybe some of their homegrown projects might see use elsewhere.
Is that kind of the same as the idea that if you are approaching a wall but each step is only 50% of the rest of the way to the wall, so you would never reach the wall no matter how close you got?
> and with literally a one line change

Except we know as software engineers that solutions to problems at scale are never that simple. The "just increase the block size limit bro" solution doesn't consider the externalities that increasing it would have on the network performance and decentralization. This is the same line of reasoning about this whole thread, compromising decentralization compromises the ability to use a credibly peer-to-peer (cash) system.
auctions and online sales
AI is making developers more productive, although I doubt that will cause a shortage in jobs
Legitimate question, please don't downvote.

Are you basing this opinion on:

- popular HN opinion

- issues that Mongo experienced in its infancy

- mis-modelling highly relational data on a non-relational DB, and blaming the DB for ensuing problems

Or are you basing it on extensive experience with wide range of use cases?
Nah, you're being snarky. Rooftop PV is common, so reducing housing land area per capita completely fails to make any difference at all to the land area required for enough PV to power those homes.
Every time someone says we've hit peak microprocessing, we in fact have not hit peak microprocessing.
Penny Arcade comic on the situation, "Isolator":

* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/12/15/isolator
The current CEO, Chris Cocks, was the President of WOTC from 2016 to 2022.
This was my first thought too. Even if transformers turn out to be the holy grail for LLMs, people are still interested in diffusion models for image generation.

I think we’re about to see a lot of interesting specialized silicon for neural nets in the coming years, but locking yourself into a specific kind of model seems a little too specialized right now.