skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like how you phrased it - "cheat ourselves out of clean air".

In my country (Serbia), politicians basically pocketed the money assigned for filters for most of heavy industry, and there's speculation of importing and burning waste from EU countries - which wouldn't be surprising given the AQI levels of 150-300 on the regular during winter months. We're a red circle in a green sea on AQI map of Europe, together with Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo was the second worst location in the world a couple of days ago).

I can definitely understand corruption and stealing for self-gain, it's a very familiar concept here. But those people, and their kids (!) are living here and breathing the same air - they're doing it to themselves (as well as to everyone else) - how stupid and greedy do you have to be?
> The time you spend managing and supervising, including desk-checking the stuff they send out, because it goes out under your name and you are only as good as your last job.

The article effectively references this when it starts talking about having to pay for a full-time manager once you have five employees. If you've added only one employee, this is largely a cost that is paid proportional to their billable hours, and you only need to be slightly more diligent than your client, so it's not much of a loss.

> IT costs, and office space if they aren't working from home.

For a small-scale consulting business, usually they're working remote or on-site, so you don't necessarily bear any office space costs. There is, invariably, some IT costs that you bear yourself, but you already have those when you're operating on your own, and the additional cost for your first employee is all but trivial compared to the billables you should be adding.

> Liability insurance in case they screw up. (Not certain about this: maybe you just trust that your company is a sufficient legal firewall because its only asset is you).

More often than not, customers want you to have liability insurance because you don't have a lot of assets they can grab in the event sue you, so the better your legal firewall, the more likely you'll have to pay for liability insurance. Still, it's a 1% cost, so not a big factor.

> I remember back around 1990 hearing that for my big company employer putting a coder in a seat in front of a computer cost roughly twice their salary. That's still true today.

That's what the article says. It actually argues that with consulting businesses, it's more like triple their salary.
> Headline literally has the word “losing” in it

Losing market share threatens “hub” status. That doesn’t mean everyone is miserable. But there is a real story in the data someone who reads the article will glean.

> as long as you’ve got the clicks

The Journal makes money on subscriptions. You’re describing publications that cater to people who don’t pay for news and don’t read articles.
hash/maphash isn't a very good replacement if you're trying to hash simple structs, since they still require conversion to byte slice by some means.
Perpetual motion / Overunity / nonsense!

We have discussed a lot of 'HHO' stuff over at fieldlines.com. Even if you didn't enjoy science at school, the laws of thermodynamics stiull apply to you.

If the CEO really said this then the board should urgently investigate their fitness to continue.

I understand that Toyota has dug itself into a hole with H2 vehicles. This is a much much deeper hole if as reported, and not some third-party scam.
What a pity, I liked the product when it was Real BASIC.
I had a friend who wrote a minimal dbms in awk just because someone told him it couldn’t be done!
> I doubt it would compile currently!

It compiles (and runs!) fine with just "gcc a.c"; nothing more needed. clang does throw some fatal errors, but there's probably some combination of flags to make it work; I couldn't be bothered to look further.

I've compiled plenty of code from the 80s; I can't recall a single example where it didn't work that wasn't due to OS-specific stuff. Tons of warnings and maybe some special-flags? Sure. But it works.

There's even some modern (well, "modern") code around today that uses K&R style function parameters.
Apple doesn't make silly charts saying they make better refrigerators.
Perhaps my issue is i find the premise unbelievable and lose suspension of disbelief, which makes me annoyed with the rest of the story.

People try to manipulate wikipedia in this fashion every day. Many of those who do are much much more sophisticated than the protagonist in this story and the story doesn't take into account the checks & balances to prevent this sort of thing. (Edit - to be clear, not saying he couldn't have some success... just total mind control is a bit much) Perhaps that's just the conceit for the story and we are supposed to accept it so that the rest of the story can take place. However stories about individuals getting ultimate power and then struggling with the moral implications of that are a dime a dozen. The only unique thing about this story is the premise, which i find obnoxiously simplified.
IMO the people who roll coal should be put in jail, but this is a good start.

We need to hit the enablers and the users of these horrible machines.
(Insert “The Office” meme with Pam saying “they are the same picture”.)
The California Department of Housing and Community Development is beginning to address this problem but it’ll take years until a noticeable difference is made.

https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/docs/policy-and-r...
Super Duty's will likely hold its value better. GMs too. Especially now after this news. It's odd to say that the result of an action hasn't happened when you haven't given it time. Perhaps If we wait on year, then look at resale numbers this news would have effected them. That would tell us the truth. Looking at the data now tells us nothing about the impact of this event, because it just happened.

Yes, a Ram diesel will hold its value better than a car, but it's the bottom out of the big 3 diesel truck makers. The "old guys" always say with the Rams that the truck falls apart around the engine. The engine lasts, but the rest of the truck has all been replaced by then.
First images of Spaceship Neptune's capsule structure
That page shows the last IOCCC was 2020. But the home page has an update from May 2023: "We do plan to hold a 28th IOCCC." Much like Nethack releases, some things are worth waiting for.
> 51. Bringing computers into the home won’t change either one, but may revitalize the corner saloon.

Maybe of these are great, but X-D that one didn’t age well.
Maybe you can run it through ChatGPT for a summary.
HELM 108
> don't think it's equivalent to say, because tech is growing, percentage-wise, elsewhere, that tech hubs are "losing the talent war."

Losing market share is losing the recruitment war for a hub. It doesn’t mean everyone will be miserable. But by definition, market share is what defines a hub.
They are right to be careful, they are held to a much higher standard than their competitors.

Pixel phones have had emergency call issues for years across multiple models but they just get a pass. Apple would be crucified for this.
I’m a contributor to OpenStreetMap, but what I find very lacking is the POI data

It’s only updated if there’s someone like me in the local area, or if it’s a tourist destination. But even then it can be sparse (eg just visited Merida, Bacalar and Valladolid in Mexico), and it’s worse in “non-western” countries

Tellingly, Overture Maps that use OSM for the street data to not use the POI data.

A lot of people pointed out that the POI data of Overture had mediocre quality. While that is true, they do at least have coverage in places OSM do not. If you know the name of the place you can at least find it

I’m not sure how this can become better, I’d think that a prerequisite would be that corporate users like Grab, DiDi, Uber start contributing

But that may not happen as they are not allowed to combine datasets [1]. Hence you have a chicken and egg problem: The dataset is not usable until it is complete…

The street data fundementally have the same problem, but that is easier to edit remotely and may be more stable in contrast to POIs

So I’m starting to question if it’s really worth it to continue update POIs in OSM, but I also would not know how to contribute to Overture as it does have quite some errors :)

[1] https://github.com/OvertureMaps/data/discussions/102

edit: Or maybe it is possible to conflate them, but that is not planned - https://github.com/OvertureMaps/data/issues/96
In one of my projects I used it to detect if browser supports blur filter and if not fall back on stack box blur.
That is "the beauty" of this conflict (if something this heinous could ever have a beautiful side): It poses many interesting technical challenges. But, quite understandably, people everywhere (including HN) are fast to move the "warring" right onto our screens (hence the flagging).

So, as you mentioned, algorithmic feeds is one of them. There are many others like how to create temporary infrastructure for such a besieged, war-torn city [0].

I suppose many would say, "This goes for all wars, what is special about this one?" Well, I would argue this is a "special conflict". It is one of (if not THE) longest-running military occupation in the world [1], where, coincidentally, the US spends its largest tax-payers-funded foreign aid [2].

Edit: And because many are now commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, it is worth recalling that it is also special for being that birth's place (spiritually, if not literally).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38673300

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_occupations

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/which-countries-receive-...
Did you ever figure out what was causing the sound?
so when electricity costs drop by 15–20× the payback time will be 150–300 years?
How do you spoil mainframe programmers? I don't believe they had sufficient passion and/or freedom to manifest spoiledness.
If your skill level is too poor, you get your license taken away.
Original article from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/cummin...

> "The company has seen no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith and does not admit wrongdoing," Cummins said in a statement.

The fact that someone caught cheating red-handed still thinks this an adequate stance is beyond reprehensible.
Interesting. What you say is true, but there is an opposing force. If someone has cash on hand when interest rates spike, they can buy when everyone else has a much harder time getting loans. So this makes things appear cheaper because there are less buyers on the market.

BUT the opposing force is the inflation that originally justified the spike in interest rates. That cash they are holding is simultaneously worth less due to the devaluing of the dollar, but also enables you to operate when others have run dry.

EDIT: so I guess there is a distinction in the value of the dollar when you are using it to buy large things that require debt vs the day to day little items. Because the little items will get inflated easily as everyone allocates their limited capital to food and fuel. But the real estate market will stagnate as no one can trade houses around in this environment.
And yet we're having a talk about nazis when substack is literally hosting the most vile ideology humanity has ever created. If censorship is on the table communists need to be part of the first batch to go. Since deplatforming works.
This feels a bit strawmanny. "If you're doing err=nil in typescript, it sucks worse than Go!" Yeah, but nobody does err=nil in typescript, you just re-throw or something similar. At least that's what happens in Python land, which I'm more familiar with and also uses exceptions for error handling.

I also think most of the criticism of Go error handling is that it's a clunky and noisy implementation of the "error values" idea. Rust does the same, but instead of a (value, error) tuple they use enums that clearly discriminate between the two, and aren't afraid of providing more concise syntax for the common 're-throw' case.
It would be nice if autonomous cars could emit a "yielding to pedestrian" light. I suppose it could be an addressable strip around the whole vehicle where only the section closest to the ped actually illuminates, so the ped can know that the car sees them specifically. The equivalent of eye contact with a wave. Otherwise, the ped will be caught in a game of chicken wondering if the apparent yield is for them or for something else that will finish sooner (like a stop sign with no interfering vehicular traffic).
Is that relevant though? They're still under the same umbrella, sharing parts, R&D, manufacturing plants and internal politics to some extent.
I believe it gives them better fuel mileage, better performance, and more power from a given design, essentially by skipping the energy cost of rectifying the NOx emissions. [0]

The defeat device lets them pass regulatory muster by using lower-performing but cleaner tuning when under test, then the engine uses performance-optimized tuning instead under ordinary driving conditions.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vw-just-the-latest-in-long-hist...
I mean, if we want to be silly, what about "Language model (large, multimodal"? :)
You are seriously demanding of a mother who lost her children to shut up? Would you demand the same of an israeli Mother?
> "shining a light on it" only causes it to spread more aggressively

Do you have any evidence of this? Studies often suggest otherwise, e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002210...

There are so many problems with censorship, but here are two examples:

1) At a really high level, bad ideas don't hold up well under scrutiny, and censorship literally takes away scrutiny. If you want to weaken the spread of a dumb idea, make its advocates defend it publicly. The most insane and backwards ideas can be made to sound somewhat reasonable in an echo chamber.

2) The quotes around "bad" were a nod to the shifting definition of what is bad. Censorship is appealing when the thing to censor is extreme, but it's a power that is too easily abused. You start off with noble ideas of e.g. censoring "hate" but suddenly realize that that's impossible to define well, and so just about anything can be construed as hateful and, by extension, censorable. Censorship just becomes a cudgel wielded by whoever is currently in power.
Absolutely. And the line numbers stuff was made it much easier to write code on these machines that lacked proper text editors, and made it easier to ship a minimal programmable machine without including one.

Plus it immediately and intuitively exposes the imperative sequential "turing tape" model of the computer to the user. "Do these sets of things, in sequence, now go back to this line, or forward to this, and do the things there" is far less abstract than "execute this function."
What's Next for Ozempic?
I'd identify a larger problem, which is teaching anything as a bunch of recipes.

My college offered stats in two tracks: There was a one-semester course for science majors, which was mostly plugging numbers into formulas. The course was utterly baffling for most of the students who took it.

There was also a two-semester course for math majors. It was mainly about proofs, but also had time to go into more depth. You have to know the assumptions underlying a formula, if you're expected to prove it. ;-) But it was only taken by the math majors.
Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the data (2011) [pdf]
Imagine, for a moment, a tax that...

- ...is a flat tax of 11.7% which you don't have to pay on income over $160k

- ...is used to transfer money to individuals with, on average, significantly higher net worths than those paying the tax

- ...has a low or even negative ROI especially if you have a lower life expectancy such is the case with many PoCs, men, and those with chronic health conditions

Sounds horrible, right? Well, call it "Social Security" and apparently people will love it.
They absolutely deserve this! App is light weight and works smoothly. Every once in a while I do get into unmarked building numbers, to get around that I search location on google maps (in browser) and get the coordinates and then plug them into organic maps - not a big deal for me.
Considering current events, I consider this comment to be inappropriate. A different example, perhaps relating to children who aren't in a conflict zone would have been more constructive.
Well now that you have banked $65K in a month, you should have plenty of time to write it all out in a comprehensive blog post. :)

Note: I was really talking about the execution specifics of the distribution for this new hit product, not general tips about e.g. social media. I just got done with Gabriel Weinberg's Traction, that book was a truly great work in large part because he gets highly specific about how his or X other person's company applies the principles he talks about, all the way down to "this is what our spreadsheet for understanding that marketing channel looked like."
Load is not what you should balance: Introducing Prequal
I have had a number of discussions from long time Mountain View homeowners who lived there from before Google and LinkedIn. Although the value of their real estate has exploded, they all said that quality of life has gone way down. It was a nicer place to just live when most people worked at Moffett Field or the associated aerospace and defense contractors.

Decentralization of the tech industry (particularly software) is a great trend so that young people who want to build a career won't be forced to move to Silicon Valley. Unless someone has strong personal ties there or gets a really lucrative job offer they should look to other regions.
First time I came across the term "roll coal" and thought it was a mining-related term or something, but the reality is much, much worse:

> Rolling (or "rollin'") coal is the practice of modifying a diesel engine to emit large amounts of black or grey sooty exhaust fumes—diesel fuel that has not undergone complete combustion.

> Rolling coal is a form of anti-environmentalism. Such modifications may include the intentional removal of the particulate filter. Practitioners often additionally modify their vehicles by installing smoke switches, large exhausts, and smoke stacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

This must already be illegal right? Or can you willingly increase your pollution, harm the environment and not break any laws?
What puzzles me with IBMs roadmap is their scaling:

2025 156 qubits, 5000 gates

2028 156 qubits, 15K gates

2029 200 qubits, 100M gates

2033 2000 qubits, 1B gates

The jump from 15K to 100M gates looks fishy to me. Maybe I am wrong but I doubt that will work that way.
finding random videos is fairly easy these researchers
are doing it the dumb brute-force way:
1.Block any famous accounts(1M+views):
these poison your recommendations.
2.Like only old and lowest-view videos.
3.Only click on lowest-viewcount videos that are not
marked as recent.

in a few days your home feed and recommendations will
consist of random low-ranked junk.
Then, start blocking the highest views channels
and repeat the 1.2.3. steps to get even more obscure content.
No need to scrape millions of IDs or flood the servers
with random requests.
> The client doesn't usually want more granularity, then they feel obliged to review it.

It really doesn't make sense for them to review it anyway. As a general rule in the consulting business, if you don't pay for it with expenses or in the rate, you'll pay for it in the billable hours. A successful consultant will necessarily make sure all their costs are covered, with room for profit... and you want the consultants you hire to be successful.
If you don't recognize any companies from that list (a number of which are very successful), then that's likely because you only learn about companies once they hit a truly massive scale, which takes time (and explains why the ones you know are older).

And there's also B2B vs B2C.
Surprisingly few warnings, and all on the same line!
Tell that to Ronald Fisher, who made it a point to deride Bayesian stats wherever there was an opportunity.
Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2023
Since last years Ask HN[1] was really useful for finding books that I read throughout the year i'd be interested to read about new recommendations.

Is there a book, paper, report or article etc. that really stood out?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34055123
It's not just the non-competes though.

California explicitly protects ownership of inventions made on your own time/equipment[0].

AFAIK other states tend to default to employer ownership of inventions.

This alone is a huge win for Cali when it comes to HN/maker type folks...

[0] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/lab/2870-2872.h...
Nearly the same story here. In HS the only computers in sight were TRS80 IIIs, PET4032s, and C64s. By graduation I'd moved to assembler for the sense of the metal and the speed.

First year at college, took intro to programming in Pascal, and oh what breath of fresh air that was. Sure it was cumbersome, had a lot of ceremony, but it had procedures and functions that you could pass parameters to! And structures! Things that had been a hassle in BASIC suddenly had legible descriptions.

But yes, BASIC did one thing very well: it got out of your way and let you cut your teeth on the fundamental concept - that a machine can follow a sequence of simple instructions to produce complex behavior. It provided a sense of that dynamic, that I think would have been a little less obvious with an edit/compile/test environment with as much ceremony as Pascal etc.
It seems to make sense to pay for the school you are using. Be it public, private or homeschooling
If schools have been failing to prepare students for reality like some Baltimore schools, those schools losing students until they eventually shut down due to a lack of enrollment is the best fate for those bottom 20% of schools. It's bad to support and continue the existence of a school who cannot teach students to meet reading writing math or science expectations/Test scores
But this is under Lula...
A UTF-8-like encoding would probably be better than VLQ encoding because the length is known up-front, which allows for the decoder to have fewer branches.

Something like [1] or alternatively [2]. See also [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#FSS-UTF
[2] https://sqlite.org/src4/doc/trunk/www/varint.wiki
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263378
I am reminded of Magnetix, though they were ball and stick based, and I don't believe included "solid" polygons.

Maybe some kits beyond the ones I saw did.
> Basic was pretty clearly designed as an interactive, student dialect of Fortran.

Yeah. I knew Fortran (at a high school level). Then I came across the TRS80 Basic manual. I read it in an hour, and I thought "this is just like Fortran, except the words are different".
Reforming agricultural AI: EasyDAM_V3 unveils next-gen automatic fruit labeling
> Synthetic data has many advantages - it is free of copyright issues, the downstream models can't possibly violate copyright if they never saw the copyrighted works to begin with.

I feel like we don't know if this is true or not. If we decide models trained on copyrighted data aren't fair game, it's possible we'll decide "laundered" data also isn't.

I mean, maybe that's not feasible. And I hope we don't decide training on copyrighted material is bogus anyway. But I don't think we know yet.

But also - you can totally violate copyright of something you never saw.
Most (all?) modern IDEs have line numbers for all languages, so if you open the code in the right program the educational benefit should still be there.