skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would not use the "we" word with quite that much confidence.

You are essentially arguing that a monopoly position in this particular industry minimizes what is known as "welfare loss". That would be quite an exceptional claim, IMHO

This in general only happens within market areas that appeal to the formation of so-called "natural monopolies" - typical examples being water, postal services, electricity, and the like (utilities). The rationale being that the monopoly formation in this case spares society as a whole for excessive costs as these industries are characterized by a very high proportion of fixed costs (infra, machinery, ect) relative to variable costs.

With browsers it seems that on the contrary the overwhelming majority of development costs are indeed variable (man hours) which -- all else equal -- would support the assumption that competition in this market would be better for society as whole, and that a monopoly here would be a loss for society (and eventually it would fall).
> That defeats the entire point of this arrangement, which allows them to investigate in situations where the legal requirements for obtaining a warrant are not met. (Which is the elephant in the room: the entire premise of this system is to bypass established legal thresholds).

This is just 100% false. If im pulling a prescription from a pharmacy its because Doctor Adams told me "I never wrote a prescription for Bill Barnes for percocet, but this state maintained record says that he filled a prescription for percocet at CVS #12345 on main street". That statement alone is enough to get a warrant for said pharmacy records.
I am sure what you are describing is being tracked at my company. The concern with misaligned incentives I have is that there is a vast gap between conducting a passable interview in terms of engaging with the candidate and actually investing yourself in the process. So it's not really about being a bad interviewer (as in rude, openly biased, etc) but about having the energy to do the best job you can - which all candidates deserve IMO.
Connect Developers with Impactful Sustainability Projects
What does it mean if you publish your open source android application on the play store (with no ads or monetary compensation, simply just to make it easier for users to use?).

Seems to me that you'll be liable for any issues.
How can that be though? If there are users using your software where their nation imposes requirements you don’t want to deal with, you should be able to bar those users from using your software. Licensing is typically that mechanism.

Think if it were something else as an exercise: say some nation implemented rules requiring you to pay $10k USD/year to that government as some nonsense open-source fee. Common sense says you should be able to say, in response, “well, then I guess I’m cutting that country off.” If the rule making country shouts “no takebacks!” and supersedes licensing, then wouldn’t that impinge on sovereignty?
Yeah, it sucks lol, I can’t fly anymore due to illness, and the demand is crazy I still get called to this day. Now if you can finish fogging a partially fogged mirror you’re hired at a major.
I have this botched up Debian desktop installation that I rarely use but never quite got around to make a clean install because I need an installation medium for that and i don’t have usb sticks anymore.

Do change root installs still work? I would probably give it a try again.
At that propitious 1900 banquet, perhaps pricing power was discussed?

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
> This randomness to the hiring process means that people don't treat it as a real discipline. And if you do hire a dud, you just fire them. Is it really any wonder that most recruiting processes are so callous?

It's just the same in Europe with way higher standards on recruiting (i.e. anti-discrimination laws are actually enforced) and employee protection laws. Recruiting, accounting and IT are usually seen as a "cost center" by the remainder of the employees instead of being respected as vital contributors to the business, so it's inevitable that people eventually "check out".
If you use open source you are accepting the license that says that there is no liability. This is similar to going walking in a national park, there is no liability for an injury that you incur. This is very different from walking in a shopping mall. If you fall in a hole on a mountain this is your problem. If you fall in a hole in a mall it's the mall's problem.

The article is attempting to create a scare about things that have always been true. If a telco's services crash the telco has to compensate customers even if it was a postgres failure that caused it by failing to authorise handsets for a connection in a cell. For example.
This is a very dangerous line of thought, and frankly, appalling.
I dont know whether being able to call it quantitative easing matters at that point. If the government has a pile of gold it deploys during an economic downturn, say they get it right and actually help, people will be less dissatisfied with the subsequent taxation. If they get it wrong though, and cause problems or fail to help the situation, people will be more resistant to that taxation; in the next cycle the government will be more careful about their allocations, pressured both by resource constraints and political pressure.

Wouldnt that be a healthier cycle than one where we just paper over everything?
> We find noncash payment types, earlier sale hours, product differentiation, and lower customer densities are associated with higher customer transaction size, as is the number of product groups (species) and item variety offered by vendors.
In countries with disposable income, kids have been a huge market. Christmas comes every year, and so do birthdays, and the birthdays of friends.

When I was a kid, Super Soakers printed money. Every kid wanted one, and the bigger the super soaker the cooler the kid.

Does no one remember Tickle Me Elmo? Or Furby?

Now days it may be roboblox gift cards, but the cash is still flowing.
We would absolutely not be better off. Engine monopoly is harmful to security. When you have an exploit for the only engine, all users are at risk. If there was even just 3 engines with comparable market share, that would increase the costs for attackers, and make it easier for people to switch if their current engine is compromised.
Syd Mead did the designs for Blade Runner and Tron, and absolute legend.
You probably need something special for batch operations. Adding five records in one transaction shouldn’t pay >= 5 times as much as a single one.

You need a different API for something like that however.
I use Firefox for everything. Chrome for the Google products except search. I have secondary Google account for Firefox.
You're right.

Rants are fine, and I've been frustrated by software too many times to count.

I'm being a bit protective because I would feel hurt if someone wrote that "I hate them" about some of the software I've worked on for free and open sourced.
To accept any tenants of EA, one must first accept the cultural mythology of altruism in the first place. Can it be proven that altruism exists?
I'm talking specifically on an individual level. I'm not as versed in the industrial side of things as I should be, and sure, if we as a nation (I live in the US) came together and said "let's fix the overconsumption issues" we could do it practically overnight, but the reality is that to fix every home requires an absurd upfront investment very little people are willing to fund. Systematic change is hard. We're working on it, but it's hard.
> By 2027, China is expected to have a total new energy storage capacity of 97 GW

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Five-things-powerin...

"there are these [energy storage plants] we know how to build, because we have already built quite a lot of them. all we need to do is build more of them."

energy storage is going to lag renewables because until you have enough renewables you don't have enough of a storage problem to solve.
Web assembly makes a lot more sense than JVM these days. But I suspect we don’t want something Turing complete.
This bird is like a GPS for honey
> What is there to say about the hack?

What is there to say about the [discovery]? Like everything back then it was probably accomplished by [a simple source code diff]...it is not at interesting 20 years later.

You get the idea. The story you know might be interesting to you because you happen to know the person involved. And it is sort of interesting? But not really as interesting as the _full_ story would be. In particular because your grammar in your original comment kind of implies you knew the actual attacker.

This all seems fairly obvious to me? Is there anything we're missing about the discovery? It's pretty mundane that one of hundreds of devs working on that source code happened to have a vanilla copy, especially in 2003 with a less reliable and slower internet.
That completely ignores the second half of the article. I agree that it's confusing why the article goes into so much depth on "companies are now liable, similar to how everyone expects" in the first half when the main talking point is/should be "open source devs are now liable if consumers use their software directly" (as discussed in the second half).
I wasn't too far off https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689019
I think this is basically what Colima is doing, if you’re willing to run docker containers to get it
> >>> when faced with a choice between being liable for their own code or being liable for open source code, most companies will choose to write their own code.

All those coding jobs lost to AI will be regained when everything needs to be reinvented in-house.
It hasn't always been, nor is it necessarily now. If you enable Hyper-V, that will act as Hypervisor for your machine and boot Windows by default. Applications that use it (VMWare, for instance, or Microsoft ones like WSL2) will add their own guests to the Hypervisor.

It is not the default configuration. And it wasn't even installed before Windows 8.
It's not just with LEOs where patient privacy gets dodgy.

I've helped get a number of tech companies HIPAA compliant, so I've become very familiar with the workings and requirements of the act. My wife, a nurse, works in medical claim management. Lots of healthcare knowledge between us.

I've had some very interesting conversations with her because of a tool she's described being used by insurance companies: medical canvassing. It's an "interesting" tool used by investigators that doesn't technically request PHI, but can paint a picture of one's past medical care.

Basically, an investigator can ask a health care provider a bunch of yes/no questions - "did the patient receive care between $DATE1 and $DATE2?" "yes" "was the patient treated for $THING_RELEVANT_BUT_UNRELATED_TO_CLAIM?" "yes" "okay, thank you, that's all we needed." No "PHI" requested, none provided, but a picture still painted... and HIPAA allows for it.

I'm very curious to know what other interesting methods exist that allow for the circumvention of patient privacy.
The article literally ends in bold with "Someone, or some entity, will need to accept financial and legal responsibility for what the project does in consumer hands. No license can insulate them from that. " If people are having a fearful reaction to the article it's the authors fault.
Which other kinds of marketing?

An ad on TV or on the highway does not have the capability of taking into account the network of people you follow and whether you have a habit of being awake at 3AM browsing posts about break ups.

There's a constant, gradual pervasive shift towards having ads in more private and intimate spaces.
From an engineering perspective don't you have to assume the worst case scenario when you use materials that might be inhaled? Is there any reasonable argument for using formaldehyde here or is it just because of cost?

It really seems like some decision makers should be going to prison here
I presented all that detail - philosophical justifications, legal precedents, court rulings, new laws, how the social contract and concepts of ownership have changed historically to address conflicts between new technology and old rules, how open standards foster innovation as opposed to letting companies manipulate the legal system to maintain profits, and how even Apple themselves did such things in the past.

But you know, without even addressing any of that, you have changed my mind! You just kept repeating the same things about ownership and entitlement, and that making changes was all my crazy idea. You even pointed out a couple times that I was thinking thoughts I didn't know I had.

I had no idea that hacker news would cease to exist if we mandated open protocols for big tech messaging. I don't see how that's related, but it must be, you said so. I'm surprised hacker news made it as far they did with all the open protocols that already exist. We'd be so much better off if CERN never opened the http protocol. Just like how mandating telephone network interoperability decades ago will destroy that industry. Any day now I'm sure.

All of those people and their concerns about big tech, and all of those countries passing new laws about big tech, I just saw one about Japan cracking down on app store monopolies, they must all be wrong. Because those companies own that stuff, like you said. Those who want choice are wrong. All of those people and governments must be hateful and selfish like me. We should let those big companies do what they want. These companies got big first and that entitles them to continue to control how most of us communicate, censuring us with their algorithms, etc. No big deal, it's not like communication is important to people. Too bad for those other companies that weren't in the right place at the right time, they don't have a moat or a enough lawyers and lobbyists to protect themselves. The printing press showed us how inconsequential communication revolutions are, just the whole reformation and enlightenment happening afterwards, no big deal. And what's with these new copyright laws at the time? If you own a book you should be able to copy it! Rules are rules and can't be changed. If we make any changes to mandate open protocols we'll utterly kill innovation, just like you said. The success of the everything built on the open internet and OSS proves that. It'll be another stone age if we keep that up, like you said.

Why didn't I see this before? Maybe I think too much, that must be my problem. Who needs logic or historical context to understand this stuff when emotional words like kill and hate and destroy carry much more weight and make so much more sense. So insightful. The current order is paramount, no matter how the world changes. I never knew how reassuring it was to be a reactionary and just dig in and ignore everything to the contrary, sure that I'm always right. I like this feeling of not having to challenge my preconceived notions, or explain myself. It's comfortable.

Thanks you so much! I applaud your efforts.
I am FN dumbfounded with the response: https://i.imgur.com/V8HtW03.png
Bake the cert pair into the id you are giving out to people. Look at the system in Estonia
Well written, informative, worth reading.

It’s fascinating how so many business mistakes from the last 100 years continue to be relevant and continue to be repeated.
UblockOrigin - set to default block all javascript on the website, and one gets no "sudden sound notification", no "chat widget", no "popup" and no "random decorations".
Homicides in U.S. set to drop by record numbers this year
They're not saying the same thing: a pointer to a dummy "nil struct" can be safely dereferenced by the machine (low-level-valid) yet remains disjoint from all the (high-level-) valid structures of that type; however a NULL stored in a DB is not equivalent to (in the case given, should not be confused with) either a '' or a 0 or a FALSE.

Null pointers <> SQL NULL
> I feel like it just ran but I don't think I did anything specific to make an x86 process run on ARM. Maybe Windows ARM does that for you, I forget.

Yeah, Microsoft doesn't get nearly enough credit for this, but Windows for Arm just automagically emulates x86 for you! Kinda like Rosetta, but for Windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
He’s probably talking about the Product Liability Directive reform.
Been using it since quantum, it happens after some updates, recently there was some modal about some feature I didn’t care about, and I had to click twice to close it. That was only a few weeks ago.
Agreed, but which one?

As I have said I see no effect on my browsing so I'm happy to just let things lie.

Maybe one day I'll find a good in-depth comparison article.
I don't mean THESE new laws, just new laws in general.

> nothing specifying that you need to continue making your open-source package continually and indefinitely available.

There's a difference between making it available, and deliberately causing harm and untold productivity loss in a single day. This was a case of the latter.
Why stream when you can either buy/torrent old media? I don't see a point to streaming when its more efficient to buy or download.
Ask YC: How does a non US founders pay their taxes for their US corporations?
Hi all,

I'm new in the economy (graduated recently in CS) and am trying my best to generate value for society. Hopefully, in 2024 I'll be able to generate income with a product I'm building (via a US corporation made with stripe atlas).

I'm quite excited, but also scared because I'm from Argentina and they don't teach us much about US laws in high school or college here. (though they probably should because now I'm completely in blank with respects to sth that sounds important).

How does one pay taxes in the US? The only reference I have is from the simpsons where ned flanders was always on time to send his returns and homer was late. I'm planning to be more like ned.

Anyway, I appreciate any info since I'm currently at 0 (but willing to learn).
LMDB works like this. The MDB_env struct keeps pointers to both meta pages:

https://github.com/LMDB/lmdb/blob/30288c72573ceac719627183f1...

Which meta-page used is determined by the transaction ID (even IDs use first, odd IDs second).

This is the earliest description I can find of the "shadow paging" concept: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/320521.320540

And I believe its first implementation was in IBM's System R.
I know this legislation is in the EU, but in the US such a regulation seems to run up against the concept of free speech. What is the difference between these hypotheticals:

Case 1: I have a blog that takes a conspiracy-level, anti-tax position. In it, I say crazy things like, “The IRS is illegitimate and financial records are unnecessary.” From reading this, someone shreds all their financial documents. As far as I can tell, the blog is perfectly legal under the First Amendment.

Case 2: I am an open source maintainer of a home assistant program. It includes personal file management. Due to a bug in the software, an end-user’s financial documents are deleted.

The easiest distinction is that the conspiracy reader is taking an affirmative act of destroying their own documents. But, I think that’s less different than at first glance. The software user is setting up a computer system based on an open source program that may have bugs in it, and that causes a loss of data. The conspiracy reader is setting up a worldview based on information that may have bugs in it, and that causes a loss of data.

Why would the software bug be regulated, but the conspiracy falsehood not?
I think its cultural. Disrespect has become normalised as part of
"fast paced modern life".

If we give toddlers a TV or tablet to play with instead of attentive
parenting they grow up with damaged attachment patterns. We stop them
playing outside and interacting with other children. They go through
metal detectors to attend hostile schools in a locked-down environment
and communicate only through text messages. They are watched night and
day by CCTV cameras. They're made to feel ashamed of simply existing
because they're using up air and "killing the planet".

Do this for 20 or 30 years and we have a generation of timid, avoidant
people with no interpersonal skills who as Julia Roberts' character in
Sam Esmail's new movie "Leave the World Behind" puts it just "hate
other people".

And then we use dating apps that reduce other humans to a dismissibe
swipe. Those are our peers today. We treat each other like machines
and mutual threats, because that's all we've ever experienced.

Is it any wonder that people in companies are too terrified to engage
in a risky human-human interaction?
what about nonprofits?
There are already numerous "leave the state with the intention of" laws, which I assume to be just some extra charge to throw at someone, like wearing body armor while committing a felony.
Sure, flour and yeast are cheap. But then you're spending a lot more than 1 minute of labor per pizza. Maybe you could build a robot that makes it for you, but now you are spending a fortune on capital equipment.

Real-world cost optimizers like Costco have some robots (the pizza saucing machine is cool) and they still end up with a cost around $10 per pizza.

Making pizza has high margins when you charge $25 or more per pizza. Not $10. Pizza Hut charges less than $25 but that includes delivery. From a random web link (https://www.vettedbiz.com/pizza-hut-franchise/) franchises average around 15% margins, which is not great.
Does no one remember the "funroll-loops" parody site? https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...
So then it’s not actually illegal to do any of these things?
Hmm. They can probably find other companies willing to sell them support contracts, and take on that liability. Even for things that are open source. You're back to the old enterprise software model then, really, even if the code in question is "officially" open source. You won't be able to run versions that your supplier hasn't certified, and the rate of change will slow to a crawl.
Can you comment on the part starting with

> What if an open source project is used directly by consumers, and causes them harm? The public policy is clear: they must be compensated.

It's expressly not clear what the implications here are, according to the article.
> as long as there is no commercial activity associated

My recollection, from previous discussion on HN, is that the definition of "commercial activity" is far more broad than the open source community would like it to be. And by "open source community", I mean the people that run various foundations and non-profits and things like that.

I don't think that throwing up a virtual tip jar on your Github page counts, but offering paid support would. If you collect telemetry and then sell "usage insights" that would also count as commercial activity. Advertising on the download page is commercial activity. If you have a Patreon account? I actually don't know about that. Anyone know?
Probably meaning that they'd lose their jobs if they solved the problem.
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Police get medical records without a warrant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38719918 - Dec 2023 (258 comments)

Pharmacies share medical data with police without a warrant, inquiry finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38615841 - Dec 2023 (46 comments)
Isn't that just not true? Larger cars have steel cages, stronger supports, higher off the ground. Actual frames, steel shell and not aluminum.