skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is BS. I've talked employers into releasing all sorts of useful things under FOSS licenses over the years. The conversation has always been like "we have this handy thing, and it's not related to our core business at all, and there's no way it'd be a marketable product, but other people could probably use it, too." And the release process has always been like "here's a thing we made to solve a problem we had, and it works for us, and maybe other people could also use it."

In every case, we used those projects in production in our own shop. The tools worked for us. If they didn't, we kept tweaking until they did. They may not have been perfect in all possible scenarios, but they were useful for us.

And if my employers faced any liability problems whatsoever, they'd never have given me permission to release them.

Imagine suing Linus because Linux turns out to be vulnerable to an attack that hasn't been invented yet. The OpenBSD gang for finding and fixing a bug, even though it wasn't known to be exploitable, because it could have been. My boss because a little tool I wrote turned out to have a problem in an environment and use case we'd never imagined anyone using it in.

This is bullshit.

Update: A lot of readers have been quick to point out that the BS laws don't apply to all situations. That doesn't help the situation. "Hey, boss, can I give this tool I made away? If an ambulance chaser sues us for idiotic reasons, we'll probably be fine because the law doesn't cover how we're releasing it. Hey, come back here! Stop running!" I present as evidence jackasses like this: https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/disbarr...

Yeah, I'm sure my employer would eventually win a frivolous lawsuit, but the mere possibility of that being an issue would be catastrophic to FOSS as we know it.
It's more like

“Come here, spend your money, enjoy our services and everything we built in the last centuries, then leave.”
Ask HN: Resource for learning probabilistic DS and Algo
Looking for resource, courses, blog, or textbook in probabilistic algorithm and data structure

Recently learn about monte carlo algorithm and find them fascinating, wondering if other people have any recommended resource to learn more.

Already read about, HLL, bloomfilter, count min sketch, Freivalds' algorithm, looking to dive deeper into the application of these DS and algo and learn more.
> Any publisher can opt out of google.

Can they? Here's reference to a legal fight where Google scraped song lyrics from a lyrics website, and presented the lyrics verbatim directly to users (bypassing the original site and the ads that allowed that site to operate)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law...
I'm doing it for my future career, not for them that's for sure!

Despite not helping in this current company, conducting a lot of interviews taught me a lot for sure.
Yes, bless him for what he did for engineers, macninists, and tinkerers !
Use a better hypervisor like ESXi (but I don’t think a different hyoervisor is available for Apple silicon).
Social media companies made $11B in US ad revenue from minors, study finds
Also, electricity from fossil fuels consumes a lot of water.

U.S. thermoelectric plants are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals, accounting for more than 40% of total U.S. water withdrawals in 2015: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698
And when Communists took power in Vietnam then exactly what was expected to happen happened - a large scale human tragedy with mass killings and torture and mass exodus.

Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer who had murdered around 400 000 people - half of them after US refused to take him down after the Gulf War. Any excuse to get him removed was a good one.
There's a middle ground between not having enough brand recognition and losing control over your trademark to the point where it becomes generic.

Defending and suing helps keep it in the middle ground, but they're not going to sue Pat on the street for misusing the word -- which is where generic comes from, right?
High cost creates a barrier to entry. And it can often be an intentional one. See luxury goods as an example. Almost all luxury items are sold at insane profit margins and cost nowhere near that much to make. But the high price is the differentiator itself. Is a Gucci branded article of clothing that much better? No of course not. The value is indirectly signally to others you have the money to afford gucci. Poors not allowed. Other things can have their access limited by price in similar ways. Raising the price is a very effective way of keeping the poors out. Its not always intentional. But many times it can be.
> Well no, you still want to minimize garbage production (and related GC overhead). Wear leveling doesn’t mean produce more garbage.

Surely some % of garbage helps as you're garbage collecting and reliably trying to shuffle data around to wear-level more evenly?

Lets say you have 99% used data and 1% garbage. You have very little room for (static) wear leveling. Ex: If you're writing 10MB of new data, and your drive is 99% full of allocated data... you'd have to move 1000MB of data around to "find" the 10MB of garbage, on the average.

In the other extreme case: 0% data used and 100% garbage (say a TRIM operation just completed), then you simply just write 10MB without having to worry about moving any data around.

The 50% data + 50% garbage scales as appropriate. 10MB of written new data will need you to find and coalesce 10MB of garbage to write the new data. This will happen after moving 20MB of overall data around.

----------

I'm oversimplifying of course. But even in a real life system, I'd expect that the more "garbage" you have sitting around, the better the various algorithms work for FTL / SSD (static or dynamic) wear leveling.
People are just npm installing whatever without even checking the github stars or usage; not that that says anything but not even that. As a bare minimum devs should check if their libraries have robust testing, are maintained by people who have the time to do so etc. A lot of open source libraries are really bad and if you are building commercial (packaged / saas, doesn't matter) software on top of that, you definitely should be held liable if that causes harm. This lazy behaviour should end as it indeed does cause horrible messes.

This over the top article is, I guess, pointing to open source software that's used by an individual directly from the source as an enduser and then causes harm, not to parts of commercial software that includes open source software when they talk about holding open source devs liable.
There are workarounds for using Firefox web apps: https://forums.puri.sm/t/firefox-web-apps/21499/
The entire playlist of Learning to Learn by Richard Hamming is absolutely worth it [0], especially the introduction talk and "You and Your Research". They make you think hard about the effective ways to learn and ask important and pertinent questions.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30
All of them? Mozilla is even worse than the Wikipedia foundation. They are a one trick pony and should just focus on their one trick ...
Ah thanks, it wasn't explicit that this was what it was referring to and was ambiguous (at least to me).
There's a very unambiguously wide gap between water being freely available to every person for sustaining life, and water being completely free to use in quantities of trillions/quadrillions of gallons for profit.
This makes little to no sense unless you take an absolutely literal view of the the "any price the market offers is in essence a fair market price" for the value of the engineers. You can't argue that without acknowledging that for the same reasons, until Apple offered those engineers more salary (and I don't think it was disclosed how different they were, just that someone made a comment of saying "$x is low"), then they were being paid the then-fair market value (I also think there's a very cogent argument to be had that SF engineering compensation is inflated). But leaving that aside:

Masimo makes as you note, industrial devices. The Root devices that I mention are not ever going to be used at home, even by the ultra wealthy.

I mean you are talking about devices that do CO-oximetry (effectively "arterial blood gas"), brain function monitoring, connect to ventilators (ISA capnography for intubated patients) and anesthesia machines and pushing aggregated data into EPIC. Like I said, these are devices being used in intensive care units, not simple finger pulse oximetry, reflected or otherwise.

They are not "gatekeeping" this technology for the ultra wealthy so poor Apple Watch owners (of which I am on my third) can't get access to it. They're entirely different models with different purposes, in an entirely differing market segment.

Also if you're referring to "potentially life saving analysis" with respect to pulse oximetry on the Apple Watch, which does it only on demand, and is not an FDA regulated medical device, regardless of patents, there's an exaggeration happening. Patients with chronic hypoxic and similar issues are not relying on Apple Watches to "potentially save their lives".
Although it's true, that's a hazardous way of thinking. If they had put more of their focus on making steel, keeping up with the technological advances rather than being dragged along grudgingly, perhaps they'd be making more money these days.
Numbers going up make a certain % of the population behave in strange ways. Some people will go to any lengths to make their imaginary number go up, from asking friends to upvote things (potentially worth $$ if a post for a product hits the HN home page) to writing bot rings to upvote their own posts.

Another POV is that the entire point of a karma system is to encourage posters to follow the cultural norms on a site. When I first joined HN, posts that weren't at least a few long paragraphs got almost instantly downvoted. I actually appreciated this as it made for a really nice S/N ratio. It also meant that I didn't post any comments unless I had something substantive to say.

So basically the karma system encouraged people to change their behavior in such a way as to contribute to conversations in a non-trivial fashion.

Now days I feel that downvotes are used to just penalize super toxic comments. Exceptions do exist, but since the maximum down vote is -4, it is pretty easy for the community to restore the score of a comment that got downvoted to grey because it irritated a few people.
CPU Affinity: Because Even a Single Chip Is Nonuniform
Why do you need an LLM for that? This functionality already exists in tools recruiters use. If a candidate is crossed off the list, the system sends them a pre-written rejection email. Simple.
There seems to be some confusion in the comments regarding what this means for people releasing open source software.

The article makes it clear that (as the author understands it, at least) someone who uses open source software in their commercial product is liable; the people who wrote the open source code [1] are not.

> If a user is harmed by software, the person they paid (targeted ads would count) must compensate them for the harm – unless the software provider can prove their software played no role in the ... harm. If open source resources are [used by] your code, you’re responsible for their performance too. *The open source resource licensed away their liability to you*.

(Emphasis mine)

[1] Assuming they used a license that limits liability, such as Apache.
Thanks for the implications on my character in the work place. Written very courteously yet not so nice.. maybe that's the key difference in perspective. I don't care about politeness I care about kindness.

When someone writes a kind or genuinely useful letter with feedback when I get rejected, I greatly appreciate it. An automatic or generic rejection is the same as nothing to me. It has no actual information in it. And requiring a recruiter to reply to all rejections personally might feel nicer to you and less nice to them.
> That GWh can be produced in two years less consistently or twenty years more consistently. Which do you choose?

Both.

Intermittent generation methods are more problematic the more of the grid you try to replace with them. You have solar generation during the day, you run your natural gas plants less during the day but still run them at night, great. Keep building solar until you can stop running them during the day at all. Installing that much capacity could take 20 years.

At that point you'd have to contend with what to do at night. But hey, by then the nuclear plants you started building today are online. You might also look into ways of speeding up the process, because it shouldn't take 20 years to do that.
I want to publish some papers.
I want to have side-incomes.
It runs on WSL, not sure about Cygwin

Interactive shell screencasts was the last blog post: https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/12/screencasts.html

Real Unix users download and build tarballs, they don't wait for the packaging gods to bless them with software :-P
Off-topic, but was anyone able to locate Part 3 of this series?
Historically the profit from gold mining was the least common denominator of society. The cost of gold mining closely tracks the revenue, meaning almost any other profitable investment would be preferable.
If you use firefox, consider donating!
People with enough reach to be worth suing will write it that way, or close enough.
Yes, WebRender makes up the compositor portion of the browser rendering engine. A very large, critical portion of it. Thus, saying "Gecko had a good and honorable run" is disingenuous to the large-scale changes and progress the developers have made (and continue to make) on the rendering engine.
My kids watch minecraft and roblox streams ad infinitumon youtube though.. I pay for ad free youtube and ad free streaming services but they still know of and want the latest toys. It's amazing. My kids never want to watch a movie or tv show, only youtube.
http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/android/android-4.0/e...
Some interesting arguments at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-movement-s... and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff...

And concern about AI safety/ethics is a lot broader than just EA these days. It actually seems to be one of the things that EA got right before they were popular, along with pandemic preparedness and other global risks.
No, there are easier and more lightweight ways to create a cross-platform UI than to write HTML/CSS/JS: Tkinter, wxPython, PySide6, MiniGUI, Dear ImGui, Nuklear, React Native.
I think you might be misreading it. The person who ships the product commercially is liable. If you sell them your code, you'd be liable but if they just use your open source code, they are liable for any potential issues in their program caused by your code (instead of you being liable).

Basically they can't just brush off responsibility for using FOSS code by saying "well I didn't write it, it's not my fault" unless you as the FOSS developer are selling them a support contract for any potential issues in your code.
Actually immutable btree has a single writer in general since there’s no translation log and the meta page pointing to one latest tree root. Even if two write transactions updating different parts of the tree, they both need to update the same meta page, causing a contention. This is one downside (or upside depending on your need since single writer simplifies things a lot and great for sequential writes).
I know you said you have a preference for fresh stuff but I just have to post my all-time faves:

- Pushing Through Friction by Dan Na: https://youtu.be/8bxZuzDKoI0?si=FRVYc-XAK_HuRNs3. Great talk about how ideas get stalled in the big organisational machine, and what you can do about it.

- You Deserve Nice Things by Soroush Khanlou: https://youtu.be/CTZOjl6_NuY?si=a1pmGILQzGR9T4Wv. Eye opener about making nice-to-use data structures / APIs.

- The Most Important Design Guideline by Scott Meyers: https://youtu.be/sfLZ7v9gEnc?si=QFNdmcguaOHbmFfX. A fun exploration of badly designed software.
NPM wasn't the one who pushed the "delete project" button, knowing full well what would happen.
I highly disagree. There's a huge amount of material out there for advanced software engineering. The problem is this material is exponentially harder and most programmers aren't interested in this stuff.

What OP is talking about is essentially learning a new language which is sort of trivial and not advanced. It's sort of a parallel track and he likely wants something that doesn't start at the very beginning. Something called: "Learning elixir for experienced programmers". This kind of thing isn't "advanced". It's more like "convenient". Most programmers spend there entire careers in this zone just learning new languages and new technologies. They are sort of moving horizontally through the field rather then upwards.

True advanced stuff is hard af, and the more advanced you get the less and less relevant it is to your job.
Also why would you need feedback?

Every company is different and will have different requirements and expectations.

Unless you are doing something universally bad (like didn't shower before going out), there is not much that feedback could help you with other than make you start acting like someone you are not.

If you acted on the interview and you got hired, you'll be expected to continue the act probably for as long as you work there. Which ultimately leads to quick burn out and self-hate.
> how would that even be evaluated?

Depends on the company. At my current workplace, the candidate is given an option to provide feedback at the end (either through a form or an email), and all interviewers are also required to submit written notes on how everything went down.

Given that a candidate at the onsite will get interviewed by 4-5 people, with each of them providing a very detailed set of notes, it would be fairly trivial to smell out a misbehaving interviewer, if one cared to do so. What actually happens at the end of the day with those notes and candidate feedback, that’s the part i am not sure about. Once they get submitted to the hiring committee (or HR), it is out of my hands.

But just saying, they do have ways of evaluating it, just on a less precise scale and more on a “bad/good enough/amazing” scale. With only the “bad” outcome raising any eyebrows/having any meaningful effect, and with 99% of them getting the “good enough”/“amazing” ratings. And how often the signal for that “bad” rating gets caught is also not something I know much about.

P.S. Your assessments and notes are all preserved in the centralized hub, so you (and some others) can always access them later as well. And, sometimes, you indeed have people checking them out for assessment or such. Especially during your first couple interviews, you have a person supervising you and taking notes in parallel as well, and then you discuss them and they give you improvement suggestions and such.
Except that all the people using left-pad weren't paying for left-pad, and didn't have a contractual relationship with the author. IANAL, but I'm doubtful the courts would find there is enough of a relationship for the author to be liable.
check out firefox containers. You can launch a specific container as a new tab with the hotkey "Ctrl+shift+#", depending on what you have set.

I have ctrl+shift+1 for personal, 2 for work, 3 for banking.

It's a super rapid way to run multiple contexts in the same window. Really recommend it.
The article is misleading unless you read the whole thing and the reactions are standard knee-jerk ones from HN users that didn't need to read past "EU" to assume the worst possible misinterpretation.
Fine: Yugabyte.
The article states "[WHO threshold proposed by Philips] allows for far higher formaldehyde emissions than benchmarks used by other organizations, including the Environmental Protection Agency."

The WHO threshold is, based on quick googling, 0.08 ppm which sounds pretty reasonable. I have been unable to find a corresponding EPA value. Anyone got better luck?
Mozilla is badly managed[1], at least from the perspective of users and developers.

Nobody outside of the executives can possibly say Mozilla is well managed with a straight face when they fire hundreds of developers and then turn around and pay their CEO /seven million fucking dollars/[2], all the while Firefox continues to slip further into irrelevance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

[2]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...
His productivity will shoot trough the roof, when it moves into deleting code.
I don't think this is targeted at large corporation employees. More intended for freelancers, small entrepreneurs, and remote workers of small businesses.
...I'm really having trouble understanding this comment. Maybe my sarcasm detector is broken?

Watching anything unsupervised is of course age-dependent, so I'm not sure I understand the mechanism at work in that part of the comment.

But on the deeper matter of Disney vs. anime:

Obviously anime is a huge basket, so it depends on what studio and creator(s) we're talking about.

There's plenty of amazing, reinforcing, validating, positive anime to be found. The Miyazaki films are, without exception, lovely and perfectly messaged for kids of all ages, including this 41-year-old. There are many other non-Miyazaki works from Studio Ghibli that are similarly friendly.

Disney, on the other hand, absolutely sexualizes and gaslights vulnerable populations. I loved Beauty and the Beast growing up, but in retrospect I realize that it taught a generation of little girls to endure abuse in the hopes of some magical transformation. Aladin is horrifyingly racist and two-dimensional. Pocahontes? Holy fuck.

Compare the Disney and Ghibli renditions of The Little Mermaid and tell me which one is made with greater concern over kids' worldview and mental health, let alone faithful passage of the ecological message of novel.

The Disney formula is very often predicated on a woman whose value is in her sexuality and virginity, with men who are divided into distinctly "good" and "evil" camps who fight over her. It's absolutely the kind of sexualization that is toxic for kids.
Clayton Christensen talk about the steel industry, and how businesses resist change - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpkoCZ4vBSI&ab_channel=Sa%C3...
No no, it's not the users that care if their client is honest, it's the websites. But users want to use those websites, and therefore whatever is in the website's interest is in the user's interest.

There's a lot you can justify with a creative thought process.
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38798825
The most basic insight of EA is to be efficient in your altruism.

It’s an extension of the effort years ago for nonprofits to report their management costs: If you want to support cancer research, you don’t want to give it to the charity that uses 60% of funds for marketing, you give it to the charity that sends 90% to quality research.

Similar if your goal is more broad than cancer research, like say you just want fewer children dying. Well then you can to the research and find that mosquito nets are dollar-for-dollar the best use of money for reducing child mortality, better than for example paying for more doctors. (*These are just examples)

The more “famous” conclusions of EA are actually less core to the movement, from what I understand. For example, the advise that one can do the most good by getting a high paying job and donating the surplus.
IMHO, Brave Browser + uBlock origin is far better than any other browser without UBO.

So, perhaps the real difference isn't so much the browser as it is UBO?

(I Know that BB is basically Chromium with some changes, just like Chrome. And, that Chromium is not Chrome)