skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the amount of developer-hours spent working on things -- without betting paid -- because they are intrinsically interested or think it's socially useful, is dwarfed, by orders of magnitude, by developer-hours spent getting paid.

The number of developer-hours getting paid to work on proprietary messaging systems is pretty huge.

And this is hardly irrelevant to understanding why we have proprietary messaging systems.

Whether you personally are a developer or not -- if you have spent more hours building something you haven't gotten paid for than you have at your paid job, you are an unusual person. (Such unusual people do exist! they often, but not always, have atypical lives in some way that allows this)

I mean, you think "the world's most profitable progress-themed ad distributor" comes about becuase "coding wizards" are just intrinsically intersted in this, rather than because it's what makes people lots of money? It's just a lucky coincidence lots of people made money, that focus is really because "coding wizards" by and large just love distributing ads, it's a personal interest? This is all guided by the personal interests of "coding wizards" rather than by who pays for software development for what?
If the problem is that they shipped a half-assed implementation of an important safety mechanism, the answer is for them to get better at technology, not saying that safety measures are unnecessary. They can disable the features which don’t work until they have time to fix them.
Habits in 300 Days
Raising money for the panoptic computronium cathedral.
IMO, if you're capable of running yt-dlp, it's far better than any website.

It's pretty simple to run these download tools as website, but it's expensive in terms of bandwidth and tends to attract legal attention. So a lot of websites go up supporting it, but even if they were started with good intentions, they will virtually all eventually add intrusive ads or other types of monetization just to break even. So there's never going to be a reliable website for it. If you're lucky, a search engine will send you to one that's working okay right now, but even odds you'll be fighting through a dozen malware nests.

Meanwhile, yt-dlp just works every time, with only an occasional pip upgrade to keep it up to date.
oracle's litigious nature?
Windows 10 forced an updated on my PC and deleted all my personal files. I paid a forensic data firm four digits to get about half my data back.
Personally I think vector lookups make more sense as a new kind of index for existing databases, as opposed to an entirely new class of database.
> You can still look exactly like someone else

But you can’t have a username that looks exactly the same anymore.

I’m in some 140 discord servers.
The amount of spam from people impersonating someone popular has reduced drastically since this change.

I wouldn’t call “one click” an investigation.
You're a legend, thanks for posting that.
2023: Year in Review
This seems like tab complete vs autocomplete. The resolution to that has been making it configurable.

Perhaps that would be advantageous here too?
Learn by doing.

Fix a couple of nontrivial bugs.

Implement a new feature.

Get comfortable with the fact that you'll be slower than others.
Happy New Year all. HN has been there for me to read, learn, get cross with comments, and generally entertaining me for several years. I may not always agree with or understand articles that are linked, but I come back every day. So Happy New Year and thanks all. Esp dang for keeping the place civil.
>Not true

Historically true. Entire US protects global shipping narrative, that got popular post Zeihan, ignore the fact that US explicitly did not protect non US flagged vessels during tanker wars for years - the last large scale SLOC disruption. And when US "got there" they didn't protect everyone, Kuwaiti vessels had to reflag as US to get protection. US protected everyone in the sense that Stark getting hit triggered Operation Earnest Will that eventually led to cease fire with Iran to end tanker wars. But US was fine with years of SLOC disruption until US lost sailors.

>Source

Sal Mercogliano of What's Going on in Shipping covered it around early/mid december. Source is his sources. But martime twitter in general, folks tracking Maersk DoD ships with apparent USN escorts were wondering why they weren't transitting red sea / hovering Gulf of Oman. They had explicit protection outside of prosperity guardian but didn't move until after. Sal sources said Maersk was trying to leverage US to protect all Maersk shipping, not just US flagged/part of DoD program.

>America shouldn’t be doing this for free...

This presuppose US is some benevolent provider of global security, or PRC is free riding. When reality is they both have postures calibrated for their own interest. There's every reason PRC should do African anti piracy that effects her since US can't be depended on. And every reason not to do anything in Red Sea when it doesn't effect her as much as it undermines US. They would be stupid to help US/west when they could be just collecting intel which for PRC interest is doing plenty. If US really wants PRC to do more, they should encourage PRC to open more naval bases abroad and burden share. But that's stupid. US benefits from adversaries not having global basing and optics of being global martime security provider even from countries that would rather not be "protected" by US.

>"Largely" does heavy lifting

Not really, PRC shipping hasn't had pause unlike Maersk or western shippers. COSCO announced they planned to detour but continued Red Sea operations like normal. So far no indication PRC shipping has been disrupted. Hangzhou (Singapore flagged) was previously docked in Israel's Mediterranean port. Whatever Houthi/Iran targetting is discriminating enough for PRC to ride things out. But yes regional war would flip script. Even India/Pak navy war cooperating after recent tanker hit off India. In the mean time, current instability is not explicitly "good" for PRC, but it's much worse for US/west. Until something changes, there's no reason to cooperate. Hangzhou still got hit despite a carrier group there to settle things down, Maersk is halting red sea transit again despite explicit US protection. It's early days, but right now PRC is position to sit back, gather data, and watch US bleed expensive interceptors (which is an easy to replace economic problem), and wear down hulls and crew on extended deployment (which is a harder to replace political problem).
There are 200 good identities in the world with an authentication system closed outside the official entities.

I have never seen any endpoint for the general population that can be used to authenticate a citizen
In fact, a neural net is “just” a stack of logistic regressions if you only use sigmoid activations.
I guess people have opinions that differ from mine, lol:

HN's current design is near perfection for legibility, density, and responsiveness/load times.
The up/down vote may be the most problematic aspect, but I hardly ever misclick, even on mobile.
- See if you can pair with someone a few months or a year ahead of you. They'll be new enough to remember what it's like to be new, but experienced enough to give you advice. Seniors devs can sometimes be very busy, not approachable, and don't remember what it's like to be new

- Just read the entire codebase...I know that's not very popular, or efficient. If it's an enormous codebase, just take it folder-by-folder. Skim large files or things you don't understand. Eventually something will pop out as familiar and you'll notice some patterns. Ask questions about those patterns and see if your intuition is correct.

- Figure out what the output is supposed to be. Is it a web app? Get it running locally so you can view it in a browser. Something else? Run the test suite and see what the tests actually do. If it's an embedded project or something that runs on hardware, ask for an experienced dev to introduce you to the hardware and show you how to upload and run builds on it.

- Find the entry point for the application. Some sort of main() function, depending on the language. Surrounding it will be some clues as to what the high-level architecture is.

Hope that helps!
> Is everything this guy writes this one-sided?

Yes.
Can't you set up a test environment with fake data, and ask them to simulate their work there?

It's less than ideal, but it would allow youto see and understand their workflows
Happy New Year Everyone.

this was the best year in my life, hope the next is even better for me as well as y'all <3
Some reputable ccTLDs don't have grace periods, and there may be good reasons for choosing such a TLD. Ten years is not the rest of your life (I hope, anyway) and you certainly won't be able to use the auto-renewal from your previous comment after 10 years. Sucks to be you if you happen to be in a hospital at that time I guess.

Are the chances small? Sure. But some are also outside your control and apply "small chance of [..]" to a large enough population and before you know it you're excluding millions of people.
I don’t think they picked the best example to showcase this, most JavaScript developers would write this simply as:

Array.from({ length: n }, (_, i) => i + 1)

But this example does get the point across, so I think it is fine. I do agree though, while reading it the inefficientness was screaming at me.
It's seven samurai in space with bits and pieces of warhammer nonsense. It's basically a movie for children.
>America might be less fucked than everyone else. But it would still get fucked.

Again, if one has a job—albeit with hours cut—and a place to live and everyone else doesn't, who is better off?

>Great analogy. You’re talking about economic catastrophe on par with the Great Depression, which involved a 29% reduction in GDP.

The Depression has a unique place in US history because it hit the US harder and earlier than the rest of the world. Europe did not really see the effects until an important bank collapsed in 1931. The crisis hit Germany hard, contributing to Hitler taking power, but it was more the shock of the abrupt end of the 1920s' sharp recovery after the stabilization of the Rentenmark and thus the postwar economy. The UK was hit, but meaningfully milder than the US, and it did not see the "second depression" that the US did in the late 1930s. France was barely affected.

Without worldwide trade today, while things won't be great in the US, the rest of the world (including Europe) is a half step from Mad Max.
honestly, there is so much that I didnt like after getting a 4k screen that i went back to 2k.
I've always heard it as "short on luck".
> updates that break otherwise perfectly-functioning hardware

Arguably the hardware still functions perfectly, it’s the software that’s broken.
curl --silent https://blog.colindou.ch/lets-make-an-os/bad.cpio | hexdump -C | less
Welcome to the real world of software engineering. It only gets worse.
Objective-C takes a lot from Self and compiles to the Mac, iOS and Linux. Because it is built on top of C it should be even more portable than that.
Because government action is consumer action.

The government is not some foreign third actor, we live in a democratic society and as such, the way in which we do things is subjected to the desires of the public.

If enough people consider the government should intervene, then the government should intervene.
happy ny everyone, thanks for making this a wonderful community
Yes. The history of authorities protecting users before failure in the cryptocurrency world is fairly empty, however.

TBH I'm not sure if they're allowed to operate in NY though.
„Today“…MBA-Thinking.

I don’t want a huge problem tomorrow.
Thanks I’ll take a look. For now you can use Twitter DM for anything
Probably not. It looks like an autocomplete engine. But technically you can do that with an LLM, with a more complex interface. You could select a region and then input a prompt "rewrite this code in xyz way". And a yet more complex system to split the GPT output across files, etc.
That's terrible. Very curious who pushed that button and why. Just confirmed they're closing all locations.
Thanks, I learned a new thing!
Your "very small team" of under 5 developers is still what React, et al. target.

Developers leave about every two years. Engineering management want to use technologies that allow for resource flexibility, and those libraries are designed to attract both parties. You, and management, for different reasons.
I liked this:

> Notice, I'm no Luddite. I don't reject technology. I depend on it.
Happy New Year from an Icelander in Garðabær (10 minutes by car south of Reykjavík... our definition of a suburb )
Ask HN: How many times will this loop run on average?
A friend of mine shared the following code snippet with me and asked me to guess how many times the loop will run on average:

for(int i = 0; i < Random(1, 100); i++);

I tried to guess the answer analytically and gussed ~50 but the empirical test was surprising to me. Can someone explain why the average is around 12?

Runnable code: https://replit.com/@aalhour/RandomLoop#main.py

EDIT: Formatting.
Elon Musk's X gets another valuation cut from Fidelity
Down in Denver too. My money is on a date rollover issue related to DRM.
The claim was if we had interoperability we would see progress. IRC exists and we didn't. Now your claim is if we had interoperability and there was a benevolent giant willing to pour billions in investment we would see progress.
In Microsoft land the best escape hatch is writing an Azure Function.
Cool post! Would love to try this with some of my own texts. How did you get Ollama to generate text based in your source texts?
A New Kind of AI Copy Can Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.
Neural architecture for one pass learning of 7 segment display
How did you get that from my comment?

I said all the non-personal accounts. Accounts using it as a platform. Celebrity brands, business accounts, influencer, anything that's one directional. Maybe technically they are "people" but they're using it in a one directional way
Well life+70y, so theoretically up to ~170y. Regardless, I'd agree that few things need protecting for so long. Kids can work for themselves.
> HN is a place that feels like home

Indeed, the only third place I feel worth participating in (for me of course, ymmv) and enjoy. Appreciate y’all. Thank you dang for all of the hard work.
Happy successful solar orbit revolution, fellow space travellers!
It'd be useful to know what site you used to verify - but if we're talking about the same site, IMO a website that presents Dan's experience sometimes, and your experience sometimes, is actively harmful.
The best binary parser I had was in the Practical Common Lisp book in the MP3 chapter. I was able to use it to reverse engineer several custom formats used to stitch files including FoxPro db format I had no idea existed.
Then he literally talked about Full Self Driving which does exactly what he described

On every other car, the smart cruise control feature that keeps a car within the lane markings...can also handle slowing down and stopping (though stopping for signage is limited to self-driving systems like FSD).

Where is Geoffrey’s outrage there

Audi wasn't required by the government to issue a massive recall. Tesla was. The outrage is that Tesla is deliberately violating the requirement of the recall.
I personally would far rather have the occasional cheater than have the game install literal rootkits. It's absolutely bonkers that people are willing to accept that.
I am anti-IP, yet I am also anti-AI and think we should leverage copyright law to drive LLM companies into ground. These are not contradictory positions, unless you subscribe to some actual Platonian idealism.
Categorization sounds like a good job for AI. Yahoo execs, are you paying attention? :)
Yes, that's the crux, for sure. Meetup or local slacks/discords are where I'd start looking. You could also email current or former coworkers, if you have that info.
Ask HN: What are the YouTube channel worth to follow in 2024?
I think they share my distaste of languages (like python) that use indentation instead of brackets to signify a code block. People have different preferences and it's totally valid, whatever the reason for those preferences.
Gibberish. Sophistry. Gorilla dust thrown to obscure what's probably happened here. What's probably happened is that you had a reason--or thought you did--but that's now thrown into doubt and so you're trying to obfuscate the matter. What's probably happened is that you were motivated to assume that I hadn't read the thread (I mean, you said as much) as an easy way to deflect scrutiny of your reasoning. Except, I did read the thread, which means your assumption was wrong. Rather than admit that, again the tactic is to obfuscate. I've seen it a million times.
The population of the city has dropped by around half a million since the pandemic and the rise of remote work. There are plenty of empty apartments, many of which are being warehoused by landlords because they don't want to rent out at stabilized rates. And erecting more luxury housing, which is mostly what gets built these days, isn't going to make city more affordable for the middle class. Perhaps vastly expanding public housing would, but the city housing authority is already almost $80 billion behind in deferred maintenance for its current housing stock. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/12/nyregion/nyc-housing-auth...)

The author has one thing right though. Transforming NYC into a place where nobody would want to live is a good way to make it more affordable.
> Some of those suggestions are things that sound good at first glance but are simply not great ideas.

Actually, yes they are. I'm not a big fan of legislation, but the upgrade crazyness has to stop at some point!

> For example, support for downgrades means you a security vulnerability can be reintroduced by a malicious user which may not be desirable

What if "I, the user" deem it "desirable"?

I'm holding to bios with known vulnerabilities so I can work around "security features" that are "for my own protection" like 1) preventing me from underclocking (to keep the security features of the now-dead SGX) 2) using any M2 WWAN or NVMe that I want

It's gone to a point where it's not desirable for me to upgrade, and to prefer the risks that come with an exploit as at least I know my freedom to use my hardware the way I want will not suddenly become limited.

Another example: getting root on android with mediatek was considered a "bug" and work a mandatory "upgrade" that prevent users from being able to get root that way.

But I want to be root!
I want tweak stuff to make it fit better for me. I don’t want tweak stuff to get it initial usable.

Likewise the rationale why people buy the Steamdeck. Other than Windows it just works. And it is tweakable.
> the same standard isn’t applied to other car manufacturers

This belief is hard to reconcile with the Cruise threads. What you’re actually seeing is that other companies aren’t hyping their technology so far in advance of its actual capabilities. If Toyota sold “full self driving” as an expensive add-on and failed to ship it over the time most people owned the vehicle, you’d see plenty of ragging on them, too.

The contrast is especially noticeable when you look at what the market leaders are doing. Waymo owns their vehicles fully and isn’t claiming they’re suitable for general use everywhere, every time. Mercedes has an L3 system far in advance of Tesla but they only offer it in certain conditions and back it with insurance. If Tesla’s product was where their marketing claims it is, they’d do the same.
This is my experience with Roku TVs. They used to be ok, but they can't resist updating them and I have 3 that run noticeably slower than they did originally. It's probably a combination of the OS and apps.

Even worse, something got updated that broke CEC integration with my sound bar on one of them, so now I can't use the built in volume control and need to use 2 remotes instead. I know it's a real first world problem, but it infuriates me that they can slowly ruin a TV that I own and I have no recourse.

I'm so sick of the tech industry I hope the whole thing collapses. We need major legislation updates to make tech companies liable for all awful they're doing to the world.
Are you still doing that commute?
Don't they stop spinning when idle?
I also found it unrealistic that somebody so young would have already fought "countless battles".
How's Threads doing from the POV of HN crowd? It seems to me like a clone of Instagram, with some celebreties double-posting their X or Instagram content to it. After its first few weeks, I probably have visited once a month.
> not calling you out.

If so, I misunderstood, apologies @robertlagrant
The whole NYC island was cut into grid lots without taking into things like utilities, just lots, by a realtor. It takes so much more money and effort it service and maintain all of that. They have no ability to grow the city like Tokyo does. They don't have the engineering ability, or funds. Tokyo has 38m people to NYC's 12m. This is all due to NYC not wanting to think about the future, only preserve the poorly designed past.
I think we are indeed saying the same thing. However, I would like search engines to do some curation -- specifically, to remove results that deliver malware, are clones of other sites, and are just entirely content free (eg Microsoft's forums).

I'll give Google credit: I haven't seen gitmemory or SO clones in a while. It took a few years but they seem to have dealt with them.
HN is my goto place whenever I feel bored, sad, lonely, without purpose, lacking inspiration etc. It's amazing how a single website with such a minimalistic design can condense so much quality content and quality people in a single place for the whole world to enjoy free of charge. Thanks and Happy New Year!
Here's a comment I posted a few weeks ago about my experience with Threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38640884
You're right, there doesn't have to be criminal penalties. Codifying compensation requirements for buggy software seems like it would need to be very broad and effectively a useless law, though.
Ask HN: Creating a small social media app
I have a small idea that I'd like to try building, I (probably) can make something usable without any extra readings but I guess I'd rather make something right and smaller than bigger but designed awfully. what are some good textbooks / resources for building a small social media app. Just to clarify, I don't mean "how to use Flutter / RN" etc, I mean, more to do with the system design, sending messages between users, storing data etc
I don’t think I ever got a chance to use it because I’m not in the US and can’t say I’ll miss it. Insta is dull enough
Contextually I like the word "drop" more too. Saying that, I might want to sync a moment in time with a particular Yann Tiersen's piano phrase that's hardly a drop, more like a favorite bit that I want to hear right when the clock strikes midnight.
Their growth only comes from absorbing the outlying areas. They aren't making a functional city by doing that.
That feels sociopathic in the context of socializing. As if you need to have something to gain in order to bother spending time with people.
Sure, but if you are planning to go from SME to enterprise you need to think strategically for the long term. You'll probably need to have more developers to deal with the complexities and hand-holding you've touched on (auth is just one of the issues and not even the most complex) and probably non-technical roles for all the compliance and so on.

The danger of landing just one or two "whales" is that you bend your product backwards for these clients, but without thinking through the TCO it can cost you more in the long run and put your business in more jeopardy than when you rely on a few hundred SMEs.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search

It's been available for ages. We used it to power the company internal search for a large enterprise I worked at 17 or 18 years ago.