skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hacking risk leads to recall of 500,000 pacemakers due to patient death fears https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/31/hacking-r...

Your distinction is without meaning
> They ask me WHY I want the alternator replaced. I tell them my vehicle isn't running and I need it to transport me from A to B. They then start asking me questions. Turns out it was the solenoid, they replace it, my vehicle successfully transports me from A to B

An XY problem[0] about A-B!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
https://youtu.be/OlXYqfQHNuA
100% - the roles of user and purchaser being different are a good chunk of the reason most enterprise-targeted software is compete shit. The user has no choice, and the person purchasing doesn’t care provided it’s cheaper by a couple of pennies on the dollar.
> This appears to be a maritime news service. Why rockets are flying isn’t practically relevant.

Once a rocket goes up who cares where it comes down, that's not my department, says Werner von Braun
> have to understand the US position

America didn’t want the war in Yemen. We’re trying to pivot to Asia. We can’t tell Riyadh what to do because they still influence oil prices and have been cozying up to China.
Uh, a Pascal-like extension to FORTH, not a Pascal compiler in FORTH.
Let me know if your find anything interesting. I'm also quite keen on contributing to science
> My point is maybe we should stop being so antagonistic to the customer.

I don't see anyone being antagonistic. The attitude you are thinking of antagonism to me is more like: we're treating them like all other humans, namely lacking good articulation skills and rarely going in deeply analyzing what is that they truly want.

And it's not about customers being "right" or "wrong". It's about making a sale. And many customers will not give you several chances.

Hence, the strategy of "do your absolute very best to figure what they really need even if that means not immediately accepting what they say they want as the truth" is optimizing for the very limited amount of tries to get it right.

It's quite logical IMO and there's nothing antagonistic or demeaning in this process.
https://archive.is/JjYdB
Laravel is quite patchy with types, because it does a lot of magic not supported by PHP’s type system. There are libraries and IDE plugins that mask this.

Symfony, the other big PHP framework, has a lot more to offer if you like types. It also has a combination of Encore, Stimulus and Twig to link the backend to the front, but it doesn’t have the features of Livewire.
I'm not even sure that a quantum computer has incontrovertibly outperformed a classical one at this time on anything. Some have claimed it, on problems that have no practical utility. Classical results have also been improved on response.

Arguably then the only concrete achievement of quantum computing to date has been improvements to classical algorithms. However, I fully expect that we will eventually have powerful quantum computers.

Practical applications for those are things like modelling chemical reactions or quantum systems, or optimisation.

No discussion on quantum computing would be complete without a link to Scott Aaronson's blog. Worth a read to get a better understanding of the subject.

https://scottaaronson.com/
At that time I enjoyed my X220. To be sincere, the form-factor and practicality moving from home to work and having the dock. Then the XPS 13 was more perfect for me because I could attach three external monitors and have power just via a single Thunderbolt cable (no more custom docks). The crux for all of these was the battery daily duration and replacement after a few years. In that context the MacBook Airs excel at a point that more expensive and powerful Apple notebooks such as the MacBook Pro cannot sustain a "marathon" without a charger. The issue with the Airs is that you cannot currently connect three external monitors (without doing very hacky things), but this is just a question of time. Also, this obsession from Apple about not having touch screens in notebooks because they also sell iPads is disturbing.

Finally, an XPS 13 with good battery support (assuming ARM) and good Linux power handling will, probably, be the best notebook available. (would love if they remove the XPS 13 fan and there are more non-moving part notebooks)
Hack That Sound's Location
You never know - like, people live in Detroit, so why not on Mars ?
Why is this general technique worth a blog post by someone who makes his living coaching working programmers, and not taught in elementary school?

(To be fair I think the first time I heard it explicitly from a teacher was Jr high shop class)

Edit: at what age do people usually learn to play 20 questions?
This reads like your mate who's had too many dexies one night and just can't stop stream of conscience blathering at you. In a bad way.

I waded through to the end of the first section, because it sort of felt like maybe things would go somewhere interesting, but by the second section my patience has run out.
Tales of the Master #3
Show HN: Running a funny experiment with my free web-analytics
Two years back, I created a little web analytics tool for my side projects and I called Faenz. It's open source and self-hostable, available on GitHub at https://github.com/a-chris/faenz.

I've recently given it an update and came up with the idea of creating a demo version that's accessible to everyone.

How does it work?

You can add your own website, blog or e-commerce site and keep track of the visits it receives. Your website stats will be visible to others, and you'll get to check out everyone else's stats too. You won't be allowed to edit/delete a website, you should reach out to me for that.

I find it to be a fun experiment to see how people handle SEO or just to discover some cool new websites :)

The demo is available here https://faenz.acmecorp.dev/
Nothing will ever beat the experience of my old IBM T43. The keyboard, the hardware kill switches for various things, the ports, the removal battery. Most of all I miss the keyboard, I miss it every day.
In my country (Colombia) Google still has not removed those spam sites that just generate all possible numbers.
this is simultaneously a valid reason not to use low code tools - and why they find favour in many organisations.

>In such an environment, creating an "example project" that contains all of the scaffolding required and just writing that sign on form is going to take waaaaay less time than even initial planning how to integrate the "no code" tool into our processes.

I've also seen the opposite. Someone in the org wants a simple site. Maybe a sign up form, or CMS/wiki for internal docs, etc. The dev team says "sure, that'll be 6 months". A large part of which is constrained capacity - the devs need to fit it in alongside a buch of other stuff. Another part is tech choice: the corporate stack uses e.g. React on the front end, calling web services written in Java, backed off to Postgres for storage (or whatever). The devs estimate for building the CMS/wiki/whatever from scratch - because it has to fit the tech stack.

At that point the (internal) customer screws up their face and utters all the familiar frustrations about "IT". Someone somewhere mentions to them that there's a way to sidestep it all, and do it yourself. In their position it's very hard not to see that alternative as attractive.

It's a hard problem. That same internal customer will similtaneously rail against the recharge in their budget for IT. It's a cost: a drag on their P&L. IT says they're under-resourced, and they could do it quicker with more people - but that would increase the P&L drag. Vicious circle.

Software is a sociotechnical endeavour yet we too often focus on the technical and ignore the social aspect. Yet "Low Code" and similar emanate primarily from the social side. Coming back to your post though, not exclusively. Development teams can be equally culpable when zeroing in on tech stacks that aren't a good fit for the problems at hand. Or, perhaps, stacks that are a good fit for the problems they were chosen to solve - but not so much when the new requirement comes along.

Of course, low code is no panacea either. Most non-technologists have no perception of the need for ongoing evolution, even if there's no new feature development. Patching/upgrading is a must. And new features always emerge - most after the original "citizen developer" has moved on / lost interest / whatever. So the whole shebang gets foisted on IT, who are expected to operate and maintain it. Usually with no tests, automated builds, documentation, ...

It's pernicious. At heart, though, it's primarily a social problem that needs a good underlying relationship between the customers/users and the developers. It's Conway's Law. Of course tech choice still matters. But no tech stack is going to magic away problems rooted in organisational friction.
That's often the ideal case. Individual tasks are small enough to run on commodity hardware but large enough that you don't have an excessive number of them. That means you can write simple software without wasting effort on distributed computing.

I've seen similar things at the intersection of bioinformatics and genomics. Computers are getting bigger but the genomes aren't, and tasks that require distributed computing are getting rare.
This is a very common story. Unfortunately the incentives and general historical inertia around sales as a role don't always gel with the long term picture.

It's a very human story, but it's one I've had to try to put preventative structures around for my whole career.

The default, "your job is just to sell and your reward structures reflect that" creates an environment where the easiest path is to over-promise. Hence when that sales role sits too high in the org structure you naturally end up in the endless sell what you don't have -> scramble, sell -> scramble cycle.

It seems very obvious that the best salesman would sell the lowest number of features for the highest price, but the incentives are typically based on the top line figure instead which is nice for cash flow but not for profitability.

So far I've managed to solve it somewhat by building internal barriers, but they take constant maintenance.

I'm sure the better solution is to lean the incentives towards profitability but the implications are complex.
> that's not my department, says Werner von Braun

You’re seriously comparing sailors and shipping insurers to a Nazi weapons specialist?
Not really because horses are expensive. They eat even on days you don't use them. Miles per hay bale needs to be asked about. Those using a horse already wanted a faster one. Most people would not have found a fast horse better. Henry Ford gave the people faster transport that they could afford.
Fanboy syndrome :P
This is really cool once you get the hang of playing. I echo all the suggestions made by other posters.
I completely agree with you. Sadly though, we inhabit a reality where the first semi-solution to a problem wins. That something is pervasive is IMO 95% of the time about whether it was first to market -- not if it was solving the problem perfectly.

Cars and many internet protocols (and software) are a perfect demonstration of this tendency.
I don't think they use Bing, but yes, Google, Marginalia, Yandex, Brave and others. I still fail to see how that's different to DuckDuckGo, who also run their own crawler. It's really weird that people are almost hating on DuckDuckGo for how they run their search engine, while applauding Kagi, for doing the same, but with a different business model.
I have an X240, I don't think I'll ever be able to love it as a true ThinkPad when Lenovo came up with that abominable trackpoint without physical buttons.

My current gen P14s has awful keyboard keys. There's barely any travel whatsoever so while I agree with your premise, things really did used to be better...

Hot swappable batteries on the X240 was quite the rush
Hah, calling the news "mental health poison" is the most accurate thing I've read all day.
Sorry for the confusion! The word you spin must be a valid word.

So if you had a row like AEBUG, you could tap B then G to spin BUG, and the row would end up as AEGUB. Or you could tap B then E to spin BE, and the row would end up as ABEUG.

(Because BUG and BE are both real words)
Ask HN: Last day of 2023, how did you manage to achieve your goals?
Greeting people of HN

I have been meaning to ask you, it's last day of 2023 and I was wondering how many of you were able to achieve said goals as you planned in 2022?

I would like to know how did you manage to pull it off?

Any tips and tricks for us?

Thanks for your time.

May you all have a banging New Year ahead and if you offer a product or service, may you work so well that your MRR goes ramen profitable.

Regards
karanveer
Concrete examples sound interesting here in so far as you’re able to share
Yes, and it was a disaster. The Houthis could aim their missiles at Saudi oil infrastructure again. Much simpler to let America handle both finding a solution and taking the fire.
Nothing conventional or practical in your daily use.

However there are scientific scenarios where superpositions and qubits come into play. They can also decrypt any form cryptology faster than any conventional computer system. The problem is that they are not as energy efficient as a conventional system.
https://archive.is/XUy1q

And some very acid English videos here: https://www.youtube.com/@Eretz_Nehederet
I was part of the team that set up a non-profit, was CEO of that, am CEO of another.

I suggest testing very carefully the idea that a non-profit is the best way to work on whatever idea or problem you're interested in. For-profits only have to get a successful two-way relationship between the customer and supplier and then when demand goes up, funding goes up. Non-profits have to get a successful three-way relationship between the beneficiary, the supplier, and the funder. Demand going up often doesn't mean funding goes up. There are problems that can best be tackled by non-profits but often a for-profit will have a simpler business model and better chance of financial sustainability.

There are also plenty of ways to configure a for-profit with some of the qualities of a non-profit, including employee ownership like the co-operative movement, donating a proportion of ownership/profits, having an explicit social purpose like the Body Shop or Patagonia.
Llamafiles look a bit scary, like back when StableDiffusion models were distributed as pickled Python files (allowing, in theory, for arbitrary code execution when loading a model) before everyone switched to safetensors (dumb data files that do not execute code). Running a locally installed llama.cpp with a dumb GGUF file seems safer than downloading and running some random executable?
The Github link is my top result on Google. Clearly a mix of uBlock and Privacy Badger are more powerful than most appreciate.
Well, the most important thing is to identify which is your priority, and it sounds like you've already achieved that, and I would say, landed on the correct answer.

Everything else kind of flows from there really.
Some are convinced sensory stimulation needs to be perfect. But in my own limited experience, including some fun "walk the plank" demo between two abandoned buildings they had at MiddleVR, it doesn’t take much.

The goal isn’t to fool the brain. Just to give it enough it can fool itself.
I had an iPod filled with music that I ripped from CDs and downloaded. It was absolutely a thing.
That would be my worry too, especially since they claim "no harness required".

Yeah good luck. No visual references because one is wearing an HMD, shoes with rollers/wheels (doesn't matter how/whether they are braked or not - equipment does break!) and no safety equipment?

This is again a typical project of someone who thought they have a "good idea" and didn't think it completely through. Or think that what works for them in their garage/lab is automatically also a viable product.

It isn't even a new idea - similar gizmos have been designed and tried before - and 100% of them flopped once the realities of the market hit:

- It is dangerous, full stop. No restraints to prevent the user from falling, in a living room with sharp furniture corners and with their vision impeded by a VR helmet? That's a lawsuit waiting to happen, no matter how many disclaimers the vendor sticks on it. And once the necessary safety gear is added to make it actually comply with the consumer safety regulations in various jurisdiction, the device becomes so unwieldy and expensive that it will be unviable.

- It universally over-promises and under-delivers - walking in place is never "natural", no matter what the vendor claims. Even more so when one emulates joystick by walking instead of actually translating walking in place to walking in game. That's just jarring and not natural at all. It will likely cause a lot of motion sickness because of the mismatch between the perceived movement on the screen and the walking happening at a different pace (since we are emulating a joystick motion and not actual walking). Humans don't think and move in terms of joystick movement ...

- It may be a good idea on paper - but most people promoting these solutions (treadmills, various "sliding shoes", etc.) have obviously not tried to actually use them to play a game where one has to extensively move around by walking or running. Have you tried to run around for an hour (doesn't matter whether for real or in place/on a treadmill)? Surprise - it is exhausting!

- Software support is going to suck - either one has to emulate a controller which is going to feel like everything but "natural" or the titles have to support the device explicitly. Good luck with the latter unless you are a really big player in the market already - nobody will even want to talk to you about it. That will result in something that isn't usable in titles people actually want to play with it.

- The company tends to disappear after a few years after the investment money runs out. Or it gets acquired - and the product promptly cancelled. Either way leaving early adopters with a useless piece of electronic junk and no support.

I don't want to rain on their parade but we have been here many times since 2012 already.
Kagi gives me websites that require more clicking; Google just gives me reasonable answers and I don't see spam in your examples.

"why do wider tires have better grip?"

Wider tires provide more grip due to a larger contact patch with the road. While it's true that friction is not directly dependent on surface area, a larger contact patch allows for more even weight distribution and better traction, particularly during cornering. This can result in improved handling and stability.

"why do they keep making cpu transistors smaller?"

Smaller transistors can do more calculations without overheating, which makes them more power efficient. It also allows for smaller die sizes, which reduce costs and can increase density, allowing more cores per chip.

"vancouver snow forecast winter 2023"

The forecast for the 2023/2024 season suggests that we can expect another winter marked by ample snowfall and temperatures hovering both slightly above and below the freezing mark. Be prepared ahead of time.
And yet you refer to analog computers in your very comment.

There’s nothing special about Boolean logic as a way to solve problems that require, wait for it, computation of some sort.
> fear is that directly attacking the Houthis will be seen as an escalation by Iran

It would, but that’s not really a constraint. Iran is in no position to risk direct strikes on its territory. It’s more simply that nobody wants to get bogged down in Yemen. So there is an element of hoping someone else will start bombing or Tehran getting their proxies under control.
Non-Euclidean games are the current viable solution to limited space.
"Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging…"

1954

https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/Backus...
At the same time Google requires employees to log in (including touching U2F key) every single day, invalidating all sessions.

So this is schizophrenia - corporation is protected, but casual Gmail users are left to be hacked with no option to set the session expiration anywhere in the account settings.
Unless we're talking about different workflows, squashing works great.

In my team, we merge squash our PRs, having a guideline that they should be a small increment. Here's what happrns:

- when you checkout a commit, you are guaranteed to have a version that was reviewed by a person and validated by ci/cd
- most commits have chsnegs with substance, instead of "log", "debug", etc

Without squash, a person can push 3 commits to a feature branch, ci/cd says the last commit is OK, it gets merged, and you may get 2 commits that don't compile or cause a very basic runtime error due to some typo or whatever.

(not that it could not be solved with due diligence, but that comes with higher effort too)

How do you assure working commits and avoid noise without either squash or rebase?
Hold on, let me turn on my Thinklight...

Team Ultrabay, represent.
Yeah, because everyone needs fluctuating light 8 hours a day. It is like seating do not destroy your health enough. /s
> the US is creating a "peaceful space" ?

On freedom of navigation, absolutely.
Like the author, I've found the perfect old ThinkPad for me and it works brilliantly. I have a nice efficient GNU/Linux install, all my local software runs smoothly and I've used it for my day job for 9 years.

But the damn worldwide web keeps marching on their mission to make the most bloated software in the universe. I should be able to keep using the machine forever with unchanged software, but the web demands more and more, it's running away from me.

The day we fix that issue will be great. So much less e waste. Computers were fast enough for most reasonable tasks years ago.
Love all the slow motion video, where they done look ridiculously unbirdlike.
KDE/clazy: Qt-oriented static code analyzer based on the Clang framework
It's not the same place because access to quantum computers is (and likely will be for a while) heavily asymmetric. People who want to break encryption will be able to do so, while people who want unbreakable encryption will, except for the tiny overlap with the former set, not have access to the hardware.
I mean thats the unwritten/implied problem with software project management.

There is no "Done" state, there is no real plan for the future. It is possible to make software sustainable, but for many reasons there's not much incentive to do so.

Partly because its rare that the business understands that product it makes, or if they do understand, leadership get bored and want to try something new.