skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I do have a question though for people familiar with trademark law. Why can't they just do away with the trademark dilution rule?

It’s not really a rule. It’s that genericization undermines the rationale for trademark protection.

Trademarks are granted to give a business exclusive use of an identifier in conjunction with a particular product or service in order to protect consumers from marketplace confusion.

For example, USPTO has granted a trademark for “iPhone” so that when consumers buy an “iPhone” they get what they expect. A phone made by Apple Inc. When people say “iPhone” they’re definitely talking about Apple Inc phones.

However, if consumers themselves don’t care, and they use a term to refer to any brand, even when they know it is from a different origin, then the word is no longer serving the purpose for which the trademark was granted.

Otis Elevator company doesn’t have a trademark on “Escalator” anymore because literally nobody cares what company manufactured the moving stairs they’re going up. Nobody is harmed, confused, or misled when other makes of moving stairs are called “escalators”.
Brave on iOS is a, more or less, perfect Youtube Player. I haven't seen ads in months and it just works while also supporting the download of videos and creation of local playlists.
Yep, I realized I was using Chrome out of nothing but habit and convivence. Made a concerted effort to switch to Firefox, Mullvad, and Tor.
Succumbing to the temptation of expediency to achieve one's ideology is indeed a plague that affects all of politics.

Dismissing critical thought, first order reasoning, and "the ends justify the means" short-term focus has brought our country once again to the brink of civil unrest.

Unfortunately, it's a phenomenon that's not limited to any particular political party.
Ok, maybe we’re not as far apart on this as I read it. Sorry.

> Curious if you have any read on why Cheney et al were so fixated on WMDs at the time they wrote the memos. Was that all completely a ruse?

I think they may have worked themselves up a little with their what-if scenarios (their concern was what he might do with a bunch of ifs) and, further, selected that in particular for the infamous open letter to Clinton because most of the rest of what they were selling had no urgency, even by what-if standards.

They had a fundamental problem with that requirement, in fact, that there be exigent need for US intervention before we undertake it. Their whole deal was that we should embrace and proactively enforce hegemony (because the Pax Americana’s just that good for the world—it’d be immoral not to, you see!).

I would guess some mix of genuine ideology and connection to a MIC that wanted those sweet Cold War dollars back and to whom they were receptive (for those ideological reasons), were behind that, but I don’t know and it was enough people that I expect motivations varied.

[edit] I should perhaps add that I’m not categorically opposed to the kind of thing they were getting at. Is the Pax Americana some greater-good thing with breaking a few eggs for? Maybe! It really might be! I’m at least open to the idea. I pull the lever on the trolly problem all day long.

My opposition to their ideas had (has… a lot of these folks are still kickin’ around) less to do with some wholesale disagreement with the very notion of what they were about, and more to do with the specifics of what they wanted to do having a history of costly failure, of that being a risky sort of road to begin with, and of these people in particular having a history of making a huge mess of things while having their hand in the till and technocratically lying to manipulate a democracy into “what’s best for it” (consistent with the means-to-the-end greater-good thing! But far, far too dangerous)
The government can violate your rights so long as they go through a 3rd party...
> I think countries who want these programs to take off for employees who aren’t contractors need to invest in messaging and legal support for employers as well.

The logical thing to do is to allow both employee and employer to sign a document saying "we both agree that the employment laws of X will not apply, and all employment disputes will be resolved by the courts of Y country according to their laws".

X country would make an explicit law allowing digital nomads to do such a thing, perhaps with limits on Y (ie. require the company to have links to Y, or blacklist countries with zero employee protections whatsoever).
The ideas shared in the post replies are great. My approach has been more hands-on and puzzled together recently. I've been digging into harder problems on sites like leetcode to learn more math, and solidify some algorithm and data structure concepts. It has really helped me feel more confident and erase some of the lingering imposter syndrome around the algorithm-side of programming. A great guide that got me started on this was the tech interview handbook[1], which helped me dig into specific concepts instead of just randomly targeting. I've found my ability to review code has also improved through this, as I am picking up different libraries and concepts that I wouldn't have otherwise.

1. https://www.techinterviewhandbook.org/algorithms/study-cheat...
From what I’ve read, hiring was already difficult prior to the wave of layoffs. Would you say it became more or less difficult to find a target skillset with a larger pool of candidates, regardless of comp?
Every time I've been passed over for a job, I've been notified in a timely manner. I would consider anything less to be grossly, outrageously unprofessional. It's never happened to me, but if it ever does, you best believe I am going to name and shame the hell out of that company. Everyone deserves to know, and people like this don't deserve to have anyone working for them.
Sigh, not with the expected increase in energy consumption. And other sources that we do intend to shut down.

Also depends on where you live.
I've had a couple "scares" like that, i.e. an entire window full of open tabs disappearing (usually closing it by mistake), but normally they come back with just a Ctrl+Shift+T. Not saying that's what happened to you, just sharing my experience.
I use PWAs for YouTube Music, Slack, and Readwise Reader.

Sometimes there is a standalone app available, like with Slack, but often the PWA has the same features and doesn't duplicate the entire Web Platform stack (Electron), which saves some battery.
I use Firefox as my main browser. I love Firefox and I want it to succeed.

However... a person who uses Firefox as their primary browser must generally still keep Chrome installed. A person who uses Chrome as their primary browser has no need to keep Firefox installed.

Firefox should endeavor to fix that.

First, Firefox should honor age-old tradition, swallow its pride, and spoof 99% of the Chrome user agent string. That's how upstart web browsers have fought against sites breaking things for them for decades.

Second, Firefox should endeavor to be as compatible as possible with Chrome with regard to the DOM and JS, being sneaky if it has to. I think O365 webmail is the first good place to start, since it's widely deployed. USG websites as well, like DFAS MyPay or Marine A-PES do not work well on it. Obviously, it's difficult for Firefox devs to test on these sites, but that's all the more reason to take bug reports seriously.
Why on earth you would try to get to Eagle Pass when totality is going straight over DFW escapes me. Big city, lots of hotels. And if you want to be out in the country, totality goes all the way to Tyler.
L2s are definitely the way. They publish all state, state updates, and proofs of the validity of the state updates on L1. That means they publish all consensus critical data on L1, allowing them to be as secure as any L1 smart contract.

They're not yet production ready though. All use centralized coordinators and failsafes, as a precaution against catastrophic flaws in the smart contracts they have deployed on L1, that could lead billions of dollars worth of digital assets being stolen/lost.
I remember reading stuff like this in March 2000 when all the .com's were blowing up...
https://cdn.ponly.com/wp-content/uploads/No-Memes-15.jpg
Firefox doesn't. But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does. I keep Chrome up for VirusTotal to scan PortableApps.com releases. In Firefox, it'll throw broken ReCaptcha prompts over and over and over after a certain number of scans per day (pick the thing, next, pick the thing, next x10, etc). And that's with all extensions disabled. Possibly related: VirusTotal and ReCaptcha are owned by Google.
I would hope that the Chinese and Saudi's realize the youth in America's mental health is largely due to America's unique flavor of corporatacracy and the climate crisis. If you think this is wrong you either don't know or understand American youth or you're being willfully ignorant.
Show HN: An end-to-end reinforcement learning library for infinite horizon tasks
rl8 focuses on end-to-end reinforcement learning (all data and computations occur on one device) for infinite horizon tasks (tasks that don't finish within a finite number of steps). This niche gives a few benefits:

- End-to-end compute means there's no time wasted copying data between devices (more speed)

- Infinite horizon means learning buffers can be pre-allocated and written to directly (fixed memory, more speed)

- The API can be minimal (less cognitive load and more customizability)

Not all environments can be rewritten to be vectorized, and not all tasks can be reframed to be infinite horizon, so I imagine the number of people this would benefit is small. But, for those whose use cases do fit this niche like myself, it drastically reduces experiment times.

Any feedback would be much appreciated!
Some years ago I was playing around with the idea of an append-only splay tree for storing a database file. The thinking was that the algorithm would keep recently-accessed items at the business end of the log (in addition to any new/updated/deleted items).

This concept is clearly quite heavy on writes, but the tradeoff is that you would then have the ability to expire unused entries simply by picking an offset in the log and chopping everything that precedes it. Any record accessed more recently than that cutoff point would be guaranteed to have been written one or more times later on in the log.

Any access would result in a new modified tree & root node being written, but the prototype did batch IO using an MPSC queue abstraction which meant that I could amortize things a bit. Multiple transactions could fit in a single IO command if they are issued from different threads, occur within a small slice of time and are smaller than the block size.
Hello, recently I've enjoyed Casey Muratori's Performance-Aware Programming course[0]. You could read Algorithms for Modern Hardware[1] to learn similar set of stuff though. Casey's course is aimed at bringing beginners all the way to a nearly-industry-leading understanding of performance issues while the book assumes a bit more knowledge, but I think a lot of people have trouble getting into this stuff using a book if they don't have related experience.

I've also found Hacker's Delight Second Edition[2] to be a useful reference, and I really wish that I would get around to reading What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory[3] in full, because I end up reading a bunch of other things[4] to learn stuff that's surely in there.

[0]: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance...

[1]: https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/

[2]: https://github.com/lancetw/ebook-1/blob/80eccb7f59bf102586ba...

[3]: https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf

[4]: https://danluu.com/3c-conflict/
So I Quit Spotify
Legitimately curious. Considering Firefox Quantum was released in 2017, is it even possible that my M1 is running any other version of Firefox? Doesn't seem likely considering the copy on the Mozilla site [1] for Firefox Quantum:

> Firefox Quantum was a revolution in Firefox development. In 2017, we created a new, lightning fast browser that constantly improves. Firefox Quantum is the Firefox Browser.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/quantum/
Ask HN: Any good 2023 retros out there?
I find writing a yearly retro a great way to reflect and get closure, and have just finished mine for 2023:

https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/2023/

Have other people done the same or seen any good ones?

I love getting a picture of people's work in other companies, what went well, what they found hard, what they were proud of, etc.
But a meaningless comparison. Purchasing power is what matters.
One thing that i think would be very useful would be for VB to have inherent database support at the language/core level with the IDE being able to edit tables, etc. Essentially something similar to what tools like dBase/FoxPro/Visual dBase/etc but also being a generic application development tool like VB.

Visual Basic did have some database support but the actual database functionality/engine relied on external engines instead of being part of the runtime itself and it wasn't really part of the language. Being able to define a data type that is transparently mapped to a table's columns in a database and variables being cursors in a database would help with a bunch of smaller scale applications.

Basically something that mixed VB and Access. Ssadly that'd mean one would cannibalize the other's sales so it was never done.
>What happens when there's a massive discovery of gold? Or there's a (trade) war between the top producers (eg. china, australia, and russia)?

Never in history has this situation caused a collapse like the hyperinflation seen in Weimar Germany or recently Zimbabwe. Because even a huge change in supply is only going to affect price by a double digit percent (check a chart of historical gold price volatility), while hyperinflation can reduce the value of currency by orders of magnitude.

>Or when there's a worldwide pandemic and you need to provide stimulus so the economy doesn't collapse?

The stimulus was only necessary because of the lockdowns, which in hindsight proved completely counter-productive, empirically producing no overall reduction in deaths (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737 ). Without the ability to print money governments wouldn't have been able to get away with locking down their citizens so long, and the damage they inflicted on mental health and children's educational outcomes could have been reduced.
> 2. We reached a consumption plateau also in 2007. Electricity use has been more or less level since.

What’s even wilder about this is the population of earth just hit an estimated 8 billion total. The US population isn’t 100% indicative of the whole planet, but one of the largest superpowers balancing out despite further planetary growth is a great sign.
No, it does not. It's just one of countless levers.

There are countless things anyone can copy or do for free already right now, that countless people pay a company for, for no reason at all. No government enforcement of anything involved.
Smart move making the figures in the law auto-update each year.
I just switched back to firefox yesterday. Not a long sample period, but so far I completely agree, less painful than chrome.
To me, it seems obvious Apple eventually builds this into MacOS (“it’s a feature not a product”). This is like local apps or native OS features that would index your drive contents and provide a frontend to query, but on steroids. This also gets us closer to transparent computing.
Yes, everything is being fucked by the drive for profit.
For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.

[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions
Show HN: OasysDB, multi-index support key-value vector database
Merry christmas and happy new year, everyone!

I want to introduce my latest open-source vector database project, OasysDB. The main feature that sets it apart from other vector database is that it supports multiple indexing graphs of a single key-value store.

This functionality allows you to version the index, create different graphs for different subset of data, and test different optimization strategies.

OasysDB communicates through its REST API so you can get started with it without external dependencies.

OasysDB is still very early in development and thus, only provides functionality to make it viable as a vector database.

Anyway, I would really appreciate it if you drop in some feedback, feature requests, or even contributions. Have a good weekend!
Oh absolutely agreed. I use Tree Style Tabs (TST) and consider it essential now, but I wish Firefox would embrace vertical tabs as a way to remain distinct from Google Chrome.

I have 15 tabs open right now. The tabs' titles are easy to read, and different sites have different colours assigned to them. My Kagi searches open in new tabs, which are automatically set as child branches/leaves of the parent tab, which helps me to organize my work. If I go over about 30 tabs, I can just scroll the TST view with the mouse wheel, it's very easy and is non-intrusive to my workflow.

I can also bookmark tab trees, which is nice when I want to switch context from Python to Terraform for instance.
Just tell me when we replace upper "management" with AI.
Then you will get me on board.

Worst part about being a programmer is meetings with non programmers about what they want you to program.

Client - "Hey can you make that pop and sizzle?"...

Also clients - "We are HIPAA compliant right?, I told that hospital we use amazon so we must be HIPAA compliant"

Also also clients - "Why can't we host our db on a different network and connect to it over the internet without a vpn?"

So these "managers" gonna use AI to replace my job? thats funny.
Will this finally decrease some of these bills? Or will this just mean even more record profit for the energy companies?
Anydesk?
I'm working on a new build to replace my 11 yr old system. Monitors are a vexxing issue as I have competing needs - general/coding use and photo editing. As I'm working with 40+MP images, I'd like to have a screen with as high a resolution as possible to minimize the need to zoom in and out.

However, then you run into the need to do display scaling for UI elements for everything else. Windows mostly works in that regard and when it does not it is often the program in use that is not quite up to snuff.

After a lot of research, it seems to me the best approach is trying to get the resolution you want at a physical size that doesn't require excessive scaling (like 300%) as after all, we all want more desktop real estate and scaling reduces the effective resolution for most non-photo/video apps.

I've been looking closely at the Dell Ultrasharp 32" 6K monitor. The dpi is a little high at 223 but it will fit about 75% of an uncropped photo. I'd likely also get one of the LG dual UPs as well.

The one issue with both monitors, disappointing for the price of the Dell, is they are 8bit+FRC panels. Don't want to find out that I'm one of those who are sensitive to flicker or that the panel does not age well. At least the Dell is a 3yr warranty and the LG can be had in a commercial version that has 3 yr too.
No, because there is nothing I wanted it to do instead. Perhaps what I should have done was to change the system prompt to something like "You are a helpful assistant that will admit its mistakes but never apologise for them."
"Is this, plus the liability insurance aspect, the root of the problem?"

Maybe for some, but not all. I know of more than a few older doctors that decided to retire because they didn't want to deal with increased regulation. So it's not always a money issue.

"I wonder if prospective doctors could “enlist” where the government pays for all this training and shields them"

They have these programs for military doctors. Doctors working for the VA (and maybe other federal things like prisons) can usually avoid a lot of state related costs, which I believe includes malpractice insurance (or maybe the federal version of malpractice is cheaper).
The ghosting problem is fixable in 2 seconds with any LLM + AI recruiting pipelining tool. That is the solution to this. Someone will figure it out in the next three months or less.

On the other hand, here is the reality:

In a "hiring company friendly" environment, where they cut all their expensive recruiters / or all recruiters / or simply don't care / or treat recruiters as disposable this is what you get.

We are seeing a rising trend, which may reverse in a "Good Market" but part of me wonders if it ever will.

White Collar workers are becoming / have become more and more "disposable."

As disposable as recruiters.

White Collar workers are not used to being disposable, we think we are unique and special butterfly hires. And much of silicon valley used to be structured around the messaging: "Your talent is so useful and valuable that we can't live without you."

That pretense was never really true but they sort of put on an act to keep things friendly.

Lately, that pretense is completely gone. And dropping.

At some point employers, in my opinion, are going to find hires speaking out publicly.

And naming names directly.

Why? No consequences and the employers have nothing, as a class, to offer.

I got to this point in my own professional career. I was treated so badly at one company, I saw no point in not directly naming and shaming them. I didn't even care if "their friends" didn't want to hire me. I didnt want to work with anyone who would be friends with people that evil.

Here is the deal silicon valley wants:

"We treat you like shit and you are expected to take it as a normal part of "professionalism," or we will black ball you and you will be deemed unhireable because you are unwilling to take being treated like shit gracefully, and we (employers) need employees who we can shit on and dispose of. If you complain after this treatment, you are a liability since you think you are worth literally anything as a human being ... when we require disposable parts."

Even THAT contract, which is a VERY BAD AND ONE SIDED DEAL is fraying.

I expect that you are going to see more and more people speaking publicly and directly naming these companies.

Once THAT happens then you KNOW ITS ON.

I suspect venture capital portfolios are going to need to directly tell CEOs not to do this because they are "angering the sheep."

Shitting on applicants, if it continues to escalate, will become a net liability.

Venture Capital companies and Venture Capital firms want to cut corners, access cheap talent and avoid treating employees like they are human beings. They will push this as far as possible until it becomes a net liability.

I think we are going to see people getting so fed up they begin naming names, and THEN it will change.
Any chance of a revised version one of these days? I, too, loved this book, but the ecosystem has moved far in the meantime & many of the examples no longer compile.
What Adblock do you use with Safari? I would also like to try switching from Firefox to Safari but I haven’t found anything that can compete with uBO
I do appreciate the moral consistency of at least supporting alternative revenue models.
I'm using Firefox everywhere I can, but in all honesty, this whole flagging issue is making me want to switch to Brave.
https://archive.is/p1hlC#selection-349.0-352.0
The Firefox Developer Edition rocks!!