skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much of what you get from HN today has real worth for your life and/or career?

I think every community and platform has a limited growth-value for their users. At some point, you've seen it all, read it all, know all the shit and giggles going around the platform. And at this point, you shift into the doomscrolling-mode and start consuming stuff for the sake of consumption, and to find the one gem of the day which justifies the time wasted on the platform today.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39036526 ("HN: Hospitals owned by private equity are harming patients, reports find")

https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/01/hospitals-slash-staff...
Scratch off everything that requires internet access (in this case the Home Assistant integration talked to the vendor's API servers).

See also previous discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39044932
I won't answer to that because we'll end up in an infinite loop, but I kindly disagree :-).
I'm still trying to understand the use case for this $3500+ device. In the introduction video, Apple touted it as "useful for watching movies on an airplane or some other similar environment"... but I'm not bringing a large, unwieldy and extremely expensive device like a VR headset onto a plane or packing it on a trip... and the battery doesn't even last through a whole movie, according to the newest reports. The main way they tried to sell it from the beginning just seems... like a bad selling point.
let's bet 1000USD that in 2 years there will not be even 2 confirmed real cases where any algorithm is doing a full time job of senior+ software engineer?
It is quite humorous that people have taken up a philosophy premised on resigning to yourself that no better world is possible, when the world devised by its adherents has been overthrown countless times over by people who did not believe that, resulting in the more just and equitable one we now inhabit.
Here Grows New York
> The exceptional case is the whole reason those vehicles exist.

Trucks are outselling sedans and lighter cars in North America because of poor regulations and lobbying from the car industry. SUVs and light trucks do not have to have to meet the same emission standards as lighter vehicles, so manufacturers have basically abandoned that market segment and selling nothing but trucks.

There is a video from "Not Just Bikes" [0] which goes deep into this. The title could be a little less clickbaity, but it's worth to watch it in full.

[0]: https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-stupid-trucks-ar...
Looks like it might have rolled on landing if their telemetry representation is accurate. There were some pretty significant rotation rate readings right after the throttles shut down.
The most important goal in designing software is understandability
Seems in both cases, what the person knows/believes to be true is in the feeling, which is what I was getting at.
The NES also had “multitaps”. One model was wired (the “Four Score”), the other was wireless (battery powered; the “Satellite”) with an IR receiver unit that plugged into both controller ports.

The IR wireless one was, in my experience (it was the only one I had) far less janky and failure-prone than one might suppose. Actually worked quite well.
So you could cut water by half while still keeping the last lock "fresh", and so long as the incoming flow is more than 2.5x the mixing rate, you could do the same on the pacific side.
Back when I had a lawn, I'd mow the leaves into the ground. But maybe that only worked well in that locale? (Now I live in the high desert, so no lawn.)
This sounds extraordinarily poorly handled by the RCMP. He could show that he purchased it from his own credit card and on Amazon, so that's pretty good evidence that he's the victim of fraud, not the perpetrator of it. Weird how extremely aggressive the RCMP is.

That this is allowed to exist in legal limbo is ridiculous. He should be able to demand rectification and damages. And the real problem here is of course Amazon for enabling such scams. They should be on the hook for this, not some unsuspecting customer. And the real fraudster should be easy to track down through Amazon if they've done their due diligence.
Your definition of theft doesn't necessarily match the legal definition. It still remains to be seen whether training foundation models is fair use or not, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Maybe they're confusing that with the last Japanese-originated lunar landing (That was a private company, ispace, that attempted and was unsuccessful)
TLDR: Person who has never used a database before benchmarks completely unoptimized SQLite vs completely unoptimized PostgreSQL and writes a content marketing post for Twilio.

Two years ago.
I don't support those policies, but the US economy had its best ever during a period of price controls, etc. in the post-WWII era (edit: I mean, from then until the late-1970s / early-1980s).

The idea that it's anathema for the American people to take control of their economy, that they must be subject to a wealthy few and the 'free market' forces, seems odd, and a bit too convenient for the power, pocketbooks, and egos of wealthy few.
At CES tech show, seeking robots neither too human nor too machine
Tao Te Ching, seriously

There is a lot of emphasis on simplicity and that things are the best when they work seamlessly.

Chapter 17, from the translation by Derek Lin, which I wholeheartedly recommend:

The highest rulers, people do not know they have them
The next level, people love them and praise them
The next level, people fear them
The next level, people despise them
I agree, I’m just wondering why other STEM fields don’t seem to have this problem or at the same level. I’m guess it’s the hubris of being the hotshot new lucrative world-eating industry.
Thanks for sharing! That video is part 1, and here is part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK9yGNuGWKE

And here are the transcripts: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... (Part 1, 2016-08-12) and https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... (Part 2, 2016-11-11)

(All four available from https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/?s...)

The papers by Dijkstra and Knuth that you mention are I think:

• (1965 Dijkstra) "Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control" (in CACM)

• (1966 Knuth) "Additional comments on a problem in concurrent programming control" (Letter to CACM, reprinted with an addendum as Chapter 13 of his Selected Papers on Design of Algorithms)

[From the addendum and comments on the latter, I don't get the impression that it had an error (and I don't get that impression from Lamport's comments in the transcripts either). He cites Gary L. Peterson's "Myths About the Mutual Exclusion Problem" (1981, https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs323/doc/Peterson.pdf) as a later improvement though. But I may have misunderstood, as I have not read any of these papers/letters or even understood the question :)]
Canada has INCREDIBLE international PR. Perhaps better than any other OECD country, compared to its reality.
SFPD’s clearance rate for violent crime has been basically flat from 2010-2020. This is despite having a flat budget in real terms paired with increasing demands for professionalization in policing from county and state oversight authorities. This has led to a department composed of more paper pushers and fewer patrol officers.

Compare this to a place like Vegas which has something like a 90%+ murder clearance rate for decades straight because they also have the country’s 2nd biggest crime lab after the FBI and a well-trained and invested in police force.

You can’t increase the overhead of policing, keep budgets the same, and then look at lower outputs and scream work strike.
Why would they? The seller wants to move product and illegal product comes with discount.
From the outside it seemed like Google 20-25 years ago cared more about making good things than they cared about making money. Which counter-intuitively is why they made so much money, people trusted google. Somewhere around the doubleclick merger or the IPO that changed. When google launched Gmail people were paying for invites on ebay. Changing your email address is the biggest pain in the ass in digital life and Google had people paying for the chance to do it before their friends. That would not happen if they launched something new right now.

After a decade or two of trading goodwill for short term gains no one trusts google, and pretty much only use it because they think they have to.
Writing fast with the English alphabet puts a strain on one's hand. You won't feel it unless you already have hand issues. You can keep adjusting how you grip the pen to improve things, but there is a baseline limit due to the orthography.
How can you set an app to production without Google verification if you're not in a workspace. I'm guessing the answer is that there is no way.
I don't need to know anything about masonry to respect a skilled mason or for it to be mutual. Why would it be any different for a programmer and a leader? I don't know much about programming and avoid it at all costs [0], but all my programmer friends appreciate insights I have when they bounce ideas off me.

[0] I've written about this: https://kyefox.com/2022/08/05/learn-to-code-or-dont/
Is the author's implication that the developer took the project in a different direction because of the war? I don't understand what the connection is between "major geopolitical events" and the library. It's just a graph that shows that a year after the war started, the developer removed a feature the author liked.
What does Jonny Appleseed have to do with anything? Apples are native to central Asia, not the Americas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple?wprov=sfla1
> which is very useful to lots of people, or even just to your team or company, _that's_ great

agree

but you don't need to inspire anyone to do that

You just need to be great at engineering and have some empathy to your end users
Just based on reading the first link you posted, what you've said is incorrect, as it says they can ask for a "Criminal record and judicial matters check" which includes charges.

If that's the case, "they can't" reject you just based on charges really means "they can as long as they don't say they did".
On international treaties the United States refuses to play ball
As it turns out, the cost of designing, testing, and selling a product include more than component costs.
Running this code on an "on-prem" AMD EPYC 9454P with 12 x 64 GB DIMMs:

1 37.4
2 73.3
3 107.3
4 141.4
5 171.6
6 199.5
7 226.0
8 251.1
9 235.4
10 243.0
11 264.5
12 281.9
13 303.7
14 323.0
15 339.6
16 354.4
17 299.0
18 286.3
19 300.9
20 310.6
21 325.7
22 339.2
23 352.6
24 364.3
25 305.8
26 309.0
27 319.6
28 326.5
29 335.4
30 345.5
31 356.7
32 364.9

And then it settles around there.
I'm not saying its a silver bullet, because sharing data via database makes change management way worse.
If you think Canadian border guards are bad, its because you've never seen how American border guards treat non-citizens.

If you tried to enter the US with a criminal record, there is a VERY good chance that you would not be allowed in, and would be handed a 5-10 year ban.

Most countries do not allow visa-less entry to convicted criminals. The fact that Canada let your co-workers in at all is at the discretion of the border guard.

Canada is very clear about the steps that those with a criminal record need to go through prior to applying for entry at the border. It sounds like your coworkers showed up to the border without the necessary preparation and were allowed to enter at the officer's kindness/discretion in spite of their criminal pasts and lack of documentation.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
Needn't rule in racism, so I don't.
> something many of us do not live in today.

As a good portion of the US population is self-sorting into two warring tribes, both bent on screwing each other over by passing laws whose sole purpose is to harass the other tribe and obstruct their ability to live the life they choose. Not to mention folks in other countries caught in wars they didn't ask to be a part of.

There's plenty of "cruel and domineering" to go around these days, and plenty of people who probably feel they have little to no ability to stop someone else from forcing their preferences on them.
Even metallic license plates can be counterfeited, I assume its just not worth the effort yet.

If you have a database of legit license plate numbers to VIN, you should be able to (a) detect that the license plate is on a vehicle that matches the VIN, and (b) detect if the same legit license plate number is being used at the same time (flagging it).
Disallow Public Code with GitHub Copilot
I'm helping my company evaluate whether we should purchase a Github Copilot license for all of our developers.

I see that Github has a feature where you can disallow public code from suggestions.

I'm curious to hear - do any of use Copilot with this feature turned on? Does it result in worse suggestions from Copilot? How much worse?

From their FAQ, it explains a bit about how this feature works: What is stopping someone using another AI tool similar to copilot that may have serious security, privacy concerns.
> They are just paying for seats with Axiom directly rather than bartering for seats with NASA.

To be fair to those countries, it's typically ESA that barters with NASA, not the individual member countries. And it seems like astronauts are selected in rough proportion to national contribution (generally in line with the National Return policy).

Paying for a private seat may be a more efficient way for smaller countries to get people into space.
I've had to reread, I was certain I missed something. But no, this is entirely conspiratorial speculation without any basis _or_ even without any point?

If at least they explicitly put forward a theory like "it's russian influence to slow down western digital development" it would have some internal consistency, but no. They suppose it's russian influence (again, without basis) without any theory of _why_ Russia would care about an inconsequential CSS-related lib. Shrug.
For those who want to eat sea food despite declining population numbers. Gordon Ramsay did a piece on how global warming was causing king crab to move north into former colder waters where they destroyed the ecosystem by reducing fish stocks and caused their numbers to balloon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6ff-ShY5Bw
The metaphor can work to the degree that the dinosaurs succeeded, and the mammals stayed small (occupying a cockroach-like niche) until a large exogenous disruption upended the system.

Of course that isn't what happened to the car companies, or the newspapers, or most once large sectors, and I do actually think that the same gradual, rather than abrupt, decay will happen to these big tech companies. In fact we see it already. I strongly believe there's a Hayflick limit to companies; even GE couldn't fight it indefinitely.

Also I disagree with "Dinosaurs ... occupied every [animal] niche on the planet." Don't forget arthropoda or the variety in the sea. But maybe that's just a quibble.
It does happen occasionally. For example Justin Garrison wrote what I would consider a fairly scathing review of Amazon's HR practices related to laying people off, while he was still at Amazon: https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sa...

He left recently, but he wrote this blog while still being employed there, as mentioned at the bottom of the post.
This is an excellent point that people seem to constantly ignore. Stoicism, for all its helpful disciplines, has been countered by a reality where changes have taken place by people who dared to think otherwise and hold on to romantic ideals.
Yeah what I got from the story is how unprofessional the police were. Unless there's more too it, the whole thing sounds like it should be an administrative investigations where everyone involved is assumed to be a victim unless more evidence comes to light. But somehow they rushed to treat this guy like a criminal.
My interpretation is that he provided enough evidence to the RCMP that convinced them to stay the case, since they likely thought the evidence they had to convict Barker was weak. This lead to him not having a chance in court to clear his name.

Had he not spoken to the police at all, and instead waited to present his evidence in court, he likely would have been found not guilty and therefore would have cleared his name.

Him talking to police worsened the situation because they are not the ones who evaluate the evidence and make a conviction decision (judges/juries do that). The job of the police is to collect evidence, and Barker did that for them (to his detriment).
That's such an odd choice for this type of infra. I've had horrendous experiences with OVH in the past and what even worse, terrible customer service. Yes, this was about 8 years ago, and not with France based metal, but still...

Being that this is Drew, I wouldn't be shocked to know that this provider choice has more to do with an anti-establishment manifesto than any practicality. Then again, I might be wrong.
> but 1 in a million die from reactions to the vaccine.

That... seems high?

I couldn't find any more info with a quick search as the results were polluted with articles about measles deaths, which also mentioned vaccination. Do you have any links to hand with decent stats for that, or a good set of search terms I could use to find out more myself?
If you’re accusing me of being an ideologue, you could not be more wrong. Especially on this matter, where I am a relative expert (I have worked as a paid consultant on criminal justice reform projects) and my interlocutor appears to have a fairly shallow, mainstream progressive understanding of the dynamics at play in policing.
Would have liked to know what the difference was in response between Cogent and Level3. Did only Cogent respond at all, or was Cogent the one handling all their IPv4 space?
These, as well as NES dittos, were all over eBay and AliExpress for $3 a piece some 10 years ago. Probably still are. I've got one of each, just to get the right feeling when playing Zelda 1 and Pocky & Rocky on emulators.
What happens when you think AI is lying about you?
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-overfished-lobster-bigger-area...
> You still haven’t given one example of where Apple has a competing service that puts them at an advantage over competitors based on private entitlements?

Apple Maps, Apple Health, Apple Music (as you mentioned) the App Store, Siri, Safari and Password Manager all come to mind.

> What can iMessage do that a competing messaging app can’t do?

Functionally replace SMS. Apple knows they should have replaced SMS using a consortium of some sort, but they took advantage of the situation and bundled instead. Now SMS is a derilect mess, the alternatives are just as greedy as iMessage and nobody wants to work together.

> How is not supporting a cross platform library given Apple a competitive advantage?

It's part of a continued, overt and obvious strategy to stop cross-platform developers from porting their code to Mac.

> Game developers use cross platform engines

...which is probably why MacOS doesn't have any games to speak of, innit?

> Back then Microsoft was the most valuable and today…MS is the most valuable company.

> Apple has literally been an integrated software/hardware company for almost 50 years

What is your point?
scripts and news articles are not the formatted the same. you wishing something was so just because it was convenient to you does not mean it is magically simple to do. posting news articles is not the wheel house of an MSNBC. they are an organization centered around delivering a video news feed. when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail
I've never understood what engineers find in this book. It looks like a shallow kitchen philosophy of a guy next door to me.

What you think is so good about this book for engineers, in a nutshell?
> In the case of SQLite there isn’t much to configure, but PostgreSQL does have some tuning levers to play with.

Indeed. If we don't bother to benchmark our ability to insert or modify records, there isn't much tuning that is relevant.

SQLite with appropriate configuration for WAL, et. al. can run circles around hosted SQL providers for many classes of non-queries. SQLite directly on top of NVMe storage is a monster.
I have been working mostly with Kafka for five years, and I found SQS to be a little weird to work with. How do you keep an overview of all services that consume a queue? What if you want multiple services to read the same data in the same order? Granted I am very new to AWS.
How do you measure that? Do you include only companies with _no_ experience in a particular language before starting a new project using that language? Companies usually continues the language they have an experience with.

Except some areas where you don't have much flexibility. Like for AI you chose Python even if you have no experience. Or for a website, you don't have much choices and have to use TS/JS even if you don't like them.
It gets A LOT colder here in Minnesota during winter than it does in Norway. I know we're an edge case for EVs and cold temperatures in the US, but it does seem a significant difference in the EV and temperature conversation. Is there an understanding around the "degree" at which specific degrees affect EV performance?
The RCMP, particularly in small towns are very bad at these types of investigations. The truly shocking thing is that they followed up on it at all.
Why is this debate being simplified to "single-stair vs double-stair"? I am not seeing anyone even attempt to pitch a return to single-stair plus fire-escape, which seems odd.
Being out of town in Halifax for the following 3 days probably made the officer a lot less convinced of innocence right off the bat. That's why he showed up at the house the next day.
There are a lot more people with iPads than Quests. I know exactly how much a 12.9’’ iPad Pro weighs (I’m holding one right now) and have zero idea how much a Quest weighs. I fail to see anything outrageous or baity about this. If you think a 12.9’’ iPad Pro is heavy (hence outrageous?) — it is not.
No, I've just resolved that I live an ethically unjustifiable life. It's more honest that way.
not only will it be common practice but likely also the law.

upcoming legislation in Europe mandates secure-boot for any IoT device sold by 2025 in EU. this and the cybersec resilience act will ensure only firmware shipped and signed by the vendor are able to boot :) ... so your comment is spot-on.
Thanks for saving me a click
If anything this is a cautionary tale against running a database without reading the docs for how it should be configured.

The PostgreSQL defaults are extremely conservative... for a system in 2010.