skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: Chekr (YC W25) – Because Your Employer Should Be More Nervous About You Than You Are About Them

Hello, HN community!

We're thrilled to introduce Chekr, a YC W25 startup that flips the traditional background check on its head. Instead of employers scrutinizing every detail of your past, Chekr empowers employees by deeply investigating potential employers. Our motto? "Because you can't diversify your labor portfolio, but you can certainly diversify your risk."

Why Chekr?

In today's job market, the power dynamic heavily favors employers. You're expected to provide references, undergo background checks, and sometimes even share your social media passwords. But what do you really know about the company that's about to consume one-third of your daily life? Chekr was born from a simple question: Why shouldn't employers be just as nervous about impressing you?

What We Do

Chekr conducts deep-dive investigations into companies to unearth everything a potential employee needs to know but wouldn’t dare ask:

- Financial Health: Is the company more financially stable than your last three relationships combined, or is it on the brink of asking you for a loan?

- Work Culture: Will you find a nurturing environment, or is it a gladiator arena with a "Best Employee of the Month" prize?

- Management: We profile leaders to predict whether your future boss will be a mentor or the reason you’ll need therapy.

- Office Quirks: Is the office dog-friendly, or does it have an "every man for himself" policy regarding the last cup of coffee?

- Hidden Perks: Beyond health insurance and vacation days, we uncover the stuff that really matters, like the quality of office snacks, abundance of Diet Coke and the likelihood of unscheduled "team-building" karaoke.

How It Works

1. Tell Us What Matters to You: Fill out a questionnaire that’s more detailed than most dating profiles.

2. Choose a Plan: From "Curious Cat" to "Full-On Stalker," we have a plan for every level of nosiness.

3. Receive Your Report: Get a comprehensive dossier on your potential employer, including a "Red Flag Index" and a "Thriving Score."

Beta Testimonials

"I thought I wanted to work for a startup until Chekr revealed the company was just a guy with a MacBook in his mom’s basement." – Sarah, San Francisco

"Thanks to Chekr, I discovered my dream company holds annual 'Survivor'-themed retreats. I accepted the job and started practicing my fire-making skills immediately." – Alex, New York

Join Us

Are you ready to take control of your employment future? Let Chekr be your guide. Sign up today, and let's start making employers sweat the small stuff—for once.

Remember, in the game of jobs, you either win, or you work in a cubicle. Choose wisely.

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Chekr is not responsible for any employers who, upon learning of our reports, decide to improve their workplaces out of sheer panic.
If anything, a technology demonstrating its capacity to continue to function normally in the face of illicit use cases is an indication of its viability for inclusion in the next human chapter.

If you tell us that a technology seems to preclude love, or creativity, or good health... sure, that warrants examination and possibly intervention. But illicit behavior? In an environment where some perfectly sociable and laudable behavior is illicit? Who cares?!

It's been crystal clear since the first whiffs of what has come to be called the Streisand effect that the internet does not tolerate censorship, including by states.

What good is served by prioritizing consideration of the throes of deprecation of the shitty legacy institutions from which the internet is finally freeing us?

(I'm not trying to cheerlead crypto here per se; I think currency is broadly stupid and subject to eventual deprecation for all the same reasons that fiat currency is leaving first).

This comes up in every discussion, every single time, without qualification or explanation, as if we all understand by default the importance of first adjudicating the legality or illegality (presumably in accordance with each of the tens of thousands of states which claim authority to make this designation) of a use case of a technology before we can celebrate the effort and achievement of the authors.

And I'm concerned that this is demoralizing and counter-productive.
It was also banned and blocked in Russia for several years. It was only unbanned when they agreed to cooperate with security services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Telegram_in_Russia
You're right: their shareholders (especially the less imaginative ones) could pressure them to take a page out of IBM's playbook – the parallels between an 0xide cabinet and an IBM big iron cabinet hosting multiple VMs/LPARs is too tempting. Or, on a positive note, they could offer customers the option to invest in the "go the extra step" customer service engineering that IBM offers.
You're basically describing the internet-scumbag use pattern - bounce around providers and servers using nothing for more than a few hours at a time and making tiny charges to (other people's) credit cards that won't trip fraud controls because they look like verification charges.

There are very very many reasons to prohibit exactly that type of usage pattern.
I agree in principle. My (unstated) point though is that when you have a second order solution to a second order problem, it is often worth considering moving up the stack to work out why that is.
> And a way to pay signal anonymously?

Heh, I donate monthly to the Signal foundation but still get the occasional notification in the app to do so. In some sense, I am paying them anonymously :D
OK thanks yes that makes sense. Pipelining problems are real.
I live about 180 miles north of silicon valley. The only utility I get here is high speed internet via a radio receiver in a redwood tree[0]. I just tested and I'm getting 20mb down/30 up, 30ms ping. Plenty for wifi calling, video calls, etc. I'm surprised your WISP has such poor performance?

[0] https://furtherreach.net/
You know what else bothers me. If I hover over a thumbnail for a video, that now counts as a view and gets added to my history. Clogging up my feed with more algorithmic horseshit I don't want to watch. I'm thinking of just using nebula because I mostly watch science videos and I'm tired of the algo inserting shit I'm not the least bit interested in.
We are somewhat different in how we are structured — for one your counterparty on Renewables.org will be solar developers who are likely more credit-worthy than the individual borrowers you lend to on Kiva.
They could call it "the upside down".
A Tale of Three Architectures
Also Autoruns from SysInternals ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut... ) "Explorer" tab lets you un-check / check individual entries.
I have personally started to avoid Google’s and others immediate answers, because they are often very wrong because they are picked out of the contex.

They try to show what you want to see, but it often means something else.
Is victim blaming inherently wrong? What about situations where the victim caused their own victimization?
its not crazy to me... ive worked at a couple of places that decided to try to use libraries in a web services context. They were all disasters, and the libraries ended up being considered severe tech debt. The practical aspects of updating all the consumers of your library, and how the libraries interact with persistence stores end up being their undoing.
Yes, summary mode is completely optional (and turned off by default as you can see in our demo).
Unlike y'all, I actually love the website! I mean, yeah, it could use some extra opaqueness and padding, but it looks cool. Rad, even.

Most of personal blogs in HN that I see on the top page usually look like they were made in the 90's, with either no CSS at all or simple CSS with just big paragraphs of text and no substance in between. I cannot stand them. My zoomer ass needs to be stimulated by getting eye candy while reading the content.
To be fair so does France. Worse, actually. If you melon-scoop the most productive 15% of the population out of any country the productivity of the rest goes down quite a bit.
One thing I like about that zero-to-hero series is how he almost never handwave over seemingly minor details.

Definitely recommend watching those videos and doing the exercises, if you have any interest in how LLMs work.
It's so strange.

Plato specifically rails against this idea of 'relativism' via Socrates, that all ideas are valid interior to that person (Aristotle then goes on to flesh it out more).

I'm no philosopher, by any means, but it was my impression that the foundations of western civilization (and maybe others, I need to study them more) are that relativism is a dead end. That we're to try (and usually fail) to find out what is actually true, what the actual facts are.

The whole point of academies and universities is to defeat relativist thought, to rail against it. At least, that was my understanding of the philosophical grounds that they were founded under. I'm very likely wrong though!
My usual thought when people complain about useless eaters is useless to who? Sure they don't think my 85 year old dad is important. But if I have to chose between between them and my dad, dad wins.

Another observation is prosocial 'useless eaters' live quiet lives and don't consume much. And a lot of them mostly pull their own weight. More, lot of super dupers seem mostly good at socially engineering a bigger share than they entitled to. If we're talking my special needs brother vs some tech bro working on spyware and adtech the choice for me isn't close as with my dad.

See: Developmentally Disabled Burger King Employee Only Competent Worker
I used to care, but at this point it’s obvious that taking a phone number is by far the most effective anti spam and anti trolling method in existence.
One thing I've wondered lately is about the 6x6 fonts (or perhaps one particular one) that I've seen in all kinds of old (late 80s to very early 90s) games, particularly on Amiga and MS-DOS platforms. The Atari ST had a 6x6 font in ROM (see https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/876150/atari_st_6 for an example) and I think I've seen text that looks just like it in games that I know where developed first for the Amiga, as well as some early VGA DOS games. Maybe there's cases where artists were drawing graphics first on an ST, weird as that seems for an Amiga production - people have to use whatever tools they have at hand, so if that's an ST with Degas, Neochrome, or whatever, so be it. I considered maybe there was a similar font included with Deluxe Paint, but I can't find any indication of that. Perhaps instead a 6x6 character cell (leaving, really, 5x5) is just so constrained that there are very few ways to draw legible characters, and that's the reason for the uncanny similarity. Or perhaps the font got ripped and converted to some other format that was then passed around.

I suppose I should start collecting examples of this font as I spot them, for comparison.
U.S. Supreme Court won't review Apple's win against $503M patent verdict
input your country as "united states" and it goes away :)
> In astronomy and cosmology, 1 and 5 are the same number. Only the orders of magnitude matter when talking about large things. At atomic scales and in photon length the precise numbers do matter.

"I am not interested in a more accurate value." said no scientist ever.

It's just easier to measure small things using big tools than to measure big things using small tools, hence astronomy has a disadvantage. Another one is that it isn't easy to create any experiments.
You don't remember Obama's campaign of "Change we can believe in" and then he enacted every single Bush policy, and even kept their timelines? If you were a progressive left, you hated Obama as much as the American Taliban right hated Obama. He betrayed every single progressive ideal he supposedly stood for, including publicly and vehemently being against gay marriage for both presidential debates. He also signed the NDAA just before Christmas, which was the most anti-constitutional piece of legislation that you could conceive at the time. Obama kept talking about gun control, but Trump did more for gun control by banning bumpstocks than Obama ever did.
Well I'm also saying that those limits exist because of historical reasons, and those reasons were derived from issues in the past, and we should examine that context, and logic for those laws, before questioning if we need usury laws.

Why? Because they've done a lot of research, and there was lead up, there were issues, that caused those laws to exist. Study that, before we ponder is what I say.
Microsoft develops AI server gear to lessen reliance on Nvidia
I doubt those are the activist faculty types...

(but no, I absolutely didn't go to business school, lol, about as far from it as you can get)
It still needs manual upkeep. Nature has a way of planting things that don't even necessarily belong on the same continent in spaces where they are undesirable.

See, for example: Kudzu. We introduced it intentionally, and nature's own mechanisms have it literally growing beyond control -- blanketing (and typically killing) anything in its path in the US South, including mature trees.
> The history of scams is long, requiring periods of societal learning and transition as e.g. credit card, identity fraud, and wire fraud have taken center stage.

And governments have enacted laws to protect people. With cryptocurrencies, they - by definition - cannot. Once you got scammed, your money is all but gone (sans a very VERY few exceptions).

> The ability to memorize 12 words and have direct ownership of your wealth anywhere with an Internet connection, independent of any party save those facilitating the network and the one accepting your payment, and the ability to cross a border or transfer to the other side of the globe without seizure, is already tremendously powerful to hundreds of millions of people who lack trustworthy financial services.

That's a societal problem, it can only be solved by society, not by cryptocurrency peddlers and tech-bros. And in any case: at some point that "wealth" has to enter the real world, and it's there that governments can step in and seize said wealth.
I very strongly believe this sort of thing is why there's been such an anxiety epidemic.

It really does need attention urgently because it's turning people into nervous wrecks, and they don't seem able to stop themselves.
unironically i can see an interesting biz model, pay $200 and get:

- financial report: does it make sense to join now, at this valuation? how much stock should you ask for? what's the market growth looking like?
- reference check past employees who worked there
- glassdoor review analysis (fake reviews? helpful reviews?)
- past layoffs?
- legal side / open lawsuits?
Yes, glad to see the skepticism towards AI, this is why it is turned off by default even in our demo.
It still exists. What do mean?
Yeah, what are the odds that the Japanese would use up the obvious Japanese words for tech stuff.
Thank you - and would you be open to white labeling?
Ask HN: How can I become like Sherlock Holmes?
I know he's a fictional character but I want to improve on the skills and qualities a person like him would possess. Perhaps a mentalist comes close?
I kick in $5 a month because that's about what I figure self-hosting a messaging service would cost me. I don't want the hassle of self-hosting and I trust Signal more than the other remote hosted options.
My view on such matters is that it's best to find a solution that has a fallback option, which usually is an open-source software. That is to say, if you choose a cloud service, it's preferable that it is built on some open-source software. This way, if the costs become uncontrollable in the end, you can still fall back to an open-source software. For instance, CelerData has built its cloud service on StarRocks, and it's said that many users have used it to replace Snowflake and Big Query. Of course, you could also opt for Elasticsearch's cloud service, and if problems arise, you can replace it with OpenSearch.
Has anyone tried to make a Yahoo! Directory vision of YouTube/web video?

This isn’t going to get better on behalf of YT product teams, and Sora et al are going to ratchet up the stakes
In the startup world, this is correct.

The success that VCs are after is when your customer base doubles every month. Better yet, every week. Having a reasonably scalable infra at the start ensures that a success won't kill you.

Of course, the chances of a runaway success like this are slim, so 99% or more startups overbuild, given their resulting customer base. But it's like 99% or more pilots who put on a parachute don't end up using it; the whole point is the small minority who do, and you never know.

For a stable, predictable, medium-scale business it may make total sense to have a few dedicated physical boxes and run their whole operation from them comfortably, for a fraction of cloud costs. But starting with it is more expensive than starting with a cloud, because you immediately need an SRE, or two.
Wow, a case between an ISP cartel member and a copyright cartel member. Hard to pick one to root for. Somehow neither side managed to make the other side look like the good guy. You'd think ISPs would do their darnedest to make it so they don't have a way of knowing what content is flowing over their pipes, to help avoid accusations of contributory infringement.

ALSO: The photo of an Internet Pirate is amazing.
Didn't know that and thanks for giving us the idea. Aibó sounds much better than Sidekick, we may need to rename :)
> The snap paper linked elsewhere in the thread shows 10 µs latencies; they've put in some optimization to achieve that, but I don't really understand why we don't expect close to that with standard kernel networking and TCP.

You can get similar results by looking at comparisons between DPDK and kernel networking. Most of the usual gap comes from not needing to context-switch for kernel interrupt handling, zero-copy abstractions, and busy polling (wherein you trade CPU for lower latency instead of sleeping between iterations if there's no work to be done).

https://talawah.io/blog/linux-kernel-vs-dpdk-http-performanc... goes into some amount of detail comparing request throughput of an unoptimized kernel networking stack, optimized kernel networking stack, and DPDK. I'm not aware of any benchmarks (public or private) comparing Snap vs DPDK vs Linux, so that's probably as close as you'll get.
I would like these APIs to have prepaid options. Then you can control your max budget. Even OPENAI doesnt have that option.
Ha! I didn’t even know that! case’s closed.

I know some people defend Signal out of ignorance or loyalty, but I suspect there are some paid shills for Signal now. I don’t see how anyone with a bit of security awareness (which is the reason to use Signal instead of whatsapp) can justify using a phone number as an ID in 2024..
> On the contrary, young people often show up having learned on their super fast Apple SSD or a top of the line gaming machine with NVMe SSD.

Yes, this is often a big surprise. You can test out some disk-heavy app locally on your laptop and observe decent performance, and then have your day completely ruined when you provision a slice of an NVMe SSD instance type (like, i4i.2xlarge) and discover you're only paying for SATA SSD performance.
A huge number. I do a lot of due diligence of companies, and the over engineering on the cloud and costs have to be seen to believed. A common theme now is people use lambdas and step functions in replace of function calls. So a page load or transaction may involve two dozen serial lambda invocations. It is madness.

By way of contrast, a payments provider we explored had four moderate sized boxes running everything. They were about six years old and fully depreciated, but more than adequate to run millions of transactions through a month.
Just go through this https://github.com/AnthonyCalandra/modern-cpp-features and you should be fine.

If you also like thorough explanations and graphs, there's https://hackingcpp.com/ that could answer many questions you might have.

By the way, just in case, bookmark this online C++ reference https://eel.is/c++draft/ for diving in deep waters.

Good luck!
What were those forced out in grad school for? What activism did they abstain from?

Also, why are those Jewish students cowering? Has there been violence against them on campus?
My lay opinion:

Without symmetry, such as in conservation of momentum, you’d be able to create and destroy energy arbitrarily. Maybe like magic? Let’s say there were no proton/electron charge symmetry. That could mean atoms would be unstable. Maybe do some imagineering from this point!
How to know if a product is useless or just needs more promotion?
I have so many SaaS ideas, and I just want to build them in my free time. I know I should find/talk to users first, etc, but if anything, it's good to practice coding skills.

Anyways, I'm not sure when I should move on to a next project or keep promoting what I currently have. Submitting to directories and making social media posts takes time, and obviously a useless product will have zero users regardless of promotion.
- "These fluxes suggest an upper limit for biomass productivity of ∼10³ kgC/year from a glycine fermentation metabolism."

This is really an upper bound on accessible energy (the "carbon" explanation in the press office release is hand-wavey). The idea is that solar photochemistry in Titan's atmosphere creates chemical energy gradients, in the form of energetic compounds like that glycine; and these energy gradients could migrate through the ice and support a biosphere in the subsurface ocean. The abstract* says that, actually, very little of that energy gradient can get through the ice shell.

This situation is different from that of some of the other icy moons: they potentially have much larger geochemical energy sources, from chemical reactions between the water ocean and primordial rock. The problem with Titan is it (probably) has a weird ice shelf on the bottom of its underground ocean, which isolates it from rock. So rock-ocean weathering probably doesn't happen there.

* (The paper's not on arXiv or SciHub if you were wondering)
What Is an Uncensored Browser?
based or biased?
> Some years later, when I finally got around to learning and using Node.js, I realized just how poor the async/await/promise design Node.js was (error-prone by design). But I highly doubt I would convince anyone to really give Elixir or Erlang a go.

IIRC Elixir got a pretty big boost early on thanks to folks making the jump from Rails to Phoenix, so it could kinda be the case that most of the folks who *would* give it a shot *have already* given it a shot.

That being said, I have the impression that you'd have more success with folks using Node.js than you might think. I expect there would be more pushback from folks using, say, Golang and Java... if only because the wider dev community doesn't look down its collective nose at those languages quite so much. (Unless you're talking about generics or null values, respectively!)
> 4chan will probably be around long after the death of every other social media website

4chan: the roaches of the Internet :)
Compared to it's European peers, the UK is ridiculously good at:

* Basically anything creative (especially literature but also film/tv, and not bad at games)

* Tech (not American levels but still better than all it's neighbours)

* Education

* High-end aerospace and automotive