skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You should learn Rust if you want to write fast code.

There’s a discussion on lobsters “C++ or Rust?” (https://lobste.rs/s/0akqy7/are_there_any_good_reasons_use_c_...) and the general consensus is that Rust is better except for legacy reasons. I disagree, I believe there are niche cases C++ is better even on new projects with new teams (maximum performance, no care about safety, most on the team don’t care about “functional programming”, something like UI or game dev), but they are niche and the benefit is marginal. Which means Rust has a good chance to become the future.

Even if you end up writing C++, Rust teaches concepts which translate to C++ specifically and writing fast code in general. Including concepts related to the “functional” aspect which will help you write better, safer C++.

Also learn Rust if you want to learn more about low-level abstractions and functional programming, primarily for writing fast code.

However, I still believe you shouldn’t learn and use Rust for writing general-purpose code, unless you care about learning performance. Because languages with garbage collectors (JVM languages) and weaker memory models (Swift) are “fast enough” in most cases. And I’m very skeptical that most people would implement something faster in Rust than they would in Kotlin, TypeScript, OCaml, even C# or Java; because the borrow checker does create overhead. Unless they need to go back and optimize for performance (or they are writing idiomatic code in Rust but not in the other languages; most of the functional paradigms from Rust, like small structures, typed wrappers, polymorphism, composition, even ad-hoc multiple inheritance (extensions or default methods) and pattern-matching can be applied to all the languages mentioned above).
Law and justice is not like a computer program that you can exploit and control without limits by being a hacker.

If the chatbot told them that they'd get a billion dollars, the courts would not hold Air Canada responsible for it, just as if a programmer put a decimal wrong and prices became obviously wrong. In this case, the chat bot gave a policy within reason and the court awarded the passenger what the bot had promised, which is a completely correct judgement.
Arbiters have the same power as judges in court and could, in theory, rule the contract unconscionable. In practice, arbiters are less likely to do so because

- they don't realise they are allowed to do so.

- they are biased towards the businesses who pay them.

- it potentially invalidates the entire contract.

- one of the only valid reasons to appeal an arbitration award is "going outside the terms of the contract". If the arbiter invalidates portions of the contract then it potentially opens the entire decision up for appeal.

The really weird part of arbitration is that you're allowed to delegate "arbitrability" itself to the arbiter (whom may rule that it must go back to court)

I haven't come across any specific studies but this is my understanding from my reading [0] (n.b. I am not a lawyer).

[0] https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/references/
>because I'm assuming Spotify's ToS also includes mandatory arbitration

Yep, they do (of course). It's in the very first section of the terms and, surprisingly, in all capitals so you can't miss it (assuming someone reads the terms, which, who ever really does).

The fun part of their forced arbitration clause is this friendly reminder:

>IN ARBITRATION THERE IS LESS DISCOVERY AND APPELLATE REVIEW THAN IN COURT.
Your friend is not trained by Air Canada. The bot is Air Canada property.

If they decide it is reliable enough to be put in front of the customer, they must accept all the consequences: the benefits like having to hire less, and the cons, which is that they have to make it work correctly.

Otherwise, woopsy, we made our AI handle our accounting and it cheated, sorry IRS. That won't fly.
We have Oligarchy marching around in capitalist skin suits.
Yeah, I like the idea of making meetings have some nominal cost - a lot of organizations won’t even blink at letting anyone schedule meetings which cost thousands of dollars per hour but will need three levels of sign-off for a $50 purchase. It feels like there could be a middle ground where you basically get reminded of the cost to the organization.

I’ve seen some people who will fill the week up with Groundhog’s Day-style repeat meetings, and even the basic expectation that they have an agenda, goals, and need to summarize what was decided afterwards increases the cost to them personally enough to make better use of everyone’s time.
The clause quoted in TFA is broad, but fairly standard (businesses need it to provide their services). The moral rights stuff is interesting, though, and I'm also not sure what "[n]othing in these Terms prohibits any use of User Content by Spotify that may be taken without a license." means.
Sale price is just one possible valuation. Replacement cost is another. Net present value is yet another.
Deep stations also add a bunch of hassle for the users. It just takes longer to get down 5 stories underground.
>says Mike Benz

>Michael Benz, a conservative crusader against online censorship, appears to have a secret history as an alt-right persona

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/michael-benz-rising-vo...
The most productive meetings I have are never the ones scheduled, they’re impromptu between myself and another engineer just chatting. Sometimes, one of us mentions a problem and the other offers an idea that pushes toward the solution. Every other meeting I have is pointless and the “leader” should have just sent an email.
You didn't get your friend to do it, an employee just decided to. There is no conspiracy.
Democracy is an ideal. There absolutely are bad implementations, democracies that get hijacked and are democracies in-name-only, dumb populaces, etc.
Your question can be rephrased as why should a company be valuated?

Do you not see a point in valuating a company?

Because if you do see a point, how else will you do it without assessing how much someone else would be willing to pay to acquire it, i.e. how much would it sell for?
Uh, no. The “natural rights” line of thought has just proven to be more-or-less a dead end, in political philosophy. It’s hard to make a strong argument for it, especially without resorting to the divine. “Rights” are a rhetorical tool—which isn’t nothing, but arguing that they have some reality beyond that is… well, if you can really nail such an argument, you can get some papers published and they’re guaranteed to be influential, put it that way.

Having been wrong about some things doesn’t make someone stupid. Plato got some stuff wrong. Doesn’t make him dumb.
She sounds awesome! Thank you for taking the time to compose such thoughtful replies.
This whole HN story is about Forgejo doing a hard fork and focusing on their own code instead of relying on Gitea, so I don't think calling them under-interested in coding is accurate.
Tech companies usually become a monopoly before to turn shit, Spotify just went straight to be shit
This is a specific example of the general point we are discussing in the other thread, so it would be better to focus on that, unless you think strongly otherwise.
The vast majority of small/medium companies aren't saleable either. However, building them to be sold, even if you have no intention of selling, makes them more valuable.
Humble Bundle had some nice collections on Python for many uses. For in general, I remember that Serious Python and Automate the Boring Stuff with Python were both good.
Nicotine itself is not MAO inhibiting, other compounds in tobacco have this effect (which may be synergistic/potentiating the nicotine effects)
>How is this different from me getting one of my friends to work at Air Canada and promise me a billion dollars to cancel my flight?

There is a common misconception about law that software engineers have. Code is not law. Law is not code. Just because something that looks like a function exists, you can't just plug in any inputs and expect it to have a consistent outcome.

The difference between these two cases is that even if a chat bot promised that, the judge would throw it out, because it's not reasonable. Also, the firm would have a great case against at least the CS rep for this collusion.

If your friend of a CS agent promised you a bereavement refund (As the chatbot did), even though it went against company policy, you'd have good odds of winning that case. Because the judge would find it reasonable of you to believe and expect that after speaking to a CS rep, that such a policy would actually get honored. (And the worst that would happen to the CS rep would be termination.)
https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archives/2009/04/21/a-car-that-c...
Some, but not all [1]: "... the remaining 17% reported using only nicotine-containing vaping products... It is believed that the non-THC/CBD vapers who were diagnosed with EVALI were actually suffering from disparate vaping-associated lung diseases caused by different toxins within the aerosols or different host responses to the inhalants."

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10228557/
This is an excessively broad grant in the tos, and is absolutely absurd.

Under this tos if I were an author and read a book for the audio book spotify could:

1. Use my voice for a reading of Mein Kampf, Turner Diaries, etc. advertise it and not compensate me.

2. Sell an AI version of my voice such thst its indistinguishable for any book, for no compensation.

3. Have some kind of ai generated versions of my book sold, for no compensation.
lighters have surely led to many infernos
They are super popular so they occasionally float up to the top recommendations by the algorithm. There are all sorts of niche things that get recommended to people whenever the algorithm changes a little. You always seem comments like "never thought I'd watch a video about X but the this came up on my feed."
Restaurant-Software Firm Toast to Cut 550 Workers
> seem not to realise how things operate in most other developed countries

Genuine question, what do other countries do differently? The way I see it (and described in my original comment) is that the underlying factors behind the decline of government services (no accountability, no incentive to use tax money efficiently) are common across many countries.

Some countries may get away with it for now because they're still "early", but if there is no pressure to do well it's just a matter of time before they too suffer the same fate?
Because that would not be reasonable, and nobody would be surprised if Air Canada reneged on that. See, for instance, Leonard vs. PepsiCo.

If your friend promised you something reasonable in the course of carrying out their duties, and you honestly believed them, I think that would be legal and enforceable just as this case suggests.
People definitely complain about Amazon in real life now, but is criticism of Google search something that actually happens outside of HN? It's not something I've seen.
I just don't understand why companies don't use something like Algolia on their KB articles with some careful manual keyword curation.

Imagine all the person had to do was type "bereavement" in a search bar and it instantly matched with the bereavement policy. What more does a person need?
I used the values from the original post, which is only the employee part and not the employer part. I also assumed that they're not using current but slightly older values here. I also didn't include the PPV, if you include that and count the employer part you end up at 1000 EUR.
"war has never been so much fun".
That's fraud because you're in cahoots with your friend.

If a random AC employee gave you a free flight, on the other hand, you'd be entitled to it.

Anyway, the chat bot has no agency except that given to it by AC; unlike a human employee, therefore, its actions are 100% AC actions.

I don't see how this is controversial? Why do people think that laws no longer apply when fancy high-tech pixie dust is sprinkled?
[dupe]
More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39395631
Microsoft is one of the few companies that seems to do a good job allowing employees to rise through the ranks from top to bottom. Most of the Partners I have met were cultivated internally. Facebook is also like this, with the added bonus of allowing much faster progression for high performers than most other companies (I know someone who became an E6 Engineering Manager/Tech Lead 3 years out of college. I don’t think it was necessarily for “bullshit” either, his work was very fundamental and important to the company).

But this is rather rare and most companies have a soft ceiling for growth internally. At Google for example, for years they have been filling most Director positions externally, and so most employees find it very hard to get there and progress past that. Progression is also often subject to norms that make the sheer number of promotions required to make it high up in the company impossible.
I drive Uber (non-food delivery) weeknight evenings and it was super busy shuttling couples to and from restaurants, easily the busiest night of the year. That was what I was basing my comment on.

Maybe there's enough couples out there where we can both be right?
General question when running a single member LLC: how do you determine how much to take as salary versus business profit, and how does that affect your taxes?

I'm guessing tax liability is mostly a wash, as if you are taxed as an S-Corp, you pass through the profit into personal income and pay income tax on that.
Your example is significantly different.

The chatbot instructed the passenger to pay full price for a ticket but stated they could get a refund later. That refund policy was a hallucination. The victim her just walked away with a discounted ticket as promised not a billion dollars.
Why Costco is so loved
I think, it's a matter of the parable of the puppet theatre. According to this, we may either "naively" enjoy the play, immersing ourselves in the story presented, sustaining our disbelief regarding the puppets, taking the scene "for real", or we may engage in a dialog with this, by applying our own perspective to what is already a perspective (or, in my words, a projection). From this arose Kant's suggested "disinterested pleasure", a state of alert suspense and readiness, which has become the blueprint of bourgeois art consumption ever since the enlightenment. It's really this framework of looking at, engaging with and producing art and visual media, I'm referring to.

On a less theory-heavy notion, the mere fact that a certain image or certain parts of a given image enjoyed that much of an investment to look like it does, somewhat guarantees that it had been worth the effort to someone, that it was meant to convey something. A quality, which is now gone for ever. Meaning, even the barest spark of expression, is now just at random. Moreover, by the very definition, art will now be dogmatic, even where it's asked for aberrations and exceptions, and redundant, since it's just a product of weighted averages based on an existing library of expressions. At least applied art is pretty much over, as is visual media. (Just look at what happened to cinema, when the regulating factor of film stock and related production costs fell away.)
I haven’t looked hard into this issue but that’s the more likely explanation in these kinds of situations. So you have a terrible kind-of dictator and you have a seemingly charismatic opposition. In a country stereo-typically ruled or co-ruled by oligarchs. What’s the most likely explanation? That the opposition is a selfless saint who only wants to liberate Russia (or tone it down to: wants reform, democracy, is kind of an egotist but is using his ego for good ends)? Or that he’s another shade of dark who is aligned with other factions close to or inside the power elite of Russia? And that Russia wouldn’t fundamentally change with one or the other at the helm—it’s still the same corrupt country.

Of course we The West jump to the fantastical conclusion that he, an opposition leader in Russia, wants everything that we want and would be the seedling of prosperity of Russia but also (most importantly) wants to be friends and buddies with The West.

Not surprised to see your comment at the very bottom of this thread by the way.
Yes. The long-term health implications of vaping are only just beginning to be understood. If you forced me at gunpoint to either vape or smoke, I'd still choose the vape.
I'm still wondering why Diaspora didn't take off but Mastodon did...
Weird straw man...

So replacing all their customer support staff with AI that misleads customers is OK? That's pants on head insane, so why spend time trying to justify it.
No, it is more similar to Air Canada hiring a monkey to push buttons to handle customer complaints. In that case, the company knows (or should know) that the given information may be wrong, but accepts the risk.
You might like the plot of the (pseudonymous Neal Stephenson collaboration novel), "Interface", by Stephen Bury. There's definitely a parallel to what you're describing applied to politics.
Fascinating post! I had no idea about this transition from cut-and-cover to TBMs. It's always interesting to see how approaches change as technology advances and the ratio of cost to benefit changes.
I remember hauling someone into a meeting because they wouldn't answer a question over E-mail, and after the question was answered, we went on to another topic where he had to present something by sharing his screen. Looked down at the MacOS dock and his E-mail client had one of those red bubbles that shows how many unread E-mails he had, and it was six digits. 241,995 unread E-mails or some ridiculous shit. Like, dude, do you realize how much of a huge problem you are?
Air Canada is going to get a lot of publicity over an $812 judgement in a provincial small claims court.
Either the algorithm or the code can be wrong.

We see frequent updates (aka error corrections) to our phone operating system and apps on a near daily basis.

To be admissible evidence, a computed result must show the entire decision tree and the code at each decision point. This should be in the initial disclosure to the defendant.
> I find it quite disturbing that high taxation is seen as a negative aspect of Europe.

after receiving the same services for no or minimal tax i also find it very disturbing that people still think high taxation is necessary.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/buy-now-pay-later/
Considering how popular marketplace is, fb seems to be doing everything possible to reduce the utility of it.
[dupe]
More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39378235
> How is this different from me getting one of my friends to work at Air Canada

One major difference is the AI wasn't your friend, another is that you didn't get it hired at Air Canada, another is that the promise wasn't $1B, etc...
I'm upset about smog and asbestos too. They're not exclusive.
> There are some who believe that meetings are work.

Meetings are work. Not practical work, but management work, which is very valuable to coordinate and unify efforts.

I agree, though, that there are people who like meetings for meetings's sake, and those waste eveyone's time. In my experience, they're usually executives with little practical background. They use meetings primarily for politics/socialization, and have the power to summon as many meetings as they wish.
Really nice story with great details.

I've been building NeuML (https://neuml.com) for the last few years. It all depends on the situation but if you need to replace salary, then of course cash flow is important. It can't just be about the future value, you have to live.

With that being said, I like to look at it as similar to renting vs buying a house. In both cases, there is cash flow except with buying you are also building equity.

For those interested in more about NeuML, I published this year-in-review last month: https://medium.com/neuml/neuml-2023-year-in-review-560457b97...
> The deepest station in Seattle has smelled like someone tried to make cheese from moldy gym socks since the day it opened.

Maybe it's just a matter of opinion, but I never found the Beacon Hill light rail station to smell like anything other than raw concrete, similar to DC metro or any other deep tunnel system.

I lived in the neighborhood at the time, and don't remember the station shutting down due to water ingress. Opening was delayed due to issues with overexcavation, but that threat was with sinkholes opening to the public above, not issues with the tunnel itself.
"People who drink often drive" is a nonsensical statement. People lose their driver's licenses permanently for drinking and driving. People get high on cannabis and drive too. And people smoke cannabis outdoors, which smells worse than cigarettes if you ask me. So as far as public nuisance goes you get the worst of both worlds... except cannabis is the "cool" drug for younger generations, so people will bend over backwards to make excuses and berate you for criticizing it :)
How could this problem be ‘solved with money, if it were not for the politics’ ?

Directly paying everyone living/working nearby to get them to accept cut and cover construction? Wouldn’t that cost even more then building it deep underground, after all the legal fees and court challenges, once it’s said and done?
The Great Lakes Are Nearly Ice-Free
All I see for that in the article is this part:

>>The woman behind the thick glass window raised her eyebrows, disappeared into a back room, came back with a large metal box of $100 bills, and counted them out with a machine. Then she pushed the stacks of bills through the slot along with a sheet of paper warning me against scams. I thanked her and left.

Giving you a generic warning slip isn't the same as "telling you to be aware of scams" -- most people lump that into generic background noise.
Did the founders envision limited liability and the public stock corporation?

Business activity was vastly different at the founding
Yes, but realistically, nobody is going to get a hardware CCID reader with the required security level and connect it to their computer anymore (assuming they even have one – for more and more people, their smartphone is their main and sometimes only computing device they own).

What might work today is a Bluetooth-capable smartcard reader with a PIN pad and display for secure transaction confirmation ("enter your PIN to open a bank account with bank xyz" vs "enter your PIN to confirm that you own a valid driver's license for the purpose of renting a car" etc.), but even that is a stretch and will probably only ever see very low adoption.

It would be great to have it as an option supported by the official reader app, though!
> There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything.

No more than those that believe every last one is 100% useful.
Some, but not all [1]: "... the remaining 17% reported using only nicotine-containing vaping products... It is believed that the non-THC/CBD vapers who were diagnosed with EVALI were actually suffering from disparate vaping-associated lung diseases caused by different toxins within the aerosols or different host responses to the inhalants."

Note that many of the toxic chemicals referred to in this paper are normal components of nicotine vape juice, including but not limited to the flavorings, so the comparison to spiking Tylenol with cyanide is not particularly apt.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10228557/
"In Germany, insurance covers everything over 0€. "

Yes. But you wait >6 months to see a specialist. And Germany has not the same level of health care than the US. Sorry to break the news to you.
I use my True Name™ to remind myself this could be subject to legal discovery (through no fault of mine). But I like the marketplace of ideas not caring about the pedigree of a good idea.