skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anecdote time.

I worked on a Deutsche Telekom cloud project, which was somewhat internally competing with the Huawei-built Open Telekom Cloud. At the same time, a business partner and I also consulted other telco companies.

What I have seen, down to the data center from Huawei was insane. From a technical perspective (hardware and software) was great, but the pace they ate up people was something I am not familiar with in European culture.

This one day, checking the servers in the DC, a manager-like dude was shouting at his subordinate engineer to fix things. I found it weird (and a bit unprofessional). Next day, a new engineer joined the team, the previous one was not there anymore. When I asked how did they replace him so quickly, they told me that they literally flew someone in from China overnight.

They delivered. Their things worked. Tech was great. I wouldn't want to work in such environment.
I think there's two kinds of bad software

The first kind was written by people who know about software, has some attempt at following some conventions, variable names, etc. etc. It's not "clean and shiny", but you can see someone tried. Like if a bunch of first year apprentices built a house. They tried their best, and often did a half reasonable job - at least for a first timer. Plenty of companies are using this kind of software to make many of millions of dollars. I would say this is extremely common in the real world.

And then there's codebases that consist of a single source file that has hundreds of thousands of LOC and that file is called indexNEW.php, indexNEWNEW.php index2022-1.php (and so on). Nobody who works on it has ever studied any kind of software course at any kind of school, and literally nobody has any real understanding of what/why/how, because it gets passed along like a hot potato everytime someone quits due to the insanity. Nobody who works on it even knows what source control is, has no idea why you shouldn't copy and paste code, and has never heard of TDD or automated testing or bullding or literally any software discipline. This isn't like first year apprentices building a house, this is like Homer building the Canyonero - an utter disgrace that just barely functions at all. [1]

I wouldn't be surprized if Joel is talking about type one, and doesn't even really consider type two to be "software" or "a system". It's just a stinking pile of garbage.

(I worked at a very large Telco. The vast majority of code plugging the systems together was type two - it was a nightmare of spaghetti so bad that when a power outage and failed backup generator took down everything (including 911), it took more than two weeks just figure out how to start everything back up again.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_Jl5WFQkA
And then some king dies in some country and it's a national holiday the next week, and the data entry guy is in sick leaves and your table isn't updated to close trading... happened to the bank I work in, wasn't funny.
Or other dropdowns for gdpr popups
As recently as 2019 I would refuse to purchase gasoline at a station that was pay-before-pump. There were enough options. This is no longer the case sadly.
> 100 years of peace on the European continent

Absolutely, if you discount minor regional conflicts such as Word War II.
Because they are poor, also because of regulations crippling fsd (for better or worse).
Why is everyone so concerned about AI training on their data in the first place?

Has anyone really pondered the consequences or are we just repeating the concerns of others without thinking for ourselves again?

What are real actual consequences? Especially if I’m a small company?
Except of course it repeating or regurgitating your content, which is a valid concern.
I think it's probably the gold standard in terms of the language creation and use in television and movies. I think most, if not all, other television and movies used less of their fictional language than did The Expanse with lang belta. Lang belta permeated the show. Of course, they had to balance that with understandability, so they sprinkled lang belta. But, they sprinkled it everywhere.
It's very hard to beat locking when the queue needs grow. It's the performance statistics - you're going to grow more often as the app warms up, reach a steady state, and only need to grow under heavier than expected load. And in that case you probably aren't going to see performance dominated by time spent waiting to acquire a write lock.

The alternative is to dive into the literature on lock-free mpmc queues, which are kind of gnarly to implement. A lot of the literature handwaves ABA problems with stuff like "use hazard pointers and RCU" without correct pseudo code to help you.

That's why locking in unbounded queues is popular, imo. It's not actually inefficient, and the alternatives are arcane enough to avoid. No one is going to understand or trust the code anyway.

It's worth mentioning that "lock free" means "one task does not prevent other tasks from making progress" and in the case of a bounded queue, you can trivially accomplish that by busy-waiting when the queue is full. This isn't appropriate if you need consumers to receive events in the order in which they happen, but you can kind of fix that using an atomic counter (to paraphrase Mike Acton, if you have a safe counter, you have a safe queue) and time stamp events/sort on which ones are consumed.
Genuine question, is your experience that it is often more your lack of understanding than the code actually being a mess? I ask because while I've been guilty of judging too soon myself, it's much more common the code is just bad, written by someone who's already left. (I work in healthcare and startups though, so different industries are probably different. Also, I've probably been the person who wrote that bad code too!)
They shouldn't require wasting time to get the old behavior, though, that's indeed alienating, it should instead be saved to user config and preserved on updates
>The main reason why developers do rewrites is because it is easier to read your own code than it is to read somebody else's code.

LOL: so did you read TFA, or just come up with this yourself?
Probably it is in the terms and conditions, so =yes
Repeat after me:

There's no sure-fire way to automatically anonymize arbitrary customer data.

There's no sure-fire way to automatically anonymize arbitrary customer data.

There's no sure-fire way to automatically anonymize arbitrary customer data.

You can't anonymize it by hand. You can't anonymize it by machine. If you're taking blobs of customer data and dumping it into a machine, customer data can come out of the machine. Neither humans nor machines are error-free. If you believe DocuSign is going to do a perfect job, I've got a bridge to sell you.
It doesn't cover anything yet, it may not even cover anything when/if it is passed because it's full of weasel words to get out of having to pay. go look at sect ion 6 (1) on payments for example and compare to the equivalent section from the Canada health act. All the "will pay" in the health act are "may pay" in this act. There's also no timeline for implementation. All this act does is highlight what a bunch of chumps the NDP are.
There was a commotion on Twitter recently when a Dutch politician posted a tweet (in Dutch) that started with the words, “we hebben een serieus probleem”.
Thanks for this. Can you explain a bit more? is it like it like it downloads a once and caches or do you need to provide the pre download model s in a volume?
Thanks for the details.

It looks like in France this is fundamentally different.

We have the labor law which is the same for everyone. It says the basic things, but it is complete. If your sign a job contact, you can almost skip reading it because everything is codified and you cannot be screwed up. This also means that the negotiation is limited, even for salaries (the general rule is that you cannot be wildly different from a similar peer in terms of your benefits).

Then we have collective agreements, which historically applied to a profession and were negotiated (sometimes very harshly) over the years. A company is part of a collective agreement and, on top of the labor law, applies better conditions from that agreement.

The "profession" part is historical - my company, a high tech one, is part of the "metallurgy" collective agreement despite having nothing to do with metallurgy. But the metallurgy agreement is arguably the most favorable one (or one of the 2, 3 best ones) so great.

Then we have unions, most of them are country-wide and a few specific to a company. They are bargaining with the company and form the core of the work council (this is France, do it is much more complicated than that :)).
Unions call for company, profession or country wide strikes. Usually when it is the worst possible time for the population. We have an extreme love-hate relation with them.

A strike (individual or group (the group one is 99.9% of the cases)) can (and does) impact the business, otherwise it would be quite useless. You cannot actively sabotage/vandalize your company (though it happens) but certainly do anything that hurts it: let it run unattended, block entrances, stop work and stop operations - the sky is the limit.
It is easier to make money by investing in expensive housing than investing in cheap housing. You can sell both, so why tie up your assets in something with less return?
Google to remove some Indian apps over Play Store fees violation
I also see very limited accountability beyond firing.

There was some in #Dieselgate (Developers going to jail for their code).
The article mentions several other examples of fictional languages in television and movies, including Game of Thrones, and they spent some time talking about those. So, I was surprised they left of lang belta, which is a pretty well developed fictional language, probably better than any of the examples from the article.

One thing I absolutely loved about the first Dune movie was the incorporation of secret hand signals (covert sign language) from the book. The use of secret hand signal conveys the gravity and peril of the world they live in.
Meh, so it puts Robert Picardo Stewart somewhere.
You can't learn things like that if you have a budget of one minute to test an app before removing it
It's really about choice.

In Struct, you can create custom feeds, which can filter threads by channels / users/ tags, etc. You have that choice. In Slack, every one of these entities (and permutations for DMs) stands alone. It's set in stone, unchangeable.

That itself is a big win.

In fact, feeds are everywhere. That's how we consume almost all internet. RSS, News, Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram. Feeds scale, they are powerful, they work. Instead, Slack has us jumping around channels and DMs for drips of messages, playing Whac-A-Mole.
When we had kids, my partner and I decided that we would never upload their pictures to any social media sites, or any other semi-public sites.

It was a good idea, and now it's becoming an even better idea.
You're in digital advertising. How would you feel if they did a poor job of de-identifying one of your contracts (maybe because the client's company name is also a common noun) and their AI regurgitated some private business dealings word for word to one of your competitors?

Yeah, it would suck.
Ask HN: Good tools for pre-made HTML template layouts for web developers?
I'm a front-end developer who mostly dabbles with React. I don't do a lot of HTML/CSS so my knowledge on it is rusty. What I mean to say is, I'm average at building websites, but I'm good at building applications.

Are there any good websites/tools which can help generate the website HTML layout side of things? I was thinking of a no-code html builder that I can export? Or perhaps there's some kind of library which kind of does all this stuff?

Any help appreciated!
Interested in how you're using DO as an ingress. I currently run a droplet that's reaching its capacity because I'm running all the services directly on that underpowered machine. I would much rather run them from a local computer. Is it pretty straightforward to set that kind of thing up with tailscale?
This is super cool! It seems that endb uses emscripten to compile to WebAssembly, I wonder if they tried WASI or WASIX (https://wasix.org) to target both browser and server environments!
And Spotify just paid $250m to Joe Rogan for a questionable podcast deal.

So squeezed is not how I would categorise the company.
My understanding is it’s still the primary hypothesis as the cause, but this hypothesis is not conclusive and is still being actively debated for multiple reasons.

There was a research scandal a while back that called into question some amount of data. And there’s the fact that many attempts at attacking the plaques have not been able to show any significant improvement to patients.
I hear Joel on this, I really do, but can one imagine using any code from Netscape Communicator 4 in whatever Firefox I'm typing this on?

Perhaps it's rose tinted glasses, but I distinctly remember that Netscape 4 had to repaint the screen on window resize. Like the code was that bad. The product was rushed to market and features were bolted on because there was a browser race/war where quality suffered greatly.

This POV would have been impossible to see if you use Netscape 6 because it was so unusable no one used Netscape 6 except for nerd points and to try out "does my browser support this CSS" tests.
I propose a useless header to send with browser requests as a toothless opt-out mechanism.
I’ve commented elsewhere that news companies are against any form of collaboration.

They could form a coalition and run their own ad network, if they are so concerned against Google taking a slice of their ad revenue.
Meta outpays pretty much all of FAANG right now, and thats saying a lot when FAANG companies are already in the top [0-5]% of compensation in the US.

The uncertainty of joining an unknown team is a little annoying, I'll give you that. But for a 350k - 700k do you really expect their interview process to be a couple of softball calls into an offer?

Thats life changing money, and I'm sure many people would be willing to put in a month or two for that. If your insensitive to compensation and more sensitive to the type of work you'll be doing, sure there are better options.
>I have ever yet to see any ad that actually made me buy something because of the ad

That's a somewhat superficial understanding of how advertising works. Sure, Barry might see an ad for McDonald's and go out and buy a Big Mac, but a lot of the work is subliminal.
yeah, you've hit it on the head – I think what I felt was missing in the demo was a feeling of presence. a hard thing to capture. anyways, awesome job and good luck!
There's definitely automated degradation at smaller scale ("if $random_feature's backend times out, don't show it", etc.).

The manual part of Defcon is more "holy crap, we lost a datacenter and the whole site is melting, turn stuff off to bring the load down ASAP"
What happened to differential privacy?
Here’s a few a remember from my time at McMurdo Station

- The fry, fried
> The accumulation of brain fry, mental fog, apathy etc that builds over time accumulated on ice especially during winter.

- The CRUD
> a general cold everyone eventually gets and then is immune to on the base. Usually there’s a lot of congestion or ‘crud’. Probably exacerbated by the volcanic dust and dry climate.

- Ice Wife (or husband)
A monogamous couple but only on the ice. May or may not be involved in other relationships off ice.
Little Tiny Website
Software development requires certain qualities from a programmer which AI can't attain before becoming human: personality and consistency. Personality is shaped by lifelong experiences mostly irrelevant to programming itself. Personality dictates the experience you want for the users. To be able to do that, you need to know the users, you need to understand how a human thinks, functions, and understands things.

Consistency is an artistic element shaped culturally. Again, you need to be exposed to cultural elements for a long time, and more importantly, develop an understanding of them.

I think it's very hard to train AI on these two fronts, and that's why we'll be needing programmers for a long time. AI will keep doing the mundane tasks for us though, thankfully!
It's not an attack on the wording, but the correctness of your first bullet point. `unsafe` is appropriate for the initialization of a ring buffer in Rust. That's true for using `mmap` or anything in "pure" Rust using the allocator API to get the most idiomatic representation (which can't be done in safe or stable Rust). It's not one line. It's also not platform dependent, the code is the same on MacOS, Linux, and Windows the last I tried it.

The rest of the bullet points are issues with scaling, which sure, are valid. But if your bottleneck is determined by the frequency at which channels get created or how many exist then I would call architecture into the question. A ringbuffer is a heavy hammer to synchronization problems. It's appropriate in many, but not many times in the same application, in my experience.

This last month I've written a lock-free ring buffer to solve a problem and there's exactly one in an application that spawns millions of concurrent tasks.
Add this to sso.tax
Or it puts your name and the name of one of your confidential clients in someone else's contract. Or it oopsies your name and salary into a job offer for someone else. Or it sees the name of your ex wife and hallucinates details about your assets based on your previous divorce papers and she sues you. I can come up with these all day.
The idea is that frameworks are generally designed to be used by other people, leading to greater focus on documentation, developer ergonomics, community support and generally more versatile code (scales with number of contributers/users; many will report obscure bugs and edge cases you may never consider testing but would impact your end users). Another huge benefit is you don't have to rewrite an entire system from scratch, saving time and mental load.

I'd say there's quite a bit "special" about all of these attributes, at least enough to warrant careful consideration.
Prius is synonymous with the power-split device (the "differential" like device that allows the EV + Gasoline engine to work as a team to drive the car).

Toyota's pure EV is bZ4X, and correctly is a new name to distinguish itself.
>Instead of one instruction counter, the TX-2 has 32 such counters which are assigned separately to different users of the computer, who then compete for operating time from instruction to instruction. A special part of the machine selects a particular user based partly on a predetermined priority schedule and partly on the current needs of that user. This multiple-sequence operation, in which many essentially independent instruction sequences interrupt and interleave one another, is an extension of the breakpoint operation found in DYSEAC of the National Bureau of Standards.

Is this the first implementation of a process scheduler in a multi-user system?
Thanks! We'll be brainstorming ways of making user presence felt, while keeping it clean.
I think it is obvious that most programming tasks will be replaced by frameworks or whatever we call it. It is not about AI but about zillions of developer reinventing the wheel and having a lof of redundancy. Once specific framework or tools is accepted (e.g. boilerplate generation) the need for more developers hours is decreased. If this is not happenning now is because there are few good crafted frameworms and/or creating them make a lot of development tools (e.g. Microsoft) irrelevant.

There will always be problems that cannot be automated but they will ve minimal and very specific.
The larger target here is the window, so according to this law you should move a window by grabbing the window itself (with either holding alt triggering a widow move mode or something else) rather than wasting space with a bigger, but still much smaller handle
I didn't even know there was such a thing as a Visa debit card. I have never seen a Visa/Mastercard debit card in my life. My debit card supports SEPA and Giropay. Which... many websites don't. (I remember when Steam got Giropay support one day, that was a pleasant surprise.)
You might look into something like together.ai or runpod doing token-based usage or per-minute usage.
If they're uniquely positioned to do it, it probably doesn't need to be done. Who is going to usurp them if they don't?
After reading this thing, first thing I did was laugh. Second thing I did was thinking maybe they wanted me to laugh. Third thing I did was laugh at myself for being such a paranoid idiot.

Entertaining article overall.
> I may be using the incorrect term. Regardless, they're happy to claim it as an expense as far as taxation goes

That's how business expenses work. Tax revenue goes down as a percentage of the expense.

How else would you want it to work?

And for 30% tax rate, for every $30 in reduced taxes facebook is paying $100, so they still lose $70.

And all else equal that money becomes profit for the news companies so the taxes still get paid.

> but given they pay no tax to begin with, the "cost of doing business complying with the regulation" is effectively passed on to the tax payer

If they pay no tax even before this law, then what's the problem? If they go from $0 to $0 then the tax payer isn't losing out on anything. And in that situation, even a single dollar of news company profit means a reduction in tax payer burden.
in other words, "no cojones"
From the google blog: https://blog.google/intl/en-in/products/platforms/upholding-...
LLM what? I'm on pretty much every starlink forum. Those rectangular dishes cost around $1700 to manufacture when they first became available. Maybe $400 to $750 today. You've never heard of loss leaders? Contrarevenue? Cost curves? Yes the first round ones were 3k all in.

There's new board revisions all the time.

Until Q2 2023 SpaceX was losing money on Terminals in the US. The discounts are still there outside the US.

Do you think the cost of manufacturing is now under $250? How much does air shipping to Europe in bulk cost for the dishes?
You can get more people to invest in your company if you put out a press release that says you're using AI.
The Wild West of Facebook [video]
The headline seems far out of step with the content: they use OpenAI/MS for chat AI, and they use the standard paid API that doesn't retain data.

Beyond that "If you have given contractual consent, we may use your data to train DocuSign's in-house, proprietary AI models." -- I'm open to hearing that "contractual consents" actually means "literally all of you mwahahaha", but that's not borne out by the content.
Conversely, and organization that imposes arbitrary choices and isn't capable of allowing people do use the tools they know best probably doesn't attract the best people. There are many different kinds of hammers, and making everyone who uses hammers use the same kind is, to say the least, counter productive.
Are you seriously trying to argue that the China/Russia is better than US when it comes to...foreign policy?
"Create a feed for your CEO's threads and stay in sync with your company's latest vision and goals. Jump in the conversation with the right answers and get that promotion you deserve. "

This made me smile with a little sad smile, as i again and again understand it is not important what you do it's important who sees you doing that :)
Are you saying that web archive services are breaking copyright law? I would say it's fair use seeing how ephemeral the content is. It's a myth that Internet content last forever.
McKinsey Chart of the Day – Mitigating climate change
Windows drivers manage printing on their own now. Don't need a vendor-specific driver any more. Enjoy.