skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2022 this was true, but today it is 2024 and I have noticed that Amazon has all but stopped sending me packages in plastic bags IN MY AREA.

IN MY AREA they seem to have switched to a new style of cardboard box that has a perforated seam along one side which aids in opening, and they appear to be closed with adhesive strips inside the flaps rather than tape. For smaller items they seem to have switched to paper mailers with some kind of shredded fabric for padding.
Are you in the Kennedy?
> 600 is a lot of human beings, and it follows a recent trend of tech companies' mass layoffs

It’s absurd to describe this as a mass layoff even relative to the 5,000 people Apple employed for this project alone. If a company can’t lay off a few hundred people after cancelling a major project, we’ve effectively banned it from taking risks.
I tried to explain that AI was ruled not copyrightable if a human wasn't meaningfully involved. Meaningfully involved being a bit blurry, with art generated from a prompt being the only explict thing so far ruled not copyrightable. Do you have a different take?
I once spent months working on an expert witness report for a high profile tech industry trial--one of 10 or so written for "our" side. Never got used because of some things that happened in the course of the lawsuit.

It was a nice change of pace, paid well, and was able to reuse snippets of material here and there over the years, so not totally useless but never got used for its intended purpose.

Of course, I've also been on projects that were just canceled.
Solar eclipses, even!
You need to support services that are getting deprecated until the very last user leaves. And believe ne, sometimes it might take several years more than the company would like to. As long as someone is using it, you're contributing to its stability, and it's not useless. See yourself as the orchestra on the titanic, playing to the best of their craft until the ship goes under.

I worked for a full year on a service who was used by exactly 0 people. Then had to do all the consequent security updates and such. It took another 2y until we were finally shutting everything down. That was useless.
https://github.com/vladiiancu/plex-reshare

Can't stop the signal
I've become more and more cynical about the incentives involved in recycling. There's not much transparency regarding what happens to to the various types of materials we all collect, sort and "recycle". Localities and countries compete to claim that they "recycle XX% of XYZ" but no-one's actually looking at what happens to the containers of XYZ once they're taken away from your recycling point.

"The European Union’s decision to ban exports of plastic waste in and outside Europe is threatening to collapse the market for the collection and recycling of plastic packaging"[0]

Although in this case banning exports of plastic waste might actually be the right thing to do, you do wonder* what was happening to all that plastic waste that was "recycled" over the decades.

[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/circular-materials/news/rec...

* Spoiler: much of it wasn't recycled at all...
My point is mostly that neither is called a coroutine in the language and if you Google C# coroutine you'll see mostly Unity results which are not official and may or may not be what the author was referring to.
I'm in the same boat as you on not knowing much about child labour.

That being said, if a child is doing labour for a company (in this case Roblox, but the same could be said for Instagram, Tiktok, etc.), why is it considered more ethical to NOT pay that child for their work?

I know an argument could be made that adding financial incentives encourage more kids to participate in said child labour, but NOT paying them doesn't dissuade them from doing so.

And how is Roblox's practice different from the creator funds of social media sites that rely on user-generated content to justify their existence? It's all very murky to me.

I think my problem with this model is Roblox taking such a large cut from their workforce, not that they pay them at all.
In the meantime, some online shops in Germany (not Amazon) are testing reusable plastic packaging (https://bp-consultants.de/en/reusable-bags-for-e-commerce-on...) - to return the empty package, just fold it and drop it into a mailbox.
I thought "self-closing" tags went away after HTML5 came along? Also not all tags are "self-closing".

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#void-elem...

div was never "self-closing", iirc.
> regulations to make it impossible to eliminate jobs unless the company is bankrupt

This is how you zombify your economy.
Companies can focus on providing service to their paying customers and (for the most part) ignore everyone else. Governments, on the other hand, have to govern over everyone.

As a society (through our group decision-making process, politics), we decided everyone should have access to education, as it's massively beneficial to have an educated workforce and the unlocked positive-sum economic opportunities significantly reduce the number of people who elect (or are stuck with) zero-sum criminal opportunities (and these people are very expensive to have to manage).

We could leave a lot of the country without usable access to the internet, but from the start we decided it's better that everyone be connected (our Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to establish post offices and post roads). And thanks to our political system and relatively high degree of openness, we have been able to discover and patch a lot of the abuses of the system that motivate you to prefer private options.
Holy shit what a ride!

Sitting at home in my office in Ozone Park NYC and I hear what I think is a low flying plane coming in to JFK. Happens when weather is bad and they come in lower they can rattle my windows. But the intensity grew suddenly and my entire house was shaking and everything was rattling.

At first I froze for a few seconds as I could not make sense of what I was experiencing - but it was clear this was not normal so I ran like hell downstairs and outside. While running I was trying to make sense of the shaking: did a truck or plane crash? no not this long - maybe the elevated A train up the block is collapsing? An explosion? some kind of cataclysm? WTF is happening! But after I reached the side door and the house was still shaking I realized this is an earthquake. Earthquake was not the first thing on my mind for sure as I have lived in NYC all my life and never felt anything like this.

Fucking nuts
Comcast wanted $210k-$1000k to hook up my house inside of city limits, on a public street, where all other homes on that street already had service.
Wow. A malicious ethnic slur, right in the headline. I know I'm pretty old & dim...but I thought doing that was really no longer acceptable, either in public or in polite company.

Or, wait - the slur is against an ethnic group that was brutally exterminated. Is the current rule that that makes the slur okay?

/s?

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines )
The west coast states have the MyShake early warning system, which sends out automated alerts for 4.5+ quakes.

https://earthquake.ca.gov/
I’m sure that’s most of it - but I’d wager the incidence rate over the long term is increasing as well given diet and exposure to pollution/toxins
I bought like 10 different things in one order from Amazon the other day. I was hoping it would come in one big box; none of it was fragile and could easily have been packed that way. but no, it came in 10 different paper packaging.
You may be right, I do know that there are very few total skydiving deaths per year so high risk activities could inflate the figures fairly easily. However, I don't think wing suiting is counted in the statistics.
It sounds like none of this advice is working for the author.
Where's the transcript then? :P
The head of Israeli intelligence is operating in a different threat landscape (both figurative and literal) than the head of the NSA.
Same thing happened to me. I was on a facetime with someone in Brooklyn, but I was a 2 hour drive north outside of NYC and it took what felt like 30 seconds to propagate over that 200km.
> Universal broadband access is a governmental program supported by Democrats to give Internet access to Republicans.

This isn't a bad observation.

To speak plainly here: It taps at the notion that poor rural Rs ought to realize that the national R party likes them poor and angry. It's not untrue but it's totally tone deaf to the reality that the national D party hasn't given a meaningful crap about rural poverty in my lifetime. (source:recovering conservative)

> Hard-nosed politics would suggest the program should not have a bright future.

Our bazillionth lesson that hard nosed politics benefit a small group at the expense of most everyone else. Much work+money goes into making sure the lesson isn't learned.

> States can deal with this problem, or not, as they choose.

This runs up against a bright line. It runs between states that are openly, gleefully hostile toward helping vulnerable people - and the states that sometimes help when they aren't busy being inept/apathetic/confused/corrupt.
The sentence you must be referring to reads "Proton VPN is realistically our only true rival in the Free VPN space", which is a pretty careful scoping that means Mullvad--which explicitly offers no free service--isn't relevant for the statement.
It is. By definition (Because they are innocent)

Even if you fail to avoid shooting innocent people and can find a scapegoat to save yourself from the consequences, homicide is definitely, unequivocally, illegal. And assassination (killing somebody that is helpless, like bombing its house or a sniper shooting a child) is even more illegal.

And any army that does not try at least to study a basic understanding of international war laws are a bunch of unprofessional criminals.
> Everyone has a mandatory ID card with a chip on it that's used to identify you.

Only in some European countries
author here:

good liars deceive others
great liars deceive themselves,

my goal was to call out that i do believe these are true, but i must acknowlege they are lies
Fun fact: If my Hebrew is not too rusty, “goralim” means “destinies” in Hebrew.
Agreed. I struggled for days in trying to get an external drive mounted into Nextcloud.
Yeah, since I moved to Seattle in 2011 there have been two largeish quakes in the northeast. I have yet to feel one in Seattle.

Of course now I've jinxed myself.
This distinction (temblor or terremoto) is made in Chilean Spanish lexicon as far as I know, but might be a general feature of the Spanish language.
I feel the same about sed and awk :)
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942880
Qwen1.5-32B: Fitting the Capstone of the Qwen1.5 Language Model Series
I developed a small bankroll/gambling simulator in Golang.

Ended up thinking I "figured out" roulette and I'm down about 2k. This isn't a lot of money for me, but I think I'm done with gambling for a while.

Ultimately just take whatever you feel like gambling, bet it on black and leave regardless of the outcome. That'll yield you better results than any system.

I'm not open sourcing the code since I don't want someone else to lose money using it.

It was really fun to learn Golang though. I also had some fun with setting up a build pipeline for the mobile app. I guess I really spent 2k to learn Golang...
Varda Space Industries raises $90M in Series B
> maybe a mental hospital is better than being homeless

We seem to have come full circle. One of the big reasons for the enormous homeless population, is because all the mental hospitals were closed, in the 1980s and 90s.

I think that news stories about [very real] abuses in these hospitals, along with the cost to maintain, were responsible.

You can yell "Get a job!" at schizophrenics, all you want, but it won't make them employable, or even able to live on their own.

There are a number of mental illnesses that can be treated, and recovery is possible, but that only accounts for a fairly small percentage of the severely mentally ill. I know a large number of folks that have done it, but for every one of them, there's a hundred more, that couldn't get it.

It's just that treating mental illness is hugely unpopular with the vast majority of folks that don't have any family or associates with mental illness, and even more unpopular with folks that have undiagnosed mental illness (It's quite possible to have a long, productive life, with some forms of mental illness -it can even be helpful, in some careers).
You'd be Kierans. ;-)

That was such an ironic twist to the story.
The 3rd rewrite of the same application because someone above me in the chain decided we needed to have AppX but on PlatformY , with just slightly changed requirements such that we cannot simply copy and paste it over.
A lot of European cities own the conduit and then lease space in it to private companies. It's not exactly the same, but a good approach all the same.
FYI, Laws require filtering and a lot more.

(This is why I love Libertarians.)
Actually, it's a near-perfect article from my point of view. I don't (regularly) work in tables, I'm not immersed in data visualization culture, and I wouldn't have thought twice about reading a simple "here is our product" page aimed only at people who already know what they're looking for.

However, this article gave me some really interesting and valuable background material and then concluded with solid, crystal clear (even to me, who's never written python) examples. I actually came away thinking, "well, this look fun - I should spin up some toy project to play around with this and learn how to use it."
I got alert after 10 mins of earthquake .....:(
Let's talk about Kuma
The link is, indirectly to Peter Watts' story "Malak", which, yeah, is exactly what I think of whenever people talk about this.
It's a form of ideological hand-washing, they don't want to link the killing to their own religion but it's ok to link the other well known religion. Coincidentally hand washing refers to the story in St. Matthew’s gospel, when Pontius Pilate ‘washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person’.
Hey, I've only dropped a couple products so far because their commercials annoyed me.

...because most of the rest were for products I already wasn't using.
Unless you're calculating your actuals vs expected variance you don't know if you're right or just unlucky.

I've known pro poker players who were down $80k and new from their hands they were just unlucky and to keep going. Eventually made more as a player than many FAANG SWEs do.
It's not at the moment, but I wouldn't be opposed to chucking you some access if you wanted to look (or talk about joining, I'm solo at the moment).

The rough gist is that it's for hosting dedicated servers for video games, with an emphasis on having an easier to use UI than most providers combined with a usable API/CLI for advanced users. Ie. Instead of editing config files as regular text files, I want to offer a view with drop downs for each config option, a description of what each value does. (with some hidden for orchestration reasons, like the port it listens on)

Architecture-wise, it's a 3-tier app. HTTP API frontend talks to gRPC backend talks to Postgres. gRPC in that middle tier because I want to move the control plane for the agents into gRPC. Currently, the control plane consists of generating an Ansible inventory and executing it, and Ansible handles downloading the game if it doesn't exist, making dirs, SFTPing configs, install a Prometheus agent, etc.

It's not anything I intend to hyperscale, but I've always been the dedicated server guy among my friends, so I figured I might as well make a little thing out of it. I'd be happy with a small ARR.
You're right, but that's why the Rural Electrification Act has been used for almost 90 years to provide electrical and communication services to communities where it's uneconomical without federal loans.
We’re gonna need to invent AGI just to sort out the chaff generated by LLM “AI”
The issue is that there is a lot more to a home server than updates and backups, and even doing those correctly automatically is... pretty hard if you don't have very strong opinions about how apps need to support them.

So to give you an idea, Sandstorm requires: An app always must recover from forced termination (the only way it shuts apps down!) and that a given app carry all of the code it needs to update its data from any previous version. If you don't do these things, your homelabber will inevitably be fixing stuff themselves in various apps because their server lost power or the app developer demanded some bespoke intermediate inane update steps, or you missed a few versions while your server was off.

What percentage of apps made available via Docker meets those requirements? Probably a lot less than you'd think. (Most of them that do easily work on Sandstorm!) But if you want to make selfhosting work for non-sysadmins (or sysadmins who don't want to do a second job when they get home from their main job), you have to do these things.

Another thing is that you basically have to have security right because your users and even your server admin probably aren't experts, and definitely aren't paying for an enterprise-class firewall. So a big part of Sandstorm's opinionated app design is around making it fundamentally impossible for app vulnerabilities to exist. Things like proxying everything through the platform, isolating individual documents into their own app instances, handling authentication and authorization, etc. all become core to making apps secure enough to not have to worry about them that much.

This is especially important because a lot of selfhosted apps get abandoned and unmaintained, but selfhosters still want to use them. Of course, all these things fundamentally require changes to the app your random Docker container shipper can't insist on, and that's before we get even into performance concerns, which are key since selfhosters tend to use old or cheap hardware.
I worked at a place for a few months where they had this very complicated K8s, Argo Workflows architecture for processing some Bioinformatics data. Felt cool when I joined, but it clearly was way over-engineered.

I started with a proposal on how to simplify it and went about developing a POC. However, a couple of months in, I realized that the company actually had NO customers for this. And multiple engineers had worked multiple years to get this to the stage it was. I had 0 motivation to do anything after this, and left soon afterwards. I think they are still working on it!
My first earthquake experience. I thought maybe I was imagining things but when the walls started to shake I got out
I worked for a company that used to resell a single-board computer used for control applications. The vendor was getting antsy because we were always late paying our bills.

Our company owner didn't like their complaints, so I was told to design one that was "better than theirs." That's it. That was the entire spec. OK, I was also told that customer X would like a board that they can program in C (current board had a built-in BASIC interpreter).

I pointed out that I didn't think it would be helpful, since every customer was happy with what we had, and no one was coming close to its limits. It was a small company: I took most of the customer tech support calls, so I was plugged into what they were doing.

I was told to go do it anyway, "we're not going to be held hostage by those guys."

So, I did. I picked a cool new 16-bit Hitachi (now Renesas) chip that had a nice C cross-compiler available and set off on my pet project. My design had more RAM and more storage and a much faster clock. I wrote a simple text-based serial monitor for debugging and uploading code. It was really nice.

As I predicted, however, it didn't sell a single unit. No one cared about all the stuff I added since the existing board already had far more capability than anyone needed anyway and this one, along with the necessary compiler, cost more than 5x the old one.

They showed it to customer X, who said "it's cool, but why would you think we need this?"
A Sustainable Path Forward for Modrinth
We need to stop looking at every negative externality caused by GenAI as a "business opportunity".

Sweeping the streets of confetti and trash after New Year's Eve is not a lucrative job.
> Does MS provide SLAs? Are there no suppliers who will provide similar SLAs for FOSS software?

Gotta love how internet commentators feel like picking a statement apart in isolation somehow validates their point.

Yes, they offer SLAs and have full control of their software and its release cycle. So can offer guarantees and stand by them.

> That puzzles me. How can you have more control over proprietary software than over open source?

"They" is Microsoft.

> If you mean MS have full control, how does that benefit their customers?

It means they don't have to wait for Linux (or a plethora of other open source softwares) for upstreaming or need to fork / manage an independent branch. It means that they aren't at the whims of a community who decides to abandon projects willy-nilly or replace them with brand new implementations at the drop of a hat. Or commercial entities built on top of those projects that can only offer surface level guarantees.

No one here is saying Windows (or proprietary software) is intrinsically better. What they're saying is that what Microsoft offers to certain large-scale/enterprise entities is clearly better.

If you disagree, have at it. I don't care. The fact that people continue to sign with Azure, Microsoft, Office, etc makes it self-evident.
Same can go for electricity, water (if there is no local enough source of good water), as well as transportation infrastructure, mobile network coverage, and access to goods. I guess the main question is, does it make sense for a lot of such places to be abandoned, just because they will never be able to compete with cities in terms of cost due to distance and being smaller markets?
Earthquakes propagate very slowly (around 2-8 miles/sec). That's how systems like ShakeAlert can send out early warning notifications. This one, for example, happened 40+ miles from NYC proper, so residents could have had like 20 seconds notice if the service operated here. People further up or down the coast could have had multiple minutes.
Who were these luddites that were involved in creating computers?
Yep - felt it here in northern NJ, as did friends in NY and CT.

Working from home - all windows rattling/etc - first thought something was happening inside house, then looked outside expecting something massive driving by perhaps!

Kids at high school did classroom emergency shelter-in-place.
That’s an arbitrary definition you made up, as has been pointed out before.
At one point I was working for a large international ag company helping them expand their mobile offering in other countries. We had working native apps in the US that were well tested and well received by customers. So the obvious choice was to take the steps needed to internationalize that code so it could be deployed in more regions. Instead we had to run with the fully custom implementation that the other country's team had already started building. And by started building I mean they had a few Ionic pages created that didn't even have full functionality. Everyone agreed that scrapping that project and just leveraging the existing code base was the right way to go. Yet that's not what we did. We continued to build on the much worse app for months knowing it was just going to be replaced anyway. One of the most depressing roles I've been in.