skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Once you start letting people edit the config files,

That way lies madness...

What can be done instead is to provide your own unified (some schema validated) configuration options, and generate the app specific config files from your source of truth. Then you can know what the user can configure and how to back everything up (and how to do a lot of other things in automated fashion). And you also have a safe upgrade path if format of any underlaying config changes.
I recently did a smartphone app audit and deleted 18 apps I classified as "social media, time wasting, and distraction." I deleted another 40 or so apps that were only occasionally useful, and that I could just install later if/when needed.

As part of that process, I personally found that the full set of app categories useful for an audit are:

A) essential (e.g. PW manager, email, maps, calendar)

B) direct and group messaging (e.g. Signal, Element, Telegram, WhatsApp)

C) social media, time wasting, distraction (serves no other real purpose other than to kill time, e.g. Facebook, Instagram)

D) episodic utilities (e.g. Airbnb, TripAdvisor)

E) always-on utilities (e.g. Venmo, Uber)

When you do this categorization, with a strong will, you can uninstall everything in categories C and D and end up with a much more utilitarian phone, primarily using the stuff in A and B.

I find that when you work on companies or projects, Slack and Discord are the tricky ones, because of how noisy they are but also how much people expect to be able to reach you there, especially via their DMs feature, which many use in lieu of email. I'm experimenting with the Texts.com app to work around this edge case. That is, keep Slack/Discord DMs visible via Texts.com app, but only use full Slack/Discord channels when on desktop when I am in a "channel skimming mood," via the desktop apps only. Haven't tried this fully yet on mobile since their Android app is still under development.

Anyway, I wrote up my personal experience with a smartphone app audit here:

https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit
> I honestly can't see a modern, programmer-friendly language not having proper discriminated union types in 2024

Does that really need to be part of the language though, or as long as you can code it, or have it in the standard library, it's fine?

What can Rust's unions do that std::variant cannot?
probably colonised by few bots?
I believe this light is triggered by a sensor for over height trucks.

However, there's definitely trucks that ran the red light as well as there's little distance between the light and the bridge.

https://www.youtube.com/@11foot8plus8
Have you considered using grammar sampling?
> Self driving cars were supposed to be around the corner because AI was advancing so fast.

To be fair, that was almost true. Waymo is doing well, Mobileye is looking good in demos, and even Tesla has a solid L2 system now.

It seems inevitable that this will hit a really dramatic exponential growth phase within the next 2-3 years.
apple got into cars because other people got into cars. it’s that simple.
Ask HN: Energy / home energy renovation question
Only reason I'm posting this here is (a) I suspect other people have had to deal with the challenges of air conditioners on separate controlling technology and hopefully have a solution and there does seem to be a group of energy folk hidden in the crowd.

I've talked to design engineers but I have a challenge that seems to be quite difficult in the home energy market and I'm curious if anyone has any insight how to resolve it.

I have an old home with a boiler and water pipes for heating. In the renovations I'm hoping to get solar [problem solved] + a air to water heat pump to minimize my dependency on fluctuating natural gas prices (and Co2 impacts).

(1) I have an air-to-air mitsubishi heat pump for summer (controlled by remote control - which I want to hook up to the main thermostat to effectively manage it - though I haven't found a good home controller - any suggestions). There controller software is brutal - curious if anyone knows better.

(2) See if it is possible to replace the boiler with a heat pump but I need to have a smaller natural gas booster (combi unit) to get to the right temperature to be viable for the old pipes in the house (different size).

(3) Does anyone have experience with air to water heat pumps?

(4) To broaden it a bit - is there any home heating tech / control tech that anyone really is impressed by? From my perspective it seems to be a fragmented market with poor options if you expect certain level of quality software / performance.
Apple isn't a jobs scheme or a charity, and its primary purpose is not to keep engineers employed - I'm sure the organisation could have kept those 600 people if it wanted to!
Google Amazon Microsoft Meta Nvidia Oracle... if 6 companies can accomplish something in 6 months, that's low barrier. Expensive, but that's not the same as high barrier.
Technically knowledgeable parents will understand that, but what do you answer to somebody saying “I don’t buy mobile data plans for my children, and now they accessed something bad on their devices due to the network you set up”?
I thought this was after both the car and the internal smartwatch display projects were canned:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-04/apple-cut... (archive: https://archive.ph/MeaiY)
Why vote down a rhetorical question?
I think you're a little bit on tilt here. "The server world" was what XDP was invented for, and it's used all over cloud providers. Watch the XDP mailing list.
what i enjoy the most when openbsd has a new release is their new song. my favourite is the legend of puffy hood.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html
It's not difficult to write a memory allocator, but there are some assumptions there which don't always hold true. For instance SmartCards (e.g. SIMs) use a language alleged to be Java, but without a garbage collector and with only one data type. Applications never terminate, so while you can allocate heap memory, you cannot free it and memory exhaustion is one way to brick the device. Since it is "Java" you don't have the low level control of C. Standard practice is to allocate some global variables once, and use them throughout the life of the device. Since another way to brick the device is by exhausting write cycles on the EEPROM on which these variables are stored, you are also allowed to allocate an array in the small amount of RAM. Ah, you might think - I can use that for an allocator! Nope. The array space is only allocated until the end of an event handler, and after that it holds undefined content.
It's Apple. They are good. They would never do layoffs like those evil companies like Google, Microsoft or Facebook. /s
Nothing can steer ITAR into the direction of sense.

I’ve had to go to extremely ridiculous lengths to buy downlead cables for a headset recently because the cable was deemed ITAR.
> Also, if the thing has an off mode... how do you mark and emboss that?

Make it a separate control entirely.
Immediately drove into the forest, and guess what: you don't have stay on the road. You can drive through the rolling hills, or under water (albeit very slowly). You don't even have to stay on the map [1]!

1: https://i.imgur.com/0XeV2d9.png
> What is very true is that most social media users don’t like to
click on links.

Ah ha, As a cybersec person I can totally understand why.

Is it also the case that the client apps SM push on people don't
reveal link URLs to check any more?
The cops dealing with poor people are often different from the ones dealing with rich people. But let’s say you are in a city with lots of poor (unhoused) and rich people: the cops are pretty mean to everyone in those, since they get beat down pretty quickly. Move over next door tot eh suburb that ships unhoused people next door, the cops are much nicer.
Great! Another thing that can be bashed into the term "5G" for marketing unrelated technologies.
I had a discussion with a colleague recently about the lottery. We posed this question: why not instead of a large jackpot with 1-5 winners, you have smaller jackpots with many winners of say, 100k?

Imagine instead of one person winning a 600m jackpot, 6000 people win 100k? 100k isn’t a particularly life changing amount of money but it could help dissuade frivolous spending and make good financial decisions. 100k can help pay off debts, pay off that car, put some in savings, etc for many people.

Just a thought.
The point is that when your job has an "larger than normal" impact on the course of someone's life you should not be able to ignore that responsibility. Responsibility should be matched with equal sized accountability.

I'd rather have a system that occasionally let someone go free because of insufficient proof than occasionally have people be imprisoned when they are actually innocent.
> That's the stuff of nightmares. I hope the real Woods sues the system that put him through this.

On the positive side, if he was using his social security number for 35 years, he’ll be fully paid up for the real Woods to draw at retirement.
Does it really make a big difference if Apple is first or second? That really wasn’t GP’s point.
I expect it depends quite a bit on how specific of a definitions of "backdoors" we're talking about.

Our main OSes, desktop and mobile, have quite a few backdoors though I couldn't speak to whether the government forced them to do it. Mobile phones, mobile networks, and most (if not all) of the internet trunk lines include backdoors for the government to use. Data collection isn't technically a backdoor, though functionally it is as it allows the government to do what they want to while dodging regulations for search warrants and similar.

The Twitter files point to another backdoor, even if again not technically quite a software "backdoor".

If we stick to the strict definition of a backdoor, the CCP very likely has more control over companies and does require software backdoors for the government to access. In a more general sense though, I at least wouldn't consider the US or the EU to be meaningfully better about the government having access to and control of tech in much the same way.
Employment is a game of matching; the employer wants to match a skill set to a particular job.

It’s entirely likely people on these products don’t easily match internally.

The job market for people capable of working on Apple high end R&D is also likely much better at matching then Apples internal HR, simply because the market has so many more openings.
Social media activity seems to be really bad for certain kinds of content. On Twitter I frequently see art posts with thousands of likes and less than 10 comments. And inevitably a few of those replies will be pussy-in-bio spam bots. Even on Threads, accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers often end up getting between 10 and 20 comments as well.

It seems like if you want engagement you have to post some sort of bait content to encourage people to reply. This is often controversial stuff which gets people fired up, or some culture war nonsense.

The Internet was supposed to make us feel more connected than ever but it increasingly feels like whatever you create ends up being a shout into the void.

If you're sharing content that's primarily outside of the main platform, it often won't get as much reach as platform-native content. That's why every big creator always ends up making their own newsletter, in order to have a way to directly connect with people.
Your world is awfully black and white.
oh god "NHK ni Youkoso" came out 20 years ago already... Watching it as a teenager made a lasting impression on me, especially the depictions of depression and anxiety, the animation by Gonzo, and also the trumpet in the jazzy opening. That being said, it properly did not age well, so I'll stick to my nostalgia-tinted glasses.
Saving this article to point to next time someone asks me yet again "why not rust". I think one could explain the entirety of C in fewer words than this "easy mode" rust.
There are now even Gen3 night vision tubes being made in China.

They aren’t quite as good as US made ones yet, but it’s getting pretty close.
> Imagine you own an ice cream shop and you don't know how your dipping cabinet works.

Imagine you're a 16 year old working in an ice cream shop that you don't own.
[dupe]

Some more discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39937426

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39937620
I rarely click link here, because I come for the discussion on the subject, not the article. And most of them especially news and business sites are hostile from my POV (trackers, popups). I’m more likely to click if it’s a personal blog.
Their core competency was the Jobs' reality distortion field
Forcibly medicating a man for insisting on his innocence, even if his guilt seems certain, is another nightmarish aspect of this situation. By all means imprison the guy, but forcing him onto mind altering drugs because he refuses to admit his guilt is over the line.
WindCon2024: A Joke Too Far for Many
they’re police officers trying to do their best with limited time, not mathematicians trying to prove a point
Yeah, you're right, even though we could say the same about Signal and others. In my defense, I know [1] very well - it's not a website!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689796
That certainly often seems to be the case with me
I do wonder if a stack-based format would be easier for an LLM. Seems like a better fit for the attention mechanism. My suspicion (without having lifted a finger to check) is that it's the closing tags that make the difference for XML. Go stack-based and you can drop the opening tags, and save the tokens.
Apple believes that designing technology-mediated experiences is a core competency. That, and a large degree of overconfidence, are what got them into it. As to what kept them there: sunk costs and that same overconfidence?
It’s totally doable. I got my wife into this when we met in 2001. We vacationed 6 weeks a year through these various schemes.

If you have a source of business expenses, it’s easy. With regular consumer spend it’s more challenging but doable.

We empathized time at destination. If you’re going for value, you target airline and other upgrades. Our focus being time, we usually targeted hotel redemptions. There used to be a path to “launder” AMEX points and convert to a multiple of Hilton points through airline programs.
In context finding new jobs for ~1400 out of ~2000 people working on a car protect seems reasonable simply because it’s very different from their usual project.

I doubt they have much need for mechanical engineers, drivers, mechanics, etc. Still unpleasant for those laid off, but I like seeing companies take these kinds of risks.
> Is it also the case that the client apps SM push on people don't reveal link URLs to check any more?

Just twitter
iPhones, iPads and hell even the iPod line weren’t core competencies until they were released and did well. Apple for a long time was Apple Computers after all.
The submission originally had a much more descriptive title, but it was changed to match the article's title as per the rules.
They are separate in terms of behavior but not necessarily separate audiences. That is, some of the same people who follow you on social media may also visit your website and subscribe to your newsletter. But attribution between the channels is difficult to measure.
Your number one article is "4 maneiras de burlar paywalls de sites de jornais" which is "4 ways to bypass newspaper website paywalls". Seems like an easy way to bring users in from Google. There is nothing wrong with that, but that skews the results.

I don't think the lesson here is no one cares if your site is not on social media. Rather, if you create content in a language that is underserved, Google is your friend.

Couple that with the fact that you have had/have a social media presence, I wonder how much of the work was already done. You've acquired a large number of users already from social media. You've already benefited from it.

Further, you are posting this here. If Telegram and WhatsApp are social media, so is HN.
So? I still don't want some Russia troll farm to squat on an account with my name and likeness.
I spend primarily on credit cards but I still think it’s important to preserve the ability to transact without the government knowing. Privacy is best preserved when data is not created at all, rather than when data is protected by law.
It's nice to know this kind of stuff is hard for the experts too
I'm struggling to understand the author's logic:

They start by saying:

> Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.

then they go on to say:

> I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits."

before bragging:

> Our PR firm was one of the best in the business. In 18 months, they got press hits in over 60 different publications.

and then spinning a narrative that it isn't PR company or the company that hires the PR company, but it is the journalist who prints the information the company wants that is dishonest:

> PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information.

> If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters.

leading to an insult that lacks self-awareness:

> The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy.

On the other hand, this is almost 20 years ago, so they were much younger and presumably less nuanced in their thinking and experience.
[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39908579
https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/abc/
I inferred it based on the image's filename, alt text, and visual correspondence to the scene described in the poem.
Living brain imaged in unrivaled clarity thanks to the most powerful MRI machine
There are two of them. HarmonyOS is a fork of Android, another (I think it's officially called OpenHarmony) is a custom microkernel OS for IoT devices.
> Everyone has a mandatory ID card with a chip on it that's used to identify you.

Or you just get rid of your documents, claim to be a refugee, and just fabricate all the data.
This was on the front page but completely disappeared. Guess it was being flagged for no good reason. It's a good article.

Luckily I can still find yesterday's article about credit cards rewards at the top. I think there's a perverse incentive around flagging.
If the chief spy of a country doesn't understand the implications of publishing books from his personal account, then you cannot trust him whatsoever... The stupid are controlling the whole thing.
If you know for a fact that your wife and friends only like your professional success and not YOU, you need to either work on that or get out of those relationships -- or at least build new, additional ones.

I suspect you are exaggerating things in your head though. How will your wife or friends even know that you are only a 75th percentile coder (or whatever your profession is) and not a 99th percentile one? They don't, and can't, and you need to do whatever work is necessary to understand that their love for you is not actually conditional on working 90 hours a week or staying up to date on "the literature".

> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.

I'm not a doctor of any kind, so this isn't medical advice but: I've dealt with similar fear (usually I get scared of being in the bottom percentiles of whatever I'm doing rather than not being in the top, but the idea is the same), and IMO this feeling is enough to talk to a psychiatrist or therapist, because it is classic anxiety disorder thinking. If you really feel this way all the time (rather than just occasionally, which is pretty normal IMO -- our society tends to over-pathologize stuff like this) then talk therapy or an SSRI might help. Even if you don't think you are "crazy" or have any kind of disorder at all, talk therapy alone can improve your life dramatically. It has mine.
The email requirement at the end isn’t classy.
Road trips?? The article is about rentals! I didn't say a thing about road trips. Glad we cleared that up.
Drive-By Accessibility Tweaks
I couldn't help but notice that the butterflies in this animation are all dead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39585207
Have you checked out this section of the docs?

https://docs.flagsmith.com/clients/server-side#get-flags-for...
The statistic: "x% of twitter users clicked yes"
Why do so many Europeans commenting online seem to believe that television is real? Could media literacy really be that poor in Europe?
> I'm sure the organisation would have kept those 600 people if it made financial sense to!
Agreed. I once cross-compiled for Intel on an Apple Silicon machine while being on a Teams call. Guess what was heavier on the CPU…
Seems like you're splitting hairs. His point was that some of these services popular with the HN crowd aren't as popular elsewhere. And Signal has historically had a reputation of being used primarily by techies, not the general masses (even if the current numbers indicate that's shifted).
The stories people tell each other, on the other hand, have historically been more like fantasy than science fiction.

What would be on the gripping hand?

(I wonder if this would place science fiction in the "comedy" camp, in that comedies often revolve around people who believe they're special running into the same old problems that beset us all?)
Really good point here - couldnt the fake woods claim he was indeed the one paying into it, and claim it after he’s released from jail?

If the court has any credibility, they should first jail the fake one for a long time, then make things like his ss payments restitution for the real woods.
Agreed. From what I know, the positive points of certain alcohols such as wine which would protect against heart problems have either been denied, or the same advantages have been found in everyday non-alcoholic products (green tea if I remember well).
Who do you think actually builds out the wifi networks at schools? It's not exactly the Fine Arts teacher running CAT6 and creating subnets for the different departments. It's better to assume positive intent until proven otherwise when people want to help out their communities.
The US loves throwing poorly determined amounts of money at projects. For example:

PG&E gets to effectively tax Californians an amount of money determined, roughly, as whatever they can spend times 1.1. Guess who massively overpays and who ends up kicking an enormous amount of money toward PG&E for essentially no value.

The US allows medical providers to collect money on a basis that has essentially nothing to do with value delivered. Services end up very very expensive.

The US kicks approximately fixed amounts of money toward broadband providers. Guess who has no incentive whatsoever to maximize the value delivered for that price?

(Comcast recently quoted me approximately $27/foot to extend aerial fiber along an existing Comcast attachment, on a route with no complications whatsoever, so they can provide me (expensive) improved service. If they’re charging rates like this, then it doesn’t matter where the Federal assistance comes from: one way or another, everyone is massively overpaying.)

If the FCC wants to improve broadband cost-effectively, they should either attach conditions forcing their money to be well-spent or rework their process to enforce the existence of a genuinely competitive market. Then fiber could be installed at something approximating reasonable prices, and service could be delivered over that fiber at reasonable rates.)
Brilliant 4D chess move by Yossi Sariel: he's cleverly feigning a mistake, aiming to exit his role without formally resigning. This "mistake" provide his superiors with a pretext for his departure, all while sidestepping the events of October 7.
Not every company needs to build every single thing. You’re making it seem like axing an unprofitable product is a bad thing.