skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is the culling

Insurance companies are very keen to get as much risk as possible off their books before the climate gets even more extreme in its volatility

Good goes with bad, so long as the bad goes, some good going too is undesirable but OK because they are aware if the catastrophic climate events looming

The insurance companies are behaving logically, probably legally IANAL, but for people who are simply caught in the wash it is unfair

This is part of the huge systematic disruptions we are all going to have to adapt to, or die from, due to climate change

Worrying times
If multiple insurance companies say you need a new roof, you need a new roof. Full stop. There’s no justification necessary.
Allstate refused to offer a policy quote because my house is fuzzed out on its street view photo from 2011.
Center for Biological Diversity | Tucson, AZ, US | Full-time | Hybrid/ONSITE | https://biologicaldiversity.org | non-profit

We are hiring for a Network and Security Engineer.

https://biologicaldiversity.bamboohr.com/careers/70
Employment schedule might shape our health as we approach middle adulthood
Apple absolutely has an incentive to protect their customers. There’s a reason Android has the horrible reputation it does now, and it’s because Google didn’t give a fuck.
That's so fascinating, thanks. Does aphantasia give you any trouble in your daily life? Or does it end up being a non-issue?
I can’t load the article because of the captcha, but based on the comments I’m assuming it’s about loud motorbike exhausts.

It’s not just bike exhausts that are loud either. Every night I hear a nearly endless stream of modified cars with pop and bang tunes. There’s not even the supposed justification that it makes you safer in a car, it’s just people doing deliberately inconsiderate things with their vehicles. It’s inflicting annoyance and misery on people for no reason but clout, and we should have less tolerance for it in society generally. It’s also the same drivers who are racing through city centres. I don’t know if they’re just racking up loads of fines and not paying them, or if they’re using swapped plates, but either way, it needs to be enforced better.
On the other hand, WAFs are another kind of security theater. They won't stop any determined attacker. Usually you just need to change your payload to make it work. Unless you tweak the rules a lot, to the point where you could encode then in your application as well (for example "user_id" field in the POST data must consist only of decimal numbers)
About when was this? Just curious about the time period
In a different way. Loathe loud motorcycles and really hate bicyclists?

But you are right. I can't recall the time anyone rolled coal on motorcyclists, much less killed them trying.
>Maybe now my fellow riders can agree that their motorbikes are a bit too damn loud, and tone it down.

It would be awesome if the rest of us didn't have to rely on the possible good sense of a motorcyclist and, instead, noise pollution laws were strictly enforced. I highly doubt any Harley out there is even capable of operating below the legal limit in CA of 80dbA.
The major problem here is that our government is turning us all into criminals. Using a VPN doesn't make it legal for you to consume anonymously, even if doing so makes it harder to enforce, at least for now. Soon VPN use will be illegal in some states. Once again, hard to enforce. But these are things which, if for some reason the gov't decides to target you (in which case they can/will spend the effort to discover), can be used against you.

This is not a technology problem, it's a legislative one. It's another example of some of us are using the power of the government to constrain other people's behavior.
> You do what the payment card industry has been doing for decades

What? Mandate a bunch of paper-thin worthless rules that tie up security & engineering teams and don’t actually add measurable security improvements?

I’d be very interested in seeing the data that shows PCI-DSS has had any impact. I spent a previous life breaking into PCI compliant companies, and it didn’t offer the tiniest speed bump.

This is a horrible recommendation.
Tokyo subway trains are manual. American train drivers just suck.
https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Wizard-Vicuna-13B-Uncensored...
What happens if we mandate that all concrete be made of these rocks?
Michigan State Police somewhat controversially switched to BMW motorcycles in 2012, and actually disbanded the motorcycle unit for awhile because of safety issues. Apparently it's returning this year, still using the BMWs.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2024/02/15/m...
I worked on software that runs in an IoT gateway on bucket trucks used in the power industry, that raises audible and visual alarms if a worker doesn't have their harness clipped onto the bucket while they're operating it. In particular, I wrote a Finite State Machine library in Python that supports what tracks what's happening with the bucket, and helped develop the (MQTT) protocol to communicate with the backend. It was a lot of fun, and very satisfying.

Having said this, some of my more cynical friends have told me: "You weren't saving lives. You were just helping these companies reduce their insurance premiums."
Yes, but those valves were rusted stuck open all the time and nobody could change them unless they emptied the whole water circuit, which never happend. And the whole installation was so full of rust, any new valve would only last a year at most until it got stuck again.
> I just feel trapped and corralled.

It might be more than a feeling.
Can I get a socially approved amount of porn then?

Would there be porn rations?
So to be clear, are you saying we don't need stack traces because we should handle 100% of errors instead?
Oh, because Apple has the plaintext file hashes even under ADP, if those files exist anywhere else in any user account in iCloud (that doesn’t have ADP enabled) then Apple has the plaintext file contents too, so it’s effectively non-e2ee for those files.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ tells me the dollar is worth 60% of what it was worth in 2004, that’s a lot more than a third. Where did you get that figure from?
I feel like this is the sort of thing Alphabet was supposed to do, but instead Google’s ad machine steamrolled any actually new ideas and even now, after having OpenAI start to take a bite of their lunch, Google’s ad business is calling all the shots on what is/isn’t allowed to be built.

If Google had the guts to put a bunch of teams in a new company under alphabet with the explicit goal to disrupt Google Search via any means necessary they’d be in a much better positions today.

Real respect to Namecheap, this takes guts to commit too.
”democratic governments collapsing back into autocracies”

I feel this statement in my bones.

We have one side making all the laws, the other side doing away with laws, both of them acting solely for political points.

No one in the middle is “radical” enough (by definition) to push back. Hard to see how that doesn’t end in major conflict with a single winner, as you say.
I use VPN for bypassing blocks created either by government of the country I currently live in or established as a sanctions by another governments.

I set up wireguard and unbound on VPS in Amsterdam and share with 10-15 people by posting wireguard config in private telegram channel.

Ironically enough, but I block porn access using StevenBlack hosts converted into Unbound config by awk script, so porhhub dot com will return REFUSE dns response from unbound.

I know, that is not impressive idea of how to utilize computing power of the VPS, but I also used it for running tor snowflake (disabled because of eating too much ram), running tor obfs4_proxy (would also eat much ram, but that can be adjusted, I don't remember clearly why I disabled it at one point) and I used it as a server for Postgres that I tried to use for uni's coursework on databases.

Maybe I am too lazy to setup tools like zapret for bypassing deep packet inspection locally on my laptop or on router.
But still there should be a ton of things that can be done on the same vps.
Dictation has to be corrected and requires knowledge of how to use a computer. I’m telling you that most of the employees at BigCo have the technical prowess of proverbial grandparents. The fact that they can open zoom and outlook at all is a small miracle.
Well if I could shake my magic wand and instantly convert all my (and other) C code to some kind of MemorySafeC code, I would. Unfortunately, there is no such magic wand, and all we can do is to rewrite tens of millions of lines of C code to another language with different tradeoffs and different compatibility. It is, in other words, usually not possible.
I'm honestly tempted by the shared hosting because of the price alone. No, I wouldn't host anything too serious there but that's way cheaper than I've seen from someone like DreamHost (where I have an old account that's not worth migrating super old sites from 10+ years ago off). I'd like to move my blog off wordpress.com and have a semi-managed WP instance instead (so I don't have to pay Wordpress and arm and a leg for plugins). I don't want to manage a VPS, I do enough of that for my day and side job and I did that for many years for my blog and hated it.
One of my most fun projects of the 2010s was an event extraction system my team and I developed that could extract events like floodings, fires, terrorist attacks and several others, determine their properties (when, where, how many fatalities, monetary damage etc.) with the added capability that it could tell whether an event in a tweet (on "X", the system formerly known as "Twitter") was the same event that an agency news article talked about.

There's a little video we made for our KDD'18 paper about it:
https://www.kdd.org/kdd2018/accepted-papers/view/an-extensib...

Another cool project was to develop a state of the art legal search engine that was put into production across law firms in the US, and that was/is used by the U.S. supreme court justices (they were given anonymous accounts so even we could not tell who entered which query).
s/cigarettes/weed/ and watch how many people suddenly get angry.

The problem is the government telling people what to do, period.
Someone’s family doesn’t even know to be thankful to you, because dad came home after it squeaked at him.
I used to leave porn downloading overnight over 56k in the mid 90s. They’ll just have to get a little more organised about it.
So if a doctor provides a written note they would reject that note because it was done through a virtual consultation? The doctors note should be sufficient and the fact that it was done virtually should be irrelevant and confidential. How is that legal?
The metal barriers currently being tested, while not an ideal solution, are one example of a solution that could save lives with minimal cost. Barriers that are not aligned to the doors and move up vertically from the edge of the platform (but stay down if someone is in the way) once a train approaches could be another idea.

Traditional doors like you see in many parts of Asia probably aren't the answer, but if this sort of complete solution were installed, the middle conductor position could be eliminated, resulting in labor savings. Of course this would never happen due to politics.

Service needs to improve and this may be a better use of funds. I would say that safety is a citywide problem, not an MTA-specific issue, though.
> You see, cybersecurity is broken because of the lack of consequences. It's really that simple. When literally nothing happens when some stupid service gets popped and loses your data they had no business collecting in the first place, this kind of thing will happen over and over and over again. Why the fuck do you need my home address just so I can copy and paste some GIFs? Because you want to sell this data to data brokers, and you know there will be absolutely no negative consequences if you mishandle this data, fucking over the people who keep your business afloat. So, companies big and small fuck things up and we need to clean up the mess and face the consequences. Sounds about right.

10 years from now: AI somehow knows every single tiny detail about your life and can accurately predict any decision before you even made it. How could it have come to this? Clearly, it's just the fundamental superiority of AI compared to the human intellect. It's just the inevitable march towards the singularity. There is nothing we could have done to prevent this...
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. Stateless is very good for privacy and I agree with that approach for a multi-user instance, (which I suppose is the most common use-case).

I'm picturing more of an instance-wide configuration of domain blocks for a private, single-user, self-hosted instance. But I understand this may not be the intended use of the project.
America: Land of Gun Care and Health Control
There's no difference, you can go look at an Amazon listing for Lao Gan Ma and it says this:

"Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp (Chili Oil Sauce)"
Yeah, I find picking the audience difficult too. For my blog posts, I want to include the details for specialized readers, but also make the post accessible to the generally technical readers (roughly the HN crowd). (If I wanted to write for only the first group, I'd write academic papers.)

My solutions are to add enough background for someone who isn't an expert (even if it seems repetitive), and to use extensive footnotes for information that most people won't care about. Also, I try to put topics into a broader framework: a few paragraphs on history and why the topic is important. A narrative framework helps too, so even if someone doesn't follow all the details, they get a sense of going on a path e.g. from problem to solution. I also try to break up massive chunks of text with photos or diagrams but worry that I lean on this too heavily.

When I read popular books on scientific topics, I try to study the techniques that they use. For example, "An immense world" is crammed full of interesting facts and stories, keeping the book even though it is discussing technical concepts of sensory perception. "Immune" describes the immune system in detail, making heavy use of metaphors and imagery and repeating these throughout the book. Other books focus on the people, moving the technical details into the background.

I'm no expert on this, of course. People seem to like my blog posts, though, so I figured I'd share my thoughts.
> Researchers found that even the loudest pipes are very hard to hear in a modern car.

Somewhat related, but I think it's so weird all the hate cyclists listening to music get. I don't do it myself, but I soo often read online motorists being angry on some cyclist with their airpod in or something. But even then, a cyclist is probably much more aware of their surroundings. If that's the standard that should be applied, drivers should be mandated to drive with their windows rolled down and no music as well..

Also, this shows how useless a small bell is on a cycle to alert drivers. Hence why have a 115 dB AirZound attached to my bike as well. Sure gets their attention when they think their negligence was about to get them t-boned by a truck.
And Canadian auto-parts prices are through the roof anyway. If there's a factory-gate price increase/supply issue, there's room for margin compression instead of raising prices. Maybe?
Any good pointer to this direction?
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

George Orwell, 1984
The English language branding on the jar says "Chili Crisp". I'm literally looking at it in my pantry right now because now I wanna make Laoganma and Peanut Butter Toast
Pathologic, a Drupal module which uses some simple heuristics to find and correct broken links and image paths in content which might happen because the content was migrated between servers, the URL of the server it was hosted on changed (such as when they started using HTTPS - early versions of this module predated the "all sites must use HTTPS" idea), the content used relative paths but was being viewed in a context where a full URL was necessary like a feed reader, etc.

It came about when I was working on the site for a local newspaper where the writers would work on articles using an internal copy of the site which would then be migrated to the live site when published, but when they linked to other articles, they would often copy-paste the URL of the article as it was on that internal site, causing a broken link when the article was published. Rather than try to teach a bunch of crusty journalists what relative paths were, I just wrote a bit of code to fix those URLs for them. With the client's permission I later cleaned up and open-sourced that module.

At its peak it was installed on over 70,000 Drupal installations that we know of (not all of them reported usage data). It's still being developed, though by other developers in the last few years as I have lost interest (and client work) in Drupal, but I'm still quite proud of it, and I still love to hear from people who say it was a must-have for their sites and made their lives so much easier.

https://drupal.org/project/pathologic
Ask HN: Does Apple ban apps if they use private APIs?
I was looking at the recent OpenSwiftUI post and was curious about "unofficial APIs" and "private internal Apple APIs"

Does anyone have experience with this? Thanks Cocoa/Swift/macOS/iOS devs for any wisdom that you'd like to share

Seems like it's similar to using the Java internal APIs, but if they are available in the JVM I can use and ship them. The complication seems to stem from their audit process - if they find a usage in the app bundle they can just not allow the app on the App Store, so I'm curious how this works out in practice.
Let's Compute – Issue 1 (1990) [pdf]
I am one of the main maintainers and contributors of Biome [0], a formatter and linter for the web.
It is great to see that so many users are enthusiastic about Biome. It is really gratifying to work on a project that is appreciated and useful to the community.

[0] https://biomejs.dev/
What technologies did you use?
There is already something called Kiwi in the Kafka space.

https://github.com/domwood/kiwi-kafka
When I started my job as an intern, I was surprised to learn that before each release, the techlead of our team would always manually verify every commit in the release branch to make sure that the issues in the issue tracker that correspond to the commits are actually marked as "to be merged" and greenlit by QA, that there's no commits accidentally merged from other branches which aren't ready for a release yet (juniors often mismerge by accident), he also checked that all commits from the original feature branches were merged and none were missed (happens sometimes) etc. It would take him 1-2 hours to sift through all commits every time (each release would incorporate tons of features/fixes and commits weren't squashed, so there was a ton of work). The techlead also didn't allow anyone to do this work because he feared people wouldn't be as attentive as him. I remember there was one time when it was 11 PM and he was still verifying the commits and the release managers had to wait and couldn't go home.

I wrote a script which finds new commits not present in the master branch and compares them to the corresponding issues in the issue tracker (each commit message has an issue ID as a rule so it's easy to find the connections), and then generates a nice report like "the release branch cannot be released as is because issue 1234 is not marked as ready by QA, while commit 3456 is not present in any of the listed feature branches and could be a result of an accidental merge".

After we started using this script, the time it took to verify release branches decreased to something like 10 minutes. The techlead finally decided to delegate this kind of check to other devs (not a bottleneck anymore).

The idea was then copied by all other teams (web devs, etc.) and the script is still in use today, with many more features than I originally envisioned.

That small silly script was probably my most useful contribution because it saved a lot of time for everyone.
Before Python, I believe Fortran (one of the first programming languages) was for many years a key language in scientific computing.

MATLAB is a proprietary computing platform with its own language that was very widely used (and probably still the standard in some fields of engineering). The fact that it is proprietary and the language is not great as a general programming language were significant drawbacks to wide adoption.

As far as ML is concerned, the deep learning revolution happened when Python was the dominant language for scientific computing (mostly due to NumPy and SciPy), so naturally a lot of the ecosystem was built to have Python as the main (scripting) language. The rest is history.

As far as "attempts to recreate similar ecosystem":

PyTorch (currently the most popular deep learning framework), was originally Torch (initial release: 2002 - long before "Deep Learning" was a thing) with Lua as the scripting language. Python's momentum in 2010's meant that eventually it was rewritten in Python thus becoming PyTorch.

Julia language is a famous somewhat recent example (first release 2012, stable 1.0 in 2018) of a language that was built partially to address some of Python's shortcomings and to "replace" it as the default for scientific computing. It didn't succeed - it's hard to move people away from an ecosystem with so much head start and momentum as Python had in the 2010s.
If they did this for all social media I might pick up guitar
I won’t contest laoganma, but I’m pretty sure Chang still maintains ownership, and Mariscal is just the CEO?
I really (err, vehemently) disagree with this feedback.

> Your writing is not clear to me. Using the word “really” is extraneous.

What's not clear? He said the article helped him, it seems pretty clear to me. The "really" was for emphasis, which is fine.

> Using “I think” is also extraneous; I assumed these are your thoughts.

"I think" indicates the degree of certainty. The author is uncertain but deems it likely.

> As the author notes, replace “it” with “the article”, or better yet a specific quote or idea distilled from the article.

The previous sentence says "the article", and the next one says "it" to avoid repetition. Saying "the article" twice would be awkward.

Very odd feedback, given how obviously out of place the corrected sentence would look.
Please move to every country on the planet and replicate your work there.
Buying Chinese vehicle over Tesla because you hate Musk is some S-tier psy-op work by mass media.