skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Who's to say they don't have slaves, or don't have good working conditions, etc.?

This is what social norms are for, and we have done it forever. The modern era has made this exponentially more difficult.

> Eventually I'll need to trade, and that trade will benefit both parties by making them both better off.

Yep yep, totally fine if you're not exploiting anybody.

> But by becoming better off, some value was captured: I value what I purchase equal to or more that what I gave up.

As long as you're creating value throughout the chain, you're doing just fine.

> Do I have to abstain from all trade if my marginal revenue exceeds my marginal cost?

This is actually an interesting question! The Luther piece touches on this a lot (where is the line between "Usury" and "Commerce"?). The answer he arrives on is no, you don't need to abstain, and that division of labor is not Usury.

The point is not to avoid profit, it's to avoid breaking the golden rule – there's no hard cutoff around how much profit is "too much" profit, but a rule of thumb that's often quoted (for whatever reason) is around 30% – i.e. if you see a gross profit that's consistently at or above that number, there's usually exploitation happening somewhere.

> How do I scale?

The answer depends on what we mean by scale. Revenues? Profits? Headcount? Volume of throughput?
It’s certainly interesting seeing the thread get attacked so obviously - that’s a first as far as I’ve seen on HN.

In terms of the actual story I think that we should be careful not to introduce insane KYC for contractors just to avoid the NK boogeyman.

If such measures were introduced, that would seriously restrict the ability to work with people from around the world. I also fear that scammy companies such as id.me will lobby for such measures in order to extract profit from companies who want to contract abroad, all the while not actually stopping sophisticated threat actors.
Trying to put the finishing touches on a Python package [1] for epidemic modeling using Compartmental models. This grew out of a series of blog posts I started writing during the pandemic [2] based on my professional experience in epidemic modeling in a previous life where I was the lead developer for a state of the art global epidemic model [3].

[1] http://github.com/DataForScience/epidemik

[2] https://github.com/DataForScience/Epidemiology101

[3] https://www.gleamviz.org/explore.html
Could you share the name (and what it does)f your startup?
Burning Up
The issue is the money is piped into the NK regime. The problem isn't that a North Korean did the work, but that it was done by a state-owned firm.
I absolutely hate going back home to the US and dealing with a self-checkout that assumes you are a thief.

Here in the Netherlands at the local stores, I walk up, scan my items, pay, and walk out. Randomly, the POS selects you for a check and a person comes by and scans a random 5-10 items from your cart to make sure you don’t have extra items. There’s also no “please but the item in the bagging area” bullshit. I literally scan the item and toss it in my backpack or cart; though you learn (from the random checks) not to put it in your backpack unless you want a random stranger digging through your backpack to scan items.

At some stores, you don’t even scan the items. They have an rfid system (similar to some libraries in the US) that just knows what you have. You then just double check the list and pay.

Just thinking about US self-checkout makes me angry. After being treated like an adult, it just makes you angry.
North Korea is no stranger to famine, so if you want food it's probably not the best place to go.

Even for tourists who they are trying to extract lots of hard currency from, the food quality is notoriously poor.
Yup. The site being advertised is proxied through Cloudflare, and they're also using Supabase.

Anyone from Cloudflare or Supabase care to remove your abusive customer? Also reported.
I am working on an app called Lime Reader. It's an app where you can read multiple "forum" like websites such as Hacker News, Lobsters, Tildes, Lemmy etc. from a single app with a familiar UI/UX. Screenshots:

https://imgur.com/a/3Ip4KVN

The origin of the idea came from my other app called HACK which has been an iOS and Android app for Hacker News for many years. I figured that I really wanted a similar app where I could read other forum like sites too. I have been working on this for a few months now and hoping to go live in the next few weeks. Starting with iOS, iPad and MacOS. Then Android too.
> TOO MUCH!

You'n'me both.

> I've been fighting depression and anxiety on / off the past year.

You'n'me both.

> 1. I have a small e-commerce site I'm almost ready to launch. Need to get over myself and the fear of "what if something goes wrong" and just fucking send it.

Link here at the end of the day?

> Custom pen plotter machine, I was stuck on this for a LONG TIME but last week I finally did enough diagnosing and troubleshooting to get it working! FEELS AMAZING!

Video of it running? I'd love to see what you've built. YouTube channels that talk about this stuff are by far my favorite channels.

> It feels great to be productive both at work and on my projects at home.

Yes! I'm excited for you! Keep moving! Keep seeking joy in your work!
I don't think it's a particularly sad hill to die on – Meta has proven themselves to be exploitative, invasive, and downright malicious time and time again.
So if it is possible with comments, does it mean it is possible with voting? I'm wondering how many posts recently came to main page upvoted by bots
It wasn't so much "science was settled" as much as the plastic industry lobbying to improve their image and put the burden on consumers to "recycle" plastics, despite knowing it wasn't going to help things. And unlike conspiracy theories -- we have evidence.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-pl...
Yep, 45 years old hardware, still getting software updates. Hey Apple, JPL is close to you, can you get someone to bike over and see how they do it? Thanks!
Escape the output based on the context a string is being used in versus trying to sanitize for all use cases on input.

This will guarantee that you’re safe no matter how a piece of content is used tomorrow (just need a new escaping function for that content type), and prevent awkward things like not letting users use “unsafe” strings as input. JSX and XHP are example templating systems that understand context and escape appropriately.

If a user wants their title to be “hello%0a%3C%25%3D%20File.open%28%27flag.txt%27%29.read%20%25%3E”, so be it.

Use input validation / parsing to ensure data types aren’t violated, but not as an output safety mechanism.
In my opinion it’s indeed like Greenspun’s 10th rule; it’s a vague imitation. If people weren’t so squeamish about parans the world would be a nicer place. The tech is there for a long time already.
Look up maps showing areas that are at risk of deadly temperatures, droughts, floods, and other climate events for the country you live in… it’s concerning to put it mildly.

Most governments have made these maps but they’re not always easy to find (or available to the rest of us at all).

There are also much more detailed maps that a consultancy (moodys I think?) has for sale for hedge funds, insurers, and other speculators that are very in-depth. But they’re way too expensive for the rest of us to get.
great, another Android.
Thank you! Definitely recommend still brushing and flossing while using Peak. We do 3 sprays and brush just like we’re using traditional toothpaste. We’ll clarify on the site!
At some point maybe stop outsourcing and just do the work.

Boeing used to make airplanes. Now they outsource the work of "make the airplanes" and all it cost them was their reputation.

Less outsourcing, more just doing the work please.
Is the GNAA alive and well???
in the meantime the market for lemons that is sketchy batteries has caused many residential buildings in NYC to ban e-bikes entirely which is unfortunate
I couldn't believe this worked when one of my friends did it! Felt like such an easy cheat lol

My parents likely wouldn't have approved but this payphone conundrum was what lead to me and my friends attempt to build a red box, which never worked well for us but we learned a lot in the attempt!
The few times I was involved in some outsourcing the outsourcing company was contractually obliged to actually be the one doing the work. Not that folks might not cheat and get away with it, but there were financial implications and a somewhat close working relationship that meant that ... it would have been hard to fake.

In this case does the original company just not care at all?
And this website ignores them. It will still summarize your video but won’t provide your profile icon or video title.
Yep, I am sure it happens but this is the first time I've actually seen it!
What's up with the botspam in this thread? Looks like hundreds of sex bot accounts are being created. Pages seem really slow to load currently... someone should notify dang.
I was a student at the 2018 racket school mentioned in the link.

All of the instructors, including Felleisen and Butterick, were nothing but helpful and friendly inside and outside of the classroom.

Even taking that link completely at face value that Felleisen is a Torvalds-type asshole in certain personal interactions... his work including How To Design Programs had such a positive impact on my life and the lives of others that I wouldn't discourage people from taking advantage of it.
What are the benefits of this over dev containers? (I just do BE and web stuff, so maybe it's just not for my use case)
I'm "working" on a blog, https://blog.javascripttoday.com. I recently added lots of updates to the main site.

Have tons of unfinished articles waiting to be published and a few other things to create.

I'm also working on jitsujournal.com, which is something I'd like to have for myself, primarily. I also launched a chess club in my area, which gained massive interest which quickly died down, sadly.

With a full-time job, it's hard to maintain everything. :/

Ah, I didn't realize it was a site. Interesting!
Are these worthy of being put on the site? I'm not so sure.
iCloud is unreliable, Dropbox is reliable, but sometimes the connectors it uses are unreliable.

Unfortunately there's no perfect solution yet across all platforms
A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy
Ask HN: Llama-2-7B adapter merged with llama-2-7B-chat model?
I realized that I fine-tuned a llama-2-7b model and merged the adapter with llama-2-7b-chat model. This was a mistake. But when I ran inference on benchmark medqa tests and found that the llama-2-7b-chat merged with llama-2-7b adapter out performs a base llama-2-7b-chat model.

Why did this work - was this a fluke? Or are adapter's modifications compatible with both the general Llama-2-7b model and the chat-specific version? Thanks!
Maybe some notes on how to handle degrading power supplies while they're at it.
To be fair, this kind of spam seems like you could output it with a shellscript.
> There are certain combinations of crime and job that are sensibly going to be risky, but how do you prevent companies from being overcautious?

Your words imply we do need to do that.
What we need now is the bot to post here and demonstrate a total lack of sense of irony.
the TSA is literal street sweepings, but that does not mean private companies should be able to sell the ability to skip lines in public airports. if the government wants to implement its own program they can.
New? No. Fully agreed.

But there's misrepresenting, and then there's "What the hell does this have to do with the movie I just watched?"

Good advertising (and I speak as an advertiser) sets up your expectations appropriately so that once you've experienced the product (in this case a movie) you leave satisfied.

Bad advertising promises you something completely different so that you leave the experience disappointed, which results in bad word of mouth.

Honestly, what none of the advertising for Civil War accomplishes (and I really liked the movie) is telling you that this is a movie about war journalism more than anything else. Yeah, there's a "this could happen here" message. But the core experience of the film is what it's like (presumably) to be a war correspondent. Didn't expect that at all going into the theatre.

Also... I loved Happy People. But yes, it's depressing. Beautifully so, but not a comedy.
Implementing Bret Victor's Learnable Programming (2014)
Ah, fair distinction.

Though also, attribution to ads is bullshit. When we turned off our ad spend at both companies, it became clear that most of new revenue was from direct (organic) sources. We had been advertising to people who were going to buy our products anyway.
Per https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments the flood stopped 2 minutes ago.
AI senior dev as a VS Code extension
Where did the PFAS contained in the ocean water spray originate?

I'm pretty sure industrial polluters are responsible for the bulk of it.
Boy the bots are thirsty today... But anyho, most of this is actually news to me. One bit that doesn't make sense to me is how caves or rock overhangings don't provide protection. I'm not following that, if it saying that the electricity will still make it's way back into the cave floor? Does it matter if you're 3 feet from the opening or 30 feet?
I bet for a billion they could make a single device that lasts decades too.
Jumps/calls are actually be pretty cheap with modern branch predictors. Even indirect calls through vtables, which is the opposite of most programmers intuition.

And if the devirtualisation leads to inlining, that results in code bloat which can lower performance though more instruction cache misses, which are not cheap.

Inlining is actually pretty evil. It almost always speeds things up for microbenchmarks, as such benchmarks easily fit in icache. So programmers and modern compilers often go out of their way to do more inlining. But when you apply too much inlining to a whole program, things start to slow down.

But it's not like inlining is universally bad in larger program, inlining can enable further optimisations, mostly because it allows constant propagation to travel across function boundaries.

Basically, compilers need better heuristics about when they should be inlining. If it's just saving the overhead of a lightweight call, then they shouldn't be inlining.
Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
You get nerd-sniped. Assigned a bug to squash. Some new tech or gadget arrived, to familiarize yourself with.

While researching / reading up / debugging, you stumble upon something interesting. Upon looking into that, yet another subject catches your attention.

You know how this goes. So... (see title). Bonus questions: what intermediate steps did you pass along the way? What stuck in your mind the most?
Yep, completely agree with you on this. Intuition is often wrong, or at least outdated.

When I'm building stuff I try my best to focus on "correctness", and try to come up with an algorithm/design that will encompass all realistic use cases. If I focus on that, it's relatively easy to go back and convert my `decimal` type to a float64, or even convert an if statement into a switch if it's actually faster.
>I'd have thought that since, according to countless headlines, younger generations are drinking less alcohol that they'd be offsetting that with consumption of more coffee.

Why are these two things even remotely related? It seems like you just stuck two completely different thoughts together.

Younger people are drinking more "energy drinks" than coffee I think.
Only people who's last name start with an A can relate. The rest, I have found, just don't care. It's a curse you have to carry from 1st grade and all through school and college.
This felt a bit all over the place. I can certainly believe people are reading less long-form. But I'm not sure this article even makes a great argument for that even given a couple of numbers.
This honestly seems like a bit of a vapid piece — vascullating between facile, melancholy speculations with little to back them up on the way to concluding very little.
Reminds me of the Vertu cell phone, which the iPhone basically killed.
Things are bad, so make no attempt to better or even avoid worsening them?
I've always wondered why enforcement of this rule didn't take delivery apps into account.

The same way they subsidize rideshare vehicles, it seems like a no-brainer to subsidize much cheaper bikes. They could even use it as a branding opportunity
At the end of each spam message there is a unique 15 character string. Anyone know what purpose the string is supposed to serve?
In the midst of searching for what my particular contribution might be in the synthesis of Fediverse / IndieWeb / $other_such_efforts. Personal web page with some experiments is surely first, but if anyone else is like-minded, I'd love to know what you're doing.

Discovery, search, UX, advocacy, are all angles I think about. Protocols seem to be in a good place, so that's less likely to need new work.
Wrong choice of word maybe, but without dedication to the craft outside of the limited work skill set you can't truly expect to expand your skills.

I keep getting asked at appraisals "rate out of 10 your ability to develop new skills", and every time I rate it 6 because I'm not learning anything new. I learnt new skills outside of work because my company doesn't see value in non work related skills.

ML and LLMs was one such skill I picked up in 2022, nobody else was interested when I attempted to start conversations and provided a demo to the department. Roll onto the end of 2023 and it became a hot skill that got me large pay rise and now I'm apparently the expert.

Currently I'm learning new system architectures (e.g dbos.dev) and new programming languages (ts,
rust, haxe), again no value because we already have a barely scalable but stable old system arch, and we're a Java only shop by virtue of that being the only skill other staff know or want to know.

Is that inherently wrong? No. Is it a problem? Well that depends on your perspective.
https://archive.ph/obrl7
Which probiotic strains? Also, great job!
It's not so bad as long as it's formatted well and adjustable (varies by app, and of course... some PDFs are just terrible due to weird static formatting). I have an endless number of books to read no matter where I am.
Too many presumptions.
It seems to be going in waves, and it also appears they are getting removed in batches.
Our of curiosity why did you think Invincible had abysmal animation? Which is ironic since in the last seasons they even broke the fourth wall and did a tongue in cheek poke at their audience who criticize their animation quality explaining how they're under crunch and what techniques they use to cut corners. Quite clever actually.

Didn't think they were covering up their North Korean animators though lol.
There's arguably also the part where it was, AFAIK, mainly driven by needs of Maxima and it's declaration (or so I recall) of focusing on CLtL first didn't help things either.

In comparison, ECL which forked from the same family seems to work out much better over time.
I agree with what you said but in this particular case, it actually was a direct integer equality check, there was zero risk of hitting side effects and that was plainly obvious to me, the checker, and compiler.
You should watch Being There. Intelligence isn't everything, sometimes just being kind is all it takes to succeed.
Here, you have good advice: "I ... consider regex expressions as the wrong solution. They're notoriously hard to get right."

However, the conclusion of "use something somebody else wrote that does it properly", while valid, is asking a lot. As regex is hard to get right, don't assume the code you find on the web or book or via some other means works correctly.

My rule is if I didn't write it and can't wrap my head around the code to convince myself it is the right solution, I don't use it. And as I think others have written, there are some interactive online tests for regex expressions that can help.
Early Validation Botdevs
Hi everyone, Johannes here. I am reaching out to you because I am validating an idea for a reverse job platform for bot developers. I feel that many job opportunities get lost, So I am interested in your opinion. Do you think that a reverse job platform (see details on how it works here https://botdevs.io ) would make your life easier? I am curious about your opinion
Not really. Outsourcing and then claiming ignorance is not a defense against financing North Korea.
Whatever the actual device I use to read it--which is typically not a phone--I really don't especially want a bunch more paper in my house that I'll have to get rid of.
This more than anything says why we need SORA AI now, and to replace these animators with AI. We cannot be allow to have reputable US firms engaging with a foreign adversary. Replacing these workers with AI should do the trick in this compliance snafu.
Everyone should be using glass deposit bottles.
Llama-3 now top-5 on the Arena leaderboard
I got used to normal look controls with practice but lots of 2005ish console games have inverted controls as defaults. I started a playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on Gamecube to find that is has inverted left/right camera controls as the default. Also, GoldenEye 007 for the N64 has inverted up/down camera controls (if I remember correctly). If you're a certain age, you lived through a time when there was not an accepted default control scheme so console games just picked defaults and moved on. We got used to those defaults. There was a period of time where choice of selection of up/down inversion was seen as a must-have to even play a game (multiplayer split screen) and zero discussion or complaints would arise over 2-3 minutes of everyone (all 4 of us) setting their controls after every console reset. Eventually non-inverted controls became the accepted default. This likely happened during a time that many of us gamed less so we might not have the muscle memory of relearning the new defaults. That's my experience on the whole thing anyway.
Ocaml, being in the ML family, makes heavy use of Algebraic Datatypes. For example, from https://www.ocaml.org/manual/5.1/api/List.html we can encode lists like this:

type 'a t = 'a list =
| []
| (::) of 'a * 'a list

In other words, values of type `'a list` are either `[]` (the empty list, like `nil` in Lisp), or `(::)` applied to two arguments (prepending an element to a list, like `cons` in Lisp). We can tell whether a particular value is one of the other by storing a bit of information, called a "tag". We can later branch on that bit to perform pattern-matching.

In constrast, the "tagless" encoding seems closer to Church-encoding. A Church-encoded list is a function which accepts two arguments, say `x` and `y`:

- An "empty list" will return `x` as-is.

- A non-empty list will call `y` with two arguments: one argument is the first element of the list, and the other argument is the result of calling the tail of the list with `x` and `y`.

Such functions have many other names, like "elimination forms", or "induction/recursion schemes", etc.

The linked page shows an example of implementing lists using the tagless approach, which like Church encoding but collects together the required parts in a record. I reckon a similar approach could be implemented via modules, but am not too experienced in Ocaml to know how easy/awkward that would be.
Super cool escape-room-esque game! I wish though, that the click-to-walk was a bit more pre-defined paths. For example, If I click on a spot thinking I could interact with it, I walk to the wall and am now so close to the wall that it becomes disorientating, and I have to click back to view the room.
Senate Approves Section 702 Reauthorization, Keeps Only the Bad Stuff