skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comment hits the crux of what OP was really getting at. It's not that software itself is an inherently bad trade; it's what's been happening to it and why.

> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product

Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.

It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.

As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.

This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.

The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
Microsoft is expanding the Secure Future Initiative
A quite nice and interesting, if subjective, list. I agree with most of its selection for the Romantic period, though I would add a little more Tchaikovsky and Grieg.

But a real objection would be the writer's assertion that Baroque is less suited for beginners. Just listen to some concerti grossi from the Italian masters (Albinoni, the Marcellos, Corelli, and such) and you'll be, I think, easily convinced otherwise.
https://pauseai.info/
The article mentions Seatrec that have more information: https://seatrec.com/technology/
They replenished the dirt on the islands with night soil dredged up from the bottom of the lake every year so it was basically a mound of fertilizer that’s always soaked through with water.

It’s as close to an ideal growing condition as pre-industrial societies had.
This finally unlocks the ESPHome and other hobbyist ecosystems for Firefox. Bizarre why they are so vehemently against supporting this API.
cool project. getting insecure form warnings when submitting.

you'll want to spin up an ingress (nginx, ..) to front your requests & use TLS (let's encrypt)

edit: the CSV i used had dates in 2024 -- got this back

"Timestamps are from year 2024 which is in the future."
This thing is going to be absolutely encrusted with barnacles af some point. How cool is that?
Judge the AI that exists, not the AI you imagine
I use this paper whenever I teach information theory. If you are mathematically inclined, I’d recommend you to read the demonstration of his two main theorems, it’s illuminating.
Discussion [0] (148 points, 3 days ago, 30 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40213024
Another issue is that the term "document" is also used to refer to XML or HTML.
Another great read from Shannon https://archive.org/details/bstj28-4-656
Yes it was some of that certainly. I could gauge roughly what kind of effort the problem would take, what kind of constraints it would have to run with and select among the tools I am comfortable with. I read about Erlang but never did anything with it. From what I know though it would not necessarily be better at this job than CL and learning another language on the go was not in the plans.

But isn't it the deal with all programming language choices? Ultimately the only true programming language is machine code, the rest are just abstractions for our wetware's benefit.
I agree the playdate is definitely the “quirky $200 teenage engineering designed device” to pick up between the two
> It may only work on gnome...

Which already has an integrated screen recorder that works fairly well.
Yes, I didn't mean to say it was impossible. Merely that the vast majority of home gardeners aren't doing it. If you have enough space to grow enough of something to keep a decent genetic pool going (which already excludes the vast majority of home gardeners), then it is certainly possible to either/or preserve a given strain or adapt a plant to your very specific micro conditions.

Most home gardeners can much more easily support the maintenance of old strains by buying heirloom seeds from breeders.

However, if one has the space, time, skills, and interest to do what you are doing, then by all means go ahead.
Yeah that's fair. CEOs being human, it seems unreasonable to expect them to never have opinions, but given the power dynamics/differential they absolutely must be held to a very high standard. This comment didn't feel at all like a threat to me given my personal experience (it felt like a blatant statement of fact), so while I don't agree that this broke the law, I do agree it isn't something he should have said and he needs to do better.

Though personally, I'd much rather know my CEOs real opinion on things, because whether they say it out loud or not they still believe it. I'd rather know where people stand than have to guess/assume.
And what is your recourse? There's no private cause of action for HIPAA violations.
I agree -- people often hear "uncensored model" and immediately jump to all sorts of places, but there are very practical use-cases that benefit from unhindered models.

In my case, we're attempting to use multi-modal models essentially for NSFW-detection with quantified degrees of understanding about the subjects in question (for a research paper involving historical classic art). Model censorship tends to not want to let us ask _any_ questions about such subject matter, and it has greatly limited the choice of models that we can use.

Being able to easily turn censorship off for local language models would be a great boost to our workflow, and we might not have to tiptoe around the prompt engine so carefully.
There seems to be a trend of people building frontends to already existing tools, then advertising their software as though it was itself implementing the underlying functionality.
AI-powered fighter jet took the Air Force's leader for a historic ride
To add to this excellent point, fossil fuels have enjoyed subsidies for ~100 years. Imagine the cumulative total of the money compounded!
Ha, I thought you were misspelling Steam Deck at first. Funny because I first got into electronic music by installing VCV Rack 2 on my Steam Deck.
Location: Denver, Coloraod
Remote: Preferably, but open to hybrid
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: MuleSoft | Java | C++ | Git etc.
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinagordon/
Email: justinalangordon20@gmail.com

4 years of software development experience in an integration space. Looking for new opportunities to develop my skills and continue to learn new technologies.
Who dictated "the tactics"? Welcome to humanity and the way it is. I've been obese and I've been in shape - guess what; people treat you differently and make different assumptions about you. If you're drunk or high all the time, people judge you (guilty of that in my past too). My cousins lovingly encouraged my aunt and uncle to quit smoking throughout their lives, but that didn't seem to have much effect either.
Strict adherence to formatting rules can impair readability, yes.

Before back-tick strings in JS, it was useful to employ both single/double quotes for strings -- you'd use one most of the time, and then if you needed to embed a bunch of that quotation mark in a string literal, you'd switch to the other one.

'my string'
'my other string'
"insert values ('foo', 'bar', 'baaz')"

A formatter with naive "single quotes only" rule would obliterate the last one to:

'insert values (\'foo\', \'bar\', \'baz\')'

unless you remember, before you hit save, to add a directive like:

// linter pwease preserve my qwotes

I still use linters and formatters every day, and on balance I think they're good to have, but it's ridiculous to pretend they don't have downsides, or that there isn't room for the occasional dash of human intervention in the automation; hence, the linters which have // linter pwease directives.
Not sure if I'm just not seeing it, does the author(s) state what criteria they used for deciding what to include/exclude?
Huh. I just checked. Swiss-based company Arxada supplies the (battery grade) prussian blue that Natron uses. Though I didn't quickly determine where it's actually made. Probably UK.
I finance pretty much everything because it's easy to make 5%+ on cash and fixed payments gradually "decrease" with high inflation.
I feel like you were trying to make a point here, but I have no idea what it was.
Mark Russinovich (CTO of Microsoft Azure): Security has always been a top priority for Azure and Microsoft but now it's THE top priority
some feedback:

as a first time visitor, the pricing page is really confusing. if its free why is there a stripe faq immediately below? i am still confused whether this product is free or paid without signing up. the pricing page requires some rework imo
I worked at equifax.

Just sort of ended up there when the fun startup I was at got acquired by them. I soon burnt out and checked out mentally and eventually they noticed and we parted ways.

I just wish I had had the wisdom to get myself out before I burnt out. Looking back, it was a slowly boil the frog type of situation.
I still wonder why there isn't a DIY option that builds in a touchpad or a usable trackball. It's great for bed / home theatre PC (HTPC) use, and some of us are just used to it

There are existing keyboards out there, like the logitech K-something for HTPCs, or then niche (and expensive) options that you need to call HP or Lenovo to order, but I'm very close to just buying the bottom of the framework laptop and building one myself, although the touchpad on the Framework is medium good, at best (as are most touchpads that aren't from big A)
I think of "boring" in this context the same way my dentist calls me a nice, boring patient. He means no surprises for either of us, nothing out of the ordinary, just a mouth in good shape with maybe a cavity or two.

That's how I like to see code. I don't want to struggle to figure out what you're trying to do. I want to be able to read your code and understand it easily and get on with what I need to do.

The opposite of this, keeping the medical context, would be the orthopedic surgeon who was so excited about how badly my then 25-year-old wife had smashed her wrist. "I never see this much joint damage in someone so young. It's incredible." Not words you want to hear from a doctor!
Let's do some math first.

1.5 months of work sold for 10K. That's 1/6th of your current salary. Let's say your current salary is X. So the equation becomes:

1/6 * currentSalary = 10,000.
currentSalary = 60,000

With a 20% cut, your current salary would reduce to 60,000 * 0.8 = 48,000

So with the pay cut, you need to make at least 12,000 to break even. Let's assume you only work 1 day a week on your side project. You made 10K from the 1st side project. So the question really is can you make that additional 12K with this additional 1 day you have ?

I would say Why not. You made 10K when you worked full time. Now you have another full day available to work on your own thing. So I would say you should definitely aim for making 12K (break even) + additional.

Without Math btw, I would anyway go for it.
Saw the headline, immediately thought of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea with Seaview and the smaller Manta craft.

Fewer humans onboard though...
We’re undergoing a Cambrian explosion of battery chemistries at the moment. Other startups, such as From Energy is scaling up production of Iron Air batteries in West Virginia, which will be an order of magnitude cheaper than lithium ion and will provide grid scale power [1]. North Harbour Clean Energy Promised to build a manufacturing facility in Australia to build Vanadium Flow batteries, which have very high charge cycle in their lifetime and can store energy for longer durations [2].

The advantage with Sodium Ion is that, although energy densities are lower than Lithium Ion, it could still be used to power mobile devices and electric vehicles.

[1] https://www.wesa.fm/environment-energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-02/vanadium-redo...
How the arrival of iodized salt 100 years ago changed America
Nice! As someone that recently started on this hobby, I love my 75% custom mechanical keyboard.

One thing though, custom firmwares aren't popular on this hobby. Right now, QMK/VIA support are pretty much a must on the community.
Two seconds of hope for fusion power
"Whuffie" is a reference to the Cory Doctorow novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It's set a post-scarcity society, Whuffie acts as a sort of currency and is earned from clout and social status. The protagonist goes from being wealthy in Whuffie to destitute and needs to earn his way back up.

I read it a long time ago as a weird story. Might be time for a reread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...
Show HN: A wiki to see useful info on Instagram posts
Happy friday :)

It feels like Instagram is two things in one: stuff from friends and content from celebrities/news. Also the comment sections suck and it’s hard to get any useful context from the latter.

Like “is this steph curry video even real” and “what is this glove on kendrick’s diss track post”.

My friend and I made a site to help with this. It’s like Genius (crowdsourced song lyric annotations) or wikipedia (as the name suggests) for instagram posts.

The basic idea is, you can add -wiki to any Instagram post (www.instagram.com/p/blah to www.instagram-wiki.com/p/blah) and see useful information about the post.

Feel free to check it out, add some wiki content, and let me know what you think! Like would you actually use this, and what features would help?

We’re still really early on so there’s a bunch more to add (small issue rn where you need www in the url, would be way more convenient to have a mobile app as well, etc), but very open to any suggestions to make the instagram experience better!
https://archive.ph/kHeUK
> Which effected almost no one, yet here you are talking about it.
So you think the FDA was wrong to recall it? And yes, I'm talking about it because plenty of people were skeptical of the vaccines because they thought they were undertested. And given the recall, they were absolutely right.

> Imagine if an early covid vaccine had killed thousands. That would have had a massive chilling effect on vaccine uptake.
You're making it sound like the chilling effect would be a bad thing, when it would actually be the correct response. There are plenty of examples in the history of medicine of the cure being worse than the disease.
Really cool. I'm currently building a text animation library and this should solve a lot of the margin issues that I've faced
If violent extremists have no choice about how they act, then you should accept that society too has no choice but to reject them. It's just the rain falling, right?

If violent extremists do have a choice, then we can also choose our response to them. And pretty clearly that response should be to ignore their demands and treat them as having abdicated any say in our political system. Otherwise, you validate violent extremism, which creates more violent extremism. Which is bad, right?

There were other choices here. They chose not to make them. It's no one's responsibility to decide other people's bad choices are noble or worthy.
I think that sharing a link to her site on a high traffic venue like Hacker News might be contrary to the author's wishes.
I remember being chastised in some Android subreddits years ago for going against the (probably astroturf) opinion that having root access was "insecure". Sigh...
As in it hangs when you launch it, not that it launches successfully but then hangs when you press the Record button? Probably a more fundamental windowing problem than the screencasting interface interaction then.
>> Extreme bias on the part of the author. Also, the statement is objectively untrue. It appears that the author has opinions on hot-button issues, calls his opinions "tolerant," and proceeds to wonder why poor countries disagree with him.

I think the bias is equating "tolerant" with good and "intolerant" with bad, which I think you're doing too.

In my experience, that implicit bias is pretty common in the language of Americans, especially liberals, but even conservatives (who would understand being called "intolerant" is a reproach).

> What other people do with their bodies is not a hot-button issue. You either accept it and are tolerant, or you don’t and you are intolerant.

I don't think it's that simple. Are you "tolerant"? Are you tolerant of people shitting on the sidewalk? I doubt it, but it's still falls under the rubric of "something other people do with their bodies." In actual practice "being tolerant" is actually defined as subscribing to a very particular set of social positions. It's one of those language tricks liberals seem particularly prone to use for manipulation.
Just because others did it does not mean we're justified in us doing it. And I am obviously not supporting any other kind of imperialism.

Also I don't think colonialism/imperialism has ever lead to anything particularly good for the subjugated people. If anything, it's emancipation from the oppressor rather than its influence that allowed for better living condition for the common man.

Historical grudges can be justified in the sense that oftentimes the scars of exploitation may last for decades, and the west refusing to even acknowledge their wrong doing is damning for its image in the eyes of the South.
Ambri? They've been making very slow progress.
Mozilla has a lot of metrics of things like webcam permissions and quite a lot of data on how often that goes wrong in practice (websites that get more permissions than users meant to give them; websites that abuse permissions after they've been granted them; etc). If Mozilla thought a permissions flow was all that was needed to make Webserial safe, they would have suggested it. I'm sure they have plenty of empirical data to give them enough reasons why they suggested that a permissions flow wouldn't be enough to keep this safe.
It's definitely true.

Memory allocation takes a very small percentage of my time. I'd guess < 1%. Debugging memory issues used to take me more time, but these days it's basically inconsequential, too.

Having written interpreted languages previously to jumping to C & C++ (>10y programming exp), there's a massive cost to using interpreted and/or GCd languages that comments like this one never seem to acknowledge. Random package bit-rot, high-difficulty memory leaks, high-difficulty AND high consequence manual memory management (to avoid the GC), poor performance tooling, nearly completely opaque performance characteristics, inability to optimize performance past a surface level... etc.

If you're building anything more complex than simple web apps, this shit all adds up to a lot. I've worked at a couple shops that these issues hit like a ton of bricks.
Does not ‘seem’ like the right shape for it, but could it use ocean currents ?

Similar idea to those weather balloons we were talking about last year ?

Is that even possible in the ocean ?
Was hard to understand until they got to the Use Cases section, should have led with that. TLDR: fonts are not vertically centered, but bottom aligned. This feature helps alleviate that by (typically) cutting off the top empty space.

Yes, you can sometimes add a little space around the text, but this is a proper solution.
People always say this, and I get it - maybe it feels like an attempt to ride a hype train.

But if you're interested in Rust ecosystem, you're probably interested in how someone wraps FFMPEG in rust, and so that tag might be valuable. Maybe we can tag projects based on languages, and help avoid this.
To answer the question of whether something like this is the future of programming posed at the end of the article: I think in a lot of ways yes. It reduces the iteration time for making a new feature and handles a lot of the project management too. As AI get's smarter it makes sense to design workflows around how their capabilities can complement ours as developers and not just force them into existing workflows.

We're working on something similar to workspaces: https://www.bismuthos.com

We provide a workspace to build Python backends. Chat on the left, code and visual editors on the right. However, we also handle deployments, data storage (we have a blob store), serving (we built a home grown function runtime) and logging.

The experience is tightly integrated with our copilot and the idea is to get ideas off the ground as quickly as possible with as little devops hassle. Right now the focus is on building something new, but we're in the process of making it easier for existing projects to integrate with us too.

Feel free to drop by our (very) new discord too:
https://discord.gg/E5Yn3vaM
Same. I had to read your comment and title several times each before it clicked.
Edit: Other commenters report that Android will silently re-enable cell data under various conditions, so this isn't a surefire solution, either.

The Grugq created a tool for this a decade ago (sadly unmaintained): https://github.com/grugq/portal as part of a presentation about operational security for hackers. It's a great watch if you're interested in how various (in)famous hackers thought they were secure and got busted anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU
Came here to write a comment along those same lines haha
I completely agree. As you stay, it's still not easy, especially in the post-ZIRP economy. Do I deserve to work with a team of interesting people, on a product I can be proud of, on a team that gives me flexible work hours? I sure do. But finding it is a big challenge for me, so I'm still going to celebrate the freedoms my current job gives me until I can find the right one.
If you think this is interesting, you'll love the book: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
You built this?

...

I built this.
When RSU vests, it is no longer an RSU. Not sure why you would call it “dividend-equivalent” as they are regular dividends at that point (unless your broker lends them out in which case you might get substitute payments in lieu.)
Jeff Lawson's Plan for The Onion's Business Model
100% this. I just visited an urgent care center yesterday for some strep tests. I was given an electronic signature pad and told to sign for "consent to care". No documentation was given to me on what I was signing - just that I needed to sign.

I had to ask for a paper copy of the form I was signing, which was handed to me. That document said that "I acknowledge receiving the privacy notice ..." Was that given to me? Of course not. Asking for that - well let's just say I think I was the first person to ever ask for any of this documentation. I'm sure my information has been shared with 30 other entities - for a strep test. It's insane and unenforceable as a patient who just wants to get shit done.