skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mean to belittle your great achievement with license annoyances so forgive me if this sounds harsh, but I won't look twice at any software with an online requirement, if internet connectivity is not an integral part of the software itself. I do realise open source can be a dark, unthankful place that will not pay bills for most developers so this is not about the cost itself.

Unfortunately, pirates almost always have it easier than paying customers, since license checks will probably be removed. Though this is hearsay (anyone?), there was "legal piracy" (no, there's no such thing :P) in the license-via-printer-port-dongle-era, since the dongles sometimes failed at the worst of times (e.g. live recording at a studio). So some users/studios bought a license to be legally covered on paper, but used a pirated version.

I live in a "well-connected" country, but a traveling a few kilometers in the wrong direction leaves me in complete radio silence, and sometimes work (academia) has required me to stay at such places for a couple of days. Since you know Rust, I can (and have had the need to) add `--offline` when building, with required crates locally cached. I know many researchers with the need to bring high-tech equipment + software to remote locations for work over many weeks, sometimes months. The need to find a city just to do a software license check would be crazy.

Unfortunately, I also don't have a good solution, other than trying to trust your customers. An online check once, at install, I can possibly live with, even if I've had to do reinstalls from local files in the field as well...
Kremlin botnet launches disinformation claiming Havana Syndrome doesn't exist
Automating FAQ releases after releases
In my previous work experience creating the FAQ was time-consuming. Articles and screenshots had to be detailed for each platform in several languages. What quickly became impossible after a few years of daily releases was updating our whole FAQ… I'm working on a tool that captures a "flow" to generate and regularly update FAQ content. This tool will monitor your product, alert you when something breaks, and auto-update content and screenshots after new features or redesigns disrupt the flow. The aim is to ensure your FAQ's accuracy without dedicating a team solely to documentation. The distribution would be made through Zendesk and Intercom app marketplace as another FAQ solution would be useless and create too much switch cost. Consistent FAQs are critical for effective customer support, especially when leveraging AI. Do you think this solution is needed? Would you use it?
Work hard != Work on your free time
You are right, and whenever we drifted by 1 hour (or whatever is deemed too much) we can just update each time zone in the TZDB to be different by that amount of time going forward. This shifts the problem from a basically unsolved one (with how no OS properly supports TAI) to a solved one, time zones.

You could even align it with a DST transition in countries that have those where you simply skip one to apply the change.
PayPal and Mailchimp close accounts of Iranian cheetah conservationist
I am not affiliated with the Iranian Cheetah Society but I saw this post on LinkedIn and it struck a cord with me.

Text from LinkedIn post:

What is the right time to give up?
It has been 17 years since I entered the world of wildlife conservation as a volunteer and then as a professional. I have experienced many hardships, joys, failures, and successes alongside the groups I have worked with. Wildlife conservation was never meant to be easy, let alone in a country that has been severely sanctioned for 50 years and has a totalitarian government.

Although we have often grown tired, paused, and then resumed, I have been thinking about this question lately: When should we give up? While we always fail, how far should we go and at what cost should we continue? PayPal recently blocked our account for receiving donations, due to sanctions. Also, Mailchimp, closed our account without any warning, solely because we are Iranian, without allowing us to back up the 20-year-old database of subscribers and recipients. Although humanitarian and environmental activities have never been sanctioned by the U.S. government, service providers refrain from cooperating with Iran. Worse still, they do not behave professionally or respectfully towards us, or perhaps we simply do not matter. Every year, the number of international organizations interested in collaborating with us decreases, and obtaining foreign financial resources has become almost impossible.

On the personal front, due to a lack of financial resources, we have always had difficulty paying salaries, and currently, not even one full-time employee remains for the Iranian Cheetah Society.
Thinking about a situation where the government has no interest in nature conservation, and we are under pressure inside the country, and while the Asiatic cheetah is on the brink of extinction, continuing seems impossible.
We met with rangers and local communities in the cheetah habitat. They are also extremely tired and hopeless. We tried to give energy to them, but in reality, we were also spending our last shreds of hope and energy.

A few months ago, among specialists in cheetah conservation in Ethiopia, among those who face much fewer and more solvable problems, I found about how meaningless the path we have taken seems. Even the cheetah conservationists asked us "Why do you still continue? You have no chance!"

Last week, after a problem arose with our PayPal account, I couldn't sleep for several nights. The moment we received the final email stating that our account was being permanently closed, I thought about whether we deserved this level of failure, despair, and stress. How long should we endure all this and continue? Where is the stopping point? When, after various harms from all sides, our mental health is severely threatened and stress and pressure have taken away our ability to work, where is the END?

Now, I think more seriously about giving up, and I imagine that after all these years, we are on the verge of losing our beautiful cheetah and facing final defeat. Without hope, without motivation, and without a future.
"Because the CTO had a yearly turnover of his direct reports, every status call about the project took some variation of “great idea, boss” even though literally no one involved thought it was even a good idea."

IMO it is still ones job to voice the concern, even if it gets you in trouble. At least if you want subsequent complaints to be taken seriously.

Personally, if I get in a situation where even voicing issues gets me in shit, that's a red flag to go find another employer.
That's a good point, haven't looked too deep as I avoid allocations but musl+jemalloc is workable in Rust at least.
How do you mean vaporware?

Surely whether a big model using a certain system exists is only a matter of the choices of those with sufficient resources to train it. That's only a matter of their beliefs, not about actual model performance.
I run a SaaS in the healthcare space and an unforeseen impact is how digitising paper-based business has a transformative economic and lifestyle improvement for the owners.

On a call with an early customer, they were nearly in tears of happiness when they realised they could free up a bedroom full of filing cabinets in their house. They continued to say how it was saving them hours of admin over their weekend to spend more time with their family. I won't pretend this was anything unique to our product offering, just the process change they capitalised on that freed them up to have a better quality of life.

I don't think I could have engineered this outcome pre facto, it's a byproduct that emerges with useful tools and process changes.
Ofcom moves to protect children from 'toxic algorithms'
Google DeepMind unveils next generation of drug discovery AI model
The MIT has open sourced their Lisp Machine software.

https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/
I always wondered the same. Or create a plugin for Jira, that does exactly that.
Can you clarify what you mean by "they're really good at writing semantic layer queries"?

Re JSON query format: you mean that's what you're using?
reminded me of 'does it blend' of an iphone.
„It’sa comprehensive system that survived for hundreds of years“ is true for a lot of woo woo, eg astrology.
One team in my company insists on storing everything related to a target in an MB-size Elasticsearch document and then do all the aggregation client-side, because they already use ES for everything else and don't know how to use a relational database.
So, how many libyears were that xz dependency out of date?

Libyears are meaningless. A library either has known vulnerabilities or it doesn't. When it doesn't, old is often better than new one.
Definitely mildly euphoric and relaxing. Source: have been choked out in BJJ training a few times. Woke up happy and relaxed every time.
Tweet by the author explaining this https://twitter.com/GordonWetzstein/status/17882394000250885...
Don’t ruin your health for someone else. People who throw themselves on this fire in BigCo don’t get recognition or reward, they get abused by the political animals that will take advantage.

Work hard for yourself to build your own. But don’t think for one moment that death marches will result in a swift rise to the top.
bitvavo.com / Amsterdam, Netherlands / Full-time / Remote or Hybrid in the Netherlands / https://bitvavo.com / Cryptocurrency Exchange / Visa-relocation supported
We are a fully regulated Dutch cryptocurrency exchange and we are one of the most exciting companies in the Netherlands!

If you are interested in one of these positions:

- Senior Software Engineer (our stack is mostly nodejs/typescript)

- Senior Mobile Engineer (react native)

- Senior Platform Engineer

- Staff Database Engineer

- Software Engineer - Low Latency

- Technical PM - Matching Engine

- Senior PM - Advanced Trading

- Payment & Wallet Operations Specialist

- IT Manager

- CRM Specialist

- CRM Specialist (German-speaking)

- Head of Risk

You can email your resume to me directly to ozgur.gul@bitvavo.com and it will be handled fast. Just mention me which position you are interested. Keep in mind you have to relocate to Netherlands if you want to work with us (regulatory reasons). We support visa/relocation process :)
https://www.tella.tv/video/clvvucjxl00ll0cjrax2u1kvf/view
Here's demo. If you add staff and connect linkedin account, connected account auto-share the post
Quite a lot of my friends here in Sweden who got kids lately ended up just buying tons of second hand velcro-closed baby clothes, paid by weight.

I don't understand why that isn't a much more common practice across the world, it doesn't make sense to me that people are buying new clothes for kids that will outgrow them in 1-6 months time.
I don't need to fiddle with settings and as a developer all my tools are there (git, clang, ...). I don't need to care about the version of my kernel and can be worry free to click update.

Plus it's beautiful, great to touch hardware.
Is it really surprising? In practice people care about the time on the wall and to get that from TAI you need to maintain a leap second database.
He did attempt to explain why. Wikipedia:
"On 4 February 1600, Kepler met Tycho Brahe....Tycho guarded his data closely, but was impressed by Kepler's theoretical ideas and soon allowed him more access. Kepler planned to test his theory from Mysterium Cosmographicum based on the Mars data, but he estimated that the work would take up to two years (since he was not allowed to simply copy the data for his own use)."
What do you mean by "getting ahead in life"? That you pass more time doing stuff at work so you are closer to your death without having done the things you like, spent time with the people you love and visiting the places that fill you with joy? Or do you mean money? I am pretty sure if you are good at your job and you are not in a dying profession there will be enough places that show you the respect you would extend to them.

Shilling for work place abuse and unpaid overtime isn't getting you ahead in life the same way begging for forgivness with an abuser will make your life better.

If your corp can't manage people's time realistically, why would you expect them to manage anything realistically? Get out and go to a real place that knows how to run projects.
Harmless is enough. The smart ones will figure out that knowing shortens lives.
ChatGPT keeps the full tree doesn't it? You can swap back and forth on any particular node last I checked.
Don't tell the corporate about it, but using charcount/80, excluding newlines and whitespace is the _improved_ pseudoscience.

Additionally, excluding 'imports', namespacing, and other boilerplate helps too.
I guess we still like solar time a lot ;-) The point is, for date/time calculations, you need a numeric representation that increases strictly monotonically (an epoch time). If you introduce unpredictable modifications to that (leap seconds), the nice calculation falls apart, you end up with a lookup table such as the one in the IANA timezone database / TZif files (the blog post calls it the Olson library).
I see all the license checking code in lib.rs but nothing in build.rs?
Can you really describe a company that makes $1.1bn in profit as a "troubled EV maker"?
Iran sentences renowned director, Mohammad Rasoulof, to 8 years in prison
> UNIX time counts the number of seconds since an ``epoch.'' This is very convenient for programs that work with time intervals: the difference between two UNIX time values is a real-time difference measured in seconds, within the accuracy of the local clock. Thousands of programmers rely on this fact.

Contrary to this, since at least 2008[0], the POSIX standard (which is just paper not necessarily how real systems worked at that time) has said that "every day shall be accounted for by exactly 86400 seconds." That means that in modern systems using NTP, your Unix timestamps will be off from the expected number of TAI seconds. And yes, it means that a Unix timestamp _can repeat_ on a leap second day.

There's really no perfect way of doing things though. Should Unix time - an integer - represent the number of physical seconds since some epoch moment, or a packed encoding of a "date time" that can be quickly mapped to a calendar day? "The answer is obvious" say both sides simultaneously :^)

EDIT: I know DJB is calling out POSIX's choices in this article, but it seems like his "definition" does diverge from what the count actually meant to a lot of people.

[0] Also: "The relationship between the actual time of day and the current value for seconds since the Epoch is unspecified." https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition...
That's no different to maintaining a timezone database though, and leap seconds are more coordinated than timezone changes.
Hopefully we get rid of DST in the next 1000 years...
> It has a huge ecosystem; it shouldn't be hard to port many high-quality packages to a similar language

...Spoken like a person who's never coded anything meaningful or serious, if you can't even gauge the complexity and man-hours needed to create (much less port) high-quality packages between programming languages.
With you on this. Also (in probably increasing order of controversy):

1)daylight savings should be completely abolished. It just causes confusion.

2)timezones should be completely abolished. They also cause confusion. If you live in California, instead of getting up at say 8am you get up at say 3pm. There is never any confusion with anyone globally about scheduling anything.

3)Months should be the same length. Instead of 12 months of 30, 31, 28 or sometimes 29 days, with a varying number of weeks in each month depending on the year, you have exactly 13 months of 4 weeks each (28 days). 13*28=364 which gives you an extra day "New years day" or "Christmas day" or whatever but that isn't a day of the week. If it's a leap year the day after that Christmas day is "Leap day" and it also isn't a day of the week. Then a particular date is always the same day of the week, months are all 4 weeks, quarters are exactly 3 months and 1 week each and have the same end dates every year etc. Tons of benefits.

Literally the only downside people come up with when I mention it is "yeah but imagine if your birthday is now a Monday, that would SUCK!"
I'd guess it's because it's the usual hubris, that a software engineer's loose thoughts are worth more than the wisdom of experts in the field. It writes off all the current work as simply useless without giving any defence of that position etc.
Related discussion:

Libyear – a simple measure of software dependency freshness
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24975339 - Nov 2020 (16 comments)
At least leap seconds will be eliminated by 2035, so there is that. Computers were never good at dealing with it. Keeping computer clocks in UTC instead of TAI and rewinding it for leap seconds was always insane. The same goes for UNIX time and NTP.
They provide a platform where people can criticize the government.
It's something people have strong opinions on. Obviously some people want to get rid of leap seconds but I personally like UTC with leap seconds. The only change I'd make is to require leap seconds to be announced several years in advance (which would require allowing a slightly bigger divergence between UTC and UT1). Computer systems should gradually migrate to using TAI internally, but a clock on the wall or a bus timetable should using something like UTC: something that, you know, stays in sync with the actual sun. Saying "oh we'll shift all the time zones around one day" isn't an acceptable solution as far as I'm concerned. And I don't believe leap minutes would work any better than leap seconds: in fact I'm fairly certain they would be a whole lot worse.

Anyway, that's an explanation of my opinion. Many people will disagree with it.
ServiceNow is great if your project/architecture people are really great. The mistake is expecting that OOTB features will be enough (with only a few tweaks) or that the product itself will steer you toward best pratices (NOPE!). Its a bag of great parts which require extremely careful assembly and a disciplined approach in implementing the simplest, and most elegant build. YAGNI. Case>Req>RITM>SCTASK is a lot of layers of bloat just for a single user request.
That's probably how it is. Given that he sells only academic licenses, if he sells 3 site licenses for €6000 each, that's a salary (a low one, but you can actually live from it).

If he advertises a single-user license for €200, let's say, then each site has to have at least 30 users to make the same kind of money. Unlikely each current site has that many users, so it doesn't make sense to offer single-user licenses if there is the danger that sites will jump to that.
I guessed the same thing but didn't even notice it was unclear, I just assumed my guess was probably right ...

The concept really does seem obvious, especially since it sounds like man year, but it needs better documentation.
Ask HN: Devs: Do you find any value in Arrange, Act Assert comments in tests?
I personally consider them to be noise so I never use them. In fact I usually remove them if I come across them in files I'm working on. But I'm curious to hear about what I could potentially be missing with regards to their value.
I don’t need a timezone database to track UTC.
I'm going to publish a web extension which is AI Powered
Introducing our adaptive AI-powered extension, which smoothly automates digital chores. With capabilities like image-to-text conversion and customizable text summaries in your desired tone and language, productivity is readily increased. Furthermore, it distinguishes itself by including audio summaries, which give a unique dimension to your material experience. Discover new opportunities and streamline your digital workflow today!

I need some feedback about it. I also incorporated a credit-based payment system rather than a subscription-based one because it does not require users to make any commitments
Be honest. Be kind. Be quick. Be brutal. Be thoughtful. Be diplomatic.

But be honest. Honesty will be a great adventure of your life. If you get punished for it, so be it. Those who punished you for no reason and for ill-will will receive their reward, even if you never see it happen.
That link to famines only goes up to 2016 which is missing out the famines in Yemen, South Sudan, Unity State, Somalia, Nigeria, Tigray, Madagascar and arguably Gaza Strip and Palestine.

I would disagree that we've gotten really good at organising food - we've gotten good at organising food for wealthy countries, but have done very little for poorer people - they usually just starve when crops fail.

I think you're treating climate change as a single event that can be dealt with, but the truth is closer to a fast changing series of events that will overwhelm governments as they'll still be reacting to the first catastrophe when the next one comes and then the next one and so on. Despite your optimism, this is exactly the kind of thing that destroys civilisations. It's like an insurance company hedging money against a once-in-a-hundred years event, but when those events happen every couple of years, the company will find itself bankrupt.

I have doubts about how easy it is to build an extensive shelter with air conditioning in areas that don't even have an electricity supply. Why would we suddenly start to care about those poorer regions when we don't currently? It's far more realistic that the richer countries will make token statements and then just leave people to die, which will inevitably involve people moving from the uninhabitable areas into places that can support human life without continual money and investment.

You seem to be judging the climate crisis with previous events, when the big problem is that we're seeing unprecedented weather events - it's not going to be like anything that we've encountered previously.
That's what TAI is for. Too bad nobody got the memo and everybody stores and communicates UTC, including computer clocks, UNIX time and NTP.

There will be no more leap seconds after 2035, AFAIK.
We are working on this exact thing, would love to give you a demo and early access. My email is in profile.
"Smearing" is much more sensible approach for the use cases where it is implemented. There is simply no solution that is optimal for every use case, and insisting on using just one approach everywhere is unreasonable.
No, you really can’t claim definitive knowledge about singularities based on our current models.

The rules—as understood through general relativity and quantum mechanics—change drastically at the scale of a singularity. No amount of observing shadows of a singularity conforming to predictions changes the ignorance regarding the interior of the singularity.

Given that these conditions are fundamentally outside of our current observational capabilities and that existing theories are known to break down under such extreme conditions, it is presumptuous to apply conventional physical models developed for ‘normal’ spacetime. Until we have a unified theory of quantum gravity that is experimentally validated, any claims about the behavior within singularities remain speculative and should be treated with appropriate skepticism.

Just because it appears from our reference frame that a black hole compresses to a point and a white hole emits from a point, does not mean that is the physical effect occurring from within the singularity. When dealing with infinite, the rules change. For all we know, beyond the event horizon, the environment could be as fantastical as a land made of ice cream and lollipops—where everything around is sweet and edible.

Doubt that?

Send a probe into the nearest black hole and somehow retrieve it. Also, locate and observe a white hole, and develop an engine with infinite thrust that can approach it. I'm sure there will be enough observational data then to make finite claims. Good luck!
AI-Powered Smart Summaries News App