skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Aren't all animals sentient?

How far are you willing to go with this? Is a roundworm sentient? An amoeba? A bacterium?
Did you know that blueberry bushes need low PH?
I think most people would consider liberalism rather mainstream.
Which is a pretty good sign the market is viable.

You only need to "be better".

And here "better", means eveything on can think of, including NOT spending money.
Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example of something that doesn't ship well.
It's fascinating to imagine how people from the past might react to the technological advancements and societal changes of the present day! I love to imagine my great grandpa exploring the world now.
VideoScape 3D and Sculpt 4D where my bread and butter at the time. Although anything would crash.

One day I'll rip and upload a video I made in the late 80s of when I was typing up a chemistry lab report. My Amiga was producing so many guru meditation errors I had my VCR record my typing (in real-time) so I had proof that I did the report. I handed in a draft of the report and a VHS tape.
Fair enough, the chant as we learned it was “no taxation without representation”, so you win this one. But my point was that it wasn’t just childish tantrums about taxes, it was also about being forced to buy into a monopoly, not getting any say in the matter, having local business blockaded, etc.
Here we go again. Someone flagging a post they don't like without rhyme or reason. A post that the community is obviously passionate about and enjoying to share their experiences and recollections. How annoying.
This is cool but I found the UX confusing at first. It was not intuitive to me at all I had to scroll to see more information.
For sure the cost of carbon and other pollution should be factored in. But I don't think the externalities are that large really. I would be surprised if the cost would go up more than 20% if we had a proper carbon tax in place. At least after the market adapts.
I see people using "linktree" to crosslink all their different social media accounts together and it really bums me out in a way I can't describe.
I think Signal could stand to gain popularity by either prioritizing overall niceness and polish in their clients (especially on desktop) or by allowing third parties to build clients which prioritize those things.

iMessage, Telegram, and Signal all get usage from me, with the vast majority of that usage weighted heavily on the former two because that’s where most people in my circles are. When comparing user experience between the three, it’s easy to see why.
Ooooh, that makes sense. I didn't know about "owt" either!
PE will "buy" you out of some of your unvested shares. And they offer new ones, possibly way out of the money to try and keep people around. When it happened to me, I lost like 60% of my unvested shares, which would have been worth way more long-term, than the short-term gain they forced.
The Impact of Screen Time on Children's Mental Health
The increase in screen time has raised significant concerns regarding its impact on children's mental health. Some psychological effects of excessive screen time include attention problems, sleep disruptions, reduced physical activity, increased anxiety and depression, and diminished social skills. Understanding these impacts is crucial for parents, educators, and policymakers who are trying to balance the benefits of technology with healthy development. How should this issue be handled, and what are your thoughts on it?
It's hard to believe for me how you would not start buying own hardware at this scale. In particular when the hyperscalers (at first glance) don't have anything to provide to match the needs.
This has been known in the security community for quite some time.
> New versions of CPython come out regularly, always adding many new features, and PyPy struggles to keep up, is always several Python versions behind. If you want you Python software to be PyPy-compatible, you’re much more limited in terms of which Python features you use, and most Python programmers don’t want to have to think about that.

Nothing can be further from the truth. A small minority, in any language, not just Python, will use the most recent version. In any language community, the most used version lags several iterations behind the most recently released. In a decade and a half of working with Python, changing plenty of companies and positions, I've never been in a situation where I was using the newest version right after it was released. Not for the "production" environment anyways.

The reason PyPy is not popular is... if I had to guess that Python is a first language for many programmers (i.e. the its audience is mostly not very knowledgeable in general, and will struggle to install a Python, installing a special kind of Python will be too overwhelming for them). Python is also a popular language with people who aren't professional programmers, eg. researchers, statisticians. In many places where Python is used its speed makes no difference, even if its used by professional programmers (eg. various kinds of automation). So, there's no particular reason to choose PyPy.

To top this: Python is a common language for OS scripting / automation, where interpreter starting time may be more important than the performance of the script.

PyPy mostly doesn't support native Python modules, but even when it does, it offers no benefits in so doing.

Finally, there's a low-hanging fruit for any Python programmer who makes Python packages: just run them through Cython. This alone gives a significant boost to speed (and some memory savings). Virtually nobody does this. Which is, imo, an indication that speed isn't important. (Also, fighting Python infrastructure and trying to understand the packaging process isn't for the faint of heart, which underscores my previous point of general low competency on the part of Python users).

----

Bottom line: PyPy doesn't offer anything of value to the overwhelming majority of Python users. It would've been a headache to work with even where there might be potential benefits. So... it's not used. Python's release schedule is laughably bad, and new features are laughably bad... well, worthless for the most part... but they aren't the reason PyPy isn't popular.
The Amiga had good DTP software and hardware at the time. I used them for large format printing. They were initially faster and much cheaper than the Apple solutions.

Once the Quadra’s came out it was all over.
Learn all about that in this post which tells about how blueberry bushes or its subvariety pink lemonade can only adapt to acidic ground. Hope this post is helpful!
I agree and I don't think it is specific to the world of entrepreneurs and/or social science experiments. If your target variable depends on a large number of correlated variables you are very unlikely to formulate the correct hypothesis by accident. This is why you need intuition or good judgement in science, just as much as in every thing else.
That sounds super interesting. Does your friend have a GitHub or site that shows what they’re doing on that front. If so could you post link.

This is super far out of my wheelhouse technically as a backend engineer but it sounds really cool.
What Does a Lonely Brain Look Like?
Agreed, I think if you showed me as a kid that a tiny microSD could store every game I ever played and still have room for every TV show I ever watched without getting remotely full, and was affordable, it'd be impressive. But it wouldn't blow my mind as something inconceivable, I had already known floppy disks both shrunk in size and increased in capacity.

Plus, I'd imagine "the ENIAC guys" would quickly realize all the things that were computationally infeasible in their time had more or less been done along the way to modern computers.
Oh interesting, I just looked into it and apparently it requires the app to support it. Apps like Keynote, Zoom, Slack, Facetime and Teams Classic (but not "new Teams") all support it. That's really strange imo, you'd think the OS would just add the overlay to the video signal and pass it through to the app. I wonder why it's implemented this way. The other OS-level video features like portrait mode, studio lighting, reactions and center stage don't require support from the app at all.
Sadly that often amounts to being more heavily marketed
Ask HN: What are your rules for launching mobile apps?
Do you have a gameplan you usually adhere to for launching new apps and onboarding and retaining users? I'm curious about anything and everything you've found handy to do. Like: if you've found you always collect an email address up front? Or you're a firm believer in using something like OneSignal to push notify over the onboard+lifecycle?
That's pretty impressive, but it also has me worried.

Does this mean you could eavesdrop all Bluetooth connections from a single satellite?
64gb is an impressive amount to fit on an LP. Come to think of it, I should back up my ZX Spectrum magnetic tapes to LPs for archival storage.
Thanks, this is helpful. Still kinda hilarious that their target for damage control is... Telegram. Musk and Dorsey never even mentioned it
I also speed up a function 100 times. It was concatenatign strings inside a loop. I changed it to used StringBuilder instead.

I could have disabled the GC to get the same speed up.
Time is coming when you'll be able to select out of hundreds of models and they'll be downloaded on demand if not already, would totally infer locally and offline even on your phone and I guess no more than 2030, we'll be there.

I am not so up to date with the hardware landscape but don't think smart people would let not be noticing the need.
Where can I pay to build Loom functionality and polish into OBS, making this open source and available in perpetuity? I mean no offense to products of these sorts, but the constant reinventing of the wheel, product churn, etc is somewhat disheartening when people just want the ability to screencast in a frictionless manner.
If you're working for an organization with such incompetent technical leadership to believe this then you should jump ship immediately, because they're doomed regardless.
You could use a dedicated project for your global notes, and maintain specific notes in your project.
Thank you so much for articles! Really appreciate it.
Use 'Developer Tools' and Inspect. Watch the Network tab.

If you also wear a tinfoil hat, delete the local storage, etc, after you are done using it.
Look up the Triangle Trade. An international slave trade was the status quo for centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
Exploring LLM Weirdness: How We Built It and What I Learned
For this particular instance and company, no. Not because microservices can't work, but instead because of the coordination required between services/api/database that doesn't appear to exist at all in this company.

This said, depending on your application and how it's split up quite often there are easy wins. An example I've seen is a company that had a huge batch reporting jobs for reporting at fixed intervals. Hammered the hell of out production, so was moved to pull data from a read only replica.
I feel like Amiga was never really alive in the US. I never knew anyone who owned one, or a 520st. Schools were almost exclusively Apple IIe, later some IIgs before Mac SE and LC. And of course PC. IIgs was more comparable to a Commodore 128 but it ran all the Apple II software. Sometimes you'd see a Mac II or SE/30 in an administrator's office running a screensaver.
I think it was mostly because $1000 items were a bit harder to come by back then so kids would do a lot of reading and day dreaming before getting enough cash to pull the trigger. By the time they could actually afford a computer/monitor/printer/software they had talked themselves into how great the product was.
I mean, we can wait and see for reproduction/retraction. I would bet no reproduction possible or outright retraction.
The rage epidemic: is our modern world fuelling aggression?
in tech, the LBO model is about selling at a higher revenue multiple than you bought it for, cashflows be damned.

traditional LBOs are not done on revenue multiples
Thanks. Figured there might be something, why the "might" have a use.

Maybe it's implied, yet the author didn't seem to care about fast, and mostly appeared to be counting whole numbers for greater lift. Guess most of the furthers probably also have uses if force is not an issue 1/3:1, 1/4:1, ect...

Sailing's not one I'd thought of much. Guess if large scale sailboats ever make it around again, hauling large scale ripstop nylon clipper sails might use a really fast spinnaker halyard.
The license is not good: https://falconllm-staging.tii.ae/falcon-2-terms-and-conditio...

It's a modified Apache 2 license with extra clauses that include a requirement to abide by their acceptable use policy, hosted here: https://falconllm-staging.tii.ae/falcon-2-acceptable-use-pol...

But... that modified Apache 2 license says the following:

"The Acceptable Use Policy may be updated from time to time. You should monitor the web address at which the Acceptable Use Policy is hosted to ensure that your use of the Work or any Derivative Work complies with the updated Acceptable Use Policy."

So no matter what you think of their current AUP they reserve the right to update it to anything they like in the future, and you'll have to abide by the new one!

Great example of why I don't like the trend of calling licenses like this "open source" when they aren't compatible with the OSI definition.
Even though the choice is impressive in any supermarket you go, unfortunately, it's very far from having every kind of drink/cheese or almost anything else you mention. Perhaps that's being pedantic, but I believe a lot of people seem to actually believe that what's in their supermarket is all there is (not talking about you specifically)... all you need to do is travel around Europe for a little while to quickly realize how much the supermarkets do not have.
Kudos to you if you appreciate the moves your parents made in their lives and you have achieved a working relationship with your parents.

But I don't think this is a fair expectation from the parents' side, at all. As a child, you did not ask to be burdened with this. If this is a contract, it was signed not by you, but by your parents unilaterally.
gatekeeping is important some times
They do. My wife lost her 10-year-old Instagram account to a well crafted phishing attack against an email she had published…

Instagram/Meta’s customer support is absolutely atrocious and disgraceful on this front. They basically treat my wife like she’s also a spammer and there’s no way to recover the account or undo any of the changes the spammers made.

It’s hilarious how they ask you to “appeal” a ban by clicking a single button without giving any chance to rectify what the spammers did to her account. Of course their automated bots just reject your appeal almost instantly. Shameful.
>That's a function of technology

No, it's a function of economics. Division of labour still works. It is not more profitable to run your own cloud and pay for your own traffic when you're specialized in producing content. It makes financial sense to pay someone to do that for you. The middleman is cheaper, that's why they exist. The internet looks like it does for only one reason, in any system of increasing complexity there are increased returns to specialization and trade.
Anything is a liability if you don't invest in it. The Amiga was unchanged basically from the launch in 1985 to Amiga 1200 in 1992. That's 7 years of thumb fiddling and the 1200 was basically a small bandaid on a gushing wound. Reacting not acting.

They never believed in themselves.

The IBM PC was launched in 1981 with 4.77MHz and 7 years later you could buy 40MHz PCs with wider buses.
I do a fair amount of business internationally and WhatsApp is increasingly becoming a default. There is Signal, Slack, Telegram, iMessage, etc plus a multitude of many other options including uploading via our website. Places like Japan and Germany are still pretty big on faxes so I guess it depends where on the continuum the customers are. Thus far our only email issues have been on the client side and they're the ones asking to send it via WhatsApp. It would make sense to me to have a non-email contingency for email.
Blocking web components would be great. That whole idea needs to be removed from browsers and rethought from the ground up.
No, domains are not junk loans
Even once I got to the end I couldn't actually use the map because the left side of it (with the legend and year-switcher) was off-screen :) best web design A++
There are so many things where that’s not relevant. “Just start” or “just test” or “just install” are idempotent, or at least stateless (assuming “start” calls out to systemctl or such).
Here's the PDF so you can read more than just the abstract [1].

It's always hard to analyze anything this big, especially with something as vague as "more productive":

> First, employment shrinks more rapidly, on average, at target establishments than at controls after
private equity buyouts. The average cumulative difference in favor of controls is about 3 percent of initial employment over two years and 6 percent over five years. Second, the larger post-buyout employment losses at target establishments entirely reflect higher rates of job destruction at shrinking and exiting establishments. In fact, targets exhibit greater post-buyout creation of new jobs at expanding establishments. Adding controls for pre-buyout growth history shrinks the estimated employment responses to private equity buyouts but does not change the overall pattern. Third, earnings per worker at continuing target establishments fall by an average of 2.4 percent relative to controls over two years post buyout

So if I'm reading this right, huge layoffs followed by lots of churn with an overall decrease in salaries. But I must be missing something because the framing & wording seems to suggest that this is a positive thing. That paper also only looks at 2 years of data following acquisition. But the criticism for leveraged PE takeovers like this is that the PE firm is starting a 5-10 year project to strip mine the company for all it's worth and leaving a husk of a company that's loaded with the debt that was used to acquire it and no real assets. I'm not sure how looking at the first 2 years tells you anything.

The PE firm's switch to cheaper labor and suppliers is also reflected typically in a significant decrease in product quality which isn't analyzed here.

The main argument for leverage PE buyouts are they are performing a valuable service as they're doing a more graceful shutdown of a company vs letting the company fail on the public markets. But that's a harder argument when squarespace doesn't seem to be particularly struggling - they just IPOed during the pandemic bubble when internet stocks were crazy overvalued but they've been working their way back up.

[1] https://econweb.umd.edu/~haltiwan/AER_DHHJLM.pdf
When you send a cold email (initiating a thread or first email to someone) does it land in the recipients inbox or spam?

This was what eventually broke my self hosting plan.. too many emails sent and never received.
Libraries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver [video]
Maybe I don't understand what you're describing. That sounds like a system where you'd prefer slow, and really heavy lift capacity?
I think it looks like a nice tool, naysayers notwithstanding. I don't have sensitive PDFs and, though I would probably not use it for my tax return, I'll use it for other stuff. For my level of security, I'm happy enough with your promise to delete the stuff right away.
You're missing the boat but that's ok, some have to stay behind and tend to the old ways
It would be interesting to get better SaaS metrics, specifically on customer churn. I can't find that in the linked document. They are growing, but how much of that marketing spend is needed for growth vs just maintaining the customer base?

I don't know what the customer makeup of Squarespace is. It could be that by volume their typical customers are business that fail a lot, or have a high amount of churn (think sole proprietorships, businesses with 1 - 10 employees without in house tech experience, or part-time/side businesses like Etsy or Instagram stores). Depending on the makeup, a significant amount of this marketing could be required just to maintain a constant customer base.
Well, that really sucks.

Thanks But No Thanks.
This would blow many people's minds, but *more than* the magical rectangle in our pockets that plays endless moving pictures and sounds and all the world's information? Oh and talk (with live images) of people instantly across the globe? Not even close.
I wonder how many people upvoted this without reading, assuming it's that Loom.
GxHash is a fast and robust non-cryptographic hashing algorithm
> Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this

The filfre.net series of articles on the history of Commodore and Amiga is truly great work, and should give you a much clearer picture than pretty much anything else.
> Apple's ridiculously expensive fast & wide on-package memory is a big reason why the M series chips are so fast

Increasing memory speeds have had only a marginal impact on common workloads (not AI) in the PC World - this has been a well discussed topic. Why would it be different on the Mac?
There is a site listed elsewhere in these comments that does the work entirely in-browser. That's what I would use.
OS/2 1.x supported memory protection for apps targeted for OS/2. Since 1.x was written for the 286, it put all MS-DOS apps in the same address space, so one errant app could bring down the whole MS-DOS subsystem. It would take OS/2 2.0 to exploit the 386's Virtual 8086 mode, which allowed each MS-DOS app to run isolated.
FireChat for protests – "Download this app, we are going to the protest"
Hi HN,

Building on the concept popularized by FireChat, I'm working on "Road", a mesh network communication app tailored for protests. While the basic premise remains similar—enabling communication without reliance on internet services— "Road" focuses on enhancing security and organizational features crucial for peaceful protest scenarios.

I'm currently grappling with several technical and ethical challenges:

Scalability: How can we optimize mesh networking algorithms to handle sudden spikes in users, typical in protest scenarios, without significant degradation in speed or reliability?

Security: Besides end-to-end encryption, what additional security measures could be implemented to safeguard against potential vulnerabilities inherent in mesh networks?

Privacy vs. Accountability: Balancing anonymity with accountability is tricky. How can we ensure user privacy while also preventing the platform from being misused (e.g., for planning violence or spreading misinformation)?

Battery Life Optimization: Mesh networking is power-intensive. What are some effective strategies to minimize battery consumption without compromising network integrity?

Regulatory Challenges: Given the global nature of protests, how should the app handle varying international laws regarding encryption, data transmission, and user anonymity?

I'd appreciate insights into these issues or any suggestions on leveraging newer technologies or methodologies. How can "Road" be a reliable tool for protestors to share societal discontents, maintaining robustness and integrity under challenging conditions?

Looking forward to your thoughts and expert opinions!
It's not an illusion any more than Vegas odds are an illusion. Free will is the (correct) perception by an agent that its actions can't be predicted by other agents. My guess is that there will never be an agent that can predict my moment-by-moment thoughts and actions, so I'll always have free will.
It's probably unenforceable