skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The combination of a growing no/low/medium-skill large workforce in the US makes for unlivable wages for most people because there are too many people chasing too few jobs. America doesn't do traditional factories per the Rust Belt and offshoring, but when it does, they are highly automated and don't employ as many people as they used to.

America either needs to find a way to put labor supply to work or it is going to have to give money to people so they can survive until we can find something useful or meaningful for them to do.

Perhaps America should heavily invest in a wider range of community, education, and healthcare social enterprises to provide services that aren't easily automated and are lacking.

America needs stronger, effective unions too.
Haha. You can’t be serious—what’s the likelihood of running into C code like this in anything remotely serious (compared to the millions upon millions of lines of innocent-looking C++ code that does like a dozen different things under the hood)?
Oracle's Deadly Gamble
Eventually isn't now, though. We'll have to cross that bridge when it happens.

Personally, the inclusion of surveillance as a standard feature in cars means that I won't buy cars made so recently. It's easier to do that than to worry about disabling stuff. If that becomes impossible for some reason, I suppose that my driving days are over.
keep 'em coming!
Nvidia announces financial results for first quarter fiscal 2025
Is "FN" Fox News? Or is that separate from News Corp?
> Please don’t ruin C.

Exactly this. C++ folks should not approach C like a "C++ lite". I appreciate the authors candid take on the subject.

As for defer, there is some existing precedent like GCC and Clang's __attribute__((cleanup)), but - at least for me - a simple "goto cleanup;" is usually sufficient. If I understand N3199 [1] correctly, which is the authors proposal for introducing defer in C, then "defer" would be entirely a compile-time construct. Essentially just a code transformation to inject the necessary cleanup at the right spots. If you're going to introduce defer to C then that does seem like the "best" approach IMO.

[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3199.htm
Agreed. I started with Java which gave me a bias towards camel case to begin with (as well as braces over whitespace), but have changed to Perl and now Python. Snake case is definitely easier to read, but Python encourages CamelCase for class names, and I see the advantage in mixing for different things.
> Every time I go to the grocery store to buy something and don’t have to worry about my card being declined, it feels like magic. Even years later.

100% with you here! Grew up in poverty, fought for myself and clawed my way out into a wonderful career as a software engineer.

This one still hits every time, even for me, over a decade later.

The other one for me is petty cash. I looked in my wallet the other day and I had $100 in it. That is still wild to me to walk around with $100 dollars without even really consciously realizing its there. I use to rush to put all unused cash into my bank account to make sure my balance was always as high as it could be just in case. Went through a can collection phase too. Sometimes it was the only way I'd eat.

Here's to better life circumstances! And may it continue for us from here on out.
If you work the lowest paid job at Amazon 40+ hours per week, you literally cannot qualify for government benefits unless you have like 3+ kids and you're a single parent.
Wow this is truly the end of journalistic integrity
(Not that they had much to begin with)
Should have maintained a python interoperable runtime. Less and less people use JVM languages for things like web apps, data eng, data science, ML, etc.
With that much and some careful engineering, I can probably generate 1.21 jigawatts of power.
In mature industries, they use the occurrences at scale to reduce the failures, or optimize cost or other factors.

E.g. a certain car part fails so many times out of a million. Okay, change something in the design. Hey look, now it's failing 1/3rd as many times, and it's a bit cheaper. Rinse, lather, ...
Doesn't need him to be on site.
This is very much a work-in-progress in the ecosystem, though. We (ParadeDB) also have `pg_lakehouse`, which is a version of `pg_analytics` designed to work over cloud object stores (AWS S3, GCS, etc.) for "cheaper storage".

I don't know if columnar engines will make it to core Postgres (I doubt it), but I do see the work of OrioleDB making it to core someday. We've joined an "alliance", alongside the core OrioleDB folks and some people from Timescale and Yandex, to push for it.
This really isn’t a similar comparison, Dutch infrastructure is built to prioritize making cycling safe at every decision point.

Whereas you’d be someone with a death wish to be riding without a helmet in most places in the US.
Speak with Fake Confidence
The controls have gotten better / more explicit over time. They flash you up a pretty explicit clickthrough wall now. And there's pretty explicit training that you hand off issues for friends/family to a 3rd party engineer to handle rather than accessing user/friend data yourself.
There's no real argument here. Your phone is a perfectly good clock, but the watch wearables are neat too. Same with these types of devices.
> In fact, the official stance of the SSL team at CloudFlare is that they won’t revoke unless the team has “determined the private key was compromised.”

Sounds like you should email the private key to the Cloudflare security team as plain text
The FaceMash of Prompt Evaluation
Here's a fun one for all of you: Recursively generating a prompt that generates flirtatious and NSFW messages.

As part of Vellum.ai's offsite, I wanted to experiment with a different way of evaluating prompts: pitting two prompts against each other.

Check out the full blog post for some cool learnings!
> Being a furry is and always has been a sex thing

I mean you could argue that about Emos, or Goths. Its not really true.

I'm sure sex is a large motivator, but you can't be doing sex all the time. When a Goth is dressed up all Goth-y its not because they are horny right now. They are just wanting to look good.

I imagine its the same with the furries, but the difference is, the furries are the butt of most jokes
When I was shopping around for EVs at the time the Bolt was actually more efficient miles/kwh than a Tesla. Factoring that into the total cost of ownership further widened the price between them.
> Which languages is this referring to?

C ?

Running old code is a challenge.

But running new code is also a challenge because "move fast, break things" mentality.
No true Scotsman.

I assume you haven't looked at the expansion of errno lately?

edit: also

https://github.com/KxSystems/kdb/blob/master/c/c/k.h
I'm building a Twitter/Bluesky/Mastadon/Farcaster competitor targeted at the average HN reader. Usable but not yet launched. Anyone want to beta test it?
What I hope for is what amazon has done with the mic controls on a few devices (fire tv cube, echo, others?) where a teardown has proven that the hardware button to disable the mic physically disables the mic from possibly working while the light is on, and additionally makes it impossible for the software to enable it (until power cycle, where they have the firmware re-set it during boot and can verify it by seeing the light on again)

Making this kind of circuit mandatory and hopefully a default that you have to switch on is the solution to keep both groups happy.

I can dig up the article that shows the schematic if anyone needs evidence
And Amazon pays no taxes
> according to a new survey

which, conveniently, is not disclosed.

How would a survey manager get that data, for ALL warehouse workers? So most likely they sampled one warehouse and relied on voluntary participation. Amazon certainly isn't going to go out of their way to help them out.
The interesting observation here is that deviating from the standard PR playbook, nobody from News Corp is quoted.
Okay. Let's talk specifics.

I log in to an end-to-end encrypted chat with a family member. We talk about life and the subject drifts to plane tickets we already bought for next month and how the neighbor across the street isn't going to be home until the end of this month.

The thief who stole my laptop now has also stolen a recorded conversation along with my passwords. Now they know when two houses will be empty. This would not have happened without pictures of my screen being taken frequently.
Oh good, the AI will be training on the openly right-wing media coming out of newscorp. Can't wait for AI to tell me that the cause of my iPhone malfunction is black-on-black crime, or wokeness, or whatever their next target is.
> We’re joining forces with News Corp to support the highest journalistic standards and enrich our products with its premium journalism.

> OpenAI has permission to display content from News Corp ... with the ultimate objective of providing people the ability to make informed choices based on reliable information and news sources.

Great choice of partner there, OpenAI.
Yes, it gives you access to the entire service, you don't need to find anything. Messages and accounts in Mastodon are visible across the network. The operators of almost all instances aren't anonmyous, the address of the default server operators is literally listed on the about page.

If you have zero knowledge and don't care Mastodon functions exactly like Twitter. If you care more, you can invest time, host your own server, do what you want, that's optional.

If decentralized systems don't work it's amazing that my grandfather is able to send emails every day. Which is btw the exact equivalent to Mastodon. You don't care you sign up for Gmail, if you do, run a server out of your basement.
Nvidia (NVDA) earnings report Q1 2025
Whoa, hacks! Thank you.
In case you didn't see it, there's a little bit of detail given if you click the question mark in the upper left.
> I am wondering why not take an existing language like python, and compile that to bash?

You'll run into the Alternative Implementation Problem

https://pointersgonewild.com/2024/04/20/the-alternative-impl...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40337036 - 10 days ago, 84 comments

Relevant excerpt:

> You may read this and think that the key lesson of this post follows the old adage that “if you can’t beat them, join them”. In some ways, I suppose it does. What I want to say is that if you start a project to try and position yourself as an alternative but better implementation of something, you are likely to find yourself stuck in a spot where you’re always playing catch up and living in the shadow of the canonical implementation.

This concept doesn't exactly map 1:1, but gist seems correct. Who wants to program in a worse and very limited version of Python? Who's going to keep things up to date in e.g. Amber as Python continues to evolve? Not fun.
You do realize that a creator hypothesis turns all theories to quite a bit more than just pretzels, and raises a lot more questions than it answers?
>whether or not concepts like "inside", "nested", or "fate" have actual fundamental qualities at the scales and timeframes under discussion

so what you are saying is that you've picked up on what experts who discuss this are discussing the nuances of.
Microsoft says WinUI 3 and WPF are the native UI platforms to invest in
Even without everything else, a big threat vector is people not knowing better who have it on, and then give access to their machine not realizing what they've done.
> also disables the car's bluetooth microphone and front right speaker.

That seems like a really small price to pay, honestly. I'd just install an aftermarket stereo and call it a day.

Although I understand if others think that price is too hefty. We all decide for ourselves what we're willing to put up with.
Three different 'governments' in this scenario. The local government still benefits from having people employed even if state government/Federal government doesn't.
There is a difference between understanding something if you get it explained and developing it at first.

Many understand Einstein's theory of relativity but few would have came up with.

He isn't some kind of Tony Stark who builds things himself.
Shitty situations should be remedied. This is most definitely a shitty situation. To effect change we need to keep the pressure up and keep calling out shitty behavior. That is indeed redundant and tiring but it must be done.
Exactly. I often wish GitHub had a messaging capability, for these same reasons.
It tickles me somewhat to note that people using the phrase "stochastic parrot" are demonstrating in themselves the exact behaviour for which they are dismissive of the LLMs.

> I am almost certain that the first conscious silicon (or whatever material) will be subjected to immense suffering until a new generation that can accept the human brains banality can move things forward.

Indeed, though as we don't know what we're doing (and have 40 definitions of "consciousness" and no way to test for qualia), I would add that the first AI we make with these properties, will likely suffer from every permutation of severe and mild mental heath disorder that is logically possible, including many we have no word for because they would be incompatible with life if found in an organic brain.
If you work full time you really can't qualify for government assistance unless you have children.
This person really needs a Surface device instead of an iPad.
This just means that minimum wage is currently set at poverty wages.

Minimum wage is set by politicians, not some arms length regulatory agency. So it's entirely possible that the minimum wage is stagnant for intractable political reasons and out of touch with reality.
The Holocene extinction was started when pointed sticks were state of the art and we ate most megafauna to extinction. It would be more the Anthropocene to blame if anything. Blaming high technology is thus rather anachronistic.

Personally I'm of the opinion that the world was already on fire as it were, what with the mass extinctions caused when we became an invasive species out of Africa. If we were still stuck in the stone age like our predecessors we would still be an ongoing mass-extinction. There is some hope to eventually not be an ongoing mass extinction but that would require some combination of even better technology and the right priorities.
This all seems pretty sensible. Another area that would be nice to see addressed are strategies for balancing latency/cost/performance when data is frequently updated. I'm building a terminal-based AI coding tool[1] and have been thinking about how to bring RAG into the picture, as it clearly could add value, but the tradeoffs are tricky to get right.

The options, as far as I can tell, are:

- Re-embed lazily as needed at prompt-time. This should be the cheapest as it minimizes the number of embedding calls, but it's the most expensive in terms of latency.

- Re-embed eagerly after updates (perhaps with some delay and throttling to avoid rapid-fire embed calls). Great for latency, but can get very expensive.

- Some combination of the above two options. This seems to be what many IDE-based AI tools like GH Copilot are doing. An issue with this approach is that it's hard to ever know for sure what's updated in the RAG index and what's stale, and what exactly is getting added to context at any given time.

I'm leaning toward the first option (lazy on-demand embedding) and letting the user decide whether the latency cost is worth it for their task vs. just manually selecting the exact context they want to load.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
Better start would be petrol not aviation fuel
Bluesky.
I just assumed that would have been the first thing they tried…
We are at the point where evacuating children from the warzone is worse and more "genocide" than randomly bombing them.

These propaganda slogans are long past any reason or logic and amount only to political agenda. Russia must be seen as an actor of genocide, while Israel must be seen as someone with reasonable security concerns and complicated circumstances, and that's it.
I did all remote last year, it killed my productivity. Back in an office now (4 out of 5 days) and the change of scenery gives me my focus back. Agreed though, hybrid is the best model.
How about homomorphic encryption? There was a nice write-up & discussion of it the other week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40262626
Our friend above is likely under NDA, so they won’t be able to comment on intricacies.

Luckily, I am not under an NDA, and I can tell you that the Reddit post is nonsense. A straight-up lie when you assume bad faith or poor recollection if you assume good faith.

The scenario described there, and further expanded upon by OP in comments is pretty much impossible. I hedge only because of an astronomical unlikely probability that everything in the universe aligned perfectly.

As you seem to be aware, encryption keys are involved, and that involvement lies at the root of the impossibility.

Say you’re inclined to believe that the Secure Enclave that stores this key has a massive bug that doesn’t delete the key upon wiping. That alone wouldn’t explain a scenario like that.

In addition to not deleting that key, the OS must’ve been unable to detect and try to use that key until some serious potent code was introduced in 17.5.

Also, during the wipe, the encrypted data partition that goes with the key must’ve not been deleted and gone unnoticed by the OS up until 17.5.

In addition, the OS must’ve kept the key intact, and ignored the existence of the encrypted data partition. Creating a new encrypted data partition with an accompanying key and acting as if it was all business as usual.

Then, suddenly, 17.5 comes around. It would have to have seen two encrypted data partitions with two encryption keys, mounted the most recent encrypted data partition, and decrypted it with the most recent encryption key without any issues and hiccups, only to then do something quite miraculous.

It would, at that point, do something that it was never designed to do, namely decrypt and mount the old data partition, all while the most recent one is already mounted, grab only a bunch of old photos from a corrupted database, nothing to else, and merge it into the database located on the most recent data partition.

All this while ignoring many complexities related to key pairs tied to iCloud accounts that I’ve omitted for simplicity’s sake and without throwing up a single error, much less a respring or, more likely, a kernel panic.

Just the part about mounting two partitions alone would cause huge issues.

It’s nearly impossible to do this on purpose due to hardware limitations on storage and the way the Secure Enclave works. To entertain a string of bugs that would execute this perfectly is just silly.

Who needs jailbreakers and the likes of Pegasus spending hours designing chain exploits when the OS stumbles into perfectly executed bugs that defy the law of physics?
Another website in this vein is https://www.maria.cloud/ which is more geared up for teaching complete beginners programming, but I think with the basic paredit style controls and the evaluate-each-form-at-a-time style is I think a lot more realistic to the kind of REPL driven development that you actually use — typing directly into the REPL terminal window is very unergonomic imo. You’re much more likely to use something like VSCode’s Calva or emacs’ cider to send the form under the cursor to a REPL process somewhere.
I second that "The B-field will always return the correct or Indeterminate value for an inserted key." before listing classes of errors would clarify it by a lot.
One approach I've used for running arbitrary code, with arbitrary dependencies, without having to rely on much support from the host system, is to create an Arx file (a shell snippet followed by tar gz data, which is self-extracting/executing) using `nix bundle`. On one hand it feels like a "poor man's container image"; but it's better in some ways since it doesn't need any daemons, etc. to be running.

For example, we had an EC2 machine whose init would fetch and run a shell script from S3, which spun up a big JVM application. We started getting strange errors from deep inside the JVM, which seemed to be caused by some security update somewhere in the stack (either ours or Amazon's); but that machine image had evolved via snapshots of snapshots, etc. and was a pain to figure out what it was running, let alone update and manage it in a sane way. As a quick fix I bundled a known-good JVM into an Arx file (along with other dependencies like Bash, etc. since it's Nix, so I might as well!) and put that on S3 in place of the old shell script. That got the EC2 machines working again, without having to mess with the (already messy) image; we gained a more sensible way of specifying dependencies (via Nix); and, since we were now building an artifact, rather than slinging a raw script, we could do stuff like running Shellcheck on the code. This definition was also easy to re-use when we eventually switched it to ECS containers (just changing the `nix bundle` options).
If you were to ever try to create a new railway, or even a small hiking trail along an existing body of water, you will discover it would have been much easier centuries ago before the local municipalities gave away all the land. It is a hard thing to undo, is the point. You wish you could go back in time and set aside the necessary land for trails, parks, etc.
If that happens, I wonder if future generations will believe us when we insist that wasn't the intention; We just wanted a helpful AI that takes pictures of what you're doing every 5 seconds in case we forgot what chinese food place we like.
And you know the answer to all those questions for bluesky?
Send me an email for an invite: alan@wakatime.com
async / await as they exist in JavaScript, Python, and Rust aren’t the only way to execute tasks concurrently.
> Gee, I hope my insurance company doesn't misinterpret this 'hard braking event' as me being an irresponsible driver.

Oh man, I had one of those boxes insurance companies send out to record you so you can qualify for lower rates for a couple weeks (my wife signed us up for it) and I felt like I was driving so much more dangerously with it on. But all my graphs would have been reeeeeal smooth.
Fox Corporation is not anymore related to News Corp.

Same main owner.
That really, really depends.

My stepdaughter was involved in a he-said, she-said collision in a lighted intersection. "I believe I had the green light", "no, I believe I had".

So me, thinking, talking to insurer, "While not definitive, if the EDR shows that she was a complete stop for 30s before moving, that might show she was stopped at a red, and then went when it turned green".

Insurer: unless we're looking at six digits in a claim, we're not pulling EDR data.

They did treat it as a not-at-fault collision, because fault could not be determined, but still.

Tesla will make you fight them to get access to your own EDR data. But will hold press conferences where they'll tell the world all about your EDR data if they think it will move the spotlight away from AP/FSD (fatal accident a few years ago where they were suspected to be involved. Tesla holds a press conference, "Akshually, the vehicle had told the driver to be more attentive". And it had. But Tesla didn't mention that it had only done that once. And that that one time was EIGHTEEN MINUTES prior to the collision. They just wanted to make it sound like an irresponsible driver.)
We just had a pandemic made from a non-living virus that was basically trying to eat us. To riff off the quote:

The virus does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else.