skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Was the idea that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan fake news?

What facts was the assertion based on? I've always thought that while possible there wasn't supporting evidence.
Houthi rebel footage appears to show a downed US Reaper drone worth $30M
The Architect Who Made Singapore's Public Housing the Envy of the World
Thanks for being real in your post description. So many ShowHN posts go hyper corporate right off the bat.

Cool little thing! The price point seems fair to me.

The homepage’s output example might need some tweaks. The code tab on mobile is wrapping text with a big font size and the syntax highlighting mode is wrong so it looks quite a bit more spaghetti-y than it really is.

Nice job though!!
There's a flag button, though. Sure - it's not the same but we don't fix visual noise with more

I don't mean to belabor it. If the system demands this, perhaps the observing powers change the system
This. It is hard overeat if your diet consists of fish, nuts, seeds, and olive oil.
I was at Info sec local meet up six months ago, and mentioned the Tensor models get control of your CPU and GPU… I was basically passed over like I was some idiot making LLM == TERMINATOR claims.

Good stuff.
The royal we.

What steps have you personally taken to automating hard labour?
The paper we're discussing based its analysis on a bunch of published reports. Eyeballing its supplement Figure 1, about 4/5 of those reports gave a bottom line in the same direction as yours (increased mortality). But the OP paper arrived at a bottom line in the opposite direction.

I haven't looked further at either of these papers; just saying that telling me there's another paper which agrees with 4/5 of the other papers is not actually much information, in itself.
I’m not a stock market person so I’m not going to comment on why this happened or if it is justified, but the ‘AI disruption’ angle that a lot of analysts speak about is pretty uninformed. The large enterprise software companies and consultancies are already making a fair amount from AI add-ons and that’s only going to accelerate. Yes, in the future we will have generative UI and such, but GitHub Copilot Chat isn’t that disruptive, and that’s really the main type of AI dev tool that’s actually in-market or anywhere close.
I can fully accept that what VR gives you is far more immersive, but if you’ve got no answer to the laundry list of downsides. It doesn’t really matter that it’s better at some point. We as the mainstream consumer don’t all run out and buy racing simulator rigs just because it’s better than playing on an Xbox controller.

Plenty of higher technology products fail when simple and cheap solutions compete with them.

If you want to tell me that 3D, depth, and space is main the draw, I could point to the various failures of 3D movies and television that were supposedly the technologies of the future.

I used to own a VR headset, a Valve Index. I loved it for what it was. Games on that system were immersive like nothing I had experienced before.

But there were numerous downsides.

Cost, not really solved by today’s products.

Eye fatigue, not solved even by the Vision Pro.

Group experience. Not really solved unless you’re a total hermit. Am I going to go to enjoy a SuperBowl party where all the attendees are wearing a VR headset? How does VR benefit the experience of watching shows with family/friends on the couch? Is it an upgrade to put on individual headsets and using virtual avatars? How do I cuddle and kiss my spouse while we watch a movie with a headsets on? How do I watch VR content at a bar or restaurant?

Multitasking: At best not an upgrade, at worst a downgrade. If I use a TV I can watch the show talk to my friend and order toilet paper on my smartphone that I already own at the same time. What upgrade am I getting there with VR?

Battery life. Not solved. Can I even get through a SuperBowl game on a headset? Is my SuperBowl party going to be a group of 30 people standing around the power outlet?

Nausea and VR acclimation. We could call this partially solved. A pretty high percentage of the population just can’t do VR physically.

Sweaty face, messed up hair, not solved. Period.

Compatibility with corrective vision: not really solved, every headset needs custom prescription lenses or needs space to fit glasses (this was uncomfortable in my Index, I was lucky to be able to wear contacts).

Visual fidelity: not solved, a standard TVs still beat the Vision Pro at pixels per FOV. 4K per eye includes all the periphery vision that doesn’t represent the main focus of your content.

Profit, not solved. The only companies making a profit on VR are companies like Valve that aren’t burning cash on R&D. How long will public companies like Meta and Apple tolerate wildly unprofitable product lines? which Apple product that sold under 500,000 units at launch is still with us today? Maybe the Mac Pro?

Let’s also not forget that high technology in the medium isn’t typically the driver of what is popular in content. The 5th highest grossing film in 2023 was a film shot on analog film technology that primarily used practical effects. The most watched show in 2023 was a cop procedural that has been on antenna television for over 20 years. The top selling video game of all time is Minecraft. Nobody really cares about being blown away by immersive visuals when they just want to watch deckhands on a chartered yacht reality show sleep around and gossip.
I enjoyed this exchange.
At&t did not reduce rates under the consent decree, regulators did.

But the specific complaint that led to antitrust action had more to do with the control at&t was exerting over the network preventing the adoption of new technology by customers.
What is hot stage jettison?
Vegan for 20 years: I check my blood every other year or so and there hasn’t been an issue. I take a multivitamin, like everybody should, but maybe that counts as “properly supplementing”? AFAIK the only vitamin that’s easily deficient in a healthy vegan diet is B12, and that’s supplemented in most soy milks
Snap, I'm using CDK to set it all up too which makes everything pretty easy to manage.
You're responding to something that isn't in my comments. Neither I said it's a scripting language, nor you are being honest in pretending that the industry does not associate whether a language is perceptibly low-level with its applicability in systems programming tasks.
Housing affordability is wrapped up in good jobs aggregating around major cities.

The complaint is that good jobs are accruing to particular areas, through nothing the inhabitants of those areas have done, and then the locals are using that accrual of jobs to boost their own property prices.

Housing in a specific locality is a weird luxury item because people often don’t really want the housing, they want access to the job market.

So an underlying question is “are we okay with citizens enriching themselves by gatekeeping the good jobs behind a paywall?”

Their desire to enforce scarcity is causing societal issues as workers demand more wages to pay for the housing, prices of everything go up as a result of wage demands (among other things), and the US deals with its citizens funneling ever greater portions of their income to housing.
Completely agree. As much as I dislike modern streaming services' habit of preventing you from owning the art, I have to credit them for breaking me out of my deep rut and getting me to discover new artists. For decades I didn't know what I was missing.
Please decode your acronyms. Thank you
One of the coolest things about the modem age is that you could easily try a different ISP if you weren't happy with your current ISP's performance (upstream and down).
For a really ancient OS like Windows 98, I'd think >99.99% of exploits out there target newer OSes & simply don't work on Win98. Safety by obscurity.

That said: for every idiot who hooks up a Windows 98 machine to the internet, there might be some other idiot checking whether exploits targeting it, still work. Or exploit kits that sniff an OS, and select exploits to apply accordingly.

Vulnerabilities tend to have a long tail...
The RAV4 EV exists! It’s also behind the curve but it’s a fun little car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4_EV
Well, I'm not sure I agree that you can draw conclusions like that if you don't take an action. Or maybe more accurately, it may not help others to know that you regret not buying a house. You're writing based on part of the financial side of the decision. Some people don't like the time and money they have to put into maintenance of a house. Taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs are all rising. Some people are surprised how much they like the freedom of doing what they want with their house. You only learn those things by going through the experience.
Honestly now with chatgpt, matplotlib terrible API is less of a problem.
I am a huge fan of the "Backend as a Service" segment (Supabase, Pocketbase, Appwrite, ...)

One of the big benefits that they all share is that they use a mainstream DB in the back (Supabase -> Postgres, Pocketbase -> SQLite) so you have a possible upgrade path if you need it - Is this the case here? I can't even easily tell what it uses as a DB, SQLite?

Also Authentication and more importantly Authorization are so prominent in the other BaaS I mentioned - completely missing here.

Not to disregard what this project is doing, but it might be better suited as a CMS that has some backend features... like for forms or appointment booking. Nevertheless, if I find a need for it in the future, I'll surely try it out.
We have our own servers (mostly consumer pc parts) and run lxd to slice them up into vms/containers. Deploy to those using kamal and expose the web server port through cloudflare tunnels. With simple scripts to periodically compress and upload the storage volumes and database dumps to Google drive, most of our less critical apps cost about $0 to keep running. For the higher criticality apps, we also deploy them to Linux vms using kamal, but use a commercial service (linode).
Kinds going through puberty are already tracked through their phones, if not by their parents then by uncle Google. I thought we were talking about younger kids.
I think we're talking past each other. You want to discuss architecture and that's fine, super.

I'm merely offering a different explanation for why software, which is presently built by humans, might express different configurations based on that fact. It's not a qualitative statement as to the merits of one over the other.
Who should "go bankrupt" in this case? Ticketmaster? Snowflake? Snowflake's data subprocessors? The manufacturer(s) of the desktop or security apps on the compromised employee's machine? I get your natural but naive reaction, but as someone who just lived through the Sisense breach as neither the original source or end-user, it's much more complicated than you try and present it.
The method of storage isn't a factor in something becoming a blockchain, only the fact that new records contain a hash of previous records, which themselves contain a hash of previous records, and so on. This is the "chain." How you store or retrieve it is up you. Any data storage method you like can be equally "blockchain-y."
Savings app CEO says 85,000 accounts locked in fintech meltdown
I thought I did, but can give an example.

If the median income increases from 50K to 100K (adjusting for inflation), and houses stay at 500k (adjusting for inflation), they have become more affordable without losing value.
Is there a better option than heroku for under 10$ a month for python app and db support ?
Man do I feel old now. I remember using that in college when it was brand new. These were in the days when Yahoo practically WAS the internet and Google was a scrappy upstart.

I remember trading mp3s on AOL before it. I remember how much effort it took to download an mp3 over a 56k modem. Every time my brother picked up the phone I had to start over. The first one I succesfully downloaded, after trying for what must have been days but felt like months, was Gettin' Jiggy Wit It and of course it turned out our 386 computer couldn't even really play an mp3 without stuttering.

I remember moving in with two friends, a block from campus, and putting a $2,500 Gateway computer (bought from the Gateway store in the strip mall, of course) on a credit card because we were going to split it three ways. You can probably guess how that ended up. Even though that was equivalent to about $5k today it was a midrange computer at best and, of course, was replaced a little over a year later. But, we did get broadband and it could play Starcraft and online poker just fine. Worth it!

I remember after Napster exploded, it had gotten bogged down with new traffic and they started offering multiple servers, and someone wrote some third-party software that let you switch between them at will until you could find the song you wanted without too terribly much wait.

I remember my first mp3 player, a Diamond Rio 500. It used a USB cord that, of course, had the pins reversed, so you couldn't just use any USB cord. It held about one hour of music, 1.5 if you bought a very expensive 32mb flash card. It ran for a week on one aaa battery. It cost almost $300, which would be like $500 today. God did I love that thing.

I remember the RIAA and MPAA suing file sharers. I remember lots of tech bros saying what idiots they were for trying to use the legal system to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I remember one particularly astute, well-known tech guy saying at a YC dinner (must have been 2007 or 2008) in response to a sneering question about it that not everyone who chooses a career outside of tech is an idiot, the people who run the media companies might know more about media than you, certainly understand that selling physical media's days are numered, and that what they were doing was really a delaying tactic while they figured out how to monetize content in the digital age. (The answer, it turned out, was things like Netflix and Spotify, but those were still a few years away. Netflix's first original content wasn't until 2012!)

I remember after Napster got sued into oblivion there were so many others. The toothpaste was out of the tube on file sharing. Limewire. Edonkey. Bittorrent. For every one they killed two more appeared. Fragmentation wasn't even an issue since everyone ran (and thus seeded) several.

Good nostalgia for a Saturday,.
> If you give people the tools and they still spread what you deem to be fake news, then you've done what you can. Tough cookies for you.

Setting aside the inflammatory tone of your take on this - I think your argument would be strengthened by an example or two of where you're suggesting the line should be drawn - this just is not how running social media sites currently works at all. Companies can and do censor user content all the time, for better or worse. What "tough cookies"? More like tough cookies for people that don't like living in a country where a third of the population believes we're ruled by baby blood drinking reptile people.
Maybe requiring credit card payment would filter out LLMs. Is this gonna lead to closed-off paid websites ?
Every musician I know says this. Back in the day, you could actually make money selling records, which led to a flourishing of music. New hopefuls would work their butts off, playing gigs and selling small-print-run CDs to make ends meet while they waited and hoped for a major label to give them their big break. And they really had a shot at a big break, too.

Then file sharing happened, and if you were any good your stuff was being pirated as soon as it was released, if not before. Major labels won't touch pirated stuff, it's radioactive. The only way to make it is to take a bath on record sales and hope that enough people buy concert tickets and swag to meet your expenses. So yeah, the likes of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Drake -- they all get rich, but everybody else is struggling.

The idea that piracy helps listeners discover new music may well be true. But it doesn't help put food on musicians' tables -- just the opposite. See also: open source and the corrosive effect it's had on programmers' livelihoods.
Software consultant. I like to group topics (like new Kafka release) together and read it all at once, rather than slow trickle over two weeks. I also like to have my sources directly linked with notes. Offline archive is just easiest way.

I started working on my own system after Google Reader shutdown in 2013. And I really hate ads.
LLM's are a fantastic tool, but they're just a tool. They're not perfect and you may not always have an LLM nearby or some dark knowledge / data may never be LLM-indexed.

Treat it like a search engine! Search engines eliminated the need for some types of skills (scouring physical books for information, using yellow pages to find the phone number of a business, etc) but they didn't eliminate the need for:

- journals & newsletters for curating & opining on said information

- new media formats for helping us understand the information

- and much more

We just moved "up the stack" so to speak. Information finding became a commodity. There will be new sources of precious information and work that may now be even more valuable because LLM's commoditized basic stuff.
maybe you are misremembering creating mp3 files from CDs, on a 486 it took quite a while to generate a mp3 from a 4 minute wav file. Pentiums with MMX made it quite alot faster.
Utility is not an asset. When you grow up with your parents they provide shelter, you get a utility of it. No asset for you. Majority of assets produce cash flow (e.g. licensing software - IP asset, renting real estate to someone - you get monthly rent, bond - coupon payments, stock - you get dividends, etc)
Agree. Details about the surrounding environment might not be too important most of the times, but they could be the key to solving nasty bugs.

Example:

> the application crashes 15% of the time, and I don't know why

It's because the user was using a stylus instead of a mouse, and was accidentally dragging the button when trying to click it, triggering the "drag" event instead of the "click" event, and this control wasn't prepared to deal with that.

The remaining 85% of times it doesn't happen is because the click is done properly. And the developers can't reproduce it no matter what they do because they all use a mouse so it's very difficult to accidentally drag the button.

You only found the issue because the user told you it only happened when they had Photoshop open (because it's the only time they use a stylus instead of a mouse), and by chance someone from the design team offered themselves to give it a try because they heard you talking about it during lunch, and they could reproduce it.

> Ooooh, that really depends on context.

Another example. For me, my Steam Deck tends to freeze in two circumstances, requiring me to force-shutdown:

1. When I have a certain website open in Firefox for a few hours. The key information in this case is which tabs I usually have open when this happens.

2. When I'm playing Stellaris, and the Steam application decided to start eating all my RAM in background. The key information here is that I'm playing on Steam Deck, which is a very small part of the user base. There have been other bugs specific to Steam Deck as well.
Hetzner + docker swarm can take you long way for a fraction of cost of any next alternative

And for a fraction of a mental burden and stress of the lightest k8s setup you can imagine
I am not fond of Bedrock. (Acorn maybe solves a problem though)

Subverting the way WP works to make it work more like other environments is, in my long experience with WP, the cause of almost all unmaintainable, hacky sites, no matter how good the intentions.

It’s entirely possible to use Composer and the autoloader within a plugin without doing stuff like this.

I tend to wrap up every plugin I write using Composer, and enclose the plugin’s functionality in a singleton instance.

If you are not then also targeting the WP plugin repository, you can make good use of PHP lambda functions to make tidier code.

But generally, it’s just better not to assume the WP conventions are wrong; almost all the interoperability of WP comes from understanding its idiosyncratic way of doing things, and leaning on simplicity and the core whenever you can.
If you go below 300 Hz, you are probably into some hardcore top secret stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines

Assuming salt water, a 1024 Kb message should take around 3 hours to transmit.
> is at the end of the day just another means to attract eyeballs to sell ads to

If you’re poor (or stupid), yes, this is the journalism you’re limited to, and that’s a problem. For everyone else, quality subscription-based journalism is an option.
You said systems, which implies a converse of scripts. There is nothing else in the category. If something is not a systems language, it is necessarily a scripting language.

The vast majority of low level tasks are systems in nature (obviously; hence why a low level scripting language would be mostly pointless), so you're not wrong, but you're not telling the whole story.
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512028
The cherry on top of a museum-worthy thread.
Want to Unlock Performance and Clarity? Use Strong Types
It's fine if you're a VR skeptic. But I never gave a timeline on when my vision might come true.

Do you think we'll have solved the problems you outlined in 5 years? 8 years?

I'd rather focus on the actual vision I laid out rather than the limitations we have today.
how is that pedantic? I assumed you were complaining about SaaS not offering REST (I don't even know what GROQ is) but it seems you're not okay with it either: what would you want then?
Someone has to multiply your matrices somehow.
Buy some used servers on eBay, at least 3 will do for redundancy, then get 2 internet connections. Set up another server to act as your opnsense firewall/router and bond the two internet connections together. Make sure to buy a pair of UPSs for power back up. Install kubernetes and rook ceph with about 12 hard drives (redundancy) then find a friend who can host another server for offside backups. Dont forget the tape drive system for your second media. Start deploying gittea so you can host your code. Use argocd so you can have a build system. Deploy dapr so you can host all of your microservices in a standard way. Deploy otel and alertmanager so you can hook it into the only cloud service you need: OpsGenie (don't forget to winge the whole time you use it)

That way you can write an article about how much cheaper self hosting is compared to the cloud and get your next round of investment.

On a serious note. The next startup I do I'm going to just use supabase.
I'm not talking about people moving to the country, I'm talking about people who buy a holiday home there. And on the tax front I suspect people staying at hotels and eating at restaurants pay every bit as much tax as people staying in their holiday homes.
This is why we have DRM -- and need more.
The number of flight hours goes way up once you have to factor in all the combinations of pylon-mounted ordnance on something like an A-10 or F-16. Your jamming system might work fine with a missile mounted, but not with a JDAM at the same location. And you want your pilots to be confident that the aircraft systems work every single time, no matter what.

I would have liked to be in the meeting where this was proposed to a General. "You want to WHAT??"
Then how did the website end up just about a mile from my house?
> We figured out that art is simple math.

Art is not about making things beautiful. It's about making things meaningful. Unless compelled by external reasons (Money,...) artists wish to express themselves and to do so the best way the can.

> Engineering and law and planning not so much.

All of these aims to be as precise as they can be and wish that they could be Math. But Nature and Humanity randomness won't let them be.
They have detectives and can go do stings and such. But a beat cop, no, not really.