skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gaslighting. “You keep using that word. I’m not sure it means what you think it means.” - Enigo Montoya

I admit to an ad hominem argument. Then I point out that my critic is themselves using one. That’s not gaslighting. Gaslighting would be if I denied it.

And yes, I say that is hypocritical and unpersuasive. But it is unpersuasive because it is hypocritical not because it is ad hominem.

I doubt this is persuasive to you. It sounds like you are emotionally invested in this. But hopefully you can at least see my intention was not to deceive or manipulate.
David Cameron falls victim to hoax call from 'former Ukraine president'
Getting the sad vibes of "philosophy dept. hopelessly trapped in bubble with microsoft and wolfram products, nevermind ever speaking to CS dept."

The argument may be valid, but could have been lightyears advanced if author had any inkling there already were attempts for computers to "think" symbolically and they underdelivered and there was an "AI winter". The reason was NOT that infinite precision arithmetic was not possible.
I think the article is just "here are a few things I'm aware of that are more expensive than I think they should be". There isn't any analysis of the industries they are in or the dynamics that enable them to maintain those price points.

The Verisign case is the strongest one, but even granting that, those price increases over the years look very aligned with the aggregate rate of inflation to me. (I do personally think that things like Verisign would be good candidates for public administration, but there are potential drawbacks to that as well.)

One issue is that there are people who do these kinds of deep analyses of industries and how various players in them can maintain particular price points and margins, but none of those people are fundamentally skeptical of the whole system, they are mostly Wall Street analysts or adjacent kinds of people, who don't question capitalism for a moment (it is their "water"). So on the one side we have skeptics mostly without deep expertise and on the other side we have deep expertise mostly without skepticism. It's not surprising that we don't get a huge amount of well-researched criticism of the system.
This is a common misunderstanding in the United States, as well.
The easiest model to understand and prevent or detect burnout happens is when you continuously rely on willpower to work on things on which you have no hope of success.

Because hope is a story you tell yourself, you can blunt or escape burnout by reframing your situation into one that is entirely about internal rewards instead of external rewards which you cannot control.

For example, in a failing situation you are gaining experience and the chance to develop skills you can use later.

The difficult cases are when you have external dependencies that can’t be met like supporting a family.

When I was younger I always felt I could quit so I worked without fear and did amazing work. But when I felt I couldn’t quit, it was painful.

My entire life I have watched tech burn people out and I then got my turn after I had kids. The lesson is to remember that industry moves with the money printing. The high salaries are double reality and to keep expenses low so you can survive the financial cycle.
I got burnout and I'm still recovering 3 years even with extensive therapy

EDIT: It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have been (and still am) convinced I will never be able to work again, in any job, at all
IIRC, the rate is somewhat dynamic.

That said, my experiments in silico say that what matters most is the pressure from the utility function, more so than the rate of mutation.

So if some organism is in an environment where only a few mutations help, then evolution progresses slowly; and when most possible changes are improvements, then evolution progresses faster.

Both environments can happen even without any dynamic change to the rate of mutations themselves.
It is not "all of Firefox is not available in Russia," as there will be unofficial mirrors, torrents, etc. But I hear you, it's indeed better to have two extensions available from unofficial sources only than the whole ecosystem.
Show HN: I made an app so I'll never worry about prompting again
prompting chatGPT sometimes feels like I'm begging for handouts.

- I assign it a role like "You're a programmer with 10 years of experience" or "You're a creative writer specializing in science fiction"
- I give it the context
- I ask it if it has any questions and try to answer them

But it still gives me rubbish code or answers.

The only times, I've gotten real gold are when I spend hours perfecting the prompt. I try and think through every scenario. I don't always have hours, I just want answers. That's why I built https://llmchef.com

I call it a prompt enrichment engine. I've curated over 100 recipes from a project called Fabric by Daniel Meissler. You can enter the basic unimpressive prompt and the recipe is applied to your prompt to give you a masterpiece.
“ Rather than consciously reasoning that most mammals lack a ventral stream, and therefore would not be able to recognize a still object”

Imagining bears and deer just hitting trees left and right because they don’t move is absolutely hilarious.
I find the premise of the paper strange -- if the router is untrusted it can do many things, not just statistical traffic analysis at a high level (e.g. DNS/HTTP may give away apps downloading a list of VPN endpoints).

In 2024 IPv6 isn't mentioned, even in the future work section. While privacy addressing is often used, the address is usually rotated infrequently in terms of tracking what a device is doing for a few hours, privacy addressing aims to stop tracking over days. A router can easily see the real MAC address in the neighbour table, but right now a client device using a VPN over IPv6 is potentially trackable even beyond the local router, which seems more interesting than their local only threat model.

I wonder if any VPN clients force renewing the IPv6 privacy address, combined with careful firewall rules to avoid leaking the device's other address(es)? I suspect many clients/people just disable IPv6 out of paranoia though.
That HN guy, amirite? Such an inconsistent individual.
>This is 60h / week.

That's not something we should praise. It's probably why healthcare workers are so burned out and make so many mistakes leading to malpractice.

Maybe in certain healthcare cases, longer hours can be more tolerable when you're doing repetitive things you've already done a million times that you can do "on autopilot" without the risk of mistakes, but for mentally intensive tasks where you're constantly thinking and problem solving and need to stay sharp, there's no way I can pull 60h/week of productivity. I'm not even fully productive for the whole 40h, let alone more.

I could pull 60h weeks if I were working on my own projects being my own boss answering only to myself and working at my own pace and deadlines, but not part of the soul crushing corporate machine with constant bullshit interruptions, meetings, theatrics and management breathing down my neck.
Is that the best use of grant funds though really? Yes, it's not the author directly out of pocket but that money could be used towards new equipment, boosting grad student/post-doc pay, etc.
Probably as many as the Chinese components in Western weapons.

All manufacturers seek to limit costs, they'll buy components from wherever they can buy the cheapest to save a buck.
People doing marketing, I guess.
This breaks my workflow.
Show HN: Markdown HN profiles at {user}.at.hn
Very opportunistic toy project as I saw the domain was up for grabs: 'at.hn' is a little site where people can have their own subdomains for whatever their HN username is (opt-in only by adding a slug to your bio). It doesn't really do much. Just shows your HN bio rendered as markdown plus meta stuff. I'm thinking of adding an aggregated user listing on the homepage so people can explore profiles. There's a bunch of interesting people on HN but discoverability is a bit longwinded. I'm wondering what other features people want. Otherwise shall likely leave it as-is. I remember hnbadges was a thing for a while, but can't remember what happened to it. Did people like that? Anyway, at.hn's on github if people want to contribute. - https://github.com/padolsey/at.hn
First chip-based 3D printer is smaller than a coin with no moving parts
That's odd: during my K-12 I had believed (encouraged by MAD magazine?) that school was where we learned how to find meaning in life, despite spending large chunks of it in granfalloons paying (just enough) attention to things other people have deemed Important?
> I meant productivity overall is constant

That's a huge statement there. Do you have any evidence that this is the case for everyone at every company no matter what?
MS went through anti-trust investigation for more than just bundling IE, and at the time commanded a much larger market share¹ of desktop computing than Apple do of the mobile market now.

But while your comparison is flawed, I agree with the assertion² that Apple should not be locking user choice like this. The EU agree too, hence Apple's immature little hissy fit nearly breaking their (already "not quite there") offline-first app support for EU users when they were told so.

--

[1] Avoiding the word "monopoly" to pre-counter the sort of "well actually" responses I got about dictionary definitions last time I said something like this.

[2] Unless I'm reading you backwards and you are saying MS should have been able to like Apple currently do!
The remarkable yidaki (and no, it's not a 'didge')
$80M for Pika
> If you compare it to transportation it is a bit like flying: its the safest way and it has many other upsides, but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic. With nuclear power even more so.

But flying is still the safest way to travel, despite a few tragic accidents. This logic doesn't make any sense.

> When a nuclear accident happens a large area can be rendered uninhabitable for a period longer than the written history of the world.

Chernobyl exclusion zone is roughly 50x50km and life is actually flourishing in there. You can see it as a tiny natural reserve which are numerous on earth and are generally seen as a good thing.
The repo is meant to be used in conjunction with the book Programming with 64-Bit ARM Assembly Language: Single Board Computer Development for Raspberry Pi and Mobile Devices. The primary learning material is the book; the repository suggests adaptations for going through exercises using Apple Silicon.
Seems like the goal of RTO is working
The thing is that in the past, the "non-useful" work (e.g. intellectual work) was often backed up by a philosophical and religious system. Now there is no sacredness to Reason or to science. In a totally secular worldview (I'm an atheist myself) there isn't an inherent value to doing that kind of work.
Definitely. That's why this doesn't really work for stuff like mass market manufacturing where your productive output is proportional to how long workers spend on the assembly line, but more for the companies that are in the innovation and knowledge work business and have secured a lucrative niche, where no competitiveness is lost due to fewer hours, but that's a relatively small percentage of the total employment.
Just wait what Apple will showcase that intelligence
How the Webb and Gaia missions bring a new perspective on galaxy formation
With current trends we'll get neither. More like 6 day plus mandatory office, judging by news and job listings.
I use the addon stylus on Firefox and apply a custom css. HN is really easy to customize and it never change.
What is new for Perl v5.40.0
>Russia, the country that has spent two years struggling to win a war against the poorest country in Europe

The war will end with Ukrainian capitulation in a couple of months if NATO were to stop all intelligence, communications and material support for the Ukraine.
CleanShot X is one of the most well-designed pieces of software out there imo.
I don't believe it.

Take cars specifically. The US makes 11 million new cars a month. If regular people can't afford them, are billionaires really buying up all those cars? How many new cars does a billionaire need? Where are they parking them all?

I can believe your explanation with money. I can even believe it with houses, with rich people buying up houses as an investment. But I can't believe it with cars. Regular people are buying new cars, and regular people think they can't afford new cars. How do we make sense of that?
> it would end in Iraq-style massacre of their army

More like with Hiroshima-style massacre of European cities.
Don't need to be a tinkerer for a Framework Laptop. You can order it prebuilt with Windows 10. It does cost a fair bit more compared to the unmaintainable Laptops though. But so do Apple products.
I mean there is no way they can whack-a-mole every problematic user post. Even if they could- users wouldn't stand for it and would look for alternatives. If they started losing users to this they'd also work on a solution or new laws.

I don't think a post-section 230 web is pessimistic but that's my opinion. We shall see I suppose.
Nobody wants to prop up the board's other investments in commercial real estate and nobody has to care that they're losing their shirts either. Make big cities safe and clean and affordable again, or they will just rot away and collapse in on themselves. I've been reading about the terrible situation in commercial real estate especially in large cities which are unaffordable and crime-ridden, it sounds like there's no escape for the people who have their wealth trapped inside the walls of buildings nobody wants to visit.
Mozilla: we're all for freedom & users privacy, but Putins regime pays us too much money!
Why would they give it away for free when they could just sell their IP to some holding company to recoup some losses? /s
Because it seems we have agreed that we need an arbitrary way to curtail the demand to some of the highest paying jobs on the planet, rather than an actual methodology around proving requisite skills for said jobs.
yet? you write "yet" as it's something that would be almost readily available, yet it's been at least 2 years now and it's still not there.

am I missing something or that "yet" is more like "maybe sometime if ever"?
I am visually impaired so take this with a grain of salt but HN is so much better to read at 200% for me. Every time it reverts back to 100% I wonder how people spend so much time reading that small text.
Hello friends,

Excited to share the release of an application designed to monitor and maintain your SQL server!

Check it out at https://www.sqlsensei.net/

Key features include:

Index monitoring with actionable improvement steps

Server wait stats/performance monitoring

Identification of bad queries based on bottlenecks

Index and statistics maintenance

Server-level actionable insights

Please note:

Special thanks to BrentOzar.com for their FirstResponderKit scripts and https://lnkd.in/dqRNqjWS for releasing the best maintenance scripts for sql server.

Thanks everyone!
I second this. I encourage all our designers to grab it. It really is a godsend for anyone who takes a ton of screenshots.
Tuxedo on ARM Is Coming
Sapir-Whorf states that language affects the way you perceive reality. I only stated that it affects your way of thinking, i.e. the set of ideas you are capable of having. It is ironic that the existence of this very concept in the English language, "Sapir-Whorf", has a gravitational effect that makes one associate similar ideas with it and automatically label them as wrong. This is a tool very often used in politics, and it only works if the idea you want to discredit has a sufficiently close relative in your language with a succinct name and a negative connotation.

For example, Westerners often label Japan as "xenophobic" (as did Biden recently), while the Japanese themselves do not see themselves as such. I theorize this is at least partly because the Japanese counterpart of "xenophobia" literally translates back as "foreigner hatred", which is a much stronger expression than "foreign-fear". This makes any argument using that expression sound ridiculous. "I'm not refusing to rent my house out to you because I hate you; I just don't know where you're coming from, what your lifestyle is like, and whether you pose a flight risk." This is within the gravity well of "xenophobia"; it is not within the gravity well of "外国人嫌悪". It is much harder to make the same argument when the language itself is working against you.

As to your other comment, a populist tells people what they want to hear. Any actual "cause" is only a means to an end for them. And Hitler was so good at being a populist that people wept at his speeches and became wholly subservient to his agenda. I think this was mostly due to his mastery of the language. It was the advertising slogans, not whatever he was selling. Had he had a larger audience to speak to, he would have changed the narrative accordingly.
The University of Chicago research was a little confusing. They added a May 2024 date to the top of the official paper, but they show most people moved to Meta and Snap. 2 companies who have been aggressively forcing people back to office and are also generally higher paying than their previous employer

They should have at least added a note that their data was 1+ years old and that RTO mandates changed during that time

It’s not surprising that people left MSFT for companies that pay double or triple. The part that’s more interesting is if people are willing to take a 50% pay cut to go remote. I haven’t seen any research on that yet

So far the data shows RTO makes people leave, but it makes them leave to other RTO companies, not fully remote ones
Well said. "Don’t design for amorphous groups. If you can’t name three real people (that you have talked to) that your API is for, then you are designing for an amorphous group and only amorphous people will like your API."
Thank you for introducing me to "sesquipedalian", a word I've never seen before in over 20 years of venturing in the anglosphere, but one which I, as a native speaker of an Awful (and very sesquipedalian) Language, instantly fell in love with. :)
Follow-up on this feedback - it would be nice if the UI supported tapping individual blocks sequentially like the game strands does. Currently (on safari on iOS at least) if you go to highlight e.g. 6+4 one at a time the UI reports “invalid equation” if you highlight 6 and + instead of highlighting the start and end of the range in one go

Otherwise, cool game!
> At a time when employee retention should be of a top concern

First line of the page. The entire development of the article hinges on this being true but I see no sign of justification or reasoning behind this affirmation.
Recently I learned that there is a decent little video editor baked in too (and you can even open pre-existing videos).
The day the British battleships 'Prince of Wales' and 'Repulse' were sunk by Japanese planes. December 8 1941, IIRC.
Yeup. Interesting how the older LED bulbs are particularly bad for this (and in the UK, at 50Hz). More modern high quality ones seem significantly better.
That's lame llm output
Exactly. Layoff without having to pay severance? What a bargain.
You do trust random humans daily. Or half of the world population would be killed in one day if it wasn't so. You trust that two white lines on the road is enough not to hit your car. You trust that you are not getting mugged by every passerby. The list is endless.
as funny as this is, this would be concerning if/when they make textbooks with AI graphics
Lol at you missing the qualifier "and no use case for it in their environmnent/culture".

Everybody knows avid users at 75+ or 10-, you haven't discovered something knew. But there are whole countries/areas/cultures where e.g. the majority of 75+ have no internet use, and no interest in getting any. You know, in the world, not in the US.
possibly of use:

https://www.skylighter.com/collections/coloring-agents

https://www.pyrochemsource.com/Fuels-Colorants_c_16.html
No one should hate string theory??? No one should hate any area of valid research? That sounds extremely dogmatic and reactionary.

String theory specifically is an extremely rich and fruitful theory that has had huge application to mathematics (mirror symmetry, no ghost-conjecture and the mysterious moonshine etc.) as well as inspiration for theoretical physics (AdS-CFT, Supersymmetry etc.). It is telling that none of the loudest voices telling people to "hate" an area of theoretical research have studied it (or often studied any physics or math, since the technical details, or even a grounded understanding, are superfluous to their "arguments").

>Hang on. Which one are you trying to say is right or wrong?

I'm saying they are both wrong

If you want to hate something, hate the pop-sci articles that sold it as a "theory of everything" for 20 years, and hate the environment that made it neccesary for researchers to peddle that bullshit in pursuit of funding, don't dogmatically hate an entirely valid area of research just because some mouth pieces who peddle narratives of a very technical field to an audience who aren't able to meaningfully engage with it, have decided to turn against it (i.e. Sabine hossenfield and eric weinstein or whatever their names are).
My personal email wound up in some peoples' spam folders for a while, because some, um, "enterprising business people" forged the return address for their spam.

So it could be that, depending on who does your spam filtering and how they do it.
Show HN: SQL Generator – OS React App for SQL Table/Insert Statement Generation
This open-source app lets you convert spreadsheet files (e.g. CSV/excel), JSON files, or pasted data to SQL in-clauses or CREATE TABLE/INSERT INTO TABLE combinations. Let's you easily move data into your warehouse for ad hoc analyses. All processing is client-side so your data stays with you. I have it hosted at sqlgenerator.io but you can also clone it and self-host it for security with your own internal applications.
I recently had this interesting conversation with the CEO of a local company. After the pandemic, he pondered on RTO/WFH. His company is still growing and he needed to hire more people.

If he ordered RTO, he would surely lose some people, but if he kept WFH, he would be able to hire the talent escaping RTO at other firms.

So he kept WFH and all went fine.
Very very cool, bookmarked!
An insightful post, this point resonated with me in particular…

However, I think that we all need to be a little more honest with ourselves as software engineers. […] Are you sure you don't use Gooby just because it's fun to write?

Why? I use raku every day just because it’s fun to write!
The higly contested South China Sea in the ancient days was called Champa Sea due the Champa Kingdom that once controlled more than half of modern Vietnam for more than a thousand years until the Nguyen warlords took over a few hundreds years ago [1].

Champa language is a close relative to proto-malay and old-malay languages. Originally 'garam' (meaning salt) was not in their original language vocabulary but it's believed to be introduced by the sea traders from the word garum for the salty fermented fish sauce that was once very popular in Roman, now a very common food sauces in South East Asia including Thailand and Vietnam [2]. Based on ancient Roman record for example Geoponika, the garum was normally used as salt replacement in their diets and probably due to its popularity perhaps it is considered as salt by the native Champa people and most probably where the word garam got its name about 2000 years ago.

[1] The Cham: Descendants of Ancient Rulers of South China Sea Watch Maritime Dispute From Sidelines:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140616-so...

[2] Garum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum