skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read this book, I enjoyed it and learned a lot. It isn't textbook quality, but I don't think it's aiming to be. I read it not to develop cryptographic protocols, but to be able to use existing ones more confidently.

It seems designed for the kind of person who isn't comfortable using something until they understand how it works under-the-hood, but doesn't actually need to do any under-the-hood work.

It assumes very little knowledge, and is light on math. Sometimes it's a little TOO light on math, and it left me confused because I was trying to understand a primitive more rigorously than the book could support.
The Way AGI Wins Could Look Very Stupid (2023)
Revenue does matter only if spending has real consequences and if the income stream depends on how your business fares in the market. In this case, revenue is nearly unlimited, earned from an unwilling party without any requirements and there is zero oversight on how it's spent.

I think economics is a lot like physics, in a sense. Part of it breaks down when the powers that be become incredibly dense, heavy, and large.
> I'm interested perhaps in an illustrative scenario where the speed is highlighted

That would be something like the standard twin paradox. You could set that up so that, for example, Cooper, Brand, and Doyle go out in their spaceship at very high speed and don't come back until 20 years have passed on Earth, where Romily has spent that time finding a cure. With the right numbers for the speed of the spaceship and the distance it travels out and back, it could be arranged that only an hour would pass for those aboard the ship. The downside of this is that the rocket power you would need to boost the ship to the required speed, and then turn it around and come back and decelerate to land on Earth again, would be huge, way, way beyond what would normally be considered reasonable.

The reason a supermassive black hole was used instead in Interstellar was to allow Cooper, Brand, and Doyle to be able to travel at much more reasonable speeds using much more reasonable rockets, and take advantage of the spacetime geometry of the hole to get the extreme time dilation effect. The reason a rapidly rotating hole was used (aside from the fact that we believe most supermassive holes in our universe are rapidly rotating in this way) was that it allows free-fall orbits to exist very close to the hole's horizon that have very large time dilation factors like 1 hour to 20 years, so that a planet in a free-fall orbit could plausibly exist in that region. For a non-rotating hole that is not possible; to get that close to the horizon and get the time dilation factor you would need, you would have to use rockets to "hover" and the rocket power involved would be of the same order of unreasonableness, if not more so, as what would be needed for the "twin paradox" trip I described above.
Brilliant question. Never thought of it before, but it make a lot of sense.

Math(s) background is one guess I can make. Based on the fact that many of those pioneers had a basic degree in math and then pivoted (heh) into computer science. In fact some of them started before computer science was even a formal thing.
The UK is now the tech unicorn capital of Europe
How is it difficult for an altruistic small business to offer a prominent "end subscription" button? It's only hard to cancel most things because businesses purposely make it difficult.
Of course it is. It’s a pure money grab and nothing else. Ban on growing weed is probably unconstitutional too.
ungodly slow on apple silicon
Thanks! Indeed, the ultimate (but very ambitious from the point of view of coordination and infrastructure) vision would be to build the "planetary computer" where everyone can contribute and every computation is transparently reproducible. While researching `mandala`, I ran into some ideas along those lines from the folks at Protocol Labs, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBo1lEZ_Iik, though I'm not aware of the current status.
And you need all the mapping rules for the past. Say, we got rid of daylight savings time starting next year. The year after that, what happens when you look at a time/date a decade before?
Every one I’ve used is on AWS and will tell you the zone so you can keep things within the region/zone. That includes Heroku, Supabase, Neon, and (obviously) RDS.

That said, I’ve used AWS DBs with Cloudflare pages and the latency isn’t a major issue. If you are running non geo-distributed DB, the DB is a lot further than 10ms away from your average user.
820 billion dollars (and counting) are spent on war by the US government every year.
Isn't that when the business majors took over?
Seductive Language for Narcissists in Job Postings
This was a tax, not a ban on production for personal use. There is no precedent here.
Good point. But on top of fork hierarchy, git commit authors can be used.

This would mean excluding non-github members, and excluding members that opt out.
The helium used to fill balloons is no different than the helium used to cool MRIs. The latter has just been liquified.
I believe they meant on https://google.com (the home page)
The private sector is entirely dependent on the willingness of people to pay them money. Private company revenue is not comparable to tax revenue in orders of magnitude.
If They Only Knew How to Leverage the ADA to Fight RTO Mandates
As far as this particular article goes, there's also a language selector at the top right corner. Quite a few articles exist in both languages, likely translated by Artemy himself (who I gather is bilingual).
Corrugated Boxes: How It's Made Step by Step Process [video]
I like you think some DBaaS vendor is reading this, thinking of how to offer an always-on fully managed, backed up, and replicated database for $2/mo.

Nobody wants a customer who values a service like that at $2.
>This is the modern way of doing it.

So by modern you mean the 1980s?

My biggest takeaway reading through all these comments is that Plug-and-Play might as well be heresy...
This isn’t about increasing revenue. It’s about making people pay their fair share. Hard working people like us have to pay more in taxes to make up for tax cheats.

Tax cheats are basically stealing money from our pockets. So when the IRS comes for them I’m not going to be upset.

And I am sure these are people who would say they love America if you asked them. I bet. If you love America so much then pay your taxes.
> They have three concurrent LTS releases when they need one. Maybe two. 18.04 is the python2 of distributions. Let it go.

> Having worked in several places that relied on it... ESM is being the bad kind of enabler.

The business proposition is 10 years of support with minimal package changes. Are you asking them to just stop selling that product?

Fewer LTS releases wouldn't change that core question, since if they never had a 2018 LTS release those users would be on the 2016 release instead.
> Every subsequent administration has dug the hole deeper

I find this claim to be intellectually dishonest.

It's pretty well-known that deficits drop during Democrat presidencies and then skyrocket again during Republican presidencies. But because democrats haven't been able to bring the deficit to zero since Clinton, somehow they still get blamed for the debt continuing to rise, even when they still manage to reduce deficit while Republicans increase it.

It drove me absolutely bonkers that people blamed Obama for skyrocketing debt when he inherited a huge deficit because of Bush's tax cuts.
First cell-free system in which genetic information and metabolism work together
In a small tech company with a small audience and finite scale, your 2012 approach will still work in 2024

In any company that operates at web scale, where success means suddenly having millions of users, and thousands of employees, you've got to have a robust way to deploy and orchestrate software.

The key point of the cloud, and technologies like Kubernetes, is that they allow you to treat hardware (servers and network infrastructure) as if they were software. Copy and paste a code template, and you have a data centre of your own to play with. To get more servers and route traffic to them, simply change some configuration. And because you're managing your server fleet via configuration, any changes can be easily automated, permissioned, audited, visualised, rolled back, shared, documented etc.

As a solo developer, you could feasibly create a whole company serving an app or website to hundreds of thousands of users before you had to consider employing any more staff. The cloud, and its infrastructure-as-code platform technology makes that possible.

Startups can focus on their core competency, rather than having to build expensive competancies and making huge and risky upfront capital investments in infrastructure.
tl;dw: No, it wasn't an evil conspiracy; a 1000 hour life span was a reasonable trade-off between longevity and power efficiency.
The post is from 2022.

However, looking at the table of contents [0], she seems to spend a lot of the book on types and pointers. That's cool, since the compiler books that I've seen don't cover languages with pointers and pointer arithmetic (and the analyses that come with that), or representations of types.

[0]: https://nostarch.com/writing-c-compiler
in poetry, it is called poetic licence.

in startups, _ _ _.

fill in the blanks.

suggestions:

disrupting

changing the world

more efficient

productivity

cost savings

people savings

hardware unsavings

...
What would it win, infinite boredom?
As a longtime vim user text editing is not an unmet need or unsolved problem. Lack of time, energy to execute on everything is a much bigger problem. And the very biggest and most dangerous unsolved problems I can see on all our plates involve democracy and climate.

Heck I'd like to "solve" all issues with public restrooms in the US, for example, or the lack of planning for trees or shade or water conservation, first, before I'd spend time on Yet Another Hip New Text Editor. The latter is perhaps several hundred slot ranks down (at most generous to it) in my priority list.
Or maybe we could collectively get back to the concept of individual responsibility and personal success? The top 10% are not the top 1%. By taxing successful people at very high rates, you're just widening the gap even more.

I know that this opinion is disregarded as a conspiracy by some, but I see the very real effect of it where I live (in Germany). We have a large part of the populace who do not see value in Work because we accidentally created equality of outcome by not raising the wage limit needed to hit the highest tax bracket for decades.

I'm not kidding. There exist multiple showcases that show there to be just a tiny difference in net income anywhere between 3k and 5k Eur before tax, if you're a single earner with a family of two in any large city.
Some SaaS providers will let you choose your cloud and set up their services there.

As for the latency, it might not matter for all applications, or it may encourage the devs to spend more time optimizing the number of SQL queries.
They definitely used SaltStack - in the early days there was a bunch of Salt config in the k8s repo. I don't think it lasted long as it all got built around with k8s native infra/functionality.
Huh, interesting. For many of the users I heard from, the end of December is the ideal time for doing upgrades, since they don't need to worry about system availability while people are away on their Christmas/New Years vacations.

I think this is probably fine though; it just means that the companies you mention will need to upgrade in October or November. That's why we have a 3 month overlap between when one minor version is released and when the previous minor version is EoLed.
Have you looked at gvisor to help implement some of the outstanding system calls given it’s a kernel written in go?
The definition of "quickly" for roboticists are different from how it's usually interpreted. I'm not a real one, but to me it seems this tree of comments contain couple more such definition disagreements.
Release Engineering Best Practices at Google [pdf]
There are no simple solutions to complex biology problems that work in a medical context.
Surprises with Rust's `as` (and Python Division)
I first used Slackware Linux off floppies in the mid 90s, yet every time I see linux in the browser I am gobsmacked.

I’ve said for a while that a browser is basically its own operating system. Now it can host operating systems!
It was always fun to have the threat of overdriving and frying your CRT monitor hanging over your head when trying to get X going.
I was always perpetually tired until my late 20s so I just slept in every class and took naps at my desk at my job too.
Most companies don’t buy jets and yachts. Implying that is just hyperbole. Even most of the richest companies don’t own or spend on those kinds of luxuries. I’m not sure why you’re lumping “huge bonuses” in with those things - a bonus is usually a necessary expense for talent. All the anger against executive bonuses is mostly from people who simply don’t understand hiring for those kinds of roles. Sure there are some packages that are irresponsible but usually there’s a good reason they are what they are, which is that companies operate in a competitive environment typically and so do candidates. On the other hand government agencies are monopolies whose funding is compelled with threat of violence.

As for Musk - he didn’t get Tesla to pay him anything. Shareholders voted and approved this compensation package, twice. When he was given the package initially many years ago, it was worth a lot less. Musk led the company through a 20x gain in value which is why it is worth more now. Shareholders got far more than they ever imagined. But even the targets they set out initially were considered impossible by most, and it was thought to be a very risky deal for Musk and great for everyone else, since he received no cash.
How could you possibly know what people read HN for.
A few questions come to mind:

- does apple just share "full visibility", or remove itself completely from the transaction?

- can customers still use apple for payment or can an app require their own payment system?
You'll never achieve what you believe to be impossible
Do you not expect Apple to use the M4 in the next round of Mac refreshes?
They don't have the old stuff any more. It's like trying to land men on the Moon now: the Apollo hardware is all gone, except the stuff in a museum that doesn't work any more.
It doesn't seem to be profitable, in part because the internet now consists of mega-sites and if your network doesn't serve ads on the mega-sites, no one is interested in your network.

Project Wonderful was a fantastic webcomic-focused ad network. From my perspective as a reader, being shown ads for other webcomics while I'm reading a webcomic was... a positive, really. A lot of webcomic artists ran Project Wonderful ads and nothing else. They shut down in part because of the rise of facebook.
Tree to Box: The Billion Dollar Cardboard Business [video]
Even though I use publicly funded infrastructure every day (and I like it, too!), government spending inefficiency in the US is a problem, even compared to “western liberal democracies” as we would say in competitive debate

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-....
A lead filled baseball bat flying through space is always moving at full force unless some external force is applied.
Is it just me or did the author just describe block chain, except without the cryptography and not distributed?

Or perhaps a Kafka partition / commit logs with infinite retention.
I suspect you’d have trouble opening ports on the client’s machine. Maybe you could use a dedicated http proxy the client talks to
How many people die from regular use of alcohol during that time?
Most of those names no longer in use will be strongly associated with the particular historical period, usually not what you want
Robin Williams on the topic: https://youtu.be/jZFR1ik3WLs?si=rXjWW5mlPvsQvYZH&t=40
Your reasons are valid and make complete sense to me. I wonder if you could write to them and explain your use case and offer to pay for a perpetual license? No idea if it'll work, but worth a shot maybe?

If you try this, do update and let us know what they say.
That doesn't mean it is more efficient. The administrative costs of Social Security, for example, are around 1/2%. That compares very favorably with most of the funds in my 401k.
For more on these themes, check out Seeing Like a State by James C Scott. What he says about legibility, and especially
how the administrative state necessarily ignores any information which couldn't be made legible to them, helped me understand better how to convey realities to managers working outside the trenches.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
Great question - personally, I mostly use it from notebooks, and I think it's a great fit for that. Bundling experiment tracking with incremental computation makes a lot of sense in a notebook (or any other interactive) environment, because it solves the problem of state: if all your computations are end-to-end memoized, re-running the entire notebook is cheap (I routinely do this "retracing" to just get to some results I want to look at).

That being said, nothing prevents you from running this in a script too, and there are benefits of doing this as well. If your script mostly composes `@op` calls (possibly with some light control flow logic as needed), you get resumability "for free" on the level of individual `@op` calls after a crash. However, the workflow you're describing may run into some features that aren't implemented (yet) if your runs write to different storages. `mandala` makes it easy to get a "holistic" picture of a single `Storage` and compare things there. Comparing across storages will be more awkward. But it shouldn't be too hard to write a function that merges storages (and it's a very natural thing to do, as they're basically big tables).
You surfaced memories of childhood me installing RedHat 5.2, carefully selecting packages and X config options, getting it wrong, not knowing how to get back to that magical installation UI, and reinstalling the OS just to have another crack at it.

Eventually I figured out how to launch that xconfig utility and found some sane defaults, and was thrilled when I finally saw the stippling pattern or even a window manager.
The premise checks out. I imagine the reason we don't hear about it at all is that the perpetrators are comfortable with nobody knowing about it and the victims are too busy trying to create a life for themselves. Unless your career involves blogging and you have some kind of success in that venue, you won't be heard.
Show HN: macOS desktop app for turning websites into glanceable widgets
Hi HN, I'm Devin, formerly the first engineer at Cresta, an AI enterprise unicorn. My background was in melding complex systems like LivePerson and Citrix with AI-first applications, focusing on ensuring seamless information flow. This experience led me to create Glanceables, a tool that turns complex web pages into streamlined, instantly readable widgets.

Glanceables is designed for anyone who's tired of the constant browser refresh. It allows users to select specific areas of a webpage to monitor through a simple, interactive interface. Once set, it captures and refreshes these snippets automatically (once per minute), so you're always up-to-date without any fuss.

I need your help:

Distribution Suggestions: I’ve built the app with Xcode and am looking for recommendations on where to host the file for download. Any tips? License Input: The project is "almost" open source. I’m open to suggestions on which license might be best suited for this project, aiming to balance openness with protection of the core ideas. Use Case Feedback: I'd love to hear what tedious web monitoring tasks you think Glanceables could simplify. If you try out the app and run into any issues, especially with specific websites not working correctly, please submit an issue on GitHub!!

Let me know all your feedback, questions, and thank you for checking it out!
Huh, I was under the impression the ban was due to the dangers of home distilling (e.g. blindness).
Not to those of us who grew up with Lego it isn't
Right; disabling eBPF doesn't solve this. And the bigger point is that this kind of eBPF is still super-user only.

Apart from the more exotic facilities, the critical facilities that would be hard to disable include LD_PRELOAD for interposers/shims (as you mentioned), and gdb for just setting breakpoints on crypto functions. And if neither of those existed, then I may have to edit openssl code and recompile my own edited version. And if that wasn't allowed (signed libraries) then maybe I'd edit the application code or binaries.
You can also use HTML+CSS and print to PDF.
I have a "du" command currently running that has been running for ~50 hours. I'd much rather have it update a half-dozen directory entries on each write.
It's interesting how everyone wants to go back to the 50's america with functioning infrastructure and all that, but no one wants to pay the 90% tax that lead up to that.

Also consider that payroll tax has become an increasing portion of what is collected, health insurance is now required to be paid by the individual regardless of health status, and auto insurance is now required for all drivers. These are effectively regressive taxes on the general population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_Uni...
…penicillin?
Anyone that believes this can prove it by taking down an existing popular product with a better engineered and better performing competitor built for the same cost.

I was using computers in the 80s. They did a very small fraction of what we ask them to do now and they didn't do it fast.
It depends a lot on where you live. In CA they’re spending 100 billion dollars on 500 miles of high speed rail, while in Florida a private high speed rail project spanning 230 miles of rail cost 5 billion. It’s hard to imagine that extra ~85 billion is being well spent, especially given it will almost certainly go further over budget
Hi, this looks really amazing, will give it a try later thanks
These are full system emulators, this is more a compatibility layer ("Linux syscall emulator") for emulated userland binaries. I.e. a bit higher level and a bit more usable/flexible as a result.