skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Else trade secrets can easily be hired away from competition

Misappropriating trade secrets is already a crime in several states and federally.

>you are paid highly for the specific reason that you are long term investment for that company.

Sounds like the company then should make staying long term an attractive proposition. I mean I understand, but "investment" usually implies some amount of risk.
Curation is, theoretically, a value-add that doesn't magically disappear with the internet. "This paper is not utter garbage" is a nice signal, if it's true.
There's just no way to spin this as the proper workings of an elegant system of checks and balances when time and time again these decisions about federal regulatory issues or other matters of national importance are nakedly forum (sometimes judge) shopped into Texas district courts. The debacle with Kacsmaryck and the Fifth Circuit's dismissal of the randomization guidance from the judicial conference is an absolute disgrace.

Until these kinds of cases are assigned to a random district court, nobody's fooled by this.
How's the work on a type checker coming along?
RIP Atsuko Tanaka
> People endlessly want hacks, workarounds, and un-normalized data structures, for a single reason - they don't want to have to think about JOIN. It's not actually for performance reasons, it's not actually for any reason other than it's easier to imagine a big table with lots of columns.

That's because, inexplicably, devs by and large don't know SQL, and don't want to learn it. It's an absurdly simple language that should take a competent person a day to get a baseline level of knowledge, and perhaps a week to be extremely comfortable with.

As an aside, something you can do is create views (non-materialized) for whatever queries are desired. The counter-arguments to this are that is slows development velocity, but then, so does devs who don't know how to do joins.
Context is the most challenging bit. FWIW, the codebases I'm working on are still small enough to where I rarely need to include more than 12 files into context. And I find as I make the context bigger beyond that, results degrade significantly.

So I don't know how this would go in a much larger codebase.

What floored him was simply how much of my programming I was doing with an LLM / how little I write line-by-line (vs edit line-by-line).

If you're really curious, I recorded some work for a friend. The first video has terrible audio, unfortunately. This second one I think gives a very realistic demonstration – you'll see the model struggle a bit at the beginning:

https://www.loom.com/share/20d967be827141578c64074735eb84a8
That's a form of enforcement, as it comes with the threat of legal action if the worker doesn't immediately quit their new job.
Atsuko Tanaka was known for voicing Motoko Kusanagi in the Ghost in the Shell franchise.
As I pointed out in a sibling thread, most SaaS offer “SSO at home” eg oauth2/oidc via either Google idp or GitHub in lower tiers, often in free tiers. So to get “adequate security” you don’t necessarily have to pay the SSO tax, but your alternative is that you must be locked to one of those two vendors, which is of course not ideal at all. But to say you have to pay the SSO tax to get “adequate security” is not really true at face value because of this.

That being said, obviously this situation as described sucks and we should not move towards it because really all it does is push SaaS startups towards these two vendors to punt huge licensing fees down the road until they have the revenue to support it. And by then they are significantly locked in to these specific two vendors, two vendors that already have problematic approaches to monopolizing certain things. So fixing this is important but for a different reason than one might take at face value.
I can identify basically three criticisms of my argument in your post.

(1) That I assume companies never have market power.

(2) That I suppose "market power" implies monopoly

(3) That my example was cherry-picked.

1. I did no such thing. I explicitly acknowledged market power several times.

2. Again, not correct. I explicitly mentioned oligopoly (assuming that 'imperfect competition' wouldn't land).

3. Of course it was. I acknowledged as much! I quite literally said the example doesn't generalize. The example serves to illustrate a 'there exists' claim. I felt a concrete example would be easier to follow than some kind of generalized model.

Your own comment claims that "actually competitive" markets can't have price discrimination. Sure, we can suppose the law of one price applies to perfectly competitive markets, but there's no sense in which a perfectly competitive markets "actually" exist at all! The obvious observation we can make is that such competitive dynamics imply that no one would make any profit!

My appeal to the airline industry as an example was not an accident. There's a very well-established literature on the relationship between competition and discrimination in the airline business. It's *certainly* not a settled question that discrimination decreases as competition intensifies. I included a classic from Stavins below that finds precisely the opposite of your claim.

My argument here isn't perfect. I can think of many flaws, many reasonable objections. But I don't think you're using any of them here.

----
Referenced paper from Stavins: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/research-department-w...
I don't think they'll use LLM's for customer service.

But it's a building block. And when used well it may be possible to get to zero hallucinations and good accuracy in question answering for limited domains - like the call center.
Cat Coat Genetics
Does AI cheating in school matter much? The primary party that loses out from the cheating is the cheater because they will fail to learn what they ought to have learned.

But wait, you say, won't they get a degree that they didn't earn? Doesn't matter: Right now anyone can just claim to have any degree they want. Universities will not confirm or deny if a particular party got a degree, citing privacy laws. Lying about degrees is probably widespread, we only hear about the few extremely uncommon cases where its caught and the perpetrator was someone high profile.

Even as it is, without/prior-to AI plenty of people manage to actually earn respectable looking degrees that turn out to be utter imbeciles in practice.

There are greater abuses of AI we ought to be concerned about.
Show HN: Compare Cities Within Europe
I created an app to compare countries/cities within Europe. It helps people to find the best places to live and work based on various data sources (cost of living, safety, quality of life, ...).

The world has become a lot smaller through the internet /plane travel and this gives people the freedom to live and work wherever they want under the motto: "Go where you're treated best".

This app enables that and allows anyone to compare cities like they would compare phones on a webshop.

I'm looking for some constructive feedback on the app. So if you have any thoughts/idea's: let me know here or on twitter (https://x.com/smn_nerd)!
A.k.a Yak Shaving [1]

[1] https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that/
Some reduction might not be so bad. I would love to know how many times I've said the phrase "the version string/CVE is irrelevant because our vendor backports patches"

A lot of this can/should be boiled down to: are our updates and mirrors current?

One selects an OS vendor/distribution explicitly to make this kind of thing their ~problem~ responsibility. They gave me "foo", they can fix it.

There's usually no problem because nobody builds everything from upstream sources. The security vendor yells at me and the OS vendor about discoveries in something they never packaged.

Each distribution gets sufficiently involved that I refuse to mind most CVEs. Eternally grateful my current role allows me to drop this charade
No, it's a triple-negative. Judge struck down (1) ban (2) on non-(3) competes.

As a result of this ruling, non-competes are now enforceable; workers are not allowed to compete with ex-employers.
I haven't tried Obsidian, but I'm pretty happy with NextCloud Notes
which saves all my notes as either plain text or markdown and keeps them in sync across my phone, and various computers.
> What is a behemoth in your opinion? I drive a Camry

Toyota Camry 1979 – 980–1,060 kg (2,161–2,337 lb)

Toyota Camry 2024 – 1,480–1,660 kg (3,262–3,659 lb)

This is the problem: All cars are getting bigger and heavier. By a lot. But us squishy humans still have the same impact tolerances we did 40 years ago.
How about iterating them to find and flush cache entries with expired TTLs, before they're weak-expired?
If all I needed to do was express my thoughts out loud, I wouldn't need to hire anyone. I can do that myself.
Fuel savings are not erased, but they are eroded. With the technology we have small, lightweight gas cars could be incredibly efficient. Consumer preferences as well as safety regulations have kept fuel economy down.
This approach then selects those who are relaxed. The candidates that have five more interviews at advanced stages, and likely to receive several offers, as opposed to candidates who badly need a job.

The former kind of candidate may be more desirable for the employer :-/
> if Google took down the apps immediately and informed all users that the app they installed was a scam, they would've prevented $millions from being stolen.

But this is the same problem. They're using some unreliable heuristics to detect this sort of thing and they have false positives. So you're proposing that they authoritatively assert that something is a scam and destroy the reputation of untold innocent people on the basis of some unreliable machine learning algorithm. The innocent people would sue them and it would be hard to blame them.

> the service providers (Google, Apple, etc.) are the only ones who can - and should be obligated to - stop actively facilitating financial crimes.

Except that they can't, because they don't have a fact finding apparatus that can accurately determine if a crime is being committed or not.
Explosives safety for Trident missile and warheads (1994) [pdf]
Wouldn't it be better to put "confetti" -- the API key as part of the domain name? That way, the key would be leaked without any required clicks due to the DNS prefetching by the browser.
There is absolutely no reason to allow this kind of strict anti-labor bullshit in almost any case barring high level leadership positions. Giving you 100% of your salary for a year doesn't cover the damages incurred by foregoing potential career advancement and skill acquisition.
I'll try my best to explain.

The use case for Andy here is building backtraces for Scheme compiled to WebAssembly. To print a meaningful backtrace, a Wasm funcref for a compiled Scheme function needs to be mapped to a code origin (file name, line, column). Unfortunately, Wasm can't compare funcrefs, so the host needs to do it. Andy's solution is to have each Scheme Wasm module maintain a WeakMap of funcrefs to code origins. However, this alone is not enough because there may be many Scheme modules that are sharing resources and any given funcref could come from any of the modules. So, the runtime needs to maintain a weak set of all modules so that you can query for the code origin for any funcref and the runtime can search all the modules to find it. A WeakSet would be enough for this task... if it were iterable. To work around this, Andy made an IterableWeakSet which has the drawbacks noted in the blog post.

I also ran into another use case recently while trying to port a library written in a language with iterable weak maps to Wasm with JS providing the weak map support. I'll have to do a very similar, unsatisfying workaround there, too.
I'm using the latest top paid models, gpt4o and claude 3.5.

They work when there's a lot of examples on github or google, but once you get into something that doesn't have a lot of examples like closed source code or rarely used libraries, it will start hallucinating and even mixing up different API versions to create a mess that doesn't work at all.

I don't believe LLMs will get any better than this without a new major breakthrough, but this is already better than using Google search.
In my case this pointed out a problem with my NVIDA drivers that I didn’t know about. Once I fixed that issue my whole KDE system ran much faster and allowed Zed to run
This is Texas so I am inclined to think the judge is a political hack installed by someone to issue judgements that are paid for. As much as I don’t want to, after seeing the recent Supreme Court and other rulings, this is the first thought that came to mind.
As it happens the place I had a really bad experience with it was stripe. I had pretty much aced every other question, but basically was setup with a problem where I didn't have a way to reliably get it running (and I wasn't even clear what the app was supposed to do, it was just some random project off of github).

Fortunately I already had an offer onhand from facebook.
That level of "argument" from a federal judge should be grounds for instant removal. It's bafflingly stupid, and nakedly partisan and outcome-motivated. Some ideas are just categorically bad, and the regulator needs to be able to say that, rather than pretend that the answer is always "halfway in between".

For his next decision, will he forbid the SEC from regulating all insider trading, since they didn't find a way to target "specific, harmful" patterns? And yet somehow I suspect he wouldn't bat an eye if the FDA were to decide that all abortifacients were disallowed, instead of looking at each one individually...

And of course, all of that is ignoring that he's flagrantly lying about the facts of the case, in at least two ways:

1. The summary is misstated. The FTC did not find that all non-competes were invalid. It specifically carved out cases where the balance leans toward non-regulation - namely, non-competes for executives.

2. Some of the "arbitrary and capricious" reasoning claims that no states have passed non-compete bans as broad as what the FTC did, and therefore none of their quantitative evidence can matter. That is, again, blindingly stupid on the face of it - but it's also factually false, because California has had just as broad a ban on non-competes for many decades.
I think that Greptile is on the right track. I made a repo containing the c# source code for the godot game engine, and it's "how to do X", where X is some obscure technical feature (like how to create a collision query using the godot internal physics api) is much better than all the other ai solutions which use general training data.

However there are some very frustrating limitations to greptle, so severe that I basically only use it to ask implementation questions on existing codebases, not for anything like general R&D:
1) answers are limited to about 150 lines.
2) it doesn't re-analyze a repo after you link it in a conversation (you need to start a new conversation, and re-link the repo, then wait 20+ min for it to parse your code)
3) it is very slow (maybe 30 seconds to answer a question)
4) there's no prompt engineering

I think it's a bit strange that no other ai solution lets you ask questions about existing codebases. I hope that will be more widespread soon.
However there is also the loss of prestige for Elsevier.

MIT is one the the preeminent universities in the world, perhaps the preeminent one.* The loss of MIT gives permission to other institutions who may be more concerned about reputation to do the same (they don’t want to generate whispers of “did they do this because they are having money troubles?”). It may also cause authors to submit other prestigious journals before elsevier ones.

* really any change in the top 10 ranked schools from year to year are just a kind of browning motion. They are as a group equally prestigious.
I’ll preface this by saying that the current system of publishing is a natural monopoly issue… but out of all the major publishers, Elsevier is the only one to offer a public API for downloading journal articles (and an excellent one at that, which anyone can sign up for in minutes), so out of this group of parasites, I honestly hate Elsevier the least.

There's a Romanian saying "A furat dar a și facut": They stole but at least they did something (usually in reference to politicians I believe but still).
A similar exercise but much easier to do in an interview is to give a short piece of code that does something a bit non-trivial and ask them to write (paper or whiteboard) test cases for it. Can then either run the test cases and see if they can find (all) the bug(s), or simply review vs a known list. Classic example in Myers The Art Of Software Testing is a method that takes 3 numbers as the length of the sides of a triangle and prints out whether it is scalene, isosceles, or equilateral. Many people miss a lot of corner cases.
It would have had to have been back when NextBus existed and I still lived there, so 15+ years ago.
An interesting part of Zen 5 architecture was related to lowering the absurd instruction passthrough time/power if I remember correctly!

This definetly used to be the case on the older Intel implementations of large SIMD instructions (my Tiger lake chip being an anecdote)!
This was known as gauntletak. Not the 4 person super hit of the same name.
Wikipedia for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntletak
On the Federal level.

If you live in a state that banned non-competes (California, Illinois, etc), your employer can try to sue you, but it won't go anywhere.
Well, that ought to reduce tech worker pay another 10% or so.
Another hypocrisy of people who advocate liberal and free economy. Many of them criticize the state because it is a monopoly and claim that the state prevents competition. However, they try to do the same thing themselves.
Hey, engineer on the OpenAI fine-tuning team here. We know this is something of a pain and we’re trying to come up with a way to allow you to share / move models across projects. If you really need to share a model across projects right now the best way to do it is to train the model in the default project, it will then be available to use and all other projects. That’s not an ideal solution obviously but is the only mechanism available currently
“Do you have recommendations on more effective alternatives to prevent prompt attacks?”

I wish I did! I’ve been trying to find good options for nearly two years now.

My current opinion is that prompt injections remain unsolved, and you should design software under the assumption that anyone who can inject more than a sentence or two of tokens into your prompt can gain total control of what comes back in the response.

So the best approach is to limit the blast radius for if something goes wrong: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/20/mitigate-prompt-inject...

“No solution will be perfect, but we should strive to a solution that's better than doing nothing.”

I disagree with that. We need a perfect solution because this is a security vulnerability, with adversarial attackers trying to exploit it.

If we patched SQL injection vulnerability with something that only worked 99% of the time all of our systems would be hacked to pieces!

A solution that isn’t perfect will give people a false sense of security, and will result in them designing and deploying systems that are inherently insecure and cannot be fixed.
> if your object has so many dynamically-computed properties that eagerly collecting them is a performance concern, then it should probably be a Map

Should be, but there's so much legacy code that is going to hand you objects.

Also, unless you go to a weirdly large amount of effort, JSON.parse will give you objects.
>Running .includes() on the client does not imply that Google has any "understanding" of what was said. It only implies that they ran .includes() on the client. includes() does not "understand" anything.

Do you want to have a good faith conversation about this? Because going back to debating the meaning of "understanding" after I already said this was misleading is not a good way to have a conversation.

>The thing I really don't understand is this: the fact that Google has closed captions at all implies they do an enormous more "analysis" than this minor feature could possibly require. If you understand how Google does CCs and what that means, this shouldn't have bothered you at all.

Can we set up a baseline that there is a difference between content agnostic analysis and content aware analysis? Transcripts are content agnostic in that they can be produced without any comprehension of the words said. This feature is content aware in that it is looking for specific meaning in the words said. Do you not see any difference between these two?
The screenshot doesn't load for me, but I see a very dark color, maybe purple, on black background. Absolutely no way to read anything, just about able to make out that there is some text.

Firefox on android, no dark mode.
That’s a different discussion. I’m disputing the claim that AI can make you a 2x dev when it seems like it’s mostly beneficial when you don’t know what you’re doing.
If the SQL took you an hour to just clean up and you're an expert that is some pretty complex SQL. I could understand how it could get it wrong.
Not GP, but the kind of search I do mostly are:

- Does this language have X (function, methods,...) probably because I know X from another language and X is what I need. If it does not, I will code it.

- How do I write X again? Mostly when I'm coming back to a language I haven't touch for a while. Again I know what I want to do, just forgot the minutia about how to write it.

- Why is X happening? Where X is some cryptic error from the toolchain. Especially with proprietary stuff. There's also how to do X where X is a particular combination of steps and the documentation is lacking. I heard to forums in that case to know what's happening or get sample code.

I only need the manual/references for the first two. And the last one needs only be done once. Accuracy is a key thing for these use cases and I'd prefer snippets and scaffold (deterministic) instead of LLMs for basic code generation.
Not arguing for this, just thinking it though from a purely technical approach.

If the cars could come to a consensus about the maximum common braking ability between them, they could also coordinate all of them stopping at that rate.
Again, not really. Most professions, once you leave University, do not consult research materials. They have no reason to. And when these folks are in university, the materials are all super easily accessible.

It's literally a non-issue for, I would bet, a majority of people. It just doesn't exist in their day to day. Regardless of how that actually impacts the world.
Lower system quality? I saw job postings from Elsevier a couple years ago and considered applying. I assume there are other paid staff who contribute to quality of the articles or their delivery as well.
I also do .NET but I went with Linux instead. Something Ubuntu based like POP OS or just plain any of the official Ubuntu flavors did the trick for me.

Heck for fun I migrated a .NET 3.5 project thats been untouched for centuries all the way to the latest all on Linux, and it looks like it worked with barely any issues.
We definitely considered it and we talked openly with the Dropbox team as well. I feel very good about the future of Reclaim.
What exactly is the interviewer looking for? Familiarity with tools, or actually debugging skill? I like the idea of debugging questions, I'm just not convinced all this setup and "use your own tooling" is necessary,and that a long enough snippet of given whiteboard code sample can morr effciently test for debugging skill. I can always teach (and learn!) new tools, and frankly, there is value to me as an interviewer to see someone manage without his tools.