skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> building alternatives takes time and resources. the EU has neither.

This is a smartphone app that buys a local service that already exists, it's not hard... In fact alternatives already exist.. I mean of course they do cmon.

On the flip side do you realise the lithographic tech used to build your Intel fabs come from EU? (ASML) building an alternative to that will take serious time and resources. EU is not some third world country.
It's more like 'if you want to do business in the EU, abide by EU rules'. Applicable to every company.
Nice quote:

> It’s more productive to ask, “How can I?” than it is to ask, “Can I?” The latter is the question that comes to mind more readily, especially when faced with a new or unique challenge…I have learned how to ask, “How can I?” From there, a path of action inevitably reveals itself.

Also, last week on HN there was a post about how uniqueness bias holds us back by causing us to disregard learnings from the solution of similar problems. (While a problem may be unique to us, it is rarely unique to the world - though perhaps in a different costume.) It’s telling here that the author says he defaults to the less productive “Can I?” mindset when he sees his challenge as unique - and also that he opens the article with the realization that he is not unique.
One of my Google interviewers leaned back in his Eames lounge chair and stated that he got his start there by contributing optimizations to Chromium. I think it worked out well for him.
Crass joke time!

Little Timmy came into his parents room one afternoon and said "mommy, daddy, where do babies come from?"

His parents were surprised, he's a little young for that, so that sat him down and explain gently "when two people love each other very much, sometimes, a stork flies in carrying a baby wrapped in blankets in it's bill, and it leaves the baby on the new parents doorstep!"

Little Timmy scrunches up his face, confused, then asks "well then who fucks the stork?"
Yeah. But it might even not be a real story. It could be a propaganda piece to heighten awareness about the intimidating military and technological capabilities of North Korea, lol. Perhaps some (US) government/military department wants a bigger budget next year, and this sort of story helps justify their case.
> Just stay fixated on this scenario: ... the attacker ... uses it to stand up a bunch of Monero miners.

This sounds more and more like an insurance policy; as opposed to a "sudden spike of load because of popularity" situation.

IE, all our talk about usage caps is really missing the point about what needs to be protected against.
Too big a market. That's the power of the EU I guess. If they can adapt to abide, they will. If they can't, quite likely due to GDPR for many US companies.
ULI - Easy credit scheme for Indian borrowers
Piggybacking the financial records created for the common man by successful UPI system, Indian regulators introduced ULI - unified Lending Interface, is expected to revolutionise access to credit for Indian people.
Free-form text like Reddit posts contains a whole load of PII. Since there is absolutely no regard for what goes into a LLM, naturally, they also contain this PII.
A brief interview with SandDance creator Steven Drucker
Yes, incredibly small scale data. I can find someone somewhere who has experienced just about anything. Hell, they don't even have to experience it - they just need to say they do.

I've known multiple people who swore potatoes cured their sickness. Yes, potatoes. No, not eaten - worn.

My sample size is greater than yours. Does that mean potatoes cure illness purely by being in proximity to people? Probably not.

People are dumb and unreliable. People are fueled by beliefs. And when those beliefs are challenged, almost every time this is taken as PROOF of the belief. They are untouchable. Agree with them and that's great, disagree and you're being silenced or the government or something thereby giving validity to their belief.

Anecdotes are not meaningful data.
The trouble is that the example shows how business people think, and therefore how requirements are expressed. (They also do not understand the notion of a dangling else.) If a developer points out that the business "logic" is heuristic and too complicated to implement in maintainable code, they are rebuked in such scarring terms that that experiment is never repeated; instead, they go back to their desk and guess.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/moerbylanga-table-oak-veneer-br...
> User: A man and his son are in a car accident. The man is totally fine and in good health. The man is a surgeon. The nurse asks the surgeon to operate on the son, because the surgeon is healthy and capable of doing this. The surgeon replies "I can't operate on this child. He is my son."

Just for clarity’s sake, what is the right answer?
Not used in serious contexts
There's a bit of family lore that during WWII my grandfather worked on building tow trucks for tanks. He was in the trucking business and knew a bit about towing large vehicles. Never been able to find out much about it, though.
Your explanation is in the second paragraph:

"In Europe, the GDPR protects the fundamental rights of people, by requiring businesses and governments to handle personal data with due care", Dutch DPA chairman Aleid Wolfsen says. "But sadly, this is not self-evident outside Europe. Think of governments that can tap data on a large scale. That is why businesses are usually obliged to take additional measures if they store personal data of Europeans outside the European Union. Uber did not meet the requirements of the GDPR to ensure the level of protection to the data with regard to transfers to the US. That is very serious."
I wonder how much of a thing "long-term culture" really is in the tech industry. The culture at Google in the year 2024 looks very different from the culture at Google in 2010. In many ways the culture at Microsoft in 2024 is radically different from the culture at Microsoft in 2001.

I do agree with the notion that company culture trickles down from the CEO over time. So that suggests that company culture can shift as CEOs come and go. Another factor that can impact culture include market pressure. I can say with some confidence that the relentless squeeze that shareholders put on operating costs undeniably has a direct impact on practices and policies that govern the quality of the average employee's experience at work.
a 9-3 school day for students means an 8-4 work day for teachers, minimum. that eats up the 40hr week right there, even for a teacher working the bare minimum.
Why is this absurd? Companies bend over backwards to do business in countries like China, put up with all kinds of nonsensical local laws and rules.

This privacy requirement at least makes sense, it is the local government’s responsibility to protect their citizens privacy.

Comments like the above reflect how big corporations have gotten, they will push and bend the laws until someone hits back. This is an example of a government hitting back. Good on them
You may already know this but Dwayne Johnson is pretty obviously on steroids or some other kind of anabolic agent.

In Hollywood anabolics are quite common, since preparing for a role can be a very short term thing, testosterone decreases with age, and very low body fat but large physiques are seen as normal.

Also, shorter people generally have it easier to have a muscular looking physique because of how the muscle mass limit scales with size.
A KVM is more likely to trigger a SOC response than leveraging built-in RDP or using Zoom remote desktop.
Loved this article and couldn't agree more with Geoffrey's point.
Generally speaking the money is coming from returns on investments. The sp500 has increased by 28% over the past 12 months with no mention of dividends.
Don't remember the product names, sorry for that, but this story happened probably 8 if not more years ago:

I was looking for a new work desk, planning to spend no more than 500 PLN - because IKEA is cheap... All desks within that price were wobbly pieces of glue and wood dust; then I found one for I believe 1500 PLN, 3x my intended budget, but imagine that: actual full metal frame! I could sit on it and it didn't even squeak, much less wobble. So I got it...Really love that desk, no problems with it over the years.

So yeah, they have cheap temporary stuff, but usually also have at least a couple of higher-end pieces per category... with accordingly higher prices.
If you're willing to completely fabricate a educational and work background to suit a specialized role, and the company gets lax on its background checking you can get away with it too.

If you're able to lie about pretty much everything and hire an SME to ace the interviewing process, then you too can commit identity fraud for employment.
What makes you think there are no alternatives to Uber in EU right now? Actually, it's the opposite:

* ride hailing alternatives: FreeNow, Bolt

* food delivery: Wolt (technically owned by DoorDash, but still), Just Eat, Bolt Food

* bikes / scooters: Tier, Bolt, NextBike, Voi, and many others

If Uber leaves, there won't be any void to fill.
I know it's naturally happening in a large codebase, I'm asking why they specifically maintain a fork just for that instead of trying to push what are probably easy (but tedious) upstream fixes.
> It’s a mental effort as much as it is a physical one.

Like a lot in life to be honest. When I lived in CO I did a lot of hiking at the higher altitudes there. I almost always hiked alone and could have easily turned around when my breath got short, but I didn't. It was strictly mental exercise. Similar to when I power lifted for years. Obviously there's a physical part, but when the numbers got big for me, it became just as much mental.

Now I've been doing BJJ for a number of years. There is so much mental effort expended to not panic or give up simply because you're uncomfortable (different from being put in an actual finishing move). As I started with, the exercise of accepting discomfort, staying calm, and moving forward is skill that resonates all through life.
> building alternatives takes time and resources. the EU has neither.

The EU does not have the motivation, mostly. They are not rivals of the US in the way China is. So money goes elsewhere. Europe is still a continent with a whole bunch of people and quite a lot of money. The path of least resistance is to just use American solutions in some areas and to develop others locally. This might change and if there is a vacuum, it will be filled quickly.
The article doesn't say it's one job and that they were employed for the whole period. Put enough people on an interviewing / meetings / minimum work rotation and I'm sure they could average 2-3 paid positions each.
Because when you tally up the numbers the cost is the same - at the time of writing that is. Would it be possible to reduce the cost further? maybe...

First stage needs to go through rigorous safety check in order to be re-certified for next flight thats what drives the cost up.
Fairly low with respect to average personal income, though.
no idea what you're even talking about, this discussion is about software quality erosion
Did you read the article and watch the video? He states (rightly) that the cores are somewhere in the “sea of gates mush”. You can’t tell visually where the cores are. And there’s so much more than just the cores in that blob of gates.
That is an absurdly Americentric take on this case. Corporations should adopt to local laws, not the other way around.
> Which one do you mean?

Ah, I said "theorem prover", I should have said "proof verifier". What I meant is something like DeepMind's AlphaProof with an additional step of generating a formal specification from a natural language description of the problem. In this way we get a semantically correct program wrt the formal specification. But with current generation of LLMs we probably won't get anything for non-trivial problems (the LLM won't be able to generate a valid proof).

> Note that in program synthesis we usually make a distinction between complete and incomplete specifications

Program synthesis begins after you can coherently express an idea of what you want to do. And getting to this point might involve a ton of reasoning that will not go into a program synthesis pipeline. That's what I mean when I say an "informal problem statement": some brain dumps of half-baked ideas that doesn't even constitute an incomplete specification because they are self-contradictory (but you haven't noticed it yet).

LLMs can help here by trying to generate some specification based on a brain dump.
More like holograms (well, "scifi holograms" (screens and stuff projected into air)).
twitter, hopefully. This is an aspect of Musk that I can live without.
Yeah, I'm definitely kicking myself for selling all my stock a year ago...
We have a modular sofa system that has moved with us two times already and there are no connector or stability issues at all. Same for a large dining table and various bed frames.

Everything that has metal connectors with fasteners on both sides still works well on 2nd or 3rd assembly in my experience.
LLM in Neovim with Inline Assistant. Supports Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, OpenAI
I started training for recreational long distance running in my late 40s. This is a good list for any age. What I would add in is - find training programs and follow them. The original article obliquely references this in #1 talking about "acknowledging reality is critical". At any age, people need to learn how to work, out and how to train. Failing to do so can cause short- or -long term injury, which can really set you back. My first attempt at a marathon lead to IT Band issues and severe plantar fasciitis. My second was much smoother, and I was able to complete the marathon at better than target time without injury.

The moral is - part of listening to your body is learning how to train within your age / ability band.
Just trust the courts, bro. Civil Asset Forfeiture totally doesn't violate due process or the 5th amendment, bro. Big brother knows best, bro.
Which is still unusable due to the famous "this message can not be decrypted" problem.
Exactly, compliance is currently impossible since this is a geopolitical spat between the US and EU over US law.

The goalposts on this move every 6 months, so the fines are easy money for the EU.

The companies are just collateral damage. For some reason HN is full of people who don’t actually understand this issue but feel very emotionally passionate that all US tech companies are evil and doing this on purpose.

“Just follow the law, you evil companies!”

Lol. They would if there was a clear law/process to follow that didn’t get shot down every few months.

As it stands, you cannot operate in the EU as a US company if you want to be totally immune from fines.

I urge you to talk to your government representatives (on both sides of the pond) if you care about this issue. This benefits nobody except for EU government coffers.
I know of a kallax shelf and some cheap 3 seater sofa that has been in the wild for under 10y. They survived college living and a few moves. I gave the sofa to a neighbor. I'm not sure if he's still using it or has since gotten rid of it...
Why do you think they will leave? They will make noise, complain but if the choice is between following rules or give up profits, they will fall in line. Money trumps everything else.

They will however keep lobbying, support candidates favorable to them etc.

EU (and other governments) should be vigilant all the time. The moment they take it easy a bit, big tech will be back to their usual shenanigans
1400? https://www.theverge.com/ (to pick a site at random) has 3,615 in the optional cookies setting alone, and a further 514 in the “strictly necessary” section. I think they might be lying on the last point.
> Which Wookiee warrior swings Luke across a chasm in "The Empire Strikes Back"?

Wait when did that happen!?
Its not that easy. Yeah, they are, but there is a lot of POSIX like glue inside
so they work correctly with select() and other alarms. Code is very complicated.

But still, kudos for Cygwin Developers for creating Cygwin :) Great work, even tho it have some issues.
Once again demonstrating that fining a corporation for criminal behavior is simply adding to their operating cost, and the lawyers will always get paid
I'm seriously considering https://www.paddle.com/. For 5% + $0.5, they promise that you'll never need to worry about

- Chargebacks

- Global tax compliance

- Billing support

- Fraud

- Subscription management

Their API is... worse... and it is expensive... but mathing it out it is like 1% for all that peace of mind. Feels worth it.
> The language being integrated into Emacs makes writing Elisp programs a very fluid and intuitive experience: things like the fact that the documentation and the place where a function was defined is available at any time makes /understanding/ the system easy, and the actual documentation itself is often quite well written, and the Info manuals will most often explain everything you need to know about a package. Common Lisp+SLIME shares some of this convenience, but not to the extent that Elisp truly does.

I think that all (or a lot of?) the Emacs niceties could be grafted into a hypothetical EMACS package in Common Lisp. There’s no reason why an Emacs in Common Lisp wouldn’t still be able to jump to a definition, or to documentation, or whatever. It could still implement advice.

And the entire thing would be hackable at runtime, unlike the current Emacs situation where everything but the core runtime is hackable. And there would be packages instead of having to prefix every package’s function with the package name.

Common Lisp is definitely not perfect, but it would probably be a better base for Emacs than Elisp is. Elisp is not bad — at least it’s a Lisp, not Lua or Javascript — but it’s really not great.
Could it be that people in India have different genetic makeup than people in other countries?

I mean, many populations have more/less risk of many physiological things. That's just how it goes.

Black men are at much higher risk of prostate cancer. White people of melanoma. As a man, I pretty much don't have to worry about autoimmune disorders because my risk is 1/10th that of a woman's. But, my risk of heart disease is much higher - even at the same weight!
My experience with IKEA furniture is that they are not made for being disassembled, nor do they handle it well.

So anything that can be moved as is, maybe, but not anything else.

In addition, considering the cost of nww IKEA furniture I would expect a huge discount for second hand ones that I need to move whole myself in order to make it worthwhile at all.
Is it “this couple reign” or “this couple reigns”? The former just feels wrong despite it being the title.
> building alternatives takes time and resources. the EU has neither.

Oh no. What would we poor Europeans do without a US company to lead us. /s

Of course local and regional players would appear, as they always have and are already in place in multiple segments.

Bolt, Glovo, Delivery Hero and many others are successful competitors to different Uber offerings in the different European markets they operate.

The biggest gap in Europe is not due to a lack of technical ability but rather of European wide capital that's not super risk averse.
Hᴇʟʟᴏ. Iᴛ sᴜʀᴇ ᴅᴏᴇs sᴇɴᴅ ᴀ sɪɢɴᴀʟ.
> That's amazing, but all-too rare.

No, it's abusive and indicative of a failing system. We should not be celebrating overwork. If a system needs its workers to be doing double- or triple-time to function at the desired level, then the system is not working well and is on its way to failure.
On the notion of lack of durability, I have come across a substantial number of people for whom that is a feature: change your furniture every 2/5 years to "keep it fresh", where spending money on anything durable wouldn't make any sense.

Note: definitely not my hobby, and I'm not going to consider waste and other impacts. So please, don't pitchfork.
Spain fined Booking (Dutch company) 413M€ last month.

For abusing its dominant position, the post has only 2 points [0].

Yet, this one has significantly more comments.

The only political aspect is where the company comes from.

Forum members then want to speak up.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41115644
Also not surprised to find out that Ozgun from Citus is behind these strong principles! :)

Yea I mean that can basically be assessed as a paradox: how can you possibly write a line of code that you don’t know how to validate its correctness!?
Leader Election with S3 Conditional Writes
I understand all that; and that's not really the kind of information I'm looking for. (I know deeply that metadata is often more expensive and complicated to process than the data your customer cares about.)

This response explains the problem best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41334596

> I don't think anyone with a serious app running on us will use a cap. Just stay fixated on this scenario: a deploy-only token gets stolen, and the attacker (like most cloud attackers) uses it to stand up a bunch of Monero miners. As a consequence... their main app goes down? Who would be OK with that?

Reading between the lines: If a customer's utilization suddenly spikes, the assumption is that the customer's revenue will follow. IE, if my utilization goes up 10x, my revenue will go up 10x, so I'll happily pay the bill.

What they are providing is more like an insurance policy against hacking.

And that is the answer that I was looking for.
What must a global theory of cortex explain? (2014) [pdf]
I tend to agree with you about what will happen, but it illustrates the depth of legal uncertainty that exists in architecting software systems in Europe that process personal information. Corporations can't necessarily trust the EC's own published interpretations of their own laws, nor the certification processes the EC has created, so the only risk-minimizing route is a maximally pessimistic approach about what is permissible.
This is the link to the platform (spanish version for Madrid):

https://preowned.ikea.com/es/en
> We probably can't significantly reduce the total

Considering it used to be commonplace to have 10 children and then maybe 2/3 make it to adulthood, I would say we absolutely can and have reduced the total number of sick days. We've also reduced the severity of sickness.
We had the same issue, but it was over by 10-20% in our case. Discussed this with them multiple times, and the last response I got was:

"I've checked in with our engineering teams, and we unfortunately don't yet have a fix or timeline to share here, though we have made additional progress on scoping a path forward. It's extremely complex on our end, as existing data models don't have the required information in place to make the change here, and we'd need to scope how to add that and backfill data (which we're approaching, but again, no timeline to share as of now)."

Obviously I don't know anything about them internally, but if I can export the data as a CSV-file, and then calculate the MRR myself in GSheets, then what data needs to be backfilled? The data is already available to properly calculate it.
If you make water cheap in the orbit, and have capability to produce fuel... it would drive investments into space through the roof.

Suddenly you only need to get to orbit, as everything else is cheap, because you can refuel and get water. You can go where you want to go, you can grow food, you can stay in low earth orbit for cheap.
All the stuff I've brought from Ikea has been pretty good, quality-wise.

I've got a set of billy bookcases, a metal-framed desk from their 'desks for office' range, two double beds with mattresses, and a 5-seater sofa. It's all lasted fine.

Of course, as a veteran DIYer and woodworker, my furniture has the benefit of being assembled right and treated with respect. And nobody in my household weighs over 150 lbs, which probably helps this stuff last longer.
Gen Z-Ers Are Computer Whizzes. Just Don't Ask Them to Type.
https://archive.ph/QIJOD