skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatsapp had about 50 employees at half a billion users before Facebook. What could that mean. 15 programmers and 10 sysadmins?
Surely its a parody. Like people can put lots of effort into a parody.

Regardless, even if it wasn't, its at worst silly. Its not like he is scamming people out of money.

Edit: after looking at a few more pages, now im not sure what to think. Maybe im wrong. The untracked browser stuff seems like it could be an actual scam on those who dont know what they are doing. Its all so much more extreme than i thought.

Maybe this all is an attempt to link farm in order to get SEO to scam people. In which case it makes me feel complicit.
Haskell and SML are even older.
proper flagging.
Isn't guard labor in the US either decreasing or staying flat?

I mean, the entire reason Allied Universal exists is because security (and therefore "guard labor") IS NOT a growth industry. A stable or declining industry inevitably leads to consolidation of the type that formed Allied Universal.

US active-duty military personnel:

2023: 1,268,027 (378 per 100k)

2003: 1,434,377 (492 per 100k)

1983: 2,123,349 (921 per 100k)

https://historyinpieces.com/research/us-military-personnel-1...

https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/defense/

Employed full time: Wage and salary workers: Bailiffs, correctional officers, and jailers occupations: 16 years and over:

2023: 365,000 (109 per 100k)

2000: 395,000 (139 per 100k)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0254491500A

Employed full time: Wage and salary workers: Police and sheriff's patrol officers occupations: 16 years and over

2023: 686,000 (205 per 100k)

2000: 567,000 (201 per 100k)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0254491900A

Population

2023: 339,996,563

2003: 291,109,820

2000: 282,398,554

1983: 230,389,964

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...

edit: Found it! Employed full time: Wage and salary workers: Security guards and gaming surveillance officers occupations: 16 years and over

2023: 730,000 (218 per 100k)

2000: 621,000 (219 per 100k)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0254492300A
“Twitter doesn’t have a choice but to obey local governments. If we don’t obey local government laws, we will get shut down"

- Elon Musk on decision to follow Modi's requests for censorship

https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/twitt...
At least in the West, we have a lot more secularism than ever before.
They can't. I can easily use a Brazil endpoint to establish a tunnel elsewhere and browse X, formerly Twitter. I suppose they could try fining the VPN service provider. (But even then they won't be able to prove what's going on.)
Defying a court order can get you arrested in any country.
Show HN: Create UGC video ad in 5 minutes
Since this is YC, it's worth looking at this from the perspective of a failed startup that made several mistakes. In particular, the authors take the view that Pfizer killed their startup. But buried on page 333 is the real reason. And if you're going to start something, this is worth learning from.

The founders gave up their ability to control their company when they agreed to become a wholly owned subsidiary from day 1. There was no need for that. And no one would ever tell you to do this today. This was done to be nice and collegial, something that broke down the moment money was involved.

The company they created this fatal alliance with had other priorities, their own drug development pipeline.

Then they got investors who were profiting from the status quo, and for whom a new drug didn't look great.

But the real reason is that the founders half-assed it. None of them left their academic jobs. They didn't have any skin in the game. Oh well, they walked away with a little money. Had the founders done what YC tells you to do, commit, this never would have happened. (bottom of page 333)

The whole article blames Pfizer and others for the failure of the startup. But it's really this last point that was the determining factor. The authors say there were confused by the buyout and just took it to move on. There would have been no confusion and no buyout if they were committed to the startup.

Even if you have the right idea, even if you are the right person in the right place, even if you're about to break through and change the world, you can fail if you don't commit.
Because the Supreme Court arbitrarily threatened the legal representatives, and Elon didn't comply. There is no legal process whatsoever, nor the regular mediums have been used. It's all arbitrary without the due process. Even a legalist would need to concede that the law hasn't been followed in the first place.
Glad they finally sorted the thermal pad at least. Everyone in the first order batch I talked to (before it was sold out a while) had the exact same thermal pad. But yes, the heatsink design still has a few drawbacks that should definitely be adjusted in a revision!
I already have a mother, I don't need a software mommy.
This is only tangentially related to the main topic of the post, but thought I might ask for your thoughts on a similar dynamic.

My thesis is that companies should not be (or just be much less) functionally org'd—that is, not divided into Engineering, Marketing, Design, Sales, etc. And that this is the root-ish of many typical problems. I don't really need to argue that's true for my question, but given that most companies are that then leads to functional managers—ie. Engineering Manager or Director of Engineering. The role of that manager sometimes involves being in the weeds of specific work, but mostly doesn't. It's usually not architecting or coding, but mentoring and maybe allocating work. The latter of which might formally be a a responsibility, but is embedded in a network of other people's needs that does some pre-determining.

What does that manager do—and I suppose how do they sleep at night if they care about their work—given they're the mentor and blocker of their IC's rise? What I mean is that if the career path for the IC is sorta mythical, how does that manager guide them? If they're honest, then they're also kinda describing their own role as a bit pointless. That would be a reason the IC shouldn't aspire to the role coming from someone who did and now remains (happily?) in it. Engineering is probably the least problematic in this regard because it tends have a bit of power and sometimes isolation within a company. But take something like design, which fights all the time with product because half of the career path/duties for product design (less so brand or visual designers) is blocked by product. So when a designer tells their manager they're having problems with their PM, there is (1) nothing power-wise for the manager to do because neither they nor their bosses are in the chain of command of product and (2) they themselves never resolved this incompatibility. The best they've done is maybe launched something in spite of it. Or maybe (to the company's benefit?) not launched things because of it.

Does the functional manager just give (knowingly or unknowingly) pseudo-career-advice out of circumstance because that's the job of maintaining civility? Is this mostly a matter of everyone all around (managers and otherwise) looking the other way because employment?
I mean, that's the point - in pharmaceutical sciences there's _so much noise_ including fraud that it's really only easy in hindsight to pick out "the guy" who was the "genius". It's hard to take one story like this and make it a repeatable success.
Related timeline:

Starlink will now be free in Brazil since remote hospitals, schools use it: Musk

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41397506

Starlink's financial assets frozen in Brazil

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41392962
Lady tasting tea
I thought that the page about a service for padding strings was some kind of satire ("I promise I won't put it on npm, won't unpublish it, and I definitely won't rewrite it in Rust"), but apparently the website tries to sell such services, and overall it's a dumpster full of SEO spam and amateur JS coding exercises. Not a great link to see on HN.
We all love a good trolley problem
I really appreciate the vulnerability of talking about what was tried and what didn’t work and why. Super helpful for those of us interested in the space.
for non-Brazilians trying to understand the situation:

(1) a supreme court judge ordered X to remove some political profiles saying they are spreading misinformation

(2) coincidentally (or not) most (if not all) profiles are from the opposition

(3) Elon said that that was censorship and closed the office in Brazil

(4) The judge applied hefty fines but those couldn't be fullfied since X doesnt have a bank account in Brazil anymore

(5) The judge orders a judicial blockage of Starlink's brazilian branch accounts to pay for X fines

(4) Finnally, Brazilian law demands a legal representative (a person who will be liable) and Elon say (very loudly) we would not comply

(5) X is now banned by all means
The review mentioning the Rolex watch face sounds pretty damning if accurate. If they did in fact report it to Rolex, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple got a call from the lawyers at Rolex.
I always think of this funny exchange about cold-war defense strategy, from the long-running British TV show "Yes Minister."

Longest clip I could find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y-yyaWCgiQ
(You can put this in ~/.sbclrc or your implementation's equivalent dot file!)

(Tangentially: I've encountered Common Lisp libraries in that wild that actually break if you do this, highly surprising bugs where the author was doing something too-clever with symbols and compared their representation against hard-coded strings, such that changing your *IDE's default print case* had the effect of breaking a very low-level library. This isn't important to anyone else here; I just wanted to vent. I have so much programming pain that only I know about and no one else in the world shares).
I share the author's skepticism that Cox would have ever been capable of this. Especially not at the scale that was claimed in the deleted B2B marketing materials.

While there are reasonable concerns over access to microphones in various devices found in consumer's households, especially cheap IoT devices (although, I'm EXTREMELY about claims that any agent is listening to unfettered microphone access on smartphones, given the restrictions that have been put in place to get access to microphones), I don't believe that a limited scale (compared to any big tech) cable company could have the engineering chops to pull this off.

Things that would be required:
* getting this system to work with an exceptionally large variety of devices from nearly as many brands.
* having nation-state quality malware to get access to the microphones on many of these devices (either from the manufacturer not wanting to work with them or not incentivized to work with them)
* battery powered devices not facing user-noticeable power draw (think a Dualshock controller)
* having advanced enough AI (bigger issue 2 years ago than it would be now) at a very large scale filtering out noise and categorizing conversations such that they are useful to advertising partners (probably possible now with the vectorization techniques in LLMs)
* having the AI be cost effective at that scale without local processing (unlikely to locally process on the devices themselves due to processing power limits; unlikely to locally process on their modems because cables modems are made as cheap as possible to offer the services that they are selling, without a FLOP more); this is a much bigger roadblock than the advanced enough AI
* actually hiring talented enough engineers to accomplish these things (especially the AI)

And frankly, they are such a small player in the grand-scheme of things, they would be idiotic to not also be selling this tech to every cableco/telco in a developed nation, in order to get their money's worth. This would be 'discuss it at the shareholder meeting' important if that much money was spent and they wanted to get their value out of it, since they are otherwise limited to where they can physically roll out Cox cable.

Frankly, a bunch of marketing hot air (that they've since removed).
(One of the Haiku developers here. Thanks for your support!)
There is actually more to this here, it was not just information about Brazilian users, the request was actually to shadowban (block without notifying the users) specific accounts. Some of those accounts happen to be political opposition (actual politicians too) to this judge and his party in general. I believe twitter or musk himself leaked all court documents when this request came in.

Twitter/X closed shop because, after stating that they would not comply with these requests, the judge threatened to jail every Twitter/X employee in brazil in retaliation. So to avoid putting these employees/people in danger they chose to immediately close all offices.

Something similar happened in Argentina with twitter as well I believe, and in that case they relocated most of the employees and their families via political asylum in Brazil at the time, if i'm not mistaken.
Hotmail was built on top of Unix by someone else, and then Microsoft acquired it.

Yes, Microsoft does do Linux these days, they even have their distro, but this still does not answer the question of why they would replace real Windows with Wine and risk compatibility issues, if they don’t have to pay anything for licenses.
it's an ongoing joke inside google: is chubby a filesystem? It's a locking service which exposes an API that resembles files and paths, and even has a File implementation, but the service owners really never wanted people to treat it like a filesystem.
Musk has been in a feud with this particular judge for a while now.

This article covers the beginning of the fight

https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-twitter-moraes-bef0...

And this one is an update on how both sides are acting kind of ridiculous

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/29/elons-standoff-with-braz...
> from each of the stations in Mission Control

It was nice poking around the various mission control loops of Apollo 11 pre-launch and randomly stumbling across a voice with a German accent and realising I'd stumbled across Guenter Wendt ("I wonder where Guenter Wendt").
A company losing money hand over fist (if the reports are to be believed), investors dumping more and more money into it (again, if the reports are to be believed), and an enormous valuation: WeWork vibes!
Even separate cultures have converged to a massive degree.

For example, most people in the world, nowadays, send their kids to school and use smartphones. And even though Putin, Xi and Western leaders may not be friends, they wear basically the same professional attire.

200 years ago, there would be much fewer common cultural traits.
For sure. Pretty similar problem space, very different implementation and target market. Apportable wasn’t a transpiler (and boy were we proud of that); it was a reimplementation of the iOS frameworks on top of a replacement NDK (Android’s libc was bad-mediocre at the time. Real nasty behaviors in its (dl)malloc for instance). Similar to WINE. It was always targeting games, so there was never a lot of effort to port any of the UIKit controls, but OpenGL CoreGraphics were supported. It also had a compiler extension that let you access the whole Android SDK in ObjC, and a tool for generating ObjC APIs from JARs. The goal was to make ObjC the one true mobile dev language. I applaud the effort to do something similar for Swift, even if it does involve transpilation.
The orders of the brazilian court are just too arbitrary, and not just in this case. At some point it ceases to be a judicial court and becomes more of an Emperor's court where the Emperor is making laws as he is going on.
Interesting context for sure, but I was referring to mainstream usage of the term, of course. In any case, the main point here is that US meddling in the region certainly didn't start with the first arms transfers in the 1960s.
Counterpoint: my Pi 4 4gb booting a USB3 SSD drive has been working fine for years. The SD cards are what kill Pis
In case anyone else is wondering:

> The protective effect occurred immediately — before participants had lost significant amounts of weight.

So this isn't merely "people who weigh less are less likely to die from COVID, and Wegovy causes people to weigh less." It's something else.

And it wasn't just COVID, the article says Wegovy decreased all-cause mortality. For me, this was perhaps the most interesting part of the article:

> The result suggests that lower life expectancy among people with obesity is actually caused by the disease itself, and that it can be improved by treating obesity.
This is cool! The page by Abbasi they link to also contains a comparison between MMA and Maple in solving differential equations

https://12000.org/my_notes/kamek/kamke_differential_equation...
I've never heard the joke version of this story. It's only people earnestly explaining that this is where the word bug comes from. Or people debunking that.

"First actual bug" gets turned into "first bug was an actual bug" in the retelling, and people are pretty insistent about it.
Wasn’t that the case for a long time in the US an the EU, too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy
In judicial systems like the Brazilian (and sadly many European ones) a judge that’s sufficiently high up in the judicial ladder gets to be judge and jury.

He is technically bound by the law, but he also has the power to interpret the law as he sees fit (many such cases in Portugal for instance).

This system puts too much power in the hands of a single person and as such is ripe for abuse for personal causes… or worst, for personal gains. There’s nothing democratic about this.

It should be a jury of fellow peers to decide if someone is guilty of actually breaking a law.
US Recorded Music Revenues by Format
Knowing you can survive reboots is positive for stability.
Wow!

I had to check with local news, because I couldn't believe it. It checks out, he did impose the fine. (It's R$50k if somebody is as uninformed as I was.)
Another "Been using RPi 4 for HAOS solidly for multiple years" anecdote chiming in here. Typically the SD cards are the unreliable bit, not the Pi itself.
As someone who has describe insects species we might alternately say "the evolutionary processes that lead to the anatomy of these creatures is mind-blowing".

Find access to a 60x scope. Fill a yellow party bowl with water about 3/4 full. Put a drop or so of non-lemon dish-soap on the edge, it will break the surface tension. Put that bowl outside, literally anywhere there is plant life (and pretty much anywhere in general). Get an algae removing dip-net, for fish tanks. After a day, but no longer than that, pour the sample through the net. Rinse it carefully by running fresh water over your hand onto the specimens. Invert the result into a small, flat-bottomed white pan with a little ethyl (or propyl) alcohol you get from a pharmacy. Put that under the scope. Be amazed.

I've seen a lot of minds melted by this little experiment, which isn't so little, it's the best way to collect many insects. In the field we'd run hundreds of these on collecting trips, servicing them every day or so.
You need a rail and dead insect to get the sort of super detailed photos in the article. But you can get decent photos of live insects handheld with a macro lens and flash (and some patience!).
It's said that people rise to the level of their incompetence. Some leaders might see this and think, this guy is dangerous and we can't have that. If I were a leader at his firm and I got that email I'd be thrilled. If everyone admit their limits and thought like this all companies would run more smoothly. He rises to the level of maximum competence, the perfect place for him, he won't be bitter about not getting the next promotion and cause trouble by leaving for seemingly greener pastures, and he will be reliable in handling his work load because he's comfortable with it. People like this are valuable assets in an organization, it's a shame that a lot of people don't see it, they look upon ladder climbing as admirable, but ambition is about taking you where you want to be, recognizing when you've achieved that is much more admirable.
According to X the Brazilian Court threatened the legal rep with imprisonment, then after they quit the court froze the bank accounts of said rep anyway.

If that is true it strongly biases me towards believing X is in the right.

Those are astonishingly authoritarian actions.

https://twitter.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1829296715989414281
I'm not going to say that's untrue, it obviously isn't. But friction, distance, and drift are going to work in the opposite direction

The result depends on the ratio. I don't see why we can't have trade and relations with other countries without also assimilating eachother
Well this is fun. Nice to see a government with some teeth for once instead of bowing to the whims of every multibillion mega corporation or agitated billionaire.
Feels like standard neoliberal magical thinking. The magic of the free market can solve any problem including oil and gas fields slowly being exhausted.

Course California through regulatory browbeating, taxation, and lawfare is slowly but relentlessly replacing imported energy sources with renewable ones.
With drugs there is also the option that something is not harmful, but also not effective and thus lead to something effective not be taken...
For anyone curious:

Proton VPN
Express VPN
NordVPN
Surfshark,
TOTALVPN
Atlas VPN
Bitdefender VPN

There are some pretty well known VPNs that are NOT on that list. Private Internet Access (PIA) for example is absent. Sure, it's used more for torrenting than anything else, but it's one of the most popular VPNs.

I thought maybe PIA just doesn't operate in Brazil, but they actually have a specific page dedicated to it:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/vpn-server/brazil-vpn

Maybe that VPN is already illegal somehow in Brazil?
To be precise, lets say that brazil was a constitutional democracy respecting the balance of powers and protecting minorities.

Now, the country, thru the usurpation of previously separated powers, has devolved into something else. What that is is hard to say but it looks like autocratic socialism, fascism or communism. Its hard to say at this point since the executive and executive are mostly looking the other way.
Can someone explain the me what actual power do Brazilian supreme court justices have? Seems like Brazilian judges are like Judge Dredd.
You can vote your way into socialism, but you must shoot your way out.
> It seems at this point OpenAI are too big to fail.

I think OpenAI is hoping for a break through, that I don't think will come.

I think both Nvidia and Apple smell blood in the water and want to make sure that they get access to what ever is behind the curtain and dont leave it for MS alone.

There is value there but I don't think any one is at a place to deliver on that (due to the costs you have pointed out).
Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means. Weird that I come across it so often, but never stopped to think what it means. :)
There's a lot to say about the Brazilian Supreme Court abuses of power.

And to be complete on the context, I expect it to have teeth.
The logical next step would be putting you under investigation for using a VPN “because only criminals need privacy”
i would thimk that the profile file for powershell would be more useful.
That would push my point even further. Work gave her solace, why find a husband? I can do it. Why breed? I can have animals. Why be a mother? Work is work and working for a corporation makes me happy. Yet she died at her work for what?

Yes, this happens to all people but I believe it happens more often because complicate our lives.
Schrödinger's cat is something that I have always assumed to obviously be a joke and nobody was expected to argue it literally.
Is it normal that a judge can impose such blanket fines on users?
I don't really understand the pro-authoritarian stance.