skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Inappropriate Uses of WebAssembly
Background: In July I attempted to pay my monthly electric bill through my utility's web portal. After logging-in I was greeted with a blank page. This was shortly after the CrowdStrike incident, and everybody has occasional downtime, so I didn't think too much of it. After a few days of blank pages I called their customer service. They denied any known outages, and with no technical support department I opted to pay my bill over the phone. Then I started digging into the problem and discovered they are using webassembly to apparently bootstrap their site code...in the interest of security (?), because I can't think of any other reason to add this abstraction to a site comprised of text and forms. This month I noticed one of my banks doing the very same thing. While I don't know webassembly, it was easy to see that both JS files are practically identical, suggesting a common source.

I am curious how widespread this practice is. For the purpose of my question, "inappropriate" is an implementation far outside the original use cases: games, CAD, sound editing, video editing, emulation, etc. I'm in the USA if that makes a difference, and had been browsing with webassembly turned off for quite some time. I am also curious if there is a "create a webassembly bootstrap version of my site" script out there somewhere?

URL's below.
I mean yeah. They do leave it sitting around on site. Because it takes up no space, they can build a bunker to store it without adding all that much to the cost and there are idiots hyperventilating at the thought of transporting dangerous goods around. I'd imagine the nuclear people decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

I feel ridiculous having to argue that volumes of material this small represent a real threat. If you wanted to move it we could. Split it up into little loads and put it in a stupidly over-engineered shielded truck. Goodness me this is not a real problem. They've been ignoring it for decades and the consequences are somewhere between nil and nothing interesting. There is nothing here to be honest about, there is no reasonable threat to debate. We transport explosives, we transport poison, we sometimes get massive port explosions that can level a district. Then we've got old mate claiming 2,000 metric tonnes of a relatively dangerous material represents a serious national problem. The absurdity of that is frustrating to deal with.
Citation counts are not very useful. They vary too much between fields and topics. I've seen people finish PhDs with ~20k citations, because they got involved in highly visible projects. And even if they stopped publishing new papers, they would have reached 50k citations in another 5-10 years purely on inertia.
I literally worked for a “home town” newspaper in the 90s and knight ridder in the early 2000s. This is not in any way comparable to syndication. Syndicated stories have an accurate byline, the publishing paper paid for syndication/content, advertising is not involved in syndicated content, and the costs are not tied to duping end readers.

Moreso this (at the time) was literal school content on media literacy. High school english classes would _get newspapers_ in order to talk about the different types of articles and content.
https://www.firstenergycorp.com/
https://www.truist.com/
How often do you go back to your encyclopedia hard copies only to find whatever knowledge you may have absorbed have already been deprecated? Or that information from Wikipedia may have changed at moments without notice, have never read or, dare I say, included a political bias to them?

Maybe I should have worded it better as a "beginner" or "intermediate" knowledge onramp and/or filler. For example, I have asked it on occasion to translate into traditional Mandarin in parallel for every English response. It helps tremendously in trying to rebuild that bridge that may have been burned long ago.
Having to page someone on vacation is a very very broken organization.

Additionally, paging someone when they should be sleeping is also abusive.

If you need 24/7 coverage, pay for follow-the-sun.

Most of what we do isn't actually that important.
Sorry never mind! I wasn't thinking at all when I wrote that thought, but that obviously doesn't make sense :)
If you work a job where having one of these incidents once a year or more is "normal" then the dev team needs to devote most of its time to fixing that, or you need to change employers.
It looks like Paul A. Jungwirth and others are trying to get Temporal Tables into Postgres 18.

https://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2024/07/temporal-reve...
> Kahng is the most prominent active researcher in this field. If anyone knows this stuff, it's Kahng.

This is written as a textbook example logical fallacy of appeal to authority.
What I tell people new to on-call: ask for overtime, time off, or some form of compensation (and don't go along with the "it's part of your standard compensation" bullshit).

On-call is you agreeing to give your time, your weekends, your freedom to your work. It's beyond the standard 8-5. Don't trade that for free.
So I’ve got a setup like this:

It’s an 8Bay Synology 1821+. Cost about $1300 for the machine, 32GB of ECC memory, and the 10gbe network card.

I have 4 8Tb drives in a btrfs volume with 1 drive redundancy giving me 21TB of space.

All the important stuff gets also backed up to another 8TB drive periodically and sent to glacier.

The way synology’s shr1 setup works seems to be like RAID5 + a bit more flexibility so I can add more drives to the array but as long as they are 8TB or larger.

The docker manager seems to work pretty well. I run a few services there and mount certain volumes into them. A few DNS records and some entries into the reverse proxy in the control panel of it and you can run whatever you want.

Most critically power draw is very low and it’s very quiet which was an important consideration to me.
There should be and could be a robot for everything. The scale and variability of the tasks just don't make them viable.

I should have a machine that peels my potatoes. I should have a machine that cooks me my favorite meal at the push of a button. I should have a machine that I can feed fabric into and it will sew me a shirt. All of these things are doable, but they don't make economic sense or they need to handle too many unforeseen cases.

A machine that sews shirts doesn't make sense to have at home, but if you're selling millions of shirts then it does. Same for all the rest.

A machine that runs all the cables etc needs to be too complicated to handle all the eventualities that there isn't enough scale (yet) to justify its existence. Basically, we don't build enough data centers.
Early teen me still knows many addresses and instructions by their decimal values 8^)
But nobody said that there is any move to overtly automated decision making.

That’s a proposal that you made.
Great post.

I enjoy the almost Oliver Burne[0] meets Mondrian[1] like outputs of Duckering's implementation, but appreciate the simplicity of the author's as well.

Excellent linked resources for anyone interested in using programming to illuminate mathematics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_(mathematician)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian
Another way to say: for most software jobs, customer-facing downtime is downstream of a development skill issue that can+should be fixed.

Some (many?) employers make this difficult, and you should try to leave them.
WP Engine, a for profit company, should be providing what their customers need, not relying on free services from a foundation for required functionality.

Especially if they have a fraught relationship with the provider of those free services.

System76 provides the PopOS repos that are based on Ubuntu. They don’t freeload.

Canonical provides the Ubuntu repos that are based on Debian. They don’t freeload.

WP Engine is freeloading, no doubt about it.
Technical/Academic people might hate "influecer" culture for its crassness, but whenever fame/popularity is the primary goal, this is the only social dynamic.

People are not outraged in academia that the primary goal is fame/popularity (rather than knowledge, technical ability), they're outraged that someone is cheating in this game to get ahead.

This is happening across the spectrum tbh, as the world becomes increasingly monocultural and winner-takes-it-all social schema. People talk about anthopocene, but look at human social cultures : the millions of ways of living (with dignity mind you) sustained by < 1B population from as late as a 100 years back is now down to 1 or 2 at best.

In such a vast pool, this kind of stuff is not only bound to happen, but is the optimal way forward (okay, may be not such blatant stuff). Honor-code etc. are BS unenforceable measures that are game-theoretically unstable (and kill-off populations that stick to it). See what the finance industry does for instance.
When yoo look carefully, shrimp and woodlouse are quite similar [1], it's just a matter of habit and presentation.

[1] Both are crustaceans, not insects anyway.
Hey I missed this reply at the time but I wanted to say thanks for your thoughtful reply, although I don't have the energy or time for much of an answer at the moment. You raise some good points, and I better understand where you're coming from now even though my preferences are just different in some cases.
Expectations should be lower as far as responsiveness or even availability, for someone who is not actually on call. The load (and expectation) is also not evenly distributed: IME senior and staff/principal-level engineers (and managers) tend to get paged in when off-call much more frequently, for obvious reasons. It's more likely to be "I need someone who knows XYZ", not "I need absolutely EVERYONE" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74BzSTQCl_c or "I need a random additional pair of competent hands".

Also, IME it's been relatively rare for issues outside of business hours to require calling in people who aren't really on call. I think the article is pointing out that it can be the right thing, not that it's necessarily a common scenario. And during business hours, being pulled away from your other work to help handle an incident is obviously a much easier pill to swallow.
I have worked for some time with Next.js and SST / OpenNext. I think that if you are fully into the AWS ecosystem OpenNext is a great option; although you have to take into account that there may be some compatibility issues with the new features mainly. If this is a big concern, I think both Remix and Astro are a great option because of the adapters. I have been using Astro for my personal blog and I love with its simplicity. My impression is that it could be a good option even for big projects.
AI Overview by NotebookLM is amazing
Steam doesn't want to pay arbitration fees, tells gamers to sue instead
My job is not to do a certain fixed set of tasks, my job is to do whatever my employer needs me to do. If an LLM can do part of the tasks I complete now, then I will leave those tasks to the LLM and move on to the rest of what my employer needs done.

Now you might say AI means that I will run out of things that my employer needs me to do. And I'll repeat what I said above: you've got to prove that. I'm not going to take it on faith that you have sussed out the complete future of business.
Most people here need to be put on a stimulant because they can't control a gambling addiction?

Why, yes, that's a marvellous idea.
Pager Duty gave me insomnia, it's not worth it. Tell your organization they can hire someone to work that shift.
Those two examples were meant to bring the idea that many things in life, though different, can be risky.
It was. However trademarks, much like patents, are made as generic as possible in order to give the company as much control and value as possible. Tech Dirt is filled with articles of trademark trolling.
There Are 89,004 Local Governments in the United States (2012)
Discussions about "the government" often treat it as a monolithic entity. This isn't the case, and within the United States there are nearly 90,000 individual governmental units (roughly on per 3,300 adults). Nearly 7,000 of those are within Illinois alone.

I find this has interesting implications when discussion heads toward "what if we supported X through the government", and the inevitable objection that handing "the government" too much power would lead to excessive concentration. The reality is that distributed governmental support might well be diverse and reasonably competitive.

By contrast, there are roughly 2,200 companies listed on the NYSE, with another 3,400 at the Nasdaq, a substantial portion of which are foreign:

<https://www.statista.com/statistics/1277216/nyse-nasdaq-comp...>
Accept it, it is the deal with opensource. It's also the basis that people should be using when debating OSS versus other models. People should not be making business or policies or economic decisions based on some unenforceable honor system
> and in the US it carries the non-insignificant chance of getting shot.

Oh brother. Citation fucking needed. Show me statistics that support your claim that a teacher is more likely to be a victim of homicide than a member of the general population.
I loved the vending machines for drinks!! I had at least one novel drink every day and enjoyed almost all of them. If you remember the name of the white grape drink you mention I’d love to look for it, it sounds great.
Freelancing Is a Real Job
But even if dataset is incomplete or not accurate, do you think we could at least get directionally right insights from such datasets?
I'd argue that sports betting is not the biggest concern. What we saw was the rise of online cassinos after a new law in 2023 classified them as "sports betting" too.

Betting your team will win the tournament has a very delayed reward: the game needs to play out for hours/minutes before you know if you have won. Only hardcore gamblers experience instant rewards and becoming a 'serious' sports gambler is no easy task: you have learn about the sport, then teams, the players, the outcomes, the time of the matches, etc. Cassinos, on the other hand, are just an app with a lever that provides instantaneous rewards and thus hook your brain with much more intensity in a shorter time span. A lot of people who don't care about sports or just won't be hooked by sports betting are now trapped in those online cassinos. It's a shame.
I went down this rabbit hole of sound reduction, but then I bought a house and put all my NAS and NAS-like things in my basement storage room where I can’t hear them from anywhere else in the house.
Discussion (61 points, 20 hours ago, 20 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41667248
It can do things like that. People who have diabetes have high blood glucose because their bodies are not actually using the sugar. If it gets bad enough it can actually feel like you're perpetually fasting despite having eaten. The energy is just uselessly circulating in the blood stream. Body thinks it's starving.

If this process continues the body starts producing ketones which acidify the blood which generally causes a lot of symptoms including depression of the nervous system.
https://archive.is/Qt016
And I'm not arguing that they should release open source models. There's no shame in releasing an open-inference model. But I think I'm fair in saying they should use an accurate term for what they do release.
Bremer was in a quanta interview recently https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-causes-giant-rogue-waves...
So a company A pollutes a river, we all learn about the downsides of dumping chemical X into the water and regulate it to 1/100s of what was done.

Now company B comes along, and they are allowed to pollute the river way above what is now accepted as OK, but because company A did so, it's allowed?
Marvel and DC were not the original holders of the term
I knew lua before learning frontend development and god do I miss lua.

They should instead make an optional lua c-like syntax if they want to ease learning for js folks.
What types of titles can ACR match to?

Can it do foreign titles?

Adult titles?

Can it OCR onscreen text, e.g. a computer desktop?

Can it identify video conferences?

Why do advertisers care what I watch? If I watch PBS mystery theater do I get ads for rich people?
Maybe you wanted to say that policies do not imply actual "moderation". But that is demonstrably false, there are documented cases where crates.io removed packages solely because they were malicious and all those cases happened as soon as possible for crates.io. So Maven Central has to do something more in order to be ever considered better than crates.io, but I have no idea---it accepts any well-formed uploads after all. Do elaborate on that.
If wordpress is to survive it needs to not be wordpress
Funny thing is you are actually the pro [corporate] tech one, not on the side of freedom. Furthermore nobody said anything about crypto - you are seriously grasping at straws. You have said nothing about the products on shelves (billions of dollars in the industry already) argument, only presented crypto as an argument which has nothing to do with the conversation.
Hard paywall: <https://archive.ph/lTXSR>

Alt accessible URL: <https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/touch-screens-are-...>
> If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission?

One of the reasons is that we can make nuclear bombs out of it. People currently value not getting nuked more than clean and unlimited fission energy, so everything that might be used to make nukes are insanely regulated. This have downstream effects that make nuclear fission hard and expensive:

- With renewable energy power plants, you can use normal security. With nuclear fusion power plants, stealing a big tokamak wall to make dirty bomb is hard, so you can still use normal security. With fission power plants you need special armed security

- You need to provide accountability to IAEA to prove that you don't smuggle those plutonium away to make nukes. This affects the nuclear power plant design, as you don't want to have any blind spot where the operator can smuggle the nuclear material away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HHMAht3gSg

- Some countries ban nuclear waste reprocessing because they don't want someone using the plutonium from reprocessing process to make nukes. This is really sad as they're throwing all the good fuel away from the waste. Similar story with breeder reactors

With meltdown risk at least its solvable by safer reactor design, but there's no way we can remove those expensive safeguards.
> Is there any solution that lets me mix and match drive sizes as well as upgrade?

Probably more than one, but on my non-Synology box I use SnapRAID, which can take any number/size of drives. Downside is that it isn’t realtime, you have to schedule a process to sync your parity: http://www.snapraid.it/
> It's also hard to tell them not to use AI because the code does work.

If they are still looking to have humans maintain the code, and hire people to optimize it, the at use case needs to be taken into account. From that perspective, I would argue that it doesn’t work.

You could/should charge a higher rate for companies that have a bigger mess to clean up. A cleaning crew is going to charge more to clean up a hoard than to do some light cleaning and re-organizing. The price reflects the effort involved, and I don’t see this as any different. They can choose to pay to write clean code up front, or pay for it later with difficult or impossible maintenance. The choice is theirs.

Personally, everyone on my team hates AI and it’s rarely used. I probably use it the most, which is maybe 4 or 5 times a month to write a single line here or there, mostly to save me a search for syntax.
What about door locks? Or the ignition that had to be ripped out to use the usb stick trick? Does everyone have to use a club or hidden kill switch to not have them blamed.

I’d be willing to guess you won’t use this word salad when describing sexual crimes.
This week in KDE Plasma: converging 6.2
> The USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled for S.J. Richold's Superbabies Ltd after Disney's Marvel and Warner Bros' DC did not file an answer to Superbabies' request to invalidate the marks.

So, canceled after the companies declined to defend them.
Running targeted advertising on devices allows manufacturers to price devices lower by recouping lost sale revenue from the advertising stream.

In other words, an advertising dollar doesn't disappear: it's paid to someone.
Are there any brands that are known for respecting privacy more than others?
"skill" is why gambling institutions are making record profits. Sports betting, for example, has way too many variables to ever make winning consistent.

Jaywalking when being blinded by the sun is about as silly as you bringing it up to prove some point. Only a fool would do that, like someone who thinks they can beat a possibly rigged gambling system.
The fine is too low for a company of this size.
About 3b if you're referring to this: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...
I’m saying that his 8% demand sounds like the last line in a long conversation with an interlocutor acting in bad faith, trying to slow walk the inevitable demise of the relationship.

If WP Engine had acted in good faith, Matt wouldn’t have had to come up with terms unilaterally.
I'm confused. All I saw was someone trying to push their own agenda, and editors preventing it. Did you see something else?
Show HN: EchoPal – I dare you to find a faster way to manage tasks
Hey HN!
I built EchoPal out of sheer frustration with my ADHD-addled brain constantly forgetting tasks. After years of struggling with clunky todo apps, I created a voice-driven, AI-powered solution that actually understands how my scattered thoughts work. Here's my challenge to you: I dare you to find a faster way to jot down and manage your tasks. Seriously, try it.
The magic of EchoPal is its ability to capture and organize tasks through natural speech. Just talk, and watch the AI handle the rest - creating tasks, setting reminders, and even prepping emails or Slack messages mentioned in your todos. Say "Email the report to Sarah and Slack the team about progress," and boom - tasks created, reminders set, email and Slack drafts ready. No typing, no app-switching, no forgetting.
I use EchoPal every day now, and it has really help me clear my mind. It has really improved my productivity as I no longer have to spend extra effort to manually structure my day. It's the app I always dreamed of but never thought could exist. There's a free trial if you want to take on my challenge. If you find a better, faster way to manage tasks, especially for ADHD brains, I'll eat my hat (it's a nice hat, so I'm pretty confident).
SideProject: An iOS App for Managing Multiple Side Hustles