skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do people keep touting warehouse numbers when the RTO conversation comes up? It's not like the warehouse employees are the ones working from home. It seems like such a bizarre thing to bring to the conversation. I get that warehouse employees have a rough go, but it's a totally different conversation.

It verges on hand wavy distraction
hot air balloons aren't birds either, monsieur
Because the working class deserve a share of the wealth they generate and if they don’t get it, it’s a matter of when, not if society collapses?

There has been an unprecedented acceleration of the concentration of wealth to the billionaire class, and that’s fundamentally unsustainable. History has shown the end result is either a decrease in inequality naturally, through government intervention, or violence.

I prefer naturally (a strike and negotiation), I’d accept government intervention, but I fear a lot of people will take your jaded view of “why should they get more money when we can replace them with automation” and we’re going to eventually end up with violence when enough people can’t afford the basic necessities.
There is no need to make a case. They have the right to strike. In general though one should support workers when they seek higher wages since the pay has increased at a much lower rate than productivity the last 40 years or so. Enough wealth has been extracted from labor. It’s time to give labor its due.
Not today, regulatory capture. Not today.
Going on strike to keep your job from being replaced by automation does not seem like a winning strategy. Not only does your job not need to exist, you actually want more money for doing something no one needs you to do?

If you want a payment for doing nothing of value, that's something government handles, not a private employer.

There's SO MUCH demand for labor right now, let's not have people do jobs that computers can do.
I made no statements remotely like this.
I’ve done it once or twice. One particular time there was a lot of hand wringing about how there was nothing to work on. I about saw red. Tech debt and bugs. That’s what you work on.

That incident really changed my perspective on people who talk about how tech debt is bad. Some of them will roll up their sleeves, but some just want to look high minded without putting in the effort.
I've never seen a PC with InsydeH2O that was not a much lesser machine than it would have been otherwise.

>Lenovo is not solely responsible for this situation. Intel could also allow downloading their update tool standalone! And so could Insyde!

From what I've seen, I still would like to see both Lenovo and Intel continue as ongoing concerns.

Not Insyde, from the beginning it has been the manifestation of enshittification compared to what came before, even though Insyde itself didn't have to become any shittier to arrive at a point where it should be completely avoided.

Always seemed like Insyde is made for disposable PC's.

Shame on Lenovo for even taking their calls.
People when a piece of software is source-available but not strictly OSS: outrage

People when Microsoft pulls this trick (core repo OSS, most useful things around it are full of DRM and legal traps): silence

The hypocrisy is really astounding and in a way, MS has managed to pacify even the strongest FOSS advocates by offering something which looks like OSS but it actually isn't. This is on par with claiming that a repo is GPL but the build API keys are not. (Yes, this also happened elsewhere, and not even in a corporate project at all!)

The Open Source Definition is hilariously unfit for purpose in 2024 because it allows shenanigans like this.

If you enjoy a rabbithole, look at how much DRM there is in Pylance (another extension that MS has locked down): https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/discussions/1641

The short summary is that MS uses multiple, constantly changing methods of DRM to make it impossible for people to patch out the "only official VSCode" check from the Pylance extension.
This is very clearly malicious.
McDonald's and supermarkets failed to spot slavery
wow this sounds like a really fun project. These are the kind of projects that excite me honestly. I find it really difficult to get excited about working on projects that are perceived as popular lucrative business ideas.
> Ent heavily uses joins

I’m specifically talking about this: https://github.com/ent/ent/issues/977.

Devs assume that the `With` methods are adding join clauses but that is not typically the case.

> does support multi field indices

Composite primary keys are useful for reasons other than unique constraints and query speed. For example, CockroachDB uses the primary key to partition rows. Also, at scale, an extra multi-column index in addition to the primary key when the primary key alone could have sufficed can be a meaningful performance degradation.

> not a Graph DB under the hood

No it is not, but because it has a graph ‘mindset’ and does support Gremlin, traditional SQL folks expecting a lightweight ORM (such as Drizzle in the JS world) may not have a good time.
No, it means shifted jobs. There's enormous demand for construction employment right now, they would have no trouble finding other employment.

In the entire history of the world automation has never caused employment reduction, only a shift.
> These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends.

Hmm, I wouldn't say so. In many countries it is illegal for an employer to prescribe what their employees should do on evenings and weekends, including up-skilling. Handing out promotions based on what an employee does outside work hours would quickly lead to labor disputes and penalties.

I don't deny that employers have this expectation, but it's often another case where if they actually enacted it, it would result in fines. And even in countries where this doesn't matter from a labor law perspective, a continuous improvement grindset culture (where employees work to improve for their work duties on a significant percentage of evenings and weekends) would often lead to morale loss, employee self-neglect and burn-out. Imagine how it would feel to have responsibilities after work (spouse, kids, parents, community commitments, chores, etc) when everyone is grinding to get ahead. You'd have no career prospects, too - a recipe for disengagement. Once again, a company would not actually want the consequences of enforcing this team value.

A better value would be that the company should provide improvement opportunities for their teams (conference tickets, time off work for professional certificates, etc), but same as before - they wouldn't want the real consequences (additional time off work) for having the team actually live such values.

I don't think anyone in most companies truly meaningfully lives those values, nor do they work with these values in mind. They may be slightly swayed towards doing something in line with the values ahead of their next performance review, but beyond that - not really. And that's best for everyone, including the company.
If you currently work at a publicly traded company, you're definitely just a number. If your company doesn't show continuous growth quarter after quarter and they announce layoffs, your stock will likely jump up that day.

Amazon has survived the dotcom bubble collapse, the Great Recession, and a global pandemic. Whatever happens here with talent loss will be meaningless.
> My phone can go from "off" (sleep) to taking pictures in less than a second with basically no effort

My Fujifilm X-E4 does the same? Flip the power switch, click the shutter. It's honestly identical in time to my smartphone - power on for these devices is crazy fast today IME
I just relaunched PostalAgent which lets you send postcards online by circling neighborhoods on a google map and then refining using demographic filters

My free plan offers an all in price which includes design, print and mail to your customers door for less than any competitor

https://PostalAgent.com
At least OAI and MSFT offer "copyright shields" for enterprise customers.

Say what you want about the morals associated to said offerings, but it sounds very interesting for companies that may want to use a plagiarizing machine for copying GPL code while covering their asses in some way (at least in terms of cost).
> The future of software development tooling that is being built is closed as fuck, and people seem to be okay with it because select components meet the OSI definition while missing the bigger picture.

This is such a huge problem and something that I have regularly commented on on Hacker News itself how the open source term is being applied so loosely especially by a bunch of VC funded companies who are further perpetrating this horrible horrible change in language and meaning and the ethos behind the open source movement.

YC itself is funding a bunch of these companies who claim to be open source but do not follow the ethos at all.
It's not a bad article, and right now there's a lot of hand-wringing in the comments by people who in all frankness probably just don't have the balls to pursue their passion.

Pretty early in my career I decided that the future of a tech bro at a FAANG was not for me so I quit. For one thing I saw that the men who were 10-20 years ahead of me on that track didn't actually have great personal lives. For another Big Tech was rapidly morphing into a net negative for humanity and I was sick of enabling it.

I knew I wanted to work with open source because it was ethically superior but didn't know exactly what or how.

It led initially to several years of wandering the world as a digital nomad and freelancing to pay the bills.

In the long run I started a bootstrapped open source company, now have about 12 people on payroll, and am 15 years expatriated and living in a country that I'm way way happier in with plenty of money and the markers of what people consider "success."

It also required me to do many many things that I didn't want to do or never thought I would do, a great example is learning how to sell things effectively, because initially if I didn't, I wouldn't eat. Then later, because it was the difference between just getting by and becoming rich.

It is completely possible to live your passion while being successful. To do it you have to temper your passion with realism. You cannot lie to yourself about what the world wants from you nor can you ever use it as an excuse for inaction.

Passion requires sacrifice, it's choosing A over B repeatedly, this is its definition. It certainly does mean that you might have to move, or make compromises in other areas of your life.

But if you're at the stage where you're still single and childless, and you're light years away from your passion because of money - frankly I think you're just a pussy. You have more freedom at that stage of life than any other. If you're doing something you don't care for, you have nothing to lose by blowing it to smithereens.

Or you can go on bitching about it on social media, like 95% of people do, and getting deeply involved in reasons that your dissatisfaction is someone else's fault. Look at older people who stayed in a situation they hated because that was where inertia and a lack of balls kept them. Get to know them. If you want their life to be yours soon enough then keep on doing what you're doing.
In general, an automated system to catalog, store and retrieve trading cards (magic for now, Pokémon next.) Right now, working on computer vision recognition of magic cards, but I’m trying to tackle the hard edge cases that many other projects and products don’t (revised vs unlimited, multiple reprints in The List, automatic language detection, etc etc.)
I've been hacking on a LLM-based text adventure this weekend: https://github.com/ianb/intra-game

It's like the fourth or fifth time I've made an attempt at this, each time learning something along the way. This might not be a success either... but I can tell I've made progress.

Right now I'm struggling with how to manage different events and different agents. Actually making a "winnable" game with "a point" is also hard!
No. For now it’s more about preemptively documenting the data and organizing it while waiting for the tech to improve.

I wouldn’t try to convince anyone. It would have to be someone already doing it, or that already wants to, but hasnt invested the time. It's a very small pool, and 1 of the many aspects that will make it challenging.
How do you handle client side interactivity? I’m probably an outlier, but all the JS I write is client side, and I sure wish I had a typed language to use in development.
You'll need lots of money or a high education to move to one of the European Union countries. Try getting a job that offers a work visa in one of the countries of your choice. But that's temporary by definition.

Another option, move to a country like Mexico that has options. Immigration is not as difficult as it is in the US or Europe and you can make a relatively good living if you have marketable skills. I know of people who have moved to Mexico from the US and they are happy. Make sure that you pick the right area to move to. Living conditions can vary a lot. A big advantage that you will have is your ability to speak English. It's a big plus. You'll need to learn Spanish. Given your assets, you can get a visa to travel to the US and use that to find businesses that you can work for as a freelancer.

I assume that you are female from what you wrote. Misogyny is a problem too but I suspect that it's better than in the Middle East. It's a democracy but it has issues with corruption. I hear that it can be a great place to live once you adapt.

That's one option. Your goal should be to do as much research as you can. You always have the option to visit for a few months and see how things work out before you make a decision.

Canada is another option, but again immigration requirements are hard to meet. Look into it. It's worth trying.
The idea proposed is so incredibly cheap, the only real cost is land and unskilled labor. This screams "government experiment" but we are doing less and less of that.

If carbon credits actually become a thing, this might be a way to cheaply sink carbon. But there is so much graft and corruption in that space at the moment.
Probably the easiest way would have been to draw a line around each factory in the US, declare that those now counted as outside-US for emissions purposes, and then declare that now the US was a zero-emissions country.

Done and dusted, problem solved.
wonder what it tastes like
You could say the same about Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Said by someone who writes Flutter for a living :/
Interconnect is going to be old news once batteries and balance-of-system costs get low enough. Local microgrids at the substation level are going to be the way to go, with only a minority of current traveling long distances (except for certain natural features, i.e. hydroelectric)
This is a downside, but big flat boats floating down river don't seem like big carbon releasers, bonus points if they use solar/wind to get back up river.
Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture (Marx). They strike because they can, and their labor has value. If it didn’t, the strike would not be feared.

Why should we care if the corporation profits more? I am not in the top 10% owning 93% of total US equities, so I do not care. Automation so the wealthy get wealthier doesn’t help anyone but the wealthy, and they need no help. Consumer excess can come from there as well, vs the pockets of people who do actual work.
> higher GDP per capita than most of continental Europe

I once read that the cost of university alone in the US explains a large part of this difference. (I cannot evaluate that claim, as I am not a trained economist.) In many European countries (there are 50!), university is nearly free, when compared the the extortionary rates in the US.

> increasingly hilarious US-euro monetary exchange rate

I have seen this on HN a few times in similar reactionary screed. If you look at the USD/EUR FX rate since 2015, it is pretty stable at 1.10.
Yeah, I’ve never got the “it’s stealth layoffs” or “because we need to use the offices we pay for” or “for the tax breaks” arguments. The math just doesn’t work out.

Staff are such a huge part of costs, and the difference between your good staff and bad staff can break a company. Adopting any policy that would encourage the staff who can go elsewhere (the best ones) to leave and be left with the ones who can’t (the less good ones) is such a huge risk, you wouldn’t take that position for a few million dollars, but only if you believed it’s the best strategy long term.

It is interesting to me though that with so many companies taking this stance lately, many of them heavily data driven (like Amazon), that I’ve not yet seen any actual data or research that says “Here are some quantitive numbers on what we think having folks back in the office is worth”. Anyone got any data on this?
In classic Google news, NotebookLM and Illuminate are two unrelated initiatives by entirely separate teams: https://twitter.com/raiza_abubakar/status/184056133374773269...
Drowning in Slop: AI Garbage Is Clogging the Internet, and It's Getting Worse
The Wordpress infrastructure is baked into Wordpress code. And wordpress users will use that infrastructure no matter which host they are with.
https://archive.ph/gT91W
I sync files across Windows, FreeBSD, Linux and Android. Your solution wouldn't work for me as easily as Syncthing.
> Structs are a part of C semantic.

Uh, no, structs, records, whatever you want to call them, are in many, if not most programming languages. "Structs" is not just "C structs" -- it's just shorthand for "structured data types" (same as in C!).

> Asn.1 is both quite complicated and not very efficient.

Every rich encoding system is complicated. As for efficiency, ASN.1 has many encoding rules, some of which are quite bad (BER/DER/CER, which are the first family of ERs, and so many thing ASN.1 == BER/DER/CER, but that's not the case), and some of which are very efficient (PER, OER). Heck, you can use XML and JSON as ASN.1 encoding rules (XER, JER).

> They could certainly have gone with protobufs or another binary serialisation format but would it really be better than the current choice?

Protocol buffers is a tag-length-value (TLV) encoding, same as BER/DER/CER. Having to have a tag and length for every value encoded is very inefficient, both in terms of encoding size as well as in terms of computation.

The better ASN.1 ERs -PER and OER- are much more akin to XDR and Flat buffers than to protobufs.

> I don’t think the issue they are trying to solve is related to serialisation anyway. Seems to me they are unhappy about the bus part not the message format part.

This definitely seems to be be the case.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/toucan-by-babbel-la...
That’s not how economics works at the scale that they’re talking about.
Just for scale how tons of carbon are in an acre or hectare of corn, wheat, or other crop. Being able to say how many farms would need to do this to counter act our release could provide an interesting sanity check.
wow, that's really troubling. people in the future will wonder what we were talking about after microsoft memory-holes that thread
I have a growing belief the advantage the advantage you're seeing is more HTML first *culture* rather than HTMX itself, I feel the same way using SvelteKit.

For example, you submit a form with a couple extra tags on a stock HTML form, do some processing server side and swap out the form (or redirect or whatever). No overriding the on submit callback, no having to wire up a validation hook, no having to think about where things are running.

React and angular have a very "let's solve this in JS" culture that creates ultimately unnecessary complexity demons for that 90%.
Is modularity an unalloyed good? Modularity comes with tradeoffs that mean you end up with, well, a bunch of discrete modules rather than something that works cohesively. That's why systemd was adopted pretty much everywhere, ignoring the arbitrary modular boundaries results in a more useful tool.

Some analogs: modern filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS that combine volume management with the filesystem, every service that's consciously chosen to deploy a monolith instead of microservices, and so on, every deployment that chooses to statically link, etc.
At this point I'm writing mostly for myself. GTM strategies for novels... that's an interesting way to think about things. I've not thought about it just yet. Happy to hear if you have any ideas tho.
To Jimmy. I feel for you, man. No kids should went through time like you did. THank you for becoming a good citizen & contribute to the great time of computing.
2022 discussion (142 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32657709

Possibly one change in 2024 is that Typefox (which contributes to Eclipse Theia) announced Open Collaboration tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970621 -> https://www.typefox.io/blog/open-collaboration-tools-announc... (2024)
Also not clear to me that Woocommerce disclosed they get a commission from Stripe. That seems like a massive FTC violation.
Show HN: Rocky AI – Chat with any webpage in Chrome using AI
A simple chrome extension that lets you chat with any webpage using AI. I was tired of copy pasting into Chat GPT from webpages all them time so built this.

Popular Use Cases:

1. Summarize Articles – Get concise overviews of content from sources like HackerNews, Reddit, and more.
2. Quick Information Lookup – Effortlessly locate key details on pages such as developer documentation, car forums, and beyond.
3. Personalized LinkedIn Outreach – Craft customized outreach messages for your LinkedIn connections with ease.
4. Review Analysis – Analyze feedback and reviews from platforms like Airbnb, Amazon, and others for quick insights.
> What do you know that millions of people all acting in their own self interest don't know?

That education of the poor is important, perhaps?

In reality, I'm pretty sure they do know that. Which is why they vote for politicians ensure the poor are educated, regardless of the fact that that can't necessarily pay for it at the time. They don't rely purely on laissez-faire capitalism to determine all our social policies.
Not really. The government agencies kinda make it hard on purpose to access this data. But, I am fortunate enough to be collaborating with experts who have been collecting this type of data for years.
It would still speed up behind-the-meter installations for existing grid connections. Rooftop solar, commercial and industrial customers adding battery energy storage, etc.
In the late 2000s/early 2010s, the left came up with "social justice warrior", and by 2015 it got turned into an insult by just about everyone online who knew the term (non-extreme-left, middle, and right). Shortly afterwards the left adopted "woke" to replace it, and even quicker than before everyone else turned it into an insult as well. DEI was, sort of, supposed to be the third replacement, and it's taken longer for this one to turn negative but it's well on its way now.
That’s the cool thing. At the top, there are humans making decisions, but based on their gut rather than data.
And a great way to justify hiring teams overseas.
Yes I live here and it seems quite successful. Most smokers I see now in my area (not counting vapes) are foreign Asian students who didn't grow up with it.

I don't think it'd work well online for similar reasons, the internet is global, it would just disadvantage local companies for no real gain due to our population. It would have to be a concerted global effort. I think there is quite a bit of overlap with accessibility too (simple and quiet is easier to parse for computers and humans than confusing noise), so maybe a push in that direction.
To be clear, you're not a port worker.. correct? You're just an outsider looking in, making a blanket judgement about how easy other people's jobs are; and how easy they are to replace?