skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> despite there being at the time almost zero evidence for

This isn't true—people had been connecting the dots for a few decades by the time these ads were running [0], and right around the start of the run (1940) was when strong evidence was starting to get published:

> Scholars started noting the parallel rise in cigarette consumption and lung cancer, and by the 1930s had begun to investigate this relationship using the methods of case-control epidemiology. Franz Hermann Müller at Cologne Hospital in 1939 published the first such study, comparing 86 lung cancer ‘cases’ and a similar number of cancer-free controls. Müller was able to show that people with lung cancer were far more likely than non-cancer controls to have smoked, a fact confirmed by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger at the University of Jena in an even more ambitious study from 1943. These German results were subsequently verified and amplified by UK and American scholars: in 1950 alone, five separate epidemiological studies were published, including papers by Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the USA and Richard Doll and A Bradford Hill in England. All confirmed this growing suspicion, that smokers of cigarettes were far more likely to contract lung cancer than non-smokers.

So it's less a case of people intuiting what was bad for them and more a case of the industry trying (and for a few decades succeeding) to get ahead of a growing scientific consensus by advertising it into irrelevance.

[0] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/2/87
> I presume you were the one that actually implemented a Product Roadmap to keep founders out of the weeds in the first place.

Wow, spot on.

The issue was that the team was being pulled from pillar to post and could never focus on anything for more than 5 minutes before having a different highest priority task foisted onto them, requiring them to change focus immediately and abandon progress.

By forcing a roadmap I gave the dev teams a week or so to work on something a little more undisturbed before moving onto the next thing. This massively increased our throughput and the quality of the outcome, but it was not popular with the founders because it forced the founders to crystallise ideas and prioritise them properly for the resources we had.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/654101/health-coverage-governme...
Yes, type-changing stores are guaranteed by the C standard to work only for allocated storage. In practice no compiler makes a difference between declared and allocated storage. A bigger problem is that Clang does not implement the C rules as specified..
I agree even just an auto mute functionality would go a long way.

People used to hack on this stuff decades ago. I suspect it's not as common now because for those who care (said hackers) they already cobble together some ad blockers and pi-holes. But ad delivery has stained so much daily life now they've sweetened the pot for a new generation of, not ad blockers, but... video shields?

I might have talked myself into tinkering on this. Curious what tools HN recommends.
Interesting. Yeah for me it's like RISCV, at the end of the day if it runs windows/Linux do I care what's underneath. I gotta get there to know why it matters. Other than the challenge of doing it.
Still not sure what the phrase means tbh.

A direct google translation comes back with "disabuse you idiot"

So maybe it means "idiot proof"?
Yeah I know, I just get extra concerned about putting stuff inside my body like that :P
> "The science" was literally changing every few days"

the world's sum total knowledge about the virus was changing from day to day - what did you want - stone tablets and burning bushes?

the mask message made sense: they were very clear, that in the early stages, it didn't make sense for everybody to wear them (community transmission was still low) and deprive medical personnel who needed them desperately (they were far more likely to encounter the virus for reasons I hope you are smart enough to figure out for yourself - but shout out and I'll try to explain further if it's not clear).

later on when community transmission was high and we had much larger supplies of masks, it made sense for more people to wear them, because then it would make a difference to the total transmission.

it seems that you just wanted an all knowing parental figure to tell you what to do and never change their opinion - that's not how real life works. in the adult world, when new information becomes available, or the situation changes, the rules can be changed. this isn't church.

and yes, even the chief of the cdc can be wrong, speak wrong, make mistakes, or get a message across poorly trying to produce short and snappy soundbites that the likes of you have a chance of remembering. but the underlying message wasn't wrong, it was correct based on available evidence at the time. it was a stressful situation and they probably didn't get much sleep for several months.
but platform engineers are so far down the chain, it's hard for them to associate their work value to actual customer's benefits.
https://archive.is/ehJbY

> Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%

> The move from a distributed microservices architecture to a monolith application helped achieve higher scale, resilience, and reduce costs.
If something can be obviously determined as spam, it shouldn't make it through the spam filter, which runs way before this model.

If the spam detection model can't, e.g. because doing so would require more context on the user and more capabilities, I don't think a summarization model would be able to help, and you'd need something more like a "personal assistant" model.

That said, I don't think we are too far away from that, but this particular model is not that.
> We will drive away the predators that keep you in constant alert and savage your children, and in exchange we will determine how and when you die (quickly, but perhaps also fearfully).

Maybe once in the past, or in places that still graze their animals. I don't think the average factory farm situation can be framed as mutually beneficial for the animals.
Texas governor was in Acapulco and nobody blamed him.

Anyway on topic an aunt of mine is a mayor of a small city (55k). Her opinion is that firefighters fight fires and having a politician walk around a disaster area with a hundred journalists isn't helping.
> Lots of travel...It’s hard being away from two little kids, but each trip turned out to be worth it.

Enough said.
oh come on guys, i've got real work to do
Realistically, and obviously I'm not a lawyer, but if it was developed as part of a course, I can see how that might (not saying I agree with it) make the IP rights assignment more complicated and maybe the university would have a leg to stand on?
I always found the whole thing odd personally. The Venn Diagram of people who both need to run a service in the cloud AND cannot manage an EC2 instance is a seemingly small set of people. I never saw the advantage to it and its got plenty of drawbacks.
The ur-example is probably Ancient Rome. Their Republic lasted for centuries, and the Roman Senate famously had zero formal power. When the Senators were doing their jobs well, it was held in extremely high regard, and Rome did (via some thin "who was elected to do that this year?" details) as its Senate advised. When not - well, things eventually went downhill. And "Republic" was replaced by dictators-for-life, who got the title "Caesar".

During the downhill slide, the Romans tried to codify loads of their previously unwritten rules - about how gov't officials were chosen, what they were allowed to do, etc. That really didn't help.
Tbf - they don't pay for WebKit, they pay to be the default search engine. If Apple wanted, they could switch to Chromium and still have the same captive audience and bargaining power (but a lot less control of the direction web standards go)
to me it seems much more intuitive to think in terms of actual servers. lambda seems like chicken nuggets but i wanna eat -say- a decent rotisserie not nuggets.
Show HN: Building the net that catches class action lawsuits
Hi HN,

I've been interested in consumer protection law and the right to repair for a long time now, but have always wondered if there's anything I can do to help hold corporations accountable for their actions. This is that project!

I recently launched a consumer protection platform designed to help individuals come together to hold corporations accountable for wrongdoing. The goal of the site is to provide a centralized space where users can submit evidence of corporate misconduct – whether it's misleading advertising, hidden fees, dangerous products, or other unfair practices.

I'm hoping that through this platform we can discover and launch more class action lawsuits than ever, and make our world a safer place for the consumer. Check it out at www.consumer-revenge.com

How would you improve this idea? I'd love to hear your feedback! Thanks for reading :)
Location: Netherlands

Remote: No, unless the job is interesting enough

Willing to relocate: Yes (anywhere)

Technologies: C/C++, Rust, Go, Go-Fiber, TypeScript/React, Linux (Kernel-level), PostgreSQL, Embedded Systems (STM32, ESP32), Cloud-Native (Docker, Kubernetes), Cryptography, Networking (TCP/IP, BGP, HTTP/3)

Email: ydewid at gmail com

Software/Hardware Engineer with a passion for elegant and performant solutions. Optimizing kernel code, building secure systems, or crafting efficient network protocols. Experience from bare-metal embedded devices to cloud-native architectures.

Currently based in the Netherlands, but open to anything. If you're tackling challenging projects that demand both breadth and depth of knowledge, please contact me.
Maybe check who you're responding to then ;).

He's not djb but definitely not a “random poster” either.
Right, if he does work for them, he is worth a full time salary for a new software engineer. That is at minimum, he can argue that he is worth a company founder salary.
It’s considered not okay if we replace vegetarian with skin tone.
Show HN: Cyantic – build complex objects from simple blueprints with pydantic
I do neuro/ai research, so I have to instantiate a lot of Tensors from YAML definitions (that's how I define models declaratively). I built a middleware to simplify this, using intermediary pydantic models as "blueprints" for building complex objects during pydantic's build process. It lets me pass parameters (e.g. mean and standard deviation) into `thing.model_validate(...)`, and get a fully-built Tensor in the appropriate field of the model.

https://github.com/flywhl/cyantic

---

Example:

If you write a blueprint like

@blueprint(Tensor)
class NormalTensor(Blueprint[Tensor]):

mean: float
std: float
size: tuple[int, ...]

def build(self) -> Tensor:
return torch.normal(self.mean, self.std, size=self.size)

and a data class like

class MyModel(CyanticModel):
some_tensor: Tensor

you can construct MyModel using mean and std instead of a Tensor:

some_yaml = """common:
size: [3, 5]
some_tensor:
mean: 0.0
std: 0.1
size: @value:common.size
"""

my_model = MyModel.model_validate(yaml.safe_load(some_yaml))

You can also pre-process the data using `@hook` references, and there's an API for defining custom hooks.

There's good test coverage and I think the library is ready for use, but would appreciate issues if you come across any bugs.

Thanks for reading
They ship with linux. Macs have zero linux support from Apple
I think it’s all about cost analysis. That said, there are definitely some services that are worth outsourcing, like smtp, until you get to a certain size.

Separately, when you factor in data privacy, your decision making tree will certainly change quickly.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42633865
> obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.

That is the privilege of corporations....
Make Llama 3.1 8B talk in Rick Sanchez's style
This project shows you how to make Llama 3.1 8B speak like Rick Sanchez by:

1. Creating a custom dataset from Rick and Morty transcripts in ShareGPT format

2. Finetuning the model using Unsloth's optimizations on Lambda Labs GPUs

3. Converting and deploying the model to Ollama for local use

It's a fun way to learn LLM finetuning while creating your own Rick-speaking AI assistant.

Wubba lubba dub dub!
most people never need one
If you have to ask that question than you might not know the market that well.

The second contender would be something like an Asus Rog. In my circle everyone loves the Rog more than the deck. Could not tell you how well sales numbers compare between the two but there are definitely other options in the market and have quite a strong community around them.
For me, it's because Rails has continued to be an excellent solution in every application I've ever needed to build, whether it's a project with 1 user or 10 million, or with a dev team of 1 or 100.

Every time I try to solve a problem with anything other than Rails, I run into endless issues and headaches that would have been already solved if I just. used. Rails.
C doesn't have "alias analysis" in the standard. It has an (informally specified) memory model which has "memory objects" which have a single type, which means treating them as a different type is undefined behavior.

This enables security analysis like valgrind/ASan and secure hardware like MTE/CHERI so it's very important and you can't get rid of it.

However, it's not possible to implement malloc() in C because malloc() is defined as returning new "memory objects" and there is no C operation which creates "memory objects" except malloc() itself. So it only works as long as you can't see into the implementation, or if the compiler gives you special forgiveness somehow.

C++ has such an operation called "placement new", so you want something like that.
Likely not at play since you see the decrease in free play across countries with public healthcare systems. As a Canadian I do not think about the cost of healthcare whatsoever. If my kid falls and breaks an arm, the cost is $15 which is one day of parking.
> Capitalists tend to have unhealthy wordviews around selfishness and entitlement and expectations on other people.

I find it funny when people make such sweeping generalizations. You think this is unique or more prevalent in capitalists? That’s curious. Especially since I think most individuals can’t even be classified into “capitalist” or something else. I don’t think I have a market theory as part of my identifiers.
Because most companies have incompetent OPs and leadership, that Cargo Cult themselves into more tech debt.
Before we all go into why lambda doesn’t work, remember that companies are happily handing many many millions of dollars to AWS each year, and will continue to do so for some time.
No, I'm driving normally at 50 in the rain or whatever and some AI hype-wagon in front of me has slammed on the brakes and swerved across my lane.

The CEO of HypeAI releases a heartfelt video in which they say they are truly sorry for my family's loss and by way of compensation offers them unlimited credits for HypeRides in select US cities conditions apply.
I’ve been beating this drum for many, many years now: https://csswizardry.com/2019/05/self-host-your-static-assets...
wyze sells their new robot vacuum for about $100-$150 every year, you have to look around nov - dec (black friday and christmas sells), you might also find it sold by walmart for $100. it usually goes for around $300.
Wireless routers also have wires.
As a lawyer, your post is almost entirely incorrect. Privilege in no way depends on whether the communication involves questions.

It cracks me up. As a lawyer, I would never post on HN to argue about pointer arithmetic or inference optimization, yet the law seems to be fair game for amateur hour.
That adds a complication: I like my home location and would rather that DayJob didn't move far enough away that I can't conveniently commute to it from here.

For the time being putting up with where I am is probably to be optimal. But I'm still giving it serious thought…

TBH I am somewhat burned out ATM, from personal & family issues at least as much as work, so the negative feelings are likely exacerbated by that. There was a point where I considered just buggering off and going to stack shelves at Tesco, or something else “physical task based” requiring relatively little mental energy, but that would mean a huge drop in income!
Did we need RTOS for activity trackers?
We developed the RTOS (Real-Time Operating System) for our activity trackers using the Zephyr kernel and its libraries.

In this article, I briefly shared a short summary of my experience of choosing different tech stacks for the firmware development of activity trackers.

Happy Reading!
How is it any more dangerous than brakes on a traditional car?

Anyone can slam the brakes in the middle of a highway.

I'm assuming the e-stop button would not be right next to the blinker.
This is an interesting change, since threads was supposed to be the nice place, but liberals in my feed(particularly journalists fwiw) were super upset about the lack of politics. I assume though underlying this will be an attempt to deprioritize movements like blm/metoo
Lol tell that to Trump.
Poland is perhaps not the best example, by GDP PPP per capita standards they're not much poorer than the US. I would expect life to be comparable.
We use backstage (backstage.io) to manage our infra. It has plugins that track costs and attribute them to individuals and teams. That gets aggregated and is used to forcast costs for projects/teams/whatever.

You can do click-ops in the UI (which then generates yaml in a repo), or you can write special yaml files in your repo yourself. These yaml files define the owner (team entity) or the individual that the cost originates from. Its a mostly automated process.

Since each resource an application uses is known, anomalies can be tracked down and attributed. So, for example, if someone starts serving big files from anywhere other than the CDN and blowing up egress costs, the source and root cause are easy to identify.

Backstage has a "lifecycle" tag for the resources you spin up (experimental is the default). If you spin stuff up that isn't tagged as being in production they get auto deleted after a period of time (you get a bunch of emails about it beforehand). That cleans up experiements or other test infra that people have forgotten about.
> Admittedly I speak as a software engineer primarily building CRUD apps

Ya, this is the majority of us.
This the reason I tend to not use a serverless solution in most cases.

I want my code to be written and executed on my machine in a way that can at least kind of resemble the production execution environment. I want a binary that gets run and some IO access, most of the time.

If I have a VM or a "serverless"-style compute like Fargate on ECS, I can define an entry point, some environment variables, and we're off to the races in a very similar environment to my local (thank god for containers and VMs).

The _idea_ of lambda and the similar services is awesome to me, but it's just such a PITA to deal with as a developer, at least in my experience.
I would look into more traditional data science for crop monitoring and management. I personally don't see Generative AI (LLMs) as something that can help nearly as much. The conditions and remedies are well known and simpler classifiers should be up to the task. The harder problem is knowing when and where things are happening, which aligns with the tradition that 80% of the work is managing the data, 20% is using the data tools and gaining insights
Because we use Nix recipes to deploy our Datalog-ish backend connectors that talk to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk via a bespoke database we wrote in Julia that's deployed on Snowflake Container Cloud. But there's a missing backslash somewhere and nobody can find it because even ChatGPT cannot decipher the error messages.

Maybe it's an expired certificate but the guy who knew how that stuff works built a 12,000 line shell script that uses awk, perl, and a cert library that for some reason requires both CMake and Autotools. It also requires GCC 4.6.4 because nobody can figure out how to turn off warnings are errors.
We've looked at these tradeoffs over and over at places I work.

There's always part of the stack (at least on the kinds of problems I work on) that is CPU intense. That part makes sense to have elastic scaling.

But there's also a ton of the stack that is stateful and / or requires long buildup to start from scratch. That part will always be a server. It's just much easier.

For my own projects, I prefer lambda. It comes with zero sysadmin, costs zero to start and maintain, and can more easily scale to infinity than a backend server. It's not without costs, but most the backend services I use can easily work in lambda or a traditional server (fastapi, axum), so it is a two-way door.
Expenses could be orders of magnitude more than an individual's fulltime salary. Just think of the equestrian disciplines, for example, where it's pretty obvious that being independently wealthy with millions to spend on your campaign with zero hope of making that money back is just what it takes to participate. You're spending those millions and devoting your life to athletics, in preference to any pursuit that's actually, you know, productive, to compete with other similarly-positioned people for what, within the circles you travel in, passes as the ultimate status symbol.

Even as things currently are, it absolutely infuriates me, that my money is taken from me involuntarily (as an involuntary license payer for public broadcasting in Germany) and given to the IOC to line the pockets of corrupt officials and further aims that I disapprove of, like overtourism and everything that surrounds the building of an olympic village etc. Every single cent's worth of transfer from my pocket to Isabel Werth's is just adding insult to injury.
I have seen multiple people claim that {Copilot|Claude|a local Llama model} has been great for them at understanding large codebases, but at least to date, I have yet to actually have anyone provide a concrete example when I ask. Maybe others have a different idea of what constitutes "large."

At my job, our main repo is over 300k lines of just Ruby code, plus a bunch of JS, ERB templates, and other stuff. Every AI tool I've thrown at it is great at making surgical edits to single files (or small groups of files) but completely chokes if you ask it a question that requires it to understand context across the repo. I'm always hoping that I'm just using the tools wrong, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case.
Serverless is more of a billing philosophy than a design philosophy in my opinion.

Serverless is all about outsourcing the infrastructure for scaling a micro service. How you design the service itself, or the system its a part of, can vary widely.

There are definitely dedign constraints of going serverless, but I'd argue those are largely just the constraints of going with microservices rather than a monolith.
Yes, but there are degrees/layers to this, and having different words for each makes sense.

At a very very high level, a spell checker and an editor advising on your target audience's aesthetic preferences and cultural nuances are the same thing; at the level we're talking about here the distinction becomes important.

Imagine asking an editor how to spell "xenomorph" and their feedback is to tell you to rewrite your story in a fantasy setting instead.
Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607794
"Yoh kay" as in "show slay"

Or "yoh keh" as in "moth fret"

?

I pronounce pokémon as "Poh Key Mon". Which is a third variation to "ké"