skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Slave labor is the labor of a slave. Removing the labor does not remove the slavery.

How do you distinguish incarceration from slavery?
Here in Southern California in the 80's and 90's we just called them "copy parties".

We'd even hold them at respectable places sometimes like a bank's conference room someone somehow managed to get access to. Everyone brought a little folding table, and their C64s, and later Amigas.

I was also part of some cracking groups, making intros for them - FBR, Agile, Intense, TSM, and some others. I was also involved in some warez BBSs, making customizations to the BBS code. We did all the phone phreaking stuff too.

And as a consequence of being too involved in some of these people's lives, I now have both an FBI and Secret Service file on me. I had no repercussions, but my friends sure did (for the phone related stuff). The stories I could tell...

It really was the golden age of warez.
The Pegasus Project has shown that pretty much anyone could be targeted. It's enough to know someone in a publicly owned company or publicly say something negative about corruption or just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Nothing you do will guarantee that the state won't come after you.
There’s a guy here on HN who tried to “fix” bookmarks or start page. He also sells wallpapers for his extension. Idk how to find the post though. Maybe will update later.
When I live somewhere for three months, I need a kitchen.

If a hotel offered a kitchen be fine, but they do not.

Hotels and AirBnB are only interchangeable if you're looking at a hotel-length stay.
> At the C-Suite level - even at a deeply technical company like TSMC - the job is mostly investor relations and arbitrating between various business units internally, so while a technical background is nice to have, the business chops are more critical than technical chops.

I think this is a problem, particularly for the major tech companies that produce tech as the end product. If you are purely a "business leader" then the continued growth and even existence of the company is in jeopardy. Isn't the part of the job you mentioned better done by the COO or CFO?
> Comments on security: This is a huge issue for me. I've followed best practices as nearly as I can, but I've also been asking around to find out who could do a comprehensive security audit, but haven't yet found anybody I trust. Does anybody have any recommendations on how to find someone?

The best first step is to conduct a review yourself; you may want to hire or recruit a volunteer to do a security review, but you can kick it off yourself by using free, open source tools to scan your application, your code, and your environment.

Your first stop should be https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatory because there are some simple, prescriptive improvements you can make.

Your second stop should be using a container or cloud security scanning tool to check for vulnerable configurations and packages. There are a myriad of tools available, like Trivy for container scanning, Prowler https://github.com/prowler-cloud/prowler or ScoutSuite https://github.com/nccgroup/ScoutSuite for scanning your cloud environments, etc

Your third stop should be https://www.zaproxy.org/, which is a free download you can use, and https://www.zaproxy.org/getting-started/ is a great way to get started. This will help you quickly identify low hanging fruit that can be found through automated scanning.

Your fourth stop should be running language appropriate static analysis tools against your application. There are too many to mention, but here is a good starting list: https://owasp.org/www-community/Source_Code_Analysis_Tools

All of these will give you quick, tactical things you can address. Once you get through any critical findings (which frequently, but not always means they are directly exploitable without additional effort) you should threat model your application, and build a plan for security - https://owasp.org/www-community/Threat_Modeling
Rota is complaining that differentials are introduced as an ad hoc technique, seemingly breaking the rules. If differentials are taught from the beginning, i.e. y + dy = f(x + dx) where f'(x) is a convenience function, this is not an issue. Of course, there are other issues with teaching differentials, namely why products of differentials vanish. On the other hand, limits aren't rigorously justified in an introductory course either.
> "Server" is a well understood term in software.

This might be why people are having trouble with it. "Cloud" and "serverless" both refer to hardware, not software.

"Cloud" was moving the hardware from something you managed, either in office or a datacenter, to using machines someone else managed, but it was still server-oriented (such as software in VMs or bare-metal that you managed).

"Serverless" drops even that, using ephemeral code that doesn't care what server it's running on, so the people managing the hardware can move your software as-needed.
As someone who was spent 5+ years in one of their many acquired companies, SFDC management has a reasonably accurate sense of their best performing staff.

However, line and middle SFDC managers are partly evaluated based on the size of their orgs. This obviously leads to perverse incentives to bloat one's org; the loss of fiefdom then leads to loss of promotion opportunity and even employment.
I taught numerical linear algebra in grad school and was really frustrated that even the applied math department took so long to build up to solving linear systems and eigen-decompsotions. The ordering of the material in the textbook is great, focusing on algorithms and decompositions.
Rolling eyes.

> Especially if the author shares neither the data or the code

What are you talking about. In this example, why do you invent they are not sharing the data? That's the whole point.

> A study that is replicated using the same data is "avoiding the replication crisis"

BULLSHIT. You can build confidence by redoing the experience with the same data, but it is just ONE PART and it is NOT ENOUGH. If there is a statistical fluctuation in the data, both studies will conclude something false.

I have of course reproduced a lot of algorithm myself, without having the code. It's not complicated, the paper explains what you need to do (and please, if your problem is that the paper does not explain, then the problem is not about sharing the code, it's about paper badly explaining).

And again, my argument is "nobody share data" (did you know that some study also shares code? Did you know that I have occasionally shared code? Because, as I've said before, it can be useful), but that "some don't share data and yet are still doing very good, both on performance, on fraud detection or on replication".

For the rest, you are just saying "my anecdotal observations are better than yours".

But meanwhile, even Terence Tao does not say what you pretend he says, so I'm sure you believe people agree with you, but it does not mean they do.
Where to download a 1px GIF or "hack" the source code of Paul Graham's homepage
Today on HN, I started a discussion about handmade webpages, and one of the examples was Paul Graham's website (https://www.paulgraham.com).

I decided to take a closer look and found several interesting artefacts.

0. Security. Instead of creating his own transparent 1x1 pixel gif for spacing (which is not the easiest task in 2025), Paul's website uses an IMG link from virtumundo.com (http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif). So, if the owner of the virtumundo server receives a lot of requests, it's because of Paul Graham's homepage. It's also possible that Virtumundo might monitor the activity of Paul's visitors and their IP addresses through IMG requests log.

1. Declaration. The HTML version is not declared correctly, as the `<html>` tag is related to HTML5, but the website uses a more or less HTML 4.01 version.

2. Comments. There are a lot of interesting comments, such as "Follow me at @paulg@mas.to" and "Paul Graham, like nobody else, tells us what it means to be a hacker.- Matthias Felleisen."

3. Syntax. The HTML has poor syntax, and many tags have incorrect syntax according to the HTML specification. (Ex. bgcolor=#ff9922, or <br> tag use inside of <font>.

4. Sitemap. The sitemap (/sitemap.xml) mentioned in robots.txt is not available and, instead, displays a Yahoo page.

5. Potential improvements. leftmargin="0" and topmargin="0" in the <BODY> tag can provide a more consistent representation of the menu.

Overall, the HTML code on the page is quite messy, I but understand how difficult it can be to find an expert in HTML 4.01 these days.

Paul, if you read this, please don't hesitate to get in touch if you need assistance with fixing the issues.
Concur.

I remember 10, 12 years ago.

They were great.
> to have chickens you must grind male chicks alive as they hatch because they don’t produce eggs

Bit of a leap there.
More details here: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/technology/2025/01/08/b...
Exactly, but that isValidAndTrue method is probably a little tricky to write...
There are server power supplies that won't work on non-sinusoidal power sources. (read: cheap UPSs) I learned that the hard way.
I like your idea of custom HTML homepage storing all your links and snippets.

Do you feel it's easy to add links from your phone?

A screenshot would be lovely, if you feel like sharing one.
https://easylang.online
LeetCode, concurrency, system design... each contrived in its own way and you can only figure them out by burning good opportunities. Reminds me of the Bridge Keeper in Monty Python's Holy Grail. My tip is just to ruthlessly ask questions because interviewers frequently are not remotely clear as they think they are.

I'll be branching off towards a different career path because of this. Tying your employability to passing these tests rather than your accomplishments as a professional is a sucker's game long term.
If you don’t understand the basics, you don’t understand anything.
I want to do that, but I also want many aliases without buying many domains that are ultimately tied back to me by ICANN WHOIS. + aliases and catch-all rules are not really a solution for this because if it’s all on one domain it’s all linkable to one identity.

I’ve also considered using a service like Njalla, but they’re expensive and you need to trust they won’t run away with your domains.
I agreed to mentor a Google Summer of Code project using a RPi before I realized that I couldn't easily get one myself, spent the whole summer checking the UK official reseller's websites and eBay, lost interest after that and still haven't got one.
Future of jobs report 2025 [pdf]
I have been stunned into a catatonic state from the embarrassment. Nay, it’s a violation. I feel violated.

Right to our faces, unhinged.
> A solution to this situation is shifting the focus from what should be written to what user needs should be addressed

This goes for all forms of communication, all the time. Whether you're writing or speaking or having an informal conversation, relentlessly focus on your audience: what they think, what they know, and what they need to hear.

Think hard about your audience, and then think about them again.

Oh, also my soapbox topic is all documentation should have a line at the top explaining it like you'd explain it to your parents. "This cli tool was built in order to automatically run all tests in the suite, instead of manually like before." Etc.
You can only job hop once in 2 years.

All that other time watching TV and commenting on YC can be used to learn to run a business.

Also the skills you'll learn by starting a very tiny biz - marketing, sales, resilience, communication, people-skills and delivery - will help you sell yourself at present and future job opportunities.

Also not everyone is in tech or wants to be in tech. /smh
> Everything except C now has standard strings, not just arrays of characters. Almost all languages now have some standard way to do key/value sets. What else ought to be standard?

I think that character strings should not be restricted to (or generally expected to be) Unicode (although using Unicode and other character sets will still be possible).

I also think that key/value lists should allow any or most types as keys, including references to objects. (PostScript allows any type to be used as keys except strings (they are converted to names if you use them as keys) and nulls.)

I think that big integers (which can have a program-specified limited length in programming languages with typed variables) and arrays of fixed-length records (which C already has; JavaScript has typed arrays which is a more limited implementation of this) are also things that would be helpful to include as standard.

> Arrays of more than one dimension would be helpful for numerical work.

I agree with this too; it is a good idea.

> Standard types for 2, 3 and 4-element vectors would help in graphics work.

This is probably helpful, too, although they can be used for stuff other than graphics work as well.

> Do programs really have to be in monospaced fonts?

No, but that is due to how it is displayed and is not normally a feature of the program itself. Many people including myself do use monospace fonts, but this should not usually be required.

> There's async, there are threads, and there are "green threads", such as Go's "goroutines". Where's that going?

I had read about "green threads" and I think that it is a good idea.

> How about "big objects?" These are separately built program components which have internal state and some protection from their callers. Microsoft OLE did that, some .dll files do that, and Intel used to have rings of protection and call gates to help with that, hardware features nobody used. But languages never directly supported such objects.

I also think it is sensible to have components that can be separated from the callers, and that operating system support (and perhaps hardware support) for such thing might be helpful. I would design a programming language for such an operating system that would directly support such objects.
>solve for prompt injection attacks

It is essentially the same Code as Data problem as always.
Ah, thanks, I forgot the real numbers. That's still tens of millions of people supporting an assassin, which majority or not, should tell you something about this country.
It's been blurry for a long time, FWIW. I have books on "Agents" dating back to the late 90's or early 2000's in which the "Intro" chapter usually has a section that tries to define what an "agent" is, and laments that there is no universally accepted definition.

To illustrate: here's a paper from 1996 that tries to lay out a taxonomy of the different kinds of agents and provide some definitions:

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

And another from the same time-frame, which makes a similar effort:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stan-Franklin/publicati...
The conversation around this topic usually goes to the lack of third spaces. Yes, it's true that this avenue of meeting people is declining and the cost of going out is increasing. I don't see any reason why this trend will change any time soon since the markets have decided that third spaces are not valuable.

I'm interested in thinking about how we can encourage social connection in a post third space society. I've been working on a project that helps people connect around hobbies in small groups of 4-5 people. The small size makes it easier for people to host at someone's place rather than requiring a public space. I think shared activities are a natural glue to have repeated consistent interactions which is key to building friendships.
NSUserDefaults is a key-value storage. Same as localStorage in browsers/js.

On other side persistence in QuickJS is more than that. Essentially it is a NoSQL DB integrated into the language and its runtime. For example you can write

let uname = root.users[2].firstName;

to access the data using pure language constructs. While with NSUserDefaults you will need to call DB's facade methods like objectForKey("some") and so on.

And also, in QuickJS, Storage is not reading whole DB in memory but fetches/unloads data on demand transparently for the user. You can think about content of DB as about genuine language data structure with root at storage.root
Terrence Tao wrote a nice blog post which captures this idea (post-rigorous phase)

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...
works for me in chrome
Came to the comments ready to mention that laundromat in SF. Very happy to see an image of it in the post!
> Yes if you want to annoy your users and deliberately put roadblocks to make progress on a task. Exhibit A: customer support. They put the LLM in between to waste your time. It’s not even a secret.

No this is because they use the LLM not only as human interface but also as a reasoning engine for troubleshooting. And give it way less capability than a human agent to boot. So all it can really do is serve FAQs and route to real support.

In this case the fault is not with the LLM but with the people that put it there.
Double indirection arrays with multiple allocations are 25 years obsolete (ok, there are some use cases) but since C99 we prefer to do it like the parent.

In your code link you over allocate memory, sizeof *arr is enough and you need to dereference like with (*arr)[i][j].
You need to dereference it because it is a pointer to an array, if you dereference you get an array. You can also let the first dimensions decay then it looks like:

double (*arr)[m] = malloc(n * sizeof *arr);
arr[i][j] = ...

but this is not as safe because the bound of the outermost dimension is lost. (Edited)
Thank you! :) Luckily, I'm now happily employed and hopefully for the rest of my life. :D
You must have never browsed IT support tickets. Oh the horrors...
It's worse than that, throwing all 60k students at the registration system at the same second with no automated waitlist is a policy decision.

Registration at my school was a zero stress endeavor because those features are built in and very good in College admin software on the open market, for at least 2 decades.

What is very likely is that UW considers something about staggered enrollment "unfair" or not right for everyone, so prefers the absurd freeforall, and therefore polices any attempt to bypass that freeforall "fairness" as unacceptable.
They are pretty deterministic then but they are also pretty useless at 0 temperature.
There are two ways to force the "Ansi" codepage to actually be UTF-8 for an application that you write (or an EXE that you patch).

One way is with a Manifest file, and works as of a particular build of Windows 10. This can also be applied to any EXE after building it. So if you want a program to gain UTF-8 support, you can hack it in. Most useful for console-mode programs.

The other way is to use the hacks that "App Locale" type tools use. One way involves undocumented function calls from NTDLL. I'm not sure exactly which functions you need to call, but I think it might involve "RtlInitNlsTables" and "RtlResetRtlTranslations" (not actually sure).
> Bush hid the facts

For those who don't know the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts it's a vaguely related issue, in which a Windows component misinterprets a sequence of ASCII characters as a sequence of UTF-16 characters. Windows just seems full of these sorts of character-handling bugs, in part due to its long history as a descendant of the codepage-using MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows operating systems.
It's another form taken by enshittification to squeeze more money from the business. Employees are the largest cost center. If a business can get away with less innovation then they will get rid of and hire less staff to maintain their margin.

Realistically, this is a delicate balancing act. As others have noted, the Sales and PR game then (and always) drives the new and existing monies that come in.
I wonder if you could add in the production / consumption rates of various machines into this and have the visualizer show bottlenecks and other data
> IMHO, the word agent is quickly becoming meaningless. The amount of agency that sits with the program vs. the user is something that changes gradually

Yes, the term is becoming ambiguous, but that's because it's abstracting out the part of AI that is most important and activating: the ability to work both independently and per intention/need.

Per the paper: "Key characteristics of agents include autonomy, programmability, reactivity, and proactiveness.[...] high degree of autonomy, making decisions and
taking actions independently of human intervention."

Yes, "the ecosystem will evolve," but to understand and anticipate the evolution, one needs a notion of fitness, which is based on agency.

> So we should think about these things in terms of how much agency are we willing to give away in each case

It's unclear there can be any "we" deciding. For resource-limited development, the ecosystem will evolve regardless of our preferences or ethics according to economic advantage and capture of value. (Manufacturing went to China against the wishes of most everyone involved.)

More generally, the value is AI is not just replacing work. It's giving more agency to one person, avoiding the cost and messiness of delegation and coordination. It's gaining the same advantages seen where smaller team can be much more effective than a larger one.

Right now people are conflating these autonomy/delegation features with the extension features of AI agents (permitting them to interact with databases or web browsers). The extension vendors will continue to claim agency because it's much more alluring, but the distinction will likely become clear in a year or so.
It's funny. As soon as he described his problem, I suspected ChatGPT would enter the picture. It's often significantly better than search engines for finding the name of even an obscure work from a description, so of course folks on book-finding subreddits would use it a lot.

But the author's absolutely right to warn that it also regularly fails us, and the author's also right the celebrate the folks who are trained specifically in finding this sort of information in ways that the automated tools can't replicate yet.
The nonconstructive proof of that is simple and fun: either sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) or (sqrt(2)^sqrt(2))^sqrt(2) is just such an example.
curious what do ppl usually use to make these animations? i’ve used pillow with python in the pass but that only really works with images and seems clunky
Stacksocial link is returning a 500 error.
For those who dont want to down load the PDF directly and prefer to start with the abstract: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16241
This is just from my personal experience, but as someone who is very sympathetic to the moral/ethical arguments from vegans but is not vegan themselves (though did try it out for a bit, lost a dangerous amount of weight and developed an intolerance to potatoes which further reduces available food to absurd levels sine potatoes are in tons of vegan food), is that it's the minority of vocal/aggressive vegans that have largely (though certainly not entirely) caused the poor reception.

My reasoning: People don't like to be judged (at all, but especially when the data behind the judgment is not so clear cut correct), and even just being in the presence of vegans can make some people feel judged. Even if the vegan says nothing, people can feel like they're being judged (to be clear, this is not the vegan's fault!). Now, add a small but vocal and aggressive minority of vegans who will explicitly judge/criticize, and you have a recipe for contention. It shouldn't be this way IMHO, but it's human nature.