skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is not just the labor/components, but that it is for a different market with different expectations and requirements. From the article:

> You can look at our concrete numbers. We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.
I can imagine knowing the apps someone uses might be a telling thing to someone looking for leverage on someone (who might not want to disclose what apps they use). Apps can expose your orientation, your lifestyle, your income level, your habits, and even where to look to find you (imagine you have an app for a gym, that narrows down the list of gyms to find you at and is better than nothing)

Politicians, law enforcement, high value targets, etc. A list of apps on their phone could totally be used against them and is better than no list of apps.
> Exactly. I expect a modular fork of systemd when people get annoyed enough.

That's exactly the case with elogind, used by e.g. Alpine, Void, and Gentoo.

> I still don't understand why people treat systemd as the second coming of the Christ.

FWIW it managed to pull most distros in a single direction, decreasing ecosystem fragmentation. The outliers are well, outliers.

Just to be clear: it's not an endorsement from my side; there's enough criticism of systemd which I will not repeat. But the fragmentation aspect is what kills so much momentum, and it just runs too deep: Gnome was started because KDE's dependency on Qt wasn't kosher; Qt later got relicensed, but both projects kept pulling in different directions. It feels like any compatibility between anything is coincidental.
Before anyone knew about neurotransmitters people knew about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths
The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for the platform as a place to find jobs or employees.

Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for something to watch means less time streaming?

I don't get it.
With the onslaught of Javascript-parsing bots and crawlers, how useful are A/B testing results any more?
"Engaging experience" being actually a weasel word for "sucking your brains out to make you watch ads and valueless nonsense".
> I see that as the smallest and most likely concession for you to make, assuming you can be intellectually honest, not because the fine being disproportionate is the full extent of my stance.

That would make sense for someone with all the relevant context about this story. While I agree with you that "most other information [I] want to know could be researched online", that would take a lot of time (I can't read German) and energy which would be best spent learning about way more important stuff happening in the world right now.

I've often seen people criticize scientists for not engaging with crackpots, with the argument if what they're saying is really dumb it should be easy to show that. I see that as naive -- there's only so much time in the day, you can't disprove every crackpot, so pick your battles.

This case feels like the same thing -- it started with someone claiming that a journalist was jailed for sharing a meme, then I learned this is a complete distortion. So I assume I'm dealing with a crackpot (not you, but the person who made the original claim), and so I refuse to spend more energy on this.

And if I'm being honest, I'm only writing this reply because it doesn't feel good to read "assuming you can be intellectually honest" while engaging in what I assumed was a cordial exchange, so I can't help but defend myself -- which I think I'll stop now and just let go.
Of course it's better to be poor, uneducated, and free than it is to be poor, uneducated, and a slave. It's not even comparable. However, it's better still to have access to education and economic opportunity. Laughing at the south for being poor and uneducated is literally laughing at the descendants of slaves for being uneducated and poor.

Glib comments about 'the end of slavery' miss the point completely. The south isn't the great great grandchildren of plantation owners complaining about being poor and suffering the consequences of the Civil War. Those people are doing quite well, look at how good the schools are in the rich, almost entirely white suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi - a city where you can't drink the tap water.
The point of functional, "sans I/O" style is to separate the definition of I/O from the rest of your logic. You're still doing I/O, but what sorts of I/O you're doing has a clear self-contained definition within your program. https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/how-to-sans-io.html
With these tools you have to talk to them as if you were talking to a knowledgeable, but a bit clueless junior developer. Sometimes it's almost as if you were coding it, just without typing the code.
Show HN: NoLinkPreview - Share links without triggering previews
I built this simple tool that lets you share links without triggering previews or thumbnails on social and chat platforms.

I often wanted to share a link without drawing attention, breaking the layout of a conversation or leaking content (coughRickRollcough) through preview crawlers - but I couldn't find a tool that did that. So I built one.

Created with CloudFlare Workers and Pages, it basically appends your URL to https://nolinkpreview.com (so it doesn't cloak or obfuscate the destination).

When bots or crawlers follow the link, they receive a plain response with no metadata, thumbnails, or Open Graph tags - nothing to preview. When a user clicks the link, they're immediately redirected to the original URL.

There are no ads, tracking, logging or storage of any kind for the generated links or traffic. There is a single Cloudflare Web Analytics snippet on the homepage - just so I can tell if anyone is using the tool at all.

Would love any feedback, critique or edge cases you think I should handle.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Appreciate any feedback - care to elaborate on your point?
Reading/hearing talks from people doing server backends there is many half insane things being done to keep servers and persistence in check, and everyone still a different custom solution.

A common scenarios:

- "Game-server" using "regular" server+DB frameworks, often works but seldom in real-time scenarios.

- Realtime Game-servers (with in-memory state, sometimes supporting rollback,etc) that then has persistence more or less as an afterthought (duplicating state management between client<->server<->persistence)

What spacetime tries to do (and my current experiment) is to merge the server and DB to move persistence _performance_ concerns into the backend process.

We _rightfully_ moved databases out of server processes for easier management and safety in the 90s, but since f.ex. SQLite has been a bit of a resurgence because the usercode was in a managed language and wasn't as likely to cause a corruption issue.

WASM is a great enabler here because it allows the server/DB to sandbox the logic-code even in "unsafe"/realtime languages from the more precarious DB parts of the process so we don't have to risk data-safety even as we move back to co-locating server-state and persistence data within the same process.
My hunch is these algos are also optimized for hiding the long tail of content that's more expensive to serve as it's not edge-cached. And it was the long tail that drew many of us to these services in the first place. At least that's my feeling using Youtube and Netflix these days.
This is strongly in tin-foil hat territory but: streaming video costs a lot more money than streaming some JSON to populate a UI. Every minute you spent browsing the catalogue over playing a video is probably a significant costs saving for Netflix.
Show HN: I built an AI extension to protect your wallet from sneaky clauses
I got tired of slogging through walls of legal text whenever I had to sign something important, so I built a Chrome extension that uses AI to:

- Spot red flags and suspicious clauses – It automatically highlights risk areas in real-time as you read through an online contract.

- Score the contract’s safety – Based on industry-standard risk parameters, it gives you an at-a-glance score so you can see how risky the document might be.

- Simplify the jargon – It generates a quick summary of the key points, saving you from reading every paragraph in detail.

No more signing on hunches or bets!

Right now, it’s in Beta, and I’m giving out 50% off on launch day for anyone who joins the waitlist. It’s been super helpful for my own sanity—especially for those multi-page eContracts that feel designed to keep you scrolling forever.

I'll appreciate any feedbacks or your thoughts on this so I can make it more valuable.
I've been self-hosting Nextcloud for calendar and file sharing for a few years now. I use DAVx5 on my Android device and my wife's iphone syncs out of the box. It's been a very solid solution for us and isn't that difficult to get up and running.
The absolute banality of evil on display here with the ICE agents who can see that tattoo and still check the box for "gang member".
for people who haven't seen Trainspotting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rPOC78NuQk
I'm hoping it induces the reversal in reckless culture of consumption and waste and longer end-product life cycles on the companies that design and manufacture them.
> More time spent looking for something to watch means less time viewing?

or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like a slot machine - where you "win" by finding a good series to watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to encounter a perfect series to watch.
I can take credit for one of these, the 63 ways to wrap a string, on line 156.
For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing. For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.

If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.

So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
I don't really know how to form this into words on a short-form text medium like this. So please read charitably.

I'm by no means a conspiracy theorist, however as I've risen the ranks of my chosen technical field I see more and more that what George Carlin said was really poignant. "You don't need a formal conspiracy when incentives align"[0].

And incentives align really easily.

Every company has some form of market analysis going on. CEO's will be invited to rub shoulders with the same groups of people. Conglomerates will have information sharing of some kind across all subsidiaries.

Everyone is acting independently, but towards the same goal. It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...

I'm a bit counter-culture in my missive, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but a little nudge across a limited population seems to be enough - and it exists.

Controversially: Blackrocks DEI initiatives are perfect public example of what I mean, no matter if you are pro or con, you can't deny the impact.

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XE3sYUJASLY
The single example given here is incorrect. Since Go 1.22 loop variables have per-iteration scope, the "broken" code is deterministic and correct.

https://go.dev/blog/loopvar-preview
URL is https://visnalize.com/brick1100 (found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652718)
This is a good, astute essay providing a useful mental framework that can undermine many a developer's innate imposter syndrome. The concept of duality is a great discriminator, it is just subtle enough that focusing on one's strength as a duality is a mind game that distracts from what normally spirals into negative self suspicion.
Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
Interesting, I didn't know about that!

I wonder why the Project Oberon website doesn't link to those ports.
Programming is about coordination between tasks. Prove me wrong.
1.) They did protested, quite a lot. And Ameruca resented it a lot, it especially went full on hating on Frannce.

2.) This is about trying to blame everyone except republicans and conservatives for what conservatives do.
Have you ... done enterprise sales?
The idea that a group of people working for a multi-billion dollar business having no idea what they want and no understanding of capabilities of new technologies is ... standard?

I have seen it personally ... dozens? of times? Its the reasons startups can even succeed at all given the enormous momentum and cash reserves of these bigger companies - their goals, management, approach - it all becomes more diffuse and poorly executed.
> Most immutable distros (this included) are developed with the idea that you'd run local commands on the machine, and update a single OS image in place. That gets pretty unwieldy to manage across a fleet of devices.

This is how it always has been on enterprise network devices like switches, routers, etc. It’s pretty trivial to automate updates.
What's even better is just using an actual programming language. Not bash, not sed, not yaml. Just python or NodeJS.
We need it for llm agent.
Netflix is winning, see net income trends:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...

Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute.

I don’t buy Netflix solely because they don’t integrate with the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.

Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions. If you recall, “reality” TV shows were taking over in the 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering of quality).
Systems Programmer

Location: NRW, Germany

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C++, Rust, C, C#, Git, GitHub/GitLab/Gitea pipelines, SQL, Linux, Golang, Networking (TCP, UDP, QUIC, ...), concurrency/async/threading/synchronization technologies

Resumé: GitHub: https://github.com/LionKor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lion-kortlepel

Email: hn@kortlepel.com

I'm a low-level/applications/networking/backend developer with 5+ years of experience. I specialize in concurrency, low level development, mostly with C++, Rust, C, but am a bit of a jack of all trades. I speak both German and English fluently. With an active open source portfolio, a decent job history, and a degree, I'm now looking for a position where I can grow and learn more.
Firebase justifies its existence by serving as a customer acquisition vehicle for GCP. This is actually quite valuable given the huge marketing costs required to get a new enterprise cloud customer.

You're likely concerned about the precedent of Facebook shutting down Parse back in the day, leaving many projects stranded. Facebook though had no real commercial interest in cloud services back then.
> Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology.

Isn't this the premise for the original Terminator ? Sure it was "unnecessarily" pessimistic, but man oh man it really hit a nerve and it set a tone for (all?) subsequent societal conversation.
That the human brain is squishy
This brings back a lot of memories. Such a nice idea.
They are just heavily subsidized!!!

We ought to just view and treat them as defense contractors and 3 letter agencies!
> Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain

Because regardless of whether or not the business model depends upon it, investors have been trained that “engagement” is inherently good quality for their investments to have. Increase engagement, stonk price go up.
Looks great! but after opening the app nothing happens... (using Sonoma 14.7.2 (23H311) on Macbook Pro 2021 with M1 Pro)
And so then the moral impetus changes to “it is right to lie to your investors and clients and utilize underpaid manual labour where you claim you have intelligent machinery to get rich?”

It’s tens of millions of dollars lol.

The emperor just took off his socks and is starting to do a little uncoordinated “sexy” dance
> but I fail to see why it is a functional programming concept.

"Functional programming" means that you primarily use functions (not C functions, but mathematical pure functions) to solve your problems.

This means you won't do IO in your computation because you can't do that. It also means you won't modify data, because you can't do that either. Also you might have access to first class functions, and can pass them around as values.

If you do procedural programming in C++ but your functions don't do IO or modify (not local) values, then congrats, you're doing functional programming.
Know the importance of Node.js 22 in web development landscape
Starting with the packaging is the easiest and most effective place to start.

Clothing is an interesting problem; silk and wool can provide superior alternatives but are costly and so it’d be a shift into quality.

That in turn requires a mindset shift away from changing trends every year to something perhaps more generational.

Are the wealthy trend setters willing to do this?
I think its a nice idea. People here criticize everything. They would probably criticize the idea of hiring a producer too. Any interest yet?
> Somehow haskell and friends shifted the discussion around functional programming to pure vs non-pure

In direct response every other language in the mid 2010s saying, "Look, we're functional too, we can pass functions to other functions, see?"

foo.bar()
.map(x => fireTheMissiles())
.collect();

C's had that forever:

void qsort(void *base, size_t nmemb, size_t size,
int (*compar)(const void *, const void *))
One doesn't have to invoke Turing or Church to show all languages can do the same things.

Any code that runs on a computer (using the von Neumann architecture) boils down to just a few basic operations: Read/write data, arithmetic (add/subtract/etc.), logic (and/or/not/etc.), bit-shifting, branches and jumps. The rest is basically syntactic sugar or macros.

If your preferred programming language is a pre-compiled type-safe object oriented monster with polymorphic message passing via multi-process co-routines, or high-level interpreted purely functional archetype of computing perfection with just two reserved keywords, or even just COBOL, it's all going to break down eventually to the ops above.
Yeah, but it didn't have to be that way. We failed to uphold anti-trust acts and now are faced with this issue.
> The interesting part is what you actually do in the middle to transforms inputs -> outputs.

Can you actually name something? The only thing I can come up with is working with interesting algorithms or datastructures, but that kind of fundamental work is very rare in my experience. Even if you do, it's quite often a very small part of the entire project.
(31:20)

> now if you want to actually run like a full stack USBC PD communication not USB or whatever just just to negotiate the power, what's on the other side or if you have any display port, prepare yourself 40KB of flash and 4KB of RAM, which is by the way the same amount that the Apollo guidance computer has...
The most valuable businesses have desirable net income trends, not “engagement”.
Rails, PHP, a lot of Python stuff (WSGI is CGI wrapped in a dict).

It's not only just about separation of concerns, but also separation of crashes/bugs/issues. FastCGI servers can run for years without restarts.

Thread creation/teardown/sleeping has gotten a lot faster as well in linux.

https://php-fpm.org/about/ it may be old but PHP-FPM is still one of the best FastCGI servers from a pragmatic point of view... ex: the ability to gracefully hot reload code, stop and start workers without losing any queries... all in production.
Clang is in git with good tracking of who each contributor is - there are more than 4000.