skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plenty of places have the "free exchange of ideas". Americans like to pat ourselves on the back for it, but we really don't do it better here than elsewhere. Europeans have more free speech than "free speech advocates" like to claim; we Americans have a ton of ways to shut down free speech that we prefer to ignore.

We've always been tribal. We fought a civil war over our tribalism, and we never really got over it. We tell ourselves that we're a "big, bold, beautiful" tribe precisely because we're not, and we're hoping to talk ourselves out of that.

Tech is certainly exacerbating that. We techies like to tell ourselves that we're purely meritocratic, but that's mostly because we've always come from a fairly narrow slice of tribe. As more excluded people try to get in, the underlying distrust of others comes to the fore.

I think one of America's key virtues is our ability to ignore each other. We expanded into "empty" space during the 19th century. (It wasn't empty, but hush.) In our cities, we developed the virtue of politely pretending each other didn't exist. The online domain removes the necessity of that virtue, and our underlying dislike expresses itself.

All of which would be OK, if it weren't for democracy. Democracy is a tool by which we get to force our opinions on each other. If it were just limited to sniping at each other on Facebook, we'd be fine. Even "canceling" each other is OK: it's a big empty space, and you can find some other place to be.

But now, people's opinions intrude on the real world. It's one thing to say you don't like a group; it's another to have them physically removed. When you "raise tough questions", you might be helping protect people, or threatening their life, liberty, and property.

Rather than being a "big tribe", I'd say that our key virtue is being live-and-let-live. But that conflicts with America's other key virtue: our love of getting ahead, and fear of being unjustly held back. The latter encourages is to innovate and become wealthy, but it also indulges our underlying dislike of each other.
Steve Jobs was one of these people. A clever marketing guy who relied on others for technical heavy lifting.

That's the currently-fashionable revisionist history. But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff. He was also good at marketing.

I suggest going back and re-watching some of his presentations,

I suggest going back and re-reading some of the print interviews he gave to technical publications. There's no question he knew what he was talking about.
I mean, it's my computer. I should ultimately be in control of how a document renders. I might need larger text due to poor eyesight, or need to use a screen reader. Or I might just be irritated that the web developer just up and decided that light gray on dark gray text looked cool (it doesn't, it barely can be read). Or I might want to scroll with my keyboard because a mouse is painful to my RSI. If I go out of the way and set up accessibility settings, I would expect all applications on my device (including the web browser) to respect those settings.
The only 'bad' thing about Vista was it's change (and thus deprecation of many drivers) of driver model. Once tweaked and with good native drivers it was the first good 64bit windows - far more reliable than XP64. At least until 7 came out.
Guardian Bikes gets $19M financing to open bike manufacturing facility in USA
I think consulting companies are outsourcing the work to lower wages countries like India, so it might not cost the taxpayer more.
And the Blurays show ads for the first company's other products.
You know what, you're tight. Just plain normal evil. The eerie thing is I can't recall the last time I saw it phrased like that before today, and now I've seen it used twice in a few hours in two totally different spaces:
https://bsky.app/profile/islan-kleinknecht.bsky.social/post/...
I think, part of the fiasco is about that engagement posters are not really welcomed on Bluesky. And, "What’s fueling your creativity right now?” is a pure engagement post, contributing nothing on its side of the conversation. Hence, it's more like another attempt to harvest Adobe's subscribers. — For X/Twitter-bound marketing it's probably fine, at least, much what we had become used to, but it totally fails the Bluesky community. (Lesson leaned: not all social media are the same.)
A good portion of Federal Government is just a bunch of leeches whose KPI is literally how much money they waste. SO works there, in a team of great dedicated people, and they are all good and professional, but the whole department can be wiped out and nobody will notice.
They invented name "Liberty Phone" before Trump made this a thing. Perhaps they should rename it, I don't know. What I know is that this modern device is as free (as in freedom) as it gets today for modern devices.
No sane company wants to work that way. Just in Time is a great thing, you shouldn't be over nighting anything you should be working so that you know when you need each part months in advance. If you can get a part in China faster it is because someone has expensive inventory and that is a bad sign in general. You do of course need some emergency supply and such, and retail customers don't plan in advance well - but a business shouldn't be buying retail anyway.
> Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.

A subscription service to cancel and renew your subscriptions. And stretch goal: annually renegotiate your utility bill so it doesn't 4-10X in cost each winter (for those that live in states that can do that).
> for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about

Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that:

1. Experts have deep knowledge, but don't keep up outside their field, and yet have the most power in distributing funds that bet on future innovation and
2. Grad students have very little power to direct funds, but straddle more fields and are better positioned to see new intersections emerge.

Each have strengths. Being naive has advantages to the learner that the expert can extract from simply by having them around

So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
I work in public policy so can add a few thoughts, but I must preface by saying this is a big lift and it will take a long time, at least a year or more. With that said, here we go:

The FTC is your #1 target. They regulate consumer protection and deceptive practices online. Bureau of Consumer Protection, especially Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, and the Technology Enforcement Division.

I would suggest reaching out to the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection. I don't see in my public databases an easy way to contact them, but the Director is Benjamin M. Wiseman. I hesitate to publish contact information for him but if you did some Googling you could probably find it. Alternatively, call (202) 326-2222 and ask for his office.

Before you do.. I strongly encourage you to write out less than 3/4 of a page of what you want, what you want to happen, and why. You may not get a meeting but if you send an email and politely ask for a short Zoom or phone call to discuss, they will generally try to make time for you.

Ultimately, however, you're going to need classic "noise and numbers" - lots of people to hammer the same message.

However, it's a little more complicated than that. First, the President has ordered that for each new regulation there must be at least 2 rescinded. So to get what you want in play will take a new regulation, or a new law, which the latter is just not worth your time.

Start with the Privacy and Identity Protection Division, talk to them, get their thoughts, and ask questions.

One more caveat and this is critical: Have an ask. Not just "fix this" but "Will you research this," "Please speak to your Director about a new regulation," something so that you have a reason to "check back" on that ask. Having an appropriate, measurable, incremental ask is absolutely key. Then settle in and just work the issue person by person, convincing others to your cause.

This is a bit simplified but it's how lobbyists and advocates do it every day across the country. I wish you the absolute best of luck because it is a good issue.

Edit: Also contact EFF. They have lobbyists who might already be working on this issue, and can use you as an expert or consumer advocate.
that's metaprogramming :D
> No amount of "federation" or technobabble or artificial complexity is going to solve this fundamental problem

Yeah, it's not solved by federation, but by running on donations and volunteer work. 9 years uptime, looks good so far. Not everything needs to be profitable.
It's really not. At least on Android they have some automated vetting but that's about it. Any human vetting is mostly for business reasons.

Also Windows and Mac have existed for decades and there's zero vetting there. Yeah malware exists but its easy to avoid and easily worth the benefit of actually being able to get up-to-date software from anywhere.
Self-Dispersing Soft Dendritic Microcleaners for Microplastics Capture
I noticed Yandex maps for St. Petersburg has this as well. Always wanted it in the US.
> Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction

This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.

The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.
Yes! But it's not a true quine because it returns “something functionally equivalent to myself,” not “my own source code.” so then I debated what else to call it before deciding that I was already taking too long writing an HN comment and it didn't matter what it was called, haha. Well spotted.
I feel strongly like this about Google Maps. The underlying product is nothing short of miraculous, but the UI is infuriating. If I create a route, my markers disappear. Clicking on the map doesn't show businessses anymore. Why can't I navigate to another city and browse the map at the same time? Why hasn't Maps graduated to the equivalent of tabbed browsing?

Every trip, I'm reminded of how disappointing Google Maps is. Simple things like trying to find a laptop-friendly cafe and getting random cafes represented by a close up picture of someone's cappuccino. Realising that I'm driving 10 kilometres to do a U-turn. Having no way to bypass a blocked road. The very clunky waypoint management. Aagh!

I want quality of life improvements more than I want new features. It's weird that a company with so much resources can't create powerful tools.
>Virtual machines are often seen as slow, expensive, bloated and outdated.

by whom?

I tend to loathe firecracker posts because theyre all just thinly veiled ads for Amazon services.

Firecracker is not included in the standard linux KVM/QEMU duo and has sparse documentation. you cannot deploy a firecracker image like a traditional VM. in fact there are no tools to assist in creating a firecracker VM, and the filesystem for the VM must be EXT4.

TL;DR: this is all fun stuff if youre 200% cloud, but most companies run a ton of on-prem vms as well.
>will power what it calls "the first large-scale bicycle frame manufacturing operation in the United States."

first? I can't imagine this is unprecedented, in the early 20th century at least
Which part exactly?

Re-loading the page on navigating back would be done using cacheability headers. This is the most shaky part, and I'm not sure if it is possible today. If this does indeed not work, then this would be one of the "things that Javascript has solved that the non-JS web is still stuck with" I meantioned in my other post, i.e. one of the reasons that JS is more popular than non-JS pages today.

Identifying the order using an ID in the URL is standard practice everywhere.

When the order page gets requested, the server would take that ID, look the order up in the database and see that it is already submitted, responding with a page that has its submit button disabled.
Yes they should. There are multiple wills of multiple peoples.
This whole AI is like humans thing is so exhausting. It's obviously not the same thing. A human can't ingest all of the library of Alexandria, and then generate dollars for their employer regurgitating those books.
Perhaps, but that is an entirely independent claim from the idea that government employees are passionate self sacrificers
I'm not talking about hardware devices. I'm talking about a very different combination of OS, hardware, and how applications are made and shared. Something closer to a Lisp/Smalltalk OS I guess, but that isn't really right either. Windows is a turd and Linux/Mac aren't perfect either. Sometimes I feel like it's turds all the way down. A lot of this is just my ignorance and hubris (I admit that), but I also feel like we somehow got off on the wrong foot and now we've built this terrifying and brittle tower of complexity.
I pay the extra cost to make sure I can cancel after my project's done. I only ever use Photoshop/Premiere and After Effects a few times a year, so it's easier for me.
There's lots left!

"When a customer in our East Coast location makes this purchase then we apply this rate, blah blah blah".

"When someone with >X karma visits HN they get downvote buttons on comments, blah blah blah".
> arbitrarily breaking contract

Arbitrarily breaking contracts usually trigger clauses where you have to pay damages/penalties for doing that, so Accenture most likely isn't loosing any money here. All government contracts tend to have clauses like these, at least where I'm form.
But those two tiers are not really competing with each other, are they? I'd wager that most people are fixed in one group: either they will never watch anything with ads (e.g. me), or they just don't care about seeing ads. The former group will never switch to the ad-supported tier -- they'll just cancel if the price gets too high -- so the only calculation is price vs. retention among that group. Similarly, the latter group will never pay extra for ad-free, so it's a completely different calculation. Why are the two prices in competition?
Windows Vista was essentially unusable on release unless you had very high-end hardware.

A couple of weeks after release the first step after getting a new computer was changed from "downloading firefox" to "downgrade to windows xp". Unironically, many people did that.
Great example of someone having expertise in one area and thinking it makes them an expert generally.
> But using AI to generate something in that style doesn't make you an artist. It isn't art, it's just a product.

This is probably how people felt at the advent of calculators
can't move the camera around?

I like the skybox of the desert and the cricket sound
I have looked at them. The ones that are even meaningful are errors, not fraud.

My professor friends are struggling to have meaningful discipline for entire essays copied from ChatGPT.

Can you please copy the ones you find most egregious here and point to similar examples leading to the outcomes you describe in other environments?
How much has been lost to the altar of shareholder value? And how much gained?

It will be interesting to see how these first decades of the millennium will be remembered.
The author of the article researches far right extremism and has been targeted by certain groups in the past IIRC, I read this part as a concern about physical safety, but this is just my speculation.
I said usually for job security because I am familiar with the current administration’s actions, and the benefits have not been touched and would take an act of Congress to change. Trust me, there are still lots of talented individuals who are eager to join the government workforce, even now.
They do not. Even the vast majority of Arch users thinks the policy of "integrate breakage anyway and post the warning on the web changelog" is pants-on-head insane, especially compared to something like SUSE Tumbleweed (also a rolling distro) where things get tested and will stay staged if broken.
I will die on the hill that TOML should be used for the vast majority of what YAML's used for today. There are times a full language is needed, but I've seen so many YAML files that use none of the features YAML has with all of the footguns.
Show HN: Bitsform – A simple API to add human input to your automations
Hi everyone,

I’m excited to share Bitsform, an API I’ve been working on to solve a pain point in automated workflows: what happens when they need a human to clarify, confirm, or provide missing info? Too often, they stall or make bad guesses, breaking the flow.

Bitsform tackles this by letting your automations generate micro-forms on the fly. You send a JSON, get back a link to a form, and share it via email, Slack, or wherever your workflow lives. It’s built to be lightweight and integrate seamlessly, so your processes keep moving without heavy lifting.

Some examples of what it can do:

- A support bot asks a customer to clarify a vague request.

- A billing system flags an unusual invoice and pings a manager for approval.

- A logistics tool confirms a delivery date with a client in one click.

This is a very early version – intentionally barebones. My goal isn’t to ship a polished product yet but to start simple and build it with real user feedback. I’d love for you to try it out, break it, and tell me what’s missing or what could be better.

Check it out here: https://bitsform.com

What do you think? Have you hit similar bottlenecks in your workflows? Any features you’d want in an API like this? Thanks for checking it out!
Yes, that's right. The Firecracker team has written a fantastic doc about this as well: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main....

It's important to refresh entropy immediately after clone. Still, there can be code that didn't assume it could be cloned (even though there's always been `fork`, of course). Because of this, we don't live clone across workspaces for unlisted/private sandboxes and limit the use case to dev envs where no secrets are stored.
It's like a website but for code instead of people.

People use web browsers to hit websites, but when code hits URLs they are typically just called APIs. A website is technically an API too
I regularly do scan as you shop and have started to notice some patterns in auditing. If I change my mind on a product and remove it from the basket while shopping I'll get audited almost every time, similarly if I add a single onion (which is a weighed product) to my basket. I do enjoy the company line of asking "did you have trouble scanning anything" just before they do the check, which is blatantly a get out of jail free card to say "oh, yes, I did in fact have some trouble scanning that 42" TV that doesn't appear in the basket currently".
Yep, totally. Also, much of Netflix's growth now comes from their ad-supported tier, so they're definitely part of that attention economy.

And part of the problem is that if somebody (TikTok) has the most engaging format possible (vertical short-form video) and you (Substack, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) don't, you're at a strict disadvantage. So you enable short-form video, boost it in the algorithm, etc. no matter if it's a fit with your product because people will watch it if it's put in front of them.

> My view is that you can’t have the chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines.

And the problem is that in media, the prefrontal cortex stuff will never make as much money as the amygdala stuff, so few platforms will survive by focusing on the prefrontal cortex stuff.

A big reason HN is still so cozy and surfaces cool articles and discussions is because YC doesn't have to monetize it or optimize for engagement.

But imagine trying to start HN today...
XHTML2 had some good ideas.
This is not so simple with Apple:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240008

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20641424
Does it support float NaNs? Only asking because of Python's quirky non-standard implementation
I don’t have to convince you. The only people who matter are government decisionmakers who are unwilling to be held hostage by him. It doesn’t matter how good you are if you can’t be trusted. The premium you pay a non SpaceX launch provider is so that the rug isn’t pulled on you. Do you want to go to space when you want? Or only when he says you can? Cheaper is not always better.
Time for research to move to the EU. No point getting involved in the trouble that is the US these days with little tyrants everywhere.
Normally, when you are leaving the baggage claim area, there are two customs corridors - green one for people who have nothing to declare, and red for people who wish to make a customs declaration.
Or maybe we're just nerds, not everything needs to qualify as a clinical diagnosis
Hmm, I saw the fairphone 5 on another page and the hardware support is not substantially worse.

Install page says you need fairphone.com to give you permission to unlock. :-/
A nonce is not a key, it's a piece of random that is meant to be used at most once.

If an attacker sees valid nonces on a VM, and knows of another VM sharing the same nonces, then your crypto on both* VMs becomes vulnerable to replay attacks.

*read: all
A lot of people maybe don’t realise how important treasury rates are to their everyday life. You might be thinking “why do I care? I’m not going to go an buy treasuries. I don’t hold treasuries. So if they go up, go down, fall off a cliff it doesn’t matter to me. whoop de doo”.

To which I say hold on there a second. Firstly you probably do own some treasuries. If you have any kind of pension it will have some treasuries in it. Also if you buy something like a stock etf they will hold their cash in treasuries probably or use treasuries as collateral when they need to do margin trades. Also your credit card, mortgage, car loan anything like that if you hold it is priced at a spread above treasuries. The spread is to take into account how much more risky you are than the US govt.

Also say you’re a founder and you’re doing some kind of investment round. Well the investors are going to price your business using a discounted cash flow model as part of their decision-making process. The discount is an interest rate that is calculated using treasuries. Basically you look at the future cash flows and you deduct interest that you could get on such an asset to get an idea of the value of that future cash today.

When someone wants to ship a containerload of goods and they accept a bill of trade or whatever that includes a counterparty credit spread which is a spread over treasuries. You heard a lot about the LIBOR scandal a few years back well interbank rates are derived from a credit curve that is bootstrapped using treasury rates. So any kind of cross-currency transaction or thing with fixed or floating interest (even if it’s not in dollars) is likely to be affected by US treasuries.

Literally every financial asset is tied in some way to treasuries because a “risk free rate” is at the basis of option pricing, discounting, lending and borrowing, margin, counterparty credit adjustment etc etc.
I think I may have simply misinterpreted what you meant. You're right, its not Dockerfile-esque easy
> more diverse, less cancel culture

I love when people use this to mean "more white and conservative."

Bluesky users lean toward hating corporate greed. Adobe is greedy as fuck. Simple as. They and companies like them can stay off.