btown

25 ms·

451.
by btown 1y ago
B2B2C marketplaces - especially ones that don't charge the "B2B" users, but take a cut of each transaction, and empower users to encourage transactions through a customized instance of the platform - are a fascinating "f
452.
by btown 1y ago
To put it another way, I choose Python because of its semantics around dynamic operator definition, duck typing etc. Just because I don’t write the bounds-checking and type-checking and dynamic-dispatch and error-handling code myself, doe
453.
by btown 1y ago
I think an important bit of context here is that computers are very, very good at speculative happy-path execution. The examples in the article seem gloomy: how could a JIT possibly do all the checks to make sure the arguments aren’t funky
454.
by btown 1y ago
The release notes mentioning this: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not... Not too many sources I could find other than https://matisyahu.blog/2025/07/31/and-it-is
455.
by btown 1y ago
IoT makes a lot of sense for a satellite-based network. If some amount of recorded data can be buffered on device, it can be enqueued to upload during a period of non-peak traffic, essentially using "spot bandwidth," and benefit f
456.
by btown 1y ago
Then the goalposts shift to: “This isn’t for reputational risk, it’s because we consider fraud more likely for this type of industry, and we are within our rights to take a proactive approach to fraud.” And there is no requirement that they
457.
by btown 1y ago
The missile needs to know how to miss, because it knows where it is from knowing where it isn’t. https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ
458.
by btown 1y ago
I like to think about it as the tactical allocation of stress. As an interviewer, I do not want the interviewee to be stressed about optics, or about whether they'll "look bad" about needing documentation; I'll encoura
459.
by btown 1y ago
How are you balancing accuracy vs. time-to-word-on-live-transcript? Is this something you're actively balancing, or can allow an end user to tune? I find myself often using otter.ai - because while it's inferior to Whisper in many
460.
by btown 1y ago
> treating URL parameters as your single source of truth... a URL like /?status=active&sortField=price&sortDir=desc&page=2 tells you everything about the current view Hard disagree that there can be a single source of
461.
by btown 1y ago
It’s really important to remember in this context that “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Do not think for a moment that ID verification primarily protects children and only incidentally enables authoritarian restrictions on spe
462.
by btown 1y ago
I remember this article in 2015 being revelatory. But it turned out that what we thought was an insurmountable amount of JS code written with callbacks in 2015 would end up getting dwarfed by promise-based code in the years to come. The “re
463.
by btown 1y ago
I really wish the community had coalesced around gevent. - no async/await, instead every possible thing that could block in the standard library is monkey-patched to yield to an event loop - this means that you can write the same exact
464.
by btown 1y ago
How would this work with mailing lists/groups? A common pattern is to have emails from third parties to e.g. accounts-payable@example.com be auto-forwarded to members of the relevant team. Would the end recipient team member's rec
465.
by btown 1y ago
IMO the real vulnerability here is that you can put a URL in the App Name for a Google OAuth app, and Google will render that in no-reply emails to arbitrary addresses from its root domain. (And even if that render is not clickable, if you
466.
by btown 1y ago
A bit pedantic, but especially relevant in a conversation about government-permitted monopoly power: while requiring minimum spend might be in breach of the payment networks' contracts, and may give rise to _civil_ liability (and punit
467.
by btown 1y ago
Even if this is a fabricated system, there are all sorts of sensitive things that might be made accessible to an LLM that is fed user-generated data. For instance, say you have an internal read-only system that knows some details about your
468.
by btown 1y ago
> After a fixed number of iterations we cut our losses. Typically and for the experiments in this post, that number is 80: while we still get solves after more iterations, it becomes more efficient to start a new solver agent unburdened
469.
by btown 1y ago
The question is whether you want to do your aggregation by unit time at the application level, or at an observability layer. You're absolutely right that the end user of metrics wants to see things grouped by time - but what if they wa
470.
by btown 1y ago
As a follow-up: Angular actually did this! https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/expression > AngularJS does not use JavaScript's eval() to evaluate expressions. Instead AngularJS's $parse service processes the
471.
by btown 1y ago
Just ship https://github.com/NeilFraser/JS-Interpreter and you’re good to go! /s
472.
by btown 1y ago
The original thread mentions “test-time compute scaling” so they had some architecture generating a lot of candidate ideas to evaluate. Minimizing tokens can be very meaningful from a scalability perspective alone!
473.
by btown 1y ago
One of the things I love about computing and computer science is how the wide variety of tools available, built over multiple generations, provide people with the leverage to bring their highly complex ideas to life. No matter how they work
474.
by btown 1y ago
If you run part of the software supply chain ecosystem, put it on the web without any kind of "alpha" or "insecure" language that's highly visible to end users on every package, and even distribute professional whit
475.
by btown 1y ago
The biggest "reveal" here is that open-vsx has far less effective anti-fraud measures than the end users of Cursor, Windsurf, etc. expect. It seems that an attacker was able to easily manipulate download counts, placing their mali
476.
by btown 1y ago
...nor is it meant to? Two things can be true simultaneously: (a) it is worrisome that a company is selling PII at scale to government entities who would otherwise need to request that data through accountable warrant processes, and (b) we
477.
by btown 1y ago
It's funny to see ARC just being described as a "data broker," which strongly implies that it doesn't play a role in facilitating the actual underlying consumer activity. ARC and IATA absolutely do play such a role, as t
478.
by btown 1y ago
https://neon.com/blog/building-a-cli-client-for-model-contex... might be of interest. An MCP server provides enough metadata and self-documentation that it's quite straightforward to make a MCP-agnostic CLI client
479.
by btown 1y ago
> I suggested that maintaining a whitelist of allowed html tags and attributes, and stripping them before passing the email html onto a web browser would be a good defense in depth strategy Are there any best in class HTML preprocessors
480.
by btown 1y ago
It’s a great reminder that (a) your prod database likely contains some text submitted by users that tries a prompt injection attack, and (b) at some point some developer is going to run something that feeds that text to an LLM that has acce

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