skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a friend who observed similar emergent behavior in an a-life (gene-based from what I understand) simulation he created, in an environment of "tanks in a maze" (or something like that).

The "genes" consisted a simplified assembler (run on a VM) that could describe a program the tank would use to control itself - it could sense other tanks within line-of-sight to a certain degree, it could sense walls, it could fire its cannon, move in a particular direction, sense when another tank had a bearing (cannon pointed) on itself, etc.

He set up 100 random tanks (with random "genes"/programs) and let the simulation run. Top scorers (who had the most kills) would be used to seed the next "generation", using a form of sexual "mating" and (pseudo-) random mutation. Then that generation would run.

He said he ran the simulation for days at a time. One day he noticed something odd. He started to notice that certain tanks had "evolved" the means to "teleport" from location to location on the map. He didn't design this possibility in - what had happened was (he later determined) that a bug he had left in the VM was being exploited to allow the tanks to instantaneously move within their environment. He thought it was interesting, so he left it as-is and let the simulation continue.

After a long period of running, my friend then noticed something very odd. Some tanks were "wiggling" their turrets - other tanks would "wiggle" in a similar fashion. After a while all he could deduce was that in some manner, they were communicating with each other, similar to "bee dancing", and starting to form factions against each other...

...it was at that point he decided things were getting much too strange, and he stopped the experiment.

Sadly, he no longer has a copy of this software, but I believe his story, simply because I have seen quite a bit of other code and have worked closely with him on various projects since (as an adult) to know that such a system was well within his capability of creating.

At the time, he was probably only 16 or 17 years old, the computer was a 386, and this was sometime in the early 1990s. I believe the software was likely a combination of QuickBasic 4.5 and 8086 assembler running under DOS, as that was his preferred environment at the time.

I've often considered recreating the experiment, using today's technology, just to see what would happen (at the time he related this to me, as an adult, he asked me how difficult it would be to make a more physical version of this "game"; I'm still not sure if he meant scale model tanks, or full-sized - knowing him, though, he would have loved to play with the latter).
I will say it again. Stallman is not being silenced in any way
State rights continue to be trampled upon...
77.8 = 360 - 282.2, or the mirror image of 282.2 degrees across the 0 degree line. That's a sort of "opposite"—just not the one the article was referring to.
When Hooks are not properly understood, blog posts like this one make hooks look bad. However, that is just an error from the author, which results into unnecessary and overly complicated "solutions".

Yes, Hooks take a bit of getting used to and until you get them they will be ... weird. I did a few mistakes trying hooks until I actually "got" them (the fact that I tried to use hooks without actually understanding them certainly didn't help). But learning to do them right was certainly not harder than learning the quirks of classes.

In the beginning I thought they complicate the code unnecessarily.

Until I realized they can just be extracted into custom hooks.

The real power of hooks, besides the fact they are declarative!, is composition and by means of composition they can be abstracted away as custom hooks.

React is all about declarative UI composition but lacked the “primitive” for having stateful logic composition in an elegant and declarative way.

Until hooks!
> Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations

Such a wild claim would require some evidence. But it's so patently false, I'll give you pass.

Linus has gotten extreme benefit from Linux and Git. And developers have massively, directly benefited and the world indirectly from Linux and Git.

Wikipedia, directly benefiting everyone, would not exist without open-source either its infrastructure or the code it runs on. The Internet would not exist without open-source.
"And you know lately, I've been thinking about how I love Jesus / Because Jesus was a dirty homeless, hippie peace activist / And he said, 'Drop out and find God' to anybody who would listen / While turning water into space bags..."
> I'm not sure how "private conversation" should be defined.

I'm not sure either. HN, or CSAIL mailing list, are community chatrooms that sometimes spill out into the world at large, but their day-to-day activity concerns their respective communities. You do not expect to see what you wrote there aired in mainstream news.

> I'm also not sure whether "private conversation" matters a lot.

I suppose it doesn't in the case of publicly recognizable people or public officials; this sort of comes with the territory. But what private (or semi-private) conversations introduce in this picture is a "kill chain" - a chain of people or organizations involved in taking a private message and turning it into a mob forcing one's employer's hand. I think it's worth to take a closer look at that chain - especially in this case, where you can clearly witness an increasing level of misrepresentation happening. The original post, for instance, stayed just a bit shy of making accusations that could be subject of a libel lawsuit, implying but not stating a lot of things. And then the media coverage did its usual misrepresentation amplification.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for shooting the messenger - just that there should be some pressure in the society which ensures messengers are communicating their messages accurately. Ironically, the subject of this outrage is that pressure - RMS attempting to correct inaccuracies.

> If I was so upset with someone that I felt the need to go to their employer and complain about them, that seems like my right to free speech and expression. If, after security kicked me out, I took the matter to the local newspaper and it caused an uproar, that also seems like my right.

Depends on the reason for you being upset, I would hope that the paper would either pick it up and air it, or laugh you out of the room too. But you're right, it's technically your right to try. But still, I think there's something wrong with trying to end someone's career - thus causing significant, real, material harm to them - just because you personally found their speech offensive. It's like a lightweight form of swatting someone because you got angry.
The environment was actually an important part of the project. It does physics simulation. Having such a 'realistic' environment allowed the agents to discover all sorts of cheats (they appear at the end of the article).
Show HN: Redial – Terminal Based SSH Session Manager for Unix Systems – Urwid
This should be easy to solve in the UI. If you haven't sent a message to a shared channel in the last x hours, require a confirmation.
This is just pure pedantry, because your whole argument would become null if the parent said "potential customer" instead of "customer".

I would consider it null already, given that the parent described their situation very explicitly, and it is clear as day that the situation implied "potential" in "customer".
I don't want Elon Musk high on some substance, being able to control the car I drive. Or anyone, really. While it's arguably hard to make your own car, it's trivial to make an ebike, that nobody can control except you.

It's trivial to not rely on cloud providers for anything. I can store mp3s (or mkvs, etc.) on a NAS and play them from a computer or a Pi. I can certainly flip switches to turn lights on or off in my house.

In fact, most "home automation" sounds a little absurd. If you can program it yourself and you like it, good for you. But to rely on a remote provider that may or may not work when you most need it, or who may "discontinue" devices you rely on, is irrational.

It seems most people are willing to give away control for the smallest gain in convenience. We should resist more.
Though I now cringe at the angsty teen outrage dripping from every word of this post, it's hard to believe that I wrote this on AskSlashdot 19 years ago:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/00/01/22/1843258/open-defensi...

and still do not know whether any formal method exists (apart from the choice of license model) which could inoculate "Open Source" from being tragically impressed into corporate rent-seeking service. Or at least, as much of the Open Source ethic as is encapsulated in the public works of ethically motivated open source contributors; people who are essentially investing their time, skills and resources in the improvement of a lightly defended public common that continues to be parceled out to private interests.

* rereading the above I don't think I've made much progress in my posting style. Maybe it's something about the apparent structural inevitability of this problem, which seems more a recapitulation of deeper conflicts in human dynamics than something specific to "open source".
> I just don't want to live in a place where expressing my opinion on some controversial issue, entirely lawfully, might have me excluded from society.

I don't either, but that doesn't mean we need to have an absolutist position on speech. I don't view defending pedophilia or making apologies for the rape of a sex trafficking victim to be merely "controversial."
The indoctrination and politics being taught. Every day children in school stand up and pledge allegiance to the flag and there are constant stories of children being abused for not abiding by it. We're told we're "not being American" if we challenge the official narrative.

The fact that you're being downvoted is just more evidence, people hate being told they're just as indoctrinated into propaganda as China is, but they're just as indoctrinated into their own version.
Do you remember being a developer in the 90s? It was horrible and you were stuck in the confines of truly for-profit companies and for-profit platforms and paradigms.

One benefit of OSS is to lead the world to a place where you want the world to go.
Adobe to Sunset Flash in 2020
The 6% becomes concentrated by internal migration from villages to cities and from cities to bigger cities. Without the massive rural population acting as a source of cheap unskilled labor, the richer parts of China would have a hard time maintaining the same level of growth.
> The fundamental problem which seems to be recurring is that the system is generally hostile towards consumer interests.

I think you're really close, but have specified the inverse of the fundamental problem. The system is generally dominated by seller interests. There is no consumer advocacy on the level of corporate advocacy.
>Asking why makes little sense.

Foucault would like a word.
The whole thread is anecdotal. I'm not aware of any quantitative study in the matter. There are also the distributions like Debian which is essentially run by volunteers.
I actually took those changes in 70, so they should make it to the release version at the end of October. If you can, please try using 70 Beta and see how the power use improves!

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1574538
Hi, that’s easy. It = Youtube. Details:

It = feminism and men’s rights. I don’t know where is the crux of it, but nothing adds up about it: Feminist studies are all disproved one by one (remember wage gap?) and storytelling keeps making people believe women are unequal, which _isn’t true_ by far.

It’s Brexit. It’s Trump. Again, storytelling makes people believe they’re bad although careful study shows... least I say, the opposite. Storytelling.

It’s the state. People, especially in Europe believe in the state like they believed in God in 1100: The state is the source of all goods, it represents the people’s general will, and no matter how you show them this isn’t the case, they believe in it so much that we’ll need a Galileo Galilei to shake them off their beliefs. We’ll have to disprove this belief in the state like we had to disprove the belief in God in 1630.

If there’s something you underestimate, it’s the culture shift represented by Youtube, in which youngsters devote themselves. Youtube is a great way to present an idea and link to sources. Show a document on screen and link to sources. Everyone can present a trial of a false idea on Youtube and disprove it. That’s what’s happening for feminism. For Brexit. For Trump. For Kavanaugh. For the Iraki war. For Bachar el Assad. You don’t get Youtube ;) Those answers lie in all the deleted channels of Youtube (ex: “Soph”’s deleted channel, available on Bitchute). You say people engaged in journalism in 1900 because they didn’t want the powers that be to be the only ones heard. Now you have a full generation of Gen Z kids, 13 years old, already able to denounce the storytelling that doesn’t add up, built by mainstream media, movies, school, newspapers. It is sweeping. You _don’t_ get it :D

I’m kidding of course, because chances are you do understand where they’re coming from. But chances are you’ve built mental barriers to prevent from acknowledging their points too, like “muh fake news I only trust CNN”, but so did conservatives in 1969 couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that the Generation X could use a bit more social freedom than their parents. Older people never understand the big changes, because they had reasons to believe they were incorrect.
Aha, yes, your math is correct & explains the "10"! I was not-fully-awake figuring the opposite compass-heading as (360-282.2), which is actually just the opposite-rotation-from-north, not the 180"-opposite direction. Got my symmetries mixed-up.
I guess it's going to be just TensorFlow in the near future. From the release notes:

> This is also the last major release of multi-backend Keras. Going forward, we recommend that users consider switching their Keras code to tf.keras in TensorFlow 2.0.
> All of the various Linux distributions just repackage those binaries

Debian and Ubuntu don’t build from sources?
Transunion, in my opinion, does it right. It's not a huge burden to get approved for anything because I have all my reports locked. However, transunion makes it very simple to lock/unlock.
I love how the 3D visualization and game selection make their research immediately relatable - right down to the cute little avatars!

"We’ve shown that agents can learn sophisticated tool use in a high fidelity physics simulator"

I always suspected to evolve intelligence you need an environment rich in complexity. Intelligence we're familiar with (e.g. humans) evolved in a primordial soup packed with possibilities and building blocks (e.g. elaborate rules of physics, amino acids, etc). It's great to see this concept being explored.

It reminds me of Adrian Thompson's experiments in the 90's running generational genetic algorithms on a real FPGA instead of mere simulations [1].

After 5000 generations he coaxed out a perfect tone recognizer. He was able to prune 70% of the circuit (lingering remnants of earlier mutations?) to find it still worked with only 32 gates - an unimaginable feat! Engineers were baffled when they reverse-engineered what remained: if I recall correctly, transistors were run outside of saturation mode, and EM effects were being exploited between adjacent components. In short, the system took a bunch of components designed for digital logic but optimized them using the full range of analog quirks they exhibited.

More recent attempts to recreate his work have reportedly been hampered by modern FPGA's which make it harder to exploit those effects as they don't allow reconfiguration at the raw wiring level [2].

In Thompson's own words:

"Evolution has been free to explore the full repertoire of behaviours available from the silicon resources provided, even being able to exploit the subtle interactions between adjacent components that are not directly connected.... A 'primordial soup' of reconfigurable electronic components has been manipulated according to the overall behavior it exhibits"

---

[1] Paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=669...

Less technical article: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2t5ozk/wha...
We moved from SF to DTLA 2.5 years ago. I never been before, but even within the last 2.5 years it improved significantly. A lot of new apartment buildings were built and a lot more are under construction, pushing rents down significantly. We went down by 50% on our rent between SF/LA and now we went down by additional 35% within last year and it doesn't seem to be stopping. A lot of the building are still quite empty and doing everything to attract tenants.

The inflow of new people is also bringing new restaurants and other places. DTLA is quite enjoyable these days.
From the release announcement:

> Development will focus on tf.keras going forward. We will keep maintaining multi-backend Keras over the next 6 months, but we will only be merging bug fixes.

So it's the end of Keras
It’s an innocent typo, but nevertheless I am amused by imagining Chic-Fil-A as a super upscale, urban, on-trend, exclusive version of Chick-Fil-A where models instragram themselves pretending to eat
I actually think this theory is not somewhat wrong, but 100% wrong. While human societies are always hierarchical (it's true even for self-proclaimed egalitarist communities), it's not because of language, and won't change because of ideological wordplay.
> The next step to make this even cooler would be to use physical, robotic agents learning to overcome challenges in real meatspace!

That's one of the main challenges - how to learn safely and with fewer than millions of trials, so it can be feasible to do in the real world.
I trust that you know GNOME has had beefs with Richard Stallman at least as far back as the way he treated Mono developers (not the Mono project, but individuals). And I recall that, coincidental with that, his "Saint Ignucius" routine delivered in 2009 at Gran Canaria had some gross sexist commentary in it, too, which Lefty Schlesinger--a member of the GNOME Advisory Board at the time--called him out on, too.

You're right that this isn't new, but at some point the camel's back breaks and the idea that it's so implausible that what he said happened to, y'know, really upset people when they read it and that they'd had enough--well, it's a pretty cheap charge on your part.
The OTHER Amazon forest fire – that no one is talking about [video]
I had a 100EUR per month subscription deal on geocode.xyz and someone was dubious as to "why it was so cheap". Doubled it to 200EUR per month and everybody is happy now.
On Reddit they said the biggest user was storing 430TB on the $5 plan
I haven't seen what would actually be in the bill, and I am curious as well. Hence one of the reasons I prefaced by saying I'm not plugging him :)

Questions like these also partly explain why legislators are so reluctant to create law for such things.
I like Andre Staltz's Future of Cycle.js (more about webdev in general):
https://vimeo.com/216975979
In my rural US curriculum, these concepts were 100% part of the (very vague) "Algebra II".

Granted it seems like it didn't stick for a large segment of folks.

(Which might be a valid thing to examine in itself: for math and science we tend to act like it's just the fact that a course is missing from the curriculum that will answer why the general population is inexperienced with it, but nearly everyone also takes composition and literature classes, and I don't feel like we can say their associated skills are really at "saturated" levels.)
https://youtu.be/3XGAmPRxV48
Society marginalizes these people, making them even more isolated and dangerous. Society doesn't allocate enough funds to identify and treat these individuals...so it only makes sense this filters down to government institutions and individual employees who are not equipped to handle them, this certainly includes schools/teachers; police; and courts.

A lot of fingers are pointed at the officer, which may or may not be useful here. At the end of the day someone was shot and killed, and all we have is the officer testimony that he asked the person's hands be raised but the hands went to his waistband. Maybe it is bullshit (I hope there was video to at least confirm the testimony and it wasn't an outright lie), but the reality is the officer was responding to a hostage situation with 1 alleged death already. I get it we all want to see some officer magically save the day and stop these tragic events from unfolding. Maybe their training confirms this isn't a real hostage situation, its kids swatting someone over a stupid video game, but society doesn't train officers for that, they are trained to respond, and if you have responded to a hostage situation, demand to see hands, demand hands be raised, and instead the go to a waistband, what follows is what they trained to do.

I see this stuff every day in mental health court, and mental health court (in my jurisdiction) is new and its voluntary...and I can confirm no one has been trained to deal with these people and you can't expect more from teachers/officers/judges/attorneys without that training...and that training only comes from society demanding funding, but they don't.
Have also wondered about this. At this point it must be well understood/accepted that clips this small fall under "fair use" (or else there would have been a major legal sh*tstorm by now) but I would LOVE it if someone could chime in with specifics.
I love the detailed writeup, but it seems like they made this a lot harder than it needs to be.

Most SaaS companies, when they raise prices, will announce that new customers will pay the new price starting in X days, where X is usually 30 or 60. This gives people on the fence a chance to jump on board at the lower price, and lets current customers keep their pricing.

Then they tell their current customers that their existing price will be grandfathered in for X months. If you make X big enough, most people don't really notice, because when you announce it, it seems far away, and when it happens, they probably don't even check their subscriptions that often.

The whole credit thing felt like a ploy to raise some immediate cash and create artificial lock in, and after this post, it seems like it didn't even really help them all that much.
Car companies know the writing is on the wall with regards to pollution and EV.

> The administration’s plans have been further complicated because major automakers have told the White House that they do not want such an aggressive rollback. In July, four automakers formalized their opposition to Mr. Trump’s plans by signing a deal with California to comply with tighter emissions standards if the broader rollback goes through
I made a tool myself [0] with slightly different tools. It answers two questions: Who are the relevant coders and what parts of the code are the hotspots?

Here is an example run on sqlite:

Top Committers (of 28 authors):
D. Richard Hipp 13359 commits during 19 years until 2019-09-17
Dan Kennedy 5813 commits during 17 years until 2019-09-16
together these authors have 80+% of the commits (19172/20987)

Files with most commits:
1143 commits: src/sqlite.h.in during 19 years until 2019-09-16
1331 commits: src/where.c during 19 years until 2019-09-03
1360 commits: src/btree.c during 18 years until 2019-08-24
1650 commits: src/vdbe.c during 19 years until 2019-09-16
1893 commits: src/sqliteInt.h during 19 years until 2019-09-14

Files with most authors:
11 authors: src/main.c
11 authors: src/sqliteInt.h
12 authors: configure.ac
12 authors: src/shell.c
15 authors: Makefile.in

By file extension:
.test: 1333 files
.c: 379 files
together these make up 80+% of the files (1712/2138)

[0] https://github.com/qznc/dot/blob/master/bin/git-overview