skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“every once in a while these systems degenerate into surreal non sequitur nonsense.”

Exactly as our minds do
I love the principle of owning your env, using the right tool for the job (which may involve acts of creation)... but this

"Some of my apps, like Ligature and Noct, are written in Ink, which is a language I wrote myself"

is both impressive (truly next-level), and also completely out of reach / impractical for the vast majority. But it is inspirational; thanks for sharing -- your other blog posts look worthwhile too...
Result<T> -> throw/catch seems surprising and hard to walk back later. Why not use std::expected or a work-alike, and let the caller decide whether to throw an exception?
Consider fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

I have it bound to ctrl-e for edit: https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/5f575b6fcda041a48f58...

It's like adding the vscode file finder to bash :)

The additional code is to make bash "act as if you typed in the command manually". So you can arrow-up to find it in the history buffer with the filename expanded.
The Pirate Bay is still relevant for me; I’ve even setup my own proxy to avoid ISP blocks. It’s not stale - new stuff is added within a day or two of release.

But it’s less important than it used to be.
Could you elaborate? To me that seems tobe too anthropocentric thinking.
I've found putting people in the same room often helps. Especially when there has been an issue. Generally, just actual discussion and a firm reminder that we're all professional adults on the same team is often enough.

Recent pandemic events notwithstanding...

I'm also a bit gun shy about firing the "problem individual" since I've generally found that particular individual is often the one caught replying and not the instigator. YMMV.

Nuance and context and all that.

The "heads should roll" thing works but make sure its well targeted and for accurate cause.
Sure but how much you gotta change is the difference between a successful implementation and a failure. Good tools are already close to what people do.
Actually, many C and C++ functions that take no variables at all are unsafe to call because they update shared global state (and tacitly assume that the user of the library will not do this more than once). Initialization functions for example.
Afaik, UEFI (at least on ARM hardware I worked with) embeds the DeviceTree for non-ACPI boot usecases, so the user is no longer responsible for providing the proper DTB for that board, although the user can still override it if needed.
Last time I worked with ARMv8, UEFI provided both ACPI tables and the embedded DTB, since ACPI support was undergoing a major rewrite in the kernel at that time.
Khan academy kids is one of the goto things we are using, they also really like tuxracer. Generally I try to limit screen time and try many offline games (I can recommend moebius noodles and avoid hard work has books for mathematically inspired games).
Spotify, Netflix etc. are in a special category called "reader apps".
We have! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua

But it’s small and moving away from us fast. We couldn’t build anything in time that could catch up to it and image it closer.
Air Force General Thompson interviewed Elon Musk at the Air Warfare Symposium this year. [1]

It was, in a nutshell, a reality check for the Air Force's combat pilots, who were present in the audience, that they were no longer top dog, and had to either get on board with the new mission of drone warfare, or get off the train.

1. https://youtu.be/sp8smJFaKYE
It's impossible to identify an ideal situation when you take the job because some aspect of the company or team will be 'different' when you start than when you interviewed, either because it was misrepresented, or there is an organizational or staffing change.

The best you can do is find a successful team as that will provide more time to improve the team or adapt.
The dichotomy between tasks and notes doesn't make any sense to me either. The distinction between short and long term things makes more sense, mentally and also technically - apps that have complex features to organize notes always load so slow that they're useless for quickly jotting down thoughts. But still I hate having my thoughts siloed into different apps. I hate having to decide what app to use to write down a specific thought, I hate having to decide which app to search. I made my own app[1], which is currently only useful for short term notes and tasks. I hope with Svelte I can add some features to make it possible to relate notes, to make it more useful for long term projects, while still keeping the app fast enough to be useful for quickly jotting down thoughts.

[1]: https://thinktype.app
> Asked if there is a clear leading candidate explanation for 'Oumuamua's acceleration, Loeb referred Live Science to a not-yet-released book he authored called "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth," due for publication in January.

I don't know enough about the science to have an informed opinion, but it seems to me that if the main skeptic is also selling a book based in their exciting alternate theory, that's kinda a huge red flag.
Wooden Combination Lock (2008)
> the crew would be placed in the hull, with the turret remote controlled

Already done: the T-14 mentioned by nradov, and also the Remote Weapon Station, used on lots of platforms [0]. Historically, the Swedish Stridsvagn 103 [1] was fully turretless. Conversely, if you like turrets, then how about the T-35, which has five [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_controlled_weapon_stati...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stridsvagn_103

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-35
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that 20th century (theoretical) statistics research overemphasized efficiency at the expense of robustness. My guess is that this has to do with the (over-)mathematization of statistics in the past century, as opposed to a more empirical/engineering viewpoint.
Efficiency typically only holds under extremely narrow (and often impossible to check) assumptions, which is great for mathematicians proving theorems and creating theories of efficiency.
On the other hand, robustness is ideally about unknown unknowns and weak assumptions, which is hard to deal with mathematically.

It seems already the 21st century is seeing a more balanced emphasis on theory vs. real world applications though.
My answer your second question actually feeds into the first --

These days developing each tool is 50% taking pieces of tools / libraries I've built before and integrating them together. I've implemented a data store, a form UI, a websocket server, etc. each a few times so as I built up a collection of things I can borrow from other past projects, new projects take less time (or, I have more bandwidth to tackle more complicated projects, new a new tool if need be, etc).

I have another blog that goes into my side-project workflows[0] but in gist, I try to make a "usable MVP" for each project within a single chunk of time -- usually a weekend. And from there I try to dogfood it and add changes that I need to keep using it.

All this is helped by the fact that, at least with these tools I use, I try to keep a really simple stack. Go or Node.js server running on a single VPS, light frontend using my own framework [1]

[0] https://thesephist.com/posts/how-i-side-project/

[1] https://github.com/thesephist/torus
You can also make it with natural gas and capture the CO2 produced.
No, the idea is that to migrate you would have to run both servers side by side and then kill the old one. We haven’t yet figured out how you’d point the old matrix id to refer to the new server (as I assume your concern is keeping the same mxid as before), but presumably there will be a way to do so.
Agreed. But just the thought that a petaflop could fit in a spare bedroom is pretty neat.
Amazingly, there is no portable way to use -i that works on both GNU and BSD sed implementations. Which means if you’re writing a portable script, you can’t use -i at all.

(Would love to be proved wrong on this)
This may be a stupid question but will this work (creating the boot flash-drive) on macOS?
Let’s be honest, The Pirate Bay exists and is primarily used to illegally download porn, movies, video games, and other software. You can try to sugar coat what PB can theoretically be used for, but that’s not what it is actually used for. A fraction of a fraction of the data transactions that originate from the PB are for “conducting commerce”. I have no idea what that has to do with people legally following tax codes in multiple jurisdictions for their own financial gain... that just seems smart.

Edit, to add: given what the PB is generally used for, people should not be surprised that content creators are hiring people to try to disrupt its existence.
My friend started a somewhat similar business 2 years ago. He started supplying RC parts and laterally moved into other categories. He's now dropped out of college and hired 2 more people to get stuff imported.

Whenever I talk to him he has a similar opinion that dropshippers are one way or the other getting in his way (take order for X, don't deliver. People are now hesitant to order X from other suppliers). His clients stay for a long time but getting more is always an uphill battle.

Whenever I see him moving into a new field with a handful of offerings and make profit, it makes me realize how many more business in niche areas can pop up in every country, that too by only putting some effort in effective fulfillment and maintaining relationships.
Pentagon is getting rid of Chinese-made drones over spying fears
Right that makes sense, so Cloudflare would actually have to make the caching context-aware, not just classic HTTP proxying.
How can something non-conscious be aware?
This sounds right but in my experience most people are set in their ways and it is very hard to rewrite the muscle memory of a process. Especially since it appears that most people are sensors (vs intuitive if you buy Myers Briggs take on personalities https://personalityhacker.com/develop-intuition-intuitive-aw...) then it requires a whole retraining of x does y and a does b. In my experience it is tremendously easier to have a computer change then a person much less a group. Admittedly most people when put in the position don’t have a choice and the cost of retraining is rarely measured but studies on adult learners generally point out it’s hard and doesn’t go as well as we’d expect.
eBay and Amazon are not the only places one call sell things on. AppStore is the only way to reach millions of people.
I actually believe fairly strongly that it's not out of most people's reach! I've written before [0] about my process for learning how to build a (simple) language, and the resources that helped me do it / how I approached it. Certainly one of my favorite projects, both intellectually and from a returns perspective.

There are so many great resources for building a toy language by yourself (my impl of Ink is a few thousand lines of pretty simple Go code) and it's never been easier. I really think most people overestimate how intellectually intractable it is. Building a production language? Yes, a lot of work. But a toy language for you to use / learn with? surprisingly doable.

[0] https://thesephist.com/posts/pl/
Ask HN: How has money changed you?
I'm currently middle class, and I'm in a situation where there's a good chance I will acquire quite a bit of money in a couple years. I've heard before that money changes people, and I'm guessing I won't be an exception.

How has money changed you? Do you feel it was a positive change, or negative? Any idea how someone can prepare for the change?
Same with PuTTY on Windows. Its certainly colorful.
Because the -i flag works differently on GNU sed vs non-GNU sed and there is no way to use it portably.
It seems it’s quite an absolutist way to look at safety. It establishes that nothing is allowed to ask a user to proof safety unless the unsafe keyword is used somewhere.

I think this is already invalidated by countless code generation and build scripts.
Regarding a) using repl.it is smart because it also avoids all the cross-platform installation madness with Python and pip.

I'm hinestly surprised that Python setup is still so complicated even in 2020. I tend to take my pyenv installation (which manages local and global Python versions) for granted, but I wouldn't consider it beginner friendly.

Perhaps you might cinsider linking to respurces in your course for getting setup locally as well? e.g a link to installation for each os or pyenv. This might facilitate exploration in areas where repl isn't the best choice (for free at least).
This is your daily reminder that a GPT-3 written post made it to the top of hn

https://liamp.substack.com/p/my-gpt-3-blog-got-26-thousand-v...
Answer: because journalists don't get to write the headlines to their articles.

Clickbait means deliberately withholding a key piece of information from a headline ("you'll never believe what this area woman found in her piano" etc) - this headline doesn't do that.

It's a decent interview with someone who expresses a view of the industry as sketchy. I don't get the disdain.
What settings? Mines more like an abstract color art piece but not so much a desktop environment.
It is foolish to even expect that we can grasp AI’s reality. ;)
I know how cxx works, and I am not misrepresenting anything.

cxx is currently unsound, and the author (dtolnay) has chimed in above with a fix they are considering that fixes it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24244121)

The API of the cxx crate is safe, and it can cause UB, therefore it is unsound.

It doesn't matter that the cxx crate API is a macro. Yes, this macro expands to unsafe code like you mention, but the problem is that this unsafe code is often "broken" (unsound).
How do you know it's non-conscious? (Serious question.) Yeah, it's not close to a human, but…
> Fuck em like the intro to Method Man

Definitely stealing that line.
And it also suffers from the tired assumption that GPT-3 (or any language models) should, or are designed to in any way, give reasonable answers[1]. All GPT-3 does is give likely continuations, given the training corpus.

The prompts here are too short, and it could likely just be writing mediocre fiction continuations. Fiction tends to not be reasonable much of the time (to create story conflict).

> "To understand why, it helps to think about what systems like GPT-3 do. They don’t learn about the world—they learn about text and how people use words in relation to other words. What it does is something like a massive act of cutting and pasting, stitching variations on text that it has seen, rather than digging deeply for the concepts that underlie those texts."

This is another pet peeve of mine. It has long been shown experimentally[1] that neural networks such as image recognition and text prediction networks such as GPT-3 do understand deep concepts that underlie texts (not perfectly yet, of course), from emergent abstractions and similar cognitive tools employed by human brains.

[1] Gwern has also written extensively on failures of proper prompt programming: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#prompts-as-programming

[2] For example, using feature map and kernel visualization. In object classification or detection CNNs, specialized filters arise for detecting common observed object classes, like faces. Moreover, there is a hierarchical assembly of objects from elementary components (e.g. from lines, to limbs, to humans).

Deep visualization toolbox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkfIQ4IGaM

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24195009 for an extended discussion.
Methane is better than ammonia (less toxic, similar performance), while hydrogen is also still better (less toxic, higher performance), and hydrazine is also better (still toxic, but hypergolic with certain oxidizers).

It has been used in rockets, but there's usually better choices.
Why not use a title closer to the article in question?

"Un-Adopted : Influencers shared every step of their parenting journey, except last".

The article is a tragic story of a family that adopted a special needs child from out of country and the hidden nightmare of being (despite their best intentions) unprepared/unable to deal with the results. Fortunately for the child in question, they have now been placed with a family that has a parent with the proper medical training and I am assuming no other children. The other thing in play here is our society's perverse desire to produce and consume "reality porn".
Kind of like the term “hacker”? I’m just going to assume there’s a site out there called Dropshipper News where the white hat dropshippers gather to talk about their industry and bemoan the negative connotations the name has taken on.
Punk isn't dead, it just inquires if it may play through...

https://michaelazerrad.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8347993c469e20154...

On the subject of white suburban punks, here's an open question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361351
(I've tried writing Alex Cox. No joy.)
Right, but that stops there

At 1.2$ you already earn more then the Apple Store.

$ 1.0 Apple: 0.7 Stripe: 0.671
$ 1.1 Apple: 0.77 Stripe: 0.7681
$ 1.2 Apple: 0.84 Stripe: 0.8652

So just make it 1.49 and you are good (you'll earn a full 10% more than with Apple)

Anyway even at 0.99 price tag (I think Apple doesn't allow 1$) it only 4.5% less, on a million unit sold the difference would be about 31,710 dollars (693,000 VS 661,290).
Uh, because of the most obvious reason that comes to mind: it's way too small and way too far away! Even when it was discovered, near the perihelion of its hyberbolic orbit, it was small enough that we had no way whatsoever actually resolving it as anything else than a point of light. We could only guesstimate its rough shape by measuring its light curve—how its brightness changes as it rotates—and then simulating what kind of shape would produce that light curve. And now it's already way beyond Saturn's orbit, almost 100 times farther away than when it was discovered.
By "other models" I think he means models other than 538's, several of which did put the probability of Clinton winning at over 95%.
OP here -- I think you captured a lot of what I wanted to express. A lot of my DIY-ing is definitely about ownership: owning (1) my data completely, including how it's stored and backed up and (2) the future of these tools, so a SaaS provider can't suddenly decide next year that I'm no longer in their target market / most profitable customer segment.

Agree on the distinction between building for myself vs. others. There are a hundred things I'd have done differently, were I building for someone else.
This is exactly how Amazon got its start: Jeff Bezos didn’t have a stockpile of books; he only ordered them when a customer made an order on his site. The difference of course was that he did physically handle the books.
Most of the friends I have don't play video games. There are both bubbles where everybody plays as well as bubbles where playing video games as an adult is a very foreign concept.
The UK’s insane libel laws are a good example.
1-1 virtual coffees with top tech talent sourced from Twitter
When you write a tool you do it around a workflow that you have observed as being beneficial.

When you adopt a tool you adapt your workflow to its limitations.

on edit: obviously this is an "ideally speaking" type situation.
Another way I like to state this is "bottlenecks are beautiful design devices".
Maybe rage is a symptom of poorly management of stress and negative emotions? Cars do not cause road rage. People who throw childish temper tantrums is not controlled by the activity, be that driving, gameing, cooking, gambling, fishing, cleaning, sports, constructing, knitting, (so far all places where I have seen rage) or what have you. Childish temper tantrums occurs in all places where people are, and especially places where people who struggle emotionally may go to, and where they might be stressed or be impacted by a negative event.
>Exactly as our minds do

This rhetorically obscures the fact that when humans do produce similar stuff, it's a recognized sort of pathology that is obviously distinct from normal functioning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derailment_(thought_disorder)

Example: "I think someone's infiltrated my copies of the cases. We've got to case the joint. I don't believe in joints, but they do hold your body together."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad

Whatever the difference between this and normal language, call it "X", and whether or not it's amenable to implementing in software in principle, GPT-3 clearly does not have "X" at all.

Maybe it would be fruitful to fund study of mental/neurological disorders more, just to understand the mind better.
(OP) Yep, ownership is definitely big for me. Maybe I've just been burned one time too many by a startup pivoting away...
The people who think of blockchain money as useful do so because they generally come from a tech background, and don't know what money actually is.

Blockchain money is worthless, it's definitely not currency, and less of a 'store of value' as say, common art.

Money is used as a basis of common commercial transaction (not hoarding), and gold has some store of value due to its historical relationship to money, but even then it's not that big of a deal.

A 'store of value' generally should retain it's value over long periods. Real estate is 100x a better store of value than BTC and it's much more accessible.

More importantly, the economy lives on credit not money and it's hard to account for that in crypto.

There are zero monetary systems that work well without flex, so this idea of 'irreproducible' is mostly valuable in a system of 'mostly non-trust and transparency'. We have monetary policy now, which is very useful.

Money is a social contract.

Technology is just the means to express the exchange of it.

BTC is a very interesting curiosity, but really its pragmatically missing the point badly.

Good blog though.
> "Our materials are intended to bridge the gap between the inert, rigid, solid, abiotic engineered device and the living, soft, wet, biotic tissue."

Wow, I love how the science fiction I read as a child is becoming reality.
I’ve repeatedly seen the following sequence, from acquaintances and randos on twitter:

1) GPT-3 is actually really dumb. The people posting impressive results are either cherry picking top 1% best results or just lying.

2) (time passes, they figure it out) Okay, I get it, you have to prompt it right, then it really does work well. But that’s so burdensome!

3) (rewriting history) Of course you have to prompt it right, how else is it supposed to know exactly what sort of task I expect it to be doing?

—

If, for example, you see GPT-3 say something extremely stupid rather than just a bit off, you’ve almost certainly primed it to think it’s supposed to be saying stupid, random things, by giving it a nonsense prompt.
OpenAI would naturally optimize for the tests published by Marcus as a critique of GPT-2, yet GPT-3 still fails physical reasoning spectacularly (the one test needing casual reasoning the most).

There are two broader points here:

1. The lack of independently verifiable evaluation metrics for these type of models should make everyone very skeptical. (Who can afford to retrain GPT-3 from scratch?)

2. I find it difficult to believe that smart people still insist that a model incapable of representing causal relationships can produce intelligent answers.
I see state planning as one of the major barriers to designing a team workflow with idealized Microsoft Access.
It's worth mentioning that nasal rinses without proper precautions can be extremely dangerous, and even fatal.
Ask HN: Game-Based Exercise?
I hate exercising. I manage to do Yoga in the morning for ~15 min but that's about it.

Are there any games that really make exercising fun?
So we can replace congress and the presidency now?
How have you implemented the heatmaps and screen recording - looks like magic