skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not a physicist so I'm probably getting different concepts mixed up, but maybe someone could explain:

> in principle, energy is not gained or lost from the system during the computing process

Landauer's principle (from Wikipedia):

> any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment

Where is this information going, inside of the processor, if it's not turned into heat?
> leaves you still checking for support for: SSE3, SSE4...

Find me a processor that supports SSE4 but not SSE3. That's the problem. With x86 you pretty much can say "we're targeting processors made after 2010" or whatever and that's that. You make one binary and it works.

RISC-V allows a combinatorial explosion of possible CPUs. You can have a CPU that supports extension X and not Y, but another one that supports Y and not X.
The A-12 was publicly announced in early 1964. It first flew in 1962. The X-3, F-104, B-58 had all flown by the mid-50s. If anything, airplanes have been much more pedestrian as function and form needs were mostly subsonic.
Signal does not has to access to contacts. It does asks for contact access permission, to show in the app the names that you have set for your contacts. But you can just answer no and everything works.

On the contrary, if you answer the same to WhatsApp, it plain refuses to work. But it actually created an account on their servers, and from that on you appear on your contacts who do use WhatsApp as another user of WhatsApp, which invites them to write to you there although you cannot receive their messages. To fix this, you have to find the option in WhatsApp to delete your account.

Tally:

Signal 1
WhatsApp 0
> using work as a distraction from your problems instead of addressing them

Some problems can't be addressed, but one can learn to live happily in spite of them. I think finding a distraction is a fine way of doing that. Relative to other options, work seems like a very healthy distraction if it works.
But the goal of the government funding was not to subsidise or support use tech companies. It was to improve education.
It's actually not the dilution that I care about in this case though, it's the fact that they don't inform me of any of it.
I can recommend protonVPN
I take the same viewpoint. But that is, admittedly, a position of privilege. Tracking "net worth" is out of reach for the vast majority of people who live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Ahhh nice catch! Evidently been looking at my screen too long
I don’t know what has brought you to this point in life, but I’m sorry that it has you considering suicide.

For me, being a workaholic left me feeling disconnected and isolated from the world. The antidepressants didn’t help, they just numbed me to my own emotional pain enough that I could keep functioning.

The holidays are a depressing time for a lot of people, and to a limited extent, I can see the harm reduction in working through them. But for me, finding a reason to live involved spending time outside of work to make new friends, revive old friendships, and improve my family life. I truly believe that work is no replacement for friends and family, the only things that I have found worth living for.

I hope things start looking up for you, friend.
You are currently the only comment in this thread to imply any of this is extraterrestrial.
The move to C++ as implementation language was approved in 2010[1]. The switch got flipped in 2013 with the 4.8 series[2].

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2010-05/msg00705.html

[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.8/changes.html
What Antarctic Meteorites Tell Us About Earth’s Origins
100,000 as of today.

The government had literally one job, don't have a spike during winter when the NHS is most hard up. Instead, we did exactly the opposite, because they didn't have a spine and cancel Christmas.
How annoying that Alex Stamos deleted both tweets when it became apparent to others he was talking nonsense.

> >We're not talking about some NSA-built crypto processor installed on an SSBN, but an old $50 piece of consumer kit. There is no way it's hardened against the last ten years of USENIX papers that have never been used in practice

I don't have much hope for his twitter byline:

> Trustworthy tech at the Stanford Internet Observatory

Obviously not trustworthy if he's deleting tweets which show him in a negative light - i.e. talking authoritatively out of his arse on subjects which more informed people call him out on. And then deleting any evidence of it.
Thanks a lot! The youtube link is fantastic.
NPR is hiring a Senior iOS Engineer
The limits on die size for the competitive consumer chip market are nothing like that of the B2B market. Largest chip ever made was over 40,000 mm^2 [1] compared to Intel's 10900K at ~205 mm^2. In production mainframe chips like IBM's Z15s are on the order of 700mm^2. The fab process has a lot of levers so very low defect rates are possible but not at the scale of a consumer CPU.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/the-five-technical-challen...

Edit: I assume a supercoducting microprocessor would use a strategy similar to the AI monolith in [1]. Just fuse off and route around errors on a contiguous wafer and distribute the computation to exploit the dark zones for heat dissipation.
Ask HN: How should I model a project to develop with a small team?
I'm planning, with a small group of friends from uni, to develop a medium-small sized project during our break. We intend to work at the same time in different parts of this project, so we will need to coordinate our work in a way that allows us to know what has been done and what needs to be done.
I'm wondering what would be the best (perhaps standard) way to do this. I'm thinking that modelling our project could probably help us do this fluently, but I'm unaware of what kind of model we should use.

If having an example project helps to the answer, I think the scope will be something similar to developing a gameboy color emulator. We're about 5 people, working at different rates.

Do you have any suggestions ? Thank you.
They were in serious decline by the time of the buyout.
It’s even worse in MacOS. No matter how much I try to use Mac, I am always so disoriented by the filesystem and the “Finder” (filesystem browsing interface).
I do this using Lightsail to run my personal blogs, each blog is running in its own container w/sqlite mounted from a local for persistence (too lazy to do actual Docker volumes).

Ditto for Nginx, it's also containerized.

It's a great setup b/c I can also deploy the containers locally (and SCP the sqlite DB locally) to run the blogs on my laptop if I need to.
Show HN: Employee engagement that doesn't suck
I used RClone to sync to B2. They've got an iPhone app that you can download to browse + download from the bucket, else the website itself.

There might be further reasons for it, but I mostly use it as an offsite backup that my wife could upload to -- so usability was a plus -- but not worth that kind of premium.
This may be a dumb question but are there any open-source routers out there that can manage to do QoS on a gigabit+ WAN connection (without tanking latency)?
"I think "and that's it" would be the weird part."

Yes, that's my point. You make the presumably-strenuous effort to broadcast to the stars, sacrificing any number of other priorities in the process, and you basically transmit the scientific equivalent of a throat clearing, and then stop? Silence is understandable, and a message like in the movie Contact is understandable, and a lot of other things are understandable, but that would just be weird.
I tried to follow the course using the backcountry map, but due to some Slack in the GPS, I ended up Discoursed. I fell, badly twisting my ankle, and was not able to Github and walk. Thus stranded in the middle of nowhere, I peered into my backpack. I only one Carrot left to eat, and to my utter dismay, I had left the Flarum gun at the Basecamp. Luckily, my cellphone's data connection somehow worked well enough that my E-mail client was able to clear the SOS message of the outbox after some 23 retries.
They did not mention Parler as the story implicated. I'm not arguing on behalf of people doing illegal things. I'm arguing against the framing of an app as the problem instead of the people committing illegal acts themselves. People use text messages for comms, people use Telegram, they use phone calls, they use a myriad of apps to communicate. Framing Parler as the problem is just a way of justifying further lockdowns on political speech and selective censorship and banning and a delegation of our sovereignty and liberty to the biased discretion of powerful corporate entities.
Reading this article makes me realize how old I am.
I pretend, but then when "historical" write-ups are presented, and I blurt out "wait, that was just yesteryear...", I instantly realize, I am ancient in technology terms.
Dropbox is only a "failure" if you require continuous growth. Let's pause for a moment and think: why do we require that? I know, markets, etc, but Dropbox could be a pretty good medium-sized business and be just fine.

Well, another way to look at it is that Dropbox is a failure because instead of doing one thing right and optimizing the heck out of it, it tries to do many things, most of them badly, in the name of growth.

I hope somebody will start a Dropbox competitor as a bootstrapper, with a long-term outlook, no VC funding, and no crazy growth targets. Just do file sync right without eating so much CPU and battery, and without pestering me with useless add-ons, and you'll have my money.
Coauthor of the paper here: this tangent does not apply to this post.

The key thing about the actual work linked in this post is that it is pointing out and addressing an important case where discontinuous computations (polygon coverage at edges) are in fact meaningfully differentiable.
> Do they?

Overwhelmingly yes.

> Do you?

Yes, only users of a library or package really have sufficient context to articulate the pain points, bugs, and missing features. Users have to weigh up their own time and priorities too, so for users to give up their free time to put work into documenting issues / feature needs, that is a bunch of free labor given to the project maintainer. Any maintainer who sees bug reports or feature requests as a time drain instead of free product research is completely wrong.

> Odd, I don't need attention for my projects.

Then why are they open source?

> You explicitly spell out that maintainers owe user listening to them and helping them for their "free labor".

No, I never said anything like that, in fact I said the opposite. Maintainers are perfectly free to ignore users if they want. It would just mean it’s reasonable for users to see that as a shitty owner and express frustration about it. Maintainers don’t owe anyone anything, and I never said otherwise. But it’s perfectly legitimate for users to express frustration over badly managed FOSS projects, neglected feature requests, etc.

In other words, “if you don’t like it, leave” is unjustified, and users should express frustration. It doesn’t mean a maintainer is going to listen, but that’s beside the point. The original comment I replied to proposed that users are ingrates or should possibly be banned if they “complain” - that if they have a problem, it’s not the maintainer’s problem.

These are just wrong attitudes. Maintainers aren’t obliged to do anything. Irrelevant. Users should still complain and lobby maintainers to fix things, as that’s far more helpful and reasonable than “take it or leave it.”

> If said users indeed invest quality time and I as a maintainer feel like their presence enhances my project, sure, giving and receiving is a good idea! Now, we both know how often that happens :)

No, this is up to the users to decide, as they actually use the project. Users decide if filing a bug report, asking for a feature, or pushing back on a roadmap is needed, because it stems from the problems they experience as users. Of course the maintainer doesn’t have to care or even read it, but that would be horrendously undiplomatic of the maintainer, and users would have every justification to express frustration about it.
I work at a Windows shop, and every time they roll their eyes at the plethora of Javascript frameworks I just bite my tongue and say "mm hmm". We're looking at tech choices for our future UI development, and we have a large .NET codebase pieces of which we would like to share between desktop and mobile. It is so not a straightforward obvious choice.
Thanks for the feedback! The blocks on the left (in the timeline) represent the individual time records. These are indeed "glued together" when a new record starts right after another stops. You can only drag a record in the timeline when it's first selected, so it should be impossible to affect multiple at once. You can also move and zoom the timeline though, perhaps this is what was happening?
Oh boy, title starts with "Open Source vs Commercial", and then the article entirely talks about paying for hosting/support/... or not, as if that's the same thing...
Going off on a tangent, I want to thank you for this:

> Notice how there's no cookie banner on this site? This site does not track you. Nor does it make use of 3d party services that do.

It's a small thing, but shows you care about your users more than you care about peeking into every little vanity metric for growth hacking. Kudos.
People striking by not using Google would save Google money. Instead, people should all do a coordinated DDoS on Google, send thousands of mails per second, click on all ads, etc
Tangential, but there are so many common in-use technologies we should be in awe of but aren't. I mean, just look at the average home or apartment built relatively recently.

For example, we have reached standards of insulation, weather-proofing, and energy efficiency that would just blow the mind of any builder from just 30 years ago (not that there isn't room for improvement).

It's not flying cars or robot butlers, but it impresses me at least.
So the main complaint is that the US Govt model has 70 million symptomatic-but-undiagnosed cases in the US compared to 23 diagnosed cases and the author claims this is wildly wrong. If those numbers were correct, we'd have diagnosed 23% of cases. Do we really thing we've done much better than that? I'm not certain. I'd be a little surprised if it were over 50%, but that's purely based off intuition.

The other point the author kind of brings up: the current Alabama numbers are roughly in line with the "Ireland event" already. So a "rolling series" of these events is kind of what we already have happening, isn't it? That doesn't diminish the toll of the situation or the mistakes in the responses from the authorities.
Chinese drones are amazing these days huh
"F.2 Types

The C floating types match the IEC 60559 formats as follows:

— The float type matches the IEC 60559 single format.

— The double type matches the IEC 60559 double format.

— The long double type matches an IEC 60559 extended format, else a non-IEC 60559 extended format, else the IEC 60559 double format.

Any non-IEC 60559 extended format used for the long double type shall have more precision than IEC 60559 double and at least the range of IEC 60559 double.

Recommended practice

The long double type should match an IEC 60559 extended format."

ISO/IEC 9899:1999, Annex F
Huawei got its start by blatantly stealing IP from Cisco and other companies, which is essentially a large subsidy of R&D. That strategy was only possible because the Chinese government shielded them from legal problems.

In other words, the Chinese government effectively forced Huawei's competitors to give them a large subsidy.
"that 70 MILLION Americans have already gotten sick with symptomatic Covid, but decided to just write it off as a bad cold and never got tested. I am not making this up."

Based on quantity of people with antibodies in NYC, Italy, etc who never knew they had it other than symptoms they thought were a cold, there's nothing surprising about a number of 70 million.
To be fair, even Amazon's support team (or robot) have done a similar mistake last November (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/15/amazon-re...).
Sounds reasonable to me. We already have homes with outlandish smart stuff (washers and dryers, I mean really!). If you have a fridge to store your food and a closet to store your clothes, why not a personal data storage unit?
Definitely possible to put some of the heat into a laser. It's simple to turn a temperature gradient into an electrical potential [0], and if you use that electricity to power a laser it will convert away some of the hat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocouple
Working on how you would commit suicide is a very strong signal you are in mortal danger, according to my friend a nurse with experience.

Your problem to solve is: ‘what will make my life worthwhile.’ Make it your job to solve that and spend time and money(=stored time) to do so. The alternative job of how to end your life is a poor goal, IMHO.

You can pay someone to care about you (edit: and has the skills to be useful): a councillor or a life coach or a nurse or whoever... Choosing someone is a difficult problem, but it is tractable; perhaps try multiple people in parallel (edit: from different specialities) and pick whoever clicks the most with you.

Don’t be scared to spend money: as a purely financial decision anything that keeps you earning for many years to come would be an insanely great investment (in fact, so good that it is a startup idea in itself that if scaled could get VC funding).

In an ideal world you have someone close to you help you that (a) would take the time to help, (b) can make the time to help, and (c) has the ability to help. However it isn’t as common as it should be to have someone like that available. If you are lonely then you likely believe you don’t have that person in your life already, so paying a stranger is far simpler.

Finally, if you must commit suicide, please do it so that it plausibly looks like an accident. Suicide is devastating to so many people around you, even very loose acquaintances and strangers in your social graph... I have seen the deep effects of suicides rip through my own friends and acquaintances, and it is the caring and vulnerable that are most deeply and often permanently hurt (sometimes they may be on the far distant fringes of the social graph from the suicide). I personally believe you can do whatever you want with your life, but harming others touches their life.

Edit: if you reply with a way to contact you, I myself would share my time with you, because even just trying to help is an interesting challenge for me. I don’t have any training, but I might possibly be more in tune with you than many who do?
I’m not sure what “black churches” have to do with this but I am still curious where the legal limits are.
Chess matches usually involve multiple games, so you don't need to win every game to win the match. It's not uncommon to play trying to avoid a loss (going for a draw), instead of playing riskier moves in an attempt to force a win.
Makes sense. For our use case, having "incorrect" gpt output isn't a viable option so unfortunately it looks like the tech isn't there quite yet as we would need to manually verify the output, or we would need access to the model to train it on our own data, but not sure if that would improve the results.
The article spends a long time complaining about the high "unreported infection" numbers used by CDC models, but doesn't actually address the biggest piece of evidence, which is seroprevalence surveys. For example, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/01/study-us... claims 15% of US residents had COVID antibodies in mid-November, and if you want to claim a number that disagrees with that, you at least need to address the evidence.
would you mind deleting your comment so I can repost?
Which CPU is on your servers? I know that they have both XEONs and EPYCs. Thanks
Don't overthink that. Talk the goal through, draw some boxes for what pieces exist on a (virtual) whiteboard, then talk through interfaces as needed, start working, clarify. That's fine for that scope and having fun, and you'll probably learn more from where it's not sufficient than if you try to overdesign something from the start.
Thanks, I'm glad someone actually takes notice. I really care about this, and would love more people to do too :)
I was curious about this too. This chip is using adiabatic computing, which means your computations are reversible and therefore don't necessarily generate heat.

I'm having trouble interpreting what exactly that means though.
I think a middle ground is observable in where retailers choose to focus- Walmart is targeting 'price first' customers, Costco is targeting 'quality with value' customers, Whole Foods is (or at least was, pre-acquisition) targeting 'quality first and sometimes only' customers.

Customers get to outsource the detailed choices to the retailers and the retailers enforces the desired quality/cost ratios on their suppliers.
No, it's the isolation that is way more harmful. Sure you can be alone even with social connections if they are superficial, but we humans are hard-wired to seek community and social connections to validate our existence. Similar to working, I guess, but which is more mentally healthier and productive.

Yet building those social connections is definitely not an easy task. Once you have been molded to a certain shape to rewire your mental patterns and the emotional rewarding system is very difficult. You have to be persistent in building those friendships until you at some point achieve a level of rapport that, hopefully, allows you to be completely yourself around another person.

But no one can really give you the answers how to approach solving the problem. My advice is to seek venues of expressing yourself to find like-minded people who think the same at a deep, instinctive level. I whole-heartedly recommend performing arts, like improvisational theatre, which forces to play like a child. There is something there that I think is very rejuvenating when you can just fool around and laugh. Also you can't really think of anything else when you are performing.

I'd say the most difficult part of the whole problem is that you can't remove your emotions from solving your problem and therefore you can't make the most rational choices as you subconsciously avoid failure. But I encourage you to keep trying. Seeking professional help would also be advisable.
I've been saying this over and over this year. Here's where I feel Dropbox has missed the mark:

Dropbox understood long ago that it wasn't a document sync company, but a work collaboration company.

It's unbelievable that a company of this size has failed to create popular work collaboration tools for chat (Slack), video conferencing (Slack), document creation (Notion) and design (Figma).
It's still getting turned into heat, just much less of it. The theoretical entropy increase required to run a computer is WAY less than current computers (and probably even the one in the article) generate so there is a lot of room to improve.
Using Better Data for Better Decisions in Criminal Justice (4.5 Min Movie)
>laptops can't easily get keyboard fixed

This is a frustrating part of recent laptops, but it doesn't have to be this way - my X230's keyboard is removable with a few screws.
>If that doesn't plainly show that big tech has gotten too big, I don't know what will.

Or...it could be free markets don't work? Why blame big tech when this same cycle has proven itself out over way too many historical economic eras.
We really need to get away from this meme of "I found a typo, therefore I'm going to discard the article". In theory it's good epistemic hygiene, but in practice it almost always cashes out to, "I'm going to engage in extremely selective sophistry so I can ignore information that doesn't agree with my existing worldview."