skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Those are exceptional. I remember gaining really nice math and physics intuition from his "applets" years ago. Yes, those started as Java applets if anyone still remembers those.

Here are math and physics ones: https://falstad.com/mathphysics.html

I like the 2D vector field one https://falstad.com/vector (2d) and the 3d one https://falstad.com/vector3d.

Antenna simulator: https://falstad.com/antenna

Waveguide is awesome too https://falstad.com/embox/guide.html. Don't forget to pick various modes in the little square at the bottom.

If Paul Falstad comes around these parts, thank you for creating and sharing those!
That talk is from 2009 though. Nowadays companies regularly run jobs on commercial data centers which can include thousands of GPU cores, Infiniband networking and other specialized equipment. One can make a pretty valid case that we are approaching the ability to make an ad-hoc supercomputer for yourself from the GCP console.
I'd say that the view against ANN gives humans (especially researchers) more "dignity", in the sense that we still need to figure out some deep stuff and not just add hardware. I wouldn't treat this as an argument either way, just an observation.

Heuristically, we came to be by a very dumb process of piling up newer generations. If my pet would communicate with me on the level of GPTx, I would be very impressed. That's why nowadays I have some scepticism for the ANN critics' arguments, though think it would be neat if they were right.

The thing that I dislike the most in these discussions is the pervasiveness of the AGI concept and the assumption of a linear scale of intelligence. Again, I can intuitively say that I'm more intelligent than my pet: but to quantify this, we'd need to use something silly like brain size, or qualitative/arbitrary things like "this being can talk". I think that human intelligence is a somewhat random point in a very multi-dimensional space, one that technology may never even have a reason to visit. But people tend to subscribe to the notion that this is the very important "point where AGI happens".
It's about tradeoffs. On one end you have precision, speed, reliability, diagnosability. At the other end you have "realness".

Unit tests fall on the far left, workload tests/E2E tests/testing-in-production fall on the far right.

It turns out that there's no 'wrong' level, there's just different tradeoffs. I've worked at a lot of companies that embraced the realness of E2E tests, but then suffered from the maintenance/performance/diagnosability/instability of those tests. I have colleagues who worked at places that avoided E2E at all costs, and suffered because they would have a green test run, but user scenarios that a simple E2E test would have caught, were completely broken.

IMO there is a lot that can be done to improve E2E testing at most companies, but they definitely have the capacity to add value to your release/testing pipeline.
I was reading the criticism and suggestions and wondering what they were talking about, it seemed to read perfectly fine…

Then I saw that the project had already been changed in response! Impressive.
I hate that I always end up referencing the Lex Friedman podcast but it is often relevant to discussion on HN. Recently Lex spoke with Yann LeCun and they had a brief chat about AI at Meta/Facebook [1] (where I believe Yann is currently Chief AI Scientist). He claims that AI is the core of Meta and that if you were to take ML out of Meta systems the company would literally crumble because it is completely built around AI.

My feeling is this is a PR push by Facebook. All tech companies keep touting AI, especially Google but also Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. In some sense I believe these business want to control how their own success is defined. That is, they are right now convincing everyone that tech dominance is equivalent to AI dominance which is equivalent to ML dominance. In some sense this is turning into a purity test, like "which tech company is the most AI focused". I expect this kind of PR to accelerate as each company tries to prove its AI bona-fides to the market.

1. https://youtu.be/SGzMElJ11Cc?t=6597
I've heard that the Krakatoa eruption was so loud that the sound wave reverberated around the globe several times. I assume that means if you're on exactly the other end of the world, the sound is coming at you from every direction? Similarly, no matter where you are on earth, the sound is coming at you from different directions at different times? Of course, I'm assuming that the sound wave was in audible frequencies which may or may not be the case...
Probably shouldn't in most cases.
`nix.gc.automatic` is implemented as a systemd timer to run `nix-collect-garbage` periodically.

`nix.optimise` is just a nix conf option. Meaning anytime nix creates a store path, it will automatically dedup files by hardlinking them to a `/nix/store/.links/` path. There's no timer involved with `nix.optimise`. You can manually force existing paths to be "optimised" by doing `nix-store --optimise`
I disagree, I think the simplicity of this page is its strength and its beauty. I wish more sites were designed this way.
When was in the pharma field I worked with a patent agent who had an M.D. and a PhD. She was outstanding -- really made a huge difference to the quality of our patents. She worked for one of the major law firms.

However I can confirm what others have written: she was at the bottom of the hierarchy. They treated her as if she were a paralegal.

This wasn't about her specifically -- we had a bunch of partners and associates working on our thicket of IP over the years: men and women from all sorts of national and social backgrounds. Despite her extensive education they considered her skills as simply mechanical.

PS: they charged as much for her time as a junior associate. I doubt she got paid as much though.
Yup, it would have been better as an officially-maintained extension.
When the heavens and MIT align [video]
Which is a problem of its own, since they're effectively usernames.

Secure usernames that have no corresponding password is already an oxymoron; that's what credit card numbers used to be, hence the introduction of the CVV, 3DSecure and so on; but at least a credit card can be blocked with relative ease. But SSNs are secure unchangeable usernames, which makes even less sense.

Do any countries other than the US have such an abomination, where you can figure out the SSN of someone and ruin their life?
ADB? This means I can use an old Mac keyboard on NeXT, or vice-versa?
Yes, this is true in a decentralized and adversarial environment. This is exactly the problem that blockchains have been invented for! In such an environment, we do not have solutions to reach "consensus" apart from blockchains.

My point is that apart from cryptocurrencies (where the blockchain is enough because it defines the truth), since you need some form of trusted third-party to make what's written on the blockchain relevant, then you're not in a decentralized and adversarial setting. So you can do things more efficiently, you don't need a blockchain. You don't have to solve the distributed consensus problem.
For me coming from Arch and AUR, yes.
I tend to agree, unfortunately.
My wife has 28 cousins which I jokingly say means, they include one of everything. Such as airline pilots, or priests.
Don't worry about it, it's the HN effect. I really recommend using a PaaS like Netlify (I'm not sponsored or affiliated). It will take a weight off your shoulders the next time you get a surge.
Aiven vs AWS
Spatial metaphors is arguably the easiest shortcut to a design that makes sense to humans. Spatial reasoning is something even animals are capable of.

Categories are much more abstract, and while useful, less intuitive.

Which is why folders should remain, complement them with other means of navigation for sure, but hiding them away will only make things less intuitive.

In the end, whatever capabilities your design has are only as useful as their ability to be understood and used.
In most of the comments there is the assumption that extraordinary claims (that viruses do not work) require extraordinary evidence. Someone mentioned an analogy with creationism.

But it does not work that way.

I couldn't care less if someone believes in a deity, creationism or homeopathy.

I do care very much about people getting vaccinated.

It means that either we go the coercive way (like we do in France to settle extend, making non vaccinated people life difficult), or we explain to people that they are wrong. And again. And again.

With some it will work and we will gain 1% in the vaccination rate, which saves lives.
https://mobile.twitter.com/sama/status/1096822724217827328
Sam Altman mentioned something similar way back in 2017.
Wasn't there when I searched the first time. Maybe I typo'd.
Nope. It's likely that the stock exchanges would halt trading, so there's not much we would be doing.
In Firefox at least you can set default permissions settings. On a fresh install the default is "Always Ask" but you can change it to "Deny". You can then grant per-page at your leisure.

I assume chromium is the same.
I’ve been frustrated by toilets where I have to contort my body to reach the dispenser. Similarly, I’ve had dispensers intrude on the space where my legs would normally be and make it awkward to even just sit on the toilet.

Toilets are absolutely designed to make the dispenser placement convenient. You just don’t think about it because 95% of toilets get it right, so it just doesn’t bother you that much that it can be wrong.

In SQL, some decisions are right about 10% of the time and are annoying and awkward the other 90%.

That’s why the order matters. Because everything else got it right.
But you might be able to trick more people to buy your fake medication if you put another company's logo on it. I'd hate to think that a country's procedures for stopping copyright infringement are so efficient that they are the optimal route for preventing the distribution of fake medication (even making trademark law pointless), but I must admit that comparing two images is simpler than comparing the composition of two medications. Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two approaches.
Could you describe your Zotero folder & tag strategy? I don’t know where to start with this and it’s a hot mess
> I've always found scaling issue to to development related not infrastructure related. So examples would be a bad db query that takes the system down, overly chatting webserver that issues too many queries to the backend

This is actually one of the strengths of the cloud, startups that can't afford talent throw compute resources at the problem. Running your own servers isn't hard per se, but it requires a certain breadth of less centrally documented knowledge than the cloud and a willingness to fuss. Developers like that can often command higher prices than most startups pay these days :)
I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the droplet but being honest, my husband is the one who set all this up for me

Yeah, HN can be all "why didn't you just...?" when a site gets hit with traffic, but you know what? I've been in this industry for over 30 years, had a decent stint at Microsoft and other companies you've heard of, working on stuff you've probably used. And if my stupid blog somehow ended up on the front page of $POPULAR_SITE I wouldn't have the first clue how to increase bandwidth. Oh, 30 years of this shite means I know where to immediately start looking, but off the top of my head? phhhhht And it sure as hell would take me more than "a minute to figure out how to add more bandwidth or whatever". :-)

Point is, your page hit the HN lottery, no need for apology. I can bookmark it for later.
> explained by a desire to not spend money on storage for "low value" data

I think this "just happens" when you reach a certain scale. For example, I was looking at our reporting at my job the other day and realized for 10k people a day, something wasn't working with our emails. We decided it was a "low priority" because it's "only" 10k people when we send over 30 million emails a day. I'm sure those 10,000 people (a small city's worth!) don't feel that way.
Confirmed by Jonathan McDowell:

>"Yes, the upper stage of DSCOVR is going to crash into the Moon. I'll give more details nearer the time."

https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1485689309625782274
If you include every component inside my board game boxes (instead of just counting it as 1 item), I'm sure I've got that beat. Some of them have like 500+ components in a single box.
Even exactly on the other side of the world, the sound will reach you at different times from different directions due to different pressures, temperatures, mountains, etc. on the way.
How about Amazon Lightsail? It price structure is basically the same with Hetzner or Linode, and you get it in-house if you use AWS.
I haven’t come across an RP2040 I couldn’t overclock to 250+ MHz. Couple that with DMA into the PIO state machines and it smashes through stuff like the weird WS281X timings, HUB75 matrix scanning and even DVI and usually has a whole spare CPU core to actually do something with whatever device you’re driving.

It feels like it sits nicely between regular MCUs and the quirky every-peripheral-is-emulated-in-a-core awesomeness of the Parallax Propeller and - though I’m probably biased by experience and necessity - I love it.
There's a person behind the IDE. If you help the IDE, you help the person using the IDE.
I think OpenBSD has support for some 802.11ac chipsets, but they don't operate at 802.11ac speeds.

For example see the CAVEATS section here: https://man.openbsd.org/iwm.4
At least for once humans were not to blame :)
Thanks for writing this all out, but I think your initial calculation is off by an order of magnitude, no? You need 1m^3 of helium to lift a kg.

I don't have time to work through the rest now but I'll give it a shot tomorrow.
This very much is a solved problem - it comes down to standardization in tools, categorization of incidents, keyword analysis of incident description, and (probably automatable) correlation with logfiles and identifiers. Preventive maintenance is not a concept that has been around only recently, and a good QA team has a whole toolkit of things to throw at code before it hits the customer. And yes, ultimately, it is a question on whether you invest the resources to deal with the dumpster fire, or just let it burn to ashes. I am also a big believer in "You build it, you run it", and a "no new features as long as there are open bug tickets" approaches, making teams responsible for their own technical debt.

Google with it's "Let's never maintain our products, let the bitrot make them gradually worse and eventually EOL them" approach seems to prefer to avoid that kind of cost.

I used to be a Google fanboy in the early 2000s. Maybe it's coming with age, but these days I prefer boring tech that works well as compared than half-baked moonshots, and Google may have burned me once too many. Other software megacorps (and even some NGOs) do this better than the big G.
Or just don't flag any file below 100 bytes.
Paul Falstad's Math and Physics Applets
exactly. NFTs are one of the hacks for status. Somehow tech people would feel weird posting a photo on a yacht, but buying a jpg makes you cool.
"As far as your own inner conflicts are concerned, if you use meditation simply as a quick fix to superficially appease your emotions, you temporarily enjoy a pleasant deferral of these inner conflicts. But as you rightly say, these cosmetic changes have not reached the root of the problem.

Merely putting problems to sleep for a while or trying to forcibly suppress strong emotions will not help either. You are just keeping a time bomb ticking somewhere in a corner of your mind.

True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is not simply closing one’s eyes to the problem for a while. Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you mentioned. They are destructive in the sense of undermining your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you need more than just a calming pill. Meditation practice offers many kinds of antidotes.
"
I wrote Supertag[0] specifically to get the same kind of ergonomics with tags as you get with folders. Basically you can dynamically render sub-folders based on the tags that apply to your current selection.

Example: /A/B contains the intersection of tags A and B. If sub-folder C exists underneath /A/B, it's because one of the files in the intersection also has tag C.

0. https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/
I generally use `nix repl` for this.

I have an example of myself looking at what my configuration.nix renders to while debugging a module I was adding to nixpkgs/NixOS.

https://youtu.be/bkDYmvKINm8?t=1949
It really doesn't matter how obvious it is if you follow the easiest rule of not getting scammed:

- If anyone initiates contact with you, don't trust any claims they make about their identity.

If you only trust real law firms, verify that independently with whatever authority determines which law firms are real. People need to stop using "can make a professional-looking website" as a proxy for "not a scammer".
That's a hard link. They have problems too.
Aside from finance, a big motivation to buy a home in the UK is to have more self-determination in your home life. Renting places you under someone else's control to a large extent.

You often can't decorate much. Can't fit better windows, and windows where I've rented have usually been poor quality. Can't replace the washing machine even if it's not working properly. Can't put up shelves.

Can't fit solar panels or better insulation, or replace carpets. Sometimes you can't even paint the walls.

In the town where I live nearly all rental properties are "furnished", to the point that there aren't many unfurnished properties to choose from. This means you can't change the furniture - couches, tables, curtains (drapes), beds, wardrobes etc. Often there is an old TV you would never choose for yourself. Of course you do make some choices when you decide where to move into, but there may not be anything particularly to your own taste, and what you want will change over time anyway.

Aside from the lack of self-determination while in there, there is a constant threat of "no reason" evictions which landlords exercise from time to time. Because no reason is given, it doesn't take much. I've seen it done sometimes by rental property agents just so they can advertise a large rent increase on the open market which would not seem reasonable applied to the existing tenant - that time, the landlord didn't particularly want the tenant out, but the agent saw a chance to get their new-tenancy fees and advised the landlord to evict.

Long term stability in a rental property is a luxury in some areas, and finding another property nearby may not be possible. Got a child in school? Don't assume they will be able to stay in the same school.

I have encountered rental situations where it is required to pay 12 months rent up front every year during the tenancy (on top of 1.5 months deposit) - but only if you're not well off enough to qualify for monthly rental payment. This sucks if the reason you are moving is because of a no-reason eviction from a previous place, so you quickly need to find another property as well as 13.5 months worth of rent at short notice. Naturally, you can't use the deposit from the previous place in that scenario as you won't get it in time, and you won't get all of it.

Speaking of 12 months, in the town where I live and I gather in many others, 12 month tenancies are the maximum you can get. Technically every year there's a new tenancy, usually with new contract fees to pay, and the possibility they might decide not to renew it. If you're really unlucky there might be a new credit and income check each renewal, which you will fail if you fell on hard times, such as between jobs. This duration is because UK law has additional tenant protections with tenancies longer than 12 months. So of course landlords don't offer them.
The Ghost team has been talking about moving more towards the JAMstack model (static sites, basically). I don't run it myself but it's something worth looking into depending on your traffic expectations in the future:

https://www.netlify.com/blog/2019/01/11/ghost-on-the-jamstac...
SQL is like BASIC for data.

It is a language created to read like natural language, to facilitate its adoption.

Not only developers use SQL, less technical users also use it, especially in the finance industry.

Now, do you use BASIC professional software development? While some do, most don't. So why do we use SQL then?

An imperative language that compiles to SQL can be attractive, but unless the compilers come with good compiler warnings, we may end up created bloated database code.
I don't see why saying "we don't need a blockchain" would imply that we can't have one agreed upon global distributed immutable ledger. To problem to achieve that is probably more political than technical. But then if HE institutions come to an agreement, we can totally have what you suggest without a blockchain :).
They both support discoverability in different ways
What does iCloud run on?
(I did wind up getting synology-csi to work!)
Should, yes, but in practice not really. I'm talking more about employee information.

You need it for tax forms, background checks, citizenship queries, sometimes bank information, etc.

So your options are:

1. Store them locally on a computer. Typically on some old windows 7 machine in the corner that hasn't been updated in some time.

2. Store documents physically. Which will either be scanned onto random computers belonging to whoever needs them to be sent through probably insecure mail servers.

Or worse, your boss taking a picture of your form and sending it to people that way, leaving the form on their phone.

3. Some other online storage like whatever M$ is offering

4. Use google and somehow store SS#'s somewhere less secure, or obfuscate them in a way no one but a few people will understand and hope they don't block any other files you upload.

Businesses have been deciding how to manage these things since the start that work best for them. Having google force you into procedures that might not work for your use case is annoying at best. And they obviously don't know best if they have issues like in OP's post.

It's like they take away your gun so you can't shoot yourself in the foot, then fires it at things it thinks are problems hoping not to hit your feet.

And what's a few toes to a company the size of google?
Close up (next island over) it was a low loud fast boom like dynamite going off nearby. Over in an instant. From a Facebook video. Really strange that it would sound that way.
"Regardless I agree with other comments to the effect that even if you are paying, you are often still the product!"

The anaylsis needs to go further than whether one is paying or not. IMHO.

It is not rare to see HN commenters who appear to believe that the act of paying some "user fee" to a "tech" company that willfully caters to advertising, devotes almost all of its resources toward catering to advertisers, and derives almost all its revenue from advertising services, is somehow meaningful.
Lack of efficacy for the risk (search Vioxx deaths) and antibody dependent enhancement both require significant time to observe.

https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and...
Just because they aren't publishing the location in a blog post doesn't mean they are keeping it secret. It's simply not relevant info.
There are a lot of them for Windows... should I then trust that linux is as secure for government use as Microsoft systems are?
It's the database that is being hit(multiple times probably) every page request. typically you would add a caching layer to wordpress so that each url would get cached for N minutes so you don't need to do the expensive rendering each time.