skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My wife bought a 2008 iMac for $50 but never used it. One day my laptop broke and I put Manjaro Linux on the iMac, hoping I could use it for a few days knowing it would suck. The screen was nice but it only had 6 GB of RAM, a spinning hard drive, and a Core Duo processor.

Thing is, I still use it all the time. It is the computer I use most often for Zoom and Teams. Web browsing is very good. I use the latest releases of Firefox, Brave, and Edge. Much of my earlier learning around Docker and Podman was on that iMac. It worked great.

I find that older computers work better than underpowered but current stuff, at least with regards to price performance.

The one way that old hardware is worse I suppose is in power usage.
My guess is you haven't worked anywhere where ML is a part of the core product. think e.g. search and recommendations.
What does "our generation" mean? 40 something americans?
>> I want to do "It+1" at the very least, more likely "It+2".

I've managed to do "it+0.5" at a couple places. Most companies are only interested in doing "it" by the book and miss out on so much. At my current place I developed a couple +1 concepts that handle issues automatically, gave presentations with relatively little code needed, got a "hey that's cool" but was never asked to actually integrate those into the product or have someone closer to it integrate it. They're very happy to just do "it", never mind that we have issues that may well stem from not taking "it" to the next level.
But verifying users doesn’t require publishing their names on their profile page.
Tangential, but twitter's customers aren't their users, it's their advertisers. The users are the product.
Language models can only parrot back their training input. There's no generality to them at all; the best they can do is some crude, approximate interpolation of their training examples that may or may not be "correct" in any given instance. There are things that the typical AI/ML approach might be genuinely useful for (e.g. generating "probable" conjectures by leveraging the "logical uncertainty" of very weak and thus tractable logics) but mainstream language learning is a complete non-starter for this stuff.
They probably shouldn't show "follower counts" publicly.
Avoid consumer cyclical companies.
Also there's a lot of research into musical training however this doesn't mean that playing sports or video games can't have similar (or potentially even better) benefits.
Just because Go doesn't have a consistent API for file stuff, does not make it 'not simple' it makes it inconsistent. It is still simpler, and easier for me to understand ALL of the Go code on screen, than it was for me to understand just that rust function signature, and all the stuff in the paragraph I posted.
Introducing Proton Calendar for Android
As a guy who follows sports it's really baffling to me how with politics there is not one iota of self-criticism among the political party voters and especially among single issue voters.

Like, sure maybe Twitter and all social media are part of a giant conspiracy, but had Republicans presented Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio as the nominee in 2016, there are 70% chances are they'd still be in the WH.

In sports you first focus on the low hanging fruit which is the stuff that you can control, this is why Trump's friend and legendary coach Bill Bellichick has 8 SuperBowl rings.

If you are at the SuperBowl and field a QB which lasts only one half then having referees which penalize you becomes much less relevant.
When you identify the primary reason why corporations and governments never built built a centralized smart contract platform that's general purpose, open source, cross-border and uncensored, then you will know why decentralization is essential.
The author understand the usefulness of blockchains. The point is that there are technologies which are components of the blockchain that are really all you need to implement a lot of use cases. For ex pub/priv key alone.
How if they are planning to mine and sell data?
Go always seems to be to be designed to be simple for the compiler (which, to be fair, has benefits: fast compilation is useful in a compiled language, to keep code-build-test cycles short) more than the programmer.
I think it's different than outsourcing that was trendy years ago. I also recall those days and the gloomy predictions.

Canada doesn't have the problems you listed. Central America has the language barrier but good devs are likely to have good English. The reason I'm thinking it's different is that now I don't see that companies are looking for cheap labor. They are looking for talented engineers and willing to pay them well, but still far below what they would pay for a similar talent in the US, esp in expensive regions. Top talent will always be OK, no matter where they are. Everyone else might have a problem.
The legal system is slow
Fwiw, another accredited online educational program, with interaction with others, is
BYU Pathway Worldwide and associated programs. It requires a Church affiliation but not necessarily membership (I think). Tuition is much lower, vastly lower to students in poorer countries; it has accredited bachelors programs (through BYU-Idaho, but all online; like IT, business, others), and is also suitable for those who need to first become qualified for a university (like learning English, which is used in curriculum, and other basic skills), and then provides that university (and then tuition is again lower still, last I checked). I believe it also provides mentor-like contacts who encourage students to not give up. I think it is not self-paced, but has semesters.

More info is in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYU_Pathway_Worldwide

...and https://www.byupathway.org/
The funny thing about some apps is they enable different strategies based on the hardware available. It's why a Chrome tab will use 1GB of RAM on a beefy machine but also run fine on a a machine with 1GB total RAM.
I assume Mr. Musk waived his right to any due diligence as part of his agreement with the Twitter board.
Where did they find a beach where drones are allowed to fly? especially given that the video seems to be shot in SoCal. I mean if you have you own private beach then of course a small drone would be a nice addition to it :)

With civilian drone use pretty much de-facto banned, the military seems to be the only blossoming domain. One can imagine how a soldier sends a small drone to look around the corner and/or into the windows of the higher floors in a city battle like Mariupol.

I remember seeing bunch of years ago guys in Stanford testing very small drone which would be parked by wrapping itself around your arm, and flying/following you on command.
You don't need any of the blockchain stuff to support logging in to websites with a public key. That's straightforward with any old public-key cryptography scheme like PGP. In fact, from what I can tell, most of the "web3 login" implementations are doing little more triggering your wallet extension (e.g. MetaMask) to sign a unique message with your private key to prove you control an Ethereum address. It works well, and I rather like it, but the login part itself could just as easily be an old-fashioned PGP key pair.
I'm surprised by the number of comments that have mentioned the same situation, which I myself am also in right now - main machine is broken and I had been using it as a pi-hole and print server. It makes me even rethink the whole idea of using the pi for even tasks like that. Maybe better to just get e.g. old x86 hardware instead of the pi.
> If you are earning next to nothing and are doing 200 widgets per minute a 10 fold salary increase wouldn't change the cost of the product per customer. If there also is a large profit margin the desire to keep wages down is more of a fetish than the sensible choice it is at the other end of the spectrum.

It depends on what portion of the cost of production is materials vs capital costs vs labor. You're presuming that labor is a small portion of the cost of production, which is probably true if you're selling them for $10. If it's an extremely low cost item, like plastic washers, labor can still be a significant part of the production costs. It also depends on whether you carry that down the supply chain, since part of your material cost is someone else's labor costs.

> Nursing care services are the most intensely used hospital services by acute hospital inpatients yet are poorly economically measured

This doesn't strike me as utterly insane. Most treatment prices should include the cost to have a nurse deliver it. The tiers of rooms should roughly approximate the amount of nursing care required outside of treatments. It's not perfect, but it might be better on the net than having nurses spend more time on the patient chart to add billing items.

I.e. it might be overall better to not have a specific line item for "rolled patient over to prevent sores" that the nurse has to enter in, and then billing has to argue with insurance about whether a roll was needed or not. It might be cheaper for everyone to figure out the average cost of providing nursing per tier, add a profit margin, and charge everyone that.

I'm not saying it is better, but it seems at least plausible.
Weirdly enough, I like that vibe about snapchat. They are the "cheaper" social media. Nothing is meant to last, and everything is meant to be low key, low stakes, "fun". You're not there to read articles or argue with people, just check out some random memes, dogs, attractive people, whatever and move on with you day. /2c
It seems unfortunate that the interior of Shackleton crater is just very slightly too warm for a "high-temperature superconductor" tape to work. To work well, you would want it another 20 degrees colder.

Equipment in the crater could be powered at all times by solar panels stood up on the rim.
Mostly agree, but missing the point that there are non-decentralized blockchains that operate like an open standard seem to failed to gain any traction (or at least awareness) since 2019, to name some: Hyperledger Fabric, Corda R3.
"Small business that wants to behave like large business"

You mean, exist in the 21st century and sell or conduct any kind of business online? Is that a big business?

It's a well recognized fact that legal and accounting complexity, aka red tape, is an inhibitor of small business growth. Derisively sneering at anyone who doesn't want to do the "necessary work" or "behave" is a troll opinion, and not particularly rational.
The IPFS link does not like to the IPFS technology but to some insurance premium financing site (“IPFS”).
The one thing I think that people should get rid of is the use of the word 'decentralization' in regards to blockchains. They're just about the most centralized thing there is because they create a global, ordered and absolute record of transactions. It's one big old state machine distributed across a lot of hardware. Which explains why they're so slow. Ethereum I think used the term 'world computer' at one point, which is apt.

And the author is right that very few people need a world computer. Imagine if you send your grandma a message but but every time you do so you check in with the rest of the world for confirmation. That's 'apps on the blockchain'. Local state is fine and global consensus is irrelevant for probably 99% of what you do.
Line goes up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Ask HN: When does ProtonDrive come out of beta?
I've been waiting so long for ProtonDrive to arrive to users who don't want their beta offering. According to this article[0] it's still in beta, but no mention of a proper launch date for when it comes out of beta.

Anyone have an official launch date so I can prepare to use it ASAP?

(I don't want to try their beta version BTW)

[0] https://protonmail.com/blog/proton-drive-early-access/
I'm not recommending that all server-side logic be inside of that single ActivityPub server.

What I would like is to run a "dumb" ActivityPub server that would hold all my activity and federate, by receiving and sending arbitrary JSONLD documents. This would be my only identity. Then, other servers like PeerTube, Gitea, etc can talk to that server for their federating needs.

When I stumble on a video post on Mastodon, I would have a link to open it in my PeerTube instance, where peer-to-peer video transmission would be implemented; but whether I retweet or reply from Mastodon or PeerTube, the same identity would be used. When I stumble on a merge request on Lemmy, I would have a link to open it in my Gitea instance, where Git repositories would be supported; but whether I upvote it from Lemmy or approve it from Gitea, the same identity would be used.

This would fit the narrative of the video.

> Imagine if you could share videos, events, instant messages, microblogs with the whole universe. Imagine if it didn't matter which planet you came from.

> Your login on any of those services allows you to interact with a whole diverse universe.
> Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political
polarization

Exercise can cause injury.

For entrenched, intellectually isolated people with rigid minds,
exposure to opposing views is going to upset them even more. At least
initially. But regular, moderate exercise builds health. Once that
initial antagonism has abated, regular exposure to challenging ideas
will build mental health and depolarise groups.
why don't you tell us?
> George W. Bush Sr.

George Bush Sr. is George H.W. Bush. There is no George W. Bush Sr. (at least, not a famous one that was president of the US.)
Honestly as someone living in Cali, I appreciate not dealing with the constant buzzing noise from 10 different tourists flying drones within earshot of me while I'm enjoying the beach.

Nothing ruins a vibe like BBZbzbzzbzzzZzbzbzzzzzzzZzzzZz
To be clear, I'm not saying that the draining of Lake Erie necessarily means that Lake Huron/Michigan or Superior would drain too. If that were to happen, the two events would be quite separate and likely separated by millennia. Lake Erie's water level will lower when/if the Niagara river erodes all the way back to to the outlet of Lake Erie, and Lake Erie will become a river, when it erodes all the way to the middle of the lake (actually the deepest part). Obviously, this event, should it happen at all, would be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years from now, assuming that climate doesn't change such that the Great Lakes dry up, or that there isn't further geological activity/uplift. Would this draining of Erie result in a catastrophic flood when it does happen? I don't know, I suppose it depends on the erodability and topographic character of the outlet area at the time. But it is surely the case that the draining of Erie (i.e. the reduction in its capacity to store water) would result in an immediate but temporary increase in the flow through the Niagara river, as it conveys the regular flow from the upper Great Lakes as well as the additional storage loss of Erie. Once the river eroded to the deepest part of Erie, however, flow would resume to simply be controlled by the water delivered to the river by Huron. Would the river continue to erode to the outlet of Huron and result in a similar draining of the upper Great Lakes? I don't know, but I do know that would be over extensive geological time scales and that there is plenty of opportunity for climate change to have a great impact on this possible scenario--Erie draining is much more immediate by comparison. However, something that many Canadians like myself don't often realize, because we live in the country with the greatest number of lakes, is that lakes are generally not that common worldwide. They represent temporary landscape features that are reflective of a relatively recent (in geological terms) disturbance...in the case of most of Canada's lakes, a recent glaciation. Lakes eventually drain as their outlets are eroded down and fill in by sediment delivery from upstream. And the same will likely be true of all of the Great Lakes over a long enough time. There is nothing permanent about our landscapes and that's exactly what makes Earth so awesome as a planet. It's dynamic and varied and today's 'great' lakes can be tomorrow's dry desert plains. We may well be devastating this planet, and its ecosystems specifically, but in the long-view, we'll likely be nothing more than a blip in the history of Earth, and one that it will erase most evidence of after enough time. I don't know why, but there is something reassuring about that thought to me.
Same background for me and I'm quite literate with vi and emacs if/as needed, so now Alpine (email client) and nano are one-for-one replacements.
Core dumps, feedback loops, and a game of telephone
Why would there be deep underground salt mines from 400 million years ago?
Isn't clicking on "connect your wallet" the thing that all the people that have lost their NFTs or coins to a scam URL have done that they shouldn't have done?
I'd argue that PoS/PoW have nothing to do with the blockchain concept, and instead are a way of building virtual currencies on top of it. The easiest way (for me) of thinking of a blockchain is a distributed merkle tree (or a patricia trie, if you're into ethereum or whatever), with a consensus mechanism. That's it. What you put there is your own responsability - so if you decide to create a virtual currency and either reward work or reward possession, its up to you - but that's on top of the "blockchain" concept.
And I've actually came across some pretty valid use cases - one good example is that blockchain could be used to enhance resiliency on systems like certificate transparency - that are already a centralized, versioned sparse merkle tree.
99% of things that claim to need a blockchain can do exactly the same thing with https://opentimestamps.org/ which uses an existing blockchain to do decentralized "trusted timestamping".

The remaining 1% are problems that need to solve the double-spend problem.
There’s Taler: https://taler.net/
"It," "It+1," "It+2," etc. can definitely be delivering software.

But that's just one "It" on the continuum. It could also be grant-writing, selling, managing, singing, shredding guitar, racing minibikes, whatever.

In any given case, there's always some threshold of what an "effective It" is. It may not be a clear-cut line. For example, research is very "fuzzy," and a researcher that can do "It," may be excellent at failure, because their job is to poke holes in theories.

In fact, if the company is all about getting A-round funding, then folding up the card tables, and moving on, someone that "looks like a shipper" could be an effective "It."
> I have a dumb question. Most publicly traded companies rarely issue new shares. Why does a company care about its share price?

If a company doesn't care about share price, the shareholders will elect a board of directors who will install a management team that does care about share price.
> no idea why people get so worked up about character counts

Think of reading code as mining ore. If the ore is rich, you don't have to mine and process nearly as much of it to get the material you need. If the ore is poor, you have to invest extra effort to mine more ore to get the same amount of refined material.

You might think Go is easy to read because lines are individually very easy to read, but Go code is so information-poor (partly because of error handling boilerplate) that you have to read a lot more lines of it to understand what a system does compared to other languages. Quantity has a quality all its own, and Go does bog you down with its sheer line count. I'm not one who often appeals to this argument, by the way; the only other language I've done significant work in that I would apply it to would be C. It's very common to write bloated, information-poor Java code, but that is still a choice, even if it is the most popular one.

My reaction looking at Go initially was that it was exciting to have a fast, simple language designed for writing services. My reaction to reading and writing code of real applications has been that Go is badly suited for writing nontrivial application logic.

> how often one experiences exception traces when using an application written in Python or Java

Python and Java aren't particularly ambitious standards for a 21st-century language.
This is not true about Keybase. They do not ever store your private key on their servers https://book.keybase.io/security

"Your private keys are only stored on your devices.
For extra security, your private keys are only stored on the device(s) you use Keybase on. They’re not even stored on Keybase’s servers. So if Keybase gets hacked, the security of your account isn’t compromised."
Fair enough to be skeptical. Some responses to your points:

> the bar to doing something useful in mathematics is extremely high

Ah but the bar to do something interesting in automated theorem proving is much lower. Solving exercises from an advanced undergraduate class involving proofs would already be of interest.

> Generating a good dataset of plausible and implausible next steps in mathematical proofs is a much harder problem.

There are thousands of textbooks, monographs, and research mathematical journals. There really is a gigantic corpus of natural language mathematical proofs to study.

In graduate school there were a bunch of homework proofs which the professors would describe as "follow your nose" : after you make an initial step in the right direction the remaining steps followed the kind of pattern that quickly becomes familiar. I think it is very plausible that a GPT3 style system trained on mathematical writing could learn these "follow your nose" patterns.

> problems you classify into "formal language translation" aren't even translation problems

Fair. Going from natural language proofs like from a textbook to a formal language like automatic theorem provers use has similarities to a natural language translation problem but it would be fair to say that this is its own category of problem.
I did. It never sounds like it's in front of me. It's not capable of making sound in such a way as so the sound feels like it is directly in front of me, it's always to the sides or behind me.

Maybe other people feel it, but I do not.
The fact is not that it now supports "xsel", the fact is a bug was fixed that prevented its usage.
Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15RTC22Z2xI
That is absolutely not my experience with academic PL work, as someone in that field. From my perspective, it seems like we're currently undergoing a renaissance of more principled approaches to resource management than GC (especially for non-memory resources), including work on substructural type systems, dynamic resource reuse (I'm thinking of FBIP here), and new ways to combine effects and resource management.
I don't see how there are 'sides' to this. Blasting a BT speaker with your music, which the majority of people aren't likely to enjoy because of the huge variety of peoples taste in music, is a uniquely selfish thing to do.

I don't know about you, but blasting my Spotify likes on a BT speaker in a crowded, and particularly an enclosed environment, would not be an enjoyable experience. I can imagine it's only enjoyable if one is sufficiently self absorbed enough to think that their music is universally enjoyed by everyone.
This sounds only slightly less irritating than the Datadog agent which has features on by default that are billed at the on-demand rate.
State of Kubernetes
Can you give examples of how this is true? I feel like the main government spending that made me more productive was some transit spending before I was born and their education spending. I feel like most government services aren't this.

Even things like health care, which arguably keeps me healthy enough to work isn't distributed in any sort of uniform way so the productivity increase from it isn't likely to match the land value tax increase.

I think there are a lot of things that can increase land value 22%. I think some of them might even raise average wages 22%. I think almost none of them will raise each individual wage by 22%.