skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I re-post the abridgement of the article, which got hidden, surely by mistake. I only included the salient parts for the chief point of interest, which is the employment of AI in weapons, specifically landmines. (The remainder was mostly about the movement ban against Professor Walsh.)

> I [Toby Walsh, Professor of AI at UNSW] was interviewed for a story about Russian weaponry in the Australian [...] The article reported my significant concerns about Russia’s use of the “smart” AI-enabled POM-3 anti-personnel mine in Ukraine. Such mines are banned by the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (informally known as the Ottawa Treaty or the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention). Russia is not a party to this treaty but 164 states are parties to it, including Australia and every country in Europe

> The POM-3 is a particularly barbaric mine, designed to cause maximum damage to humans. It’s a descendant of the German “Bouncing Betty” mine used in World War II. When the mine is triggered, an expelling charge projects the warhead roughly one metre above ground level, at which point the warhead detonates. The warhead is packed with toothed rings designed to harm vital organs in a target’s body many metres away. The mine is triggered by a seismic sensor that detects approaching footsteps

> Russia claims the mine is equipped with AI that can recognise friendly soldiers, thus minimising the risk of collateral damage. This is an absurd claim. The footsteps of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers will produce the same seismic footprint. No AI can tell them apart

> Russia’s wild claim illustrates a worrying trend where states will say weapons use “AI” to target combatants rather than civilians. Handing over battlefield decision-making to AI is a hugely dangerous proposition. And this is just one the many dangers of AI in warfare. Others include the lowering of the barriers to war, and the development of new weapons of mass destruction

From the New Scientist (page linked in the article):

> While the mines supposedly comply with international law, experts doubt whether they are any less dangerous to civilians

How can landmines even comply with international law...
I’m not getting the problem Anthony is trying to solve. I get that people are trying to keep him at bay, but what is he trying to do that they don’t want him to do? I get that he’s trying to identify pockets of innovation, but what will he do with those pockets?

It sounds like his game plan is to do “cto stuff”. But shouldn’t there be a more precise goal? Like picking some business metric and cause it to move in the right direction? Or define a new metric? Or introduce a fundamental new way for the company to do business? Once you know the specific problem you want to solve in the company, it becomes a lot easier to pick a strategy.

But maybe I’m just misunderstanding what the cto of a 30k person company does.
I think the best solution is having a few tactical comments. Imo the best setup for a project is:

1. Some high-level documentation explaining how the key systems work and interact conceptually, to give context.

2. Comments for anything non-standard (i.e. we're using some weird encoding here instead of JSON because of XYZ reason)

3. Comments for the tricky extra complicated bits

For everything else, well-written code following standard conventions and good naming practices is enough.

Also choose a statically typed language, so that your function signatures will give you a useful contract to work with, and it will mostly be pretty easy to trace the intent of your code.
Well AAPL shares kind of are a form of money used to pay compensation to its workers.
1. "Comments are bad" is bullshit.

Definitely put the comments in the docsting or equivalent for your language, not in the middle of the function.

The best place for comments is nicely grouped under (or above, an elegant C++ convention) the interface. If the function signature is 200 LOC away... the problem isn't the comments.

But they should be there.

2. People, need, diagrams. People NEED a picture.

At the minimum, the bare minimum, your application needs a high level and low level diagram explaining how it works.
The same could be said of a lot of modern art: it is heavily influenced/driven by the critics, not the enjoyment/pleasure/surprise of a more general audience (who just don't "get" it). There's a feeling that a refined taste is by definition not a popular taste, or even a learned taste, but instead must be exclusive to art and music schools.

I mean sure, I get that your atonal poem breaks with traditional tonality etc etc, and maybe on some intellectual level that is (was) a fresh move, but I don't _enjoy_ it, no matter how hard I've tried.
Who would hire a chef without trying their food?

And a surgeon needs accreditation from the state.
I respect your skepticism; exercise in VR is certainly not for everyone. If gym works for you and you have the time to go several times per week, great. Just sharing that VR works for me (and apparently some other hardcore users [2]).

FWIW, sweat is solved problem; there's plenty of silicone covers [1], sweat bands, etc. And the parent also mentioned of wearing glasses, but prescription lenses are widely available (I use these ones [3]).

I'm just puzzled by your comment of "doesn't mirror real world applications of your body"; as if boxing, squats and cardio in general weren't "real world" :)

[1] https://us.vrcover.com/collections/silicone-covers

[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/getsupernatural/

[3] https://www.framesdirect.com/virtuclear-lens-inserts-for-ocu...
They are neither smart, nor contracts. They are pieces of code written in an esoteric language running in world's most inefficient and expensive VMs where every single operation is billed to the user.
Even outdated comments I still find useful in that they tell me how things used to work, and why they used to work that way.

Which is important context for figuring out how it works now.
Totally agree: tests are the living documentation of usage!

And if the team is properly collaborating, they are linking issues and merge requests with commits, providing historical snapshots of the ever evolving context!
Theoretically, but humans are less reliable than a compiler at catching issues.
If you consider that Facebook bans around 5B accounts per year (https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissaholzberg/2021/03/22/face...).

At this point that's more noise than signal. Not ideal for you but I can see the problem. For whatever reason you met the bar for requiring more validation. If they had let you in then another N'000 fake accounts would have also passed the automated system. Someone else would be posting here, Reddit or Twitter explaining how Facebook had let in some bot and was posting fake and untruthful stories, on the internet no less.
They don’t because no matter how well my tasks are mapped to tasks it rarely reflects reality.

The only reason stuff gets done as it should it because me and my peers are responsible, and because we have a good understanding of what needs to be done, not because of how things are mapped in JIRA.
> avoid taxable events and gain leverage

This is a highly specialised use-case unlike a normal loan. And the collateral for this is as difficult to obtain as the cash you'd like to borrow in the first place. [EDIT: More difficult because the "loan" is over-collateralised!]

> There are plenty of critiques around Crypto but this isn’t one of them.

No. It's a perfectly good critique of how DeFi people abuse the word "loan".
> To get 100 affordable units into San Francisco is very very expensive.

What's insane is that 100 units is just two small blocks of flats. That I see hundreds of being built at the moment in my largish sized (<700k pop) city in central Poland, purely commercially with zero support from local government.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing Damon.
> content providers and adtech will turn about 10-15% of the population insane with far-right conspiracy theories.

I have some of these people in my family tree. Adtech, content providers, censorship, etc are all irrelevant. Those 10-15% are going to find their nutjob content no matter where it lives. The content doesn't make them crazy, they make themselves crazy by filtering their memetic exposure to stuff that confirms their biases. Kicking it off of youtube does not prevent them from finding it, it just confirms their suspicion that there's a conspiracy trying to stop them from hearing "the truth".
Google: "accept crypto payments"

For example:

https://bitpay.com/online-payments/
If you want to read my article, you can pay me 0.001 Nano (sub-second, 0 fee transaction), or you can pay me $0.001. Oh no wait, you can't pay me $0.001!
I did the same thing, with similar results: 17,398,525 points after 1100 years. It has to be pretty far into the habitable zone, though, and the dwarf star has to be in an uncomfortably-tight orbit, and timing probably matters a fair bit, too.

Putting dwarf stars on the outside produces some rather fun and funky orbits, though :)

EDIT: and I managed to accidentally (and disappointingly) produce a stable one with a far-orbiting dwarf star; 12,122,408 points at 1101.1 years.
There was a time window where they could get away with it. This time window seems to come to an end now.
> I must admit I feel quite a bit of irrational fury when this happens (similarly, when DNS lookups hang).

Neither of those reactions are in anyway irrational. In fact, they're not only perfectly reasonable and understandable but felt by a great many of us here on HN.
The Chinese government has committed horrible atrocities. The US government to this day has people locked for life in prison because they sold marijuana for the third time and were sentenced to life.

Prior governments worldwide sanctioned human slavery and collected taxes on slave sales.

You say illegal - but I say immoral
South Korea imposing exit ban on ex Terra employees
Magic: The Gathering was designed from the beginning as a Trading Card Game. Very importantly, it is a physical game, where the laws of physics prevent trivial copying of their cards, while the laws of copyright prevent them from stopping people selling the cards they bought.

There is also no way for someone to exploit a flaw in MTG and gain access to all of your cards to sell. Conversely, if someone exploited a bug to steal your WoW account and sell off your items for thousands of dollars, you would sue Blizzard for damages. Even worse, if you did something against their terms of service and they wanted to ban you, they would probably have to have some way to compensate you for all the items you would lose access to.

Further, WotC they actually do have problems because of this trading: they have had to create a list of cards they promise not to reprint, because of all the backlash from traders who perceived a re-print of Black Lotus as "flooding the market". Afterwards, they once wanted to still go ahead with a re-print of these cards with some special features, and again faced serious backlash and threats of lawsuits, so they backed down.
Nivea sensitive shaving cream? In the squeeze tube? I bought sooooo much of the back stock when they stopped making it.

Also: 11" MacBook Air. Strawberry Shortcake SkinnyCow ice cream sandwiches. McCormick Perfect Pinch Tuscan Seasoning with Sun Dried Tomato.
Hey that's awesome thaks! Seems to have been there for decades. How could I miss this?
Here's an example of a very useful comment:

# using heapsort instead of quicksort
# because we care about the worst case

heapsort(data)

Code alone cannot tell the reader why heapsort is chosen, nor whether that's how the code should be. And tests are unlikely to capture this either.
Information is power, it allows you to make decisions with greater expected value on average.
Yes, Legato's first product was the Prestoserve NFS accelerator card (in 1989!).[0] NetApp's implementation mirrored the cache across two servers in a cluster with an interconnect.

NFSv3 "fixed" the write issue by adding a separate COMMIT RPC:

"The write throughput bottleneck caused by the synchronous definition of write in the NFS version 2 protocol has been addressed by adding support so that the NFS server can do unsafe writes. Unsafe writes are writes which have not been committed to stable storage before the operation returns. This specification defines a method for committing these unsafe writes to stable storage in a reliable way."[1]

[0] https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1225665691472166912
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1813#section-1.1
Sounds like a pretty depressing POV to me
I think 'general purpose' search engines are often doomed to fail, and this extends to 'web search engines' (which, in reality, do not search the full web and are NOT general purpose.)

This list makes a great list of attempts at general purpose search engines (I would include DDG and Bing) which ultimately fail and are not what the masses want.

There's also precedence for how only domain-specific search engines are valuable / make sense these days: Google itself is shifting to ML-based answers (attempting to build the holy-grail of general-purpose search engines), and whatever you do isn't going to beat Google at that - even Google hasn't been successful at it yet.

Examples of real-world domain-specific search engines today:

* Image, YouTube, Maps search

* Amazon search

* Code search (Sourcegraph, cs.github.com, cs.opensource.google, etc.)

* Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn search

* Documents search (iCloud, Drive, etc.)

* Messenger search (Discord, Slack, Messenger, etc.)

It's really telling how Google has largely only achieved general-purpose search in their domains of data (a Google search turns up YouTube videos, Maps locations) but isn't even complete in that area (Drive, images, etc. don't show up in Google results)

General-purpose search is simply non-viable these days due to (a) data silos and (b) you need to have domain specific search to provide an edge (e.g. regex for code search, or drag-n-drop an image for image similarity search)
Latest Chrome and Firefox both do.

Make sure the server sends h3 with the alt-svc (http) header and adds h3 to the (tls v1.3) alpn. The browser may connect to h1 or h2 endpoints at first, then upgrading it to h3 for subsequent connections where supported (provided, the firewall isn't blocking QUIC).

https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-quic-http-23.html#rfc.s...
This happened to me years ago with Facebook.

I had never used Facebook during my earlier school years and wanted to jump on the (late) train to help socialliaze with other students at my uni.

I already hated Facebook at that time, but I seriously needed to make friends. I was planning never to upload anything of myself and only use it to check on social events and stuff like that.

I was reluctant to give them the usual personal information during registration, but those were generic info I already gave to lots of other websites so I complied.

After registration, I logged out and back in again, only to find out that there had been some kind of problem and that NOW I was required to upload a personal picture of myself so they can verify it really was me (despite me never having sent them any photo).

I knew they were trying to manipulate me with gambler's fallacy. I went this far giving them some info, surely it wouldn't hurt giving them a single personal picture?

This behavior felt so disgusting to me that I did not complete the account "recovery" process.

The funny thing is that if they had been honnest right from the start and required I uploaded a picture during the registering process, I may actually have used FB.

Reflecting back, I'm glad I did not use it. FB is a sinking ship that did more harm to society than good. And I did not need it to make friends at uni anyway.
What does CC BY-NC-SA actually mean when applied to the model? Are the .wav files generated by it considered CC BY-NC-SA as well or only software derived from it? Would I be allowed to use the output in say a Youtube video?

PS: This still points to the old AGPL license: https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models/wiki/Licensing-and...
This brought a smile, my father was a sales manager for Morton Salt. Growing up our family was flooded with gear featuring that little girl and her umbrella. As a kid I wanted no part of the brand merchandise. The single item that I used was a metal wastebasket my Dad gave me for my dorm room. Still have it decades later, it's a reminder of my family's history.

Morton Salt was a great employer until it wasn't. A young president decided to fire all the employees over 55. He reasoned they were too expensive and it would make room for younger employees that cost less and it would increase earnings. Raising the stock price would increase his compensation.

The young president was gone in a year after the stock collapsed. The company has been sold four or five times since and has gone from the industry leader to an also ran. My Dad was a few years away from retirement but serendipity reigned and he got another job and did OK.
I read the whole paper and the supplementary information, but nowhere could I find the list of zipcodes.
As someone who teaches CS at a reputable university, I can state with certainty that we graduate a lot of students who have no clue how to code.

As someone who used to do hiring for a small company, I can state that a lot of people who have degrees have no clue how to code.

Until our field gets the equivalent of a bar exam or NBME, each employer has to evaluate candidates on their own.
Be curious.

Never get defensive.
1) Kotlin just shipped an experimental wasm compiler with 1.7.0 that is not actively marketed at this point but starting to work. They are depending on a few feature flags in chrome to turn on experimental garbage collection and a few other things. Jetbrains decided a while ago to build on and wait for the standardized wasm functionality for memory management and garbage collection instead of shipping their own version of that (like blazor does). My guess is that once this stabilizes, a lot of other languages will start targeting wasm more actively.

2) Actually, wasm is showing up in a lot of js/ts applications as an optimization. Mostly developers don't even notice their npms are pulling in some wasm. For example react does this apparently. What is native is a pretty fuzzy notion these days. A lot of mobile apps are hybrids that lean heavily on embedded browser components.

3) IO gets done by the browser via native libraries. The Javascript facade for this is pretty narrow (browser fetch API basically). If you are manipulating lot of data (e.g. graphics) in binary form, having some native code with actual types is helpful.
Oh, nothing wrong with going with your gut and paying attention to the warning signs. But, "I briefly looked at these people from afar and immediately concluded they all only pretend to work and never accomplish anything" is just ridiculously arrogant.
If the correlation turns out accurate, that would explain why marketers use every possible tactics to collect data about who we are and what we purchase, as it could give them an indicator of which product will fail. Such profiling is already done for targeted advertising, although this way it means buyers are also finely categorized including data about their political orientation and other sensitive aspects of their life.

ps. I like a lot Cory Doctorow's articles; also Boing Boing was among my favorite sites in the early 2k; I'm saddened to see what it has become today: mostly a shop for overpriced crap. Suffice to say that after noticing my account was terminated during my long hospitalization in late 2020 with no warnings given, I didn't create another and removed the site from my bookmarks.
VR works for me today, for what I use it for. What on earth does it mean to "work for normal people"?
The solution is to just let it be. A why comment encodes the programmer's belief at the time. This is very useful.

Just because the comment is at odds with what the code is doing doesn't mean that the code is right. The code wins by force because the comment isn't executable.

Sometimes the comment is at odds with the code because the code should be the way the comment says. It's not that way because (1) someone changed it. Or (2) it never was that way; the comment is just wishful thinking.

If you want to know which of those two it is, you do the archaeology.
I’m not sure how much transcoding skills you need beyond ffmpeg; that’s what everyone uses.
You shouldn’t be waiting for them to come to you.

You should be spending hours each day looking for, reaching out, and networking.
> Could you expand a bit on why do you think Java has too many features?

I think you're asking for technical details, but I'm afraid I don't know Java well enough to do an objective comparison. I'll try with a subjective explanation or why I think so.

I've learned Go in 20 minutes following the Go Tour. Few months later, I feel like there isn't a single thing I don't know about Go. It's dead simple. When I open a Go repository, it's easy for me to get into the codebase, as all code is more-or-less the same.

I've learned Java back in high school, and to this day I don't feel like I "know" the language. I've tried reading some Java repositories, and every time I feel like there's some kind of friction - some implicit knowledge about it that I just don't understand.

Maybe it's just me, and I haven't spent enough time learning Java. But then again, I've spent even less time learning Go, and yet I have a much easier time using it. That's what I mean by "a very small language".
I do not usually use diagrams. Therefore... I'm not a person? :)
> "The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids"

> Is 4 hours the amount of time the candidate is being given to complete it, or roughly how long the employer expects it will take? In the past I've generally come up with tests I know can be done in an hour or so (2 tops),

Have you actually given these assignments to some of your colleagues and asked them to complete and how long it took (including setting up the development environment ...)? People are notoriously bad at estimating time it takes someone else to do something that oneself is intimately familiar with. So I would not be surprised that the assignments took more like 2-4 h, if you add the additional time for context switching, organising to free your schedule etc..

> but allowed 24 hours, exactly because not everyone is going to be in a position they can dedicate those 2 hours to it right there and then.

I don't think the GP was implying that the assignment was to be done right there and then, where and when would you do those 2 h in their schedule?

> Sure, those that did take the full 24 hours to complete I tended to apply higher expectations towards when judging,

So for someone with kids etc., who couldn't do the assignment straight away you actually expected more than 2h worth of work? To me that's already a red flag that you don't respect peoples life-work balance.

> but at the end of the day it didn't make much difference - the tests were only to weed out those that had clearly made a poor career decision (and there were surprisingly many of those, to the point we switched to testing before interviewing).

Unless you offer exceptionally high salary or are a highly desirable place to
work at, you are likely not getting the best applicants.