skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a reasonable list of things a reasonable person might have grievances about.

With these types posts in general, keep in mind that they are "personal lists" -- meaning that other people might feel differently, and that's OK.

The context of the tweet that motivated this was "how can things be improved", and lists like this help (if not for rust, then for whatever comes after rust).

To pick one thing (mostly at random) to comment on:

> It might have been better to call `unsafe` blocks `trusted` blocks.

This is a thought I've often had myself. The name `unsafe` is not wrong, per-se, but it can sometimes have the wrong connotation
architecture optimized assembly?
Indeed, true restoration involves investment in forest engineering and returning to more indigenous ways of life.

I was recently on the Amazon with relevant scientists and activists. There's a lot of work to do and little financial incentive.

If you're wondering, the best thing you can do as an individual, besides getting involved in international politics, is go do an eco-tour (or otherwise support that industry), provided you don't think the benefit is offset by the plane flight.

The people doing the deforestation need alternative sources of livelihood.
Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers
Depending on how you're measuring it, video generation will come in less than 12 months, or it's already here.

- In the Video Diffusion paper[1] they generate 64x64 16 frame videos, model is not released, but an open source implementation using an imagen-like pipeline exists[2], no model is available publicly.

- The CogVideo paper[3], which is essentially a huge transformer model, can generate 480x480 videos, the code for the paper and models are open source[4], but be warned that you need a huge GPU like an A100 to run the damned thing.

The future of text to video generation will probably be video diffusion, i.e. using 3D UNets, or more likely a much more optimized version of a UNet. Improvements on diffusion models are happening on a daily basis, and we're probably a couple papers away from having a breakthrough in efficiency that we can generate good looking videos on a high end GPU.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03458
[2] https://github.com/lucidrains/imagen-pytorch/tree/main/image...
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15868
[4] https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo
A simple example of a bad test is one enforces an incorrect behaviour (i.e. 1 + 1 == 3). I can't see how a language could improve this situation. Is it possible it is the community as opposed to the language itself?
Then you couldn’t use it to browse any of the existing web…
Apple Shares List of 12 Features Affected by WatchOS 9's New Low Power Mode
Of course I agree that there is no written constitution, I said as much above. But there _is_ a constitution. Constitutions do not have to be written, unless you think otherwise?
It does a pretty good Mario
Ooof hadn’t thought of that, entirely possible
So we can already make video. But the "authentic-looking" part is going to be quite a bit. Even current face work still has a lot of issues that are a bit more subtle. The diversity in a whole scene is higher. Then also you'd need convincing voice deep fakes, which does exist. But then you need to integrate this and/or the lip syncing into the prompts (totally doable). Right now peopel are trying to smooth variance between frames.

I'd suspect we'll get something 360p-480p quality in <2 years (definitely less than 5). Idk, is 24 months "a matter of months"?
No? The imperative tone doesn’t sway me. There are few and poor reasons to “strongly prefer” plaintext. It’s just an aesthetic and personality choice. Which almost no one does.
I wrote an EDI parser from scratch some years ago (2 to 5, really don't remember). Almost until the end I kept second-guessing myself. It all looked so flimsy.

Eventually I made a second parser that utilized a parser-combinator library (the first one was hand-rolled) and devised extremely detailed property tests that I ran against both parsers. Only then did I feel confident.

Naturally, in production the code crashed on the second day because OF COURSE the senders didn't obey the EDI[FACT] spec and had quirky deviations from it.

Shit like that makes people retire to the mountains and never touch a computer again, man.
The Hebrew language Nespresso site pops up a browser dialogue "you have unsaved changes" every time one tries to browse to another page. The dev team is aware of it, but "the site only supports Google Chrome" so they don't fix it.
https://www.nespresso.com/il/he/
Isn't one of the main uses of JS to get the contents of elements on the page? That "97%" and "100%" would be clearly evident.
"There simply aren't enough people, or enough space to do so."

The people part is the issue. The teachers I know hate the bureaucracy and policies. Private schools seem to be better at hiring, even when they pay less. Dealing with certain parents is a nightmare too.

If you have a classroom made for 25-30 students, it wouldn't be too hard to partition it in half, then have two instructors leading each half of the room.

I went to a robotics class and a game design class as a kid and they both had something like 20 students with two instructors. It went fine. Sure some of it was introductory instruction, but then we'd build our own stuff as individuals or teams. So there might not need to be much reconfiguration at all.
It doesn't matter whether or not the use case is "legitimate". The software must obey the user. If I tell the software to process the image of a bank note, that's exactly what it should do. Without complaining, warnings or refusal.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
It's always worth a try. My father on the east coast reported similar excellent accuracy for hyperlocal precipitation forecasts from AccuWeather, but I've found the rain forecasts in TX little better than guesses (often going so far as to fail to predict what the rainfall will be in 15 minutes, much less in a few hours).
Same, but since 2010 on iPad. When Dark Sky got popular, I looked at it, but I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I'm sure the data is fine, but it is not an attractive app by any means, the graphics all look washed-out, and the data presentation is nothing special. Everything needed for local weather is provided by that free hourly dashboard on weather.gov. Because it is slick, I also use RadarScope on rainy days, and not as often for checking wind I'll use windy.com. On CLI I use py-metar to grab weather data from nearby NOAA stations, but I get those station IDs from weather.gov
Like Begich Towers in Whittier, AK?

See https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/begich-tower...
I tried that the first time I heard about the EURion constellation[1] a few years back. Printed fine. It was a Brother printer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Given how insanely high the bar is in creative industries, I’m not sure how deep a purely AI generated graphic can succeed
It helps with nausea and pain, both of which are symptoms pregnant people experience.
I'd get it for Linux if it was all free range organically programmed GNU GPL3.0
Using any Photoshop tool still requires some work. AI is an order of magnitude more multifaceted and autonomous. What happens when we realize that AI art generators consistently and instantly bring forth better contributions than what we can make ourselves over a much larger period of time? The artist will look at their paintbrush and wonder what the point of holding it is when the drunk genie is doing much better on their own. There will still be artists, but there will be space only for the most exceptional of them.

Art software is similar to cruise control. AI art will in a few years become the equivalent of a fully perfected autonomous car that is safer than a human driver in all but the most contrived scenarios.
I think you bring a great point, creativity, ideation and making good decisions. More people means more ideas being bounced around, that could lead any one person to a solution which would have not happened otherwise.

But I think there's a cap to that as well, if you bring 10 people do they get over the 10 foot wall faster than 2 people would?

No they probably don't.

So from 1 to 2 you've got great added productivity, but at 10 you're majorly wasting resources.

That's where the other advice would kick in, getting over that wall won't get any faster, you can't scale beyond a point, unless you use other strategies:

1. Build better tools/frameworks, like say have a team build a ladder, now 1 person can get over the wall as fast as 2 people could prior.

2. Diversify your offering, have the other 8 work on other stuff that don't depend on getting over this wall.

I think that's all the ones mentioned on the article, but it be interesting to see if there could be more?

Now, maybe it takes 10 people to think about the problem of how to get over the 10 foot wall repeatedly and efficiently, at lower cost, for example to invent a ladder assuming ladder's didn't exist. I'll give you that, this is an interesting take.

But did it really take 10 people, or it's more that only 1 out of 10 people will come up with this great solution? And if so, you could find yourself adding 100 people with no one thinking of the solution and a competitor with only a single person might think of building a ladder. So what's the takeaway for scaling here?
This is a pretty reasonable list, one I resonate with (as an otherwise large fan of Rust).

I'll point out one that I think is a little less solid:

> Cargo.toml is capitalised, unlike most other development files.

This is consistent with Makefile, Gemfile, Pipfile, etc., meaning plenty of precedent. My understanding is that these files are capitalized to put them first in a directory listing.
A few things to learn from an API expert
If they do this, I will move the (substantial) portfolio I have there elsewhere.
Yes, the Hp elite dragonfly. I think the Pixel chromebooks haven’t been available internally for a while. I still use the Pixelbook I bought myself at home—it is fairly nice and light with 3:2 screen.
> People who accept an obviously fake printed copy of a banknote basically deserve it; it goes with their collection of wooden nickels.

Define "obviously". Black and white on copy paper? Sure. But color ink, on paper of the right color and feel? That's different. Forget the fibers and the holograms--we're not worried about people printing $20s and $100s to buy a high-end TV. It's singles and fives for groceries and household essentials that are the real pull. If a cashier is handed three fives and seven ones and has to spend two seconds scrutinizing each bill because one in ten people are trying to pass counterfeits they printed at home, that's going to slow things down.
> The tabaco and oil industry (and other huge non-sustainabe and dangerous business models) cultivated this trust issue over decades

There's this popular myth that nobody knew smoking was bad for you until the 1960s. My dad would laugh at this, saying when he was a boy (1930's) his fellows called them "coffin nails". Doctors then always advised their patients to quit smoking.

In the 1960s, I saw a smoker's lung on display in a bottle of formaldehyde. It was black and looked horribly diseased. Another non-smoker's lung was also there, it looked pink and normal. A doctor who ever saw a smoker's lung would have to be crazy to not conclude smoking was bad for your health.

It wasn't exactly rocket science.
The mysterious balancing stones on frozen lakes
During the review process of the Rust for Linux patchset, a common comment was "show us what a real-world non-trivial driver looks like in rust". Doing so was always part of the plan, but obvious took some time.

I don't know the exact goal/purpose of this new driver (does it aim to be used in production eventually?) But I suspect that a review on this driver code will help in validating or refuting or improving the work being done by the Rust for Linux crew
>The biggest insight I am gaining from this thread is how many misconceptions about the US are rampant.

Most of those spreading the nonsense here know that what they are spreading is false. It's mostly (not entirely) massive copium, because they have tried to get a US job and for whatever reason haven't been able to.

They know very well that European salaries don't compensate for the "guaranteed leave" that is, along with "free healthcare", the favorite citation for why it's ackshually more expensive to live in the US than in Europe.

That's not to say that there are those who sincerely prefer life in Europe for family, cultural, linguistic, or other reasons. But 90% of people here denying the naked truth about US paychecks and cost of living versus those of other advanced countries aren't coming from such perspectives.
I look at this differently. I see an intrusive restriction on the private use of a general purpose tool, and ask: is this intrusion necessary?

Do restrictions like this even serve as a road bump for real counterfeiting operations? Or do they exist to create a sense of ubiquitous surveillance? To lower the general public’s baseline expectations for autonomy and privacy? To drop another anchor that can be used to justify unrelated intrusions in the future?
> as far as I can tell, unless I’m an easy hire with experience in the stack being hired for - they have little interest in a “wildcard”.

What signals lead into your perspective?

If you have been explicit about taking lower comp for a more interesting role, you should be aware (external) recruiters are usually paid a % of your starting salary. So they would have no self-interest in helping you here.

My recommendation is to hang out where people are using tools you find interesting, then ask them directly about their employers. Try to find the internal recruiter, externals' incentives are not aligned with your situation in particular.
Pegasus: The Spyware for iOS and Android
The confusion is magnified by the fact that to achieve the results medical professionals achieve, you have to know how to wear them like they do.

One of the ways I read a certain now-infamous communication from a surgeon general was (a) we need the limited supply of n95s for medical staff (b) we think there are better measures the public can take to protect themselves and (c) we're not confident the public can wear them correctly.

(a) made sense, though there's always the temptation to think "maybe I too should have a few."

(b) can't get the virus if you're keeping away from people, or in a strict bubble. Same logic as abstinence/monogamy and STDs. Though the policy proved to be even less popular than extended runs of abstinence and monogamy, hence the inevitable interest in prophylactics.

(c) What? I was kindof insulted, personally. And thought that represented an insulting view of the public.

BUT after learning about fit testing, trying it on my own, and struggling to keep a consistent fit that passed a test.... yeah. I had to admit I was not a natural at wearing an n95. And as for the public, all of us have seen people wear masks sloppily, or pull them down to sneeze, or any number of other behaviors that entirely defeat the purpose. Who has confidence that most people would wear an n95 in a way that passes a fit test?

Of course, badly-fit n95s probably provide better marginal protection than well-fit cloth masks, so maybe they should be an acceptable public intervention when available, but I doubt they'd protect the public as well as they do medical staff that's learn to fit them.

Which makes the infamous announcement arguably correct, although it remains a communication failure. But then again, the more complex you make a communication, the more poorly it scales, and "masks work if you wear them correctly and here's how you determine this" might already be ineffective.
[Podcast] Christopher Manning: Linguistics and the Development of NLP
A conversation with Christopher Manning, Director of the Stanford AI Lab.
Yeah.

A strong enough signal will show in a sample of one.

With a correct model, cause and effect can be predicted without any samples (scientific progress often occurs this way).

And some people’s intuitions are remarkably astute. Albeit there are a lot of people who have incorrect intuitions and don’t know it.

A cannabis example would be strong paranoia after one sesh. More ingrained paranoia (qanon?) that I have seen linked to regular heavy usage doesn’t feel to me to be a stretch of the imagination.
We assume that the loss of inhibition will automatically make people more likely to interact. But what if a person would like to interact less in the moment, but feels compelled to do so via social rules? In this case, being less inhibited would make them less sociable, not more.
The two on here that stand out as things I agree with but don't see called out much are:

> allowing semicolons to be omitted after some expressions, like match, if/else, and if

This drives me up the wall. I know a lot of rust's aesthetic is there to make C++ programmers comfortable (I'm a recovering C++ programmer myself), but it would have been so much better if semicolons had been left out.

It seems like we put a semicolon on every line (except the ones mentioned above! But only if they're not subexpressions!) just to make the whole "you don't need to say return in the last statement" look clever.

> Confusion about whether to use kebab-case or snake_case for crate names I now lean to the former, but it's impossible to import snake case crates using kebab case, leading to an ugly mix in my Cargo.toml file.

I'm so tired of guessing which one I need every time I import a crate in Cargo.toml. Never mind that this is a blatant opportunity to make supply-chain attacks. I don't know why these are treated as distinct names in crate names, and if there are any conflicting crates out there in the wild right now they should probably all be forced to rename.

My personal pet peeve that doesn't come up much is the way magic impls around From/TryFrom/Into/TryInto conspire to make incredibly obtuse error messages about implementing TryFrom<T, Error=Infallible> or the like. I'm not entirely convinced having these 'helpful' impls is really worth it, at least not the way they were implemented.
Masks worked to protect agency budgets from oversight lest the public notice that Centers for Disease Control… didn’t.
I think that is why he asked the rhetorical "which masks?".
So which is better?
> there are many causes for anti-science sentiment

There are many scientists who infuse their scientific pronouncements with opinions and politics.
> A fire extinguisher large enough for a 500wh battery weighs 12 kilos - most people can barely lift that!

Almost everyone can lift that overhead. 90% of men and more than 50% of women can lift a bit more than twice that overhead. It's a common job requirement.

There would have to be something really wrong for an adult to struggle lifting 12kg. That's a large watermelon, and unlike the melon, the fire extinguisher got a handle.

Handheld fire extinguishers top out at that weight - because the vast majority of people will be able to use them and it's better to have two than make them any bigger.
Definitely. I've used iTunes Sync Library and iTunes Match since the day they were released by Apple. Never heard of Lala until today.
Do you have a citation for these claims about the debts? I've seen a lot of different disparaging claims about figures in American history, but I've got to admit this one is new to me, and I can find no citations through Google.
You should read the article. It clearly addresses that...
Is consciousness simply the art of being unpredictable?
I know very little about web engines, but I would be interested to know how this project is architected perhaps to supplant webkit for alternative browsers such as Vivaldi.
I would think that the French have better food
Project Veritas has been caught lying in their reporting (deceptively editing footage, misrepresenting court records, etc.) too many times for me to take them seriously.

Their wikipedia page is particularly damming, every allegation lovingly well-cited: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
It's very likely that realistic looking (to the level of Stable Diffusion) video will happen and tools to create it will be available within 12 months (maybe 80% likelihood).

What is likely to be missing is the ability to control that video in useful ways directly from prompts. There will be some type of direction, but as anyone who has spent time doing prompt-based image generation actual control isn't there yet.
Besides the EURion constellation, what other indicators do imaging software like this use to detect bills? Have any other indicators been made public yet?
Six Simple and Useful PostgreSQL Features that I wish I knew when I started
well - that explains like half of my childhood friends growing up.

Anxious, ADHD, depression, …

They were on a laundry list of SSRIs and mood stabilizers and they were only 15-17 y/o
This is incredible. Unlike sql injection, LLM-injections will not be easily solvable.

Any code that is written to "sanitize" an input will either need to be less "intelligent" than gpt3 or at least as intelligent.

If it's less intelligent, that means a sufficiently complex prompt will escape the sanitization (just up to a hacker to figure it out, which will happen with enough time).

If it's as intelligent, the same attack could be done on it.

So we'll have to construct LLMs that are more intelligent than gpt3 to prevent this. Maybe that could be done by gathering and fine-tuning on a lot of negative examples of "dangerous" prompts (very manual process). Maybe it could be done with a different neural-net architecture, but that hasn't been discovered yet (and will probably have its own problems). Maybe it could be done with a second model observing the output of the first model, but that's like creating a ROP slide from sequential buffer overflows.

This problem will rapidly approach the same complexity as the AI alignment problem- how do you prevent a smart AI from voluntarily destroying humanity (or from voluntarily leaking its source code).

We'll probably need some breakthroughs in understanding the internal structure of LLMs before this problem can be fully solved.
Relatedly, my company discovered the same issue and published this paper preprint about it 7 days ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02128 I'm glad this issue is getting attention.

[Edit: Thank you simonw for adding a citation about the paper in your blog post! Very kind of you.]
I would love to have a printer with built-in counterfeiting though. :-)
Tell HN: Dear game hardware designers, make a nice D-pad or none at all
Rant:

I know it’s not the 90s and no one uses dpads outside of fighting/retro games. I also know not a lot of games even make primary use of dpads anymore.

It looks like Microsoft got it right this time, but I still see a piping hot stream of shitty, blister inducing, injection molded plastic crosses that leave me in awe. Why depreciate your product, why steer people away?

If it’s cheap 3rd party garbage, fine, use buttons. Most shooters make use of the d pad as an extra array of buttons anyway.

Sincerely, someone who hasn’t been a serious gamer since 2007 and is very confused.
Recommend windy.com
If you're successful, you can just hire people to help build out this custom internal infrastructure.

If you're not successful, then you won't have any scaling problems.
> No support for using something like separation logic within Rust itself to verify that unsafe code upholds the invariants that the safe language expects.

I think this is something we might see in the future. There are a lot of formal methods people who are interested in rust. Creusot in particular is pretty close to doing this - at least for simpler invariants

https://github.com/xldenis/creusot
Uprooting your life to move to another country is a big decision, and while your country might not be perfect, there may not be a country that treats immigrants as well as your original country does native citizens, or if there is, it might not be easy to get in to.