skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This website still works the same way it did 26 years ago
People are absolutely, 100% responsible for his death.

A young person near the beginning of their career got sentenced to 13 federal crimes, 50 years of imprisonment and one million dollars in fines, for downloading some PDFs of scientific articles.

It's not like someone asked him to delete the PDFs and he killed himself in protest. His life was ruined to make an example out of him.
> One of the people I showed this to had an interesting reaction. Their response was something like: “Hey! I like functional programming because I’m lazy and incompetent. It’s about all the things I don’t have to think about.”

I can perfectly imagine the most intelligent and smart people I've ever meet saying this same thing.
There are reasons to think we can do something about AI alignment, but there's zero chance of being able to get anywhere on that topic with dozens of hours of conversation. It's complicated.
Deliveroo quits Australia citing ‘challenging economic conditions’
I had my 7 years daughter on my lap during the launch (minutes before school here), I dropped a tear when the engines went on. It had something magical to it. Hope for the future.
> The reasons for its decline aren't particularly well understood.

another victim of the bronze age collapse that we can't explain fully.
This software is obviously intended to demonstrate or investigate the vehicles' locations and velocities leading up to a collision, not determine how damage occurs once the collision is in progress.
What are the changes that Mercurial has? I've read many times that Mercurial is easier but I've never seen the reasons. The times I've used mercurial (mostly to download a repo) it doesn't look that different, and other than the staging area weirdness I don't find git too difficult.
For the most part, if you can make money for other people, you can use that skill set for yourself.

Also, if you're somewhere where it's legal or at least accessible, it's not actually 100% true that at a casino the house always wins. It will take a little bit of effort to get started and you do need a small bit of infrastructure (but a cheap VPS or a SoC would actually do, depending on what you focus on), but it's not only possible, but can be fairly profitable to bet on sports. You do need some money in the bank to start, but there's a fair bit of resources on Github that can help you with data collection, analytics, etc. And places like the sportsbook subreddit or one of many forums out there where you can get a lay of the land.

I have no CS degree, hell, I haven't taken math since I failed AP Stats in 11th grade (tbf my teacher had a stroke in class 3 weeks before the test and died before he got to the hospital and it screwed up everyone and nobody in the class passed since this was just before we could bring cell phones to school, but still, that year was a wash). I haven't taken a formal math class since and I went to 8 more years of school after that. 3.5 years later I'm up 161 units which is just about viable (5%+ ROI is generally considered viable).

It's nice to work from home, hang out with likeminded fans in groupchats and reddit, and watch sports and make money. Now, it is still gambling. I've lost 32 straight picks in a row once - then Brentford beat City and made half of that back. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is a viable option if you are into sports, or statistics, or just hate making front ends as I do. Just don't buy anyone else's picks, they wouldn't be selling picks if they're actually making money.
Interesting article with some very useful information. This reminds me of a perennial, and mostly untouched back-burner project of mine :)

I've owned a Roland MC-202 Microcomposer for many years. It's an early '80s analogue monosynth with a two track sequencer that's a LOT of fun, but is infamously awkward to program. It allows you to dump sequences in an audio-based format to tape and load them back.

Rather than endure the slog of programming sequences directly on the machine, I've often dreamed of a workflow where you could program sequences in a UI, and then encode that information to generate an audio file that you could then load into the MC-202.

For example, it'd be relatively straightforward to create a web-based UI using HTML5 audio to create a simple sequence builder that you could then dump to some text/cell format.

The challenging part would be using this information to encode the final audio file. I've done a little research, and I read the MC-202 uses an encoding format that's similar to, but not the same as, the Kansas City Standard. One day I'll dive into this (hopefully it won't be too complex for me!)
It's a shame they use 'accident' for collisions. The motor industry back in the 1920s pushed hard for RTCs to be referred to as 'accidents' and to move blame away from the drivers responsible. It's even less appropriate for simulations where the collisions are explicitly designed.
> Linux is great if you don't value your time

Continues to be one of my favorite quotes. Yes I can spend endless hours getting arch installed with only the packages I want/need making sure it's totally optimized and then what, every single other part of my workflow now has to work around the limitations of linux. One day perhaps, but for now, macOS will do.
Stay away from headphones if you can or be very careful with them.
(Off topic comment) With the font you're using to write code it's sometimes difficult to read some of the characters. For instance, I had some problems to read the `getKey` method, since the `K` char is pretty blurred.
This is very hard and I wish I had a good answer, but all I can do is commiserate, really.

Most of the time when I try to float the idea that advertising is making someone sad so that they make purchases, that person tells me about the Great Products they discovered through instagram.
Has anyone successfully imported Linux kernel git into fossil? I'm interested to hear how that was done, my attempts never terminated...
That's the problem Twitter over engineers every single thing way too much.
> Falcon Heavy is not designed for crew. [..] On the other hand, this launched today.

The Orion capsule launched today did not include the ECLSS system.
GOOD: having large chunks of code that runs (mostly) without side-effects. As projects get bigger global state can trip you up, so try to keep it in check. That's where the real value of functional programming is.

BAD: copying data needlessly and turning trivial stuff into a functional pipeline that is impossible to debug. You want your code to read top to bottom like the problem you're trying to solve, if at all possible. If your call stack looks like map, fold, reduce you've introduced a ton of complexity, and why exactly?

Every programmer should understand functional programming. Higher order functions can be super useful. Immutable objects are invaluable for preventing subtle bugs. But if you feel the need to transform simple linear code into a map of higher order functions because of some abstract benefits you're probably doing stuff that's too easy for you and you should get your mental challenge from solving a more difficult problem instead.
downplaying the difficulties of on orbit refuelling.

This isn't kerbal space program... Fluid's gonna fluid dynamics in a 0g environment...
Microsoft uses monorepos, and you have access to Microsoft's tools! They chose to work with Git and amend it when necessary, just like Meta did with Mercurial.

A few years ago they had a Virtual File System extension for Git. Now it's a public fork of Git that is intended for large repositories (several hundreds of GB). It adds a `git scalar` command, see https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/HEAD/contrib/scalar/do...
The thing with first-mover formats (SGML and derivatives such as XML and HTML) is that they tend to stay around a long time. Where should an all-new doc format come from in this day and age anyway? The ecosystem of multiple parties adopting a format that led to XML and related standards has largely been abandoned by FAANG.

However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.
To know what the ROI actually was we'd need to know both the costs and returns of this type of work. Proposing a way to save $[redacted]M per year doesn't mean the ROI was high because it depends on the cost of having a kernel/compiler team. A team of specialised kernel hackers, in a place where you're competing against Google for them, in the Valley which already has high salaries, will be an expensive team to have. It's not going to be enough to deliver some improvements to the kernel scheduler that could save a lot of money if you only do it once. You'd have to yield massive savings like that every single year.

Technically to really understand this, you'd also need to do a calculation of what it'd cost to just outsource to a more specialized company like Red Hat or (for the JVM) Oracle itself, where the knowledge of what to do is already present and can be amortized over more companies. For example what was the ROI of Twitter writing its own compiler optimizations vs just making a deal to buy Graal Enterprise which has far more optimizations in it that improve Scala than the ones Twitter wrote? How much would their kernel changes have cost if they'd acquired them through a high-end support contract with a Linux distro company? How much money would they have lost from migrating to the cloud DB and suffering higher tail latencies, vs the added cost of writing and supporting their own database from scratch?

I don't know, maybe at Twitter the engineers were doing this sort of calculation on a regular basis, but my experience when I was at Google was that most engineers weren't doing so and indeed could not, because there was no solid basis on which to compare the cost of engineering time vs machine costs. Neither were exposed to the bulk of the staff in comparable units. Obviously at some level up the management hierarchy these costs started to become relevant and must have been taken into account but a lot of projects were bottoms-up and never did any sort of build vs buy cost/benefit tradeoff. In fact I don't recall anyone buying off the shelf tech or even proposing to do so, other than in the early days with Orkut and that was a maverick approach that was quickly rewritten onto internal platforms. In my time there I saw a document that compared the costs of using home-grown infrastructure vs open source commodity stuff exactly once (for Gmail) and it didn't even take into account salary costs yet the commodity stuff won by miles. Needless to say, that analysis was a very obscure document. They didn't need to care much, due to the prevalence of money and skilled engineers. Twitter doesn't have the same prevalence of money.

So overall this list looks to me more like a list of cool and fun projects rather than a concrete financial argument that it actually had a positive ROI. We just don't have enough information to know that.
No markdown links on HN (thank god)
I don't know anything about the movement, so can't comment on the earlier points.

>If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent.

Ive seen this argument many times on many different issues and I think it's almost always bunk. The classic example in Fusion research, I had friends when I was a student in the 80s arguing that if we only doubled fusion research spending we'd have unlimited cheap electricity by the year 2000, or others said that AI was the most important thing we could be researching at that point.

The problem is if you're too early on in the development process of a technology, you just flat out don't know enough about it to be able to make informed decisions. That early phase is about exploring avenues of research and figuring out what works and what doesn't, and that takes an irreducible amount of human time, diligence and hard work. Yes you need to invest in that, but above a certain threshold anything more you invest is almost entirely going to be wasted.

With general, or strong AI we only just barely have the beginnings of an idea of how to even do preliminary research on it. We're groping around in the dark for a starting point. It's far, far too early to start worrying about controls and management strategies for the end point of that research. I think there's very little chance much of that is likely to turn out to be relevant, and there's nothing to stop us focusing on that area once we do know what is going to be relevant.

I'm not saying ignore the issue, or don't think about it at all, but the idea that it's some urgent issue that we absolutely have to invest heavily in right now IMHO doesn't stand.
It's a Megaship from Consider Phlebas! https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Megaship

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.

A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Yeah. I'm one of those who are not convinced yet about functional programming being so great. In most cases what people call functional programming are inefficient shortcuts to lengthier functions, so I never got all that hype about it :\
Yeah. That was awful.

It occurs to me that anyone lost in the wilderness, due to reliance on incomplete navigation info, is probably not prepared for adventure.

I might not have thought to bring a satellite-capable Personal Locator Beacon (PLB), but I have my cell phone with me.
Or https://fable.io in the F# world, which is production ready and excellent
Yeah I just setup a new phone and the prompt is "would you like to enable location services?" then it lists the reasons it will use it, including weather, find my, etc. I typically hit disable there, and then manually enable it for the things I do want to give access to.
Had this same thought the other day. I got Lost Men In London (by Olaf Stapledon) from the public library the other day and kept wondering why the paper used for the pages was so thick compared to most books you buy nowadays.

I flipped back to the first few pages and saw that book was printer in 1934. I was amazed to realize the book was nearly 90 years old and held up really well. Sure the cover was worn and paged yellowed with the time, but it was in pretty great condition for something that old
Oral history. And before someone says anything, Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address, the 4 day one. Done every year. Still.
They Called Him a Gangster Out for Revenge. The Evidence? 6 Text Messages
Legitify-CLI tool that detects security misconfigurations in GitHub orgs
Red Team makes the rocket run on time. Loved that they brought them out.
Legacy data centres remain one of the biggest obstacles in the industry’s mission to meet net zero. While new builds are inherently more sustainable than traditional builds, embodied carbon within the construction phase, and in particular, the embodied carbon of the infrastructure components, are key areas all operators must address.
Sorry but this theory is false, I’ll explain. Hearing loss is caused by genetics or a consequence of infection. It’s a part of aging no matter how loud the volume of your earphones. Just some people get it worse than others.
I’ve been listening at max (100db+) volume, 5 hours a day, every day, since the mid 80’s. I did recently lose some hearing to an infection in my left ear. I’m not playing down the severity of hearing loss, you don’t know the value of what you have until you lose it. When hearing loss does happen, there’s no cure. I took steroid injections through the eardrum, and orally, and a handful of other drugs but there is no effective treatment.

The loss of happiness from not having music is just incalculable. But I would in a moment give up all my money and possessions to get back music.

Anyway, what they’re blaming on loud music is a consequence of genetics or infection.
Yeah if this thing ran on bunker fuel it would be utterly awful for the climate, in terms of per passenger emissions.
What made EV-as-an-industry financially feasible is the advancement in lithium battery technology, which by itself is fueled by the growth of the smart device industry. It's the parts that were changed, not the design of EV. Any details in today's EV design is optimization made for the sake of competition, and have nothing to do with the modern form-factor, if there's any. (It's still the same motor-connected-to-battery from (probably) early 1900s.)

The actual achievement should look like how Apple nailed the modern smartphone form-factor. Hardware-wise, LG did it first with their Prada phone, but Apple polished it with matching software and UX. Even though each component was already explored by others, Apple still had to come up with a working combination. That's an achievement.

Anyways, back to Tesla. Tesla didn't really achieve anything about EV. The real achievement of Tesla is car-as-smart-platform (which engulfs the entirety of self-driving). AFAIK, this is difficult on ICE cars due to mechanical and business reasons, but Telsa could avoid them by building on EV. Now this is a real new thing. IIRC, this is also what Elon has always been emphasizing. It's more than just an EV company.
Unfortunately, it didn't help to convince me either.

For me the question still remains: how is any of this better than good ol' reliable `for` loop?
Our moral intuitions are developed for dealing with actual cases that we are actually experiencing. If you showed up with a fire hose and found that a bus full of X people and an empty community theater were on fire - it would not even occur to you to save the theater. You would save the screaming people who are begging for help.

One way to think about effective altruism is that it's trying to get you to apply whatever moral intuitions you would use in a concrete scenario to an abstract scenario. To any individual apart from it, it's abstract to know that mothers in some poor country can't adequately nourish their children, or that mosquito nets reduce malaria deaths, and so on. But, the reality is that those people are actually real, are actually suffering, and actually could be helped. If you take that message to heart then it won't make sense to send your charity to the community theater - by all means, send the theater money if you want, but it's a selfish thing, not an altruistic thing.
Its greatest strength I see is its simplicity. OOP gives a lot of latitude to overcomplicate solutions, and I've found it tends to obscure more obvious solutions to certain problems, e.g. reaching for inheritance to modify behaviours instead doing it by passing functions as arguments, especially among less experienced team members.

The biggest problem in software development is the slow down of value output over time caused by accumulating complexity. Anything that can help keep complexity down is a big win for long term value output.
How do you know the phone doesn't have multiple levels of root and you're only breaking the topmost one?
I played the first second of that and my dog went insane. Now I'm wondering if I can sequence my dog with this.
With the barrage of Astronomy articles that have been hitting HN front page of late, perhaps we should start asking, "Is it Aliens yet?"
It's an astonishing article. It seems to reveal a hidden world that I have no knowledge of.

I don't know how to absorb that many of my colleagues and even supervisors are taking speed. Like, what percentage?

Honest question: are you all on Adderall?
And that is considered damaging the trash can?

Can you cite any laws, legal analysis, or newspaper in any US jurisdiction that describes moving a trashcan a short distance as criminal mischief, or any other crime?
How to Write a Multiplication Aggregate Function in SQL
> Most web related indie dev has been killed by open source.

You throw this out there like some fact.

Meanwhile, the lot of us make money on web dev that is built upon open source. The same we have been doing for a long time now.
https://www.mcrmfertility.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Glo... mentions "No clear etiologic factors have been identified; however, multiple factors have been shown to have correlative associations" then lists some possibilities:

* Increased obesity.

* Changes in diet, to have more fats.

* More people with chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension.

* Environmental toxins including bisphenol A (BPA), phthalates, triclosan, and air pollutants.

* Tobacco, including "parental tobacco exposure in utero has been reported to
affect male fertility in the offspring."

* Increased marijuana use ("though the field is under-researched")

* "Sedentary lifestyle, stress, and lack of sleep"
That would reboot after every update, no matter how trivial, not just for kernel and libc upgrades.

There is a "dnf needs-restarting -r". In my experience it's not completely reliable though.
I don't understand - the debugger in Turbo C was such a delight and inspecting structs, linked lists etc was so easy and somehow fit nicely on these old screens.

In VS today everything feels so cumbersome and convoluted I almost never bother witht the debugger, and instead just look at stack traces instead.
There are surely two separate issues here? One is whether it's bad to eg. take first world crypto investors' money and use it to stop hundreds of thousands of people dying of preventable diseases in developing countries. Personally, I think not really, or at least it'd be an odd thing to be upset about? Happy to hear the arguments in favour of huge numbers of preventable deaths.

Where that narrative gets problematic wrt SBF is that, aiui in the eyes of EA "leadership", "too many" EA individuals choose to allocate their donations to boring global health causes, rather than building the movement or weird long-termist stuff. So with that in mind, the obvious decision was to take the friendly billionaire money and put it into those "important" areas. Which means now, we have a popular and hard to refute characterization of EA as an organization that raises money for itself and weird causes normal people don't care about. But, like I said, the majority of EA money goes towards global health, ie. stopping people dying.
I am a big fan of forced simplicity. In practice that means (dramatically) less code, less abstraction, single paradigm, less choices. People tend to find the code extremely readable and easy to follow but yet somehow exotically foreign and thus grade it poorly. To me that sounds like selection bias. So I have stopped worrying how people might grade my code and instead attempt to prove everything with numbers, such as execution speed or time to add new features.
Like what, for example?

From what I understand, Twitter's security was/is shit, and bribing some random employee is all that was needed to hijack very high value accounts. I'd be surprised if the number of people who were able to access DMs and "like history" wasn't in the hundreds. Kompromat isn't very useful if everybody has it.
It’s the most natural type of economy there is. The only required ingredients are private property and arguably also contracts (ie the concept of two or more people agreeing to something). It arises entirely naturally, without any form of intervention. In fact, if you want to prevent capitalism from naturally occurring, then you need to perform radical interventions to make that happen. The recorded history of capitalism goes as far back as the recorded history of humanity. Some of the earliest pieces of recorded history in existence are cuneiform tablets documenting the accounts of private businesses.