skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> maybe they will think again what's the point of speech that does nothing

Downvotes are meaningful speech too. Usually people use them when they think your comment isn't worth a reply or doesn't belong here. They exist to prevent people from feeling like they have to reply to something that otherwise wouldn't be worth replying to, as a way of communicating to the poster that their post is extremely uninteresting. One thing they actually do is move your comment down the page.

That being said, since you hold this opinion so strongly, maybe it's reasonable for me to point out: although the article mostly covers real and hypothetical laws that could make Twitter harder to moderate, there's also the question of how Twitter is supposed to make enough money to stay afloat, and how it can continue to do that if advertisers would rather not advertise on a platform that might show their ad next to messaging they'd prefer not to be associated with. There's no silver bullet here even if they did ignore EU laws or whatever it is you find unreasonable.
Schools like Stanford et al produce things like Sam Bankman-Fried who I cannot deny is an innovator of something.

I'm not sure it's a good thing, mind you.
Yet they still have a tax free status so the public does have an interest.
> Everybody lost a lot in the most recent downturn and (most) nobody gained...Where did that value go? How could it have just vanished?

Didn't the other side of the transaction make the money that you lost?
Corporate media produces nothing of intellectual value. It merely continues to exist because their business model, advertising, allowed them pivot into being drama generating entertainment machines.
Sure, he can mint himself enough rope, but the opportunity can give weight to a narrative that is desired, whatever it may be.
Harvard has a pretty steep discount rate these days. People love to point to tuition and compare it to 30 years ago. The way college is priced has changed. Very few people pay full sticker price at Harvard anymore.
Here's John Mashey, a designer of MIPS, on what RISC is:

https://danluu.com/risc-definition/

START QUOTE

A: there is a very specific set of characteristics shared by most machines labeled RISCs, most of which are not shared by most CISCs.

The RISC characteristics:

a) Are aimed at more performance from current compiler technology (e.g., enough registers).
OR
b) Are aimed at fast pipelining in a virtual-memory environment with the ability to still survive exceptions without inextricably increasing the number of gate delays (notice that I say gate delays, NOT just how many gates).

Even though various RISCs have made various decisions, most of them have been very careful to omit those things that CPU designers have found difficult and/or expensive to implement, and especially, things that are painful, for relatively little gain.

I would claim, that even as RISCs evolve, they may have certain baggage that they'd wish weren't there ... but not very much. In particular, there are a bunch of objective characteristics shared by RISC ARCHITECTURES that clearly distinguish them from CISC architectures.

I'll give a few examples, followed by the detailed analysis:

MOST RISCs:

3a) Have 1 size of instruction in an instruction stream

3b) And that size is 4 bytes

3c) Have a handful (1-4) addressing modes) (it is VERY hard to count these things; will discuss later).

3d) Have NO indirect addressing in any form (i.e., where you need one memory access to get the address of another operand in memory)

4a) Have NO operations that combine load/store with arithmetic, i.e., like add from memory, or add to memory. (note: this means especially avoiding operations that use the value of a load as input to an ALU operation, especially when that operation can cause an exception. Loads/stores with address modification can often be OK as they don't have some of the bad effects)

4b) Have no more than 1 memory-addressed operand per instruction

5a) Do NOT support arbitrary alignment of data for loads/stores

5b) Use an MMU for a data address no more than once per instruction

6a) Have >=5 bits per integer register specifier

6b) Have >= 4 bits per FP register specifier

END QUOTE

Not having a hardware division opcode isn't on the list; in fact, the MIPS chips had hardware division, but it was odd in that it used the hi and lo registers and had an architectually-visible latency such that the compiler or human was encouraged to schedule opcodes such that they wouldn't stall the pipeline by trying to read the results of a division right after the division opcode had issued.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180404-00/?p=98...

The divide opcode also didn't have a divide-by-zero exception. The point is that the MIPS, like a lot of RISC designs, prioritized pipelineability over convenient assembly language behavior, and expected compilers and humans to pick up the slack and write code to implement what, in a CISC design, would have been implemented in microcode.
> > future artists having their jobs taken by AIs
> that's simply not going to happen

It will indeed happen, though not to all artists.

> as in every technological development so far, this is just another tool.

Just like every other tool, it changes things, and not everyone wants to change. Those who embrace the new tech are more likely to thrive. Those who don't, less likely.

> 1) artists create the styles out of thin air
> 2) artists create the images out of thin air

I understand what you're saying, but as an artist, I can't agree. No artist lives in total isolation. No artist creates images out of thin air. Those who claim to are lying, or just don't realize how they're influenced.

How artists are influenced varies, obviously, but for me I think that however I've been influenced, that influence impacts my output similarly to how the latest generation of AI driven image generation works.

I'm influenced by the collective creative output of every artist who's stuff I've seen. An AI tool is influenced by its model. I don't see a lot differences there, conceptually speaking. There are obvious differences about human experience, model training, bias, etc, but that's a much larger conversation. Those differences do matter, but I don't think they matter enough to change my stance conceptually they work the same in terms of leveraging "influence" to create something unique.

> 3) computers are just collectors of this data and do not actually originate anything new. they are just very clever copycats.

Stable Diffusion does a pretty damn good job of mixing artistic styles to the point where I have no problem disagreeing with you here. It comes as close to originating something new as humans do. You could argue about how it does it disqualifies its output as "origination", but those same arguments would be just as effective at disqualifying humans for the same reasons.

That all said, I agree with you that the tech is a disruptive tool. It's a threat the same way that cameras were a threat to portrait artists, or Autocad for architects, or CNC machines for machinists might be a threat. The idea that new tech doesn't take jobs is naive - it always does. But it doesn't always completely eliminate those jobs. Those who adapt and leverage and take advantage of the new tools can still survive and thrive. Those who reject the new tech might not. Some might find a niche in using "old" techniques (which in away still leverages the new tech - as a marketing/differentiation strategy).

For me, I've been using Stable Diffusion a lot lately as a tool for creating my own art. It's an incredibly useful tool for sketching out ideas, playing with color, lighting, and composition.
Clip Studio Paint will no longer implement an image generator function
> Love to see a timeline of world history

> You ought to be able to zoom in

IMO history is so complicated, and timelines do not do justice to the nuances.

Being more familiar to us (as contemporaries), what about timelines of recent news? (Wikipedia current events [1], or even HN?). it helps to visualize the bigger picture for those who don't follow very close (which is healthier these days)

Beyond zooming, filtering will also help declutter the UI.

FYI There are already nice open-source timelines widgets like https://github.com/NUKnightLab/TimelineJS3 and http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Graeber's book talks about this in a much more interesting way that I can, and is very explicit about not trying to be a book about basic income. So me adding that was a little editorial.

But the point is that for a large variety of cultural, political, and economic reasons there are a lot of jobs like university administrators that are simply not useful but get paid nonetheless, in many cases much better than the people doing the actual work. In both public and private spaces (eg. Harvard, a private university).

Even in tech circles we see this argument, like, why does it take 10,000 developers to run a website etc.

I think most people want to be useful to society and have a meaningful job but a lot of jobs that pay well are not that. With UBI those admins would be able to volunteer, teach children, make culture, or all the other useful things that pay terribly.

Note that these admins are already working to support themselves but society is still failing to find something useful for them.

I'm happy to talk abt this more of ya think it would be useful to you :)
Got more to say but comments are hard to fit nuance into
> Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?

This. Or they're planning to drop out and get a job in the Thiel universe.
> Everybody in crypto is a fraudster so investors and depositors all deserve to be wiped out by a scammer?

Nobody deserves to be wiped out. But anyone wiped out in crypto is on their own. They chose to sidestep centuries of knowledge on financial regulation. If they want their money, they need to pay for lawyers.

> and he should walk free?

The wheels of justice grind slowly but fine. The day after any fraud, HN is filled with conclusions that the fraudster will walk free. (Holmes until the day of her sentencing.)

SBF is almost certain to be charged. It just won’t happen this week.
That's one reason. Another reason is that while some effort was spent on writing this spec, apparently (?) almost no effort was spent on promoting/enforcing it: there is another top-level comment in this thread from a 10-year Linux application developer that says they've learned about XDG from this very post.

And indeed, there are lots of tremendously popular apps out there (Slack, for instance) that use e.g. $HOME/Downloads as a default download directory instead of $(xdg-user-dir DOWNLOAD), and most users don't mind.
What I'm suggesting is Harvard more or less say "We're pivoting. We no longer consider ourselve a traditional higher learning institution...and thus our criteria and selection process is not - for good reason - limited to test scores and traditional metrics..."
I had a modest proposal, and then decided to fact-check myself. The proposal was "Charity Navigator should do a health check on Harvard."

Then I found they already had! https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/042103580

Harvard gets a 100% rating. I didn't see right off a way to distinguish "cost of all those administrators." Maybe they allocate it to the various "programs" so it's hidden?

Here's their IRS 990 form for 2021, all 373 pages of it:

https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/042103580_202106_990_...

If anyone wants to dig through all this, have a big time.
Likely the education would be similar or even worse at Harvard.

But the main thing you get is graduating from Harvard, and knowing everyone from your class and school. Those connections are huge, depending on the field you're going into.

An MBA from a state school might work if you're staying in-state, but an MBA from an elite school opens the world.
On the other hand, Wikipedia pages seemingly get "vandalized" all the time and sometimes aren't corrected immediately.

Doesn't this create a situation where a bad actor could change the Wikipedia page for a `semi-popular-brand.com` url listing to something bad? Anyone who used `semi-popular-brand.idk` in that timeframe would land in the bad page. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding.
magical indeed!

>> describe databases in the style of jay z

Databases are like the rap game,
Storing information, just like a player's fame.
Keeps track of records, just like a DJ's record crate,
And can be accessed anywhere, like a rapper's great escape.

Organizing data like a producer's mix tape,
Making sure it's secure, just like a bodyguard's gate.
Indexes, queries, and tables, like a rap battle's rhymes,
Keeping information safe, like a rapper's best lines.
Connections and access to capital. Isn’t that why people move or get a job, etc.? And the fact that they can tolerate the ridiculously low PHD stipends.
Europe chose to deprioritize building natural gas capacity in the form of LNG ships and ports in favor of wind and solar. This order of priorities made them increasingly dependent on Russia's natural gas coming from two pipelines, Nord Stream 1 and 2.

So as many across the western world predicted, Russia used (and continues to use) that dependency as leverage to get leniency on their actions in Ukraine.

Natural gas will continue to be a critical bridge fuel to get to a world that is majority powered by renewables. Impossible to do without it.

Europe gambled Russia wouldn't do something like this and they lost. That loss caused the price of European nat gas to spike 2000% at one point and it's still up 800% today.
How to install some machine code bytes. What machine code bytes do you want to install though? That's the interesting bit!
> What are these people for?

I consider it unsurprising that a bureaucracy gets taken over by bureaucrats. The rest of the faculty is too busy doing research and teaching classes to bother with office politics, climbing the ladder, and increasing staff counts at levels of the ladder beneath themselves. The professors consider the importance of their research and teaching efforts to be self-evident, so there's no need to waste time justifying them, trying to convince people that they're important or that their department budget should be increased.

You see a similar effect in tech companies, where engineers building the company's product get relegated to the sidelines after the technology is proven or the market is captured, and MBAs, management, and sales become the dominant forces within the organization...engineering is still focused on the product, with their careers an issue that they assume will resolve itself, while the MBAs are entirely focused on their careers.
> If you're not very sick then sure the treatment isn't going to change much. But if you actually need any sort of intervention (rare) they'll give you different drugs than say an Ebola infection.

That's literally what I just said - medical facilities keep pushing COVID testing even though in 99% of cases, it's not going to be used to modify the diagnosis or treatment. As you said, the other ~1% or less of cases that might make a assist or alter a decision based on information provided by the test is rare, and nor did I say that in that scenario that it shouldn't be done.

> Unclear how you know if you're not contagious if you don't actually know what you're sick with.

There's more than just COVID testing, and some tests can reveal an infection that isn't contagious. For example, many bacterial infections are no longer considered contagious after ~24 hours of antibiotic use [1]. A positive on a bacterial infection can give enough confidence on the risk of being contagious.

However, with a negative COVID test, you could (1) still have COVID, or (2) have another infection that is contagious. Doctors can't assume you have strep throat or a sinus infection from a negative COVID test, but doctors can make a diagnosis based on a positive strep test that you don't have something else based on your symptoms.

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/infections/how-lo...
> hours of planning can save weeks of engineering.

This is so hard to get teams to do. I am almost always the slowest to implement a change simply because I don't conflate design and implementation.

At first glance it looks like I get less done, but when you account for the fact that nobody has to clean up after me or shoehorn a work around for an edge case in I become one of the most efficient.

Assigning cost to subsequent follow up tasks is difficult as well. Both technically in terms of aggregating/grouping as well as interpersonally because people get defensive or discouraged when you're consistently pointing out shoddy work.
This is very true, and there's certainly nothing I could do if our industry becomes filled with people who are willing and eager to put in 70 hour weeks for months at a time.

All I'd add is look where it got this guy: still fired. And I bet he got less severance than the people who opted for the 3 months from that form Musk sent out weeks ago. I started my career in startups and I saw the same thing quite often. Passionate young engineers sinking their life into a project only to get the same, or an even worse deal than the people who did less work but were more politically savvy.
I’m glad my daughter doesn’t have to aspire to take a grueling east/south asian style admissions test for her life to not be extreme poverty. It doesn’t measure intelligence or aptitude or ability to conduct research, it measures the ability to take a high stakes test effectively. That’s useless once the test has been taken. I have had a very successful career as a computer scientist, but my standardized test scores were abysmal due to some childhood ADD and a late in life diagnosed bipolar disorder (which is very common in highly intelligent people). While my intelligence tests consistently put me in the 99.9+ percentile, my standardized test scores placed me pumping gas for a living.

I’m certain my daughter will have my challenges, and I am glad for me, her, and all like her we didn’t grow up in India.
It will work out just fine, the only thing that matters when you date is your physical appearance and social skills. Money has no bearing at all, you know how many women broke dudes in bands pull?
Woah.

A bit much, eh? I write programs in whatever I want as an hobby. Why does that make me a murderer? Everyone needs to chill about this.
> You will be surprised to see the startup ecosystem now since the investment is flowing in.

Do you mean copycat chumps getting bloated on Softbank money as example of startup innovation?
How is it biased?
Did ChatGPT come up with that?
You missed the Theranos founder :)
It seems like he's going to establish two lines. One right and one left. The current line will shift to the right and allow more anti-vax/conspiracy garbage, but continue to disallow wignats and *nats. Meanwhile we'll get a new line on the left, so you can't say stuff like 'Whiteness is the root of all evil' anymore. At least that's how I'm interpreting his comment about 'being for the 80%.
Perhaps, but co-mingling a perceived problem at Harvard (high nameplate tuition that few students actually pay) with an actual problem at public universities (disinvestment in higher education by state legislatures causing tuition increases) doesn't help the debate at all, it just muddies the waters.

Even this article doesn't actually address the issue directly; it complains about excessive administrators, then tries to support that complaint with tuition data. Tuition is not the primary funding source of university administrators. Federal research dollars pay for a significant fraction (if not a majority) of them. The data that the author should be leveraging is expenditure data, not income data.

This is the best aggregate dataset I have on university expenditures, showing a modest increase in spending on a per-student basis:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_334.10.a...
850 actual hours, butt-in-seat and required, or 850 scheduled hours?
All great tips. I would add another bullet point along the lines of,

* Make your software observable. Your feature is not finished until you've verified it is being used as expected. Ideally you should have all of the data you need to know if things are going well without having to wait for customers to email you with complaints. Be careful not to develop a culture of developers throwing code "over the fence", either to QA staff or a release team - developers own their code from IDE to production.

If you don't develop this culture of ownership you end up with longer feedback loops between customer support, QA and dev.
Some package managers don’t really prevent this, particularly thinking of npm but also apt and other system package managers, because they can run arbitrary post-install scripts.

As always, you need to trust the vendor of software you install and/or do an audit of the source/installer regardless.
I would have thought this kind of deal would have been struck at some point when people still thought of the internet as "novel" or a "fad" and therefore didn't scrutinize the situation too closely but no, this deal began in 2017.
The trope about successful dropout founders just isn't really true. Most successful founders finished college. That's not to say that college is the end-all and be-all of life (it's barely just beginning), but let's not pretend that a small handful of famous dropouts makes the trend.
Ask HN: How to not become a victim of circumstance?
acknowledge the realistics.
Because Harvard gets not-for-profit status and the associated tax breaks, despite having a $51B endowment that keeps growing. I think it's fair game to ask what our public policy should be for providing tax breaks to schools that horde huge amounts of money. On the other hand, if they didn't get tax breaks, then I'd agree with you that's it is none of the public's business.
Tesla Semi’s Enormous Battery Might Weigh 11,000 Pounds on Its Own
> Corporate media

People like to read that stuff.
Hey, Syrus here from Wasmer. This is the first time I'm hearing from this.
No, there shouldn't be any security concerns in our website (it's actually fully open source as well [1], if you want to take a look)

Do you happen to know what firewall does your work use? I'd love to follow up with them to make sure this is resolved asap

[1]: https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer.io
> Maybe it's not for Harvard consumption, but auditioning for a Conservative internship?

Or maybe the author was genuinely disturbed by the inequalities and racism currently being perpetuated by said administrative bloat, similar to how Snowden was disturbed by the behavior of the US government?

The fact that you see this situation only in terms of personal gain is disturbing
Except when, as in this case, they are forbidden from striking by law.

Which is a legislative form of ‘keep working your field peasant, or else.’