skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to get better at writing?
I’ve been writing for a while but I feel like I’ve stagnated for a while. What have other people done?
I have been starting to suspect that a big part of the gap may be a sort of field guide to real-world patterns with context on what's new/old, where they are used/useful, and so on.
PBS is an American TV channel - Public Broadcast Station.

I'm guessing that is what OP ment
I do appreciate that this is a war and both sides are able to disseminate propaganda, but from over here in Europe, some of the stories we hear about the things that the Russians are doing does not leave me with any confidence that the war can end without the complete dissolution of one side or other.
I think you have it backwards in your last paragraph. Five years ago Elon Musk had a lot of goodwill and was highly thought of by lots of people. Through his actions as a boss and through his public statements he’s shown himself to be a jackass. There is a cadre of supporters who forgive or overlook the overwhelming evidence of his jackassery. Perhaps you should consider the possibility that you are among this cadre of supporters.

I don’t know who Brown is and it’s quite possible he/she too is a jackass but that doesn’t detract from the fact that Elon Musk is a shitty person.
1Password is also inherently more secure because of the extra Secret Key. If a breach like this ever happens to them, users with weak master passwords will still be safe.

Also, Lastpass doesn't encrypt URLs. There's really no excuse for that.
It’s not not their job to be informed about state crimes.

I don’t think it’s a crime to literally leave it up in the same way distributing CSAM is, but it’s evidence someone is committing a crime, which is a TOS violation most places as most sites don’t want to encourage that. And Twitter’s TOS is what Twitter cares about. Whether reports come in as emails or their annoying inefficient report form is not important.
But can’t you whitelist/blacklist signatures? Then use a web of trust to determine the probability of trusting non-listed signatures. Filter content by trust probability and spam should disappear.
Creative writing? Or improving the quality of your personal / professional comms?
I just love this thread.
Yea this has been bothering me. I have to fight to ignore the desire to run my own and just enjoy my medium-sized instance.. because any interest i get in Mastodon itself makes me want to rewrite it to run more lean and allow users to contribute costs (P2P data).

I quite enjoy Mastodon, but the whole thing feels.. incorrectly aligned with technical needs. I hope the attention it's getting leads to core implementations more aligned with the community.
I looked into using oracle cloud servers this year, but gave up after a day or so because the interface was bad.

They only called me once, because I hadn't used the account in a month.

They've only emailed me once since then.
Those web viewers for e-Books make PDF look great. There is nothing I dread more at the library for my uni than seeing a book is "in the collection" but is only visible through a web viewer. It's like trying to read the book through a shaving mirror.

(1) They try to slice the book into the thinnest possible salami so you are always click click clicking to navigate

(2) You can't download the book to read on the bus

(3) There is a general "evil" trend in the web to hide the content as much as possible. Cookie popups and "subscribe to our email newsletter" popups count, but hard-to-use navigation, <iframe> and friends all make their contribution. You'd think the people who make this stuff are paid more the less content is visible on the page.

(4) and of course it seems like the people are paid the more you have to struggle to log in.
It really bothered me when Google Reader went away. I always wondered why they did that??
I don’t think it’s a true problem though, but a symptom of being raised in capitalism.
Badly socketed ram was one of the reasons my PC started failing after being on for a while. When everything was cool it was all fine, when the case and everything heated up a bit it failed eventually. Re-seating the ram fixed it and ran for quite a time without issues. This was in the early Athlon days though.
The trend I was talking about is small, well-designed simple to use, truly cross-platform header only libraries.

For accessibility I think that's sadly a part that people in general don't seem to care a lot. And while some of the big libraries do a lot for you there, it also depends a lot on how it really is used. The trend to Electron and others also isn't really helping there.

To be fair though, I am happy about the trends that this topic is actually something people even are aware of. Five, ten, fifteen years ago this was very different. I remember a time when using HTML over Flash for accessibility reasons was considered a non-argument. Now you see that topic brought up "a lot".
Just listen to your body. Start doing your training a daily and see if you can keep it up.

It’s not bad to let your body rest, so you should add a rest day here and there even if you are not tired after weeks on end.

For your goals, consistency is key, so just stick to it and you’ll start to see changes with time.

And since you won’t get huge overnight, you can always adjust if you notice you are getting bigger than what you want.

Make sure you compliment the exercise with a good diet to maximize results :)
The US will see a slowdown in GDP growth, with a rate of 0.2%, while the Eurozone may experience a mild recession, with a rate of -0.1%. Inflation will remain high, particularly in Europe, though it will be lower than in 2022.

90% or more of the population of China will become infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants during the first quarter. Assuming infection fatality rate of around 0.1%, between 1 and 1.5 million people may die, however the Chinese government will report numbers that are lower by at least an order of magnitude. The supply chain will be impacted, and it is possible that new variants may emerge and spread to the rest of the world.

The Russo-Ukrainian war will continue. A second major offensive against Ukraine is likely. Mobilisation (both military and industrial) will continue, Ukrainian infrastructure and economy will be further damaged. There will be no negotiations. Russian regime won't collapse, Russia will not split, NATO will not become involved in fighting on Ukrainian soil. The risk of a full-scale nuclear war is very low, the use of tactical nuclear weapons is more probable, but still unlikely.

China will not launch an attack on Taiwan in 2023.

There will be many new startups based on the OpenAI API, and this market will become extremely crowded. OpenAI will continue updating their GPT model and release version 4, which will significantly improve the quality and reliability of text output and will be multimodal. There will be at least one major, publicly available, competing LLM, likely from Meta.

Twitter will add the ability to make payments on their platform and will work on developing e-commerce capabilities. Meta will follow suit, most likely on Whatsapp.
I'm not sure how you can separate the question about inheritance fairness from multiple generations other than in a very abstract sense because I think the unfairness is most often perceived with wealth that is so great that it will last beyond just the immediate heirs lifetimes. An inheritance of $10,000 is likely not going to last long enough to be passed on to one's own children, but an inheritance of hundreds of millions is presumably not going to be entirely used up in one generation.
Another line from that part:

> After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her.

Sometimes I wonder this about my own parents. I haven't seen them in over a year. I have no desire to see them either, and am dreading the obligatory Christmas call.

I see a ton of advice floating around these days about "make sure to visit your parents a lot, because you'll regret it after they die if you don't". But there's another side to the "life is short" coin: maybe it's not worth spending time with people that make you intensely unhappy, even if those people are your parents.
I'm surprised nobody has made RAM with the ECC logic built into the ram itself, that just looks like normal ram to the CPU.
Who is Santa Claus, why does he look like that, and where did he come from?
>Wtf wtf wtf. This would be considered wildly insecure even by the standards of the 80s

For this particular use-case? Hardly.

Since an attacker can easily use any login form of their choice as an oracle for password reuse, ECB mode can't really introduce significant issues here.
There are a few responses people have found useful to misdirect and shut down conversation around this topic. Nothing burger, and the claim that it was about revenge porn, are strong signals that this is one such stock response.

It’s disappointing how the commenting postures surrounding culture war issues curtail curiosity, the spirit of inquiry more generally. A now naive-seeming but widely held assumption about the information revolution was that the instant availability of primary source material would lead to more informed public debate. It’s now apparent to me that knowing how you’re supposed to feel, and what others think, are more important— at the very least more useful— than any naive interest in trying to interpret the messy reality.
Got it. Allow me to express just how dumb I feel for having not figured that out.
What exactly is that supposed to mean?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
Merry xmas to you too!
We can dispute the veracity of dumps without resorting to ad hominem attacks
1. We will learn that one or more traditional banks have taken on cryptocurrency exposure and will need to be bailed out to prevent another financial crisis.

2. Politicians will introduce legislation to regulate AI, with the initial focus on copyright protection, but it will be defeated. Court cases are brought against companies for training ML using copyrighted data, setting up an eventual supreme court battle in coming years.

3. AI will drive advancements in medical treatments, especially in pharmaceuticals and personalized medicine. While this has already been happening to some extent, the recent interest in AI will cause an increased investment of money and resources to companies working in this space.

4. Year of Linux desktop!

5. Remote work will end for many, due to the recession making employers feel more powerful to enforce back-to-office, for which which many middle managers will advocate. Companies who have thrived with a remote culture will remain that way, but those who have struggled will "force" employees back to their offices full time.
Yeah maybe the point of the post is to be snarky and pedantic, but it seems like it’s deliberately missing the point.
> Before all the nitpicking starts...

...because we can all imagine how the article could be better!
I understand and agree that this is a great corruption but they don’t have Smaug levels of wealth and so your analogy fails. They are prostitutes that sell their votes/souls for money in order to influence outcomes.
Thanks. It was indeed folded. My ignorance is showing, I guess.
Mine (Mastodon.art) published their financials on Patreon. Iirc a couple months ago we were in the 15k user range, for ~$700/m.
The probability of a bit flip depends on the size of the transistor used. RAM tends to pack many small transistors.
I love board games. I started playing board games in 1995, have a little over 600 now, and have run all kinds of events over the years.

We are not in a golden age.

Back in 2013 I was invited to a dinner with the Asmodee brass during Toy Fair. They laid out their plans for the company and industry. It all came to pass very quickly. By Gen Con 2016 you could feel that the wheels were coming off. The opening moments of Gen Con 2016 were hectic. This was the first year where you could pay $10 to get into the show floor a little early and the people who didn’t know were furious. Seafall, Cry Havoc, and Scythe were getting their pre-releases and when the gates opened it was the usual stampede but what was different were the lines. People were pretty rude, it was rough. I watched a YouTuber walk perpendicular into the Scythe line, which was blocking the walkway, shout at the people in the line, and then start physically moving people apart when they didn’t get out of the way fast enough..

And here’s the thing. None of those games were very good. We can argue the point on Scythe, but Seafall is considered a massive failure and Cry Havoc was rethemed to the point of illegibility before release. A gaggle of people being rude over terrible games they were told they “needed” to buy was the end of the “Golden Age” for me.

Every year since has felt worse. Asmodee gobbled up some of the best companies and now it’s changed hands multiple times. The studios are just logos on a box now, they’re shells of what they were.

I’ve played dozens of games over the past two years and they aren’t like they used to be. If they’re not outright dull or poorly designed, they usually feel like copies of imitations of better games.

I’ve had a subscription to Game Trade Magazine forever. Each month I tear out the blurbs of the games I want to buy. For the past two years I’ve been tearing out fewer and fewer ads. I tore out one page in the December 2022 issue. The game didn’t even look that good.

I’ve basically stopped buying new games. The ideas just aren’t there.

Board games aren’t going away, but this isn’t 2000-2015 either.

But also, who cares? The excitement is draining from board games and RPGs but other things like Warhammer and GMT/historical war games are getting more interesting. RPGs and board games are just overexposed and need to rest for a bit.
The Model Y becomes the top selling car in the world in 2023. Other than that plug-in hybrids will get a big push in 2023.

The war AI is waging in 2022 against social media and its tactic to convince humans to comment so similarly to ChatGPT as to become indistinguishable comes to light. It becomes public that people are training AI to train people on social media.

In Ukraine mostly stalemate punctuated by horrible attacks as it becomes a war between how long Ukraine can endure attacks and how long Russia can hold on economically. Talks towards resolution begin in the last 2 or 3 months of 2023.

Economically the world continues to teeter on the edge of what looks to be a major recession for an unreasonably long time. People argue whether or not we are in the recession and if the holding pattern and uncertainty is just what it looks like.
Btw, I endorse all US influence operations run on any websites and think all of them are awesome. America #1, after all.

If you want Twitter to be upset about that one, you may have to get them to move to some non-aligned country. Maybe there’s some kind of Yandex Twitter? In the meantime, it’s probably against TOS insofar as it’s a spambot, but state media like VOA seem okay.
“Religious-ness” has two contexts. One is for philosophical purposes, where a person agrees with a set of assumptions (aka beliefs).

The other context is as a tribal marker, for practical purposes. In this context, the “religiousness” is not about agreeing with the set of assumptions, but pretending to agree and/or going through the motions of various customs as a signal of how committed they are to the tribe.

In societies where individuals need to rely less on the tribe, it might be posited that there is less reason for people to put on a show for the latter reason, so they can afford to be less “religious”. So if, on average, children of Christians are more likely to be economically independent, then they may tend to being less religious, and children of Muslims, who are more likely to be economically dependent on each other, tend to be more religious.
dang: What is this a dupe of? It's a new blog post, part 2 rather than part 1.
Handling complex material has never been a priority for the Kindle. To be fair, more recent iterations have improved support for things like tables and MathMl, but it’s still a work in progress.
This is why they deliberately went out of their way to get some non-WEIRD[0] subjects for the later studies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias
Agreed, it requires user-participation. However, LastPass could be proactive about this, perhaps including the number of rounds in its security check. It could tell you that your legacy account should be updated and guide you through it. That would be helpful. I have the standard 100,100 iterations, but had no idea that this was a feature I had to keep track of.
Shitty first drafts

https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%...
>This allows an attacker to detect repeating plain text segments, e.g. reused passwords.

This is hardly a problem, any login form will also allow an attacker to do this.
On Linux VM, if a program is given root privilege and it just execute whatever command ChatGPT spit out, then you'll got hell a problem solver/havoc wreaker.
Sails are pretty good about that :-D
Video game companies start using ai in various tedious parts of the development process. Enough is done the old fashioned way that the result is not immediately obvious. The video game market is saturated with new releases.
If legal options aren’t useable, the black market will fill the void. Once this is fixed, the dynamic swings back (like how torrenting became less popular since streaming services)
You might find it immoral, but 99% of the world disagrees with you (e.g. ubiquity of illegal drug use worldwide)
Look at lastpass' wikipedia page, they have been collecting a security incident after another since 2015.
> I realize it's Christmas Eve, but this post tempts my inner curmudgeon.

Genius! I'm reading your comment in my best Boris Karloff (Grinch) voice. You just improved my already-nice Christmas morning :)
Right…why is this nonsense becoming normalized?

Congress folk are highly likely to have an investment professional managing their money, who usually outperform “the market” (whatever that means, considering most don’t benchmark S&P for obvious reasons).

What I really don’t get is that most insider trades make less than 70k before going to jail and even with inside information, a large percentage of insider trades don’t make money (but you still go to jail). Yet folks think it’s some kind of cheat code.

Folks need to stop reading WSB.
You can but bugger that. Better to kill the ROI by not even looking at it.
to be fair most of my family and friends without tech jobs didn’t really get twitter either
Bakhmut is where Russia is concentrating its recently conscripted forces.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/12/22/bakhmut-is-...
Yeah it also struck me as bizzare. When client-side app has master key entered it it could just opportunistically upgrade that
Sometimes yes, sometimes no; how well does xeyes work under Wayland?
This doesn't pass the sniff test.

There's nothing about being a Congressperson that lends itself better to the kinds of knowledge or intelligence that would increase the chances of betting well on the stock market...

...except the knowledge that comes from a) knowing what legislation will be ahead of time, and b) getting "paid" in insider knowledge from companies that want favorable treatment. (And possibly other kinds of insider-trading-type knowledge; I'm not particularly familiar with the specific methods they use.)
Dear Bunny, you've been delaying the S3 storage bucket for 3 years. Please don't waste time on this trash.
APITable: open-source Airtable alternative
Digital ocean has a premade droplet that is costing me $20 / mo.
My question is, why do you need separate processes to handle mostly async operations? You need to do HTTP requests and database queries, that is mostly waiting, there is no CPU needed for this. You can do it with one process and millions of tasks operating in concurrent fashion.

I don't really know how Mastodon does this with the Sidekiq, but what I've seen people with a very small amount of activities (we're talking about hundreds of thousands, or a few millions), need to do manual scaling of Sidekiq processes or threads. As a user, you should not be tuning these metrics to handle this kind of activity. A single beam process could handle all the WhatsApp messaging back in the days, so it can easily handle our relatively tiny fediverse servers with much less users.
I would guess that if we further split 40 year old dads into introverts and extroverts, the sentiment would also split into loving wfh and being happier working away at the office.
Given that any login form can be used to rapidly confirm password reuse it's hard to see how ECB introduces new issues here.
What I worry about is that GPT-written books are going to be well enough written on the surface to pass the "read ten pages before deciding if I buy" test. These are the going to be the books where you get 70 pages in before realizing there isn't a coherent story there.

If the book is poorly written and it's obvious, then it's probably not going to gather much of a following but it's not going to hurt anyone. The next two years of book spam are going to be grammatically impeccable and require so little effort that a few people are going to make large amounts of money, at the expense of legitimate self-publishers who'll have an even harder time getting noticed at all, selling fake books on Amazon until the hammer comes down.

After that, traditional publishing becomes the target. By 2025, Amazon will have the fake book problem largely solved--it'll still be possible to get fake books through, but at some point it'll be harder than to just write a real one--while New York publishers are running the third-party software the MBAs bought because it was cheap. Meanwhile, even though the AI-written books won't be good in the sense of James Joyce, they'll be good enough to best-sell. And, of course, there will be prestige associated with being the first one to pull it off. If you make a living selling fake books on Amazon, you don't admit to it. If you get the New York Times to review your book, and if you get a few celebrities to include it in their book clubs, and then reveal (with proof) that it was written by AI, you become a hero among the 90 percent of the US who hate the New York Times (and, to a lesser extent, traditional publishing) because their kids will never get hired by places like that. Selling fake books on Amazon is shameful; selling a fake book to a publisher for a seven-figure advance, and all the big ticket reviews and celebrity endorsements included in the package, is hilarious. Of course, 99.99% of attempts at this are going to fail somewhere in the process--the hardest part is going to be creating fake identities [1] so you can query the same agents hundreds of times--but there are going to be way more than 10000 tries.

It actually wouldn't surprise me if someone writes a real book, gets it into traditional publishing, makes the bestseller list, and then tries to go back and say that it was written by AI, just to become a national hero (as opposed to just another guy who was an NYT bestseller for a few weeks). Which is why I hope the first person to actually pull it off does a good enough job of documenting his process that he can prove that it really was a GPT novel... so he can't be accused of this.

----

[1] Gray hat uses of LLMs, such as creating fake personal identities for social proof and credibility purposes, may be more widespread than the black hat purposes we're all scared of. It's now really easy (seconds vs. hours) to get the 3- or 4-digit karma count necessary to not look like a sock puppet. In the past, the gray hats brought Reddit and HN accounts; in the late 2020s, you'll be able to buy whole "people", with deepfaked audio, video, and text presence all over social media, for $100 a pop.